The Brutal History Of Freedom - Sebastian Junger | Modern Wisdom Podcast 396

Sebastian Junger is a journalist, author and filmmaker. Throughout history, humans have been driven by the quest for two cherished ideals: community and freedom. The two don’t coexist easily: we value individuality and self-reliance, yet are utterly dependent on community for our most basic needs. Expect to learn how having kids in your 50's can give you more freedom than you might think, what happens when you lose 10 pints of blood and have a near death experience, why fighting to the death was most common in free societies, how free countries always get tempted toward tyranny and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get 10% discount on your first month from BetterHelp at https://betterhelp.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Reclaim your fitness and book a Free Consultation Call with ActiveLifeRX at http://bit.ly/rxwisdom Extra Stuff: Buy Freedom - https://amzn.to/3nUc4DX Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #freedom #history #war - 00:00 Intro 00:24 Examining Sebastian’s Near-Death Experience 15:44 Starting a Family Later in Life 20:00 Tension Between Freedom & Community 26:20 What is the Opposite of Freedom? 37:58 The Story of Michael Mallin 46:16 Why Politicians Fail at Leadership 1:01:44 Dealing with Covid as a Community 1:11:54 Where to Find Sebastian - Join the Modern Wisdom Community on Locals - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Listen to all episodes on audio: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I mean, you can give up temporal freedom and get a high-paying job and make a bunch of money, and then you have economic freedom. You can give up the sort of safety and stability and predictability of living in a modern society and go into the wilderness, and you have the freedom of that, but you're in a fair amount of danger. And if something happens to you, like you have a ruptured appendix, sorry, guy, you're dead. You never get all forms of freedom at once.

• 0:24Chris Williamson?

  A little while ago, you had a near-death experience. What was the story behind that?

• 0:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, you know, I'd been in a lot of combat as a journalist with American soldiers and otherwise around the world. And I thought all the danger was behind me. I'm in good health. I'm an athlete. I'm in good shape. I've got a heart rate of 60 and blood pressure of 120 over 80 and everything you could want at age 58 last year. And I felt a sudden pain in my abdomen, and it was an undiagnosed aneurysm in my pancreatic artery, which is this like little artery that nobody thinks about, and it had an aneurysm, and it ruptured. And I started bleeding out into my own abdomen. And by

• 1:10Speaker 00

  the time they got me to the ER, I'd lost three-quarters of my blood. And, you know, when women, often when women die in childbirth, which tragically still happens, they're basically, they're dying the same way. They're bleeding to death, and they can't find the bleed, and they can't stop it, and they lose the woman. And that's basically what was happening to me. But it was the result of a ruptured aneurysm. And, you know, by the time they were cutting my neck open to put a line into my jugular to get enough blood into me fast enough to save me, by the time that was happening, you know, I was actively dying. And I'm an atheist. I'm not religious. My dad was a physicist, but my dead father

• 1:53Speaker 00

  appeared above me, sort of welcoming me, which is an experience I'm still struggling to explain. And a black pit opened up underneath me, and I was getting pulled into it. And, you know, it was the... I I I mean, I guess neurologically, the black pit of unconsciousness, I don't know. But it was a very, uh, it's not like falling asleep. It's not like losing consciousness when you're having about to have a medical procedure. I was getting pulled into a black hole and my dead father was there. And the last thing I said to the doctor was, you gotta hurry. You're losing me right now. And um, they, you know, they did their work, their amazing work and they saved me. And um, you know, I was touch and go for a while because I need, they needed another eight hours to find the leak inside me.

• 2:35Speaker 00

  And um, you know, when you're transfused like that, I had 10 units of blood. And when you're transfused like that, you know, other problems happen. Like you start to get, you run the risk of organ failure and, and, and things like that. And, and luckily I'm healthy and my body managed to stay alive for eight hours until they, they, they fixed the leak. And I'm very, very lucky to be here. Most people die from this and I'm very lucky to be here.

• 3:02Chris Williamson?

  That's an insane story. I have a friend that I met last year in Dubai and he had, he was put under a induced coma for three months or so. And during that time, he lived an entire another life for two years in Singapore. And he could tell you the name of the company that he had, the brand of toothpaste he put on his toothbrush, where his ties were kept inside of his apartment. He would be able to tell you the name of the street that he went to. And he was selling virtual reality software in this other life. And he was testing it on himself and he had a full team, he had a sales team, he had developers. And he would go into the experience, the virtual reality experience inside of this other world.

• 3:43Chris Williamson?

  While he's laid in a hospital bed and he doesn't know, he would go into it and he would hear people talking. And at one point, he gets trapped inside of the virtual reality world for two months inside of this dream. So this is like two layers down of inception. And in that, he can hear people speaking to him and he doesn't know what it is. And then eventually he gets his fingers into a corner and pries it apart. And that's when he wakes up. But during this other world that he lives in for two years, while he's away for about three months, his father dies. So his dad, his dream father dies while his real father's still alive. And they're watching him while he's in bed, Paul. In bed, in this induced coma, and they see that he's weeping, he's got tears streaming

• 4:27Chris Williamson?

  out the corner of his eyes, and that's when he's burying his dead father in the dream, while his real father watches him cry about the fact that he's had to do it. Crazy.

• 4:37Speaker 00

  That's insane. Did he ever go to Singapore to look up the places he had thought, you know, imagined he was?

• 4:45Chris Williamson?

  I don't think he has, no.

• 4:48Speaker 00

  Wow, that's insane. There's a lot of, you know, again, I'm an atheist, I feel like I have to keep saying this, but there's a lot of things we don't understand, and I'm very open to the idea that there are dimensions of reality that we don't understand or haven't even guessed at. And that in those, in these threshold states, like in a coma, or in a sort of transported religious, an ecstatic religious state.

• 5:15Chris Williamson?

  Transcendent sort of, yeah.

• 5:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, that we sort of like gain some sort of like entry, some glimpse into another, another dimension of reality. I can understand how that would be true. And I think my father, the physicist, would also say, yes, there's things we don't understand, and that means that there are phenomena that we can't explain.

• 5:35Chris Williamson?

  Even if there isn't some otherworldliness going on, even if it's not a different plane that you're tapping into, sheer, the sheer fact that your brain decided to create some sort of, kind of like a polarity thing, it's sort of welcoming, there's something symbolic going on with regards to darkness and father, and then with Paul, this near-death experience in an induced coma is semi-common, it's like rarely common. And even if all it was, was the brain trying to create some sort of an existence in which he could keep ticking over, even if that's it, like just that is pretty miraculous itself.

• 6:14Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, my understanding of the medical understanding of an induced coma is that there's no brain activity at all. So I wonder how they- You know, I wonder how they understand that, but likewise with death, you know, like that there's no brain activity. And I, you know, I mean, I was entering a very strange place and when I was on that threshold. And, um, you know, I've done some research into it and, and my experience is a very common one. And it's interesting because they had, there are various neurological explanations, like low blood oxygen, um, uh, endogenous DMT in your brain that gets released, um, and ketamine, endogenous ketamine that gets released, things that will produce visions and hallucinations in, in test subjects. But when they, when

• 6:58Speaker 00

  they expose people to those effects, like ketamine, people have wild hallucinations. They don't see the dead. They don't see dead relatives, right? You have to be dying for that to happen. And, um, and that, that's the part that it's, that it's very common for people who are dying and it's not really part of the ketamine experience for otherwise healthy people. And that's where the mystery sort of begins for me.

• 7:24Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I am familiar from my days partying. I'm pretty familiar with ketamine and I never saw any of my dead parents coming back, even though both of them were alive, which means, is it set and setting, which is something that psychedelics researchers talk about? Is it the fact that you've been primed because you feel like you're about to die so that there's some sort of predisposition toward thinking that this is the sort of vision that you may have? Or is there maybe something else going on? Is it a blend of other sort of chemicals? Pretty interesting.

• 7:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I didn't know I was dying. So I, I mean, I was shocked.

• 7:57Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, of course. You just thought that you were...

• 7:59Speaker 00

  No, I mean, I said, I said to the doctor, you're losing me right now. And I meant, I felt myself getting pulled away, but I had no idea that I was dying. It never crossed my mind. I mean, I just had a tummy ache, right? And I felt funny. I mean, I did, and you know, my, I was pretty loopy because I had, I had a, um, uh, uh, you know, my blood log, oxygen levels were incredibly low. My hemoglobin was 1.2. I mean, it's hard to find that. On the internet, right? I mean, almost no one goes that low. That that's that's incompatible with life. Right is what I was told. One point two hemoglobin. Hemoglobin is what transports oxygen. So basically, I mean, I was running on fumes. And I had no idea that I was dying. The next day, the nurse in the ICU

• 8:43Speaker 00

  said, we no one knows how you made it. Like, you almost died yesterday. No one knows why you're still here. It was completely shocking to me. So maybe there's some kind of body knowledge that understands your dying on a kind of animal level and produces the appropriate hallucinations entirely possible. Or there's something weird going on in reality, and there's something we don't understand about death and that, you know, dead people have some dimension of existence that we don't, we don't understand, that we that we ourselves access on the threshold of death. I mean, I don't know, you know, but it's a, it's a, it's a legitimate question.

• 9:20Chris Williamson?

  Didn't you say that there were a couple of things that had occurred? Weird embodied senses, sort of subconsciously things that you'd gone through in the time leading up to that incident as well?

• 9:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, for many years, for no reason that I can identify, and I'm a, I was an endurance athlete when I was young. I'm very for for a person of my age, I'm very healthy. I'm a high-performance human, you know, and, and

• 9:47Speaker 00

  um, for many, for many years, I, I, I had this bizarre certainty that I would die before I was sixty. You know, and I'm not really eligible for, you know, a heart attack or a stroke or something like that. I, you know, I just have a constitution that makes that very unlikely. I don't know why, and that's exactly what would have happened, but for this sort of miracle. But, but also like two days before, I was woken up by a nightmare that that I had died and I'd crossed over and I was looking back at my family and they were grieving and I couldn't go back to them because I'd crossed over. And I was just like, anguished. I, I, I have two little girls, you know, four at the time they were three and one.

• 10:27Speaker 00

  And I was absent and my wife and I was completely anguished that I'd sort of screwed up and had died through by accident. And, uh, and I couldn't, I couldn't go back again. And I was anguish and it woke me up. And that was thirty six hours before exactly that happened.

• 10:45Chris Williamson?

  Crazy. Given the fact that you had such a profound experience, has there been a lasting mindset shift around how you see the world or a change in your behavior in any way?

• 10:59Speaker 00

  Well, you know, I'm a little bit more open to, you know, what you might call the great mystery of life and of death. You know, a little more open to the idea that it may not be that we might be something more than purely biological beings. And that are everything that that we are ends at the moment of death. I mean, you know, I've seen dead bodies. I've seen people who were dead an hour. I've seen people who were dead a week. I've seen people who are dead a month, right? It's hard to imagine when you look at those individuals that there's anything remaining of that, what, who that person was, right? I can tell you right now, like, it just, wow, you're some skin and a bunch of bones.

• 11:41Speaker 00

  Like, you are no longer you, right? So that, but now I'm not sure, like, I just don't understand what happened to me. And people keep saying to me, like,

• 11:53Speaker 00

  well, you know, are you reconsidering your atheism, you know, like, you know, and I'm like, I didn't see God. I saw my father, you know, like, I don't know, God doesn't necessarily have anything to do with this. But the presence of my father does raise questions about the nature of reality in a physical sense and the nature of death in a physical sense. And so, other than that, you know, I would say, I mean, it's sort of cliche, but all we know we have for sure is right, we don't even know that we have today. We know we have this moment, right? This moment that you and I are both in right now, we know for sure we have that because we're in it. And literally moment by moment, you cannot absolutely know that even the next moment will come,

• 12:37Speaker 00

  much less the day, the next day will come, right? You don't know. There was a lady who About a week ago, who was woken up? He was, she was asleep and she was woken up because a meteor the size, it was said, it was said, but it seems quite gendered. So it's a sort of funny, but this was in the media. A meteor the size of a large man's fist. I just find that in this modern era, quite a funny way to describe a meteor. But anyway, a meteor the size of a large man's fist walloped into the pillow next to her head. Right? She was three inches from being annihilated. Right? And, uh, yeah. So, um, uh, or she came to bed and found it there.

• 13:18Speaker 00

  I mean, I don't know which it was, but at any rate, had her head been there, like she would be dead. So you don't know moment to moment that you would, but right in this moment, right now, you do, you know, exist. You know, you exist and in this sort of Zen sense, that is all we know for sure that we have. And so it makes me just think, you know, be in the moment. Like appreciate the fact that you are alive right now, right here with your little girls. Or whatever, like who you are right now and just have a reverence for that because it's all you ever know that you have for sure.

• 13:50Chris Williamson?

  If that's what you get out of a near death experience, overall, I think avoiding the near death experience would probably have been preferable. But that realization is pretty beautiful. Another crazy thing, which is what I said to my friend on the podcast, Paul, about the fact that he'd buried his father once and he was going to have to bury him again. Um, you're potentially going to see your father and that sort of black pit again at some point. You may sort of glance off the top of that once and then come back around for a second loop at some point and then see it again.

• 14:21Speaker 00

  I, you know, I was taken to the threshold and then brought back. And so I now know what that, that is like, that place is like, and I gotta say, I did not want to go down there. But it seemed like a minor transition. It didn't seem like this massive, like, oh my God, I'm dying. Like it seemed in that moment, it seemed like, well, that whatever that next thing is, it's a small step to the left. It's not a huge thing. It's a small thing. And by the time you're dying, death is a, a small transition. Right? And dying is a. You know, it's a vague thing, right? I mean, when you're dying, your body is shutting

• 15:02Speaker 00

  down, but there's no moment, right, where you just get, you get less and less alive and more and more dead, right up into the point where you're almost completely dead and very little bit alive. And then that last little bit seems to be a minor step. And there was some, you know, funny way, it took a bit of the mystery out of it. I mean, a bit of the awe out of it. It's like, oh, death is just, it's a very mundane thing. You know, it's like, I mean, it's, it's an ordinary thing, right? It's a very ordinary thing that everybody does, and it's, it's not some transcendent thing. It could just be part of what happened during your day. You know, I mean, it was a very strange perspective.

• 15:43Chris Williamson?

  Talking about freedom today, and you went from someone who, I guess from the outside looking in, is a single guy in his late 40s, early 50s, would have had all of the freedom in the world, but then started a family, had two young daughters, got married. Talk me through that experience as someone who's done it later in life.

• 16:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, so I was married previously, and, you know, my wife and I were still friends, my ex-wife and I are still friends. We broke up on very good terms and remained sort of like, loyalty to each other as friends throughout that process, thank God. And I'm very grateful to her for that. But during the trek that I undertook, I was going through that process of separation and divorce, and it was a very sad, very sad year. And I was, I should just sort of describe it briefly. So me and a few buddies, we'd all been in a lot of combat, either as soldiers or as journalists. We walked along the railroad lines.

• 16:50Speaker 00

  Um, from Washington DC to Philadelphia to Pittsburgh, uh, about four hundred miles. The railroad lines in this country are these sort of swaths of no man's land that are really not patrolled uh, or monitored by the authorities and um, you can kind of do what you want out there and you know, it's a dangerous environment, right? I mean, there are trains going by at a hundred and twenty miles an hour. Um, and whatever, they're marginal environments, there are some drifty kind of people out there, whatever you, but it goes through everything, right? The suburbs and the farms and the wilderness and the ghettos and the industrial wasteland, it goes through everything. And we were sleeping under bridges and in abandoned buildings and cooking over fires

• 17:32Speaker 00

  and um, getting our water out of creeks and dodging the police, uh, cause it's illegal, of course, and um, every, you know, most nights, as I say in the book, my, my book, Freedom, most nights, we were the only people in the world who knew where we were. And that's a form of freedom and uh, and one that's not to be sneezed at and although there's many other forms as well, but, but um, you know, after that, yes, I, I, I found myself in a very, very good relationship with a wonderful, wonderful woman and um, and we decided that I would try to have a family and we were lucky, we were blessed and that we, that it happened and we have two little girls.

• 18:14Speaker 00

  And you know, I've had all kinds of other freedom prior in my life, uh, you know, my first daughter was born at age fifty-five and um, you know, one of the reasons I've tried to stay very healthy and athletic is gonna, because I want to stay alive as long as possible, possible for them and for me for them, you know, and, and uh, so I, I, I felt like I was giving up, yeah, you're giving up one kind of freedom and you're getting another kind of freedom, but that's always true, right? I mean, you can give up. You know, temporal freedom and get a high paying job and make a bunch of money and then you have economic freedom.

• 18:53Speaker 00

  Uh, you can give up, you know, you can give up the sort of safety and stability and predictability of living in a modern society and go into the wilderness. And you have the freedom of that, but you're in a fair amount of danger. And if something happens to you, like you have a ruptured appendix, sorry, guy, you're dead, you know, like, so there's, you, you never get all forms of freedom at once. And the form of freedom that I got as, you know, as a father, as a, as a, as a hu- husband and father, is this profound emotional freedom of be, uh, uh, of, of luck, you know, and, and, and, uh, you know, in some ways, it's the most un, the most boundless form of freedom there is.

• 19:36Speaker 00

  And it has no limits, no depths, you know, it's as boundless as, as, it's only limited by you. And, uh, and that, and then, you know, there's something about that, that, that, uh, you know, maybe it would have been lost on me at age 20 or 30 or whatever, and that's probably good, I wasn't a dad back then. But thank God I'm a dad now, because I, I, you know, at this point, I would have wondered what's life for.

• 19:58Chris Williamson?

  That's a beautiful story. It's a really, really beautiful story to hear.

• 20:01Speaker 00

  Thank you. Thank you.

• 20:03Chris Williamson?

  You say that there's a, a tension between freedom and community. How does that play out?

• 20:08Speaker 00

  Well, you, you are not, um, you're not safe unless you're part of a group. I mean, just in sort of like biological terms. Anthropological terms, humans do not survive alone in nature, they die almost immediately. We survive, uh, uh, as a biological matter, we survive because we're part of a group. We don't have sharp claws, we don't have sharp teeth, we can't climb trees very well, we can't, we can't run very fast, although on hot days, we can run, run quite far, which makes us different than, than, from, from most other mammals, but, um.

• 20:42Speaker 00

  We get our safety, our mo- our physical safety and therefore emotional safety from being part of a group, a survival group. And uh, that means that if you're part of a group, you have to participate, you have to contribute and you have to abide by group norms. And you know, if you were in a hunter gatherer group fifty thousand years ago and you were a young male, that the group norm probably expected you to be part of the effort to hunt food, right? And to defend the community with violence, with force if necessary, from a predator or from a group of a- another group of aggressive humans. That was your job, right?

• 21:24Speaker 00

  And if you were not willing to do that, you were not fulfilling your, the, your expected role in that community and you were cast out. Undoubtedly, you were cast out. And I, so I looked at the American frontier in Pennsylvania in the seventeen hundreds, these, the early settlers that went into what was called Indian Territory, you know, escaped the sort of control and oppression maybe of the colonial government and uh, uh, and of the, of the church of that era, to the wilderness, right? It, it, God, God's, God's world, God's great land, right? And, but the problem was the wilderness was enormously free and enormously dangerous. And the way that they re- reduced those risks, the settlers, was by having basically a, a, a mutual defense pact among the sort of families in every area.

• 22:09Speaker 00

  They would build a stockade and if there was a sort of like, if the, if there were Indian raids, um, everyone would collect at the stockade and defend it. And if you were a boy aged fourteen or over, you were expected to carry a rifle and, and use it and fight in defense of the group. Wi- women had roles as well, uh, of course, equally vital roles. And um, they would reload the weapons, they would, they would attend the wounded, they would try to put out the fires that were started by flaming arrows in the roofs and bu- of the buildings, right? So if you were not willing to do those things, you were not wanted, right? You're welcome to leave now, if you're not willing to help defend the group.

• 22:50Speaker 00

  So these settlers got a great freedom in the wilderness, but they had to abide by the norms of the group. They were not free to act selfishly within the group. And likewise, I would say, just on a very mundane level, like, we are a, America is a free country in many important regards, but you are not free to drive on the left-hand side of the road, as you do in England. In the United States, you drive on the right-hand side of the road. If you drive on the left-hand side of the road, you're going to kill somebody. Or if you run a red light, you're going to kill somebody. You are not free to do that. You have to abide by the norms of this particular group, which, in this case, is a community of 330 million people, all whom agree that we'll all drive on the right-hand side of

• 23:34Speaker 00

  the road to keep highway deaths to a minimum.

• 23:37Chris Williamson?

  Is there a particularly unique tension now, that previously, the symbiotic relationship between the individual and the group had to work a little bit more hard? Because the individual could not survive without adhering to the rules of the group. Whereas now, we have a much more fragmented society that's a lot safer. You don't necessarily need to. Yeah, there's some laws that you need to, but the individual has more power as convenience and safety has increased.

• 24:04Speaker 00

  Well, they indulge in the illusion that they don't need the group. But, you know, we're all putting gasoline into our cars that is drilled by other people. We're eating food that other people grew. We're living in homes, for the most part, that other people built. We're outsourcing our defense and survival needs to the fire department, and to doctors and nurses, and to the police, and to soldiers, for that matter. And, you know, every survival task that confronted small-scale, organic societies in modern society has been outsourced, right? So you don't grow your own food, but you have to be at work at 9:00 a.m., and you work till 5:00 p.m.

• 24:47Speaker 00

  And maybe you're paid half a million dollars a year, or maybe you're paid $30,000, whatever it is. Maybe you're doing well or not well within that system, but that system is providing your basic survival needs, and in return, you're giving it your time, right? You're not temporally free. Right, but you're free from the sort of most immediate threat to your survival, uh, at least in sort of evolutionary human terms. Um, so the idea that you're like, oh, I'm, I, you know, I'm an American citizen and I don't need anybody, I'm blah, blah, blah, like just complete nonsense, right? Listen, man, the gun you're carrying that you're, you're, the gun that you're like showing up at the state house with to show what a badass you are and how free you are, that

• 25:29Speaker 00

  gun was made by somebody else, the ammo is made by somebody else, the pickup truck you drove down, you know, drove down there was made by somebody else, and the gasoline that's in the tank was made by somebody else, you are not free at all. And humans never have been, we have never existed alone in nature, we live in groups. The group that we all live in in modern society is an extremely large, complicated group with a huge supply chain that is so complicated that it really needs some kind of like federal oversight and regulation to keep it running well. And countries that don't have that, like Somalia or Afghanistan, the supply chain is very unreliable, there's a black market economy that's extremely exploitative and there's a huge amount of corruption. So, you know, like if you think you're doing, not doing well in this country with federal

• 26:13Speaker 00

  oversight, go to Somalia, you, you, you will, you will be blessed with no federal oversight, see how it goes.

• 26:19Chris Williamson?

  What do you class as the opposite of freedom? Cause some people would say like tyranny or something, but I'm guessing that's maybe a little bit rough hewn.

• 26:28Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, again, I, I mean, I hope I'm not sort of hiding behind, you know, anthropology and biology, but in, in, uh, in longstanding human terms, the most immediate threat to your freedom was an enemy group that would come in and kill or enslave you. Right, that was the most immediate, uh, threat to, to the, to your freedom and by you, I mean you and your community, right, you and your tribe, uh, you and your, and your loved ones. Um, the word freedom is, is taken from the Middle German, uh, freedom, um, which means beloved.

• 27:08Speaker 00

  So, in that sense, people who were free were the people around you in your community, the, the, the people who were beloved by you. And strangers, foreigners, outsiders, did not necessarily have the right to freedom, right? I mean, if you could... Kill and enslave them, they were your slaves, right? I mean, they like, they didn't have, there was no international law, right? There was no human rights law. There was no international standards like that of human rights and human dignity. Basically, the only people you were, you could not morally kill or enslave were people within your own community. The term murder applied to those people.

• 27:53Speaker 00

  Killing the enemy was not murder, right? That was killing the enemy. And so, freedom, the essential meaning of freedom is that the people, you and your beloved, your community, are without an, an outside oppressor. Right? Which means you can oppress other people, but you yourselves are not being oppressed. Right? That's the meaning of the word freedom. So, so, so, in the modern worlds, I would say, we still have to pay sort of homage to that original meaning. If you are safe from the predations of an outside enemy group, you are in a very, very important sense, free. The way you do that is being a well armed, well organized state

• 28:33Speaker 00

  that can repel the, the attacks of an invader, the, the, of an aggressor. But if you're well armed enough and well organized enough to, to defeat the enemy, then an abusive leader has an apparatus, a security apparatus, that is well armed and well organized enough to oppress his own people, to basically turn his own people into serfs, which is what the elite of Europe did throughout the entire medieval era, right? I mean, the, the era of serfdom, that essentially, that essentially ended with the Enlightenment and then with the revolutions in France and America and elsewhere.

• 29:14Speaker 00

  That system was one of elite power and, and essentially serfdom. Every, people had no legal rights. You couldn't sue the king, right? The king could kill you and you had no, your family had no recourse. You could rape and plunder and pillage as much as you wanted if you were royalty, right? There was no- Democracy brought an end to that and the laws that applied to the commoners, to everyone, also applied to the to the elites. Obviously, democracy falls a little bit short on that, but but at least in theory, that was that was the idea. So that's how you keep, I mean, basically, there's freedom from an oppressor and out there's freedom from an enemy and then

• 29:57Speaker 00

  there's freedom from an oppressor within your own society. And what democracy tries to do is have a well-equipped state that can defend itself and have a system of laws that defends the populace populace against an unscrupulous ruler.

• 30:12Chris Williamson?

  So you've got three identifiers for ways that people and groups can become free, as in run, fight, and think. But it sounds like coordinating is actually the first thing that everybody needs to do. There's a there's a pre-step to all of that.

• 30:27Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, I mean, societies coordinate, right? I mean, that's what a society is. So that's just taken as a given. But there is no state of human evolution where a bunch of individuals like, oh, this isn't working on our own out here in the jungle. Let's get together and do this. That that never happened, right? I mean, we are closest relatives are chimpanzees. We we split from the from chimpanzees about six million years ago. Ninety-nine percent, some or ninety-eight percent of our DNA is indistinguishable from chimpanzee DNA. We're very, very closely related to them. We are social primates and always have been. So in my book, Freedom, what I wanted to figure out was how do humans alone among mammals

• 31:10Speaker 00

  maintain their their autonomy, their freedom in the face of a larger, more powerful foe? So individual combatants, a smaller man can defeat a larger man. I mean, one of the interesting things about mixed martial arts in its early days is that they had no weight categories. And there are plenty of examples of smaller, smaller fighters who handily defeated larger, larger adversaries, inconceivable in the primate world, right, in the rest of the primate world. You know, likewise, smaller coalitions can defeat larger coalitions, the Montenegrins in the 1600s.

• 31:44Speaker 00

  A wild mountain tribe were invaded by the Ottoman Empire, one of the dominant militaries of the era. The Montenegrins were outnumbered twelve to one, right? The Ottomans had cavalry, artillery, you know, all the advantages that America had in fighting the Taliban. And the Montenegrins handed them their hat, right? I mean, that over and over again, they defeated the Ottomans and expelled them from their land. And inconceivable, except for humans. So I was trying to figure out, how does this work? So basically, the first, a, a, a, a, a underdog group, the first thing that they try to do when they're dealing with an oppressor is outrun them. So the Apache in the American Southwest, unlike the Pueblo societies that were rooted

• 32:29Speaker 00

  in place because they're agriculturalists, they were much more wealthy, they were sedentary, they didn't have the option of fleeing, they were rolled by the Spanish immediately, sometimes within hours of the confrontation, they, they, they, they were defeated or surrendered to the Spanish. Where the Apache maintained, after first contact, the Apache maintained their autonomy for another three centuries, right? Almost to within my, my grandmother's life, right? My grandmother was born in nineteen hundred. There were, there were bands of free Apache who survived almost until nineteen hundred, right? Because they were mobile, they were free. But if you can't outrun your enemy, you're gonna have to outfight him. And that's where this amazing dynamic comes in, that with humans, either on one-on-one

• 33:13Speaker 00

  combat, or, or in coalitionary combat, the smaller group, the smaller individual can actually win. Which means that larger groups, like the United States, eventually, you know, winds up negotiating with, with smaller groups like the Taliban. I hate the Taliban, I, they're loathsome, right? No respect for women's rights, for human rights. But I gotta say, if the smaller group always lost, there would no, there would be no freedom in the human experience. The, the world would be composed of large fascist mega-states that impose their will on everybody else. That's not what the world looks like. And then finally, if you're within a society, you know, this, this is how you deal with an, you know, enemies, right? You run or you fight. But how do you deal with oppression within your own society?

• 33:58Speaker 00

  If you're being oppressed by the government, or, or business interests, or what have you, how do you, what do you do? You have to outthink them. You're now in a chess game, right? You're not gonna run away, and, and you can't defeat them in outright combat. How do you do it? So I looked at the labor movement in the United States about a hundred years ago. I looked at the Easter Rising in Dublin and in Ireland in nineteen sixteen, around the same era. You know, these are groups that are completely outgunned by the power, the established powers. You know, military, government, and corporate powers, completely outgunned. And yet, they managed to eventually achieve their purposes.

• 34:40Speaker 00

  And one way, one very important thing to do, I looked at successful underdog groups. And one thing they had in common is they often incorporate women. Not necessarily into the front lines of combat, but into the sort of matrix of the revolutionary movement, the insurgency. Women have lateral networks. Men are very top-down hierarchical. That's very important when it comes to charging machine guns. It's essential. But women's lateral networks are also very important because they're almost impossible for the state, for the authorities, to penetrate, to infiltrate, to decapitate. You can't do it. It's a lateral network, like a spider web.

• 35:25Speaker 00

  Very, very important. And the other thing is that women on a, you know, sort of on a, in a social movement, you put women on the front lines of a strike or a protest. It makes it very, very hard for the police to use force. They will, of course, it happens. But there is a sanction against using mass violence, public mass violence against women that isn't quite as strong as it is for men. A group of men protesting in the street look like a mob. A group of women protesting in the street, they look like a social movement. And you open up with the machine guns on them, and it's very problematic for the government, for the dictatorship, whatever it may be.

• 36:08Speaker 00

  And so, in the labor movement in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in nineteen twelve, they were confronting National Guard with fixed bayonets. And the men were sort of powerless to confront this show of force. So they started putting women on the front line of the protests. And these young boys in uniform with fixed bayonets did not know what to do. They're looking at women just like their sisters and their mothers, or maybe their daughters, right? And one frustrated police captain said...

• 36:40Speaker 00

  He said, "One, one, one good cop can handle ten men, but it takes ten cops to handle one woman." And they did not quite have the manpower to handle those protests, and that tipped the balance. Um, and the other thing that these underdog groups have in, successful underdog groups have in common, is leaders that are willing to die for the cause. Uh, literally willing to die for the cause. And, um, if you don't have that, if you have leadership that's sort of hiding behind the people that they lead, either literally or figuratively, are leaders who will not accept blame, will not take risk, who, who will, who will not own mistakes, uh, who will not expose themselves to gunfire if it's actually a shooting situation. You have leaders like that, they're really not

• 37:25Speaker 00

  leaders, they're opportunists. It does not work.

• 37:28Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, there's, you see this echo symbolically in stories and in movies as well. The leader of the goody side is always the guy that's charging into battle. He'll stay behind to help the wounded man and carry him on his shoulder. Whereas the leader of the baddies, he's always up in some ivory tower commanding people around. And then it's the good guy that will eventually rise up the lift and fight through all of the layers and then eventually get to this bourgeois twat that someone, someone needs to kill. So yeah, you see this, you see this happen. What was the story with, was it Michael Mallin that you looked at?

• 38:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, Michael Mallin was an Irish revolutionary in 1916 who commanded a brigade in Dublin. Um, and, um, you know, was eventually caught. I mean, there was a, after a week of, uh, after a week of combat in, in Dublin, um, in bloody combat, I mean, a lot of people died. Uh, and you know, the Brits were throwing soldiers at the problem, you know, by the thousands and the, and the rebels who had machine guns and were like hiding, you know, you know, sort of in, in, in, you know, in sandbaged apartments, you know, they'd figured this out. They were just mowing down these poor British teenagers. Um, conscripts and, you know, but you know, this is the same, the same era when, um, you

• 38:46Speaker 00

  know, they, the, the, the British lost sixty thousand men on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, something like that, killed and wounded. If I'm remembering my numbers correctly, it's there was the population of County Wicklow in Ireland. In one day, that was just the first day and nobody blinked, right? So, human life, you know, didn't mean anything. And I'm sure the Irish rebels were like, Jesus, if they treat their own people like that, how are they gonna treat us? We don't wanna be part of this fiasco, right? So, so Michael Mallin was one of the leaders and I think he had four children and he, uh, was married and had four children and, you know, he was tried as sort of a, a sham

• 39:27Speaker 00

  trial and, uh, not allowed any representation and condemned to death for treason. Uh, and on his way to the jail where they would, uh, where they would kill him, he passed the wagon past his home and he saw his dog.

• 39:45Chris Williamson?

  Was that done on, on purpose?

• 39:46Speaker 00

  I don't know. I don't know. Um, uh, and, and he, uh, he saw his dog in the yard and he, there, there are these anguish letters that he wrote in the hours before his death. His family was allowed to visit him in the, on his last night. And, um, then he was left alone, um, in his cell with God, presumably. He was very religious. And in my book, I have, uh, printed in full is his last desperate letter of, of anguish to his wife and, and children.

• 40:27Speaker 00

  Um, and the first sign of light and dawn, at dawn, they took him from his cell and walked him down to the stone breakers yard. And stood him before a wall and a firing squad leveled their rifles and on command they fired in unison and killed them and the medical examiner, you know, they killed, I think, twelve or fourteen Irish revolutionaries like this. And including a man named Connolly, who was the commander of the Dublin forces that fought the Brits and, you know, he was wounded twice, I mean, the, you know, the big job that his aides had was to drag him, you know, trying to drag him out of gunfire, you know, because he kept risking his life to command the troops.

• 41:11Speaker 00

  I mean, he was the epitome of heroic leadership, right? And he was shot twice, wounded twice, and he couldn't even walk to his own death when they executed him. They had to carry him in a stretcher and prop him up in a chair. And the medical examiner that was present at these executions said that the only people in the situation that were not nervous, that were not shaken, were the condemned, the condemned men. And the firing squads were all shaking, they were so nervous. They were the fearful ones. And, you know, I should, I should say, I should say that this, what you said about, you know, this sort of like Hollywood movies about villains being these sort of bourgeois

• 41:53Speaker 00

  twats in a tower, you know, getting other men to do their bidding. And on the good side, there's like a selfless leader that, that grabs the flag and charges forward, as it were. You know, what we're depicting in the bad guys is our own society. That is exactly what our leaders are. They're instanced in safe buildings, telling other people what to do. And, you know, I get it, it's a modern society and no one wants the president himself leading the charge. You know, I mean, it just wouldn't work, right? I mean, it's just, I mean, you know, like with, like with Connolly, you know, we, you know, we need those people to help run the show, so you don't want them taking a bullet, that, you know, that's for soldiers to do.

• 42:38Speaker 00

  But I totally get it. But, but just to your point about what the sort of bad guys look like, they look like, we make them look like us. And they have leaders, I feel like political leaders in, in modern European, Western democracies, including America. Are sort of notable for their for their moral cowardice, you know, I mean, they they, you know, they, there is no principle they weren't, they won't trample to further their political interests.

• 43:06Chris Williamson?

  Well, that's the equivalent, the equivalent of not taking the bullet is standing by your word. You don't need to stand in front of the gunfire, but if you are to say a thing, you need to not forget that you said that thing three weeks later and pretend that you said something else and try and spin a different line out. I think this is one of the reasons why we have concerns about the trustworthiness of the people at the top.

• 43:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, you know, I would vote for someone who was willing to lose an election because he or she felt that the truth was necessary to articulate. So Liz Cheney, I'm a Democrat, right, Liz Cheney is very conservative and she is standing up to the, you know, this sort of like MAGA Donald Trump world by insisting on reality, right, insisting on the truth about January 6th and about Donald Trump's efforts to subvert the election. And, and, you know, I would vote for her, even though I'm a Democrat, I would vote for her, she's an arch conservative, I would vote for her simply because she is willing to sacrifice her career for the sake of the truth and our democracy and our democratic system.

• 44:13Speaker 00

  I would vote for her over a Democrat who was not willing to tell the truth in a heartbeat, right? And, but that's the, that is now the standard for, for courage, is are you willing to tell the truth? And I feel like a lot of politicians actually won't even pass that standard, it's pathetic.

• 44:31Chris Williamson?

  It's a pretty low bar.

• 44:33Speaker 00

  It's a low bar, right? It's absolutely pathetic. And if there weren't such enormous financial rewards for being in government, I mean Mitch McConnell has $10 million in the bank. Where the hell did Mitch McConnell get 10 million bucks, right? I mean, I'm not sure he got, saying he got that illegally, but there's a, a sort of aspect of unseemliness that you have people who are exploiting Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat also, like, it's completely violated ethics rules about insider stock trading, right? And, I mean, 37, I think it was 37.

• 45:07Speaker 00

  Congressmen and women have violated, and I'm getting this from Russell Brand, by the way, so you can go check it, you can go check it, but I just interviewed with him a few days ago, and I looked up some of his busy videos, so assuming that he has his facts right, I'm sure he does, thirty-seven American congressmen and women have violated their own ethics standards about insider stock trading, their own standards, a law that they themselves passed, thirty-seven, right, that's not ethical, right, that's immoral, and that, and people like that forget about being able to benefit financially, they shouldn't be anywhere near a public office if they're willing to do that. I mean, that's what, okay, you don't have to take a bullet, that's, you know, politics don't involve literally

• 45:48Speaker 00

  fighting the enemy in the trenches, right, but at the very least, you can forego the opportunity to admit yourself for four years, at the very least, you can do that for us, and they're not even rising to that.

• 46:01Chris Williamson?

  It's a severe distance from the philosopher king of the Marcus Aurelius era, you know, you think about somebody who's concerned with virtue above all others, that will sell the inside of the palace wares to try and pay off the debts of the nation, yeah, I mean, I think this is why, for me, politics feels like such a wasted endeavor, that the understanding of how to limbically hijack the electorate has taken precedent over people actually doing what is good, like being able to manipulate cognitive biases means that someone who isn't good can appear more good than someone who is, that's, that's unfortunately the situation that we're in.

• 46:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely, and, you know, if you live in a sort of small-scale, organic survival group of thirty, forty, fifty people, as humans have done for most of their two-hundred-thousand years of existence, it's very easy to detect fraud, to detect that kind of duplicity, that kind of dishonesty and cowardice, and it's usually punished by death. I mean, there's an anthropologist named Richard Bohm who looked at the application of capital punishment within hunter-gatherer societies, right, and the most common reason for killing one's leader as a hunter, in a hunter-gatherer community. Um, in modern day hunter gatherer societies and what is known from the last hundred years

• 47:27Speaker 00

  of anthropology in these societies, the most common reason by far was abuse, uh, when leaders abused their position of power and, and, um, and, and worked to benefit themselves ahead of other people. Um, I know that there were tribes, native, native tribes in, in, in, in America, uh, you know, a hundred plus years ago, um, where cowardice, you know, a warrior who was, who, who was cowardly on the battlefield, um, was killed by his, his fellow warriors. Like you were a coward, man. You didn't defend the tribe. Sorry. Like, we're gonna do you a favor. You've disowned yourself. We're gonna do you, we're gonna spare you having to kill yourself. We're gonna do it for you. Right?

• 48:12Speaker 00

  That's leadership. That's selflessness. That is acting on behalf of your tribe. And, and, you know, political leaders now, that's not even on the menu. Right? So how do we, how do we patrol that, that behavior, monitor that behavior? We're not in groups of thirty, forty, fifty people, or a hundred people, or five hundred people. We're in groups of millions and millions. And you know what it used to be? There was a great thesis that the modern, that the, that the monotheistic god was invented during the advent of agriculture, when surplus food, food allowed great numbers of people to live together. Basically, there were communities of strangers, of, and, you know, anonymity was possible, right? After the advent of agriculture.

• 48:54Speaker 00

  And that was when the monotheistic god was sort of invented to an all, all seeing, all knowing punitive god who would punish sin. Right? So the community might not know who you are, and you steal a loaf of bread, and you get away with it, because no one knows who you are, you know, whatever. But God knows who you are. It's a monotheistic, all-knowing God. That was invented to control, to encourage good behavior in a society that was so large, there was anonymity. Well, now we're basically a godless society, you know, since I'm an atheist, so, you know, I get it. So what do we have in its place? You know, we have CCTV. You know, basically, it's very hard to commit a public crime without it being captured on video.

• 49:39Speaker 00

  And thank God, right? Because there are lots of very, very bad people who have done very bad things, including the, you know, the London Underground bombers of 2004, you know, who were, you know, one of them was captured because he was seen, he was seen on CCTV cameras. So they're a good, you know, they're a good thing. They've taken the place of a monotheistic God. So what, but what do we do now as the electorate? How do we, how do we get people to act that way? We get them to act that way by penalizing at the, at the, at the polling booth, penalizing selfish behavior, dishonest behavior. You know, we have to call it out and we have to call it out in our own party because if we call it out in the other party, everyone's going to ignore it.

• 50:22Speaker 00

  We have to call it out among ourselves, among our own. And that's something that the Democrats and the Republicans are uniquely bad at. And, and the country, it's not going to be an honest system until those two parties decide to apply some real morality to their own people.

• 50:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, game theoretically, it doesn't sound like a good strategy to stop focusing on the enemy and start focusing on the inside. But that's without the luxury of a God's eye view. If you were to say, look, I want the best sort of world, community, nation that I can do, you need to hold everybody to account, not just the opposition, to try and get yourselves back into power. To do what? To have four more years of shitty power? That's not going to get you very far. Thinking about the people riding into battle, I heard a story about a Spartan soldier who was incredibly proficient. He was one of the finest soldiers in the army and he went into battle naked. So he stripped off all of his armor, stripped off all of his clothes, just went in shield, sword and spear. And when he got back, he was punished.

• 51:21Chris Williamson?

  He was punished by the commanders of the army because he'd endangered a Spartan asset himself. He had endangered one of the assets of the army by being so reckless with the way that he went in. So even somebody, that's another control measure. What we're talking about here are control measures, whether they be Monothistic gods that cause you to emergently try and act in the way that you think that you should, whether they be CCTV cameras that dictatorially tell you that if you do not act in the way that you're supposed to, whether they be cultural norms that are kind of this embodied sensed communitarian version of this, and you even have when somebody oversteps their

• 52:03Chris Williamson?

  mark, when somebody utilizes their skill or their prowess and is wasteful with it in a society like Sparta, where it was all about trying to get the most done, trying to squeeze everything you could out of a small society, even those soldiers were told you can't endanger an asset, even if it's yourself.

• 52:23Speaker 00

  Well, listen, I'll tell you, I've been in a lot of combat with US military and we were in a situation, very bad situation at one point up on a ridge and the Taliban were on either side of us, there was nowhere to hide, right, and they were about to open up on us. And there was no good place to be, right, and the only chance we had was, by we, I mean the soldiers I was with, was to unleash so much firepower back at them, you know, I mean, we sort of hide behind our own firepower, but eventually you run out of ammunition, right, and so it was extremely exposed place. Everyone had run out of water, it was very hot, so everyone was black on water, it was called black on water, they'd run out of water, they're drinking the fluid in their IV bags,

• 53:05Speaker 00

  so where people wounded, they wouldn't have IV fluid, it was a desperate situation, we were getting ready to get hit and it was gonna really suck. And the lieutenant stood up in this sort of awful moment of quiet before we were gonna get hit, and we could hear it on the icoms, on the radio chatter from the enemy, like, okay, we've got them, they have nowhere to hide, they are done, right, and we were waiting for this hurricane of lead, right, and the lieutenant stood up.

• 53:36Speaker 00

  I mean, the only place you can be is like on the ground, as close to the ground as possible, so standing up in this situation, I can't tell you how hard that would be to do, right, and the man stood up to look around to see where his heavy weapons were positioned, to make sure that they were in the best possible position, again, think Ponnally in Dublin in 1916, he stood up to see where the heavy weapons were placed, the two 40s particularly, to make sure they were placed right, and the staff sergeant that was right next to me said, sir, please sit down.

• 54:11Speaker 00

  We need you. We need you to stay alive. It's your job to make decisions. It's our job to get shot at. And the staff sergeant stood up and he said, tell me what you need. Tell me what you need to know and I'll find it out. And you take, please take cover. And so that's exactly, that is leadership. And when corporations sometimes bring me in as a consultant to like, how to make their corporation like feel more like a tribe. So that basically there's more like group loyalty by the workers. So they'll produce more and everyone gets richer. Right? Particularly the leadership. Uh, when they bring me in for that consultation, I say, look,

• 54:48Speaker 00

  you have to be a leader. A leader makes sure that they may, they may benefit disproportionately when things go well. No problem. Right? Leadership should be rewarded disproportionately as higher responsibilities, takes more experience, et cetera, et cetera. But if there's a downturn, and people are going to make less, or people are going to have to be fired, the leadership of this company has to experience the negative consequences before the people they lead, or at least with them. Right? So before you fire anybody, you have to get rid of your year end bonus. Right? And if you don't, that's not leadership. That's you're, you're just

• 55:33Speaker 00

  running a company at that point. You're not leading a company. You're running a company. If you keep your year end bonus and fire people because there's a downturn in the market, you're just running a damn company. You're not leading it. If you want to lead it, if you want loyalty, you need to lead it. And if you lead it, you will make it clear that you will suffer consequences right alongside the people that are trusting you. Not a welcome message in the corporate world, I should add.

• 55:59Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I bet it's not. I should, it makes me think about an example. So I run nightclubs. I have done for a very long time. I've stood on the front door of a lot of them. And part of that, me and my business partner have been the directors of this company since we were 18. We've always been the top of the tree. And then we've just added in people below us all the way up. Every single night that we run an event, one of us stands on the front door of the nightclub. And we're in Newcastle, which is the Winterfell of the UK. Right? It's the final city before Scotland. In the winter, it gets brutally cold. It's wet. It's, it's dark. It's miserable. We stand on the front door of the night. Every single one, there has never been an event that we've operated where somebody hasn't stood there.

• 56:39Chris Williamson?

  We have always been there, right next to the boys, right next to the event managers, right next to the door staff that kick people out. And we'll freeze our nuts off on the door along with them. And for a long time, people have asked, what is it that you do? We don't do that much. The whole purpose of us creating a business that runs in a slick and organised way is that it's so self-sufficient that everybody knows the jobs that need doing beforehand. And there are a lot of nights where we stand there and I feel like a spare part. I'm like, well, I'll just, I'll just make sure that the DJ's drinks are topped up again. You almost end up doing the most surplus ridiculous jobs because there isn't anything for you to do. But it's less about the fact that you're there to do a job and it's more about the fact that symbolically you are there with the rest of the group. Look, it's freezing, it's cold, it's going to be a shit Thursday in the middle of January.

• 57:24Chris Williamson?

  It's, we're going to do 400 people tonight when we should do 1,000 and that's what, break evens 500 people. So we're going to lose money and I'm going to get out of bed at 10pm at night and I'm going to stand on the front door of a nightclub with you for five hours. And there's going to be drunk people and they're going to complain, but we're all going to do it together. And a big part of that that we see as well is in small businesses like ours, that's quite hierarchical. There's lots of different little layers that we create so people can progress and it feels like they've been promoted and stuff. The guys that get the most respect are the ones that people have seen enter the company at the absolute bottom. They started flyering and doing street PR and giving out guest list bands, trying to get people in. Then they were the guest, best guest lister. Then they became a junior event manager and they smashed it at that. Then they become a full event manager and they smashed it at that, then a senior, then a city manager.

• 58:09Chris Williamson?

  And people see this lineage of them going up bit by bit by bit. And they know that they've earned their stripes. They know that they have the chops to be able to do the thing that they are telling you to do. They've done it. I've done thousands and thousands of knocks on doors. We got to the point where my knuckles were bleeding during my gap year because I was knocking on the doors of so many different halls of residence to say, hey, you coming out tonight? Hey, you coming out tonight? So I've been there, but the only reason that I can tell my boys to go and do that is because I've done it as well. I'm like, look, this is a fucking rite of passage. This is what you do. If you want to get to the stage where you can have your own company or where you can be paid the sort of money that you want to be paid, like step into the fire.

• 58:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I mean, right, you're signaling that you're part of the group. You're not outside it, you're not above it. And I was thinking, this morning, actually, I was sort of, what's the definition? You know, I wrote a book called Tribe, and it's hard to define what a tribe is. And, and, um, some people think that, oh, if you're a, you know, a football fans, football fans are all like one tribe, but they're not a tribe, right? I mean, they have, they're a group of people that have a common interest, but they're not a tribe in a meaningful human sense. And so the definition I sort of came up with this morning was,

• 59:24Speaker 00

  the idea of what happens to you happens to me. We're in the same tribe, because that's true. And you were saying that to the people that were working for you. Like, if you got to stand out there in the cold, I'm gonna stand out there in the cold. Now, I may be completely useless. And if they say to you, listen, sir, why don't you get it, go inside and get warmed up? It sucks out here, we got this.

• 59:50Speaker 00

  Like the lieutenant in my story, you're, you then, you, you can honorably step down, right? You can honorably say, okay, I, I understand, thank you, appreciate it, right? Uh, I mean, there's no merit in being stupid either, right?

• 1:00:04Chris Williamson?

  Isn't, yeah, isn't it interesting that that kind of has to be gifted from below? It's not the sort of thing that you can bestow upon yourself.

• 1:00:11Speaker 00

  But, I mean, real leadership is, i- i- is, is given from below, right? It's, it's by, it's by the consent of the led.

• 1:00:23Speaker 00

  Imposing leadership, it really isn't leadership, right? I mean, that, you know, when it's sort of imposed from above. And that's the problem with inherited wealth. It's not earned, and you have a huge amount of social and economic capital that can be imposed on other people. And it hasn't been granted by them, and it ha- and, and, and it hasn't been earned. And so, but when the people that you're leading... Ask you to take care of yourself, like we need you, right? Then you're good and it's because you have signaled to them what happens to you happens to me until you tell me otherwise, right? And then I will step inside and have

• 1:01:01Chris Williamson?

  Warm up, yeah, exactly.

• 1:01:02Speaker 00

  Whatever it may be and you know, in the, in the Marines, um, there's a, there's a motto, um, officers eat last, right? Well, in a situation like that, what you may well have is enlisted men saying, sir, you know, please get a plate of food, like, you know, like we understand that officers eat last. We appreciate it. Now, can you please feed yourself? You know, we, you know, we respect and admire you and we want you to eat. And you know, so that's the, that's the honorable way to do it. And likewise Connolly in Dublin, you know, is, you know, his, it took his aide sort of dragging him out of gunfire, uh, you know, to keep him safe. He wasn't going to do it on his own, uh, but he would do it for, for others.

• 1:01:44Chris Williamson?

  One of the things that I've found that's been quite interesting is how, uh, stresses from the outside, uh, cause groups to stick together. So when freedoms get threatened, a community suffers a collective trauma or whatever, people usually bind together. What I've found really interesting is that I don't think we've seen that up against the global threat of COVID over the last 18 months.

• 1:02:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, the problem with COVID is, is that there was a lot of mixed messaging by political leaders. Um, I mean, my political leader at the time, Donald Trump, started by saying it didn't exist. There wasn't a threat at all, right? And then he continued to have very confusing messaging about masks and vaccines. And you know, to the point where it's completely hypocritical. I mean, the entire administration was vaccinated and so was all of Fox News. And yet the messaging coming out of those groups was that vaccinations were somehow a plot by the left to take, you know, whatever. I mean, just complete nonsense, right? So when you have, uh, political leadership and very powerful people that are actually,

• 1:02:49Speaker 00

  um, endangering the public for their own political benefit.

• 1:02:54Speaker 00

  You're not going to have a healthy response to COVID.

• 1:02:57Chris Williamson?

  So I get that for the USA, but I don't think I've seen a particular wonderful sense of belonging and coming together, really anywhere on the planet. Maybe you could argue that the USA are culturally so influential that if they cough, everybody else catches a cold of COVID, of misinformation, perhaps. But there was, do you remember that video? I think it was in Italy and there was someone singing on a rooftop and there was balconies all the way around and they were all watching. And there was another period where maybe in Spain or Italy, again, somewhere in Europe, someone was doing a workout routine on their own rooftop and all of the people on their balconies overlooking that were doing it as well. Now that, to me, that was one of the moments where

• 1:03:41Chris Williamson?

  you go, wow, that's sort of human spirits really binding together. Everybody is in this. We know, I know what it's like to be locked down in the UK. Yeah, I don't live in New York the same as you. Yeah, my life situation is different to yours. But I kind of know what it feels like to be locked in my own house because of this pathogen that's outside. So we have more of a shared experience now than we probably ever did before. And it's the same for people that are in China and in Vietnam and in Australia and everywhere. There's always been the argument made, if Earth was threatened by an alien species, imagine how quickly our differences would be forgotten because we would bind together. And you get that, I think it's called, is it the globe effect that astronauts get once they've been out to space and they view the Earth without borders and they come back and they realize we are just one race, one species, blah, blah.

• 1:04:28Chris Williamson?

  I hoped 18 months ago that COVID was going to be that thing and it just hasn't, it doesn't seem to have occurred anywhere.

• 1:04:37Speaker 00

  Well, it's not an existential threat, right? I mean, I mean, it's way worse than the flu. It's a deadly disease. And it's communicable, you know, unlike, unlike some things, but, but it's not, it's not an existential threat to society. And, you know, I think what the sort of skeptics were saying is that the protections against COVID are an existential threat because it'll cripple the economy, blah, blah, blah. That's where the debate happens. But look, the Black Death in Europe. Um, and what was the twelve, thirteen, thirteen hundreds, twelve hundreds, thirteen hundreds? Killed one out of three people, right? That's an existential threat, right? And if COVID were killing one out of three, thank God it wasn't.

• 1:05:19Speaker 00

  But if it was killing one out of three, I think you might have seen a sort of different reaction. But even to the extent we lost, we've lost six hundred thousand people in this, in this country, right? Um, but you know, if you lose six hundred thousand people during an alien attack, it'll traumatize the nation for a century, right? Like, I mean, that gets your attention. The problem with the six hundred thousand is to spread out, spread out over a couple of years. And it's happening invisibly in ICUs around the country. And it's, in some ways, it's sort of theoretical, sort of abstract. And but even despite all that, and despite the fact that we had to stay away from people in order to protect people, which is deeply antithetical to sort of human, human reflexes during the crisis.

• 1:06:03Speaker 00

  But even so, I think there was actually a fair amount of sort of solidarity of the, of the, of that sort that you described in New York City. People were, I think it was at five PM every night, people leaning out of their windows, banging pots and pans for the healthcare workers that were working in the, in the ERs, in the hospitals. So, you know, I think, um, for a modern society that's very, very fractured and alienated, there was actually a fair amount of sort of like communal sentiment around all of this.

• 1:06:31Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it makes me realize why false flag events by governments have seemed alluring over time. You know, you look at trying to do a thing, trying to have some catastrophe occur that forces, that's what they're actually doing. They're trying to artificially inseminate this sense of binding together. Here is the threat, there is something happening out there and we need to bind together. We need you to come together as one. That's what they're trying to enact.

• 1:06:56Speaker 00

  That's right, and the problem is, they are, at least in my country right now, um, they are, politically, they are doing that with half the country. They're saying, "Half the country is a threat to this country." If you're a Republican, the Democrats, the socialists, communists, godless, like Black Lives Matter Democrat anarchists are a threat to this country, right? So they're, what they're saying is that half of the country are literally the enemy, right? The enemy. They're not the beloved, right? They're not the definition of, you know, freedom. They're not, they don't deserve freedom. They don't deserve to be free. They're the enemy, right? They're not one of us. The Democrats, I don't think do it in the same way and not as, not as sort of virulently

• 1:07:41Speaker 00

  as the Republicans have lately, but they have a bit of that as well. And so when you, when you cast your own people as the enemy of the state, you're, you are creating civil war. You are, that is one of the steps to fascism, right? I mean, that's the classic, the one, a classic step in the fascist playbook, is take the political opponents and say, "Not only do I disagree with them, not only are they not nice people, they're actually an enemy of this country and they must be eradicated." And that's how you get fascism. It's a classic, classic move in the fascist playbook. And that's one of the things that really bothers me about the last few years in this country. We have a very robust democracy and we have a, a military which is absolutely loyal

• 1:08:26Speaker 00

  to democratic ideals, whether it be a Republican or a democratic president. They don't really care. Um, my father grew up in Spain and left when, when Franco came, Franco and the fascists came in, and Franco succeeded because he had the military behind him. That will never happen in this country and therefore, in my opinion, fascism will never come to this country. But boy, it's awfully ugly to see the sort of preparatory steps in action, uh, even if it'll never come to that.

• 1:08:53Chris Williamson?

  It's crazy when you create in-group, out-group dynamics within a nation when there's other things that need to be worried about. And this is, I think, why the people that have done research into China and into Russia and into sort of long-term trajectories and concerns about what's happening to the globe, that's the ones who are... You know, standing in the middle of the street with a megaphone desperately saying, "Look, there are bigger fucking problems out there. There are really bigger problems." There's this quote from your book that says, "If the enemy is not going to show mercy, you might as well fight to the death. Freedom as a supreme value was born out of the fact that there were really no alternatives worth considering, and the result was that the freest people were the most warlike." What that sounds like is kind of a race to the bottom,

• 1:09:38Chris Williamson?

  or a race to extremity. And when you have that enacted against another nation, you end up securing your own nation. But when you start to play this self-referential game within a country, what you end up with is ever escalating tensions, ever more malicious strategies in order to be able to manipulate people and make the other side seem like the bad guys and make you seem like the good guys. And that's why it doesn't surprise me again that we don't really know what politicians think, or what the truth is, or what's going on.

• 1:10:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, and you can read the word "warlike" to mean best able to defend themselves, right? And if you can't defend yourself, you're not going to be free for very long. These enemies will come along and dominate you. And that has been true for, I think, all of human history. And there's plenty of examples. But the great thing about democracy is that international law is sort of has taken care of that problem, right? There are coalitions of nations that have treaties, mutual defense pacts. So you attack Belgium, you're attacking the whole EU. You attack Belgium, you're attacking NATO, right? All of a sudden, you're attacking half the world. And so it keeps, you know,

• 1:10:58Speaker 00

  those treaties have a stabilizing effect. And, you know, I would say that when you cast people as an enemy now...

• 1:11:14Speaker 00

  We're in a situation, at least in America, we really cannot plausibly be invaded by anybody, right? So when you cast people as an enemy, it's a pretty much a sort of naked attempt to just reinforce your political base. There really is not a threat to this country. Not from the other political party, not from Black Lives Matter, not from China. I mean, there are economic threats, but you know, whatever, but they're not a threat in the sense that enemy is used, the word is usually taken. And it's a naked political ploy. You know, it really should be called out because it is the beginning of the end of democracy. It's going to destroy it.

• 1:11:55Chris Williamson?

  Sebastian Junger, ladies and gentlemen. Freedom will be linked in the show notes below. You are not on social media, so there's nothing else for people to keep up to date with. Do you have a blog or a website or anything?

• 1:12:06Speaker 00

  I have a website, sebastianjunger.com, J U N G E R is my spelling of my name. My publisher started some social media accounts for me. I have a flip phone. Here, I'll show it, prove it. I have a flip phone. I'm not interested in social media, but I've discussed, and I hate the idea of tweeting meaningful things 140 characters at a time, but I have taken to posting sentences from my book, Freedom, on Twitter with photographs and sentences that often involve the concept of freedom, just for people to share and debate. So I do do that a little bit. I'm pretty easy to find in that way. So, thank you. It was a pleasure talking to you. I really enjoyed it.

• 1:12:47Chris Williamson?

  Me too, man. Thank you.