Name: Joe Rogan Experience #975 - Sebastian Junger
Uploaded: 2017-06-09T22:52:56.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #975 - Sebastian Junger' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2017-06-09. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #975 - Sebastian Junger' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2017-06-09. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #975 - Sebastian Junger

all right we're live what's up man how are you hey i'm pretty good i'm uh
excited i walked in
on a pool game it was uh i barely squeaked it out it was a very nice shot to
end it though
that's the way to end it so uh i've been reading your book man tribe i really
enjoy it it's really
good and it's it's so uh it resonates it's very interesting i will into the
first chapter i wanted
to move in with the native americans it was such a i mean it was uh one of the
more interesting
aspects of it was something that i didn't know about which was uh the european
settlers that had
been kidnapped and were living with the native americans and then when they
were rescued many
of them wanted to go back yeah or they would go into hiding so they wouldn't
have to be repatriated to
colonial society they wanted to stay with their adopted tribes and there and
there was also a lot
of um a lot of young white people particularly white men but young women too
who basically absconded
across the frontier into tribal society and they fled white society they didn't
like it and and as
benjamin franklin pointed out we have lots of calling colonial young colonials
fleeing to the indians and
we have not one example of an indian as they were called fleeing to white
society yeah that was one
of the more fascinating aspects of it i didn't anticipate that i thought that
there would be a lot
of native americans that would be like wow this is a way better look at all the
food look at the houses
and i mean they had plenty of food you know they were whatever they were
success success very successful
society in fact they were they had better nutrition than the whites did a more
varied diet and a much
much more egalitarian society uh than colonial society that was also
interesting about it um when
you were talking about the women that had moved in with the native americans
and were expressing how
much more freedom they experienced yeah i mean indian society native society
wasn't crushed by
and morality so you could divorce you could marry as a woman you can marry whom
you wanted you could get
divorced you could do whatever you wanted it was very very egalitarian what
they've shown is that um
the in societies where everyone is necessary for food protect food production
uh everyone's more or less
equal and in agrarian societies agricultural societies industrial societies you
have large segments of the
population often women who are not involved in food production they're involved
in reproduction and so
their um equality goes down wow it's just it's almost like society as we've
created over the last couple of
hundred years is almost totally incompatible with with human genetics or with
the human body or the the human
spirit or whatever well if you look at um i mean genetics are complicated i
mean obviously on some
level industrial modern society is very successful we have seven billion of us
um uh but as wealth goes
up in a society as modernity goes up in a society the suicide rate goes up the
depression rate goes up
schizophrenia goes up uh in urban environments um they're not good for the
human psyche we are designed we
evolved to live in groups of 30 40 people in a harsh environment totally inter-reliant
on one another
for survival that creates a huge amount of equality within a group and loyalty
within a group that's what
we are designed for genetically uh modern society allows the individual to be
independent from the
group which is in some ways a great liberation uh in other ways it can lead to
a profound alienation and
depression yeah it's uh it's just a very confusing thing it seems for people to
be amongst so many
people but to be alone yeah i mean we're not wired to uh be confronted with
strangers all day long
and i live in new york city and i love new york city um but all day long you
you encounter strangers
and you don't and you don't recognize anybody so you can be alone in a crowd
which is not something that
human beings have experienced until quite recently in their history yeah um
that was i i think one of
the more disturbing parts about this idea that these people um were uh
kidnapped by the native americans
and wanted to stay with them was that whatever that native american life was
like however they were living
that just seemed to just resonate with them it seemed to it seemed to be what
was right well we're wired to
want to feel like we belong to a group uh native american society was uh
sexually quite relaxed it was
quite egalitarian um in a hunter-gatherer society you really can't accumulate
wealth very well because
these societies are often nomadic so you can only accumulate as much wealth as
you can carry which isn't
much um and and ultimately in societies like that uh as in a platoon in combat
which is another part of my
book obviously um you're you're you're primarily valued valued for your
contribution to the group
and that has been lost in modern society people are enormously self-serving uh
capitalism basically
instructs us to do so uh that's a whole other evolutionary imperative which is
also important but in our
society it's way out of whack so we are wired to serve ourselves and we are
wired to serve the group and in
a healthy society those two those two are in a dynamic tension with each other
and in balance in modern
society there really is no group to serve uh and it leads to a really profound
sense of um meaninglessness
for a lot of people yeah i also found it pretty fascinating that when you were
really young
you when you when you were working i think you said you were working
construction is that what it was
uh i'm trying to remember the story you're about to you you were talking to you
were just saying that
you were uh talking to someone you were working with and they were telling you
to slow down because
some of us some of us have to do this for a lifetime that's right yeah i forgot
about that story yeah
yeah i was on a construction crew it was a highway department of my town and
you know a lot of these
guys were kind of lifers in the highway department not a particularly
challenging job
um in a in a sense uh but you were on your feet all day long in the sun or
whatever and and so i you
know i was a young guy and i you know i wanted to sort of prove my mettle or
whatever i was i was we
were digging a trench and i was digging like crazy and uh and an older guy came
up to me you know he's
probably in his 60s he came up to me and clapped me on the shoulder he said son
you want to slow down
there you know some of us are going to have to do this job our whole lives and
he knew i was a college
kid he knew i wasn't going to right um and i said just slow down you know no
one needs to work this
fast it's just uh it was uh really interesting that you were longing for
something you were saying
like almost to go wrong so everybody had a band together whether it was a
hurricane or something
and that that mundane life of just work and doing things you don't really want
to do
well i mean the irony about modern society is that it has removed hardship and
danger from everyday
life and it's in the face of hardship and danger that people come to understand
their value to their
society and their sin they get their sense of meaning from that and so what you
have is when you know
during the blitz in london for example 30 000 people were killed by german
bombs it was a horror show
over the course of six months it was ghastly but people were sleeping shoulder
to shoulder in the tube
stations and putting out fires with bucket brigades and digging people out of
rubble and and they were
acting as a unified society and the english government was prepared for mass
psychiatric casualties because
there's a civilian population getting bombed to bits and the opposite happened
admissions to psych
wards went down during the blitz and then back up after the bombing stopped and
um and then afterwards
there was enormous nostalgia in england for the blitz for those days um as
tragic as they were because
english society felt um people felt like they were together um later i was i
went back to sarajevo where
i'd been during the siege of sarajevo in the early 90s and civilians uh would
tell me you know this is 20
years later 20 years after the war people would say you know a lot of us missed
the war because we were better
people back then we took care of each other i've talked about that with september
11th um i went to new
york city um about i guess it was maybe six months after september 11th and i
was there a couple times and
the the before september 11th and after september 11th there was a very clear
difference in the way people
were behaving people seemed to be more more friendly more open they were uh
really appreciative of first
responders um i was there once and a friend of mine she fainted and uh so they
called the fire department
came to check her out and and when the fireman showed up man you would think a
superhero showed up
it was amazing everybody was so happy to see him and it was in stark contrast
to the way people used to
behave and treat each other and it was directly because of having experienced
this horrific event well
adversity produces pro-social behaviors in people adversity makes people act
well uh the lack of
adversity safety and comfort allow people to act selfishly uh so after 9 11 um
the suicide rate
went down in new york uh the violent crime rate went down in new york vietnam vets
reported that their ptsd
symptoms went down after 9 11. what happens is um people suddenly feel that
they're needed by their
society by their people and if you feel needed you are able to um ignore your
own personal troubles as
one someone in england an official english official said uh during the blitz in
london um he said it's
amazing we have the chronic neurotics of peacetime driving ambulances um and if
you think about it
in terms of evolution if adversity and danger produced bad human behaviors we
wouldn't be here today
another way to say that is we are the descendants of the individuals 100 000
years ago who acted well
in a crisis the people that acted badly in a crisis and just took care of
themselves and didn't take care
of their people their group those those people those groups died out uh it's
people it's groups that
encourage a a form of altruism itself self-sacrifice of individuals for the
group during a crisis those
groups survive that dna gets passed on to us and did you gain a deep
appreciation for this because of
your time as a war journalist did it sort of manifest itself in your mind
because of that well i i this
book came to me in a two-step process you know first of all when i was a young
man i had a surrogate
uncle figure in my life very important person to me named ellis ellis settle he
was uh half lakota
sue half apache and he was born in 1929 on a wagon out west he had lived an
extraordinary life he was
very very educated self-educated and at one point he said to me you know it's
so funny all throughout
the history of this country white people were always running off to join the
indians and the indians never
ran off to join the white people and i filed that away in my mind i kind of
liked the idea of it i thought
it was i hoped it was true i didn't know if it was true and then decades later
i was with american
soldiers on a remote outpost in afghanistan and uh called restrepo and i made a
documentary film by
that name with my colleague tim heatherington and there was almost daily combat
there was no no link
to the outside world no internet there was no electricity for a while they just
slept in the
dirt they got shot at every day we got shot at every day uh there was no women
out there there was
nothing but combat and tarantulas and pallets of water and mres and ammo that
was it for a year
those boys were out there for over a year and they were very psyched to come
back to italy where they're
based at the end of their deployment you can imagine they had some pretty good
parties planned 