Joe Rogan Experience #1655 — Sebastian Junger Transcript

Transcript

0:00 The Joe Rogan Experience. saying that, uh, over the last year you almost died because you had some crazy internal and, And within a few minutes I couldn't stand up. And within about 10 minutes I was started to go blind and my wife called the ambulance and, um, those guys got there and, and, um, you know, 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, trying to communicate with me and comforting me.

2:34 It was really close. And so I just felt this pit underneath me the people in your life and just everything. It was a long path. You know, I mean, I'm a really I have two little girls. And then she came back an hour later. And I didn't even know. And I'm not religious. It's so easy to lose sight of that when you're caught up in your bills or traffic or your bullshit.

6:35 getting pulled into that pit. That didn't happen. And my daughters get to have a father. I get to yourself. That is a beautiful thing and a beautiful way to think about it and i think it's in a dusty corner of my brain. Okay. I'm always worried about my fucking memory. And lower blood pressure. Well, whatever the amount of blood in your body is. appreciation for life. But also the truth about life is that none of us know for sure we're going

10:18 I didn't know it worked that way. You just don't know that you're going to be alive And that's just what life is. And often, I mean, there's all kinds of reasons that you might hallucinate when your brain's low on oxygen. like they have all these DMT and they have all these sort of neurochemical explanations You can subject a healthy person to those things and they don't have the same kinds of hallucinations.

13:09 You know, they were doing it out of University of New Mexico. So what the problem was for the longest time is the pineal gland. and functionally connected set of organs and originates in an evagination? Parietal? mysticism and whenever people are enlightened or depicted they're depicted with that third eye and this But through this Cottonwood Research Foundation, which was working on different DMT studies.

16:27 Well, let me tell you, I mean, that's a pretty stunning thought. And we all, I mean, I'm not a if you can bear it, then it's not going to kill you. You know what I mean? And the other, Oh, thank God I'm not dead. I'm alive. And here's my, my daughter was right next to me. I put my my body tried to tell me with pain that something was wrong and I ignored it.

19:07 You know, it's a small town. And I'd been meaning to do it for two years. But your conscious mind's a freaking idiot. But at the end of the day, your body's trying to keep you alive, and it sent me out there with a chainsaw. And I want to report what I saw. I don't want to keep doing this. I'd be like, shit, not yet, I have too much to do. That's a good question.

22:30 No. It's usually from traumatic childhood. that you deal with when you're bombing You get us together when we're around our people, pretty fun. Because it's not that many of us. So I might even be overestimating there. Well he had some serious physical problems. So he was writing about that and he was saying that there could have been, and then all this medication they had to take,

25:22 You know what I mean? Robin was a big one for a lot of people It was like a 24-hour film. is so lucky to have geniuses in it you know what i mean like we all feed off them yeah we do we get we they elevate were sort of like not sufficiently sort of respectful of the war or whatever. But of course, I met him only once, and I met him after one of my shows.

28:26 I'm like, holy shit, this is Robin Williams. he decided he wanted to come see me maybe somebody told him i was funny and he came to and then he So it is, you, you need to be in that sense. You need to be an example. Yeah. If you can. Yeah. and the sergeant said sir please sit down you it's our job to get shot at it's your job to stay alive you're really, really a leader. Make yourself one of everyone else.

32:10 So we can have bad leadership that's sort of like opportunistic and self-serving, and it doesn't because you're talking about a woman And it was really frustrating for people. both parties, I think, have a deficit of that. And, you know, I mean, I'm a registered Democrat, that it was a free and fair election. And then there's been a lot of sort of hemming and hawing

35:09 And she did it knowing she would be punished for it. through all of the checks and balances that they've laid in place to make sure that you I think it's a mix of things. 70%? you know, as if things have caught up that took place that stole the election or is it just a narrative that gets out there like the lib 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

38:18 That's where it gets really scary. you believe, if you really believe that the other side is cheating and you say, well, we have to There should be a word for the sort of the mirror image of that on the left. the extremes feel like they personally own the truth and that they can dictate what this country should be. Right. And they sort of poison the like well of public discourse by rejecting any legitimacy to the other side.

40:07 to drink out of that well, and the extremes on both sides have poisoned it. And I feel like if They want to get other people to comply with whatever rules they're setting forward. of the boundaries of the accepted ideology that they'd like to enforce on everyone else. enemy of the country, or you're a racist, or you're this or that. When you're told how to think and

42:54 We all have common ground, especially people with children, right? Your common ground is you want He's complying with it, though. much more socialized medicine. centrist Democrat. Well, one of the first things he did in office, he's a pretty centrist Democrat. And I mean, that's why at 59, I'm not the runner I was at 20. maybe black trans people would trump that.

45:50 I get how you would want it to be inclusive and you would want everyone to just feel fully The world is complicated, right? maybe it's not possible. I don't think it's possible right now and now is going to compete in the Olympics. mobile that the heavier, like the heavier entity, the bigger guy, the bigger the empire just cannot trying to avoid a threat than to be of equal strength to the men to share in the fight if they couldn't

49:46 It's like if you don't lift weights and you weigh 150 pounds and you bench 150, you could get up to 300 pounds in a few years. Oh, of course. But if you look at the world records for those weights, right? There's a sort of sweet spot where being a little bit smaller is actually a sort of tactical advantage in a fight. Yeah, but in what sport? Boxing?

51:33 Ngannou. He has to cut weight to make the 265-pound weight limit. will dominate, but it doesn't always, I know what you're saying. It's like, there's, there's a And Stylebender, although he's you know than to punch right so if a guy if a guy if the big dude tries to punch you 10 times in a row right, when you see the light flash. So the light would flash, and 15 hundredths of a second later,

54:55 And the brain is really good at reading unconscious signals, right? In other words, the brain's very perceptive. i interviewed a mma former mma fighter named kyle sonnet and he spoke about this really eloquently Well, statistically, it's 50-50. I'm not going to do very well. I just want to state, I'm a big fan of Chael There was one fight that really put him over the edge,

58:21 He's a beast. not really because he wants to hit you because he wants to set you up for a takedown is he throwing The smaller chimpanzee will never win. No, that's right. Because a coalition can always take them down. because the variables are so extreme, and there's so many things that go into play. And you can't predict. Unless they study only the heavyweight division, which has the largest disparity in weight.

1:01:22 But that's exactly what I'm saying about humans. is that Caitlyn Jenner is now being accused That same person is saying that it's a question of fairness But, I mean, could there be a third competitive category of trans? Well, and also, do we have enough trans females and trans males to have a whole separate category also there's going to come a time where through CRISPR or through some other much more sophisticated

1:04:32 It might all go away. society like the labor movement in this country 100 years ago. But so I was, you know, I was Can you imagine? Right. She beat the second place man by 10 hours. Yeah. 10 fucking monster. She's amazing. She's amazing. Yeah, she's incredible. She beat the second place man by 10 hours. Yeah. 10 fucking hours. So if she took an eight hour nap, just laid down for

1:06:59 They lived in towns. That's almost within my grandmother's lifetime. And so there was one war leader named Nana, N-A-N-A, Nana. But if you just think of us as sort of animals, insurgency can defeat an empire. And if that weren't true, if the empire always won, or if is the single best skill for MMA because Right. Because the great wrestler dictates

1:10:37 Right. Right. And the Ottoman Empire, which was the most powerful military force in the world at that time, kept invading Montenegro. And, you know, my last book was called Tribe, and we talked about that. you, then you realize how crucial it is. That's right. That's right. Well, we're very lucky that from DC to Philly and we're going to go to New York. Then we decided to turn West and we headed

1:14:12 Thank you. We were trying to think of our next project. no man's land. Like the cops aren't really out there and it's illegal. So, you know, it did its grid and missed us with its floodlight. But the thing is, it's this weird no man's land. Really? Did you have filters? I mean, there are many definitions of freedom, but that's one of them. Like I said, it was a hard one.

1:17:40 And, you know, a lot of people that went out there, they were very poor. And it's very wild there, right? This is 2012, 2013 that we saw that sign was? Oh, it was contemporary. And this was a few years ago. This is 2012, These are people who are living in log cabins in the wilderness. 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

1:20:38 comfortable and completely free without obligation to your tribe right Right. When you wrote this, and I wanted to write about freedom. into the research that I did. And one reason the Europeans couldn't be defeated was because they came with diseases And, you know, you can make a pretty good argument that the Europeans actually could not have defeated them militarily.

1:22:56 And the Iroquois as, like 30 seconds. By the time that happened, the command sheet would be on them and filling them full of arrows. It's really interesting about the Comanche. and sedentary ones. 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 and about their – like if they were – like are we living better lives than the nomads?

1:26:28 I will kill you and go. Oh, totally. or the anthropological thinking about this is this story goes back to this original bifurcation between farmers, the sedentary people and the mobile ones. and do that kind of thing. It's like, So when you see someone who's doing that, I mean, you know, they're bad actors, right? Right? the sort of seminal story of fratricide goes all the way back.

1:31:09 We're very vulnerable. you have signed on, born into and have signed onto, you're really talking about your rights. And they entered the Iberian Peninsula, Spain and Portugal, about 5,000 years ago. True. in ancient historical terms, you know, now there's international laws and there's defense 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.

1:35:01 And for a lot of human history, and this is true in a playground fight as well. I mean, if you can't defend yourself, you might end up having to do what someone else tells you to do, right? That's just an eternal human truth. And so the history of dictators. My father grew up in Spain and left when Franco took when the fascists took over in Spain and he took over with the military so that's

1:37:00 And that people, if you leave them alone, they're probably not going to commit the same amount of crime and will find a default state. that people are safe and protected Well, I mean, here's what I think is happening. So I think what those people are doing is they're saying we have given up trying to reform the police. you know, on the frontier in the 1840s, 50s, 60s, 1870s, on the American frontier out west,

1:40:20 7%, right? We know that they won't be. talking about a huge, huge country. And I frankly can't answer that question. But they know from And the other thing is that men get married and they have children. Right. Right. more. And, you know, I live in the Lower East Side and it's, you know, a pretty, you know, So they're talking through their open windows, right?

1:44:48 everyone involved in that situation was african-american and the cop didn't get out of the Right. Yes. And you've got to – it's got to be – officers i know that they treat me differently than they would a young black man or you know by hamstringing the police and by telling them to stand down I was in Afghanistan in the 90s and whatever before 9-11. But when, you know, my last trip

1:48:46 And he was a really nice guy and he said to me, listen, tell me, how do I get journalists to trust me? don't give an itch that's what's happening politically right now with our two political It's pretty clear from the video. of a sudden all cops are even for things that were complicated and um and confusing and you know Yes, always. And that was, I feel like the original sin with the Republicans was, and everybody's got,

1:51:18 No, exactly. And the institution of the GOP. Was he really? When he was running for president, he was doing that? Yeah. Yeah. Of course he was. Right. He was doing that. He was. But he kept doing it while he was a GOP candidate. Yeah. Right. And the institution of the GOP. It's very weird. Barack Obama. I think it's to preempt sort of like suspicions that this is a bad actor who has come

1:53:17 that the ultimate, that sort of like paramount leader of this whole crazy circus that we have 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 It was a strength of brotherhood term, not a sort of moral corruption term, right. and everybody did. And if you failed that 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,

1:56:06 They put them in the back of a car and they drove them to the heart of enemy territory of some rival gang and they just pushed them out of the car. Like that's what it means to betray your group. is that they were all, it was a completely egalitarian society in that sense. And when 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.

1:58:32 the more people band together. And so there was incredible coming together after 9-11 in this of mind? And so the three ways, and part of this comes out of what And all of these awful distinctions between people that are so painful to society, they disappear when it comes to blood. I can't wait. I've donated once and they saved me. I owe them. I owe the universe 10 units. I can't wait.

2:00:33 I think it's about a pint. I needed, I lost all my blood basically. And we also learned today that it's actually good for you. and that your nation needs you, right? I'm not in. And that's, you know what, you're one person part of this thing. And so you all do whatever you want. I'm not in. The jury duty is the only thing that keeps one person from deciding the fate of another person.

2:02:51 of a country. It also would be, if we all relied on this jury system, which we do, it should be What did the cop do? So there was this sort of happy medium where we, at least at the time where michael dowd was in the police force this was how it was run yeah then we're at risk. call it all kinds of nonsense. But at the end of the day, that's why we don't, we're not living in

2:06:36 But we're dependent on society, right? And then the rest of it, the research material, is divided into run, fight, and think. 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, country by simply leaving, right? If you're going to stay within your community, you're really

2:09:43 And, you know, likewise in this country, I mean they were facing unbelievable odds and they out-thought them. And it's such a powerful factor that if you put women on the front line of a labor strike, in uniform they had mothers they had sisters one cop can handle the authorities could not penetrate. They couldn't get any intelligence. And so they used women for

2:13:31 Is it a guidebook? And this is what I came up with. And, you know, what I would say is, just to reiterate this point And so what I would say is that the freedom means you don't – you have the right to not be oppressed by your leaders. It means that you're part of a group and you understand that its rules keep human life as sacred. change from the left-hand side to the right-hand side or the other way around?

2:16:52 And when those rules impinge on your rights, then you, in a democracy, you have fair recourse So all you guys, do you mind if I go first? Rights are given to you. Congratulations. unprotected category that although we allow you to express yourself freely, Okay. kill him. He does not have the right to say that, right? He has crossed over into incitement to

2:20:14 are very strong systems. Dictatorships don't do very well. I mean, they're very unstable. I mean, You know, you play that out a few more steps, real lives are actually going to be in danger. killed on Capitol Hill and that are a grave threat to the democratic process. I'm not going to weigh we saying here right do what when you get there? What happens when you get

2:23:05 This is the lawyer to the president speaking. Because he validated the election results. But imagine if a real mob got to Mike Pence and murdered him after that. Oh, it was firing squad. Firing squad. Yeah. And so that's just my – it's like a security blanket. hours. But I'm proud that I can do it well. It's very, very gratifying to read your own work.

2:26:49 He's never going to see them again. The words that he said, the last words that he said to his beloved And so it just, I don't know. at all the executions. It was in the Stonebreaker's Yard in the central prison that the only person there who wasn't troubling was the condemned. That all these young boys, sure no one has, you know, no one has blanks. And then we really have a real conversation about if

2:31:15 courageous person in that photo is the guy who's not. Look, look at that. Think of the courage for Now, that's someone who believes in democracy more than his own life. And that, I mean, if you can watch that in Art Stock Ryan, you're, you know, like, it's incredible. it's heavy and heavy to think that that government to this day is still a dictatorship

2:32:54 Yeah, that's right. You know, whatever it is. our rights are amazing and transcend the rights of most people throughout almost all of human arguably the less just the society is And exacerbated by the pandemic. It's on a scale from 0 to 1.0. It killed so many people. 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 Gini coefficients. So as a good lefty, I like to think, oh, well, a just and fair egalitarian society eventually will be the most

2:38:18 didn't exist in terms of like a global leadership, egalitarian. And in a lot of those societies, women are in a subordinate role and all kinds 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. Right? right? Economically, politically, legally fairer countries. The Gini coefficients have come down.

2:41:20 the same amount of, of material wealth. So, but you know, you need a sort of unfair system to put people in a Completely whacked out, out there people, and amazing warriors. And, you know, back in the day, armies were drawn up within sight of each other, right? he was like anyone who can hunt rabbits before a battle like this has got to be sure they're

2:43:56 Before – They sort of like stand next to each other and face each other. And they examine those for like unconscious want to get into a fight. So a smile, and we've all seen people do this, we've all done it ourselves It's an unconscious thing. Wow. It's wired into us. That's pretty badass. But how does one balance these things out to the point where

2:47:21 But I've always found that appealing because I don't think that money should be the motivating factor And those things wind up being beneficial. Well, I mean, you said it, it has to balance, right? Yes. but other people would also look at them with sort of suspicion like, and in a single family home, et cetera, et cetera, Yeah. which allows people to do other things that the group needs done. And the hunter hunts and the

2:50:49 because it's a dangerous job. And it's better to just show up and collect your paycheck and just that it is the education, that education is the key. But also, community is the key, I'd spoken at the Naval base, and I was coming out of my hotel in the morning, 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.

2:53:03 And I said, wow, well, I got to say, you're a tough old bird. Like, you know, I'll try again. And I said, I said, I just don't know how to get people to do it. Well, I think of any way your work, you know, It comes through. It comes through in your work.