Episode 91
Connection and Belonging with Sebastian Junger and Steve Ilardi

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Description

In this very special episode, Brandon Burns welcomes back Dr. Stephen Ilardi, author of The Depression Cure and clinical researcher, to help welcome an exceptional guest, Sebastian Junger, investigative journalist as well as critically acclaimed author for works such as; Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, War, and Freedom among others. These three have riveting conversations about problematic factors in society causing social disconnect and alienation, societal observations of patterns with clinical depression, Sebastian’s incredible near-death experience, and the knowledge that came from such a traumatic experience, along with so much more! This episode holds a plethora of profoundly impactful information and enlightening conversation that will leave viewers with a deeper appreciation for connection, belonging, and life. To learn more bout Sebastian Junger, check out sebastianjunger.com for his collection of books and documentaries.

Talking Points

1. The psychological motivation behind “Tribe.”
   
2. Societal observations of clinical depression
   
3. Adaptive behavior in human evolution
   
4. The human need to feel important
   
5. Connection vs. belonging
   
6. Finding your community or tribe
   
7. Experiencing the present moment
   
8. Sebastian’s near-death experience and The Hero’s Journey
   
9. The notion of “absolute freedom.”
   

Quotes

“All you know for sure that you will have is right now. The past is already lost to you, and you have absolutely no guarantee that you have a future. But you do have it now. So, maybe don’t scroll through your social media all damn day. Maybe sit there and look around and be amazed at the world.”

– Sebastian Junger

Episode Transcripts

Episode -91- Transcripts

Brandon Burns chief executive officer for Peaks recovery centers so excited to be here today with you on this very special episode of Finding Peaks where we are joined today by Dr Stephen elardi clinical researcher at the University of Kansas he’s been on many different episodes of ours talking about his book The Depression cure his TLC model and so forth if you haven’t seen those go back in time check them out it’s great material and an excellent book but the other guest that’s on today is a very special guest to both Steve and I and we are excited to be having a discussion with him his name is Sebastian younger and he is an author and a journalist and so without further Ado let’s dive into it and uh get the discussion going so yeah thank you again both for being here you know Sebastian joining us from New York City Steve joining us from just south of Kansas City I believe uh in Kansas Southwest yeah Southwest Lawrence Lawrence Kansas over the fighting Kansas Jayhawks um which maybe a few few folks have heard of it’s important and uh brandenburg’s chief executive officer Peaks recovery centers here in Colorado Springs Colorado uh just uh you know I think first and foremost just want to say that uh you know the journey for how we got here uh you know I met Steve several years ago in 2017 at a conference and he’s talking about his book The Depression cure we ended up uh hanging out a bunch and I think we’ve befriended each other in the process I think we can call each other friends Almost uh maybe we’re texting in the background 100 yeah definitely I catch you as a friend Brandon so the the last time we did an episode together we you know we’re waxing philosophical in the background and Steve’s like hey I’m going to send you some books and I was like great I love reading and I love listening to books certainly and one of the books he sends me is tribe by Sebastian younger here uh join with joining up with us today and um just immediately floored by uh the writing the storytelling um you know even listening to the audio versions of the text and um you know you walking me personally through your experience variances within War you know as a journalist and the intensity of those environments filled with hardship and it inspired me in a variety of different ways I think you know tribe is a word we use often in our company culture here at Peaks recovery centers and forming that sort of those bonds and belongingness have just been really essential out of that inspiration and the three books that I’m most familiar with um of Sebastian’s work are a tribe on homecoming and belonging war and freedom I’ve personally read through those several times and I just learned a great deal about them and so thanks for you know bringing those texts into the world Sebastian first and foremost but to kind of bring these two worlds together for why I’ve got you know Steve on the call with us today as we talked about kind of prior to the episode in Steve’s book the depression cure he references out of the therapeutic Lifestyle the TLC model where he’s addressing the modern depression epidemic at its source he States the fact that human beings were never designed for poorly nourished sedentary indoor sleep deprived socially isolated frenzy paste of 21st century life hit me you could you could add screen screen addicted screen addicted right screen addicted as well too just to just to get it in there but um uh in also in the book tribe um it’s highlighted what the Journal of effective disorders concluded in 2012 as the source the economic and marketing forces of modern society have engineered an environment that maximizes consumption at the long-term cost of well-being and in effect humans have dragged a body with a long hominid history into an overfed malnourished sedentary sunlight deficient sleep deprived competitive inequitable and socially isolating environment with dire consequences both statements a mouthful but both very much connected in that way of things and so what I’d like to set kind of the stage for our viewers out there is the foundation of what we’re experiencing as the problem and primarily why these texts are being written in the first place and just hopeful you know to start here Sebastian to you know bring us forward obviously you place that uh that reference within the boat tribe for a reason and it it must have spoke to you in a way certainly that I think it speaks talking to the three of us in this room and I would just love for you to expand on that a little bit for the viewers today yeah so the idea for tribe came to me and the idea is basically this that some of the psychological struggles that veterans have when they come home um might be rooted in uh some kind of alienation rather than actually a disorder that they’re carrying themselves they might be having a healthy reaction to an alienating Society uh and so the idea came to me when someone said damn why why are vets so messed up when they come home why are they so messed up and I remember like of many guys in the platoon you know platoon is a 30 40 men it was all men in this case and they were in an area of hotly contested area in eastern Afghanistan called The Corn Gull Valley and I was with them off and on for a year and you know when the deployment ended I experienced this terrific Longing To for for that place I wanted to go back and I felt quite guilty about it because I thought how could you know how can you long for something that was so hard on everybody but then I found out that a lot of soldiers that I’d been with felt exactly the same way and one of them was like oh I go back there in a heartbeat I don’t want to go back to America are you kidding I go back to the cornball in a heartbeat they’re living on a Hilltop getting shot at every day no internet no communication with the outside world uh no cooked food sleeping on the grounds like tarantulas scorpions and no women no television no nothing I mean it was really austere and dangerous and they missed it and suddenly I remembered something that a friend of mine who’s long since passed away he was a lot older than me it was sort of a surrogate Uncle he was born out west he was Native American uh uh and uh he was born in a wagon and he grew up in a very traditional society and and he said he told me something I didn’t quite believe at the time he said you know all along the history of the history of the American frontier from Pennsylvania on West all the way through you know the Midwest and Texas all the way to California the the sort of white people were constantly constantly running off to join you know this is what he said he join the Indians join us Indians right and we Indians were never running off to join the white people and I and I never I was never quite sure if that was true I mean I like the idea of it but I was like is that really true as I started to research it and indeed it was a real concern along the frontier even Benjamin Franklin wrote a kind of despairing letter to a friend like why is it if we’re Superior Christian Society why is it that young young people young young people in the colonies keep running off to join the native societies uh the Savages as he called them and the reverse never happened and suddenly I put the two together like oh my god of course we’re social privates we love connectedness we love living in small groups where we have to we rely on each other for our survival and when you deprive people of that there’s a real loss there and of course what what I just described a moment ago is a platoon in combat it recreates our evolutionary past very very closely you expose young people to that um they respond in very positive ways that have a lot of genetic encoding in a lot of evolutionary history to it and then you wrench them out of there and bring them home to America with with all of its um alienation and all of its uh so the um fractured communities and trauma is the least of it I’m going to end with this this Peace Corps has the same problem one quarter of Peace Corps volunteers struggle with depression when they come home what they’re struggling with is the grave grave human loss of no longer being in a small community yeah thank you thank you for coloring that uh that part in uh Steve would you like to add to that at this time uh absolutely yeah so I mean it it for me the first thing that brings to mind Sebastian is so my background in training I’m a clinical neuroscientist brain guy and that’s what I did for the first 10 15 years of my career and then a magical thing happened I got I got tenure in my University which um you know is a controversial uh kind of event but but for me one of the magical things was it gave me the freedom and the permission to begin delving much more deeply into something that I just bumped into that really resonates with what you were saying I had just read the work so I’m a depression clinical neuroscientist focusing on major mood disorder looking at what’s happening in the brain when people get clinically depressed and writing for an audience of maybe 50 to 100 other scholars in the world those were the people that read what I was publishing but I had just um bumped into an anthropological account of the kalooli people in uh the highlands of Papua New Guinea and their modern day Aboriginal people largely hunter-gatherer they’re a little bit forging horticulturalists but essentially hunter-gatherers living very similar lives to those that our ancestors lived as you said we’re we’re you know we’re social primates and most of our ancestors were on this lifelong camping trip with their combat platoon as it were with their 50 to 100 closest relatives dearest friends sometimes it’d be 150 but you know somewhere in that ballpark yeah and Edward schiefelin who’s an American Anthropologist embedded with the kalooli people who number about 2 000 scattered through about a dozen or so different Clans and he was very keen on answering the question how is it that they lead such incredibly challenging difficult lives just like you were describing with with our young men in combat I mean these are folks without any modern medicine any modern conveniences with a high rate of parasitic illness a high rate of infant mortality a high rate of violent death in combat not within the group but between groups and um yeah what he discovered is when he applied Western DSM diagnostic psychiatric criteria to the kalooli he could only identify one marginal case of clinical depression out of two thousand and if you do the math on that their rate of debilitating clinical depression which is the leading Global cause of disability now on the planet and accounts for the majority of the one million deaths due to suicide on the planet their rate of depression is about one in a hundred ours is about 100x theirs despite the fact that they have so many depressive depressogenic thing things that would trigger depression in us don’t trigger depression in them and this had been gnawing at me for a long time and I was also aware of of a construct in medical anthropology called diseases I’m going to use the scare quotes Brandon I’m sorry I could probably reads terrible on video diseases of civilization yeah so illnesses that are endemic in modern affluent societies largely non-existent among Aboriginal groups diseases for example like atherosclerosis and type 2 diabetes and obesity and hemorrhoids who knew but they don’t spend a lot of time sitting and and depression fit the pattern and I said okay I’m going to leave my my everything I’ve done in my career to this point
um and set it all behind me and Chase down this rabbit hole and this mystery why because since 1990 we’ve had a 400 increase in antidepressant use in this country and it hasn’t moved the needle one bit in terms of lowering the societal burden of clinical depression in terms of lowering suicide in terms of lowering the extraordinary suffering that we’re seeing unfold in millions and millions of lives and so that’s what inspired me to begin thinking about clinical depression not as a chemical imbalance which is a good formula for selling drugs if you’re big Pharma right and by the way I’m not I’m not Democrat if any viewers or listeners are on a medication I’m not saying that they can never be helpful they sometimes can but the fundamental underlying problem with depression goes deeper than so-called neurochemical imbalance the in the the deeper level is we were never designed for this and when I stumbled across Sebastian youngers amazing book tribe I couldn’t put it down I was like this is exactly it just in in in every page I was seeing Echoes and resonances of of my own work and thinking yes the problem of post-traumatic stress in our combat veterans is mirroring in so many ways the problem of clinical depression clinical anxiety in our civilian population
May Amazing Stories amazing facts I’m guessing the kalooli I think I remember the word to be that’s right k-a-l-u-l-i clearly I I’m guessing that suicide is not a big factor in their in their society absolutely not yeah absolutely now yeah people that have killed themselves I mean I really shouldn’t I mean I mean and they’re all from very affluent segments of our society absolutely now the caveat I want to put on that is there have been many Aboriginal groups who’ve been forcibly transitioned onto reservations and I spoke with Kim Hill who’s a a very well-known Anthropologist with the ace or the akae people of um the Amazonian basin and they’re they’re lovely people but most of them have have been forcibly resettled on reservations and no longer have their traditional hunter-gatherer way of life and many of their old Warriors have now developed PTSD right in in middle age and old age where now they’re reflecting back on their combat histories and they don’t have that supportive context and a sense of purpose and belonging and in that sense of disconnection and emptiness they are developing post-traumatic stress and and depression and some do indeed get suicidal right right that makes sense terrific I appreciate you coloring all that in uh for us uh Steve uh always always brilliant and and focused in your words uh and and with that uh just kind of inching It Forward here a little bit uh whether it’s in the book uh fire tribe war or Freedom uh again text I’m most familiar with these books seem to be inspired by the connection and belongingness that you observe Sebastian during your on the ground accounts among environments of extreme hardship and I’ve I’ve shared with the viewers out there many times already and certainly within my you know company culture you know one of my favorite you know quotes right out of the introduction of your texts in tribe that says humans don’t mind hardship in fact they thrive on it what they do mind is not feeling necessary modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary and it’s time for that to end and so you know moving through these texts and and your accounts of being in these platoons and these really these environments filled with hardship there’s belongingness within the environments of hardship and then stories of the tree troops you know going home for leave or whatever the case might be and then they they’re Desiring to come back to the experience of hardship but if we were sitting down just with anybody or it feels like I don’t want to be too broad about it but most people in my experience as they would say war is something I don’t ever want to be a part of yet we have military Interventional individuals Desiring to get back to the boots on the ground experience versus re-engaging or integrating within you know our society and you know whatever way that is in that regard and so just curious if you can bring the viewers a little bit closer through uh some examples of those shared experiences of kind of that boots on the ground belongingness that you’re seeing and that desire to return to something that seems like most of us would never want to be involved with yeah so one way to think about it is that the way that Evolution quote got us to I mean it doesn’t work that way but basically the the reason we have adaptive behaviors is because those behaviors feel good and we do things that make us feel good and the Adaptive behaviors that feel good survive as genetic traits and the maladaptive ones don’t so pretty much with human behavior if something feels good you can assume it’s adaptive sex feels good it’s highly adaptive without it you don’t pass on your genetics right eating food when you’re hungry ditto one of the things that feels very very good is connecting to a small group of people and connecting in a powerful emotional way and one of the things that feels really really good is being necessary being helpful to that group right and you can watch the oxytocin levels rise right it’s like when you hit the target with the bone arrow you can see the dopamine go up like you know so clearly those adaptive behaviors are reinforced neurochemically and most assuredly helped with our survival right so think about humans we’re social primates right but we’re unbelievably defenseless like we don’t have claws we don’t have sharp teeth we can’t climb trees very well we can’t run very fast I I mean we’re like children in the wilderness right relatively speaking right compared to other uh apex predators and other mammals and um but so what we have is our Unity right we have the fact that we will function deliberately uh as a consciously as a group right and that is because humans do not survive by themselves in nature they die almost immediately right not a virtually all of us I mean you could drop almost any American off into the Canadian wilderness with the wife of wife a knife and a pack of matches
and and he or she or she right like and and so but we survive in groups and so when you when you look at I mean the sort of the the pity of modern society and I’m listen up all four modernity in a lot of ways right it’s brought amazing things to human consciousness medical advances I’d be dead if there if it were not for modern society for modern modern medicine um it’s capitalism is associated with a lot of good things including uh human rights right so so I just want to acknowledge that before moving on uh to say that the downside of all this uh technology all this uh mechanization uh is that we don’t need each other for our daily survival I mean wherever you live when you wake up in the morning and look around and the people in the houses around you or the apartments around you you’re not depending on those specifically those people for your survival right they didn’t help you build the house you live in they didn’t gather the food you’re about to eat and they’re certainly not helping defend you from the enemy so the enemy come right that’s all been outsourced in a very very efficient way that depends on a huge supply chain and it’s all good the downside is you don’t really need anybody and just so think about that offense with this think about if you’re in a group that need you your survival depends on being part of that group and if it needs you you can be pretty confident the group isn’t going to get rid of you right it’ll take care of you because it needs you you’re the guy that knows how to make arrowheads right like so they’re not going to get rid of you they need arrowheads right if you’re not needed on some level even in modern society if you realize that Society does not need you if you’re not being productive and helpful in some senses your safety is now in danger because you you’re the group doesn’t need you then you’re you’re dead weight you’re right they’re just carrying you and that makes people very very anxious and very insecure and as soon as you give them a situation where they’re needed a platoon in combat right or a disaster the Blitz in London I mean the the English got bombed for six months straight every night practically by the German Air Force in World War II they lost 30 000 civilians right I mean we lost 3 000 people in 9 11. 10 times that number right and people buried alive under the rubble et cetera Etc awful everyone’s sleeping in the tube stations but what happened was the common person became necessary to their society people were helping us save the wounded they were doing everything they could for the war effort and it was a social leveler which also feels great right after agriculture it’s a hierarchical economic system started with a few people at the top most people on the bottom that’s not a hunter-gatherers Society is a very egalitarian and uh so so what happens in a disaster is that everybody’s everybody’s sort of even right like I mean they I looked at an earthquake in in uh in Italy in the early part of the 20th century and there’s one it was the earth in avanzano that killed over 90 percent of the population in a minute right they’re basically hit by a nuclear weapon right and the people that actually survived it had to wait four or five days for help to get to them and one of the survivors said it’s an amazing quote I’ll finish with this the disaster gave us what the law promises but does not in fact deliver which is the equality of all people social class was completely erased for a little while during that disaster so of course people are nostalgic soldiers civilians anyone who lives through a disaster or even a hurricane in this country and you’re help you’re helping with a chainsaw clear your neighbor’s driveway like that all feels great and so that that kind of communalism can happen even in a modern society you never know tomorrow morning when you’re going to be needed and when you are people often look back on those terrible quote terrible days as the best days of their lives yeah yeah I I think you you’ve put your finger Sebastian on on a on a really important principle and and if you’re amenable I’m gonna see if I can broaden it even just a little bit because I I don’t know that that as a licensed psychologist I would want to prescribe for the entire population hey what you need is to get yourself a lot of trauma a lot of Crisis a lot of life and death um like you I want to have the best of both worlds I I there’s a lot about modernity that I I I think is worthy of celebrating and that I’m really fond of but I think there’s a lot that that we have left behind from The ancestral past a lot of wisdom a lot of healing and protective habits that maybe we can reclaim and weave back into the fabric of 21st century life so that maybe in some sort of hybridized way we can have some of the best of both worlds and one of the things I think you’ve got your finger on the pulse of is the broader principle that every single one of us needs to feel like we matter like we are a part of something bigger than ourselves and that we’re deeply connected and that we deeply belong and the the easiest way to see that unfold like you said is in a situation like our hunter-gatherer ancestors face like a combat position faces where it’s like hey if you are I mean I don’t have you all ever been out hiking like in Grizzly territory where um I mean this happened to me a few years ago in um in Yellowstone and I’m out on a trail and and as I’m getting off the trail I see a sign I’m by the way I’m with my wife so it’s just the two of us and I see a sign um there is a mama Grizzly who has adopted two orphan Cubs she has four Cubs she’s ridiculously aggressive don’t go on the trail well we have been on the trail and so I started doing some research about we just got lucky um what is these the the the smallest group of humans um that has never been attacked in any sort of you know recorded uh uh grizzly attack and apparently Grizzlies will not attack based on the research that I saw more than a group of more than four humans so if you’re out hiking they they just you know they’re just using this crude heuristic of like uh that’s a big group of humans so just adding another warm body to the group makes it safer every person gets safer well guess what primates like our closest primate covens the cousins the Champs when when a group is plotting an ambush if they see a certain critical threshold of three four five they’re like ah let’s call it off it’s too dangerous too risky there’s safety in numbers and we feel it at such a deep Primal level when survival is on the line if we are just another warm body that’s part of a group we know at a very Primal level we matter we belong just by virtue of our presence but then as Sebastian said if you’re in a small hunter-gatherer group say you’re in a group of 50 you don’t even have to worry about contributing just because you belong it’s also going to be the case that you’re going to be the best person or among the best at several different things that that the group values you’re going to be among the best at finding a fresh source of water among the best at you know weaving the roof of a temporary shelter or you know whatever hundreds and hundreds of different skills and things that people would need in a small group and so everybody gets to be valued well the Dilemma of 21st century life in the affluent West is no matter how good you are at anything there’s always going to be somebody better right even if you’re in the in the one percent or the one tenth of one percent there’s always somebody better no matter what it is that you’re great at unless you’re LeBron James and even there LeBron’s 38 now you know uh and and you know no offense Brendan but sometimes when people get to be 38 you know
or sometimes when they’re 59. um but um the the point is that what we see in the modern world is you don’t have to be in a combat platoon to feel like you belong necessarily many of us get that feeling from participating in something that is Meaningful and valued I just walked out of a classroom of 270 students an hour ago and we were all in this conversation together and we’re studying psychological disorders and they’re in it and they’re doing the readings and they’re supporting each other and you know and we’re part of our own little tribe um and as ephemeral as that is as temporary as that is it matters and um and and many of us are lucky enough to find that in 101 different ways different places in our lives where we know that we matter but one out of every four Americans has none of it one out of every four Americans will tell you they don’t have anybody that that counts on them they don’t have any role and we see these deaths of Despair especially for working class men where you know they feel like no but they have no status they have or minimal status nobody values what they do they’re not earning enough they feel like to really necessarily support a family um right and and so we see a hundred thousand overdose deaths last year in the U.S 50 000 suicide deaths um and disproportionately concentrated among people back to Sebastian’s Point who feel like they don’t really matter they don’t really count um and those are the folks that we’re just we’re we’re leaving behind and I think we could do better absolutely yeah thank you for coloring uh that that in as well too uh Steve and uh it brings us right to the Cliff’s Edge of the of this transitionary moment for the questions for uh Sebastian so very much appreciated but you know given your experiences Sebastian and observation of how a combat platoon provides Soldiers with extraordinary feelings of belongingness despite what looks like quite a bit of diversity on the surface you know for example different cultural backgrounds uh they you know the soldiers come from different geographies political ideologies and so forth um but they have a shared Mission ethos and so forth um what do you see are the lessons um that you would like for Americans to draw from that and what are the the principles that might be generalizable to the broader Society you know civilians um you know those struggling with mental health addiction you know kind of on where we’re working from here at Peaks uh workforces and so forth uh and how can we in a day-to-day life work to promote such bonds of connectedness um in a way that is unfamiliar to us because we don’t have access to that you know uh that platoon type environment of those communal type events so I know there are three questions buried in there but um uh hopefully uh you can set us in the right direction here yeah so I mean it is tricky I mean we’ve been having a conversation that’s basically been sort of diagnosing a problem by referencing our evolutionary past we used to live like this now we like live like this one poor people are depressed it’s probably because they need a sense of coherence that comes from adversity but as we agree we don’t as we you know we want we we don’t want we don’t want to subject ourselves to to adversity simply to feel like we belong to something right I mean that’s like that that doesn’t make sense so how do we how do we have the Best of Both Worlds how do we feel uh how do we have the the buffering effect of inclusion the buffering effect against sort of psychological struggles of inclusion of being hard included as part of a group without the adversity that that requires group participation right and so so in a way you have to sort of trick Evolution you have to sort of like make you have to trick our our our our our wiring like let’s we’re going to try to live as if as if we are desperately needed by this group even though thank God we’re not right thank God we live and stay for easier circumstances but how can we make it feel like we’re we’re intensely needed because if we do then we’ll feel intensely good so that’s the that’s a that’s a it’s a lot to ask but I think it can be done I mean I think sports teams go a long way towards creating that feeling of solidarity and participation and look it doesn’t matter who scored the goal we scored the goal and we beat that team right you know I mean that that is a great feeling they’ve done studies where women young women in college who participate in team sports go on to do better in life in all kinds of ways particularly economically right so so I think Sports is good I’m an atheist but I understand that church is an amazing sort of communal event that I think Taps into a lot of those behaviors uh in my opinion as an atheist unfortunately it also can come with a lot of sort of shame-based like ideological um teachings that make people feel bad about very human choices and very human desires so I you know just you know just just for the record like I think for me as an atheist there’s a downside to some of the church church teachings but what’s up and I’ve been to church and and you know you can go to church and not believe in God and have a very good time there right I mean I was at a sort of black Neighborhood Church in in in Baltimore with just an incredible bad I mean incredible musicians and singing and that the neighborhood feeling I mean the sort of community feeling the very poor neighborhood and the feeling I had in that room was like oh my God if I lived in Baltimore I’d be here every every Sunday morning right I mean it was just like a drug it was amazing right so so there are those things um and but I would but and you know there’s the workplace right I mean the workplace is a community and one of the problems with the workplace is that it can be hierarchical in some sort of nasty ways and so when sometimes corporations bring me in to talk about how do we make the you know x-corporation feel like a tribe because everyone knows if you feel like a tribe you’re going to fight harder and you’re going to do better and you beat the other tribe and that’s what it’s all about which I you know I get it you know that’s the game right so and so you know what I say to them is okay there’s a few things that would really help and I so I in my book Freedom I looked at Underdog groups that were able to overcome a superior enemy and numerically Superior or technologically Superior enemy the ukrainians are doing that now with the Russians the months of negrons did it against the Ottoman Empire the Irish did it against the British after the Easter rising in 1916 the American labor movement really did it in the 1920s and on uh uh against the government and corporate interests in the National Guard like it can be so I looked at the common elements and so those common elements of course go to a very strong sense of tribal identity and um they are you need leaders who are willing to die right and in the sense of a modern Corporation you need leaders who are willing to take a hit make a sacrifice for the good of the of the company so when you have corporations where the the top docs are getting you know multi-million dollar urine year-end bonuses while laying people off because there’s a downturn I get it like that’s business go for it but don’t don’t imagine you’re going to create a sense of tribe there you’re not you’re not leading a company you’re running one right which is a way to go through life again it’s not for me but like that’s that first of all you need leaders that are willing to be self-sacrificing and then you need uh sort of peer accountability like the soldiers one of the reasons they clean their weapons all the time was because their peers would say hey man clean your weapon like if we got if we get overrun in your gun jams I’m dead like clean that thing right so peer pressure for for for high performance it’s very very it’s much more effective than top-down disciplinary pressure right um and in the case of many of the small groups that have out fought larger larger forces the involvement of women is really really crucial uh in the labor movement um I mean for many many reasons but like in the labor movement in this country what they figured out is is if they put women on the front lines of the of the protests the National Guard didn’t know what to do they were not willing to hurt women right and completely confused the sort of power structure and and uh this one in in Lawrence Massachusetts in 1912 is one frustrated police chief said uh he said one one good cop can handle 10 men but it takes 10 cops to handle one woman and women create a sense of moral legitimacy to have movement as well and so so you know what I would just say is if you involve yourself in group in groups that have those components you’re probably doing pretty well and finally and I I well I promise and with this I’ve been asked many times how do you feel like you’re a big part of the biggest group which is the United States you’re an American citizen how do you it’s almost 400 million people how do you feel what do you have to do in your life to feel necessary to feel um uh to feel admired to feel um like you have a role to your contribution it’s the wealthiest most powerful country in the world and there’s 400 million like what do you what can you do to feel do you have that feeling of oh I belong to this right and these are symbolic steps but symbolism is quite powerful and don’t knock it so I would say there’s three things you can do you must vote you have to vote right the nation needs you to vote like it needs soldiers in war it needs voters in peacetime and in war like we will not survive without people voting it’s one thing you can do that makes you part of this whole and you are needed right um machines can’t vote computers can’t vote only humans can vote right jury duty it’s the only thing keeping us from tyranny right I mean one person cannot decide the fate of another person in a system with jury duty like no small town sheriff no president no Union boss nobody can decide someone else’s Faith robots can’t do it computers can’t do it you need humans in jury duty right and you are part of the fabric of society and God forbid if you’re charged with something you didn’t do you will want a jury duty you don’t deserve something you yourself are not willing to do for others so um served jury duty and finally uh donate blood robots can’t do it computers can’t do it the scientists can’t create but only humans can create blood and it’s free like within a week you have all the blood you gave you have back in you and someone’s someone in the ER is going to survive because you gave what it makes you part of the human race and part of this nation and without it God forbid there’d be terrible terrible loss and suffering in this country my life was saved by two years ago I almost died of a kind of freak medical occurrence I had an aneurysm that ruptured in my abdomen a very freak thing random like and I blend out into my abdomen and I was saved by 10 units of blood donated by 10 people that I’ll never know who they are and now I would give blood as much as I can as much as they’ll let me right and it’s so it feels so good you’re part of something so sorry about the long sermon but but it but it’s you know it’s important stuff and it’s complicated and it’s hard to it’s not easy and obvious it’s hard yeah no I I appreciate it and I want to I want to get Steve’s a side of this real quick but it you know to one of the bullet points that you know we’ve talked about part of the episode it feels easy to take a global view and say something like well interdependence is essential because we only have one planet a shared environment Etc and out of that we ought to come together however it feels like most Americans and you know cannot you know fortunately unfortunately relate to the global view right we’re we’re hard working we’re moving fast and quickly we’re not you know generally engaged in kind of a community so who has time for the lofty goals here and you know so the question becomes then how do we act locally and how can we be of service in a way that doesn’t obviously bring about you know bring me anything other than a sense of purpose and belonging and how else will you know useful can I be today and um and I and I think you’re spot on there you know at least with those particular three examples those are three extraordinarily important ways though we are separated as a community that we can contribute individually toward the community with a sense of you know sort of purpose like when I drop off the ballot you know for example in the mailbox and send it off that feels really good like a sense of purpose like I said something I cast my vision with other Americans in line doing the same sort of thing and giving blood is another distant but connected way of giving back to the community in a very selfless action as well too that visibly in front of us today saves lives in that regard and so you know we’re going from this kind of global view these these well-written texts text into something where we can actually locally produce it and find that meaning and belongingness in a really important way and so I think the tangent there was important Sebastian because the answers are not always imminently obvious but at the same time I think there we can access them in its conversations like this that can be of service to those who might be floundering a little bit in the process of discovery for community and connection so Steve if you want to add any thing to this at this time yeah I’d love to weigh in with just one more extension maybe um because I’ve always got that clinical hat on and as Sebastian was talking the the the research study that popped into my head and I’ll bet you both heard of it it’s called The Harvard study of adult development sometimes called the Harvard happiness study and it was launched 80 years ago by researchers at Harvard who recruited three cohorts of undergraduates and then matched Community controls in Cambridge and began from age 18 1920 tracking them bringing them back every few years to look at their psychological development their their life outcomes their health they eventually started doing all kinds of Biometrics and brain scans and yada out of it toward the end of these uh men and women’s lives so they tracked them all the way into their 80s and 90s and now I think there are maybe four original participants in in that are centenarians um they started focusing a lot more in late life on overall quality of um well-being and happiness and life satisfaction and one of the headline findings that um really warmed my heart was that ultimately as people enter into the latter stages of their careers um or raising kids and and Beyond what predicted their level of satisfaction and happiness was not their achievement not how far they made it in their careers not how famous they became and several participants did become you know somewhat famous uh not as famous as Sebastian but you know pretty pretty famous and and you know they they didn’t write The Perfect Storm but but um they did really well and what predicted their happiness was was Far and Away the single biggest variable was their social ties but I want to be really careful here because we have to I think disentangle we think about social ties or social support to disentangle connection which often has to do with our most emotionally intimate meaningful friendships and relationships with families spouses children siblings parents and so forth and belonging to a tribe belonging to a group so connection versus belonging and what I loved about Sebastian’s work is he put a spotlight on belonging that had never been there in in my opinion in our culture that was so necessary but I don’t want us to lose sight of the fact that connection in many ways has these very Primal Echoes back to our hunter-gatherer days if you think of a combat platoon right which kind of in some ways approximates a hunter-gatherer band you’ve got whatever 30 50 100 individuals but it’s comprised of smaller little family like units yeah right um squads squads and um and that’s where you’re talking about banza brothers where you know literally people will lay down their lives for one another often um without flinching these are these are my brothers um in the way that hopefully we would all think there are people in my life I would lay down my life for without even like no questions asked wouldn’t even think twice about it um and what we find is that that level of emotional connection and intimacy is extraordinarily protective against the slings and arrows of Outrageous Fortune so when a medical crisis hits you know like Sebastian goes through this this freakish tragic aneurysm um and then makes this remarkable full recovery um when we have when we’re blindsided by failure and and loss and setback it’s those intimate connections that are even more protective than belonging to the tribe now that they both matter for for sure um but I feel like for many Americans even if they fail to find their sense of their people in say a church group or um you know they’re lucky enough to be part of some sort of a sports team or some other team or they’re I mean I worked for a while on a medical unit at Duke Med Center and there was a really strong sense of tribe among the providers on this unit like we were just we were all in and it was it felt like it was literally life and death you know not for us but for the people we were caring for um it was extraordinary the the bonds that form there but but I just want to put on the viewers and the listeners radar the idea that when we are meaningfully embedded in the lives of our very closest friends and family that it has a primal Echo it’s we’re not literally involved in a life or death sort of you know in other words our presence doesn’t literally matter for their survival their life or death but emotionally it still feels like it does because for hundreds of thousands of years it did does that make sense yep in other words emotionally there’s a vestigial Echo of the life or death Stakes we feel like those connections are a matter of life and death emotionally they are psychologically they are but they’re literally not so much anymore although our brain still thinks they are how about that um and and so I I just really don’t want us to lose sight of the fact that even if we haven’t found our people yet um you know that bigger tribe we can still get so much of the psychological benefit from our Squadron as it were and I think we should all be looking to find who is you know who’s in our Squad uh if we don’t have one I think one I’d love that I think one way to phrase the question and figure out who’s in your squad is to sort of ask yourself if there were a crisis who I who do I think would stick with me right right and uh I mean one of the interesting statistics that came out of 9 11 was well first of all that um Vietnam veterans who had PTSD said that there are symptoms declined after 9 11. in New York in New York City yes Vietnam that’s in the New York area said their symptoms declined after 9 11. you’d think it would trigger that right it was the opposite there was a feeling of oh my God we’re needed like it’s game time what are we going to do right that wasn’t the last attack does it another one’s coming you know whatever so but the other interesting statistic was that the um a lot of people got divorced after 9 11. I think it was a realization while it was a crisis that I just figured out that my wife or my husband actually isn’t in my squad like yes right like it took the crisis I and I I I also want to add that that one of the guys in the platoon I mean so in the platoon yeah there was about 40 guys 50 guys something like that uh there were three platoons in the company in the Cornwall Valley so around 150 maybe pushing 200 men and so so the feelings among the guys was you know we would risk our lives or definitely our squads right we would die for our squad for anyone in the platoon and really extending into the company because they basically won’t have proof that you could know all the names of everybody even if you didn’t know them well or even like them particularly they were sort of in the group right yeah on the company once you got to the Battalion level uh like and once you go to the Brigade level 3 500 people you know if something bad happened to the Brigade like they lost their aerial surveillance blimp to a in a hurricane in a thunderstorm it’s a lightning and everyone in the platoon thought it was hilarious like oh my God Brigade lost their blimp so one of the guys said to me we were on an ambush and it was a lot of time to kill because we were waiting for the enemy that never showed up and and uh and we were chatting he said you know it’s funny there’s there’s guys in the platoon who straight up hate each other but we would all die for each other yeah I love that that’s belonging right belonging doesn’t require love right I mean it doesn’t right my individual love the other thing that would happen is that there were guys who were like really brothers in the platoon right I mean like they really were really really really really close so both of those components combined to make a very strong healthy sort of human Fabric in the platoon and then imagine those guys suddenly going home and they’re not in the middle of any Matrix whatsoever certainly not in the middle of a matrix of anyone who would die for that imagine how scary that that is absolutely yeah the contrast there so I’m going to return to that Harvard study um uh happiness study because I’m going to tell you the the best predictive variable for happiness for people was one particular question at least I and I hope I’m not misrepresenting the study but my understanding is there was one question which was I’m paraphrasing and you can both think about answering this for yourself and I’ll do the same how many people and give me a list you don’t have to give me your list but they asked for lists list the the people who you could call at three in the morning in a medical crisis or some other crisis three in the morning and they would drop anything without thinking they are there for you no questions asked three in the morning um which is kind of echoing nicely I think Sebastian some of what you’re saying right so in other words now when it might be a matter of life and death at Great personal sacrifice and inconvenience you’re going to give up your night’s sleep you’re going to drop everything you’re just going to show up take that person to the ER be with them God only knows what you’re stepping into when you get that three in the morning call and we’ve all had it right and we counted a privilege um there were many people in the study who said I have nobody wow you know I have friends I’m not there were people who couldn’t even list their spouse wow again to your point there are people who went through covid and learned like hey I can’t count on my spouse yeah to be that person for me um just like they went through 9 11 and learned they’re you know there are those of us who are lucky enough you know we’re going to run out of fingers and hands when we think about how how blessed we are with the different people in our lives that you know um or we think about the number of people that we would drop everything for if it came to it um but that I I don’t know I think it it speaks both to the fact that we can differentiate between connection and belonging a bit but at a certain point quantity has a quality all its own in other words if we have a big enough group then all of a sudden we do have not just connection but we do have our people you know yeah and what’s interesting about modern society is that for most of human history the people that would go on your list would probably live in pretty close proximity to you
now modern society you have that list I have that list while you were speaking I racked up about eight or nine people you know not including my immediate family but uh and um but they’re not part of my daily experience they don’t live in my neighborhood I mean they were getting the car and drive 400 miles to get here right they’re not part of my life right the one’s there but so imagine if you go through your life with that group of people like not only do you have that group but you see them every day like imagine imagine what that’s like like of course you’re not depressed you know what I mean of course right of course that’s human that’s that’s human existence until like yesterday exactly right yeah I know that that’s that’s a really lovely Point um and it takes me back to um an incredible experience of community that I had in college where there was just a group of us you know sort of it sounds ridiculous to say it but it was a little bit like the TV show Friends where it was a group of about 10 of us uh men and women that were just extremely close we just loved each other would hang out all the time had this sort of community and we’re still 40 years later in really really close touch but nobody lives anywhere near anybody else and now we you know we’re in we’re in contact all the time and it it echoes back to this time when we did all share the same physical space yeah and it’s still very nourishing in that way but it’s sort of nourishing in this way of of echoing back to the in-person reality and then of course you know we’ll get together and have a little reunion every now and again but but um yeah I I think you’re really on to something important we need to have people that are part of our day-to-day face-to-face as the kids would say IRL you know in real life um experience as well as maybe some of those lifelong bonds of folks that are halfway across the planet now The Gamers call um the world that we all live in uh that they don’t actually but everyone the rest of us live in they call it the meat world and and I love it I love it yeah you do you need some meat world right like and the thing is you met your friends in college where you know because you’re in college together you were put physically into a kind of tribal setting right like seeing each other in the mornings you know the evening you know wherever like you were the dining hall yeah exactly right and facing us you know a sort of uh similar and sometimes shared struggle of academic stress and you know whatever so they don’t but you know just but there it is again like you you can’t quite get there without something that at least vaguely replicates our evolutionary past in terms of being in the meat world with each other on a daily basis and that’s absolutely the problem with our neighborhoods and our communities Etc I mean I grew up in a pretty affluent suburb and spiritually speaking um it was death on wheels for me I mean I just like no one knew each other no one needed each other like I live in a mixed income neighborhood in New York City where people do need each other and know each other and you know there’s a lot of unpleasantness of a sort of um unimportant story in in the neighborhood but there is connection like I mean for me that’s gold because of where I grew up it’s gold right I don’t care about the junkies in the garbage like I’ll deal with that as long as I feel like I’m part of something and I do and I’m here with my family you know it’s it’s me I have two little girls and my wife and and you know we’re you know really as happy as can be
yeah I love that and I you know I I’m now I’m really pondering Brandon is okay if I jump back in one more time yeah go for it well I’m just pondering um you you both probably know the book uh by Robert Putnam the great sociologist bowling alone yeah bowling alone how you know the decline of Civic connections that people you know they used to find a little bit of a tribe experience in a bowling league or in the Kiwanis Club or in the Key Club or whatever and parallel with the decline of those kind of Civic organizations has been a decline in church attendance and membership although Americans are still by Western affluent Nation standards by an order of magnitude more religious than any other civilization and still something like 40 or so of Americans have a strong uh church or uh house of worship identity okay my point well I was brought up in a very devout family and I had the experience in high school of attending a largely black church um and it was brilliant for all the reasons the music was just you know otherworldly in a phenomenal way and I learned a lot of what I know musically in that setting but eventually um I got to the point where I wasn’t really sure exactly what I believe um if I believe um I’m a very hopeful person ontologically existentially so I think there’s something I don’t know what to label it or name it I don’t think it necessarily matters but my wife and I eventually migrated to a religious community that’s very open and non-judgmental and you know in other words where you can kind of have the best of like oh there’s connection and Community without having to sign your name on the dotted line for any kind of you know harsh strict dogma and I’m not judging those who are you know in a more dogmatic setting but it wouldn’t work for us but I was just thinking about Sebastian in my meat world is that what can I call it that the meat World it sounds a little risque but I’m gonna go go for it in the meat World in IRL um
my wife and I have a circle of friends here in Lawrence Kansas that we meet with in a sort of a book club setting but they’re all from this little Episcopal Church and we meet with them once a week and it’s like 10 people again and it’s a beautiful beautiful thing that we we all have this sort of shared background that once upon a time we were all in a very devout kind of setting and we’ve kind of wandered off does this make any sense at all in other words it’s like a it’s a way of like all of us miss that sense of belonging and community and so we’re like can I swear on can I cuss on here go for it is that okay we’re like [  ] [  ] it we’re gonna stay a part of we’re gonna keep the best parts of this yeah without any of the Dogma or the Judgment or anything else but with by the way something that I value and I think both of you do too just from getting to know you both a little bit the sense of life has something about it existence has something about it that’s kind of mysterious and kind of magical like there’s a sense of wonder yeah about existence even if we don’t want to label it anything even if you know we say we’re an atheist or an agnostic but there’s something magical about it and joining with a group of people to celebrate that kind of magic of existence I think there’s something very uplifting about that and something that people can come together over that that’s my story anyway and I’m sticking with it no yeah I love it and and I and I think it’s a good great segue into one of our you know uh questions for Sebastian while we have him uh here with us today is that you know Sebastian you shared with the guardian that uh you you know and uh just a little bit uh backwards uh that you nearly died in the summer of 2020 due to having an undiagnosed aneurysm in the pancreatic artery asymptomatic not related to anything it’s just a structural you know congenial thing and you had no way of knowing about it and then out of the blue just like we’re talking right now you know it ruptured and you lost nearly 90 of your blood and given your experiences on the front lines of War um how is this experience into you know Steve’s Point as well too um how’s this experience different given that you know both experiences brought death front and center for you uh but from here um uh just curious you have you have death coming you know in both different directions uh in this regard but how do you see those differences playing out you know being faced with death imminently on two fronts and then to Echo what Steve’s talking about how can you bring us closer to you know maybe that mysteriousness that comes up um in that regard and the magic to life being faced with that imminent uh sort of death yeah well uh yeah so I was a combat reporter for a while and and suffered some consequences I mean I you know I had a certain amount of trauma that would follow me home and would sort of rattle me a bit and I was anxious depressed quick to anger sometimes which is new for me um I didn’t know it had to do with combat PTSD wasn’t a term that was being used very much so you know I just thought in my late 30s I I just thought I was going crazy like I mean I had no idea that you know I panicked when I was in a small space like on the subway I had no idea it had to do with combat in Afghanistan you know I was in Afghanistan in 2000 a year before 9 11. I was in a lot of like pretty heavy combat I had no idea like that it was my panic in New York was connected to that how could I there were no Subways in New York you know so so I had I had problems with it but they they did they I didn’t deal with it but I didn’t see a trick or anything I mean just like they went away like over the course of a year or so I normalized I reset and I was fine um what happened with my aneurysm was way more traumatic than combat right I mean seeing civilian casualties that doesn’t go away that stays in your head for a long time is extremely upsetting but in terms of danger to yourself right the mortality issue the risk that you run in combat are for me I mean we’re we’re transitory right I mean the effects were very very transitory no problem right when I had my aneurysm which ruptured boom like that like I was talking to my wife and I felt the pain in my my abdomen and a minute later I couldn’t stand because my blood pressure was dropping and they got me to the hospital my blood pressure was 60 over 40 and I was on the way out the door right and that was terrifying I mean that that I’m still struggling with the consequences of that I I I was I had a very intense anxiety panic disorder after that like and it was because it was the randomness of it it was just like you people do quite well with danger if they feel they have agency and when you’re in combat you have some agency right including not going to combat right if if you’re if you rupture your pancreatic artery artery randomly because of a sort of genetic quirk in your abdomen like you have zero agency right and and so that was terrifying that was absolutely terrifying and people will accept a a higher level of risk with agency than a lower level risk without agency that’s why people are scared of flying airplanes and they’re fine with driving right so so I really really struggled with that but it did bring into Focus this sort of you know if it’s true that you never know no matter how healthy you are you never know if you’re going to live till sunset I mean that’s existentially true right there was a lady in Canada in British Columbia who woke up at 25 minutes to midnights from a loud crash in her in her house she turned on the light and a meteorites the size of a large man’s fist was sitting next to her head on the floral print pillow and had it hit her forehead and killed her right that thing had been zipping around the universe for billions of years right it missed her head by inches right that’s some random [ __ ] right there right there was Zero agency and and that’s the kind of thing that humans that people have a very very hard time reconciling with their with the with the they’re said their identity their sense of themselves in life like I’m I’m steering my ship here like I can I have some control over my faith when you find out that you actually in some senses to have no control over what happens to you it’s absolutely terrifying and I have young children I’m 61 but I have an almost six-year-old and a three-year-old and now I’m living for other people I’m not living for myself I belong to them right and what happens to me is going to happen to them in a way and the idea that I almost died and left my girls and my wife was so upsetting like I’m still recovering from that idea it was absolutely devastating and so I you know I what I came out of it with is if you never know what ultimately all you is so trite this is so cliche I can’t even believe I’m saying it but ultimately you’d all you know that you will have for sure all you know for sure that you will have is right now the past h