Preet Bharara:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, welcome to Stay Tuned. I’m Preet Bharara.

Sebastian Junger:

Can a democracy maintain a relatively fair distribution of income and protect the sort of capitalist engine, and have it be a free and democratic and just society? Can we sort of do all these things?

Preet Bharara:

That’s Sebastian Junger. He’s a writer and filmmaker who is best known for his nonfiction book, The Perfect Storm. You may have seen the film adaptation starting George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg in 2000. Much of Junger’s reporting has focused on wars abroad. He directed and produced the Oscar-nominated documentary, Restrepo, which is based on his experience embedded with the US military in Afghanistan in the late 2000s.

Preet Bharara:

Junger recently published a new book, Freedom, which is a rumination on what that word means. Today, we talked about his 400-mile walk along railroad tracks that inspired the book and how we get closer to figuring out what freedom really means. That’s coming up, stay tuned.

Preet Bharara:

Hey, folks, before we get to your questions, quick reminder. The second episode of Now & Then, our new podcast hosted by Heather Cox Richardson and Joanne Freeman is out. Subscribe for free and listen on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Now, let’s get to your questions.

Preet Bharara:

This question comes in an email from Lee and the subject line of the email is Lisa Monaco, cyber sheriff. And Lee writes, “Hey, Preet, how about Lisa Monaco calling back the Colonial Pipeline bitcoin? About time for some good news on the ransomware front.” Lee, I could not agree with you more. We spend a lot of time in recent years talking about the ways in which law enforcement has let us down or the justice department is not doing this or that. And when there’s a substantial victory that enhances public safety and holds people accountable or makes victims whole or partially whole, we should celebrate that.

Preet Bharara:

Lisa Monaco, of course, my good friend, former colleague, podcaster with the CAFE until she was summoned back to public service to become what she is now, the deputy attorney general of the United States. And earlier this week, I have a TV on and who do I see? I see Lisa Monaco, making a pretty remarkable announcement.

Lisa Monaco:

The sophisticated use of technology to hold businesses and even whole cities hostage for profit is decidedly a 21st century challenge. But the old adage, “Follow the money,” still applies.

Preet Bharara:

It’s not unprecedented but it’s pretty remarkable given all the attention around this ransomware attack of Colonial Pipeline. Remember that in early May, that company, Colonial Pipeline was a victim of a ransomware attack resulting in the company having to take down portions of its infrastructure. And the hackers, known as DarkSide, demanded a payment of ransom in bitcoin although this is somewhat controversial.

Preet Bharara:

Like many companies and even individuals, Colonial Pipeline felt it had no choice but to pay the ransom to the tune of about $5 million. Lisa Monaco announced on behalf of the department and the FBI that they had figured out a way to recover $2.3 million or so of the ransom that was paid by tracing, according to the New York Times, through a maze of at least 23 different electronic accounts belonging to DarkSide that amount of funds.

Preet Bharara:

So I think the announcement in the case is significant for a number of reasons. Ordinarily, Department of Justice officials announce an arrest, they announce charges or they speak after a guilty verdict of a particular individual or a group of individuals. It’s not often that there is a big splashy significant announcement of the mere seizure of funds.

Preet Bharara:

But I think the ransomware problem is growing so significantly in this country and around the world that the department wanted to make a statement. And what is that statement? It’s all about deterrence to show folks, DarkSide and others, that hacks that involve demands for ransom are not the perfect crime and simply demanding payment in cryptocurrency, bitcoin or something else, does not let you get away with it, does not let you keep all the funds, and that the American government has the resources and wherewithal to trace meticulously those funds in a lot of different ways and can take it back. Hopefully, that takes some of the incentive away from folks who try to engage in these kinds of attacks.

Preet Bharara:

The other point that I used to make the time, when cybersecurity was a priority of mine as US attorney and that Lisa Monaco reiterated and I think has become more and more important is the critical step of a company or individual, who’s a victim of hacking and in particular ransomware, is to come forward to the FBI. In this case, that was fairly unavoidable perhaps because the ransomware attack was so public and it took offline portions of infrastructure.

Preet Bharara:

But a lot of the time, individuals keep this quiet. Companies keep it quiet, and I think this announcement of the recovery of close to half of the ransom paid might incentivize not just the hackers not to engage in this activity but also incentivize the victims to report it and maybe get some of their money back. By the way, Lee, you mentioned Lisa Monaco, but we should also talk about John Carlin, another former colleague who now works for the deputy attorney general, Lisa Monaco, his old friend. And he’s one of the nation’s foremost experts on cybersecurity.

Preet Bharara:

So congratulations to Lisa, John, the rest of the team at the DOJ and at the FBI, great work.

Preet Bharara:

This question comes in a tweet from Becky who asked, “On grand juries, if the grand jury fails to indict, can prosecutors just convene another grand jury?” That is an excellent question. Becky, thanks for asking it. So I’ll talk about the federal practice. First of all, at the outset, let me say and I think even lay people who understand this, if your grand jury fails to indict, you have a problem. There’s probably something wrong with your case. You probably have a failure of proof, or maybe the facts of your case don’t fit the law.

Preet Bharara:

Because remember, although I dispute the adage that a grand jury will indict ham sandwich, it is still true that the challenge of getting an indictment is much, much, much lower than the challenge of getting a conviction of trial. First of all, you don’t need unanimity. You just need a majority of the grand juries present. Number two, the standard is not proof beyond a reasonable doubt. It’s just probable cause. And there’s no adversary. There’s no opposing party to poke holes in your case.

Preet Bharara:

So if your presentation in the grand jury has resulted in what’s called a No True Bill, a failure to return an indictment, you have a problem that you need to consider in the case as an initial matter. That said, there is no law or constitutional provision that prevents a prosecutor from going back into the grand jury and representing to that grand jury with additional information or additional facts or additional witnesses or not, or a different grand jury.

Preet Bharara:

And when I say no law or constitutional provision prevents it, that includes the double jeopardy clause which does not attach, does not apply in any way when a grand jury fails to indict. However, as is true with lots of different issues at the justice department and other prosecutor’s offices, there’s an interest in making sure that justice is not abused, and that includes the grand jury process, and that the grand jury is not abused.

Preet Bharara:

There’s a provision in what’s called the justice manual, it used to be called the US attorney manual that addresses the precise question you’re asking. And it states once a grand jury returns in no bill or otherwise act on the merits and declining to return an indictment, the scenario that you mentioned, the same matter, i.e. the same transaction or event and the same peat of the defendant should not be presented to another grand jury or resubmitted to the same grand jury without first securing the approval of the responsible United States attorney.

Preet Bharara:

What’s interesting is, it doesn’t say you can’t do it, certainly you can. As I said, no law prevents it. It does say you need to get the explicit approval of the US attorney. But it doesn’t give guidance as to what kind of considerations you take into account to allow someone to represent the same matter to that grand jury or another grand jury.

Preet Bharara:

Now, my recollection is in the seven and a half years that I was a US attorney, I was probably asked for this kind of approval a handful of times probably I could count on one hand, and I always got a fairly detailed memo as to what the reasons were and the considerations included things like the seriousness of the crime, how substantial the evidence was. There may have been a concession that more evidence was needed to be given to the grand jury than they got to make them comfortable.

Preet Bharara:

But in certain situations, it happens. Not prevented by law, but again, if you’re having a problem in the grand jury, you may be having a problem with your case.

Preet Bharara:

Stay tuned, there’s more coming up after this.

Preet Bharara:

My guest this week is Sebastian Junger. He’s an esteemed author and documentary filmmaker, his latest work, Freedom, seeks to unpack what the word has meant to different communities throughout history. From the debate around mass mandates to accepting election results, the word freedom gets thrown around a lot. Today, Junger explores how he has come to understand such an important word.

Preet Bharara:

Sebastian Junger, welcome to the show.

Sebastian Junger:

Thank you very much.

Preet Bharara:

So we’re going to talk about a lot of things, your time as a work correspondent, the most recent book you’ve written, Freedom. But we were talking before we started taping and here we are about midday on Monday June 7th. And you are recording from your place in lower Manhattan. Is that right?

Sebastian Junger:

Yeah, we live in the lower east side.

Preet Bharara:

It’s a hot one today. It’s already up to 88 degrees and you have no air conditioning?

Sebastian Junger:

No air conditioning. The windows are opened, so you’ll hear some street noise. We’re definitely part of the street.

Preet Bharara:

So my question is, so the lack of air conditioning, is that an expression of freedom or an abridgment of freedom? It’s an honest question. I don’t really know the answer to that.

Sebastian Junger:

Freedom means, for my purposes, it means you can’t be unfairly controlled by a greater power. And so-

Preet Bharara:

And the thermostat is a greater power?

Sebastian Junger:

Well, no, that’s just the reality of the physical world.

Preet Bharara:

So your book has a very broad title, Freedom, a subject that from time to time people think about, write about, argue about, go to war about. No subtitle to let us get sort of a handle on what your take is here. How come no subtitle and what would the subtitle be if you had one?

Sebastian Junger:

Well, if I could have thought of a subtitle to capture the scope of the book, I might have stuck it in there, but it’s a very, very broad book. It talks about freedom in sort of almost mammalian terms. And freedom has too many definitions-

Preet Bharara:

Mammalian as opposed to reptilian?

Sebastian Junger:

Yeah. I mean, we’re mammals so if we study ourselves as a species, mammals are the best reference point. But in the mammalian world, smaller individuals almost never are able to outfight and maintain their autonomy in the face of a larger individual, smaller groups likewise in the face of a larger group. But for humans interestingly, the smaller person or the smaller group actually can maintain their autonomy in the face of a greater power.

Sebastian Junger:

No better example than the Taliban in Afghanistan, facing the greatest military power ever and they fought us to a standstill for 20 years and we’re leaving on their terms. And you would not find that in … We’re social primates, in any of the other primate species, in any of the other mammalian species. It’s uniquely human and allows us access to what we call freedom autonomy.

Preet Bharara:

Let’s take a step back and talk about the context in which you were ruminating on these various things like freedom and culture and societies and fighting and running and all those other things that you described in the book. The book is centered around, fair to say, a hike or a trek that you and a number of other men took alongside railway lines some years ago?

Sebastian Junger:

Yeah, that’s right.

Preet Bharara:

400 miles of railway walking in the northeast, a lot in Pennsylvania, why did you do that?

Sebastian Junger:

I wanted to meet the country in sort of the most raw terms possible. I wanted to spend some time with a few other guys that had been through a lot of combat like I had. I needed a kind of timeout from my life, which on a personal level was meeting with some painful difficulties. I like testing myself and seeing if I can make things turn out okay. There’s something about that that’s eternally interesting and satisfying to me.

Preet Bharara:

But why the railroad?

Sebastian Junger:

Well, because they’re sort of no man’s land. And you can sleep outside and you won’t get arrested for vagrancy because there’s no cops out there, that these swaths of no man’s land that just crisscross America, and you could kind of do what you want. I mean, there’s no cops.

Preet Bharara:

You keep referring to the fact that there are no cops which suggest that what you were doing was not actually lawful. Did that add a level or a layer of sort of interest or fascination for you that … Because you described at various points trying to make sure that you have not been seen by police. There’s one example you give that a train goes by and the head of the railway catches you and your group and calls it in apparently but no cops ever show up. Was that a feature that made it more interesting or just another fact?

Sebastian Junger:

I mean, we’ve all been in combat. There was sort of tactical element to this that appealed to the 10-year-old boy in all of us, I think, like can we get away with this? We were very clear that it’s illegal because we were trespassing on railroad property. But there were no real human victims here and it didn’t feel like we were doing something actually immoral which is when it was illegal.

Sebastian Junger:

And so there was this sort of test for us, like can we make our way along the edges of this modern industrial society that we depend on? We would go into town to buy food and then head back out there for a few days, whatever. Can we thread our way through the margins of this crazy society without getting caught? And depending on it but also staying sort of out of it to reach, below its radar.

Sebastian Junger:

We could have walked the Appalachian trail but none of that would have been true. You’re supposed to be out there. And we wanted to meet Americans and we wanted to get to know the country-

Preet Bharara:

So you would wander from the railway into the towns and meet people?

Sebastian Junger:

Well, there were sometimes people along the lines themselves, but yeah, we would go into town and get a cup of coffee at a diner or snag pancakes if we wanted to have a meal sitting in a chair. It’s felt like a luxury, and we would resupply in town. We’d get more food. We did all obviously all our cooking over fires or a little camping stove that I had.

Sebastian Junger:

So in the railroad, lines go through town so you don’t have to sort of wander off. Usually, you just step off the lines and you’re in a town.

Preet Bharara:

And not a lot of hills, I think you’ve mentioned?

Sebastian Junger:

Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

Trains don’t go uphills?

Sebastian Junger:

They don’t go uphills worth a damn. No, they don’t. And they like cutting these tangents off of things. So we were carrying 60 to 70 pounds. We’re walking 10, 15, 20 miles a day. Sometimes, it was mid-winter. It was freezing cold. Sometimes it was literally 100 degrees, hotter than it is today. And so, if you’re not walking uphill or you’re not doing a lot of loopy curves, you’re definitely grateful for that.

Preet Bharara:

So as I was reading the book, and I hope you’re not offended by this. And I’m reading about a number of grown men walking along a railroad tracks. You know what came to my head?

Sebastian Junger:

No, tell me.

Preet Bharara:

Various scenes from the movie Stand By Me. Have you seen it?

Sebastian Junger:

Of course. I never saw it, but a lot of people have told me that. Yeah, of course.

Speaker 4:

You must have started walking on the train tracks and just follow them the whole way.

Speaker 5:

Yeah, right. And then after dark, train must have come along … el smacko!

Speaker 4:

Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

And it seemed to me through a sort of wistful look at through the young boys who are a little bit also trying to figure out what the world is about, make their way but much younger. But I guess, does that ever leave, should that ever leave that sort of searching for what the hell your life is about and wanting to meet America? Do you think you’ll do it again in 10, 15, 20 years?

Sebastian Junger:

I was going back out there as recently as a couple of years ago. And so, yeah, I love that environment, that’s sort of weird half wild, half industrial environment with the railroads lines. I absolutely adore. And I also love it in the wilderness. I may have two young children which is a different form of, and I don’t mean this ironically, it’s a different form of freedom that it’s enormously profound for me. But I do hope I get out there.

Preet Bharara:

So I want to go back to something you were saying before about the nature of interaction combat fighting between smaller individuals and larger individuals. And one of the things you say in the book is, “The reason size and strength did not absolutely determine outcome is that tactics play a huge role in human conflict.”

Preet Bharara:

And you also say, this had me thinking and I’d wonder if you could elaborate on it. And you talked about boxing matches and mixed martial arts and other kinds of fighting that you say approximate sort of violence in the wild and in the world. And you say, some of the issue is, “the disproportionate energy cost of an offense compared to a defense,” and you refer to a one particular fight. It sounds a lot like the famous rope-a-dope that people talked about with boxing. Explain what you meant by that and how that matters sort of in the larger world of conflict.

Sebastian Junger:

Yeah, I mean, it costs energy to throw a punch. It costs energy to invade another country. In that case, economic energy.

Preet Bharara:

But much less energy as you also say to dodge a punch if you do that successfully.

Sebastian Junger:

Yeah, so it scales up. At every scale, slipping a punch in a fight requires less energy, just less movement than throwing a punch. And we don’t have infinite amounts of energy. So at some point, even a conditioned fighter, if he or she throws enough punches in a row, they are in oxygen debt. And once you’re in oxygen debt, if you don’t alleviate that, pretty soon you can’t really function very well.

Sebastian Junger:

And so what it means is that the attacker … I mean, just look what happened on D-Day. The enormous American casualties trying to take those beaches. Eventually it worked. But had they gotten bogged down on those beaches without any cover, it wouldn’t have worked. And so basically, the attacker because they’re using up manpower or energy or ammunition or oxygen or whatever it may be, because they’re using it up disproportionately faster, if they don’t clinch the wind fairly quickly, there’s a chance that even if they’re a more powerful force, they may actually never win.

Sebastian Junger:

And so for a large 250-pound man, moving around in a boxing ring or in a field just cost more energy than a smaller person. And if the smaller person could just not lose for long enough which is what the Taliban did to us, if they could just not lose for long enough, the bigger entity is basically going to run out of resources.

Preet Bharara:

And is that always true or is that generally true?

Sebastian Junger:

I’m not sure what you mean by always true.

Preet Bharara:

The idea that if the large sort of cumbersome weighted down force whether an individual or a nation state does not clinch a quick victory against an enemy that is mobile and kinetic and small and nimble that it’s doomed to lose.

Sebastian Junger:

Well, I would just say the longer the fight goes on, the more the odds shift in favor of the smaller entity that’s using up less energy.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, you give up. It’s not worth it.

Sebastian Junger:

Well, or you’re just incapacitated. I mean, we’ve all been in deep oxygen debt. There’s not much you can do except grab your knees. That’s not a very good fighting position. So yeah, it’s physics. It’s metabolism. It’s biology. It’s economics. I mean, what was the cause of Afghanistan for us? It’s not something we could sustain for, let’s say, 200 years and I think economically speaking, the Taliban probably could have fought for 200 years.

Preet Bharara:

And there’s something also about, you spend a lot of time talking about the concept self-sufficiency of, for one of a better phrase, mobile societies. Some societies are more mobile than others. You talked about the difference between as they evolved over time, agrarian societies where you start to stock pile crops and food as opposed to societies that roamed around and sort of catch and eat what they kill on an ongoing basis. But there are differences in those societies, what are they and which is superior?

Sebastian Junger:

Well, superior is a value judgment. I mean, what I would say is that each offers particular advantages. Agrarian society was first established around 10,000 years ago and they were pastoral societies and hunter-gatherers societies all around them that were, I think one could argue, more free on the individual level. It’s very hard to oppress a mobile society because in the morning, their tents are gone and they’re in the hills.

Sebastian Junger:

Likewise, in a small group, a sort of survival level group of hunter-gatherers, it’s very hard to accumulate wealth because you can’t carry it and it’s very hard for one powerful leader to dominate everybody because it’s too easy for a coalition of males to just kill the person. That’s been studied quite a lot by a wonderful anthropologist named Richard Bauman, the sort of group morality of a hunter-gatherers society, abused by the powerful is one thing they will absolutely not tolerate.

Sebastian Junger:

But once you have people who are invested in a piece of property, who have picked all the stones out of the soil, who have irrigated, who have spent a generation developing a piece of land, you can’t just pick up and go. You lose a whole lifetime’s investment in this property and you depend on those crops for your food, for your income, your livelihood.

Sebastian Junger:

And so that makes sedentary people willing to say, “Pay 20 percent of their crop to the king,” or whosoever at the top of the power structure. And that’s sort of pyramidal structure also allows for very wealthy elite segments of society to pay for and establish a standing that’s even better at making outcomes go in favor of the establishment.

Sebastian Junger:

You get this sort of fork in the road between mobile societies that are maturely poor but have enormous amount of personal and group autonomy. And sedentary societies that are much wealthier, much more powerful in military terms, but the individuals on those society are literally or figuratively working a 10-hour day, deeply in debt, don’t really have the autonomy that a pastoralist herding chief in the mountains, the old biblical story of Cain and Abel. Cain, the agriculturalist, the farmer kills Abel, the pastoralist out of envy. And so you have that story played out over and over again in human history.

Preet Bharara:

Is it the case, the one society versus the other, is more or less free or just have different kinds of freedom?

Sebastian Junger:

Well, it depends how you define freedom. I would say that a useful definition of freedom is that you can’t be unfairly controlled by a greater power.

Preet Bharara:

Unfairly controlled?

Sebastian Junger:

Yeah. So one of the advantages of small scale mobile societies is that there is a kind of collective decision making where more people are involved than, and say, the Sumerian empire where it really was a top out hierarchy or Medieval Europe where most of society were effectively serfs and not only not participating in large scale decision-making but were subjected to pretty onerous conditions and abusive economic practices.

Preet Bharara:

I want to focus on that one word that’s doing a lot of work there, unfairly controlled by a greater power. But if you have a reasonable and fair social contract in which in these sedentary societies as you called them, there is an understanding that you pay 20% of your crop or you pay a certain amount of tax that so long as the features of that system are fair in ways that we can talk about and that other people have talked about, written about for centuries, that you get a certain freedom.

Preet Bharara:

Freedom from hunger, freedom from want, the kinds of freedom that Franklin Roosevelt talked about which are real and important freedoms too.

Sebastian Junger:

Right, I mean that’s where democracy comes in. That’s why it’s a profound form of freedom because the population gets a vote. That it’s a collective decision to figure out how we want to run the country. And furthermore, the powerful in this country, those with a lot of responsibility are those we elect or assign to positions of power. They are abiding by the same rules that we do.

Sebastian Junger:

We pay our taxes. It’s a huge chunk of our income, but the people that write the tax law, they also pay taxes. The president also pays taxes. The generals, the police chiefs, they all-

Preet Bharara:

Well, not all presidents necessarily.

Sebastian Junger:

Okay, I know. I agree. And that’s in violation of the law. But there is a law there that says, “No, what’s true for the populace is also true for the rulers.” And that is very, very new invention. That was not true in Medieval Europe, the Ottoman Empire, the Han Dynasty and go as far back as you want. And you’ll really find that again in a pastoralist or hunter-gatherer economy as described by anthropologists.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, it seems to me the problem is, and I know this is a feature of freedom or it’s a different kind. Freedom and equality are related in some way and affect each other but they’re different things.

Preet Bharara:

And the other point that you make that I’ve been thinking about since reading your book in a particular way is once society has moved from being nomadic and mobile through sedentary, fixed, gathering societies that introduces notwithstanding a fair social contract, but that introduces the possibility of radical inequality.

Preet Bharara:

In a nomadic, mobile society whether you’re talking about Apache Indian tribes or some other examples, the difference in the value and the “wealth” of the most powerful member of that society and the least is just not that different because everyone is important and you’re eating as you go. But once you begin stockpiling food, then you introduce the possibility of radical inequality. Explain what you meant by that.

Sebastian Junger:

Yeah. The anthropologists have looked at North America, the tribal peoples of North America and what they found in prehistoric record was that something like 90-something percent of the native peoples of this continent that did not have a way to stockpile food or to monopolize the production of food were basically classless, like they were essentially no social classes. There were differences in positions of authority and responsibility but there were basically no social or political-

Preet Bharara:

And possibly life expectancy too.

Sebastian Junger:

Yeah, no difference. Yeah, exactly. In the tribal societies of North America that were able to stockpile food or monopolize the production of food, immediately there were social classes, political classes and slavery, and something like 90% of those societies. And so, yeah, you’re absolutely right, and the question is can a democracy maintain a relatively fair distribution of income and also have …

Sebastian Junger:

Capitalism is a great generator of innovation and all kinds of things that are good for the human experience. So can it maintain as a fairly fair system and protect sort of the capitalist engine and have it be a free and democratic and just society? Can we sort of do all these things? And so ultimately, the question is, is it better to be at the bottom rung of a capitalist democratic society or smacked in the middle of an egalitarian but materially poor society? I don’t have an answer to that question.

Sebastian Junger:

I would say that modern democracy has brought a huge amount of good to the human experience, and that where we fall behind a little bit is I think sort of grotesque income inequalities that we find even in very enlightened countries like America. It’s still there. And with a follow on consequence of a disparity in how justice is meted out.

Preet Bharara:

My conversation with Sebastian Junger continues after this.

Preet Bharara:

The other point you make that I think is well said and it’s important all the time but particularly now, and I wonder if you were commenting more specifically on what’s been going on in the country in the last year or two, and it seems like in various places you are but you’re referring to universal principles. I think that’s a good way of going about it.

Preet Bharara:

You say on this issue of freedom, “For most of human history, freedom had to be at least suffered for, if not died for and that raised its value to something almost sacred. In modern democracies, however, an ethos of public sacrifice,” and you talked about sacrifice over and over again. We’ll talk about it. “An ethos of public sacrifice is rarely needed because freedom and survival are more or less guaranteed. That is a great blessing that allows people to believe that any sacrifice at all, rationing water during a drought for example, are forms of government tyranny. There are no more forms of tyranny than rationing water on a lifeboat.”

Preet Bharara:

And then you say, which I like very much, “The idea that we can enjoy the benefits of society while owing nothing in return is literally infantile. Only children owe nothing.” What other things were you talking about there?

Sebastian Junger:

Well, I mean I was writing this in the middle of the great mask controversy.

Preet Bharara:

Controversy, right.

Sebastian Junger:

Whether the government has the legal right, the political right, to enforce a mask ruling during a pandemic. And the point, I don’t come down on either side of any specific debate, but I would say is that the idea just on principle broadly speaking, the idea that you can accept the benefits of being part of a group, any group, be it United States or your outward bounds expedition and everything in between, that you can receive the benefits of being in a group but then turn around and say, “But you can’t tell me what to do, I can to do whatever I want,” like that is a relationship that children have with adults. It’s not a relationship that adults have with each other, that individuals have with a group.

Sebastian Junger:

And that for most of human history, that position will be completely insane and that the person would be picked up and thrown out of the life raft. And what I would say, I mean, just to follow on just for a moment, an interesting real world example. I looked at a street gang in Chicago in the 1960s called the Vice Lords in the Lawndale section of Chicago, which was extremely violent back then and maybe it still is, I don’t know.

Sebastian Junger:

But the Vice Lords were formed because it was an African American community and the young men in that community were really at risk of being attacked or killed by other street gangs in the area. So, they formed Vice Lords. And in that group, they all found a sort of mutual defense that kept most of them fairly safe most of the time. The one and most important criteria for being a member of the Vice Lords is that if another Vice Lord was under attack by a rival group, that no matter how bad the odds were, 10 to 1, I don’t care, you run towards that guy and you help him out. And if you go the other way, you’re just not a Vice Lord.

Sebastian Junger:

And so what they do, of course, people get scared. They’re not all infinitely noble or courageous or whatever, so what would happen is the guys that turned tail and ran the other way and didn’t help out their brother in a street fight, they would just track that Vice Lord. They just track that guy down. They wouldn’t beat him up. They wouldn’t put a hand on him. They would just put him in the back of a car and they drive them into the middle of the enemy gangs territory and just make them get out of the car, walk home. You’re on your own. You’re not part of this group? Then you’re not part of this group. You’re on your own.

Sebastian Junger:

So to my point, like if you enjoyed the benefits of the group, you do owe it something. You might even owe it your life. So, do you have to stop at a red light? Yes, you do. You don’t have the right to run red lights.

Preet Bharara:

Because you’re part of the group, because there’s a communitarian aspect to it. And to follow the rules of the group that are for the common good, I guess, is the point that you and many, many people have made, is not to be denied freedom because you have these people … I think in some case of the edge of society or on the edge of sort of mainstream thinking who say all taxation is tyranny. I guess if you start a society in that way, you can make some argument for that and you have to figure out how you take care of the common good and you do things that individuals can’t provide to society like roads, bridges, et cetera.

Preet Bharara:

But I think some of these folks don’t realize that being a free rider when most people follow the rules of the group that are meant for the common good does not mean that you are a freedom seeker. And the other problem is, and I ask you to talk about it, that this word freedom, it’s not that it’s devoid of meaning. But lots of people have different views about what that means. And so in certain instances, they will take a certain position and then other things they don’t like, whether it’s wearing a mask or something else or paying taxes, they will say, “Well, to be free, I need not be forced to do this particular thing.”

Preet Bharara:

And people conflate the freedom to do what they want with what freedom corporations have to do what they want. People don’t understand the First Amendment in this regard. Sometimes, people are conflating legal freedom with personal freedom or financial freedom, or other kinds of freedom that are not part of sort of legal policy or the social contract and that was a rambling way of asking the question, do you think part of the problem in these debates is that nobody knows what the hell anyone else is talking about when they say freedom?

Sebastian Junger:

Well, I think there’s a number of problem. First of all, freedom is one few things along with community in one’s children that people will readily die for. There are too many things on that list than freedoms. It’s a short list, and freedom is one of them. It’s a very, very potent word that goes-

Preet Bharara:

But I don’t have the quote in front of me but it was a powerful one which bears on what you just said. And it’s something like people will readily sacrifice and even die for a member of their family, to save a member of their family. But to die for and do something for a group requires something more. Did I get that right?

Sebastian Junger:

I’m not exactly sure which quote that was but I know what we’re talking about. Humans die immediately when they’re on their own. They die in nature immediately. Humans only survive and in fact, thrive because we’re social primates. We function in a group. We’re extraordinary animal and we get our safety and ultimately, our autonomy and closely related to our autonomy is our sort of human dignity. We get that from being within the protection of the group.

Sebastian Junger:

And if the group can’t protect itself, people’s autonomy, their freedom, their dignity is quickly trampled. I mean I cite an example of the Yamnaya, who are a fierce nomadic tribe off the Eastern Steppe. 5,000 years ago, they invaded the Iberian Peninsula and within a hundred years, they fought on horse-drawn chariots with battle axes. They were the sort of like the first motorcycle gang. They traveled without women. They invaded Europe. They cruised right into Iberia. And within about a hundred years, they killed all of the men in Iberia 5,000 years ago and clearly mated with all the women.

Sebastian Junger:

And so the Iberian men were not able to defend the Iberians, period, were not able to defend their territory from the Yamnaya and they had a radical loss of freedom. So, your freedom comes from the ability to defend yourself and then not finding yourself in a society where the powerful are then oppressing the less powerful. That’s the double-edged sword of the human endeavor.

Sebastian Junger:

So, what I would say about the word freedom is that it’s so potent and powerful. People often use it to justify doing things that are immoral or illegal. And they just say, “Well, I’m defending my freedom. So, I need to invade the Capitol building or I’m going to not pay my taxes,” or whatever.

Preet Bharara:

Or not wear the mask. Because it has so much power in, I think, western democracy generally and in the United States of America in particular that you play the “easy, fast, little” freedom card in which I’m not going to wear masks because freedom, whereas I think my view is, and some people defer about this. If it is so, that the medical research says that the more people wear masks in the short term, the more general freedom we will all have to do all those other things that we want to do that I think in accord with the people’s general sense and understanding what freedom is, then it’s not a loss. It’s not a loss of freedom any more than in your example.

Preet Bharara:

It’s a loss of freedom to ration water on a lifeboat. Why is that so hard for people to get?

Sebastian Junger:

Well, I think it’s an extremely politicized environment now and I think people were taking direction from the top of their government a couple of years ago and it was direction that was not made in good faith. It was not for the general good. They had very specific political intentions and that subverted the whole conversation.

Sebastian Junger:

But what I would say is that when they say freedom often, they’re really actually talking about their rights. Is that freedom? It’s their rights, so I have the right to not wear a mask. And freedom is a much broader term in a really … It sort of involves a different equation, but usually, people are talking about, well, it’s my Second Amendment right. It’s not your freedom. It’s a specific right.

Sebastian Junger:

And then that conversation quickly evolves into the reality that rights are given by the group to the individual and you cannot give yourself the right to drive on the left hand side of the road. Only the group can give you that right because there’s construction and there’s a cop there.

Sebastian Junger:

So, in a democracy, there is recourse. I mean that’s the problem I have with sort of take matters into their own hands kind of thinking, is that if you don’t like the mask mandate or you don’t like the results of the 2020 election, what have you? Go to the courts. There’s a free and clear process for addressing perceived wrongs.

Sebastian Junger:

And if you fail in the courts and you’re in a democracy, sorry. If I’m accused of committing murder and I feel like my freedom is being abrogated, if the jury decides I committed the murder, that’s just how it goes. It doesn’t matter that I feel like I should be free. Feelings have nothing to do with anything in a democracy.

Preet Bharara:

You talk about sacrifice and the importance of sacrifice on the part of people in connection with freedom but also on the part of leaders. But here’s a quote that I was looking for before but found a little bit late. “While most people will defend their families without a second thought, dying for an idea usually requires giving ordinary people an extraordinary sense of purpose and both national suffering and God do that nicely. None of that will help though if leaders aren’t prepared to make huge sacrifices as well.”

Preet Bharara:

And here’s another thing you say about leaders, and I wonder if you would elaborate. “In a deeply free society, not only would leaders be barred from exploiting their position, they would also be expected to make the same sacrifices and accept the same punishments as everyone else.” What’s your thinking about this notion of sacrifice in the part of leaders?

Sebastian Junger:

Well, I think what it weeds out is opportunists who want to be leaders so that they can maximize their own individual benefit. And for a hundred thousand years, leaders of human groups who were expected to run the same risks and suffer the same consequences and hardships as everybody else in the group. And even in the modern day, what I was looking at is sort of like underdog groups that succeed it and maintaining your autonomy in the face of a greater power.

Sebastian Junger:

So, the Easter Rising in Ireland around a hundred years ago is a great example. I mean the British empire was enormously powerful. It was 50 miles off the Irish coast. And through series of some military encounters and political movements and et cetera, the Irish achieved their freedom from England.

Sebastian Junger:

And during the Easter Rising, which was in 1916 during about one week, the sort of paramount leader of the Irish rebels in Dublin was a man named … I think his name was Michael Connolly. And he was sort of infamous for just being completely unheedful of his own safety. At one point, his aide was trying to drag him out of the street because he was getting shot at and he was trying to scout a good location to put sandbags. And his aide was like, “Sir, you’re going to get killed. Please, take safety.”

Sebastian Junger:

That’s a proper leader and people have asked me like what kind of leaders do we deserve? And my answer is point blank we deserve leaders who will die for us, period, end of sentence. That’s always been true in human society. And obviously, in a fairly safe democracy where it isn’t a street fight, literally a street fight every day, you don’t need the kind of raw, physical courage of someone like Michael Connolly. But at the very least, let’s hope for the sort of moral courage of, say, Liz Cheney.

Sebastian Junger:

I just have to say I’m a Democrat. If I live in Wyoming, I can’t really imagine voting for Liz Cheney. But I admired her enormously for standing up for a principle at some really serious consequences for her political career. And I would say that the possibilities of advancing yourself as a political leader, advancing yourself economically, are so enormous that proper leadership in this country would be to positively, overtly announce that you will refrain from enriching yourself while in office.

Sebastian Junger:

And I don’t know the details of the story but I got to say just on the face, and democrats are just as bad as republicans in this matter. But what I would say is that someone like Mitch McConnell, who’s worth tens of millions of dollars in a sort of circular cash loop that goes from the coal industry into his legislative record and back into the industry. That kind of backscratching between political leaders and industry leaders is not an overt rupture of our freedom but at the end of the day, it’s a less free society than one where our leaders were acting in a moral way.

Preet Bharara:

I want to ask you a question about your war reporting. And when you talk to people who were in combat and in the military fighting in the war in Afghanistan or any other conflict, did you have a sense that the soldiers, the American soldiers believed that they were fighting for something like freedom? What did you get the sense they thought they were fighting for if it was something other than just doing their military obligation?

Sebastian Junger:

Well, it wasn’t an obligation. Obviously, it’s volunteer army and they joined.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. But once you volunteered, then you’re obligated to serve.

Sebastian Junger:

Yes, right. And they all wanted to be in a combat unit. They were all men. It was a combat unit in Eastern Afghanistan. There was a lot of combat, and they really saw themselves as sort of warriors that they were sent out there to execute a tactical task. They want it. They were very eager to be in combat. They liked it. And they didn’t think about their efforts in sort of grand terms. They signed up in the wake of 9/11, so if anything, they had a sense that America had been attacked and had to be defended.

Sebastian Junger:

The idea that Al-Qaida hated our freedoms with an S which is always thought was a weird way to use the word. To me as journalist, as an American, doesn’t really make sense. We were in Afghanistan to defend our security to kill or capture Osama bin Laden, Al-Qaeda, but our freedom is sort of self-given in our constitution, in our bill of rights. And Al-Qaeda, what they wanted was us to stop doing business with Israel and to get off Saudi Arabia. I don’t think they give a damn about our freedom in this country. I think it’s completely irrelevant to them.

Sebastian Junger:

But again, I think that word was dragged into the war effort because it’s so potent. And once you say I’m protecting my freedom whether you were the January 6 rioters or George Bush after 9/11 or whatever, once you say I’m defending my freedom, everyone sort of backs off and says, “Oh, well, okay. Well then, yeah, go for it. Everyone has the right to do that.”

Preet Bharara:

Do you think there is a connection between war and masculinity?

Sebastian Junger:

Well, for most of human history in every human society, organized violence is almost invariably committed by men. I think the sort of levels of testosterone in young males, their physical abilities just as sort of athletes, their mindset, the social awards that are given to men who’ve acted bravely in combat, frankly, sexual access to women who are impressed by their feats of whatever.

Sebastian Junger:

There was a really serious study about Medal of Honor recipients and throughout their lifespans, they had far more children than people who fought in the same units who were not given the Medal of Honor. So, there definitely are like very real rewards meted out to men who participate in organized violence successfully and heroically. So, in that sense, yes, there is definitely a connection between violence and masculinity.

Preet Bharara:

Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Sebastian Junger:

In terms of human evolution, I don’t think there is a good or a bad. It’s whatever works and sustained and supported the species as successfully as possible. If we have a capacity for violence, it’s because that was adaptive and allowed violent individuals to maximize their reproductive success and their survival.

Sebastian Junger:

We live in a very complex society that can decisions that go against our sort of evolutionary hardwiring. We do that all the time. So, I would say that the moral conversation doesn’t happen so much in terms of our biology which is given, but in terms of our social organization. Do we glorify violence? Do we glorify oppression or even accept oppression of women, that kind of thing? It’s those social values, those moral values where we really have the chance to live a righteous life or not.

Preet Bharara:

But you’re not making a comment on … Just so listeners will understand. You’re not making a comment on whether or not women should serve in the military as they do in the modern world?

Sebastian Junger:

No. I mean individuals are capable of all kinds of extraordinary things and I think for the military’s purposes, they have these sort of like basic set of parameters somebody pulled up, somebody run the mile in such a time, whatever it may be. They are just this sort of minimum requirements, like for the fire department that your body has to be able to do in order to conduct the tasks of modern warfare.

Sebastian Junger:

But women integrate … I mean there’s an amazing book called The Daughters of Kobani that just came out a couple of months ago about the YPG, the sort of female fighting unit in Northern Syria. All young women, they fought unbelievably bravely identically to the men. So, women could do anything men can do in that sense.

Sebastian Junger:

No, I’m not making any recommendation whatsoever but people have different tastes and a smaller percentage of women may be interested in combat than men, you know what I mean? That sexes don’t have the same predilections and tendencies and desires. Clearly, they don’t.

Preet Bharara:

Before we go, I thought I would ask you to preview your next book project, which as I understand it, explores something that happened to you on a personal level.

Sebastian Junger:

Yeah, thank you. Last year, I almost died. In fact, I-

Preet Bharara:

Oh, you said that very matter-of-factly.

Sebastian Junger:

Yeah. I mean I came so close to dying. You could almost say I should have died and I somehow failed to. I had an undiagnosed aneurysm in my pancreatic artery. It was the result of just a congenital quirk of my body. It wasn’t related to any health issue, asymptomatic.

Sebastian Junger:

And at age 58, one fine June day almost a year ago, it ruptured without warning. And within a few minutes, I couldn’t stand up because my blood pressure was plummeting. I was bleeding out into my own abdomen, gushing blood into my own abdomen. And within 10 minutes, I was starting to go blind and it took them from then another hour plus to get me to the emergency room. When I got there, I’d lost 90% of my blood and my odds of survival were, I think, almost nonexistent.

Sebastian Junger:

But I was in and out of consciousness and I started dying and experiencing dying. I was in this sort of twilight world. I was getting pulled into a dark pit that had opened up underneath and I was terrified of going down there. And right at that moment, my father, my dead father appeared above me and started sort of consoling me. And I should say I’m an atheist. I’m a rationalist. I’m anti-mystic, like I don’t believe in anything of that nature. I didn’t know I was dying and I’m really at pains to explain what my father was doing there.

Sebastian Junger:

And I did some research into it. And the appearance of dead relatives, dead ancestors in the minds of dying people is extremely common. And most of the time, you don’t know you’re dying. I mean, it’s one of the small mercy of the universe. People that are dying often don’t know it and yet the dead appear and comfort them and advised them and even tell them, no, turn back, go back, don’t do this. And I want to understand my dad was a physicist, and I want to understand in sort of like clear and rational terms what might be happening when people die and obviously, we know because some of them managed to come back like I did.

Sebastian Junger:

So, my book is going to be called Pulse, and it’s going to be about what keeps us alive and what happens when we die.

Preet Bharara:

Well, I’m looking forward to that. In the meantime, congratulations on your most recent book, Freedom. It’s been fun talking to you. Thanks for joining us.

Sebastian Junger:

Thank you. I really enjoyed it. Thanks for the great questions. It was a great conversation.

Preet Bharara:

My conversation with Sebastian Junger continues for members of the CAFE Insider community. To try out the membership free for two weeks, head to cafe.com/insider. Again, that’s cafe.com/insider.

Preet Bharara:

Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guest, Sebastian Junger. If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. Tweet them to me @PreetBharara with the hashtag, #askpreet, or you can call and leave me a message at 669-247-7338. That’s 669-24-Preet. Or you can send an email to staytuned@cafe.com.

Preet Bharara:

Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE Studios and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Your host is Preet Bharara. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The senior producer is Adam Waller. The technical director is David Tatasciore. The CAFE team is Matthew Billy, David Kurlander, Sam Ozer-Staton, Noa Azulai, Nat Weiner, Jake Kaplan, Jennifer Corn, Chris Boylan and Sean Walsh. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m Preet Bharara, stay tuned.