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0:01:16 The history of philosophy is really just the history of various teams
0:01:20 arguing about what’s good or true.
0:01:24 The Epicurean, the empiricist, the stoic, the skeptic,
0:01:29 the positivist, the pragmatist, you get the point.
0:01:33 I’m not an official member of any of these teams,
0:01:38 but if you asked me to pick mine, I’d go with the existentialists.
0:01:48 For me, existentialism was the last great philosophical movement,
0:01:54 and one reason for that is that it emerged at a transformational period in history,
0:01:57 the early to mid-20th century,
0:02:01 headlined by two devastating world wars,
0:02:05 and many of the existentialists were responding to that.
0:02:08 But another reason this movement became so popular is that
0:02:15 its leading proponents didn’t just write arcane academic treatises.
0:02:19 They wrote novels and plays and popular essays,
0:02:22 stuff that real people actually read,
0:02:25 and their ideas crossed over into the culture.
0:02:33 People like Jean-Paul Sartre or Simone de Beauvoir
0:02:37 wrote about freedom and responsibility and authenticity,
0:02:44 and their ideas still resonate because the human condition is the same as it’s always been.
0:02:46 But every historical moment is unique,
0:02:50 and so the question is always, how does this tradition,
0:02:55 how does any tradition address our world in the here and now?
0:03:02 I’m Sean Elling, and this is the Gray Area.
0:03:15 [Music]
0:03:18 Today’s guest is Natalie Itoke.
0:03:21 She’s a professor at the Cooney Graduate Center
0:03:27 and the author of a terrific new book called Black Existential Freedom.
0:03:31 Sometimes I don’t know that I’m looking for a book until I see it,
0:03:33 and this one was like that.
0:03:40 Race and identity have been at the center of our discourse and politics for years now.
0:03:45 But this book engages with these issues through the lens of existentialist thought,
0:03:51 and it feels like a genuinely fresh way into some of these ongoing conversations
0:03:54 about history and racism and freedom.
0:04:00 Which is why I asked Itoke to talk to me about it.
0:04:01 And she did.
0:04:04 And I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
0:04:10 Natalie Itoke, welcome to the show.
0:04:12 Thank you for having me.
0:04:15 I’m really excited to have this conversation with you.
0:04:21 And I think before we get to the story you want to tell in this book,
0:04:28 I’d like to do just a little philosophical table setting for the audience.
0:04:32 What does existentialism mean to you?
0:04:35 How do you approach this tradition of thought?
0:04:42 Well, I come from the French / Francophone schooling background.
0:04:45 So I was exposed to philosophy in high school.
0:04:51 Right away, I just found the questions that philosophers were asking very interesting.
0:04:53 I read Jean-Paul Sartre being a nothingness.
0:04:55 I read some Kierkegaard.
0:04:57 I read Camus.
0:05:03 So in general, questions of existence were always part of my thinking process.
0:05:09 But there’s something about existing as a black person
0:05:12 in the context of white supremacist capitalist society
0:05:16 and the overall idea of the dehumanization of black people.
0:05:24 Which thinkers like Du Bois, Fanon, Ralph Ellison also helped me think about.
0:05:29 So you have the traditional existentialist school when you think about the white thinkers.
0:05:34 But honestly, when you think about African writers and diasporic African writers
0:05:38 who did not present themselves as philosophers,
0:05:44 you continuously have them engaging the question of existing as a black person.
0:05:48 Those writers don’t have to label themselves existentialists.
0:05:49 You know, academics, that’s our job.
0:05:54 We create boxes and categories because for some reason we’ve been trained to think
0:05:58 that if we don’t come up with a taxonomy, we cannot be analytical.
0:06:01 Of all those great lights in that tradition,
0:06:07 which of the thinkers, which of the writers spoke to you most personally?
0:06:10 Oh, the question of freedom is essential to me.
0:06:18 So when Sartre talks about this idea that to exist as a human being,
0:06:23 all human beings are condemned to freedom, that speaks to me right away.
0:06:30 When Sorin Cochegard describes anxiety being the vertical, the dizziness of freedom,
0:06:36 that also speaks to me directly because I always think about what does it take
0:06:40 to be free in the context of slavery, for instance.
0:06:46 The issue is not freedom necessarily, it’s the consciousness of your freedom
0:06:51 and knowing what you have to risk and what you can lose in the process of trying to be free.
0:06:57 So reading people like Cochegard and also to a certain extent,
0:07:01 Aldo Camus never really said that he was a philosopher of the absurd,
0:07:03 absurd in French.
0:07:07 The question of what, how do you find meaning?
0:07:10 The question of meaning and meaninglessness.
0:07:14 Again, thinking about oppression.
0:07:23 What gives meaning to your life when it looks like freedom is totally out of reach?
0:07:29 The last episode we recorded, actually, it was on Camus who I wrote my dissertation on.
0:07:36 And I know he, he insisted he was neither an existentialist nor a philosopher, but he was both.
0:07:38 I don’t care what he says, he was both.
0:07:39 We claim it, we claim it.
0:07:40 That’s right.
0:07:43 He’s on our team, whether he wants to be or not.
0:07:44 You know, it’s so interesting.
0:07:53 All of the existentialists were obviously committed to and concerned with freedom and responsibility.
0:07:53 Yes.
0:07:55 And that’s partly what people dig about it.
0:07:59 But I always feel, I’m curious if you feel the same way,
0:08:05 there’s a tendency to focus too much on the freedom part and not enough on the responsibility part.
0:08:10 Because if you take seriously the idea that we’re truly free,
0:08:17 then you’re immediately confronted with other questions like, what are we to do with that freedom?
0:08:19 What responsibilities does it carry?
0:08:23 And what happens when we flee those responsibilities?
0:08:29 I just love that the existentialist took those questions so seriously.
0:08:32 That’s also one of the reasons why they work with me.
0:08:37 Because, you know, there are ways in which in the Western framework,
0:08:41 people will talk about human rights in French.
0:08:44 The people will talk about the founding fathers.
0:08:49 So they have those lofty interpretations of freedom.
0:08:54 And it seems like freedom is something, yes, you fought for it, you gain it.
0:08:59 And then you sit down, usually a bunch of white males.
0:09:02 You sit down and you put something in paper.
0:09:06 But when you’re coming from the Haitian perspective,
0:09:09 when you think about Nick Turner, when you think about Fredric Douglas,
0:09:11 when you think about all these people,
0:09:14 it’s really about the question of responsibility.
0:09:17 And it starts with the individual and then it becomes collective.
0:09:23 You don’t have this conflict or discrepancy between freedom and responsibility.
0:09:28 When you’re looking at freedom from the perspective of un-freedom,
0:09:30 you have to be responsible.
0:09:32 And now we’re getting into your book,
0:09:36 which is about existentialism and the Black experience.
0:09:42 I mean, is there something unique about the historical Black experience
0:09:45 that makes it a good fit for existentialism?
0:09:48 Or maybe it’s better to reverse that a little bit and ask,
0:09:50 is there something about the historical Black experience
0:09:55 that informs or expands existentialist philosophy?
0:10:00 Yes, the question that I really ask is the following one.
0:10:07 What does it mean to be human when you’ve been historically dehumanized?
0:10:10 And regardless of where you find yourself on this globe,
0:10:14 you will see that people with darker skin are at the bottom.
0:10:19 So there’s something about this legacy of dehumanization
0:10:23 that creates an existential tension.
0:10:27 Of course, it manifests differently depending on where you find yourself.
0:10:30 So I was born in Paris, France,
0:10:33 but I was raised in Cameroon, Central Africa.
0:10:35 And I grew up there.
0:10:41 So I never thought of me as being non-human or as being Black.
0:10:48 But once you move to a space where the majority population is white
0:10:50 and the interaction you have with people
0:10:52 make you realize that you are the other,
0:10:55 although you never really see yourself as being the other,
0:10:59 you realize that although race is a racial construct,
0:11:01 it’s a lived experience.
0:11:04 For whatever reason, even in this country,
0:11:09 citizenship is not enough to be part of the nation.
0:11:14 Once you’ve been defined as non-human,
0:11:17 what can you tell to those who think that they are human
0:11:19 what it means to be human?
0:11:23 Because what they don’t realize is that they too have done something to their humanity.
0:11:26 Fanon wrote about it, Césaire wrote about it.
0:11:29 It says, “And I’m paraphrasing that to dehumanize the others,
0:11:31 they dehumanize oneself.”
0:11:34 So the question of dehumanization/being human
0:11:38 is still at the core of Black existential thought.
0:11:41 I have to be honest, when I first started your book,
0:11:45 I think I had this maybe vague skepticism in the back of my mind.
0:11:48 I was thinking, why Black existentialism?
0:11:49 Why not just existentialism?
0:11:53 Because existentialism is about the universal human experience.
0:11:56 So what does it even mean to say Black existentialism?
0:11:59 But then your book very quickly drives home the reminder
0:12:02 that we have this tradition of Western thought
0:12:05 and part of the history of that tradition
0:12:08 is the devaluing of Black humanity.
0:12:11 And that dehumanization is part of the historical Black experience.
0:12:16 That sense of exile is part of that experience, in the West at least.
0:12:20 And so there’s just no way to engage with a tradition like this one
0:12:24 without also dealing with that history.
0:12:25 Exactly.
0:12:29 Even in the African context, you know, because we are conditioned
0:12:35 to think about the question of the human and racism only in racial terms.
0:12:41 But when you think about the fact that the banchanization of Africa
0:12:46 occurred in Germany in 1884
0:12:50 and that not a single person of African descent was invited.
0:12:55 So whatever countries we inhabit today,
0:13:01 they became our countries through the process of dispossession and imperialism.
0:13:05 So for instance, Cameroon, the way we spell it today,
0:13:12 came from Cameroas because the Portuguese were the first one to show up there.
0:13:15 And in Cameroas, they saw a lot of big shrimps.
0:13:17 So basically, I’m a big shrimp.
0:13:19 That’s, you know.
0:13:22 And to me, that’s the beginning of the humanization right there,
0:13:27 because people claim a land and they act as if the people they find
0:13:30 on that land are of no value.
0:13:32 So they rename the place.
0:13:34 They balkanize the entire place.
0:13:39 And there we are today still trying to make sense of those spaces.
0:13:44 So it’s not just white versus black.
0:13:46 It’s geopolitics.
0:13:50 It’s the political economy and the people who live there.
0:13:53 They’re going to be enslaved or they’re going to work for us.
0:13:55 And we’re going to use the land.
0:13:59 So it’s not just what we think about when we think about existence
0:14:00 from this universal perspective.
0:14:02 It’s not universal.
0:14:04 Yes, oppression happens everywhere.
0:14:08 But the outcome is very different depending on your positionality
0:14:10 in the in world history, you know.
0:14:14 Well, as you say in the book, you’ve been air quotes black
0:14:16 on three different continents.
0:14:19 In this part of the book and your experiences,
0:14:22 maybe the most interesting and clarifying for me.
0:14:26 So I do want to linger on it for a little bit.
0:14:30 How does your sense of self vary from one place to another?
0:14:36 And what are those differences say about how identity and race
0:14:39 and culture really work?
0:14:43 Yes, my parents met in Paris because they’re part
0:14:45 of the colonial/postcolonial experience.
0:14:50 At the time, it was very common for French-speaking colonized
0:14:54 Africans to end up in France.
0:14:58 After they were done with college, they moved back to Cameroon.
0:15:01 And I was, what, two or three years old?
0:15:05 So I did not have the time to develop a racial consciousness
0:15:09 in France because I basically became whoever I became
0:15:13 as a human being in Cameroon, a country where,
0:15:18 because the majority population is black, everybody is black,
0:15:20 therefore no one is.
0:15:25 So you don’t have to think about race.
0:15:28 Yes, you see white people, but they’re a minority
0:15:33 and they do not disrupt your everyday life.
0:15:37 So when I think about police brutality, for instance,
0:15:40 the first image of police brutality,
0:15:46 it’s the oppressive Cameroonian police state oppressing
0:15:48 other Cameroonian.
0:15:50 So I have more of a class consciousness
0:15:56 because wealth disparities in Sub-Saharan Africa are just
0:15:57 unbelievable.
0:16:01 Fast forward, I moved to France to go to college.
0:16:06 You move to a majority white country.
0:16:08 And although French is the language
0:16:11 that I always spoke with my parents,
0:16:14 people start complimenting you on your French.
0:16:22 So it’s a little bit odd, or people start wondering,
0:16:25 why is it that maybe you’re smart or you know certain things
0:16:28 and they ask you, are you God there?
0:16:32 So at first, it’s not really an understanding of blackness,
0:16:35 per se, from this academic perspective.
0:16:38 It’s really the kind of question you’re being asked.
0:16:39 And also the fact that in Cameroon,
0:16:44 yes, we talked about colonization in history course,
0:16:46 but we did not really dwell on that.
0:16:47 So I moved to France.
0:16:51 Then I realized that your way of understanding the world,
0:16:53 your way of understanding yourself,
0:16:56 goes through a certain kind of French ideological filter
0:16:58 that you are not aware of.
0:17:01 And also in France, we have what they call universalism,
0:17:03 a French universalism.
0:17:08 French people do not believe that race is real, per se,
0:17:11 or even a social construct.
0:17:15 They have a very strange approach to history.
0:17:17 So for instance, when I was in France,
0:17:21 they celebrated the abolition of slavery.
0:17:25 You see, the key word here is not slavery, it’s abolition.
0:17:30 And the focus was on victor shall share, or white abolitionists.
0:17:33 So at the end of the day, we were taught in condition
0:17:36 to celebrate this white guy.
0:17:39 And the history of black resistance in the French Caribbean
0:17:42 was totally repressed and erased.
0:17:45 And every time you brought up race,
0:17:48 people would not hear you.
0:17:51 So even in the French context, you see something is odd,
0:17:53 but you don’t have the tools to engage it
0:17:58 because society at large is living in a state of denial.
0:18:00 Then I moved to the US, and I discovered
0:18:04 what I call the Africana Library with all these African-American
0:18:05 thinkers.
0:18:10 And I operate a return to African history
0:18:14 and French colonization and identity
0:18:18 because I was exposed to this way of thinking about the self
0:18:20 in a historical context.
0:18:23 So these are kind of the three ways in which
0:18:27 I engage those spaces in my work.
0:18:30 Yeah, a relevant passage from your book
0:18:33 that I’ll just read if you don’t mind.
0:18:36 And now I’m quoting, “I don’t speak the language,
0:18:39 but I will never forget when I found out
0:18:43 that in Haitian Creole, the word “neg” does not mean black,
0:18:46 it means man, it means human.
0:18:49 And I was thinking, these people have something
0:18:53 that we lost because in Haiti, you can be a negre blanc.
0:18:56 You’re just a human who happens to be white.
0:18:58 This idea that these people who were enslaved
0:19:01 created a language where neg means human really
0:19:03 turned my world upside down.
0:19:07 Once you start thinking that way about that word
0:19:10 and the condition of being human from that perspective,
0:19:15 it really changes the conversation.”
0:19:16 That is fascinating.
0:19:18 How did that word and thinking about the condition
0:19:21 of being human from that perspective
0:19:24 change the conversation for you?
0:19:26 Well, it totally changed the conversation
0:19:32 because in French, the “en-word” is not necessarily
0:19:34 the word “neg.”
0:19:36 “Black” could be “negre.”
0:19:39 You’re just describing somebody’s skin color.
0:19:41 But then you also have phrases such like,
0:19:45 “travailler comme un negre” to work like an “en-word,”
0:19:49 which to me, you have to directly trace it back
0:19:54 to unpaid labor and being enslaved.
0:19:58 In the American context, you have this evolution
0:20:00 in terms of the tenementology.
0:20:02 So we know what the “en-word” is.
0:20:03 It’s a derogatory term.
0:20:05 But in the context of Haiti, we’re
0:20:12 talking about creole, a kind of language which, by definition,
0:20:18 has to do with hybridity and mixing different cultural
0:20:20 and linguistic legacy.
0:20:26 So you see that the word “neg,” “ne-g,” comes
0:20:29 from the French word “negre.”
0:20:33 But they totally reinvented the meaning of that word.
0:20:38 It wasn’t used to describe the condition of the enslaved
0:20:42 or an enslaved person.
0:20:45 It means human.
0:20:47 And there is no surprise.
0:20:52 That’s also where the first black republic was born.
0:20:56 So there’s something about Haiti, that word,
0:21:02 and the question of freedom that helped me revisit
0:21:07 the black experience in the context of oppression.
0:21:09 There’s another passage that I’m thinking of now,
0:21:12 and I’m going to read that as well.
0:21:14 Again, if you don’t mind–
0:21:15 Please go ahead.
0:21:17 You wrote– and now I’m quoting–
0:21:19 “What makes black existentialism very unique
0:21:23 is this situation of despair, and tragedy,
0:21:25 and ontological catastrophe that you constantly
0:21:29 have to engage, not only from an existentialist standpoint,
0:21:32 but in the material conditions of your life.”
0:21:34 So when I look at the ways black immigrants are treated,
0:21:37 whether we’re talking about Europe or America today,
0:21:43 I ask, what is there that makes their exclusion unique?
0:21:45 What is your answer to that question?
0:21:48 What does it mean for you to exercise freedom
0:21:50 in the context of oppression?
0:21:52 And how is that different from exercising freedom
0:21:56 when you occupy the favored or dominant position
0:21:57 in a society?
0:21:58 It’s very simple.
0:22:02 For people who are oppressed, and this is not just black people,
0:22:04 freedom is in the struggle.
0:22:06 The victory is in the struggle.
0:22:08 Nothing will be given to you.
0:22:10 You have to fight for it.
0:22:14 Once you surrender to your circumstances, you defeat it.
0:22:18 So people can look at black immigrants
0:22:20 and come up with all kind of narratives.
0:22:23 But personally, from an existential perspective,
0:22:26 I see a certain kind of struggle to be free.
0:22:29 The question is, that freedom cannot be
0:22:32 divorced from the material conditions of the people’s
0:22:33 lives.
0:22:41 [MUSIC PLAYING]
0:22:44 After a short break, we’ll talk about avoiding
0:22:47 the traps of pessimism.
0:22:49 Stay with us.
0:22:52 [MUSIC PLAYING]
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0:26:28 There’s a term you use in the book, Afro-pessimism.
0:26:29 What does that refer to?
0:26:32 And is the argument you’re making in this book
0:26:36 opposed to this or is the relationship more complicated?
0:26:41 It’s very interesting because depending on the reader,
0:26:44 I get two different types of responses.
0:26:49 Some people read my work as a response to Afro-pessimism.
0:26:54 Other people read it as a way to engage Afro-pessimism
0:26:57 but from a different perspective.
0:27:02 But what Afro-pessimism does is basically focusing
0:27:07 on the fact that there is a continuous
0:27:12 and ongoing process of dehumanization
0:27:14 that people of African descent go through.
0:27:19 And in many ways, there’s no way we can be fully human
0:27:24 because we make everybody else human.
0:27:27 In other words, it’s the dehumanization
0:27:30 of people of African descent that makes other people human.
0:27:35 And they talk about a certain kind of ontological catastrophe.
0:27:40 So I do not necessarily disagree with that perspective
0:27:44 but I just reverse the paradigm.
0:27:49 I focus on the ongoing struggle for freedom.
0:27:53 So I’m not dismissing the reality of white supremacy.
0:27:55 I’m not dismissing the reality
0:27:58 of the dehumanization of black people.
0:28:03 I’m not dismissing the material conditions of our lives
0:28:06 but I’m looking at it from the perspective of those
0:28:11 who for a very long time had to fight in order to exist.
0:28:14 – But at the very beginning of the book,
0:28:19 you say explicitly that blackness is not synonymous
0:28:23 with victimhood.
0:28:26 Why was it important to state that so clearly?
0:28:30 – Well, because I think historically people of African descent
0:28:32 have been victimized.
0:28:37 So they are victims, but at the same time,
0:28:42 the other side of the story is that they always try
0:28:45 to find a way to free themselves.
0:28:47 I cannot separate the two.
0:28:52 So that’s why I draw the line between being historically
0:28:57 victimized and being a victim and the state of victimhood.
0:28:59 And in the work that I do,
0:29:03 I am not necessarily saying that that’s it.
0:29:07 They are free and it’s a difficult argument to make
0:29:11 but I’m trying to examine the ways in which you cannot think
0:29:16 about black freedom without this question of the struggle.
0:29:21 And it’s not even just in the US or in France
0:29:25 when I think about what’s happening in sub-Saharan Africa,
0:29:30 you know, the dictatorships and the many ways
0:29:35 in which neocolonialism and the setting up of a power structure
0:29:40 that still oppress Africans is happening at the moment.
0:29:44 People are still trying to be free.
0:29:47 So, and to me, I’m not just being pessimistic.
0:29:50 It’s just the facts of our black life.
0:29:55 It’s how you deal with it and continuously you still trying
0:29:59 to improve the conditions of your lives, right?
0:30:03 Whereas the Afro-Pessimists will say that, you know,
0:30:08 there’s no point talking about the struggle
0:30:10 because at the end of the day,
0:30:13 why should you even be struggling in the first place?
0:30:15 – Well, this is getting to the tension for me,
0:30:16 one of the tensions at least.
0:30:21 There is a certain pessimism to just stick with that word
0:30:26 that I feel in so much of the race discourse in America.
0:30:28 And I just don’t know what to do with it.
0:30:31 And I can try to explain what I mean.
0:30:37 So I’m a white guy who grew up in the deep South.
0:30:40 That’s just a fact about me.
0:30:43 And I’m not saying that in some performative perfunctory way.
0:30:46 I’m just acknowledging that that’s my experience.
0:30:50 And it places some kind of limit
0:30:52 on how much I can understand the experience
0:30:55 of someone with a totally different life.
0:31:00 But I also believe in the universality
0:31:02 of the human condition and the power of language
0:31:06 and ideas to bridge differences.
0:31:09 And when the pessimism goes too far
0:31:14 or when we become trapped in our given identities,
0:31:20 we sacrifice our agency on some level.
0:31:23 We sacrifice our ability to define ourselves
0:31:24 in the here and now
0:31:27 and project ourselves into a better future.
0:31:29 But at the same time, we are products
0:31:33 of material and historical forces.
0:31:37 How do we accept the all too real constraints
0:31:39 imposed on us by history
0:31:42 without at the same time reducing ourselves
0:31:45 to historical props?
0:31:49 I always go back to the lived experience
0:31:54 because African people or people of African descent
0:31:55 are not concepts.
0:32:01 I honestly believe that every day when someone wakes up,
0:32:04 they try to figure out what they have to do,
0:32:06 how to go about it.
0:32:09 And, you know, it’s not an academic matter.
0:32:11 It’s very concrete.
0:32:14 It doesn’t mean that you’re not going to be facing
0:32:17 difficulties, challenges, problems.
0:32:22 But you still go about your life
0:32:26 because that’s the life you were given to live, you know?
0:32:30 But I also think a little paraphrase Gramsci that,
0:32:32 you know, you need to strike a balance
0:32:35 between the pessimism of the intellect
0:32:38 and the optimism of the will.
0:32:42 Because looking at reality, to me,
0:32:45 is not a matter of being pessimistic or optimistic.
0:32:48 You need to be able to deal with reality.
0:32:51 Otherwise, there’s a flight from responsibility.
0:32:56 So once you’re able to look at a situation for what it is
0:32:59 and you don’t lie to yourself,
0:33:03 you’re able to look at death straight in the eyes,
0:33:04 you’re able to deal with it.
0:33:08 And this is not some grandiose philosophical statement.
0:33:11 I see that every time I go back to Cameroon,
0:33:13 coming from a perspective of somebody
0:33:16 who has lived most of her life overseas,
0:33:18 yes, you can come and be like, oh my God,
0:33:19 these people are suffering.
0:33:21 They don’t have this, they don’t have that.
0:33:25 So you can look at their daily lives
0:33:29 from a perspective of lack and deficiency.
0:33:32 But that is not how they’re living their lives.
0:33:37 They’re still trying to work whatever job they can do.
0:33:39 They’re still having children.
0:33:42 They’re still having a certain kind of joy.
0:33:44 Horrible things happen to them,
0:33:49 but they don’t sit in a state of pessimism and paralysis.
0:33:54 To the contrary, sometimes I wonder,
0:33:59 because I’m thinking, is this some kind of active nihilism?
0:34:04 Like you keep on pushing, just like Sisyphus,
0:34:06 to go back to Camus and the meat of Sisyphus.
0:34:08 It tells us that we have to imagine
0:34:12 that Sisyphus is happy and his happiness is in that rock
0:34:14 and the fact that he has the strength to push it.
0:34:15 But then at the same time,
0:34:20 I’m also fully aware that life could be so much better,
0:34:22 so much different.
0:34:25 If from a political standpoint,
0:34:27 what about redistributing the wealth
0:34:28 in a certain kind of way?
0:34:32 What about making sure that people have decent housing,
0:34:33 free healthcare?
0:34:36 So you see, that’s why I’m constantly engaging
0:34:38 the material conditions of our lives,
0:34:40 but at the same time,
0:34:45 I’m aware of the fact that people are continuously
0:34:48 also trying to improve the material conditions of our life,
0:34:50 but it’s not just up to the individual.
0:34:52 That’s what the political comes in.
0:34:55 And I cannot afford to be pessimistic also
0:34:58 because all the people who came before me
0:35:01 of what people of African descent in this country
0:35:05 had to endure and fight for and open the door.
0:35:09 When it seems like everything was dark
0:35:12 and there was no hope, you know?
0:35:16 So, and I also think about the freedom fighters in Cameroon.
0:35:18 All those people who believed in freedom
0:35:22 and who were killed, had those people not believe
0:35:25 and had they not fought, where would I be today?
0:35:28 So that’s where I also find a certain kind of hope.
0:35:29 – I love the line in the book
0:35:32 about people of African descent or Sisyphian,
0:35:33 whether they like it or not.
0:35:34 – Yeah.
0:35:38 – I love it because Sisyphus symbolizes
0:35:40 this dual reality that you’re talking about, right?
0:35:43 That suffering and loss are objective realities,
0:35:45 but so is the choice to affirm life
0:35:49 and make that goddamn boulder your own.
0:35:52 – Yeah, and honestly, I can look at it
0:35:53 from the aproposimist perspective
0:35:58 and I can totally understand how, you know, what’s the point?
0:36:02 – I mean, some of this gets at the ambivalence.
0:36:06 I felt reading someone like Ta-Nehisi Coates
0:36:10 who writes beautifully and in a way
0:36:14 that helps me understand his experience.
0:36:18 What I wrestled with was the philosophy of hopelessness
0:36:21 that seemed to undergird it.
0:36:22 On some level, I get it.
0:36:27 The black experience in America is perpetual struggle,
0:36:29 but I can’t help the fact that it strikes me
0:36:31 as a form of resignation.
0:36:34 I think it yields too much to the forces of oppression.
0:36:37 There’s no exit, as Sartre would say.
0:36:39 But I don’t know, do you think I’m misunderstanding
0:36:41 the point there?
0:36:43 – Well, yes and no, because remember
0:36:47 that people of African descent in the United States,
0:36:49 and I’m paraphrasing Baldwin here,
0:36:52 they are the only people who never want to come here.
0:36:55 So they didn’t come here because they had a dream
0:36:59 or they tried to improve their living conditions
0:37:01 and they’ve been through hell.
0:37:02 And they stay going through hell.
0:37:04 There’s a certain kind of legacy.
0:37:09 We’re talking about at least 250 years of free labor.
0:37:13 We’re talking about Jim Crow laws.
0:37:15 We’re talking about lynching.
0:37:19 So I cannot say that Ta-Nehisi Coates
0:37:21 is a preacher of hopelessness per se,
0:37:23 because in the United States,
0:37:27 there’s also this obsession with hope and happy endings,
0:37:30 which I do not have because I come from a French
0:37:32 slash Francophone background.
0:37:35 When you watch a French movie for an hour and a half
0:37:37 or two hours and the movie ends,
0:37:39 you’re just like, what happened here?
0:37:40 (laughs)
0:37:42 What did I just watch?
0:37:46 But you look at, American movies is,
0:37:48 you always have the dualities and the binaries,
0:37:51 the good guys and the bad guys.
0:37:55 And you always need an happy ending.
0:37:59 There’s this obsession with, we need to find hope.
0:38:00 Where is hope?
0:38:02 That’s why I love the blues,
0:38:05 because the blues is an African-American art form
0:38:11 that helps you deal with the dissonance of your existence.
0:38:14 And you cannot be in denial of your reality,
0:38:16 but you have to be responsible about it.
0:38:18 You can be humoristic about it.
0:38:20 You can have a sense of irony.
0:38:22 And when you listen to some blues songs,
0:38:26 you can see that the lyrics can be sad or tragic,
0:38:28 but the melody is upbeat.
0:38:32 What is the blues singer expressing?
0:38:34 Joy, happiness, hope?
0:38:36 Is expressing an existential struggle?
0:38:43 – I wonder what you think is the principal struggle today
0:38:49 and where freedom is to be found in that
0:38:52 for black people in this country at least,
0:38:53 ’cause that’s where we are.
0:38:58 – When you think about the ’60s and the ’70s,
0:39:02 the black struggle was not just for black people.
0:39:04 It was universal.
0:39:09 Most of those black leaders were Marxist or leftist.
0:39:11 They were also anti-capitalist.
0:39:14 It wasn’t just anti-racism.
0:39:16 I think the difficulty today
0:39:20 is not necessarily just the question of freedom,
0:39:25 is the fact that leftist politics,
0:39:27 first of all, is divided.
0:39:29 You have the cultural left
0:39:32 and then you have the left that focuses on class,
0:39:36 but also there is this neoliberalization
0:39:38 of identity discourse.
0:39:41 Therefore, the question I have is,
0:39:45 are we fighting or are we framing freedom
0:39:50 in terms of becoming part of a system
0:39:55 which by definition reproduced inequality?
0:39:57 If that’s what we’re claiming,
0:40:02 you’re going to create a minority elite class
0:40:06 and then they will be part of this world as it is,
0:40:09 but I am told that it is progress
0:40:12 because now you have more black people here,
0:40:14 more black people there,
0:40:17 or do you want to create a world
0:40:21 that is difficult to actually create
0:40:26 because we all have to lose and risk everything.
0:40:29 And I’m including there the black bourgeois.
0:40:30 (laughs)
0:40:32 So I think the question today
0:40:34 is not some abstract freedom.
0:40:38 It’s connected to the material conditions of our lives.
0:40:41 And it’s not an American problem,
0:40:43 but I think that in the US,
0:40:44 and maybe I’m biased
0:40:47 because I come from all these different spaces,
0:40:50 we are very used to just look at issues
0:40:53 from a certain parochial perspective.
0:40:55 Like we can fix problems
0:40:58 that are actually global locally.
0:41:00 No, it’s going to take more.
0:41:03 That is also the reason why the murder of George Floyd,
0:41:08 for instance, was used in Sub-Saharan Africa by activists
0:41:12 to challenge the police states and police brutality.
0:41:15 At first I thought it was odd
0:41:17 because of course in the US context,
0:41:20 you think about race and racism,
0:41:23 but then in the African context,
0:41:24 you think about, well,
0:41:27 the relationship between the state,
0:41:30 violence and disciplining citizens.
0:41:34 George Floyd belongs to a category of people
0:41:36 that Sylvia Winter wrote about
0:41:41 in her essay titled “No Human Involve”.
0:41:44 Basically, that was the qualifier
0:41:47 that the LAPD used in the ’90s
0:41:52 to describe an unemployed black male
0:41:56 who were involved in petty crimes, more or less,
0:42:00 and who were also high school dropout.
0:42:03 And she wrote that essay more than,
0:42:04 was it in the, it wasn’t in the ’90s,
0:42:07 it was after the Rodney King situation.
0:42:12 Asking black academics, what language can we use?
0:42:15 What type of framework can you create
0:42:20 to actually talk about the ratchet of the earth?
0:42:22 And she was talking about this specific class of people.
0:42:26 – You look at a movement like Black Lives Matter,
0:42:31 which in 2020 really gathered a lot of steam
0:42:33 and a lot of support,
0:42:36 but then you fast forward the clock
0:42:37 a few years into the future
0:42:40 and what did it yield materially?
0:42:43 Not much, the material conditions
0:42:46 of black people in this country
0:42:50 are not better than they were five years ago.
0:42:54 – Well, to me, I think the challenges today
0:42:55 are just very different.
0:43:00 So there are ways in which today
0:43:04 some people believe that capitalism
0:43:10 and activism can lead to some kind of freedom.
0:43:18 You have the neoliberalization of the black freedom struggle.
0:43:20 It’s not necessarily about the movement,
0:43:24 it’s about the dynamics of capitalism
0:43:28 in the context of the black freedom struggle.
0:43:33 Today, can we really have a genuine political movement
0:43:38 that does not in real concrete terms
0:43:42 address capitalism and the material conditions
0:43:44 in terms of your platform,
0:43:47 in terms of what you’re advocating for?
0:43:50 And I think that’s the tension today.
0:43:54 How do we reinvent grassroots organizing?
0:43:57 And when you have all those billionaires
0:44:01 giving money to movements,
0:44:05 is it an oxymoron to even combine the two?
0:44:08 Apparently not, but I think that’s also why
0:44:11 those movements are not successful per se.
0:44:14 I heard you say something along these lines
0:44:16 in another interview where you were talking about
0:44:20 how we engage the issue of identity in this culture,
0:44:23 that it’s all about who you are
0:44:27 instead of the relationship you have with other people.
0:44:31 – Yes, but the saddest thing is,
0:44:34 I don’t know, we can reverse the discourse
0:44:39 because it creates a certain kind of competition
0:44:41 amongst groups that are oppressed.
0:44:46 And then the conversation is, what is this fight really about?
0:44:51 Is it about freedom or access?
0:44:56 Because I don’t believe that I can be free by myself
0:44:59 or one group can be free,
0:45:02 whereas the other group is not free.
0:45:05 It’s very complicated when you have a society
0:45:09 that is organized with different groups.
0:45:12 Yes, you have the master categories, whiteness.
0:45:16 But whiteness is a name for so many things.
0:45:19 People are usually talking about wealth.
0:45:21 They’re talking about access.
0:45:26 They’re talking about things that are very concrete.
0:45:28 So what are people fighting for?
0:45:32 They’re fighting for access, for resources,
0:45:34 and you’re using identity
0:45:37 because that’s the way this society was built.
0:45:38 That’s why it’s also very difficult
0:45:41 to talk about solidarity sometimes.
0:45:43 – When you look around here
0:45:46 or anywhere else in the world for that matter,
0:45:51 do you see concrete examples of emancipatory politics
0:45:55 that we could actually build on?
0:45:57 – That’s a difficult question
0:46:00 because what is emancipatory politics?
0:46:06 For instance, I went to college in France, right?
0:46:08 And it was pretty much free.
0:46:11 And I also have free healthcare.
0:46:14 And a lot of European countries
0:46:17 promote a certain kind of social democracy.
0:46:20 So moving to the US
0:46:23 and looking at the ways in which here
0:46:27 you pretty much on your own for everything,
0:46:33 the European political context can look progressive,
0:46:38 but we also see that even there is not working anymore.
0:46:41 And I also see places where the states,
0:46:43 they basically do not care at all.
0:46:47 So I know this is going to sound strange
0:46:49 and I don’t know what it would look like,
0:46:51 but I think we need a global revolution.
0:46:55 It sounds very abstract,
0:47:00 but I will be a little bit dishonest if I were to tell you
0:47:03 this is working here and this is working there.
0:47:06 – You were talking earlier about
0:47:09 the various factions within the left.
0:47:14 And I suppose I’ve always been in the old school
0:47:18 materialist camp and the political frustration for me
0:47:24 when it comes to race is how often it’s used as a tool
0:47:27 to undermine the solidarity we actually need.
0:47:31 I guess this also gets to the political traps
0:47:33 of neoliberalism.
0:47:37 And it’s part of what makes fascism so vexing.
0:47:41 It weaponizes existing grievances
0:47:45 while at the same time reinforcing the conditions
0:47:49 that brought about those grievances.
0:47:52 And that’s the loop we’ve got to get out of.
0:47:53 – It’s funny, you’re bringing this up
0:47:55 two days ago in my class,
0:48:00 we had a conversation about race reductionism
0:48:04 versus class reductionism.
0:48:05 And I think that’s the problem.
0:48:08 I think they intersect.
0:48:11 You cannot necessarily separate the two.
0:48:15 The problem is when you start essentializing
0:48:20 each qualifier and it becomes either or
0:48:22 particularly in the American context.
0:48:25 You’re right, that’s also part of the problem.
0:48:32 – After one more short break,
0:48:36 hear more of my conversation with Natalie Itoque.
0:48:37 Stay with us.
0:48:39 (upbeat music)
0:48:58 – The white chocolate macadamia cream cold brew
0:49:00 is back for the summer at Starbucks.
0:49:02 So bold and so dreamy.
0:49:05 It’s the coolest co-pilot for wherever the sunshine takes you.
0:49:07 Embrace the chill.
0:49:10 The silky cold foam of that anticipated first sip.
0:49:13 And join us on summertime only at Starbucks.
0:49:17 – I’m Claire Parker.
0:49:19 – And I’m Ashley Hamilton.
0:49:22 – And this is Celebrity Memoir Book Club.
0:49:26 – A podcast that says what if your must read book list
0:49:29 and your absolutely must not read book list got married?
0:49:31 If you’ve ever seen a celebrity memoir
0:49:33 and thought what could they possibly write about?
0:49:35 – The answer a lot of times is nothing.
0:49:37 So we have to make up the jokes to fill in the blanks.
0:49:39 – Yeah, so if you wanna know what’s in there,
0:49:42 but you don’t wanna waste your eyeballs’ strength,
0:49:43 we’re gonna tell you what’s in it.
0:49:45 So hop along for the ride.
0:49:46 – Who are we?
0:49:47 We are two best friends and two comedians
0:49:50 who had enough time to read a full book a week.
0:49:51 – We live in New York,
0:49:53 so we think we know everything about everything
0:49:55 and we’re gonna tell you what’s what.
0:49:57 – And if we’re wrong, that’s part of the fun.
0:50:00 – So if you are interested in celebrities,
0:50:04 in literature, in a good time with your pals,
0:50:07 tune in to Celebrity Memoir Book Club.
0:50:08 – The podcast where we read the book
0:50:09 so that you don’t have to.
0:50:11 – You can listen to Celebrity Memoir Book Club
0:50:13 wherever you get your podcasts.
0:50:15 – I mean, can’t wait to hang.
0:50:20 – Basically every home in America has a refrigerator.
0:50:23 I mean, you have to have at least one refrigerator
0:50:24 if not more, right?
0:50:26 How else are you gonna keep your food fresh long enough
0:50:28 so you actually eat it?
0:50:30 – Not necessarily.
0:50:32 This episode of “Gastropod,”
0:50:34 how the future of refrigeration
0:50:36 might not involve refrigeration at all.
0:50:38 – These are untreated lemons.
0:50:40 So this is eight weeks old and these are the same age.
0:50:42 So these are treated and these are untreated.
0:50:43 – That’s nuts.
0:50:44 I mean, look at them.
0:50:45 – Pepper’s the same thing.
0:50:47 So untreated and then these are treated
0:50:49 and they’re both the same age.
0:50:51 You should feel it actually, I mean, they’re solid.
0:50:53 – Bell peppers nearly as good as new
0:50:55 after eight weeks at room temperature.
0:50:57 This is a new technology that could help address
0:50:59 one of the most serious offenders
0:51:01 when it comes to global warming, your fridge.
0:51:03 – “Gastropod” has got the story.
0:51:05 Find “Gastropod” and subscribe
0:51:07 wherever you get your podcasts.
0:51:20 – I often feel suspended between the deniers
0:51:23 and the pessimists.
0:51:28 The people who insist racism is a phantasm on the one hand
0:51:32 and the people who insist we can never get beyond it
0:51:33 on the other hand.
0:51:35 The deniers are fools.
0:51:39 And I think the pessimists are dead end.
0:51:42 But I ask you sincerely, as someone who’s thought
0:51:44 about this much more than I have, I mean,
0:51:48 do you think we’ll ever live in a world without racism
0:51:51 or at least a world in which racism is so irrelevant
0:51:55 and confined as to be politically inconsequential?
0:51:58 – No, I don’t think so.
0:52:02 And I’m not just talking about race.
0:52:07 I also come from a place where you have many people
0:52:09 who use the word ethnic groups,
0:52:11 but this is colonial language.
0:52:14 You have different peoples living together.
0:52:21 They share different languages, different cultures,
0:52:24 but the issue is not the difference.
0:52:26 It’s the struggle for resources and access.
0:52:31 So some of the conflicts in the African context
0:52:37 that are continuously framed in terms of ethnic conflicts.
0:52:41 People just fighting because they’re different
0:52:44 or they’re fighting over land or water
0:52:47 or some kind of resources.
0:52:52 And are they using race or the so-called ethnic identity
0:52:55 to create a sense of unity
0:53:00 so that they can bond in order to oppress other people,
0:53:03 i.e. have more resources?
0:53:06 You see, that’s how I think about those issues.
0:53:11 I will always bring into the conversation
0:53:16 the mechanism of power, exploitation and race.
0:53:18 And I will paraphrase Barbara Field.
0:53:19 – Yeah, she’s great.
0:53:24 – She talks about how, okay, racism is real,
0:53:27 but we should be aware of the fact
0:53:31 that people were not enslaved
0:53:32 so that they can come to the US
0:53:35 to produce racism or white supremacy.
0:53:39 They came here to work for free and produce cotton,
0:53:41 for instance, or tobacco.
0:53:45 If we ontologize race and racism,
0:53:48 we will end up in the dead end that we’re describing
0:53:50 and we’ll continuously ask the question,
0:53:52 will we ever get over race?
0:53:54 – I don’t think so.
0:53:58 Am I pessimistic about that?
0:54:02 Yes, I know, but I think that if we reorganize
0:54:06 the ways in which we share the resources of this earth
0:54:07 and protect the planet.
0:54:10 – I think you’re probably right.
0:54:14 That we’ll never get beyond race or racism.
0:54:18 And yet, and I guess maybe this is why
0:54:21 Sisyphus is my political spirit animal,
0:54:25 but we somehow have to accept that
0:54:28 and maybe even be pessimistic on that front.
0:54:32 But that doesn’t mean you have to surrender to spare.
0:54:33 That’s the resignation, I think,
0:54:36 that produces the real dead end.
0:54:39 And I guess the difficulty is towing that line
0:54:42 between being realistic about it,
0:54:46 but also still believing that it’s worth the struggle.
0:54:49 – There are so many reasons why
0:54:56 a lot of humans on this planet wake up every day
0:55:02 and it looks like yesterday, today and tomorrow
0:55:05 are pretty much the same.
0:55:07 Nothing is changing.
0:55:12 So I cannot demand of people
0:55:17 who cannot see any type of concrete change in their lives
0:55:20 to be hopeful.
0:55:23 I mean, who am I?
0:55:25 In order for our hope to be real,
0:55:30 every now and again, you need something to happen
0:55:35 that will change somewhat the circumstances of your life.
0:55:41 And I think if we don’t find a way to do that,
0:55:45 we’re creating a society that actually lead to despair
0:55:48 and chaos and depression.
0:55:52 It’s not just up to the individual to fix themselves.
0:55:56 Yes, in Cameroon, we say that there’s only one seat
0:55:58 in a casket and it’s yours.
0:56:02 Meaning, yes, you come here alone,
0:56:04 you leave this place alone, but then at the same time,
0:56:10 what keeps us going every day?
0:56:12 You need something that keeps you going.
0:56:16 I did some work on the spirituals
0:56:18 and you can see how the enslaved
0:56:20 were trying to understand their experience
0:56:22 in the United States at the time
0:56:28 through a certain kind of theology.
0:56:30 And when you listen to the spirituals,
0:56:34 you can think that there is a lot of despair there.
0:56:37 But it’s not just that.
0:56:41 It’s people wrestling with the facticity
0:56:43 of their human condition.
0:56:48 But at the same time, being aware that there’s so much more
0:56:53 than what is happening to them and holding on to that.
0:56:54 But it’s not easy.
0:57:01 Once again, the book is called Black Existential Freedom.
0:57:04 Natalie Itoke, what a pleasure.
0:57:05 Thanks for doing this.
0:57:06 Thank you so much.
0:57:20 All right, I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did.
0:57:23 My only real complaint is that I wish we could have gone longer.
0:57:26 But I did the best I could and there’s a lot there to think about.
0:57:29 And I’d love to hear your thoughts as always.
0:57:33 You can drop us a line at thegrayarea@vox.com.
0:57:36 And if you don’t have time to do that,
0:57:39 then I know you have time to rate, review, subscribe.
0:57:45 This episode was produced by John Arons, edited by Jorge Just,
0:57:49 engineered by Patrick Boyd, fact-checked by Melissa Hersh
0:57:52 and Alex Overington wrote our theme music.
0:57:55 New episodes of the Gray Area drop on Mondays.
0:57:57 Listen and subscribe.
0:58:00 This show is part of Vox.
0:58:04 Support Vox’s journalism by joining our membership program today.
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0:01:05 I find it disturbingly easy to imagine all the ways the world could end.
0:01:11 You, dear listener, probably know this already since we’ve done our fair share of dystopian shows.
0:01:18 On a long enough timeline, we’re all dead anyway, so that discovery was aliens destroying us.
0:01:24 AI will either destroy humanity or create utopia.
0:01:29 So in other words, everything is on fire.
0:01:31 Everything is on fire, yeah.
0:01:33 But one thing we’ve never really discussed, not in any serious way, at least, is nuclear war.
0:01:44 Which is surprising because this scenario is near the top of basically every list of existential threats.
0:01:52 And that’s why I want to know more about it.
0:01:55 And the public deserves to know more about it.
0:01:58 So I jumped at the opportunity to invite someone on the show who’s done the work and truly understands what we’re facing here.
0:02:06 I’m Sean Elling, and this is the Gray Area.
0:02:16 [Music]
0:02:28 Today’s guest is Annie Jacobson.
0:02:31 She’s a phenomenal reporter and the author of a bracing new book called “Nuclear War,” a scenario.
0:02:40 I read a lot of books for this show, and I have to say,
0:02:45 this one stuck with me longer than any I can recall.
0:02:50 It’s a book that clearly wants to startle the reader, and it succeeds.
0:02:57 Jacobson walks you through all the ways a nuclear catastrophe might unfold.
0:03:04 She gives a play-by-play breakdown of the terrifying choreography that could unfold in the minutes immediately after a nuclear missile launch.
0:03:15 If you read this book or listen to this conversation, you’ll walk away with a much clearer picture of what a nuclear war would actually look like,
0:03:25 and how perilously close we are to that reality.
0:03:29 [Music]
0:03:36 Annie Jacobson, welcome to the show.
0:03:38 Thank you for having me.
0:03:40 So I’m just going to ask you, why did you write a book like this?
0:03:45 My intention was to demonstrate in appalling detail just how horrific nuclear war would be.
0:03:57 So that dot, dot, dot, and I have a feeling that’s going to be what we’re going to be talking about today.
0:04:04 Yeah, well, mission accomplished on that front.
0:04:08 We’ll get into it, but the reporting in this and the color and the vividness of your descriptions are quite terrifying,
0:04:17 but they’re terrifying because they’re done so well.
0:04:19 That’s going to become apparent as we move our way through this conversation.
0:04:23 I mean, is it a working assumption of yours that this is an issue that’s not taken seriously enough by the general public?
0:04:34 Most certainly, and that is echoed by the reaction I’ve been getting,
0:04:40 not just from people around the world who are astonished after reading my book that they knew none of it,
0:04:47 and yet in some manner how easy it is to digest and understand after reading my book, another intention.
0:04:54 But then there’s also the calls I’ve been getting from former lawmakers, from former congresspeople,
0:05:02 from former nuclear command and control people, all saying, “Wow, this is a significant demonstration of how horrific nuclear war would be.”
0:05:15 Can you describe America’s nuclear triad so that listeners have a snapshot of the world destroying power we’re currently wielding?
0:05:29 How many bombs do we have and what are the differences between them?
0:05:33 I mean, most of the stuff in the nuclear nomenclature seems so intimidating, and yet it’s actually almost exactly as it sounds.
0:05:41 Like triad means three.
0:05:43 The nuclear triad involves three nuclear weapon systems.
0:05:48 There are the ICBMs, Intercontinental Ballistic Missile.
0:05:52 They sit in silos.
0:05:55 They are land launch, one part of the triad.
0:05:58 Second part of the triad are the bombers.
0:06:01 We have 66 nuclear capable bombers, B-52s and B-2 stealth bombers.
0:06:08 They carry gravity bombs.
0:06:10 And then we have the nuclear-armed nuclear-powered submarines.
0:06:17 They carry sub-launched ballistic missiles, SLBMs.
0:06:22 And those are the three choices that the President of the United States has when he is asked to launch a counterattack.
0:06:32 He can choose from one or all of the weapon systems of the U.S. nuclear triad.
0:06:38 Do we know how many bombs we currently have?
0:06:41 Is that public?
0:06:42 We absolutely do, thanks to people like Hans Christensen and his team at the Federation of American Scientists who keep track of all the warheads.
0:06:53 So right now, America and Russia have each approximately 5,000 nuclear warheads.
0:07:02 5,000.
0:07:04 Of that 5,000, I’m going to give you the number in a moment of what are ready to launch.
0:07:10 And the reason why I’m emphasizing this is because ready to launch means they can be launched in as little as 60 seconds after the President’s command.
0:07:24 And up to a few minutes, most of them, some of them on the bombers might take an hour or so to load.
0:07:31 So those ready for launch numbers, I hope you’re sitting down.
0:07:35 The United States has 1,770.
0:07:41 Russia has 1,674.
0:07:45 That is enough to destroy the world.
0:07:48 What is the country that has the next largest arsenal?
0:07:51 China.
0:07:52 Last year, China had 400 nuclear weapons.
0:07:56 Now they have 500.
0:07:58 That is a lot of new nuclear weapons in one year.
0:08:02 The Defense Department recently calculated they believe that China will have as many as 1,500 by the end of the decade.
0:08:13 Okay.
0:08:14 And are there still nine nuclear powers?
0:08:17 Is that correct?
0:08:18 There are.
0:08:19 And so Pakistan and India, for listeners, each have approximately 163 nuclear weapons each.
0:08:28 North Korea, CIA estimates they have 50, but some of the NGOs that track this stuff believe North Korea has as many as 130.
0:08:38 Israel is believed to have about 90 very secret nuclear program, hard to discern.
0:08:45 UK has about 225 warheads on stockpile. France, 290. And that makes up nine nuclear armed nations with what are understood to be approximately 12,500 nuclear weapons.
0:09:03 I want to do my best in this conversation to not take anything for granted.
0:09:10 And for me, that means being as specific and concrete as possible about the stakes.
0:09:18 So when we talk about the power of these weapons, we all know it’s immense, but I suspect the image most of us still have is the image of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
0:09:33 But that was a very long time ago.
0:09:36 And the bombs America dropped then were what, 15 and 20 kilotons, something like that, right?
0:09:43 How much more powerful are the thermonuclear weapons we’re talking about now?
0:09:51 To give you an idea of a thermonuclear weapon.
0:09:56 I went to one of the ultimate sources, a nuclear weapons engineer named Richard Garwin, probably the most famous nuclear weapons engineer, physicist, presidential advisor, still alive.
0:10:12 Garwin drew the plans for the very first thermonuclear weapon. Its codename was Ivy Mike. It’s on the cover of my book.
0:10:23 It was 10.4 megatons.
0:10:27 So consider that the 15 kiloton Hiroshima bomb that you referenced and then think about 10.4 megatons. It is about 1000 Hiroshima sized bombs detonating at the same time from the same center point.
0:10:46 Garwin explained it to me in the simplest of terms when he asked me to visualize this fact.
0:10:53 A thermonuclear weapon uses an atomic bomb as its fuse inside of the weapon.
0:11:02 Wow.
0:11:05 I want you to paint the picture as you do in the opening pages of the book where you imagine a nuke is dropped on the Pentagon in Washington DC. Tell me what happens the second after a bomb is dropped in a place like DC or New York City?
0:11:23 So with a one megaton bomb on Washington DC and that is called a bolt out of the blue attack. That is what people in Washington fear most. That was said to me by an assistant secretary of defense.
0:11:37 And what happens in the very first millisecond is that this thermonuclear flash expands into a ball of fire that is one mile of pure fire.
0:11:52 It’s 19 football fields of fire. And then you have to imagine that the fireballs edges they compress into this what is called a steeply fronted blast wave.
0:12:06 So you have this dense wall of air pushing out mowing down everything in its path three miles out and I’m talking everything in every direction because it is accompanied by several hundred mile an hour winds.
0:12:23 You know it’s like Washington DC just got hit by an asteroid and the accompanying wave when you think about this initial nine mile diameter ring.
0:12:35 Imagine every single engineered structure I’m talking buildings bridges changing physical shape and collapsing.
0:12:44 We haven’t even spoken of what happens with that thermonuclear flash that sets everything on fire. It melts lead steel.
0:12:54 I mean titanium you’re talking about streets nine miles out transforming into molten asphalt lava people kind of getting sucked into this.
0:13:06 The details are so horrific and I also think it’s important to keep in mind these are not details from Annie Jacobson’s imagination.
0:13:15 These are sourced from Defense Department documents because the Atomic Energy Commission and the Defense Department have been keeping track of what nuclear bombs do to people and to things.
0:13:31 Ever since the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings of nineteen forty five.
0:13:36 You can’t find a vision of hell and any religious text that can even approach the horror of this scenario in my opinion.
0:13:45 You know it’s interesting that you say that because the religious tax and I often look at the paintings that portray hell and their narrative and their evocative.
0:13:58 They’re not specific and scientific and when you read in the book things like at precisely what distance pine needles will ignite from line of sight nuclear flash.
0:14:14 And you realize that that is something that has been measured by the Defense Department because when we were setting off these thermonuclear bombs in the Marshall Islands.
0:14:25 We were measuring all of this in terms of distance in terms of atmosphere we were sending animals up in planes we were tying animals to ships.
0:14:37 This is like horrific details a lot of which I left out so that readers didn’t get essentially beyond grossed out.
0:14:45 But I worked to include enough detail that the readers could have their own imaginations and their own narrative thoughts about this kind of horror or as you say hell.
0:15:04 You know working in tandem with some of these scientific facts.
0:15:10 In service of more detail in that giant mushroom cloud that’s the image everyone has of a atomic bomb.
0:15:19 If I understand the physics of this at all and I don’t but if I understand what people who do understand it told you everything around that blast gets sucked up into this giant mushroom cloud.
0:15:33 So in the case of an actual bomb in a populated area what gets sucked up into that cloud are thousands of people and I guess all the rest of the non human debris in the area which would be basically everything.
0:15:49 It’s not thousands of people.
0:15:52 It’s hundreds of thousands of people.
0:15:55 It’s upwards of a million people if you’re talking about a one megaton thermonuclear bomb and when you can try and wrap your head around that.
0:16:07 I think that it takes your heart and soul to an entirely different area of being perhaps that you’ve never even been.
0:16:18 This was certainly my experience reporting this book when when Ted Postel the MIT professor emeritus was describing to me how humans turn into combusting carbon and then they become sucked up in that cloud.
0:16:31 And this is a man who’s been writing about the medical effects of thermonuclear weapons.
0:16:37 You begin to realize the depth of the horror.
0:16:42 I want to talk about a nuclear winter for a minute or what you call day zero in the book.
0:16:48 What does that look like how cold would it be how dark one of the big premises of the book was to take readers from nuclear launch to nuclear winter.
0:16:59 And the nuclear launch up to day zero as you say takes place over this horrifying 72 minute period.
0:17:14 And you know that is enough to shock anyone that as stratcom commander general Keeler said to me in an interview when we were talking about a nuclear exchange between Russia and the United States.
0:17:26 Yes Annie the world could end in the next couple of hours.
0:17:29 And so nuclear winter begins in essence after the bomb stop falling stop exploding.
0:17:38 There is a process of mega fires.
0:17:41 So the area around every nuclear detonation is going to ultimately result in what is known now as a mega fire.
0:17:49 You’re talking about a hundred two hundred three hundred square miles of fire per bomb where everything in that area is burning until it doesn’t exist anymore.
0:18:03 This is because of course there are no first responders anymore.
0:18:07 There are no fire trucks.
0:18:09 There’s no way to put anything out.
0:18:11 And so with all of these explosions so it gets lofted into the troposphere three hundred and thirty billion pounds of so it would be lofted into the air.
0:18:28 And that is enough soot to block out 70% of the sun.
0:18:33 What happens when that much sun gets blocked out is a dramatic temperature plunge.
0:18:39 It’s up to 40 degrees Fahrenheit certainly in the mid latitudes.
0:18:45 The areas for example from Iowa to Ukraine that whole band of the mid latitudes the bodies of water in those areas become frozen over in sheets of ice.
0:18:56 With that temperature drop you have the death of agriculture.
0:19:01 And that is why nuclear winter after nuclear war will result in what is now estimated to be five billion dead.
0:19:13 And that model you just mentioned if I remember also estimated that in places like Iowa and Ukraine temperatures basically wouldn’t go above freezing for something like six years at least.
0:19:29 That’s right.
0:19:30 And I mean that you know sometimes that the details become so overwhelming they’re almost hard to keep track of and other details you simply can never forget.
0:19:40 At least that’s the case with me as a reporter.
0:19:43 And when I was reading Carl Sagan he was one of the original five authors of the nuclear winter theory.
0:19:50 And Carl Sagan wrote about how after these bodies of water that would get frozen over for as you say seven years after the thawing out of that the dead people who had been frozen in the nuclear winter.
0:20:11 Then you have to start considering the pathogens and the plague.
0:20:17 And so just when you thought you couldn’t imagine more horror.
0:20:22 Now you have to learn about the details of nuclear winter.
0:20:25 And I think the best quote for all of this was spoken by Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet premier during the Kennedy administration and the two of them talked a lot about nuclear war with deep horror.
0:20:37 And it was Khrushchev who said after a nuclear war the survivors would envy the dead.
0:20:46 Yeah, that sounds about right.
0:20:52 When we get back from the break what safeguards are in place to prevent a nuclear catastrophe.
0:20:57 And are they enough?
0:20:59 Stay with us.
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0:24:48 I’d like to talk a little bit about some of the ways we might stumble into this nightmare scenario and the protocols in place should we get there.
0:25:01 First of all, let me just ask you this. Are you confident, should the public be confident that there are enough checks and guardrails in place to ensure that we’ll avoid a nuclear exchange if it’s at all possible?
0:25:19 Let me answer that question with a quote from the present day Secretary General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres. He said, “The world is one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation.”
0:25:39 What does that mean, really?
0:25:41 What it means is exactly what he said, that we could just have a mishap. We could have a mishap would be a misinterpretation.
0:25:51 A miscalculation would be one nuclear armed nation thinking another nuclear armed nation was doing something that maybe it wasn’t even doing.
0:26:03 And this gets us into some of the crazy policies that exist on the books, things like launch on warning, whereby once the United States learns that it is being attacked by an ICBM or a sublaunched ballistic missile, which, by the way, cannot be redirected or recalled,
0:26:23 and takes 30 minutes approximately for an ICBM to get from one continent to the other. For a sublaunched missile, it’s under 10.
0:26:32 So the US policy of launch on warning means that the president then has six minutes to decide not if he should respond, but how he should respond with nuclear weapons.
0:26:46 That’s what Guterres is speaking of, I believe, when he talks about a miscalculation.
0:26:52 I mean, how much room is there really for human agency in these command and control protocols? I mean, you always hear people say in presidential elections, do we really trust that guy with the nukes?
0:27:09 But is that the right way to think about this? I mean, if the president has six minutes to make a decision, I guess it is.
0:27:16 You’re raising an existential question that everyone should be raising, I believe, because we have been living in what some call a 79-year experiment.
0:27:28 Yes, you could say deterrence has held all these years. Never mind the fact that there used to be two nuclear-armed nations, and there are now nine. Never mind the fact that you have new technology factors coming into the mix.
0:27:43 Never mind the fact that nuclear-saber rattling has suddenly become acceptable among world leaders. This is astonishing. If you look at history, this was never part of the rhetoric, particularly out of the mouth of a US president, as happened with the former President Trump.
0:28:02 When I began reporting this book, the fundamental question that I was trying to answer was not, “Isn’t deterrence great?” but rather, “What if deterrence fails?”
0:28:18 The Defense Department predicated its nuclear arsenal on this idea that deterrence will hold. That is the fundamental. It’s written everywhere. Deterrence will hold.
0:28:29 Well, I also found a discussion with the Deputy General of STRATCOM talking to his colleagues, not in a classified setting, but in a somewhat rarefied setting. And what he said was this, “If deterrence fails, it all unravels.”
0:28:49 That word “unravel” is at the heart of the question that you asked me and that we’re discussing. What if it all unravels?
0:28:59 Yeah, it is. There are a lot of jarring, bracing anecdotes and quotes in the book, and many of them are bouncing around in my head as we speak. I recall, I think it was former CIA director Michael Hayden told you explicitly that this process is designed for speed and decisiveness.
0:29:24 It is not designed to debate the decision. On some level, I get that, but Jesus, the automaticity of the process is more than a little terrifying to me.
0:29:39 You better believe it, and Hayden actually told that to members of Congress. So these are big, bold statements on the record. These are not the words of somebody at a dinner party pontificating. This is like official language answering the United States Congress.
0:30:01 And by the way, I believe that with the rhetoric from the former President Donald Trump about the fire and fury days with North Korea, it worried Congress to such a degree that they issued a number of reports that drilled down on a couple concepts that the public was not clear on.
0:30:28 And even you could do a Google search and very easily get the wrong information. I’m talking about from top media places, and one of them had to do with what’s called sole presidential authority.
0:30:40 So when Trump was, you know, saying, I have a bigger button and that kind of rhetoric, which is so unpresidential. I’m not politicizing that. I’m talking about a POTUS should never be threatening anything about weapons of mass destruction, period.
0:30:57 It’s incredibly undemocratic. But the upside of that, if you will, was Congress releasing a couple reports, making clear that the President of the United States does have what is called sole presidential authority.
0:31:13 And what that means is that he needs to ask permission of no one to launch a nuclear war, not the Secretary of Defense, not the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and not Congress.
0:31:27 Yeah, that’s not very reassuring either. You write something near the end of the book. What if the Secretary of Defense, who’s the acting president in this hypothetical situation, what if this person has a crisis of conscious debate, as you put it?
0:31:43 And wonders, is there really any point in firing these bombs, these missiles and wiping out the other half of humanity? And it’s pretty clear that there really isn’t any room for that, because the whole logic of deterrence is predicated on the absolute promise that the process is fixed and automatic.
0:32:03 That’s what makes it deterrent. But then again, it imprisons the actors in this process that they don’t really have any control over, which, again, is terrifying.
0:32:13 Let me add something, because Dr. Glenn McDuff of the Los Alamos Laboratory, who is both a nuclear weapons engineer who worked on the Star Wars program during the Reagan administration, and has served as the historian at the classified library at the lab.
0:32:33 I asked him, “Do you think anyone would defy orders?” And he said, “Annie, you have a better chance at winning Powerball.”
0:32:41 Yeah, I think that’s right. And I guess we’re talking about the potential for miscalculations and that sort of thing. And I realize North Korea is a bit of an outlier here, so we can set them aside for a minute. Beyond them, is there clear and open communication among the other nuclear powers in an effort to avoid miscalculations?
0:33:06 What a great question. And I did not know the answer to that question when I began reporting the book. So most people have absolutely no idea. What I learned was really fascinating and terrifying on this issue.
0:33:21 So one of the things I write about is sort of nuclear war has all these rules, except there are no rules once the missiles start flying. But one of the very important rules to essentially make sure that deterrence holds to safeguard the entire world from miscalculation is the simple fact that some of the treaties that have been laid down,
0:33:48 many of which are now in jeopardy of not existing anymore, say that it is incredibly important to notify other nuclear-armed nations of your tests when you’re testing a delivery system like an ICBM.
0:34:05 And so I noticed during the Ukraine war, which began after I was already writing the book, and really put a monkey wrench in terms of like threat levels, meaning a lot of my sources before were like, people have forgotten about nuclear threats, and then suddenly the Ukraine war in Putin is talking about it.
0:34:24 But announcements are made between nuclear-armed nations. Oh, we’re doing an ICBM test. Now, this may be from State Department to State Department. It may be through more covert channels or less rather intelligence community channels.
0:34:39 And nonetheless, these tests are announced. During the Ukrainian war, the United States canceled one of its ICBM tests, so as not to get into a situation where there was some kind of misunderstanding when the threat level was so high.
0:34:57 What I learned is that there is the outlier in North Korea, and that North Korea not only doesn’t announce its missile tests, but that in this 18-month period where I was heavily reporting the book, North Korea launched over 100 missiles, not announced.
0:35:19 Now, when you consider the first 150 seconds after a ballistic missile launch, after our satellite system identifies the launch, the entire nuclear command control system in the United States is on alert determining the trajectory of that missile.
0:35:38 And when you realize the intensity of those first 150 seconds and you interview people who have actually sat through these, and then you have to balance that out, that North Korea alone put the U.S. command and control through 100 some-odd alerts in a 18-month period where they didn’t know if the missile was coming to the United States or was simply going into the sea of Japan or into space for a satellite launch.
0:36:04 Then you go, “Wow, that is incredibly reckless.”
0:36:09 Well, I’ll just say this.
0:36:11 Anyone listening can think whatever they want about Donald Trump or Putin.
0:36:17 I have a fair amount of contempt for both of them for different reasons.
0:36:21 But I don’t think, and I emphasize this is just my opinion, my feeling, I don’t think either of them are truly nihilistic enough to start a mutually annihilating war.
0:36:37 But North Korea, that feels like a different story to me just because it is such a black box.
0:36:48 And what I can imagine rather easily is maybe Putin doing something like using tactical nukes in Ukraine, for instance.
0:37:00 And those are not mega bombs, but how easily could a decision to do something like that use a tactical nuk, especially if it’s in a NATO country?
0:37:08 How easily could that kickstart a sequence of events that leads to Armageddon?
0:37:14 And that doesn’t seem that implausible to me.
0:37:17 And to that end, I do break up the scenario with these little vignettes that are essentially history lessons.
0:37:24 And to your point, one of the history lessons, I discuss a rare declassified war game, because of course they’re so jealously guarded.
0:37:35 But one was declassified about 10 years ago, and it is called proud profit.
0:37:41 And in that nuclear war game, we learn no matter how nuclear war begins, whether NATO is involved, whether China is involved.
0:37:53 No matter how it begins, it ends in total nuclear Armageddon.
0:37:59 And Bracken said everyone at that war game, and we’re talking secretaries of defense on down, everyone left “greatly depressed.”
0:38:08 Is there some near future where, in order to further reinforce the automaticity of this process, we just have AI controlling the whole thing from start to finish,
0:38:22 in which case, I guess then we’d have to worry about AI launching a damn nuke on its own?
0:38:27 I can’t imagine a worse nightmare scenario of bringing AI, what I call, more machine learning technology into the mix of decisions.
0:38:35 I mean, there is an incredible amount of machine learning that is built into the system.
0:38:39 For example, the satellite detects the launch, and then that data is processed in space.
0:38:45 We’re talking about one-tenth of the way to the moon is where a geosync satellite sits.
0:38:51 And imagine that data is then being processed and streamlined down to the nuclear command and control bunkers in the United States.
0:38:59 This is happening in seconds.
0:39:01 This is an astonishing degree of machine learning.
0:39:04 But the idea of putting an air quotes “AI” into the mix on the human decision-making level or identifying level,
0:39:12 I mean, that just seems like a recipe for disaster and is a reason why so many of the systems within the triad are still analog.
0:39:23 They are not digital.
0:39:25 In other words, they continue to be similar systems to that when they were invented decades ago so that they can’t be hacked.
0:39:33 No, I mean, I recall from the book, I mean, in the event that the president gets that alarm,
0:39:38 and there’s six minutes to make a decision about how we’re going to respond and which weapons we’re going to deploy,
0:39:44 the military representative carrying the nuclear football gives the president what is basically a laminated restaurant menu
0:39:51 from which to choose how he’s going to blow up the world.
0:39:54 You’re absolutely right.
0:39:55 And in my reporting, I learned more about the black book than I ever wanted to know.
0:40:03 That is that Denny’s restaurant menu concept that you referred to, which prior to my book,
0:40:09 I believe was one of the only original reporting situations on what is actually inside that football.
0:40:17 The president’s satchel that follows him 24/7, 365.
0:40:21 And we learn also that the black book contains the quick version of the president’s counter strike options in the event that the United States has an incoming ballistic missile targeting it.
0:40:37 And that black book, it was told to me again by Glenn McDuff at the Los Alamos Lab.
0:40:45 He said the reason it’s called the black book is because it involves so much death.
0:40:50 I have some vague recollection of a famous story about a Russian submarine captain during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
0:40:59 And the story goes that the Americans were aware of the sub off our coast.
0:41:06 We confronted them and we were deploying underwater charges around the sub in order to force them to surface.
0:41:16 But we didn’t know they had nukes on that sub and they were cut off from Moscow.
0:41:24 They weren’t communicating anymore with Moscow and they had the authority to launch independently.
0:41:30 The people on board thought they were being attacked.
0:41:33 And this blown submarine captain basically just refused to authorize the launch when the other two people who have to, they all have to have a consensus and I guess turn their metaphorical keys at the same time or maybe literal keys at the same time.
0:41:47 He said no.
0:41:48 And that was basically the only thing that prevented a potential nuclear Armageddon scenario.
0:41:54 I mean, is that the closest we’ve come that you know of to nuclear war?
0:41:58 Just hearing that from you is just, again, it sort of sends…
0:42:02 Crazy.
0:42:03 Chills up the spine because…
0:42:05 Just one guy.
0:42:06 One guy.
0:42:07 And it is absolutely an accurate story and there are six or eight or ten of those stories that have been described by insiders that now exist on the public record.
0:42:20 But those are only the ones that are on the public record.
0:42:23 And just last month, David Hoffman, a reporter who has covered this issue, he reported on a new set of documents that even added more color to some of the stories that are known on the record and also a lot of documentation that suggested that there are a lot more that we don’t know about.
0:42:45 But the most terrifying one that I heard came to me firsthand from former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry.
0:42:54 And I always like to relay the firsthand stories because, you know, even after all these decades, I still got the sense when Bill Perry was telling me that story of how terrified he was in that moment and almost still was decades later.
0:43:10 And the story that Perry was involved in is also another famous on the record one.
0:43:15 It was 1979.
0:43:16 Carter was president.
0:43:17 He was on the night watch, essentially, that it would be his job if there was a nuclear launch against the United States to tell the president.
0:43:26 And he got the call.
0:43:28 And it came from the National Military Command Center beneath the Pentagon.
0:43:34 And not only that, it was being verified from the StratCom nuclear bunker, which is the bunker beneath Offit Air Force Base in Nebraska.
0:43:45 And both of these command and control centers were reporting that there was more than 1000 ICBMs and sub-launched ballistic missiles coming at the United States.
0:44:01 And as Perry was thinking through how he was going to wake up the president and tell him that he needed to order a counter nuclear strike, he got another phone call saying it was an error.
0:44:16 And the error was that a VHS tape had been inserted into a system underneath the Pentagon that was actually a training tape, a simulated war game.
0:44:31 And what Perry said to me was it looked real because it was designed to look real as a simulation.
0:44:37 I laughed because I don’t know what else to do. And again, just in case anyone isn’t shitting their pants already, another horrifying tidbit from the book.
0:44:48 Someone told you, I forget who, that it’s actually harder to locate one of these nuclear submarines in the ocean than it is to find a grapefruit sized object in outer space.
0:45:02 And I guess I got to file that one under not reassuring along with many other things.
0:45:07 And I’m so glad you remembered that detail which came from Michael Conner, retired commander of the United States nuclear submarine forces.
0:45:17 And the point of that is to demonstrate that that is why nuclear armed nuclear power submarines are often called the handmaidens of the apocalypse.
0:45:31 Because they’re unlocatable and they can sneak up within a couple hundred miles of a coast.
0:45:39 And I’m talking about our nuclear armed sub and also those of Russia and China.
0:45:45 They can sneak up within a couple hundred miles of a sub and no one knows they’re there.
0:45:51 And these nukes that are fired by subs, they cannot, and I want to emphasize this, they cannot be recalled or redirected, correct?
0:46:02 That’s right. And that is the same with the ICBMs.
0:46:05 OK, that’s true of all. OK.
0:46:07 The airplanes can be recalled. Those airplanes take hours to get to their target.
0:46:13 We keep B2s in Guam to get to North Korea, to get to Russia.
0:46:18 You’re talking about several hours long trip and you’re talking about refueling.
0:46:23 As it was said to me, the nuclear war is going to be over by the time they get to their target.
0:46:29 And they’re certainly not going to be able to refuel so they’re suicide missions.
0:46:33 Is something like an anti-nuke iron dome a possibility?
0:46:38 Because if it was, that sure would be a game changer, wouldn’t it?
0:46:42 That is a very important question heightened by the fact that the recent ballistic missile attack by Iran against Israel that was successfully thwarted by an iron dome situation,
0:46:57 and also including the US Aegis system, which is an anti-missile system on Navy vessels.
0:47:04 The success of that could very easily lead a lot of people to say, hey, what we need is an iron dome.
0:47:10 But the short answer is this, short-range ballistic missiles, even medium-range ballistic missiles,
0:47:18 are an entirely different kettle of fish when you are talking about shooting them down than a long-range ballistic missile.
0:47:28 And so to shoot down an intercontinental ballistic missile is almost impossible.
0:47:36 The missile defense agency that has spent billions of dollars trying to do this for the US said it’s like trying to shoot a bullet with a bullet.
0:47:47 They’re still trying, by the way. We have 44 interceptor missiles.
0:47:51 So just imagine those 44 interceptor missiles going up against over a thousand incoming Russian long-range ballistic missiles.
0:48:01 Yeah, it’s throwing a pebble at a tsunami.
0:48:03 And the numbers just simply don’t add up. And if you look at the costs, you realize, oh my God, you could spend all the money in the world,
0:48:11 and you wouldn’t have enough interceptor missiles to try and defend against the potential missiles coming in.
0:48:24 After one more short break, does anyone really believe that a nuclear war is winnable? Stay with us.
0:48:39 So you’ve arrived. You head to the Brasserie, then the terrace. Cocktail? Don’t mind if I do. You raise your glass to another guest because you both know the holidays just beginning.
0:48:54 And you’re only in Terminal 3.
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0:50:11 Of all the serious people you spoke to in the course of this reporting, and you spoke to a lot,
0:50:26 what was the most sobering thing you heard?
0:50:29 All of it. For example, when Hans Christensen explained to me that one of the major existential terrors in all of this is that the U.S. Minuteman ICBMs do not have enough range.
0:50:45 If they’re going to target North Korea, they have to fly over Russia. Let me repeat that. They have to fly over Russia.
0:50:55 Well, that’s crazy. If you’re the Russian president, you’re supposed to just know that? What if you can’t get the president on the phone?
0:51:05 The two presidents haven’t spoken in years, as far as I understand, Biden and Putin.
0:51:10 So nuclear weapons are flying, and you see your radar see U.S. ICBMs coming at North Korea, but they have to fly over Russia.
0:51:21 How would you know they’re not coming for you? You wouldn’t. And that seemed so unbelievable that I had to confirm that fact with former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta,
0:51:33 who not only confirmed it with me, but discussed with me that it’s a major problem.
0:51:40 And he also said once the nuclear missiles are flying, not a lot of thought goes into what other people are thinking.
0:51:50 Did anyone, literally anyone you spoke to, believe that a nuclear war is winnable in any meaningful sense?
0:52:00 Boy, is that an important question. Everyone that I interviewed who is a former, dot, dot, dot, right?
0:52:10 Former sector, former nuclear sub force commander, former director of FEMA, former U.S. cyber chief.
0:52:17 Any of these individuals confirmed with me time and time again the fundamental former stratcom commander that, you know, nuclear war is unwinnable.
0:52:28 The quote from Reagan and Gorbachev, the jointly issued statement after the Reykjavik summit, “Nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”
0:52:38 That has been reiterated to me by people who have worked in nuclear command and control.
0:52:45 Interestingly, a lot of the pushback, a lot of the sort of what I would say insanity comes from maybe more the pundits with PhDs.
0:52:58 The people who are maybe even paid by NGOs to analyze this, that have a horse in the race of the defense contracting world, the nuclear arms race world of it all.
0:53:11 They always tend to sort of land it on deterrence, which is so that they are not caught saying, “Oh yeah, we could win a nuclear war,” because that would just be a ridiculous premise.
0:53:24 But the suggestion is deterrence is the best thing, therefore we have to have deterrence.
0:53:30 And you have to say we would win because we have deterrence, therefore we have to be able to win.
0:53:35 And so you can see that crazy loop, the idea that more nuclear weapons make us more safe.
0:53:43 It is kind of our welling, isn’t it?
0:53:45 In order to survive, we have to kill everyone.
0:53:48 It’s saying peace is war.
0:53:50 I think a lot about that Einstein quote that I think he referenced where he says, “I don’t know what weapons World War III will be fought with, but I know World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
0:54:03 And I guess that kind of speaks for itself, doesn’t it?
0:54:06 And what a great quote, because I think it really echoes this idea, particularly coming from Einstein, where you’re thinking about, my God, the human race.
0:54:18 You’re thinking about our past and what would be our legacy.
0:54:23 And I’m thinking specifically about man’s ability to use tools and how quickly we’ve advanced over, let’s say, 12,000 years.
0:54:34 This idea that we use science and technology to our advantage, and it also is entwined with war.
0:54:41 And so when I hear that quote, I think of Einstein saying, all of this is a cautionary tale.
0:54:51 All of this must make man think of his own legacy, and that is the future.
0:54:59 Not just the future of an individual, but the future of mankind.
0:55:03 A world without nukes is an ideal world, but that’s not the world we have, obviously.
0:55:09 And I don’t think it’s a world we’re going to get.
0:55:12 So where does that leave us?
0:55:14 What’s the sanest, safest path forward?
0:55:18 Perhaps the most important question and a great way to kind of end this terrifying discussion we’ve been having that probably leaves people just wanting to go put their head under their pillow,
0:55:30 which is one of the problems endemic in all of this.
0:55:33 But the ray of hope comes, I think, from exactly the question you’ve raised.
0:55:39 There is a possibility of disarmament, a movement toward it.
0:55:45 And let me give you an actual real world example.
0:55:47 It’s called the Reagan reversal.
0:55:49 So when I was in high school in 1983, there was an ABC television film called The Day After.
0:55:57 And it was a fictional scenario of nuclear war between the US and Russia.
0:56:02 And it was horrifying.
0:56:05 100 million Americans watched it.
0:56:09 A very important American was among those 100 million, President Ronald Reagan.
0:56:15 Before seeing that film, Reagan was a nuclear hawk.
0:56:18 He believed in nuclear supremacy.
0:56:20 He believed the more nuclear weapons, the better.
0:56:23 He was the one that was thinking about putting a nuclear weapon defense system in space.
0:56:29 And after Reagan saw the day after, he wrote in his White House Journal that he became depressed.
0:56:37 But his depression led him to reach out to Gorbachev.
0:56:41 And Gorbachev had been seen as an enemy.
0:56:44 And instead, suddenly Gorbachev was an adversary.
0:56:48 And the two men began talking.
0:56:50 It led to the Reykjavik summit.
0:56:52 And that is why the world number of warheads has been reduced from 70,000 to the 12,500 approximate that we have today.
0:57:04 So there is a possibility to move in that direction.
0:57:08 What I would hope that my book does would have an effect on readers where they realize it is not just futile to want to move in the direction of less nuclear weapons.
0:57:20 Because in the world we are in right now, people are starting to have this idea that maybe we need more nuclear weapons because things are getting more dangerous.
0:57:30 Well, I wouldn’t call it beach reading material.
0:57:34 And I don’t think I’m going to read it a second time.
0:57:37 But I’m damn glad I read it once.
0:57:41 I think this is a book that, as I said earlier, is phenomenally reported.
0:57:46 It’s a book that I think every informed, engaged citizen of the world really ought to read, and that this should be part of our political consciousness in a way it hasn’t been up to this point.
0:57:58 Thank you so much for that lovely compliment about the book.
0:58:02 And I sure hope it has an effect intended, which is to get more people thinking about an issue that affects all of us.
0:58:14 Once again, the book is called Nuclear War, a Scenario.
0:58:18 Annie Jacobson, this was a needed education.
0:58:22 Thank you.
0:58:23 Thank you for having me.
0:58:25 [Music]
0:58:40 This episode was produced by John Arons, edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Patrick Boyd, fact-checked by Colleen Barrett, and Alex Overington wrote our theme music.
0:58:54 If you have any thoughts about anything you heard or anything I said or she said or could have said, anything I could have done better, please, as always, let me know.
0:59:04 Shoot me an email, tell me what you think.
0:59:06 You can drop us a line at thegrayarea@vox.com.
0:59:10 New episodes of The Gray Area drop on Mondays. Listen and subscribe.
0:59:18 The show is part of VOX. Support VOX’s journalism by joining our membership program today.
0:59:25 Go to vox.com/members to sign up.
0:59:28 [Music]
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0:01:43 A few months ago, I received a long, handwritten letter from a very thoughtful listener.
0:01:52 His name was Eric.
0:01:54 Near the end of it, he asked me why I haven’t dealt with the war in Gaza on the show.
0:02:00 It wasn’t really a criticism, but there was a hint of disappointment in the question.
0:02:09 He knew that I’m not a foreign policy expert, but he wondered why a show that’s so steeped
0:02:15 in philosophy and history and ethics didn’t have something to say about the situation.
0:02:24 To be honest with you, I read Eric’s letter, I responded to it, and then I moved on.
0:02:33 But it stuck with me, and it’s been hovering in the back of my mind ever since.
0:02:41 The main reason I didn’t engage with this topic on the show is that the discourse is
0:02:45 so toxic and there’s so much bad faith that I just couldn’t see any possible value in
0:02:51 lunging into this conversation without a clear contribution to make.
0:02:57 But despite all of that, the truth is that I haven’t felt totally at peace with my silence.
0:03:04 What I do feel is what I suspect a lot of you feel, which is a combination of anger
0:03:09 and sadness and a desperate desire to understand, or at least to process.
0:03:16 So what should a show like this offer in a time like this?
0:03:22 I’m Sean Elling, and this is the Gray Area.
0:03:37 Today’s guest is Robert Zarecki.
0:03:39 He’s a philosopher and historian at the University of Houston.
0:03:44 You might recognize Robert as a previous guest on this show.
0:03:47 It was an episode called Resisting Despair, back in March of 2022, about the writer Albert
0:03:53 Camus.
0:03:58 Camus was raised as a French citizen in Algeria, which means he lived in a colonized state,
0:04:03 and that experience shaped his philosophy and politics.
0:04:08 He was attached to his French identity, but he also revolted against the treatment of
0:04:13 the native Arabs and Berbers who had lived in Algeria for centuries before the French
0:04:17 arrived.
0:04:20 The push for Algerian independence began in the early 20th century, but when it became
0:04:25 clear that France wasn’t going to cede power, the National Liberation Front, known as the
0:04:31 FLN, launched a guerrilla war against France, and part of that campaign included brutal
0:04:37 attacks on civilian targets.
0:04:39 France throws the bulk of its military manpower into the Algerian rebellion, which daily
0:04:44 assumes the proportions of total war.
0:04:47 Flying columns fan out through the country, which on all sides has become a target for
0:04:51 hidden run attacks by native guerrillas.
0:04:57 Camus was criticized for his insistence that neither side had a monopoly on truth and justice.
0:05:04 He was called a “fence-sitter” and a “moralist” who didn’t understand the realities
0:05:08 on the ground.
0:05:11 But ultimately, I think Camus did understand the situation.
0:05:15 He wasn’t naive or blind.
0:05:18 He simply believed that there were moral lines that couldn’t be crossed.
0:05:23 That killing innocent people as a means to some greater end wasn’t justifiable.
0:05:38 Algeria in the 1950s is not exactly like Palestine today, but there are parallels.
0:05:45 So I invited Robert back on the show to talk about how Camus wrestled with the morality
0:05:49 of the French-Algerian conflict, and what he might have to teach us as we wrestle with
0:05:55 some of the difficult moral challenges in this moment.
0:06:06 Robert Zuretsky, welcome to the show.
0:06:09 Thanks, Sean.
0:06:10 It’s good to be back.
0:06:11 You know, I don’t really have a conventional opening question here.
0:06:16 I think I’m just going to start by asking you how you’re processing this ongoing war
0:06:23 and Gaza and why you wanted to talk about it.
0:06:39 I suspect that I’m not unlike many other people that when I confront a crisis, I turn to writers
0:06:52 that have confronted crises in their lives.
0:06:59 And for many years, the person that I’ve turned to at moments like these is Albert Camus,
0:07:08 and following the massacre of October 7th, and then the response of the Israeli government
0:07:16 in military, and that the horror of that massacre, the unspeakable horror of that massacre was,
0:07:26 to my mind, compounded by the unspeakable horror of what was happening to Palestinian
0:07:35 men, women, and children, civilians in Gaza.
0:07:40 I couldn’t help but think of what Camus towards the end of his life was facing in his native
0:07:48 French Algeria.
0:07:49 Well, I tell you what, let me stop you there because I’m going to ask you almost that very
0:07:56 question in just a bit.
0:07:58 Okay.
0:07:59 I’m sorry, I was rambling a bit.
0:08:01 No, no, no, no, don’t you ever apologize for that, I love it.
0:08:08 What I would like to do first is, I think it’s important, Camus, as you know, is someone
0:08:15 I’ve studied a lot.
0:08:17 He’s not a systematic thinker.
0:08:19 He’s not a political scientist.
0:08:23 He was a philosopher artist, really.
0:08:26 But he was someone who witnessed the worst horrors of the 20th century, and he thought
0:08:32 very hard about why they happened and what it would take to prevent them in the future.
0:08:39 And that’s why he’ll always matter, especially in moments like this one.
0:08:44 But I’m getting ahead of myself a little bit here.
0:08:48 Before we go any further into Camus and his ideas, maybe you can say a bit more about who
0:08:55 Camus was and what he was about.
0:08:58 Yes, of course.
0:08:59 Albert Camus was a remarkable individual.
0:09:04 He was born in 1913 in a rural village in French Algeria.
0:09:12 The following year, his father, who had been drafted into the army, died at the Battle
0:09:16 of the Marne, and his mother took both Camus and his brother to Algiers, where they moved
0:09:23 in with Camus’ grandmother.
0:09:27 And he was raised in a household where the grandmother and the mother were both illiterate,
0:09:35 and where the mother was not just illiterate, but she was also death and largely mute.
0:09:42 This is the context, the atmosphere in which the young Camus grew up, gets a job, where
0:09:49 he becomes an investigative journalist.
0:09:52 He spent those years uncovering a series of awful acts being committed by the French
0:10:02 authorities in respect to the native population of Arabs and Berbers.
0:10:11 His reporting was so explosive that the French government shut the newspaper down.
0:10:18 He was very much on the left after a brief flirtation with the Algerian Communist Party
0:10:24 in the mid-1930s.
0:10:26 He was kicked out because he refused to tow the line of the party.
0:10:31 From that point on, he became one of the harshest critics on the left in France of communism.
0:10:38 Camus from the very get-go was acutely aware of the miserable situation that was imposed
0:10:49 on Algeria’s indigenous population.
0:10:53 French Algeria was not a colony of France.
0:10:58 It was invaded in 1830, and by the mid-19th century was incorporated into metropolitan
0:11:07 France, unlike France’s colonies that were acquired later in the 19th century.
0:11:16 Algeria was part and parcel of France itself.
0:11:21 Now the problem with this is that, while the Pied noir, the name given to those French
0:11:30 colonists who arrived mostly in the second half of the 19th century to settle large swathes
0:11:40 of the land, the Pied noir population by Camus’ time was about a million, but the indigenous
0:11:48 population of Arabs and Berbers was about seven million, whereas the Pied noir, the colonists
0:11:57 enjoyed full civic and political rights.
0:12:01 They were French.
0:12:03 The Arabs and Berbers enjoyed neither one nor the other.
0:12:08 And so it was, though not in name, in practice, it was a French colony.
0:12:16 The parallels here are interesting and revealing.
0:12:19 Camus is a mutual hero of both of ours, and the politics of that situation and the politics
0:12:25 of the situation today, for me, feels pretty hopeless.
0:12:31 And I think over the years, my view of the political world, and this is, I think, in
0:12:36 part because of Camus’ influence on me, has become increasingly tragic.
0:12:44 That’s a strange word, but what I mean by that is that I think the political world is
0:12:50 not only not perfectable, I think it often presents impossible choices and irresolvable
0:12:59 moral dilemmas.
0:13:01 And while I can imagine lots of ways this conflict today could have ended before we
0:13:09 reached this moment, now that we’re here, now that there are so many victims and victimizers
0:13:16 on both sides, it is very hard to see an end in sight.
0:13:24 And I could be wrong about that, I’m just being honest about my own despair here.
0:13:28 Now, Camus, as you’re saying, was deeply engaged with Algeria’s fight for independence from
0:13:34 France.
0:13:35 That’s a conflict for people that don’t know, that stretched from 1954 until 1962, when
0:13:42 Algeria finally gained independence, and Camus, as you were saying, was a French citizen
0:13:47 who grew up in Algeria and felt pretty connected to the land and the culture.
0:13:51 How would you sum up his position on that conflict, and does it feel like a useful historical
0:13:59 analog to what’s happening today in Palestine?
0:14:03 As far as serving as an analog to what’s taking place in Israel and Palestine, there
0:14:11 are striking similarities.
0:14:13 But there are also striking dissimilarities.
0:14:16 The similarities are that we have a situation which in many respects resembles that of apartheid
0:14:27 South Africa, where the lives of those who had lived on the land for centuries is now
0:14:36 dictated often in unforgivable ways by another people who have succeeded in creating a state
0:14:47 on that same territory and have a monopoly on the tools of violence.
0:14:54 And so there are similarities, there are parallels between apartheid South Africa and Israel,
0:15:02 the ways in which Palestinians, both inside the borders of Israel as well as in the Gaza
0:15:09 Strip and the West Banks, are both legally and extralegally treated by the Israeli state.
0:15:21 I know that the term apartheid raises the hackles of many Israeli Jews as well as Jews
0:15:28 of the diaspora, but I think the label sticks.
0:15:35 There are important differences though, whereas the French Piednois, the colonists in Algeria
0:15:44 can trace their presence in Algeria no further back than the early 19th century, Jews can
0:15:55 trace their presence in Palestine back several millennia, an unbroken presence.
0:16:03 Another difference is that whereas the legitimacy of a French Algeria in the eyes of the world
0:16:15 had never been, in a way, validated by that same world.
0:16:21 This wasn’t the case with Israel.
0:16:23 I mean, Israel was created under the auspices of the United Nations.
0:16:31 On that creation, it was immediately contested by several Arab states and that was the first
0:16:41 of too many wars over the course of the last three quarters of a century that have occurred
0:16:50 in Israel and in Palestine, whereas the Piednois did have a place to go in 1962, though the
0:17:00 manner in which they went was extraordinarily cruel and that place was France.
0:17:08 Israeli Jews don’t have anywhere else to go.
0:17:14 There are so many reasons why Camus resonates with me.
0:17:20 He’s a beautiful writer, obviously, but I think what I admire most about him is his
0:17:30 absolute refusal to hide behind dogmas and abstractions.
0:17:36 And the result of this, however, was that Camus would often appear to stand in the middle,
0:17:45 denouncing the excesses on both sides.
0:17:49 And for this, he was dismissed and mocked by many of his contemporaries as a kind of
0:17:56 feckless moderate.
0:17:58 Do you think that was a fair criticism of Camus?
0:18:01 No, of course I don’t think it was a fair criticism.
0:18:06 It’s telling, to my mind, to compare Camus’ response to the spiral of violence in French
0:18:15 Algeria in the 1950s to say the response of Jean-Paul Sartre and to so much of the French
0:18:23 left, that while Sartre was applauding the violence exercised by the principal independence
0:18:39 and nationalist movement in Algeria, the FLN, the National Liberation Front, and he gives
0:18:48 his voice, his excitement, his approval of what they are doing in his, to my mind, infamous
0:18:56 preface to François Nones, The Wretched of the Earth, where he celebrates the fact that
0:19:05 it’s by taking the life of a colonist that the colonized fully comes into a sense of
0:19:12 self.
0:19:13 Camus, on the other hand, had, you can call it, skin in the game, but actually he had
0:19:20 lives in the game.
0:19:22 There’s one famous exchange that took place in 1957 after he had become silent on the
0:19:30 subject of the bloodbath in his native French Algeria.
0:19:35 He had gone to Stockholm to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, and he met with a group
0:19:43 of students, where one of the students who was Algerian confronted him.
0:19:51 Why is he not speaking on the horrors that were taking place in Algeria?
0:19:59 Can he not see the justice in what it is that the Algerian nationalists are fighting for?
0:20:07 Camus’ answer was that, at this very moment, terrorists are placing bombs on tramways in
0:20:20 Algeria.
0:20:21 My mother might be on one of those trams.
0:20:27 If that is what justice is, I prefer my mother.
0:20:33 What’s fascinating about this exchange, at least in part, is that the next day it was
0:20:39 reported by Francis Flagship newspaper on the left, Le Monde, that what he said was,
0:20:48 in fact, I prefer my mother to justice.
0:20:55 There is a world of difference between what he told that student, the Algerian student,
0:21:01 and what was reported the next day in Le Monde, namely that he’s making, as you noted, he
0:21:08 abhorred abstraction, and he’s trying to explain what is truly existentially at stake, lives,
0:21:19 the lives of individuals in Algeria, and that when we lose sight of those individual lives
0:21:31 because of abstractions like justice, we’ve lost sight of what it is that makes us fully
0:21:41 human.
0:21:43 And in the retelling of his response in Le Monde, it becomes sloppy sentimentalism, something
0:21:52 that the left, like Sartre, had always mocked him for.
0:21:56 This is why I don’t think he was feckless or weak or wanted to keep his hands pure,
0:22:04 all of which were accusations leveled at him by the French left.
0:22:08 Instead, I think that the sort of moderation that Camus embodied, that he practiced, was
0:22:18 truly heroic.
0:22:20 So, he supported the Arab struggle for political rights.
0:22:26 He did.
0:22:27 He also never quite fully embraced the idea of an independent Algeria.
0:22:31 Is this just a contradiction that he just never quite squared?
0:22:35 Yeah.
0:22:36 Absolutely.
0:22:37 Camus was an extremely harsh critic of French policies in Algeria, what we can call its
0:22:44 colonial policies in Algeria.
0:22:47 The basis for that criticism was that France wasn’t living up to its own republican values
0:22:52 in the way that it was treating the indigenous peoples of Algeria.
0:22:57 From the 1950s, he was horrified and he wrote about his horror in the treatment of both
0:23:08 suspected Algerian terrorists, as well as Algerian citizens at the hands of the French
0:23:15 military.
0:23:17 But he never embraced the idea of an independent Algeria.
0:23:25 The furthest he went was to propose a federal model in which Arabs, Jews, because there
0:23:35 was an important Jewish population in Algeria, an indigenous population that was granted
0:23:43 citizenship, French citizenship, by the French government, unlike their Muslim neighbors.
0:23:53 So he foresaw a federal framework in which the various ethnic and religious communities
0:24:00 could coexist peacefully.
0:24:03 That might have worked in the 1930s, but by the 1950s, it was far too little and was far
0:24:10 too late.
0:24:11 And when, after his failed effort to introduce the idea of a civilian truce, an effort in
0:24:21 which he risked his life, he flew to Algiers from Paris and he gave a speech in which he
0:24:29 made the case for a civilian truce.
0:24:33 He never came to terms with an independent Algeria.
0:24:40 That’s true.
0:24:41 But what’s fascinating is that after his return to France and his silence over Algeria, this
0:24:51 is when he begins his last novel, Sean, the first man, one that was fated to remain unfinished.
0:24:59 Now along with the text itself, there’s a collection of notes at the end, and in one
0:25:08 of the notes, he writes, and I can’t quote it verbatim, I don’t have the book in front
0:25:14 of me, give the land back, give all of it back to the poor, mostly Arab and a few French.
0:25:28 And so it seems that he has taken the measure of the tragedy.
0:25:43 When we get back from the break, we talk about Camus’ complicated relationship with pacifism.
0:25:49 Stay with us.
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0:30:00 The other part of this, and this is something critics like Sartre were quick to point out,
0:30:07 and I think this challenge applies to the present as much as it did to this historical
0:30:14 moment, is that extremism is often what happens when moderation fails.
0:30:24 And in the real world, when you’re dealing with vast asymmetries in force and power,
0:30:34 it’s hard to hold both sides to the same standards, because that leaves the powerless perpetually
0:30:41 at the mercy of the powerful, and maybe that’s just attention we have to live with.
0:30:49 But at the same time, I think Camus was right that the ends justifies the means logic.
0:30:59 If followed long enough, ends in terror and mass death, and there are certain crimes like
0:31:07 bombing thousands of civilians in their homes, or slaughtering innocent men, women, and children,
0:31:15 that simply cannot be justified under any circumstances.
0:31:19 I don’t care who does it, but, and I think you’d agree with this, that principle has
0:31:25 to coexist with the reality that violence is sometimes necessary, and once conversation
0:31:31 gives way to violence, you can’t really control it.
0:31:37 I think Camus would agree with that.
0:31:39 In fact, I know he agrees with that, because in a famous exchange with another former member
0:31:46 of the resistance who criticized him for this effort to straddle both these worlds, Camus
0:31:57 replied that violence is simultaneously unavoidable and unjustifiable.
0:32:07 That’s right.
0:32:08 I think that it’s applicable in the situation of Algeria.
0:32:13 This was the argument of the leaders of the FLN, that it was profoundly asymmetrical,
0:32:23 and they had no recourse but to use the weapons of the weak.
0:32:30 But Camus would take issue with that.
0:32:34 He tried to resolve it, for example, in his play The Just Assassins, based on an actual
0:32:40 event in 1905 when a group of young Russian revolutionaries, in taking the life of one
0:32:49 of the members of the Romanov family, they justified the taking of a life by offering
0:32:56 their life in return, in other words, that they allow themselves to be arrested and hanged
0:33:03 up following the commission of this crime, this assassination.
0:33:08 But it becomes much muddier when you think about suicide bombings in our own age.
0:33:13 It’s no longer so surgical or so limited.
0:33:18 But for Camus, at the end of the day, it’s not so much that the end justifies the means,
0:33:27 but instead that the means can only justify the end, recalling what happens when you lose
0:33:37 sight of the humanity of those who are, in fact, either directly or indirectly oppressing
0:33:48 you.
0:33:50 And when he came to New York in 1946, he had already completed the manuscript to his second
0:33:56 novel, The Plague, which is precisely about the nature of resistance or revolt.
0:34:06 Now in the rebellion, and then a few years later in the philosophical essay called The
0:34:11 Rebel, he makes this terribly important distinction between what we can call the ethics of conviction
0:34:21 and the ethics of responsibility, and by these two contrasting ethics, Camus attempted to
0:34:30 explain what was taking place in France during the occupation, namely that there were those
0:34:38 driven by conviction by an idea, and that idea was the end that justified all means available.
0:34:51 And so those driven by the ethic of conviction were not only willing to sacrifice their own
0:34:58 lives, but all too willing to sacrifice the lives of countless others in achieving that
0:35:03 ideal.
0:35:04 Right, and the problem with that is that ultimately it undermines the conditions that make life
0:35:09 possible in the first place.
0:35:10 Exactly.
0:35:11 To stick with that moment.
0:35:12 Do I think the Nazis had to be defeated?
0:35:14 Yeah, of course.
0:35:16 Do I think that was possible without killing a tremendous number of innocent civilians?
0:35:21 Probably not.
0:35:22 How do I square that moral logic?
0:35:24 I don’t know.
0:35:26 Maybe it’s not really squareable, and I appreciate that Camus wasn’t a pacifist.
0:35:30 He actually was a pacifist, Sean.
0:35:32 Really?
0:35:33 During the 1930s, he was a pacifist.
0:35:37 He was an outspoken pacifist on the left in Algeria.
0:35:42 He only put aside his pacifism come the invasion in 1940.
0:35:50 But you mentioned earlier that how do we square the death of innocents in times of war?
0:35:58 Well, one of the ways in which we do try to square it is through rules of law.
0:36:05 And this is being addressed right now in the case of both Hamas and the current government
0:36:11 in Israel.
0:36:13 There are unavoidably civilian deaths at such times.
0:36:19 We saw it on World War II.
0:36:20 We saw it with the carpet bombing of Dresden, for example, which had no military usefulness
0:36:30 at all.
0:36:31 We saw it with the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
0:36:38 An act that Camus wrote about and said that in some ways this signals the beginning of
0:36:46 the end for humankind.
0:36:49 That not only was this weapon invented, but it was then employed.
0:36:56 He recognizes the inevitability of civilian deaths.
0:37:01 He said more or less to his audience, French Piedmont and Algerian nationalists, “Listen,
0:37:11 if you want to carry out this war, so be it, but don’t take the lives of innocents.
0:37:21 Don’t take the lives of civilians on either side of this battle.”
0:37:28 It might be unrealistic after a certain point in a conflict, but it’s not unimportant.
0:37:37 That’s perfectly put.
0:37:40 If he was a non-pacifist, he was certainly one very, very reluctantly.
0:37:47 In that essay of his, the rebel, one of the reasons his instincts are against violence
0:37:53 is because it produces this endless dialectic of violence and retaliation, which once it
0:38:02 gets going is almost impossible to stop.
0:38:07 Once it gets going, eventually the victims become the victimizers.
0:38:11 I have to say, there is something deeply depressing about the historical arc here today, that
0:38:21 after the Holocaust, a Jewish state emerged that ultimately came to wield life and death
0:38:29 power over a population of refugees, and that the memory of the Holocaust is part of the
0:38:35 justification for that power.
0:38:37 I understand how this came to pass, and I understand the legitimate fears Israelis have
0:38:43 about Hamas, a group that says they want to wipe Israel off the map.
0:38:48 I understand why so many Jewish people feel they need a state of their own.
0:38:52 I get all of that, and I clearly don’t have any grand theories about any of it.
0:38:57 The whole thing just feels untenable that Israel has put itself in a position, and I
0:39:03 think Kimu would agree with this.
0:39:05 I’m curious if you think that’s true, that this position cannot be morally sustained.
0:39:13 Christopher Hitchens might have said this almost verbatim, so I don’t want to pawn it
0:39:17 off as an original insight, but it doesn’t matter why you’re doing it or what your ultimate
0:39:22 objective is, you simply cannot occupy people against their will without eventually visiting
0:39:28 cruelties upon them.
0:39:30 There is no humane occupation, and it feels like that’s where we are now.
0:39:35 I couldn’t agree with you more.
0:39:37 It was an inhumane occupation prior to October 7th, not that Israel’s actions prior to October
0:39:45 7th in any way justified what Hamas did on October 7th.
0:39:51 No, it doesn’t.
0:39:52 But one of the things that terrified Kimu, we think about what this widening spiral of
0:40:00 violence does to all participants that it turns victims, eventually into victimizers, is that
0:40:07 he saw this taking place with resistance movements in Algeria by the mid-1950s.
0:40:17 The only nationalist movement was the FLN.
0:40:22 The character of the FLN was truly terrifying.
0:40:28 Camus’ fears about the FLN weren’t only about what they might do to his mother or to the
0:40:39 million or so other Piedronas living in Algeria, but what they would do to their own people
0:40:47 – and he was mocked for this concern by the French Left, which saw the FLN as this
0:40:57 idealistic and authentic expression of Algerian nationalism.
0:41:04 Well, it turns out that Camus was remarkably prescient when it came to the character of
0:41:10 the FLN.
0:41:12 It was a one-party state following its independence in 1962 when it tried to become more democratic
0:41:25 in the late 1980s and early 1990s that led to the horrors of the Civil War that took
0:41:31 place between the Algerian military and the Islamic Salvation Front.
0:41:39 And still do not live under democracy.
0:41:42 Now, it casts a very dark light on what has happened in Israel, to my mind.
0:41:49 You have this growing sort of violence on the Israeli right, and now Israel has a government
0:41:59 that in many ways is as undemocratic, is as violent as the FLN was in the 1950s.
0:42:12 You have a government under Benjamin Netanyahu that has some of its members, including ministers
0:42:21 who now sit in this government, who have called for the recolonization by Israelis of Gaza,
0:42:30 who have called for the eradication of the Palestinian presence in the West Bank, who
0:42:40 have allowed and at times orchestrated the increasing number of attacks on Palestinians
0:42:49 by illegal settlers on the West Bank, and that this is moreover a government that divided
0:42:58 Israel, polarized Israel in its effort to undertake what it called judicial reform.
0:43:06 In other words, to kneecap the powers of the Israeli judiciary so that it could have open
0:43:15 season on carrying out whatever policies it wished to carry out.
0:43:23 And so the parallels while they’re not perfect are more than perplexing.
0:43:31 They’re simply disturbing.
0:43:33 Speaking of parallels, as we’re recording this, Israel is launching raids on Rafah
0:43:43 and southern Gaza, where something like half of Gazans had previously taken refuge.
0:43:50 The carnage is horrific, obviously.
0:43:54 First and foremost, there’s the humanitarian tragedy and all the suffering.
0:44:01 And then for Israel, I don’t understand how any of this is going to make them safer or
0:44:10 freer.
0:44:11 My colleague at Vox, Zach Beecham, wrote a piece on this recently, and he called this
0:44:17 a form of murder suicide in which Israel slaughters Palestinians while raising the chances of
0:44:24 its own long term destruction.
0:44:28 When you look at this, what Israel is doing right now in Rafah, do you see echoes of the
0:44:35 mistakes France made in Algeria?
0:44:38 That’s an excellent question.
0:44:42 We can point to similar, though not identical acts of horrendous violence by the colonized
0:44:51 that lead to even more horrendous acts of repression by the colonizer and both one in the other
0:44:58 case.
0:44:59 So Netanyahu and the fanatics in his government insist that total victory can be achieved
0:45:08 in Gaza of Hamas.
0:45:11 Now this was the disastrous conceit of governments in both the fourth and fifth republics of
0:45:19 France concerning Algerian nationalist movements.
0:45:23 In both cases, in France in the 1950s, in Israel in the 2020s and in fact stretching decades
0:45:33 and decades before, the dominant power refuses to accept that the war can end only when the
0:45:43 dominant powers end their fantasies of controlling the territories they occupy.
0:45:50 The French won the battle of Algiers in 1957, but that victory lost them the war by turning
0:46:02 the indigenous population against them because of the tactics they employed, tactics that
0:46:09 included torture, torture at nearly an industrial level.
0:46:16 And I think this is going to be the case with Rafa, that the Israeli military may well raise
0:46:25 Rafa, but rather than creating peace, they will have created two paraphrased Tacitus
0:46:35 about the Roman legions in Germany, they will have created nothing more than a desert.
0:46:45 The consequences to my mind are horrifying.
0:46:59 After one more short break, what would Camus say today about the war in Gaza and the protest
0:47:04 movement it’s inspired?
0:47:06 Stay with us.
0:47:22 Support for this episode of The Gray Area comes from listening.
0:47:26 I’ve got a great gig and I love it, but one thing I don’t love is how much time I spend
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0:49:54 As your kids get older, some things about parenthood get easier.
0:49:58 Like diapers.
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0:50:59 Obviously, Columbia University has been in the news lately because it’s the epicenter
0:51:22 of the protest movement.
0:51:24 If Camus showed up to Columbia today to give a speech, as he did famously in 1946, what
0:51:33 do you think he’d say about this conflict?
0:51:36 I want to believe that the Camus that I think I know, Sean, would say more or less what
0:51:43 he said at Columbia in 1946.
0:51:47 So let me just read one passage from that 1946 address.
0:51:54 He asked them, “How is it,” and I quote now, “that we’ve allowed this atrocious accumulation
0:52:02 of crimes to disfigure contemporary Europe in such a world stripped of values?
0:52:09 What in fact could revolt itself even mean?”
0:52:14 And then he attempts to answer this question and I quote again, “We said no to the world.
0:52:22 We said no to its essential absurdity, to the abstractions that threatened us, to the civilization
0:52:30 of death that was being prepared for us.
0:52:33 By saying no, we declared that things had lasted long enough and that there was a line
0:52:43 that must never be crossed.
0:52:45 At the same time, we affirmed everything that fell short of that line.
0:52:53 We affirmed that there was something within all of us that rejected the scandal of human
0:53:00 suffering and could not, should not, be humiliated for too long.”
0:53:08 Now that’s the end of the quotation, but let me simply add, and I can never be anywhere
0:53:16 near as eloquent as Camus, that this is where the very heart of rebellion beats.
0:53:23 And I use the word “rebellion” because Camus does, but Camus would remind the students
0:53:29 at Columbia that the rebel seeks to impose a limit not just on those who oppress him,
0:53:37 but he also seeks to impose a limit on himself, that true revolt or rebellion is an act of
0:53:47 defense and not offense.
0:53:50 For Camus, and I think he would say this at Columbia, it is a never-ending watchfulness
0:53:57 over the humanity of others as well as oneself, resisting the power exercised by oppressors
0:54:07 all the while insisting on even their humanity.
0:54:13 How did that conflict eventually end, and what was Camus’ reaction to that?
0:54:19 The war itself only comes to an end after Camus’ death in 1960, so Camus died before
0:54:29 Algeria or his idea or ideal of Algeria died, he died two years before that.
0:54:36 The fallout from 1962 on politics not just in Algeria about the commanding position assumed
0:54:48 by the FLN and post-war politics, but also politics in France to this very day.
0:54:54 One of the enduring bases of support for the extreme right in France, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s
0:55:04 Afron National, which has since been re-baptized by his daughter, Marine Le Pen, as the ressemblement
0:55:10 model, one of their enduring bases of support is with the expatriated Pierre-Demois, who
0:55:19 now live mostly along the southern rim of France, and so it’s had all sorts of consequences
0:55:29 to this very day.
0:55:30 The last thing I’d say about Camus.
0:55:32 Oh, there’s never a last thing to say about Camus, there’s always more.
0:55:37 You’re right about that.
0:55:40 He will always be worth revisiting in these moments because his work fundamentally was
0:55:49 a response to human brutality and a plea to pay attention to the language and the logic
0:56:01 that justifies it.
0:56:03 And I think, in the end, Robert, I have never really believed that the arc of the moral
0:56:10 universe is long and that it bends towards justice, though that’s a pretty thought.
0:56:17 I think history is directionless and the wider you zoom out, the clearer that is, and ultimately
0:56:23 history is just human beings acting in the world, and to the extent that decency and
0:56:29 justice prevail, it’s not because of some cosmic plan.
0:56:33 It’s because people defended those ideals in a way that preserved them.
0:56:39 And Camus wasn’t perfect, but he did that as best he could in a time when many people
0:56:46 with microphones and platforms didn’t, and I’ll always love and respect him for that.
0:56:53 I couldn’t agree with you more, Sean, as Paul said, I can’t better that.
0:56:59 You mentioned that he wasn’t perfect by any means, and I think that really does need to
0:57:06 be emphasized.
0:57:10 He was a great believer in our imperfection, and this is what this philosophy of Camus
0:57:20 is all about, that it always aspires to the relative.
0:57:25 It’s a philosophy which recognizes not just our knack for fallibility, but it also reminds
0:57:33 us of our need for humility, and I think that both, well, nearly all of us seem to have
0:57:42 lost sight of both of these qualities over the past several months.
0:57:48 Well, Robert, you know how much I adore you and I appreciate the wisdom you bring to these
0:57:54 conversations, so thanks for having another one with me.
0:57:58 Well, thank you, Sean, for inviting me, and I just can’t tell you how much these conversations
0:58:03 have meant to me over the years.
0:58:11 After Robert and I wrapped our recording, I went back and read a speech that Camus gave
0:58:15 in Algeria while the war was still raging.
0:58:20 It captures where Camus was coming from quite well, and it feels like a natural coda to
0:58:26 the conversation we just had, because it applies just as well to almost any conflict at almost
0:58:33 any time and almost any place once it’s crossed a certain line.
0:58:38 Anyway, I’ll leave you with this passage.
0:58:43 The struggle has taken on an implacable character that arouses on both sides irrepressible rage
0:58:50 and passions that can be slacked only by escalation.
0:58:54 No further discussion is possible.
0:58:59 This is the attitude that kills any chance of a future and makes life impossible.
0:59:05 What follows is blind struggle, in which the French decide to ignore the Arabs, even if
0:59:11 they know deep down that the Arab demand for dignity is justified.
0:59:16 When the Arabs decide to ignore the French, even though they know deep down that the French
0:59:21 of Algeria also have a right to security and dignity on the land we all share.
0:59:28 Steeped in bitterness and hatred, each side finds it impossible to listen to the other.
0:59:34 Every proposal, no matter what its nature, is greeted with suspicion and immediately
0:59:40 twisted into a form that renders it useless.
0:59:44 Little by little, we’ve become caught in a web of old and new accusations, acts of vengeance,
0:59:51 and endless bitterness.
0:59:53 As in an ancient family quarrel in which grievances accumulate generation after generation, to
0:59:59 the point where not even the most upright and humane judge can sort it out.
1:00:04 It becomes difficult to imagine how such an affair can end.
1:00:12 This episode was produced by John Arons, edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Patrick Boyd,
1:00:19 fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch, and Alex Ovington wrote our theme music.
1:00:24 New episodes of the Gray Area Drop on Mondays, listen and subscribe.
1:00:30 This show is part of VOX.
1:00:32 Support VOX’s journalism by joining our membership program today.
1:00:36 Go to vox.com/members to sign up.

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0:01:52 The kids are not all right.
0:01:56 The younger one seems to be living in a world of tension and great anxiety.
0:02:00 Are we finding rock music the new pornography?
0:02:04 I think every generation says something like this at some point in their evolution into
0:02:10 oldness.
0:02:11 School officials in many cities report high school students are forming satanic groups.
0:02:16 These video games send the wrong message and we live in a completely different day and
0:02:20 age.
0:02:21 They are not all right and they haven’t been for quite some time.
0:02:24 So when you hear it, it’s totally understandable if the response is an eye roll.
0:02:32 But, and hear me out for a second, what if the kids actually aren’t all right?
0:02:44 This is bound to be the case every now and again and when it is, we really should try
0:02:49 to figure out what’s wrong.
0:02:54 There is quite a bit of data piling up on the mental health of kids and the picture
0:02:59 is pretty disturbing.
0:03:02 Whether you look at anxiety or depression or suicide or even quality of friendships,
0:03:09 the trends are not good.
0:03:12 So what’s behind that and how concerned should we be?
0:03:20 I’m Sean Elling and this is the Gray Area.
0:03:33 Today’s guest is Jonathan Haidt.
0:03:35 He’s a professor at NYU and the author of a best-selling new book called The Anxious
0:03:41 Generation, How the Great Rewiring of Children is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.
0:03:48 Haidt has a pretty straightforward answer to that question about what’s behind all these
0:03:53 negative trends and the answer is smartphones and social media.
0:04:00 He says these technologies have transformed the lives of adolescents in all kinds of
0:04:05 ways, most of them bad.
0:04:08 And if you’re looking for a master variable to explain the trends in mental health, this
0:04:14 is where we should look.
0:04:17 The book has provoked a ton of commentary and criticism, which isn’t all that surprising.
0:04:23 This is a huge topic of importance for basically anyone with children and anyone who might
0:04:29 have children.
0:04:32 So I invited Haidt on the show to talk through his research and some of the responses to
0:04:46 it.
0:04:47 Jonathan Haidt, welcome to the show.
0:04:48 Sean Elling, it’s always great to talk to you.
0:04:49 Nice to be on the podcast now.
0:04:50 We’ve talked before, but I don’t think you’ve been on the pod, right?
0:04:51 I think I must have interviewed you a while back.
0:04:52 No, that’s right.
0:04:53 In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you.
0:04:54 I didn’t know what you looked like until we just logged on.
0:04:55 You didn’t know how lucky you were.
0:04:58 Okay.
0:04:59 Before we really get into this, can we just get some clarity on the basic picture of mental
0:05:05 health for young people right now?
0:05:07 Because the data is not encouraging, so just lay this out for us as best you can to get
0:05:14 us going.
0:05:15 Sure.
0:05:16 So there’ve always been concerns about youth mental health, and there is a slow rise since
0:05:20 around the 1950s in depression and anxiety.
0:05:23 As we get wealthier, as we get further away from difficult times, people get more fragile.
0:05:27 But there was a big spike up on suicides and other things in the ’70s and ’80s.
0:05:32 And then that receded.
0:05:33 And actually, if we go into the ’90s and the 2000s, the millennials, when they were teenagers,
0:05:38 they actually had better mental health than Gen X.
0:05:41 So things are actually pretty stable from the late ’90s through 2010.
0:05:45 Levels of depression, anxiety, self-harm.
0:05:48 Suicide is dropping early in that period.
0:05:49 It begins to rise a little around 2008, ’09.
0:05:52 But then all of a sudden, right around 2012, 2013, you get hockey stick shapes in most of
0:05:57 the graphs.
0:05:58 Anything to do with internalizing disorders.
0:05:59 So that’s anxiety, depression, self-harm, especially.
0:06:03 What you get is hockey stick shapes for the girls.
0:06:05 The girls is very, very sudden.
0:06:07 There’s no sign of a crisis in 2011.
0:06:09 And by 2014, 2015, everything is going up that’s related to depression, anxiety, self-harm.
0:06:13 And it’s not just that they say that they’re depressed.
0:06:15 It’s actual emergency room, psychiatric emergency room visits.
0:06:18 And it’s not just us.
0:06:19 It happens exactly the same way at the same time in all the English-speaking countries.
0:06:24 Suicide is up almost 50% overall from 2010 to 2019.
0:06:28 So much of the rise is before COVID.
0:06:30 COVID is small, very small, compared to whatever happened in the early 2010s.
0:06:35 Even major depression symptoms in relative terms have jumped something like 150% for boys
0:06:42 and girls.
0:06:43 Is there any historical precedent for a spike in that amount of time?
0:06:48 No, no.
0:06:49 I mean, we don’t have data going back to the 19th century on this.
0:06:52 So it’s conceivable that, you know, bubonic plague, I’m sure, was very, very bad.
0:06:57 But depression isn’t caused because bad things are happening.
0:07:01 When a country is attacked, depression and suicide go down.
0:07:05 People have a much stronger sense of collective.
0:07:06 They come together.
0:07:07 Their lives have meaning.
0:07:09 It actually makes you want to be an activist, and that gives you a sense of meaning and
0:07:12 purpose.
0:07:14 There are a lot of things that are glaring about the data.
0:07:18 One of the most obvious things that jumps out at anyone looking at it is that this
0:07:22 seems to have been much worse for girls, young girls, than it has been for boys.
0:07:26 I mean, the rates of self-harm among young adolescent girls have nearly tripled.
0:07:32 From 2010 to 2020, what’s going on there?
0:07:35 Why has this been so disproportionately difficult for young girls?
0:07:40 Yes.
0:07:41 Increases are generally larger for girls.
0:07:43 I’ve been in a debate with the skeptics since 2019 all over the depression anxiety data,
0:07:49 and there there are very clear links for girls between ours on social media and their mental
0:07:54 health.
0:07:55 Very clear links.
0:07:56 They’re not huge in correlational terms, but they’re quite clear and consistent as something
0:08:00 is going on.
0:08:01 For girls in social media, there are many reasons why it hits them more.
0:08:05 The main one is you just look at what boys and girls want to do when you give them freedom.
0:08:09 Boys want to get together and form teams to compete.
0:08:12 So they’ll do that on the playground, but if you can do it online, especially this online
0:08:17 video game, online multiplayer games, they’re amazing.
0:08:19 So the boys rush home after school.
0:08:21 They sit alone in their room in order to play with their friends.
0:08:24 They’re happy.
0:08:25 They enjoy that.
0:08:26 But then in the long run, that leads them to not develop face-to-face friendships, not
0:08:30 develop social skills.
0:08:32 So the boy’s story is about disengaging from the real world, disengaging from people, and
0:08:36 just really immersing themselves in video games and pornography.
0:08:39 Girls in their hand are more interested in social space.
0:08:43 They want to know who is mad at who, who’s friends with who, who’s dating whom.
0:08:48 So social media promises all that and it promises connection, but it doesn’t deliver it.
0:08:54 What girls need is a few close friends.
0:08:56 To make it through puberty, if a girl has two or three close friends, she’s probably going
0:08:59 to be okay.
0:09:00 And if she has a hundred shallow friends and no close friends, she’s probably going to
0:09:04 be depressed and anxious.
0:09:06 There’s also the aggression aspect.
0:09:08 Girls do relational aggression, boys do physical aggression, and social media, especially those
0:09:12 apps that allow anonymous comments.
0:09:14 Those are just devastating.
0:09:16 Girls use them to ruin each other’s relationships and reputations.
0:09:20 Do we have a good sense of what percentage of young people are actually using smartphones
0:09:26 and for how many hours a day?
0:09:28 What are we talking about here?
0:09:30 So in 2010, very few had a smartphone.
0:09:32 Everybody had a flip phone.
0:09:34 We just couldn’t find ourselves to America, Britain, Canada, those countries.
0:09:38 The numbers are well over 90% for having a phone in 2010, but only about maybe 30% have
0:09:44 a smartphone.
0:09:46 By 2015, I think we’re up to 70% have a smartphone.
0:09:50 And now I forget what the latest number is, but I think it’s around 90% have a smartphone.
0:09:54 So this is just a part of life.
0:09:56 I just got back from the UK, their office that regulates this, Offcom reported that
0:10:01 of the five to seven year olds in Britain, 24% of them have their own smartphone.
0:10:07 Now, that doesn’t mean they have it with them all the time, but it’s just become normal
0:10:11 because it’s such a damn good babysitter.
0:10:14 I mean, you can have peace and quiet in your home if you just give the kid a screen.
0:10:20 Everyone’s happy, but the kid has no life experience and is more likely to end up depressed,
0:10:25 anxious, and incompetent.
0:10:27 I read in the book that teens in this country get on average around 192 notifications a day.
0:10:36 And they’re in school most days.
0:10:40 Every educator I’ve spoken to to a person feels like this has been an absolute nightmare
0:10:47 for education.
0:10:48 Now, that’s right.
0:10:49 There are a couple of studies that have found that and I tested it with my own students.
0:10:52 I teach a course at NYU called Flourishing.
0:10:55 And I have them pull out their phones, we go through the notifications, it varies.
0:11:00 Some of them have less than 200, but some have 500 to 1,000 notifications a day.
0:11:05 If you’re on group chats, group texts, they’re just constantly coming in.
0:11:09 Look, we adults have the same problem, but our prefrontal cortex got a normal human development.
0:11:14 If you didn’t get smartphones until you’re in your 20s, then your brain probably had a
0:11:18 normal development.
0:11:20 And the millennials who didn’t get smartphones and social media until college or later, they’re
0:11:24 fine.
0:11:25 Their mental health is fine.
0:11:26 So it’s a very sharp division between millennials and Gen Z.
0:11:28 Well, that’s a question I did want to ask.
0:11:30 These spikes in psychological distress, to use a very generic category, is the data for
0:11:36 adults comparable or is this exclusively or disproportionately a young people problem?
0:11:43 So you look at what’s happened to people over 50 and the answer is they are no worse off
0:11:48 psychologically than they were 10, 20 years ago.
0:11:51 Sometimes they’re a little better off.
0:11:52 People in their 30s, you do see a little bit some increase, but it’s really Gen Z that
0:11:56 stands out.
0:11:57 And the bottom line is, if you went through puberty with the world’s greatest distraction
0:12:02 device in your pocket, and especially if you had social media like Instagram for the girls,
0:12:07 if you went through puberty from the age of 11 or 12, spending hours a day on your phone,
0:12:12 constantly worried about what people are saying and doing and commenting on your photo and
0:12:15 your posting and everything is about image, you’re more likely to be depressed and anxious
0:12:20 than if you made it through puberty before getting a smartphone and social media.
0:12:25 Let me just say, we’ll get into some of the criticisms in a bit as well as some of your
0:12:29 solutions, but I really want to unpack your argument as best we can before we get there.
0:12:36 It’s clear enough that the mental health trends for kids are not good since 2010, 2012, whenever
0:12:43 you want to start the clock in that general area, 2012.
0:12:47 As with any social problem this large, I think there’s very rarely a monocausal explanation,
0:12:54 but give me your case that smartphones and social media in particular are driving this
0:13:01 phenomenon.
0:13:02 So first, my theory is not monocausal, it’s sort of bi-causal.
0:13:05 So it’s not just that the phones make us ill directly.
0:13:08 My theory in brief is that humans had a play-based childhood for millions of years where mammals,
0:13:13 all mammals have a play-based childhood, we need it to wire up our brains.
0:13:15 We gradually deprived kids of that starting in the 1990s.
0:13:18 So by 2010, kids have not had a full normal suite of outdoor activity on supervised.
0:13:23 But yet their mental health didn’t go down during that period.
0:13:26 It’s only when phase two, you get the arrival of the phone-based childhood, that’s really
0:13:30 what did them in.
0:13:31 And so it’s not one cause, it’s two.
0:13:34 And as a social scientist, I share the view that things are usually complicated, it’s
0:13:37 usually all kinds of interactions.
0:13:40 But sometimes there are things like leaded gas.
0:13:42 Leaded gas had a huge impact, especially on Gen X.
0:13:46 Leaded gas had a pervasive effect on kids around the world, especially on boys because
0:13:50 it disrupts the frontal cortex development, so you get a huge crime wave in many, many
0:13:54 countries around the world.
0:13:55 And then we then leaded gas around 1981 plus or minus, and then crime plummets 15, 17 years
0:14:02 later all around the world.
0:14:03 So sometimes you can have a single factor that actually does cause global effects.
0:14:08 The same is probably true with some plastics, some hormone disruptors.
0:14:12 So I hope that my fellow social scientists will say, “Yeah, usually it’s not monocosal.”
0:14:19 But you know what?
0:14:20 Sometimes it could be.
0:14:21 We should be open to the possibility that it was one big thing.
0:14:23 Okay.
0:14:24 Now, what’s the evidence?
0:14:25 When I got into this in 2019, after writing The Coddling of the American Mind with Greg
0:14:29 Lukianoff, some people challenged us.
0:14:31 I made a gentle assertion in the book that, “Well, you know, it’s mostly the overprotection,
0:14:35 the coddling, but maybe social media, the timing is right, maybe social media had some
0:14:41 do with it.”
0:14:42 And some people said, “No, you’re wrong.
0:14:43 There’s no evidence.
0:14:44 There’s no evidence that social media is harmful.”
0:14:46 And there were a bunch of correlational studies back then.
0:14:48 And some of them found correlations and some didn’t.
0:14:51 And so that was the state of affairs.
0:14:52 And there were a few experiments back then, too.
0:14:54 You know, we use experiments to establish causality.
0:14:56 If you have random assignment and one group is asked to get off social media and the
0:14:59 other isn’t, you know, you look at that and you can see the causation.
0:15:02 So there were some experiments that showed effects actually, even back then.
0:15:05 And so you might say, “There’s been evidence of causation all along.
0:15:08 Now we can debate how strong that evidence is.”
0:15:11 As we’ve gone on in time, there are a lot more experiments.
0:15:13 There’s a lot more correlational studies.
0:15:15 There are a lot of longitudinal studies.
0:15:16 And there are now a lot of quasi-experiments, where you look at what happens when high-speed
0:15:20 internet comes into like one part of British Columbia, a couple of years ahead of another
0:15:24 part of British Columbia, things like that.
0:15:26 So I’ve organized all of the studies, and I did this work with Zach Roush and Gene Twengey.
0:15:31 We’ve organized hundreds and hundreds of studies.
0:15:33 We lay them all out by category.
0:15:36 We get everything we can that shows an effect, everything that doesn’t show an effect.
0:15:39 And guess what?
0:15:40 The correlational studies are overwhelming.
0:15:42 There are some that don’t show an effect, but the great majority do, and it’s usually
0:15:45 larger for girls, and it’s very similar.
0:15:47 The longitudinal studies are a little different.
0:15:49 It’s like if you use more social media at time one, does that mean you’re more depressed
0:15:53 at time two?
0:15:54 And most of those studies suggest that kind of linear causal effect.
0:15:57 A few show a reverse, but most suggest that.
0:16:00 And then there are the experiments.
0:16:01 There’s about 25 experiments in our Google Doc at present.
0:16:03 16 of them show a significant effect.
0:16:05 And so the skeptics now are saying, “Well, there’s no evidence.”
0:16:09 Like, “Wait, wait a second.
0:16:11 There’s a lot of causal evidence.
0:16:13 Just in the experiments, we can debate whether you’re convinced by them, but you can’t say
0:16:16 there’s no evidence.
0:16:17 There are now a lot of experiments.
0:16:19 It’s not just correlational data.”
0:16:20 In the studies that we have, how statistically significant is the relationship between hours
0:16:26 of use on smartphones and measures of depression and anxiety?
0:16:32 So the thing is to not focus on statistical significance, because if you have a large
0:16:36 enough sample size, everything is significant.
0:16:38 The thing to focus on is the effect size.
0:16:40 And this is part of the confusion.
0:16:42 A study by Orbit and Shibilsky that gets cited a lot reported that the correlation is the
0:16:47 equivalent of a correlation coefficient of 0.04, which in this giant data set, it was
0:16:51 about the same as the correlation between eating potatoes and being depressed.
0:16:56 And so they say, “If you’re afraid of social media, you should be equally afraid of potatoes.”
0:17:02 First of all, what the skeptics tend to do is they tend to combine everybody and everything
0:17:05 and report that there’s very little or no correlation.
0:17:08 So when you mix together boys and girls at all-screen media, including Netflix, including
0:17:13 having a computer, including watching TV, it was what they do, then they report there’s
0:17:17 almost no correlation.
0:17:19 But Gene Twenge and I went into the exact same data sets.
0:17:22 We used their exact code to run this complicated statistical analysis, but we limited it to
0:17:27 social media and girls.
0:17:29 And guess what?
0:17:30 We found a much larger effect, equivalent to a correlation coefficient of around 0.2,
0:17:35 which is much larger than potatoes.
0:17:36 It’s in the ballpark of binge drinking and heavy drug use.
0:17:38 In terms of the correlation between the activity and mental health.
0:17:42 Now social scientists will say, “Okay, even a correlation of 0.2, that’s not very big.
0:17:47 You square that, you get 0.04, so this explains 4% of the variance.”
0:17:50 Oh, that’s trivial.
0:17:52 But here’s the big mistake that I think the skeptics make.
0:17:54 They say, “If this correlation explains 4% of the variance, they think that means the
0:17:59 variance in life.”
0:18:01 And there’s a quote from Shibilski.
0:18:02 He says, “Something like 99% of the variation in your happiness has nothing to do with social
0:18:07 media.”
0:18:08 And I think he’s doing there is mistaking the correlation in a data set.
0:18:11 We have very crude measurement on the incoming side.
0:18:15 It’s just how many hours a day, self-report.
0:18:17 You have very crude measurement on the output side.
0:18:21 How’s your mental health or symptom checklist?
0:18:23 And so, of course, if you have very, very rough measures on both ends, you can’t possibly
0:18:26 capture half the variance.
0:18:28 You can’t even capture a quarter of the variance.
0:18:29 You’re looking at shadows dancing on the wall in Plato’s cave, and yet you still find a
0:18:34 relationship over and over again.
0:18:36 The one last thing I’ll say, when you look at the correlational studies, the other way
0:18:39 to look at it is not percent variance explained.
0:18:42 It’s odds ratios.
0:18:43 And what we find over and over is that the girls who are heavy users have two or three
0:18:47 times in the biggest study we have here, the millennial cohort study, it’s three times.
0:18:51 Three times the rate of being depressed as those who use it little or none.
0:18:56 So when people say the correlations are tiny, well, that doesn’t mean that the effect in
0:19:01 the world is tiny.
0:19:02 It’s not.
0:19:03 It’s actually quite large.
0:19:04 You’ve given me nightmares in my first stats course in grad school.
0:19:08 No.
0:19:09 Well, it was the most plausible alternative explanation you have encountered to explain
0:19:14 this trend.
0:19:15 There really isn’t one.
0:19:16 That’s the funny thing.
0:19:17 So if it was just the United States, if that’s all, then there’d be a lot.
0:19:21 But I want to put people back into this time, 2012, President Obama, his first term is ending,
0:19:28 he wins reelection.
0:19:30 If you’re a progressive, you should be thrilled.
0:19:33 So many advances on women’s rights, civil rights, gay rights, animal rights.
0:19:37 I mean, the last 50 years have been amazing.
0:19:40 And now it looks like the Republicans are dead in the water 2012.
0:19:44 So Obama’s second term should have been a pretty happy time for liberals.
0:19:48 But actually liberal girls are the ones who get the most depressed during Obama’s second
0:19:53 term.
0:19:54 And I’ve seen efforts to explain it by, well, there was the rise of right wing something
0:19:57 or other.
0:19:58 Come on, come on.
0:19:59 This is not a time when progressives should have suddenly all gotten depressed.
0:20:03 But the girls and especially the younger girls suddenly get depressed.
0:20:06 I don’t know how you can explain that from the global financial crisis.
0:20:09 That’s the other one.
0:20:10 Some of my critics say, “Oh, if you listen to height, you’re not going to see the real
0:20:13 causes of the crisis,” which is the global financial crisis and its effects on low SES
0:20:18 people.
0:20:19 That just doesn’t make sense.
0:20:20 That was 2008.
0:20:21 Why would it affect the younger girls especially?
0:20:23 It just doesn’t make any sense.
0:20:25 Let’s get back into the causal mechanisms here a little bit.
0:20:28 There’s a shift from a play-based childhood to a phone-based childhood.
0:20:32 Now apart from just simply not going outside as much, why is that so poisonous to the mental
0:20:37 health of young people?
0:20:39 So I thought I was going to write a short book on what social media is doing to kids,
0:20:42 especially girls.
0:20:44 But what I realized is, wait, I have to write a chapter on childhood.
0:20:47 And then I actually needed two chapters on childhood, one of which was for just a whole
0:20:50 chapter on risky play and the importance of risk-taking.
0:20:53 And then I realized, wait, now I need a whole chapter on puberty.
0:20:56 And so the book, it starts off with a chapter on all the stats, but then I’ve got three
0:20:59 chapters on child development.
0:21:00 And I think that might be why people are coming away from the book almost always persuaded.
0:21:05 Because once you understand that human childhood, like all mammals, they have to play in order
0:21:10 to wire up the brain.
0:21:11 If you were to lock a kid in, give them good nutrition, but not let them play, well, we’ve
0:21:15 done this with rats and they come out socially deformed.
0:21:18 They’re anxious.
0:21:19 They’re not sociable.
0:21:20 We’ve done it with Reese’s monkeys, same thing.
0:21:22 And since 1990, we’ve done it with our children.
0:21:24 If you don’t let your kids out to play for always supervising, if they don’t learn to
0:21:27 be self supervising, we don’t want to take risks, kids must take risks.
0:21:31 They’re attracted to things that are risky, where there’s a possibility of getting hurt.
0:21:35 And then they go closer and closer to it and they take a little risk and then they back
0:21:38 off.
0:21:39 They did it.
0:21:40 Okay.
0:21:41 And then the next time they go a little further.
0:21:42 So our neural development program has to be an interaction with the world, the three-dimensional
0:21:45 physical world and the social world.
0:21:47 That’s the way we evolved.
0:21:49 That’s what the brain needs to wire up.
0:21:51 And if you say, “Not just you can’t go outside and play.
0:21:53 You can’t go unsupervised with another kid, but here’s a screen.
0:21:57 Here’s a screen.
0:21:58 Leave me alone.
0:21:59 Here.
0:22:00 You’re happy.
0:22:01 Here’s a screen.”
0:22:02 You now have such enormous amounts of stimulation coming in and the screens do something television
0:22:06 never did.
0:22:07 The touch screen allows you to act and get reinforcement instantly within a 10th of a second.
0:22:12 Television didn’t do that.
0:22:13 So instead of their outside playing, they’re basically being trained by a behaviorist conditioning
0:22:17 machine for hours and hours a day, every day for 15 years.
0:22:21 Yeah.
0:22:22 That’s going to affect brain development.
0:22:23 It’s interesting that we don’t see any meaningful spikes and mental health disorders with the
0:22:29 rise of personal computing and the internet.
0:22:32 Whatever’s going on now, it doesn’t seem to have begun in earnest until we got social
0:22:38 media and smartphones and the iPad.
0:22:41 You know, my son will be five next month, so we are not at the smartphones and social
0:22:47 media stage.
0:22:48 It’s not a problem for us yet, but we do occasionally let him use, you know, the little iPad tablet.
0:22:54 And I have mixed feelings about it.
0:22:57 I can absolutely see the effect that screens and entertainment and instant gratification
0:23:03 have on his attention and his mind.
0:23:05 He is already so accustomed to slicing and dicing reality on the tablet, switching shows,
0:23:13 rewinding, whatever he wants on demand, that reality itself becomes almost intolerably
0:23:17 boring.
0:23:18 Exactly.
0:23:19 You call smartphones and tablets and the hands of children experience blockers.
0:23:24 And I like that.
0:23:25 I mean, based on what I’m seeing with my son, I kind of think of them as reality diminishers,
0:23:28 but I guess those are just two phrases for the same thing.
0:23:31 No, that’s right.
0:23:32 I mean, one of the remarkable things about kids, you know, and you probably saw this
0:23:34 in your kid’s early birthday parties, you get your kid a present, and they might be
0:23:38 just as interested in the box or the ribbon.
0:23:40 They’re very curious.
0:23:41 They get in the box, they swing the ribbon around, kids are curious, but as soon as they
0:23:46 get a phone, nothing is as interesting as the phone.
0:23:49 So I’d like to give parents listening just a couple of principles here.
0:23:52 Stories are a good thing.
0:23:54 Humans live in stories.
0:23:55 Humans have always told stories around the campfire.
0:23:58 So letting your kid watch a 20 minute or 10 minute story, like on Netflix or on PBS Kids,
0:24:05 that’s fine.
0:24:06 I wouldn’t do it before age two, but you know, your child, four or five, six years old stories
0:24:10 are great.
0:24:11 But what if there’s a story, but if he touches something, he gets a different story.
0:24:14 And if he touches something else, he gets a game.
0:24:17 So if you can’t even learn to pay attention to the story, now you’re fragmenting attention.
0:24:21 You’re not training attention on a 20 minute story.
0:24:23 You’re fragmenting attention.
0:24:25 Now multiply that every hour for the next 15 years or for the rest of their life, because
0:24:29 once you give a kid a phone, the phone will be in the center of their life for the rest
0:24:33 of their life until the phones are implanted directly into our heads.
0:24:46 When we get back from the break, height responds to some of the criticisms of his work.
0:24:51 Stay with us.
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0:28:58 What do you think is the most significant thing young people lose when more and more
0:29:03 of their life consists of virtual experiences and fewer and fewer embodied real world experiences?
0:29:12 I would say they lose any sense of rootedness.
0:29:15 What I mean by that is what you really see happening around 2012, 2013 is a huge increase
0:29:22 in the sense of meaninglessness, pointlessness, loneliness.
0:29:26 I imagine like a plant that is full and green and you pull it up by the roots and you just
0:29:33 leave it up in the air and within hours it begins to wilt and within a couple of days
0:29:36 it’s dead.
0:29:38 Kids need to be rooted in the physical world without directivities, with friends, with family.
0:29:43 They need to be in communities and a community is a group of people.
0:29:47 Most of them are still going to be there in a year or two.
0:29:49 Most will still be there in five or 10 years, but instead you give them this device that
0:29:53 connects them to everyone.
0:29:54 Well, if you’re connected to everyone, if you’re letting your kid develop roots in
0:29:59 this always churning fake world of people who are not using their real names and they’re
0:30:04 almost all be gone in a day or two, there’s no community there.
0:30:08 It’s like you’re pulling your plant up by the roots and saying here, flourish in the
0:30:11 air and it can’t be done.
0:30:14 The thing I’m constantly thinking about, at least on this front in particular, the real
0:30:20 three-dimensional social world is really difficult and thorny and fraught and awkward and unpredictable.
0:30:28 Exactly.
0:30:29 But that’s kind of where you learn the art of living, for lack of a better phrase.
0:30:33 And the safety of the phone in isolation shields you from all of that.
0:30:38 And I don’t think that’s good.
0:30:40 And the more and more I see life dictated by algorithms and screens, the more and more
0:30:46 it seems to me that people are terrified of engaging the world and other people unless
0:30:53 those engagements are mediated by the safety and the isolation of technology.
0:30:58 And if you don’t think that’s producing more anxiety in people, I don’t know what to say
0:31:02 other than I vehemently disagree.
0:31:06 That actually is one of the keys is technology makes things easy.
0:31:11 And so for us adults, it used to be sometimes hard to get a cab in New York City, but now
0:31:15 it’s super easy.
0:31:16 You press a button and it comes.
0:31:17 So we’re losing our cab hailing skills.
0:31:19 But who cares?
0:31:20 Do you want to play a game?
0:31:21 Well, you could go out and look for some friends to play with and find a space and make the
0:31:25 rules.
0:31:26 That’s kind of hard.
0:31:27 Just log on any point day or night.
0:31:28 You can find four people to play a game with you.
0:31:30 They can be strangers anywhere that’s easy.
0:31:32 You want sex?
0:31:33 What’s really hard to, if you’re a boy, okay, you’re going to flirt with a girl, which girl?
0:31:38 What’s going to happen?
0:31:39 I mean, it’s really hard to get sex when you’re a boy, but you work at it and you develop the
0:31:43 skills and you learn how to flirt and you eventually fall in love.
0:31:47 And then you break up and you fall in love again.
0:31:49 All of that is cut off when everything goes through the apps.
0:31:52 Everything is easy.
0:31:53 You find someone who’s willing to have sex.
0:31:54 You swipe.
0:31:55 There’s very little courtship.
0:31:56 There’s very little love.
0:31:57 And amazingly, there’s less sex.
0:31:59 The ease with which you can meet a sexual partner now, it’s 1,000 times easier than when I was
0:32:03 in college or when I was in my 20s.
0:32:06 But yet there’s less and less sex, young people having less and less sex.
0:32:09 You know what, even married people are having less sex because we’re all so busy.
0:32:13 We all are spending five, seven, nine hours a day on our phones.
0:32:17 There’s not time for anything else, including sex or religion or friends or nature.
0:32:22 If you’re an adult, you have a normal brain and then you decide to give away all your attention
0:32:25 and live this weird life, that’s your choice and you already have a normal brain.
0:32:29 But if you were to say, and I’d ask any parent here, how about if you could make life easy
0:32:33 for your child?
0:32:34 Your child will never have to struggle.
0:32:36 Nothing will ever be difficult.
0:32:37 It’s kind of clear, that would break your child.
0:32:40 You can’t do that to your child.
0:32:41 But when you give them an online life, that’s kind of what you’re doing.
0:32:44 Everything is easy.
0:32:45 I love that phrase by Sherry Turkle that he used, “We are forever elsewhere.”
0:32:50 Even when we’re together in real life, so much of our attention is redirected by our
0:32:55 phones so that even when we are present, we’re not really present or not reliably present.
0:33:01 And I see that in everyone, not just young people.
0:33:03 I see it in myself.
0:33:04 I see it in my friends.
0:33:05 I see it in everyone.
0:33:06 Because a moment of silence can be awkward.
0:33:08 That’s right.
0:33:09 Even if you’re sitting with your friends, my NYU students tell me, you know, they go
0:33:11 to lunch and they’re sitting with their friends, but if there’s a little lull in the conversation,
0:33:16 one person checks their phone, and then once they do, others do.
0:33:20 And so you never have times like you’re joking around, you’re really having fun, you’re laughing.
0:33:25 Those times are much less common nowadays because someone’s on their phone in K through
0:33:29 12 classes, kids are on their phone in between classes.
0:33:33 When schools go phone-free, an almost universal comment is, “You hear laughter in the hallways
0:33:37 again.”
0:33:38 Teachers say, “I haven’t heard that in 10 years.”
0:33:40 So I mean, I’m exaggerating.
0:33:41 Sometimes there’s life.
0:33:42 But the point is, the normal sound of kids between classes is not what it’s been for
0:33:46 the last 10 years.
0:33:47 It’s been closer to silence.
0:33:48 And the strange thing about, in a sense, being online most of the time on your phone, it
0:33:53 is safer.
0:33:54 It is easier.
0:33:55 But it’s also more emotionally destructive in other ways.
0:33:59 Someone who’s experienced anxiety knows what that feels like.
0:34:03 Always being self-conscious, always worried, always anticipating threats and being online
0:34:08 all the time feeds into this.
0:34:10 The constant performativity, the brand management, the status-seeking, that’s bad enough for
0:34:15 adults.
0:34:16 But it’s not hard to see why it’s even worse for kids.
0:34:19 That’s right.
0:34:20 Because one-to-one is the best.
0:34:23 You’re talking, you’re joking, you’re laughing.
0:34:24 If you say something wrong, your friend may give you a funny look.
0:34:27 Your friend may even get mad at you.
0:34:28 But then you learn to apologize and you keep going.
0:34:31 But once you get into these group chats where there’s maybe 30 or 50 people, now it’s not
0:34:35 communication.
0:34:36 It’s performance.
0:34:37 You’re performing at them.
0:34:38 You’re anxious before you press send or whatever it is.
0:34:41 Because if you get it wrong, the costs are very high.
0:34:43 What kids need is low-cost situations to make mistakes.
0:34:47 They have to make bad jokes.
0:34:48 They have to hurt someone’s feelings, realize it, and apologize.
0:34:51 But when kids are raised on social media and on screens, it’s like they’re being raised
0:34:54 on the stage, and a stage with an audience is just no place for a child.
0:35:01 One of the counterarguments I’ve seen to your book is people will say, “Okay, sure, reported
0:35:07 cases of anxiety and depression and these sorts of things are up.”
0:35:12 But a big part of that is that people are just more willing to be transparent about
0:35:18 their struggles now because it’s no longer a source of shame or stigma and that’s a good
0:35:22 thing.
0:35:23 Do you buy any of that?
0:35:24 I don’t explain the whole story, but surely it explains some of the story.
0:35:28 I don’t know.
0:35:29 Where do you land?
0:35:30 I would assume so.
0:35:31 But now that I think about it more, I’m actually a little more skeptical because when I was
0:35:34 growing up in the ’70s, my mother sent me to a psychologist for a brief time.
0:35:37 It was very shameful.
0:35:38 I didn’t want anyone to know.
0:35:40 There was real shame to any sort of mental health issue in the ’70s and into the ’80s.
0:35:44 By the ’90s, the stigma is beginning to drop, but in the 2000s, it’s really dropping, yet
0:35:49 we don’t see the numbers rising.
0:35:51 We don’t see young people saying, “Oh, yeah, I’m more anxious.
0:35:54 I’m more anxious.
0:35:55 I’m more anxious.”
0:35:56 We don’t see that.
0:35:57 By the time we get to 2012, mental health issues have been largely desigmatized.
0:36:01 In fact, the weird thing, once the girls get on social media, girls share emotions much
0:36:05 more than boys.
0:36:07 Any girl who shares that she’s anxious gets a lot of support.
0:36:10 The more anxious she is, the more support she gets.
0:36:13 This is not just a general law of psychology.
0:36:15 This is the way the algorithms work.
0:36:17 The more extreme posters in these mental health forums get the most likes and the most followers.
0:36:23 I think what’s happening is that mental illness is becoming valorized, and that’s the last
0:36:28 thing we want.
0:36:29 The last thing we want is for kids, especially girls, to think that it is somehow desirable
0:36:35 for them to be depressed, anxious, feeble, traumatized, so no, I actually don’t buy it.
0:36:41 Is it possible that some of these associations between social media use and psychological
0:36:48 distress are a reflection of kids who maybe already have mental health issues, and they’re
0:36:54 disproportionately using these platforms or using them in different ways than their more
0:36:59 healthy peers?
0:37:00 In other words, maybe we’ve just created platforms that tease out the problems that were already
0:37:04 there.
0:37:05 Well, it’s not exactly teasing out.
0:37:06 It’s then amplifying.
0:37:07 Yes, it has generally been found that people who are … Because look, long before social
0:37:12 media, some two, three, four-year-olds were anxious, and you could see it.
0:37:17 They’re exposed to something new they pull away, so kids who are set to anxiety, there
0:37:21 are some suggestions that they are more likely to move to social media, in part because it’s
0:37:27 easier than talking to people, so some portion of these correlations can be reverse correlation.
0:37:32 That’s true.
0:37:33 The big protective factor is kids who are rooted.
0:37:35 Kids who play team sports are active in their religion have been largely protected or partially
0:37:39 protected from this tsunami of mental illness.
0:37:43 Has there been changes in diagnostic criteria in the way hospitals and clinics code these
0:37:48 sorts of things that might explain some of the changes in reported cases?
0:37:53 This is one of the main skeptic arguments, is that there have been a couple of changes.
0:37:57 There was a big change that would affect things globally around 2015.
0:38:00 That’s true, but yet we don’t find a big jump at 2016.
0:38:03 We find it at 2012, 2013.
0:38:06 The skeptics loved it.
0:38:07 They’ll find an … There’s some study in New Jersey seemed to show that maybe suicide
0:38:11 rates didn’t go up in New Jersey.
0:38:12 Well, okay, fine.
0:38:14 One study found that in New Jersey, but the CDC data is pretty damn clear about the whole
0:38:18 country.
0:38:19 Yeah, I think the skeptics are often cherry picking.
0:38:22 They’re finding the occasional study that doesn’t find an effect.
0:38:26 The chutzpah bad is that they accuse me of cherry picking when I’m the only one who’s
0:38:29 picking every single cherry.
0:38:31 I don’t pick just the ones that favor me.
0:38:34 I’d say probably the most familiar reaction to this kind of thing is to say, “Okay, John,
0:38:40 okay, okay, I get it.
0:38:42 This is a very recycled argument, right?
0:38:46 Every time there’s a new technology, whether it’s TV or video games or-
0:38:50 Comic books, novels, yep, I’ve heard it all.
0:38:53 There’s always a moral panic over how it’s poisoning the youth and the culture, but in
0:38:58 the end, it’s just changed and changes constant as is adaptation, so we’ll be fine.
0:39:06 That is the most common argument I get.
0:39:08 You’re right.
0:39:09 That is what animates all of the skeptics.
0:39:11 I believe they’ve been studying technology for a long time, and so they’ve seen previous
0:39:13 moral panics like over video games, especially violent video games.
0:39:17 Playing violent video games turns out not to make kids violent, so they come at this
0:39:20 with skepticism that is rooted in their real experiences as social scientists, and I freely
0:39:25 grant that that’s a reasonable hypothesis and it’s a reasonable starting hypothesis.
0:39:29 Let’s assume this is just another moral panic, but now let’s be open to the evidence that
0:39:33 it’s not.
0:39:34 In any previous moral panic, the kids themselves are not calling out for help.
0:39:39 There are not a lot of kids who say, “Oh, these comic books free us from the comic books,”
0:39:44 but you talk to Gen Z about social media and smartphones, and while they don’t want to
0:39:48 get off because everyone else is on, if you say, “How about if everyone got off?”
0:39:51 They say, “Oh, yes, we’d love that.”
0:39:53 If you have a consumer product that’s sucking up most of the world’s attention and most
0:39:56 of the people using it wish it was never invented, this is a very different technology.
0:40:01 Another difference is that a traditional moral panic, nothing terrible really happens, but
0:40:07 some story about a kid who read comic books and then he murdered his mother.
0:40:12 Maybe it happened, maybe it didn’t, maybe it was schizophrenia, whatever it is, you
0:40:16 get a moral panic.
0:40:17 The media is essential for a moral panic in the past.
0:40:21 That’s not what’s happening now.
0:40:22 Right now, almost everyone has seen it.
0:40:24 If not in their own family, they’ve seen it in the children of people that they know.
0:40:28 The kids are all right.
0:40:31 It’s just the media.
0:40:32 It’s just people like John Height and Gene Twengey trying to scare up people.
0:40:36 Talk to any human being with children and they’ll say, “Yeah, I’ve seen it.”
0:40:39 I think this might have come up in your interview with Tyler Cohen.
0:40:43 Oh, that was a fun one.
0:40:45 That’s one word for it.
0:40:48 Maybe he’s right.
0:40:49 His point was that lots of good has come from social media and smartphones and no doubt
0:40:53 lots of good has come from those things.
0:40:55 Not for kids.
0:40:56 No, I don’t think so.
0:40:57 Not for middle school kids.
0:40:58 I don’t think so.
0:40:59 Well, okay.
0:41:00 That’s fair.
0:41:01 For adults, sure.
0:41:02 We’re experiencing the downsides and the externalities in real time.
0:41:05 Many of them are very, very bad.
0:41:06 But in the fullness of time, there will be a net improvement.
0:41:09 Maybe that’s true, but one thing I came to believe pretty firmly while writing my book
0:41:16 on media and democracy is that Marshall McLuhan was right that-
0:41:22 Oh, he really was.
0:41:23 Oh my God, yes.
0:41:24 He really was.
0:41:25 He was right that electronic media was a kind of extension of our nervous system in the
0:41:30 sense that it connected our-
0:41:31 Oh, that’s such a cool point.
0:41:32 Yeah.
0:41:33 It connected our consciousness with the rest of the world, but digital technology and smartphones
0:41:37 and social media in particular has this truly terrible dual quality.
0:41:42 They bombard us with all this negative feedback and all the bad news in the world all the
0:41:48 time while also leaving us mostly impotent in the face of all that awfulness.
0:41:54 It’s not just bad for our mental well-being.
0:41:56 I think at scale, it also amplifies some of our worst social and psychological pathologies.
0:42:03 That is my opinion.
0:42:04 Oh, no, I fully agree.
0:42:05 For this project, I began reading some Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman.
0:42:08 They’re just so brilliant.
0:42:11 One of their main points, McLuhan said it so famously, the medium is the message.
0:42:15 He was pointing out that in the ’70s and ’80s or back when he was writing, everyone’s focused
0:42:20 on the content.
0:42:21 There’s too much violence and sex on TV.
0:42:24 We have to get the sex and violence off TV, and his point was, well, okay, the sex and
0:42:28 violence, but the real thing isn’t what’s on the TV.
0:42:30 The real thing is, how did life change when TV moved to the center, when everyone got
0:42:34 a TV in their living room, and now the rhythms of life now revolve around sitting and watching
0:42:39 the screen?
0:42:40 That has very pervasive effects on us, and I would say in the same way, when we go from
0:42:44 2010 to 2015, that’s the great rewiring of childhood, in 2010, kids are still using the
0:42:48 technology to meet up with each other.
0:42:50 You text your friend on your cell phone, you have to press the seven key three times to
0:42:53 make an S, so it’s like, see you at the pizza shop at four.
0:42:58 By 2015, everything’s different.
0:43:00 You’re now posting stuff and hoping strangers will like it or follow you.
0:43:03 You are not active as much.
0:43:04 You don’t touch as much.
0:43:05 You don’t put your arm around anyone as much.
0:43:07 You’re not out in nature as much.
0:43:08 You don’t laugh as much.
0:43:10 Life is different in 2015 from 2010, and that’s the point that McLuhan and Postman would have
0:43:14 made if they had seen this happening.
0:43:24 After one more short break, we’ll hear some of Height’s practical solutions to the problems
0:43:29 we’ve been talking about.
0:43:31 Stay with us.
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0:46:54 You know, every book like this has the obligatory, “All right, here are my 10 steps to solving
0:46:59 the problem I just diagnosed over the last 275 pages.”
0:47:04 Maybe I roll my eyes at this, but I honestly think you have some serious practical suggestions
0:47:10 that even people who aren’t persuaded much by your general argument would probably find
0:47:16 agreeable.
0:47:17 That’s right.
0:47:18 Could you maybe just lay out some of those now?
0:47:19 Yeah, sure.
0:47:20 So the key to understanding how we fell into this trap and how we get out is to see that
0:47:24 we’re stuck in a collective action trap.
0:47:27 And the reason why parents are pressured to give their kid a phone at an early age is
0:47:30 because everyone else did.
0:47:32 And the reason why every kid, you know, my daughter wants to be on Snapchat, because
0:47:35 everyone else is.
0:47:37 And so it’s painful.
0:47:38 And I’ve said, “No,” and I’m not going to let her on.
0:47:41 She’s 14.
0:47:42 She’s a freshman in high school.
0:47:43 So I’m not going to let her on because lots of bad stuff happens on Snapchat, you know.
0:47:46 It’s an app created for strangers to send disappearing pictures, you know, for strangers to reach
0:47:51 out to you.
0:47:52 No, no, thank you.
0:47:53 But I’m imposing a cost on my daughter.
0:47:55 And what I’m hoping to do is say, “You know what?
0:47:57 If we just set a few norms, and even if only half of us follow them, it becomes very easy
0:48:03 to do the right thing.”
0:48:04 And so the four norms, they’re so simple.
0:48:06 No smartphone before high school.
0:48:08 Just give your kids a phone watch or a flip phone if you want to keep in touch with them.
0:48:11 Those are good for communication.
0:48:12 They’re not giant distraction devices.
0:48:14 The second norm is no social media till 16.
0:48:16 Let kids get through early puberty.
0:48:18 Early puberty is when the most damage is done, especially for girls.
0:48:21 Girls 11 to 14 should absolutely not be on social media.
0:48:25 Early 18, it really isn’t appropriate for minors, but I want a norm that we might actually
0:48:28 meet.
0:48:29 So I’m trying to set it at 16.
0:48:30 Can’t we all agree?
0:48:31 Let’s just wait till 16.
0:48:32 Just to be clear, you’re not suggesting that the state should ban this.
0:48:35 This is something that parents are going to have to implement with their own children?
0:48:38 Yes.
0:48:39 So as an American, I assume that our Congress is broken and we’ll never do anything.
0:48:43 And so I wrote this as norms that we could follow.
0:48:46 And if even a half of us stick to it, it’s very easy, because now your daughter comes
0:48:51 to you and says, “Mom, half of the kids have Instagram.”
0:48:54 And you say, “Okay.”
0:48:55 Well, you’ll be with a half that don’t.
0:48:57 So the third norm is phone-free schools.
0:48:59 And this is one where the data is unbelievably clear.
0:49:02 When I was in high school, if they’d said, “You know what?
0:49:04 You can bring in your television set, your VCR, your walkie-talkie, bring it all in,
0:49:09 put it on your desk, play with it during class,” like, “No, we would not have learned anything.”
0:49:13 So phone-free schools.
0:49:14 And that is happening.
0:49:15 That’s happening very fast, thank God.
0:49:17 And then the fourth is actually the most important in the sense that if we’re taking
0:49:20 away most screen time, which we have to do, we have to give them back a fun childhood.
0:49:26 And so the fourth norm is more independence, free play, and responsibility in the real
0:49:31 world.
0:49:32 That’s the rootedness.
0:49:33 Kids have to be rooted in the real world.
0:49:35 They have to be running around the physical world with other kids, unsupervised, making
0:49:39 the rules and forcing the rules, getting into arguments, settling arguments.
0:49:43 And so, you know, what I would urge you to do as the parent of a four or five-year-old
0:49:46 is in a year or two, your son might start having some friends that he plays with.
0:49:50 And by the time it’s seven or eight, you really could have a group of friends.
0:49:53 Try to find ways for the kids to hang out together unsupervised.
0:49:55 You know, I’m not saying at seven, they should be walking down to a store and buying stuff,
0:49:59 although that’s what most people did back during the crime wave.
0:50:02 But by eight or nine, they should have some independence.
0:50:04 And it’s so exciting for them when they’re out on their own.
0:50:08 So give them back a fun childhood.
0:50:09 Don’t make it like, “I’m going to deprive you of the thing that you most want.”
0:50:12 Make it like, “No, I want you to have fun in your childhood.”
0:50:16 And on the phones and schools thing, lots of schools have actually banned phones.
0:50:20 No, not really.
0:50:21 Well, some have, right?
0:50:22 No, they say they have.
0:50:23 So some have, yeah.
0:50:24 The ones that actually do it, the ones that actually do it, have tremendous results.
0:50:27 Where it has been tried in schools have banned phones.
0:50:31 What have the results been?
0:50:32 So most schools say they banned phones.
0:50:33 But all they mean is you’re not allowed to take out your phone during class.
0:50:37 You have to hide it in your lap or go to the bathroom if you want to text or look at pornography.
0:50:41 And that was the case in New York City public schools.
0:50:43 But going phone-free means you lock up the phone either in a special phone locker or in
0:50:49 a yonder pouch, which is these magnetic locking pouches.
0:50:51 That’s the only thing that counts as phone-free.
0:50:53 You need the phone to get to school.
0:50:54 I understand.
0:50:55 Come in, you put the phone away.
0:50:57 Now you have six hours, six or seven hours you have to actually be with other people.
0:51:02 You’re not forever elsewhere.
0:51:04 But if people have access to their phones, they’re forever elsewhere.
0:51:06 Why bother coming to school?
0:51:08 If all you’re going to be doing is be on your phone, why bother coming to school?
0:51:10 Just be remote.
0:51:11 So I’m collecting stories.
0:51:13 I’ve asked for counter stories.
0:51:14 No one can find one.
0:51:15 When a school goes phone-free, they say within weeks, within weeks, the amount of laughter
0:51:21 and fun goes up, discipline problems go down, bullying goes down, violence and detentions
0:51:26 go down.
0:51:27 I mean, this is the cheapest and easiest and most powerful cure for depression, anxiety,
0:51:32 loneliness in school.
0:51:33 It costs nothing.
0:51:34 I mean, honestly, unless you’re making some absurd libertarian case for personal autonomy
0:51:39 or something like that, I cannot even imagine what the argument would be.
0:51:43 Oh, it’s school shooters.
0:51:44 That’s the argument.
0:51:45 That’s the argument there.
0:51:46 Oh, the argument is, what if there’s a school shooter?
0:51:47 I want to know that my kid’s okay.
0:51:49 I want my kid to be able to call for help.
0:51:51 But school security experts say, if there is an actual intruder in the school, if there’s
0:51:55 someone with a gun in the school, what you want is for all the kids to be quiet and to
0:51:59 do the things that they drilled for.
0:52:01 What you don’t want is for all the kids to pull out their phone and start crying to their
0:52:04 parents.
0:52:05 Boy, I have lots of thoughts on that, but I’m just going to set that aside because that
0:52:08 would open up a whole other thing.
0:52:11 I guess a big lingering question here is, do you think we have the institutional and
0:52:15 collective will to implement any of these changes, much less all of them?
0:52:20 Yes.
0:52:21 I’m confident that we do.
0:52:22 You and I have both been deep into the problems of democracy and the role of social media
0:52:27 in making liberal democracy difficult.
0:52:30 And there, I have a few ideas that might help, but we’re never going to do them.
0:52:33 And even if we did, I don’t know how much they would help.
0:52:35 I’m pretty pessimistic about what technology is doing to our democracy.
0:52:39 But what it’s doing to our children.
0:52:40 The solutions are so easy.
0:52:42 They cost nothing.
0:52:43 They’re totally bipartisan, red states, blue states, Democrats and Republicans in the
0:52:48 Senate and the House, like everyone’s in favor of these things.
0:52:50 So here is one of the biggest national problems we face that we’re harming our children.
0:52:56 We’re reducing their abilities.
0:52:57 The solution is actually pretty easy.
0:52:59 It costs almost nothing and we can do it within a year.
0:53:02 So it’ll take longer to work its way through.
0:53:05 It’s hard to take the phones away from high school kids who’ve been on them for years.
0:53:08 But if we can get it entirely out of elementary and middle school, it’ll just take a few years
0:53:13 before those kids are the ones who are in high school.
0:53:16 So I think we can really solve this problem in three or four years.
0:53:19 There may be lingering questions about causality and we’re obviously talking about an incredibly
0:53:25 complicated social environment, but, and this is just my opinion, people can quibble with
0:53:32 the specifics of your case.
0:53:35 But the point about phones and social media creating problems for all of us, fragmenting
0:53:41 our attention, distracting us from learning, pulling us away from the real world and real
0:53:46 connections with other people, dragging us into these shallow, never-ending status games.
0:53:52 This is not good and we know it’s not good and I don’t need a peer-reviewed study to
0:53:57 tell me that it’s not good.
0:54:00 In this case, it’s not like we’re reviewing for an academic journal and we’re saying we’re
0:54:04 not going to let anything in until we’re certain.
0:54:06 When there is an epidemic, there’s a public health threat, and when the cost of action
0:54:10 is trivial, nobody gets hurt if we impose my four norms, and the risk of not acting,
0:54:16 if I’m right, is beyond comprehension, another generation lost to mental illness and reduced
0:54:21 learning.
0:54:22 Of course, look, it’s always good that we have skeptics.
0:54:23 They keep me and Gene Twenge honest.
0:54:25 They push us on certain points.
0:54:26 But to say there’s no evidence and we don’t think we should do anything until we’re certain,
0:54:32 that’s a misunderstanding of the role of science in society.
0:54:36 Science doesn’t require absolute certainty.
0:54:38 It doesn’t even require settled science before we can act.
0:54:41 The tobacco industry, the oil industry, they’ve tried to muddy the waters and say, “Oh, it’s
0:54:45 not settled science.
0:54:46 There’s some contradictory findings.”
0:54:48 Now there, the cost of acting was quite expensive, but we did it anyway.
0:54:51 Here the cost is nothing.
0:54:53 That’s why I think we can do it.
0:54:54 We’re seeing action by legislators, oh, and in Britain, they’re way ahead of us.
0:54:58 Parents are rising up, forming groups.
0:55:00 Their government is acting.
0:55:01 They’ve mandated phone free schools.
0:55:03 So in Britain, they’re going to take care of it.
0:55:05 I just continue to believe that to tinker in such fundamental ways with our minds and
0:55:10 our attention and our presence at this scale is pretty wild.
0:55:16 And if you use these technologies, you can’t tell me that they haven’t changed you in some
0:55:22 way.
0:55:23 How many people listening to this can’t go to the bathroom or brush their teeth or cook
0:55:28 a meal without grabbing their phone?
0:55:30 I’m not even saying you’re a bad person or it’s necessarily a bad thing.
0:55:32 I do it.
0:55:33 I’m just saying that we have engineered this compulsion and that’s a pretty big deal.
0:55:39 We may not fully understand the implications yet, but it’s a big deal.
0:55:43 I couldn’t put it any better.
0:55:45 Whatever tools we have, it becomes like an extension of our bodies, of our nervous systems.
0:55:49 So we are fundamentally rewiring our sense of self and our interaction with technology.
0:55:54 I don’t want to say no, we shouldn’t do that, but I sure as hell want to say we shouldn’t
0:55:58 do it on children unless we have strong evidence that it’s not harmful.
0:56:02 And since what we’re getting is increasingly strong evidence that it is harming at a scale
0:56:05 beyond anything you can imagine.
0:56:08 This is, I think, the greatest destruction of human capital in human history.
0:56:12 I don’t think there’s ever been a 10-year period where we destroyed more human capital
0:56:15 than we have in the last 10 years.
0:56:17 Is there a happier point on which to end?
0:56:20 Yes, that we’re going to fix this this year.
0:56:23 And I don’t mean everything gets all better in a year.
0:56:25 What I mean is our expectations, our understanding of technology in children is just different.
0:56:30 And a year or two from now, it’ll be common knowledge that you just don’t give a two or
0:56:34 three-year-old an iPad to play with for hours each day.
0:56:38 It’ll be common knowledge that it’s okay to sit and watch a story with your kid, but
0:56:41 you don’t give the device to the kid when they’re very young.
0:56:45 You don’t let your 11-year-old daughter lie about her age and go on Instagram and open
0:56:50 an account and share photos of herself in a bathing suit with strange men.
0:56:53 You just don’t do that.
0:56:54 So I think we can change, and we’re going to change, our expectations about this and
0:56:59 our norms.
0:57:00 We’re going to change it within a year or two.
0:57:01 A year or two from now, it’s going to be very different.
0:57:02 And it’s going to be much easier.
0:57:03 So it’s just in time for you, Sean, because when your kid is begging for an iPhone, the
0:57:08 best that he’ll be able to say is, “Dad, 25% of the kids in my class have an iPhone.”
0:57:14 Well, when I tell him he can’t have one, I’m going to say, “It’s Jonathan Hight’s fault.”
0:57:17 So I’ll forward your contact information to him.
0:57:20 Fine.
0:57:21 But you also have to tell him, “Oh, and the playdates that you have, the two-day sleepovers
0:57:24 that you have with your four best friends, thank Jonathan Hight for that too.”
0:57:28 Once again, the book is called “The Anxious Generation.”
0:57:31 Jonathan Hight, thanks so much for doing this, man.
0:57:33 Sean, thanks for your many, many years of excellent work on social science, and it’s
0:57:38 always a pleasure to talk to you.
0:57:39 Thank you.
0:57:40 All right, another one in the books.
0:57:51 I really appreciate this conversation.
0:57:53 As you can tell, I was pretty honest about this at the beginning.
0:57:56 I mostly agree with Hight.
0:57:58 I think he’s right, or I think he’s right enough, certainly, to take seriously.
0:58:03 And I tried to be honest about that, but also push a little bit in some of the opposite directions,
0:58:09 and hopefully we got some clarity there.
0:58:12 I’m curious if you felt the same way.
0:58:14 Do you think I’m right?
0:58:15 Do you think he’s right?
0:58:16 If you think I missed something, or if you think he missed something, send me an email
0:58:20 and let me know.
0:58:21 You can drop us a line at thegrayarea@box.com, and please rate, review, subscribe.
0:58:27 That stuff helps get the show in front of more ears.
0:58:30 This episode was produced by John Arons, edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Patrick Boyd,
0:58:37 and Alex Overington wrote our theme music.
0:58:40 New episodes of The Gray Area Drop on Mondays, listen and subscribe.
0:58:44 This show is part of VOX.
0:58:57 Support VOX’s journalism by joining our membership program today.
0:59:01 Go to vox.com/members to sign up.
0:59:03 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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0:01:52 What happens when we die?
0:01:54 I’ve always been a cold hard materialist on this one.
0:02:03 Our brain shuts down, consciousness fades away, and the lights go out.
0:02:12 And beyond that, what else is there to say?
0:02:16 I had no experience of life before I was born, and I expect to have no experience of life
0:02:22 after I die.
0:02:26 As best I can tell, that’s the most reasonable assumption we can make about death.
0:02:31 But most reasonable does not mean definitely true.
0:02:36 There’s the conventional view, taken by major religions, that the shape of your afterlife
0:02:42 depends on the quality of your actual life.
0:02:46 I have my issues with that, but it’s a widely held belief.
0:02:51 The point, in any case, is that this is one of the oldest questions we have.
0:02:56 Which means there are all sorts of theories about how consciousness, in some form, might
0:03:01 survive the death of the body.
0:03:04 However unlikely these possibilities might be, they’re not impossible.
0:03:11 And if they’re not impossible, how seriously should we take them?
0:03:18 I’m Sean Elling, and this is the Gray Area.
0:03:31 Today’s guest is Sebastian Younger.
0:03:35 He’s a former war reporter, a documentarian, and the author of several books, including
0:03:41 his most recent one called “In My Time of Dying.”
0:03:46 Younger’s not the religious or superstitious type.
0:03:50 He’s a self-described atheist and a science-minded rationalist.
0:03:55 And I suspect he would have given a very confident response to that question about life after
0:04:01 death, until the day he almost died.
0:04:06 An experience that didn’t necessarily transform his worldview.
0:04:11 But it did shake it up.
0:04:14 I wouldn’t say my answer to the “what happens when we die” question is all that different
0:04:20 after reading the book.
0:04:22 But I would say that I’m less certain about it.
0:04:26 And that’s sort of the point.
0:04:38 Sebastian Younger, welcome to the show.
0:04:40 Very nice to be here.
0:04:41 Thanks for having me.
0:04:42 Before we get to the strangeness of your near-death experience, can you just describe what happened
0:04:51 to you the day you almost died, just to set the scene here a little bit?
0:04:55 Yeah.
0:04:56 So I was 58 years old.
0:04:57 It was four years ago.
0:04:59 I’ve been a lifelong athlete.
0:05:01 My health is like very good.
0:05:04 And so it never occurred to me that I would have a sudden medical issue that would send
0:05:09 me to the ER or kill me, sort of drop me in my boots, as it were.
0:05:14 So I just had no thoughts like that about myself.
0:05:18 And so one afternoon, it was during COVID, my family and I were living in a house in
0:05:23 the woods in Massachusetts that has no cell phone coverage.
0:05:25 It’s at the end of a dead-end dirt road.
0:05:28 On the property is a cabin, no electricity or anything like that.
0:05:32 And we went out there to spend a couple of hours.
0:05:35 And literally in mid-sentence, I felt this sort of bolt of pain in my abdomen.
0:05:40 And I couldn’t make it go away.
0:05:41 I sort of twisted and turned.
0:05:43 I thought it was indigestion, and I stood up and almost fell over.
0:05:47 And so I sat back down.
0:05:48 I said to my wife, “I’m going to need help.
0:05:50 I don’t know what’s wrong.
0:05:51 I’ve never felt anything like this.”
0:05:53 What was happening, I later found out, was that I had an undiagnosed aneurysm in my
0:05:58 pancreatic artery.
0:06:00 And one of several arteries that go to the pancreas, and one of them had a bulge in it
0:06:05 from a weak spot.
0:06:07 And aneurysms are widow-makers.
0:06:09 I mean, they’re really, really deadly, particularly in the abdomen, because it’s hard for the
0:06:14 doctors to find them.
0:06:15 And if you’re stabbed in the stomach and an artery is severed, the doctors sort of know
0:06:18 where to put their finger as it were to plug the leak.
0:06:21 But if it’s just internal hemorrhage, your abdomen’s basically a big bowl of spaghetti.
0:06:25 It’s very, very hard to find it.
0:06:27 So I was losing probably a pint of blood every 10 or 15 minutes, and you know, there’s like
0:06:32 10 pints in the human body, 10 or 12 pints.
0:06:35 So you can do the math.
0:06:37 And I was a one-hour drive from the nearest hospital.
0:06:40 I was a human hourglass, basically.
0:06:42 So by the time they got me there, I’d probably lost two-thirds of my blood.
0:06:45 My blood pressure was 60 over 40, and I was in end-stage hemorrhagic shock.
0:06:50 I was probably 10 minutes from dead, but I was still conscious.
0:06:53 Blessedly, I had no idea that I was dying.
0:06:56 I was enormously confused by what was happening, and I had no clue about the seriousness of
0:07:01 it.
0:07:02 60 over 40.
0:07:03 My God, how are you even still alive at that point?
0:07:06 That’s sort of where you cross over into a place where you can’t recover from even if
0:07:10 you get a massive blood transfusion, which I got.
0:07:12 I mean, if you need that much blood, receiving that much blood causes other problems that
0:07:17 can also kill you.
0:07:19 So you can die in the hospital from blood loss with plenty of blood in your veins, because
0:07:24 other things happen chemically in your bloodstream that will kill you.
0:07:28 It’s deadly.
0:07:29 And I was sort of right on the cusp of when that could reasonably have started to happen.
0:07:32 And I’d actually had sort of intermittent pain in my abdomen for about six months, which
0:07:37 just being an idiot dude, I just ignored, right?
0:07:40 And it was bad enough to make me sit down at times.
0:07:42 I was like, “Oh, what’s that?”
0:07:43 And then it would go away, and I’d forget about it, and that was probably the aneurysm
0:07:47 getting to a kind of critical point where it was starting to leak a little bit, starting
0:07:52 to bleed a little bit or something.
0:07:53 And if I’d gone to the doctor, I could have avoided a lot of drama, but I didn’t.
0:07:58 Yeah.
0:07:59 Note to everyone in the audience.
0:08:00 If you know something’s wrong with your body, don’t fuck around.
0:08:02 Go get it checked out.
0:08:03 Yeah.
0:08:04 I mean, pain’s an indicator, and persistent pain’s an indicator.
0:08:07 And frankly, your unconscious mind, listen, I’m an atheist, I’m a rationalist, I’m an
0:08:13 anti-mystic.
0:08:14 I hate woo-woo stuff.
0:08:15 My dad was a physicist and an atheist, just, like, that’s who I am.
0:08:19 But the unconscious mind actually has access to a lot of information about the body.
0:08:24 It communicates with your conscious mind in these strange signals and intuitions and feelings.
0:08:29 And one of the stranger things about this was the first time I felt this pain in my abdomen,
0:08:33 I had this bizarre thought.
0:08:35 I thought, “Huh, that’s the kind of pain where you later find out, oh my God, I have terminal
0:08:40 cancer.”
0:08:41 Right.
0:08:42 I immediately thought this was a mortal threat, and then immediately dismissed it as, you
0:08:46 know, listen, you just have a pain in your abdomen, like, don’t worry about it.
0:08:49 And what was the survival rate for your condition that day?
0:08:52 The survival rate is as low as 30%, but I assume that that’s for a reasonable transport
0:09:00 time to the hospital.
0:09:02 It took me 90 minutes to get to a doctor.
0:09:05 My survival chances were extremely low.
0:09:10 The brain does such strange things in these moments.
0:09:14 You knew on some level that something was really wrong here, but even at the hospital,
0:09:20 you write about not having any grand thoughts about life or mortality, or even about your
0:09:25 family.
0:09:26 You wrote, “I had all the introspection of a gut shot coyote,” which is a great line.
0:09:31 But what the hell is that about?
0:09:33 You think it’s just a kind of defense mechanism in the brain, or is it just plain old-fashioned
0:09:38 shock?
0:09:39 I was in hemorrhagic shock and deep into hypothermia, which comes with hemorrhagic shock.
0:09:46 I was in an enormous amount of pain.
0:09:48 So blood in your abdomen, outside of your vascular system, is extremely irritating to the organs.
0:09:54 I was in and out of consciousness, which I didn’t know.
0:09:56 I mean, if you go in and out of consciousness, you don’t know it.
0:10:00 You think it’s all one stream of consciousness, but actually what drops out is the parts where
0:10:05 you’re unconscious.
0:10:06 You have no idea you’re in and out of consciousness.
0:10:08 So I didn’t know that about the situation.
0:10:11 And it was belly pain.
0:10:12 And I had this sort of distant thought, “You may turn out you’re going to wake up in the
0:10:15 hospital tomorrow morning with really grim news that you have a tumor in your abdomen.”
0:10:18 And I sort of was aware that that might happen, but I didn’t know it was going down right
0:10:23 now.
0:10:24 I had no idea.
0:10:25 And I had the level of sort of situational awareness that someone who’s really, really
0:10:30 drunk might have.
0:10:32 And pain turns you into an animal.
0:10:34 I was an animal.
0:10:35 I was a wounded animal.
0:10:36 So when this happened, if your wife, Barbara, wasn’t with you, if you were out running or
0:10:42 something like that, you’re probably dead right now.
0:10:45 We’re not talking.
0:10:46 I mean, how much did that thought rack your brain in the aftermath?
0:10:49 Oh, afterwards, I was tormented by that.
0:10:52 I mean, any other situation, I mean, the traffic jam and the cross-France Expressway, if I
0:10:58 was on an airplane, hiking in the woods, running, I mean, anything, like anything.
0:11:03 And as it was, I barely made it.
0:11:05 Another strange thing that I should mention about the unconscious.
0:11:09 So two nights prior at dawn, so about 36 hours before the aneurysm ruptured, I was woken
0:11:16 by this terrible dream, a nightmare, and it was that I was dead.
0:11:22 Not that I was dying or going to die.
0:11:23 I was dead.
0:11:24 I was a spirit.
0:11:26 And I was looking down on my family and they were grieving.
0:11:29 They were sobbing.
0:11:31 And I was trying to yell to them and wave my arms like, “I’m here.
0:11:34 It’s okay.
0:11:35 I’m right here.
0:11:36 It’s all right.
0:11:37 Everything’s okay.”
0:11:38 And then I was made to understand that I had died.
0:11:41 I was beyond their reach and there was no going back and this was just how it is.
0:11:46 And I was headed out into the darkness.
0:11:48 And I was so bereft, I was so anguished by this, that it woke me up.
0:11:53 I mean, I was just like, “Oh, my God, thank God, that was just a dream.”
0:11:58 As a rationalist, I have to sort of think, “All right, your unconscious mind has some
0:12:02 mechanism of knowing if there’s a mortal threat going on and it doesn’t know how to
0:12:06 communicate with dumbass up there who’s, “Okay, six months of pain, he’s still not taking
0:12:10 notice.
0:12:11 All right, now what do we do?
0:12:12 All right, well, let’s give him a really bad nightmare.”
0:12:14 Right?
0:12:15 Oh, he’s still not listening?
0:12:17 Well, we tried.
0:12:18 You know, I feel like the unconscious mind is sort of like a little bit in that place
0:12:21 with us.
0:12:22 Yeah, we’re about to careen into some potentially woo-woo stuff here.
0:12:25 So let me pause, back up just a hair, and then we’ll ease into it.
0:12:31 Because I want to actually get to the near-death experience itself.
0:12:35 The way you write about it in the book is so unbelievably vivid.
0:12:39 I mean, I really feel like I experienced it, just reading it.
0:12:44 There’s a moment when the surgeons and the nurses are working on you and they’re on
0:12:50 your right side, and then on your left side, there’s this pit of blackness, it’s scary
0:12:56 as hell, and your father, who I think has been dead eight years at this point, appears
0:13:02 before you or above you.
0:13:05 Tell me about that.
0:13:06 Right, yeah.
0:13:07 So the doctor was busy trying to put a large-gauge needle into my jugular vein, you know, through
0:13:12 my neck.
0:13:13 It sounds a lot worse than it actually is.
0:13:16 It didn’t particularly hurt, but…
0:13:17 It sounds bad.
0:13:18 It sounds bad, yeah.
0:13:19 I mean, I think they numb you with lidocaine, so actually I didn’t feel much except the
0:13:22 kind of pressure.
0:13:23 But anyway, so they were working on that, and seeming to take a long time, and suddenly
0:13:29 this black pit opened up underneath me that I started getting pulled into.
0:13:33 You know, again, think of me as extremely drunk, right?
0:13:36 Like, I’m like, “Whoa, what’s that?”
0:13:37 Like it didn’t occur to me like, “Black pit, that makes no sense.”
0:13:41 Like, I was like, “Oh, there’s the pit.
0:13:43 Like why am I getting pulled into it?”
0:13:45 And I didn’t know I was dying, but I sort of had this animal sense that if you don’t want
0:13:49 to go into the infinitely black pit that just opened up underneath you, like that’s just
0:13:53 a bad idea.
0:13:54 And if you get sucked in there, you’re probably not coming back.
0:13:57 Like that was the feeling I had about it.
0:13:59 And I started to panic, and that’s when my dead father appeared above me in this sort
0:14:03 of energy form.
0:14:04 It’s hard to describe.
0:14:05 I can’t describe what it was like.
0:14:07 I just perceived him.
0:14:09 It’s not like there was a poster board of him floating above me.
0:14:11 It wasn’t quite that tangible.
0:14:13 And he was communicating this incredible benevolence and love.
0:14:16 He’s like, “Listen, you don’t have to fight it.
0:14:18 You can come with me.
0:14:19 Don’t take care of you.
0:14:20 It’s going to be okay.”
0:14:22 I was horrified.
0:14:23 I was like, “Go with you.
0:14:25 You’re dead.
0:14:26 I’m not going anywhere with you.
0:14:27 Like what are you talking about?
0:14:29 Get out of here.”
0:14:30 Like I was horrified.
0:14:32 And I said to the doctor, because I was conversing, “You got to hurry.
0:14:36 You’re losing me.
0:14:37 I’m going right now.”
0:14:38 And I didn’t know where I was going, but I was very clear.
0:14:39 I was headed out, and I did not want to.
0:14:42 And I knew he had to hurry.
0:14:43 So you say communicating.
0:14:44 What does that mean?
0:14:45 Is he actually talking to you?
0:14:46 Is it gesturing or just a feeling, or is it telepathically or what?
0:14:51 I didn’t hear words, right?
0:14:53 But his communication to me, I guess you would have to classify it as telepathic.
0:14:57 But it was very specific.
0:14:59 You don’t have to fight this, “I’m here.
0:15:02 I’ll take care of you.
0:15:03 You can come with me.”
0:15:05 And so, you know, again, now I’m a rationalist, but I’m a rationalist with questions.
0:15:11 Like I’m a rationalist with a serious question of like, “What was that?
0:15:16 Is it just neurochemistry?”
0:15:17 I mean, when I woke up the next morning in the ICU and the nurse came in, and I was
0:15:22 in a lot of distress.
0:15:23 I was throwing up lead.
0:15:24 I was a freaking mess.
0:15:25 I was still not, I could have still died at that point.
0:15:27 I mean, I was not out of the woods at all.
0:15:30 And the nurse came in and said, “Well, congratulations, Mr. Younger.
0:15:33 You made it.
0:15:34 We almost lost you last night.
0:15:35 You almost died.”
0:15:36 And when she said that, that’s when I remembered my father.
0:15:40 I was like, “Oh my God, I saw my father, and I saw the pit.”
0:15:44 And it all came rushing back to me.
0:15:46 A rationalist with questions.
0:15:48 I love that.
0:15:49 That may be my religion if I have one.
0:15:53 I mean, given what I know about your dad from this book, that he would appear to you almost
0:15:59 like an angel, seems like exactly the kind of thing he and you, hyper-rationalists and
0:16:05 whatnot, would have dismissed as supernatural nonsense before this.
0:16:10 He would have said, as I’m sort of inclined to say, but not entirely.
0:16:14 I think he would have said, “Well, you know, I’m sure there’s sort of neurochemical explanations.
0:16:19 It’s the brain in distress.
0:16:21 There’s probably all kinds of things going on, neurochemically, high cortisol levels,
0:16:25 this and that, like dopamine, whatever.
0:16:29 I mean, you know, you can make the brain hallucinate.
0:16:31 You can, you know, epileptics have visions.
0:16:33 You know, I mean, there’s analogous phenomena in life with people.
0:16:36 And so I think he probably would have ascribed it to that.
0:16:39 And I’m inclined to as well, you know, sort of, except there’s one thing that sort of
0:16:43 stuck in my mind that the doctors and the rationalists couldn’t quite explain.
0:16:48 And let me just say, reiterate again, I’m an atheist.
0:16:52 Now, I still do not believe in God.
0:16:55 Atheist means that you do not believe in God.
0:16:56 I do not believe in God, but I do have serious questions about whether we understand the
0:17:01 nature of the universe and the physical reality that we inhabit.
0:17:05 That there is a serious question.
0:17:06 And that’s different from God.
0:17:08 There’s something you describe in the book that was maybe the most holy shit moment for
0:17:13 me and there are several holy shit moments in this story.
0:17:17 So a few days before your, your dad died of heart failure, you had an intense dream.
0:17:23 He was in Boston, you were in New York, but you woke up in the middle of the night as
0:17:28 though he was screaming your name from the next room.
0:17:31 You look at the clock and it was 315 a.m.
0:17:35 And then a few hours later, your mom calls tells you to go to Boston as soon as you can
0:17:39 because your dad tried to throw himself out of bed in a panic.
0:17:44 And when you asked her what time that happened, she said 315 a.m.
0:17:49 I mean, come on, Sebastian, what the hell is that?
0:17:54 That’s crazy.
0:17:55 It is crazy.
0:17:56 And again, the rationalist in me is like, okay, does that prove there’s a God?
0:17:59 No, not really.
0:18:00 It means that humans can communicate in ways that science doesn’t understand and even
0:18:05 communicate across distance.
0:18:07 And there’s at the quantum level, at the subatomic level, there actually is instantaneous communication
0:18:14 between particles across vast distances, even across the entire universe.
0:18:19 And that’s known to be true.
0:18:20 And we don’t know why we can’t explain how that works, but we know that it does work.
0:18:24 So if that’s possible, can human minds communicate with quote, telepathy?
0:18:31 That seems to be something that almost everyone experiences with people they love.
0:18:34 So to me, it stands to reason that it’s possible.
0:18:36 Well, you talked to plenty of doctors and scientists about this.
0:18:41 You even tried talking to some of your own doctors about your experience.
0:18:46 What do they make of it?
0:18:47 I’m sure they take you seriously, but how seriously do they take this story and stories
0:18:53 like this, near-death experiences, that is?
0:18:56 Well, it depends on the doctor.
0:18:58 And who you’re talking to depends on the researcher.
0:19:00 And there’s a whole body of research conducted by doctors and neurobiologists and all kinds
0:19:06 of very accomplished, educated people.
0:19:10 There’s a lot of documentation of what are called NDEs, near-death experiences, and sort
0:19:13 of hovering above loved ones as I did in my dream, or seeing a dead person show up to
0:19:20 escort you over the threshold, or very, very common for NDEs.
0:19:24 Now, I didn’t know this, so I wasn’t projecting something that I knew.
0:19:28 So some researchers have concluded that this is sort of verifiable proof that there is
0:19:34 some kind of afterlife that we don’t understand.
0:19:36 And they do use the word afterlife, which is, of course, on a semantic level is kind
0:19:41 of a problem, because death is the end of life.
0:19:44 So afterlife, I don’t even know what the quick word that means is clearly not life, but they
0:19:49 do come to that conclusion.
0:19:50 And then there’s a lot of other scientists and doctors, like nonsense, it’s neurobiology.
0:19:54 We can explain all of this.
0:19:56 And after I came home from the hospital, it was not a sort of joyful party.
0:20:01 I was enormously traumatized.
0:20:04 The fact that I’d almost left my children fatherless was devastating to me.
0:20:08 I became very sort of paranoid that now that I sort of looked over the precipice and realized
0:20:13 that any moment of any day, you can suddenly find yourself dying in entirely unpredictable
0:20:20 ways.
0:20:21 It really rattled me.
0:20:22 And then I got into this other existential bind, which was I started to worry that maybe
0:20:27 I had died and that I was a ghost and that I was sort of haunting my family and they
0:20:33 couldn’t see me.
0:20:34 And I just thought they could see me and were interacting with me, but actually I wasn’t
0:20:38 really there.
0:20:39 And I know that sounds totally silly, but it was a real fear.
0:20:42 And at one point I went to my wife and I was like, “Tell me I’m here.
0:20:45 Just tell me that I’m, you know, of course you’re here.”
0:20:48 And she sort of reassured me.
0:20:49 But in my mind, I’m like, “That’s exactly what a hallucination would say to you.”
0:20:53 Right?
0:20:54 Like I was in a real very, very difficult place, which is not uncommon for someone who survives
0:20:59 something like this.
0:21:00 So I started researching and eventually I tracked down researching NDE’s and quantum physics
0:21:06 and all this stuff, trying to explain what happened to me.
0:21:09 And party was kind of rooting that maybe there, wow, maybe there isn’t afterlife.
0:21:13 Maybe we don’t need to be scared of death, you know, like, oh, wow, these stories are
0:21:17 pretty hard to refute.
0:21:18 And then I’d read the rationalist, I was like, “Oh, well, like nice try, but this clearly
0:21:23 is just nonsense.”
0:21:25 So I called on some colleagues of my father who were younger than him, who were really
0:21:30 fond of my dad.
0:21:31 And I invited them for lunch and I told them what happened to me.
0:21:34 And I said, “What do you think my dad would have thought of this?”
0:21:37 And at one point I asked, “What would the odds be of my father reappearing above me, reconstituting
0:21:43 himself on some level above me as I was dying?
0:21:47 Are there odds for such a thing?”
0:21:49 And he said, “Well, this is how scientists think, right?”
0:21:53 He took me totally literally.
0:21:54 He was like, “All right, well, let’s see.”
0:21:56 He’s a random, he’s like, “Well, I would say probably about 10 to the minus 60.”
0:22:01 Very specific.
0:22:02 Very specific.
0:22:03 It’s a number with one chance and a number that has 60 zeros following it, roughly.
0:22:09 I was like, “What’s, what are you talking about?
0:22:12 How did you come to that number?”
0:22:13 He said, “Well, it’s roughly the odds of all the oxygen molecules converging in one corner
0:22:19 of the room and suffocating us.
0:22:22 Their odds are not zero.
0:22:23 They’re almost infinitely small, but they’re roughly, according to statistical mechanics,
0:22:28 they’re roughly one to the minus 60.
0:22:31 And so those are the odds of the molecules that made up your father or the subatomic particles
0:22:36 that made up your father randomly and miraculously having a reunion in the corner of the room.
0:22:46 There are numbers for this.
0:22:47 And so at that point, I realized the infinite rationality of the scientific mind.
0:22:52 Yeah, I think when I got to that part of the book, I was reminded that I most definitely
0:22:57 do not have the brain of a physicist for better or worse.
0:23:01 Yeah, for better or worse.
0:23:02 That sort of focus of thought makes human relationships hard because my father missed
0:23:07 a lot of the sort of, the human element, right, the sort of emotional element.
0:23:12 He was a very sweet man, but very distant and had no idea how to relate to children
0:23:16 or really, I had sometimes a tough time with adults.
0:23:20 So when he appeared above me, it struck me as the most overtly loving, generous, big-hearted
0:23:27 thing he’d ever done.
0:23:33 When we get back from the break, what can science tell us about near-death experiences?
0:23:39 Stay with us.
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0:27:37 Getting back to the science, do we really understand what happens in the brain during
0:27:41 these experiences?
0:27:43 Do science have a firm grasp of this?
0:27:46 Yes and no.
0:27:48 There was a case where a man was dying, I think he’d had a stroke, and they had electrodes
0:27:54 attached to his skull to signal different brain activity to know how to treat him.
0:28:00 He passed some point of no return, and the doctor said, “It’s okay.
0:28:04 You can sort of turn the machines off, basically.”
0:28:06 But the sensors were still in place on his skull, and so they had the chance to watch
0:28:11 what was happening to the brain waves in real time as a person died.
0:28:20 What they found was that in the 30 seconds before and after the moment of death, and
0:28:25 of course death isn’t just confined to a single moment, it’s a spectrum, but there was a surge
0:28:30 in brain activity related to dreaming and memories and all kinds of other things.
0:28:36 One of the things that might happen when people die is that they experience this sort of flood
0:28:41 of sensations from their life.
0:28:43 Why would they?
0:28:44 Who knows?
0:28:45 It’s hard to come up with this sort of Darwinian reason, like how would that be adaptive?
0:28:48 The person’s dying.
0:28:49 It’s not a question of survival and procreation, and Darwinism is not concerned with emotional
0:28:54 comfort.
0:28:55 It doesn’t matter in those sort of Darwinian arithmetic, so it’s hard to know what to
0:28:57 make of that, but they did have one chance to do that.
0:29:00 Science is reductionist by design, and you can study near-death experiences and you can
0:29:07 map the neurochemical changes, and you can give a purely materialist explanation for
0:29:14 them.
0:29:15 But do you think it’s wise to leave it there, or do you think there’s something just inherently
0:29:20 mysterious about this that we just can’t quite understand?
0:29:25 At one point, someone said to me, “You couldn’t explain what happened to you in rational terms.
0:29:29 Why didn’t you turn to mystical terms?”
0:29:34 And I said, “Because rational terms is what an explanation is, and the alternative is
0:29:42 a story,” and humans use stories to comfort themselves about things they can’t explain.
0:29:49 I don’t choose to use the God story or the afterlife story to comfort myself about the
0:29:54 unexplainable, which is like, “What’s going to happen when I die?”
0:29:57 But let me say that the one thing that really stood out, I sort of bought all the neurochemical
0:30:03 explanations, all of the sort of hard-boiled rationalists, like we’re biological beings.
0:30:07 When we die, that’s it, and the flurry of experiences that dying people have is just
0:30:12 the dying brain frantically bombarding us with signals, like, “What’s going on?
0:30:18 Stop.
0:30:19 Stop.
0:30:20 Stop.
0:30:21 Stop.”
0:30:22 You know, that kind of sort of neurological confusion.
0:30:23 Except for one thing, and what I don’t understand is this, like, if you give a roomful of people
0:30:27 at LSD, we know that 100% of those people will have hallucinations.
0:30:34 We know why.
0:30:35 We know how that works.
0:30:36 There’s no mystery there.
0:30:37 You don’t need God to explain that.
0:30:39 But they’ll all hallucinate different things, right?
0:30:42 And what’s strange about dying is that only the dying seem to see the dead, and they do
0:30:48 that in societies all around the world and have for ages.
0:30:51 I mean, there’s many historical accounts of this as well, and the people who aren’t dying
0:30:56 do not see the dead.
0:30:58 And often the dead are unwelcome, and they’re a shock.
0:31:01 It’s not some reassuring vision of Aunt Betty, right?
0:31:04 It’s just like, “Dad, what are you doing here?”
0:31:06 Or my mother, as she died, she saw her dead brother, who she was not on speaking terms
0:31:11 with, and when she saw him, she was horrified.
0:31:14 She was like, “What’s he doing here?”
0:31:16 And I said, “Mommy, it’s your brother.
0:31:18 I mean, I just took a guess, right?
0:31:20 I said, “Mom, it’s your brother George.
0:31:22 You have to be nice to him.
0:31:23 He’s come a long way to see you.”
0:31:25 And she just frowned and said, “We’ll see about that,” you know, she died a day later.
0:31:29 So it’s not like these are comforting visions or in projections.
0:31:33 And the fact that only the dying see the dead is the one thing that science can’t quite
0:31:39 explain.
0:31:40 It’s the one thing that really does make me wonder, you know, maybe we don’t understand
0:31:44 everything in scientific terms.
0:31:46 Maybe there is something missing here that is very significant about how reality works,
0:31:52 how life and death work, what consciousness is, and ultimately what the universe is.
0:31:56 Yeah.
0:31:57 I don’t want to fetishize doubt or make a virtue of doubt, but this is the kind of stuff
0:32:01 that just leaves me in that same place, just the position of, “Man, I don’t really know.”
0:32:09 And I’m not sure it’s knowable.
0:32:10 And that’s okay.
0:32:11 Yeah.
0:32:12 I mean, like I said, some people rush in with stories to fill that gap.
0:32:15 A lot can go wrong there.
0:32:16 Yeah.
0:32:17 One of the theories about consciousness, a theory that Schrodinger has described to,
0:32:21 who was one of the pioneers of quantum physics, is that consciousness actually suffuses the
0:32:27 entire universe.
0:32:30 And there’s a kind of colossus of consciousness in the universe, which is 93 billion light
0:32:35 years wide at the moment, just so that you understand the scale of the universe.
0:32:41 And that our individual consciousness is sort of a very, very limited experience of
0:32:47 the universal consciousness.
0:32:48 It sort of scaled down to sort of the puny human size, but actually there is a universal
0:32:54 consciousness.
0:32:55 And there’s a theory called biocentrism that this consciousness completely affects how
0:32:59 the universe is constructed physically, that there’s a symbiotic relationship between physical
0:33:04 reality and consciousness where they actually depend on each other.
0:33:08 And you can’t prove it.
0:33:09 You can’t disprove it.
0:33:10 It’s a fascinating theory.
0:33:12 But it’s where there, for me, there’s a little bit of comfort.
0:33:15 Like, no, I do not believe in God.
0:33:16 And I certainly don’t believe in an afterlife where I, as Sebastian Junger, sort of continue
0:33:21 on without the need to eat or sleep, and I can kind of float around talking to all the
0:33:26 people I miss.
0:33:27 But it’s possible that when we die, that the sort of quantum information that involved
0:33:34 our identity and our consciousness is reunited with the grand consciousness, the colossus.
0:33:41 There is something there that I find a little comforting and scientifically possible, right?
0:33:46 It’s just we’re never going to prove it because I think we just don’t have the tools.
0:33:49 And even to say that there’s an afterlife is not to say that there’s a God necessarily.
0:33:55 There could be some post-life reality that we just don’t understand, or one that’s far
0:33:59 weirder than we can imagine.
0:34:01 But that would not mean that any of our religious stories are true.
0:34:06 It would just mean shit’s a lot weirder than we thought.
0:34:08 Yeah, I mean, as I say in the book, our understanding of reality might be akin to a dog’s understanding
0:34:14 of a television set.
0:34:15 No concept that what they’re watching is a product of the screen and the wider context
0:34:21 that produce the screen.
0:34:22 I mean, religious people, and I have obviously a number of friends who are religious, like
0:34:28 when they hear this story of mine, they’re very fond of saying, “So, are you still an
0:34:32 atheist?
0:34:33 Like you saw your dead father while you were dying.
0:34:35 Are you still an atheist?”
0:34:36 And of course, my pat little answer is, “Look, I saw my dad, not God.
0:34:40 Like if I’d seen God, we might have a conversation to have, but I saw my dad.”
0:34:43 And as you point out, it’s entirely possible that there could be some kind of creator God
0:34:50 that created biological life in the universe that when it dies, it dies absolutely and completely
0:34:56 and there’s no quote afterlife.
0:34:58 Or there could be a post-death existence at some quantum level that we don’t and can’t
0:35:03 understand in a completely physical universe that has no God.
0:35:07 The two things don’t require each other and you could have one or the other or neither
0:35:11 or both.
0:35:12 It’s all possible.
0:35:14 One of the medical paradoxes here is that people who are dying experience near total
0:35:23 brain function collapse and yet their awareness seems to crystallize, which seems impossible
0:35:31 on its face.
0:35:32 Do scientists have an explanation for this?
0:35:34 Is it even a paradox at all or does it just seem that way to someone on the outside who
0:35:37 doesn’t understand it?
0:35:38 I don’t think anyone knows.
0:35:40 You know, ultimately, no one even knows if what we perceive during life is true.
0:35:45 I mean, it’s known at the quantum level that observing a particle, a subatomic particle
0:35:51 changes its behavior.
0:35:52 And of course, when you observe something, it’s a totally passive act.
0:35:56 You’re not bombarding it with something, right?
0:35:58 You’re just watching.
0:36:00 If a particle, a photon is sent through two slits in an impassable barrier and it’s unobserved
0:36:06 by a conscious mind, it will go through both slits simultaneously.
0:36:12 And once you observe it, it’s forced to pick one slit.
0:36:16 So as the early physicists said, observation creates the reality that’s being observed
0:36:21 and then the snake starts to swallow its tail.
0:36:25 And it’s been proposed that the universe is one massive wave function of all possibilities,
0:36:32 of all things, and that the arrival of conscious thought, conscious perception forced the entire
0:36:39 observable universe to collapse into one single thing, which is the universe that we know.
0:36:45 The observer creates the reality that was being observed, including the entire universe
0:36:49 that the observer inhabits.
0:36:52 I will say this.
0:36:53 If there is a heaven or afterlife, I don’t think it’s what most people think it is, which
0:36:58 is a projection of our earthly wishes and a rather transparent one at that.
0:37:03 But it might be some bizarre quantum reality that I can’t even pretend to understand because
0:37:08 I don’t know the first thing about physics or quantum mechanics other than that great
0:37:12 line from Einstein calling it spooky action at a distance.
0:37:16 This is sort of where you land too, right?
0:37:18 That reality is just very strange and who the hell knows what’s really going on or what’s
0:37:21 really possible for that matter?
0:37:23 Yeah, I mean, at the quantum level, things happen that contradict everything we understand
0:37:28 about the macroscopic level.
0:37:30 So you can’t walk through two doorways at the same time.
0:37:33 You can’t be in two places at once, but at the quantum level, you can.
0:37:36 And so that opens the possibility of extremely strange things that are extremely strange in
0:37:42 the macroscopic world being absolutely ordinary in the quantum world.
0:37:47 What the granddaddy of them all is the universe.
0:37:52 The universe came from nothing and expanded from nothing to hundreds of millions of light
0:38:02 years across in an amount of time that is too small to measure.
0:38:09 So if that’s possible, and we know it’s possible because it happened, we can prove that it
0:38:14 happened.
0:38:15 We are proof that it happened.
0:38:17 If that’s possible, in some ways, what isn’t possible?
0:38:21 Just a question of how limited our brains are, our amazing brains, but how limited are
0:38:25 they in what we can perceive and explain?
0:38:29 You used the phrase “the other side” a lot in the book.
0:38:33 Someone was clinically dead, they glanced the other side, and then they came back.
0:38:36 I mean, on some level, this is just the only language we have to describe such things.
0:38:42 But what is your understanding of the other side as you sit here now?
0:38:48 Is it a place, is it more like an awareness, or is it just neurochemicals detonating in
0:38:52 our brains?
0:38:53 Well, I mean, my direct experience of it was it was an infinitely black, deep pit that
0:39:01 would swallow you and never let you back.
0:39:04 And where you would become part of the nothingness that’s in it.
0:39:08 Whatever you want to say about this, I did have a dream where I experienced being dead.
0:39:12 Whatever you want to make of that, I did have that dream.
0:39:15 And the experience of that dream, for whatever it’s worth, is that I was a spirit.
0:39:20 I didn’t exist physically, but I existed as a collection of thoughts, and that that entity
0:39:26 that was thinking was being pulled away from everything I knew and loved out into the nothingness
0:39:34 forever.
0:39:36 And there was a sense of the nothingness being an enormous circle that I was going to start
0:39:43 sort of like proceeding around.
0:39:46 And in infinitely huge circle, there was a sort of circularity to it, a kind of orbit
0:39:51 to it.
0:39:52 And I was getting pulled into this orbit of nothingness, and it made me panic, right?
0:39:57 It was horrified.
0:39:58 Like, there are my children, there’s my wife.
0:40:00 So for me, the other side is nothing.
0:40:04 I mean, it’s not like, oh, it’s the other bank of the river.
0:40:06 You know, as the joke goes, like, how do I get to the other side of the river?
0:40:09 You’re on the other side.
0:40:10 It’s not like that.
0:40:12 And that’s a kind of comforting vision, and it’s one that religions seem fond of.
0:40:16 But it’s not at all how I see it.
0:40:17 And you know, if it were that way, you’d be looking at an eternity of consciousness with
0:40:22 no escape, which is its own hell, right?
0:40:25 I mean, I could barely get through math class in high school, 50 minutes, right?
0:40:29 That was an eternity.
0:40:30 Like an eternity.
0:40:31 You really want to be conscious for eternity with no way out?
0:40:34 I mean, at least with life, if you need a way out, you can kill yourself.
0:40:37 There’s no way out of an eternity of consciousness.
0:40:40 And suppose that includes unbearable pain or grief, suppose it’s unpleasant.
0:40:45 People often talk about the near-death experience as though it’s a gift.
0:40:52 To get that close to death and survive, the story goes, is supposed to bring clarity and
0:40:57 peace or something like that.
0:40:59 Do you find this to be true?
0:41:01 It brought an enormous amount of trauma and anxiety and depression afterwards that I
0:41:06 eventually worked through.
0:41:08 And I mean work.
0:41:09 I mean, it was work to climb out of that.
0:41:11 The ICU nurse who told me that I’d almost died, she came back an hour later and said,
0:41:16 “How are you doing?”
0:41:17 And I said, “Not that well.”
0:41:19 And she said, “Try this.”
0:41:20 Instead of thinking about it like something scary, think about it like something sacred.
0:41:25 And then she walked out.
0:41:26 And so, as an atheist, I’m happy to use the word sacred for its other wonderful meanings.
0:41:32 You don’t need God to understand that some things are sacred.
0:41:36 So for me, that word means what’s the information that people need to lead lives with greater
0:41:44 dignity and courage and less pain?
0:41:48 That’s sacred knowledge.
0:41:49 So did I come back from that precipice with any sacred knowledge and took me a long time
0:41:55 to sort of answer that question?
0:41:57 And I read about Dostoevsky.
0:42:00 He sort of provided the final answer in some ways for me.
0:42:03 So when he was a young man, before he was a writer, he was a little bit of a political
0:42:06 agitator.
0:42:07 And this is the 1840s during the times of the Tsar and serfdom.
0:42:11 And he and his sort of like, his woke brothers were agitating for freeing the serfs.
0:42:17 Much like in the United States, there was talk about fending slavery.
0:42:21 And the Tsar didn’t take kindly to the intelligentsia talking about such nonsense.
0:42:26 So he threw these kids in jail.
0:42:27 But no one thought it was a particularly serious situation, right?
0:42:32 And then finally, they were released and they were sort of put into a wagon.
0:42:36 And they assumed they were going to be released to their families after eight months.
0:42:39 And instead, they were driven to a city square and tied to posts.
0:42:47 And a firing squad was arrayed against them.
0:42:51 And the rifles were leveled and the rifles were cocked and the men waited for the order
0:42:57 to fire.
0:43:00 And what happened, we know what Dostoevsky was thinking because a writer galloped into
0:43:07 the square and said, the Tsar forgives them.
0:43:10 It was all theater, but they didn’t know that, of course.
0:43:12 The Tsar forgives them, you know, do not stand down, I do not kill them.
0:43:17 So Dostoevsky threw a character that is widely thought to be a substitute for himself in
0:43:23 a book called The Idiot notices sunlight glinting off a roof and thinks to himself, in moments
0:43:29 I’m going to join the sunlight, I’ll be part of all things.
0:43:33 And that if I should survive this somehow by some miracle, I will treat every moment
0:43:39 as an infinity.
0:43:41 I’ll treat every moment like the miracle that it actually is.
0:43:45 And of course, that’s a almost Zen appreciation for reality that’s impossible to maintain
0:43:51 while you’re changing the baby’s diapers and the smoke alarms going off because you burned
0:43:55 the dinner and blah, blah, blah.
0:43:56 I mean, of course, we’re humans and we get sucked into our drama.
0:43:59 But if you can have some awareness at some point that life happens only in moments and
0:44:06 that those moments are sacred and miraculous.
0:44:08 If you can get there once in a while, if you can understand that the sunlight glinting off
0:44:13 the roof that you’re part of it and it’s part of you and one day it’s all going to be the
0:44:17 same thing.
0:44:18 If you can do that, you will have reached a place of real enlightenment and I think it
0:44:23 deepens your life.
0:44:24 You had a great line in the book, you wrote it’s an open question, whether a full and
0:44:28 unaverted look at death crushes the human psyche or liberates it and it really is, isn’t
0:44:35 it?
0:44:36 We all know that death is inevitable and that it can come on any day and living in constant
0:44:42 contact with that reality is supposed to be motivation for being more present, for living
0:44:47 in the moment, as they say.
0:44:48 But no matter how hard we think about it, our death remains an abstraction until it arrives.
0:44:55 And I just don’t know how you can be prepared for that.
0:44:57 And I love what your wife, Barbara, says about that in the book to the effect of that attitude
0:45:03 of life where you feel like you’re always at risk of losing everything.
0:45:08 That doesn’t seem to be healthy to be in that space all the time.
0:45:13 That’s the needle we have to thread is be aware of a mortality but not taken hostage
0:45:17 by that awareness, which is what happened to me in the immediate aftermath of almost
0:45:21 dying.
0:45:22 So I should say that two of the young men who were with Dostoevsky by his account were
0:45:30 insane for the rest of their lives.
0:45:31 They never psychologically recovered from the shock.
0:45:34 Dostoevsky went in another direction.
0:45:36 He went towards a kind of enlightenment.
0:45:38 I don’t know.
0:45:39 I guess never thinking about death seemed as unwise as obsessing over it.
0:45:43 So maybe there’s some sweet spot in between.
0:45:46 That’s where we’re supposed to toggle.
0:45:48 One of the definitions of consciousness is to be able to imagine yourself in the future.
0:45:52 Well, if you can imagine yourself in the future, you’re going to have to imagine yourself dead
0:45:55 because that’s what the future holds.
0:45:57 And once we’re neurologically complex enough to have that thought, it would be paralyzing
0:46:04 for the puny efforts of our lives if we weren’t able to use an enormous amount of denial.
0:46:09 So we have this abstract knowledge that all is for naught and we’re going to die.
0:46:14 But we have to keep it out of our daily awareness because otherwise it would demotivate us.
0:46:19 It would keep us apathetic and crazy.
0:46:21 And so it’s a balancing act that the human mind does.
0:46:26 And so the trick, I think in terms of a kind of healthy enlightenment, is to allow in that
0:46:30 awareness of death only to the extent where it makes life seem precious, but not to the
0:46:37 extent where it makes life seem so fleeting that why bother.
0:46:41 Maybe that’s just our fate as finite, painfully self-aware creatures.
0:46:45 We live, we keep rolling our boulders up the hill until the lights go out.
0:46:49 And as Camus says, we must imagine Sisyphus happy.
0:46:53 Oh, wonderful.
0:46:54 I didn’t know that quote.
0:46:55 It’s a wonderful quote.
0:47:05 After one more short break, we talk about how confronting death changes the way you
0:47:11 live.
0:47:13 Stay with us.
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0:50:41 You spent so much of your life taking risks, calculated risks, I would say.
0:50:46 Now that you’ve almost died, now that you’re a parent, the game has changed.
0:50:51 I imagine the calculus for you is much different as well.
0:50:55 Oh, I stopped war reporting after my buddy Tim was killed in 2011.
0:50:59 I saw what his death did to everyone who loved him, and I just realized that going off to
0:51:04 war suddenly looked like a selfish act, not a noble one.
0:51:07 And so I stopped doing it.
0:51:09 And then six years later, I had my first child, and I’m an older dad, so I feel extremely
0:51:14 lucky, extremely lucky to be a father, and I’m the most risk-averse person you’ll ever
0:51:20 meet now.
0:51:21 I won’t cross Houston Street against the walk light, I mean, you know, it’s ridiculous.
0:51:25 Being a parent is emancipatory in the sense that you’re not living for yourself anymore,
0:51:31 which I do believe, I’ve come to believe, is a happier, more fulfilling existence.
0:51:36 But it makes the prospect of death even worse because of what you leave behind, because
0:51:41 the people you love need you.
0:51:45 That is what terrifies me.
0:51:46 I had a recent scare with a mole, a funky-looking mole on my arm, and I was so worried about
0:51:52 it.
0:51:53 I mean, my wife was like, “You’re fine, you’re fine,” but I mean, I was Googling what does
0:51:58 Melanoma look like and all this shit?
0:52:00 Oh, Bob Marley had a Melanoma on his foot.
0:52:03 Oh, shit, that can happen to him.
0:52:05 Those are the thoughts running through my mind.
0:52:07 Not that I would cease to be, but that my son would not have a father, and that is the
0:52:13 most terrifying thought I’ve ever had.
0:52:15 I talked to a fireman, a father of four, I think, a fairly young man who was trapped
0:52:19 in a burning building.
0:52:20 He couldn’t get out.
0:52:21 I mean, he was so desperate, it was a brick exterior wall, and he started trying to punch
0:52:26 his way through it.
0:52:27 He obviously couldn’t, and he finally got to a window, there was zero visibility, it
0:52:32 was so filled with smoke, and he finally got to a window and threw himself out head first
0:52:36 and survived, and another guy didn’t survive.
0:52:38 But in those terrible moments, he kept thinking, “My son’s going to grow up without a father.”
0:52:44 Once you’re a parent, it’s foremost in your mind, and if you’re a parent when you’re
0:52:48 young, that’s the point in your life when you’re enormously driven by your own desires
0:52:52 and curiosity, and juggling that with the responsibilities of parenthood is extremely
0:52:57 hard, and frankly, it’s pretty easy to resent the obligations, right?
0:53:01 I mean, I’m glad I wasn’t a parent at 25.
0:53:03 I think I would have been a selfish parent, like I became a parent at 55, and by that
0:53:09 point, I didn’t interest me anymore, like I wanted to be a father.
0:53:13 In that sense, as long as I live a long life, it will have been a very good choice for me.
0:53:17 I didn’t interest me anymore.
0:53:19 That’s a good line.
0:53:20 Yeah.
0:53:21 I may have to steal that.
0:53:22 There’s a beautiful passage at the end of the book that I’d like to read if you don’t
0:53:27 line, because it feels like an appropriate way to wrap this up.
0:53:31 So now I’m courting you.
0:53:33 One might allow the quick thought that it is odd that so many religions, so many dying
0:53:39 people, so many ecstatics, and so many quantum physicists believe that death is not a final
0:53:45 severing, but an ultimate merging, and that the reality we take to be life is in fact
0:53:50 a passing distraction from something so profound, so real, so all-encompassing that many return
0:53:57 to their paltry bodies on the battlefield or hospital gurney, only with great reluctance
0:54:02 and a kind of embarrassment.
0:54:04 How can I pass up the truth for an illusion at the end of the quote?
0:54:09 What I would say to that is that there’s something in me that revolts against any ideology that
0:54:16 thinks of life itself as an illusion.
0:54:19 This is why I didn’t care for Christianity, the religion of my community when I was younger,
0:54:25 because I didn’t like the idea that this life is some kind of way station en route to the
0:54:31 next life, which is supposed to be the more important life.
0:54:35 But hearing these accounts of Indies, your account, it gives me pause.
0:54:39 I don’t know how else to say it.
0:54:40 I don’t know what to think.
0:54:41 I don’t know what’s true.
0:54:42 There’s something here, something worth taking seriously.
0:54:45 I guess that’s all I know.
0:54:46 I guess I’ll stop there and let you close this out with your own thoughts on that.
0:54:49 Yeah, so I’m a journalist and I try to keep my biases out of my work and I do not come
0:54:57 to assertions to conclusions that aren’t backed up by fact.
0:55:01 So what I found in my research is that there was an extraordinary number of people who,
0:55:11 on the threshold of death like I was, looked back and thought, “That’s not the real thing.
0:55:18 Life’s not the real thing.
0:55:19 I’m entering the real thing now.”
0:55:22 And then I was surprised that there were some extremely smart people and non-religious people
0:55:27 like Schrodinger, like the physicists, who had a sort of similar thought.
0:55:31 And so I put that in there not because I’m trying to convince anyone of anything and
0:55:36 I don’t even know what I believe particularly, but it’s good information.
0:55:40 It’s important.
0:55:41 It’s interesting information.
0:55:42 It either says something profound about the human brain’s capacity for self-delusion
0:55:49 or it contains something profound about the nature of physical reality.
0:55:53 And I doubt we’ll ever know which it is, but it’s important to keep both in mind and to
0:55:57 take all the information we can from these extraordinary experiences and to take them
0:56:01 at face value, to take them literally.
0:56:03 Like these people really did experience this.
0:56:06 What does it mean?
0:56:07 I’m going to leave it right there.
0:56:08 Once again, the book is called In My Time of Dying.
0:56:12 I read it cover to cover in a day, just a sublime and honest book.
0:56:17 I can’t recommend it enough.
0:56:19 Sebastian Younger, this was a pleasure.
0:56:21 Thank you.
0:56:22 Thank you.
0:56:23 I really enjoyed the conversation.
0:56:28 Alright, another episode about death.
0:56:39 How about that?
0:56:41 As you can tell, it’s a recent favorite of mine.
0:56:44 I just, I love the intensity of it and I love the honesty and for a show that prides itself
0:56:52 on leaning into the questions and not needing final answers.
0:56:58 This one felt pretty on brand.
0:57:02 What did you think?
0:57:03 You can drop us a line at the gray area at vox.com and let us know.
0:57:07 And if you don’t have time for that, great review, subscribe.
0:57:12 That stuff really helps and we appreciate it.
0:57:16 This episode was produced by John Arons, edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Patrick Boyd,
0:57:23 and Alex Overington wrote our theme music.
0:57:25 New episodes of The Gray Area Drop on Mondays, listen and subscribe.
0:57:33 The gray area is part of Vox, which doesn’t have a paywall.
0:57:36 Help us keep Vox free by going to vox.com/give.
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