Written by Christopher Kelly
Dec. 6, 2019
[0:00:00]
Christopher: Well, Christopher Ryan, thank you so much for coming to my Bonny Doon recording studio to record a podcast with me. I'm super excited to have you. Thank you.
Chris: Thank you. I love your office.
Christopher: It's great, isn't it?
Chris: The wallpaper is really impressive.
Christopher: It's excellent here. I first became aware of your work when our friend, Greg Potter, posted an interview that you did with Bruce Parry who is a lifetime hero of mine. Remember that interview?
Chris: Sure, of course, I've been looking forward to that for years, hoping I'd someday meet that guy.
Christopher: He's fantastic. I really enjoyed that interview, and it prompted me to dig out all Bruce Parry's old stuff. Now my daughter is obsessed with him, and she'll ask for him all the time. His movie is great as well actually. We watched that too. I forgot what it's called. It's called something like Tawai?
Chris: Tawai, yeah, I think it's what it's called.
Christopher: Absolutely fantastic. That was the first time I became aware of the Tangentially Speaking podcast. Then your name came up again when I interviewed a disruptive anthropologist by the name of Stephanie Welch. She said, "There's a book you should read called 'Sex at Dawn.'" I read the book and I thought, oh, my God, that's the host of the Tangentially Speaking podcast. I connected the dots.
Chris: I like the concept of it, a disruptive anthropologist.
Christopher: Yeah, she's good.
Chris: What does that mean? Is that actually a thing, or do you just call her that?
Christopher: I just call her that. I think she calls herself that. We did a podcast where we talked about circumcision. Male circumcision is really male genital mutilation and a really terrible idea unless you've got a really good reason to do it. More recently, we talked about a gender-segregated communal living structure as an alternative to the nuclear family unit, super interesting stuff. The first time I interviewed her, I've never even heard that term, the nuclear family. I had absolutely no idea what that meant.
Chris: Oh, really?
Christopher: Yeah, so I'm quite new, and it has been a journey.
Chris: New to what?
Christopher: Designing the human zoo, that's my interest. In NBT, we work with clients, and the first thing we do is try and minimize environmental mismatch. That is the thing that has been incredibly helpful in restoring my own personal health. So the last five years of recording this podcast has really been an exploration of what are the environmental mismatches? The first thing I came across was food. Perhaps this is not the diet that humans evolved eating, and that might matter. Then more recently --
Chris: Cheez-Its didn't exist 20,000 years ago?
Christopher: Optimal foraging strategy backfires with...
Chris: What about all the Cheez-It bushes I see around? Nacho cheese, yeah.
Christopher: Then more recently, the nuclear family unit, I thought, oh, shit, the diet, I can fix that. Overnight almost, the diet changed. Then somebody introduced me to this idea of the nuclear family unit, and I read Sex at Dawn. Then I read The Red Queen Race by Matt Ridley, which I thought was good. I know there's some controversy there after reading your work, but it was good. I enjoyed it. Then more recently I read Civilized to Death which is obviously fantastic. We'll get to that.
Chris: Obviously.
Christopher: Obviously.
Chris: You, me and my mom, it's obvious. Everybody else can make up their own minds.
Christopher: That's what I'm thinking is, blimey, what have we done? We've gotten to this monogamous nuclear family unit thing, and I know from other interviews and other research that I've done that being lonely is about the worst thing you can do for your health. Then you realize, oh, shit, we're not supposed to live like this. It's supposed to be completely different. What can I do about that? I know that you don't really have many prescriptions, either in the book or on your podcast.
Chris: Well, we were talking before we turned on the mikes about how I bought this land. My friends are coming and buying land nearby. That's largely to address this issue. Because I've been doing so many interviews in the last couple of weeks around Civilized to Death, and one of the questions people -- toward the end of the interview, normally we get to this, okay, what do we do then? I'm interested in ways we can bring these prehistoric patterns and antidotes into the modern world. One of them, as you mentioned, is community is so important to our health.
The research I've read indicates that whether you feel embedded in a community of people who love you and respect you, is a greater predictor of health and longevity and life satisfaction than whether you smoke, what you weigh, what your BMI is, how much you exercise, what you eat, name it. Whatever factor you can possibly think of, that's more important which is why, right now, this year, the latest World Health Organization study shows that the country with the longest lifespan right now is Spain. You think about Spain. I've lived in Spain, 20-plus years, a lot of people smoke. Everybody drinks.
[0:05:00]
Christopher: They eat in the middle of the night. The eat dinner in the middle of the night.
Chris: At 11:00 at night. They're doing everything wrong, but they're living, longer, healthier, happier than anyone else. How does that happen? It's because they have community, because they hang out with their friends. They're not in a hurry. I remember I was living in Barcelona when Starbucks was sort of going global. My Spanish friends were like, wait a minute, they sell coffee that you take away from the store? You're walking down the street -- why would you walk down the street drinking coffee? They couldn't understand. Spanish rental cars even don't have cup holders. Why would you want a cup holder in your car? If you're thirsty, you stop and you get a drink.
Christopher: Yeah, if you're in a rush, you get an espresso. You stand at the bar, and you have your espresso.
Chris: Even then you're going to look at the paper and maybe have some tapas. Being in a rush means you only have 20 minutes. Whereas in America, 20 minutes is your lunch hour. It's a totally different approach to life which is demonstrably better, not just in terms of how much fun you have, but how much love there is in your life, how much intimacy and companionship and just happiness. It's bizarre. Anyway, I don't know if I'm dragging you away from your question.
Christopher: No, no.
Chris: So, the nuclear family, yeah, I think it's a big problem because parents get stressed -- I mean, the whole motivation of writing Civilized to Death and Sex at Dawn really was to try to help people understand that things that feel like failures in their life, often aren't their fault at all. What I love is when people contact me and say, "After reading that book, I forgave myself." Or I forgave my mother or my father or my ex-husband or my ex-wife or whatever because they can see the behavior and the challenges of life in a different context, in a more global context that extends into prehistory and contemplates what sort of an animal we are and the mismatches that you mentioned earlier.
When you realize that you're dealing with this world that's totally out of alignment with the animal that you are and that everyone else is, then it becomes easier to forgive people for their missteps because everyone is trying. Everyone is doing the best they can, but we're all swimming up against a current, a strong current of cultural nonsense that's raining down on us constantly, mixed metaphors a bit there.
So, how this pertains to the nuclear family is you have parents who feel, or single parent, who feels guilty for being overwhelmed. That's not your fault. You're not designed by evolution to raise children alone or even with a partner. That's overwhelming. Parents feel terrible. Oh, we never have time for ourselves anymore. We never have time for our relationship. We're always dealing with the kids. It's the way you do it. It's a lot of work. It's not supposed to be a lot of work. It's supposed to be fun. Everything is supposed to be fun. Life is supposed to be fun.
As you read in Civilized to Death, hunter-gatherers approach life the way kids approach play. What they're doing is fun. They don't even have a word for work. The concept of why you would do something you don't want to do, why? I don't know. That's a question that seems, to us, to be an absurdity, but it's actually a really profound question. Why do we do things we don't want to do? Start unpacking that and I think you get to something interesting places.
Christopher: It's usually circular in nature, isn't it, because I need to do this job so that I can afford to pay my rent, and the reason I need to live here is so that I can be close to my job. You get to circles quite quickly.
Chris: I remember I had a girlfriend years ago who had a kid. She worked so she could pay someone to take care of her kid. I thought, man, that's a heavy treadmill to be stuck on. You can't afford to be with your own child because you need to work in order to pay for that child to have a roof and someone to take care of the kids. It's just like, wow, that's a rough one. Anyway, I think we're all stuck on a treadmill like that, similar to that, some more than others but, yeah, it's tough.
I told a story in Civilized to Death of the guy who was in Papua New Guinea with a tribe, the Insect Tribe, they were called. He was doing a documentary. Johnny Hughes was his name. A couple of the guys from the tribe said, "Hey, you've seen how we live. Can we come and see how you live?" He thought, well, that would be interesting, to fly some Stone Age tribesmen from Papua New Guinea to the UK and see how they react to the modern world. He talked to his bosses at the BBC, and they were like, "Yeah, we'd pay for that, definitely sounds interesting."
[0:10:04]
The first thing he did was he went and talked to some anthropologists because he was afraid that they would see the modern world and say, "Oh, fuck that, we're not going back. This is too good, man, oatmeal and lights that flick on and off. This is amazing." The anthropologist said, "Yeah, don't worry about that. That's not going to happen." So they flew them out. I think they spent a month or six weeks or something in the UK.
Johnny Hughes tells the story about how they're sitting around one morning. I guess the tribesmen were staying at a producer's house, and they were having breakfast. The producer was like, "Okay, gotta run, I'll see you guys tonight." One of the guys said, "Where do you go every day? You leave before the sun comes up. You come back at night. You're not with your people here, your kids, your wife." The guy sad, "Well, I have to work." They said, "Work, really? Why?" He said, "I have to pay for this house, for example." The guys said, "Oh, okay, I see. How many days do you have to work to pay for the house?" The guy was like, 30 years. What? 30 years? The tribesman was like, "Man, I want a house, my friends come over and we build a house in a few days. What's wrong with your people?"
Christopher: Bruce Parry is really good for illustrating this, phenomenal. You can actually see that happen.
Chris: Yeah, Bruce Parry, I love that guy. I was watching his show, Tribe, when I was living in Spain when I was writing Sex at Dawn so, before I had a podcast, before my life changed. My life changed radically after that book came out. Yeah, I watched every episode of that and then I found his film, the first film he did, Cannibals and Crampons.
Christopher: Oh, I've not seen that.
Chris: Oh, yeah, that was his first thing. He and a buddy went to, I think it was Papua New Guinea or maybe Irian Jaya on the other side of the same island, and they wanted to climb this mountain. I don't remember how high it is, but it's probably 14, 15, 16,000 feet, maybe higher. It's a major mountain, and I think no one had ever summitted it before.
I may be getting the numbers all wrong but I remember, because I saw this 15 years ago at least, but he and his buddy hiked back maybe a month to get even to the base of the mountain. They went through this area that they said there were cannibals. Nobody had hiked through there before. It was just the two of them. They didn't even have guides and stuff for part of it. They took turns carrying the camera, and they filmed this whole thing. That's how he got the BBC thing to do Tribe because of that movie.
Christopher: I'll seek that out.
Chris: It's amazing, yeah, and he was Special Forces, top survival skills.
Christopher: Yeah, former military.
Chris: He sounds like such a macho dude, but you meet him. He's just the sweetest. You just want to hug him. He's not big. He's, I don't know, 5'6" or 7" or something. What I loved in that show was you can just see -- I travelled a lot in my 20s and 30s. I backpacked all over the world. What I learned is the way you travel well is to have an open heart and let people see that. If you let people see that, great things happen to you. If you travel through the world, protected, it doesn't work. It just doesn't work.
You see him, he's so open, and he's just laughing all the time and accepting and kind, and that translates across cultural and language, linguistic barriers so well. Anyway, I'm going on and on. You have a list of questions.
Christopher: Talking points, shall we say. Yeah, I haven't prepared, if anything.
Chris: You've probably interviewed so many who has their own podcast.
Christopher: I have, and you're one of the few people where it gets better when there's no guest. I don't mean that as an insult to your guests as we've just discussed Bruce Parry and the others are phenomenal guests. It's just that you're so good. I think that it's actually better when you're talking than when the guests are. I don't mean that as a compliment.
Talk about Sex at Dawn. My understanding is the central thesis is that the primary purpose of sex is for bonding and not reproduction. Would you agree with that?
Chris: Yeah, among humans. We use the word primary. That could be misunderstood. Of course the primary biological function of sex is reproduction but in our species and others, the sexual interaction has been co-opted for purposes other than reproduction. This is rare among primates and mammals, for sex to be very common in the animal's life and to be clearly not for reproduction. For example, proof of this or evidence of this is that we have sex when women are menstruating or when they're post-menopausal or when they're already pregnant or when they're breastfeeding and not ovulating.
[0:15:20]
We have sex in ways that I'm sure I don't need to specify. We have lots of sexual acts that can't possibly result in pregnancy. We have same sex, is very common among humans and bonobos and other primates as well. So there are all these sexual practices that form the bulk of our sexual interactions. The vast majority of our sexual interactions don't and can't result in pregnancy.
Clearly, if you look at evolution in Darwinian terms, it's, well, this is a waste of energy. You're vulnerable. You're fucking. You're not paying attention to predators. You're opening yourself up to sexually transmitted diseases. You can scratch your knees and get an infection. There are all sorts of potential costs so, in evolutionary terms, animals don't do things with significant costs that don't have benefits. They would be weeded out of the gene pool pretty quickly. So, what's the purpose?
You look at mammals that have non-reproductive sex often, and you see chimps, bonobos, humans, dolphins -- I think that's it. There might be one I'm forgetting. What do they all have in common? They all live in complex social groups with multiple males, not like gorillas with one alpha male and a bunch of females and then juveniles. They're living in these complex social groups with multiple adult males where conflicts can arise, but conflict would be detrimental to the group. The species thrive as a group.
Is it a coincidence that those particular species all have sex for non-reproductive purposes and with a significant degree of promiscuity? I don't think so. It's pretty obvious that in each of those species, sexual pleasure has been co-opted for the good of the social group to establish and maintain these complex social networks of trust and intimacy because like most primates, including chimpanzees actually, which I numbered among this group, but chimpanzees and bonobos are quite distinct as we can talk about, if you want, in more detail.
For example, a chimpanzee mother who has an infant will not let another chimpanzee hold the infant, certainly not a male, won't let a male get anywhere near the infant because male chimpanzees quite frequently will kill an infant. A female bonobo will hand her infant over to another female in an instant, no problem. They'll breastfeed one another's offspring. Now, we're humans in that line.
I'm in the grocery store. I see a woman with a little kid or I just met your kids a moment ago, you don't have any problem with me being around your kids. You're not afraid I'd kill them or something. So, obviously we're closer to bonobos in that sense. We trust one another. Sarah Hrdy has written lots of books about alloparenting, how we raise children communally.
So, if we raise children communally in hunter-gatherer groups which is well-established, and that habit probably goes back to our primate origins with bonobos, 5 million years ago, then why would we assume that we share our food, we share our children, we share our group protection, we share access to resources, in many cases we share living space, tribal people live in the long house or communal living, we share everything but, no, not sexual partners. That's private property. It makes no sense to me.
Yet the argument of Sex at Dawn is seen as the outlier. We're the weirdo, radical, Commie, pinko anarchist.
Christopher: I've heard you being accused of cherry picking the evidence, but there were no details given. It was impossible to confirm or deny that because they don't say.
Chris: It's such an easy shot to take, that cherry picking thing because the thing is, any nonfiction book that's presenting an argument, presenting a view, a comprehensive approach to something, what do they do? You outline your argument. You look at alternative arguments and discuss the holes, the reason you think those arguments don't make sense which is why you're presenting a new one in the first place. Then you present evidence for your argument.
[0:20:04]
Now, you can call those cherries. It's like, okay, I picked some cherries, but it's a big bushel of cherries. If you see cherries that disprove the argument that I'm making then, fine, point them out. Obviously I've read some reviews and rebuttals that say that we're cherry picking. My favorite one, it's in the Journal of Higher Education, I think is the journal. It's by David Barish who is an evolutionary biologist. It's amazing. The first line is, if one more person asks me about this book, Sex at Dawn, I'm going to vomit. Did you read this one?
Christopher: I didn't read it.
Chris: That's the first line. Then it goes through, and it accuses us of cherry picking, of not understanding basic evolutionary theory, of forming the argument to justify our depraved lifestyle. Really, it's --
Christopher: There's literally no prescriptive in the book nor do you say anything about your lifestyle.
Chris: Exactly, not even in interviews. I never talk about -- so he goes through this whole thing and accuses us of lying, of misrepresenting the evidence, on and on and on. There's not a single example. How can you accuse somebody of these terrible intellectual crimes and not offer even one example? Anyway, I just don't pay attention. If somebody wants to make a comprehensive critique then that's fine. Maybe I'll respond to that, but cherry picking, yeah, whatever.
Christopher: What is there to respond to when all they said is, if one more person asks me about this book, I'll vomit. What do you want me to say?
Chris: I don't want to provoke any puking here.
Christopher: So I think you agree then that the reports of our monogamy are greatly exaggerated, but how did that come to be? Why is it that most people think this is the standard narrative? I would say that's the common thread between the two books, Sex at Dawn and Civilized to Death, is this challenging of the standard narrative. Where did it come from in the first place?
Chris: Well, it came from the same place that the belief that low-fat yogurt is good for us came from. It's civilizational propaganda.
Christopher: Nestle.
Chris: In that case, Nestle, yeah. People believe what they're told is true, and you can't blame them for that. Then they suffer because what they're told is true doesn't feel true and then they've got these deep conflicts. Someone's raised -- I don't know, pick a religion. You were raised, as my parents were raised in the Catholic religion and then you get to the age when you can actually think. You're like, wait a minute, Noah's Ark, seriously? Is a woman's job really to serve her man? Is a woman really the property of a man? All these things that are taught to us but then come into conflict with what we know to be true on a deeper instinctive, collective unconscious kind of level generate anxiety and shame and depression and suicide and all sorts of violence, all sorts of horrible outcome.
So, where did it come from? Cacilda and I argue at Sex at Dawn that it came from agriculture. It came from this profound revolution in the way human beings organize themselves and relate it with each other in the natural world that include it in that whole -- what's the word in Zorba the Greek? He calls it the whole catastrophe or something, entire catastrophe, includes the notion of private property for the first time because hunter-gatherers don't really have a notion of private property. Everything is shared. It's not because they're noble savages because when you're in a nomadic group of 50, 60 people moving around all the time, you don't want to have a lot of crap to carry. So, it makes a lot more sense.
If we're going, if you, me and a dozen other people are going on a camping trip where we're going to be hiking for a week, we're not all going to take our own stove, our own cooking pot, our own this. We're going to share. Okay, you're bringing the cooking pot. I'll bring the other thing. You bring the filter and I bring -- that's how you organize.
Christopher: It's efficient.
Chris: It's efficient. So, for the first time, with agriculture, you have people staying in one place for a lifetime so that you no longer have to carry things. You own land. You own animals. In many cases, you own other people, slaves. This is all totally novel in human experience, and women become one of the possessions of men. The reason they become the possessions of men is twofold; one is their status relative to men dropped radically. There are different reasons for why that happened. One is that the upper body strength of men became more important for plowing and doing the kind of work that was needed in agriculture.
[0:25:15]
I think it's more complex than that because when you have these hierarchies and ownership, you have armies. Armies are made of men. You have teams of workers sowing and harvesting. Those are also men. Men are better workers and doing physical labor, but you also have women now become reproductive vessels for men because for the first time, it became very clear that sex caused pregnancy. That is unknown to most hunter-gatherers.
Chris: So, the notion that women, in order to ensure their paternity among hunter-gathers doesn't make sense because in most cases men don't know sex causes pregnancy. Secondly, among hunter-gatherers, there's no private property so who cares if my sex caused that baby, my procreative act caused that. Who cares?
Christopher: Paternal certainty is not important.
Chris: There's nothing to pass onto that kid. So, in agricultural societies where you've got a farm, you've got a house, you've got these herds of cattle or pigs or whatever that you've accumulated resources, now it becomes important who gets those when I die. The only way you make sure that the person, the son that's getting those when you die is your son, is to totally control the woman's behavior sexually. That's when it became both important for men to control women's sexual behavior in order to assure of paternity and also became possible because women's status had dropped so low, relative to men, that they are actually possessions of men.
You see in that Old Testament line, thou shall not covet thy neighbor's wife, I always thought, most people think that means, be cool about your neighbor's relationship, respect his relationship. It doesn't mean that at all. You read it in context, it says, "Nor his house, nor his slave, nor his ox."
Christopher: It's about property.
Chris: Yeah, it's property, and she's just one of his things that you should not covet.
Christopher: Have you read James C. Scott's Against All Grain?
Chris: I think I've read parts of it. I certainly have it sitting on my shelf at home.
Christopher: Okay, I just wondered if you have any thoughts on grain being --
Chris: Against the Grain, yeah.
Christopher: Yeah, grain being the first thing that made it possible to start building civilizations. With every other type of plant that you domesticate, you can't know when they're getting to be ready for harvest. With grain, it's almost ripe at the same time, so harvest is always at the same time. If people are concentrating resources at the same time then you can tax it.
Chris: Okay, I have read it because I remember that argument that grain is especially easy to count. It becomes a currency and then you get the offshoot of the taxation system. Yeah, I have read that.
Christopher: We talk about the domestication of women, but I think it's all humans. We're domesticated in this civilization-building.
Chris: I would say we domesticated all of us eventually. I would also say that women became slaves of men, men became slaves of other men. So we're all slaves in one way or another but, yeah, I think women definitely got the worst part of the deal. Well, I don't know. It's debatable whether women got the worst end of that stick or not because, of course, men were the ones who were being sent off into these pointless wars. Everybody got screwed. That's the argument of Civilized to Death. We all got screwed.
Christopher: So what are you going to do about it?
Chris: Yeah.
Christopher: Talk about how some of these -- what would you call them, a Communist? You talk about Sir Darwin and then Thomas Malthus and Thomas Hobbes, the two Thomases. I feel like that was an important thread that ran through both books. It seems like both of these men were important and perpetuated this standard narrative that perhaps you don't agree with.
Chris: Yeah. Well, certainly Thomas Hobbes is famous for having said or written in Leviathan in 1651, his line of before the advent of the state, human life was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.
Christopher: Everybody said that, right? Even I've heard that.
Chris: Yeah, it's one of the most famous lines in the English language, I think, and, yeah, it's 1651. God, that's 350 years ago, so it has got a lot of power, culturally. He didn't know anything about hunter-gatherers. This was far before there was any scientific study of hunter-gatherer life or anthropology or anything, so he was just pulling that out of his ass. It resonates because people want to believe that they're lucky. We want to believe that we live in the best place. We have an emotional predisposition toward gratitude, I think, which relates to hunter-gatherers. The gratitude itself relates to our hunter-gatherer nature.
[0:30:31]
What's relevant here is that I think -- it's strange. I was in San Francisco just before I came here. I lived in San Francisco when I was young, in the late '80s and early '90s. I lived there for a few years. I was just driving down this highway, and I felt this strange sense of nostalgia because I remember that I used to take that highway to graduate school on my motorcycle when I first started going to grad school. I felt a personal connection. I felt affection for a highway. It's a weird thing, and I was struck by it. I thought it weird because I've lived in New York, I've lived in Barcelona, I've lived in different places in the world, and when I go there, I feel like --
Christopher: It's the context, isn't it? It just brings back all those memories.
Chris: Yeah, and so I think people develop a personal relationship with their surroundings. We don't recognize that often, how that happens. So, extending that out, I think that we have a predisposition to believe that we are in the best place, the best time so when someone says, "Yeah, it was worse before. You're really lucky to be alive now --
Christopher: I was going to say, I feel like when people say that, it's like people trying to impart it on someone else. It's not an intrinsic thing that, oh, I'm really grateful to be alive today, now, and not in 1651. It's rather that somebody from the outside says, "Oh, you should be grateful." You should be grateful that we've got guns and antibiotics.
Chris: Well, yeah, but I think that resonates and people hear that message very profoundly because they want to believe it, because we want to believe it, just like kids want to believe that mom and dad are the best people ever. Maturity is realizing that mom and dad are people. Mom and dad are not gods. They're just people. You forgive them, and you forgive yourself. These are all stages of maturation.
So, intellectually, I think, it's also important for us to step back and say, okay, is America really the best country that has ever existed? Because I've heard that a lot, having grown up here. Is the 20th or 21st century really the best time to ever be alive? Am I that lucky? Do I just happen to have been born in the best place, in the best time of all humans who have ever lived? Really? Does that make sense logically? It only makes sense if you believe that progress is constant and undeniable, and I think it's painful to entertain that notion.
So, yeah, I think Thomas Hobbes is important because he articulated a belief that people find, emotionally, very satisfying and appealing, and that's why we still have that sentence knocking around. Malthus was important because Malthus was a young man. His father actually was a left wing thinker, and there was a lot of poverty. I think this was late 1700, like 1798 or something, around there. There was a lot of poverty in London.
They were a well-to-do family, and his father was advocating that there should be a minimum basic income essentially. The poor should be taken care of. There was so much wealth among the wealthy that they should share some of that and take care of people who were starving in the streets. Malthus who, like a lot of young men, was defining himself against his father, wrote an essay. They had an argument at dinner one night and that led him to write an essay.
In the essay he argued very mathematically. He said, well, look, you can expand the amount of land given over to food production in order to take care of poor people. The problem is when you take care of them and they're not dying of starvation, what will happen? Their population will expand exponentially whereas the land increase can only happen arithmetically. It will be 1, 2, 3, 4 acres, like that, but population will expand, 2, 4, 16, 36. It expands much faster. You'll never be able to alleviate poverty because people will always reproduce faster than you can produce more food. Therefore, the poor will always be with us. There's nothing to be done about it. We just have to buck up and face it.
[0:35:05]
Now, it turns out that the two men who independently came up with the idea of evolution, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace, were both reading Malthus when the idea came to them in two different parts of the world. So, it was extremely important idea. Turns out, totally wrong as applied to hunter-gatherers. Hunter-gatherer population was steady, very slight increase over hundreds of thousands of years until agriculture. When you have agriculture, that's when population starts increasing exponentially mainly because children are being weaned from their mothers' milk much earlier because of the availability of animal milk.
Christopher: Wet nurses as well.
Chris: What's that?
Christopher: Wet nurses.
Chris: Yeah, and wet nurses, right, slaves bur another form of slavery. So, population starts increasing very rapidly with the advent of agriculture. Whereas in hunter-gatherer groups, it tends to be quite steady. To be fair, part of the reason it's steady is that infant mortality is quite high among hunter-gatherers. Although infant mortality was quite high among early agriculturalists as well, so that's not really the biggest factor in terms of population growth. It's more the fact that women are having 8, 9, 10 kids as agriculturalists. Whereas hunter-gatherers would have 2, 3 kids, max.
Christopher: Do you think it's a problem -- in fact, I know it's a loaded question because I know you know the answer -- that then gives you an excuse to not care about the people. They're destined to live in squalor and poverty and be their own demise whatever we do, so we might as well not do anything.
Chris: That's essentially the argument that I make in both books. An extension of what I was saying about Hobbes, I think a lot of ideas derive their power from their utility to the powerful. If you can argue something that makes powerful people feel better or gives them a tool that's useful for them in increasing and maintaining their power, that idea is going to get a lot of play. They own the newspapers. They own the media. They're going to make sure that idea spreads far and wide. Contrary-wise, if you have an idea that would undermine or question the legitimacy of that power, it tends to get squelched pretty quickly.
The irony is Darwin was actually a pretty radical thinker. He was very much against slavery and very tortured by a lot of what he saw in his life in terms of inequality and access to resources and so on, but his work has been co-opted by the powerful to justify the ruthlessness of capitalism. I think that's one of the great ironies of our age that someone who was actually very concerned, almost tortured over what he saw happening in the world, in the Capitalist world has been co-opted into the greatest apologist for ruthless Capitalism, survival of the fittest.
Andrew Carnegie who was the richest man in the world at the time, built libraries around the northeast, hundreds if not thousands of libraries which is pretty cool. I went into those libraries when I was a kid in Pennsylvania, but there's only one book that he demanded be included in every collection, in every library, was Origin of the Species, because he said explicitly that "I'm the fittest. I'm supposed to have all this money. This is the way it's supposed to work."
Christopher: That's terrifying.
Chris: Yeah.
Christopher: Talk about Darwin thinks your mother is a whore. I think this is where you and Matt Ridley differ a little bit. When I read the Red Queen Race, he seemed to be of the same viewpoint as well that Darwin thinks your mother is a whore. The reason I say that is because I think it has changed. It's transactional. Sex is a transaction for women. They get something in return.
Chris: Right, the mainstream Darwinian view is that women aren't interested in sex, per se. They do it in order to get providers. The mainstream argument around human sexual evolution is that men want to spread their seed as far and wide as possible because, biologically, sperm cells are very cheap. We produce billions of them in our lifetimes. Whereas an ovum is biologically expensive. Women only produce a few of them or a few dozen, and they currently have a few kids so they want to be very careful about with whom they have that child, making sure that man is going to stick around and provide for them and protect them, feed that kids and all that, which seems to make a lot of sense if you assume that the way we live now is the way we've always lived, getting back to your nuclear family thing.
[0:40:08]
If you assume the nuclear family is the primary unit of human social organization forever then, yeah, that makes sense. A woman who gets pregnant, doesn't have a husband who is going to go and hunt for her and protect her, is extremely vulnerable then that kid is unlikely to survive. The rest just cascades from there. If you actually study the anthropology concerning hunter-gatherers and you see that the nuclear family is not the primary unit of social organization that, in fact, the band is.
You see that people in these hunter-gatherer bands share food. They're fiercely egalitarian. They take care of one another. They take care of one another's kids, as I said. The kids grow up calling all the adult men, "Father," all the adult women, "Mother." They're welcome to go and sleep in someone else's hut. It's the movement, the free flow of kids throughout the village is still, in many parts of the world, undeniable.
So, if you see hunter-gatherers actually live, the notion of a man going out and shooting, whatever, an impala or something and bringing it back to the village and saying, "Okay, this is for my wife and my kids, fuck you all. Oh, you didn't get to anything today? Oh, too bad, better luck tomorrow, buddy." That doesn't work. It could never work.
Christopher: You reminded me of something I heard on one of the Bruce Parry episodes. The best place to store food is in the belly of my brother.
Chris: Right, exactly. Again, that's not because they're noble savages. It's because, first of all, there's no refrigeration. By definition, immediate return hunter-gatherers, which is what we're talking about, our ancestors all were, those are people with no accumulated resources; meaning they don't preserve food. They don't carry it around. They don't store it for later. They find what they need in the world and eat it as they need it.
So, those people, in order to mitigate risk, sharing is essential. Otherwise they die. It's, together we stand, divided we fall. That goes back into our prehistory. Now we have insurance companies. We don't say, "Oh, we're so noble. We paid our insurance policy." No, that's how we mitigate risk. When there were no insurance companies, you mitigated risks by taking care of the people around you because you are going to need them to take care of you. That's just basic human nature. There's a reason it's human nature because that's how we evolved.
So this notion that women needed one man to provide and take care of her and the children, the assumption of the nuclear family, just I don't see evidence for it in the anthropological literature. People who want to accuse me of picking cherries are going to have to show me how -- that's the whole damn cherry tree as far as I'm concerned. I don't know where Matt Ridley and Steven Pinker are getting the evidence that people actually do that in hunter-gatherer societies.
What I read is a bunch of thought experiments and game theory and laboratory mumbo jumbo. Oh, yeah, because -- what's it called -- inclusive fitness, the theory that I would risk my life for someone, my brother's child, because I know that we share a certain percentage of our DNA, but I wouldn't risk my life for a stranger because I don't share DNA. What are you talking about, man? That's all great.
Christopher: Theoretical.
Chris: You've got a computer model. How about if you go and look at how people actually live? Let's look at the data of actual life as opposed to this theoretical construct you've got in your lab.
Christopher: I think that is the central thread between the two books. I see this theme of egalitarianism and abundance versus elitism and scarcity. Would you agree with that?
Chris: Yeah. In fact I quote an anthropologist, I forget her first name, but it's like Nurit Bird-David, I think maybe is her name. She had a hyphenated last name. She says the great irony is that hunter-gatherers have nothing, literally, materially, and yet they act as if they have it made. We have great abundance and act as if we're constantly in fear of the future. There's this strange conundrum.
In Sex at Dawn, I remember we quoted a missionary, a Jesuit missionary who was living with, I think, the Huron Indians in present-day Canada. He recounted this conversation he'd had with someone where they were having a feast. I don't know. They caught a bunch of beavers that day. They were roasting them and invited everyone from the neighboring villages.
He was like, "Why don't you save some for tomorrow?" Because it was cold, they could have frozen them. They're like, why? We'll catch more tomorrow. He said, "What if you don't?" They said, "Well we'll be hungry tomorrow." What's your problem, man? What are you talking about? Tomorrow will be tomorrow. It will work itself out. It always does.
[0:45:34]
He also recounted saying something to them about -- because they had this feast, and then I guess the women were having sex with the guys from another village. This missionary is just like, come on, what are you doing? Why are you letting your women have sex with these men? The guys said, "Well, why not? Why wouldn't we?" He said, "Well, because then you won't know whose children they are."
This missionary recounts the Indian looking at him quizzically and saying, "You Europeans are so strange. You only love your own children?" That conversation, to me, is the conversation that's happening now between people who think Sex at Dawn makes sense and agrees with Sarah Hardy and other people who have written about collective parenting and how that is very clearly the way our species evolved.
The people like the Matt Ridleys and the Steven Pinkers and the Richard Dawkins and those people who are saying, "No, no, men are, by nature, obsessed with women's sexual behavior," David Bass, Helen Fisher, all that evolutionary psychology crap who have built their narrative around this idea that we only love our own children with selfish genes who are dictating us to do that. Or at least we love our own children far more than any other children, and we'd risk our lives for our own children and not other children. This ignores so much human experience.
When Sex at Dawn first came out, I did this interview with, I forget her name, but she was a former Playboy Playmate who now had a radio show. It was a big radio show. I think truckers, sort of like a Howard Stern kind of show, but there's this sexy woman. When I went to do the interview, I thought, okay, whatever. I'm doing all interviews because I'll just take anything when I get this book out there.
I was really struck. She was super smart, and it was one of the more substantive interviews I had done at that point. I was ashamed of myself for assuming she was going to be shallow just because you have this whole Playboy thing going on. Anyway, I was making this point that we don't only love our own children. We don't only love people who we're related to. Love is something that happens.
I remember she started crying in the interview. Tears were running down her face. I was like, oh, shit, some parental thing I had stepped on? She said, "I'm so glad you said that because I have a son who I gave birth to, and I adopted a little girl three years ago, and I couldn't love her more." There's no difference on how I love those two kids. People don't understand that. She felt there was something biologically wrong with her or something. She should love her son more because he came out of here body. And she was like, no, there's no difference.
Christopher: Yeah, it's funny, isn't it, because you're right there at the cusp of solving perhaps the most important and difficult problem that everybody in that nuclear family unit has, which is childcare. What's the problem do you feel most frequently and most severely? It's childcare. Everybody says the same thing for reasons that we've already discussed. If you choose to subscribe to this new way of thinking, so many problems go away.
Chris: Yeah, and not only the problem of the parent. I was traveling around this summer in the van, doing Vanthropology tour, which I do every summer, and this year was particularly interesting in that I spent a lot of time with people who have little kids like the ages of your kids. It's an interesting age.
Anyway, it was so nice to be able to -- I remember one case in particular. There was this couple who was living off-grid on a mountain in Idaho, and they had three sons who are just the coolest, funniest little guys. It was so nice to be able to just say, "Why don't you guys go see a movie or have lunch or whatever?" They hadn't been alone together in two or three years. They're living in a tent. It was like frontier living.
[0:50:20]
My point is that, yeah, parents are totally stressed out, and it sucks for them but also, there are people who don't have kids who would love to spend time with kids. I didn't offer to do that because I was doing them a big favor. I like hanging out with those kids. They're hilarious, granted, more than five or six hours might be a little more than I could handle. My point is that it cuts both ways. It's not just parents who need a break. It's people who don't have kids who would benefit from being able to share their lives with kids because it's great.
It's like everything else. We've concentrated it, put all that weight on one or two people and then now, economically, tell them you both have to work. It's really hard for only one of you to work to be able to support a household. Yeah, it's an unsustainable situation, and it could be win-win-win for everybody.
There's also a lot of evidence showing that kids benefit from having lots of adults in their lives. They benefit from not feeling like it's only mom and dad. If mom and dad split up then now I'm half as loved and half as secure as I was before. No, they benefit from having a bunch of adults around who love them and take care of them, and you see this in hunter-gatherer groups.
I think, honestly, you asked earlier, where does this monogamy myth come from, this idea that we're designed to only love one person and only be attracted to one person, I think it comes from a culture that tells us that's what natural. It also comes from our parenting situation where you grow up with a sense that there are one or two people who give you everything you need, and you're entirely dependent upon them.
Whereas in a hunter-gatherer group, you've got a bunch of people who give you what you need. You get a lot of people who love you. If you're sick of mom, you go hang out with this woman, maybe your aunt or your grandmother or just some lady who happens to be there that you've known all your life, may as well be. Everyone is related in some level. That creates a different expectation, I think, as an adult for what love feels like. It creates a sense of abundance emotionally as well as materially.
Oh, you don't love me anymore? That's okay. There are a lot of people who do. Maybe you'll love me again later, whatever. In the meantime, I'm going to go with her. That's a different approach to love than what we have which is, no, baby, you belong to me. You're the only one. If you stop loving me, what will I do?
Christopher: Right. It's that same theme again. It's the plenty birdies, plenty fishes, plenty fruit, plenty mongongo nuts. There's this abundance right there.
Chris: Isn't that crazy? Here we are running away from abundance, thinking that we're getting closer to it.
Christopher: Right. So, how has the message been received? Have you encountered many people on your travels that have turned Sex at Dawn or Civilized to Death into a practical concern? You've hinted at a few people that are living differently. Even while I'm living here, I'm like we're the nuclear family unit here. We're in the mountains in Santa Cruz, and I don't subscribe to the narrative of perpetual progress in every way, shape or form. So, food, light-dark cycles and everything else is fairly aligned with what will be evolutionarily appropriate, but certainly this nuclear family unit thing is well out of shape. Who have you encountered that have done something completely differently?
Chris: Oh, man, that's --
Christopher: Is there are lot?
Chris: That's a lot, yeah, because Sex at Dawn came out almost ten years ago, so I've met a lot of people and heard from a lot of people in those ten years. Probably 90% of what I hear is positive that Sex at Dawn opened up, provoked conversations that needed to happen.
I think one of the great things about Sex at Dawn is that -- or its function in the world, not necessarily that it's a great book -- that it gives couples an excuse to talk about things that are really hard to raise, the question of being attracted to other people. It's really hard to just, one night, you're getting ready for bed, just say, "So, honey, what do you think? Would you fuck that guy we met at dinner tonight?" It's a hard conversation to just, hello.
[0:55:01]
If you're reading this book and it's talking about all these reasons for why we're attracted to other people, and that doesn't mean there's a problem with your relationship. That doesn't mean that things are falling apart. You're doing something wrong, or your partner is not the one for you, whatever. All it means is that you're an animal that evolved along these lines. It gives people an opportunity to have that conversation in a nonjudgmental way, and a lot of people have taken that opportunity, I'm very glad to say.
Christopher: I see that. It opens up the conversation. I've been reading a book recently. Somebody recommended a book called "Opening Up."
Chris: Yeah, Tristan Taormino.
Christopher: Yeah, and the thing that was mind-boggling about that book was all the different variants. It had all these different variations like numbers of people and genders and orientation. The number of variants just blows your mind, but what I realized is that the monogamous relationship is just one of those variants. She's asking you to ask these difficult conversations and to communicate with your partner or partners with all these different questions. I don't see why you should have asked those questions we've been talking about and stuff even just because you're in a monogamous -- we signed a contract that we would never look at anybody else ever again, therefore, we never need to discuss that. That doesn't seem like a very good strategy to me.
Chris: Yeah, good luck with that contract. Anyway, yes, I've met a lot of people who have taken the opportunity to have that conversation. In some cases, it resulted in a divorce or their relationship ended. At least the person who wrote to me said it's a good thing. That had to happen, and at least it happened sooner rather than later, after I got pregnant or after, whatever, we bought that house together, whatever point of no return they were approaching.
Most of the feedback I've gotten has been super positive. One of the first emails I got, I'll never forget. I've got hundreds of emails from people, if not thousands at this point, but one of the first emails I got was just so powerful. It said, "I'm a 64-year-old widow. This is the most important book I've ever read. I wish I could live my life over."
Christopher: Oh, my God. It's terrifying as well though, isn't it? You've gone the wrong direction.
Chris: Yeah, so, it has been amazing. I'm super grateful for having had this experience of I had this idea in grad school and thought about it for a while and knocked it around and then actually decided to put together a proposal and email it out and see what I could do. I didn't know anyone. I didn't have any contacts. I'd never written a book. Just suddenly, the world just opened up and a major publisher was interested. Then Dan Savage happened to -- you know Dan Savage?
Christopher: Yeah, I do.
Chris: Yeah. I don't know what would have happened if he hadn't -- I mean, it's this weird thing. What happened with him was I've read his column I think since he started writing it. I was working on the book in Spain, and he did a thing where he was raising money for an organization that helped gay kids. It was a counseling hotline, I think. He said, "If you donate at least $50 to this organization, email me a copy of the receipt, I will personally respond to your question."
So I sent him $50, and I emailed him. My question was, "I'm writing a book that explains the evolutionary origins of human promiscuity and that monogamy is a cultural construct. It will be done in three or four months. Would you be willing to look at the manuscript when it's finished?" He said, "Sure, send it to this address." I thought, fuck, I've done it. That's so great because I knew he'd resonate with it.
So, I worked on it. Three or four months later, I got one of the pre-publication copies, the galleys, and I sent it off to that address, and I waited. Meanwhile, I learned later that he had totally forgotten about my email. Of course he had. He gets so many. The address that he told me to send it to was his office at The Stranger, this newspaper where he works in Seattle, and it went onto a pile with hundreds of other manuscripts and gifts and things that people send him. There's just this pile of stuff in the corner of his office. The pile had gotten so big it was starting to block the doorway.
[1:00:11]
I think they had a fire inspection or something, and the fire guy goes, "You've got to clean this up. This is blocking emergency egress." This is like two weeks after I sent it. Because this fireman told him he had to clean it up, he spent the afternoon just going through it, opening these packages and looking at it and throwing it away and opening and throwing it away, whatever.
He opens the package that has this copy of Sex at Dawn. The book falls out of the package and lands on the floor, on the spine and opens, and he picks it up. It's already open. He picks it up, and he read whatever was on the page that was open, and it made him laugh. Whatever the line, and I don't know what the line was. He didn't remember when I talked to him. Whatever it was, he read something that made him laugh and he was like, oh, okay, this is funny.
So he puts it in his bag to take home that night. He took it home, and he opens it up. His husband fell asleep. He was in bed. He thought he'd read a little bit. He read through the night. He texted me, "reading, loving," two words. I get this text in Spain from a number in Seattle. I don't know his number. I've never spoken to him. I think, could that be Dan Savage? Reading, loving, wow.
He calls me a couple of days later, and he's like, "Chris, I'm going to do everything I can to publicize this book. I want you on my podcast. I'm going to do a column with you. I want you to guest host my column when I go on vacation this year."
Christopher: That's amazing.
Chris: Yeah. "Tell your publisher to order more copies because I'm going to blast this out." Of course my publisher was like, "Yeah, yeah, we know what we're doing. We're fine." 5,000 copies sold out in 20 minutes and it took him another ten days to get books back in bookstores, total fuck up on the publisher's part.
So, he got it. It's because of him that it got on The New York Times bestseller list and then it got attention. It all started rolling. It's all thanks to Dan.
Christopher: That's amazing.
Chris: Yeah. I don't know what would have happened if that book had fallen on its face or if the fireman had come a week earlier. It's all total serendipity.
Christopher: Right. This is where I think some of what Matt Ridley has written about is useful, is the idea that there is no mastermind. I've just recently read his book, The Evolution of Everything, where he talks about everything being a bottom-up selection with modification. There's no such thing as a mastermind. So if it had not been Dan Savage, it would have been someone else that would have promoted it.
Chris: Maybe, but the assumption there is that it was destined to find an audience.
Christopher: That's what my point is. The audience is ready to hear that. Everybody knows about the divorce rates and how long a marriage lasts in the US, and postpartum depression and all these problems that we've talked about and so the world was just ready for Sex at Dawn. I think they're ready for Civilized to Death.
Chris: Well, maybe, I hope so. That's a generous way of thinking of it. I agree with you, Sex at Dawn came out a few years after it should have, I guess, if I had been a more productive, disciplined writer. Civilized to Death is several years late as well because I tend to work like a hunter-gatherer which means as little as possible. Especially since Sex at Dawn came out, there are a lot more opportunities coming my way, so it's harder to find time where it's like, yeah, I'm just going to sit alone in a room today.
Christopher: I did wonder about that when you were on the road all the time, in the van recording podcasts. Where the hell does this guy find time to write a book?
Chris: Yeah, it's hard. Honestly I don't know if I'll do it again or, if so, how many times, because I like the podcast much more. That's much more in alignment with my personality and my appetites. I like people. I like hanging out. I like talking. I like the immediacy of having a conversation like this and then hit a few buttons and, boom, it's out there.
Christopher: Yeah, it's amazing.
Chris: People are responding. You have this interaction even, online with people you don't know. I love that. Sit and write for a year, two years, alone and your back hurts, it's not healthy for your body, sitting in front of a computer all day.
Christopher: It's good for me though. I'm a fan of the Tangentially Speaking podcast now. As I said earlier, my favorite thing is when you're talking. You just gave me nine hours of that with Civilized to Death because not only did you write the book, you took the time to narrate it as well, which. I very much appreciate you.
[1:05:15]
Chris: Well, thank you. That was fun. Yeah, I'm glad, and I didn't do Sex at Dawn even though I offered to. I offered to do it for free, and they weren't into it, Audible, about the rights. They were like, no, we have our actors. We have our professionals. We know what we're doing. I was like, yeah, I have a pretty good voice. I had done voiceovers for Spanish porn movies. That was the only thing I'd done, audio, which I guess didn't impress them very much. They let me read the preface in Sex at Dawn which is just this monkey attack in Malaysia, maybe five pages or something.
I vowed, this one, I'm not going to let anyone else read it because like the way I write, I like it to be very conversational. I like to throw in little jokes and stuff and keep the reader amused as much as I can, and the people who read Sex at Dawn didn't get the jokes. Or they just were told not to stray from a strict reading of the page. I don't know what happened, but it's really dry. They missed the cadence of it.
So the audio contract expires -- it's a ten-year contract -- it expires this summer, and I'm thinking of doing a ten-year anniversary director's cut where I'll read it myself because now I have all this audio equipment. Unless Audible wants to do a ten-year anniversary thing. I don't know. Maybe I'll have my agent reach out.
In any case, either with them or on my own, I want to do this updated version where not only will I read the book, but I'll also talk about what I was thinking when I wrote that chapter or how I would change it now and what I wish I'd included or mistakes that I'd like to correct now or whatever. I think that would be fun.
Christopher: Simon Marshall is our performance psychologist. He narrated his own book, and he talked about how they don't generally like the author to narrate the book. He talked about how hard it was to not start going off on a tangent and start ad libbing.
Chris: Yeah, it's true.
Christopher: The guys that were recording, were going, "Ah, I don't think so, Simon. This is not what it says in front of me."
Chris: Yeah, it's true. It is hard. I did that audio book just like a month before it came out. It was a fast turnaround. It was four, six-hour days in the studio. Yeah, it was tough. It's hard to focus. When you're reading that much, you're not -- at least in my case, maybe I just don't have enough brain capacity. It's hard to think about what you're reading and read. All my CPU processing power was just translating these images into words coming out of my mouth, but I couldn't really get distracted and think too much about what the words meant.
Sometimes I'd get to a sentence and, oh, shit, I used that word in the last sentence. Oh, I should edit that, wait. Now you're lost in the page. So it's just pure focus, focus for six hours for four days. That's rough but, yeah, it was gratifying. I'm happy I did that.
Christopher: There's not much of a prescriptive in Civilized to Death either. Is there anything you can in general in terms of -- here's my hypothesis. I think the reason why people that you don't like to give much of a prescription is that there's nothing really you can say to people without knowing more about their personal situation. When I read a book, I think -- I'm a zoo human. You write about this in Civilized to Death the total number of hunter-gatherers on the planet was, what did you say, one per square mile or something?
Chris: Oh, yeah, the density has to be low. There's no way we'd go back to that.
Christopher: Right. The bad news is you're a zoo human. You're stuck in the zoo. The good news is you get to design your enclosure.
Chris: Yeah, to some extent, individually and also collectively as a species. That's what I'm really hoping we'll get to is --
Christopher: So you're not trying to speak to, here's an individual trying to design my human zoo, but maybe you're trying to speak to the powers-that-be that have control over.
Chris: Well, both. You know that old adage, think globally, act locally. I think it's important to see the problem on a large scale and understand how industrial agriculture, for example, is an insult to the dignity of animals, is an insult to the health of humans, is an insult to the health of the planet. That's important, so what do you do? Well, maybe you start a garden. Maybe you shoot squirrels for dog food.
[1:10:29]
Christopher: [1:10:34] [Indiscernible].
Chris: Yeah, you can edit that. The point I'm trying to make is that there are both large-scale structural issues about energy, about birth control, about resource distribution that would go a long way toward addressing some of these issues. If there were, for example, instituted global, universal, basic income where everyone on the planet would know, okay, you're going to be good. We're going to give you the equivalent of $1,000 a month, relative to whatever economy you're in. You can live. You can eat. As long as you're alive, free health care, you're okay.
What does that do? It takes away the motivation of a lot of people around the world to have lots of kids, to be secure in their old age. We know that when girls are allowed to go to school and to make their own decisions and to have autonomy, they tend to have fewer kids. So there are nudges that we can make pretty well within our grasp. Birth control, make it available to everyone, free. We can do a lot that would start to address the global population issues which are, in my opinion, underlie, basically, every other problem we have.
If we allowed global population to diminish rapidly, which it would if people didn't feel the need to have so many kids. In fact, if you have the basic universal income and you say, look, you get a thousand bucks a month for life. If you don't have kids, you get 1200 bucks a month from 50 on," something like that. There's actually a motivation not to have kids. Yeah, we could reduce global population without any coercion. You don't know what you want, but here are the benefits.
You do that, suddenly your environmental issues get much better, the oceans start to recover, the fisheries recover. We don't have the demand for industrial agriculture. We can have free animals living, moving about in a more natural way. Permaculture situation, solar energy generation, all this stuff becomes much more manageable when the number of people dependent upon it is fewer.
So, I do think there are global things that can be done. Whether we'll do them or not, yeah, I'm not super optimistic. I'm not very impressed with our specie's capacity to make these global, large-scale decisions until too late, but individually, I do think there are things that we can do. As you said earlier, like your own life, you pay attention to light cycles. You pay attention to what kind of food you're eating. You think about where you live. You live in a beautiful place with nature all around you. It's silent. It's dark at night. You see the sky.
There are things that we can do. Now, of course, I'm not discounting the fact that you and I are very affluent on a global scale and have these opportunities, but everyone has these opportunities. Everyone decides if they're going to be looking at their cellphone in the middle of the night before they go to bed. That affects the brainwaves and the quality of their sleep. Everyone decides if they're going to drink alcohol, have a drink of wine. Although the Spanish would say there's no problem, but that affects sleep cycles as well.
Christopher: It's happy drinking though, right? Happy drinking and sad drinking.
Chris: Yeah, I'm a big fan of happy drinking. Anyway, there are lots of things that we can do. If you have kids, you can look at configuring your life in such a way that your friends get to spend time with your kids, that you're not freaking out about you have to be this helicopter parent all the time. You can have a looser relationship and let that experience be more dispersed and recognize that it's good for the kids and recognize maybe there's some ego involved in needing to be so central.
[1:15:05]
Christopher: Controlling.
Chris: Yeah, especially in America.
Christopher: You also write about extending adolescence as well which is another terrifying topic.
Chris: Yeah, acknowledge that your adolescent kids are sexual beings. There are a lot of people who can't do that. Come on, are you kidding me? We've all been adolescents. We know what that was like. Why would you think it's not like that for your kids? Even just simple acknowledgments of reality can make life much easier to manage, I think.
Your question was, you said something like, I know why people like you don't like giving advice. I don't know what people like me means, but it's true --
Christopher: I don't know. I think of you as a critical thinker, an academic. Academics especially don't like giving advice. You've got a PhD. You're not a medical doctor, a clinician or anything like that.
Chris: I'm not really an academic though. I've never taught in a university or anything. I'm just a douche bag with a PhD. I think the reason I don't like giving advice is that it's, as you say, you need to know a lot about a person's life to know what advice would be relevant to them or not.
What I like to do is give the person a fish versus teach them to fish. What I wanted to do at Sex at Dawn and Civilized to Death is say, look, here's, in my opinion, a much more accurate way to look at life, to look at a human life in the context of human evolution, hunter-gatherers, which I don't think we said in this interview, but hunter-gatherers, for people who don't know, our ancestors, anatomically modern human beings have existed around 300,000 years. For at least 290,000 of those years, they were immediate return hunter-gatherers.
We're talking about the vast, vast, vast majority of our existence on the planet, we lived in this one very consistent universal way that involves sharing and taking care of one another and this communal intimacy and taking care of each other's kids and sharing food and all this stuff that we've been talking about. That's the way we have lived forever. People don't get that because we think Ancient Rome was a long time ago. That was 2,000 fucking years ago. That was nothing. That was yesterday.
It's understandable because our educational system doesn't tell us about this. It doesn't create this context. I think that when you have that context then you look at life differently. My hope is that people will make decisions based upon this knowledge. I don't know what decisions they're going to make, but I think they'll be better decisions if they have a more accurate context in which to see their own lives.
Christopher: It's having a value system in place, isn't it? I've heard Ken Ford at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition ask the question, does this improve the human condition or not? This new gadget that you speak of, does it improve the human condition? Is a self-driving car really an improvement on the human condition? What are you going to do with that time that you're not spending driving? That's a really interesting question to ask.
Chris: I think it's essential, and I think that's the question that isn't asked often enough about civilization. That's what I was trying to do in Civilized to Death is say, okay, wait, does civilization work for us or do we work for civilization? Which way is this going? Who benefits? Who really benefits? Is the average human being alive in 2019, on the planet, better off than the average human being 20,000 years ago? I don't claim to have a definitive answer to that, but I think it's a very important question. I think when you ask that question, when I ask that question, people tend to scoff and look at me like I'm a lunatic, as if that question is not even worth asking. I think it's very much worth asking.
The reason people think it's an illegitimate question is that they don't understand the extent to which they're understanding of the human condition is based upon propaganda. They think we've doubled the human lifespan. We haven't. The human lifespan is basically what it has been for 300,000 years. What we've done is we've prolonged the dying process, and we've reduced infant mortality, and that only in the last 100 years or so. We don't count abortions in our calculation of average longevity. So, the average lifespan, as a statistical norm, is higher than it was 20,000 years ago. People misunderstand that and think people were old when they were 35 or 40. That's not the case. Indisputably, that's not the case.
[1:20:14]
Christopher: It seems super obvious to me, but you're totally right. I've met doctors in Santa Cruz that fall for this one. I'm like, really? There's one in particular talked about his daughter that was doing CrossFit and with that came Paleo and the community of CrossFit. You see CrossFit is not just a gym. It's a community. All these health improvements that she was enjoying, he said "I just can't really get into this Paleo diet thing because, obviously, cavemen, they died. They lived brutish and short lives. I don't want that. That sounds terrible." Even though the evidence was right there in front of him, involving his daughter doing so well on the diet. Yeah, it's just a statistical nonsense.
Chris: It's nonsense, but it's like Hobbes. It's extremely powerful, popular nonsense because it supports the powers-that-be. It supports the notion of progress. It supports the idea that we are accomplishing so much and that all our sacrifices are worthwhile because they lead to this great increase in human happiness and prosperity, all the stuff that we've heard over and over and over again. Nobody really wants to unpack that and look at that. It's a taboo, in fact.
So, yeah, we'll see. You say the world might be ready for this book. It might be. As I was writing it, I was thinking, okay, you had your good time with Sex at Dawn. Everybody loved it. This one, there are going to be fewer people who really are able to hear this. That's okay. When I write, I don't do it trying to -- Edward Abbey said, "I don't write to -- what he was saying basically, I write to hurt the powerful and give power to those who are hurt. I'm paraphrasing, but that's how I feel.
I'm not writing in order to sell a message I think people want to hear. I'm writing to say what I think is true. If that turns out to be popular, fine. If not, that's fine too. I don't really care. I'll just do my podcast.
Christopher: Talk about your podcast. I think that's a good place to wrap up. I really, really enjoy the Tangentially Speaking podcast. Can you talk about ways in which people can support you? I know that recently, you fell out of love with Patreon.
Chris: Well, let them support you. This is your podcast. How do people support you? You probably say that in your intro, I hope.
Christopher: No, I don't actually. I find that smart people are really good at finding you. We work with clients at NBT. It's the main way that we earn income but, yeah, I do travel and record podcasts a bit like you, not quite as much travel, that's for sure. We do have a Patreon.
Chris: You've got a van.
Christopher: We've got a van. That's true.
Chris: You're halfway there, man.
Christopher: We do. The van is for bike races. It's not like on the scale that you do. It will be a little bit challenging with two kids. No, I really want you to talk about how people could support your work so if you could explain --
Chris: Well, just listen to the podcast, if you like it then there are all sorts of ways. My mother sells t-shirts out of the garage, Civilized to Death t-shirts which are very popular.
Christopher: Do they have a monkey on?
Chris: Yeah, I'll give you one. We have one in the van for you.
Christopher: Oh, that's fantastic. I don't care what the message is. If it's got a monkey on, I'll wear it.
Chris: It's not a monkey. It's an ape.
Christopher: Sorry.
Chris: You know the difference? Very easy.
Christopher: Apes have got no tail.
Chris: Yeah, that's it.
Christopher: I got it?
Chris: Yeah. So, chimps, humans, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans are the great apes, the five great apes. Then there's the gibbon which is a lesser ape that lives in Asia?
Christopher: Is it lesser because it's monogamous?
Chris: Smaller, and it is. It's the only monogamous ape. That's true.
Yeah, so, Tangentially Speaking, my podcast is, I think of it as conversations with random people that flow through my life. Some of them are famous, Joe Rogan, comedians, porn stars, authors, but a lot of them are just people I meet, just happen to meet one way or another. I love it. I love all of it. I love talking to famous people who, I hope, have conversations that are different from what they have in normal interviews because I don't necessarily want to talk about anything in particular which is why called it's Tangentially Speaking.
Christopher: Yeah, I love that, yeah, very clever.
Chris: So, I'm happy to just whatever comes up. I want it to be spontaneous. To me, it's like you sit down next to someone on a two-hour bus ride. They feel like chatting, and you feel like chatting. Let's see. How are you, and what's your story?
[1:25:02]
Christopher: Yeah, conversations.
Chris: Yeah. What I found in the early episodes was that, because it was conversational, I would occasionally lapse into some ten-minute story about when I was in Rajasthan in the '80s or something. I felt weird about that because it's like, okay, it's relevant and it's a conversation. Then if you and I were hanging out and having a beer one day and this came up, I'll tell you the story. I also felt like, I have this guest in here, and I'm talking all the time.
I talked to the audience about it. They were like, yeah, but we love the stories but, yeah, it is a little weird when your guest is just sitting there. So I started doing these things called ROMAs which is ranting out my ass. Oh, no, TOMA, TOMA was the first one which is talking out my ass. That was where I would just tell stories from my own adventures. I would just be like, okay, I'm going to tell you a story about when I was in India and this happened.
So, I did a series of those. I need to get back to those. I haven't done any for a while. Then I do these other ones called ROMAs, which I've done more frequently, which is ranting out my ass where I'm just talking about whatever comes up. I'm responding to emails sometimes. I'm talking about whatever is in the news. I'm talking about some weird thing that happened, so I'm not taking up a guest's time. It's more of a direct thing between me and the audience.
Christopher: Now I know what ROMA stands for. I was trying to figure that out the other day. What the hell is that? I was Googling. I had absolutely no idea what that means.
Chris: Yeah, I should probably say that at the beginning or something. So, for years, I didn't do any ads. I did ads at the beginning, the first year or so. One day, I remember, I had hired this woman to get ads for me. She was great. Mandy, she was on the podcast, really interesting woman. You should check out on her. She had a life-threatening disease. She was dying. She was paralyzed. I forget what the disease is, but it's like a thing on the skin. It's something about the connective tissue. It's an autoimmune thing, really bad.
She was able to do Ayahuasca. The people came to her. She couldn't leave her apartment. She was so messed up. They came to her and she had this experience with Ayahuasca. Something happened. Some switch was flipped in her, and a month later she walked out of the apartment. She has been traveling around the world. Her whole life just changed. Anyway, I hired her to generate ads, and she got the Wine of the Week Club and this underwear company.
I heard myself saying, "Hey, don't forget to check out this underwear. They're only $35 each but really good quality. They'll cradle your balls." I'm like, what is wrong with me? This is so against my -- because my whole philosophy of life is don't waste money on bullshit. Experience. So then I stopped doing ads entirely for years. It was only listener-supported, and that was great.
About a year ago, I decided to, as the podcast became more and more central to my life and I started thinking, eh, I'm probably not going to write books so much, so I need to focus on this more, I decided to start doing ads only with companies that are making things that I actually use and really appreciate.
Christopher: Like dildos.
Chris: Like vibrators, yes.
Christopher: Sorry, I used a derogatory term there.
Chris: They probably sell dildos as well.
Christopher: Oh, they're different.
Chris: Yeah, dildo is just a phallus, and a vibrator is, you know.
Christopher: I do check them out actually.
Chris: LELO.
Christopher: Yeah.
Chris: They're high-quality stuff, let me tell you.
Christopher: I was trying to work out. What goes well? I had to look at the instructions to figure out which fit goes where.
Chris: They've got different ones. The one you're probably thinking of, that's --
Christopher: The rabbit-shaped thing.
Chris: The rabbit, yeah. So that's a popular style which has both of the vaginal and the clitoral stimulator.
Christopher: You said that, not me.
Chris: Yeah, I tend to say these things. They're amazing. They're waterproof. They're USB rechargeable. They've got all these different modes. It makes me wish I had a vagina. The intensity, you can change up and down and then you press the button and it's like, buzz, buzz, buzz, only inside. You press it again, buzz, buzz, buzz, outside, or buzz, inside, buzz, outside.
[1:30:05]
Christopher: It's an impressive piece of industrial design.
Chris: Yeah, that is progress.
Christopher: We wish to change the narrative to actual progress.
Chris: Exactly, that makes civilization worthwhile, right there.
Christopher: Excellent.
Chris: Yeah, so, anyway, Tangentially Speaking, if you want to hear me talk with random, interesting people. I had a guy on who was a rattlesnake expert. Did you happen to catch that one?
Christopher: I didn't listen to that one.
Chris: Oh, that was an interesting dude. He has been bitten 15 times.
Christopher: Holy cow.
Chris: Yeah. One of my favorite ones was a -- I'll just tell a brief story. We'll wrap it up. It's your podcast. You can do what you want. I know you want to wrap it up. So, I was in the van. I was traveling in Texas. People follow me on social media and they'll send me things like, hey, I see you're in Texas. You should visit my cousin. That's how I met the rattlesnake dude. Somebody wrote to me. Hey, I have a friend who lives in the desert. He's a rattlesnake guy. If you want to, I'll reach out to him for you. I was like, fuck, yeah. Anyway, that's one of the ways that guests appear.
Christopher: What a fantastic way to make friends.
Chris: Oh, dude, it's why I do it. We also do these meet-ups where I'll just say, hey, I'm going to be in Idaho Falls, Thursday at this brew pub. Come on down, and 50, 100 people show up.
Christopher: That's amazing.
Chris: Then they get to meet each other which is the real -- which, for me, is exhausting to talk to that many people. The point is that a lot of people listening to the podcast are eccentric or unusual. They're living in a little town where there's nobody like them and so they find a community. So, I want to do what I can to make that community real, bringing it into their real life. So people drive five hours to come to one of these meet-ups.
Christopher: That's amazing.
Chris: Anyway, this story, this guy writes to me and says, "Hey, you're in Texas. If you happen to go to a town called Terlingua, you should look up my buddy, Tony, who is a real interesting guy. Yeah, okay. So I drive to the neighborhood of Terlingua, get to Big Ben National Park where I wanted to camp out. I get to the entrance and the guy says, "All the campgrounds are full. You can't go in tonight."
I said, "What should I do?" He said, "Go back to that. There's a little town down the road here and come back in the morning, and I'll get you hooked up." Okay. So I go to this little town he told me to go to. It's Terlingua. I thought, Terlingua, didn't somebody -- I feel like somebody might have said something. I parked under this tree, and I was looking -- it's like a tiny little town -- I'm looking. I finally found the message.
I text this guy, Tony. I said, "Look, you don't know me but some friend of yours, I do a podcast and some friend of yours said I should look you up. I happen to be in town tonight." Ten minutes later, he's like, "Hey, we're having beers down at this place, come on over." So, we go to this place, and there's this table of a dozen people drinking pitchers of beer. I sit down at one end of the table. They were all really friendly. Who are you? What's up?
At one point, one of the guys says, "Oh, man, look how dirty this mug is. I'm going to fucking die from that." The other guy says, "Oh, shut up. It's good for your microbiome." I'm like, oh, microbiome, you guys know about that? Well, yeah. That's cool because most people don't even know what the word means. I had people on the podcast who do fecal transplants, and I'm really interested in the microbiome.
Christopher: Jeff Leach.
Chris: So, I say, "You know about the microbiome." They're like, yeah. I said, "I read this article a few years ago." I'm going to impress them with my weird erudite knowledge. I said, a few years ago, I remember this article about a dude who was living in Africa with the Hadza. He took some of the Hadza's shit. He mixed it up in warm water, and he blast it up his ass to see if he could get, like a hunter-gatherer, a microbiome established. It was Jeff Leach.
Christopher: I was Jeff Leach, I got it.
Chris: Jeff Leach was sitting at the end of the table. The guy I'm talking to goes, yeah, that's him.
Christopher: No way.
Chris: He points down the table. I look out and Jess is sitting back, smiling because he heard me. I said, "What do you mean that's him?" Yeah, that's him. I said, "That's you?" He said, "Yeah." You wrote that article? You're the anthropologist? He said, "Yeah. I spent half of my time in Terlingua, half in Tanzania."
Christopher: That's amazing.
Chris: That's how I met Jeff Leach, and the next day, I did a podcast with him.
Christopher: Oh, that's incredible.
Chris: Isn't that insane?
Christopher: What are the chances of that?
Chris: I know. It's so crazy. I guess, eventually, I would have found out who he was or something but, yeah, so random and beautiful. As I said earlier, I travelled all through my 20s and 30s, all around the world, backpacking. That's what I loved about it was once you open yourself up to serendipity, all sorts of crazy shit starts happening.
[1:35:12]
Christopher: There's dumb luck, and there's luck that you make for yourself by being in the right place at the right time with the right mindset.
Chris: Or just, yeah, just that you're open. You notice things. It's like with psychedelics. I took psychedelics a lot when I was younger. I would take some mushrooms or something, and I'd go walk in the woods and just sit down by a stream. I would notice all this stuff. Oh, there's a freaking snake right there. I would have just walked by and not even seen it. The fact that I'm open and I'm taking my time and I'm following my intuition leads me to see all these things that were always here but normally I just don't notice them because I'm not paying attention.
I find traveling is great, especially the way I was doing it. That real on-the-ground, slow, don't know where I'm going tomorrow, kind of no plans traveling was just so great because I started noticing things and allowing things to happen that otherwise never would have happened. The world looks different when you approach it that way.
Christopher: That's the definition of mindfulness. What you just said is mindfulness. Kids are good at doing that too, especially here in the woods. They'll pick something up and show it to you. Look at this. Look at the fractal nature at the end of this. You're like, oh, look at that. I would have stepped on that on my way to getting my phone to answer a call.
Chris: Exactly, right? Sorry, kid, get out of my way. I've got shit to do.
Christopher: Well, we've been talking about Civilized to Death. When you're headed in the wrong direction, progress is the last thing you need. I like that tag line. Go get a copy and support Chris Ryan and his Tangentially Speaking podcast.
Chris, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much. I feel very honored and grateful that these people are driving five hours to come and see you speak, and here I am. Oh, yeah, come and record at my house.
Chris: It's a nice house. Come on. It's great. Yeah.
Christopher: Excellent. Well, thank you so much. I very much appreciate you.
Chris: Thank you. It's great.
[1:37:19] End of Audio
© 2013-2024 nourishbalancethrive