Introduce this guy here. Really special guy. Done me a lot of solids over the years and he appreciate it. Chris is a really interesting character. I wouldnt try this life at home but its worth knowing about. In addition to being a very decent guy, he is ode indicated to the hit and more than that, krist takes big bites out of the ass of life, and i think the ass . Yes, out of the ass of life. Heres a sampler. He has racked up college degrees, of course. He is traveled for 20 areas, during which he gutted salmon in alaska, taught english to bangkok 0 prostitutes, adult selfdefense to lan reform activists in mexico. Was involved in the diamond business in new york. I dont know how that fits in and i jut haese lan has been purchase in an undisclosed location where tributes are gathering and thats chris. Give him six months, Something Else will happen. He and his cowriter wrote sex at dawn, a pretty major work on human sexuality that taught us that prehistoric sex was pretty damn good and we should try expect one man, one phenomenon, family mod and the idea of fidelity, are really a construct of a tiny blip of human time. And that is was all profoundly wrong tumor and sexual love, family, child raring raring and structures we have today are unnatural in that that it lead to alienation and illness, and loneliness ask dysfunction on a lot of levels. That is nation resonated with a lot of people. Now chris hays taken the same broad approach to society at large. Questioning the entire basis of progress in civilization. And invites to us go a lot more paleow than just eating nuggets and drives a bright lynn when when we hunting and foraging and agriculture and then things took a little about of a bad turn. Hers a quote. Civilization is like a whole that our clever species dug and feel into. Breeds cruelty, ill in and disco music, which you dont like very much and which you compare to the plague. One of the in the book. Im reading long and cebu bonnic plague and disco music and you dont like that, dont worry, be happy. I dont. Good and deposit and funny and sharing and we need to find a way to get that way again, and worse yet, civilization makes us want more of what ails us. Were begging for the a very good line. Im throwing this out for questions. Progress, the basic illusion of era is spent. So, chris advocates a return to our basic nature before we fell into the hole we dug, and with the sense and this is off of something. I was throwing this out for the crowd. Ask him about the upside of armageddon because im trying to figure that out. Through this very, very dark examination of current civilization, theres a lot of joy, a lot of humor, a lot of lightness. Dont know how you do it but you do it. I drink. You drink. I just did at bit with you. Ill ask you well chat for ten minutes and then were going to open it up. Heres my first question. Its really in three parts. What is rich asshole syndrome what the difference between doggy dog and dog eat dog. The phrases that came out of the book which if you can we have that together. And in ten minute. The first part. Rich asshole section. Acoin a syndrome, call ras, rich asshole send tremendous and its attempt to discuss an attempt to discuss the phenomenon of people who are wealthy being obnoxious, and i wanted to come at it from a different direction because i have a bunch of friends who are very well off, and some of you who listen to my podcast know, i lived in a mansion in barcelona for a few years where everyone in the mansion was a fashion model except me, which is sort of an acid test for the ego. And i have seen people in these elite worlds, and theyre not any happier than the rest of us. So theres this sense, this illusion, that if you have a lot of money youll be happy. If you are super beautiful youll be happy. If youre famous youll be happen and thats all wrong in my experience. So i came to this point in researching this book where i started to ask the question, well, i idea to think that economics was a zero sum game, where like playing poker at your present odd house which ive done for year. If i lose 20 bucks somebody elsees walking away with 20 pucks. Theres more money for them and less for me, whatever. But then when i was hang out with these way. Y people i realized theyre not happy either. So, the misery or absence of access to resources that people at the lower end of the spectrum are experiencing, done translate into Greater Happiness and contentment to the people at the upper end, so who is winning . If everybody is losing this game, including the people who are in Silicon Valley with the house on the over looking the ocean and the three teslas in the tripe, who is winning this thing . And so i wanted to sort of examine what is going on with people who have a lot of wealth and who seem to be very unhappy, and what i came to conclude is that its not poverty or wealth thats the problem. Its the disparate disparity, the separation that occurs and a lot of research, especially done here in San Francisco, actually in berkeley, i forget the name of the man dasher celtfer, they set up a camera at a crosswalk and position an old lady there with a cane, and they have a camera, and they monitor which cars stop and which dont to let her crazy. The more expensive the car, the less likely it is to stop. They do this thing where well, its less likely. And so what i came to see is that its psychologically painful, its traumatic, to have more than the people around you, and this book, civickized to death is saying what can we take from our huntergarterrer pass and apply to our con term prayer live to understand ourselves better and create a better artificial world for ourselves. Its traumatic to have more. So, for example in the back i talk but the first time i went to india and i was sitting in a restaurant, never forget. In new dehli, restaurant at street level, eating me curry and some street kids came over and were standing there, staring at my food. And they werent asking me for anything, just staring at the food. And when the waiter came and shooed them away if felt a sense of relief. Put i also felt disgusted with miss. For feeling that. For feeling the relief because their presence put me in an untenable position. And i stayed i was in india for five or six months, and pretty quickly i developed psychological scar tissue that allowed me to ignore this kids, allowed me to step over a body in the sleep that may have been sleep organize may have been dead. Think thats what happens on a macro scale when their these differences in wealth and access to resources. That is not the way we evolved. We evolved in egalitarian, huntergaterrerrer societies in which resources were shared, and i dont want you to think im talking about noble savages. Im not sharing hunter gary gathers are spirit lilly more advantage but inheritgater garthering society is a way to share risk. So at we pay our insurancer policies, they share. An expression in africa the best place to store extra food is in your friends stomach. Right . Why is that . Because when youre hungry, your friending going to share his food with you. This is the way evolve. This is in our instinctive repertoire, and anything that takes out of the relationships with each other hurts us and hurts us if youre on the bottom, if youre on the top. So thats the ras. What was the second harris. Grasshoppers and locuses. People ask if civilization is not a net positive, which is what i argue in this book, why is it so popular . Why is it so powerful . Why is it everywhere . And i came across this species of grasshopper in north africa that lives disbursed, mining its own business, crewing on grass, chilling out, and occasionally there will be unusually heavy rains, and so the grasslands spread and expand and the grasshopper population grows and then the rains stop, and when the rain stops the grass lands for to contract so the grasshoppers be closer and closer, higher and higher population density and at some certain density, dormant genes are triggered, changes take place, the grasshoppers transform, not over generations, im talking about individual animals, their front legs get shorter, back legs get longer her thorax, same species, they become jekyll and hyde, they become canniballistic and then they swarm the biblical plague of locusts, swarm over north africaeating everything in their path, destroying everything, until theres nothing left, and then most of them. Die, and the ones who survive go back to doing grasshoppers. Were swarming right now. Thats the point. We are grasshoppers but because of the conditions that were living in, we often fine ourselves acting like locusts. So you dont need to buy the book. Thats the whole thing. What was the trigger . When did we leave the egalitarian, Horizontal Society without leaders, without hierarchy, without masters and slaves . What was the trigger . How did that happen and how did we the same creature because you say over and over in your book, the same species. Its not like muff of an evolutionary change. When and how did it chang. Anatomically modern human beings, like us, have existed at least 300,000 years. The most recent research they used to say 200,000 years. If you read sex al dawn, the first book i wrote, we talk but 200,000 years and this book is 300 because of new research. So we have been around for 300,000 years, this is people who have same brain capacity we have, actually larger brains than we have, the human brain has shrunk by so since agriculture began. A fact people dont like to hear. And People Like Us have been around 300,000 years. Agriculture started at most 10,000 years ago so youre looking at very small percentage of our existence as a species, and that is at its earlier point in the fertile crescent. Other parts of the world arose more independently more recently. What was the question . This happens all the time. Host the inflection point. So the infection point is when human beings settled down into communities and growing anywhere own dont and domestickiccating animals. Host what went wrong. The thing is when they took those steps, they didnt know what was happening. They didnt know that they were entering into a ratcheting process from which there was no escape. If you look at the conditions that preceded the sort of emergence of agriculture in these different parts of the world at different times, theres a universality there periods of increaseed rainfall, increased plant life, which scientists can fine in the pollening signature left in soil samles on lake beds and beds of pond. What you see is greater and greater fertility of the environment, more food, so human population would have increased in response to that, just like rabbits and foxes and Everything Else does. And then the rain stopped. Theres a radical break in the rains. Now in previous times what would have happenes human population would have decreased in response to that, just like the rabbits and foxes and the rest. But in this cases what happened was somebody came up with the idea of, wait a minute, these fruit trees are withering because it has not rained but theres a stream over there. If we dig a trench and bring the water to the fruit frees and the fruit trees responsible, we can help the trees. This is the first step into manipulating the Natural World rather than responding to the Natural World. And you can imagine that in each of thieves cases, that would have been a fantastic idea. Whoever came up with that was great. They saved a lot of lives. Saved the lives their friends. A hero or heroine. But what happened was that put our species on this treadmill from which there is no escape because as soon as you do that, you have increased resources, you want to stay in that place now, right . You have this stretch to the grove of trees and animals coming in, you can build fences rogue that and you heck domesticked animals and population because babies can be weaned earlier because you have milk from the animals. Men who are much more interested in controlling the sexuality of the women because now they understand that sex causes babies, which hunter gathers dont understand. A whole suite of changes occurs. You have accumulated resources for the fir time. Hunter gathers dont have accumulated resources by definition, which is why sharing is so important. But now you have accumulated resources, crop that you have harvested. Who decided who who distributes the crop . Who defends it while we get through to the next season . Who defends the land . We need more land because populations are expanding so you have this growth based economy which is what we still have today but still live in a world in which eternal growth is in an assumed prerogative of our economic system. So all of these things kick into effect totally unintended. And were steel stihl reeling from that. I tell the story of a guy named ian stevenson, a scottish dude in sonoma was a winery, with his family, and he and his family decided to take a hot air balloon ride one morning they went out in the parking lot and they were setting thump he balloon, and it was sort of half inflated and a wind came and started tearing the balloon away, and the professionals were having troublecontrolling it so this guy who was fit, like a personal trainers, jumped in, grabbed the basket, helping to manage it and the anchor ropes broke, and it started to take off and all the professionals immediately let go because if you work with beens you know you never let both feet leave the ground. He didnt know that. He hung on. And went up and up and up until he couldnt hold an anymore, and he fell to his death. And in the article i read about this, the sheriff is quoted as saying, we dont know why he hung on. And when i read that it thought, are you kidding me . I know why he hung on. He hung on but a everyday he thought he should have left go before. At every instant it was too late. When he was ten feet off the ground hi thought he should have let go before this happened, 20 feet, should have let go when i was ten feet off the ground and so on. So thats what agriculture is. A ranchchesting process because of this rapid population growth, your need to keep going and going and going. And thats what we have been doing for five thousand to ten thousand years. Tell us about i think you called it the myth or narrative of perpetual progress, which i think builds on this. We have this notion that what we have done is going to keep on serving us and that if we just invest a little deeper in progress, we can fix the problem we created. Yeah. So, i want you to talk into the microphone. Telephone us about the anywhere tv 0 perpetual progress. The narrative is the idea that we are toll that we live in the best possible time, right . Were developed that because life has been Getting Better and better this must be the best time to be alive logically. And yet i think a lot of us feel that is not true. Were looking at the first generations of americans who arent going to have as many opportunities or as much wealth as their parents. Things have peaked and i hope what that mean is is people are more open to the sort of message im trying to communicate in this book because i think that lot of people feel deeply unhappy and discontented and dont know why, because the message theyre getting is, this is the best time to be alive. Come on. Quit complaining. Go back toure cubicle and put in your 50 hour work week and be happy, be lucky. Oh, yeah, not pick your health care . Well, youre lucky you live in americay you can go to the emergency room. So, the point is that the narrative of perpetual progress has been around for centuries. One of the most fame new phrases in the english language is nsay, brutish some short. Life before the state was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. What does thomas hobbs now put hunter gathers . Indiana damp. It was 1651. He lived in london and paris, never there was no anthropology no study of this, just pulling this out of his nether regions. So, the narrative of perpetual prohas two parts, one part is demonization of pea history, life was a constant struggle for survival. War was cant. Luckive your survived to 35. The average life span was 35. Everybody died before the were 40. Thats the story we hear but prehistory, and then the story we hear but civilization is, its been this amazing thing, were pulling everybody out of poverty. Its been gives us all this leisure time. Hunt gathers work 20 hours a week and what were calling work is hunting, fishing and pick knicking, things we do on vacation. Most hunter gathers dont have a word for work in their language, dont understand the concept of doing something you dont want to do. Especially for someone else, because as you mentioned earlier, theyre feesly egalitarian. Hunter gathers dope like to be told what to do, and so what you fine is we have this native that civilization is fantastic, its the huge improvement, its wonderful, and yet when you look at the historical record, what you find is huntergathers never choose to join our world. Hoe,ey. This guy Johnny Hughes was a documentary filmmaker for the bbc, and he had been living in few guinea for a few months with a tribe, the insect tribe, and is stonage tribe by a by a back in the interior, and at some point some of the guys he was hanging out with the tribe said you have been here a long time you see how we live. Can we go and see how you live . And invite us to your world and the thought, what great idea. Right . That would be so cool to have these guys come to london and see our world. So he when he got book to london he pitch i it to his bosses and they were like yeah, well pay for the flight sod he went to talk to some an to the pollingists because an to the pollingists because he was anthropologists because he was worried once these so, anyway they understood. They studied this. So these guys fly these guys to england, and they were living i guess staying with one of the producers, in his house, and one morning theyre sifting at breakfast and the producers getting ready, drinking his coffee and going to work and hes like, okay, got go and theyre like, where do you go all day . We have noticed you leave before the sun comes up, you come back when the sun is down. Youre not with your people. These are your children, why are you not with your children . And the guy said, have to work. I have to make a living. They said, why . Said, well, i have to pay for this house. How many days do you have to work to pay for the house . All of them. He said 30 years. 30 years . When i want a house, my friends come and we build a house. Whats wrong with you . So this is you see this again and again and again. On the beagle, the boat chat charles darwyn was on, three native people that had been kidnapped on a previous voyage, by captain fit roi, and the idea being he bring them to england , show them his amazing philosophy england and then take them back to teara del fuego, build them a hut, a garden and they would show the other native people how to garden and then soon everybody would have a garden and a house and it would be great. What happened . Took them back, built them a hull, made garden, left them, three months later came back, n