Something new. His rank of college degrees, of course. He traveled for 20 years in avwhich he gutted hammond in alaska, taught english to bangkok prostitutes, taught selfdefense to land reform activists in mexico, was involved in the diamond business in new york , i dont know how that fits in and i heard land was purchased in an undisclosed location where tribes are gathering and thatstress. Give him six months, Something Else will happen thats pretty amazing. Along the way he and his cowriter wrote second don which was a major work on human sexuality that taught us if prehistoric sex was pretty good and we should try and thats one man, one woman family model as well as the idea of fidelity. There really a construct of a tiny group of humans. Really the one last one or two percent and it was all a profoundly wrong turn. And that sexual love, family childrearing and societal structures that we have today are not only unnatural alienation and the fullness and loneliness and dysfunction on a ton of levels. That resonated with a lot of people. Was a bloodshot to the new york times. And now chris is taking the same broad approach to society at large. Questioning the entire basis of progress in the civilization and advises usto go a lot more failure than just eating nuts. He draws a bright line between life when we were hunting and in foraging and agriculture. As a bright line after which things took a little bit of a bad turn. Heres a quote, civilization is like a whole our species done and throw into. Itreads cruelty, illness and disco music. You dont like very much and which you compared to the play. Does in the book, im reading aloud. I see bubonic plague, disco music. You also dont like that long dont worry be happy very much. Youre going to tellus about that. Another quote, weve been misinformed about what kindof creatures we were, are and can be. Were not the brutal competitive ship heads that we see on tv and that sort of fashion ourselves. Were actually good decent 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 same shift is made in the first place. A very good line, im just throwing this out. Progress, the basic goal in religion is spent chris advocates a return to our basic nature until we fell into the hole we done. And this is all for something, i was throwing this off the ground and asking about the upside of armageddon trying to see that , how thats going to work through this dark examination of current civilization, theres a lot of humor, theres a lot of politeness, but how do we do it . You drink. I just did a little bit to listen, i may ask you. Going to chat for about 10 minutes and open it up. So heres my first question, is in three parts. Whats is Rich National syndrome, whats your thing with grasshoppers and what is the difference between naughty dog and dog eat dog. There are phrases that came out of the book that i figured if you can wait that, he will bring out some of the same. You want me to do in 10 minutes. You just read a bunch. What was the first part . Rich acyl syndrome. Theres a section where i jokingly pointed a new psychological syndrome i call ras, rich acyl syndrome and its an 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 was i have a bunch of friends who are very well off and as some of you who listen to my podcast know i live in a mansion in barcelona for a few years where who where everyone was a fashion model except me with was sort of an acid test for the ego. And so ive seen people in these elite worlds and theyre not any happier and the rest of us. So theres this fence, the illusion that if you have a lot ofmoney youre going to be happy. If you are super beautiful be happy. If youre famous youre going to be happy 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 used to think that economics was a zerosum game where playing poker at your friends house which ive done for years. So if i lose 20 bucks, somebody else is walking away with box. Theres more money for them and less for me, whatever but then when i washanging out with these wealthy people i realize theyre not either. No the misery or absence of access to resources that people at the lower end of the spectrum are experiencing doesnt translate into Greater Happiness and contentment to the people at the upper end so whos. Winning . If everybodys losing this game including the people who are in Silicon Valley with the house on, overlooking the ocean andthe three teslas in the driveway, whos winning this thing. And so i wanted to examine whats 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 wealth thats a problem, its the disparity area the separationthat occurs. And theres a lot of research especially done here in san esfrancisco in berkeley. I forget the name of the man, Dasher Keltner is his name. If done things like a set up a camera at a crosswalk and positioned an old lady there with a cane and they have a camera and they monitor which cars stopped and which dont let her cross. 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 the book is basically saying what can we take from our hunter gatherer past and apply it to our contemporary lives to understand ourselves better and create a better artificial world for ourselves . Its traumatic to have more. So for example in the book i talked about the first time i went to india. And i was sitting at a restaurant, ill never forget. I was in new delhiat a restaurant on street level , eating my moses and curry and some street kids came over and were standing there staring at my food. They were asking me or any, they were juststaring at the food. And when the waiter came and shooed them away i felt a sense of relief, but i also felt disgusted with myself. For feeling the relief. Because their presence puts me in an untenable position and i was in india for five or six months and pretty quickly i developed psychological start issue that allow me to ignore those kids, that allow me to step over a body in the streets that may have been sleeping or may have been dead. And i think thats what happens on a macro scale when there are these differences in wealth and access to resources. That is not the way we evolved area we evolved in a gala terry and hunter gatherer societies in which resources were shared and i dont want you to think that im talking about noble savages, im not saying hunter gatherers are spiritually more advancedthan we are. What im saying is in a Hunter Gatherer Society, sharon is a way of mitigating risk so just like we pay our insurance policies, they share rid theres an olexpression in africa that i love that the best place to storeextra food it in your friends . Why is that . Because when youre hungry, your friend isgoing to share his food with you. This is the way we evolved. This is our instinctive repertoire. This is who we are as a species so anything that takes us out of the sorts of relationships with each other hurts us and hurts us if youre on the bottom, it hurts if youre on thetop. So thats the raf. What was the second part . Grasshoppers and locusts. People often ask civilization is not a net positive which is what i argue in this book, onwhy is it so popular after mark why is it so powerful . Why is it everywhere . I came across this species of grasshopper in north africa that lives dispersed, just minding hisown business, chewing on grass , chewing out and what happens is occasionally there will be unusually heavy rains and so the grasslands spread and expand the grasshopper population ndgrows and then the rain stopped and when the rains stop the grasslands start to contract so the grasshoppers get closer and closer to each other, higher and higher population density and atsome density , dormant genes are triggered, epidemic changes take place. The grasshoppers transform. Not over generations, im talking about individual animals. Their front legs get shorter, their back legs longer, their thorax changes shape. Their coloring changes, same bug, same dna. They become jekyll and hyde. They become either aggressive, they start fighting each other, they become cannibalistic and then they swarm, this is the biblical plague of locusts. They swarm over north africa eating everything in their path, destroying everything. Until theres nothing left. And then most of them die and the ones who survived go back to being grasshoppers. We are swarming right now. Thats the point. We are rappers, but because of the conditions that were living in, we often find ourselves acting as locusts area so you dont need to buy the book, thats the whole thing right there. What was the trigger, when did we leave the gala terry and Horizontal Society without leaders, without a 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 its the same species, just not much of an evolutionary change. When did it change and how did it change after mark. C anatomically modern human beings, like us have existed at least 300,000 years. But most recent Research Puts it back, they used to say 200,000 years. If you read the first book i wrote, we talk about 200,000 years andin his book at 300 because of new research. 0 so we have been around for 300,000 years area is people who have the same brain capacity we have, larger brains than we have. The human brain has trunk by about an percent and agriculture began. A fax dont like to hear. Anyway, we like us have been around 300,000 years. Agriculture started at most 10,000 years ago so youre looking at a very small percentage of our existence as a species that had in its earliest part in the fertile presence, other parts of the world it erodes independently more recently. What was the question . This happens all the time the affection point, the Inflection Point is when human beings settle down into seven communities where theyre growing their own food, domesticating animals and all that business. And where things went wrong but the thing is that when athey took those steps, they didnt know what was happening. They didnt know that they were entering into a ratchetingprocess from which i there was no escape. If you look at the conditions that preceded the sort of emergence of eagriculture in these different parts of the world, different times theres a universality area there were period of increase, rainfall, increase plant life which scientists can find in the pollen signature and was left in soil samples. That lake beds and desert ponds. So what you see is greater and greater fertility of the environment, more food e. So human population would have increased, the response to that like rabbits and boxes and Everything Else e and then the rain stopped. There is a radical break in the rain. Now, in previous times what would have happened is human population would have decrease in response to that just like the rabbits and boxes and the rest in these cases, what happened was money came up with the idea that wait a minute, these fruit trees are withering because it hasnt rained theres a stream over there, if we dig a trench and bring the water to the fruit tree and then the fruit trees respond , we can help the trees. Though 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 these cases thatwould have been a fantastic idea. Whoever came up with that was great. They saved a lot of lives. They saved the lives of their friends. They were a hero or a heroin area 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 have, you want to stay in place now. You got this trench to the grove of trees. Animals coming in, you can build fences around that area now you got domesticated animals. Youve got land that you own that youre willing to fight for you youve got relation that starts increasing now because babies can be weaned earlier because of the milk fromthese animals. You have men who are much more interested in controlling the sexuality of the women is now they understand that sex causes babies which hunter gatherers generally dont understand. Whole suites of changes occurs. You have accumulated resources for the first time, hunter gatherers dont have related resources by definition. Which is like cheering is so important. Tibut now you got lucky related resources. You got a crop you harvested so who decides who distributes this crop after mark 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 growthbased economy which is what we still have today. And we still live in a world in which paternal growth is an assumedprerogative of our economic system. So all of these things into o effect. Totally unintended. And were still reeling from that. In the book i tell a story about a guy, his name is ian stephenson. A Scottish Student who was up in sonoma at a winery with his family and he and his family decided they were going to take a hot air balloon ride one morning so they went out in the parking lot and they were setting up the balloon and its sort of half inflated and the wind came and started carrying the balloon away and having fessionals were trouble controlling it so this guy was, he was like a personal trainer jumped in and he grabbed a basket and was hoping to manage it and the anchor ropes broke and it started to take off and all the professionals immediately let go because ifyou work with balloons you know you never let both feet leave the ground. He didntknow that. He hung on. And went up and up and up until he couldnt hold on anymore and he fell to his death. And in the article i read about, the sheriff is quoted as saying we dont know why he hung on area and when i read that i thought are you kidding me . I know why he hung on, he hung on because every time he thought he should have let go for. Every instance, it was too late. When in 10 feet off the ground, he thought i should have let go before this. 20 feet off the ground he thought i should have let go and so on and so on area so etthat what agriculture is. Its a ratcheting process because of this rapid population growth. We need to keep going and going and a going. And thats what weve been doing for 5 to 10,000 years. Now i think you called it the myth of the narrative of progress. Which i think builds on the, that we have this notion that what weve done is going to keep on serving us and that if we just invest a little deeper in progress , we can ask the problem we created. I want you to talk intothe mic for that. Tell us about the narrative of professional progress. The narrative of professional progress is the idea that we are told that we live in the best awful time. Told 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 thats not true. You know, were looking at the first generations of americans who are going to have as many opportunities or as much wealth as their parents. Things have feet. So i hope what that means is that people are more open to this sort of message that im trying to indicate in this book. Because i think that a lot of people feel deeply unhappy and discontented and dont know why. Because the message that theyre getting is this is the best time to be alive. Come on. Complaining. Go back to your cubicle and t put in your 50 hour work week andbe happy, be lucky. Oh yeah, were not paying your healthcare . Youre lucky you live in america where 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 famous raises in the english language is nasty brutish and short. Weve all heard its Thomas Hobbes, 1651. He said life before the estate was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. What did Thomas Hobbes know about huntergatherers . Nothing area he didnt know a thing about hunter gatherers, he never lived in london and paris. There was no anthropology, no study of this, he was just pulling this out of his nether regions. So anyway, the narrative of perpetual progress has two parts, one part is demonization of prehistory. Life before the state was horrible. It was a constantstruggle for survival. Huntergatherers work on average 20 hours a week and what we call work is Hunting Fishing and picnicking essentially, things we do on vacation. Most huntergatherers dont have at word for work in their language that they dont understand the concept of doing something you dont want to do especially for someone else because as was mentioned earlier they are fiercely egalitarian. Hunter gatherers dont be like to be told what to do. What you find is we have this narrative and its fantastic and huge improvement in this wonderful and yet when you look at a historic low record which you find his huntergatherers never choose to join our world. Oh yeah so this guy Johnny Hughes was a documentary filmmaker for the bbc and he had been living in new guinea Papua New Guinea for a few months in a tribe which is essentially a stone age tribe in the interior and at some point some of the guys he was hanging out with in this tribe said hey youve been here for a long time. You see how we live. Can we go and see how you live and be invited to your world . He thought what a great idea. Out he so cool to have these guys come to london and see our world. When he got back to london he pitched it to his bosses and their like yeah will pay for their flight. The first thing he did was he talked to anthropologist because he was worried that once the stone age people saw the wonders of the modern world they would never want to go home and the anthropologist said dont worry about that. So anyway they understood. Anyway these guys flew the these guys to england and they were living, i guess they were staying with one of the producers in the house of one of the producers and one morning they are sitting at breakfast and the producers getting ready and drinking his coffee getting ready to go work. Okay, got to go in there like where do you go all day . We noticed you leave before the sun comes up and you come back when the sun is down and you are not with your people and your children. Why are you not with their children it . Well you know i have to work. I have to make a living. Why . How many days do you have to work to pay for the house . 30 years. Years . When i won a house my friends come and rebuild a house in a day or two. Whatth is wrong with you . You see this again and again and again c. The boat that Charles Darwin was on there were three native people that essentially had been kidnapped on the previous voyage by captain fitzroy and the idea of being he would bring them and show this amazing life in england and take them back build them a little hut to build them a garden and they would show the other native people how to garden and everybody would have a garden and a house and it would be great read what happened . Made a garden lefthe them in the months later came back and nobody is around. The gardens are overgrown. They finally found one of the guys and they brought them on the ship and he wrote in his journal that he was happy to see he remembered how to use a knife and fork and he was like dude what happened . Why would i do this when there are plenty of rudys and plenty of fishes . Want me want d me to work in otr men acolla kari desert a famous story about anthropologist trying to talk to them about farming and you dont understand he said. Why should i farm . We find this again and again the logic of our way of life we shall i eat or the sweat of our brow and bring her children in pain and all this sort of Old Testament bull shed. Hunter gatherers dont get it. Why . Why are you doing this . The world is full of anything you need. I know that sounds very romanticized but if you study the anthropological literature you see again and again and again they passed a law forbidding white people from running away to live with the indians because some of them were like im done with this. There are many cases, documented cases where the indians would ambush them kill the men take the women andd children back to the tribe adopt them into the tribe which is what they did generally because they did not slavery. They didnt haveth this. They would adopt them into the tribe and w then as the frontier moved west those people would be rescued by the whites and they bring them back in. Thank god you are back and you are not living with those heathens anymore in the first chance they got they ran back into the woods to try to find those heathens. This isnt a romanticized fiction. This is historically accurate and ubiquitous in the literature. Chris i have one more question. Im hearing an indictment kind of allowed indictment of civilization. I had a bagel today which i love a lot. I had coffee from sumatra i drove my dream car which isnt perfect comfort and then im going to get a shot to save myself from a thomas paine. I do want that pain. All that stuff is just so much alienation that im feeling . Dont take it personally but in general. With that a lot of great stuff, kind of great stuff. The thing is bagels are gray. There were no eggleton prehistory i will give you that. The thing is when we judge quality of life what we tend to do is look at the things that we appreciate and say they didnt exist then. Ive had this conversation so many times where people will say i dont know dude, i dont know how to hunt. I like my iphone. I know you do because you grew up here and now but if you its like i wouldnt want to be a fish. I would drown. Not if you were a fish so its logically inconsistent. I think will we need to do is we need to look at the quality of life of different people at different times and also look at the average. You are driving your korean car. You are a lawyer. You are an author. You live in a big beautiful house. You are not a typical human being nor amty i. We are lucky and yet here we are in the richest country. Suicide rates are up 33 of the last 10 years. Among teens up 50 . 25 of boys in schools are being drugged to make them comply with the ridiculous requirements of the public school. Addiction is off the chartss. More people are dying from addiction then died in the vietnam war year after year this country. Our population iscess overflowi. Prison is the number one purveyor of Mental Health care in this country. I could go on and on and on. Clearly this is not a particularly successful experiment righton now and we ae still being told is so much better. Tell the story in the t book abt one night i was watching a bbc nature special lists or richard attenborough. Great, i love those things that youve probably seen this one could i forget which one it was that there was a scene in south africa and you see them frolicking and then you hear this and you see the shadows coming out. Its either a great wider and orca but it got the seal of the seal when a then the air and its like flopping around. We see the teeth and the seal falls down and he chomps on and theres blood coming down and the narrator said we have slow this down to one 30th of its normal speed to really get into the pain and the gore. And he says nature in a constant struggle for survival. Im thinking i have hung out with some seals and they seem. Relaxed to me. I looked up her burst seals which is the species this was that it turns out they lived typically around 30 years. Lets say this seal was 23, in the prime of her life. He spent 23 years eating sushi lying around on warm rocks with their friends and having a good time and then she died so quickly that you need to slow it down to it 30th of normal speed to even see it happen. I will take that. When i i watch that fill my fatr had been dying for five years. He was going to test after test and procedure after procedure. Hehe had a really good insurance policy so they were chang ching. I will take that seals life and death. The point is that nature is a scare tactic used by zookeepers to convince us that our cages or protect did that we should be happy to be in those cages because out there its a jungle which gets to the dog eat dog world. I have always heard this expression is ahi dog eat dog world and i never understood that expression because i like dogs and seems like dogs have a pretty good life. Finally i was in college and i wrote in the paper something about it being a dog eat dog world and my professor was like dude its not dog eat dog its dog eat dog. Really . I thought it was dog be dog. Its a dog be dog world like a disney movie orr something. Anyway i tried to weave that through the book that its more of a dog be dog world and a dog eat dog. Without i think we should turn to questions. We are there. Where doing Instagram Live. Youu want to do the first question or should we come back from that . We are going to merge a couple of questions from Instagram Live because the internet is amazing. Someone want to note there could be a resurgence in nomadic tribes in america of modern life or would it be limited to privatelyowned land and someone similarly as is there a better way to create bid newer human basically what do we do in modern life to do the best we can . Thank you for your question instagram person. I think theres a lot that we can do to integrate prehistoric principles into our modern lives for example i spend this year i spent five months in my van traveling all around the world in north america quite dramatically. Particularly in the United States and north america theres so bl mum land where you can hymn for free in their other places where you can camp for very cheaply. Van live is a big thing. A lot of people are doing it. A lot of millennial generation people are looking at this package that they are being offered and saying no thanks. Youre not going to pay my health care. Whenever youme want. I have to get up 30year mortgage to pay for a small little box to live in. Lifes too short. I am there with them. I agree. So i think van life cometh think people try to live together forming communities because there are good things about civilization and Tech Knowledge e. One of them as recently a lot of people are able to work remotely so if you can work remotely why are you going to live in San Francisco and pay 1400 for a bedroom in someone elses apartment when you could pay 1400 buy a house and a trait or in idaho and you could have your friends come with you and join together have one washing machine a one car. Everybody doesnt need all their own stuff. Thats allll consumerism and tht benefits corporations. We are better off sharing. One part of the book that we havent spoken about yet but that i found personally very touching and important was that came across a book called paradise built until by rube at the suleman lives round here somewhere. Its about disaster sociology. People who study of human beings behave in disasters when the trappings of civilization fall away and what happens . According to the neohobbesian people like Richard Dawkins and stephen pinker and matt ridley what happens is we and pillage and attack each other. We fight the cuts we are all inherently selfish and we are all lookingng out for number on. If you take away these civilizational constructs what is going to happen is we are going to be in a dog eat dog world. What they found disaster sociologists that in tsunami centers breaks and wars and other situations in which the trappings of civilization falls apart with you people to . They act like huntergatherers because thats what we are at heart. We are grasshoppers. We are not locusts. They help each other. They take care of one another not just people that are genetically related to some sort of inclusive fitness calculation they help each other. Thats what we do. I was actually here i think i mentioned earlier. I was in San Francisco in 89 with the big earthquake and when the bridge fell on all that stuff. People i had lived next to for months i had never spoken to then suddenly we were talking. I was offering them water and they were offering me whatever they had. Thats how we react to these things and theres a quote from Charles Fritz that started the discipline of disaster sociology where he says in all my years of research ive come to the conclusion that people who lived through disasters think of those years and remember those years as the best times of their lives because they have a sense of purpose, of community and meaning. The realan disaster the slow rolling disaster. So getting back to this question i think that one of the most important ways we can bring hunter gatherer valuers and tour like this to look is on community and focus on one another and try to arrange your life in such a way that you can live around people who love you and that you love and take care of each other, help each other raise kids, take care of each other when you are sick and when you get old. All that stuff is very easily ingrained in us. The number one predict her of mortality is not how much you smoke. Its not how much exercise. Its not how much you weigh in is not what youd eat. Whether or not you feel embedded in a community of people who love you. If you feel that you are like a tube of longer than someone who doesnt matter how much they work out and eat perfect food and count calories and the rest of it. When i tried to do in this book was outlined what sort of animal we are and then to recognize that we live in a zoo that we ourselves are creating. We live in a zoo that we have designed and built. Do we want it to be the calcutta zoo which is just a bunch of cages and selective life for the San Diego Zoo where the environment is created with the knowledge and respect of the world that created those animals so thats what i am hoping we will do. You will design our world in such a way that we the inhabitants of the zoo live a more comfortable and meaningful life. Okay, next question. Sneaky talk a lot about civilization but its extra fat in america. Can you talk about variations in civilization . I can talk about that in the book. Its true a lot of the worst examples are in the United States. We live the most fractured existence in the western world. I talk particularly about some of the scandinavian countries who have a more collective identity, collective sense of community. I talk about, theres a whole section in their about Sex Education and how the dutch roach versus americans and respect for children and acknowledge meant of the sexuality of adolescence that makes americans very uncomfortable. I lived in spain for most of my adult life and it was much more cohesive sense of identity than americans. Again thats something that i want to try to popularize in america so people understand we live in a sick society. We live in a sick society whose bodies are out of alignment with the values of our species. Its much worse than other countries and we are very selfcongratulatory and so proud to be americans. Maybe lately it is changed. I work like a hunter gatherer which means i dont get it done. Its taken a long time to get this book out and im glad it came out so late as they think in this moment people are much more willing to entertain the notion that maybe things arent going in the right direction than they were three or four years ago. Another question. [inaudible] im curious to know because personally have lived through it five times so anything is worth talking about. Theres just so much to it and im wondering was just so much to take in and also what that left you with . Stephen jenkinson is what would you call him . A guru . Antidoula. He has written about dying in he has helped thousands of people die and sat with their families as they went through the process ive been trying to get them on my podcast for months and people kept writing to me saying you really need to get this guy on your podcast. A cat would love to but i only do them in person so i dont like talking through computers. I just feel like that ruins the experience. The only time that we can do it, he wasas in l. A. And it happened to be the morning of my fathers memorial service. Thats what he is referring to is a happy moment for me talking about death. We wrapped up the interview and drove to celebrate the life of my father two weeks before. What i came away with was sort of a reinforced sense of there is something deeply wrong with our approach to death and life of course. And that as i mentioned earlier the last few years of my fathers life were unnecessarily difficult and at one point i called this doctor and i said you have got to stop this. The dude is dying, let them die. Stop it and it was very difficult for her to hear because doctors are traineded in this country to fight against, its a war, its a war and its a war of attrition that we cant let death when. Where is the dignity . Wheres the grace of the beauty and the kindness . It going to happen. Let it happen. I have often as i said i have lived in spain for a long time and i always go back to the conversation i had with the spanish oncologist that i knew. He is a funny guy dr. Rubio. I was teaching english to him in this hospital. He really had no interest in learning english. What he wanted was the hospital paid me to come in twice a week and said in his office with him for an hour. Close the door and said sorry. He locked the door open a the window and Smoke Cigarettes and talk in spanish. That was dr. Rubio. The very spanish kind of situation. I remember one day hee said to e we were talking about culture and the differences between spain and america and he set the thing is chris the best thing in the worst thing about your your country as you have no sense of the ridiculous. He said Jimi Hendriks could only be american like im going to restring your guitar and played lefthanded or that never taken a music lesson ian dont give a dam about time signature. No spanish guitarist is ever going to do that but on the other hand ronald reagan. Only americans would elect this guy president. I mentioning that because we have sort of an adolescent approach in america an adolescent boy in particular. We are fascinated by violence and guns and sex but we are also embarrassed and we dont want to talk about it. We are all weird like a 15yearold boy, perpetual. Whether came away from that particular conversation was a sense that their aversion to death as part of that mentality, and immature approach to life. The first huntergatherers deal with death all the time. They are hunters. Every time you hunt to kill something so death is not a foreign concept. Also because i think we are in a difficult spot now because we have become so cynical or iced that its difficult for people who have any sense of an afterlife and so many of us are raised in a materialistic mental set like oh im dead, thats it. So wean get sort of panicked. I want to get every last minute because wanted and thats all there is. Again its the scarcity mentality. Everything about our world is based on scarcity which is ironic compared to the hunter gatherer life where they actually are materially poor but they act as if they are wealthy. They dont save anything because the environment around them as whatever they need so theres no need to save things for later. Its out there. You have huntergatherers with nothing who act as if they have everything and you have fussed with everything who act as if we have nothing. The huntergatherers or spiritual, understanding and tend me anna must. They tend to worship ancestors in the ancestors speak or shamans and sometimes born into children and a cyclical belief system in Hunter Gatherer Society which i think relieves a lot of that pressure that we feel in this very sort of linear to getting, middle and end experience. You had a question . Two for the price of one. Its really cool. [inaudible] you talk a lot about quality of life and im curious and was wondering if that isnt aspect in itself an aspect that suggests a different way. Hunter gatherer people have the aspect of being happy. Of a came across anything suggesting that huntergatherers have an appetite for something beyond quality of life . Thats an interesting question. I dont think so. Yeah, there is a point at the end of the book where im talking about the fact that for 50 or 60,000 years there doesnt seem to have been a lot of technological innovation in our ancestors lives. The spear points didnt change much. It seems that not much changed material in their lives and then there was an explosion of innovation 30 to 40,000 years ago and thats been a big question for archaeologists, why did nothing change for so long when we know they had this great mental capacity. Why did nothing change . I looked at that and i thought maybe nothing change because nothing he needed to change, right . Rather than assuming nothing change because they couldnt figure it out maybe life was so easy that there is no need to innovatefe because thats what e see and huntergatherers today. And going back to those guys that came to london. When they went back to Papua New Guinea there was one thing they wanted to take back with them, one thing that they have seen in the western world that reallyth impressed them and they wanted to take backck. It was the idea that you could put feathers on arrows and they would fly straight. Thats what they found clever, right . Its a really adjusting point because we have, we are trained tog think if you are going to a legacy you have to change the world. Are we changing it for the better . Who change the world, columbus, hitler . Hitler change the world. Good job at a lot of the people who change the world should have left it alone as far as im concerned. He was better off before the change. People say to me your books will outlive you. I dont care. It has no value to me. I think this idea that there is something, we are put here on earth to fill a company or brand or i dont know what people are doing at these ambitions but ive been very suspicious of ambition. Its like trying to extract my lifes energy for someone elses benefit. I think on earth or purpose is to take care of each other and have a good time. I dont see anything beyond that i think thats enough, at least for me. A greatat quote by Kurt Vonnegut we are here to fort around until [inaudible] back in merrily 20s i got involved in the Artist Community and two books were bibles. Your book getting into that community what i foundnd was at lunch of like young men who are painfully irrelevant or felt so at least. I was wondering like both of you have completely different world views. The worldview of getting to the top and thats your main strategy. I know you probably had plenty of success not leading with that strategy. I dont know when your sexual memoir book is coming out. See the down the road. Down the road. Down the road. Thats your lastt book, right . I guess what i want to ask if you had a ton of these guys in the room right now knowing that they are suffering because they are lacking something that they feel that they need in society. If you wanted to alleviate suffering. Its just kind of the pickup Artist Community. Did everyone hear the question . I dont know how well the mic is working. Basically neil strauss is a friend of mine and he wrote a book called the game which if its about the pickup Artist Community. Its funny i first heard of neil strauss, i was in spain and a buddy who was a tattoo artist came to my t place one day and e were talking and he said, i was working on it at the time he said oh you are writing a book about sex. Yeahah. He said the oh you should read the game by neil strauss. Who is neil strauss . This book is great, man. Its the science of how the pickup women by making them feel insecure. He told me about, i dont know if there was a woman you want to talk to at the bar you might Say Something like i dont know, i love that allows for a seat around everywhere these days. Something that seems like a complement that is designed tos. Make her feel like whats going on with astute . And i said to my friend like no, no. Thats the opposite of what im trying to ride about here. I always assumed this guy was somebody i didnt want to know and then a couple of years later he interviewed me for a book he was working on after it came out and it was successful and he invited me to mobys Birthday Party which is the first time i met them in person. I didnt know who moby was that i was envisioning event. We have become friends. What would i say . Neil, that took the game which sold millions of copies, neil lives in a mansion in malibu works with thanks to that book but neil says and honestly i havent read the book but what he says its the story of the people in this world. Its not a celebration of these people. Its sort of an embedded journalists documentary approach to their world and it starts with a guy who is the best the best pickup artist in the world who is suicidal. Anyway i dont know the extent of covering it is out there. What i would say to these guys is rather than learning how to try to manipulate other people figure out who you are and be at decent unapologetic version of yourself. And then other peoplef come to you. Rather than going out and trying to change, what you going to do anyway . He trick a woman sleeping with you. Eventually shes going to figure out who you are. Thats the whole point of intimacy is to figure out who each other is or are not sure which verb that is. You are never going to achieve intimacy of your pretending to be someone else in order to get someone to come home with you. The point is intimacy. If your point is to get laid just go. What is the point . But they cant have intimacy of their not being honest and not enough and take and if they are using tricks to make someone feel bad about themselves in order to achieve that intimacy. Thats kind of an evil approach and eventually thats going to come out. What i would say to these guys is i feel your pain. Thats why i included that chapter because i think its a very underappreciated phenomenon in American Life how much suffering sexual shame causes and thats why i wanted to ride sex ad dawn. It affects men and women its a divide and conquer strategy pitting men against women in this war of the sexes which i think doesnt exist except in the imaginations of the people who are promoting it. I think teenage boys suffer greatly and almost all the Mass Shootings of teenage boys there is indication that sexual frustration is one of the reasons they do this. Im not excusing it and im not saying its womens fault in any sense but i am saying when you live in a culture that is so afraid of sexuality that you are shaming people for being who and what they are its going to cause serious problems. In light of that question we have time for one more. Its been all dudes. Yes, please. Earlier you mentioned something about agricultural being the tilting point were civilization. What about technology and that manipulation . Are we making a huge mistake or what are your thoughts . I dont know much about the question is what about Crisper Technology and is that a huge mistake . I dont know much about crisper. I know its gene editing. I think most of the diseases that we suffer from are caused by civilization. People often say wow come on man we have modern medicine. We have antibiotics. We have vaccinations. Yeah but most of the things that vaccinations in antibiotics in the restive medicine are partially addressing are in fact caused by civilization. Heart disease, hypertension, diabetes, cholera, malaria, tuberculosis, smallpox, influenza a pretty good on the list of the biggest killers of humanity they are all results, muster results of civilization. Cancer. Most forms of cancer didnt exist before civilization so i think we come up with these new technologies heart stents and dialysis machines. This is a guy who lights her house on fire and shows up in our later with the bucket of water and you are supposed to feel grateful. Wait a minute we are causing the problem and then partially fixing it. We up the water supply and then we sell bottled water. Im supposed to be thankful for that . When i was a kid we drank water out of the tap and it was fine. I could buy it at the store or by filters. This is a special civilization. Destroy the free things so you can modify it to make money from it. I love that commercial, like a good neighbor, state farm is there. I like the good neighbor. Other Technological Solutions are very partial solutions to problems that are factory edited by the system of technology. On that thought i think we are out of time and when we need to sign these books so thank you all for coming and for your Great Questions and we will see you next time. [applause] [inaudible conversations]