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 a