Latest / Beyond Labels Premium / Episode 6: Breaking Out of the Civilized Zoo - Joel & Sina with Dr. Christopher Ryan

Transcript

Episode 6: Breaking Out of the Civilized Zoo - Joel & Sina with Dr. Christopher Ryan · Beyond Labels Premium

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, everybody, thank you so much for joining us.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: Joel and I have a special guest today.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: His name is Dr.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: Christopher Ryan.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: His work has been featured just about everywhere, including MSNBC, Fox News, CNN, NPR, The New York Times, The Times of London, The Washington Post, Newsweek, and so many other publications.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: He's also been a featured speaker in various platforms from TED to the Festival of Dangerous Ideas at the Sydney Opera House to the Einstein Forum in Germany.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: Dr.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: Ryan has consulted at various hospitals in Spain.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: He's provided expert testimony in a Canadian constitutional hearing and has appeared in well over a dozen documentary films.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: He's the author of Civilized to Death and the co-author of the New York Times bestseller, Sex at Dawn.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: Dr.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: Ryan puts out a weekly podcast called Tangentially Speaking, where he features conversations with interesting people ranging from famous comics to bank robbers, drug smugglers, authors, and plasma physicists.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the program, Dr.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: Ryan.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_01: Please call me Chris.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, well, I am so excited to have you here.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: Joel and I just met you now for the first time.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: This was a fantastic example of how tribes come together to help each other grow because we were actually directed to you from a listener.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: So someone was listening to our podcast, and Joel and I were pondering why um humans got into agriculture.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: You know, how we see that's kind of an enslavement to the land.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: So why did we actually take that step?
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: And the listener emailed us and said, you have to read this book called Civilized to Death, and you have to read, you have to meet Christopher and have you know have him on the show.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: So you are kind enough to come on the show and talk about this question with us.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: But before we dive into the agriculture component, what I want to do is just give a broad um perspective of what you're talking about in this book called Civilized to Death.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's you you wrote that it's the new, it um explores the ways in which progress has perverted the way that we live, including how we eat, learn, feel, mate, parent, communicate, work, and even how we die.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: So the fundamental question is whether civilization has a net benefit to our species.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: And in the introduction of the book, I love this, it deeply resonate resonates with me.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: You said we are the only species that lives in zoos of our own design.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: So I'd love to start the conversation with you exploring that a little bit.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: What do you mean by we live in zoos and it's by our own design?
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I guess what it gets down to is the idea that, of course, you know, we all acknowledge that we're living in largely artificial environments at this point.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, uh our water comes in pipes, and our light often comes in a lamp, you know, and our food comes in packages, and every our connection to the source of life seems to be uh several, you know, interrupted by many intermediary steps at this point.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, we live in shelters that are built according to the sort of uh the strictures of economics and convenience of the builders or the developers.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_01: Build the cheapest thing, the fastest way you can, you know, stamp them out, McMansions, you know, like cheap Chinese drywall that's gassing, off-gassing, all sorts of horrible things.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_01: And anyway, the point is we're living in a designed environment, a human-designed environment, and the design is really bad.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_01: And I started thinking of it in terms of zoos.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_01: I read about this in the book.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_01: I went to a zoo in Sumatra in um a place called Bukatinggi years ago.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_01: I was traveling there, and uh, it was one of the saddest places I've ever been.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_01: It was primarily orangutans, which are native to that island, that they had caught and they had them in these cages, and they were just concrete cages with iron bars.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_01: And it was like walking down death row at a prison or something.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_01: It was just you could see these intelligent, desperate creatures that had lost all hope sitting in these cages, just sort of reaching out through the bars, like, just touch me, something, kill me, anything, just something.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_01: And that stuck with me still.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_01: I still remember that and haunted by the memory of it.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_01: And then years later, after Sex of Dawn came out, um, my wife and I were invited to the San Diego Zoo where they have a um bonobo troupe there.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_01: And I hadn't been to a zoo since Bukatingi 25 years earlier.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, we were invited because we talk about primates a lot in that book, and the primatologist wanted to show us around.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_01: And so we accepted the invitation.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_01: We went down, and it was so different.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_01: Now, I I'm not particularly pro-zoo.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um, this isn't about whether zoos are ethical or not.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_01: But if you're gonna have a zoo, design it in such a way that the animals feel at home as much as possible, right?
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_01: So the bonobos they weren't in cages, they were on islands.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_01: And because bonobos don't swim, so it was a natural kind of enclosure.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_01: There weren't iron bars.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um, they had lots of space, they had trees to climb in.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_01: The troop configuration was intentionally a replication of what's found in nature, how many adults, how many juveniles, the ratio of male to female, the food that they were provided was the food that they would have found in their own environment.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so there were the space was designed with an understanding of what kind of animal this is, what kind of social networks are necessary for it, how much space it needs, how much movement, what kind of movement, right?
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_01: Climbing and um and so I looked at the human world and I say, we're living in a world that's much more like the Bukatingi zoo.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_01: People are going to work and sitting in cubicles with air conditioners and windows that don't open and artificial light, and they're eating, you know, taco bell or some shit for lunch in 20 minutes, and they're not moving, and they're of course we're unhappy.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_01: We're like the orangutans in that zoo.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so I'm not suggesting that we should abandon civilization and all become hunter-gatherers again, but I am saying that we can make a much better enclosure for ourselves than we have thus far, and we can incorporate a much more sophisticated understanding of what kind of animal Homo sapiens is into the artificial world that we design.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: I love that.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: And um, I love this concept of that you bring up in the book that in order to know ourselves as individuals, we have to take a step back and know us as a species.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't think a lot of us do that.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: We spend a lot of time in self-reflection, right?
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: Who am I?
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, what makes me happy, right?
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: All these self-help books that we have.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: But um, it was really insightful to hear you say that, to step back as us and just discover who we are as a species.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: And it reminded me of just how out of touch we are.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_00: So and but there's some areas of what we would call progress, right, in the in our civilization that have tapped into that knowledge base.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: So, for instance, in my opinion, social media like Facebook, right?
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: They are tapping into how humans operate on this cognitive level and to get you to like stay on Facebook and you know, tag this.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: And and it's recently come out that Facebook itself knew of the dangers of Facebook to teenagers, right?
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: They knew that they could manipulate them in certain ways, and they just kept doing it anyhow.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: So it seems like there are some facets of our civilization that are actually looking at how does the species actually operate and they're tapping into that for like their own gains.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think that's been going on for quite a while.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, you know, the the fish are always the last to realize they're in the water, right?
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_01: It's the old sort of you don't see what's right in your face.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_01: I think that the people who have a lot to gain from this understanding uh financially have understood for a long time that you can manipulate um human beings on the sort of species level, uh, propagandists, uh, advertisers, uh, you know, military training camp, you know, there are a lot of different things that are going on, including organized religions, um, are very good at understanding what motivates people uh and how you can turn the dials and get people to do what you want them to do.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so I I consider the both books that that I've published so far to be hopefully very subversive in the sense that what I'm trying to help people see is that you are an animal.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_01: You are every bit an animal as the gorillas or the your dog.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_01: And so to uh I think one of the fatal flaws, and and this ties into what I was saying about the sort of mind control of organized religion, is that first you tell people they're not animals, you're never gonna die.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_01: If you do what we say, you'll have eternal life.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_01: And you remove people from the material world of animals and plants and wind and water and all that.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_01: We're semi-angelic creatures floating above it all.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_01: Therefore, we can destroy the earth however we want, because it doesn't really matter.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, the modern iteration of this is people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos think we're going to go to Mars, so we can just trash the earth, whatever, it's disposable.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but when you remove people from this material animal world, you also take away their ability to understand themselves as animals and to understand that they have animal needs and that there's nothing sinful or shameful about that.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so my work is always about trying to um sort of uh cleanse people of that assumption of sin and that assumption that they are beyond animal, beyond meat, we might say.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_01: And uh and that there's nothing wrong with that.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_01: And that there are wonderful ways to to live your life acknowledging that you are in fact an animal.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_01: You're you're an animal with self-determination, of course.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but we we have these hungers and needs and tendencies that have come about through hundreds of thousands of years of of evolution.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and there's no escaping that.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: Can you give us an example of something that you would consider one of these animal needs that we're suppressing?
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, there's so many.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_01: Uh the first, Sex at Dawn, uh, is largely about um sexual appetites that we suppress by convincing people that long-term uh sexual monogamy is a natural human state.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_01: The science is overwhelming that that's not how our species evolved.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_01: We did not evolve in nuclear families, mom, dad, two kids.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, that's not how hunter-gatherers live today.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_01: That's not what our body, the story that our bodies tell about our uh reproductive past.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_01: You can read a human body or any animal's body like a map, and it tells you it's a map to the past of that animal, the evolutionary pressures that that animal has undergone.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so anyone who's interested in a sort of a quick encapsulation of that can see my TED talk, for example, where I um talked about sex at dawn.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_01: But, you know, our the the size of our testicles, the placement of our um ovaries, the the so many different things about our body um tells us that our ancestors were relatively promiscuous.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so here we are in the modern world saying, well, that's that's not true.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_01: Anyone who's got tendencies toward uh, you know, an appetite for sexual variety is some kind of a pervert, or you don't really love your husband, or there's something wrong with you, you're a you know, you're a hussy, or you know, all this slut shaming.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_01: We've built up all these institutions around denying what's obvious.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so that, you know, I think sexual appetite's a very clear example.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_01: More sort of uh pedestrian examples would be our need for movement.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_01: We have a certain, if we don't move a certain amount uh regularly, we get heart disease, we get diabetes, we um develop anxiety, we have all sleep disorders.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_01: Our ancestors moved, they were nomadic.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so you know, there's a sort of an evolutionary trajectory.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, same thing with sleep, you know.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_01: So I hear people say, Oh, I I sleep five hours a night, that's plenty for me.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_01: That's bullshit.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_01: Sorry, dude.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_01: Human beings for hundreds of thousands of years have needed a certain amount of sleep, and you can't will that away.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um, diet, how much fiber?
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, what does our microbiome need?
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_01: You know, all these things.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_01: All you know, the the biggest determinant of uh longevity, this is a more important factor than weight or exercise or diet, or whether you smoke or not, or any of these other factors, is whether or not you feel that you are part of a caring community of people.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_01: That is the biggest factor in determining how long you're likely to live.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_01: That comes straight out of our hunter-gatherer past, right?
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, we all lived in these small, interdependent, highly intimate social groups.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_01: And so people who are isolated are suffering in a way that uh, you know, we can only suffer because our past is so marked by our sociability as animals.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I can see that not only the isolation um that we've been going through, but as you've brought up, the judgment, right?
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_00: Judgment itself also makes you feel isolated and the like you're not part of the tribe.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: So it doesn't have to be a physical isolation.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_00: Like I've been in groups of people where I have felt like I was shamed, I was not accepted, you know.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: So it was it was almost worse than being by myself, right?
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: Because then you're sitting there in the room and you feel completely rejected by these people that you think are your tribe.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: So for me, the judgment and the shaming of people is just as harmful as being the isolated.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_00: So I can see what you're saying that we're placing these.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: Um, this is right up Joel in my alley with labels, right?
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_00: Our problem with labels, that we're placing these labels on groups and shaming and shunning and blaming them based on the these labels that we're we're attributing to people, right?
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_00: But Joel, I want to let you jump in here because I I'm sure you might have something to say on this point.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, well, um I I wouldn't be honest with myself if I didn't if I didn't take a bit of issue with that we are just animals.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_02: I think we are uh I happen to be a Christian, and uh I I think that we are uh we are a certainly uh a different kind of animal.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_02: Um but that doesn't mean that doesn't mean that we don't have basic needs.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_02: And so uh while we can we can agree to disagree on a on a minor on a on a point here, um the the fact that we do have you know basic you know basic needs is absolutely um absolutely valid.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_02: I I I couldn't I couldn't agree more.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_02: And and that the and that the uh the cage we put ourselves in is uh you know is a is a tough is a tough cage.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_02: So um uh one of the one of the things that uh that I'm hearing a lot these days uh is is how do I how do I disentangle?
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_02: Um I think I think Chris, in your lexicon, that would be similar to saying, how do I get out of this cage?
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I've I I put myself in this cage with the way I recreate, entertain, invest, uh uh, you know, uh vocationally.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_02: My my cubicle, you described it extremely well.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_02: Um uh so how do I how do I simplify?
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_02: How do I disentangle from this cage?
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_02: What does what does an open door, what does an open door look like?
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_02: And um I'd like to hear you, I'd like to hear you address that a little bit.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_02: Sure, sure.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um and and before I get into that too much, just to to respond to what you began with there.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_01: I I'm agnostic myself, but I do have I'm actually named after a priest.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um, my father was in a Catholic college, and um his favorite professor was Father Chris, and they both left the church together.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um I'm sort of named after a fallen priest.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_01: But interestingly, I met him years later, and you know, he left the the priesthood, he married a fantastic woman, and the two of them spent the rest of their lives doing the kind of work that they believe Jesus would have approved of.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I have nothing but respect for them.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_01: So when I speak harshly about organized religions, I'm talking more about all the gold in the Vatican than I am about uh you know I'm I'm with you.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_01: Christian theology or whatever.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um as far as the you know, how to get out of the cage, you know, that's the perennial question, right?
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_01: Uh the truth will set you free.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_01: Free from what?
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um, free from a false life, I think.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and the first step, of course, is to recognize that you are in a cage, that those barriers are not protecting you, they're enclosing you.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that you know, the powers that be are very good at convincing people that they are lucky to be where they are.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, in the in the zoo metaphor, we could say that that's the the zookeeper saying, you animals don't know how good you have it in here.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_01: We bring you food every day, you're protected from the lions.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, you know, the the cobras, there's so much danger out there.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_01: You can't imagine how terrible it is out there.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_01: You should count your blessings.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and that, you know, that's the same thing that the slaves were told in the south.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_01: That's the same thing that oppressed people are told everywhere and in every time.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_01: Just count your blessings, be happy with what you have.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think the first step is to recognize that this isn't working.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_01: And I think a lot of people are looking at their own lives and saying, this doesn't feel right.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_01: I'm very unhappy.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_01: And I look at my friends, they're very unhappy, they're addicted to painkillers, they're suicidal, they don't have any friends, they don't enjoy life.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_01: They don't, there's nothing, they're not hopeful about the future.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, there are a lot of indications that the way things are going is not in the right direction.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_01: I think you see that in polling data, you see that in mental health, suicide rates and depression, everything's going up.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, 80.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, eight, 80% of Americans, uh, supposedly 80% of Americans hate their jobs.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, uh uh the the average the average American male between 25 and 35 spends 20 hours of the week playing video games.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_02: Um yeah, yeah, you're you're you're spot on.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_02: You're spot on.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_01: And then a physical health, right?
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_01: The the obesity and the the uh anxiety disorders and On and on.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: So I think that that's the first step is to recognize like this isn't working.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_01: This is a cage.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_01: This is not a protective enclosure.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_01: And then you have to start to look at what are the bars in that enclosure.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_01: What are the the bars that are holding you in?
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_01: Debt is a big one.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_01: Consumerism, the idea that things are going to make you happy.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_01: If you get more money, you'll be happier.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_01: You'll be able to buy your way out of this mess.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_01: That's uh that's a scam.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_01: And that's probably one of the central themes of Civilized to Death.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_01: That there's a whole section in there about people who've made it, people who are the winners, the wealthy people.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_01: And let's look at how happy they are.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_01: Turns out they're no happier than anyone else.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_01: So the whole narrative that if you just work hard and apply yourself and trade your precious time for money, that eventually you'll be able to buy a happiness, that's a lie.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so I think you know that you're asking for practical uh steps that people can take.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_01: I think the first one is to look at your life and say, is all this stuff actually making me happy?
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_01: Do I need this big house?
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_01: Is this making me happy?
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_01: Are the three cars in the garage making me happy?
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_01: And if the answer is no, which I think is almost always the answer, then you have to start extracting yourself and you recognize that there are two currencies in life: money, which is replaceable, and time, which is not.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_01: So any situation in which you're selling time for money, you need to be very, very careful because you're probably getting ripped off.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I think we've seen this.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_00: Like, so one of the things that came out of like the shutdowns was um, I think people had to slow down, right?
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_00: They were forced to slow down.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_00: And a lot of people that I know started to wake up and they're like, wait a minute, I recognizing that they've been on this treadmill.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_00: And that while initially they were upset that they were having to slow down and you know, stop doing all these million activities a week, they learned to really like it.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_00: They started to do things like getting in the kitchen and cooking with their kids and reading more stories with their kids instead of rushing from here to there and like always feeling overwhelmed.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so I was actually very encouraged uh to see that.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_00: But then as, you know, here well, here in Virginia, as things started opening back up, for instance, you saw people get right back on the treadmill.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_00: So it's this, and I feel the tug too.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_00: You know, my husband and I constantly, it feels like every few weeks we're like, okay, we're ramping things back up, you know, we're starting to lose touch with what's really important to us and filling up that calendar, for instance.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_00: So let's back things off again, you know, and I feel like there's this constant tug between what I'm gonna say, like my intuition, my spirit wants to do, and what you feel almost pressured to do by our modern society.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it feels like there's just this tug, this constant tug, and that we are we judge people for like if I'm not on the treadmill, if that fact that my kids aren't in all these league sports, and you know, we get kind of shunned for it, to be quite frankly, to be quite frank.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_00: So um, you know, I was a little more hopeful that more people were gonna get off the treadmill and stay there.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_00: But what I'm saying is it seems like it's difficult, right, in the culture to take that next step.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_00: Like they recognized that they were to some extent in some kind of zoo-like cage, but then they chose to go back into the cage.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I think a lot of people are are not choosing to go back into the cage, right?
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_01: There's a big labor shortage in the US right now in low-paying jobs.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_01: People don't want to go back and work at Walmart or whatever.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and you know, of course, that's being presented as people are lazy or you know, people are whatever, the foreigners are taking our jobs or whatever.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_01: No, it's just that you're paying them so little money that it's not worthwhile.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_01: If you have child care expenses and you're making amount the same amount of money you have to pay for child care, what's the point?
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_01: You know, um, I I sympathize with the difficulty of swimming upstream in any culture, right?
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_01: Because the uh especially American culture is so insistent uh about the buy, buy, buy, you know, produce.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_01: It's all about your value, is what you how much you make, how much you spend.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but people, one of the beautiful things about travel is if people get the opportunity to travel, and this is an actionable step that hopefully people can take.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_01: You get outside of the United States and you see that's not how the rest of the world is.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_01: I I lived in Spain for 20 years, and the value of someone's life in Spain is how much fun they have, how interesting they are.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_01: It, you know, I as I said, 20 years, I went to a lot of dinner parties in Spain, and no one ever asked me what I did for a living.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_01: No one, they just don't ask.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_01: They ask what you're reading, they ask what kind of films you're into, they they ask, you know, where you went on your vacation.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_01: They all have a month off every year at least.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, they ask about what makes you interesting as a human being, what you are, not what you do.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_01: That's a very American thing.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_01: And um, you know, I think that's a part of the process.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, you guys probably know Joseph Campbell, the mythologist who wrote A Hero with a Thousand Faces, very famous guy.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um, he has a concept called detribalization, which I think is very important as a stage of maturation, which is recognizing that you come from a tribe and that that tribe has certain um a certain system of reference, a certain view of the world and a system of meaning, but that there are other tribes.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_01: And if you have the opportunity to travel either physically or by reading and meeting people, however you do it, you start to realize that you come from this one little tribe that speaks its language and has its worldview, but there are all these other worldviews, and you start to incorporate those and de-tribalize yourself.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and when you do that, it's an amazing key because it gives you a much more complex perspective from which to view these different problems and to organize and um sort of uh orchestrate your own life.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's what we're all trying to do.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think I think that is that is extremely uh extremely fascinating.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_02: I I I know uh when I go to Mexico or Spain, I've been there numerous times, and and um they they they don't eat in 20 minutes and and start getting fidgety.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_02: Uh they're happy they're happy to sit there for two hours, you know.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_02: And we see it as a waste of time.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_02: And um and they they see it as that.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_02: I was at a I was at a biomass, an energy biomass conference, uh, and I had dinner with an Austrian.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_02: And I've been to Europe many times and and always marveled.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_02: We know you know worldwide, the Europeans are known for the way they they uh they manage their forests.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_02: Their forests are far more productible, but far more productive per you know acre than than North American forests.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_02: And I asked this Austrian, I said, you know, why why are our American forests so poorly managed compared to the ones in Europe?
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_02: And I expected some you know great um you know uh academic answer.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_02: And uh without batting an eye, he said, royalty.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_02: I said, What royalty?
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_02: He said, Yeah, he said the average the average tree in Europe is owned for 800 years by the same person.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_02: In America, the average tree is owned by the same person for 40 years.
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_02: He said, you cannot have a forest policy, uh a long-term forest policy, when the turnover ownership of a tree is is 40 years.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_02: And so that that that speaks to I mean those are just a couple of practical examples of what you're describing and um and and to to know that you know that we're not the center of the universe.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, you know, we when you go to any other country in the world, it's interesting, or you know, I'm farmer food, I um I I'm always interested in the local food, you know, the local cuisine and that sort of thing.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_02: And I ask people, I say, um in your in your perception, when you think food, America, food, food in America, what is our cultural, you know, food item that you think of?
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_02: And I have yet to have anybody say anything besides McDonald's.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_02: And and you know, talk talk about a um what a a cheap a cheap contribution to the world.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's a really cheap contribution to the world.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_02: So, so I I love these.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_02: Um I would not have thought uh of of your of your practical tip travel.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_02: That's a that's that's really a good one.
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_02: Um if I could jump off from what Cena was saying there uh about the uh just the peer pressure, the peer pressure that we have to, you know, the the kids to wear wear clothes like their friends wear, to be in the soccer league where their friends are in the soccer league, to eat at at the place where their friends eat.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, the the social pressure is just enormous.
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_02: Could you could you speak to that animal uh go ahead with with the animal idea of of that of that peer dependency?
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_02: Um uh certainly in the animal kingdom, in the animal kingdom, we see tremendous peer dependency.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_02: I mean uh cows all pretty much eat the same thing.
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_02: Chickens eat the same thing.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_02: We we don't see we don't see innovation.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I may be wrong, but yeah, I raise a lot of animals and and I don't see much innovation uh among the animals.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_02: And so are we just are we just doomed to be to be peer dependent, to be a zebra like, you know, to be a zebra like all the other zebras or to be a you know a chicken like all the other chickens?
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, interesting question.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_01: Uh you know, I I agree with you that we're not just animals.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_01: There's definitely something very different about humans and you know chickens, uh on an individual level.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not so sure about it on a collective level.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_01: I I do think that humans, there's an emergent intelligence, for lack of a better phrase, um, when you get a certain number of humans together, they start to act like a superorganism, like a school of fish or a flock of birds or a herd of cattle that all turn in the same direction.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, uh, I'm no expert on cattle, but my understanding is that there's no leader, there's no cow saying, we're all going over there now.
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_01: It all just kind of happens, right?
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_02: Or uh now there, there, there, there is a leader.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_02: I I raise a lot of cows.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_02: There, there's there's a lot, well, we c we call it we call her the boss cow, the boss cow.
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_02: She she determines, you know, kind of kind of where but but I I I totally get um having raised different groups of cows, you know, uh five in a group, ten in a group, a hundred in a group, uh, seven hundred in a group.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_02: There for sure, for sure, as you move the groupings up in scale, um my descriptive term is they they become less individualized and become more like an organism, they become more like an amoeba.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_02: Well, the the obvious the obvious jump off then, the next the next question then is does uh does the larger a city become, does that exacerbate, does that amplify this this um peer dependency or or pressure to conform?
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um I think it does, and and it expresses itself through institutions rather than individual relationships.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um, there's a uh a guy named Robin Dunbar, who's a biologist in England, who was studying um mammal, I think primate brain size, brain volume.
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_01: And he wondered whether there was a correlation between the brain volume of different primates and the sort of typical social group size of that species of primate.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_01: And he found that in fact there is a very uh powerful correlation, and so just by looking at the brain volume of different primate species uh in ratio to their body size, he could accurately predict the maximum social group size for that species.
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_01: And when he looked at humans, he said it's about 150.
• 36:05
  SPEAKER_01: Because the neocortex is mainly evolved, according to his hypothesis, uh, to keep track of social relationships.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_01: Who can I trust?
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_01: Who's a liar, who's a cheat, who's generous, who's stingy, and you're constantly adjusting your own behavior based upon what you know or what you hear about these other individuals.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_01: And it turns out that we can keep track of about 150 relationships.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_01: Beyond that, it becomes Facebook friends and Twitter followers and you know, these sort of more institutionalized groups that are managed by dictate.
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_01: And so you get uh political leaders or economic leaders who are willing to do things to other people precisely because they don't know them.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_01: They'll never have to look in their eyes, they'll never have to, you know, uh face the consequences of their decisions.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas in hunter-gatherer groups, which never grow behind beyond 150 individuals, those groups splinter.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_01: As soon as they start to get that big for various reasons, often having to do with availability of food in the environment, they'll break down into smaller groups and spread out.
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so any kind of leadership in hunter-gatherer groups, which we lived in for 300,000 years before the advent of agriculture.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_01: So it's very much our sort of home uh environment socially.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, any sort of leadership in those groups is non-um coercive.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_01: People become leaders because other people respect them.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_01: So you're not saying I want to be the leader.
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_01: People turn to you and say, Cena, what do you think we should do?
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_01: Because you were right about the last thing.
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, you know, your opinion turned out to be right about that.
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_01: So that's how leadership accrues in these groups because of respect and um uh a history of being right about things.
• 38:13
  SPEAKER_01: So it's kind of funny because in a hunter-gatherer environment, the worst thing you can do is express any interest in being a leader.
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_01: That makes you ridiculous.
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_01: So someone says, I want to tell you, you're absurd.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_01: People think you have some sort of mental illness.
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_01: Leaders tend to be even more humble than the average person, even more self-effacing.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_01: They always speak last.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, wealth, and this relates to something Joel and I were talking about before we started recording.
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, wealth is measured by how much you give away, not how much you have.
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_01: So it's a totally different, almost 180 degrees different view of wealth.
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_01: Your value as a person is based on how generous you are, not how much you have accumulated.
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um, it's a it's a very different world.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_01: And getting back to your question, Sina, about examples of these hunter-gatherer motifs that continue in the present day, we still really respect um people who are generous, right?
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_01: In our social groups.
• 39:31
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and it's it's interesting how our behavior differs among our friends, people who actually know us, and the the greater world.
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_01: I think this is one of the big problems that people are facing now, where they're designing their lives around the feedback they're getting from strangers, uh, rather than the feedback they're getting from people who actually know them.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_01: So we see these, you know, Instagram influencers who are trying to design their lives around how many likes they're getting from strangers.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, it's it's a tragic dead end, I think.
• 40:08
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 40:08
  SPEAKER_00: This is so fascinating because you know, I've studied hunter-gatherers, but usually in the relationship to like diet and health, not necessarily in this like social interactions that you're talking about.
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and it really makes me think so.
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_00: When you're talking about practically, how can you get out of these cages?
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_00: You know, the first step identify that you're in the cage.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_00: And then I think another step is to identify that we call them hunter-gatherers and we tend to judge them or label them as being uncivilized, right?
• 40:42
  SPEAKER_00: Because they don't have all this progress that we have.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_00: But from what I'm hearing you say, and from what I know about their health and how it was, you know, dramatically improved compared to ours, it sounds like um they're not like necessarily these uncivilized people, that they had a lot going for them that was right, that was good, that was like moral.
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's not a bad thing for us to say, hey, I want to be could be swing more toward, I want to take my life, kind of break out of this cage and swing more towards toward a hunter-gatherer um social interaction or lifestyle, that they're not this uncivilized you know, group that we think that they are.
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, would you agree?
• 41:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, the the whole term civilization, of course, is very self-congratulatory, right?
• 41:37
  SPEAKER_01: We are civilized, they're not by definition.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_01: But if you start to break this stuff down and unpack it, which is what I was trying to do in Civilized to Death, and say, okay, what do we mean when we say our quality of life is better?
• 41:53
  SPEAKER_01: What do we mean when we say we've been progressing for 5,000 years?
• 41:59
  SPEAKER_01: What's better now?
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_01: And so I looked at some of the writers who talk about this.
• 42:05
  SPEAKER_01: Um Matt Ridley is a famous example.
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, he wrote a book called The Rational Optimist, which is uh a sort of the mirror image of civilized to death in a sense that he's saying everything's getting better, everything's better, better, better, all the time, better.
• 42:22
  SPEAKER_01: And that's the, you know, that's the sort of standard narrative.
• 42:25
  SPEAKER_01: That's what most people believe.
• 42:26
  SPEAKER_01: Most people will say, you know, we live in the best time ever.
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_01: And I say, okay, when do you understand how radical that is?
• 42:35
  SPEAKER_01: That of all 300,000 years of anatomically modern human beings, you're saying this right now happens to be the best time.
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_01: So then 10 years from now is going to be even better, right?
• 42:47
  SPEAKER_01: If you're saying it's just unremitting progress, but everyone, but people say, no, no, I don't want to live in the future.
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_01: Right now is the best.
• 42:55
  SPEAKER_01: And it's like, wait a minute, that that doesn't make sense rationally.
• 42:58
  SPEAKER_01: All that is is a form of nationalism applied to temporality.
• 43:03
  SPEAKER_01: You're, you know, it's like a Frenchman says, Well, I was born in France, so France is the best country.
• 43:08
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that's because you're born there, right?
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_01: So I was born in 1962, that's the best time to be born.
• 43:13
  SPEAKER_01: There's no rationality there, that's just silly personal bias.
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but if you if you really try to look at this objectively and you say, okay, what makes people happy?
• 43:25
  SPEAKER_01: Free time, friendships, relationships, um, rich life in terms of creativity, uh, doing what you enjoy doing, right?
• 43:37
  SPEAKER_01: Like you, I think the you said uh you were talking about hundred gatherers, and you said there are many things that are that are good, that feel right, that are healthy.
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_01: Well, the whole concept of good and right and healthy comes from our evolutionary past, right?
• 43:53
  SPEAKER_01: Like I was saying earlier, the kind of food we eat, you know, all these different scientific um disciplines.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: Disciplines now are turning to the past to understand what works.
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_01: And I go through a lot of this in Civilized to Death.
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_01: The paleo diet, paleo exercise, evolutionary medicine, right?
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_01: Psychiatry and psychology starting to look at, you know, what do we need?
• 44:16
  SPEAKER_01: What makes us happy?
• 44:17
  SPEAKER_01: What brings meaning to our lives?
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_01: And they look to the past.
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_01: Just like if you want to understand your dog, you don't go and study geese, you study wolves and coyotes, right?
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_01: Because that's where your dog came from.
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_01: That's the kind of animal your dog is.
• 44:31
  SPEAKER_01: So when you start to unpack these things that bring quality to human life, what you find is that they are the things that are typical of hunter-gatherer life.
• 44:41
  SPEAKER_01: Feeling protected and respected by a social group.
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_01: Feeling that your voice matters in decisions.
• 44:50
  SPEAKER_01: So hunter-gatherer groups happen to be consensus-oriented.
• 44:54
  SPEAKER_01: Nobody is forced to do anything they don't want to do.
• 44:58
  SPEAKER_01: Raising children in a group, not in a nuclear family.
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_01: So a mother andor a father are not responsible for those kids by themselves.
• 45:07
  SPEAKER_01: Everybody takes care of the kids.
• 45:09
  SPEAKER_01: And if you don't happen to have any kids, that's okay.
• 45:11
  SPEAKER_01: There are a lot of kids in your life.
• 45:13
  SPEAKER_01: That brings meaning to you as well and a sense of belonging.
• 45:18
  SPEAKER_01: There's an anthropologist named Marshall Salens, who wrote a seminal paper called The Original Affluence Society that was published in the mid-70s, I think.
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_01: And it was a radical departure from mainstream thinking because he looked at hunter-gatherer societies and he said, okay, we've been saying for a century that these societies are impoverished, they have nothing.
• 45:45
  SPEAKER_01: This is our Hobbesian, you know, nasty, brutish and short human past, and we're so lucky to have moved beyond it.
• 45:53
  SPEAKER_01: But when I look at these societies, I see people who have a lot of free time, seem very happy, are not the least bit eager to come and join our way of life.
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_01: Every time they're coerced or offered the chance to come and join our civilized life, they say no.
• 46:13
  SPEAKER_01: And if we capture them and drag them in, they run away the first chance they get and go back to the woods to the way they they know how to live.
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_01: There's something about these societies that they act as if they have it made.
• 46:26
  SPEAKER_01: They act as if they have no needs.
• 46:29
  SPEAKER_01: And when you look at their lives on their terms, they they do have it made because they live in a world that they don't see as an enemy.
• 46:39
  SPEAKER_01: They live in a world that they see as generous and providing for them.
• 46:43
  SPEAKER_01: So any hunter-gatherer looks around in their environment.
• 46:46
  SPEAKER_01: They know how they know where the medicinal herbs are, they know what to hunt, they know how to make a blow dart, a blowgun or a bow and arrow, whatever.
• 46:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um, they know how to build a shelter, they know how to take care of themselves and each other.
• 47:00
  SPEAKER_01: And so there are many examples of this sort of mutual incomprehension between the civilized world, not understanding why these poor, miserable natives don't want to come and live like us.
• 47:13
  SPEAKER_01: And the natives saying, you know, there's a famous example of a of uh African uh tribesman saying, wait, why should I learn to farm when there are so many mongo-mongo nuts in the world?
• 47:26
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 47:27
  SPEAKER_01: It's like you think the world is poor, I think the world is rich, I have everything I need, and you're telling me I have to go and work.
• 47:35
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't make sense.
• 47:37
  SPEAKER_00: So then this is a great place to bring in that initial question of why, why do you think we did move most of us from hunter-gatherer to having agriculture in our lives where we have less time, where we are more enslaved, you know, to the land and not mobile anymore?
• 47:56
  SPEAKER_00: Why did we make that sacrifice?
• 48:00
  SPEAKER_01: Well, emerging uh research is giving us a better and better picture of what happened roughly 10,000 years ago, which is where we see the first evidence of agriculture in the Fertile Crescent.
• 48:19
  SPEAKER_01: So it appears that leading up to a few thousand years uh leading up to this major change, uh, that part of the world was getting more and more rainfall and uh very temperate temperatures.
• 48:36
  SPEAKER_01: And so the natural environment was growing richer and richer.
• 48:41
  SPEAKER_01: And the area around um Gobekli Tepi, it's around the Syrian-Turkish border now, it's a really terrible place to be at the moment.
• 48:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but 10,000 years ago was extremely rich.
• 48:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um forests of pistachio and almond and uh walnut, precursors to um uh elk horn, uh wheat, I think, is a precursor to rye, um these wild grasses with seeds that could be uh processed and eaten, uh, herds of um large ungulates, wild ungulates.
• 49:23
  SPEAKER_01: So the environment was so rich, and human population was growing and growing in response to this very rich environment.
• 49:31
  SPEAKER_01: And people were starting to settle because the environment was so rich that they didn't need to keep moving.
• 49:36
  SPEAKER_01: You could have a settlement and just go out and hunt this area this week, and that area another week, and this area another week, and the animals would keep replenishing, and you could keep fishing the rivers.
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_01: And so it was almost an adenic situation.
• 49:52
  SPEAKER_01: And meanwhile, in North America, the uh ice age was receding, the sheets of the glaciers were receding to the north, and there was a giant lake the size of all the Great Lakes combined, uh, that was full of melted glacial water, so extremely cold, fresh water.
• 50:17
  SPEAKER_01: And apparently, as the ice sheets were retreating, this lake was confined by some of the ice sheets.
• 50:27
  SPEAKER_01: And when it reached a point where one of the dams, the ice dam, started to breach, this entire massive lake of freezing cold, fresh water emptied into the North Atlantic and stopped the current that brought warm water up to Europe.
• 50:47
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I forget what it's called, but it's in danger of stopping again now.
• 50:51
  SPEAKER_01: It's reduced about 30% in the last few years for the first time since the dawn of agriculture 10,000 years ago.
• 50:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but this is the current that brings temperate um weather to Europe because it's bringing this warm water up from the Caribbean and sort of cycling around.
• 51:10
  SPEAKER_01: But this sudden flood of freezing cold fresh water stopped that current.
• 51:16
  SPEAKER_01: And so it sent the world into climactic change, and the extremely hospitable climate conditions in the Fertile Crescent ended, the rainfalls ended, temperatures dropped, and a lot of this food supply disappeared.
• 51:32
  SPEAKER_01: So, what you had now was a very elevated human population, and suddenly the food's gone.
• 51:42
  SPEAKER_01: And so, and by the way, agriculture arose independently at five or six other spots on the planet at different times, and the same pattern of climactic conditions preceded each of those, which they can tell by looking at pollen counts and in mud samples from the bottom of ponds and things like that.
• 52:04
  SPEAKER_01: So basically, what you have is this sequence of lots of food, lots of human population settled because there's so much food around, then the food disappears, climate changes, and now you have massive starvation and desperation.
• 52:21
  SPEAKER_01: So someone must have noticed that these fruit or nut trees are withering and it hasn't rained, but there's water in the stream over there, and if we dig a trench, maybe we can keep these trees alive.
• 52:38
  SPEAKER_01: So I think the first step, and and this is a view shared by most archaeologists, the first step toward agriculture was probably irrigating pre-existing plants.
• 52:51
  SPEAKER_01: So pre-existing grove of trees that supplied pistachio nuts or fruits or whatever, starting to die.
• 52:58
  SPEAKER_01: They would have dug a trench, brought some water, an irrigation canal, the trees came back to life.
• 53:04
  SPEAKER_01: That's the first step toward controlling the plants, is trying to save human lives.
• 53:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so I don't see it as some sort of uh eureka moment where someone was like, wait a minute, we can do this better.
• 53:19
  SPEAKER_01: I see it as a desperate move that worked.
• 53:23
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, no one saw the ratcheting process that was gonna happen.
• 53:27
  SPEAKER_01: Like, oh, if we control this, human population is gonna keep growing, we're gonna start owning the land, we're gonna have to have armies, or it's gonna be expansive, we're gonna have to kill people to take their land.
• 53:38
  SPEAKER_01: You know, the whole thing that happened in uh result.
• 53:43
  SPEAKER_01: There's a great book called uh Ishmael.
• 53:45
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if you've ever heard of this.
• 53:47
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I read it.
• 53:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, he he really spells it out very well.
• 53:51
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, it probably came out 30 years ago.
• 53:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but it's a it's a beautiful book.
• 53:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I love this explanation.
• 53:59
  SPEAKER_00: This of every explanation I've heard in terms of why did we begin, you know, move towards an agrarian culture.
• 54:07
  SPEAKER_00: This is that the explanation that resonates with me the most, because it did not make sense to me of why we would make all those sacrifices, you know, even in, I mean, there's great sacrifices that were made to our health, you know, and of course, those would not have been immediate sacrifices for most people, would have been more long term.
• 54:27
  SPEAKER_00: But even in just in terms of time, you know, it it didn't make sense as to why we would make that trade-off.
• 54:34
  SPEAKER_00: But this makes this makes perfect sense to me.
• 54:37
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I don't know, Joe, you studied this more than I have.
• 54:40
  SPEAKER_00: What what do you think about that explanation?
• 54:44
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, well, I I think um I think for it it certainly jives with everything that I've read that that cities um cities and agriculture grew up together.
• 54:58
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so you had concentration uh of people.
• 55:01
  SPEAKER_02: And and and and in fact, we're still seeing that that uh uh adaptation or evolution today, in that um we could not have, for example, factory farms, uh we couldn't have a Tyson chicken house or a Smithfield hog factory or uh or a 10,000 cow confinement dairy in the desert, we could not have that until we had cheap energy.
• 55:29
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and and so throughout human history, when you have the um technological barriers uh uh uh that create boundaries to um boundaries to how we live, then you have a breakthrough of that.
• 55:51
  SPEAKER_02: And uh and I I think Chris's whole point, and it's so well, it's so perfectly stated, you're you're really eloquent.
• 55:58
  SPEAKER_02: Uh the point is that every time we break through these technological um hurdles, if you will, on the other side of those hurdles is an unseen bunch of of um uh of things that that complicate, that harm, that that create other issues in life.
• 56:26
  SPEAKER_02: Um you know from from the from the you know from from the steam engine to the internal combustion engine to the the Faber bond to the uh green revolution, you know, uh and and you know I've always said boy if we had taken the bonanza of cheap energy in let's say 1900, the you know, discovery of oil in the internal combustion engine, if we had taken that technological breakthrough and and devoted it entirely to building permaculture style ponds, you know, in all the valleys of the mountains around us.
• 57:07
  SPEAKER_02: And and you know, we we could we could have recreated Eden.
• 57:13
  SPEAKER_02: We could have massaged our landscape uh to be uh to be um uh uh abundant again, but instead we built a food system that now spends four calories of energy energy bringing one calorie of food to your plate.
• 57:32
  SPEAKER_02: You know, it it used to be only a quarter, one-fourth of a calorie of food to bring a calorie to your plate, and now we're four calories, you know, to bring one calorie.
• 57:43
  SPEAKER_02: And and and is this progress?
• 57:45
  SPEAKER_02: Well, yeah, no, it's not progress.
• 57:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, and that brings up uh you know the question I I was sort of getting at earlier.
• 57:54
  SPEAKER_01: It's like when we were talking about wealth.
• 57:56
  SPEAKER_01: If, you know, if if we look at the the Western world and we say, well, there are winners and losers, right?
• 58:03
  SPEAKER_01: They're the the the people, the billionaires are the winners and the rest of us are the losers.
• 58:08
  SPEAKER_01: But then you look at the billionaires and you find out that they're miserable, that they're suffering just as much in in many ways as everybody else, which is demonstrably true.
• 58:21
  SPEAKER_01: And I I go through that research in in the book, then who's winning?
• 58:26
  SPEAKER_01: Who who, you know, like obviously it's not progress to show that we're spending more energy, four times as much energy as we're getting in in our agriculture.
• 58:39
  SPEAKER_01: That's not helping humans, it's not helping animals.
• 58:42
  SPEAKER_01: Who's it helping?
• 58:43
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 58:44
  SPEAKER_01: And so it's it starts to seem to me like we're living in someone else's world.
• 58:50
  SPEAKER_01: Human interest is not the determining factor in the decisions that are being made here.
• 58:57
  SPEAKER_02: So who's the who's the zookeeper?
• 58:59
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's it.
• 59:02
  SPEAKER_01: Who's the zookeeper?
• 59:03
  SPEAKER_01: Who's the zookeeper?
• 59:06
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I think you touched on it earlier when you said that at a certain point, at a certain scale, those cattle start to seem like an amoeba, right?
• 59:16
  SPEAKER_01: Decisions are being made somehow that no individual cow is making.
• 59:21
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 59:21
  SPEAKER_01: And and maybe those decisions aren't in the best interest of any of those cows.
• 59:26
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's where we are as a species.
• 59:29
  SPEAKER_01: And that's why I was getting into Dunbar's number and all that stuff.
• 59:32
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I and this gets back to your original question.
• 59:36
  SPEAKER_01: And I think uh one of the the points you want to stick to in this interview is what can we do?
• 59:43
  SPEAKER_01: What can we, what actual practical things can we do?
• 59:46
  SPEAKER_01: And I think one of the major things we can do is try to return to smaller scale living.
• 59:52
  SPEAKER_01: So for example, um my partner and I uh have just bought some land in a small town in Colorado.
• 1:00:01
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, we're not, it's not a commune, right?
• 1:00:04
  SPEAKER_01: We're not pooling our money together and and all marrying each other or something, but it's a small town, the land is cheap, and the idea is we all go there, we'll help each other build houses, we combine our skills and whatever assets we have to help each other.
• 1:00:23
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, we've I've got a buddy who's an auto mechanic, and he and his wife just bought some land, and she raises goats and chickens, and you know, everybody's got different skills, and we'll get old together and take care of each other there.
• 1:00:36
  SPEAKER_01: And it's you know, we'll buy we last year we were there, we bought a cow that we shared from a you know a grass-fed humane ranch just down the road.
• 1:00:47
  SPEAKER_01: There's a yak ranch down the road.
• 1:00:49
  SPEAKER_01: We also bought a yak.
• 1:00:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so it there are ways in the modern world to try to replicate these patterns that work for our species.
• 1:00:59
  SPEAKER_01: And I think one of the main issues is scale.
• 1:01:02
  SPEAKER_01: Live with people you know and respect and love and take care of each other because your quality of life will be much higher.
• 1:01:09
  SPEAKER_01: It always annoys me when I see those commercials that say the what is it, state farm, like a good neighbor, state farm is there.
• 1:01:17
  SPEAKER_01: Well, what happened to the good neighbor?
• 1:01:19
  SPEAKER_01: Why don't we just have a good neighbor?
• 1:01:23
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:01:24
  SPEAKER_02: Well, uh that's exactly right.
• 1:01:26
  SPEAKER_02: And the uh certainly the the atomization and the segreg the segregation, atomization of the family, uh, you know, where people uh move, you know, every every parent wants their child to get a good enough education to go get a good enough job somewhere to earn enough money to pay for them in a nursing home when they get old.
• 1:01:52
  SPEAKER_02: That's nuts.
• 1:01:53
  SPEAKER_02: That's nuts.
• 1:01:53
  SPEAKER_02: Why don't why don't parents instead um work less, earn way less, and raise up children who adore them enough to take care of them when they get old?
• 1:02:05
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, would that not make us happier?
• 1:02:07
  SPEAKER_02: Right in the big scheme of things.
• 1:02:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and and getting back to Spain, I I mentioned I lived there for 20 years.
• 1:02:14
  SPEAKER_01: I did some research.
• 1:02:16
  SPEAKER_01: I I was originally going to write my uh doctoral dissertation about oncologists.
• 1:02:20
  SPEAKER_01: And so I was working with a lot of oncologists in Spain, and I remember being so amazed when I asked them why they became oncologists.
• 1:02:30
  SPEAKER_01: And I thought the answer was going to be, you know, when I was a kid, my grandmother had cancer, and her doctor was wonderful, and you know, one of those stories.
• 1:02:39
  SPEAKER_01: But over and over again, what I heard was well, I really wanted to be a cardiologist, but I would have had to move to Madrid to go to medical school to study uh cardiology, and I didn't want to leave my family, so I stayed in Barcelona and I studied oncology.
• 1:02:56
  SPEAKER_01: Their first priority was maintaining their connection to their family.
• 1:03:01
  SPEAKER_01: That was more important to them than their career.
• 1:03:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I, you know, to an American, that sounds really strange.
• 1:03:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but then you see the way the families work there.
• 1:03:12
  SPEAKER_01: The couple has kids, they're young, they're working hard.
• 1:03:16
  SPEAKER_01: Well, they've got four grandparents who love to hang out with those kids.
• 1:03:21
  SPEAKER_01: Free childcare, people you love, people you trust, all the kids know their grandparents.
• 1:03:27
  SPEAKER_01: The grandparents feel useful, and it just works.
• 1:03:30
  SPEAKER_01: It's fantastic.
• 1:03:32
  SPEAKER_01: Same thing with food.
• 1:03:33
  SPEAKER_01: I remember talking to a Spanish guy saying, Why is it why do you think organic food isn't more popular in Spain?
• 1:03:41
  SPEAKER_01: And he said, You know what we call organic food in Spain?
• 1:03:44
  SPEAKER_01: I said, What?
• 1:03:45
  SPEAKER_01: He said, Food.
• 1:03:48
  SPEAKER_02: I knew that was coming.
• 1:03:51
  SPEAKER_02: Because I've been there.
• 1:03:51
  SPEAKER_02: I know I knew that was coming.
• 1:03:53
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, he said he was a farmer and he said, Why would I put chemicals, you know, uh dangerous toxic chemicals on food that I know my friends are going to be eating?
• 1:04:03
  SPEAKER_01: That's crazy.
• 1:04:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you know, it's it's a very America like McDonald's.
• 1:04:08
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, that's our contribution to world cuisine.
• 1:04:11
  SPEAKER_01: McDonald's isn't about food.
• 1:04:13
  SPEAKER_01: McDonald's is about efficiency, right?
• 1:04:15
  SPEAKER_01: It's not about what tastes good, what's healthy, what's good for the farmer, what's good for the animal.
• 1:04:22
  SPEAKER_01: Doesn't matter.
• 1:04:23
  SPEAKER_01: It's what's good for the company.
• 1:04:24
  SPEAKER_01: That's all that matters.
• 1:04:26
  SPEAKER_01: That's a strange way to think about things.
• 1:04:29
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:04:30
  SPEAKER_02: Actually, when Ray Croc, when Ray Croc launched McDonald's, um, he went, he went down in the city and interviewed every every woman that he found on the sidewalk at one o'clock in the afternoon in the city and said, uh, what what would you like right now?
• 1:04:45
  SPEAKER_02: And every one of them said, you know, they had you know kids, kids in tow, many of them.
• 1:04:50
  SPEAKER_02: And he said, I want a clean bathroom.
• 1:04:52
  SPEAKER_02: And so uh, so uh uh Ray Crock actually hit his very first commitment was I'm gonna have a clean bathroom because that's gonna get the women and kids in here.
• 1:05:03
  SPEAKER_02: And uh so my my joke is McDonald's has been in a sewage business ever since.
• 1:05:10
  SPEAKER_02: But they do have a clean bathroom.
• 1:05:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, give them that.
• 1:05:14
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, what a what a fascinating discussion.
• 1:05:16
  SPEAKER_02: This has really been uh really been really been good.
• 1:05:20
  SPEAKER_02: Lots of wisdom.
• 1:05:22
  SPEAKER_01: Well, thanks, guys.
• 1:05:23
  SPEAKER_01: It's an honor to be with you.
• 1:05:24
  SPEAKER_00: I've I'd love to actually wrap up if uh with one more question for you.
• 1:05:29
  SPEAKER_00: Um, since Joel asked that fantastic question of, you know, who's the zookeeper?
• 1:05:34
  SPEAKER_00: In in America, in our modern, you know, civilized progressed culture, can we be our own zookeeper?
• 1:05:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, good question.
• 1:05:47
  SPEAKER_01: I I think that on the national scale, no.
• 1:05:51
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I I think there's you know not much that any of us can do as individuals.
• 1:05:56
  SPEAKER_01: Uh yeah, and I'm no expert.
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_01: National political power or anything like that.
• 1:06:02
  SPEAKER_01: But I do think that we can uh take these concrete steps that we've talked about to design our own zoo, our own branch of the zoo, you know, if we'll go with the metaphor.
• 1:06:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um, for example, I live in a van half the year.
• 1:06:17
  SPEAKER_01: Every summer and spring, I've got a sprinter van, and we go up to the northern Rockies, Idaho, Montana, up into Canada sometimes, and maybe we'll go to Alaska this year.
• 1:06:29
  SPEAKER_01: And we just set off in the van.
• 1:06:30
  SPEAKER_01: No rent.
• 1:06:32
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, you know, we're sleeping in the back.
• 1:06:35
  SPEAKER_01: It's sort of a modern nomadism.
• 1:06:37
  SPEAKER_01: And I've been doing this seven years now.
• 1:06:40
  SPEAKER_01: So a bunch of my friends have seen how much fun it is.
• 1:06:42
  SPEAKER_01: They buy vans and little RVs and we'll meet up at different points.
• 1:06:48
  SPEAKER_01: This is very much like a hunter-gather existence, right?
• 1:06:50
  SPEAKER_01: You sort of go out on your own.
• 1:06:52
  SPEAKER_01: They're called fission fusion societies.
• 1:06:55
  SPEAKER_01: They split up and then they come back.
• 1:06:57
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, seasonal festivals, or you know, uh, when all the salmon are running, everybody goes down to the river.
• 1:07:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so we do that every year.
• 1:07:06
  SPEAKER_01: Keeps our overhead really low.
• 1:07:08
  SPEAKER_01: Don't have to work as hard, don't have to worry about, you know, all that kind of mortgages and all that.
• 1:07:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and then as I was saying earlier, we all are buying land in this little town, we're helping each other.
• 1:07:21
  SPEAKER_01: I've, you know, I do this podcast, and so my social world includes a circle of really close friends, many of whom I've met through the podcast, actually, at this point.
• 1:07:33
  SPEAKER_01: I've been doing the podcast for nine years now.
• 1:07:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but then I also have people reach out to me.
• 1:07:38
  SPEAKER_01: This amazing guy reached out to me, heard me talking about what we were doing in Colorado, and he says, uh, his name's Michael.
• 1:07:45
  SPEAKER_01: He said, You know, I used to be the chief of um parks and recreation in Berkeley, California.
• 1:07:52
  SPEAKER_01: And now I've got this milling operation because I go and take out trees and the city doesn't care what I do with the wood.
• 1:07:58
  SPEAKER_01: So I've got all I've got tons of old growth redwood and eucalyptus and whatever you want.
• 1:08:04
  SPEAKER_01: I'd love to send you a truckload of lumber to help you guys, you know, with your project in Colorado.
• 1:08:10
  SPEAKER_01: And I get people saying, Yeah, we want to come down and you know, help you build your house and help your, you know, just people are desperate to be part of a community.
• 1:08:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and and people are so generous and kind.
• 1:08:24
  SPEAKER_01: If you give them the opportunity to help, with obviously with gratitude and recognition, there's a world of people who can't wait to come and help out.
• 1:08:34
  SPEAKER_01: So I do think we can create these natural uh communities just by opening up a little space and and sending out some invitations.
• 1:08:46
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's right.
• 1:08:47
  SPEAKER_02: People are desperate to to surround themselves with eclectic mastery uh that knows how to build things, grow things, and fix things.
• 1:08:57
  SPEAKER_02: And and if you if you are if you are rubbing uh immersed uh closely, intimately with people who know how to grow things, build things, and fix things, um that that is a very, very satisfying thing as opposed to not knowing anybody who knows how to do those things except on Angie's list and and um you know uh you know, just a nameless, faceless, um professional expert that you have that you just get out of the, you know, out of the um the phone book.
• 1:09:32
  SPEAKER_02: And that that's a very different thing than than being able to have relationships among people with all those different kinds of eclectic skills.
• 1:09:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's the difference between love and prostitution, you know?
• 1:09:44
  SPEAKER_01: It's yeah, it's it's doing something out of love or because someone paid you.
• 1:09:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:09:50
  SPEAKER_02: Right, yeah, that's great.
• 1:09:52
  SPEAKER_00: I love that.
• 1:09:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I love closing on this note of you know, forming tribes, um, because Joel and I talk about that a lot, and particularly now, uh the need to actually find your tribe and and connect with people and and just feel that support from them.
• 1:10:08
  SPEAKER_00: And as you know, it's one of the predictors of longevity, as you said.
• 1:10:12
  SPEAKER_00: So um I I love that, I completely agree.
• 1:10:14
  SPEAKER_00: And Chris, I'm so thrilled that you came and spent this hour with us.
• 1:10:18
  SPEAKER_00: I'm so grateful.
• 1:10:19
  SPEAKER_00: I've learned a lot.
• 1:10:20
  SPEAKER_00: I have so many more questions that I'd love to ask you, even though we're out of time.
• 1:10:25
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm hoping that at some point you'll be willing to come back on the show and share more of your insights and your wisdom with us.
• 1:10:32
  SPEAKER_01: Sure, I'd be happy to.
• 1:10:34
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:10:35
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much for joining us.
• 1:10:37
  SPEAKER_00: And thank you, everybody, until next time.
• 1:10:39
  SPEAKER_00: Have a great day.
• 1:10:40
  SPEAKER_00: Bye bye.