Chris Ryan’s work has been translated into over twenty languages, and appeared just about everywhere, including Netflix, HBO, MSNBC, Fox News, CNN, NPR, The New York Times, The Times of London, Playboy, The Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, National Geographic, and The Atlantic. Chris has been a featured speaker at TED, SXSW, The Festival of Dangerous Ideas at the Sydney Opera House, the Portland Comedy Festival, the Einstein Forum in Pottsdam, Germany, and is a frequent guest on The Joe Rogan Experience, the Duncan Trussell Family Hour and many other podcasts. He’s provided expert testimony in a Canadian constitutional hearing, won a coveted AVN award (best non-sex performance, Marriage 2.0) and popped-up in dozens of documentary films and television shows.

Even before co-authoring the New York Times best-seller, Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What it Means for Modern Relationships with Cacilda Jethá, MD in 2010, Chris was on a wild ride. After receiving a BA in English and American literature in 1984 he spent the next two decades traveling around the world, pausing in unexpected places to work at very odd jobs (e.g., gutting salmon in Alaska, teaching English to prostitutes in Bangkok and self-defense to land-reform activists in Mexico, managing commercial real-estate in New York’s Diamond District, helping Spanish physicians translate and publish their research).

In his mid-30s, Chris decided to get a little serious and pursue doctoral studies in Psychology at Saybrook Graduate School, in San Francisco, CA, using his dissertation to examine Darwin’s rather naive understanding of human sexual evolution — providing the core arguments later advanced in Sex at Dawn.

Chris’s latest book, Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress (Simon & Schuster/Avid Reader Press, 2019), asks whether civilization has been a net benefit to our species. He hosts a weekly podcast, Tangentially Speaking, often recorded from the road while traveling in his van, Scarlett Jovansson. The podcast features conversations with comics, bank robbers, drug smugglers, porn stars, authors, and an occasional rattlesnake expert. 

When I first conceived this podcast many moons ago, I noted Dr. Chris Ryan as one of my dream guests. I lived by (my version) of the “Sex at Dawn” lifestyle for many years, and although my wayward ways have most definitely changed, I strongly align to the core of Dr. Ryan’s thought-provoking literature. 

Humanity has mutated into a strange and disconnected species of which intimacy to each other and the natural world has been well and truly severed. Chris’s most recent book, “Civilized to Death” is a startling anthology of how bad we’ve torched God’s natural plan. 

In this episode, we unpack the threads of our existence, the expansiveness of travel, and how we can reclaim a little bit of what we’ve lost.

 

08:50 — Lessons From a Life on the Road

  • A life fully traveled with “Scarlett Jo-Van-son”

  • The concept of “detribalism”

  • Getting comfortable with being an outsider

  • How progress separates us from life

  • Corporations as living, breathing entities 


25:06 — Breaking Down “Sex At Dawn” 

  • How I used “Sex at Dawn” to justify my fear of intimacy  

  • The aftermath of the book’s publication and reactions 

  • Intimacy networks in hunter-gatherer tribes 

  • Looking at hunter-gatherers to understand ourselves 


41:41 — “Civilized to Death” 


01:03:58 — How Can We Gain From What We Have Lost?

  • Community and health 

  • Why treadmills are the enemy 

  • Building modern communes 

  • Can we integrate psychedelics into the Western world?

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