Christopher Ryan
Chris Ryan’s work has been translated into over twenty languages, and has 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 Potsdam, Germany. He has been a frequent guest on The Joe Rogan Experience, This Past Week with Theo Von, and many other podcasts. He’s provided expert testimony in a Canadian constitutional hearing, and appeared 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 second 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, authors, athletes, bank robbers, drug smugglers, porn stars, misfits, geniuses, and oddballs.
860: Christopher Ryan, part 1: Civilized to Death
The predominant responses to the idea of polluting and depleting less include fears of reverting to the Stone Age, losing civilization, being invaded by aggressive opponents, dying at 30, dying from small cuts, and reverting to a past viewed as worse than today.
My upcoming book describes why we feel those fears and why what we fear losing is exactly what we can expect to get more of. A key part of that pattern is that all those fears are false, based on misunderstanding humanity’s past.
Christopher Ryan’s latest book, Civilized to Death, is the clearest, most comprehensive single work describing the past accurately. I spent years researching, learning from countless sources. The results were conclusive, but difficult to communicate. What could I say, “Read these dozens of academic papers and books and watch all these documentaries”?
Chris researched more and compiled it more clearly, concisely, and readably than I could have dreamed to. Now I can say, “Read Civilized to Death.”
I mean it: Read Civilized to Death.
Our conversation covers the highlights. It will help you see why you hold legitimizing myths that lead you to fear changes that when you do them you will only wish you had done them earlier. Things about yourself, humanity, culture, and life will make sense that never did before.