Based Camp - The Pre-Agricultural Period Was NOT Better

00:00:00.000 Hello, Malcolm. I'm excited to be speaking with you today because there's been this thing that's

00:00:05.160 bothering me and I just need to get it off my chest. We need to talk about it. And I just,

00:00:11.240 first, I want to set the scene because people need to understand how profound and widespread

00:00:15.200 this scourge of a problem is or scourge, scourge. So let me, let me just set the scene. Okay.

00:00:21.800 It's 2015 and you know what people can't stop watching? It's like what the hot video is. Do you,

00:00:29.440 can you guess? Like what, what is a hot? It's not some stupid viral dance or like a celebrity

00:00:36.480 scandal. No, it's, it's a dude, a pale dude in the woods, silently creating. Oh, I watched a lot of 1.00

00:00:45.780 those. A hut. Yes. I, yes. You, you, you were one of them, Malcolm. You, you watched and this was

00:00:52.420 primitive technology, waddle and dob hut. This was the first video published by the YouTube channel,

00:00:58.380 primitive technology. The video now has over 32 million views. So one of those was yours.

00:01:04.920 That's a lot of views. I mean, it's obviously not like dumb viral video views. Like Charlie, 0.72

00:01:11.180 but my finger has 888 million views. The bed intruder song has 158 million views, but 32 million

00:01:18.640 for an 11 minute video with no music, no words, no historical explanation.

00:01:26.380 It was pretty cool. It was a pretty cool video.

00:01:30.360 Yeah. Yeah. You, you may say that, but yeah, I don't, I, I, I don't, it's, I,

00:01:48.900 primitive technology has 11 million subscribers. Asmode Gold has 4.21. Okay. I don't, I don't know.

00:01:56.480 Like for me, I think it's a little bit suspicious. And here's the thing. I'm going to argue that it

00:02:03.440 was the Admiral Ackbar of agriculture himself. Yuval Noah Harari, the author of Sapiens,

00:02:10.180 a brief history of humankind, who's responsible for the little subconscious obsession that made

00:02:16.520 primitive technology big. And that has ever since led people in comments on our videos and randomly

00:02:23.340 online to be like, Ooh, if only we could go back to when we made mud huts in the woods, because

00:02:29.580 that was so much better. Simone, you've, you've introduced us in a rather convoluted way. The

00:02:36.080 point that she's making is she wants read, because what she often does for our family is she'll read

00:02:42.000 whatever books are popular at the time or whatever. And then she summarizes them. And she basically gives

00:02:46.380 me a summary. She was like GPT before GPT. And when she did that for Sapiens, she was fuming the entire 1.00

00:02:55.620 few days she was reading this. She was like, this is just like the science in it is so bad. It's such

00:03:02.300 a misrepresentation of history. And we did a video not too long ago about Thanksgiving, where we were

00:03:09.360 going over all of the ways that modern civilization and modern life is better than life historically.

00:03:14.140 And one of the types of comments we saw in that, which is based on this common myth that she is

00:03:20.520 outlining, is that things were better in the pre agricultural world, like life on average was

00:03:29.240 better. You had more free time and less diseases and was less likely to be able to be killed and

00:03:35.020 blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The reality is, this is not remotely the case. Before we go into the

00:03:42.020 details, basically, the gist of the story is, in the first cities, in many ways, things were worse than the

00:03:51.180 agricultural period. Absolutely. In the first cities, by the time you enter the classical era, or the bronze

00:04:01.440 age, not even modern times, that trend had been easily reversed along almost every single important

00:04:09.680 metric. But when you get to the Roman period, absolutely reversed by every meaningful metric.

00:04:16.740 And when you get to modern times, and this is the thing that gets you, because there are a lot of

00:04:21.380 people who live under this myth that their life, and I mean, if you are living in poverty in the United

00:04:28.560 States, and you are an incel, and you were born ugly, and you were born, you know, like every bad 0.85

00:04:34.540 trade possible for our society. Literally, a hundred to one, you would prefer this life if you knew what 0.96

00:04:42.580 your life would actually be like in the pre-agricultural period. Except, you've been lied to. You've been

00:04:49.080 lied to. Because this book, Sapiens, became so freaking big. I mean, just anecdotally, I was reading it because

00:04:57.080 your dad, and Michael, if you're watching, thank you so much, would not stop talking about it. Even

00:05:02.820 your mom read it, and she always read things for cultural literacy, so I knew everyone else was

00:05:06.660 reading it. But just objectively, this is one of the top performing narrative nonfiction books in the

00:05:12.080 past decade. Tens of millions of copies have been published. Its total worldwide sales are around 40 to

00:05:19.660 45 million copies in an age when nobody reads anymore. The book has been translated to about

00:05:25.720 65 different languages, and it repeatedly appeared in the New York Times top 10. This, this, this book

00:05:33.240 was so pervasive. Also, it wasn't originally published in English. Do you know whether it was

00:05:37.020 originally published in 2011? No, French. Hebrew. Hebrew. Hebrew. Oh, interesting. Yeah. Oh, so, so for our

00:05:43.840 audience, just you guys know, this is, this is Hebrew propaganda here. Yeah, just in case, you know, all the, 0.82

00:05:49.660 it was the Jews. Yeah, so when you, when you go out there, and, and, and you say life was better in a 1.00

00:05:56.320 pre-agricultural period, that is Jewish propaganda. It's Jewish propaganda. Yeah, guys. You're gonna 0.98

00:06:02.480 think, quote, that's the only thing I had to say. The rest of, the rest of the argument doesn't matter

00:06:07.540 anymore, because honestly, there's a huge overlap between the commenters who are like, they use the

00:06:13.120 juice box emoji, and they hate Jews, but also they're like, agriculture. And we don't realize that the whole,

00:06:18.860 like, like, the, the pre-agricultural period was great thing. This is, no, it is funny that that

00:06:24.720 group that actually buys that is actually really heavily overlapped. It's a group that actually

00:06:29.640 thinks that, like, Jews are out to get them. No, but, but actually, but anyway, let me, let me give 0.98

00:06:34.320 you some choice quotes from the book to get to, here's the propaganda that they're, you know, that's

00:06:39.340 being drummed into people. We did not domesticate the wheat. It domesticated us. And the agricultural

00:06:48.360 revolution was history's biggest fraud. And who was responsible? Neither kings, nor priests, nor

00:06:55.320 merchants. The culprits were a handful of plant species. These plants domesticated homo sapiens

00:07:01.680 rather than vice versa. Oh, whip me, Mr. Korn. Oh my gosh. He's coming to get me.

00:07:11.160 Oh my gosh. No, no, but it is, it is, what's funny is, is the way that it has been co-opted by

00:07:18.940 parts of both the far left and the far right to bolster their narratives. Yeah. I remember when I

00:07:25.160 was younger, this was an ideology that was only had on the far left, where you'd have these, like,

00:07:29.420 anti-GMO type people to be like, if we could go back to living off of the land. Yeah. And any sane

00:07:35.340 person would immediately be like, you know, like the carrying capacity, like, even if that was

00:07:40.020 possible, even if everything you said was true, we could support like 1% of Earth's existing

00:07:44.920 population if we went back to living off the land. But outside of that, now there's this new thing,

00:07:50.940 like liver king and, and it's sort of aesthetically like bronze age pervert. Isn't an idiot. He 1.00

00:07:56.000 obviously doesn't believe this stuff. But also bronze age pervert. Okay. He's a civilized man. 0.90

00:08:02.220 Yeah. But there's this element of the right. That's like, there is a miss and they recognize

00:08:07.300 correctly this miss of a progression through history in which things always get better.

00:08:12.860 Wait, is this like, is this the rights version of oppression Olympics, but it's just nostalgia

00:08:16.880 Olympics or we'll say conservatives version of it. So like your, your very surface level

00:08:21.120 conservatives is like, Oh, everything was better in the fifties. And then you've got like the

00:08:25.120 edgelords who were like, nah, man, bronze age. And then you've got like the intellectuals who think

00:08:30.420 that they're like the hyper geniuses who are like pre agriculture. Well, so here's why it works.

00:08:37.000 And I think you're absolutely right is because they, they, one, they recognize the lie of constant

00:08:42.140 progression. And, and, and, and then two, they sort of are while, while competing on, you know,

00:08:49.880 nostalgia points, they're also competing on masculinity points. And there's this perception

00:08:55.140 of the further back in time you go, the more masculine man, what's nothing says masculine,

00:09:02.780 like bacteria eating away at your face while you live years of your life out in the exposure.

00:09:07.840 Fungus by the way, is the famous case of that, that we'll go over. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to,

00:09:14.220 I'm going to, I'm going to go through some examples. I do want to give sapiens credit. There are some

00:09:19.480 really interesting theses in it that we might even want to do an episode at some point, because

00:09:23.780 the larger argument he's, he's making is that what, per his view, differentiated homo sapiens from

00:09:31.780 say Neanderthals is that not only did they develop languages, but they developed the ability

00:09:36.120 to create basically shared fictions or imagined realities, you know, like myths and religions

00:09:42.560 and origin stories. But then he also talks about sort of the fictions of like capitalism and cities

00:09:48.680 and stuff. Hold on, hold on. I I'll, I'll, I'll explain his like core analogy of the book in dumber

00:09:53.960 terms. So if you have a broad understanding of American history and America's economic history,

00:09:58.460 you would be very well aware that the South due to slavery did not economically develop like the North.

00:10:05.500 The slavery made the South poorer. The slaves didn't build America. They economically trapped

00:10:11.980 the South in a cycle of, of poverty basically. And, and it's actually somewhat humorous to me when

00:10:18.100 people come out and they try to make the counter argument, they're like slavery was actually

00:10:21.080 economically good and useful. And I'm like, that's a, that's not, that's not the argument you think

00:10:26.120 it is, but, but the reality is, and this is very, very easy to see in the data is that is why the

00:10:31.220 South's never industrialized. Now it would be like somebody seeing that data and then saying,

00:10:35.940 so what that really means is the slaves enslaved their masters. The masters were the core victims

00:10:45.260 of slavery. It was the Southern plantation owners. Anyway, he, more, more than that. I mean, it's,

00:10:53.700 it, this is like the American gods version of, of Midwood historians where it's like, well,

00:10:59.260 we'll know what, what makes, and I still think this is interesting though, that basically almost

00:11:04.540 everything we value from nations to money, to human rights is in our collective imagination,

00:11:10.340 this sort of shared fantasy and that these fictions have been really useful, but they've

00:11:16.660 also caused immense suffering per his view. And now they threaten our future. And I mean,

00:11:24.300 he also sort of argues at the end of the book that like, we're going to not become human anymore

00:11:28.020 anyway. So kind of like, what does it matter for his view? It, it, it gets all really crazy.

00:11:32.760 So like, there are some interesting things about the book. Like I really liked those ideas,

00:11:36.140 but I just couldn't get over his arguments about agriculture. They made me so angry, but

00:11:43.460 it would make you, this is the thing. If you're like reading this book or you hear somebody explain

00:11:48.400 this to you, it all sounds very plausible. Yeah. Actually, let me do this. Cause we need to give a

00:11:54.520 good faith. Like here's what he argues. And when you actually hear it laid out, you're like, oh man,

00:11:59.280 like I can understand why someone who's not putting a lot of thought into this is told these things or

00:12:05.180 they read this book or they hear someone talking about this and they're like, oh yeah, man, like

00:12:09.260 agriculture did make everything worse. Cause there are lots of factual and true things that when

00:12:15.420 you could say taken out of context or interpreted from a certain perspective, like a purely present

00:12:22.480 focused hedonic perspective are compelling. Shall we go for it? Before you go into this, I'd say the

00:12:28.000 core reason why his argument works so well is because the early agricultural period and pre-classical

00:12:35.940 civilization is a giant hole in the American education system. That's a great point. Yeah. Education

00:12:44.300 typically starts with Egypt or Greece. And so a lot of you're lucky, Mr. Private school, you're lucky.

00:12:51.680 So somebody can just come in and say a bunch of things about this transition. And if you're not an

00:12:57.960 anthropology or, you know, historic, you know, historical anthropology. Yeah. You're just like,

00:13:02.960 oh dude, that sucks. Also, even if you are taught about pre-agricultural societies, which I was 0.96

00:13:08.640 through all of our native American education in California, when you go to like the local tribe

00:13:14.880 sites and like, you do all the stuff to like, learn about local historical native American tribes,

00:13:20.300 you're only hearing about the cool stuff. You don't hear about like, it's like, oh, they grand,

00:13:25.020 they ground down acorns to make, you know, like acorn meal. And it's like, oh, this is so cool.

00:13:31.020 That sounds tasty. You don't hear anything. That's like, here are the practicalities of life.

00:13:35.740 Okay. Continue. So make the argument, make the argument.

00:13:38.700 So yeah, here's, here is his argument as to why things got worse with agriculture. So working

00:13:45.040 hours got worse. Hunter gatherers, he says, worked 20 to 35 hours per week. And, and they spent that

00:13:50.500 time just getting their basic needs in order. So like he, he's citing modern studies of the Kung

00:13:56.720 and the Hasda. I'm mispronouncing that, but we don't actually know that. I just want to point out.

00:14:02.040 No, I actually, if you're going to make the, what he does not address here. And it's something that

00:14:07.980 you're likely not thinking about as like a modern human is leisure time in a hunter gatherer tribe

00:14:16.220 is not as valuable as a leisure time today. Yeah. Maybe they were just trying to keep warm in a cave

00:14:24.340 and you're like scrolling YouTube. Yeah. They're, they're literally like staring at a wall in a cave

00:14:29.580 and they're cave paintings. You're, you're imagining them like, I don't know, like going on their daily

00:14:36.400 jog or something. I'm kidding. I just think that they don't even think about like what you're doing. 1.00

00:14:41.780 What are they doing? What are they doing? They imagine a lot of these tribes and I kid you not,

00:14:48.140 they do not even have games. They may have stories, but it's the same stories their ancestors told for

00:14:55.280 X many generations. It's just about telling something you memorized once. Yeah. It is the,

00:15:00.960 the level of existential boredom you would be facing, I think would horrify a modern person.

00:15:06.880 No, I think more than that. And this is one of the arguments that I make, I want to make is that

00:15:11.680 they weren't as online as they weren't as human as we are today. You know, they're prefrontal

00:15:17.700 cortices. I don't think the studies that he's referencing were done on anatomically modern

00:15:23.200 human groups, anatomically modern groups. Yeah. But like, I think a part of our audience knows what

00:15:30.180 you're talking about, but I think maybe not the, okay. Well, okay. Even, even, okay. I'm not saying

00:15:35.600 anatomically that they were that different. I'm just saying like, if you do not cultivate your

00:15:39.960 prefrontal cortex throughout your life, the way our entire bodies work, including our minds is

00:15:44.320 use it or lose it. Okay. So if you spend your life supercharging and stimulating various parts

00:15:50.820 of your prefrontal cortex in your imagination and your language centers and all this, you're going

00:15:55.160 to have hyperactive language and you're going to experience boredom, but like, you know, a dog

00:15:59.840 that can't talk. This is like a more existential issue than I think people realize when they talk

00:16:03.960 about the leisure time people used to have. They're like, oh, come on. I could make that time

00:16:07.560 more interesting. I'd talk with like my friends and it's like, no, you don't understand like what

00:16:13.780 conversations are like in these societies. And you can listen to like recordings of them and stuff

00:16:18.900 like that. They are either talking about stuff that's just objectively not true, like about like

00:16:24.240 spirits and nonsense. Well, that's fine. And again, like, I don't know, like you can, you can watch a

00:16:29.540 cat or a monkey like chilling and you're like, man, that looks good. Like they're lying in the sun.

00:16:33.360 They're happy. Like I was just looking at the professor like chilling and she's happy. And I

00:16:37.120 think people are like, I want to do that. So I don't think your argument that like, oh, they must

00:16:41.460 be so bored is a good argument. All our audience gets this. If you have ever been unemployed for X

00:16:48.080 amount of time or something like that, you know, this idea of like, oh, life would be so much better

00:16:51.840 if I just did no work at all is BS. Like your life becomes existentially like horrifying when you

00:16:58.120 literally do like that little work. Right. But it's not just that the point I'm making is you don't

00:17:04.240 have many games when you're talking to people, their view of the world is incredibly myopic. So you don't

00:17:10.380 have much in terms of conversation. You don't, you can't even really gossip that much because there's a

00:17:15.500 danger to the tribe and we'll just get you killed. Like really, I mean, gossip is, I mean, there's just all

00:17:20.580 these arguments of developmentally that women make about gossip, about how important it is and stuff 0.98

00:17:24.820 like that. Again, I don't know. Basically living often in a somewhat authoritarian regime. Many of

00:17:31.480 these tribes are set up not dissimilarly to like chimpanzee tribes, right? Yeah. No. And that's 0.76

00:17:37.920 the thing. Yeah. Is like, don't, don't compare it to human life, compare it to animal life because

00:17:43.600 that's what it was. And like, you have to choose a team. Like if you want to be an animal, I respect

00:17:49.720 that. If you want to be a human, what makes us human. Anyway. Yeah. So like early farmers went

00:17:56.440 from the 20 to 35 hours of work to 50 to 60 plus hours of work that, that, that he categorizes

00:18:05.080 as backbreaking, you know, you're plowing and you're weeding and you're highly seasonal work

00:18:09.760 and grinding grain. Yes. Highly seasonal, but he doesn't like to talk about that because that's

00:18:15.000 not as convenient for his argument. So shut up. Right. And then diet and nutrition hunter 0.99

00:18:20.160 gatherers had an extremely varied diet, right? That dozens of plants and nuts and fruits and

00:18:25.760 game and fish and honey. Of course he doesn't point out necessarily that it might be like three

00:18:29.880 days where you eat nothing but honey. Like it's not a, it's a diverse diet, but not by choice.

00:18:36.480 Yeah. It reminds me of some friends that I had in college where like they would just eat like

00:18:40.340 a bag of peas and that was it for the day, you know, like I point out here that the,

00:18:44.720 the labor was very different. So he hits you with comparisons that make sense to a modern person

00:18:51.080 where he says, Oh, you know, he makes it sound like they like have a whole foods food deliveries

00:18:57.100 like every day. No, no, no, no, no. But he, that's not the argument I'm making here. So he'll say

00:19:01.420 something like, Oh, you know, they're working four times as much, but it wasn't even four times as much.

00:19:05.260 I think it was like twice as much in his book when they're doing agricultural labor. Right.

00:19:08.680 And it's backbreaking and it's very physically demanding compared to the hunter gatherers.

00:19:13.760 And it's like, that is true. Yeah. But what is the negatives to the hunter gatherer work that

00:19:20.820 he's leaving out? Oh, it's often incredibly dangerous. You get gored by the moose. You get,

00:19:27.600 you know, you get killed. You, you break your neck running and falling off a cliff.

00:19:32.380 And I know that people can say now when they don't actually have to deal with charging a mammoth

00:19:38.100 or something like that. Right. Or a herd of Buffalo, right. On foot, because keep in mind,

00:19:44.080 these people were on foot, not on like horses or something. And they can hear, Oh yeah, I would

00:19:50.080 rather charge a mammoth. Well, come on. We, we clearly enjoyed it because we hunted them to

00:19:55.760 extinction. Right, right. No, but then, then spend four X that time cultivating a field. And it's like,

00:20:01.620 you, you, you actually probably wouldn't because you haven't actually dealt with the injuries

00:20:07.440 regularly of charging mammoths and large game, which we know a lot of males in these societies had,

00:20:13.680 like the horrifying injuries. So no, you, you wouldn't have loved it. The labor was not actually

00:20:20.400 better. Anyone who had actually done both of these tasks would prefer the, the, the agricultural

00:20:28.120 task to the charging the mammoth at one fourth the time. Well, yeah. And this is the second big

00:20:32.760 argument I want to make, which is like, if you just let, look at, look at the market choices being

00:20:37.780 made, right. At any point, unless you're a slave or like you're literally forced to not leave,

00:20:43.400 you have always had the option to leave. Okay. No one is keeping you. You're actually wrong on this

00:20:49.500 point. Okay. So there were two lifestyles that were strictly better than the, than the hunter gatherer

00:20:56.440 lifestyle. Are you familiar with the two lifestyles that they jumped to your head off the top of your

00:21:00.300 head? You mean agricultural lifestyle? Cause my argument is you can always leave a post-agricultural

00:21:05.020 world and go live in the wilderness if you want to. No, there were two core types of societies that

00:21:10.660 developed and they hated each other. And most of history is about these two societies wanting to

00:21:15.780 kill each other. Okay. So like the Mongols, like the roving bands of the sea peoples. 1.00

00:21:21.280 One was agriculturalist. What was the other? They were our ancestors, Simone, other than the

00:21:26.120 Vikings and sea peoples. No, no, no, no. What do you eat? What do our kids eat? What is

00:21:30.940 literally 80% of our calories? Dairy and meat. Okay. They were herding society. Oh, okay.

00:21:40.040 They're all grouped together, aren't they? No. Herding societies and agriculturalist societies

00:21:45.320 generally hated each other. He doesn't differentiate between the two in this place. He just assumes

00:21:51.780 they're the same. Herding societies can't stay in the same place. Herding societies basically...

00:21:58.000 Well, sort of. I mean, you obviously need a lot of acreage, but... Not really. And their lifestyles

00:22:03.800 are actually directly in opposition to each other. The herding lifestyle means to move from place to

00:22:09.100 place, often eating the food of agriculturalist societies. Also because they don't stay in locations,

00:22:13.980 they often developed a side hobby of raiding agriculturalist societies. So most raider

00:22:21.180 societies came from herding societies. And even in modern times, and I know this because I lived for 0.99

00:22:27.240 a period in the Pantanal region in Brazil, and my brother lived down there and he actually had this

00:22:32.020 more in his thing. And so that's still a more primitivist society to get this until fairly recently.

00:22:37.200 And he remembers that the groups would, at bars, one instance in which they all pulled guns on each

00:22:43.600 other, the herders versus the agriculturalists. The Pantanal region, if you're not familiar,

00:22:50.840 it's deep in the Amazon. You know, so we, well off any, like on the other side of the Amazon is

00:22:55.880 basically where it was. Not like deep in, it's sort of like on the other side of where the mouthwater

00:22:59.520 that the Amazon River are. Anyway, the point is, is this still happens around the world as these two

00:23:04.300 groups conflicting each other? And so painting it as an agricultural revolution is disingenuous.

00:23:10.140 There were multiple revolutions happening simultaneously, and they led to very different

00:23:16.320 lifestyles, but continue some more. The point I wanted to make about diet and nutrition is that

00:23:21.700 he makes it seem as a diet is very varied. And it was for pre-agricultural, but it was also like,

00:23:27.780 you get what you can get. Like, and there were many pre-agricultural societies that only ate like

00:23:32.800 whale lover and seal meat and stuff. Oh yeah. So I want to get to that in a second. But the other

00:23:36.620 thing I wanted to mention about the, the two society types is you're like, you could choose

00:23:40.740 not to join them. You really couldn't. If you didn't join one of them, they just kill you and

00:23:44.620 take your women. This is, they, they were, they were more powerful. They had structures that other 1.00

00:23:52.080 groups didn't have. And it reminds me of the, the, the welcome to bronze period. Like, well, what if we

00:23:59.480 don't adopt bronze? And it's like, well, then the people who do will kill you and take your women 0.99

00:24:03.340 and things. I just say, as a tribe, why don't we leave the bronze to the smart Alex and the whiz kids,

00:24:09.340 and we'll just carry on using stone axes like we always do. Because if you do, the tribes with the 0.81

00:24:15.000 bronze axes will kill you and then take your stone axes and then throw them away because they're 1.00

00:24:20.200 rubbish. And I sometimes feel when people are like, well, what if I don't engage with genetic 0.99

00:24:25.260 augmentation technology or AI? I mean, it's like, well, huh, I'll tell you what will happen.

00:24:30.440 But the, the point here, I'm making a point. It wasn't actually a choice and it's not actually

00:24:35.600 that much of a choice today. The people who still live that way basically live in human created

00:24:40.040 zoos where we like rope off parts of the world and say, okay, no one's allowed to go here.

00:24:44.700 Yeah, I guess it's, it's, or, and, or the same kind of argument that you make about the Amish,

00:24:48.480 which is like, you are still living at the, at the pleasure of the larger government.

00:24:55.020 More technologically advanced group, yes.

00:24:56.380 Yeah. And if they change their minds. Health and disease. And this is a totally fair point,

00:25:02.420 is that hunter-gatherers didn't have a lot of epidemic diseases because they lived in really

00:25:07.140 small mobile bands and they had really diverse diets.

00:25:10.720 But they had diseases that they don't have.

00:25:13.040 To go over an example of one of these diseases, because you, you brought it up here. There's a

00:25:21.620 disease that is quite common on paleolithic, like Cro-Magnon skeletons and stuff like that.

00:25:26.520 And I know because I used to work in the field at the Smithsonian and I've held one and it always

00:25:29.860 sticks with me, this, this bubbling skull. And so specifically it's called Cro-Magnon 1 skull.

00:25:34.860 So that's from the Abri-Day Cro-Magnon site in France, dated 28,000 years ago. So this is

00:25:42.780 a good representation of what it would have been like to live in this period. The male facial bones

00:25:48.900 show extensive pitting and erosion consistent with a fungal affection, likely antemortem while alive

00:25:57.620 since bone remodeling takes time. The bubbly foam look or the pitted texture was the fungus eroding the

00:26:05.560 bone tissue. This, this fungus was a type, likely Aspergillus or Mucosiris, I think, which would have been

00:26:16.200 treatable even in the, the classical period, right? Like this was a type of like so easy to treat fungus

00:26:23.000 that it really is not relevant in most of human history.

00:26:27.220 So even some diseases that I, I, I associated more with like the Victorian era that like I would

00:26:34.080 have, if, if trying to argue in favor of sapiens actually did still exist in pre-agricultural

00:26:41.440 times, like did you know tuberculosis was an issue in pre-agricultural times?

00:26:45.160 Oh, it was such an issue that we have giant bone piles where like 40% or 60% of them died. Are we

00:26:50.700 going to get to that?

00:26:51.140 Yeah. Cause if you, if you ate infected game, you, you could get tuberculosis.

00:26:56.260 Yeah. It's like you just eat the wrong meat one day and then, and you could be like, oh,

00:27:00.000 they knew better than to eat infected game. Keep in mind, an animal can be sick, right? Like

00:27:03.940 you don't know. It's not just rotted game or something like that.

00:27:07.740 And then there's also, I'm not familiar with this. I mean, I guess maybe because it's more

00:27:12.140 of a pre-agricultural condition, but treponimastosis, which is a non-venereal syphilis-like

00:27:19.640 disease, yaws, begel, pinta, it disfigures skin and bone and it, it causes bone lesions

00:27:26.040 and it's common in tropical foragers. So that sounded terrible. Then of course there's

00:27:31.300 the tapeworms, there's the hookworm, there's malaria. There, there are various-

00:27:35.440 Well, but you can also just get things from soil when you interact with them. So-

00:27:39.360 Yeah. I mean, well, and obviously too, if any wound got infected.

00:27:42.740 If you're looking at the Los Muertes site, this was Arizona AD 1100 to 1450. They had an infection

00:27:51.040 from condigodes and etes spores inhaled from soil. Damage included lytic destructive lesions with

00:27:59.920 central cavity in the skull vault and vertebral brones, essentially holes hinted into the bone,

00:28:07.020 making it look like Swiss cheese. We know this happened while the person was alive and healed

00:28:11.780 over because of the healing patterns around the bones. This was happening in their spine

00:28:16.440 and skull. Yeah. Anyway, continue. Obviously people talk a lot about how the higher sugar diets

00:28:25.580 or like carb diets from agricultural periods cause dental problems, but they also totally existed

00:28:30.760 before agriculture, especially extreme wear from grit in food, because you're just kind of getting what

00:28:36.720 you do. Oh, actually, sorry. I need to talk about this because this is a different thing and it's not

00:28:40.400 just grit in food. It has to do with cooking techniques that are important if you study this

00:28:44.300 period. So what she's saying, and this is true, you had much more tooth rot in the agricultural

00:28:49.780 period. Before the agricultural period, you had much more toothlessness or serious tooth damage.

00:28:57.060 And this was caused because a lot of the cooking techniques involved the meat being in sand and dirt,

00:29:04.640 and then you would cook it and you would be eating cooked sand and dirt, which acted like sandpaper on

00:29:10.660 your teeth. Now this damage actually went into the agricultural period, leading to a unique

00:29:16.100 teeth nuking during the early agricultural period where you had both the sand and the dirt problem

00:29:21.680 and the carbohydrates problem. But by the classical period, you were dealing with largely better

00:29:27.980 dentition than you were in the pre-agricultural period. And I just, I want to, obviously like,

00:29:34.380 I want to point out that there's, you got botulism, especially if you, you know, caught meat in a warm

00:29:41.820 climate, you, you would, you could get rabies, you could get any sort of snake bite or bug bite that

00:29:48.420 could kill you. And, you know, those are a little more common when you're kind of out in the jungle

00:29:53.220 covering a lot of ground every single day or forest. But most of the deaths also in this period

00:29:58.760 were really, really slow and long if you didn't immediately like slap your, snap your neck. And 0.77

00:30:04.640 because you weren't living in a city and you weren't surrounded by like a supportive family and you

00:30:09.220 didn't exactly have a base, you were often just left behind because everyone else was going to die

00:30:14.200 if they hung around to like be there for you and they couldn't really afford to keep you with them.

00:30:19.140 So in many cases, you would just be sort of exposed and left to slowly die. And I think when,

00:30:26.020 when you watch how animals die in nature documentaries, like when they're being eaten

00:30:30.540 alive and you know, like that, you're like, man, that it's more alive type die, even when other human

00:30:37.140 groups are doing this. So I point out it's at the low range, 10% of humans were killed in homicide

00:30:42.340 during this period. So way more than today. And I've seen higher ranges that could go up to, I think

00:30:47.900 it was like 30 to 60% from some that I've seen, like really high ranges. To give some examples of

00:30:52.820 like what we're looking at here. If you look at Natarak, Kenya, 10,000 years ago, there's a lakeside

00:30:58.160 hunter camp where 27 unburied skeletons scattered as if left to rot. They provide evidence of a

00:31:04.580 premeditated massacre. 10 of the 12 articulated adults show violent lesions from clubs, arrows,

00:31:09.840 and close range stabbings. And we're also dealing with, I'm not going to go into detail here,

00:31:13.920 lots of kids and babies. Thank you for not going into detail. Not going into detail.

00:31:18.500 Goes cave England, 14,700 years ago. Here you have the remains of five to seven individuals,

00:31:24.960 including a, we're not going to go into detail, bears the mark of systematic defleshing and

00:31:29.840 cannibalism. Bowls were fractured and modified into cups and bowls with cut marks from stone tools,

00:31:35.560 matching those of animals nearby. Not great. Yeah.

00:31:38.840 I'm not going to go into detail. Oh, we have another one. The off that caves in Germany,

00:31:42.600 9,000 years ago, 33, 33 decapitated heads, mostly women and children arranged west and adorned with

00:31:50.620 wet ochre and deer teeth. So their teeth were replaced. We're not even going to go into this.

00:31:55.540 And here's the thing. Okay. Here's, cause I'm just going to jump. Cause I mean, obviously he also

00:32:00.620 talks about physical toll and injuries. He talks about child mortality and the overall population,

00:32:04.760 but he also biggest thing is he talks about the social inequality and that when you had farmers,

00:32:10.440 you finally got a surplus and then you had private property and then you had inherited wealth and

00:32:14.920 then you had sharp class divisions and then patriarchy and then slavery and then warfare over

00:32:20.280 land. But look at those examples you just cited. And first off, like, honestly, you're kind of lucky

00:32:26.740 to become a slave because if you're a slave, you haven't been tortured and skinned alive and killed

00:32:33.360 or just generally killed. And in, in pre-agricultural societies, when they like, so a lot of, first

00:32:39.780 off, there totally was slavery in pre-agricultural societies. It was incredibly common in pre-agricultural

00:32:45.580 societies. Many don't like to call them that. They like to call them captives from war. Although I

00:32:50.720 will point out that complex delayed return hunter gatherers in the Pacific Northwest, for example,

00:32:55.440 people did fight over like each other. And actually in the classical or like academic definition of

00:33:04.860 true slavery, indeed have slaves because they raided neighbors specifically to capture slaves for labor

00:33:12.120 and prestige. So it's not even like. It wasn't just for slavery. If you study the surviving tribes in

00:33:17.420 like the Amazonian region. A number of them have rituals where like they, they can't mate or take a

00:33:22.440 wife until they've killed someone from another tribe. So that's like really common. But one of 0.98

00:33:26.800 the ones that always reminded me, and so I think that what happened, and I can tell you how people

00:33:30.900 get this rather dumb belief is they say, okay, pre-agricultural humans were probably like hunter

00:33:38.380 gatherer tribes today, which I do not disagree with. Right. And then what they do is they go, oh, 0.98

00:33:43.780 let's read anthropological literature on hunter gatherers today to try to understand what, what they then

00:33:50.120 forget is, oh, if these tribes were incredibly barbaric and lived horrible lives, would a woke 0.91

00:33:57.280 researcher, which anyone writing these likely is, write about how horrible and evil these minority 0.97

00:34:05.920 communities that they want to protect actually are in real life. If you actually read the, the, like,

00:34:14.100 if you're actually like into anthropology research and not like anthropology highlights,

00:34:17.360 you know, that life in these tribes is horrifying. So a great one that I read about, I want to say 0.99

00:34:23.760 it was the Ari and this was a South American group. I'm trying to remember from memory, but one of the

00:34:28.920 events that always really struck with me is he was talking to a woman and one of the dominant males from

00:34:34.320 the tribes. If you wonder what it's like to live in a tribe with a few dominant males, which is actually

00:34:37.800 the way most of these tribes are structured. They are not egalitarian, even though anthropologists

00:34:42.300 sometimes try to forrain them as egalitarian. The dominant male, they were, they were talking with

00:34:47.260 a woman and she was talking about how her kid was crying one day. This was like a four-year-old kid

00:34:52.640 or something and it annoyed the dominant male. So he just slammed the kid's head against a tree until

00:34:57.320 they died. And there was just nothing she could do. Nothing. She could, she just had to live in that tribe, 1.00

00:35:03.700 move on. Her partner just had to deal with it and move on because that was a normal thing for

00:35:10.320 dominant males in that tribe to do, to kill children that mildly annoyed them. That is not

00:35:16.980 the egalitarian world that you believe that you are living in. Okay. That is, and, and, and if you did

00:35:24.300 that in many agricultural societies, the, the good thing about agricultural. Oh, I mean, keep in mind,

00:35:31.140 just remember in the Bible, there are all these rules about like, well, if you do this to a slave,

00:35:34.840 I can't remember if it's, it's that or like some other ancient texts. The important thing about,

00:35:38.840 and we have a whole video where we go over all ancient rules and everything about slaves. Yeah.

00:35:42.720 Right. About like, well, if you do this to a slave, you have to pay this penalty. Like you're not allowed

00:35:46.740 to do that. There are rules. The point I'm making here is there are actually advantages to living in

00:35:53.540 a society with less equality when you live in these structures and you can be like, wait, explain that

00:35:59.840 to me. Okay. So suppose you have a collection of tribes, like the, the one I just laid out, like this

00:36:06.320 RE tribe. Right. And they have practices like this with a few dominant males. Okay. So you might have

00:36:11.320 one male dominant over a small group of like 17 other individuals. Right. And they can basically

00:36:17.360 like one group of three males and they can basically do whatever they want to the rest of those

00:36:20.800 individuals whenever they feel like it. Okay. Now move to a city. You have less equality, but it's one

00:36:27.480 or a group of like three or four males for like a thousand people or something like that. Okay.

00:36:32.180 The chance that your child draws the anger of this three males for this thousand population, 0.94

00:36:39.580 or your daughter catches their eyes is dramatically lower than the chance that this happens in

00:36:46.240 RE population. Right. This means that if you're not one of the dominant males in this tribe,

00:36:51.420 and one of the dominant males takes a liking to your wife or girlfriend, too bad you're having 0.71

00:36:57.100 his kids. That's just the way the tribe works. Whereas in other tribes, you just keep them hidden.

00:37:03.280 You know, it's, it's, it's, there, there are advantages when you're dealing with this degree

00:37:07.660 of despotism for inequality, ironically speaking, but continue. Yeah. Yeah. And, and again, I want to,

00:37:15.460 like a lot of what happened here and what was being misrepresented, which I just want to highlight,

00:37:19.540 because you pointed it out earlier, was it sort of like, you could argue from a just pure

00:37:25.300 happening in the moment hedonic perspective. There was a local maximum perhaps with some

00:37:33.100 pre-agricultural societies where it did absolutely get worse for a little bit when agriculture was

00:37:40.200 introduced, like nutrition got a little worse. Dentition was a little worse or sorry, like dental

00:37:46.580 health was a little worse. Child mortality went up mostly because people were having more kids because

00:37:50.780 they could, because they weren't starving and they didn't have a menorrhea. You know, they were

00:37:54.640 working more, et cetera. But then from bronze age onward, like from 3000 BCE in the near East and

00:38:02.000 a little later elsewhere, there were better storage. There were better plows. There was better

00:38:06.180 irrigation. There was better dietary supplementation. So nutrition got better. Life got better from the

00:38:13.220 iron aging classical periods onward. Absolutely. Things got so much better. Like you can see in,

00:38:18.380 in skeletons, heights go up and in health pretty much recovered back to like what you saw in,

00:38:23.540 in pre-agricultural skeletons at that region. Cause people didn't get shorter initially when,

00:38:28.440 when agriculture was introduced. And then of course we saw a full recovery and then some,

00:38:32.860 as soon as, you know, we, we have modern sanitation and medicine and dietary abundance. And then that's

00:38:39.640 the, the big thing is if you, if you compare non-agricultural life today to agricultural life,

00:38:46.440 there's just no comparison. And that's where I get super annoyed with people today who are like,

00:38:52.880 man, things like it just, it's better because like, right now there are people who live in

00:38:59.660 non-agricultural societies. What is their life expectancy at birth? 21 to 37 years. What is the

00:39:05.520 average sick fat American's life expectancy? And I'm not saying we're super healthy, right? Like we have 0.91

00:39:11.780 problems. 21 to 31. If somebody today died within that range, like at 31, you'd be like, wow, they

00:39:20.400 died shockingly young, right? Like you're like, this is a shockingly young death. That was the average

00:39:25.980 upper end life expectancy even today for these sorts of societies. Yeah. So I mean, like the actual

00:39:33.400 average is, is 30 to 33 years. It's kind of messed up by the high infant mortality, which again,

00:39:39.240 really bad, 15 to 25% in the non today, non-agricultural societies. So once I want to,

00:39:48.060 I want to pull on this a little bit because I want to talk about like this, like based framing,

00:39:52.360 right? Where people think I'm based because I'm talking about how great it would be if I lived like

00:39:58.620 an African tribalist, if I lived like, you know, the, the native Americans did when the European

00:40:06.940 colonialists reached, there's a reason why they lost, right? Like even before the diseases had

00:40:11.920 started spreading, there was a reason why the conquistadors was significantly less technology 0.55

00:40:17.360 than we have today. You are ensuring, and this is the truth of it. The people who do this sort of

00:40:24.360 like bronze age fronting, none of them have kids. And if they do, they're below repopulation rate, 0.98

00:40:28.600 like, like, like, like the, the liver King guy. I think he has like two, four kids, right?

00:40:35.040 He's completely faking. I thought he had two kids. Let's see how many kids does liver King have?

00:40:38.500 Or maybe it was just two bronze age pervert certainly has no Kings. 0.94

00:40:43.820 Okay. I mean, here's the other problem though, is, is there are, I think people look to even,

00:40:50.580 even contemporary. He's got two kids. Oh, two. Oh. So below replacement. Yeah. No,

00:40:55.520 they're never above replacement. It's not an above replacement strategy. It's, it's about,

00:40:59.660 it's literally to me, it is the worst of male strategies. It is the male equivalent to the

00:41:06.720 woman who dresses and all like Prada and Gucci stuff to show off to other women and wears all 1.00

00:41:12.080 the extra makeup and everything to show how he has status. She's dedicated her entire life to

00:41:18.160 intrasexual status signaling. And for this, it's males who have dedicated their entire life to

00:41:23.480 intersexual status signaling to other males in populations that they think that they can flex

00:41:28.720 with. And to me and to anybody who's actually interested in actually winning the genetic game

00:41:34.260 that we're playing in the civilizational game, they look like buffoons. Yeah. Well, and so many of the 1.00

00:41:39.480 things that people complain about where they're like, well, these non-agricultural societies are

00:41:44.200 healthier in this way, like lower levels of chronic disease, lower, like, okay, then like eat up,

00:41:49.800 eat better food. Like you can, you can choose to do that at any level. Like if you, you can choose

00:41:55.380 to eat whole foods, you can choose to eat, you know, a more varied diet. You can choose to walk

00:42:01.080 more or move more, even if you're a desk. If you arrive at the shore, you encounter these people for

00:42:07.040 the first time. And it's like, Oh, you, you're going to kill us with guns. That's so soy. And you 0.98

00:42:13.700 what, how soy you're going to kill us with guns. You don't even work out. Bam. It's like, well, 0.79

00:42:20.720 I did. Yeah. It's like that famous Indiana Jones scene. Yeah. And he was like, they had this whole

00:42:40.560 elaborate fight scene and he was sick and they're just like, just take out a gun. That's just such

00:42:45.480 good, good film lore. But yeah, I like that. They're also like, well, they don't get, they

00:42:50.980 don't get cancer. Their rates of cancer because they die because they're dying. That's why they're

00:42:55.900 not getting cancer. Okay. Cancer is a privilege friends. It's what happens when you get old.

00:43:00.200 No, no, no. Actually, I want to point this out. If you're 31 to 33 and you're a group that has a

00:43:05.360 life expectancy of like 31 to 33, how, how many people do you know who have cancer before 31? Right?

00:43:11.100 Like, what are you, what are you talking about? Like who's going out into the woods and like,

00:43:15.900 who's the mortician? Who's like, oh yes, this appears to have been.

00:43:20.480 No, no, but I mean, you can study this in skeletons and mummies and stuff like that. And they did have

00:43:24.680 lower rates of cancer. I'm referring to people, to people who are pre-agricultural today who are like,

00:43:29.200 you know, remote tribes, you know, some guy going in and being like, I wouldn't exactly say lower

00:43:35.900 rates of cancer is the flex you think it is. Cancer is, you know, not awesome in society today,

00:43:41.720 but like we've largely found a way to deal with cancer in younger individuals outside. And people

00:43:46.800 can be like, I know X person who died of cancer or whatever. It's like, yeah, you can know somebody

00:43:51.240 who's died of cancer. We know people who have died of cancer, but the reality is, is that dying of cancer

00:43:56.600 these days is you, we, we have in and increasingly have solutions to it.

00:44:02.520 Yeah. It's an increasingly preventable disease, which is great, especially with early screening,

00:44:07.400 which is crucial as we've learned the hard way from losses in our families. So yeah, I mean,

00:44:13.180 I'm with you on that. And, and here's the other thing too, ultimately is these tribes that live

00:44:19.540 pre-agricultural lives, like they're going through a crisis of disappearing because people are voting 0.59

00:44:25.600 with their feet and leaving when they have a choice to go, they're going, they're moving,

00:44:32.520 to cities and they're living lives in the modern world because you know what? Antibiotics,

00:44:38.760 they're pretty fricking great. So I just, I, to, to wrap this up, cause I don't want this to be

00:44:44.020 too long. It's that. Yeah. I mean, there's lots of evidence we could cite that I don't even think

00:44:48.640 is worth citing. No, like this, it's, it's like, I just, but I also just feel like there's like this,

00:44:53.800 this book and this overall meme is, it's this, it's this deep undercurrent that keeps me through

00:45:02.060 the internet and it's not dying. And it's been 10 years since this book came out in English and it's

00:45:09.580 still not dying. And listen, it, I think it's great to integrate elements that are, you know,

00:45:16.360 like our, like we should have more varied diets. Absolutely. We should be more physically active. I

00:45:21.060 agree with you. I work from a treadmill desk. I walk about 15 miles every damn day. Right? Like

00:45:25.600 I love this stuff, but you can do this with modern life. And so Harari, the, the, again, the author of

00:45:33.660 Sapiens, he says, there's no clear evidence that humans today are happier than hunter gatherers,

00:45:39.020 but like define happy because like how happy is, is Grug whose, whose skull is being eaten away?

00:45:46.060 Like he's waking up in pain every single day. Is he happier?

00:45:50.420 You don't compare apple to oranges. Everyone that sort of has a happiness set point where they,

00:45:54.380 you know, get to a set happiness level with whatever their life is.

00:45:56.940 Yeah. Which is probably largely genetic.

00:45:59.300 What is true is if you took somebody from one of these cultures and you put them in our culture,

00:46:04.520 they would generally be happier. If you took someone from our culture and put them in one of their 1.00

00:46:08.900 cultures, they would generally probably unalive themselves.

00:46:12.440 Yeah. They wouldn't be feeling anything. So I guess, no, no, what I'm saying is they would

00:46:16.880 hate their lives so much. They would, no, they'd be dead. I'm saying they wouldn't be feeling anything

00:46:20.620 because they would die immediately.

00:46:22.320 No, but even if they did, even if they survived, they integrated with the tribe, they would, 0.98

00:46:26.200 they would hate. You take a kid who grew up with cell phones and computers and philosophical

00:46:31.580 conversations and an understanding of reality. And you put him in one of these primitive tribes, 0.71

00:46:36.680 he's going to hate his life. Right? Like there is no reverse integration, right? Like,

00:46:42.220 here's what also really annoys me though. Like, and this is an argument and this is very similar

00:46:48.720 to the American dream, butthurt that you hear, like, we've been robbed of the American dream.

00:46:54.020 And very similarly, Harari is like, well, most ideologies and religions throughout history have

00:46:58.940 failed to deliver on their promises of happiness and meaning. And I'm like, sir,

00:47:04.400 they never promised happiness and they never promised meaning.

00:47:09.900 They're like, I'm a jealous God. I'm going to, I'm going to kill you. If you don't listen to me, 1.00

00:47:16.700 or, you know, like this is capitalism. If you want to live, play the game.

00:47:21.740 Yeah. Or we'll kill you. 1.00

00:47:22.900 The other groups better are the ones who spread their ideology historically. 1.00

00:47:27.840 We never promised happiness. Happiness was never promised. Same with the American dream.

00:47:32.220 The American dream, you know, this is about life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, which you may

00:47:37.120 never get. Like, hold on. What I want to point out here is there is an alternate. There is an

00:47:42.720 actual sane and not stupid way to make an argument like this, but the people who make this argument 0.92

00:47:48.660 wouldn't make it because the moment they make this argument is go do it then do it. And the answer

00:47:53.120 is, is to say, well, the Amish have uniquely low rates of cancer. The Amish have uniquely low rates

00:47:59.780 of transmissible diseases. The Amish genuinely do seem happier than most people.

00:48:04.680 Yeah. They're in their base. They're so cool.

00:48:06.780 There is a way you can go back to an earlier time that might be a civilizational optimum.

00:48:13.280 And they're absolutely people who convert into Amish communities and Mennonite communities,

00:48:17.480 everything like that. And it's called being a Mennonite or being Amish.

00:48:21.680 Yeah, go. It's cool.

00:48:24.380 If you want to do that, you can just go do it, my friend. You can just go to the Amish or the

00:48:30.460 Mennonites and show them that you'll work hard and do the labor and marry into one of the families 0.91

00:48:34.820 and become one of them. But you don't actually want to make those sacrifices. And being an Amish 0.99

00:48:39.560 doesn't make you look cool and buff and status signal to other men. So you're like, oh,

00:48:43.880 it does. Didn't you, there's a whole like Amish romance novel genre?

00:48:47.580 There is. Yeah. It's like, but for people who don't know this, they're called

00:48:49.940 Bars. Yeah.

00:48:50.900 And they're really popular among women who like want to have Amish fantasies. So again, 0.95

00:48:57.220 this is, this is the, the tough guys not knowing what girls want.

00:49:00.120 I know.

00:49:00.880 They know.

00:49:02.080 No, they don't know. They don't know. No, they don't know that they don't know the type

00:49:04.880 of masculinity that girls want. There is not a big category of a female romance about living in a,

00:49:10.220 in a tribal society other than like Gorian, which isn't that popular anymore.

00:49:13.560 Yeah. There is a lot.

00:49:15.520 No, that wasn't, no, that wasn't a tribal society. It was like super regimented,

00:49:19.780 full of tradition and like intergalactic trade. It was clearly an imperialistic,

00:49:25.540 like complex civilization. So that doesn't count at all.

00:49:29.660 Anyway, love you, Simone.

00:49:31.180 No, no, no. I want to, one, one final point. Is it sort of the way that Sapiens ends?

00:49:35.180 This is kind of like, well, it almost doesn't even matter because we're,

00:49:40.120 we're on the verge of breaking out of natural selection and we're becoming

00:49:43.540 something utterly unhuman. And that, that basically like 20th, 21st century technologies

00:49:48.960 like genetic engineering and AI are going to turn us into cyborgs and we can redesign

00:49:54.700 life itself and create inorganic life forms. And that this is the ultimate disruption of

00:50:01.800 all the disruptions he talks about in his book of which the agriculture revolution was just

00:50:05.700 one. I mean, he also sort of talks about like various forms of capitalism and imperialism.

00:50:09.260 Anyway, he's like, well, it doesn't even matter because like, we're sort of becoming gods.

00:50:14.180 And like, I think he's missing more largely. The point is that to me at least, and sue me

00:50:23.640 if this isn't your thing. And if you want to go back to living like an animal, be my guest.

00:50:29.140 We just talked about, I mean, the Amish are not animals. They're like super cool. But I mean,

00:50:32.920 like, you can go even further back. Like if you want to make your mudstone hunts, you can do that.

00:50:37.720 You know, print of technology, he goes off into the, into the woods and he makes his huts and he

00:50:43.820 gets tons of views and it's great. He's happy. Right. But like, per my view, what makes humans

00:50:49.440 human is that we do these weird things that we have this prefrontal cortex and we use it and that

00:50:56.880 we are, we are our, our ideas. Like we are not our meat puppet bodies that still have like all the

00:51:03.940 old instincts that you see in like mammals and other animals. Like we, what makes us different

00:51:09.200 and what makes us human is all that stuff that he decries so much. It is that shared delusion that

00:51:15.160 he talks about. And to refute that is to refute humanity. And what is humanity in my view, what is,

00:51:22.360 what is hyperhuman is AI. And, and so I just get really miffed when he.

00:51:27.360 No, I'm going to push back on this a bit. I'm going to say from a different perspective,

00:51:31.220 just from a practical perspective. It's not that I disagree with what you're saying,

00:51:35.140 but I would say this. Okay. The reason why people have this dumb belief that they can just go back

00:51:40.960 to nature. And that's one of the pass forwards for humanity or disengaged from technology. And that's 0.83

00:51:44.740 one of the pass forwards is because they live under the Pax de Romana of the urban monoculture. They live

00:51:49.080 in this unique period of history where groups aren't killing each other because they can and

00:51:55.340 forcing their ways of life on other groups and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so they have

00:51:59.780 forgotten that that was ever a possibility or is even a real threat to them. But the reality is,

00:52:05.240 is that the people who are playing for keeps for the future of human civilization, they understand

00:52:09.780 that this is a, the eye of the storm. Okay. It's coming back, right? Everyone can see this when we go

00:52:17.540 out there and we're like, Hmm, what cultural groups do we want to ally with? Well, Jews look

00:52:21.500 broadly powerful and technologically competent and they'll ally with people who are different from

00:52:26.160 them. You know, like when we, when we talk about things like that, right? Like who else will we

00:52:30.320 argue? Well, you know, the, the Calvinist groups, they largely seem theologically aligned with us and

00:52:36.000 we could probably ally with them in a number of areas and would bring them on our show. And we talked

00:52:39.360 with them, but, but the people who are like, I'm going to go and live in the woods and do whatever

00:52:45.580 when groups and whatever groups do this, obviously we are one group that is moving in this direction,

00:52:50.800 but other groups will, the Chinese will, they already have, you are actually talking to one

00:52:53.920 of your kid groups. Apparently the Chinese are already regularly, wealthy Chinese doing human 1.00

00:52:57.580 augmentation, like genetic augmentation. They're embryos. Yeah. Which is great for our kids because

00:53:02.140 now they'll be able to look at that to understand what works and what doesn't work with this.

00:53:05.280 Exactly. But anyway, so, you know, the groups that do not engage with this technology, that do not

00:53:10.980 engage with AI are just really placing themselves at the benevolence of groups like us that do engage

00:53:18.140 with that stuff and see it as our partial duty to protect them so long as they don't annoy us enough.

00:53:23.340 But at the end of the day, I'm not going to put my own and my family and culture wouldn't put

00:53:27.800 itself at risk to protect you. So if you annoy some other group with technology, they're just going to

00:53:32.420 erase you. You know, you are going to be the tribal, I don't want to say savage, the tribal savage 0.96

00:53:40.180 when, when the group with guns comes. Okay. You, you, you, you will likely not even be enslaved

00:53:47.880 because you as a slave would be worth less to them than AI. Yeah. But again, that's like,

00:53:53.720 that is exactly how it was in pre-agricultural times. Like again, you're, if you like survival,

00:54:00.260 you were lucky to be a slave because it meant that you weren't killed often in a very terrible

00:54:04.460 way, you know? But the thing about AI is it means that it is no longer even worth it for a group that

00:54:11.080 is being practical to keep these sorts of individuals who have optimized themselves for

00:54:16.520 this traditional concept of masculinity and pre-agriculturalism. They are strictly less useful

00:54:22.640 to me than an AI. They, they like, if you conquer their land and their stuff, there, there is no

00:54:29.260 reason to keep them around outside of pure benevolence. Yeah. I shudder. Anyway, which we

00:54:37.980 have, of course, I'm just saying, don't go, you, you require the benevolence of the technologically

00:54:44.180 capable groups and advancing groups to protect you from the other technologically capable and advancing

00:54:48.920 groups that are not benevolent and will just take yourself. Yeah. Thank you for hearing me.

00:54:56.800 Anyway, love you so much. Have a great day. I adore you. You too. Good day, sir.

00:55:03.600 Just, I want to like, also see what's like, I don't know, considered standard, but oh my, okay.

00:55:10.320 I was, while outlining this episode, watching like the 30th recap of season one of Sex and the City

00:55:18.700 on YouTube by some YouTuber, because like, that's a genre on YouTube is just talking about Sex and the

00:55:23.200 City and the episodes. And- I don't think Gen Z is watching a lot of like old shows like that.

00:55:28.600 Yeah, like in Clueless. And they're like, oh my gosh, it's, this is amazing. And there was this,

00:55:32.860 she was talking about this one episode where someone was trying to do a threesome or 1.00

00:55:37.340 there was a threesome and I had this realization that someone had targeted me for a threesome when

00:55:47.680 I was like before, right before I met you. And I didn't realize it. Yeah. I met this really nice

00:55:54.380 nerdy guy who like worked in a tech company while commuting in San Francisco. And he was like, oh yeah,

00:56:02.660 like my wife and I, like, you know, blah, blah, blah. And I can't remember the circumstances.

00:56:08.160 We were like, do you want to like come over to our house and watch a movie? And I'm like, yeah,

00:56:12.520 I need to make some friends. That sounds great. And I go over and we're like watching a movie.

00:56:20.200 And then like at one point the wife, and I don't know why, well, I guess now I know why she,

00:56:25.680 she like brings out her vibrator and she's like, this is my vibrator. And I'm like, oh, good for you.

00:56:30.100 And like, I just keep watching. I love it. Wasn't even awkward for you. No, because you're

00:56:35.900 socially retarded. Oh, that's so good. I'm so happy for you. I just had a great time. I had a 0.99

00:56:45.480 fantastic time. And I, I rode my little bike home and yeah, that was, that was it. Thought they were

00:56:52.160 great people. However, many years later, what that was, that was probably early 2012 or late 2011.

00:56:58.700 2007. So like more than 10 years later, I'm like, oh,

00:57:03.620 oops. I'm sorry, guys. I wasted your, I feel so, I know I feel bad. Cause like I wasted their time

00:57:15.540 and I should have been like, yeah, that's not me. You put yourself in so many dangerous situations

00:57:22.240 being a section, like, like oblivious to people hitting on you. You have no idea.

00:57:26.880 You must've been hit on it so hard all the time. I'm pretty sure. I'm pretty sure I was.

00:57:31.880 And then I was the first person who pulled the, the cyber jujitsu move of like sitting down and

00:57:38.080 being like, okay, here's what I want. You act, you like autistically were like,

00:57:42.160 I'm not looking to date. I'm looking to find a wife. And like,

00:57:45.180 and you're like, well, I'm not looking for that. And then I'm like, oh, so no hold sex. Yeah,

00:57:49.800 that works. All right. Bye. Yeah. And it was, it was great. I mean, like you were just so

00:57:54.400 transparent with everything and it was kind of necessary. Cause if you weren't, I would have

00:58:01.300 been like, what a nice guy. I bet he hates me and then go home. Anyway, are we starting with like

00:58:08.880 the sapiens intro? Well, we're talking like sapiens is the whole turning point of this entire thing.

00:58:15.180 but I'm, I'm, I have a, I have an intro. Shall I just do it? Okay. Okay. Do the intro. I love it.

00:58:19.640 I'm excited. Shock. Okay. All right. Octavian, where are you going with Indy?

00:58:25.380 I'm trying to, um, I'm, I'm, I'm trying to, I'm trying to find, I'm trying to find a Christmas

00:58:34.740 drama. This is baby power. Oh, so baby, young people have powers and they can see magic? Yeah.

00:58:41.380 So you're walking her around until she sees it. Oh no, she got sad. We got to keep her happy

00:58:50.000 or the Christmas drama will run away. No, I'm done with her for now. Hey,

00:58:57.640 do you know where Toasty is? Oh, I don't know. Put her down. Maybe. 0.99

00:59:02.640 Hey,

00:59:03.200 you're looking for my dad's teeth. I think he's happy with that.

00:59:09.080 She's very nice.

Based Camp - December 22, 2025

The Pre-Agricultural Period Was NOT Better

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