Going Deep with Chad and JT - EP 209 - James Suzman

Episode Date: October 21, 2021

What up stokers! This week we've got anthropologist, James Suzman, to talk about his new book "work". Enjoy!     We have an exclusive offer for our audience -- get 20% Off + Free Shipping, with the code [GODEEP] at Manscaped.com !   If you want to feel good knowing that your favorite on-the-go blanket is made sustainably using recycled materials so they care for the Earth, Go to rumple.com and enter code DEEP15 for 15% off your first order.

show what's up stokers of the stoke nation this is chad kroger coming in with the going deep with chad jt podcast i'm here with my compadre jean thomas what clap, Stokers. And we are here today with our guest, anthropologist James Sussman. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for having me. So do you go by, is it Professor Sussman, Dr. Sussman? I go by the amazing name of James. That's generally the best one. I do talk to if I've got to book an airline ticket and I'm hoping for a free upgrade. Oh, nice.

Otherwise, I leave the honorifics behind. Do your students call you James? Well, actually, at the moment, I'm writing all the time, so I don't have a... But yeah, my students actually do call me. Well, they call me lots of other stuff as well but yeah james james and they're being polite how do you uh how do you like teaching when you are doing it um i like teaching a lot i mean i'm not doing much anymore um i like teaching because well actually i'll tell you what it's kind of i

haven't taught in the university for four or five years. I haven't actually had actual live students in a classroom. And I'm kind of pleased because students are bloody terrifying these days. You get, you get, God, no, you know, I mean, I've been known to make the odd tasteless joke once in a while. And it seems like anybody who makes a slightly tasteless joke these days risks getting, And it seems like anybody who makes a slightly tasteless joke these days risks getting spending the next 12 months of their lives in various forms of inquisition for being inappropriate. So I kind of miss teaching, but I only miss it a bit. Right. Was that always a goal to transition to full time author?

Look, not really. I mean done i've done lots of stuff actually i went for sure and you know most of the work i've done i've actually spent very little time teaching in actual universities i mean i've spent up until i had kids I spent most of my life working well pretty much all of it working in Africa usually you know on anthropology stuff and conservation sort of wildlife wildlife related work and a lot of kind of political stuff and I like being I mean that was my home I had you know I sort of I had a bus there I had a truck I had lots of cool stuff in my truck you know that is a place Namibia isn't a place where. I had a truck. I had lots of cool stuff in my truck. You know, that is a place. Namibia isn't a place where you actually need a truck. It's not like downtown LA.

Where do I have a truck? Cambridge and a school bus. Yeah, exactly. But so I lived and worked there most of the time. And then I had kids. And then I even got a real job for a while. I worked. I got a corporate job and I paid well but boy did it suck. What were you doing for the corporate gig?

Well they persuaded me to come in to be like their good guy and they were like we'll get James to speak to the hippies they said. It was Beers the diamond business what they wanted to do was make me paint diamonds green effectively so they put me in charge of sustainability and response corporate responsibility and all that kind of stuff and environment and so on and and you know to be honest they're pretty good but I mean in terms of good as a business, but, you know, I mean, my fundamental issue with it in the end came down to it was a business. It was a business involved in basically, well, I mean, this was the good side of the business. Basically, it was involved in selling pointless pieces of rock to Americans primarily and Chinese and various others. primarily in Chinese and various others, and using that to really amazingly enrich a couple of African states

where the money wasn't wasted and it was spent on good stuff like education and roads and schools. But at the same time, it still was selling diamonds and it sucked. I happily left that and I left it after a Bushman friend of mine died in Namibia. I went to bury him and then decided on that trip, sitting amongst the elephants and basically chasing the elephants out of the bloody graveyard. There was no way I was going to give that up anymore. And one way of dealing with it was writing. And so I went back to that life and writing and balancing childcare and all that kind of crap. Did working for the corporation inspire a lot of your work that you've done since on work, which is your primary focus now?

Yeah, it did. It taught me a huge amount about, well, I mean, it's a phrase another anthropologist came up with, but it's a good phrase. It taught me a lot about bullshit jobs. It's a phrase another anthropologist came up with, but it's a good phrase. It taught me a lot about bullshit jobs. And I discovered, you know, in corporate life, corporate life is a strange space. It runs by its own rules. And these rules are not, you know, they're not something I was particularly familiar with. But, you know, to succeed in a big glass building with suits and ties, it's all about making yourself seem somehow important and

invaluable and and it's about creating bigger and bigger bureaucracies um you know i worked out i was pretty good at it i did pretty i did pretty i did pretty well but the truth was that you know it really bothered me for example the level of reward that people like me were paid with it. You know, really through being good at coming up with ideas that seemed like great expensive ideas and things that you had to do and pushing for bigger budgets and all that kind of stuff. But was any of it particularly necessary or important or useful? On the whole, I don't think it was. on the whole i don't think it was um and so you know it it as i say it paid paid pretty well but you know in the end it didn't feel like it was doing something particularly important for the world or for anybody for that matter what was the name of the tribe that you studied to figure out like how they're well yeah okay let me let me explain that a little bit yeah the guys i worked with

they're they're called the genoese you know so you you means person means truth real people they call themselves and they've been hunting and gathering really i mean they're in ancestral terms they were part of a direct lineage of people who'd been hunting and gathering in southern africa really since the first emergence of our species homo sapiens 300 000 years ago possibly you know they've been a hell of a long time or their particular lineage had and for one reason or another they ended up as one of the last hunting and gathering societies left on earth and they're one of the last places where the great expanding global economy got to and squelched out the remnants of their existing life and in the 1960s when anthropologists started

working with them first time they were viewed at the time by many people as you know they're things like you know people in my grandfather's generation would refer to them as the lowest form of human being alive you know they're somewhere you know in South Africa in parliament they had debates about whether they should be conserved as part of the flora and fauna of the country because to quote one of their ministers they are more like a baboon than a baboon you know so they're victims of all this kind of racist claptrap because they're living as hunter-gatherers and it was assumed that they led lives which are terrible they assumed that you know they lived in the desert it was really tough

that they were constantly starving that they're constantly miserable that life was nasty brutish and short and then a group of anthropologists you know mainly americans that are the marshall families and a guy called richard lee they went out in the 50s and 60s and what did they discover they discovered people who are basically really content who didn't work particularly hard to make a living you're incredibly skilled at making a living in this really tough environment and who basically managed to get by and feed themselves you know better on the whole than you know most people certainly more nutritiously than a lot of modern people on the basis of about 15 hours hunting and gathering in a week.

And that's just healthy adults. And then they spend more time doing other kind of domestic stuff like we all do. But the bottom line was that these hunter-gatherers were supposed to lead lives that were absolutely miserable and who presumably our ancestors lived a fairly similar way to um you know and the idea in our world was that you know agriculture was invented and suddenly elevated us from this miserable lot and then we've got industry and all this kind of stuff and it's

always got better and better the truth is it turned out these guys in some very fundamental ways lived a lot better than we did and in in other ways, they don't. They live shorter and there are all sorts of other things. You know, it's not a dreamy Eden thing. But that's why I started working with them. And I started working with them in the early 1990s, basically when they were being sucked into the global economy. You know, by this time, big farms were coming into the Kalahari. It was very much like the sort of Wild West, if you imagine, you know, that sort of period where the Native Americans were being shoved aside and the land expropriated.

And Jindrasi were taken in effectively as slaves by mainly white farmers and treated like absolute hell. And when I started getting there it was you know a time when apartheid had just ended and we're you know so I got actually involved a lot in sort of dealing with how these poor guys who were working as virtual slaves and farms how they were dealt with and treated and there it became really clear to me how different their instinctive approaches to things like work and pay and working for the long-term were and how much of the issues, many of the issues that had arisen between them and farmers were subject to that. So works have kind of been a theme of my work for ages, but in the case of Namibia in the early days, it was very much on focusing on labor rights and farm workers' rights and understanding why it was so difficult for the Genasi to actually cope and adapt to this global economy where suddenly, you know, you're expected to work some crappy job, you know, instead of, you know, living off your wits and on the land, as they had done for

generations. And it produced some really interesting insights, yeah. And on top of that, you sort of described these tribes as being fiercely egalitarian as well. Yeah. Right? Yeah. egalitarian as well yeah right yeah well let's look hunter-gatherer hunter-gatherer life and again you know these guys these guys lived in small what you know we typically call bands these bands are you know groups of 15 to 30 people and you know for bands to survive and i think this is probably the way many of our ancient ancestors, through most of human history, organized themselves. And these bands were what we call, as you said, fiercely egalitarian. But fiercely egalitarian, I mean, there was no hierarchy at all.

All the kids were not senior to younger kids and weren't expected to treat them. And people were not senior to young people. Men were not senior to younger kids and weren't expected to treat them. Old people were not senior to young people, men were not senior to women. In fact there was this sort of fierce anti-hierarchical thing. Anybody who had ideas a little bit above their station, anybody who started lording it over their neighbors or their family, they would get taken down and they'd get taken down in the same way a good comic probably takes people down by wit and insult and just laughter you know so if anybody in particular young men was sort of prone to it so young men would go out hunting they'd kill a big animal they'd be like yeah i'm the balls

they'd come back and basically everybody would take the piss out of them even if they were hungry and they were desperate you know meat is really important food there it's a real cause for celebration but even still people be stuffing their faces and they'd be passing out insults in between meat tastes like shit yeah not enough of it so you know but this applied to pretty much everything you know everything in that society based on this kind of leveling and it produced a really interesting social dynamic it produced societies which now you know they've really struggled to get leaders because suddenly now they're stuck in a country where it's political parties and you know they're getting screwed over by everybody and you need somebody who can represent you, because that's how things work in the world of states and countries and governments.

But they're a society where actually people don't accept people leading them. Like, no way. So it's really tough for the few guys who do stick their necks out and try and peer lead leader because this egalitarianism sort of it pushes pushes back against them and so things are you know things are beginning to gradually change it's been 50 60 years a couple of generations and younger people think differently to older ones but yeah it was i mean unbelievably real egalitarianism and what was interesting about it was that they didn't confuse egalitarianism with difference. So they were happy to accept difference.

So, for example, in the Genois world, men and women have very different roles. Very, very different roles. Women, for example, it was unthinkable that they'd hunt. But at the same time, there was no elevation of one role over the other and on lots of other activities things you know like child care and so on beyond breastfeeding child care was everybody's business and everybody looked after everything so there's this kind of real fluidity and the egalitarianism made a system of yeah it clearly kind of worked because you know if this society had been around for as long as it had and so many of its neighbors were so similar and we see similar kind of social

forms in lots of other hunter-gatherer societies far more recent one like the Inuit in the Arctic the Australian ones who arrived there first people got there 50 60 000 years ago the aboriginals and the Batak all sorts of different people people have something similar to this kind of fierce egalitarianism. So I think it's something that comes out of living in that particular way. I think it's a byproduct of making a living as a hunter gatherer. Do they have art? Oh, hell yeah. What's their art?

Well, traditionally, they're art. So look, there's their art um well traditionally they're up so look there's ancient art so if you go across southern africa is like this massive ancient art gallery i mean you go through as you know you go through the big mountain ranges and the caves and there are petroglyphs and paintings of dazzling kind you know of, of animals, of people transforming into animals. They're also just doodles. Like there's a really famous, you know, I mean, they're art historians and archaeologists who've made entire careers talking about just this art.

And I mean, when we're saying numbers, there's like sites in Namibia, there's a place called Spitzkopi, there's another one called Brandberg, and both of them have about 30,000, 40 40 000 individual paintings and etchings in the mountains I mean the actual and then there's Tzedilo Hills which is amazing in Botswana you know and there's famous really famous beautiful pictures and then there are also some which are clearly people just doodling like we doodle I mean some of them have been over interpreted massively by archaeologists like there's a famous one of which is three dancing penises in a place called Cedillo Hills and you know this one guy who made an absolute career as a lecturer teaching about ancient rock art talked about

how it was symbolic of the state men get in a deep trance state when they do their trance healing dances and all this kind of stuff and i an old lady sitting there dad up and then over and whispered to the guy next to me and he was she was just like it's got nothing to do with trance it's just boys drawing dicks on the wall but you know they they had this extensive artistic tradition and musical tradition and so on like all people you know when people have free time they use it creatively that is the nature of human history from the beginnings of time until right now is that when we have time and we have energy at our disposal we spend that energy usually well something maybe we sit on with an

xbox but usually people actually our lives are pretty crap when we don't we do stuff and and they did stuff they played music they played games they they enjoyed hanging out a lot the kalahari is a hot place and you know in the summertime basically you the more time you spend under a tree you know making wisecracks the better your life is so are we missing out on a lot of like new warhols and bob dillons and paul walkers because we're too busy too busy working at jobs that are unsatisfying i think that is this this i think is in ways, it's the kind of crux of the book. So you get through all the heavy stuff in that book. And the conclusion effectively is, is that, you know, as a world, we're already almost too rich, there's too much energy,

we do, you know, and energy is just work, you know, we, and more work we do, the more greenhouse gases we pump out into everything. The truth is also that we have this entire economic system organized around employment. Everybody's got to be employed. If somebody doesn't have a job, they're a layabout and they're useless. It means they're not contributing. That's certainly the narrative. But actually, we're far more than wealthy enough to look after everybody, really.

It's not that hard to provide the basics for people. And if people have the basics, I'm absolutely certain that they would do stuff that they cared about. So it means we'd probably end up with loads more crap musicians and loads more crap artists. But out of those crap musicians, that vast pool, instead of guys just sitting doing some rubbish job at, you know, in an Amazon warehouse, you know, packing crates for 12 hours till they're exhausted. Instead, they, you know, they'd be producing art. They'd be producing something of value.

The other thing that I think would happen is actually people tend to do. If you think about kids, you know, you never meet a kid. When you go and say to kids, what do you want to do with your life they always talk you know and they talk about jobs they'll talk about socially valuable roles roles which bring kinds of rewards other than money they want to be firemen they want to be cops they want to be you know doctors and nurses and teachers and you know you never meet a kid and he goes like i want to be an insurance loss adjuster you know or actually no i want to be trading derivatives in goldman sachs in new york you know kids don't dream that we get kind of forced into that and that's because of this kind of whole expectation of jobs and our whole economy being organized around it and as

a result of it and you know they're more serious things than just losing musicians and writers and artists you know i sit in a university town where you know we've got i overlook the buildings where they got the astrazeneca you know made the vaccine and all that stuff you look at the amount of flow through of academics who're doing good work important work whether it's in medicine or any other kind of stuff. And then they get seduced out of it into corporate life where they end up making, you know, working out how to make bouncier rubber for kids' toys or some kind of crap like that instead of producing heart valves or what have you.

So there's, you know, yeah. I mean, my big thing is I suspect if people were given the time and the opportunity to do what they want we would have a world with much more good stuff happening but then you had kind of a counter example where like the the people who worked at kellogg were given a shorter yeah work week and they were given less hours and then can you kind of explain what they ended up deciding yeah okay i'll give you that story look in the 1930s the kellogg's company you know they basically decided yeah exactly kellogg's kellogg's cornflakes and all they decided what they'd do was because unemployment was really bad in the united states at the time

and there were a bunch of companies actually did it. This was the day that actually they thought about these kind of things. And they said, well, you know, if we cut everybody who's on our staff's shift to six hours, we could add a whole other shift every single day. And that means a whole other shift of employment. We can double the number of people who work here and are looked after effectively in this period where it's characters and it went and you know as a result they did really well they upped their investment business did really well and it carried on like that until the 1950s and then 1950s

the staff came and actually said to management they said look we want to work a 40-hour week we're tired of we're tired of We're tired of these short working days. And look, the reasons they explained for it was, one, they were annoyed because they spent too much time with their wives, they said. And so this is the 1950s. This was that kind of, you know, women were kept out of the workplace. They weren't worried about their wives hearing that?

They clearly, I think the wives wanted to get rid of them as well because the wives you know popped the valium to try and keep themselves sane and you know with the kids. I don't know but there was another reason and this is the far more interesting one. The other reason I said was they wanted more money. They wanted that extra marginal capital that doing a few more hours work they would do. And why did they want more money? Because the 1950s was this era of advertising. This was the era where advertising, madmen and all that stuff kicked off.

And this was the era of manufactured desire. This was when the desire making machine that is at the heart of the american and global economy now kicked off and stormed out and you had advertising everything suddenly a tv pumping messages and people were like see stuff on tv and they're like that's something i've never even heard of but by god i need it or i'm gonna die so i need the money to be able to afford that so it created this huge culture of consumption, getting stuff, you know, and often the, you know, and the genius behind it in a sense was that what people consume was short time. So, you know, have this thing upgraded, continually upgrade your car, upgrade your life, this whole idea that, you know,

something's better on the horizon. And it was pumped through in a million media and it's still pumped through today. I mean, I can't remember what the stats are in terms of advertising exposure, but now we're sitting on our devices all day long. We get hit with thousands of individual adverts in a day, thousands of little triggers of desire. And that's excluding, you know, the, I don't know,

the strange things that the algorithm pump up and things like your your various social media feeds and what have you so yeah that i think that was the thing it was the birth of desire that was the birth of this kind of rampant unsatisfied desire and with it the kind of strange form of greed and lack of satisfaction that came with it that persuaded a lot of people to work bloody hard too so these last existing hunter-gatherer tribes they didn't have stuff that was just their own or they didn't try to accrue stuff to keep for their own that was separate from the the group absolutely not they had basically look people owned things people owned things. Nobody owned much.

You know, I mean, your average person owned pretty much what they were wearing and a few other little things. You know, really, you didn't want it enough because you were mobile. You didn't have a permanent home, you know, nowhere to store stuff. So you had a few items of jewelry individually that you made. You would have your bows and arrows your hunting kit like this one i got behind me um and that is kind of it you'd have stuff that you can carry 15 miles to your next camp without any hassle you know and that's remembering you might be

carrying small kids as well and so people didn't really have stuff and then they also had the system there of demand sharing which is another way they kept that fierce egalitarianism going and demand sharing basically it's like the opposite of what we have if i want something from you um i generally you know i'm english so i'd actually sit and just wait for hours for you to offer it to me first and then i'd say oh thank you so much and then i'll doff my hat and i'll be very i'll be like i'm in your debt i'm really grateful it's like we've had a transaction i now owe you something there it's the opposite way around there anybody has the right to ask anybody for anything that they've got so i see you and i'm

like i like your shirt can i have it and it's basically considered damn rude for you not to give it to me it's it's a complete opposite of our system and what that does is it has an effect of leveling stuff out it makes no there's no point in accumulating stuff because people are just going to ask for it so everything ends up being really evenly leveled out nobody's incentivized to get tons more stuff than somebody else and yet within that there's also remains this kind of system where gifts are given all the time. Often it's sort of in private and they're called haro gifts. And these gifts are meaningful, but they cast, they undertake, the gifts undertake journeys between lots of people

when you're given a haro gift. You know, maybe it will be a beautifully made piece of jewelry made from a tortoise shell or something. You will inevitably give that gift away to somebody else. And so these objects have the sort of life of their own, binding whole networks of people together. But basically it produces a society which is, yeah, as I said, fiercely egalitarian. Nobody is particularly worried about having more stuff. Nobody is worried about having as much as the

next guy because if the next guy has more than you you can just go give it to me and then he said you know it's rude for it's rude for him not to in fact it's it's you know so on the whole you know when you give it you know i used to when i first got there and i'd bring like sweets for kids sometimes you know i'd bring tobacco for the adults because that's what they were really into and sweets for the kids because that's what they were really into and sweets for the kids and you'd be expecting like you'd do at a party with kids in Europe or something you'd have to dole out the sweets individually yourself. You actually just give them to, I discovered, you'd give them to one kid and they'd be perfectly, everything would be shared out absolutely spontaneously and unthinkingly.

absolutely spontaneously and unthinkingly and in a way that's just you know it was pretty pretty cool and surprising and so so this sort of like greed and and and sort of need in our society to sort of dominate i guess for lack of a better term but that's not inherent in human beings that's sort of just taught that's been taught to us by the way, our society and sort of economy functions. Yeah. In some ways. I mean, I don't like to say what's inherent in us or not because all human beings are, we're all human beings. So if somebody believes in greed or, you know, so our worldviews can manifest in hundreds of different thousands and infinity of different ways.

What I'm saying is that what I dislike is the idea, and this is we have it wheeled out to us again and again and again. It's very much part of the dialogue of identity in the modern world. It's a very powerful narrative in the States, this idea that actually we are inherently competitive because nature made us that way. We're inherently un-egalitarian and hierarchical because nature so they making claims in human nature that can't be supported we can be actually a whole bunch of different things we can be what we can choose to be and we can be what we collectively decide we can be and we can

make decisions based on good research but the bottom line is we are you know i won't say what we are but i can happily say what we're not and what we're not is born to be hierarchical greedy mean bastards actually you know even in business i mean this is the irony you know everybody you know you're going to business meeting and they're going survival of the fittest and all this kind of crap. You know, it's a war out there. We're going to kick their ass and blah, blah, blah. But actually what really happens in business is actually business is mostly about cooperation. It's about working with a team.

It's about working with your, you know, it's about having a relationship with your suppliers, your contractors, your customers or what have you. And, you know, the funny thing about it is you have this kind of ideology saying we're inherently super competitive and it's a kind of war out there yet you look at all the kind of laws in business what are the strongest ones these are the ones to prevent people cooperating too much so they have all these anti-trust and anti-competition laws so they don't want you you know if you go to shop and you talk to your neighbor and say, oh, let's put the same prices on everything. You'll get your ass kicked. You'll be closed down. It's anti-trust behavior.

It's about creating, let's say, you're making a monopoly on price fixing. Instead, you're just cooperating. So bizarrely, there are a whole bunch of laws that prevent us from being as cooperative as we'd like to be in a lot of things. as we'd like to be in a lot of things. And how much do you think of our competitiveness as a result of our awareness of what everyone else is doing or how much they have? Well, I think, you know, I do not, you know, I think there must be some biology in it. But yes, fundamentally, I think where we are now is my you know if i if you ask me to take a punt

and it's a punt of an idea you know i mean you know people i've written a book on it but it's like you know i'm not a million percent confident that it's it's the way but yeah my sense is you know if we go back to like the jim rc again part of the reason you have demand sharing is so nobody has any more than their neighbor yet modern economics you know classical economics tells us that humans have infinite desires i don't think that's true what we do is we have a desire to have as much as the next guy we respond to inequality so our aspiration our desire for more is not to have more than anybody else has got or more than anybody's ever had. It's always just to not be worse off than the dude next to us. I think we're pretty

instinctively egalitarian. We're pretty bothered when somebody has something and we don't. We find it pretty awkward. I don't know. I certainly find it awkward if I'm in a restaurant eating a burger or something and there's a homeless guy outside the window looking in at me. It's an uncomfortable thing. And you do that on on a macro scale i think this is sort of why you know pretty much every major revolution we've ever had anywhere has been because people are pissed off with inequality one way or the other and there are two ways you beat inequality you either kind of you know well according to the sort of the legend is you either try and emulate the people at the top and be like them so you know get that glossy corporate job or you eventually

give up and you build up the barricades in the streets and tear down tear down the buildings um you know and that happens in history with you know almost clockwork regularity in various forms. And we're in an incredibly unequal time now. And this is certainly one of the things behind the pretty weird politics that you guys are having, we're having, everybody's having. I'm sorry, how do you say it? Well, je ne vois si. Je ne vois si, I's having. I'm sorry, how do you say it? Well, juhwasi. Juhwasi, I'm sorry. There's a click in it, but

you just say juhwasi. That's the... That's the way people like me say it. Juhwasi, do they party? Well, historically, they had basically... Again mean i was looking you know i mean when i started there when i was 20 the first thing i did was go and look for indigenous narcotics well any any any any anything that we could take which would make a party more enjoyable

and the traditionally have no history whatsoever of taking any drugs including alcohol so tobacco they were really into at the time that had found its way in but did they party yes indeed they did they had these things called well i mean it's just simply i you know they're called they're basically quasi a mix between a healing ceremony and a ritual and a dance but these dancers would go on that start at sunset and you'd have two fires women would sit around them and clap this kind of heavy rhythmic clapping and they would go on all night and people would go into trance like nothing I'd ever seen before. So when I first when I went to was when I was 21 in a really remote place in the central Kalahari. And I was blown away. I've got pictures somewhere, photos, you know, from back then with my crappy camera.

You know, the last getters uppers, you know, this is dawn. The sun is rising behind them and they're still the six knee chain and are still going around. And they've dug a hole because they dance around the circle in the fire and they've dug a trench with their feet but they go into a really intense trance healing state so they describe it as going into another world and they're taken there by this unbelievable rhythm that blasts off i mean it's a really potent and powerful thing and those happen really frequently and they started off as a kind of social gig in the early evening but then they'd always get more intense and often they'd be held if somebody a kid was sick or something

and then well you know once guys in the trance state then they go off and they go and argue with the gods and they have a fight with the spirit and they do all sorts of things but it's a really intense thing i mean i it was really interesting for me to be with people who really got off their heads on absolutely nothing other than rhythm and heat that was the other thing the heat of the fire would do it so the shaman would move in and out of the fire with their chests you know and they talk about reaching the state which they call boiling energy and boiling energy was when you as hot in the inside as the world on the outside and that was when you could enter the kind of spirit realm and disappear and it's really it was really intense and recently the truth is that you know the genasi they've lost most of their land

now you know and they're leading really rough lives and lots of people with really rough lives. Alcohol is the main drug there now and alcohol does not go down well. Jinnasi don't have any history of control with alcohol and I think

physiologically they're probably not used to it. When people get drunk, it gets very violent very quickly. All these they're probably not used to it. So when people get drunk, it gets very violent, very quickly. All these things that didn't used to exist have now become very much part of life of people. So Genoese living in, you know, 20 years ago, there wasn't a single Genoese living in towns. Now there's, you know, outside the town of Hobababis in namibia right you know 200 kilometers from where i did my first field work there's now about 7 000 people living in this hideous squat of tin shacks and crap on the edge of town because they're being kicked off the land and and there

they you know like anybody life is crap so they drink and when they drink they fight and you know there's also other kind of you know and there's other things so for example people are people are you know anti-retroviral drugs for aids which are given out free that you know people are crushing those and smoking them in bottlenecks you know bottleneck is a south african way of smoking weed basically you break a bottle and you pack it full of and then they stick lots of other things in so yeah there's there's kind of bad partying happening in the sense that it's you know it's partying of poverty kind but the traditional stuff was amazing you know and for me i was into the dance music scene in england when i was kicking off in

there like the early 90s and for me there that that desert thing was amazing did you find the boiling energy me yeah I had to I had to I had to experiment with certain artificial stimuli in order to achieve boiling energy personally no I mean to be a shaman it's a thing it's a skill that they had to work on and it's something that you know i mean i could only you know there's one anthropologist who claims to have done it and a couple of others who sort of studied it and i think maybe understood it a lot more on a spiritual basis than me i mean it wasn't i just couldn't i thought it was amazing i mean i'm into you know i like you know i like rhythm and in particular i mean i'm a guitarist butist, but I've got no, I'm tone deaf.

So I like stuff, losing myself in a beat. And yeah, it is, it's an amazing thing to witness and see. And it's also amazing to sort of get your head around the idea that, you know, when somebody tells you they're in that state, they become a lion, they actually become a lion from in their reality. It's not like I'm like a lion or, so it's just fascinating and amazing thing to do. But no, I couldn't even, you know, the truth is often,

you know, with the trance dance, often by like four in the morning, once, you know, I'd start trying to think how I'm going to get some sleep. When you think about the music scene in the 90s was that like the happy mondays at like the hacienda but uh where were you at what were you listening to yeah that was that was that sort of i was a little bit i i wasn't so much into the happy mondays or the hacienda I was up in Scotland doing my degree um but it was the early days of the rave scene had come across come across from Ibiza and and you know for me I was a little South African boy you know not not particularly sure of my place there and I I found those I

found that that early scene was amazing it was kind of this one place where you get this amazing mix of just everybody. And they'd be having a great time together and dancing. And it also suddenly made people actually look like decent dancers for the first time. I'd never been to a club where anybody actually looked like a half-decent dancer until the wave scene kicked off. But, yeah, it was a similar it was a similar

kind of thing and definitely the two things happening at the same time were really interesting i mean you could see in a sense you know at least on a physical level or a basic rhythm level you could see similar things happening in the two in the two worlds yeah so when i was back back in edinburgh writing up my doctorate I would I would I would take refuge in the clubs on the weekend until I got to feel too miserable did you ever have breakthroughs about like what you were working on while you were dancing or while you were partying um I had many breakthroughs after partying you you know, that kind of, you know, everybody's sitting around looking like a ghost of some kind, you know,

but you actually have pretty good touch at sometimes, you know, that, you know, what there is, is that energy that you get from a dance. And it's the same for the Jumbasi, that energy, that release, that movement that it produces afterwards, you have this kind of really at peace feeling and in that you discuss things and you discuss things often very sincerely and openly and um so yeah so certainly i did i mean i've definitely had lots of inspirations coming from strange sources throughout my life yeah you know and and and we'll still seek inspiration

you know when i'm when i'm writing and i'm stuck i know i know exactly what i gotta do you know and i'll i'll seek inspiration by smoking or you know um and it sometimes does it just helps you break out of a train of thought right problem is remembering it afterwards yeah and i've been i've been i've been taking walks lately whenever i just uh on the weekends and i take like a post-it note and a pen and i leave my phone because it's like so with with my phone i'm like always connected in your mind just so like it just tenses everything up so when you just go for a walk and it's like uh and that's kind of a yeah the connected thing is crap absolutely i mean i do i sit i sit and i have i mean i actually use

because i'm now i'm now so bloody old i have to have reading glasses yeah i actually have a really big notebook like a massive thing and i write in really big letters whenever i have an idea so if i do the same thing with a walk it's just with a massive notebook the only way I can read it if I don't you know otherwise I'm flipping between glasses all the time yeah yeah it is it is I mean you know it is being disconnected and being able to think I mean for me it's critical like when I write I whenever possible I mean pre-covid I would disappear I would disappear to Namibia or Cape Town you know where my parents have a sort of empty place and I would literally go and hibernate for three weeks just so that you can focus and you get in the rhythm of it

and you just constantly on your notes and you know it's it's a it's you got you got to be able to focus being online sucks that way yeah it's almost euphoric disconnecting where it's it's a it's you got you got to be able to focus being online sucks that way yeah it's almost euphoric disconnecting where it's like if you go for a walk and you like disconnect from your phone and you're like sort of out in nature it's like it's it's you're sort of like is this what life is really like without my phone this is this is this is the amazing thing about doing you know working somewhere like the Kalaharis. I mean, you're dealing with Namibia, you know, if you take Namibia and Botswana together,

the two neighboring countries of Kalahari, they're, I don't really know the American equivalents. They're probably the size of like California and Texas combined or something. And between them, they got three and a half million people. You know, it is it is it is empty and there's life there there's things scuttling through the sand and there's birds in the skies and there's elephants and rhinos and and you know now it's harder than it used to be but now you can get out completely out of range and you get sucked into the kind of rhythm of the

space where other rules apply you know it's it's it's it's you know it's a good dilemma instead of wondering how many likes you got on tweets or something to actually be worrying about whether you know you're sleeping you're sleeping on your roof of the truck and there is a lion nearby you know you could hear it but you're wondering whether it's too nearby to climb off and take a leak that's a different kind of anxiety it's a good kind of anxiety and it's one that actually you sleep really well with it you know yeah i worked out you just stand on the truck route in the end lions aren't so good with cars they they don't understand them at all but it's nice to be able to go to these places and just disappear and the sad thing is actually in

a strange way is in all these countries network coverage for mobiles is showing up everywhere i've been in strange places where suddenly i've got a peep on a phone and it's just like a breaking of the so like a breaking of the glass bowl around you yeah well where i went to high school i went to a boarding school they didn't have cell service and we didn't have tvs um so like my whole high school experience was i didn't have a cell phone uh which like now it's it's tough for me to sort of i always forget about that it's like tough for me to really you, I always forget about that. It's like tough for me to really, you know, have an idea of what that's like to not have a phone. But I just think it was such a, it's crazy nowadays where it's just,

you're always sort of thinking about what's on your phone. What's all the connection, all that stuff. I see it with my kids who are just, you know, 14 and 11 and it's yeah it's insane but it's also I look at it and I think well this is kind of their world this is what the world is going to be like for them

and who am I to say what's good and bad with it although it does drive me nuts you know me I'm just so crap at social media it's unbelievable you know my publishers all over the place say do more Twitter you know me i'm just so crap at social media it's unbelievable you know publishers all over the place they do more twitter you know i'm just like i can't think of anything i want to say yeah got got no ideas yeah you need someone else to play off of it's hard to do it when it's just uh like low generated you're like well i don't know what i would say to nothing like i'm

just speaking uh blank like atmosphere like i need someone to give me something to to respond to yeah well this is exactly well at least you you know at least if you're like a comic there's a thing of having a dialogue in the end i'd rather have the conversation in private anyway look what i do is i write these massive tweets which they call books hardcore tweets that you gotta you gotta spend like days you want it to be like a big substantial thing that has like real weight to it yeah you gotta have i mean like this is they made this it's a fat boy you know yeah but a bit you want it you want a boy. You want a bit of substance to these things.

Nobody's going to be able to respond to that in 120 letters or well. They can say it's a pile of crap. I'll just say you're wrong. Then they'll say you're wrong. Then they'll say you're wrong. Then that will probably get a twitter banning or something are you fired up that you wrote a book like that you wrote an entire book does that I really I written three of them now

I'm writing I'm writing a fourth one as we speak um yeah I look I like it it's a it's a good thing to have it's bloody hard work I mean I can tell you that it's not, it's not a faint hearted kind of thing to do. It's a kind of lonely and slightly miserable process, but when you actually get the solid thing out in your hand, it's a, it feels good. And actually what feels really good is when people like it and they say they like it. And, you know, it's,

it's kind of crap when they say it's a part of crap though because some of them do like you get the odd stinker review where guys are just like this guy's just full of shit and you're like well thanks for thanks thanks for publishing that yeah what what i guess for me what was so interesting about it too is just that that you're kind of framing it like there is like a better way of life, but then it was hard for me to make the mental leap at times to trust that.

I was like, was life actually better in these hunter-gatherer kind of situations or are we better off in our kind of like city domesticated lives well i wasn't really saying one one was better than the other i'm saying at the moment we're in trouble i'm saying at the moment we got the you know the way we're organizing things it is not working out and the biggest thing is obviously climate and biodiversity loss which i just see it right in front of my face the biodiversity side in particular um and then there's other ones like there's yawning gaps of inequality that are driving people into

really weird behavior what i'm saying is you know if the genasi can live in this desert you know with basically nothing and they can sit and feel say we're affluent we're wealthy we have a good life and they live shorter than we do they you know a whole bunch of stuff that materially they're nothing close to us yet if they have so little and can be content to work so little and be content with what they have why do we who have so much crap so much stuff i mean we and we burn through we waste stuff like you wouldn't believe i mean the amount of disposable nonsense that we deal with you know from my kids toys to we're constantly consuming and disposing of stuff which brings us very little satisfaction often

and we're unhappy constantly because we're always wanting more we're always thinking the thing on the other side of the horizon, that's going to be what brings us to happiness. And what I'm saying is we have this great wealth. We've got this, you know, we've got amazing medicines. We've got people. We've got the capacity for people to develop all sorts of things. And yet we're wasting our time by sort of forcing everybody into rubbish jobs,

not doing work that they think is important or they need. So what I'm saying is let's just take a moral lesson from the generality and apply it to ourselves because you know we do have we've got so much more than they have and you know if we just spent it used it better then we could you know then life could be better for i think a lot of people and to be honest i think you know even the ones i mean you know, then life could be better for, I think, a lot of people. And to be honest, I think, you know, even the ones, I mean, you know, the richest people, I mean, the one thing working in the diamond trade was, you know, I met a lot of rich people. And boy, did they seem miserable. Yeah, I was wondering, do you think our sort of desire for more and for money is sort of wondering do you think our sort of desire for more and for money it's sort of because we most people in our society have all our basic needs covered and do you think it's sort of like our

need for a purpose um because i sort of think you know if i had like a 15-hour work week because i i love work so much but granted granted, I love what I do. But I sort of feel like our current society, if we had less work to do, we'd kind of decay because our needs are already met. Yeah, I think that's, again, I think that's a myth. And that's sort of what's one of the big parts of the book. It's sort of why I go right back into our evolutionary history, you know, before even proper Homo sapiens are out. You look at some of the tools and things that were made even 700,000 years ago.

These were made by guys, you know, some of them, you can see are just practical. It's like they make these things called hand axes, these big rocks for some of them are just practical. It takes four or five claps and you know you've got the shape roughly that you need but some of them you can see some dude or woman has spent just days making an exquisite one i mean a thing of beauty doing it because the work is bringing them this great satisfaction and this is really what human history is is after doing the basic work to get

your needs done we also need a degree of purposefulness to satisfy ourselves and that is why you end up you know we talked earlier about all that rock art and stuff in southern africa music traditions and so on that is why these things exist because people had spare energy and spare time and what do they do they get creative with that's what we do that's why prison sucks because you can't get creative with your time and energy you're confined you're effectively restricted from doing work and in many ways the way we've organized work now we restrict people from doing the kind of work that brings them satisfaction and joy and you know one thing which was amazing in this lockdown was that lots of people didn't have work to do and our economies actually survived i mean forget what the numbers said but basically things rolled on and people stuck at home what did they do they

found work to do in britain you couldn't get for the first the first lockdown we had last year you couldn't get flour for love or money because everybody had become a bloody baker everybody every house in freaking cambridge was making sourdough loaves from morning till night just to keep themselves busy people do stuff we we are this amazing creative species and we have this kind of fear that if we lose our jobs because we've structured our lives around them for so long that you know we'll just do nothing we'll sit and and partially that's because we're in a society which discourages that and penalizes you you'd look down upon for not having a job so you sort of cower at home and you and you also if you don't have a job often you

don't have the money to do have the access to do the kind of things that you want if you're an artist to buy art supplies or you know you're you know so it requires that people sometimes get a push and i suppose some people have more energy than than others but you know i i think once we get used to it it would be liberating and it's interesting to see you know over here there's a lot of talk these days about the four-day work week in spain they've got a really big trial of it um and it's interesting to see what people do when they have that little bit of extra time on their hands and they're on the whole they spend it well and you know why because that's what they do people are like that people and so i think it's the change in structure we don't like change people are nervous about change and i suspect that if

we change things you know we'd see good changes and people people would do well with it and for the lucky few amongst us who actually love what we do or the way we organize our work and life. And, you know, there are definitely tons of people who love what they do. You know, that's just for them. That's a, you know, it's a blessing that they've managed to make a career out of doing the work they love rather than having to do the work they love after they come home from that job. If you think about it there are a lot of people who cook and garden and do work after work because

they like that work because their day job is so unsatisfying they have to do this other stuff well i was gonna ask you this is back to the beginning of our of us talking but you were saying how you get nervous about i know you're just being playful too about making like an off-color joke in front of students and then getting upset about it is it weird that the paradigm has shifted now where it used to be the student was afraid of getting in trouble from the teacher but now it seems like teachers are more afraid of getting in trouble with their students it's it's a complete it's yeah it's a it's a complete inversion look i mean i was a student once and you know when you're 19 you're basically i know i was kind of dumb and full of full of anger excitement and hormones yeah well and you're utterly convinced that you're right

about everything you know and we've done this kind of strange inversion now. I mean, it is a kind of weird inversion. And yeah, I mean, I'm glad I'm kind of not part of it in a major way. I hope it's a sort of temporary thing. But I also think, look, it's partially a byproduct of, you know, when you live in strangely politically polarized times. You know, and I grew up in South Africa and apartheid. strangely politically polarized times you know and i grew up in south africa and apartheid you know i was definitely one of the very few people who were in families that were very known to be very opposed to the whole thing and so on and you know there was a really politically fraught environment in terms of what you said and what you do sort of some in some ways similar to the

kind of sensitivity that's in the states at the moment with something people jumping onto a bandwagon and you know it's i think people sort of do that these things become amplified in our minds and you know but then south africa is an amazing story and that historically you know for a few years at least you know i mean it was actually everybody was brought down you know took took the work of one good man to talk everybody away you know talk everybody to put their guns in their pockets we're sort of like a bit of a scene in reservoir dogs at the end of a party everybody pointing guns at everybody everybody calling revolution here and and then you know one sensible man in the form of mandela managed to talk talk everybody away from the cliff edge in a set do you think that's kind of where your hope comes from that we can go through automation and kind of

have a a positive outcome where everyone kind of has abundance or enough and and we can yeah well i think look i think we already do have enough i just think we distribute it really badly and so i mean i think to me that's just an obvious moral moral thing to do have enough i just think we distribute it really badly and so i mean i think to me that's just an obvious moral moral thing to do but yeah i mean it's really easy to give up hope and say these forces are just too big for anybody to control or deal with but you know the truth is you know humans are bloody adaptable creatures you know we've coped with all sorts of stuff you know feeling of first hunter-gatherers who just stumbled into europe in the ice age you know coming from you know long history of living in the savannas of africa and suddenly there's just sheets of ice you know coming all the way down and they made a living

and i guess we've got to fight mammoths now but you know we'll make a living doing that people adapt to stuff and we're clever and we have this incredible technologies at our disposal you know and if we if we don't accept you you know, I mean, maybe we will screw everything up. I mean, you know, with the climate, we're getting close. But if you don't have hope, then you're left with nothing really. Then, you know, then then we may as well all just kind of give up. And, you know, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know what we'd do without hope. So I'm not necessarily optimistic, but I'm definitely hopeful. And it's like basically, if you imagine the world as a sort of restaurant

with tons of amazing ingredients you can make fantastic dishes with. And basically all we're saying is, I'm hopeful we don't fuck it up. We've got all the right ingredients. We can do it. But there is a chance that we're going fuck it up we've got all the right ingredients we can do it but there is a chance that we're going to end up mixing sugar with you know god knows sugar sugar with trout

um you know i don't know what doesn't go but you know we you know this is my worry is we know what we need to do and we know how to do it but we might still screw it up but i'm hopeful that we won't and i'm hopeful that you know we're you know it requires that we're a little bit brave we have to be prepared that there's a need for change and we have to be prepared to experiment stuff because nobody has the answers so we've got a reasonable idea of what to do and what to experiment with but we've got to be open about it yeah all right uh should we answer some cues you got one more quick question how prized is organ meat uh in the what do you mean when you say organ meat what do you mean i've just been really passionate about beef liver lately okay nutritious it is and i just

feel like things you mean things like the heart the lung the tribes the kidneys yeah basically in terms of me i mean here's the thing we eat so much meat now that you know we pay tons of money to eat the fillet in fact when i used to slaughter a goat or something or if there was a hunt we had a perfect arrangement with the gym because i like the meaty bits because that's what i grew up with in these really overfed households they thought the meaty bits were absolute crap the fillets and things they were like this is what they wanted were the knuckles they wanted the liver the kidneys the stomach the heart the lungs the brain yeah those are the bits where you had this packs of nutrition you

know that was you know meat is just meat it's just iron you know so once you've got your iron thing you don't need much of it but actually in all your gristly kind of deep bits that's where the nutrition is so like for me it was a perfect arrangement you know i'd say in the end because i don't really like killing stuff much so in the end i stopped butching being butch and killing my own goats and i'd be like somebody killed the goat and you can have the head and the feet and the tail and the gut and i'd be like oh yeah man yeah yeah no totally it's it is and pretty much in all hunting societies you know in all societies where actually you have to work for your meat the bits that are prized are those bits the bits that generally we in the overfed modern world just don't care for so much nice that fires me up but you do you do well you do well you do well with them i'm a bit like

sometimes you know i'm looking at the thing in the pot on the fire and i don't know what it is yeah they're like kunta this is for you i'd be like oh is it are you sure yeah yeah yeah it's taking me a while when i first started eating beef liver i was like this is horror like this is like the worst shit i've ever tasted but now i it's so nutritious that when you eat it you can you can feel it and it's look it's the same with the genwasi it's the hunter's portion so often what you'll do is because your kill will often be far away from the camp or your village you know and you've got you know it's a big animal you take down the first thing you do is you'll eat the liver raw

yeah right out of the straight out of the kill and it of the kill. And it's just like, you know, it's for them. It's like, it's a bit like Popeye with a spinach, you know, it's suddenly the muscles will pop out and they've got a spring in their state and then they've got to carry this bloody animal home or they've got to walk all the way back to the village to get everybody else to come and help carry it. So it's. All right. Questions about age. I recently discovered the pod and appreciate everything

you guys do. This is the therapy I didn't know I needed. I've always felt like being young was part of my identity as I am the youngest sibling. Having been the youngest in my office for years, I usually hang out with guys that are a bit older. I recently turned 30 and all of a sudden I've noticed that this is not the case anymore. I don't know how it happened, but it flips switch and I started noticing that my current friends and coworkers have matured, yet I still feel like I'm in my mid-20s. I'm starting business school next year where the average class age will be in the mid to late 20s. And I'm starting to feel self-conscious about my age. I'm learning to deal with the new part of myself. And I'm wondering if you guys have felt the same. Any recommendations on how

to navigate this transition period in our early 30s? Thanks, Brydog. You want me to give some wisdom for that? Sure, yeah. You want to kick it off? I'll tell you what, I don't know the answer to that question. I think age is immaterial look i'm i'm 51 i can't even i can hardly even remember what it was like being 30 and it age becomes less material the older you get how about that i have friends of absolutely every age group on earth and actually there's a point where you just stop bothering that's nice yeah i i think uh i think it's good he's probably has some anxiety about it because it it might propel him into working harder at things because you're gonna you're gonna really want to you'll have some notion of where you should be at

at a certain age and i think a lot of that stuff is kind of arbitrary but it's always good if it motivates you and it makes you get after it a little bit more and then I don't know I would uh it's kind of nice when you hang out with younger people and you can feel like you're the more seasoned mature one and you don't even I think it'll just come through and in your energy because I didn't go to college until I was like 24 so all my classmates were like 18 and I was super embarrassed about it so I'd shave every day and not bring up like things that predated them like Bill Clinton or something like that but but all the kids in my class like they would tell me they'd be like hey you're pretty cool you seem to like kind of have some swagger but I think what they didn't understand was I just had more years to understand

who I was and so even though I was way behind where I should have been at that time I still in a lot of ways was a little more developed so I don't know I think I think you'll be one of the cooler kids in class I would uh I think you got a lot of fun coming your way yeah I agree I love getting older and uh I heard Brad Pitt say that he'd take youth or he'd take wisdom over youth any day and i thought that was very inspiring especially as he does in his 50s yeah exactly all right next cue you're vaping right do i see you vaping over there james yep what are you working with over there i got i got a hype bar here this is a tiny little thing called the vape presso it's in my pocket but i have to have

like five of them at a time in my pockets because they keep running out um yeah look it's it's it's got me off it's got i you know i lived in the car in the kalahari smoking was like mandatory so uh it's it's taken me a long while to to get myself off the cigarettes and this is the answer yeah i feel that um getting over an ex my first ever serious girlfriend and i broke up seven months ago and i've been struggling with getting over her and haven't made much progress and getting her off my mind. I guess my question is, do you guys have any experience with struggling to get over an ex like this? I feel like seven months is way too long to be still stuck at this point in the recovery phase. And I feel like it's hindering the progress of my life in general. Some more info that might be useful is me and my ex

went to high school together and we're in the same friend group and i will say it's certainly every single girlfriend i've ever had i went into complete meltdown for absolute months afterwards or until i found somebody else and then fell insanely and crazily in love and then they dumped me and then i'd go back into meltdown for months and it keeps nothing's ever going to change that way but you might end up finding somebody who you're really happy with for a really long period of time and that's when it ends so you fall you fall hard when you go all in pretty yeah yeah I always did I never yeah I look it's because I only reached puberty when I was like 24 so that might help with your, your, your younger guy.

I was sort of, you know, people would look at me. I got asked for ID everywhere. And so the girls weren't that big on me until I hit my twenties. But yeah, I was completely until I got well, even through and beyond my first marriage, I was all in and I've got a,'ve got a new partner now five years and we're all in and it's there you know it's a good sign if if he's mourning his previous relationship i'd say that's a good thing because it means he gives love properly and so the next person will get good love oh yeah uh yeah i i i was i've been dealing with that a lot lately.

And yeah, it's brutal. But I think a lot of it too is, you know, you just got to keep, you can't sit in there and just sort of stay in your feelings. I guess it's good to sort of feel the pain and process it and like acknowledge it, you know. sort of feel the pain and process it and like acknowledge it and you know but i think it that it's also used as motivation to get back out there and meet new people and and just keep you know working on your life and and maturing and and using that pain to uh to find something better um but it's also you know it's it's good to feel pain because it makes you a more dynamic, deeper person. So, yeah. And you know what?

One time I was really heartbroken over an ex. It actually didn't happen until a couple of years after we broke up. It was like this like depth charge of remorse where it took a long time to hit. But when it did, I was like inconsolable. I was like, oh, my God, I lost her forever. And then I made a choice. I was like, you know what? what I'm gonna make my life like way better and I'm gonna get way happier and when I do that she'll come back and then even if she doesn't come back I'll be way happier because I did all this work so I wouldn't I don't know if this is good advice but I would uh

just work on yourself as a way to trick you to trick yourself into believing that'll bring her back. And then even if she doesn't come back, you'll be happier. So you'll be fine. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Last up. All-out war between tennis players and pickleball schmoles.

I've been a stoker since day one. My homie Michael partied with Chad at Santa Clara. Oh, what's up? He says, what's up, Chad? What's up? He'll be writing's up, Chad? What's up? I'll cut to the chase. There's an all-out war between tennis players and pickleballers in my neighborhood.

Do you know what pickleball is, James? Yeah, I do. I'm a big racket sport player. What are you doing? I don't have picket. I've seen picketball on TV, so I know what it's about. I play tennis and I play squash. Squash isn't an

asshole sport here nice people play squash in england yeah and how did tennis become a sport for the elites i don't understand it because it's not that expensive of a sport really but when you watch like a tennis tournament it's all like it looks kind of snobby but yeah i don't understand how these sports become associated with like a social class yeah i think club the clubs that's what it is you know like like like groucho marx you know i don't want to be a member of any club that will have me yeah um pickleballers have been using our tennis courts they put down some makeshift chalk lines or they leave masking tape on top of the tennis lines that melt into the court,

making it confusing when I'm trying to serve fire aces. An unofficial pickle league took the liberty to pave over two of the best tennis courts in the neighborhood and are now asking for donations on Nextdoor to finish the project. Are you fucking serious? Thanks to this group of pickleball dorks, no one can play anything until they finish their amateur paving job. Council, what do we do? Should we just assert dominance like Genghis Khan and reclaim our territory? Should we serve 100-mile-per-hour tennis ball lasers straight to their domes?

Much love to you bros, and what's up to Joe's ginormous hog? Joe's our friend who's prodigious in the private park department. Ah. He gets a lot of love from the fans for it did you find that when you're working in the um I'm sorry I forget the name Juma Z is like a big dong cherished a big dong is cherished I never i never you know funny enough it was like in all my years it's just like one of the things i never thought of asking or paying attention wow i envy your mind yeah i don't know how you know some reason and some reason yeah my mind was elsewhere i i'm gonna put it down like i haven't been able to go back for 18 months because of COVID, but when I get back there, it's going to be the first

thing I'll ask. I'll send you guys a text. Yeah, you can tweet about it. Yeah, I'll tweet it. You can imagine, yeah, that would be the most interesting tweet I ever make. I feel like they would be mean to the guy who has the big dong as a leveling kind of thing

where they'd be like, oh, nice big dick, Charlie. You think you're so... Yeah, I imagine if you got a really big one, you'd... Well, actually, people... Yeah, strangely enough, nudity wasn't something that traditionally bothered them. But since the missionaries have got there, everybody's wearing pants. So before then, it was just like a little leather loin pouch and your butt stuck out. But, you know, the missionaries have got there and everybody's got increasingly you know they've they've been taught to be prudish so i haven't had a lot of time to inspect anything either

um but my my sense is no my sense is it my sense is it depends it's not the size but what you do and i my sense is it depends. It's not the size, but what you do. And I... So what do we think this dude should do about these pickleballers? He should learn to play pickleball. If he's a half-decent tennis player, he'll kick their ass. Yes. Beat their ass at their own game.

That was like when I was doing kettlebell competitions and then i did one against a crossfitter and he destroyed me and i was like i'm definitely in the wrong discipline of weight training if i'm doing this specific exercise all the time then this crossfitter can just venture in on a lark and dominate me i'm probably not playing the right sport yeah i think that's i think that's it i think that's a good answer they both sound absolutely hideous to me i appreciate your candor yeah yeah i play squash um yeah i agree with james i mean i think just uh start playing pickleball and dominate these dudes. Beat them

at their own game. That sounds legit. Yeah, and you know, you might realize in that process that you aren't so different from the pickleballer and that they're not so different from you. You guys probably have the same wants, desires, fears, and maybe in playing one another, you guys will create

a kind of kinship. Maybe the pickleballers will write in to you next week. I would like to hear from them. How they all got their ass kicked. Yeah. Well, that's it. James, thank you so much for coming on, man. Yeah, thank you, James.

Thanks for having me. Can you let the listeners know what the books that work? And then what, what's your other, your other two works? Yeah. The book we've been talking about is called work, a history of how we spend our time. That's like a history of everything. It's not really just about work. It's about a history of life. And then my other book is called affluence without abundance.

And that's a book about, you know, it's a a much more detailed it deals with a lot of ideas their own work but it's really a story about genuasy and genuasy lives and so it's about hunting and gathering it's full of it's much more kind of story like and it's about southern africa and human evolution and it's like a it's like a yeah i i like i like my first book more probably really that's all right well thank you so much i'm sure the the listeners will check it out and I like my first book more probably. Really? All right. Well, thank you so much. I'm sure the listeners will check it out.

And we were stoked to talk to you. I hope so. Yeah. Buy some books, listeners, because otherwise starving writers starve. Thanks, man. Great. Okay. Have a great one. I'm going to hit the leave button.

Thanks for having me, Abe. Chad, who is your beef of the week? My beef of the week uh my beef of the week uh my constant need to drain the lizard uh which i have to do right now uh mostly it's at night well at night you know like i'll like drink you know i just drink a lot of water and then i'll i'm going to bed like i just i i always feel like i need to like keep you know i just drink a lot of water and then i'll when i'm going to bed like i just i i always feel like i need to like keep you know i i i'll drain the lizard and then like it'll be like 15 minutes later and i'll be like i know there's still some in there so i gotta drain a little bit more so i don't have to wake up in the middle of the night to go pee you know it's just like

i don't know uh my whole family we all have small bladders and and I drink a lot of diuretics like coffee and you know I'll drink diet coke and stuff and just I just have to pee and it's annoying it's like an annoying you know because I I know some people who they I I'm like you know people I've dated or whatever though it'll be like I'll be hanging out with them for like five hours i'll be like you don't have to pee once and uh so yeah i guess maybe more of it's like my small bladder and um uh so that's my beef it's pissing me off you know i'm sure there was hunter-gatherer tribes that celebrated people with small bladders oh dude thank you man yeah appreciate it i thought you were gonna say that celebrated being i forgot too probably yeah yeah that'd be cool to just find tribes and like find out that they extol things that extol virtues that

like you know we're a little self-critical about it just makes it feel lighter you're like oh dude there's this other tribe out there in like the amazon and they love it when you pee all the time and you're like all right there's a place where i'd be cool for this yeah um this is probably going to come out in a long time but my beef of the week is with tom brady he's been my beef before he'll be my beef again because he's probably never going to come out in a long time but my beef of the week is with tom brady he's been my beef before he'll be my beef again because he's probably never going to stop playing football and dominating but i just love rooting against tom brady because you think the guy always wins it's like predetermined you know what i mean so me like rooting against him is almost rooting

for the unexpected in life i just just want something that, you know, I want the impossible to happen. I want Tom Brady to not win. And then it's kind of weird against him too because he always wins. So you almost never feel bad for rooting against him because life always works out for him. Like he's more handsome now at 45 than he did at 20.

His arm looks stronger now than it did 10 years ago. And he's got this juggernaut of a team that he's expertly leading and i don't know i just really dislike him i just really really dislike him and i want to see him go down and uh i'm sure it won't happen but i'm just going to keep saying it every year that he's going to suck because one year it hopefully will come true although with him you know they say father time is undefeated but i don't know if father time's ever gone up against anyone like brady but he's got to go down he's just got to go down enough is enough my buddies were like why are you rooting against him like because enough is enough it's time for him to go

down and i want my whole life to be just ever hopefully uh chad who's your baby yeah but just just uh he's you know he's a dweeb you should know it yeah hey man or hey i'm tom brady sorry nerd um who's my babe or legend what'd you say babe my babe is uh my new wall art i just got some new wall art i'm pretty fired up on it uh actually maybe i'll just show you guys hell yeah your camera for a ride all right now we are walking through my place and check this shit out pirates Pirates of the Caribbean. Boom, baby. I love it.

I'm fired up on wall art, and I feel like Strider right now. Check this out. This is a painting of John Travolta and Uma Thurman dancing in Pulp Fiction. Nice. And then

Roadhouse. Oh, that's awesome man yeah you got yeah yeah there's nothing better i mean it was it took me a while to really decorate my place but when you do do it and you have stuff on the walls that fires you up it really makes a difference and i felt 10 times lighter when i finished it so fired up on my wall art that's what's up that's what's up dude my uh my babe of the week is um getting your back scratched nice better feeling in the world and if i could do it 24 hours a day i would i i just i look forward and maybe it's like too much of a good thing and it would, it would take away how good it feels because what makes it feel so good is that you can't get it all the time.

But I don't think that's true. I think if I was getting scratched 24 hours a day, I'd be the happiest guy on earth. And I just hope one day we can get there. I hope one day I make so much bank. I can just hire someone to scratch my back 24 hours a day. I'm going to back scratch, just doing it. And then sometimes people are like, oh, have you tried it with like a brush or like with like, you know, one of these weird like utensil kind of things.

And I'm like, nah, dude, I want the hand. I need a physical hand. So that's my favorite. Chad, who's your legend of the week? My legend of the week is my buddy Mason from college um i'm not sure if i did this story if i've told this story before but if i have i'm going to tell it again uh so one time our buddy ass clown in college was acting up and so one day we uh we took his hot he had a honda civic and one day we took his honda civic and we installed street glow on it and um which is like you know in fast and furious it's the light

in the undercarriage of the car so we put blue street glow on it put some decals on it and we just rolled back to the place and we turned ass clown's car into a fast and furious car and then we did donuts in the street with it and um and i wouldn't be able to uh pull off that dream if it wasn't for mason and his knowledge of cars and whips uh so that was just a really fun time in my life and uh i don't think ass clown was was as appreciative as he should have been about having a Fast and Furious car, you know, within the span of two hours. So, you know. But yeah, that's why Mason's my legend and what I've asked Clown. Nice, dude.

Dude, my legend of the week is the show Sex Education on Netflix. I started it last night. It's fantastic. It's funny. It's got snappy editing it's like this super heightened sexual world where everything's just about sex in high school and you're like yeah that's what it felt like that's what it felt like and and it's just uh it's clever and it's got heart and i really relate to it i relate to all the characters and i just really relate to like the way it deals with like neuroses and sex especially in young people and and how just talking about stuff can make things

better and i also i like the casting a lot i think a lot of the actors are well placed i i always love it too when like someone plays like the uh the the the poor person who's kind of like the outsider you're like yeah school like kind of dislikes her she's a weirdo and she's like poor but then you look at her and you're like that's like the most beautiful person i've ever seen and they clearly went to like good high schools and colleges but i'm glad that they're playing this part yeah but you're like i don't quite believe it but i like it but it's a show it's a great great show i definitely recommend it to everybody i'm only two ups in but i'm loving it sex educated on that foot nice what's your quote of the week my quote of the week comes from uh

i don't even know who it is but i heard this the other day and i was like it fired me up um the foolish person seeks happiness in the distance the wise seeks it under their feet whoa yeah so which which means and i think that relates to what james is talking about a lot which uh you know uh external things unless it's ass clowns honda civic then i think you can find a lot of happiness in that at least i did uh so yeah find happiness within yourself and you know james inspired me too like what he was talking about with like the way we live and stuff and it's just like all the like the competition and like this need for like more and stuff i was just like and i don't know i think i think i've been like on these walks you know on the weekends and like

it's nice to just be happy just because you know and i think i think a lot of people can find that and it's just like it's so simple yeah so i'd say you know seek that out for sure let's go i gotta quote so i guess james came up with a kind of 15 hour work week prediction from uh john maynard canes the famous uh uh economist and but basically john maynard keynes in like 1930 predicted like the technology revolution and basically his uh outlook on it was that none of us would have to work because we would have abundance from all the uh all the technology had afforded us but he was like crazy accurate with where we'd be at in the world but i can't find the full quote about what he predicted but i would recommend

people look it up but uh part of what he also predicted and i'll use this as my quote of the week is that uh in the long run we are all dead so nice yeah that was a really good prediction by him as well wait what what oh fuck dude what did you say that's not true he's like no it's true in the long run you're all dead i'm like get out of here back off with that what what dude ali g ali g has a good interview when he's talking to like the the chief surgeon or whatever the guy's like he's like all human beings will die and he's like well i ain't he's he's like he's like there's nobody that i know that doesn't believe that a human being that all human beings will die and he's like i think you're being a bit of a player hater. What's your phrase of the week you're going to have to?

Oh, fuck, we're going to die. Dude, mine is, I'll talk about it more on some other pods too, or they'll probably come out before this. I've probably already talked about this a little bit, but i went to my brother's bachelor party this weekend in palm springs what a party all the guys my brother's homies my homies just great guys my brother the greatest guy but we had a big dinner at a steakhouse on like the second night and we had our room and we were going ballistic everybody was being loud as shit screaming uh table was rocking and i guess uh there was like a middle-aged dude in the restaurant who heard us wanted to get in on the

action so he walks in towards the end of dinner he's wearing like a polo gray hair he's just like your quintessential like goes to palm springs to golf dude and he just walks in the room he goes hey fellas and we're all like yeah and there's like 15 of us staring at him. He goes, you guys think when an atheist has sex, he says, oh, God. Oh, God. And then he walked out. He's like, I'll leave you with that. And then he took it.

And we were all like, dude, what a legend, dude. That's awesome. Yeah, it was a big, bold move by him. And we appreciated it. So yeah, the reason we forget an after is, oh, God. Oh, God. That fires me up. All right, nice, dude.

That was fun. Well, I'll see you in like an hour. Yeah. Yeah. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom.

Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Thank you. We'll be right back. Thank you. Chad, what is your beef of the week? Aaron, who's your best? Strider, what is your best? Joe, what's your quarter league? Chad, what is your beef of the week? Aaron, who's your best?

Strider, what is your best? Joe, what's your quarter league? Thank you. What is your name for the week? Aaron. Who's your friend? Strider. What is your legend? Joe, what's your friend? What is your legend? What is your legend? What is your legend? What is your legend?

What is your legend? What is your legend? What is your legend? What is your legend? What is your legend? What is your legend? What is your legend? What is your legend?

What is your legend? What is your legend? What is your legend? What is your legend? What is your legend? What is your legend? What is your legend? What is your legend?

What is your legend? What is your legend? What is your legend? What is your legend? What is your legend? What is your legend? What is your legend? What is your legend?

What is your legend? What is your legend? What is your legend? What is your legend? What is your legend? What is your legend? What is your legend? What is your legend?

What is your legend? What is your legend? What is your legend? What is your legend? What is your legend? What is your legend? What is your legend? What is your legend?

What is your legend? What is your legend? What is your legend? What is your legend? What is your legend? What is your legend? Guys, guys, let's do it. Guys, guys, let's do it. Let's do it.