Trillbilly Worker's Party - Episode 197: The Mods Must Be Crazy (w/ special guest Daniel Immerwahr)

Episode Date: May 6, 2021

Author and Northwestern University history professor Daniel Immerwahr stops by to tell us about why our tech overlords in Silicon Valley are suddenly interested in all things paleo, and about why studying deep time is important. Here is a link to the article in the New Republic that we discuss: https://newrepublic.com/article/161593/prehistoric-myth-work-james-suzman Also buy Daniel's very good book, How To Hide An Empire: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374172145 Outro music by Michael Howard: https://soundcloud.com/baronvonsuckit Support us on Patreon: patreon.com/trillbillyworkersparty

Welcome to the Trillbilly Workers' Party, everybody. We have a very special guest for you today. We are talking with professor of history at Northwestern University and also author of the book, How to Hide an Empire, Daniel Imrevar. How are you doing today, Daniel? I'm okay. I'm okay. I feel like we're almost at the end of this and, you know, it's almost springtime in Chicago. So those two things match up in a really nice way yeah yeah it's um probably you know if you're in chicago it's probably got to be a much more welcome spring because it's so cold there so yeah i mean the line is that you know you'll never see a a large group of people seized with such collective exuberance as chicagoans when,

you know, in the summertime, because, you know, they know what they're missing. So, yeah, it's almost spring. But, you know, we had snow last week. So, just a reminder. Yeah, we did too. Winters in Chicago seem pretty rough. Winters here in eastern Kentucky are also pretty rough because everything's dead. So, I mean, it's kind of a double-edged sword here in Eastern Kentucky. You know, in the summertime, everything's alive and lush, and you're like, this is the best place on earth. But the flip side of that is that everything dies in the winter, and so it's the most depressing place on earth. So, it's pretty rough. Yeah. All right, you win.

Well, Daniel, I wanted to have you on because you wrote for The New Republic about this book that just came out. It is in the genre of, what would you call it, like lessons from the Stone Age genre? Paleo wisdom. Paleo wisdom. There you go. And it's called Work. It's by this guy, James Sussman. And we'll get to Sussman here in just a second. But I kind of just wanted to start out by asking you, who are the San people

of the Kalahari Desert? And why are they suddenly so important to our tech overlords in Silicon Valley. Yeah, it's rarely good when suddenly you've become important to our tech overlords in Silicon Valley. That story doesn't usually end well. Right. So the San people are more traditionally known as the Bushmen. And although that sounds like that might be one of those old-timey terms that we should avoid actually that is now a term that a lot of San people prefer and advocate so we can use that as well but there's a lot of some sort of nomenclatural diversity around here so but what they are is they are people who've lived in the Kalahari desert for a very long time how long exactly is somewhat up for debate. But the thing that is

interesting or has been interesting to a lot of people about the San or the Bushmen is that late into the 20th century, they were still foraging, meaning that they weren't practicing agriculture. They were getting their living from the lands by hunting and, you know, taking out tubers and, you know, finding nuts and that kind of thing. And so there was this line about the quote unquote Bushmen was that they were our best glimpse into the prehistoric past. If you wanted to see how humans were doing things, you know, 10,000 years ago, well, arguably,

and we're going to talk about whether this argument is right or not. They've been doing it the same thing for an incredibly long time. And so this is how we can actually see like our past. And it's in fact, one of the only ways that we can see our past, because there aren't actually that many people who are still foraging. Right. You know, in the article, you talk about this movie that was popular in the 80s, The Gods Must Be Crazy. I've not actually seen the movie. I am aware of it. What is it like? Can you give us the Daniel Imrevar movie corner review? Yeah, I mean, first of all, like, there's just this way in which we throw stuff at kids that I don't know why we do that. So, I mean, I grew up like, not only did I see

this movie, I was shown this movie many times. Like this is, they're like, this is a family friendly comedy and you should enjoy. So what it is, it's a, it's a comedy. It's a comedy by a South African director. And the comedic element is that he actually gets Bushman to be in the movie. And there's like this really sort of incredible actor who, who, who stars in it. And, and a lot of it's sort of this, like the, you know, the friction between quote unquote, civilized life and, you know, busy, busy life in the office in Johannesburg.

And then what it's like for these guys out in the Bush who, you know, have a very different lifestyle. And so it's then what it's like for these guys out in the bush who you know have a very different lifestyle and so it's a it's comedic it actually lets you see Bushmen doing their thing to some limited degree I mean a lot of it's staged and it's somewhat sympathetic to the Bushmen um or at least it seems like that in that you know one of them is is the hero yeah the way it starts is that um some pilots throw a coke bottle like a glass coke bottle out of the like out of the window because they're like done drinking the coke and they just like throw it into the bush and um this this group of bushmen finds it and then like they just go like this like completely unravels everything for them they're like

fascinated by this object it fights over the object they start hitting each other with it and so one of them goes to throw it off the edge of the world. And that's where he encounters, you know, white people and, and, you know, comedy ensues from there. Right. You know, you, you talk about the, the actor in it, um, the director basically kind of exploited him, told everybody that like he had lived in this society, that they didn't know money. kind of exploited him, told everybody that he had lived in this society, that they didn't know money, they had no awareness of the outside world. But yeah, these were basically false assumptions. Like the Bushmen knew about money, they knew even about agriculture, but they had been in many ways forced off their land and forced into the slums. Is that kind of inaccurate?

Yeah, I mean, it's in some ways worse than that. So the director, this guy, Jamie Ace, part of, you know, promoting this movie, and the movie was insanely popular. And, you know, it's not often that a South African comedy is an international sort of hit. And, you know, it's storming the theaters in the United States. But this is what was going on. And so what Jamie Ace did was said, you know, yeah, it's a,

like I'm basically getting this right. This guy, I plucked him straight from the bush. He'd never seen money before. I was the first or third white man he'd ever met. And, and so this story that I'm telling about these sort of simple quote, unquote, primitive people versus civilization, that's right. I mean, I'm telling you in a sort of cute way, but like, that's, that's basically the real story, which sounded, I mean, you know, people were interested in that, that made, that made newspaper had, you know, made good newspaper copy, but yeah,

that guy lived for a while and anthropologists went to interview him and the story that he had to tell was completely different. He was like, oh yeah, yeah. I met Jamie Ace cause I was, well, I was working as a cook uh in the school and i actually met him when i was like making some bows and arrow sets to sell to tourists like him right uh and so yeah i was not you know and like i don't live in the bush like here's my house uh so right it just it's you realize that there's this kind of myth making about um the bushman that is just relentless and in case, you could just see it so clearly because the story that the actors had to tell themselves

about their own lives was completely different from the story that the director had told about them. Yeah. Well, I mean, you write in your article that very few anthropologists today would actually use these societies as windows onto the distant past, but not all of them that's right

yeah no that's right i mean so the naive theory and you can i mean you can see why this is tempting if you don't know a lot about anthropology is to think okay well how did humans behave in the deep past i mean that's a really interesting question and you know the evidence that we have for it you know we've like a few paintings that can be interpreted various ways. We've got some fossils. I mean, it's kind of hard to reconstruct someone's life. So you could see how it's really tempting to just be like, I mean, these guys look like they've been doing this for a while. So, I mean, why don't we just check out what they're doing? Like, that seems like, and that's our story. Anyway, it turns out that, I mean, the basic assumption there is that you're looking at the Bushmen and you're looking at people who've been fossilized in time. And that, you know, they're the past, you're the present.

Yes, it's technically, you know, whatever year it is when you're the anthropologist, they're the 60s or whatever for them too. But in some way, it's profoundly not the 60s yet for them. They haven't hit the 1960s yet. In fact, they haven't hit, you know, 1800 yet. Look, there's a lot of condescension in that view. And I mean, it just suggested some people are sort of apart from history. And it turns out that the more we know, the less plausible we find that. So that would be a good kind of segue into talking about what it is about their history and their lifestyles that makes it so attractive to Silicon Valley people. And so, you know, to do that, you talk about this book.

It's by this anthropologist named James Sussman. And the book is called Work, and it is a history of work. And when I saw this, you know, I mean, I consider myself more or less a Marxist. I'm not an expert or anything, but it is funny to think about the history of work from a standpoint that isn't necessarily, I don't even know what you would really call this. But I mean, as you point out,

there's hardly any mention of slavery, of the gender division of work. Yeah, dude, this is a guy who wrote a book about work, like a history of work that doesn't discuss yeah dude this is a guy who wrote a book about work like a history of work that doesn't discuss unions just like think about that you're like okay work what are the topics i mean slavery too that's a huge omission right uh you know like i mean it's kind of mind-boggling and the way he does it is you know he's sort of this like god-tiered you know galactic thinker where instead of of, you know, asking the kinds of

questions that we might ask, he zooms out as far as he can. So he's like, okay, you know, screw, I mean, like, Marxists have been telling us a history of work for a long time. And usually that's about, okay, like, how does capitalism effects work, you know, people transition to wage labor, he, by the way, James Sussman has very little say about these topics. And the reason is that he's like, okay, if you really want to get deep, like you really want to get into it, my friends, we're going to do the history of work for 300,000 years. So it's, you know,

a lot of it is prehistory and he's trying to reconstruct how people used to work, which isn't a terrible question, but it's a, it's a weird move. Right. And particularly because he's really aiming it at the Silicon Valley set. It's supposed to get us up to the present. He's sort of this, I mean, you say he's an anthropologist and I guess that's a generous way of describing it. He's trained as an anthropologist, but then he sort of went rogue and he's a consultant.

He has a consultancy firm and he's very clearly like aiming for a post at Google or something like that where he can pontificate about, you know, like the nature of labor. Yeah. Before we started recording here, I was telling you about this segment we have about, you know, deeply diseased. And as I was reading your description of his consulting firm, I was like, man, that doesn't really get more disease than that. Let me just kind of read here a little bit about it. It's called Anthropos.

It's a consulting firm that offers, quote unquote, thought leadership to organizations seeking, quote unquote, a competitive edge. Their clients include National Geographic, Sony, the European Commission, and De Beers, the diamond company that he actually used to work for. Oh, De Beers, the diamond company. Yeah, what's that doing there? What's that doing there? Look, what's that doing there? Yeah, I mean, I raised an eyebrow, too. The thing is, I'm a book reviewer. I got the book cold.

I didn't know who this dude was and i started reading it and i just you know felt myself being irritated in the way that one is but like with inside baseball-y stuff like i write books he writes books like i can tell like game recognize game like i can tell when you're like not paying very close attention to the paragraphs you've written or that you're just kind of like hurting over some events so initially i was like all right well it seems like we've got this sort of thing going on and it's kind of hard to bring up in a review you can't like be like all right guys just so you know this paragraph is really poorly constructed like no one really cares you know i mean right but anyway so but i just i was

like i just feel like i want to know what's up with this guy like what is this dude's problem and it's it's fractally bad like the more you look like at any scale it's bad like it so okay what does he do he starts out as um you know he's trained as an anthropologist he doesn't really kind of work much as an anthropologist he's immediately drawn to being a consultant and so he works in Southern Africa. And one of the main issues in the area where he's working in the Kalahari Game Reserve, Central Kalahari Game Reserve, is that the Bushmen are going to be, the governments want to displace the Bushmen.

And one reason they want to do so is because they're diamonds that they've just discovered on these lands that the Bushmen have been using. So, yeah, I mean, do you want to guess where this is going? Because it's going exactly there, right? So some whole debate ensues, like quasi-intellectual, but also fairly political about what kinds of, you know, claims can Bushmen have to land, right? It's not like they have title that, you know, like that comes down through the Western system, but they quite clearly should have some claim to this land. So James Sussman kind of, I think he bops around between positions, but the position

he ends up on is that, interestingly, the idea of indigenous land rights sounds great, but actually is completely inapplicable in Africarica because technically everyone's indigenous in africa right and therefore any claim you can make that the bushman have like deserve to like use or own or exclusively have this space is ultimately intellectually incoherent and there you go which turns out to be a highly convenient position to um to beers diamond mining, which a few other anthropologists point out. James Sussman's like, I mean, whatever, like, that's fine, but it's the right position.

So they're accusing him of being a shill. He's, you know, of course, you know, denying this. That's a fairly serious accusation among anthropologists that you're just shilling for a diamond company. And anyway, after this, and so he says two things. One is I'm not shilling for a diamond company uh and anyway after this and so he says two things one is i'm not shilling for debiers and two debiers doesn't even want this land anyway like they're like they're not going to displace anyone i'm just making i'm just making the right argument but this is not about displacing anyone so anyway two things happen after this

argument all plays out uh thing one is that uh they do take the land. The diamond companies do take the land. James Sussman goes to work for De Beers full time. Like at a fairly high level post. Yeah, it was like global director of public affairs or something like that. Yeah, it's one of those titles where by the time you get to the end of the title, you're already bored, you know? Like, yeah, manager of global imaging. i don't know something like that yeah so he works at debiers for a while and and it's just like there's just no hiding it right i mean this is this is the use of anthropology for corporate privilege and um it turns out that

those particular diamond mines don't pay out as well as they thought but anyway but it all pays out very well for our friend James Hussman, who works at De Beers. And I presume he makes an enormous amount of money doing so. Yeah. You know, I think this will come back up later, or at least I wrote it down in my notes at a later point. But he actually quits De Beers. And you noticed, you noted this in your article. He basically quit because he was getting kind of bored and unfulfilled like just sort of like you know wondering about what his next bonus

was going to be and decided he needed to do something bigger and more important i mean that's what he said look i don't know i don't know the man um we're not close uh but i you know i mean i i just this is not i have no information here but uh i often if someone is like leaves a high-paying post they're just like i don't know i just want to think bigger man yeah like maybe that's true right you know i don't know i don't know what went on there um but yeah that was the story he said he's like oh you know just it's just stupid his corporate life is just dumb like all i'm thinking about is my next bonus um and so then he's presented himself to the world as someone who is you know just one of these sort of galaxy brains who who wants to you know think outside the box

and he started out this um consulting firm anthropos and now he's now the book is his sort of bid for i mean basically i don't know if you know much about this guy who wrote Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari, but like, like it, you know, James Sussman is like aiming to be the next Yuval Noah Harari. And that guy's had an incredible career, you know, pontificating writing these books about same thing about basically the same thing about deep history and, you know, just getting kind of unconscionable

amounts of love from the silicon valley elite yeah if i had to sum up the kind of thesis of harari i've not read sapiens but i did read the new york pro new yorker profile on him yeah it's it seems that both susman and Harari's kind of thesis here is that the agricultural revolution was basically a mistake. Like we need to turn back the clock. Yeah. They're, they're careful not to say that we're going to,

you know, we want to go back to, you know, foraging, but yeah, them and, and the other person to add in here is Jared diamonds. Right.

Who's been, you know, kind of a lurking presence in airport bookstores for a very long time now. And yeah, what you hear from all of this trio is a story about, you know, the drastic wrong turn that humanity took with the agricultural revolution. And, you know, it kind of, you know, it destroyed our diets, it forced us to work far more arduously than we ever had. And the benefits didn't really, you know, we still gave us diseases. And the benefits didn't really pay out for, you know, until the 20th century. That's and even then, you know, there's a kind of just, you know, until the 20th century. And even then, you know, there's a kind of just, you know,

swamp or fog of skepticism that surrounds the whole operation. So it's interesting. I mean, in that way, it's a very, you know, critical take on, you know, modernity and everything that's tumbled out since. I'm not sure how much, like, useful social criticism that generates. We can get into that. But, yeah, that's the line they've all done. And part of that line is to say say and this is something that sussman has really spent like

doubled down on is that humans before the before agriculture had something called original affluence right like that they were doing i mean you know obviously didn't have like a lot of stuff and you know their laptops were screwed up but like but basically, they were happy and they had all they needed and they didn't have to work very hard for it. So that's the line. It's called the original affluence thesis. And Sussman's particular version of this, which he's been really loudly trumpeting,

is that humans used to have at most a 15-hour work week. Right. Which, you know, big if true. Sounds nice. I'd like a part of that. I like a 15 hour work week too yeah um yeah so you know he wrote this book susman wrote this book uh abundance without affluence i think was the name of him and um yeah same book it's it's honestly the same book like it's the same same argument. It's just slightly, I mean, you can tell this is like a repackaging operation more than a rethinking or rewriting operation.

Yeah, both books make the same argument. Yeah, so I mean, I kind of clicked on this website. And there's some choice cuts on here. There's some really choice cuts on here. Yeah, the website's awesome. Yeah. I mean, like, I love the way it's kind of structured. Well, this, he's got this newer website, but then you have like a web archive version of it. And I love that there's like these blurbs of questions that kind of pop out at you. Like, do traditional hunter-gatherer economies offer any clues as to how we might approach some current economic and sustainability challenges how different are consumptive and productive behaviors to those of hunter get is an economy based on giving possible yeah yeah i mean you know those are the stumpers

look i mean they're not they're not insane questions i there is this sort of like corporate speak that in in that afflicts his website and also i mean we should just say this the man is terrible at website design and i have a lot of sympathy for that i mean you know the most human part of him has a square space right um yeah but so yeah so he he subscribes to this idea of original affluence. And so I kind of want to talk, and before we go any further, actually, just before we go any kind of further to zoom out a little bit to talk about original affluence, in your article, you linked to this New York Times interview with him that was like, tell us five things about your book, Abundance Without

Affluence. And I don't know if you noticed this but the last question they were like who's one of your biggest influences and he said lenny riefenstahl and i was like whoa what wow nazi propaganda i feel very embarrassed for missing that yeah i didn't know if you had noticed that or not, but I knew that if you had seen it, you would probably have the same reaction I did. Look, you know, I think this guy is ideologically odious in ways that we're getting into, but, I mean, he's not a Nazi. I mean, it's not that kind of vibe, right?

Right, right, right. It's a different flavor. But, okay, yeah, go on. Yeah, I think his um thing for lenny riefenstahl was more for her sort of aesthetic photo he's like a photographer too that's true yeah yeah and he actually has this like um interest in a lot of the sort of older photographers of you know of the global south africa right you know um and and he gets into it and you know i mean there's a way in which we can look at those photographs today and and sort of

cringe um and i think that's one of sussman's gifts is that things that we might cringe at he's like kind of into right um and partly maybe because he doesn't have quite the same instincts as at least as i do but but he's also you know he's he's, he's able to say like, it's actually really cool to see these old photographs of Bushman. And I'm sure that there's something, you know, in the Imperial gaze of the photographer that, you know, brings up problematic assumptions or, or whatever, they're hiding the fact that these people are actually engaging with modernity in all kinds of ways. But, um, I mean, Sussman's interested in knowing how indigenous people or foragers lived in the 20th century.

And, you know, some of that old ethnograph photography actually gives you some clues of that. Right. Yeah, I mean, I watched this lecture he did. You had linked to in there. He's a smooth talker, right? Yeah, he is. He really is. Yeah. I was really kind of shocked that his speaking style did not mirror his website

building style. But again... No, the website is... Yeah, he tells on himself on the website. Right, right. So, let's talk a little bit about the original affluence thesis. Like, you had talked about how this is actually an old idea, kind of dating back to the 60s, and there were a pair of anthropologists that kind of put this idea forward and then kind of, you know, talked about it a little bit more through this conference in the 1960s called Man the Hunter. So, let's talk a little bit about the original affluence thesis. Like, what were, who were some of these people and what, why were they looking into this? Yeah, so, it's kind of amazing that we would be talking about an academic

conference that was held in the 1960s, that that would still seem relevant, but that really is the way to have this discussion. yeah um the old you know wrong bad old version of uh what foragers are like is that they're the you know you know they're the kids who failed class right they never like figured out modernity and now they're stuck in these like awful backward ways uh and i mean they're kind of interesting to an anthropologist but but mainly because how much they suck yeah uh so i mean that was the kind of prevailing wisdom of you know popular wisdom and i think it you know kind of was both encouraged and and also informed some some anthropological studies um then the the man the hunter conference

i mean look this conference got written, I forget if it was Time or Life, but this is like the conference that was big enough that at the time it got written up in like one of those big magazines. They're like a two-page review of like the Man the Hunter conference. Back when they still wrote about conferences. Jesus, yeah. That has not happened at any academic conference I've been at and it didn't even come close. So, but the idea was to sort of collect a lot, you know, to collect the sort of revisionist take on foraging societies. Foraging is another way, in a shorter way, to say hunter-gatherer.

And the new emerging take, and there was a guy particularly named Richard Lee, who was one of the editors of the Man the Hunter conference volume and one of the conveners of the conference and a really important figure for Sussman. The idea that Lee had and a lot of other people around him, like Marshall Sollins and other big anthropologists had, was that actually the foragers are getting it right. They're not the screw-ups, they're not the fuck-ups. They have some way of life that actually holds up pretty favorably when compared to modern conditions. And the, the big thing there was the work hours. So, you know, it's at the same time everyone's, you know, it's like 1960.

Everyone's like, Oh my God, my job is hard. And, you know, I'm working in the office and, you know, the wife doesn't understand me. It's like still that kind of vibe is happening, you know? And then these anthropologists come out and they say, look, we have spent a lot of time in Latin America, in Southern Africa, in fairly, you know, quote unquote, remote places with people who don't, this is what they said, don't seem to have a lot of interaction with modernity. You've been sort of isolated or insulated or protected from all these kinds

of transformative processes that have mangled our lives. And they're cool. Like they seem pretty happy. And also they just take it easy. Like, you know, okay. They do like, they just get their food. Food is pretty easy to get. And then what do you need after that? Like you're done like day done. You can just kind of like fuck off. Um, and, and that sounded pretty amazing yeah i mean i mean still sounds good yeah um you know and so i don't know i think that you kind of point this out it seems like susman kind of takes it a little bit further though um these these anthropologists said that there was kind of a 12 to 19 uh hour work week but then they had to kind of revise it upwards a little bit. But Sussman still kind of clings to this 15 hour work week.

Yeah. So, I mean, following this guy's footnotes was was absolute agony. And it was only motivated by the fact that I was so pissed at him for the De Beers thing that I was like, I was like, all right, we can get to the bottom of every one of these footnotes. Like, where is your evidence coming from, my friend? Yeah, so let's just say this. Both Sussman's books are really founded on this 15-hour notion, which is really attractive, really interesting. And he's, you know, made, you know,

got a lot of news coverage for it. And it's just wrong. It's just like deeply wrong. And it's like not correct. And there's no reason to think it's right. And like, I don't know how to say that more. It is, in a very technical sense bullshit it is it is speaking out interest in whether the fact that what you're saying is true or not um and and the you know it's not like totally out of out

of the air but what happened here's here was a chain of garbling that happened so this guy richard lee had done also worked on, on the Bushman and, and had done these studies and, and, and said, I had somewhere ballpark 15 hours, like that's their work week is 15 hours. And then, you know, and that was, that was lower than anyone else had found in their other studies of other people's, but okay. Like one place, it seems like it's 15 hours. Um that you know and you know that that that figure got got a lot of play uh and then you know the anthropologists had their like next level revisionism and they're like really like like it seems like you're romanticizing these people a lot

and and they had these huge arguments about it and two things happened uh first uh well three things happened first richard lee went back and, actually, it wasn't 15 hours. It was more like 20 hours. And then he said, and yeah, okay, I'm actually only counting the hours that it takes them to get food. Right. Which you're like, right. Think about how many hours of your day you need to get food. Right.

Like, it's not all of them. Like, there's a lot of the working that you do is necessary, but it's not necessary on what anthropologists would call your food quest. Right. Like the food quest, at least for me, is like a fairly small part of my working week. But then like, I also have like a shelter quest and I also have a, you know, I don't know, whatever. Like, um, so, so that, so you're, and you just realize like, he's like, no, literally how long does it take you to get the food into your house? And they're like, okay, well, a lot of the, the, the nuts that they're eating, like are incredibly hard to grind up. And he's like, yeah, I wasn't counting any of the time it took to grind the nuts. They're like, well, okay. That seems like that's relevant. grind up and he's like yeah i wasn't counting any of the time it took to grind the nuts they're like okay that seems like that's relevant okay uh so like

what about like he's like yeah and you you know you killed an animal and you brought it back they're like well what about you have to like butcher it and clean it he's like i wasn't counting any of that they're like okay well that also seems relevant what about water what he's like i was just counting the food quest you're like okay well for a lot of these people there's a fairly significant water quest too and that seems i don't know the food quest. I was like, okay, well, for a lot of these people, there's a fairly significant water quest too. And that seems, I don't know, important. So Richard Lee was like, okay, adding up all that stuff, now we're talking about like 42-hour work week,

which is, by the way, less than people in the United States do for paid work. And then even that, so that's like two things. First of all, my number wasn't even right for the food quest. Second of all, right, the food quest is not everything. And then all these other anthropologists, you know, like went through the data or were there with Richard Lee, including the best thing is his wife was there with him. His wife is also an anthropologist. And she wrote this book that is different.

And one of her things was, dear, I noticed that in counting first food quest hours and then your expanded 42 hour non-food quest hour count you didn't mention child care right the dude didn't count child care i mean i guess it's different if the kids are just like hanging out with you but like obviously that is a major form of labor that we do and so his so richard lee's wife nancy howell you know she like just pointed out all these other things that are not part of any part of her husband's accounting.

And then she also pointed out something. She's a sort of does medical work. And she's like, well, you know, I like weighed these people and, you know, checked out their health, not just like their working hours. And they're not healthy. Like they were, they had, this is her words, gnawing hunger. And they tended to die at age 30 and often from disease that were compounded by malnutrition. And once you get that in view, you're like, yeah, it's not like they have an easygoing

15 hour work week. Oh, sorry, not to go on. But the other thing she noticed, she was like, yeah, there are some times when they're just hanging out, not doing much, but also it's a very hot environment and they're kind of exhausted. And like, you can't be doing things all the time. Like part of that is just like recuperating from what sounds like a really kind of not easy life. Anyway. So this is not news. Like all of this had played out and, you know, anthropologists gone back and forth and that's how scholarship works.

And it's great. And I love it. And like, you know, they'd all had this debate and then, and then God's perfect idiot james sussman comes in he's like hey did you guys hear that the bushman only worked for 15 hours like no one thinks that anymore so that's where we are that's where we are now he's always like fucking like peace in the guardian it's like jane sussman discovers that bushman only worked for 15 hours i mean and the thing is he did some ethnographic observation in Namibia, I believe, but that was not with people who

were foraging. That was people with people who remembered that they used to know people who had foraged. And then James Sussman comes back. He's like, not just Bush for 15 hours. He's like, all humanity used to only work at most 15 hours. Right. Which is just such a level of bullshit. Look, it's not that i

have like another hour like work time sheet that i have like filled out for all of humanity but 15 hours like there's no evidence for that um there's no evidence but there's an enormous amount of confidence so the guy is just flying and you know it's just one last thing the other thing that he does is even richard lee would you know he would say okay you know these guys work 15 hours that i hung out with, but what does that mean for our prehistoric ancestors? He's like, it's suggestive. And maybe they didn't work that much. Maybe there's original affluence,

but he's kind of careful about how he said it. James Sussman will just go there. He has written this. He says hanging out with the Bushmen is like visiting the stone age, which is like, like anthropologists would like commit suicide if they had accidentally, like a real anthropologist, if they had accidentally written that sentence. Right.

And so he just goes there, man. I mean, he's, you know, I admire the confidence. Yeah. Well, it's kind of, and I know this isn't an exact one-to-one, but kind of where I'm going with this, it makes it relevant.

I'm sure you're aware of like J.D. Vance, right? And like Hillbilly Elegy and all this. Yeah. I don't know why, but it kind of reminded me of that because J.D. Vance's entire book, his entire shtick, we've talked a lot about it on the show. But it is a revived argument from the 60s. revived argument from the 60s, the, you know, sort of culture of poverty argument that people are in poverty because there is a culture of it. Yeah. It's been discredited or whatever.

But he kind of does the same thing that Sussman does. He just kind of latches onto the idea and just kind of runs with it very confidently. But, you know, one of the reasons why I was kind of also interested in talking with you about this is because, as I mentioned before we got on here, a lot of these same ideas that are popular in Silicon Valley, like this one, for example, they get taken up and sort of proliferated in all of these other regions and areas where they're trying to use tech innovation as economic development. So I was joking with my buddy Tom, you know, our co-host on the show.

I was like, I wonder how long it's going to be before these like tech people, they start looking at like hillbillies in Appalachia as like their next like, oh, that's the lifestyle that we need. They have a simplified lifestyle. They make their own corn liquor. They bathe in the creek. That's who we need to be trying to. Because like, do you remember like the raw water thing? It was like a craze in Silicon Valley for a brief time.

Yeah. So let's just pause so let's talk let's just pause and let's talk about why this is so attractive to silicon valley like let's connect that dot yes um because it's you know on the it's great okay humans only worked 15 hours like cool uh why would silicon valley care about that right um and you can see i mean sussman is just like you know he says the quiet parts out loud in some way or at least on the website and so you can sort of see how he's how he's making trying to make this as a case to silicon valley and the portrait that he gives you of foraging society sounds a lot like startup self-image of themselves. They move quick, they break things, like they adapt, they're egalitarian, they share stuff.

You know, when you think of like software sharing and like all that stuff that's been really important to the self-identity of Silicon Valley. And he's like, and, you know, they're not bureaucratic. Like they don't fuck around with paperwork. They just like, they get what they need done and then they're done. And then like, they know they're done and that's it.

And like, you know, there are like Silicon Valley books out there, like the four hour work week that are just kind of all about that, right? It's like, that's the self-identity of the entrepreneurs is, you know, they're quick, they're adaptable. They have like appropriate technologies. Like they figured out how to work in their environment. And then like, you know, they don't have to like put in like extremely long hours.

Um, so it's a weird moment where like the prehistoric and the post-industrial are kind of like mapped onto each other. So I think that's part of the attraction, but I think the other part of the attraction is the ability to just like, look at all this crushing economy that a lot like this, just like a lot of people have shitty jobs or not enough jobs and, and, you know, having a hard time making a living and just look at that and be like, Oh yeah, man, that's bureaucracy. Right. That's just like,

that's just like what happens when you let like the idiots in charge and like, but actually like the real economy, like, you know, for like true, the true economy, just like run by people who are like actually obeying the laws of the market is going to be quick efficient and like and easy so so in some ways economic problems are solved and it's just a bunch of like red tape that's getting in the way i think that's the vision and that's not my understanding of why the economy is not working for everyone. It's a very flattering understanding for the people who are at the apex because it doesn't blame them in any way. It suggests that people should emulate them.

It suggests that they're doing it right and everyone else is an idiot and that's why everyone's poor. And there's no sense of like – I mean, and also if you're telling a story about foragers, they're completely individualist. And Sussman like really emphasizes this, like they don't depend on large scale social operations, like for all they do, they just set them down and like, you know, they like, you know, go hunting and like with a bow and arrow and then they're done. And so this idea of like these like small bands of really sort of admirable people who can fend for themselves. I mean, I think that's how these companies look at themselves, without any understanding of like, all of the public investment that's gone into, you know,

building the infrastructure, the educational system, everything that sort of allows them to have this predatory position in the economy. Yeah, it kind of makes me wonder i feel like a lot of these tech you know geniuses or whatever they were kind of they were almost sort of acculturated in a world where it was sort of vaguely generally acknowledged that like corporations were just bad and like ruining the planet but they themselves they can't really admit that um that their own businesses are subject to the course of loss of capital competition or whatever and so they have to develop these i don't know it's it's like you said to me before we started recording it's they're working their ideology out in real time and it's just fascinating to watch yeah no i think that's right i think i

think what you have to get about silicon valley is it's anti-corporate. Right. Like they hate corporations. Right. Right. And of course they are corporations and that's, but like that, the whole line is we're different. We're slimmer, we're smarter. You know, we don't do the, like, we're not Ford, you know, we're not general electric. Like those were the dumb old bad corporations that gummed up the economy. And, and we're, you know, like, they're the like bront corporations that gummed up the economy uh and and were you know like they're the like brontosauruses and we're the velociraptors or

right is um and and that's right and so you know i think the the stone age you know tribe is like a very good self-image for them um but it's an inaccurate image of course because you know if you're looking at this not from the top but, but from the bottom, you're like, these are like massive corporations. Like they're absolutely enormous. And to think of them as just like, like these like live little things that move fast and solve problems. Like that's just not true. I mean, at this point, um, like Amazon is quite literally its own nation state at this.

I mean, they are, but it's awesome. And an Amazon warehouse looks nothing like a Stone Age group as described by James Sussman. And yet that's the master ideology, right? That's the ideology for the people who are running Amazon. That's how they think of themselves and their small community. And, you know, and it's not a bad, like, I get why they think that way, because it feels like that to them, because it's just like, they work in a small, in small groups and fairly,

fairly like sharing based things where they're just like, breaking rules and solving problems. Like, that's how it feels to them. Yeah. I also kind of think, and I think this is very much the case with Harari and Jared Diamond, but I think there's also this idea that, this awareness that climate change is real and that the sort of ecosystem is changing. Sussman said this or Harari said this, one of the two, I can't remember, but they seem to acknowledge that history is kind of at a pivot point, at least in terms of our sort of ecological limits. And, you know, various tech overlords work this out in various ways. Like, Elon Musk's way is obviously Mars. It's like, well, we've exhausted all of our frontiers here, we'll just expand them into space. But it seems like for others, it's like, well, we've exhausted all of our frontiers here. We'll just expand them into space. But it seems like for others, it's like, well, let's just roll back the clock, because everything wrong with the world now. And this is even kind of the case,

I don't want to mischaracterize this, because I've not read the book, but I did read Jed Purdy's review of it. But it seems kind of like this might be the case with James C. Scott as well, that like all of our current hierarchies and social relations are a result of the original sin of the agricultural revolution. And so, if we could just dial back the clock to before that time, like you had a great quote, if I can remember it. Basically, like if you zoom out this far if you if you take the deep perspective of deep history it allows you to sort of ask the questions about human nature rather than you know the problems before us now yeah so i mean if you we have this phrase right we say that someone missed the forest for the trees what we're saying there is like there's

a thing to see it's the forest but you idiot you couldn't see it because you're so obsessed with botany and individual trees that you missed forestry which is like the big star okay so that's that's like that's right like people make that cognitive error a lot and it's frustrating when we do and we and we we appropriately revere and admire the far-seeing thinkers who don't make that error but there is actually another error that goes in the other direction which is that you miss the forest for the galaxy like you zoomed out so fucking far that you can't see the forest i'll go galaxy dot yeah exactly right and that's that's what's going on with a lot of this literature is like the way that they're not talking about capitalism and the way that they're not talking about, you know, this particular configuration of capitalism that we've got going on right now is they've zoomed out so far and they're just like, oh, man, it's all the agricultural revolution.

Right. You know, and they also see themselves as so disconnected from these forces of history that they can map themselves onto the prehistoric past and like be like yeah that's basically what we're about uh so so it's it's such a weird thing but but you see it so clearly in sussman right because look you know it's cool to work on a lot of different scales and you know i'm a historian i mean like it's it's it's useful to you know we're talking about something in the present it's useful to be like all right record scratch how did we get here you know and often what's useful about that is that, you know, one thing that power does is it tries to convince you that everything is natural, right? That the way we're doing things is kind of mandatory. There's not really an alternative. It's either how humans have always

done it, or it's how the laws, what the laws of supply and demand require. And it's really useful to just be like, oh, it turns out that, you know, we didn't used to look at people with different skin color and understand them as to be racially different. And you're like, oh, it turns out that, you know, we didn't used to look at people with different skin color and understand them as to be racially different. And you're like, oh, really fascinating. Right. About that. And, you know, so like it helps us kind of denaturalize a lot of the present. But what so I'm into that kind of, you know, looking back move.

But but what Sussman does, especially with labor, it just feels so crazy, is by looking so far back, everything that would seem really relevant to me to talking about labor, including the things you mentioned, slavery, the gender division of labor, unions, all that kind of stuff, that just becomes a smudge on the side of the canvas. a smudge on the side of the canvas. It's just like, it's just a little detail. You don't need to talk about it because the real story is, I don't know, I guess we're working too much because we didn't used to have to work that much. Right. And that just seems like a, such an uninteresting, like it's a untrue, but also be like sort of uninteresting. It doesn't give you a lot to go with because I mean, how do you personally take that as that as advice? Like you're like, Oh, maybe I should work less. Like you have a say in walmart like like yeah exactly i mean i mean there are ceos for whom that is right literally advice like they're always telling each other like yeah maybe you should like go to the caymans more often man like that really like help you like vision things better but like for most of us like that's

just not that like just being like oh yeah i should work less like that's not like a choice um and it feels kind of offensive i just in a minor way just to like come being like all right man i've looked at like all of work and all of human history and my advice is take a break right be good to yourself right well i mean it kind of gives away the ballgame, like who this is actually for. I mean, it's not for the working stiff, you know, it's. And, you know, to his credit, Sussman doesn't just deliver this as advice. He's like, maybe we're organizing our work lives in crazy ways. Like maybe there is just like needless amount of work that we're doing, which I mean, I'm sure that's true. But boy, is this not a book that gives you any view on how you might get there

because you're basically just left with being like, all right, I guess I should think big, you know, think outside the box. It kind of strikes me that, you know, and I don't know if this is an accurate characterization or not, but earlier when I said like it was kind of key that he left the beers because he was kind of unfulfilled, I kind of feel like a lot of these guys, they reach a certain level of success and they're just not sure why or what comes next. And so they have this sort of like general restlessness or, you know, they're always searching like Twitter Jack going to meditate, you know, in whatever. Yeah.

I don't know. I mean, it must be weird to get really rich really quickly. Right. That must just be very, this is not, you know, an enormous amount of sympathy because there's a very quick solution to getting rich very quickly, which is to just give your money to somewhere useful. Right, right. are useful right but but nevertheless like you know and and also that feeling of power has got to scramble your brain in some way like like i mean not not just not i'm not saying that in the sense of like make you stupid although power usually does that but like it's just weird yeah to realize you're like oh like some like minor hacks in my algorithm could have affected the 2020 election or 2016 election.

Like that's a weird feeling. Totally. For a tech pro to have. Right. And so, yeah, I think, you know, and especially because their social position is so new, like these people are insanely rich. They're young.

Like their parents were not rich like them. It's very hard to look to like, like who do you look to if you're Zuckerberg, like as a role model, like the guy who founded Napster, like you don't have a lot of options. And so that's, I think part of the way in which these guys are like figuring out their ideology on the fly.

Like, I mean, they're answering questions and yeah, and I think looking for meaning and there's this like market for intellectuals who can kind of deliver meaning in some way and can pontificate in both ways that seem legible and useful to the tech bros, but also can like transport them and like supply. I mean, a lot of these guys didn't go to college.

Right. Do you know what I mean? Like they were already like kajillionaire or on their way to be. And so I think think i mean i actually kind of there's a lot that i like about you've all know harari i think he's um less annoying in the ways that diamond and um system and are annoying and and he's actually he's a wonderful writer um i think he plays fast and loose with a lot of stuff but whatever um but

like one of i mean he meditates like an insane amount of hours per day. And it's probably great to just like have this soft spoken Israeli historian who's like looked at the deep past, just like, you know, telling you fun and weird stories about prehistory and then like, you know, advising you to meditate. Right. Well, that's the kind kind of that's kind of what i was going to bring up next it's like once you actually get to sort of the prescriptive parts of this like harari kind of has some um suggestions you know like meditation for example and veganism that's another one yes veganism right but if you're talking about like susman or jared diamond

or or even like maybe james c. Scott, like what do you do? We can't roll back the clock to before. We can't just stop producing agriculture on an industrial scale. We can't return to foraging societies. So like what is the ask here? I don't know. That's the thing. Yeah, no, I think, I mean, with Sussman and Diamond, they are kind of interested in producing some sort of advice.

You know, I think Harari is more thoughtful about how he does this. And his advice is mainly therapeutic and he's very okay with that. Right. I mean, Diamond, I feel like Diamond has just become a complete embarrassment since he kept going after Gunstroms and Steele. But, I mean, Diamond's stuff will tend to be like you know let your kids run a little more right i mean just you're like all right so banal yeah no i mean yeah yeah he's a he's a paragon of adequacy at this point um you know i think an interesting

thing is you mentioned this guy james c scott who's a professor at yale and and is actually one of the most cited social scientists in, in our, in our, who's still alive. Like, I mean, he's, his use, his work has been useful to a lot of people and he and David Graeber, who's this both anthropological theorist and also, you know, arguably the lead activist behind Occupy Wall Street. Right. And certainly the guy who came up with, we are the 99% is the slogan. Those, those guys have been been a sort of anarchist wing of studying the deep past. And I think that's actually much more productive because the reason that they're interested in the way far back is that they're interested in the origin of states and hierarchies and they want to denaturalize that. And at least for Graeber, there's a, that's related to a present practice of, you know, helping ourselves, you know, kind of realize that a lot of the kind of work lives that we buy into

is not necessary. And then, I mean, he has a sustained practice of activism that is built around his sort of anarchist philosophy that comes out of a study of the deep past. So, so I think there can be moves to make, but you're right, a lot of the time, you zoom out that large and what you're left with is just meditate and wow, our relationship with animals is really weird. Which is, both of which are like true. Right, right.

Well, that kind of gets at the, maybe this sort of like destination point for this, or the end point for all this. Like why is it so important to have an examination of deep history from a perspective that asks some of these questions about, yeah, the true nature of labor? Like, what can it impart to current leftist movements and movements to change our mode of production? Yeah, well, I think there's actually a lot that deep history could do.

So I don't think that looking at the far distant past is always the wrong move. One obvious thing it could do is it could lead to a really rich discussion about labor among men and women. And I think that's a conversation we unfortunately keep needing to have. And I would love to know, you know, what we can know about from prehistoric societies about how that's gone down, why it's gone down that way, what the introduction of

states did to that, what the introduction of agriculture did to that. So those are some really big questions. You know, and another thing that's interesting is that a lot of human history, once you start looking back, has involved slavery or something like it. And so thinking about why that's the case, when that started happening, why it started happening, how we got out of it,

those are really interesting questions to ask. And they feel to me to be more kind of politically relevant than just, you know, are we working too hard? Right. Yeah. I think that at one point, Sussman, or maybe it's Harari, I can't remember, one of the two says, you know, these foraging societies didn't gather surpluses. They were, the environment provided everything for them at the time. And so they weren't worrying about what was going to happen a week from now.

And, and, and that this, you know, drive for surplus is what gave rise to hierarchies and other things. And yeah, that's, or go ahead. That's a part of the original affluence thesis is that people aren't driven by a fear of tomorrow. They have a kind of happy-go-lucky attitude, which, by the way, maps really well onto Silicon Valley. Yeah. Right? Because they are not about storing surpluses.

They're very comfortable going into deep debt. I mean, they just have a sense that the world is going to provide for them. And, you know, it kind of does. Right. Yeah. yeah um you can kind of see why this kind of thinking is so not just popular with the silicon valley people but also with people that listen to like the joe rogan show for example yeah i mean like this is i advice that's just kind of so vague and broad that you can apply it to your life in the sense that like, oh yeah, maybe I am working too hard. But it does kind of divert or moves the goalpost or it kind of diverts your, rechannels your

maybe frustration with that problem somewhere else. Because then you can say, well, I'm not working 60 hours a week at Walmart because of capitalism, but because of things that maybe took place 50,000 years ago. Because of the agricultural revolution. You know what I mean? Like what a blame shifting operation. Right. And I'm not saying it's wrong, but like that's a weird politics you've got where you're like,

this job sucks. Oh man, I wish we'd never gathered in city states and started growing grain. This blows. You know, like It doesn't give you a lot of leverage. Right, right. But it is fun to smoke weed and think about deep time. I think that's partially the appeal. I mean, I like it too. I don't deny the pleasures of that. Whatever. It's not like you've committed a crime if you've written a book about prehistory that like all it just you know leads to is like hey there used to be different kind of humans and they used to do make make funny

axes and uh right yeah maybe maybe don't need so much meat right like that's fine but but but but now that we're like noticing how it's becoming the ideology of this like new like tech bro master class like i think we can like point to the limit of that as like a good description of our work lives yeah yeah well it's interesting you know just on the kind of like last note here um there is like leftist theory like for me marxist theory is kind of fun in the same way that getting stoned and thinking about deep time is. Like, you read Capital and it's, like, taking

apart the commodity, for example. Like, Joe Rogan would love that. If you could just get on Joe Rogan and tell him about, like, oh, here is the process of, you know, fetishization of the commodity. I want someone to explain to Joe Rogan, they're like, okay, first it's M, m then it becomes c then it becomes m prime which is more money which is more money right right you just shifted between modalities his brain he would love that he no he would love

that stuff yeah i mean i'm sorry i'm gonna interrupt where you go. I love that image. I love that image. Yeah, I don't know. But I don't know. It, to me, is just as fun to, you know, think about that than it is to, you know, ask some of these, like, questions. Yeah, like you said, you're not going to be able to do anything about the agricultural revolution 15,000 years ago. Right. I mean, I think that, you know, gives the question of like, what is theory for? Right. And, you know, part of what theory is for is, is cause it's fun to think about the world.

And it is fun to just be like, man, everything around me, that's because the treaty of Westphalia, you know, like that, like there is something that like that, that enriches our world. It really does. And like, if it were just that, then, then, you know, that would be enough. But, but ideally, you know, theory, not just kind of is a series of like, just so stories that help you like come up with explanations, but, but that those explanations might reasonably guide your action and like,

might give you a sense of like, Oh, like what should we really be targeting here? And like, where should I like invest my energy and like, what's a good way to do that. And I guess what disappoints me about a lot of this sort of you know look forward by looking to the deep past lessons from the stone age stuff is that it doesn't have that second component and it kind of crowds out like like it's amazing how popular like just between uh harari and jared diamond like just like my god like that's a lot of people who are curious in really admirable ways about the world and thinking big and about social theory, you

know, who just end up with very little except for, you know, a cute story to tell at the end of the airplane ride. Right, right. Well, Daniel, I think that's probably a good spot to end this. But before we go, while we're talking about demystifying naturalized ideas and things that we just take for granted, pitch your book a little bit. I want to talk about your book. Yeah, How to Hide an Empire. How to Hide an Empire.

Buzz marketing. I'll never say no. book yeah how to hide an empire how to hide an empire buzz marketing i'll never say no uh so yeah i mean look i think the the the the quickest pitch is this if you ask most people to envision the united states like in their heads like mentally map it most people will return a very familiar shape the contiguous blob right it It's like Mexico on one side and Canada on the other and the oceans on the left and right. And it turns out that that is an accurate map of the United States for only three years of its history. There are three years of US history where that's right now. And the reason, I mean, partly because the country started out smaller,

but the reason that I really talk a lot about is that, you know, starting in the mid 19th century, the United States has claimed overseas territories and annexed them to the United States. And, you know, when we talk about U.S. history, we don't really talk about that as something that takes place in the Philippines or Puerto Rico or American Samoa, but those are also parts of the United States. They're subordinated and they're placed on the margins, but they're part of the country. And so what the book tries to do is to retell the history of the United States, but with an understanding that, you know, Puerto Rico and the Philippines are part of the United States. And it turns out that a lot comes out differently because those are places where an enormous amount of, you know, like highly consequential events take place.

So that's the pitch for the book. It's a history of not the contiguous blob, but of what some people used to call the greater United States. Yeah. I mean, growing up, you think about, you hear that phrase, like the sun never sets on the British Empire. When you think of the British Empire, like, you know, conceptually, it's not just that island. And then it's just's just historically it was this global thing but when you apply it to america you don't have that same conceptual uh association there no i mean i i grew up in pennsylvania no one at any point that i remember in my education showed me a map of the united states that had puerto rico on it And like, that seems like an omission.

It's not even hard to put Puerto Rico on that map. You don't even have to have a separate box is right there. Right. Right. Yeah. So this was a kind of, no, that's right. The British get this, like the British know that there was a British empire, the French know the French empire. And there's a way in which people in the United States, or as I learned to call it the U U.S. mainlands, are kind of willfully almost blinds to the overseas, the imperial aspects of their own country. Yeah.

Well, go check that out at Daniel Imrevar, How to Hide an Empire. And you can go check out this article in the New Republic. It's called the Paleocon. I believe that's the title. Paleocon. Yeah. Right. That was a good, that was not my title, but it's a very good title. Yeah, called the Paleo Con. I believe that's the title. Paleo Con. Yeah. Right. That was a good, that was not my title, but it's a very good title. Yeah, it is a good one. Um, so definitely go check all that out. Daniel, thanks so much for joining us. Um, we'd love

to have you back on next time. Uh, you, you find the next, um, Silicon Valley guru that is speaking. Next one I skewer excellent that's right well thanks again Daniel and we'll hear from you next time sounds great it's been an absolute pleasure Thank you.