A Conversation with Chris Ryan

I went on Chris Ryan's podcast last week. The episode is up now. He invited me on to talk about my book, The Minimum You Need to Do Before AI Changes Your Life. I had been listening to Tangentially Speaking for years, so this was a small landmark for me.

If you don’t know Chris, he wrote two books. Sex at Dawn argues that humans did not evolve as a strictly monogamous species. The book was a popular success and an academic controversy. Evolutionary psychologists pushed back hard on methodology, which is a real debate. A lot of readers misread it as an argument for polyamory, which it wasn’t. Chris was making a descriptive claim about our evolutionary past, not a prescriptive claim about how anyone should live. He has been clarifying that for fifteen years.

His other book, Civilized to Death, argues that the modern arrangement is a worse deal than we tell ourselves, and that the metrics we use to declare ourselves better off than our ancestors are mostly cooked. It came out in 2019, before any of the current AI weirdness. Reading it now feels like reading a weather forecast that turned out to be right. The book is more relevant today than it was when it was published.

How I prepared

I prepared for this podcast like I was going to a job interview. Chris showed up like he was meeting a friend at a bar. He had the right idea. Luckily his approach is contagious, so I caught up, somewhat.

Before recording, I made him a small gift. A deepfake of his wife Anyaa’s voice, calling from a hospital, asking him to wire money to post bond after a car accident. I sent it over and told him it was a demonstration of one of the things I cover in the book. He used it as the cold open of the episode. It is genuinely creepy, which was the point.

What we talked about

The book, mostly. The solar energy system Chris is building in his yard. The fact that AI is now better at writing code than I am, and that I have decided this is fine. Whether universal basic income will actually arrive, and whether it will arrive peacefully. The guy who burned down a warehouse and filmed himself doing it. Whether we’re in March 2020 of the AI curve, which is the position I took and am sticking with.

Chris is more verbal than I am. He performs thinking out loud. I do the thinking first and then speak, which means there are pauses. For a while I worried about the pauses. Then I noticed Chris was fine with them, and I stopped worrying.

Kindred spirits

Chris’s career, if you read his two books in sequence, is one long argument that the official story about how we live is not the real story. Sex at Dawn says it about relationships. Civilized to Death says it about civilization itself. My book says it about AI. Different topic, same instinct. Don’t trust the brochure.

We have also both spent significant chunks of our lives outside the country we grew up in. Chris lived in Spain for years. I left the Netherlands in 1991 for the US and have been in Taiwan since 2016. Neither of us takes the official story for the real story. We have spent enough time outside it to notice the gap. It is a way of seeing things, hard to describe to someone who hasn't picked it up, and easy to recognize in someone who has.

Listen

The episode is here: Tangentially Speaking 722.

Chris’s books are at chrisryanphd.com/books.

My book is at theminimumyouneedtodo.com, if you have not yet had your holy shit moment about AI and would like a short, calm, practical guide for when you do.