#331 Parenting in Prehistory - Chris Ryan, Ph.D

If you dig this conversation with Chris Ryan, Ph.D and want more, he’s also featured in episodes 48, 79, 109, and 206.

Christopher’s work has been featured just about everywhere, including: MSNBC, Fox News, CNN, NPR, The New York Times, The Times of London, Playboy, The Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, The Atlantic, Outside, El Pais, La Vanguardia, Salon, Seed, and Big Think. 

A featured speaker from TED in Long Beach, CA to The Festival of Dangerous Ideas at the Sydney Opera House to the Einstein Forum in Pottsdam, Germany, Chris has consulted at various hospitals in Spain, provided expert testimony in a Canadian constitutional hearing, and appeared in well over a dozen documentary films.

He was on a wild ride even before co-authoring the New York Times best-seller, Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What it Means for Modern Relationships. After receiving a BA in English and American literature in 1984 he spent the next two decades traveling around the world, pausing in unexpected places to work at decidedly odd jobs (e.g., gutting salmon in Alaska, teaching English to prostitutes in Bangkok and self-defense to land-reform activists in Mexico, managing commercial real-estate in New York’s Diamond District, helping Spanish physicians publish their research). In his mid-30s, Chris decided to pursue doctoral studies in Psychology.

Drawing upon his multi-cultural experience, Chris' research focused on distinguishing the human from the cultural, first by focusing on shamanism and ethnobotony—studying how various societies interact with altered states of consciousness and the sacred plants that provoke them—and later, by looking at similarly diverse cultural perspectives on sexuality. His doctoral dissertation was a multi-disciplinary investigation of prehistoric human sexual behavior, guided by the world-renowned psychologist, Stanley Krippner, at Saybrook Graduate School, in San Francisco, CA. Chris’ most recent book is Civilized to Death: Why Everything's Amazing but Nobody's Happy.

He puts out a weekly podcast called Tangentially Speaking, featuring conversations with interesting people, ranging from famous comics to bank robbers to drug smugglers to porn stars to authors to plasma physicists.

If you dig this podcast, will you please leave a short review on Apple Podcasts? It takes less than 60 seconds and makes a difference when I drop to my knees and beg hard-to-get guests on the show. 

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