I would be remiss chris if i didn't you know i'm sure you're to some degree tired of talking about it but i want to talk a bit about your sex at dawn book oh god i think you're saying my sex life no we don't have to talk about that unless you so choose if it weaves into the conversation i'm open to it but you know i i think i probably got this some time after it came out and there were there were two books yours and uh the ethical and i was someone who was just terrified of true authentic intimacy and the idea of uh being monogamous and committing my life to a partner and you know through a lot of work and specifically in in medicine and psychedelics,
Which hopefully we'll get to uh found that it was childhood experiences for me that really prevented me from the um the capacity for vulnerability right so there was always kind of this wall and barrier and when i found those two books i was like yes you know now i have a good excuse to never really be all in you know it's because hey we're not designed this way like all the historical sort of rhetoric and and maybe facts around uh that humans aren't innately this way that led me and i'm assuming probably tens of thousands of other people to explore different um configurations of relationship and i know for me uh for the most part those explorations ended up in pain for me and the other party and through my own this kind of maturity and growth,
I am very happily in a committed relationship couldn't imagine it being any other way i have zero desire to try anything out because i kind of tried everything and none of it worked so i'm wondering what the impact that book had from from your perspective it's one subjective not like i blame you and your book for my meanderings but it was kind of the it was the key that fit the lock that i was looking for to go look look it says it right there and i think a lot of people share that experience so since you wrote the book and put it out what has been the kind of aftermath or effect of that in terms of what you see in people's relationships,
And how they choose to be in them yeah that's an interesting question um and of course there's a lot of uh sort of filtration that happens before i see anything right so i either hear from people who reach out to me because they're grateful because the book helped them move to a better place or i hear from people who are angry because the book gave their partner an apparent excuse to act irresponsibly right right so right i and then you know those are just the people who take the time to write to me and and you know tell me their story so i don't know how representative any of that is but i've been very i would say you know 90 percent of the feedback i've received has been really positive,
It's been people saying that the book helped them have a conversation that they needed to have right so i mean i guess the the most comprehensive answer to your question is that as far as what i've learned from having written that book is that people have their own re reaction and relationship to a book that doesn't really involve me it's it's like i sometimes think about michael jordan's father and people would come up to michael jordan and say man you must be so proud of my son and you know of your son and that and he's like i don't know i gave birth to the kid and then he did this thing and now you have a relationship with him it kind of has nothing to do with me right that's how i feel about sexadon in some ways like i wrote the book with casilda and we put it out there but it was like 12 years ago,
So i hardly remember the experience of writing it and um and people have their very personal responses to it because people read in it what they want to read in it exactly there's no there's no place that was my experience right and there's no place in the book that says you know it's human nature to be uh you know shallow and disrespectful and just run around lots of people without giving a about anyone like that line is not in the book i'm sure of it uh but people some people read that other people read um you know it's natural to have desire for someone other than your partner uh but that doesn't mean there's any reason to act on it,
Necessarily and that's more that's closer to i think what we meant to say the thing about pre-history is it's very hard for people to make the imaginative leap to really get a sense of what life was like there because it's so diametrically opposed to what we know in the modern world so i remember we made a point of the word promiscuous like we're saying yes the the data as we read it is quite overwhelming that our ancestors were sexually promiscuous but that doesn't mean to them what it means to us to us promiscuous means you have sex with strangers you have sex with people you'll never see again well those people didn't exist in prehistory right in a prehistoric band of up to a hundred people,
Those are people you grew up with those are people you're going to grow old and die with those are people you go hunting with or gathering or or you you breastfeed each other's children there's anything but uh you know anonymity in a hunter-gatherer society there's deep intimacy whether it's sexual or not there's deep intimacy among that group and what we were proposing in the book is that sexuality was a way of establishing and maintaining these networks of intimacy um in addition to sharing food and taking care of each other's children and living together in one structure and traveling together and watching each other grow up and die so so sexuality was embedded in all in this complex nuanced system of intimacy not anonymous,
You know meet someone in a bar have sex and and call them an uber right so i i think that's one of the problems with the book is that people look at it and say oh if i apply this to my life it looks like this and it's like yeah but that's a whole different world different context yeah yeah so i often find myself you know saying no this doesn't give you an excuse to cheat no this doesn't mean you know everyone's a and should run around and everybody and not worry about it no this is not an argument that everyone should be a swinger that's all modern interpretations of this all we're saying in the book is this is clearly the type of primate.
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