Today I finished reading The Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond which was a plethora of valuable information for me along my Journey!

I do have to state though that there were several aspects I didn’t agree with (such as the chapter on: ‘Why Do We Smoke, Drink and Use Dangerous Drugs?’) and in general much of part four/five of the book is speculation, based on logical guesses and deductive reasoning but I do have to say, this book provides the best ‘evidence’ I’ve seen in regards to how/what/when/why we evolved as the Human Animal.

I plan on using many points and notes from this book to justify the necessity for #Optimized, my online course, which helps arm individuals with the knowledge and skills to manipulate aspects of their lives in order to optimize their body, mind, hormones & lifestyle.

In general, I believe many aspects and factors in our lives as human beings, such as the need to eat, sleep, fuck, fight and be social (which I believe can dominate over us if we do not conquer/control them) are remnants of our animalistic instinctual past as is clearly laid out in this book where Jared Diamond breaks down our evolution from apes which we share 98% of our genes with. He deduces in this book that the small 2% change in our genetic structure from apes is what lead to our current modern day all stemming from an explosion of language/cultural development over thousands of years.

Although that language/cultural development is important and makes us distinct and unique from all other species on this planet, my goal with this book was to find/research/study those differences between what makes us animal and what makes us human in order to help flush out my theories in regards to how to optimize these different factors that affect our animalistic instinctual nature and our (newly attained) human traits to delay gratification and appease our need to transcend time.

Here are some of the notes I took from the book: