In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, we're joined by the author of the new book, "The Paradox of Wui: How to Get Drunk in Ancient China: A Guide to Improving Spontaneity and Enjoying Life: A Book About Getting Hilarious in the Age of Drunkenness. Dr. Aaron Sorkin and I talk about the paradox of wui, how to get drunk in ancient China, and why we should all have a glass or two of whatever it is that s good for you. We also talk about how to make sure you don't get drunk too much, and whether or not you should even be drinking at all. It's a good thing we're doing a podcast about drinking, because if we don't drink, we won't be able to make sense of the world as we know it. Cheers, Cheers! Joe and Sarah Sarah's book is out now, and it's available for pre-order on Amazon, so be sure to check it out! If you haven't already checked it out, you should definitely do so. It's worth the time and money, because it's going to be worth it! Sarah and Sarah's website is here: Aaron's blog is here and her book is here. You can get a copy of "Wu Wei: The Paradox: How To Get Hooned in the Ancient China's Ancient Philosophy." Aaron s blog post on the book here. You can also find it here Sarah s website here Joe s blog here This episode is also has a free copy of her book, which is on amzn=a&t=1&a=3&a&qid=8&q=1Pt&q&qn=3d&qref=3s=3 We hope you enjoy this episode! We'd love to hear what you think of it, and share it on social media if you're a fan of the podcast! Thank you, Sarah's blog post about this podcast and the book! You're awesome, Sarah s blog: , Sarah s ramblings: . , , and Sarah s Insta: & Sarah s insta & her blog: . Thanks for listening, , & Sarah's Insta : And if you like it, please leave us a review!
00:00:47.000It literally means no doing or not trying, but it's a spontaneous, it's kind of like being in the zone in sports.
00:00:54.000So it's a state where you lose a sense of yourself as an agent, you feel like everything's just happening, you're not making any effort, and yet everything works perfectly.
00:01:03.000You solve problems, people like you, everything works out.
00:01:07.000And the early Chinese thinkers want to get you into this state of wui.
00:01:12.000But they have this problem that I call the paradox of Wu Wei, which is how do you try not to try?
00:01:23.000How do you get from A to B? And what I argue in my dissertation is that all of early Chinese philosophy is this series of attempts to solve the paradox.
00:01:34.000And no one does it because it's a genuine paradox.
00:01:37.000And so I revisit my first general audience book.
00:01:40.000It's called Trying Not to Try, and it's about this tension.
00:01:43.000And I walk people through the various strategies that the early Chinese came up with.
00:01:47.000But none of them really can be 100% effective because when you're trying not to try, cognitively, you're activating the part of your brain that you want to shut down.
00:01:59.000Dan Wagner, the social psychologist, talked about what he called the white bear problem.
00:02:03.000So if I say, don't think of a white bear, you think of a white bear, because I've just activated that concept in your brain.
00:02:09.000If you're a stand-up comedian and you're choking, like everything's falling flat, the audience is turning ugly, you're getting nervous, and part of your brain's like, just relax, just do your stuff, be funny,
00:02:26.000How do you be funny if you're not feeling funny?
00:02:31.000And so this is a real tension, and that's what my previous work focused on.
00:02:36.000But there's a story in one of these texts, this Daoist text, where Zhuangzi, this early Daoist thinker, compares the person who's in ui to someone who's drunk.
00:02:50.000They can bump into things and not harm themselves.
00:02:54.000And it's clear that in that text it's just a metaphor for the spiritual state Zhuangzi wants you to get into.
00:02:59.000But I think that story made me start thinking about how cultures might use alcohol as a technology for getting around this paradox of wu-wei.
00:03:35.000That's the thing about alcohol, right?
00:03:38.000One of the things about alcohol is when you start drinking, the moment you start to lose your inhibitions, you also lose the inhibition to drink too much.
00:07:48.000I mean, I'm telling an evolutionary story.
00:07:50.000So my story begins 10 million years ago with primate ancestors who adapted to alcohol.
00:07:56.000And so 10 million years ago, about 20,000 years ago to 13,000 years ago, we started making alcohol seriously, not just relying on fruit lying around that has some alcohol in it.
00:08:10.000And then distillation happens probably around 1300s in China and 1500s, 1600s in Europe.
00:08:18.000So that sounds like a long time ago, but really, evolutionarily, it's yesterday.
00:08:23.000We really haven't had time, culturally or genetically, to adapt to access to this kind of alcohol.
00:08:30.000And a long time ago when people were drinking beer and drinking wine in particular, like a lot of what they were doing, like if they were carrying it around with them, they would carry beer or wine when they were going on trips because it didn't go bad the way water would,
00:09:28.000We've been making and drinking alcohol for just about as long as we've been doing anything in an organized fashion.
00:09:35.000In fact, it's looking likely that we were doing this before agriculture and that it's possible that the desire to make beer and wine is what motivated agriculture.
00:09:49.000So hunter-gatherers were making beer before they had agriculture.
00:10:21.000Yeah, I'm super familiar with it because of Graham Hancock who's been on my podcast multiple times.
00:10:25.000He's obsessed with ancient civilizations and that is sort of the Rosetta Stone of ancient civilizations because it's at least 12,000 years old and the thought process was at that point in time no one could build the kind of structures that those people built.
00:10:40.000So when they did it, it sort of lent credence to some of his theories that civilization has gone through multiple periods of ascension and then resets, usually through catastrophic disasters like asteroid impacts.
00:10:58.000So, his theory, it's not really just his theory, it's the Younger Dryas Impact Theory.
00:11:05.000And the Younger Dryas Impact Theory, it's pointing to the end of the Ice Age, which coincides with real proof of impacts on Earth, in the sense of they take soil samples, and when they go down to the same amount of time where the Ice Age ended,
00:11:28.000It's called nuclear glass or tritonite.
00:11:31.000And this stuff, it occurs at blast sites where they test nuclear weapons, but it also occurs at asteroid impact sites.
00:11:39.000And they find it all over the place at around 12,000-ish years ago.
00:11:46.000And so this theory is that at the end of the Ice Age, what had happened was We pass through an area in our solar system that is rich with comets.
00:11:59.000And that it literally restarted civilization, killed off a massive amount of people, stopped civilization dead in its tracks, and then there's a period of rebuilding.
00:12:09.000So is Gobekli Tepe the rebuilding period?
00:13:17.000This was always the evidence against something like Gobekli Tepe.
00:13:20.000Where's the evidence of sophisticated structures 12,000 years ago?
00:13:24.000And then finally, they found Gobekli Tepe.
00:13:26.000So now they're like, okay, well now we have evidence of sophisticated structures 12,000 years ago, which should have been built according to our timeline by hunter-gatherers.
00:13:35.000But they're resisting that, and they're thinking this Younger Dryas impact theory may indicate That there was something that happened that, you know, if you look at Egypt, there's clearly more than one era of building styles.
00:13:53.000There's like an old kingdom style and a lot of the old stuff is like deep under the sand when they're finding it.
00:13:59.000And it's their position that a lot of this stuff is thousands of years older than the pyramids.
00:14:49.000Then sometime after that, we note that someone leaves their sourdough starter out too long and it starts to turn into beer and they're like, oh, this actually tastes all right.
00:14:59.000So we had agriculture and then we get alcohol.
00:15:02.000Around the 1950s or so, some archaeologists started to argue, you know, sites like this one and other sites around the world suggest that hunter-gatherers were gathering and making alcohol before agriculture.
00:15:15.000And so this is the beer before bread hypothesis.
00:15:20.000Is that what motivated people to settle down and start focusing on making these grains more productive was they wanted to get high.
00:15:27.000Not because they wanted to make bread.
00:15:29.000And you see the same pattern in other parts of the world.
00:15:33.000So in South America, they make this beer-like substance, chicha.
00:15:39.000Now they make it out of maize, out of corn.
00:15:42.000But they used to make it out of the ancient, the wild ancestor of corn is called teosinte.
00:15:49.000And what's interesting is teosinte sucks for making grain.
00:15:53.000Like if your goal was to make tortillas, you wouldn't even notice this plant because the grains don't make very good grain products to eat.
00:16:05.000So this plant, if these early people were looking for something to make food with, they would overlook this plant.
00:16:12.000But if they were looking for something to make beer with, they would focus on it, cultivate it, start making it produce bigger grains, and that's how you would get corn.
00:16:20.000Do we know what the original thing that they got high with was?
00:17:55.000And I think the Golden Triangle, it's called, this region in Turkey around 12,000 years ago, there's a carving from a site near Göbekli Tepe that has a picture.
00:18:07.000It's a carving of a human dancing with these two dancing turtles.
00:19:29.000That's one of those Gobekli Tepe things as a three-dimensional image that's carved into the stone, or taken the stone all around it to leave it there.
00:19:40.000That's super sophisticated stuff for 12,000 years ago.
00:19:44.000So my argument is this is why people settled down originally.
00:19:48.000I mean, so civilization comes from intoxication.
00:19:52.000Hunter-gatherers who were living in these small bands, wandering around, were motivated to come together and settle down and start getting organized about growing stuff because they wanted to produce the stuff that was going to mess them up so they could have these kind of ceremonies.
00:20:06.000I guess that makes sense if you think about their everyday existence being very difficult, right?
00:20:12.000You're just trying to find food, you get food, you eat it, you try to keep neighboring tribes from coming in and stealing that food, and then you bond through these hallucinogenic experiences or these alcohol experiences or any altered state, right?
00:20:25.000Well, so it's doing a lot of different things for you.
00:20:30.000So one of the functions of alcohol and hallucinogens is it's, you mentioned a four-year-old, so there's good work on creativity and development by Alison Gopnik, who's a child developmental psychologist at Berkeley.
00:20:45.000And she's got this great task where you have to figure out this really counterintuitive problem.
00:20:52.000And she's got a graph that I reproduce in the book of how people do on it as they age.
00:20:58.000And so four-year-olds are awesome at it.
00:22:58.000And that allows us to be open, to make ties to other people, to learn from our culture, to learn language.
00:23:03.000We have all these skills we need to learn.
00:23:05.000And then right around kind of mid-20s, like 24, 25, is when you finally finish developing your PFC. And that's around the time when you have to start being hyper-responsible.
00:23:17.000And so it seems like a good solution for evolution to do that.
00:23:21.000The problem is, once you've got that fully developed PFC, you've lost a lot of these childlike traits.
00:23:28.000So you've lost your ability to trust people implicitly.
00:23:32.000You've lost your ability to be creative, as Gopnik's work shows.
00:23:37.000And so it would be awesome if you could be a grown-up and have a PFC and be able to get to work on time and do everything you need to do.
00:23:45.000But you had a way to temporarily be like a child again for a few hours.
00:23:55.000It's basically a cultural technology for temporarily turning down your prefrontal cortex so you can be like a four-year-old for a little bit.
00:24:28.000The first time I ever lectured to a big crowd, I was a grad student, and I had to cover for my professor and lecture to like 150 people in this auditorium.
00:24:41.000I worked in the service industry in San Francisco, and I was finishing up a shift having a drink at the bar with a bartender and told him, yeah, I got to go do this lecture tomorrow.
00:25:04.000Remember with film photography, you had those little plastic things you put film in?
00:25:08.000I filled one of those with vodka and put it in my backpack.
00:25:11.000And right before I went out, I did a shot of vodka.
00:25:14.000And just as I was starting the lecture, that's the hardest part.
00:25:19.000Like you stand up there, 150 people, they get quiet, they all look at you, and you need to start talking and saying something that's compelling.
00:25:28.000That's usually when you choke and freeze up.
00:25:30.000But right around that time, the vodka was hitting my brain and I was like, this kind of mellow relaxation was spreading through my body.
00:25:38.000And it got me through that initial nervousness.
00:25:43.000Until, you know, by the time it started to wear off, I was into my lecture.
00:26:39.000So there's actually some good experimental evidence that you get people drinking together in small groups, and they just start to like each other more and feel like, oh, we're really a team, and I like these people I'm hanging out with.
00:26:58.000We're—our nature is to be kind of selfish and suspicious and hostile.
00:27:04.000Like, if you took—I've never met either of you guys, and if we were chimpanzees and someone just threw three chimpanzees into a room together, you know, one of us would walk out, maybe, and there'd just be blood left.
00:28:21.000So religious traditions that, for various reasons, decide they don't want to use chemical intoxicants usually substitute some other way to do it.
00:28:30.000I like that you said stay up all night because I used to be on this sitcom called News Radio and The Writers...
00:28:38.000It was an amazing show because the writing was so good, but the way they wrote it was so nuts.
00:28:44.000They were a bunch of young, really smart guys who were kind of crazy, and they would stay up until like 4 o'clock in the morning playing video games and then start writing.
00:28:56.000So sometimes we would show up, you know, like maybe call time would be 9 or 10 a.m., and they were just done with like the first draft of scene one.
00:29:06.000And we're like, what are you guys doing?
00:29:08.000They were all fucked up and their hair was a mess and they were barefoot.
00:29:15.000The strategy was to get overtired and really, really silly.
00:29:18.000And then they would come up with some of the most preposterous scenarios for...
00:29:23.000And oddly enough, they weren't getting high.
00:29:25.000These people were getting high that way.
00:29:28.000Yeah, no, you can do it through sleep deprivation.
00:29:30.000That's literally how they did it on purpose, which I'd never heard of before.
00:29:34.000But then once they told me about it, I was like, well, that does make sense because when I'm loopy, you know, it's like I'm hanging out with my friends and I've been up like and it's four o'clock in the morning.
00:29:54.000Yeah, you want to get rid of that playground monitor if you want certain types of things to happen.
00:29:59.000Exercise, we were talking about that earlier, that that seems to have some sort of an effect that's similar, like that's where runner's high comes from, right?
00:30:07.000Yeah, so extreme, like if you're running, doing any kind of extreme exercise, at a certain point your body is like, we don't need the prefrontal cortex.
00:30:16.000Prefrontal cortex is a really expensive organ.
00:30:18.000It's sucking up a lot of energy from your body.
00:30:21.000And so at a certain point you're like, we don't need the prefrontal cortex anymore.
00:30:25.000So it gets turned down by your body because you need to send it to your lungs and your heart and your muscles.
00:30:30.000So how do we know how much energy it's using specifically?
00:30:37.000You get a sense of how much blood flow is going through the brain, let's say, and you get a sense it's a proxy then for how much energy it's using because that blood's delivering nutrients to it, right?
00:30:48.000Oh, so they've done fMRIs on people that are really tired and loopy and you can see it shut off?
00:30:54.000I'm trying to think, the guy who's done work on runner's high is called Arne Dietrich.
00:30:59.000And I'm trying to remember now if he was putting, I don't know how he would get people, maybe he would stress them physiologically and then stick them in an fMRI machine.
00:31:08.000But he talks about what he calls hypofrontality.
00:31:11.000So it's a state where your prefrontal cortex is shutting down in response to physiological stress.
00:31:16.000And I don't remember now how he was getting that measurement.
00:31:19.000Me and my friends a few years back did this.
00:32:37.000But the point is that the feeling that you get when you do that is incredible in terms like how much you don't give a fuck.
00:32:47.000You're so relaxed and calm and and my friend Tom Segura was saying the same thing.
00:32:51.000He's like, man, it cuts all the chatter down when you do that.
00:32:55.000Yeah, you want to get rid of the chatter.
00:32:56.000But it cuts it all down where you're like really calm and I was always trying to figure out like is it because you're so tired that you don't have time for nonsense?
00:33:07.000It's for like is your brain Like, are you occupying your mind with nonsensical concerns and worries and anxiety?
00:33:17.000Is that a function of the fact that you don't have enough real threat and real struggle in your life?
00:33:24.000And is doing something that's incredibly physically struggling, like seven hours on the elliptical machine, like that's so taxing that when it's over, your body doesn't have any time for any stupid nonsense.
00:34:41.000This is my theory, and obviously I haven't studied this, so these are just guesses, but without really understanding the whole neuroscience behind it.
00:34:49.000I've always felt like that the human body has certain physical requirements and we don't meet those physical requirements.
00:34:56.000Your body starts coming up with problems that don't really exist.
00:35:00.000So it's like if you don't have problems in your life, your body creates those problems for you.
00:35:07.000So the way I always like to point it out to people is like I make my own problems.
00:35:53.000You watch movies, and two hours is gone before you know it, if it's a really good movie.
00:35:58.000Especially if you have headsets on, it's because you're completely engulfed in the film, and you're watching it, and you barely even realize.
00:36:07.000But you get the same effect by sprinting really hard for, like, 20 minutes.
00:37:10.000So the word ecstasy comes from Greek ekstasis, getting out of yourself.
00:37:16.000And there's something, humans crave it.
00:37:19.000Humans really like the experience of getting out of their own heads and either getting absorbed into something bigger than them or just almost oblivion, right, where you're not thinking about anything.
00:37:32.000And it's beyond the just functional...
00:37:35.000So I'm arguing in the book that intoxication has all these social functions.
00:40:16.000I mean, this is one of the arguments I have in the book is that we've ignored this function because there's this kind of weird puritanical discomfort with chemical intoxication.
00:40:38.000I think it comes from the idea that some people are not going to chip in and do the work that needs to be done.
00:40:44.000Because if you're in a tribe of 150 people or so, everyone has a crucial role.
00:40:50.000And if you're a person that likes to lay around and get drunk and fuck off, you're not going to be the person that gets up and gathers food or hunts the food, and you're going to be a non-contributor, or you're not going to contribute your part.
00:41:02.000So we think of people that engage in these frivolous activities, not just normal, like, you know, not ritual things where everybody does it together, but normal frivolous activity, like it's a part of a normal everyday life for you.
00:41:43.000Cultures are suspicious of people who drink alone.
00:41:45.000So we always do it in company with others.
00:41:48.000Part of the reason we're suspicious of pleasure is mind-body dualism.
00:41:56.000We have this kind of sense that If I want to get into a great state of mind, relaxed, open, friendly, loving people, if I do it through meditation, if I meditate for 10 hours and get there,
00:42:22.000I think we have a feeling that using a chemical to directly change your brain is cheating.
00:42:31.000Eliade was this famous religious studies scholar who wrote a lot on mysticism, and he talks about these mystical states of ecstasy where people are feeling outside of themselves, no self, one with the universe.
00:44:15.000And so whether you do it through meditation or meditation, You know, breathing exercises or whatever, it's all physical.
00:44:22.000I think our problem is by not acknowledging that, we don't recognize that there's not just strategies, but there's methods where you do it correctly.
00:44:35.000It's one of the good things about alcohol, like we've had a drink, right?
00:44:38.000We had a drink, now we have a second drink.
00:46:37.000And there's a guy, Alex Berenson, he was a writer for the, a journalist for the New York Times, and he wrote a book called Tell Your Children that's highly criticized by people that love cannabis.
00:46:48.000But I had him on with this guy, Mike Hart, who is a doctor from Canada who prescribed cannabis.
00:46:55.000And Alex's take on it was, by just pretending that cannabis does no harm, it doesn't do anybody any good.
00:47:04.000Because some people have schizophrenic breaks while they're on cannabis.
00:47:08.000And I personally know of people That, especially with eating cannabis, have had schizophrenic breaks, and some people who smoked too much of it and smoked it all the time went nutty.
00:47:18.000I know multiple people where I could point to and I could say, that guy was doing pretty good, and then he started smoking a lot of weed, and then he eventually got crazy.
00:48:15.000And I think we need to be studying this because the fact that it has been a Schedule I drug for so long, our understanding of what it does to different people, Look, I love peanuts.
00:50:20.000Anyway, MAPS is an incredible organization that is working to make certain psychedelic compounds available to people for therapy and to, like, particularly MDMA for people with PTSD,
00:51:11.000And then when I was about 20, I dropped out of college on the East Coast and rode my motorcycle to California and thought I was Jack Kerouac.
00:51:35.000I was out of my apartment in San Francisco and moving into a new one and I rode my motorcycle north and did some camping and then I got too cold.
00:51:43.000And so I ended up at this youth hostel and someone who worked there introduced me to hash cooked into an omelet.
00:52:38.000And, you know, these goddamn stoners, you know, when they make that hemp butter, they make that stuff and they cook in the butter and then they add weed to the food too.
00:54:17.000So we have dedicated machinery in our body that its job is to identify ethanol and get it the fuck out of our bodies as quickly as possible.
00:55:55.000And it's because that's most directly associated with the thing the genes most want us to do, which is make copies and pass it on to the next generation.
00:56:04.000But it's not a perfect system because we can get orgasms in other ways, right?
00:56:10.000So we masturbate, we engage in all sorts of non-reproductive sex.
00:56:14.000But it works good enough because the cost of whatever else we're doing is minimal.
00:56:20.000The point is, over evolutionary history, statistically speaking...
00:56:24.000Orgasms were associated with getting us to pass on genes to the next generation.
00:56:29.000The reason evolution can tolerate all the non-reproductive hijinks we get up to is because they're not costly.
00:56:37.000It's not imposing adaptive costs on us.
00:56:40.000In the case of alcohol, especially if you have a predisposition to alcoholism, it's imposing huge costs on you.
00:56:47.000And so evolution should be really interested in getting...
00:56:50.000Our taste for alcohol should be eliminated from the human species if it really is only a costly mistake, if it's just kind of brain parasite.
00:57:01.000And so one possibility is, well, evolution just hasn't figured out a solution yet.
00:57:07.000Selection can't work on a mutation that doesn't exist.
00:57:10.000But there's a gene complex that evolves separately at least three times at different points of history and around the world where people don't like to drink.
00:57:22.000And so I think people know that the most common prevalence of it is in East Asia.
00:57:28.000So some people from East Asia, if they had that first drink we had, like about halfway through that first drink, they would turn red.
00:57:36.000They would start to get heart palpitations.
00:58:12.000This first enzyme called ADH takes it and pulls a couple of hydrogens off it and turns it into this substance called acetaldehyde, which is still really nasty.
00:58:24.000And so then there's another enzyme, ADLH, that takes another couple of hydrogens off that and turns it into acetic acid, which is harmless.
00:58:31.000You can get rid of that really easily.
00:58:33.000What's going on with people with these mutations is that first step, their ADH enzyme is hyper-efficient.
00:58:41.000So they're taking alcohol and immediately turning it into acetaldehyde.
00:58:44.000But then the second step, that enzyme is not very good.
00:58:48.000So all this acetaldehyde is building up in their system and it starts happening right away.
00:58:52.000And that's what's giving them the flushing and the nausea and all this other stuff.
00:58:57.000The theory is that there's something about high acid aldehyde concentrations in the body that might help with tuberculosis or fungal poisoning.
00:59:07.000And so the theory is this was useful for hunter-gatherers who had just settled down and started to do agriculture.
00:59:35.000Basically, it started in kind of where modern-day Shanghai is, so Southeast China.
00:59:42.000In the book, I show a map of the distribution of this gene right now, and so it spread to Japan and Korea a little bit, but it pretty much stayed there.
00:59:51.000And so part of my argument in the book is that if alcohol is just an evolutionary mistake, If it's just hijacking reward networks in our brain that evolve for other reasons, this, what's sometimes called the Asian flushing gene complex,
01:00:28.000It basically creates a chemical version.
01:00:31.000It somehow reproduces the effect of high levels of acetaldehyde in your body.
01:00:37.000Now, one of the theories about Native Americans is that they didn't have alcohol as a part of their culture until the Europeans came in the 13th century or whatever.
01:00:52.000When they started introducing them to alcohol, they didn't have the genes for it.
01:02:38.000Is that that one that's like really oddly dissociative?
01:02:42.000There's one that I remember reading, again, it was McKenna talking about it, where he had to take it.
01:02:50.000He had to stop using it because he was talking to a friend at a market and he realized that the friend believed that they were back in his apartment.
01:03:02.000Like he didn't recognize that he wasn't outside in a market.
01:04:50.000I wonder if you really can, through chemicals, for a brief moment of time, take a poke, just take a peek into a neighboring dimension and experience some sort, like a chemical gateway into, like we know that there's more,
01:05:07.000there's more to the universe than what we can observe.
01:05:10.000Like, if you wave your hand over the top of an earthworm, it has no idea you're there.
01:05:34.000We can imagine that what we see and what we can measure and what we observe with our eyes and ears and our senses, that this is all that exists.
01:09:25.000Like really, the brain subserves consciousness in such a really specific way that I have trouble imagining that consciousness is anything, first of all, ontologically, like really in the world,
01:09:43.000And it's really anything more than a kind of effect you get.
01:09:49.000We can talk about human-level things and conscious-level things in a way that makes sense to us because it's more efficient, but the only real description is the chemicals all the way down one, is my view.
01:10:03.000And just because when you do studies over and over again that the effects don't work, that can't be with every study.
01:10:13.000No, and I'm probably misquoting Jonathan, so you have to ask him about it.
01:10:17.000It's just a weird conclusion to draw, but here's the take.
01:10:22.000One of the things that makes me curious about it is the idea of a simulation theory.
01:10:27.000If you believe in the possibility of the simulation theory, and Elon fully believes in it.
01:11:04.000Which was really engrossing at the time.
01:11:06.000Oh my god, you couldn't believe it, right?
01:11:07.000You're like, I can't believe I'm playing something on the TV. I'm making the TV move.
01:11:11.000But now you get Call of Duty and it's like way more engrossing and Halo and all these crazy games.
01:11:17.000If you extrapolate that with this sort of HTC Vive or Oculus technology, you would imagine that one day there's going to be an artificial reality that's indiscernible from regular reality.
01:11:32.000When you talk to people like Elon Musk about Neuralink, right?
01:11:37.000And they're going to essentially wire your brain.
01:11:41.000They're going to reach areas of your brain and stimulate them with some sort of energy, electricity.
01:11:48.000I don't know what they're doing to do that.
01:11:50.000It hasn't been really clearly demonstrated how exactly.
01:11:55.000They're planning on ramping this up into the future.
01:11:57.000But one of the things that Elon said to me, you're going to be able to communicate without words.
01:12:02.000Which is kind of terrifying, but also fascinating.
01:12:07.000I would imagine that this innovation is also going to apply to things like artificial reality and virtual reality.
01:12:19.000And that it's going to get so good, you're not going to be able to tell the difference between reality And artificial reality.
01:12:26.000If that's the case, how do we know if we're not already there?
01:12:31.000If one day it becomes indiscernible and virtual reality or a simulation of reality is indiscernible from regular reality, how will we know?
01:12:44.000Nick Bollstrom, who is another guy who broke my brain, who was on the podcast, was arguing that according to probability theory, we are in a simulation.
01:13:24.000If human beings don't blow ourselves up or we don't get hit by another asteroid and we last another million years, I can't imagine a world where we don't have something that you can plug into that's indiscernible from this.
01:14:24.000If I could go with Lewis and Clark, if I could virtually go with Lewis and Clark and make that trip across the continental United States, oh my god, I'd be all in, man.
01:16:03.000But, you know, again, if you look forward, if you see this, you sort of extrapolate and say, okay, well, what will this be like a thousand years from now?
01:16:12.000Well, then you're going to feel things and smell things, and that is certainly inside the realm of what you can imagine.
01:16:22.000Especially when you can see something like this, where they can have the sun moving across the sky and changing Changing all the shadows.
01:17:33.000People have weird little sort of herky-jerky variabilities, and she's This is even easier for us to now.
01:17:40.000We could mo-cap you, Joe, and get your body movements in there in probably an hour, less than an hour, half an hour, and it would be Joe's movements, Joe's kicking and walking and jumping.
01:18:14.000Have you ever done anything with haptic feedback?
01:18:16.000No, but I understand the concept, yeah.
01:18:17.000There's a company in town called Sandbox, and there's all these cool games you can play, and one of them is this wild zombie game called Deadwood Mansion.
01:18:26.000So you put on virtual reality headsets.
01:18:44.000But the point is, they put you in a haptic feedback vest, and they give you these goggles, and you have this gun, like this plastic gun, and these zombies come running at you, and when they grab you, you feel it in your chest.
01:18:58.000It's very crude, but it gives you this, it gives you just enough of a jolt where it makes it extra fun.
01:20:00.000The Matrix when it came out was crazy.
01:20:02.000But The Matrix today, you're like, maybe that's not that crazy.
01:20:07.000And Ready Player One is, in my eyes, a really excellent example of what we may be looking at 50 years from now or 100 years from now or whatever it is.
01:20:21.000And the haptic feedback suits that the lead character has on in this film allows this girl that he has a relationship with in the game to touch him.
01:20:53.000The books are more in-depth and more than the movie was even capable of doing, because the IP, I guess they would have had to pay for, which is impossible, and what they were doing.
01:21:05.000They were inserting people into movies, reenacting things with your favorite movie characters.
01:21:10.000You had to memorize the lines and perform them in the exact way that was done in the movie, or you fail, had to restart again.
01:22:47.000You dream about a thing and you think it's real and you cry and you get scared and you feel these emotions and then you wake up and you realize it was just a dream.
01:22:56.000And so how do we know that we're not in a dream now?
01:23:51.000We have this attachment to the idea that all of our life has been real.
01:23:58.000And so, since it's been uniform in its realness, we assume that it's real.
01:24:05.000We assume that the touch and the textures and the tastes and the sounds and the emotions and the pains and the joys have all been very similar or at least recognizable.
01:25:42.000This is outside my area of expertise, but my understanding of the function of sleep, and dreaming especially, Is that it's allowing us to consolidate the information, the data we've acquired over the course of the day.
01:25:54.000And that's really crucial for smart animals that are accumulating knowledge.
01:26:14.000Oh, the right half gets four hours of sleep, but the left half also gets four hours of sleep, just at different times.
01:26:20.000So that's an adaptation to the fact that they're in water, but they're air-breathing mammals like us, so they need to have part of their brain on.
01:26:30.000So I think there's stories you can tell about why we dream, why we sleep, that are completely consistent with the idea that I am the same body I was when I was little.
01:26:41.000The scar I have on my forehead really is from George Lloyd hitting me with a snow shovel.
01:27:54.000Then you get really confused, and you take home a shitty jam.
01:27:58.000Because you're thinking about it too much has messed up your appraisal.
01:28:02.000Well, that's one of the things that people always say about psychedelic experiences, in that in describing the psychedelic experience, you then become attached to the narrative of the description of the psychedelic experience.
01:28:17.000Psychedelic experiences are interesting, so I talk about them in the book as well.
01:28:22.000You had Michael Pollan on at one point, and I watched part of that show.
01:28:27.000And he repeated an analogy that he uses in his book that I quote in my book, which is that psychedelics are for cultural evolution what mutagens are for genetic evolution.
01:28:41.000So genetic evolution needs mutations to work on.
01:30:31.000And so humans need tools, and we need constantly evolving tools because the environment's changing.
01:30:38.000Even if the environment's staying the same, we have other cultural groups that are trying to exploit that environment in competition with us.
01:30:45.000And if they do a better job, then we're out of luck.
01:30:48.000And so we're uniquely dependent on creativity in a way that no other primate is, no other species is, really.
01:30:57.000And Paulin's point is that one way we could get that is occasionally completely scrambling.
01:31:04.000So what psychedelics are doing is just de-patterning the brain completely.
01:31:10.000So just parts of your brain or talking to other parts of the brain that normally doesn't happen at all.
01:31:15.000And as he points out, that usually results in bullshit.
01:31:19.000So, you know, I did a lot of psychedelics in San Francisco in my 20s.
01:31:24.000And I used to go up to Mount Tam and do mushrooms or LSD. And this one trip, I always brought a notebook with me.
01:31:34.000I talk about this in the book that I was convinced during one trip that I was a PhD student at the time.
01:31:44.000I was convinced that once I published this thing I was writing, they would give me my PhD, they would give me a tenured full professorship, and that was it.
01:31:52.000And it was because I had proven that truth is the color blue.
01:31:58.000And I had like a 20-page treatise where I laid this out.
01:32:03.000It had diagrams and there were mathematical equations.
01:32:06.000And I really came out of the trip thinking, this is it.
01:32:38.000Paulin's point is that most of what gets produced is nonsense, but every once in a while, it might be useful.
01:32:46.000Basically, in terms of evolution, it's a high-risk, high-payoff strategy.
01:32:53.000Was there something that had to do with your confidence and having achieved some sort of revelation that maybe you were trying to seek this same thing or find some sort of understanding about your own personal life and you chose to do it through a proxy?
01:33:10.000Like you tried to seek it out through this thing and thinking that if I saw...
01:33:37.000I think Paulin's right that psychedelics are scrambling stuff, but then every once in a while something really cool and new comes out.
01:33:47.000I actually don't explicitly make this argument in the book, but listening to him on your show is what I thought, is that alcohol is a way to do that in a slightly lower risk way.
01:33:59.000So we're scrambling our brains a little bit right now, but we're still pretty much connected to reality.
01:34:04.000So the innovation level is going to be lower because we're not completely de-patterning our brains.
01:34:11.000But the likelihood that we're going to come up with something useful is higher.
01:34:15.000And so what I would argue is chemical intoxicants all have this role to play.
01:34:22.000In accelerating and enhancing cultural evolution, hallucinogens have a place in that ecosystem, right?
01:34:30.000But typically, hallucinogens are used very rarely.
01:34:34.000So in cultures where everyone does them, they do them every once in a while.
01:34:40.000So typically, there's like an annual ritual or semi-annual ritual where everyone takes hallucinogens and gets really messed up.
01:34:46.000Another way to do it is have a special class of people whose job it is to get messed up on hallucinogens pretty regularly and then bring their insights back to the group.
01:34:57.000How are you going to trust those guys though?
01:35:38.000And the shaman goes and gets completely lit up on psychedelics and spends, whatever, two days in the woods and writes a thing about truth that's color blue and writes a thing about something completely random.
01:35:50.000But maybe somewhere in there they have an idea that we've angered the gods because of X, Y, or Z. And that works.
01:35:56.000Like, actually doing one of those things gets us to the new hunting ground where we can get gazelles again.
01:36:01.000So sometimes there's a particular class of people whose job it is to do intoxicants in a much more serious way.
01:36:21.000So you think that there's some sort of benefit to having some people that are professionals do that work rather than the general population?
01:36:40.000Why would you pawn it off on somebody else?
01:36:43.000Don't you think the more people that have these revelations, the better?
01:36:47.000And the more people that have these revelations, the more people are going to sort of understand some of the dilemmas that we face and maybe what's happening with the ego Yeah, I mean,
01:37:02.000I think now in modern society, maybe we have a luxury where everyone can figure this out for themselves.
01:37:09.000But I think in a traditional society, like if your job was hauling stones to build the pyramids, You getting more insight into stuff is not going to be very helpful.
01:37:26.000So I think now we have more egalitarianism and people have access to resources in a way that maybe this is something everyone should be doing.
01:37:35.000I used to say that, everyone, but now I've changed my tune because I think some people are just not wired right for it.
01:39:17.000No one has a real clear understanding of what the fuck is going on when you're tripping on DMT. You're just guessing.
01:39:23.000But one thing that I've gotten out of it, for sure, is to be more open to the idea that everyone is going through a different experience.
01:39:37.000I've had people say, I couldn't imagine being a fireman, or I couldn't imagine being a musician singing on stage in front of all those people, or I couldn't imagine being a professor giving a lecture in front of all those people.
01:39:52.000But some people, you know, I couldn't imagine being a bricklayer.
01:39:55.000I couldn't imagine being a motorcycle mechanic.
01:39:57.000Like, everybody has a different fucking thing in this world.
01:40:01.000And we're all this weird container of chemical soup.
01:40:06.000And everybody's genes and life experiences and all these things play a part of what it means to be you or to be me or to be Jamie or anyone who's listening to this thing.
01:40:18.000And we all like to look at the world like, oh, I see the world and you need to live the way that I live because I've figured this out about the world.
01:40:28.000But I've always figured out that part about the world like how it works for me with my peculiar genetics and my peculiar life experiences and sensitivities or lack thereof.
01:41:09.000It helps you because you're an integral part of the tribe.
01:41:12.000Yeah, so there may be group-level effects, and there's clearly an effect where if I'm in a culture where introverts are rare, There's going to be a marginal advantage to being an introvert because I can bring things to the group that other people can't.
01:41:30.000So what that's going to end up, what you're going to end up with is a mix of people.
01:41:34.000So you're going to have introverts and extroverts.
01:41:36.000You're going to have people who are very conscientious and people who are incredibly not conscientious.
01:41:42.000And each of them are going to play some role in the culture.
01:41:46.000Well, I have a theory about today's culture.
01:41:48.000One of the things that is unfortunately happening is that we've become so kind and compassionate that we've allowed certain personality traits and certain people to exist unchecked.
01:42:05.000And certainly not talking about introverts, but I am talking about sloths.
01:42:10.000You know, we've allowed a lot of, like, the homeless situation, right?
01:42:15.000Clearly some of the homeless situation is mentally ill people.
01:42:18.000Clearly some of the homeless situation is people with drug dependency.
01:42:22.000But it's also, some of it has got to be people that have no desire for growth.
01:42:31.000They just decide to lay down on the concrete floor for whatever reason.
01:42:47.000Whatever it is about our culture that coddles that, San Francisco is a fantastic example of how that's a disaster for everybody else and bad for the tribe.
01:43:00.000I don't believe that there are more people that don't have their shit together today than did in 1930. But I do believe there's more homeless people today than there were in 1930, per capita.
01:43:12.000And I think it's because we're more compassionate, and in being more compassionate, more understanding, and more kind, that's all great.
01:43:57.000You can make these connections between the way human beings live their life with people fucking up their problems, How many of us have people like that in our lives?
01:44:07.000I know quite a few friends that will tell you, I am too nice, I have too many people that are trying to take advantage of me, and they're always doing this, they're always doing that, and they want this, they want that, and they're always selfish.
01:44:21.000I think that's the same thing with our culture.
01:44:23.000There's people that don't want to contribute, and they don't want to be a part of society in any meaningful way, but they think the society owes them something.
01:44:31.000And that has accelerated in modern times because we've placed value on being compassionate and being kind.
01:47:35.000And it's gotten worse with COVID, so I don't talk about this too much in the book, but...
01:47:40.000I talk about in some other pieces I've written more recently that COVID has made this so much worse because it's driven drinking totally into the household and all the normal social cues that you have to help control your drinking are gone.
01:47:55.000Well, not just that, people are trying to cope.
01:47:59.000Trying to cope with this very bizarre, strange, not so much now, but, you know, 12 months, unless you're in Canada.
01:48:04.000Unless you're in Canada, yes, thanks, dude.
01:48:06.000They still live in March of 2020. But if you're going back to, you know, last year, like April of last year, I found myself drinking a lot.
01:50:39.000At that point, I am safer than any random person flying around the streets of Vancouver, but I still have to stay in my apartment for two weeks.
01:50:49.000But the point of this is the solitude, like being alone, especially once the book was done.
01:50:57.000Normally when I finish a project I go into this weird, I don't know if you have this, like if you write a show and then you perform it and then you need to do a new thing.
01:53:19.000But this has been hardest on, like, my daughter is 14. And that age group, it's been brutal for them because this is the time when they just want to be out with their friends, socializing.
01:53:32.000It's one of the reasons I moved to Texas.
01:54:26.000Well, one just turned 11 and one turned 13. These young kids that I have that are experiencing this weird new life, it was way more troubling in California because people had a different approach to it.
01:55:00.000And I realized, like, how bad is this for children?
01:55:02.000Where, like, two months of this shit where you're locked in home worried about an invisible demon that's floating through the air and taking people's lives.
01:55:12.000And we're all walking around with masks on.
01:55:50.000This is the thing that's so troubling.
01:55:52.000But here's the thing that drives me the most bonkers is like there's so many opportunities to educate people about strengthening your immune system.
01:56:02.000There's a reason why it only kills less than 1%.
01:56:06.000It's because most people recover from it.
01:56:40.000It's like what we did is exacerbate the spread of the disease unintentionally.
01:56:44.000In a lot of ways, the lockdowns in California, when you force people inside, a lot of times those people, they transmit it inside, unfortunately.
01:59:45.000So it's funny because I gave a talk about, when I was doing the Try Not to Try book tour, I gave a talk about spontaneity and creativity and how they're linked.
02:00:17.000This is almost certainly apocryphal, but supposedly Steve Balmer, the former CEO of Microsoft, figured out that his coding ability peaked at this very particular blood alcohol content.
02:00:29.000So it's like, not good, not good, not good, really good, really good!
02:01:25.000My standard whiskey is Lagavulin, 16-year.
02:01:28.000And I can get that at K&L Wine Merchants in San Francisco usually for like 70, 80 bucks at U.S. And in Canada, it's more like closer to 200 Canadian.
02:02:26.000But I'm also less the playground monitor is off duty.
02:02:31.000And so I'm also I'll say it to you out loud.
02:02:33.000Even if if I was sober, I might think it was stupid.
02:02:38.000This has happened to me in academic situations where we came up with this multi-million dollar grant to study the evolution of religion at UBC years and years ago.
02:02:49.000And I don't think it would have happened unless they had opened a pub.
02:03:45.000So I think it's the realization that really successful organizations like Google selectively use alcohol in the workplace in this way really lit a light bulb for me, too.
02:03:59.000That was one of the motivations for writing the book as well.
02:04:01.000That's interesting that they're so open-minded.
02:04:03.000They looked at it that way and chose that approach.
02:04:06.000Because that's not just unconventional, but frowned upon in a work environment.
02:04:56.000So once we understand, so in addition to fun, we've got enhanced creativity, we have team building, we have trust building, we have all these things happening.
02:05:05.000So let's put some other things in the positive column.
02:05:08.000And it may be the case that you still look at it and you're like, nah, it's too risky.
02:07:44.000And that means that you are now frozen out of everything that's happening there, right?
02:07:49.000You don't get that post-doc because the drunken PI offered it to somebody after his fifth tequila and you went home because you were uncomfortable.
02:07:59.000Or you went home because you're a recovering alcoholic and you don't drink.
02:08:04.000Or you went home because you have to get up early and pick the kids up from daycare.
02:08:24.000I think because there's also, you know, one of the things alcohol does is disinhibit you.
02:08:28.000And if you've got any prejudices, if you've got any kind of views about outside groups that you don't like, that's going to come out in drinking too.
02:08:38.000And it makes people who are not part of the in-group.
02:08:43.000Not only feel uncomfortable, but actually really genuinely disadvantaged because they lose that on opportunities.
02:08:48.000Well, because it takes what is a working environment and turn it into a much more social environment and then a much more uninhibited social environment that leads to, air quotes, partying.
02:09:17.000So I think what we need to do is figure out how to harness the positive functions of it while putting, kind of like bumper cars, like put on some barriers so that it doesn't get out of hand.
02:11:55.000But if you get the wrong person in that mix, and we've had a few of those guys, the wrong person gets in that mix, and all of a sudden they have shark eyes, and they go blank, and then the next thing you know, they're naked and sliding across the top of the bar, right?
02:12:08.000You know that guy, and that's the 15% that you were talking about.
02:12:34.000Is alcoholism like maybe you were in the wrong place in time in your life and you were drinking to try to avoid all the responsibilities that you had and you called yourself an alcoholic and now you've got your shit together with sobriety and discipline and positive mental attitude?
02:12:49.000And is there also someone who has some weird genetic disposition where they can't have a drink?
02:12:54.000I have friends that I know that can't have two drinks.
02:12:59.000They have two drinks and then no one's home.
02:13:14.000The literature on this is complicated, so there's some candidate genes, and some of them seem to have to do with regulating fear responses or pleasure responses.
02:15:25.000So when I was in grad school, especially once I got to a point where I wasn't taking classes anymore, my job, like when I was preparing for my comp exams, my job was to sit in my apartment alone and read things and take notes on them.
02:16:20.000I was much more introverted when I was a kid, much more so to the point where when I was young, in my early 20s, and I'd have to go to the bank, I would get anxiety that I had to talk to the bank teller.
02:18:48.000Well, this whole podcast came about because of genuine curiosity.
02:18:52.000There was no money in it when I first started doing it.
02:18:54.000And when I got to interview people, like Graham Hancock was one of my first guests, one of my first really interesting guests, who I talked about earlier.
02:19:03.000Having people like that where I'd studied his work and read some of his books and I got a chance to, all of a sudden I'm sitting down talking to this guy who I deeply admire, I can just start asking him questions.
02:19:14.000And my whole life has been essentially completely non-conventional in terms of my choices.
02:19:24.000But it's all been authentic in that these are the things.
02:19:28.000You can't pretend to be interested in martial arts.
02:19:31.000You're either interested in it or you're not.
02:19:33.000You can't pretend to be interested in stand-up comedy.
02:19:35.000You're either interested in it or you're not, in pursuit of it.
02:19:38.000You can't pretend to be interested in people.
02:19:44.000And sometimes it gets me in trouble because people assume that if I talk to someone who's like some hardcore right-wing person that I share their beliefs.
02:19:54.000You just want to know what they're thinking.
02:19:56.000I want to know what they're thinking and I think it's valuable to hear their voice and I think it's dangerous to not hear their voice.
02:20:02.000I think we're in this weird polarizing time where people are scared to talk to someone who has differing opinions than they do because they're worried that people will Their tribe is going to punish them.
02:20:15.000Yeah, but that is what happens, and it's because of social media and people without this core tenant of empathy, which I think is one of the most important things that we can have, and I think we should all...
02:20:30.000I've fucked this up many times, but I think we should generally lean towards empathy as much as we can.
02:20:38.000And so empathy exists also in the context of understanding people's perspective in conversations.
02:20:45.000And when I'm talking to someone, I'm trying to draw out of them their thoughts because I want to examine them in terms of like, oh, okay, I see how he's framing this.
02:21:01.000Different than me like we were talking about earlier where we're very different like all of my choices I know that all my choices are fucked up like if I had if I was a different person and I said okay well here's your life here's your schedule you know you have to commentate a cage fighting match and then you have to go talking on stage in front of thousands of people and then you have to do this podcast where you're speaking you know about something you really don't even know what you're talking about and you're You're asking questions to someone who
02:21:31.000is a doctor or a scientist or whatever.
02:21:50.000So Prisoner's Dilemma or Public Goods Games or Tragedy of the Commons.
02:21:56.000There are a lot of these situations in life where the best payoff for me is to cooperate with you and for us both to work together.
02:22:04.000But I don't have a way of verifying that you're going to do the right thing.
02:22:09.000You could defect in economist language and then I'm going to be really screwed.
02:22:14.000And so purely rational agents can't solve the prisoner's dilemma.
02:22:20.000They get stuck with a suboptimal outcome because they don't trust people.
02:22:25.000But humans, normal humans, solve prisoners' dilemmas all the time.
02:22:31.000And the way we do that is we trust people.
02:22:34.000And we trust people based on cues, so emotional signals, smiles.
02:22:41.000So, for instance, there's a difference between a so-called Duchenne smile, is you're genuine when you're really amused, that's a Duchenne smile.
02:22:50.000And then there's the fake smile when you're kind of smiling for the camera or something.
02:22:54.000Right, which is really disturbing to people.
02:23:30.000And we developed this signaling system to do it.
02:23:33.000I can tell if you're authentic or not by your eyes and everything else.
02:23:38.000But then if you can fake that, like if you can fake being trustworthy or being loyal and get all the benefits of that cooperation, but then as soon as the costs come for you, you're out of here, that would be great for you.
02:27:27.000When that person is doing great, it's actually good for you.
02:27:30.000When you're genuinely happy for your friends, it's actually mutually beneficial.
02:27:35.000You miss all that if you're this actor who's faking it.
02:27:40.000So when you're saying that they get all the benefit, I say they don't, because I say they're this sad, lonely person with all this financial success, but they don't have all the real success, which is camaraderie.
02:27:54.000Right, but you care about that, because you're a human and you're not your genes.
02:27:59.000So from a genes perspective, Just in terms of transmitting those genes?
02:28:03.000Transmitting those genes, producing a miserable psychopath who's never happy is fine.
02:28:24.000So the fact that I can tell at an instant...
02:28:29.000If you're interested in what I'm saying, if we're getting bored, if we need to stop soon, I can figure that out just from looking at your face.
02:28:37.000That would seem like magic to a chimpanzee.
02:28:42.000The way I can read your mind from facial expressions is amazing, and I'm actually not that good at it.
02:28:49.000But don't you think dogs have a little bit of that?
02:28:51.000Dogs have it too because they've co-evolved with humans.
02:28:53.000So they're constantly worried about human intentional states.
02:28:57.000And so part of my point in the book is we're the end products of this evolutionary arms race.
02:29:04.000Basically between sociopaths and normal people like us.
02:29:08.000We want to be able to pick out sociopaths.
02:29:10.000They want to be able to pass for normal people.
02:29:12.000So you've taken it down to this reductionist perspective where you're looking at, not saying you in your personal life, but looking at it as a scientist.
02:30:18.000They're willing to tolerate masturbation and they're willing to tolerate adoptive parents loving their kids as much as biological parents do.
02:32:11.000People think that once you get wealthy that you can kind of have that same childlike joy because you don't have any responsibilities anymore or you don't have any worries in terms of paying your bills.
02:33:01.000We have a very different relationship now.
02:33:03.000She's still a kid in some ways, but she is negotiating being an independent person and not being my kid anymore and having independent relationships.
02:33:13.000And I do kind of miss when she was five.
02:33:19.000And so that intense feeling of loving kids and kind of appreciating kids having fun, you can experience it as a human, but the power of thinking scientifically is you can also abstract from it and understand where it came from.
02:33:36.000And then that gives you some understanding of how it can go wrong in some people.
02:33:41.000What the barriers are to it in some people.
02:33:44.000So that's what in the book what I'm trying to do is let's say we like to drink.
02:33:50.000We like to hang out with friends and drink.
02:33:52.000Let's abstract away from that which we all know and think about scientifically why would we want to do that.
02:34:03.000And getting a scientific understanding of why we would want to do that then gives us the power to make better decisions because then we understand, you know, should we keep alcohol at public events, professional events?
02:34:17.000Maybe we should because, you know, within limits it has certain functions.
02:34:21.000So I think putting on evolutionary or scientific spectacles to look at human behavior is valuable.
02:34:31.000And I think we should strive to experience things that exist outside the common plane of existence, whatever they are.
02:34:38.000I think the common drone of, unfortunately, most people's lives in society, because of the fact that most people are Doing something that they probably wouldn't do if they weren't getting paid and they're stuck in traffic and they're on their way to an office where they have to deal with office politics and maybe they have a boss that's not so thankful and appreciative and they have colleagues
02:35:08.000they don't necessarily enjoy working with.
02:35:11.000There's all these things that exist that are this common plane, the common plane of existence.
02:35:16.000When you get hammered with some good friends, you jolt outside of that common plane and it gives you a little bit of perspective.
02:35:24.000And maybe you're sitting outside that bar and it's, you know, 2 o'clock in the morning, you go to get some pizza with your friends and you're sitting there eating and you go, you know what?
02:37:59.000And other people, maybe they only did it once in their life and then they hit and killed someone and their life is ruined.
02:38:05.000So there's all these ways in which we were also born into a certain society where we had certain benefits and privileges.
02:38:12.000So I think that understanding privilege and luck is important for being humble and realizing that you didn't just do it because you pulled yourself up by your bootstraps.
02:38:31.000That's a problem as well because then you get involved with grifters who want to punish you for luck.
02:38:38.000I think that you should be humble whenever possible and understand that you're extremely fortunate just to be alive in 2021, especially to be alive and to be living in North America, especially to be alive, to be living in what is essentially the 1% of the population on Earth if you make more than $34,000 a year.
02:38:59.000I mean, that's hard for people to wrap their heads around, but that's the real 1%.
02:39:03.000When people want to talk about the 1%, you make $34,000 a year, you are in America, where we are right now, you make more money than most of the people alive.
02:39:14.00099% of the people alive are doing worse off than you, which is really interesting, because people love to use that term, the 1%.
02:40:57.000And so a lot of the religious traditions of the world are focused on trying to get us out of that hamster wheel of always pursuing the next thing and learning how to actually just realize the value of what you have right now.
02:41:13.000Well, that is the thing that people always pose, the question people always pose about someone like a Bill Gates.
02:42:03.000But if you're living in a place where very few people have any money, but everyone has enough to eat, you'd be amazed at how happy everybody is.
02:42:12.000And the amount of stress that we take on in keeping up with the Joneses versus the amount of pleasure that you get from the actual benefit of the success, boy, if you could look at it on a graph, you'd probably be like, oh, this is terrible.
02:42:35.000It gets you, it breaks you, you're on a hamster wheel, and your PFC is keeping you on, your prefrontal cortex is keeping you on that hamster wheel.
02:42:44.000It's like, because it's about goal fulfillment, right?
02:43:32.000So that's what the job of these substances here, partly, I mean, it's got a lot of functions, but one function for individuals, I think, is helping to pop you off the hamster wheel for long enough that you get some perspective on...