The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1663 - Edward Slingerland

00:00:01.000 Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out!

00:00:04.000 The Joe Rogan Experience.

00:00:06.000 Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

00:00:14.000 So what possessed you to write a book about getting hammered?

00:00:19.000 That's a really good question.

00:00:21.000 Like, my colleagues are flabbergasted when they see the topic.

00:00:25.000 So my day job is early Chinese philosophy and I do comparative religion and then I'm writing this book on alcohol.

00:00:31.000 It actually grows organically out of work I've done before.

00:00:35.000 So my specialty is early Chinese philosophy.

00:00:39.000 My early work focused on this idea in early China of what I translated as effortless action.

00:00:45.000 The word is ui.

00:00:47.000 It literally means no doing or not trying, but it's a spontaneous, it's kind of like being in the zone in sports.

00:00:54.000 So 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.

00:01:03.000 You solve problems, people like you, everything works out.

00:01:07.000 And the early Chinese thinkers want to get you into this state of wui.

00:01:12.000 But they have this problem that I call the paradox of Wu Wei, which is how do you try not to try?

00:01:18.000 You want to be spontaneous.

00:01:20.000 You're not being spontaneous.

00:01:23.000 How 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.

00:01:34.000 And no one does it because it's a genuine paradox.

00:01:37.000 And so I revisit my first general audience book.

00:01:40.000 It's called Trying Not to Try, and it's about this tension.

00:01:43.000 And I walk people through the various strategies that the early Chinese came up with.

00:01:47.000 But 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.

00:01:59.000 Dan Wagner, the social psychologist, talked about what he called the white bear problem.

00:02:03.000 So 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.

00:02:09.000 If 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,

00:02:26.000 How do you be funny if you're not feeling funny?

00:02:29.000 How do you force yourself to do that?

00:02:31.000 And so this is a real tension, and that's what my previous work focused on.

00:02:36.000 But 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.

00:02:47.000 They kind of lose a sense of self.

00:02:49.000 They're relaxed.

00:02:50.000 They can bump into things and not harm themselves.

00:02:54.000 And it's clear that in that text it's just a metaphor for the spiritual state Zhuangzi wants you to get into.

00:02:59.000 But 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.

00:03:09.000 You want to be spontaneous.

00:03:11.000 You want to be relaxed.

00:03:12.000 You want to just be loose.

00:03:15.000 But thinking about it's not going to get you there.

00:03:18.000 Alcohol is a way to kind of directly reach into your brain and just turn down your prefrontal cortex a little bit so you can relax.

00:03:26.000 And so that's what started me thinking about alcohol as a cultural technology to enhance spontaneity.

00:03:33.000 And it has to be modulated correctly.

00:03:35.000 That's the thing about alcohol, right?

00:03:38.000 One 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.

00:03:46.000 Yeah, that's the problem.

00:03:47.000 That's why alcohol is super dangerous.

00:03:49.000 Especially that kind of alcohol, distilled liquor, is super dangerous.

00:03:52.000 Buffalo Trace.

00:03:53.000 I feel like we should have a drink.

00:03:54.000 I think we would be remiss.

00:03:56.000 We have to.

00:03:56.000 I think we're professionally obligated to drink.

00:03:59.000 We're doing a podcast.

00:04:00.000 That's nice.

00:04:01.000 If we're doing a podcast about drinking, it just makes sense.

00:04:03.000 We should have at least a small...

00:04:05.000 So historically, there's been a safety feature built into alcohol.

00:04:10.000 So for most...

00:04:11.000 We've been drinking...

00:04:12.000 Thank you.

00:04:12.000 Cheers.

00:04:13.000 Cheers, yeah.

00:04:16.000 Let's try this.

00:04:20.000 Ah!

00:04:21.000 Woo! 0.99

00:04:22.000 Yeah, that's nice.

00:04:23.000 I'll start your Monday morning.

00:04:24.000 I'll start your Monday.

00:04:25.000 There's a way to start a Monday morning, yeah.

00:04:28.000 So this stuff is new.

00:04:29.000 So having alcohol that's this strong is something we've only had for a couple hundred years.

00:04:34.000 Really?

00:04:35.000 Yeah, so a lot of people don't realize that.

00:04:37.000 So for most of our history, we've been drinking like 2% to 3% beers.

00:04:43.000 2% to 3%?

00:04:45.000 Yeah.

00:04:46.000 Historically, it's typically what beers came in at.

00:04:49.000 Grape wines, you could get up to like eight to ten.

00:04:52.000 But there's a built-in limit to natural fermentation.

00:04:55.000 So the yeast are turning sugars into alcohol, which is a poison.

00:05:00.000 So the yeast are slowly poisoning themselves, basically.

00:05:04.000 And we've bred these super hardy yeast.

00:05:07.000 So like nowadays you can get an Australian Syrah up to like 16% ABV. Wow.

00:05:13.000 Which is historically really unprecedented.

00:05:16.000 That's crazy.

00:05:16.000 But that's as high as you can get because then the alcohol shuts down the yeast.

00:05:20.000 Wow.

00:05:20.000 But a way around that is distillation.

00:05:22.000 So you take that wine, you heat it up.

00:05:26.000 Ethanol is really volatile, so that comes off first.

00:05:29.000 And if you could figure out how to capture that vapor and turn it back into a liquid, you've got this.

00:05:35.000 You've got really concentrated alcohol.

00:05:38.000 Do they do that with wine?

00:05:40.000 They do it with wine, or they'll take something that's naturally fermented, so a weak beer or wine, and then they distill it.

00:05:45.000 And what do they call that when they get it on the other end?

00:05:48.000 Distilled liquor.

00:05:49.000 That's what liquor is.

00:05:50.000 Oh, okay, so it's just a kind of liquor?

00:05:52.000 Yeah, so liquor or spirits refers to something that's been distilled.

00:05:56.000 So you've basically extracted the alcohol out of the mixture and made it into a pure form.

00:06:02.000 And once you do that, you've got like 90, you can get like some vodkas could be like 90-something percent ABV. So that's crazy strong.

00:06:11.000 It's just really – we're not equipped to – so what you're talking about, it needs to be modulated.

00:06:18.000 It was always modulated historically by the fact that we were drinking beers that weren't very strong.

00:06:23.000 So there's going to be just volume limit to how much you can consume.

00:06:29.000 Yeah.

00:06:46.000 And even, you know, you think about just even in a pub, you don't just drink as much as you want.

00:06:51.000 You order rounds.

00:06:52.000 And if you down your beer real fast, you've got to wait until everyone else is ready to order another round.

00:06:58.000 So we socially regulate our drinking, and then it's been regulated by its inherent weakness, if you want to think of it that way.

00:07:04.000 But then all of a sudden you get this kind of stuff.

00:07:07.000 You get really strong liquors and you can have that in your house.

00:07:11.000 That's when alcohol gets really dangerous.

00:07:13.000 And it's only been the last couple hundred years.

00:07:15.000 Yeah.

00:07:15.000 Distilled liquors weren't – because the concept's really simple.

00:07:19.000 Aristotle described distillation.

00:07:21.000 But technologically, it's really hard to do because you have to have metallurgy.

00:07:26.000 You need to be able to heat liquids and keep them at a certain temperature.

00:07:30.000 That makes sense.

00:07:31.000 They're pressurized.

00:07:33.000 So in Prohibition, when people created stills at home, it was like early 20th century version of meth labs.

00:07:40.000 They were constantly exploding and people were getting scalded with hot liquid because it's really dangerous.

00:07:45.000 So it's hard to do.

00:07:46.000 So we only mastered it...

00:07:48.000 I mean, I'm telling an evolutionary story.

00:07:50.000 So my story begins 10 million years ago with primate ancestors who adapted to alcohol.

00:07:56.000 And 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.

00:08:10.000 And then distillation happens probably around 1300s in China and 1500s, 1600s in Europe.

00:08:18.000 So that sounds like a long time ago, but really, evolutionarily, it's yesterday.

00:08:23.000 We really haven't had time, culturally or genetically, to adapt to access to this kind of alcohol.

00:08:30.000 And 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,

00:08:46.000 right?

00:08:48.000 Beer, unhopped beer, it goes bad pretty quickly.

00:08:51.000 Like a couple days, yeah.

00:08:54.000 There's a theory that beer might have been useful in some cultures because fermenting water purifies the water.

00:09:02.000 So if you've got bad water from a pond or something like that, then you ferment it and make beer out of it.

00:09:06.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:09:08.000 So that's one of the stories.

00:09:09.000 I mean, the purpose of my book is to try to explain the puzzle of why we do this.

00:09:14.000 Why do we put poisons into our body?

00:09:16.000 Why do we like to drink?

00:09:18.000 And it's mysterious because it's really costly.

00:09:21.000 It's damaging physiologically.

00:09:23.000 It's got all these potential social problems.

00:09:26.000 And yet we've been doing it forever.

00:09:28.000 We've been making and drinking alcohol for just about as long as we've been doing anything in an organized fashion.

00:09:35.000 In 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.

00:09:49.000 So hunter-gatherers were making beer before they had agriculture. 0.94

00:09:55.000 Really?

00:09:56.000 Yeah.

00:09:57.000 So they're making clay pots and...

00:10:00.000 Yeah, they're pounding the stuff.

00:10:03.000 They're malting it to up the sugar content.

00:10:05.000 I think that's the effect of that.

00:10:06.000 And then they're fermenting it.

00:10:08.000 And so we have these sites like in what's present-day Turkey, the site called Göbekli Tepe.

00:10:15.000 Is this really cool ritual site.

00:10:17.000 It's this huge stone.

00:10:19.000 Have you seen pictures of it?

00:10:21.000 Yeah, I'm super familiar with it because of Graham Hancock who's been on my podcast multiple times.

00:10:25.000 He'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.

00:10:40.000 So 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.

00:10:58.000 So, his theory, it's not really just his theory, it's the Younger Dryas Impact Theory.

00:11:05.000 Okay.

00:11:05.000 And 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,

00:11:24.000 they find what this stuff called...

00:11:28.000 It's called nuclear glass or tritonite.

00:11:31.000 And this stuff, it occurs at blast sites where they test nuclear weapons, but it also occurs at asteroid impact sites.

00:11:39.000 And they find it all over the place at around 12,000-ish years ago.

00:11:46.000 And 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.

00:11:58.000 And then we were hit.

00:11:59.000 And 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.

00:12:09.000 So is Gobekli Tepe the rebuilding period?

00:12:13.000 They don't know, right?

00:12:14.000 It's all speculation because Gobekli Tepe was for sure covered on purpose somewhere around 12,000 years ago.

00:12:22.000 But that doesn't indicate how long ago before then it was built.

00:12:25.000 But what they do know is it was made with some pretty sophisticated methods because a lot of the carvings were three-dimensional.

00:12:32.000 Instead of carved into the stone, the stone around it was carved away to leave.

00:12:38.000 And there's also animals in it that aren't even supposed to be from that part of the world.

00:12:42.000 They find that pretty fascinating.

00:12:43.000 I didn't know about that. 0.99

00:12:44.000 Yeah, there's some pretty cool shit to it. 0.96

00:12:45.000 And it's huge. 0.96

00:12:46.000 They've only uncovered, I think, like 10% of it so far.

00:12:48.000 It's a cool sight.

00:12:49.000 So the role it plays in my story is that they're hunter-gatherers, the people who built this place.

00:12:55.000 They used to think that, but they're not necessarily sure of that.

00:12:58.000 This is the theory that Graham Hancock is proposing.

00:13:01.000 He believes that civilization predates that.

00:13:04.000 So they were like, they had full-on agriculture and they were...

00:13:07.000 This is just completely theoretical and very disputed because you're dealing with...

00:13:14.000 It's so long ago.

00:13:15.000 It's hard.

00:13:16.000 What evidence is there?

00:13:17.000 This was always the evidence against something like Gobekli Tepe. 0.83

00:13:20.000 Where's the evidence of sophisticated structures 12,000 years ago?

00:13:24.000 And then finally, they found Gobekli Tepe.

00:13:26.000 So 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.

00:13:35.000 But 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.

00:13:53.000 There's like an old kingdom style and a lot of the old stuff is like deep under the sand when they're finding it.

00:13:59.000 And it's their position that a lot of this stuff is thousands of years older than the pyramids.

00:14:05.000 Okay.

00:14:05.000 So my understanding of the site is that- It's a hunter-gatherer site.

00:14:09.000 It was hunter-gatherers. 0.90

00:14:11.000 There's no grain storage locations.

00:14:14.000 They were clearly gathering.

00:14:15.000 They were coming from all over, and they were gathering at this site to build.

00:14:19.000 So they were working to erect these pillars and stuff.

00:14:23.000 And they were having blowout feasts.

00:14:25.000 So they have all these remnants of feasting.

00:14:27.000 And they have these big vats that almost certainly contained beer and possibly hallucinogen-laced beer.

00:14:35.000 So a lot of early people...

00:14:35.000 So these hunter-gatherers, they weren't growing the hops or whatever they made the beer out of.

00:14:40.000 They were just finding it wild?

00:14:41.000 They're making it out of wild grains.

00:14:43.000 But the argument...

00:14:44.000 So the standard story about alcohol is...

00:14:47.000 We invent agriculture.

00:14:49.000 Then 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.

00:14:57.000 That's the standard story.

00:14:59.000 So we had agriculture and then we get alcohol.

00:15:02.000 Around 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.

00:15:15.000 And so this is the beer before bread hypothesis.

00:15:18.000 That's crazy.

00:15:20.000 Is that what motivated people to settle down and start focusing on making these grains more productive was they wanted to get high.

00:15:27.000 Not because they wanted to make bread.

00:15:29.000 And you see the same pattern in other parts of the world.

00:15:33.000 So in South America, they make this beer-like substance, chicha.

00:15:39.000 Now they make it out of maize, out of corn.

00:15:42.000 But they used to make it out of the ancient, the wild ancestor of corn is called teosinte.

00:15:49.000 And what's interesting is teosinte sucks for making grain.

00:15:53.000 Like 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.

00:16:02.000 But it makes great beer.

00:16:03.000 It's really good for making chicha.

00:16:05.000 So this plant, if these early people were looking for something to make food with, they would overlook this plant.

00:16:12.000 But 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.

00:16:20.000 Do we know what the original thing that they got high with was?

00:16:25.000 Do we have like the first, the atom?

00:16:30.000 Yeah.

00:16:32.000 I mean, certainly we're getting a little bit drunk on just naturally fermenting fruit.

00:16:37.000 So if fruit falls on the ground, it starts to rot.

00:16:40.000 What the rotting is, is some of it's being turned into alcohol by yeast.

00:16:44.000 And so it's easy to discover alcohol because it's happening naturally in our environment all the time.

00:16:49.000 The earliest evidence of deliberately produced alcohol is from about 13,000 years ago, so a little bit before Kopecle Tepe.

00:16:58.000 And this is in modern-day Israel.

00:17:01.000 They have traces of beer production, so people were clearly fermenting beer.

00:17:06.000 Are you aware of Brian Murorescu's work?

00:17:09.000 No.

00:17:10.000 He wrote a book called The Immortality Key and it's all about ancient Greece and the Eleusinian mysteries.

00:17:15.000 Okay.

00:17:16.000 And he has proven through examination of these vessels that they used to carry their wine in That the wine was laced with ergot.

00:17:27.000 Yeah, yeah. 0.95

00:17:28.000 So they were tripping balls. 0.96

00:17:30.000 I have heard about this theory, yeah. 0.96

00:17:31.000 They were adding psychedelic compounds to their wine.

00:17:35.000 So they were doing these things where they would have these ceremonies where everybody would get together and they would...

00:17:41.000 I mean, and this is where they figured out democracy.

00:17:44.000 They solved a lot of the world's problems.

00:17:45.000 You get a lot of new ideas when you're doing hallucinogens.

00:17:48.000 That's very common.

00:17:49.000 So in Europe, a lot of the beers were clearly mixed with hallucinogens.

00:17:53.000 Yeah, he talks about beer as well.

00:17:55.000 And 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.

00:18:07.000 It's a carving of a human dancing with these two dancing turtles.

00:18:14.000 Wow.

00:18:14.000 And it's hard to imagine seeing that on 2% to 3% near beer.

00:18:21.000 There's got to be something else going on.

00:18:23.000 Right, right.

00:18:23.000 And so I think it's likely that they were lacing their beer with hallucinogens.

00:18:27.000 It's really a common thing to do.

00:18:28.000 Well, they were all probably eating mushrooms too, right?

00:18:31.000 They were possibly eating mushrooms as well, yeah.

00:18:35.000 Why turtles?

00:18:36.000 I wonder why turtles?

00:18:36.000 Is that like that?

00:18:37.000 Look at this.

00:18:38.000 Oh yeah, there it is.

00:18:39.000 Yeah, that's great.

00:18:40.000 Yeah.

00:18:40.000 Dude's dancing with turtles.

00:18:41.000 So does that look like people on two to three percent beer?

00:18:44.000 It doesn't...

00:18:45.000 That looks like something my kid would make when she was four.

00:18:48.000 Okay.

00:18:49.000 Also, I mean, what intoxicants are doing to you is returning you to a state of a four-year-old.

00:18:55.000 Interesting.

00:18:56.000 Do we know how old this is?

00:18:59.000 That's around, I think, 12,000 years ago.

00:19:03.000 Now, when did they, you know, what's that wacky theory that the Earth is suspended by turtles?

00:19:10.000 It's turtles all the way down.

00:19:11.000 Yeah, it's on the back of turtles all the way down, yeah.

00:19:13.000 I don't know if they had a mythology like that.

00:19:15.000 So, yeah, that's interesting.

00:19:16.000 Like, go back and look at, right there.

00:19:18.000 Scroll down, Jamie?

00:19:20.000 Down?

00:19:21.000 No, no, no.

00:19:23.000 Either way.

00:19:23.000 Yeah.

00:19:24.000 That image off the, with the cat?

00:19:27.000 Yeah.

00:19:28.000 Yeah, right there.

00:19:29.000 That'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.

00:19:40.000 That's super sophisticated stuff for 12,000 years ago.

00:19:43.000 Yeah.

00:19:44.000 So my argument is this is why people settled down originally.

00:19:48.000 I mean, so civilization comes from intoxication.

00:19:52.000 Hunter-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. 0.92

00:20:06.000 I guess that makes sense if you think about their everyday existence being very difficult, right?

00:20:12.000 You'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?

00:20:25.000 Well, so it's doing a lot of different things for you.

00:20:28.000 It's helping with creativity.

00:20:30.000 So 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.

00:20:45.000 And she's got this great task where you have to figure out this really counterintuitive problem. 0.93

00:20:52.000 And she's got a graph that I reproduce in the book of how people do on it as they age.

00:20:58.000 And so four-year-olds are awesome at it.

00:21:00.000 They solve it right away.

00:21:01.000 And it just goes down in a line until adults are really bad at it.

00:21:05.000 And what I do in the book is lay that on top of a chart showing the development of the prefrontal cortex.

00:21:12.000 So this part of your brain, the prefrontal cortex, is really important.

00:21:17.000 It's in charge of self-control, cognitive control, executive function.

00:21:22.000 It's what allows you to stay focused on a task.

00:21:24.000 It's what allows you to not meander in a conversation and actually stay focused on what you're talking about.

00:21:30.000 But it's an enemy of creativity, for one thing.

00:21:33.000 So it seems to interfere with your ability to think out of the box or think laterally.

00:21:38.000 Doesn't this also coincide, though, with responsibilities in life?

00:21:41.000 Yeah.

00:21:42.000 The timeline?

00:21:43.000 Well, in a way, it's the other way around.

00:21:45.000 So you get more responsibilities because you can handle them because you actually have a prefrontal cortex.

00:21:49.000 But is that really what's going on or is it just that you actually have a family and you have to feed them?

00:21:55.000 And then you have these primal responsibilities that sort of rise up that force you to think much more pragmatically.

00:22:02.000 I mean, what came first?

00:22:03.000 The chicken or the egg, right?

00:22:04.000 I think they're happening.

00:22:06.000 They're co-happening.

00:22:07.000 So it's developing the way it's developing because evolution has a problem it needs to solve.

00:22:14.000 The prefrontal cortex is the enemy of spontaneity.

00:22:19.000 It's the enemy of creativity.

00:22:21.000 It's the enemy of kind of childlike trust.

00:22:24.000 You see kids just walk up to a stranger in the airport and be like, hey, do you want to meet my stuffed animal?

00:22:29.000 Kids are just open, right?

00:22:33.000 That's a good trait for some things.

00:22:37.000 Right.

00:22:58.000 And that allows us to be open, to make ties to other people, to learn from our culture, to learn language.

00:23:03.000 We have all these skills we need to learn.

00:23:05.000 And 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.

00:23:17.000 And so it seems like a good solution for evolution to do that.

00:23:21.000 The problem is, once you've got that fully developed PFC, you've lost a lot of these childlike traits.

00:23:28.000 So you've lost your ability to trust people implicitly.

00:23:32.000 You've lost your ability to be creative, as Gopnik's work shows.

00:23:37.000 And 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.

00:23:45.000 But you had a way to temporarily be like a child again for a few hours.

00:23:52.000 And this is how you do it, right?

00:23:55.000 It'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.

00:24:04.000 That explains comedians.

00:24:05.000 That explains comedians.

00:24:06.000 Yeah.

00:24:07.000 I mean, it's got to be the case.

00:24:09.000 You must use alcohol in writing.

00:24:11.000 Yeah, I like a little bit of alcohol and a little bit of marijuana mixed together.

00:24:15.000 It's good for writing.

00:24:16.000 It's also good for performing. 1.00

00:24:18.000 It's like, don't give a fuck sauce. 1.00

00:24:21.000 Yeah, yeah. 1.00

00:24:21.000 You just go out there and be loose. 1.00

00:24:23.000 So you do that before you go out?

00:24:24.000 Yeah, I like to have a shot and smoke a little weed.

00:24:27.000 Yeah.

00:24:28.000 Yeah.

00:24:28.000 The 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.

00:24:37.000 It just scared the shit out of me.

00:24:39.000 And I was a waiter.

00:24:41.000 I 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.

00:24:50.000 I'm really nervous about it.

00:24:51.000 And he was like, dude, bring a flask and do a shot before you go out there.

00:24:55.000 And I was like, well, it's 1030 in the morning.

00:24:58.000 It doesn't matter.

00:24:59.000 Just do it.

00:25:00.000 And I'm dating myself here.

00:25:02.000 You're old enough to remember this.

00:25:04.000 Remember with film photography, you had those little plastic things you put film in?

00:25:08.000 I filled one of those with vodka and put it in my backpack.

00:25:11.000 And right before I went out, I did a shot of vodka.

00:25:14.000 And just as I was starting the lecture, that's the hardest part.

00:25:19.000 Like 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.

00:25:28.000 That's usually when you choke and freeze up.

00:25:30.000 But right around that time, the vodka was hitting my brain and I was like, this kind of mellow relaxation was spreading through my body.

00:25:38.000 And it got me through that initial nervousness.

00:25:43.000 Until, you know, by the time it started to wear off, I was into my lecture.

00:25:46.000 I knew the material.

00:25:47.000 It was just getting over that hump.

00:25:50.000 And so people use alcohol in this way, right?

00:25:52.000 To get over stage fright, to get over...

00:25:55.000 This is why people have drinks on first dates, right?

00:25:58.000 You know, you're meeting someone, it's a little awkward.

00:26:01.000 You want to be relaxed and funny, but how do you try to be relaxed and funny?

00:26:06.000 Yeah.

00:26:08.000 A couple drinks helps with that, right?

00:26:10.000 It relaxes, turns down the prefrontal cortex.

00:26:13.000 Alcohol is doing a lot of things at the same time.

00:26:15.000 It's turning down your prefrontal cortex.

00:26:17.000 It's making you feel better, so it's boosting serotonin and endorphins.

00:26:22.000 It's making you feel...

00:26:24.000 People who are drunk think they're more attractive, and they see other people as more attractive.

00:26:30.000 So the beer goggles thing is true.

00:26:33.000 You actually rate other people as more attractive when you're a little bit drunk.

00:26:37.000 You're feeling connected with them.

00:26:39.000 So 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.

00:26:50.000 So it's a tool for getting...

00:26:53.000 We're primates, right?

00:26:58.000 We're—our nature is to be kind of selfish and suspicious and hostile.

00:27:04.000 Like, 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.

00:27:16.000 We would tear each other apart.

00:27:19.000 But humans solve this problem all the time.

00:27:22.000 I sat on an airplane coming here with a whole bunch of other people.

00:27:25.000 We all sat in our seats, behaved ourselves.

00:27:28.000 Must not have been a Southwest flight.

00:27:29.000 It wasn't a Southwest flight.

00:27:30.000 Yeah, it wasn't.

00:27:31.000 Thank God.

00:27:34.000 How do you get primates?

00:27:35.000 So the way we cooperate in large-scale societies, we look more like social insects.

00:27:40.000 We look more like kind of ants or bees.

00:27:43.000 And yet we're not ants or bees.

00:27:45.000 We're primates.

00:27:46.000 And so there's this trick of getting primates to cooperate in this ultra-cooperative way.

00:27:53.000 And the argument in the book is alcohol is one of the tools we've used to do that.

00:27:57.000 What do you say about sober people that are also very cooperative?

00:28:02.000 What techniques are they using if they're not using alcohol?

00:28:05.000 There's a lot of ways you can get into these kind of states.

00:28:09.000 So you can use exercise.

00:28:12.000 You can use meditation.

00:28:13.000 Meditation can do it.

00:28:15.000 You can use breathing exercises, right?

00:28:17.000 You can do extreme breathing.

00:28:20.000 You can stay up all night.

00:28:21.000 So religious traditions that, for various reasons, decide they don't want to use chemical intoxicants usually substitute some other way to do it.

00:28:30.000 I like that you said stay up all night because I used to be on this sitcom called News Radio and The Writers...

00:28:36.000 They had that strategy.

00:28:38.000 It was an amazing show because the writing was so good, but the way they wrote it was so nuts.

00:28:44.000 They 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.

00:28:55.000 Yeah, that's crazy.

00:28:56.000 So 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.

00:29:06.000 And we're like, what are you guys doing? 0.89

00:29:08.000 They were all fucked up and their hair was a mess and they were barefoot. 0.99

00:29:12.000 They were animals. 1.00

00:29:13.000 But it was a strategy. 1.00

00:29:15.000 The strategy was to get overtired and really, really silly. 0.92

00:29:18.000 And then they would come up with some of the most preposterous scenarios for... 0.72

00:29:23.000 And oddly enough, they weren't getting high.

00:29:25.000 These people were getting high that way.

00:29:28.000 Yeah, no, you can do it through sleep deprivation.

00:29:30.000 That's literally how they did it on purpose, which I'd never heard of before.

00:29:34.000 But 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.

00:29:43.000 We just laugh at anything.

00:29:44.000 Yeah. 0.99

00:29:45.000 And you don't give a shit anymore. 0.99

00:29:46.000 And that's the PFC being shut off playground monitor. 0.99

00:29:51.000 Right, right.

00:29:52.000 Playground monitor.

00:29:53.000 Interesting.

00:29:54.000 Yeah, you want to get rid of that playground monitor if you want certain types of things to happen.

00:29:59.000 Exercise, 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?

00:30:07.000 Yeah, 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.

00:30:16.000 Prefrontal cortex is a really expensive organ.

00:30:18.000 It's sucking up a lot of energy from your body.

00:30:21.000 And so at a certain point you're like, we don't need the prefrontal cortex anymore.

00:30:25.000 So it gets turned down by your body because you need to send it to your lungs and your heart and your muscles.

00:30:30.000 So how do we know how much energy it's using specifically?

00:30:34.000 You can look at kind of fMRI studies.

00:30:37.000 You 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?

00:30:48.000 Oh, so they've done fMRIs on people that are really tired and loopy and you can see it shut off?

00:30:53.000 Yeah, so that's interesting.

00:30:54.000 I'm trying to think, the guy who's done work on runner's high is called Arne Dietrich.

00:30:59.000 And 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.

00:31:08.000 But he talks about what he calls hypofrontality.

00:31:11.000 So it's a state where your prefrontal cortex is shutting down in response to physiological stress.

00:31:16.000 And I don't remember now how he was getting that measurement.

00:31:19.000 Me and my friends a few years back did this.

00:31:22.000 We do this thing every year.

00:31:23.000 We do Sober October, so the whole month of October we don't do anything.

00:31:27.000 No drinking, no boozing.

00:31:28.000 No drugs at all.

00:31:30.000 We're allowed to smoke cigars, though, which me and Ari both agree is kind of cheating.

00:31:34.000 It's kind of cheating, yeah.

00:31:35.000 It's kind of cheating, but not enough that it's- Can you drink caffeine?

00:31:38.000 Yes, you're allowed to drink coffee.

00:31:39.000 All right. 1.00

00:31:40.000 You just can't get fucked up. 1.00

00:31:42.000 All right. 0.99

00:31:42.000 Which, as a comedian- Yeah, that's hard. 0.99

00:31:44.000 Well, it's normal.

00:31:45.000 It's not hard.

00:31:47.000 But here's the point.

00:31:48.000 One year, we had a fitness challenge, and when we had this fitness challenge, we were using this thing called MyZone.

00:31:54.000 It's a heart strap that works with an app, and it measures how much time you are in what percentage of your max heart rate.

00:32:04.000 How much time you are at 80% max heart rate.

00:32:07.000 It puts you in the yellow zone and then you rack up points for every minute that you're in this state.

00:32:14.000 And we did this competition where we were competing against each other. 0.97

00:32:18.000 So I would wake up in the morning and I'd be like, shit, Ari got 600 points last night. 1.00

00:32:23.000 And oh my god, Burt got 600 points too. 0.99

00:32:25.000 That must be really motivating.

00:32:26.000 Yeah, it was crazy.

00:32:26.000 So we were just like all day, like one day I did seven hours of cardio in a day.

00:32:31.000 It was crazy.

00:32:32.000 That's crazy.

00:32:32.000 Yeah, I just decided to just bury everybody.

00:32:35.000 I watched all these movies. 0.99

00:32:37.000 But 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. 0.99

00:32:47.000 You're so relaxed and calm and and my friend Tom Segura was saying the same thing. 0.96

00:32:51.000 He's like, man, it cuts all the chatter down when you do that.

00:32:55.000 Yeah, you want to get rid of the chatter.

00:32:56.000 But 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?

00:33:07.000 It's for like is your brain Like, are you occupying your mind with nonsensical concerns and worries and anxiety?

00:33:17.000 Is that a function of the fact that you don't have enough real threat and real struggle in your life? 0.99

00:33:24.000 And 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. 0.98

00:33:37.000 Like monitoring you. 0.98

00:33:38.000 It doesn't want to monitor you anymore.

00:33:39.000 Yeah, you're not worrying about an email that you sent.

00:33:42.000 Was that the wrong tone?

00:33:43.000 You know what I mean?

00:33:44.000 Did that person at the store?

00:33:47.000 Dude, if I don't work out for a few days, I second-guess everything that I do.

00:33:51.000 I get crazy, too.

00:33:53.000 I wrestled in high school and just got in the habit of weightlifting as a wrestler.

00:33:59.000 And if I don't do it, I get really weird.

00:34:02.000 I get really cranky.

00:34:04.000 And it's true, I start thinking too much.

00:34:05.000 Yeah. 0.98

00:34:06.000 And I get the same, if I do a really good workout, I get that feeling of kind of not giving a fuck. 0.94

00:34:14.000 100%. 0.97

00:34:14.000 That's really relaxing. 0.97

00:34:17.000 I wrestled in high school as well, but only one season.

00:34:19.000 But what I did do for many years is jujitsu.

00:34:21.000 And still do.

00:34:22.000 And jujitsu gives me that feeling.

00:34:25.000 When I'm done with a hard jujitsu session, first of all, I am so friendly.

00:34:30.000 You're a super nice guy.

00:34:31.000 I'm the friendliest person.

00:34:32.000 I'm so friendly when I'm done jujitsu.

00:34:34.000 And you love people, right?

00:34:34.000 I love everybody.

00:34:35.000 I want to hug everybody.

00:34:36.000 I don't have any aggression in me.

00:34:38.000 And I wonder if it's the human...

00:34:41.000 This is my theory, and obviously I haven't studied this, so these are just guesses, but without really understanding the whole neuroscience behind it.

00:34:49.000 I've always felt like that the human body has certain physical requirements and we don't meet those physical requirements.

00:34:56.000 Your body starts coming up with problems that don't really exist.

00:35:00.000 So it's like if you don't have problems in your life, your body creates those problems for you.

00:35:07.000 So the way I always like to point it out to people is like I make my own problems.

00:35:12.000 Yeah.

00:35:12.000 You stress your body.

00:35:14.000 Yeah, they're not real.

00:35:15.000 But like if I... One of the things I like to do is hit a bag, like hit a heavy bag, and I have one of them electronic timers.

00:35:25.000 It syncs up with your phone, and I set it for like 15 three-minute rounds.

00:35:29.000 Oh, I use that for sprinting.

00:35:32.000 Yeah, so I do sprinting.

00:35:34.000 Like I do like really intense sprinting.

00:35:36.000 I hate running.

00:35:37.000 Like long-distance running is boring as hell, but sprinting is awesome.

00:35:41.000 Wrong distance running is boring as hell, but if you can do cardio in front of a TV, this is the secret.

00:35:48.000 Ari Shaffir figured this out when we were doing the Sober October thing.

00:35:51.000 He's like, watch movies.

00:35:53.000 You watch movies, and two hours is gone before you know it, if it's a really good movie.

00:35:58.000 Especially 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.

00:36:07.000 But you get the same effect by sprinting really hard for, like, 20 minutes.

00:36:10.000 Oh, yeah, no, for sure.

00:36:11.000 And I'd rather just do that.

00:36:13.000 Oh, yeah.

00:36:13.000 Listen, I'm a big fan of Tabatas.

00:36:16.000 Yeah, that's what I use.

00:36:17.000 That's what I use.

00:36:17.000 I love those.

00:36:18.000 Those are great.

00:36:19.000 That's a great way to build real, usable cardio, too.

00:36:22.000 I mean, it's amazing.

00:36:24.000 But the point about distracting the mind with something else while you're doing it makes...

00:36:30.000 That's what music does, right?

00:36:31.000 If you hear a great song while you're running, I swear you can run faster.

00:36:34.000 Oh, no, absolutely.

00:36:35.000 I have special music that I actually only use it for a workout because I don't want to fuck it up.

00:36:40.000 You don't want to waste it, right?

00:36:41.000 Because if you listen to it and you're not working out, you get used to it and it's kind of not as...

00:36:45.000 So I save it.

00:36:46.000 I have special music that I only allow myself to listen to when I'm working out.

00:36:50.000 Yeah.

00:36:51.000 Well, I'm lucky that I have a lot of music like that.

00:36:53.000 I don't have to worry about wearing it out.

00:36:55.000 Running out of it.

00:36:56.000 Yeah, there's some songs like Ozzy Osbourne, like Crazy Train.

00:37:01.000 Crazy Train.

00:37:01.000 There's something about that song.

00:37:03.000 And any Wu-Tang Clan song.

00:37:05.000 There's something about that.

00:37:06.000 So music's doing that too, right?

00:37:07.000 It's taking you...

00:37:08.000 So there's a Greek term.

00:37:10.000 So the word ecstasy comes from Greek ekstasis, getting out of yourself.

00:37:16.000 And there's something, humans crave it.

00:37:19.000 Humans 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.

00:37:32.000 And it's beyond the just functional...

00:37:35.000 So I'm arguing in the book that intoxication has all these social functions.

00:37:38.000 So it makes us more creative.

00:37:40.000 It makes us more trusting.

00:37:42.000 Helps us to solve these cooperation dilemmas, which is why people who...

00:37:46.000 I want to make a treaty with you or I want to sign a business deal.

00:37:51.000 I'm not going to just talk to you on the phone.

00:37:53.000 I'm going to come to where you are in person and we're going to drink.

00:37:56.000 And only then am I going to trust you.

00:37:58.000 So people use alcohol that way.

00:38:01.000 But there are lots of other ways to do it.

00:38:03.000 And you can use music, you can use dance.

00:38:06.000 But you're talking about the treadmill, do a treadmill for 12 hours.

00:38:09.000 That works.

00:38:11.000 Staying up, religious traditions that have you stay up all night dancing and singing hymns, that's another way to do it.

00:38:18.000 But you could also just sit in a really comfortable chair and drink this.

00:38:22.000 And so there's a reason people use alcohol because it's just a hassle doing it other ways.

00:38:27.000 And so there's something to this chemical path that's always been appealing for people.

00:38:33.000 Terence McKenna had a great story that he would tell about this monk who practiced a city of levitation for decades.

00:38:43.000 So you know what that is?

00:38:44.000 No.

00:38:47.000 Like a meditation, like he was concentrating on levitating.

00:38:50.000 And so he practiced this for decades.

00:38:52.000 And then the Buddha came to town and he said, I have practiced a city of levitation and now I can walk on water.

00:38:59.000 And the Buddha says, yeah, but the ferry is only a nickel.

00:39:02.000 Exactly.

00:39:03.000 Yeah, there you go.

00:39:04.000 And they serve beer on the ferry. 0.99

00:39:05.000 So why don't you just fucking do that? 0.99

00:39:07.000 That has always been the argument about enlightenment. 0.99

00:39:10.000 Can you achieve enlightenment through meditation and all these different things?

00:39:14.000 Yes.

00:39:15.000 Well, whatever enlightenment means.

00:39:17.000 You can achieve a state of elevated consciousness.

00:39:19.000 Let's put it that way.

00:39:20.000 Because the term enlightenment to me, it always sounds like you're done.

00:39:26.000 I don't think you're done.

00:39:28.000 No, you're not done.

00:39:28.000 But you can get into an altered state.

00:39:31.000 Yeah.

00:39:32.000 Through meditation.

00:39:33.000 An elevated level of consciousness.

00:39:35.000 That can be achieved.

00:39:37.000 But there's ways to help that along.

00:39:40.000 And you can help that along.

00:39:43.000 There's stuff that people figured out.

00:39:45.000 You know, it's like...

00:39:46.000 You don't have to chop a tree with a knife.

00:39:48.000 They figure out axes and saws. 1.00

00:39:50.000 And the reason why is because they're like, hey, something's got to be better than this fucking knife. 0.99

00:39:54.000 This tree's huge. 0.99

00:39:54.000 I've been working on it for a month. 0.99

00:39:56.000 And so you mix in a little bit of alcohol to a lot of these other things and they work better.

00:40:01.000 So religious traditions use intoxicants.

00:40:04.000 They're doing the dancing and the singing and all that stuff.

00:40:07.000 They're moving in synchrony.

00:40:08.000 They're chanting.

00:40:09.000 All that's great.

00:40:10.000 But they're also slowly turning down the prefrontal cortex with chemicals.

00:40:14.000 Yeah.

00:40:15.000 And it's interesting.

00:40:16.000 I 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.

00:40:26.000 Where do you think that comes from?

00:40:29.000 I don't know.

00:40:30.000 It's this weird kind of distrust of pleasure that baffles me.

00:40:36.000 I have a theory on that.

00:40:37.000 What's your theory?

00:40:38.000 I think it comes from the idea that some people are not going to chip in and do the work that needs to be done.

00:40:44.000 Because if you're in a tribe of 150 people or so, everyone has a crucial role. 0.92

00:40:50.000 And 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. 0.92

00:41:02.000 So 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. 0.99

00:41:18.000 You're not going to be as productive.

00:41:19.000 Yeah.

00:41:20.000 It's also, I mean, drinking, getting intoxicated alone is historically really weird.

00:41:25.000 We've never done that.

00:41:26.000 We always do it in groups.

00:41:27.000 It's a George Thorogood song.

00:41:28.000 Yeah, I know.

00:41:29.000 Well, that's the reason that's so effective is because it's weird, right?

00:41:31.000 So I drink alone.

00:41:33.000 This is the guy who also wrote Bad to the Bone.

00:41:35.000 If you drink alone, there's something a little bit off about you.

00:41:39.000 Nobody else.

00:41:40.000 Nobody else, right?

00:41:41.000 It's weird.

00:41:42.000 People are suspicious of that.

00:41:43.000 Cultures are suspicious of people who drink alone.

00:41:45.000 So we always do it in company with others.

00:41:48.000 Part of the reason we're suspicious of pleasure is mind-body dualism.

00:41:56.000 We 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,

00:42:13.000 everyone's like, that's awesome.

00:42:14.000 That's a wonderful thing to do.

00:42:16.000 Even if I do it through exercise, I feel like there's a sense that, okay, that's all right.

00:42:20.000 But there's something about using...

00:42:22.000 I think we have a feeling that using a chemical to directly change your brain is cheating.

00:42:31.000 Eliade 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.

00:42:46.000 I think? 0.76

00:43:06.000 Well, it's kind of a foolish notion, right? 0.70

00:43:09.000 Because everything is chemical. 0.90

00:43:11.000 Everything is chemical.

00:43:11.000 All your food is essentially in some way or form.

00:43:16.000 It's broken down to chemicals or it's coming in as chemicals.

00:43:19.000 Yeah.

00:43:20.000 It's not turtles all the way down.

00:43:21.000 It's chemicals all the way down.

00:43:23.000 Your body's a chemical factory.

00:43:24.000 Yeah.

00:43:24.000 And that's the crazy thing about music, right?

00:43:27.000 Like a great song.

00:43:28.000 You know, you hear Ozzy Osbourne.

00:43:31.000 Like, if that's your jam, like, you're...

00:43:34.000 Your adrenaline rises.

00:43:35.000 Yeah.

00:43:36.000 Right?

00:43:36.000 You get goosebumps.

00:43:37.000 Sometimes you hear a song when you're on the radio and you're like, yeah!

00:43:40.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:43:41.000 Not the radio. 0.99

00:43:42.000 Who the fuck listens to this? 1.00

00:43:43.000 Who listens to this? 1.00

00:43:44.000 Jamie White.

00:43:45.000 Jamie White.

00:43:46.000 Only a.m.

00:43:47.000 Only a.m.

00:43:48.000 political talk.

00:43:49.000 But that's all physical, right?

00:43:51.000 So there's sound waves that are being transmitted into your ear.

00:43:55.000 That's making something vibrate.

00:43:56.000 It's a drug.

00:43:57.000 So it's all drugs.

00:43:59.000 Great music is a drug.

00:43:59.000 It's all drugs.

00:44:00.000 And so I have a quote from Aldous Huxley where he's talking about this prejudice.

00:44:05.000 And he said, people look down at chemical means of attaining ecstasy, but it's chemicals all the way down.

00:44:14.000 It's all chemicals.

00:44:15.000 And so whether you do it through meditation or meditation, You know, breathing exercises or whatever, it's all physical.

00:44:22.000 I 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.

00:44:35.000 It's one of the good things about alcohol, like we've had a drink, right?

00:44:38.000 We had a drink, now we have a second drink.

00:44:40.000 Now we have a second drink.

00:44:40.000 And we both know what that means.

00:44:42.000 We're pacing ourselves, right?

00:44:43.000 Yeah, we're pacing ourselves.

00:44:45.000 Right now we're doing it.

00:44:46.000 But we both know how much that is.

00:44:50.000 Like, a drink of whiskey is, you know, okay, that's one shot, and this- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:44:55.000 I know exactly.

00:44:56.000 We're modulating correctly.

00:44:58.000 And the thing about recognizing the correct dosages for all these different things is we have a roadmap.

00:45:09.000 And that's one of the problems with the illegality of certain drugs.

00:45:15.000 It's always been a really big problem in Los Angeles with marijuana because it's the Wild West there.

00:45:22.000 You never know what you're getting.

00:45:23.000 Right.

00:45:24.000 Especially with edibles.

00:45:25.000 Yeah.

00:45:26.000 Oh, edibles are bad.

00:45:27.000 So one of my arguments in the book is that I call alcohol the king of intoxicants.

00:45:32.000 So there are other ways you could do it.

00:45:33.000 You could do it with cannabis.

00:45:34.000 You can do it with cava, which is this intoxicated drink they drink in the Pacific.

00:45:39.000 What's special about alcohol is that it's easy to dose.

00:45:43.000 Like you're saying, so it's easy to dose.

00:45:45.000 You know how much you're getting.

00:45:47.000 The cognitive effects are similar across individuals.

00:45:51.000 So it does kind of the same thing to different people.

00:45:54.000 Whereas cannabis is really, like, I can't, I've been, my whole life, you know, I spent my 20s in San Francisco and everyone smoking pot.

00:46:03.000 When I smoke cannabis, I get briefly really paranoid, and then I get horny for about two minutes.

00:46:14.000 And then I fall asleep.

00:46:15.000 Catch it in two minutes?

00:46:17.000 If you catch me in those two minutes, I have a great time.

00:46:19.000 But that's it.

00:46:20.000 And then I fall asleep.

00:46:21.000 All I want to do is go to sleep.

00:46:23.000 And everyone's been like, oh, you haven't had sativa.

00:46:26.000 You haven't had the right strain. 1.00

00:46:27.000 It's bullshit. 1.00

00:46:28.000 Every strain of cannabis affects me that way. 1.00

00:46:31.000 Well, I definitely think there's biodiversity in terms of the way your body responds to cannabis.

00:46:36.000 I've seen it.

00:46:37.000 And 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.

00:46:48.000 But I had him on with this guy, Mike Hart, who is a doctor from Canada who prescribed cannabis.

00:46:55.000 And Alex's take on it was, by just pretending that cannabis does no harm, it doesn't do anybody any good.

00:47:04.000 Because some people have schizophrenic breaks while they're on cannabis.

00:47:08.000 And 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.

00:47:18.000 I 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.

00:47:28.000 That's real.

00:47:29.000 I have a friend who recently had a kind of breakdown psychotic.

00:47:33.000 Yeah, it's real.

00:47:34.000 One theory is he was just smoking too much pot.

00:47:37.000 And this is coming from a person who loves pot.

00:47:39.000 I'm a pot enthusiast, but I also have a lot of willpower.

00:47:43.000 I'm really good at not doing something and stopping it.

00:47:47.000 Or if I thought that I was fucking up my life with pot, I would just hit the brakes.

00:47:51.000 If I started not blowing off podcasts or canceling things and just sleeping and watching TV or something.

00:47:59.000 Or drinking during work.

00:48:00.000 This is okay for my job.

00:48:02.000 Well, my job, it actually enhances our conversation, which leads to your book, right?

00:48:07.000 But this guy, Alex Berenson, he's like a lot of people resisted that.

00:48:12.000 And I was like, no, I think he's right.

00:48:14.000 I think he's right.

00:48:15.000 And 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.

00:48:26.000 I'm a big fan of peanuts.

00:48:28.000 Some people, peanuts kills them.

00:48:30.000 Right?

00:48:31.000 That's not me.

00:48:32.000 But that doesn't mean that peanuts should be illegal. 0.98

00:48:36.000 We should understand what the fuck is going on. 0.98

00:48:38.000 And the only way we understand what the fuck is going on is if we're honest about it. 0.99

00:48:41.000 And I think we have to be honest about the effects of cannabis because they're different with everybody else. 0.97

00:48:46.000 With everybody, rather.

00:48:48.000 With different people.

00:48:49.000 And for me, I'm okay with it.

00:48:50.000 It doesn't bother me.

00:48:51.000 So what's the effect on you?

00:48:53.000 What is it?

00:48:54.000 Well, it depends on what I'm doing, right?

00:48:55.000 It depends on if it's before bedtime.

00:49:00.000 But I don't like it before bedtime, because then I don't go to sleep.

00:49:03.000 See, that's bizarre to me.

00:49:05.000 I'm a thinker.

00:49:05.000 The only thing it's good for is to make me go to sleep.

00:49:08.000 For me, when I'm high, I'm a thinker.

00:49:10.000 I'm not a sleeper high.

00:49:12.000 I'm a thinker high.

00:49:13.000 I just go to sleep.

00:49:15.000 I'm a good sleeper. 1.00

00:49:16.000 I could go to sleep at a fucking train station. 1.00

00:49:18.000 I could just lay down on the ground. 1.00

00:49:19.000 I hate people like you. 0.99

00:49:19.000 I'm always tired. 0.99

00:49:21.000 You're always working out.

00:49:22.000 Yeah, I'm always working out.

00:49:23.000 I'm always tired.

00:49:24.000 And I do like a little bit of meditation.

00:49:27.000 But what I really like before sleeping is sauna.

00:49:30.000 I like to go in the sauna and get wrecked in the sauna.

00:49:33.000 I like to do like 25 minutes in the sauna.

00:49:35.000 And then I like to sleep.

00:49:36.000 So it relaxes your muscles?

00:49:39.000 Yeah, it also relaxes you.

00:49:42.000 It sends your body a lot of anti-inflammatory heat-shock proteins, and it's difficult.

00:49:48.000 And I like that it's a struggle, and then after it's a struggle, I feel like I earned my rest when I go to sleep.

00:49:54.000 But cannabis, it depends on the dosage, and it really depends on if I eat it or smoke it.

00:50:00.000 And I'm sure you know the difference between it.

00:50:02.000 Yeah, eating is weird.

00:50:03.000 It produces, I had Rick Doblin on a couple days ago from MAPS, you know, a multidisciplinary advanced studies of psychedelic substances.

00:50:15.000 What is it?

00:50:19.000 Multidisciplinary...

00:50:20.000 Anyway, 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,

00:50:36.000 soldiers.

00:50:36.000 I've read some of the research on that.

00:50:38.000 Psilocybin as well for a lot of these different things.

00:50:41.000 And Rick Doblin and I were talking about this the other day, that...

00:50:44.000 There's this thing that happens when you eat cannabis.

00:50:47.000 It's processed by your liver and it produces 11-hydroxy metabolite, which is five times more psychoactive than THC. Oh, interesting.

00:50:54.000 Yeah, so it really whacks people.

00:50:57.000 And they don't think that it's pot.

00:50:59.000 They think, oh my god, I got dosed.

00:51:01.000 Like something's wrong.

00:51:01.000 Right, right, right.

00:51:02.000 Because it really has a psychedelic effect.

00:51:04.000 Yeah, no, I've experienced that.

00:51:06.000 The first time, I had actually never smoked pot, and I moved to California.

00:51:10.000 So I'm from Jersey originally.

00:51:11.000 And 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.

00:51:19.000 Look at you, bro. 0.99

00:51:20.000 Yeah, and I was a dick. 1.00

00:51:21.000 I was like such a self-righteous little dick. 0.99

00:51:23.000 I was in the art of motorcycle maintenance. 0.98

00:51:26.000 Yeah, it was not a good time for me.

00:51:29.000 But it was a good move, and I moved into California.

00:51:31.000 And I'd never done drugs before that.

00:51:35.000 I 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.

00:51:43.000 And so I ended up at this youth hostel and someone who worked there introduced me to hash cooked into an omelet.

00:51:52.000 Yo! 1.00

00:51:53.000 And so I did it.

00:51:56.000 I ate it.

00:51:57.000 And I felt nothing.

00:51:58.000 I was like, no, it's not affecting me.

00:52:00.000 And then I had to go to class.

00:52:02.000 So I was at Stanford.

00:52:03.000 So this was happening up in Point Reyes National Park, like north of San Francisco.

00:52:07.000 And I had to ride on my motorcycle down to school for class.

00:52:11.000 And about halfway through the ride, I just started tripping.

00:52:15.000 Like, it felt like I was tripping.

00:52:17.000 I was just...

00:52:18.000 The trees started moving and...

00:52:20.000 And I was high for like three days.

00:52:22.000 It was horrible.

00:52:23.000 It just would not stop.

00:52:25.000 I'd wake up the next day and I'm like, am I still high?

00:52:27.000 I was like, yeah, still high.

00:52:29.000 So the eating scares me because I had such a, it's just an uncontrollable experience and it lasts for so long.

00:52:35.000 You never know what you're getting.

00:52:37.000 It's so inconsistent. 0.99

00:52:38.000 And, 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. 0.99

00:52:48.000 Like, There was a restaurant... 1.00

00:52:50.000 Where was it?

00:52:53.000 Colorado?

00:52:53.000 There was a restaurant that was making marijuana food.

00:52:57.000 They were making food with marijuana.

00:52:59.000 So they're just cooking with cannabis infused.

00:53:01.000 Cooking with cannabis, yeah.

00:53:02.000 And that was part of the appeal of the place.

00:53:05.000 I was like, Jesus Christ, it sounds like...

00:53:07.000 That sounds terrible. 0.99

00:53:07.000 I would never fucking go there. 0.99

00:53:08.000 That sounds like my worst nightmare, right? 0.99

00:53:11.000 It sounds so dangerous.

00:53:12.000 Yeah.

00:53:12.000 Because at least...

00:53:14.000 They have certain things.

00:53:15.000 One of the things about the legalization that passed in 2016 in California is that they put limits on edibles.

00:53:22.000 And so the limits on edibles are, I believe it's 10 milligrams.

00:53:24.000 Oh, how strong are they going to be?

00:53:25.000 Yeah, so you could buy a bunch and you could eat 10 of them and get 100. But the thing is, 10 is a good dose for a lot of folks.

00:53:33.000 It's not that bad.

00:53:35.000 Unless you're Jamie.

00:53:36.000 Jamie has this weird thing where he doesn't get high off edibles.

00:53:39.000 At all?

00:53:40.000 No, not at all.

00:53:41.000 Like, he's taking a thousand milligrams.

00:53:43.000 I've seen it.

00:53:44.000 I've seen it.

00:53:45.000 It's bananas.

00:53:45.000 You've seen that happen.

00:53:45.000 That's weird.

00:53:46.000 And apparently it is a thing, just like some people die if they eat Brazil nuts, right?

00:53:51.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:53:51.000 So this is the thing about cannabis and all these other drugs, is none of them are as predictable as alcohol.

00:53:57.000 Right.

00:53:57.000 So alcohol is easy to make.

00:54:00.000 You can make it out of anything.

00:54:02.000 It's easy to dose.

00:54:04.000 The results are consistent across individuals.

00:54:08.000 Like, what's happening to you right now as we drink this is similar to what's happening to me.

00:54:12.000 We're not having completely opposite experiences, right?

00:54:15.000 Right.

00:54:15.000 And it's going to wear off.

00:54:17.000 So 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.

00:54:26.000 And so the half-life is short.

00:54:28.000 Like, in two hours we'll be fine.

00:54:30.000 But it's interesting that different cultures traditionally don't have a use of alcohol as a part of their culture.

00:54:42.000 They have lower tolerances.

00:54:44.000 And then individuals, for whatever reason, some individuals are like predestined to be alcoholics, which is really weird.

00:54:53.000 That's part of the puzzle I'm trying to explain.

00:54:55.000 So the estimate is that up to 15% Of the human population has a predisposition to alcoholism.

00:55:02.000 Wow.

00:55:03.000 That's really high.

00:55:04.000 It's really high.

00:55:05.000 You can't use alcohol safely.

00:55:09.000 And so the question is, why has our taste for alcohol been allowed to stay in our gene pool for so long?

00:55:14.000 And so one of those stories I tell is we have...

00:55:17.000 So one possibility, the standard scientific story about why we like alcohol is it's a mistake.

00:55:24.000 So it's a way we get a reward for no good reason.

00:55:28.000 And so it's kind of an evolutionary hijack. 0.98

00:55:31.000 And so it's similar to masturbation.

00:55:34.000 So people can get – pleasure is our genes' way of getting us to do what they want us to do.

00:55:42.000 So they give us pleasure for things that advance their cause and they give us pain for things that don't.

00:55:49.000 And the best pleasure you could have as a human being is an orgasm.

00:55:53.000 Everything else is compared to that.

00:55:55.000 And 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.

00:56:04.000 But it's not a perfect system because we can get orgasms in other ways, right?

00:56:10.000 So we masturbate, we engage in all sorts of non-reproductive sex.

00:56:14.000 But it works good enough because the cost of whatever else we're doing is minimal. 0.77

00:56:20.000 The point is, over evolutionary history, statistically speaking...

00:56:24.000 Orgasms were associated with getting us to pass on genes to the next generation.

00:56:29.000 The reason evolution can tolerate all the non-reproductive hijinks we get up to is because they're not costly.

00:56:37.000 It's not imposing adaptive costs on us.

00:56:40.000 In the case of alcohol, especially if you have a predisposition to alcoholism, it's imposing huge costs on you.

00:56:47.000 And so evolution should be really interested in getting...

00:56:50.000 Our 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.

00:57:01.000 And so one possibility is, well, evolution just hasn't figured out a solution yet.

00:57:06.000 And that's possible.

00:57:07.000 Selection can't work on a mutation that doesn't exist.

00:57:10.000 But 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.

00:57:22.000 And so I think people know that the most common prevalence of it is in East Asia.

00:57:28.000 So some people from East Asia, if they had that first drink we had, like about halfway through that first drink, they would turn red. 1.00

00:57:36.000 They would start to get heart palpitations.

00:57:38.000 They would feel nauseous.

00:57:40.000 That first drink you poured me, about two sips in, they would stop drinking because they would start feeling really uncomfortable.

00:57:47.000 Why East Asia?

00:57:49.000 So it's an interesting story.

00:57:51.000 So it seemed to have arose about 7,000 years ago at the same time as rice agriculture.

00:57:58.000 So something's going on.

00:57:59.000 There's some connection between this set of mutations and rice agriculture.

00:58:05.000 So what's happening is they have two mutations.

00:58:08.000 So alcohol gets broken down in your body in two steps.

00:58:11.000 So ethanol comes in.

00:58:12.000 This 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.

00:58:23.000 It's still very poisonous.

00:58:24.000 And so then there's another enzyme, ADLH, that takes another couple of hydrogens off that and turns it into acetic acid, which is harmless.

00:58:31.000 You can get rid of that really easily.

00:58:33.000 What's going on with people with these mutations is that first step, their ADH enzyme is hyper-efficient.

00:58:41.000 So they're taking alcohol and immediately turning it into acetaldehyde.

00:58:44.000 But then the second step, that enzyme is not very good.

00:58:48.000 So all this acetaldehyde is building up in their system and it starts happening right away.

00:58:52.000 And that's what's giving them the flushing and the nausea and all this other stuff.

00:58:57.000 The theory is that there's something about high acid aldehyde concentrations in the body that might help with tuberculosis or fungal poisoning.

00:59:07.000 And so the theory is this was useful for hunter-gatherers who had just settled down and started to do agriculture.

00:59:15.000 Suddenly you're living in big groups.

00:59:17.000 Tuberculosis becomes a problem.

00:59:19.000 Suddenly you're storing grain in a wet climate that's going to start to rot.

00:59:25.000 And so you're vulnerable to fungal poisoning.

00:59:28.000 And so it may be an adaptation to rice agriculture.

00:59:33.000 And you said this is East Asia?

00:59:35.000 Basically, it started in kind of where modern-day Shanghai is, so Southeast China.

00:59:42.000 In 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.

00:59:51.000 And 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,

01:00:07.000 this is the silver bullet.

01:00:08.000 This is the solution.

01:00:09.000 Evolution figured out the answer to this.

01:00:12.000 And it's such a good solution that actually a chemical that simulates the same effect of this mutation is used to treat alcoholism.

01:00:20.000 So you give it to alcoholics and they don't want to drink anymore because they have all these negative effects.

01:00:25.000 What's that called?

01:00:27.000 Disulfamine or something like that.

01:00:28.000 It basically creates a chemical version.

01:00:31.000 It somehow reproduces the effect of high levels of acetaldehyde in your body.

01:00:37.000 Now, 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.

01:00:52.000 When they started introducing them to alcohol, they didn't have the genes for it.

01:00:57.000 Does that make sense?

01:00:58.000 Yeah, so you have to talk about North versus South America.

01:01:02.000 So South America, they've had alcohol for a long time, so they were making chicha, this beer.

01:01:07.000 But North America is one of the few places in the world where they didn't have indigenous alcohol cultures.

01:01:13.000 Do we know why?

01:01:14.000 I think that it's because they had a different drug that was doing the same job.

01:01:21.000 Native forms of tobacco are really powerful.

01:01:25.000 They're much more powerful.

01:01:27.000 They actually get you a little bit high from just the nicotine high.

01:01:30.000 And then they were mixing in hallucinogens.

01:01:34.000 And so I think they had a smokable drug.

01:01:36.000 For whatever reason...

01:01:39.000 Their cultures hit upon this smokable drug that they used in exactly the same way other cultures used alcohol.

01:01:45.000 You smoked it at treaties, you know, signing.

01:01:49.000 You needed to get along with strangers.

01:01:51.000 You'd sit down first and smoke.

01:01:52.000 You know, the peace pipe is in Columet.

01:01:54.000 This is where it comes from.

01:01:56.000 In North America, when you include Mexico, there's a long history of consumption of psilocybin mushrooms, right?

01:02:01.000 Right.

01:02:01.000 Yeah, I don't know how far north it goes.

01:02:03.000 I'm not sure they were doing it in North America.

01:02:05.000 It's possible.

01:02:06.000 The hallucinogen they were including in the tobacco was Datura.

01:02:11.000 I don't know what.

01:02:13.000 It'll get you high.

01:02:16.000 But it's not psilocybin.

01:02:18.000 As far as I know, psilocybin was primarily used once you started in northern Mexico going south.

01:02:26.000 And then it was used in ancient times in all of those regions.

01:02:31.000 Datura?

01:02:32.000 Yeah.

01:02:33.000 Is that...

01:02:35.000 Are you saying it right?

01:02:36.000 Is it Datura?

01:02:37.000 Maybe Datura, yeah.

01:02:38.000 Is that that one that's like really oddly dissociative?

01:02:42.000 There's one that I remember reading, again, it was McKenna talking about it, where he had to take it.

01:02:50.000 He 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.

01:03:02.000 Like he didn't recognize that he wasn't outside in a market.

01:03:06.000 Okay.

01:03:06.000 And this was...

01:03:08.000 I want to say he was taken in India.

01:03:11.000 All right.

01:03:12.000 It could be.

01:03:12.000 I mean, hallucinogens do all kinds of crazy stuff.

01:03:15.000 But Datura is...

01:03:16.000 Let's see if we can find out.

01:03:18.000 Yeah, let's see if we can find out about the effects of it.

01:03:20.000 Is that it?

01:03:20.000 I found, like, I didn't like Datura.

01:03:22.000 Terrence McKenna, I just typed in his name in the drug.

01:03:26.000 Yes.

01:03:27.000 Oh, this was in Nepal years ago.

01:03:28.000 Right.

01:03:29.000 That's it.

01:03:29.000 Yeah, that is it.

01:03:30.000 Because he felt completely disassociated.

01:03:33.000 They felt like you really have no idea what reality is.

01:03:36.000 Like, say, if you took the tour and we were in this room doing this podcast, you might think we were back at your house.

01:03:42.000 Or you might think we were at the bus station.

01:03:45.000 Right.

01:03:45.000 Or you might think, you know, we were in the movie theater.

01:03:47.000 Like, you really have no idea what the fuck is going on. 0.96

01:03:49.000 And the reality that you perceive through your eyes is completely distorted in some way. 0.97

01:03:55.000 Psilocybin does that too.

01:03:57.000 Sort of, but it doesn't put you in a different place in terms of you don't think you're at the movie theater.

01:04:02.000 I remember he was discussing it with this guy.

01:04:05.000 That's when he realized it was way too odd.

01:04:08.000 This guy didn't know that they were at the market.

01:04:11.000 He's like, hey man, we're at the market.

01:04:12.000 We're not at your house.

01:04:13.000 Yeah.

01:04:14.000 Have you ever done ketamine?

01:04:15.000 No, I have not.

01:04:16.000 I did it once, and it sounds a little bit like that, where I was convinced I was just in a different universe now.

01:04:25.000 Yeah.

01:04:26.000 And it's not a universe I was thrilled about. 0.99

01:04:29.000 It's kind of a fucked up universe. 0.98

01:04:31.000 And I was never coming back. 1.00

01:04:33.000 I was just filled with this, fuck, why did I walk through that door? 0.99

01:04:38.000 And now I'm in this universe and I'm stuck here. 0.99

01:04:41.000 And I will never get back to my old universe.

01:04:44.000 It was a really strongly disassociated feeling that was unpleasant.

01:04:48.000 I wonder if that's real.

01:04:50.000 I 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,

01:05:07.000 there's more to the universe than what we can observe.

01:05:10.000 Like, if you wave your hand over the top of an earthworm, it has no idea you're there.

01:05:15.000 How many of those senses do we lack?

01:05:21.000 How many senses to perceive things that exist but that for whatever reason we don't have the instruments to pick up?

01:05:32.000 We can only imagine, right?

01:05:34.000 We 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.

01:05:45.000 But that's just speculative.

01:05:46.000 We really have no idea.

01:05:48.000 When you take into account things like dark matter and dark energy, we really don't know what the fuck 90% of the universe is.

01:05:53.000 And then there's weird things like...

01:05:57.000 The concept of multiverses and the concept of parallel dimensions.

01:06:01.000 I saw you had Sean Carroll on the show.

01:06:03.000 Oh, my God.

01:06:03.000 He hurts my brain.

01:06:06.000 Last time we talked, he hurt my brain.

01:06:08.000 Yeah, the idea of multiple universes is trippy.

01:06:11.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:06:14.000 I think there's almost got to be a genetic predisposition to being attracted to these ideas and not...

01:06:21.000 I have a good friend, Jonathan Schooler, who's a social psychologist who is convinced that consciousness is all that exists.

01:06:32.000 There could be multiple universes.

01:06:36.000 Consciousness is real.

01:06:37.000 It's actually the only real thing.

01:06:39.000 And what's interesting is he has access to all the same—he's a scientist—he has access to all the same data that I have access to.

01:06:46.000 And yet we are both looking at that same set of data, and my conclusion—I'm a physicalist, so I just think this is it.

01:06:55.000 We're a bunch of physical chemicals.

01:06:58.000 There's no meaning in the world.

01:07:00.000 Humans create meaning because we're built to create meaning, but there's no inherent meaning in the world.

01:07:05.000 And consciousness is just an epiphenomenon.

01:07:08.000 So it's something that evolved for a certain reason because it helps us regulate ourselves and communicate to others in a certain way.

01:07:14.000 And he looks at the same data and says, no.

01:07:18.000 Consciousness is all there is.

01:07:19.000 And there are other universes, and this physical life is just one life.

01:07:23.000 Tim, do we have any more of these notepads?

01:07:26.000 Do we have one of these for me?

01:07:27.000 You want it just here?

01:07:28.000 I just want to write that dude's name down.

01:07:30.000 No, it's okay.

01:07:31.000 You should have one.

01:07:32.000 All right.

01:07:32.000 Okay.

01:07:33.000 Because I want to write his name down.

01:07:34.000 Does he have a book out or anything?

01:07:36.000 No, no, but he's a fun guy to talk to.

01:07:38.000 I like him.

01:07:42.000 And does he...

01:07:43.000 Where is he at?

01:07:46.000 He was my colleague at UBC in Vancouver, but he's at Santa Barbara.

01:07:50.000 Jonathan Schuller?

01:07:50.000 Jonathan Schuller.

01:07:52.000 Schuller?

01:07:52.000 Yeah, like schoolhouse, Schuller, yeah.

01:07:56.000 And what leads him to that conclusion?

01:07:59.000 Yeah.

01:08:05.000 He's got a lot of funny ideas.

01:08:07.000 But why?

01:08:08.000 So he thinks one of his research projects is on the decline effect.

01:08:15.000 So you do a study and it works and then you do it again and it doesn't work as well.

01:08:20.000 And then you do it again and it works even less well.

01:08:24.000 And my interpretation of that is that it's not a real effect.

01:08:29.000 It looked good randomly initially, and then the whole thing about statistics is that it washes out.

01:08:35.000 If it's not a real effect, it goes away.

01:08:38.000 But he thinks the universe gets tired of effects.

01:08:41.000 He's like, you know, the universe gets bored with this, and that's why the effect is happening.

01:08:48.000 And I understand, like, intellectually...

01:08:54.000 You can't rule that out.

01:08:56.000 I can see how a kind of mind-only view of the world...

01:09:00.000 You can't point to any particular bit of empirical evidence that rules it out.

01:09:06.000 But the kind of stuff that sways me is selective brain deficits. 0.98

01:09:13.000 So I knock out a part of your brain with a stroke.

01:09:16.000 So you have a stroke and some part of your brain gets knocked out. 0.57

01:09:19.000 And now you can't use proper nouns.

01:09:23.000 Or you can't use verbs.

01:09:25.000 Like 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,

01:09:41.000 separate from the brain.

01:09:43.000 And it's really anything more than a kind of effect you get.

01:09:49.000 We 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.

01:10:03.000 And just because when you do studies over and over again that the effects don't work, that can't be with every study.

01:10:13.000 No, and I'm probably misquoting Jonathan, so you have to ask him about it.

01:10:17.000 It's just a weird conclusion to draw, but here's the take.

01:10:22.000 One of the things that makes me curious about it is the idea of a simulation theory.

01:10:27.000 If you believe in the possibility of the simulation theory, and Elon fully believes in it.

01:10:35.000 Lay that out for me.

01:10:35.000 So what's the theory?

01:10:36.000 The simulation theory is that if Like, we can do now.

01:10:41.000 We can have virtual reality.

01:10:44.000 I don't know if you've ever experimented with, like, the HTC Vive or any of these things.

01:10:48.000 They're not very good in terms of—they're very cool, but they're not very good in terms of, like, convincing you that this is reality.

01:10:55.000 Right.

01:10:55.000 But they're way better than Pong.

01:10:58.000 Yeah.

01:10:59.000 Right?

01:10:59.000 We're old enough to remember Pong.

01:11:00.000 Right, remember Pong.

01:11:01.000 Space Invaders.

01:11:02.000 Yeah.

01:11:03.000 Right?

01:11:04.000 Which was really engrossing at the time.

01:11:06.000 Oh my god, you couldn't believe it, right?

01:11:07.000 You're like, I can't believe I'm playing something on the TV. I'm making the TV move.

01:11:11.000 But now you get Call of Duty and it's like way more engrossing and Halo and all these crazy games.

01:11:17.000 If 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.

01:11:32.000 When you talk to people like Elon Musk about Neuralink, right?

01:11:37.000 And they're going to essentially wire your brain.

01:11:41.000 They're going to reach areas of your brain and stimulate them with some sort of energy, electricity.

01:11:48.000 I don't know what they're doing to do that.

01:11:50.000 It hasn't been really clearly demonstrated how exactly.

01:11:55.000 They're planning on ramping this up into the future.

01:11:57.000 But one of the things that Elon said to me, you're going to be able to communicate without words.

01:12:02.000 Which is kind of terrifying, but also fascinating.

01:12:05.000 I'm not sure I would like that.

01:12:07.000 I would imagine that this innovation is also going to apply to things like artificial reality and virtual reality.

01:12:19.000 And that it's going to get so good, you're not going to be able to tell the difference between reality And artificial reality.

01:12:26.000 If that's the case, how do we know if we're not already there?

01:12:31.000 If one day it becomes indiscernible and virtual reality or a simulation of reality is indiscernible from regular reality, how will we know?

01:12:44.000 Nick 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.

01:12:55.000 Okay. 0.84

01:12:56.000 And this is where it gets really weird and very intellectually masturbatory. 0.51

01:13:01.000 Yeah, this is where...

01:13:03.000 Why would those people create us as a simulation?

01:13:07.000 I don't think that's what they're saying.

01:13:08.000 They're saying, we did it.

01:13:09.000 We created ourselves a simulation.

01:13:13.000 Let's imagine that a simulation doesn't exist.

01:13:15.000 We're not in a simulation.

01:13:18.000 We're actually here in Austin.

01:13:19.000 We're here in Austin, carbon-based life form.

01:13:22.000 We're really drinking whiskey.

01:13:24.000 If 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.

01:13:38.000 I can't imagine.

01:13:39.000 Would we do this conversation?

01:13:41.000 Why wouldn't we?

01:13:42.000 Right?

01:13:42.000 Why wouldn't we?

01:13:43.000 Look, I love conversations.

01:13:45.000 Why wouldn't we do new things?

01:13:48.000 New things in what way?

01:13:49.000 I think I've heard about the simulation theory before, but what I don't get is why...

01:13:55.000 So let's say it's a thousand years from now we have the technology to do that.

01:13:59.000 Why wouldn't we just simulate new things we haven't done already?

01:14:02.000 Maybe we are doing that.

01:14:04.000 Maybe we haven't done this.

01:14:06.000 But here's the thing.

01:14:09.000 If you could do simulation, what do you think Westworld is?

01:14:14.000 The show Westworld is you're going back and living like it's 1840. And that's really engrossing for people.

01:14:20.000 People are very attracted to that idea.

01:14:22.000 I would be attracted to that idea.

01:14:24.000 If 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.

01:14:32.000 What is this, Jamie?

01:14:33.000 This is the new background Unreal Engine 5. I tried to get a good spot here, so when they put the lights on here in a second...

01:14:41.000 Let me pause and explain to him.

01:14:43.000 Do you follow video games at all?

01:14:45.000 No, I haven't done video games since Paul.

01:14:48.000 The Unreal Engine, the most recent version of the Unreal Engine is absolutely sensational.

01:14:54.000 So good and so vivid and the dynamic lighting, is that what it's called?

01:14:59.000 Dynamic lighting?

01:15:00.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:15:01.000 Do you have shadowing?

01:15:02.000 Do you have stuff on or are you just looking at it?

01:15:03.000 No, this is just visual.

01:15:04.000 You could, you could.

01:15:05.000 They use it as the heart, like the engine, that's why it's called an engine, of a virtual reality game if someone so chose to use that.

01:15:12.000 Oh, so someone can do it in a VR game.

01:15:14.000 So what it is, is it's so, you know the Uncanny Valley?

01:15:18.000 Yeah.

01:15:18.000 This is really close to bridging the Uncanny Valley.

01:15:22.000 So let's play some of it.

01:15:23.000 This is fake.

01:15:26.000 I mean...

01:15:27.000 We're watching a video, right? 0.99

01:15:30.000 So this is a guy, he's fucking with all the different... 0.99

01:15:33.000 You don't have to do it, just let it play out. 0.98

01:15:35.000 He's fucking with all the different textures and all the lighting. 0.94

01:15:39.000 Like, this is all real, man. 0.97

01:15:41.000 Yeah, that's cool.

01:15:42.000 It's crazy!

01:15:44.000 So it has dust in it.

01:15:46.000 It has lighting effects due to the sun traveling over the place. 0.95

01:15:53.000 I mean, it's fucking incredible. 0.54

01:15:56.000 And look at the textures and the details of this. 0.95

01:15:59.000 They're so close.

01:16:00.000 They're really, really close.

01:16:03.000 But, 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?

01:16:12.000 Well, then you're going to feel things and smell things, and that is certainly inside the realm of what you can imagine.

01:16:22.000 Especially when you can see something like this, where they can have the sun moving across the sky and changing Changing all the shadows.

01:16:32.000 I mean, it's incredible.

01:16:33.000 But you can also have that by going to Arizona and just walking around.

01:16:36.000 Some people can't though.

01:16:37.000 Yeah, of course you can.

01:16:39.000 But hey, of course you can. 0.99

01:16:41.000 But that doesn't mean this isn't fucking insane. 0.99

01:16:43.000 Yeah. 0.94

01:16:44.000 Like, of course you can go there, but the idea that you could put on a headpiece, like some sort of Oculus Rift headpiece...

01:16:52.000 And be transported to full immersion.

01:16:54.000 So now he's changing it to a different place.

01:16:56.000 So he's gonna look at all these different textures and all these things.

01:17:01.000 Go way ahead.

01:17:02.000 Yeah, there's one thing.

01:17:03.000 They went...

01:17:03.000 I don't know if this is the exact video I was watching.

01:17:05.000 I think it is.

01:17:06.000 They turned it from Utah like it is like we're watching and then hit like...

01:17:10.000 There it is.

01:17:10.000 Like medieval lighting and it goes to like Lord of the Rings with the same shapes...

01:17:17.000 Look at this.

01:17:17.000 Oh, wow.

01:17:18.000 And everything.

01:17:18.000 You're in Mordor now.

01:17:19.000 Yeah.

01:17:19.000 You're looking out for Sauron.

01:17:21.000 Yeah, right.

01:17:21.000 I mean, what they can do now just with video games is pretty incredible.

01:17:27.000 But again, if I'm looking at this, I'm like, oh, she's not real.

01:17:30.000 Yeah.

01:17:30.000 She's too uniform in her movements.

01:17:33.000 Yeah.

01:17:33.000 People have weird little sort of herky-jerky variabilities, and she's This is even easier for us to now.

01:17:40.000 We 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.

01:17:50.000 Well, I'm in a video game.

01:17:51.000 I'm in that UFC game.

01:17:52.000 They've already done that with me.

01:17:53.000 Really?

01:17:53.000 Yeah, I'm in a UFC video game.

01:17:56.000 That's trippy.

01:17:58.000 That's not nearly as good as this in terms of the visuals and even the movements of the characters. 0.98

01:18:05.000 The point is, as technology advances, they're going to have that shit dialed in where you're going to feel it. 0.83

01:18:12.000 There's going to be haptic feedback. 0.87

01:18:14.000 Have you ever done anything with haptic feedback?

01:18:16.000 No, but I understand the concept, yeah.

01:18:17.000 There'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.

01:18:26.000 So you put on virtual reality headsets.

01:18:28.000 My family loves to do it.

01:18:30.000 At one time, I had third place in the world.

01:18:32.000 I was the third place zombie killer on Earth. 0.99

01:18:37.000 Some motherfuckers have beat my score badly since then. 1.00

01:18:40.000 You'll come back. 1.00

01:18:42.000 I'm not going to come back. 1.00

01:18:43.000 These fucking kids, they're too good. 1.00

01:18:44.000 But 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. 0.99

01:18:58.000 It's very crude, but it gives you this, it gives you just enough of a jolt where it makes it extra fun.

01:19:04.000 But again, it's like Pong.

01:19:06.000 Yeah.

01:19:06.000 Right?

01:19:07.000 Boop, boop, boop, boop. 1.00

01:19:07.000 And then go from Pong to Unreal Engine. 1.00

01:19:10.000 Yeah.

01:19:11.000 No, I can see it.

01:19:12.000 You could buy one.

01:19:12.000 Oh, you could buy one.

01:19:13.000 Yeah.

01:19:14.000 That's a haptic feedback.

01:19:15.000 It works wirelessly with a lot of different VR things.

01:19:17.000 It does enhance the experience.

01:19:19.000 It definitely does.

01:19:20.000 It gives you a little bit extra fun.

01:19:22.000 But it's so crude in comparison to something that one day – like Ready Player One, are you familiar with that movie?

01:19:28.000 I have not.

01:19:29.000 No.

01:19:30.000 I've not played video games or really done much.

01:19:32.000 No, Ready Player One is a movie.

01:19:33.000 It's a Spielberg movie.

01:19:34.000 And it's about immersive video games in the future.

01:19:37.000 How people's lives just completely revolve around these immersive video games.

01:19:41.000 And all of the money they're chasing is all this virtual money in these games.

01:19:46.000 That's now, right?

01:19:47.000 A lot of people are addicted to video games.

01:19:50.000 Yes.

01:19:50.000 The way they lay it out, though, in Ready Player One, it's amazing.

01:19:54.000 And it makes you realize, like, wow, this is not...

01:19:58.000 This isn't too crazy.

01:20:00.000 The Matrix when it came out was crazy.

01:20:02.000 But The Matrix today, you're like, maybe that's not that crazy.

01:20:07.000 And 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.

01:20:20.000 All right.

01:20:21.000 And 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.

01:20:31.000 And he feels it through the suit.

01:20:33.000 You see the suit lighting up.

01:20:34.000 That's what my partner and I need.

01:20:35.000 It's pretty wild.

01:20:36.000 She's in the east coast of the U.S. I'm in Canada.

01:20:39.000 We're across a closed border.

01:20:40.000 We need some sort of haptic.

01:20:42.000 FaceTime's good. 1.00

01:20:43.000 You need to move the fuck out of Canada. 1.00

01:20:44.000 There's goddamn tyrants up there. 1.00

01:20:46.000 That's true. 1.00

01:20:46.000 What are they doing with people? 1.00

01:20:47.000 I need to get out of Canada.

01:20:48.000 But, Jamie, you just read Ready Player Two, right?

01:20:51.000 You read the movie?

01:20:53.000 The 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.

01:21:05.000 They were inserting people into movies, reenacting things with your favorite movie characters.

01:21:10.000 You 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.

01:21:17.000 Yeah.

01:21:17.000 That kind of stuff is very close to almost being able to be done.

01:21:20.000 They're working on something like Ready Player One in real life called the Metaverse.

01:21:24.000 I was trying to look it up.

01:21:25.000 I've heard about it sort of with NFTs.

01:21:28.000 We might be on the way there.

01:21:30.000 I don't know how much computing power it's going to take.

01:21:32.000 So in the Matrix movie, they want to escape the Matrix.

01:21:37.000 Some people do.

01:21:38.000 Remember that one dude? 1.00

01:21:39.000 The one dude does it and he's a pussy, right? 1.00

01:21:41.000 We hate that guy. 1.00

01:21:42.000 We hate that guy. 0.83

01:21:45.000 We don't like him, right?

01:21:46.000 And why is that?

01:21:47.000 He just wants to be rich and he wants to eat steak.

01:21:48.000 He wants to eat steak and have the women. 1.00

01:21:50.000 But it's all fake, so we want the real world.

01:21:54.000 We want the real world.

01:21:54.000 But what is the real world?

01:21:55.000 That's the question.

01:21:56.000 What is the real world?

01:21:57.000 I think it's this world.

01:21:58.000 So, I mean, I completely grant the intellectual point that I mean, this is an old philosophical problem, right?

01:22:06.000 So in philosophy, there's always been this idea that we could be deceived about everything we think we know.

01:22:13.000 So Descartes talked about the demon, right?

01:22:15.000 So this demon, I think that I'm sitting in front of a fire in this inn, and that I just ate this food, and that I'm drinking this beer.

01:22:24.000 But it could be the case that there's an evil demon who's deceiving me about all this, and it's all an illusion.

01:22:30.000 Yeah.

01:22:31.000 And I can't really know it.

01:22:46.000 Sure.

01:22:47.000 You 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.

01:22:56.000 And so how do we know that we're not in a dream now?

01:22:59.000 It's exactly the same problem.

01:23:01.000 So philosophers have been thinking about this for, you know, whatever.

01:23:06.000 Sure.

01:23:09.000 But?

01:23:10.000 It's Occam's razor.

01:23:13.000 What's the most parsimonious explanation that we have?

01:23:19.000 It could be the case that we are all simulations in our future selves' lives.

01:23:25.000 Or we're actually in tanks and these aliens are farming us out for our electricity and we're not really here.

01:23:35.000 It just seems to me the most plausible explanation is the simplest one.

01:23:39.000 I'm not necessarily sure I agree.

01:23:40.000 Here's why.

01:23:42.000 How about your friend, Jonathan Schooler?

01:23:45.000 You're going to super get along with Jonathan.

01:23:47.000 I bet I am.

01:23:48.000 I'm thinking I am.

01:23:49.000 But how about...

01:23:51.000 We have this attachment to the idea that all of our life has been real.

01:23:58.000 And so, since it's been uniform in its realness, we assume that it's real.

01:24:05.000 We 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.

01:24:17.000 That this is what we have.

01:24:20.000 There's so many variables, and there's so much we don't know. 0.99

01:24:23.000 Like, what the fuck is going on when we go to sleep? 0.98

01:24:25.000 We're just guessing. 0.99

01:24:27.000 We're completely guessing.

01:24:28.000 We shut off every night, and we like it, and we look forward to it. 0.99

01:24:33.000 We look forward to going blank and disappearing and traveling to wherever the fuck the mind goes to while the body just lays there prone. 0.99

01:24:43.000 It's odd. 0.99

01:24:44.000 I went to check on my daughter the other day to see if she was asleep, and I'm looking at her lying there.

01:24:50.000 And I was thinking, it's so strange that this is a normal thing that people do.

01:24:55.000 We just shut off.

01:24:57.000 And we just lay there with our mouths open.

01:25:00.000 And our eyes closed.

01:25:01.000 But we're doing stuff.

01:25:02.000 Yeah, we are doing stuff.

01:25:03.000 We're reorganizing information.

01:25:05.000 And we're repairing.

01:25:07.000 We're repairing stuff.

01:25:08.000 But it's fascinating that the human animal, and not just the human animal, but most mammals.

01:25:14.000 And my dog does this too.

01:25:16.000 It's an incredibly vulnerable thing to do.

01:25:20.000 And yet we all do it.

01:25:23.000 It's like, what purpose has it served in evolution?

01:25:27.000 How come sharks don't do it?

01:25:29.000 Sharks just keep moving. 1.00

01:25:30.000 Sharks are stupid. 1.00

01:25:31.000 They're stupid as fuck. 1.00

01:25:32.000 They're stupid as fuck. 1.00

01:25:34.000 Dolphins do it. 1.00

01:25:35.000 Because dolphins are really smart.

01:25:37.000 But they swim.

01:25:38.000 Animals that are smart need it.

01:25:40.000 We need to consolidate.

01:25:42.000 This 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.

01:25:54.000 And that's really crucial for smart animals that are accumulating knowledge.

01:25:59.000 And that is not a shark.

01:26:01.000 Sharks are just a pretty simple chomp-chomp.

01:26:04.000 You don't need to learn that.

01:26:05.000 But don't dolphins swim while they're sleeping?

01:26:07.000 Apparently not.

01:26:08.000 It says they're motionless on the surface of the water.

01:26:11.000 Then you get eight hours sleep a day.

01:26:13.000 And shifts, weirdly.

01:26:14.000 Oh, the right half gets four hours of sleep, but the left half also gets four hours of sleep, just at different times.

01:26:20.000 So 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. 0.96

01:26:27.000 Fucking danger everywhere. 0.99

01:26:29.000 Yeah, yeah. 0.98

01:26:30.000 So 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.

01:26:41.000 The scar I have on my forehead really is from George Lloyd hitting me with a snow shovel.

01:26:48.000 Says who? 0.65

01:26:48.000 That guy's a part of your memory. 0.65

01:26:50.000 I understand a priori you can't prove it.

01:26:53.000 Just think about how bad memory it is.

01:26:54.000 No, memory's bad.

01:26:55.000 Terrible.

01:26:56.000 But the body's not bad.

01:26:58.000 The body records things.

01:26:59.000 Imagine if memory is that bad because it's like a built-in design to keep you confused.

01:27:04.000 Yeah, you're going to super get along.

01:27:06.000 His friend, the only thing I googled about him, he has a very interesting theory about memory.

01:27:11.000 Yeah?

01:27:11.000 Oh, what is it?

01:27:12.000 That verbalizing it fucks up the accuracy of it.

01:27:15.000 Yeah, that verbal overshadowing.

01:27:17.000 That's for sure true. 0.99

01:27:18.000 Because how many friends have told you a story from childhood and you're like, bitch, that did not happen that way. 0.99

01:27:24.000 You know things didn't happen that way. 0.98

01:27:25.000 No, that's different.

01:27:26.000 So his research actually looks at the fact that if you...

01:27:30.000 You have an experience, and then you try to describe it in words, it fucks up your recall of the experience.

01:27:36.000 Of course, yeah.

01:27:37.000 The classic study they did was on jams.

01:27:41.000 So you have people taste jams, and which jam do you want to take home?

01:27:45.000 Which one tastes the best?

01:27:47.000 If you have them, then you taste the jams, but you have to write down tasting notes on the jams.

01:27:53.000 And you rate them?

01:27:54.000 Yeah, you rate them. 0.98

01:27:54.000 Then you get really confused, and you take home a shitty jam. 0.98

01:27:58.000 Because you're thinking about it too much has messed up your appraisal.

01:28:02.000 Well, 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.

01:28:17.000 Psychedelic experiences are interesting, so I talk about them in the book as well.

01:28:22.000 You had Michael Pollan on at one point, and I watched part of that show.

01:28:27.000 And 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.

01:28:41.000 So genetic evolution needs mutations to work on.

01:28:44.000 And usually mutations suck, right?

01:28:46.000 They usually don't work very well and those organisms die. 0.55

01:28:51.000 But every once in a while you get a mutation that works and that can get selected on and become the new normal.

01:28:57.000 And for cultural evolution, this is possibly what psychedelics are doing.

01:29:03.000 So, we need humans.

01:29:05.000 Part of the argument in the book is that humans are uniquely dependent on creativity, unlike any other species.

01:29:13.000 So, you know, cheetahs chase gazelles.

01:29:17.000 They have their claws and their teeth.

01:29:19.000 They don't need to think up new technologies for catching gazelles, right?

01:29:23.000 And they can get better, but it's through genetic evolution, not cultural evolution.

01:29:27.000 Humans are helpless without tools.

01:29:30.000 So we're literally helpless without tools.

01:29:34.000 So the most basic tool is fire.

01:29:37.000 So at some point in our lineage, we tamed fire.

01:29:41.000 And fire allowed us to cook food.

01:29:43.000 And once you can cook food, you can digest it a lot better.

01:29:47.000 Cooking is basically pre-digesting your food for you.

01:29:50.000 It's almost like a parent or bird chewing up food for their chicks.

01:29:54.000 It allows you to digest it better.

01:29:56.000 And then our genes change.

01:29:59.000 So once we have fire, our jaws change.

01:30:02.000 So our teeth get less robust, our jaws less robust than our ancestors were, and actually our guts change.

01:30:08.000 So our stomach and our intestinal system is shorter than it would be in a primate that ate raw foods.

01:30:17.000 So we're so dependent on fire that we biologically have adapted to eating cooked foods.

01:30:23.000 We could not survive without cooked foods anymore.

01:30:25.000 Just like our bodies have biologically adapted to clothing.

01:30:28.000 Yeah, so the hairlessness.

01:30:31.000 And so humans need tools, and we need constantly evolving tools because the environment's changing.

01:30:38.000 Even if the environment's staying the same, we have other cultural groups that are trying to exploit that environment in competition with us.

01:30:45.000 And if they do a better job, then we're out of luck.

01:30:48.000 And so we're uniquely dependent on creativity in a way that no other primate is, no other species is, really.

01:30:55.000 And so we need innovation.

01:30:57.000 And Paulin's point is that one way we could get that is occasionally completely scrambling.

01:31:04.000 So what psychedelics are doing is just de-patterning the brain completely.

01:31:10.000 So just parts of your brain or talking to other parts of the brain that normally doesn't happen at all. 0.99

01:31:15.000 And as he points out, that usually results in bullshit. 0.96

01:31:19.000 So, you know, I did a lot of psychedelics in San Francisco in my 20s. 0.98

01:31:24.000 And I used to go up to Mount Tam and do mushrooms or LSD. And this one trip, I always brought a notebook with me.

01:31:34.000 I talk about this in the book that I was convinced during one trip that I was a PhD student at the time.

01:31:44.000 I 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.

01:31:52.000 And it was because I had proven that truth is the color blue.

01:31:58.000 And I had like a 20-page treatise where I laid this out.

01:32:03.000 It had diagrams and there were mathematical equations.

01:32:06.000 And I really came out of the trip thinking, this is it. 0.98

01:32:09.000 I fucking solved it. 0.96

01:32:11.000 And then the next day I looked at it. 0.97

01:32:13.000 I was like, oh yeah, I probably won't publish this.

01:32:15.000 So most of what comes out of trips is complete nonsense.

01:32:19.000 But maybe there was a kernel of information there.

01:32:22.000 There was, and actually the kernel of information I took out of that particular trip, I kind of remember, was about my personal life.

01:32:28.000 So it helped me figure out a relationship I was in.

01:32:31.000 What did it have to do with the color blue?

01:32:34.000 Nothing at all.

01:32:35.000 The color blue was nonsense.

01:32:38.000 Paulin's point is that most of what gets produced is nonsense, but every once in a while, it might be useful.

01:32:46.000 Basically, in terms of evolution, it's a high-risk, high-payoff strategy.

01:32:53.000 Was 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?

01:33:10.000 Like you tried to seek it out through this thing and thinking that if I saw...

01:33:15.000 Could have been an analogy for...

01:33:16.000 Yes.

01:33:17.000 That's possible.

01:33:18.000 It's possible. 0.99

01:33:19.000 But the actual argument was bullshit. 1.00

01:33:21.000 It's nonsense. 0.99

01:33:22.000 It's not publishable.

01:33:23.000 But was there anything in there that, like, when you go, wow, I had a real good point here?

01:33:29.000 No.

01:33:32.000 I'll send it to you.

01:33:33.000 It might scramble my brain.

01:33:37.000 I think Paulin's right that psychedelics are scrambling stuff, but then every once in a while something really cool and new comes out.

01:33:47.000 I 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.

01:33:59.000 So we're scrambling our brains a little bit right now, but we're still pretty much connected to reality.

01:34:04.000 So the innovation level is going to be lower because we're not completely de-patterning our brains.

01:34:11.000 But the likelihood that we're going to come up with something useful is higher.

01:34:15.000 And so what I would argue is chemical intoxicants all have this role to play.

01:34:22.000 In accelerating and enhancing cultural evolution, hallucinogens have a place in that ecosystem, right?

01:34:30.000 But typically, hallucinogens are used very rarely.

01:34:34.000 So in cultures where everyone does them, they do them every once in a while.

01:34:40.000 So typically, there's like an annual ritual or semi-annual ritual where everyone takes hallucinogens and gets really messed up.

01:34:46.000 Another 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.

01:34:57.000 How are you going to trust those guys though?

01:34:59.000 Those are shamans, right?

01:35:00.000 Yeah, right.

01:35:00.000 So those are these people...

01:35:02.000 Shamans are supposed to guide you through it, right? 1.00

01:35:04.000 They can, but I mean traditionally in cultures they do the hallucinogens.

01:35:09.000 You come to them and you say...

01:35:12.000 We're not catching gazelles anymore.

01:35:14.000 We go out to the usual hunting grounds and there are no gazelles.

01:35:17.000 Everyone's hungry.

01:35:18.000 What do the gods say?

01:35:20.000 So it's always couched in terms of communications from the supernatural realm.

01:35:24.000 So what I think is going on is there's this problem.

01:35:27.000 We have a problem that we haven't figured out as a culture anymore.

01:35:32.000 We need some insights.

01:35:34.000 And so we go to the shaman and we say, what have we done wrong?

01:35:37.000 Why are the gods angry with us?

01:35:38.000 And 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.

01:35:50.000 But maybe somewhere in there they have an idea that we've angered the gods because of X, Y, or Z. And that works. 0.80

01:35:56.000 Like, actually doing one of those things gets us to the new hunting ground where we can get gazelles again.

01:36:01.000 So sometimes there's a particular class of people whose job it is to do intoxicants in a much more serious way.

01:36:10.000 And that would normally impair you.

01:36:13.000 Like you wouldn't be able to hold down a normal job and do stuff.

01:36:16.000 But that's okay because that's their job in the culture.

01:36:19.000 That's their niche that they fill.

01:36:21.000 So you think that there's some sort of benefit to having some people that are professionals do that work rather than the general population?

01:36:28.000 Yeah.

01:36:29.000 If you're talking about seriously messing yourself up, yeah.

01:36:33.000 And you could argue that maybe in large-scale societies, artists fill some of that role.

01:36:39.000 But why?

01:36:40.000 Here's the thing.

01:36:40.000 Why would you pawn it off on somebody else?

01:36:43.000 Don't you think the more people that have these revelations, the better?

01:36:47.000 And 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,

01:37:02.000 I think now in modern society, maybe we have a luxury where everyone can figure this out for themselves.

01:37:09.000 But 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.

01:37:20.000 You need to just haul stones.

01:37:21.000 If you have to haul stones.

01:37:24.000 If you're working as a slave.

01:37:26.000 Yeah.

01:37:26.000 So 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.

01:37:35.000 I used to say that, everyone, but now I've changed my tune because I think some people are just not wired right for it.

01:37:42.000 And I don't know why.

01:37:44.000 I only know how I'm wired.

01:37:47.000 Everybody's wired differently.

01:37:49.000 I've talked to people that they'll have some sort of a weird interaction with people online and they have to get on medication.

01:37:57.000 I know quite a few people like that. 0.98

01:38:00.000 They'll do a podcast and the podcast goes sideways and they get on fucking anti-anxiety pills. 0.92

01:38:06.000 Yeah, so, I mean, human cultures are clearly ecosystems, right? 0.95

01:38:10.000 Yeah.

01:38:10.000 So we have people with different personality traits, and they all play different roles.

01:38:15.000 And they're important.

01:38:16.000 Everyone's important.

01:38:16.000 Super sensitive people are important.

01:38:18.000 Yeah.

01:38:18.000 Just like the super callous people are important.

01:38:20.000 Yeah, so we need some super callous people. 1.00

01:38:22.000 You need people that can handle anything, and you need people that they have a really difficult time with everything.

01:38:28.000 And sometimes those people make beautiful songs, you know?

01:38:30.000 Yeah.

01:38:31.000 There's a place for everybody in this strange, weird soup of humanity.

01:38:36.000 And I'm always very wary when people dismiss certain things as being trivial or certain experiences being non-necessary.

01:38:47.000 I don't think...

01:38:49.000 And again, I used to be way more cocky about this because I think I was operating on limited information and then I think I had...

01:39:00.000 Less control of the ego.

01:39:02.000 And I say less, because I certainly don't.

01:39:04.000 When I was younger, when I first started taking psychedelics, like early in my 30s, I think I had a distorted perception.

01:39:13.000 Not think, no.

01:39:14.000 I know I did.

01:39:15.000 I still do, right? 0.99

01:39:17.000 No one has a real clear understanding of what the fuck is going on when you're tripping on DMT. You're just guessing. 0.99

01:39:23.000 But 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.

01:39:37.000 I'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.

01:39:52.000 But some people, you know, I couldn't imagine being a bricklayer.

01:39:55.000 I couldn't imagine being a motorcycle mechanic. 0.98

01:39:57.000 Like, everybody has a different fucking thing in this world. 0.98

01:40:01.000 And we're all this weird container of chemical soup. 0.99

01:40:06.000 Yeah.

01:40:06.000 And 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.

01:40:18.000 And 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.

01:40:28.000 But 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.

01:40:40.000 You know, everybody's so different.

01:40:42.000 Yeah, there's this concept in evolution of frequency-dependent selection.

01:40:47.000 And so if you're in a population, let's say, so I'm introverted.

01:40:51.000 And it's a bit of a puzzle why introverts exist, because we're not very good at social stuff.

01:40:57.000 We like to spend a lot of time alone.

01:40:59.000 Don't you think you think a lot when you're introverted?

01:41:02.000 Probably we think more.

01:41:03.000 So you sort things out more.

01:41:04.000 So you probably come up with ideas that are beneficial to the rest of the tribe.

01:41:07.000 Right, but how does that help me?

01:41:09.000 It helps you because you're an integral part of the tribe.

01:41:12.000 Yeah, 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.

01:41:30.000 So what that's going to end up, what you're going to end up with is a mix of people.

01:41:34.000 So you're going to have introverts and extroverts.

01:41:36.000 You're going to have people who are very conscientious and people who are incredibly not conscientious.

01:41:42.000 And each of them are going to play some role in the culture.

01:41:46.000 Well, I have a theory about today's culture.

01:41:48.000 One 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.

01:42:05.000 And certainly not talking about introverts, but I am talking about sloths.

01:42:10.000 You know, we've allowed a lot of, like, the homeless situation, right? 0.97

01:42:15.000 Clearly some of the homeless situation is mentally ill people.

01:42:18.000 Clearly some of the homeless situation is people with drug dependency.

01:42:22.000 But it's also, some of it has got to be people that have no desire for growth.

01:42:31.000 They just decide to lay down on the concrete floor for whatever reason.

01:42:36.000 I'm not judging them.

01:42:37.000 I'm just saying this based on their current state.

01:42:39.000 They could have been abused as a young person.

01:42:41.000 They could have gone through personal trauma.

01:42:44.000 Who knows what happened to them.

01:42:47.000 Whatever 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.

01:42:58.000 Whereas the perceptions... 0.98

01:43:00.000 I 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.

01:43:12.000 And I think it's because we're more compassionate, and in being more compassionate, more understanding, and more kind, that's all great.

01:43:20.000 Like, I love that.

01:43:21.000 I want to live in a world where people are more compassionate, more kind.

01:43:25.000 However, I think there's an argument that opens up the door for a lot of people to take advantage of those things.

01:43:31.000 Like, we all know someone who says, like...

01:43:36.000 Man, I'm too nice. 1.00

01:43:38.000 People fuck me over. 0.99

01:43:39.000 I've got these mooches and all these people in my life because I'm too nice. 1.00

01:43:44.000 We all know people like that.

01:43:45.000 I think a society can be too nice.

01:43:47.000 I think there's a real argument for that.

01:43:49.000 I think it's just like from the microcosm, if you look at it in the macro, I think those things, they're analogous.

01:43:57.000 They work.

01:43:57.000 You 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?

01:44:07.000 I 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.

01:44:21.000 I think that's the same thing with our culture.

01:44:23.000 There'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.

01:44:31.000 And that has accelerated in modern times because we've placed value on being compassionate and being kind.

01:44:41.000 Yeah.

01:44:42.000 Yeah.

01:45:00.000 And you could look at a culture that has problems like that in their streets.

01:45:05.000 And I think it's kind of the same thing going on.

01:45:08.000 That I love kind, compassionate people.

01:45:12.000 But it always frustrates me when I have friends that can't get mooches out of their life. 1.00

01:45:16.000 And can't get vampires.

01:45:18.000 My friend Duncan Trussell calls them emotional vampires.

01:45:22.000 Because they really are like vampires. 0.99

01:45:24.000 They will cling to you and suck your life's blood. 0.97

01:45:28.000 And they will take energy from you to feed themselves.

01:45:32.000 And they don't contribute to your existence.

01:45:34.000 They just distract from it.

01:45:35.000 They just detract from it.

01:45:37.000 All right.

01:45:37.000 Yeah, it's a complicated issue.

01:45:38.000 I mean, San Francisco, some people are homeless because to live there, you have to make a million dollars to afford rent.

01:45:44.000 You don't have to live there. 0.99

01:45:45.000 You don't have to camp out in the middle of a fucking mission. 1.00

01:45:47.000 You can go wherever you want. 0.99

01:45:49.000 You don't have to live there.

01:45:50.000 People also have access, unlike the 30s, they have access to really powerful drugs.

01:45:54.000 And so this is the modern life.

01:45:57.000 Modern life is weird.

01:45:58.000 So in traditional societies...

01:46:02.000 We're good to go.

01:46:20.000 In a lot of cultures, when you drink, there's a kind of toastmaster or someone who's in charge of the pace at which you're drinking.

01:46:29.000 So like in a traditional Chinese banquet to this day, you don't just drink as much.

01:46:34.000 We don't sit here drinking out of coffee mugs as much as we want.

01:46:38.000 It's sitting there in front of you, and then someone makes a toast, and that's when you're allowed to drink.

01:46:41.000 And then you put your cup down, it gets refilled, but it sits there until someone makes a toast.

01:46:47.000 And that's a way to control alcohol consumption.

01:46:49.000 So alcohol has always been consumed in these communal, ritually organized ways that help to...

01:46:57.000 There were safety measures.

01:46:59.000 It's like a seatbelt.

01:47:01.000 And that's gone in modern societies.

01:47:04.000 The fact that you can drive into a drive-in liquor store...

01:47:10.000 And have your SUV filled up with vodka and scotch and firearms and, you know, cannabis probably, you know, and some Cheetos, whatever.

01:47:22.000 Take that all back to your house, and you have it in your house, and you can just consume it whenever you want.

01:47:28.000 That is something that we're not evolutionary-equipped to do.

01:47:33.000 It's never happened before.

01:47:35.000 And it's gotten worse with COVID, so I don't talk about this too much in the book, but...

01:47:40.000 I 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.

01:47:55.000 Well, not just that, people are trying to cope.

01:47:58.000 Yeah, and people are depressed.

01:47:59.000 Trying to cope with this very bizarre, strange, not so much now, but, you know, 12 months, unless you're in Canada.

01:48:04.000 Unless you're in Canada, yes, thanks, dude.

01:48:06.000 They 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.

01:48:15.000 I was drinking a lot of wine.

01:48:16.000 Like, every night I'd have, you know, three or four glasses of wine with dinner because I think I was trying to calm myself.

01:48:23.000 Yeah.

01:48:23.000 And you're not going out doing other things that are distracting.

01:48:27.000 I've got, I had, you know, my partner's in the States, and so we've been doing the long distance thing across the closed border.

01:48:34.000 Every time I go to see her and I come back to Canada, I've got to quarantine for two weeks.

01:48:38.000 Do you teach in Canada?

01:48:40.000 Yeah, but I've been on sabbatical.

01:48:42.000 Can't you teach on Zoom from the East Coast?

01:48:44.000 Yeah, but my daughter's in Vancouver, so I have reason to be in Vancouver.

01:48:49.000 What does your partner do?

01:48:50.000 Sorry to be crying.

01:48:52.000 She's a neuroscientist, a social cognitive neuroscientist.

01:48:55.000 Oh, dating a bunch of smart people, huh?

01:48:56.000 Yeah.

01:48:56.000 So she's got, we have the same, she has kids in Boston and I have a kid in Vancouver, so we're doing a long distance thing.

01:49:03.000 Got it.

01:49:05.000 So every time I came back from seeing her, I would have to quarantine for two weeks alone.

01:49:11.000 And I've done that now, I've done two with her, but I've done seven alone.

01:49:17.000 So 14 weeks of being in my apartment, not allowed to leave.

01:49:21.000 And with essentially unlimited access to alcohol, because you can order alcohol online, they deliver it to your door.

01:49:29.000 That's really unhealthy.

01:49:30.000 So like when I was writing the book, so it was helpful when I was writing Drunk, it was awesome.

01:49:35.000 The first three quarantines I did, I was still writing, and I wish the quarantines would never end.

01:49:41.000 I'm an introvert too, so I can go long periods of time without seeing people.

01:49:45.000 And I just focused and I wrote.

01:49:47.000 It was awesome.

01:49:47.000 It was really great.

01:49:48.000 Do you have to specifically stay in a place or you can stay in your own house?

01:49:53.000 You can stay in your own house, but you can't leave.

01:49:55.000 But there's like apartments or hotels that they make some people stay in.

01:49:59.000 That's a new thing.

01:50:00.000 And that's why I drove to Seattle.

01:50:01.000 A new thing.

01:50:02.000 They made it worse.

01:50:03.000 They made it worse.

01:50:05.000 Don't get me started. 1.00

01:50:07.000 Fucking Canada. 1.00

01:50:07.000 What are you doing? 1.00

01:50:08.000 Don't get me started on Canadian COVID policy.

01:50:10.000 But how did this happen?

01:50:11.000 I don't understand.

01:50:12.000 It's the Trudeau government wanting to look tough.

01:50:15.000 There's no scientific rationale for it, especially when they did it.

01:50:20.000 Like, if they'd done it earlier, it would have made more sense.

01:50:22.000 But now it's just catering to people who feel like they aren't being tough enough.

01:50:27.000 I mean, I'm fully vaccinated.

01:50:29.000 There's no reason for me to quarantine when I go back to Canada.

01:50:34.000 I tested negative here, right?

01:50:36.000 I'm going to test negative before I go back.

01:50:37.000 They test me at the border.

01:50:39.000 At 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.

01:50:47.000 Rules are rules.

01:50:48.000 So it's frustrating.

01:50:49.000 But the point of this is the solitude, like being alone, especially once the book was done.

01:50:57.000 Normally 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.

01:51:07.000 I can't do the new thing right away.

01:51:09.000 I go into a state where I just want to not think for a little while.

01:51:14.000 And that's normally when I would kayak or I'd garden or I'd chop wood or do something physical.

01:51:21.000 That's healthy, right?

01:51:22.000 But instead I was stuck in my apartment.

01:51:24.000 So I don't have a project anymore.

01:51:27.000 I can't leave my apartment.

01:51:29.000 It was bad.

01:51:30.000 So what did you do?

01:51:31.000 I drank a lot.

01:51:32.000 By yourself?

01:51:33.000 Yeah.

01:51:33.000 I mean, I would start drinking earlier.

01:51:35.000 I would drink more than I wanted.

01:51:37.000 And this is not just me.

01:51:39.000 I mean, this has happened to a lot of people.

01:51:41.000 There's good data on this that...

01:51:44.000 Obviously, consumption moved away from bars and restaurants to the home.

01:51:48.000 And some people initially said, oh, all that's happening is it's shifting from one place to another.

01:51:54.000 But there's evidence now that it's actually gone up in absolute terms.

01:51:57.000 People are drinking more.

01:51:58.000 There's more drinking disorder problems.

01:52:02.000 People are getting weight.

01:52:03.000 People are feeling that they're not in control of their drinking.

01:52:07.000 Right.

01:52:07.000 Apparently there's more domestic violence and child abuse as well.

01:52:10.000 Yeah, it's not good.

01:52:11.000 And it's because we're drinking in a social environment that is unprecedented.

01:52:17.000 We never had unlimited private...

01:52:20.000 In my apartment in Vancouver, I'm going to go back and quarantine there when I'm done with this.

01:52:25.000 I have enough alcohol to kill a mid-sized village.

01:52:30.000 If someone drank all that, they'd just be dead.

01:52:33.000 And it's mine.

01:52:34.000 I can drink as much of it as I want, whenever I want.

01:52:37.000 It's evolutionarily weird.

01:52:38.000 Do you plan out what you're going to do when you go back?

01:52:41.000 You have 14 days.

01:52:43.000 You're probably getting wicked shape.

01:52:45.000 I work out, yeah.

01:52:46.000 I've got a lot of stuff in my apartment to work out.

01:52:48.000 That's good.

01:52:50.000 It's hard.

01:52:51.000 It's not normal for people to be isolated like that.

01:52:54.000 No, it's not.

01:52:55.000 And it's also not smart.

01:52:57.000 And especially because there's no...

01:52:59.000 When you look at the motivation, you poke so many holes in it.

01:53:04.000 No, I know.

01:53:05.000 It'll make you angry.

01:53:06.000 We could have a whole show about that.

01:53:07.000 We should.

01:53:07.000 We should have a whole show about Canadian COVID policy.

01:53:10.000 We should get Justin Trudeau drunk.

01:53:11.000 Justin Trudeau drunk.

01:53:12.000 Get him on a podcast.

01:53:13.000 And find out why he's doing this. 0.99

01:53:14.000 What the fuck are you doing, man? 1.00

01:53:16.000 Part of his problem is he's too handsome. 1.00

01:53:17.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:53:18.000 It's a big problem.

01:53:19.000 But 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.

01:53:32.000 It's one of the reasons I moved to Texas.

01:53:33.000 Really?

01:53:34.000 Yeah.

01:53:35.000 Why?

01:53:35.000 Because in California, all the parents were paranoid.

01:53:37.000 They didn't want their kids, but I'm like, well look, we know what it does to children.

01:53:41.000 It is statistically safer than the flu, right?

01:53:46.000 If you just look at statistics for kids.

01:53:48.000 Well, my kids, both my kids got it.

01:53:51.000 It was nothing.

01:53:52.000 And I know some kids got it and it's not nothing, but usually that's because of pre-existing conditions and you should adjust accordingly.

01:54:00.000 Kids that have all sorts of comorbidities, they're the ones who have real problems with it.

01:54:05.000 But most kids, they don't have a problem with this particular disease.

01:54:10.000 We're very fortunate because of that.

01:54:12.000 Yeah, it's a cost-benefit analysis, right?

01:54:14.000 And so for kids, the cost is huge of not letting them socialize.

01:54:18.000 Yes, it's a giant cost socially.

01:54:20.000 When you're talking about 10-year-olds, oh my god, man, it's just bad for them.

01:54:25.000 How old are your kids?

01:54:26.000 Well, 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.

01:54:43.000 There's less cases here.

01:54:45.000 And people just generally have a different attitude about it.

01:54:49.000 And they had a different attitude about it back in May.

01:54:51.000 Yeah.

01:54:52.000 So my kids, like, we were on a lake out here in May and we were jumping in the water and playing.

01:54:57.000 Like, we can go outside?

01:54:59.000 This is crazy.

01:55:00.000 And I realized, like, how bad is this for children? 1.00

01:55:02.000 Where, 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. 0.99

01:55:12.000 And we're all walking around with masks on. 1.00

01:55:14.000 Yeah.

01:55:15.000 It's weird.

01:55:15.000 It's very weird.

01:55:16.000 Well, when they taped off playgrounds, I was just like, what the fuck? 1.00

01:55:20.000 Nonsense. 1.00

01:55:20.000 It's like the safest thing. 1.00

01:55:21.000 As far as we know, even back in spring of 2020, we knew that outdoor transmission was not very common.

01:55:27.000 Well, we heard that, but we were still nervous about it, right?

01:55:30.000 And we were worried about touching things.

01:55:32.000 Yeah, we were wiping down Amazon packages.

01:55:34.000 Oh, yeah.

01:55:35.000 My manager was spraying everything with bleach.

01:55:38.000 Spraying vegetables.

01:55:39.000 Yeah.

01:55:39.000 It's like everybody got weird.

01:55:40.000 No, it's still like today, you know, people are constantly in Vancouver.

01:55:44.000 So you walk into a store, they want you to sanitize.

01:55:46.000 And I'm just like, you know what?

01:55:47.000 Surfaces aren't a thing anymore.

01:55:49.000 Thank you.

01:55:49.000 We know that for sure.

01:55:50.000 This is the thing that's so troubling.

01:55:52.000 But 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.

01:56:02.000 There's a reason why it only kills less than 1%.

01:56:06.000 It's because most people recover from it.

01:56:08.000 Well, how do you recover from it?

01:56:09.000 Your immune system.

01:56:10.000 How can we get our immune system stronger?

01:56:12.000 Well, it turns out there's a bunch of proven methods.

01:56:16.000 Exercise, sunlight, vitamins, water, healthy food.

01:56:20.000 There's a bunch of different things you can do.

01:56:22.000 Limiting stress.

01:56:23.000 You know, eliminating stress or meditation.

01:56:26.000 All sorts of different things you could do to strengthen your body, strengthen your immune system.

01:56:30.000 Community.

01:56:31.000 Turns out actually being around people that you love and care about is good for your immune system.

01:56:35.000 It's good for your health.

01:56:36.000 It's good for your mental health.

01:56:37.000 All these things we denied people.

01:56:39.000 It's so weird.

01:56:40.000 It's like what we did is exacerbate the spread of the disease unintentionally.

01:56:44.000 In a lot of ways, the lockdowns in California, when you force people inside, a lot of times those people, they transmit it inside, unfortunately.

01:56:55.000 Yeah.

01:56:56.000 So I'm hoping that with Canada's finally ramping up vaccinations, so my daughter just got her first shot, which is great.

01:57:03.000 All her kids have their first dose, all her friends in school.

01:57:06.000 So life's going to get back to normal.

01:57:08.000 But I think that you see the toll that it's taken on kids being isolated.

01:57:15.000 And it's hard to know what the long-term effects of that are going to be.

01:57:19.000 Well, I'm hoping.

01:57:20.000 Kids are generally resilient.

01:57:22.000 But I really wish there was more time spent about education, about your immune system.

01:57:27.000 And also, it's a long conversation about this.

01:57:32.000 So the take-home message is try not to drink alone.

01:57:35.000 Drinking alone is really unhealthy.

01:57:38.000 But what about if you're drinking alone because you're trying to achieve a certain result, like you're writing something?

01:57:42.000 Yeah, so that, it's funny because when I was writing the proposal for the book, I wrote like 10 versions of it, and it still sucked.

01:57:54.000 And my agent, every time I'd send her the new version, she was like, eh, no.

01:57:57.000 Really?

01:57:58.000 You've got a good agent, huh?

01:57:59.000 She's good.

01:57:59.000 She's this hard-bitten Manhattanite.

01:58:03.000 Getting praise out of her is very difficult.

01:58:05.000 What was wrong with it?

01:58:06.000 When it was finally good, she was like, hmm, okay.

01:58:08.000 What was wrong with it?

01:58:09.000 It didn't pop.

01:58:11.000 It needed to pop.

01:58:13.000 I had all the facts there.

01:58:15.000 I had the ideas there.

01:58:17.000 It just was boring.

01:58:20.000 Nothing drew you into it.

01:58:23.000 And she was right.

01:58:24.000 It didn't pop.

01:58:26.000 And all of a sudden I realize, hey, you know what?

01:58:28.000 I haven't written any of it drunk.

01:58:30.000 I'm not taking my own advice.

01:58:32.000 So in the book I talk about all this evidence that when we get to about.08 blood alcohol content, you're more creative.

01:58:39.000 That's when you shouldn't drive.

01:58:41.000 Just about when you shouldn't drive is when you should write.

01:58:44.000 Because you're actually making connections.

01:58:47.000 You're coherent enough that you can still do serious work.

01:58:51.000 But, you know, the prefrontal cortex has just been turned down a couple notches so that you can start thinking laterally.

01:58:57.000 How do they know that it's 0.08?

01:58:59.000 Why 0.08?

01:58:59.000 Well, I was quoting a study.

01:59:00.000 So there's one study that was done where they got people drunk.

01:59:04.000 So they got them.

01:59:05.000 They were either doing placebos or alcoholic drinks.

01:59:08.000 And they were trying to solve a lateral thinking task.

01:59:11.000 So this one's called the remote associate test.

01:59:13.000 So you get, like, three words that seem completely unrelated, and you have to come up with a fourth word that unites them all.

01:59:21.000 And the thing about these lateral thinking tasks is you can't power through it.

01:59:27.000 Like, there's no way to, like, do an algorithm and figure it out.

01:59:30.000 You just have to kind of relax and see the answer.

01:59:35.000 And people who got—they seemed best at this task at about.08%.

01:59:40.000 And there's a deterioration when it gets higher?

01:59:43.000 Yeah, there's a deterioration when you get higher.

01:59:44.000 So there's a sweet spot.

01:59:45.000 So 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.

01:59:56.000 And I reported this.

01:59:57.000 This study had just come out.

02:00:00.000 And so I talked a little bit about how alcohol might be a shortcut to spontaneity and creativity.

02:00:06.000 And after the talk was over, this was at a Google campus, this guy, his hand shot up, and he was like, do you know about the Balmer peak?

02:00:14.000 And I'd never heard of this thing.

02:00:17.000 This 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.

02:00:29.000 So it's like, not good, not good, not good, really good, really good!

02:00:33.000 That's amazing that it's coding.

02:00:36.000 Supposedly he kept himself hooked up to an IV. It's almost certainly bullshit. 1.00

02:00:41.000 I don't know if it's bullshit. 1.00

02:00:43.000 It captures this idea that alcohol is a tool that can help you solve creativity problems. 0.99

02:00:51.000 They told me about the Balmer Peak.

02:00:53.000 And then after the talk, they were going to take me on a campus tour.

02:00:57.000 And they came up and they were like, okay, we know where we're taking you first.

02:01:00.000 And they took me to their whiskey room.

02:01:02.000 So they have this room that is just a wall of really good single malt scotches.

02:01:07.000 It was actually amazing.

02:01:08.000 Because I live in Canada now.

02:01:09.000 I can't get anything in Canada.

02:01:11.000 Really?

02:01:12.000 Why not?

02:01:12.000 Yeah, because everything's like 200% tax on alcohol.

02:01:16.000 So everything's too expensive.

02:01:17.000 200% tax?

02:01:18.000 Basically, yeah.

02:01:19.000 What do you mean?

02:01:20.000 So like if a whiskey bottle is 50 bucks...

02:01:23.000 It's 200% tax on that?

02:01:25.000 My standard whiskey is Lagavulin, 16-year.

02:01:28.000 And 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.

02:01:40.000 Really?

02:01:41.000 Yeah.

02:01:41.000 So anyway, I was salivating over the scotches they had.

02:01:46.000 But what was important is that this is where they go.

02:01:49.000 So they said that when they run into—so they're working on a problem.

02:01:53.000 They run into a wall.

02:01:54.000 They can't solve this problem.

02:01:56.000 Instead of sitting there at their computers banging their heads against the wall, they stop.

02:02:01.000 They go to the whiskey room.

02:02:03.000 It's got beanbag chairs and a foosball table. 1.00

02:02:06.000 And they drink some scotch, and they just shoot the shit. 0.99

02:02:10.000 They're like, well, what if we did this? 1.00

02:02:11.000 What if we did that?

02:02:12.000 And they said often they come up with a solution.

02:02:15.000 And so especially alcohol is really good at enhancing creativity in groups because it's making me more creative.

02:02:24.000 So I'm thinking of more things.

02:02:26.000 But I'm also less the playground monitor is off duty.

02:02:31.000 And so I'm also I'll say it to you out loud. 1.00

02:02:33.000 Even if if I was sober, I might think it was stupid. 0.97

02:02:38.000 This 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. 0.97

02:02:49.000 And I don't think it would have happened unless they had opened a pub.

02:02:53.000 There's no place to drink on campus.

02:02:54.000 And they finally opened this pub right near the bus loop.

02:02:57.000 So after work on Fridays, me and a bunch of colleagues, all from different departments, would meet at this pub.

02:03:03.000 There was no purpose. 0.99

02:03:05.000 We were just drinking and shooting the shit. 0.99

02:03:08.000 And this huge project came out of it because I think we were both individually more creative. 1.00

02:03:15.000 But we were also disinhibited, and so we would say things that we would normally censor ourselves from saying that might sound stupid. 0.98

02:03:22.000 But then I'd say something that maybe was stupid, and then my colleague who does archaeology would be like, oh, you know what? 0.98

02:03:28.000 Actually, that relates to this other thing that I know about. 0.97

02:03:32.000 And then that relates to the thing that my colleague who does cultural evolutionary theory knows about.

02:03:38.000 And it all kind of gels.

02:03:40.000 But it wouldn't happen unless we slightly turned down the knob.

02:03:43.000 Right.

02:03:45.000 So 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.

02:03:59.000 That was one of the motivations for writing the book as well.

02:04:01.000 That's interesting that they're so open-minded.

02:04:03.000 They looked at it that way and chose that approach.

02:04:06.000 Because that's not just unconventional, but frowned upon in a work environment.

02:04:10.000 Yeah, yeah. 1.00

02:04:11.000 Because oftentimes we think of people drunk as being ridiculous, doing stupid things, creating chaos. 0.99

02:04:17.000 And we think about lawsuits, right? 1.00

02:04:20.000 Oh, yeah, for sure.

02:04:20.000 So this is the problem.

02:04:22.000 Again, part of the reason for me writing the book is trying to make the argument that Alcohol is dangerous.

02:04:28.000 There are all these bad things.

02:04:30.000 There's addiction.

02:04:31.000 It hurts your liver.

02:04:32.000 It increases your cancer risk.

02:04:34.000 It leads to sexual harassment and all sorts of problems.

02:04:39.000 Drunk driving.

02:04:40.000 Fights.

02:04:41.000 Violence.

02:04:42.000 Violence.

02:04:42.000 So we know about all the costs.

02:04:45.000 But unless we understand the functional benefits, on the other side, on the positive side, what is there?

02:04:51.000 Right.

02:04:52.000 We have to look at it for what it really is, like everything else.

02:04:55.000 Yeah.

02:04:56.000 So 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.

02:05:05.000 So let's put some other things in the positive column.

02:05:08.000 And it may be the case that you still look at it and you're like, nah, it's too risky.

02:05:13.000 We're not going to do that.

02:05:14.000 Well, it certainly is for some people, right?

02:05:27.000 For all the positive functions of alcohol, there's always this dark side.

02:05:32.000 So Dionysus has this dark side. 0.99

02:05:34.000 So the god Dionysus, the god of wine in ancient Greece, could do all these great things for you, but he could also really fuck with you. 0.99

02:05:44.000 So he could give you a gift. 0.99

02:05:46.000 He's the one who gave Midas the golden touch.

02:05:49.000 So yeah, you want gold?

02:05:50.000 Sure, everything you touch turns to gold.

02:05:53.000 And then that didn't work out very well for Midas.

02:05:56.000 So there's always this danger attached to it.

02:05:57.000 Didn't he touch his kids or something?

02:05:58.000 He touched a woman he loved and she turned to gold and he couldn't touch anyone anymore.

02:06:03.000 It turned out it was a bad thing.

02:06:06.000 Isn't that Frozen?

02:06:07.000 The movie Frozen?

02:06:07.000 Yeah, it's kind of like Frozen.

02:06:09.000 It touches everything.

02:06:10.000 So it's, you want to bring up frozen clay?

02:06:13.000 No.

02:06:13.000 All right.

02:06:14.000 So there's a dark side to Dionysus, right?

02:06:18.000 And you need to see that.

02:06:21.000 And you can't see it in its context without understanding the benefits.

02:06:26.000 And so I think, you know, in terms of do you have alcohol at professional events?

02:06:31.000 Do you have it at academic events?

02:06:33.000 Right now, the atmosphere in academia is so prohibitionist.

02:06:38.000 It's just like we can absolutely not have any alcohol.

02:06:41.000 It's so dangerous.

02:06:43.000 When did that start?

02:06:45.000 I think it started with kind of people finally—I mean, it started for good reasons, right?

02:06:51.000 It's people finally talking about all the abuse that happens and the unfairness of it.

02:06:56.000 So a lot of work at conferences, for instance, really ends up not—it's not being done in the talks.

02:07:03.000 It's being done at the end of the evening when people are at the hotel bar. 0.98

02:07:07.000 They're down-regulating their PFCs, and they're talking freely about shit. 0.98

02:07:11.000 So we're striking up new partnerships. 0.99

02:07:15.000 What is PFC? They're prefrontal cortex.

02:07:17.000 Oh, okay.

02:07:18.000 So we're relaxed.

02:07:20.000 We're talking about new stuff.

02:07:21.000 I mentioned a postdoc opportunity that I have, and you're a grad student who's graduating recently, and you're going to need a job.

02:07:29.000 All this great networking and creativity happens at the hotel bar.

02:07:33.000 But it's mostly dudes doing it.

02:07:36.000 And if you're a woman, you're not going to be super thrilled about hanging out at the hotel bar at 11 p.m.

02:07:43.000 with a bunch of drunk guys.

02:07:44.000 And that means that you are now frozen out of everything that's happening there, right?

02:07:49.000 You 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.

02:07:59.000 Or you went home because you're a recovering alcoholic and you don't drink.

02:08:04.000 Or you went home because you have to get up early and pick the kids up from daycare.

02:08:09.000 You know, whatever.

02:08:09.000 You don't have time to...

02:08:12.000 Drinking around the bar late at night is a perfectly comfortable environment for white men. 1.00

02:08:20.000 And especially white men who don't have full child care.

02:08:24.000 Why white men? 0.62

02:08:24.000 I think because there's also, you know, one of the things alcohol does is disinhibit you. 0.62

02:08:28.000 And 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.

02:08:36.000 But mainly it's men.

02:08:38.000 And it makes people who are not part of the in-group.

02:08:43.000 Not only feel uncomfortable, but actually really genuinely disadvantaged because they lose that on opportunities.

02:08:48.000 Well, 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.

02:09:00.000 Yeah, some very bad stuff can happen.

02:09:02.000 Right, but also very good stuff.

02:09:04.000 Also very good stuff, so what do you do?

02:09:06.000 What do you do?

02:09:07.000 What's the solution?

02:09:09.000 I don't think there's a clear answer.

02:09:11.000 One solution is ban it, which is the current answer in academia.

02:09:16.000 And I don't think that's right.

02:09:17.000 So 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.

02:09:30.000 So like simple stuff like limit...

02:09:32.000 So it used to be the case that at receptions, at professional conferences, there were open bars. 0.99

02:09:37.000 So you could just drink as much as you wanted at these receptions, and shit went south. 0.98

02:09:42.000 Used to be. 0.99

02:09:43.000 Used to be.

02:09:44.000 Right.

02:09:45.000 And then it changed to where you had drink tickets. 1.00

02:09:47.000 But shit went south. 1.00

02:09:48.000 Yeah, she went south. 1.00

02:09:50.000 So good things happen, but really bad things happen really quick.

02:09:53.000 Maybe there should be some way of stopping the really bad things from happening.

02:09:57.000 So drink tickets.

02:09:58.000 So limiting the number of drinks people can have.

02:10:01.000 Making water...

02:10:09.000 Right, but isn't the real problem personalities?

02:10:27.000 It's persons and situations, right?

02:10:30.000 So personalities definitely play a role.

02:10:34.000 I like to drink.

02:10:35.000 I'm going to tend to drink more than most people.

02:10:37.000 But also, if I'm in a situation where I have non-alcoholic options, the situation pushes my behavior in a different direction.

02:10:46.000 Right.

02:10:46.000 Or if I'm in an open bar situation, I'll drink a lot.

02:10:52.000 If it's two drink tickets and then I'm not allowed anymore, that puts a limit on me.

02:10:58.000 That's the situation helping me help myself.

02:11:02.000 Regulate.

02:11:02.000 Yeah, helping me regulate.

02:11:04.000 Yeah, that's the way to put it.

02:11:05.000 It's funny because it's such a human thing, right?

02:11:08.000 Like a human issue, meaning that there's a lot of human issues that are so messy.

02:11:14.000 There's no clear binary one or zero.

02:11:19.000 There's so many of those things.

02:11:20.000 Yeah, so my goal in the book is just to lay out the complicated nature of it, right?

02:11:25.000 Because right now, it's just like alcohol is bad.

02:11:28.000 Let's get rid of it.

02:11:29.000 And it's not that simple.

02:11:30.000 Well, it's certainly not that simple if you have really good friends, right?

02:11:33.000 Like, I have a lot of good friends, and we like to get together and drink, and we have a great time.

02:11:38.000 Like, I have a group of friends where, on a regular basis, Is that a word?

02:11:45.000 On a regular basis, we have a couple of drinks together and have tons of laughs, and it's normal.

02:11:51.000 And it's a standard thing.

02:11:55.000 But 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?

02:12:08.000 You know that guy, and that's the 15% that you were talking about.

02:12:11.000 Yeah.

02:12:12.000 Or just, yeah.

02:12:13.000 I wish there was a way to tell.

02:12:15.000 Like if you had a turkey tester.

02:12:16.000 You know those things that pop up?

02:12:19.000 Don't give this guy more than two drinks.

02:12:21.000 Bob's an alcoholic!

02:12:21.000 Yeah, Bob's an alcoholic.

02:12:23.000 I mean, alcoholism is such a strange term.

02:12:28.000 Is there a spectrum?

02:12:32.000 There's a spectrum.

02:12:33.000 Of alcoholism? 0.98

02:12:34.000 Is 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? 0.72

02:12:49.000 And is there also someone who has some weird genetic disposition where they can't have a drink? 0.96

02:12:54.000 I have friends that I know that can't have two drinks.

02:12:59.000 They have two drinks and then no one's home.

02:13:02.000 There's a strong genetic component.

02:13:04.000 So the estimate is 60 to 70% is a genetic contribution.

02:13:09.000 Interesting.

02:13:09.000 And so then you need to really be careful.

02:13:11.000 Is there a gene we've isolated?

02:13:14.000 The 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.

02:13:25.000 There's debate about this.

02:13:27.000 I wonder if alcoholics, like straight-up hardcore alcoholics, are better at certain tasks.

02:13:32.000 I wonder if there's an evolutionary advantage to going shark-eyes.

02:13:36.000 I think there has to be.

02:13:38.000 You know, we talked about this kind of frequency-dependent selection.

02:13:41.000 Like, why are introverts allowed to exist?

02:13:44.000 We're probably also about only 15% of the population.

02:13:48.000 But define introverts, because you and I have had an easy conversation the moment I met you.

02:13:54.000 You're not a rabid introvert to the point where you get really uncomfortable.

02:13:58.000 But after this conversation, I'm going to need to go back to my hotel and not talk to a single person for like a day.

02:14:04.000 Really?

02:14:05.000 Yeah, I can be...

02:14:06.000 This is hard?

02:14:07.000 No, it's wonderful.

02:14:08.000 It's fun.

02:14:09.000 But it takes energy out of me and then I need to recover.

02:14:14.000 Just talking to people?

02:14:15.000 Just talking to strangers?

02:14:18.000 No, so I don't have it.

02:14:19.000 Like with my partner, I don't.

02:14:20.000 It's not a drain.

02:14:21.000 I like how you call your girlfriend your partner.

02:14:23.000 Yeah, my girlfriend.

02:14:24.000 I don't know. 0.98

02:14:24.000 We're fucking 50 years old. 0.98

02:14:26.000 I know! 0.99

02:14:26.000 It's a funny question. 0.99

02:14:27.000 So I could call her my girlfriend? 1.00

02:14:29.000 She's fucking 50 years old. 1.00

02:14:30.000 I remember I was listening to a comedian, this guy Richard Jenny, who's brilliant. 1.00

02:14:34.000 He's dead now, but when he was in his 30s, he was talking about his girlfriend.

02:14:37.000 And I remember I was in my 20s.

02:14:39.000 Is she a girl?

02:14:40.000 No, she's not a girl.

02:14:41.000 She's a woman. 0.82

02:14:42.000 So there's no good term.

02:14:43.000 Partner's a weird one, though.

02:14:44.000 Partner's a weird one.

02:14:45.000 It's like you guys in business together, you know a law firm?

02:14:46.000 But what do I call her?

02:14:47.000 My lover?

02:14:48.000 I remember my friend, my lover.

02:14:49.000 That's kind of hot.

02:14:51.000 Say that with a wink, like this.

02:14:53.000 Raise the eyebrows.

02:14:54.000 We're middle-aged people, so she's not my girlfriend.

02:14:57.000 My special lady friend.

02:14:58.000 How about that?

02:14:59.000 But we don't...

02:15:00.000 She has introverted tendencies, and we don't train each other. 1.00

02:15:05.000 But it's interesting.

02:15:07.000 When I was a grad...

02:15:07.000 Well, you're intimate with each other.

02:15:08.000 You know each other very well, so you're comfortable around each other.

02:15:12.000 Yeah.

02:15:12.000 And my daughter doesn't.

02:15:14.000 So with family...

02:15:15.000 But with me, I'm burning you out.

02:15:17.000 You're not right now.

02:15:19.000 No, you really aren't.

02:15:20.000 I don't notice it.

02:15:22.000 I enjoy it.

02:15:23.000 So it's kind of like waiting tables.

02:15:25.000 So 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.

02:15:39.000 For a year and a half I did that.

02:15:42.000 And even as an introvert, that's too much.

02:15:45.000 And so I loved, I kept these, I used to, waiting tables and working in bars is how I put myself through end of undergrad and grad school.

02:15:53.000 But I got to a certain point where I was making a lot more money doing translation.

02:15:57.000 So I know Chinese, so I was translating Chinese to English, and that was much better money.

02:16:03.000 But I kept like three waitering shifts a week. 0.99

02:16:06.000 Because I needed to go out and do this kind of shit. 0.99

02:16:09.000 I would banter with customers. 1.00

02:16:12.000 I would have some drinks with my colleagues at the end of the day.

02:16:15.000 So I need doses of it.

02:16:18.000 But then I need to rest.

02:16:20.000 I 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.

02:16:34.000 I remember thinking that.

02:16:35.000 I would be super nervous waiting in line to talk to the bank teller for no reason.

02:16:39.000 But it was because my interaction with people was pretty limited.

02:16:44.000 Okay.

02:16:44.000 But your nature seems to be extroverted.

02:16:48.000 You thrive off of talking to people.

02:16:51.000 I enjoy talking to people because I find it to be extremely beneficial to my perspective.

02:17:01.000 I'm a curious person.

02:17:03.000 You're a curious person.

02:17:05.000 I'd heard of you, but I'd never seen one of your shows until my publicist booked me on the show, and then I started watching some shows.

02:17:11.000 And you're like, oh no.

02:17:14.000 I was worried at first, and then as soon as I saw the first one, I was not.

02:17:18.000 Because, you know, I talked about this idea of wu-wei, right? 0.98

02:17:22.000 Effortless action.

02:17:24.000 The Chinese think that when you're in that state, you have this power that there's no good translation for it.

02:17:31.000 And unfortunately, in Mandarin, it's pronounced duh.

02:17:33.000 That's hilarious.

02:17:35.000 It's called duh.

02:17:36.000 Yeah, but I translate it as like charisma.

02:17:39.000 So basically, when you're in the state of wu-wei, people like you. 0.97

02:17:42.000 And if you're a Confucian ruler, people defer to your authority and kind of want to follow you without you having to force them to.

02:17:52.000 They admire you and they want you to like them and they want to do things for you.

02:17:56.000 If you're a Daoist, so like for Zhuangzi, The effect of your duh is to relax other people around you. 0.99

02:18:05.000 So you're super uptight.

02:18:07.000 You come and interact with me.

02:18:08.000 If I have duh, I relax you.

02:18:12.000 And you become more natural.

02:18:14.000 You start being hung up on the things you were hung up on.

02:18:18.000 And they want that power.

02:18:20.000 So that power is what allows you to be successful.

02:18:22.000 And that's the tension, right?

02:18:24.000 How do you get duh if you don't have it?

02:18:26.000 And I was struck by the fact that you seem to have duh.

02:18:29.000 Like you relax people and people will talk.

02:18:33.000 And it's because of a kind of authenticity, right?

02:18:36.000 You actually are genuinely, authentically interested in other people.

02:18:41.000 And that's hard to fake, right?

02:18:43.000 I don't think you can fake that.

02:18:44.000 You can't fake it.

02:18:45.000 And so people relax around it.

02:18:48.000 Well, this whole podcast came about because of genuine curiosity.

02:18:52.000 There was no money in it when I first started doing it.

02:18:54.000 And 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.

02:19:02.000 Yeah.

02:19:03.000 Having 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.

02:19:14.000 And my whole life has been essentially completely non-conventional in terms of my choices.

02:19:22.000 Yeah, it seems like a series of life.

02:19:24.000 But it's all been authentic in that these are the things.

02:19:28.000 You can't pretend to be interested in martial arts.

02:19:31.000 You're either interested in it or you're not.

02:19:33.000 You can't pretend to be interested in stand-up comedy.

02:19:35.000 You're either interested in it or you're not, in pursuit of it.

02:19:38.000 You can't pretend to be interested in people.

02:19:44.000 And 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.

02:19:53.000 But I'm curious.

02:19:54.000 You just want to know what they're thinking.

02:19:56.000 I 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.

02:20:02.000 I 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.

02:20:15.000 Yeah, 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...

02:20:28.000 Again, no one's perfect.

02:20:29.000 I'm not perfect. 0.50

02:20:30.000 I've fucked this up many times, but I think we should generally lean towards empathy as much as we can.

02:20:38.000 And so empathy exists also in the context of understanding people's perspective in conversations.

02:20:45.000 And 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.

02:20:58.000 Oh, I see her perspective.

02:21:00.000 Like she's looking at it.

02:21:01.000 Different 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

02:21:31.000 is a doctor or a scientist or whatever.

02:21:37.000 It's clear that it works.

02:21:38.000 Because you're authentic, you send out...

02:21:42.000 In the book, I talk a little bit about these cooperation dilemmas that we have in life.

02:21:49.000 They go by different names.

02:21:50.000 So Prisoner's Dilemma or Public Goods Games or Tragedy of the Commons.

02:21:56.000 There 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.

02:22:04.000 But I don't have a way of verifying that you're going to do the right thing.

02:22:09.000 You could defect in economist language and then I'm going to be really screwed.

02:22:14.000 And so purely rational agents can't solve the prisoner's dilemma.

02:22:20.000 They get stuck with a suboptimal outcome because they don't trust people.

02:22:25.000 But humans, normal humans, solve prisoners' dilemmas all the time.

02:22:31.000 And the way we do that is we trust people.

02:22:34.000 And we trust people based on cues, so emotional signals, smiles.

02:22:41.000 So, 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.

02:22:50.000 And then there's the fake smile when you're kind of smiling for the camera or something.

02:22:54.000 Right, which is really disturbing to people.

02:22:56.000 It's really disturbing to people.

02:22:57.000 They're totally different muscle systems.

02:22:59.000 Really?

02:22:59.000 Yeah.

02:23:00.000 Oh, yeah.

02:23:00.000 One of them is controlled by the PFC, the deliberate one, Smile Now.

02:23:05.000 Yeah.

02:23:05.000 It's time for you to nod and smile.

02:23:08.000 That's your PFC doing it.

02:23:10.000 And then if you say something really funny and I laugh, that's a different muscle system and it's not controlled consciously.

02:23:17.000 And it's hard to fake.

02:23:19.000 Actors can get good faking Duchenne's smiles.

02:23:22.000 And so part of the story I'm telling is this evolutionary arms race.

02:23:27.000 So people need to trust other people.

02:23:30.000 And we developed this signaling system to do it.

02:23:33.000 I can tell if you're authentic or not by your eyes and everything else.

02:23:38.000 But 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.

02:23:52.000 But it wouldn't be great for you.

02:23:54.000 It would be great for you if you're a defector who's in a minority in the culture.

02:23:59.000 You could get a lot of benefits.

02:24:01.000 Yeah, but see, this is where I disagree.

02:24:04.000 Because I think the benefit is always camaraderie.

02:24:08.000 But that's because you're sincere.

02:24:10.000 Yeah, but I also think that people should understand this.

02:24:14.000 There's a deep benefit to real genuine love and friendship.

02:24:18.000 And if you are somehow or another getting financial benefit or societal benefit or...

02:24:26.000 Some sort of status benefit without the actual friendship aspect of it.

02:24:31.000 You miss the whole point.

02:24:32.000 I had this conversation with a friend of mine the other day, a comedian friend of mine.

02:24:35.000 We were talking about this comedian that threw another comedian under the bus.

02:24:39.000 And I said, I feel bad for this guy because he's a comedian, but he doesn't have any comedian friends.

02:24:45.000 And we were all talking about this in a group chat.

02:24:48.000 We were saying, man, you missed half the fun.

02:24:52.000 Half the fun of being a stand-up comic is being friends with the funniest people on the earth. 0.72

02:24:57.000 Like, I have group texts that if they ever got out, I have some fucking real explaining to do.

02:25:02.000 Some of the people have said some horrible things to me. 0.77

02:25:05.000 And we were laughing.

02:25:06.000 But it's just comedians...

02:25:09.000 Understand each other and to be one of us and to be without any real sincere friendships within this group is crazy.

02:25:20.000 Right, but that's because just put on your evolutionary goggles for a second.

02:25:24.000 So like put aside the way you feel which is because you're a sincere human being and you're authentic you feel like this.

02:25:31.000 But imagine there was Joe Prime who's just like you in every way But you're faking it all.

02:25:40.000 There are ways in which you would do well in a population that was full of cooperators.

02:25:45.000 And so the upshot is just there's a danger of Joe Primes faking it.

02:25:51.000 I understand, but I don't think it works in this setting.

02:25:53.000 This is my point.

02:25:55.000 This is 1,665th?

02:26:02.000 63rd?

02:26:03.000 1,663rd podcast, not including Fight Companions and MMA shows.

02:26:09.000 There's more than 100...

02:26:11.000 How many MMA shows?

02:26:14.000 111 MMA shows, a ton of fight companions.

02:26:18.000 You can't fake that much, man.

02:26:20.000 People will figure out your weirdness.

02:26:24.000 And they'll figure it out faster if you're drinking together.

02:26:28.000 Or if you're high.

02:26:30.000 High is the most.

02:26:31.000 That's the most because that just strips you.

02:26:34.000 Paralyzes your prefrontal cortex.

02:26:36.000 But this thing of being genuine, it's not...

02:26:44.000 If you're not genuine and you're benefiting, you're not benefiting. 0.99

02:26:48.000 You're fucking up. 0.99

02:26:50.000 You're missing the whole thing. 1.00

02:26:52.000 The whole thing, it's like being in a loving relationship where you hope the person dies.

02:26:59.000 What are you doing?

02:27:01.000 You're supposed to hope that person feels great.

02:27:02.000 You want people to feel great because then you feel great.

02:27:05.000 We're all connected, whether we agree or not, whether we look at it correctly or not.

02:27:11.000 All the information points, all the evidence points to the fact that we're all connected.

02:27:15.000 And then when you have genuine, loving friendships, they're super beneficial for you.

02:27:22.000 They're good for you, too.

02:27:24.000 They're not just good for the other person.

02:27:26.000 They're good for you.

02:27:27.000 When that person is doing great, it's actually good for you.

02:27:30.000 When you're genuinely happy for your friends, it's actually mutually beneficial.

02:27:35.000 You miss all that if you're this actor who's faking it.

02:27:40.000 So 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.

02:27:54.000 Right, but you care about that, because you're a human and you're not your genes.

02:27:59.000 So from a genes perspective, Just in terms of transmitting those genes? 0.96

02:28:03.000 Transmitting those genes, producing a miserable psychopath who's never happy is fine.

02:28:09.000 Like, genes don't care about that. 0.97

02:28:11.000 So this is why cultures have to worry about the...

02:28:17.000 Sociopaths.

02:28:18.000 Sociopaths, right?

02:28:18.000 Yeah.

02:28:19.000 They are going to take advantage of this.

02:28:21.000 And so there's kind of arms race.

02:28:24.000 So the fact that I can tell at an instant...

02:28:29.000 If 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.

02:28:37.000 That would seem like magic to a chimpanzee.

02:28:41.000 It seems like telepathy.

02:28:42.000 The way I can read your mind from facial expressions is amazing, and I'm actually not that good at it.

02:28:49.000 But don't you think dogs have a little bit of that?

02:28:51.000 Dogs have it too because they've co-evolved with humans.

02:28:53.000 So they're constantly worried about human intentional states.

02:28:57.000 And so part of my point in the book is we're the end products of this evolutionary arms race.

02:29:04.000 Basically between sociopaths and normal people like us.

02:29:08.000 We want to be able to pick out sociopaths.

02:29:10.000 They want to be able to pass for normal people.

02:29:12.000 So 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.

02:29:19.000 As a scientist, I look at it.

02:29:20.000 You're looking at it as these traits, they exist in order for people to more successfully transmit their genes or transfer their genes.

02:29:28.000 Yeah.

02:29:29.000 So it's a weird mindset because as a scientist, I think that as a human, I just like hanging out and talking to you.

02:29:38.000 Right.

02:29:39.000 You know, it's the same thing with parental care.

02:29:41.000 So as a scientist, the reason that I love my daughter is because she's carrying half my genes.

02:29:48.000 That's why parental love is implanted in me by my genes.

02:29:52.000 And yet if I really thought that consciously, I'd be weird, right?

02:29:56.000 I love my daughter because I love my daughter.

02:29:58.000 It's spontaneous, it's natural, it's part of just being a normal human being.

02:30:03.000 Yeah, but I don't buy that.

02:30:04.000 My daughter has a little tiny chihuahua and I love him.

02:30:08.000 Why do I love him?

02:30:09.000 He's not carrying on my jeans.

02:30:10.000 Your jeans are tricking you.

02:30:12.000 Is that what it is or is it just love?

02:30:15.000 No, it's love.

02:30:16.000 So genes are happy with mistakes. 0.76

02:30:18.000 They're willing to tolerate masturbation and they're willing to tolerate adoptive parents loving their kids as much as biological parents do. 0.63

02:30:27.000 And even puppies. 0.99

02:30:28.000 And even puppies because puppies look like kids, right?

02:30:31.000 So I have a dog.

02:30:32.000 I love my dog.

02:30:33.000 And my dog, again, I genuinely love my dog.

02:30:37.000 Like when he is distressed, I feel distressed.

02:30:40.000 When is your dog distressed?

02:30:42.000 We didn't brush him very well during COVID. He's a miniature poodle mix.

02:30:48.000 And we had to shave him down.

02:30:50.000 And he freaked out? 1.00

02:30:51.000 No, he was just cold as shit. 0.99

02:30:53.000 So he was shivering all the time. 0.99

02:30:54.000 Oh, Vancouver.

02:30:55.000 It's cold and rainy.

02:30:56.000 Vancouver, it's cold and rainy.

02:30:57.000 And I just felt so bad for him.

02:30:58.000 We got him a sweater that's quite attractive, actually.

02:31:02.000 He looks handsome in it.

02:31:04.000 So I feel genuine distress when he's distressed.

02:31:08.000 Yeah.

02:31:08.000 And so that's my proximate psychology.

02:31:11.000 That's, like, me as a person.

02:31:12.000 But I can always step back from that and, as a scientist, say, well, why would I feel that way?

02:31:18.000 And I'm aware that it's my genes tricking me.

02:31:20.000 Like, it's me feeling parental feelings toward...

02:31:23.000 And it's why we love kids.

02:31:26.000 Like, I live...

02:31:27.000 I have a view of this park where I live in Vancouver.

02:31:30.000 And my favorite part of the day is when there's an elementary school in the park...

02:31:36.000 And like four or five times a day, kids, I guess they must do their pee out in the park.

02:31:41.000 So they all go out in the park and they run around.

02:31:45.000 And I'm up on the 39th floor, so they're kind of small.

02:31:48.000 So it's almost like Brownian motion, like watching molecules bounce around.

02:31:52.000 I can hear them.

02:31:53.000 You can't really see individuals.

02:31:56.000 But the motion of kids on a playground is so satisfying.

02:32:00.000 There's something beautiful about it.

02:32:02.000 Right.

02:32:02.000 Just pure joy.

02:32:03.000 Just pure joy.

02:32:04.000 Yeah.

02:32:05.000 They're so free in so many ways.

02:32:07.000 They don't have responsibilities.

02:32:09.000 And here's the thing.

02:32:11.000 People 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.

02:32:20.000 But that's nonsense.

02:32:21.000 Yeah.

02:32:22.000 This doesn't exist.

02:32:23.000 It only exists in children and in people in ecstasy.

02:32:26.000 Well, and that's because you're chemically making yourself a child again, right?

02:32:30.000 Yeah, in some ways, yeah.

02:32:31.000 So that desire, and there's also, it's not just joy, but there's a feeling of wanting to protect that, right?

02:32:39.000 You ever read Catcher in the Rye?

02:32:41.000 Yeah, but I haven't since high school.

02:32:43.000 But he wants to be a catcher in the rye where he's protecting these kids playing in the field, making sure they don't run off the cliff.

02:32:51.000 That feeling of caring for all kids.

02:32:54.000 I see kids in the airport.

02:32:56.000 My daughter is 14 now.

02:32:58.000 She's now a quasi-grown-up.

02:33:01.000 We have a very different relationship now.

02:33:03.000 She'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.

02:33:13.000 And I do kind of miss when she was five.

02:33:16.000 I was her world.

02:33:19.000 And 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.

02:33:36.000 And then that gives you some understanding of how it can go wrong in some people.

02:33:41.000 What the barriers are to it in some people.

02:33:44.000 So that's what in the book what I'm trying to do is let's say we like to drink.

02:33:48.000 Drinking makes us feel good.

02:33:50.000 We like to hang out with friends and drink.

02:33:52.000 Let's abstract away from that which we all know and think about scientifically why would we want to do that.

02:34:03.000 And 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?

02:34:17.000 Maybe we should because, you know, within limits it has certain functions.

02:34:21.000 So I think putting on evolutionary or scientific spectacles to look at human behavior is valuable.

02:34:29.000 Yeah, I completely agree.

02:34:31.000 And I think we should strive to experience things that exist outside the common plane of existence, whatever they are.

02:34:38.000 I 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

02:35:08.000 they don't necessarily enjoy working with.

02:35:11.000 There's all these things that exist that are this common plane, the common plane of existence.

02:35:16.000 When you get hammered with some good friends, you jolt outside of that common plane and it gives you a little bit of perspective.

02:35:24.000 And 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? 0.99

02:35:32.000 I'm going to fucking quit this job. 0.98

02:35:33.000 I'm done. 0.99

02:35:34.000 And you go, are you serious, Tom? 1.00

02:35:36.000 Like, dude, I'm going to quit this fucking job. 1.00

02:35:37.000 I'm done. 1.00

02:35:38.000 You know what I need to do?

02:35:39.000 I need to save $20,000.

02:35:41.000 If I can save $20,000, that can keep me going for five months. 0.99

02:35:44.000 I need five months to get this shit going. 0.99

02:35:47.000 And this is what you need. 0.99

02:35:48.000 You need those moments in life.

02:35:49.000 And maybe you get that from running a triathlon.

02:35:53.000 Maybe you do that.

02:35:55.000 Maybe you get it from a yoga retreat. 1.00

02:35:58.000 Whatever the fuck it is. 0.99

02:35:59.000 Something that takes you outside that common plane. 0.99

02:36:02.000 Yeah.

02:36:03.000 And I think I've been very, very, very lucky that my interests all lie outside the common plane.

02:36:11.000 But that's just dumb luck and fortune and the fact that I've found myself in the right place and time.

02:36:19.000 But it's also because you pursue what you love.

02:36:22.000 So it's not pure dumb luck.

02:36:24.000 But it was dumb luck because I started doing it when I was young.

02:36:28.000 I started pursuing what I loved when I was 15. But so did I. Yeah, I guess I had a lot of luck too.

02:36:33.000 For sure there's fortune involved in this, right?

02:36:35.000 And I used to deny that too, and I think that's very unhealthy.

02:36:38.000 To deny fortune.

02:36:40.000 You know, like...

02:36:45.000 Obviously, so many things could have gone wrong, and they do go wrong with people all the time, where health things, circumstance... 0.98

02:36:52.000 Or just random shit. 0.98

02:36:53.000 Random things. 0.99

02:36:54.000 The philosopher Martha Nussbaum has a book on what she calls Moral Luck.

02:36:59.000 And is trying to point out that a lot of our well-being, we have to recognize the extent to which our well-being depends on luck.

02:37:08.000 And if we can do that, it enhances humility in a variety of ways.

02:37:14.000 So, you know, I went out, you know, I used to, in San Francisco, I would drink.

02:37:21.000 I worked at this nightclub.

02:37:22.000 I would drink all night, sometimes do hallucinogens.

02:37:26.000 And then I would go joyride my motorcycle downtown because I like going up the really steep hills and going down the other side. 1.00

02:37:34.000 It's so fucking stupid! 1.00

02:37:36.000 It's so stupid! 1.00

02:37:38.000 I didn't die, right? 1.00

02:37:40.000 And so I'm lucky.

02:37:43.000 That's a funny kind of luck.

02:37:44.000 It's got to be the case that you and I have both driven.

02:37:49.000 I guarantee you at some point in our lives, you and I have both been driving at over.08.

02:37:55.000 Right?

02:37:56.000 And we didn't hit and kill someone.

02:37:59.000 And other people, maybe they only did it once in their life and then they hit and killed someone and their life is ruined.

02:38:05.000 So there's all these ways in which we were also born into a certain society where we had certain benefits and privileges.

02:38:12.000 So 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.

02:38:26.000 Oh, yeah.

02:38:27.000 It is very, very important, but also it can be weaponized against you.

02:38:30.000 Sure.

02:38:31.000 That's a problem as well because then you get involved with grifters who want to punish you for luck.

02:38:38.000 I 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.

02:38:59.000 I mean, that's hard for people to wrap their heads around, but that's the real 1%. 1.00

02:39:03.000 When 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.

02:39:14.000 99% of the people alive are doing worse off than you, which is really interesting, because people love to use that term, the 1%. 0.92

02:39:22.000 Because fortune is relative.

02:39:24.000 If we look at someone like Jeff Bezos, we're like, Bro, I wish I was that guy.

02:39:28.000 And you look at the person you're talking to, like, hey man, you make $75,000 a year.

02:39:32.000 Yeah, it's crazy.

02:39:32.000 You know how crazy you are to say that you wish you were that guy?

02:39:35.000 Like, you're alright, man.

02:39:36.000 If you budget, you're doing pretty good.

02:39:38.000 Well, this is a problem with humans.

02:39:40.000 It's called the hedonic treadmill.

02:39:42.000 So we have this built-in...

02:39:46.000 We're built to be dissatisfied.

02:39:48.000 This is a good example of how our interests and our genes' interests diverge.

02:39:53.000 So our genes actually don't want us to be happy and just give up and kind of relax.

02:39:59.000 They want us to be striving.

02:40:00.000 And so anything that's pleasurable becomes less pleasurable after a while.

02:40:09.000 You know, I got used to, when I was a grad student, I couldn't afford very good wine, so I kind of got good at enjoying whatever.

02:40:17.000 Trader Joe's, like a good deal from Trader Joe's.

02:40:20.000 And then I became a professor, I had more money, I could afford better wine.

02:40:24.000 Then I habituated on that better wine.

02:40:26.000 And then if I was at a party and someone served me Trader Joe's two-buck chuck, I'd be like, eh.

02:40:32.000 And it's the same.

02:40:33.000 But I enjoyed Two Buck Chuck back then as much as I enjoyed this better wine now, probably.

02:40:39.000 You just adjust it.

02:40:40.000 You adjust, right?

02:40:41.000 And so you're constantly adjusting your expectations to match your resources individually.

02:40:47.000 And if I were my genes, I would make me that way too because it keeps me striving and trying to get more stuff. 0.95

02:40:54.000 But as a human, it sucks.

02:40:57.000 And 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.

02:41:13.000 Well, that is the thing that people always pose, the question people always pose about someone like a Bill Gates.

02:41:18.000 Like, what keeps that guy working?

02:41:20.000 Like, why would he keep working when you have so much money?

02:41:22.000 There's no way you could possibly spend it all.

02:41:24.000 Because it's not really what it is.

02:41:26.000 It's this strange game.

02:41:28.000 No, you're internally motivated, right?

02:41:29.000 Yeah.

02:41:30.000 And there's an odd game.

02:41:31.000 And in his defense, he's turned a lot of it towards philanthropy.

02:41:36.000 But there's this weird game of acquiring currency.

02:41:43.000 And that's the game you played your whole life.

02:41:46.000 And we're built that way.

02:41:47.000 And there's good evidence that your absolute wealth doesn't matter.

02:41:52.000 It's your relative wealth.

02:41:54.000 And so whatever, you're making $34,000, you're in the top 1%. 1.00

02:41:58.000 But if everyone around you is making $100,000, you feel like shit. 0.99

02:42:02.000 Right, right, right. 0.95

02:42:03.000 But 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.

02:42:10.000 Yeah.

02:42:11.000 Right?

02:42:12.000 And 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.

02:42:28.000 Yeah.

02:42:29.000 And so this may be, I think this is, as you mentioned, like this is one of the functions of intoxicants, right?

02:42:34.000 Yeah.

02:42:35.000 It 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.

02:42:44.000 It's like, because it's about goal fulfillment, right?

02:42:47.000 Here's a goal.

02:42:48.000 Let's be self-controlled.

02:42:49.000 Let's get that goal.

02:42:51.000 So the PFC is keeping you on the hamster wheel.

02:42:54.000 Intoxicants momentarily pop you off the hamster wheel.

02:42:58.000 Yeah.

02:42:58.000 You get drunk with your friends.

02:43:01.000 You start to look at your life in a different way.

02:43:04.000 And you're like, you know what? 0.99

02:43:04.000 Actually, I fucking hate my job. 0.99

02:43:07.000 And your friends are like, yeah, your job sucks. 1.00

02:43:10.000 You should hate your job. 1.00

02:43:12.000 You're miserable. 1.00

02:43:12.000 We've seen you since high school. 1.00

02:43:14.000 You've gotten more and more unhappy.

02:43:17.000 You should quit your job.

02:43:20.000 That's people, especially good friends in the community helping you to get off the hamster wheel.

02:43:27.000 That's not going to happen drinking coffee.

02:43:30.000 No.

02:43:31.000 No.

02:43:32.000 So 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...

02:43:48.000 Do I really want to do this?

02:43:49.000 But like many other tools, there's inherent dangers involved.

02:43:53.000 And if you want to use a bandsaw, you might cut off one of your fingers.

02:43:56.000 Or you might build a house.

02:43:57.000 Yeah, you might build a house.

02:43:58.000 And building a house without a bandsaw would suck for a really long time, right?

02:44:02.000 Exactly.

02:44:02.000 That's a great way to look at it.

02:44:04.000 We need the tools.

02:44:04.000 Yeah.

02:44:06.000 Dude, I think we should wrap it up with that.

02:44:07.000 That's a perfect way to describe it.

02:44:08.000 Hey man, I really enjoyed this conversation.

02:44:10.000 This was a lot of fun.

02:44:10.000 I really, really did.

02:44:11.000 Thank you.

02:44:12.000 I'm sorry you're going to be tired for a day.

02:44:14.000 I'll recover.

02:44:15.000 I got time.

02:44:15.000 Yeah, I got some downtime.

02:44:16.000 And your book is Drunk.

02:44:19.000 It's available right now.

02:44:21.000 It's available right now.

02:44:21.000 Did you do the audio?

02:44:23.000 No, my good friend Jordan did, though.

02:44:25.000 Oh, as long as it's a friend.

02:44:26.000 Someone I trust, yeah.

02:44:26.000 I fucking hate when authors don't do it, but as long as it's a good friend.

02:44:29.000 Oh, God, no. 0.92

02:44:29.000 Someone I didn't know did my first book, Audio, and it's painful listening to that. 0.92

02:44:34.000 But no, my good friend Jordan did it.

02:44:36.000 All right, beautiful.

02:44:37.000 Do you have social media?

02:44:38.000 Yeah, so I'm on Twitter.

02:44:40.000 What is it?

02:44:41.000 At Slaterland 20. What is it?

02:44:43.000 At Slaterland 20. Slaterland 20?

02:44:47.000 Slingerland 20. Slingerland 20. Yeah.

02:44:49.000 Oh, your name.

02:44:49.000 Duh.

02:44:50.000 Yeah, basically people could just get edwardslaterland.com.

02:44:53.000 Listen to the way you say it, though.

02:44:54.000 You hear the way he's saying it?

02:44:56.000 He's saying, like, Slaterland.

02:44:57.000 He says it faster than he said a lot of times.

02:44:59.000 I say it faster than I've had. 0.99

02:45:01.000 You would confuse the shit out of him. 0.89

02:45:02.000 How many buffalo traces? 0.62

02:45:04.000 Two.

02:45:04.000 We've had two drinks.

02:45:05.000 So, yeah.

02:45:07.000 EdwardSlingerlandOneWord.com.

02:45:08.000 Slingerland.

02:45:09.000 No.

02:45:09.000 Spell it out.

02:45:10.000 I'm from Jersey.

02:45:12.000 I'm from Jersey too, man.

02:45:13.000 We make everything short.

02:45:14.000 How do you say drawer?

02:45:15.000 Drawer?

02:45:16.000 I say draw.

02:45:17.000 Well, listen.

02:45:17.000 I was born in Jersey, but I lived there until I was seven.

02:45:20.000 There it is.

02:45:21.000 Great cover, by the way.

02:45:22.000 Yeah, it's a good cover.

02:45:23.000 All right.

02:45:26.000 Slingerland.

02:45:27.000 S-L-I-N-G-E. Edwardslingerland.com is my website.

02:45:33.000 I really enjoyed our conversation.

02:45:35.000 Thank you very much. 1.00

02:45:36.000 Go get that book, fuckers. 1.00

02:45:38.000 Bye, everybody. 1.00

02:45:39.000 Thank you.

02:45:39.000 Thanks.

The Joe Rogan Experience - June 08, 2021

Joe Rogan Experience #1663 - Edward Slingerland

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