Joe Rogan Experience #1663 - Edward Slingerland

Joe Rogan 0:00 (drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.

Narrator 0:04 The Joe Rogan Experience.

0:06 Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. (instrumental music plays) So what possessed you to write a book about getting hammered? (laughs) .

Edward Slingerland 0:20 (laughs) Yeah, that's a really good question. Like, my colleagues are, are flabbergasted when they see the topic. Uh, so my day job's early Chinese philosophy and I do comparative religion, and then I'm writing this book on alcohol. It actually, i- it grows organically out of work I've done before. So my, my specialty is early Chinese philosophy. My early work focused on this idea in early China of what I translated as effortless action. The word is wu wei. It literally means no doing or not trying, but it's this, it's this spontaneous, it's kinda like being in the zone in sports. 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. You solve problems, people like you, everything works out. And the early Chinese thinkers wanna get you into this state of wu wei, but they have this problem that I call the paradox of wu wei, which is how do you try not to try?

Joe Rogan 1:18 Mm-hmm.

Edward Slingerland 1:19 Y- you, you wanna be spontaneous. You're not being spontaneous. How do you get from A to B? And all of what I argue in my dissertation is that all of early Chinese philosophy is this, uh, series of attempts to solve the paradox, and no one does it because it's a genuine paradox. And so I revisit... My first general audience book is called Trying Not to Try, and it's about this tension, and I walk people through the various strategies that the early Chinese came up with. But none of 'em really can be 100% effective because what's hap- when you're trying not to try, cognitively, you're activating the part of your brain that you wanna shut down.

Joe Rogan 1:58 Mm-hmm.

Edward Slingerland 1:59 It's c- Dan Wegner, the social psychologist, talked about the, what he called the white bear problem. 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. If you are, if you're a standup comedian and you're choking, like, your 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," how do you, how do you be funny if you're (laughs) not feeling funny? How do you force yourself to do that? And so this is a real tension, and I... That, that's what my previous work focused on. But there is a story in one of these texts, this Taoist text, where Zhuangzi, this early Taoist thinker, compares the person who's in wu wei to someone who's drunk. They kind of lose a sense of themself.

Joe Rogan 2:49 Mm-hmm.

Edward Slingerland 2:49 They're relaxed. They can bump into things and not harm themselves. And it's clear that in that text it's just a metaphor for the spiritual state Zhuangzi wants you to get into. 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. You wanna be spontaneous, you wanna be relaxed, you wanna just be loose, but thinking about it's not gonna get you there.

Joe Rogan 3:18 Yeah.

Edward Slingerland 3:18 Alcohol's a way to kinda directly reach into your brain and just turn down your prefrontal cortex a little bit so you can relax. And so that's what started me thinking about alcohol as a, as a cultural technology to enhance spontaneity.

Joe Rogan 3:33 And it has to be modulated correctly.

Edward Slingerland 3:36 Oh-

Joe Rogan 3:36 That's the, the thing about alcohol, right? The, one of the things about alcohol is when you are, when you start drinking, the moment you start to lose your inhibitions, you also lose the inhibition to drink too much.

Edward Slingerland 3:46 Yeah. (laughs) I know. That's the problem.

Joe Rogan 3:47 (laughs)

Edward Slingerland 3:47 So that's why alcohol is super dangerous. Uh-

Joe Rogan 3:49 Yeah.

Edward Slingerland 3:49 ... especially that kinda alcohol. Distilled liquor, super dangerous.

Joe Rogan 3:52 Buffalo Trace.

Edward Slingerland 3:53 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 3:53 I feel like we should have a drink.

Edward Slingerland 3:54 I, I think it, we would be remiss-

Joe Rogan 3:56 I think we have to.

Edward Slingerland 3:56 ... if... I think we're professionally-

Joe Rogan 3:57 If we're doing, if we're doing a podcast-

Edward Slingerland 3:58 ... obligated to drink. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 3:59 Hit it, right? (glass clinks) There we go.

Edward Slingerland 4:00 That's nice.

Joe Rogan 4:01 We're doing a podcast about drinking.

Edward Slingerland 4:03 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 4:03 It just makes sense we should have at least a small... (liquid sloshes in glass)

Edward Slingerland 4:05 So the... Historically, there's been a safety feature built into alcohol. So for most... We've been drinking... (liquid sloshes in glass) .

Joe Rogan 4:12 Oh.

Edward Slingerland 4:12 Thank you.

Joe Rogan 4:13 Cheers.

Edward Slingerland 4:13 Cheers. Yeah. (glass clinks) .

Joe Rogan 4:15 (gulps) Let's try this.

Edward Slingerland 4:20 Ah.

Joe Rogan 4:21 Woo!

Edward Slingerland 4:22 Yeah. That's nice.

Joe Rogan 4:23 That'll start your Monday morning off.

Edward Slingerland 4:24 (laughs) That'll start your Monday. There's a way to start every day (thumps table) morning. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 4:27 Um...

Edward Slingerland 4:28 So this stuff is new. So having-

Joe Rogan 4:30 Really?

Edward Slingerland 4:30 ... alcohol that's this strong is something we've only had for a couple hundred years.

Joe Rogan 4:35 Really?

Edward Slingerland 4:35 Yeah. So a lot of people don't realize that. So for most of our history we've been drinking, like, 2% to 3% beers, uh, grape-

Joe Rogan 4:44 2% to 3%?

Edward Slingerland 4:45 Yeah. That's, it... Historically that's typically what beers came in at. Um, grape wines you could get up to, like, 8% to 10%, but there's a built-in limit to f- natural fermentation. So the yeast are turning sugars into alcohol, which is a poison. So they're, the yeast are slowly poisoning themselves basically, and we've bred these super hearty yeasts, so, like, nowadays you can get a Australian syrah up to, like, 16% ABV-

Joe Rogan 5:12 Wow.

Edward Slingerland 5:13 ... which is high. Historically, really unprecedented, but-

Joe Rogan 5:16 That's crazy.

Edward Slingerland 5:16 ... that's as high as you can get 'cause then the alcohol shuts down the yeast. But a way around that is distillation. So you heat... You take that wine, you heat it up, ethanol is really volatile so that comes off first, and if you could figure out how to capture that vapor and turn it back into a liquid, it... you've got this (laughs) . You've got really concentrated alcohol.

Joe Rogan 5:38 Do they do that with wine?

Edward Slingerland 5:40 They do it with wine or they take... They'll take something that's naturally fermented, so a weak beer or a wine, and then they distill it.

Joe Rogan 5:46 And what do they call that when they get it on the other end?

Edward Slingerland 5:48 Distilled liquor. That's what liquor is. Uh-

Joe Rogan 5:50 Oh, okay. So it's just a kind of liquor in some-

Edward Slingerland 5:52 Yeah. So liquor, liquor or spirits refers to something that's been distilled.

Joe Rogan 5:56 Right.

Edward Slingerland 5:56 So you've, you've, uh, basically extracted the alcohol out of the mixture and made it into a pure form, 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.

Joe Rogan 6:11 S- (laughs)

Edward Slingerland 6:11 (laughs) It's just really... We're not equipped to... So the... What you're talking about, you know, this, it needs to be modulated. It was always modulated historically by the fact that we were drinking beers that weren't very strong, so there's gonna be just-... volume limit to how much you can consume, is also, uh, modulated by social stuff. So we're drinking typically, historically in a communal situation where there's really clear ritual restrictions on drinking, so you only drink when someone makes a toast. You're, you're modulating your drinking with other people. And even, you know, you think about just even in a pub, you don't just drink as much as you want; you order rounds.

Joe Rogan 6:52 Right.

Edward Slingerland 6:52 And if you down your d- your beer real fast, you gotta wait until everyone else is ready to order another round. So we socially regulate our drinking, and then it's been regulated by its inherent weakness, if you wanna think of it that way. But then all of a sudden you get this kinda stuff, you get really strong liquors, and, and you can have that in your house. That's when alcohol gets really dangerous.

Joe Rogan 7:13 And it's only been the last couple hundred years.

Edward Slingerland 7:15 Yeah. Distilled liquors weren't ... 'Cause the, the concept's really simple. Ar- Aristotle described, um, distillation, but technologically it's really hard to do 'cause you gotta be able, you have to have metallurgy, you need to be able to-

Joe Rogan 7:27 Mm-hmm.

Edward Slingerland 7:27 ... heat liquids and keep them at a certain temperature.

Joe Rogan 7:30 That makes sense.

Edward Slingerland 7:31 Uh, they're pressuri- it's really, it's actually kinda da- So in Prohibition when people created stills at home, it was like early 20th century version of meth labs.

Joe Rogan 7:40 (laughs)

Edward Slingerland 7:40 You know, they were constantly exploding and people were, like, getting scalded with hot liquid-

Joe Rogan 7:44 Oh, Jesus.

Edward Slingerland 7:44 ... 'cause it's really, it's dangerous, so it's hard to do. So we only mastered it, um ... I mean, I'm telling an evolutionary story, so.

Joe Rogan 7:51 Mm-hmm.

Edward Slingerland 7:51 My story begins 10 million years ago with primate ancestors who adapted to alcohol. And just, so 10 million years ago, about 20,000 years ago to 13,000 years ago, we start making alcohol seriously, not just relying on fruit lying around that has some alcohol in it. And then distillation happens probably around 1300s in China and 1500, 1600s in Europe. So that sounds like a long time ago, but really, evolutionarily it's yesterday. We just, we really haven't had time culturally or genetically to adapt to access to this kinda alcohol.

Joe Rogan 8:30 And a long time ago when people were drinking beer and, um, 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, right?

Edward Slingerland 8:47 Um, beer, unhopped beer goes bad pretty quickly.

Joe Rogan 8:50 How qu- It won't the same as water?

Edward Slingerland 8:51 Like, a couple days, couple days, yeah.

Joe Rogan 8:53 Yeah?

Edward Slingerland 8:53 Um, there's a theory that, uh, beer might have been useful in some cultures because it pur- fermenting water purifies the water.

Joe Rogan 9:02 Hmm. Right, so if you had-

Edward Slingerland 9:03 So if you've got-

Joe Rogan 9:03 ... bad water from a pond or something like that, and then you ferment it and make beer out of it.

Edward Slingerland 9:07 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 9:07 And drink it.

Edward Slingerland 9:08 So that's one of the stor- I mean, the purpose of my book is to try to explain the puzzle of why we do this. Why do we put poisons into our body? Why do we like to drink? And it's mysterious because it's so, it's really costly. It's, it's damaging physiologically, it's got all these social, potential social problems, and yet we've been doing it forever. We've been making and drinking alcohol for just about as long as we've been doing anything in an organized fashion.

Joe Rogan 9:35 Hmm.

Edward Slingerland 9:35 In fact, we, the, it, it's looking likely that we were doing this before agriculture, and that it's possible that the, the desire to make beer and wine is what motivated agriculture. So hunter-gatherers, hunter-gatherers were making beer before they had agriculture.

Joe Rogan 9:55 Really?

Edward Slingerland 9:56 Yeah. And, uh-

Joe Rogan 9:58 They were still making it in clay pots, and ...

Edward Slingerland 10:00 Yeah, there's, um, you know, they're pounding the stuff, they're malting it to up the sugar content. I think that's the effect of that, and then they're fermenting it. And so we have these sites, like in, in what's present-day Turkey, this site called Göbekli Tepe is this really cool ritual site. It's, um, these huge stone-

Joe Rogan 10:20 Yeah.

Edward Slingerland 10:20 Uh, have you seen pictures of it?

Joe Rogan 10:21 Yeah, I'm f- super familiar with it because of Graham Hancock, who's been-

Edward Slingerland 10:24 Okay.

Joe Rogan 10:24 ... on my podcast multiple times.

Edward Slingerland 10:25 Okay.

Joe Rogan 10:26 He's obsessed with ancient civilizations, and that is, uh, sort of the Rosetta Stone of ancient civilizations because it's, uh, at least 12,000 years old.

Edward Slingerland 10:35 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 10:35 And the thought process was at that point in time no one could build the kind of structures that those people built, so when they did it, it sort of, uh, it lent, uh, credence to some of his theories that, um, civilization has gone through multiple periods of, uh, uh, ascension and then resets-

Edward Slingerland 10:53 Okay.

Joe Rogan 10:54 ... usually through catastrophic disasters like asteroid impacts. So his theory, um, it, it im- it's not really just his theory, it's the Younger Dryas Impact Theory.

Edward Slingerland 11:05 Okay.

Joe Rogan 11:05 And the Younger Dryas Impact Theory, it's pointing to the end of the Ice Age which coincides with real proof of, uh, impacts on Earth in the sense of, um, they take soil samples.

Edward Slingerland 11:18 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 11:18 And when they go down to the same, uh, amount of time where the Ice Age ended, they find what this, this stuff called, um, it's called, uh, nuclear glass or-

Edward Slingerland 11:30 Yeah, okay.

Joe Rogan 11:30 ... uh, trinites, and this stuff, it, it occurs at blast sites where they test nuclear weapons, but it also occurs at asteroid impact sites.

Edward Slingerland 11:39 Okay.

Joe Rogan 11:39 And they find it all over the place at around 12,000 sou- 12,000-ish years ago. And so this theory is, um, that at the end of the Ice Age, what had happened was we passed through an area in our solar system that is, uh, rich with comets.

Edward Slingerland 11:58 Okay.

Joe Rogan 11:59 And then we were hit, and that, um, it literally restarted civilization, killed off a massive amount of people, and stopped civilizations dead in, dead in its tracks, and then there's a period of rebuilding.

Edward Slingerland 12:09 So is Gobekli Tepe-

Joe Rogan 12:10 Gobekli Tepe.

Edward Slingerland 12:10 ... the rebuild- is the rebuilding period?

Joe Rogan 12:12 No, Bek- Gobek- They don't know, right? It's, it's all speculation 'cause Gobekli Tepe was for sure covered on purpose-

Edward Slingerland 12:20 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 12:20 ... somewhere around 12,000 years ago.

Edward Slingerland 12:22 Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 12:22 But that doesn't indicate how long ago before then it was built.

Edward Slingerland 12:25 Right.

Joe Rogan 12:26 But what they do know is, it was made with some pretty sophisticated methods because a lot of the carvings were three-dimensional. Instead of carved into the stone, the stone around it was carved away-

Edward Slingerland 12:37 Right, right, right.

Joe Rogan 12:37 ... to leave ... And there's also, like, animals in it that aren't even supposed to be from that part of the world.

Edward Slingerland 12:42 Okay.

Joe Rogan 12:42 They find that pretty fascinating.

Edward Slingerland 12:43 I didn't know about that.

Joe Rogan 12:44 Yeah, there's some pretty cool shit to it and it's huge, you know.

Edward Slingerland 12:46 It's huge.

Joe Rogan 12:46 They've only uncovered, I think, like, 10% of it so far.

Edward Slingerland 12:48 It's a cool site. So the, the role it plays in my story is that you've ... They're hunter-gatherers, the people who built this place. They don't have-

Joe Rogan 12:56 They used to think that, but they're not necessarily sure of that. This is the theory that-

Edward Slingerland 13:00 Okay.

Joe Rogan 13:00 ... Graham Hancock is proposing.

Edward Slingerland 13:01 All right.

Joe Rogan 13:02 He believes that civilization predates that.

Edward Slingerland 13:04 So they were like ... They had full-on agriculture and they were ... Okay.

Joe Rogan 13:07 This is just, uh, completely theoretical, right?

Edward Slingerland 13:09 All right.

Joe Rogan 13:10 Because ... And, and very disputed-

Edward Slingerland 13:12 Okay.

Joe Rogan 13:12 ... because you're dealing with, you know, it's like so long ago, it's hard. Like, what, what evidence is there?

Edward Slingerland 13:17 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 13:17 And this was always the evidence against something like Gobekli Tepe.

Edward Slingerland 13:20 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 13:21 Where is the evidence of sophisticated structures 12,000 years ago?

Edward Slingerland 13:23 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 13:24 And then finally they found Gobekli Tepe, 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." But, um, they are ... Uh, they're, they're resisting that and they're thinking, uh, this Younger Dryas impact theory may indicate that there was something that happened that, you know, uh, if you look at Egypt, there's clearly more than one era of, uh, building, uh, styles.

Edward Slingerland 13:53 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 13:53 There's, like, an old kingdom style, a new k- ... And a lot of the old stuff is, like, deep under the sand when they're finding it. And it's their position that a lot of this stuff is thousands of years older than the pyramids.

Edward Slingerland 14:05 Okay. So my, my understanding of the site is that it was-

Joe Rogan 14:08 It's a h- a hunter-gatherer site.

Edward Slingerland 14:09 It was hunter-gatherers.

Joe Rogan 14:11 Yeah.

Edward Slingerland 14:11 Uh, there, there's no grain storage locations. They were clearly gathering. They were coming from all over and they were gathering at this site to build, so they were working to, you know, erect these pillars and stuff. And they were having blowout feasts, so they have all this, these remnants of feasting.

Joe Rogan 14:28 Mm-hmm.

Edward Slingerland 14:28 And they had these big vats that almost certainly contained beer and possibly hallucinogen-laced beer, so a lot of early people-

Joe Rogan 14:35 And so these hunter-gatherers, they weren't growing the, the hops or whatever they made the beer out of. They were just finding it wild?

Edward Slingerland 14:41 They're making it out of wild grains, but the argument ... So, so the standard story about alcohol is we invent agriculture then some time after that, we note that, you know, someone leaves their sourdough starter out too long-

Joe Rogan 14:54 (laughs)

Edward Slingerland 14:54 ... and it starts to turn into beer. And they're like, "Oh, this actually tastes all right." That's the standard story. So we had agriculture and then we get alcohol. Around the 1950s or so, some archeologists 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. And so, this is the beer before bread hypothesis.

Joe Rogan 15:18 Hmm.

Edward Slingerland 15:19 Is that-

Joe Rogan 15:19 That's crazy.

Edward Slingerland 15:20 Is that what motivated people to settle down and start focusing on making these grains more productive, was they wanted to get high-

Joe Rogan 15:27 (laughs)

Edward Slingerland 15:27 ... not because they wanted to make bread. And it, it's, it jives. You see the same pattern in other parts of the world. So in South America, they make this, uh, beer-like substance, chicha, out of ... Now they make it out of maize, out of corn, but they used to make it out of the ancient, the wild ancestor of corn. It's called teosinte. And what's interesting is teosinte sucks for making grain. Like, if your goal was to make tortillas, you wouldn't even notice this plant 'cause the grains don't make very good, um, grain products to eat. But it makes great beer.

Joe Rogan 16:04 Hmm.

Edward Slingerland 16:04 It's really good for making chicha. So this plant ... If these early people were looking for something to make food with, they would overlook this plant. But if they were looking for something to make beer with, they would focus on it, cultivate it, start making it produce bigger grains-

Joe Rogan 16:18 That seems wild.

Edward Slingerland 16:18 ... and that's how you would get corn.

Joe Rogan 16:20 That's, like, what was the ... Did they ... Do we know what the original thing that they got high with was?

Edward Slingerland 16:25 Well, pro-

Joe Rogan 16:26 Did we have like a, like the, the, you know, the first, the atom

Edward Slingerland 16:30 (laughs) Yeah. Yeah. I think certainly we were getting a, a little bit drunk on just naturally fermenting fruit.

Joe Rogan 16:37 Mm-hmm.

Edward Slingerland 16:37 So n- You know, if fruit falls on the ground, it starts to rot. What the rotting is, is some of it's being turned into alcohol by yeast, and so cle- It's easy to discover alcohol because it's happening naturally in our environment all the time. The earliest evidence of deliberately produced alcohol is from about 13,000 years ago, so a little bit before Gobekli Tepe. Um, and this is in, uh, modern-day Israel. They have traces of, of beer production, so people were clearly fermenting beer.

Joe Rogan 17:06 Are you aware of, uh, Brian Muraresku's work?

Edward Slingerland 17:09 No.

Joe Rogan 17:10 He wrote a book called The Immortality Key and it's all about, uh, ancient Greece and the Eleusinian mysteries.

Edward Slingerland 17:15 Okay.

Joe Rogan 17:16 And, uh, he, uh, has, uh, proven through, uh, examination of these vessels that they used to carry their wine in, that the, uh, wine was laced with ergot. It was-

Edward Slingerland 17:27 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 17:28 Yeah, so they were, they were tripping balls.

Edward Slingerland 17:30 I have heard about this theory, yeah.

Joe Rogan 17:31 They were adding psychedelic compounds to their wine.

Edward Slingerland 17:35 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 17:35 So they were, they were doing these things where they would have these ceremonies where everybody would get together and they would ... I mean, th- and this is where they figured out democracy.

Edward Slingerland 17:44 (laughs) Right.

Joe Rogan 17:44 They solved a lot of the world's problems.

Edward Slingerland 17:45 You get a lot of new ideas-

Joe Rogan 17:47 Yeah.

Edward Slingerland 17:47 ... when you're doing hallucinogens. That's very common. So in, in Europe, a lot of the beers were clearly mixed with hallucinogens.

Joe Rogan 17:53 Yeah, he talks about beer as well.

Edward Slingerland 17:55 And I think these, th- the Golden Triangle it's called, this region in Turkey, you know, around 12,000 years ago, there's a, uh, there's a carving from a site near Gobekli Tepe, uh, that has a picture. It's a carving of two ... A human dancing with these two dancing turtles.

Joe Rogan 18:14 Wow.

Edward Slingerland 18:15 And, uh, it's hard to imagine seeing that on 2% to 3% in your beer, right?

Joe Rogan 18:21 (laughs)

Edward Slingerland 18:21 (laughs) Like, you have to have ... There's gotta be something else going on.

Joe Rogan 18:23 Right, right.

Edward Slingerland 18:23 And so I think it's likely that they were lacing their beer with hallucinogens. It's a really common thing to do.

Joe Rogan 18:28 Well, they were all probably eating mushrooms too, right, if they found them.

Edward Slingerland 18:31 And they're possibly eating mushrooms as well, yeah.

Joe Rogan 18:33 Um, that's ... D- d- why turtles? I wonder why t-

Edward Slingerland 18:36 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 18:36 Is that, like, that ... Look at this.

Edward Slingerland 18:38 Oh, yeah, there it is. Yeah, that's great.

Joe Rogan 18:40 Oh.

Edward Slingerland 18:40 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 18:40 Dudes dancing with turtles.

Edward Slingerland 18:41 So do you ... Does that look like people on 2% to 3% beer? It doesn't-

Joe Rogan 18:45 That looks like something my kid would make when she was four.

Edward Slingerland 18:48 (laughs) Okay, she-

Joe Rogan 18:49 (laughs)

Edward Slingerland 18:49 And so, well, so, I mean, what intoxicants are doing to you is returning you to a state of a four-year-old. So-

Joe Rogan 18:55 Interesting.

Edward Slingerland 18:56 ... um-

Joe Rogan 18:57 Do we know how old this is, post- supposed to be?

Edward Slingerland 18:59 That's around th- It's around, I think, 12,000 years ago.

Joe Rogan 19:03 Now, now when did they, um, you know ... What's that wacky theater theory that the earth is, uh, suspended by turtles, it's turtles all the way down?

Edward Slingerland 19:12 Yeah, (laughs) it's on the back. Yeah, turtles all the way down.

Joe Rogan 19:13 Yeah.

Edward Slingerland 19:13 Yeah. I don't know if they had a mythology like that. So-

Joe Rogan 19:15 But tha- that's interesting. Like, go, go back and look at, look at ... Right there, scroll down, Jamie. Down.

Narrator 19:22 Up?

Joe Rogan 19:22 No, no, no.

Edward Slingerland 19:23 The other way.

Narrator 19:23 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 19:24 Yeah. That in- im- that image off the, uh ... Go back, with the cat.

Narrator 19:28 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 19:28 Fo- yeah, that, right there. That's one of those Göbekli Tepe things.

Edward Slingerland 19:31 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 19:32 It's a three-dimensional image that's, uh-

Edward Slingerland 19:33 That's cool.

Joe Rogan 19:34 ... carved into the, uh, stone, or taken the stone o- all around it to leave it there. That's super sophisticated stuff for 12,000 years ago.

Edward Slingerland 19:44 Yeah, so my argument is this is why people settled down originally. I mean, so civilization comes from intoxication. 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 gonna mess them up, so they could have these kind of ceremonies.

Joe Rogan 20:06 I guess that makes sense if you think about, like, their everyday existence being, like, very difficult, right? 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.

Edward Slingerland 20:18 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 20:18 And then you bond through these hallucinogenic experiences, or these, uh, alcohol experiences, or-

Edward Slingerland 20:24 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 20:24 ... any, any altered state, right?

Edward Slingerland 20:26 Well, so it's doing a lot of different things for you. It's, it's helping with creativity. So one of the functions of alcohol and hallucinogens is its ... You mentioned four-year-olds. So there's good work on creativity and development by Alison Gopnik, who's a child psychologist at, um, child developmental psychologist at Berkeley, and she's got this great task where you've gotta ... You have to figure out this really counterintuitive problem. And she's got a graph that I reproduced in the book of how people do on it as they age. And so four-year-olds are awesome at it. They solve it right away. And it just l- goes down in a line until adults are really bad at it. And what I do in the book is lay that on top of a, a, a chart showing the development of the prefrontal cortex. So this part of your brain, the prefrontal cortex, is really important. It's in charge of self-control, cognitive control, executive function. It's what allows you to stay focused on a task. It's w- it's what allows you to not meander in a conversation-

Joe Rogan 21:27 Mm-hmm.

Edward Slingerland 21:27 ... and actually (laughs) stay focused on what you're talking about. Um, but it's, it's a enemy of creativity, for one thing, so it seems to interfere with your ability to think out of the box, or think laterally.

Joe Rogan 21:38 Doesn't this also coincide, though, with responsibilities in life?

Edward Slingerland 21:41 Yeah, yeah. Well, it-

Joe Rogan 21:42 Like the, the timeline?

Edward Slingerland 21:43 Well, it's the other ... I mean, in a way, it's the other way around. So you get more responsibilities 'cause you can handle them, because you actually have a prefrontal cortex.

Joe Rogan 21:49 But is that really what's going on? Or is it just that you actually have a family and you have to feed them-

Edward Slingerland 21:55 That-

Joe Rogan 21:55 ... and then you have these primal responsibilities that sort of rise up that force you to think much more pragmatically? I mean, what came first, the chicken or the egg, right?

Edward Slingerland 22:05 I think they're happening, they're co-happening.

Joe Rogan 22:07 Mm.

Edward Slingerland 22:07 So it's developing the way it's developing because evolution has a problem it needs to solve. It ... The prefrontal cortex is the enemy of spontaneity. It's the enemy of creativity. It's the enemy of, of kind of childlike trust. You know, you see kids just walk up to a stranger in the airport and be like, "Hey, do you wanna meet my stuffed animal?" (laughs) You know?

Joe Rogan 22:30 Right.

Edward Slingerland 22:30 Kids, kids are just ... They're open, right? Um, that's a good trait for some things, but kids also can't tie their fricking shoes and get to school in the morning, right?

Joe Rogan 22:41 Right.

Edward Slingerland 22:41 They ... And so we ... There's this tension. Evolution wants us to be able to take care of our families and do our jobs and get food, and so its solution, essentially, is to give us this really extended childhood. So we have this long period where we're just gradually building our prefrontal cortex, and that allows us to be open, to make ties to other people, to learn from our culture, to learn language. We have all these skills we need to learn. And then right around kind of mid-20s, like 24 or 25 is when you're, you finally finish developing your PFC, and that's around the time when you have to start being hyper-responsible. And so it seems like a good solution f- for evolution to do that. The problem is once you've got that fully developed PFC, you've lost a lot of these childlike traits. So you've lost your ability to trust people implicitly. You've lost your ability to be creative, as, as Gopnik's work shows. And so it would be awesome if you could be a grownup and have a PFC, and be able to get to work on time and do everything you need to do, but you had a way to temporarily be like a child again-

Joe Rogan 23:50 Hmm.

Edward Slingerland 23:50 ... for f- for a few hours. And this, this is how you do it, right?

Joe Rogan 23:55 (laughs)

Edward Slingerland 23:55 It's a, 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.

Joe Rogan 24:04 That explains comedians.

Edward Slingerland 24:05 That explains comedians.

Joe Rogan 24:06 (laughs)

Edward Slingerland 24:06 I mean, it's central to com-

Joe Rogan 24:07 Yeah.

Edward Slingerland 24:07 I mean, it's gotta be the case. Do you use ... You must use alcohol-

Joe Rogan 24:10 Yeah.

Edward Slingerland 24:11 ... when writing and-

Joe Rogan 24:11 Yeah. I like a little bit of alcohol and a little bit of marijuana mixed together.It's good for writing, it's also good for performing. You know, y- it's like, uh, don't give a fuck sauce.

Edward Slingerland 24:21 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 24:21 You just, you go out there and, and be loose.

Edward Slingerland 24:23 So, you do that before you go out?

Joe Rogan 24:24 Yeah, I like to have a shot and, uh, smoke a little weed.

Edward Slingerland 24:27 Yeah. Yeah. 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.

Joe Rogan 24:37 Hmm.

Edward Slingerland 24:37 It just scared the shit out of me. And I was a waiter, I worked in the service industry in San Francisco, and I was, um, finishing up a shift, having a drink at the bar with the bartender, and told him, "Yeah, I gotta go do this lecture tomorrow. I'm really nervous about it." And he was like, "Dude bring a flask and do a shot before you go out there."

Joe Rogan 24:55 Hmm.

Edward Slingerland 24:56 And I was like, "It's... Well, it's 10:30 in the morning." (laughs) And he was like, "Don't... It doesn't matter, just do it." And, uh, I'm dating myself here. You're, you're old enough to remember this. Remember with film photography-

Joe Rogan 25:05 Yes.

Edward Slingerland 25:05 ... you had those little plastic things-

Joe Rogan 25:07 Yeah.

Edward Slingerland 25:07 ... you could put film in? I filled one of those with vodka-

Joe Rogan 25:10 (laughs)

Edward Slingerland 25:10 ... and put it in my backpack, and right before I went out, I did a shot of vodka. And just as I was starting the lecture, that's the hardest part. 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 c- compelling. That's usually when you choke and freeze up. 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, and it got me through that initial nervousness until... You know, by the time it started to wear off, I was into my lecture. I knew the material.

Joe Rogan 25:48 Hmm.

Edward Slingerland 25:48 It was just getting over that hump. And so, people use alcohol in this way, right? To get over stage fright, to get over... This is why people have drinks on first dates, right? You know, you're meeting someone, it's a little awkward. You wanna be relaxed and funny, but how do you, how do you try to be relaxed and funny?

Joe Rogan 26:06 Yeah.

Edward Slingerland 26:08 A couple drinks helps with that, right? It relaxes, turns down the prefrontal cortex. It's... Alcohol is doing a lot of things at the same time. It's turning down your prefrontal cortex. It's making you feel better, so it's boosting serotonin and endorphins. It's making you feel... People who are drunk think they're more attractive and they see other people as more attractive. So, the beer goggles thing is j- is true. You actually rate other people as more attractive when you're a little bit drunk. You're, you're feeling connected with them. So, there's actually some good experimental evidence that people who, uh, 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-

Joe Rogan 26:48 Hmm.

Edward Slingerland 26:48 ... and I like these people I'm hanging out with." So, it's a, it's a tool for getting... We're primates. We're... Our nature is to be kinda selfish, and suspicious, and hostile. Like, if you took... I've never met either of you guys, and if we were chimpanzees and some- someone just threw three champi- chimpanzees into a room together, you know, one of us would walk out, maybe (laughs) and there'd just be blood left. It would just... We would tear each other apart.

Joe Rogan 27:18 Yeah.

Edward Slingerland 27:19 Um, but humans solve this problem all the time. I sat on an airplane coming here with a wh- whole bunch of other people. We all sat in our seats and behaved ourselves. So, how do-

Joe Rogan 27:28 Must not have been a Southwest flight.

Edward Slingerland 27:29 (laughs) It wasn't a Southwest flight.

Joe Rogan 27:30 (laughs)

Edward Slingerland 27:30 Yeah, yeah, no it wasn't. Thank God. Um, how do you get primates... So, the way we cooperate in large-scale societies, we look more like social insects. We look more like kind of ants or bees. And yet, we're not ants or bees, we're primates. And so there's, there's this trick of getting primates to cooperate in this ultra, uh, cooperative way. And, uh, the argument in the book is alcohol is one of the tools we've used to do that.

Joe Rogan 27:58 What do you, uh, say about sober people that are also very cooperative? What techniques are they using if they're not using alcohol?

Edward Slingerland 28:06 There's a l- there's a lot of ways you can get into these kinda states. So, you can use exercise, you can use meditation. Meditation can do it. You can use breathing exercises, right? You can do extreme breathing. You can stay up all night. So, re- religious traditions that, for various reasons, decide they don't wanna use chemical intoxicants usually substitute some other way to do it.

Joe Rogan 28:30 Um, I like that you said, "Stay up all night," because, uh, I used to be on this sitcom called NewsRadio, and the writers, uh, they had that strategy. It was a, uh, amazing show because the writing was so good. But the way they wrote it was so nuts. They were a bunch of young, really smart guys who were kinda crazy, and they would stay up until, like, 4:00 in the morning playing video games-

Edward Slingerland 28:54 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 28:54 ... and then start writing.

Edward Slingerland 28:55 Yeah, (laughs) that's crazy. Right, yeah.

Joe Rogan 28:56 So, sometimes we would show up, you know, like, maybe call time would be, uh, 9:00 or 10:00 AM, and they were, uh, just done with, like, the first draft of scene one.

Edward Slingerland 29:06 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 29:06 You know? And, and we're like, "What are you guys doing?" Like, they, they were all fucked up and their hair was a mess-

Edward Slingerland 29:11 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 29:11 ... they were barefoot.

Edward Slingerland 29:12 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 29:12 They were animals. But they... It was a strategy.

Edward Slingerland 29:15 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 29:15 The strategy was-

Edward Slingerland 29:16 Yeah, it's good.

Joe Rogan 29:16 ... to get overtired and really, really silly.

Edward Slingerland 29:19 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 29:19 And then they would come up with some of the most preposterous scenarios for f- And oddly enough-

Edward Slingerland 29:24 That's smart.

Joe Rogan 29:24 ... they weren't getting high. These people were getting high that way. They-

Edward Slingerland 29:28 Yeah, no, you can do it through s- sleep deprivation will give it to you, yeah.

Joe Rogan 29:31 That's literally how they did it on purpose, which-

Edward Slingerland 29:33 Yeah, it's cool.

Joe Rogan 29:33 ... I'd never heard of before. But then once they told me about it, I was like, "Well, that does make sense." Because when I'm loopy, you know-

Edward Slingerland 29:40 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 29:40 ... if, like, I'm hanging out with my friends and I've been up, like, and it's 4:00 in the morning, w- we just laugh at anything.

Edward Slingerland 29:44 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 29:45 Like, you get full down silly.

Edward Slingerland 29:45 And you don't give a shit anymore.

Joe Rogan 29:46 Yeah.

Edward Slingerland 29:46 And that's, that's the PFC being-

Joe Rogan 29:49 ... shut off.

Edward Slingerland 29:50 Playground monitor is gone-

Joe Rogan 29:51 Right, right.

Edward Slingerland 29:52 ... and you don't care anymore.

Joe Rogan 29:52 Playground monitor, interesting.

Edward Slingerland 29:54 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 29:54 Yeah.

Edward Slingerland 29:54 Yeah. You wanna get rid of that playground monitor if you want certain types of things to happen.

Joe Rogan 29:58 Um, exercise, uh, 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?

Edward Slingerland 30:07 Yeah, so, you know, extreme... Like, if you're running, doing any kind of extreme exercise, at a certain point, your body's like, "We don't need the prefrontal cortex any-" Prefrontal cortex is a really expensive organ. It's a lot of en- It's sucking up a lot of energy-

Joe Rogan 30:20 Mm-hmm.

Edward Slingerland 30:21 ... from your body. And so at a certain point, you're like, "We don't need the prefrontal cortex anymore." (laughs) So it gets turned down by your body 'cause you need to send it to your lungs and your heart and your muscles.

Joe Rogan 30:30 So, how do we know how much energy it's, it's using specifically?

Edward Slingerland 30:34 Um, you can look at, um, kinda fMRI studies. You get a sense of how much blood flow is, is going through the brain, let's say, um, and you get a sense... It's a proxy then for how much energy it's using, 'cause that blood's delivering nutrients to it, right? It's getting-

Joe Rogan 30:48 Oh, so they've done fMRIs o- on people that are really tired and loopy and you can see it shut off?

Edward Slingerland 30:53 Yeah, so that's interesting. I'm trying to think. The guy who's done work on runner's high is called Arne Detrick, and I'm trying to remember now if he was putting... I don't know how he would get peop- Maybe he would stress them physiologically and then stick 'em in an fMRI machine. But he talks about what he calls hypofrontality. So, it's a state where your prefrontal cortex is shutting down in response to physiological stress. And I don't remember now how he was getting that measurement.

Joe Rogan 31:19 Me and my friends, uh, a few years back did, uh, this. We do this thing every year, we do Sober October, so the whole month of October we don't do anything.

Edward Slingerland 31:27 Okay.

Joe Rogan 31:27 No drinking, no boozing.

Edward Slingerland 31:28 No drugs at all?

Joe Rogan 31:29 No bo-... No drugs at all.

Edward Slingerland 31:30 Okay.

Joe Rogan 31:30 Um, we're allowed to smoke cigars though, which me and Ari both agree-

Edward Slingerland 31:33 Okay. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 31:33 ... is kind of cheating.

Edward Slingerland 31:34 Is kind of cheating, yeah.

Joe Rogan 31:35 It's kind of cheating. But not enough that it's-

Edward Slingerland 31:37 Can you drink caffeine?

Joe Rogan 31:38 Yes.

Edward Slingerland 31:39 Okay, all right, all right.

Joe Rogan 31:39 You're allowed to drink coffee. You just can't get fucked up.

Edward Slingerland 31:42 All right.

Joe Rogan 31:42 Which, as a comedian, you know, it's-

Edward Slingerland 31:43 Yeah, that's hard.

Joe Rogan 31:44 ... it's... Well, it's normal. It's, wasn't... It's not hard.

Edward Slingerland 31:46 Okay.

Joe Rogan 31:46 It's really... But here's the point. One year, we had a fitness challenge. And when we had this fitness challenge, we were using this thing called, um, MyZone. It's, uh, a heart strap that works with an app, and it measures how much time you are, uh, in what percentage of your max heart rate. So, how much time you are at 80% max heart rate, it'll, it, it puts you in the z- the yellow zone, and then you rack up points for every minute that you're in this st- this state. And we did this competition where we were competing, uh, against each other. So like, I would wake up in the morning and I'd be like, "Shit, Ari got 600 points last night," and, "Oh my God, Burke got 600 points too."

Edward Slingerland 32:24 That must be really motivating.

Joe Rogan 32:26 Yeah, it was crazy.

Edward Slingerland 32:27 (laughs) Yeah.

Joe Rogan 32:27 So we were, we were just, like, all day. Like, one day I did seven hours of cardio in a day. It was crazy.

Edward Slingerland 32:32 That's crazy.

Joe Rogan 32:33 Yeah, I just decided to just bury everybody.

Edward Slingerland 32:34 (laughs) Oh, what's this?

Joe Rogan 32:35 I, I watched all these movies and...

Edward Slingerland 32:37 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 32:37 But the point is that the feeling that you get when you do that is incredible in terms... Like, like how much you don't give a fuck.

Edward Slingerland 32:47 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 32:47 You're so relaxed and calm. And, and my friend, Tom Segura, was saying the same thing. He's like, "Man, it cuts all the chatter down."

Edward Slingerland 32:54 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 32:54 When you do that-

Edward Slingerland 32:55 Chat- Yeah, yeah, you wanna get rid of the chatter.

Joe Rogan 32:56 But it cuts it all down-

Edward Slingerland 32:57 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 32:57 ... where you're, like, really calm. And it's... I, I'm ba- I was tr- always trying to figure out, like, is it because you're so tired that you don't have time for nonsense, for like... Is your brain... Like, are you occupying your mind with nonsensical concerns and worries and anxiety? Is that a function of the fact that you don't have enough real threat and real struggle in your life? And is doing something that's incredibly physically struggling, like seven hours on the elliptical machine-

Edward Slingerland 33:30 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 33:30 ... like, that's so taxing-

Edward Slingerland 33:32 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 33:32 ... that when it's over, your body doesn't have any time for any stupid nonsense, you know?

Edward Slingerland 33:37 Like monitoring you.

Joe Rogan 33:38 Yeah, worrying-

Edward Slingerland 33:39 It doesn't wanna monitor you anymore, you know?

Joe Rogan 33:40 Yeah, you're not worrying about, like-

Edward Slingerland 33:41 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 33:41 ... an email that you sent. "Was that the wrong tone?"

Edward Slingerland 33:43 Oh, is it-

Joe Rogan 33:43 Or like...

Edward Slingerland 33:43 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 33:44 You know what I mean? Like-

Edward Slingerland 33:44 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 33:45 You know the kinda things that-

Edward Slingerland 33:45 Did that person at the store react as I'm reading to them? Yeah. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 33:47 Man, if I, if I don't work out for a few days, I, I second guess everything that I do and-

Edward Slingerland 33:51 Yeah. No, I get crazy too. I've gotten...

Joe Rogan 33:54 It's the worst.

Edward Slingerland 33:54 I, I wrestled in high school and just got in the habit of weightlifting as a wrestler, and if I don't do it, I get really weird. Like, I get really cranky. And it's true, I start thinking too much.

Joe Rogan 34:05 Yeah.

Edward Slingerland 34:06 And I get the same... If I do a really good workout, I get that feeling of kinda not giving a fuck.

Joe Rogan 34:13 100%.

Edward Slingerland 34:14 That's really-

Joe Rogan 34:15 100%.

Edward Slingerland 34:15 ... relaxing.

Joe Rogan 34:17 Um, I wrestled in high school as well, but only one season. But what I did do for many years is jujitsu-

Edward Slingerland 34:21 Okay.

Joe Rogan 34:22 ... and still do, and jujitsu gives me that feeling.

Edward Slingerland 34:24 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 34:24 Jujitsu, when, uh, I'm done with a hard jujitsu session, first of all, I am so friendly.

Edward Slingerland 34:30 (laughs) Yeah, you're a super nice guy, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 34:30 Like, I'm the friendliest person.

Edward Slingerland 34:32 Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 34:32 I'm so friendly when I'm done with jujitsu.

Edward Slingerland 34:34 And you love people, right? You-

Joe Rogan 34:35 I love everybody.

Edward Slingerland 34:35 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 34:35 I wanna hug everybody.

Edward Slingerland 34:36 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 34:37 I don't have any aggression in me.

Edward Slingerland 34:38 Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 34:39 And I wonder if it's the human b- This is my theory, and obviously I haven't studied this, so these are just guesses. But, uh, you know, without, uh, really understanding the whole neuroscience behind it, I've always felt like that the human body has certain physical requirements, and when you don't meet those physical requirements, your body starts coming up with problems that don't really exist.

Edward Slingerland 35:00 (sniffs)

Joe Rogan 35:00 So it's like, if you don't have problems in your life, your body creates those problems for you. So what I... The way I always like to point it out to people is, like, "I make my own problems."

Edward Slingerland 35:12 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 35:12 They're all... They're bullshit.

Edward Slingerland 35:13 You stress your body.

Joe Rogan 35:14 Yeah, they're not real.

Edward Slingerland 35:15 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 35:15 But like, like if I s- like s-... One of the things I like to do is hit, hit a bag, like hit a heavy bag. And I have, um, the, one of them, uh, electronic timers. It syncs up with your phone, and I, I set it for like 15 three-minute rounds, and I-

Edward Slingerland 35:30 Oh, I use that for ru-

Joe Rogan 35:31 They're great.

Edward Slingerland 35:31 ... for sprinting.

Joe Rogan 35:32 They're great.

Edward Slingerland 35:32 Yeah, so I do sprinting. Like I do, like, really intense sprinting with a friend.

Joe Rogan 35:36 Mm-hmm.

Edward Slingerland 35:36 I hate running. Like, long-distance running is boring as hell, but sprinting is awesome.

Joe Rogan 35:41 Long-distance running is boring as hell, but if you can do cardio in front of a th- a TV... This is the secret.

Edward Slingerland 35:48 Okay, this, this is good. Okay.

Joe Rogan 35:48 Ari Shaffir figured this out when we were doing the Sober October thing.

Edward Slingerland 35:51 All right.

Joe Rogan 35:52 He's like, "Watch movies." You watch movies, and two hours has gone before you know it if it's, like, a really good movie.

Edward Slingerland 35:58 Right.

Joe Rogan 35:58 'Cause like, especially if you have headsets on, just 'cause you're like completely engulfed in the film and you're watching it-

Edward Slingerland 36:05 Right.

Joe Rogan 36:05 ... and you don't... You barely even realize.

Edward Slingerland 36:07 E-- but you can get the same effect by sprinting really hard-

Joe Rogan 36:10 Oh, yeah. No, for sure.

Edward Slingerland 36:11 ... for like 20 minutes, and I'd rather just do that.

Joe Rogan 36:13 Oh, yeah. Listen, I'm a big fan of Tabatas.

Edward Slingerland 36:16 Yeah, that's what I use.

Joe Rogan 36:17 Yeah.

Edward Slingerland 36:17 That's what I use. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 36:17 I love those, those are great. That's a great way to build real, usable cardio too.

Edward Slingerland 36:22 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 36:22 I mean, it's am- amazing. But the point about the, like, distracting the mind-

Edward Slingerland 36:28 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 36:28 ... with something else while you're doing it makes... That's what music does, right? If you hear a great song while you're running-

Edward Slingerland 36:33 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 36:33 ... I swear you can run faster.

Edward Slingerland 36:34 Oh, no, absolutely.

Joe Rogan 36:35 Right?

Edward Slingerland 36:35 I have special music that I, I actually only use it for a workout 'cause I don't wanna fuck it up. I don't wanna-

Joe Rogan 36:40 (laughs)

Edward Slingerland 36:40 ... you don't wanna waste it, right? Because if you listen-

Joe Rogan 36:42 Yeah.

Edward Slingerland 36:42 ... to it and you're not working out-

Joe Rogan 36:43 Yeah.

Edward Slingerland 36:43 ... you get used to it and it's kinda not as... So I save it. I have special music that I only allow myself to listen to when I'm working out, so.

Joe Rogan 36:50 Yeah. Well, I'm, I'm lucky that I have a lot of music like that. I don't have to worry about w- wearing it out.

Edward Slingerland 36:55 Running out of it. (laughs) Yeah.

Joe Rogan 36:56 But, uh, yeah, there's some songs, like, uh, like Ozzy Osbourne-

Edward Slingerland 36:59 Ozzy Osbourne. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 37:00 Like Crazy Train.

Edward Slingerland 37:01 (laughs) Crazy Train is a classic, yeah.

Joe Rogan 37:01 There's something about that song, you know?

Edward Slingerland 37:03 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 37:03 And any Wu-Tang Clan song.

Edward Slingerland 37:05 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 37:05 There's something about that.

Edward Slingerland 37:06 So m- so music's doing that too, right? It's taking you-

Joe Rogan 37:08 Yeah.

Edward Slingerland 37:08 So the, there's a Greek term. So the word ecstasy comes from Greek ekstasis, g- getting out of yourself, and there's something humans... Humans crave it. Humans really like the experience of getting out of their own heads-

Joe Rogan 37:24 Yeah.

Edward Slingerland 37:25 ... and either getting absorbed into something bigger than them or just almost obliviate, right? Where you're not thinking about anything. And it's beyond the just functional... So I'm arguing in the book that intoxication has all these social functions, so it, you know, makes us more creative, it makes us more trusting, helps us to solve these cooperation dilemmas, which is why people who, you know, you, "I wanna make a treaty with you," or, "I wanna sign a business deal, I'm not gonna just talk to you on the phone. I'm gonna come to where you are in person and we're gonna drink, and only then am I gonna trust you."

Joe Rogan 37:59 Hmm.

Edward Slingerland 37:59 So people use alcohol that way. But there are lots of other ways to do it, and you can, you can use music, you can use dance. But, you know, if you pair it... You're talking about the treadmill, do treadmill for 12 hours. That could... That works. Staying up, you know, religious traditions that have you stay up all night dancing and singing hymns, that's another way to do it. But you can also just sit in a really comfortable chair and drink this. And so there's a reason people use alcohol, because it's just easy... It's just a hassle-

Joe Rogan 38:25 Right.

Edward Slingerland 38:25 ... doing it other ways. And so there's something to this chemical path that's always been appealing for people.

Joe Rogan 38:33 Terence McKenna had a, uh, a great story that he would tell about this, uh, monk who, uh, practiced a city of levitation for decades. So you know what that is? It's like a-

Edward Slingerland 38:44 No.

Joe Rogan 38:45 ... it's a, um, like a, a meditation, like, he was concentrating on levitating. And so he practiced this for decades and then the Buddha came to town and he said, "I have practiced the city of levitation and now I can walk on water." And the Buddha says, "Yeah, but the ferry's only a nickel."

Edward Slingerland 39:02 Yeah, right, exactly. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 39:03 (laughs)

Edward Slingerland 39:03 Yeah, there you go. And they serve beer-

Joe Rogan 39:05 (laughs)

Edward Slingerland 39:05 ... on the ferry. So why don't you just fucking do that? You know?

Joe Rogan 39:07 Like, that has always been the argument about enlightenment. Like, you can-

Edward Slingerland 39:11 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 39:11 Can you achieve enlightenment through meditation and all these different things? Yes, you, you... I mean, well, whatever enlightenment means.

Edward Slingerland 39:17 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 39:17 You can achieve a state of elevated consciousness, let's put it that way. 'Cause the, the term enlightenment, to me, always, um, it always sounds like you're done.

Edward Slingerland 39:26 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 39:26 Right?

Edward Slingerland 39:26 Right.

Joe Rogan 39:27 But don't think you're done.

Edward Slingerland 39:28 No, you're not done. But you can achang- you can h- get into an altered state-

Joe Rogan 39:31 Yeah, you, you-

Edward Slingerland 39:32 ... through meditation.

Joe Rogan 39:33 An elevated level of consciousness. You g- that can be achieved. But there's ways to help that along, and you c- you can help that along. There's stuff that people have figured out, you know? It's like you don't have to chop a tree with a knife.

Edward Slingerland 39:48 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 39:48 You know, they figured out axes and saws-

Edward Slingerland 39:50 Yeah, yeah, right.

Joe Rogan 39:50 ... and the reason why is just, like, they were like, "Hey, this sawing's gotta be better than this fucking knife."

Edward Slingerland 39:54 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 39:54 "This tree's huge, I've been working at it for a month," you know?

Edward Slingerland 39:56 Yeah. And so you mix in a little bit of alcohol to a lot of these other things and they work better.

Joe Rogan 40:01 Yeah.

Edward Slingerland 40:01 Um, so religious traditions use intoxicants.

Joe Rogan 40:04 Mm-hmm.

Edward Slingerland 40:04 They're doing, they're doing the dancing and the singing and all that stuff.

Joe Rogan 40:07 Right.

Edward Slingerland 40:07 They're moving in synchrony, they're chanting, all that's great, but they're also slowly turning down their prefrontal cortex with chemicals.

Joe Rogan 40:14 Yeah.

Edward Slingerland 40:15 And it's interesting. I mean, this is... One of the arguments I have in the book is that we've ignored this function because there's this kinda weird puritanical discomfort with chemical intoxication. So, like-

Joe Rogan 40:26 Where do you think that comes from?

Edward Slingerland 40:30 I don't know. It's this weird kinda distrust of pleasure (laughs) that baffles me. But, um-

Joe Rogan 40:36 I have a theory on that.

Edward Slingerland 40:37 Yeah, what's your theory?

Joe Rogan 40:38 I think it comes from the idea that some people are not gonna chip in and do the work that needs to be done because if you're in a tribe of 150 people or so-

Edward Slingerland 40:48 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 40:48 ... everyone has a, a crucial role. And if you're a person that likes to lay around and get drunk and fuck off, you're not gonna be the person that gets up and gathers food or hunts the food, and you, you're gonna be a non-contributor, or you're not gonna contribute your part. So we think of people that engage in these frivolous activities, uh, not just k- normal, like, you know, not, not ritual things where everybody does it together but-

Edward Slingerland 41:14 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 41:14 ... normal frivolous activity, like it's a part of a normal everyday life for you, you're not gonna be as productive.

Edward Slingerland 41:20 Yeah. It's also, I mean, drinking ali- g- getting intoxicated alone is historically really weird. We've never done that. We always did it in groups.

Joe Rogan 41:27 It's a George Thorogood song.

Edward Slingerland 41:28 Yeah, I know (laughs) .

Joe Rogan 41:29 (laughs)

Edward Slingerland 41:29 Well, that's... The reason that's so effective is because it's weird, right?

Joe Rogan 41:31 Yeah.

Edward Slingerland 41:31 So I drink alone. This is the guy who also wrote Bad to the Bone, right?

Joe Rogan 41:35 Yeah.

Edward Slingerland 41:36 It's, it's, it's... If you drink alone, there's something a little bit-

Joe Rogan 41:38 Damn!

Edward Slingerland 41:38 ... off about you.

Joe Rogan 41:39 With nobody else.

Edward Slingerland 41:40 (laughs) With nobody else, right?

Joe Rogan 41:41 (laughs)

Edward Slingerland 41:41 This is weird. Uh, people are suspicious of that. Cultures are suspicious of people who drink alone.

Joe Rogan 41:45 Right.

Edward Slingerland 41:45 So we always do it in, in company with others.

Joe Rogan 41:49 Yeah.

Edward Slingerland 41:49 But, but I think part, I mean, part of the reason we're suspicious of, um, pleasure is mind/body dualism. So we, we have this kinda sense that if I wanna 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, everyone's like, "That's awesome. That's a wonderful thing to do." Even if I do it through exercise, I feel like there's a sense that, "Okay, that's all right." But there's something about using ... I think we have a feeling that using a chemical to directly change your brain is cheating. And so there's this, um, there's ... Eliade was this, 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. You know, one with the universe. And he grudgingly admits at one point that, yeah, sure, some of them may have been using chemical substances, but that's just a vulgar way to attain spirituality. And it's this kind of prejudiced against ... In a way, a kind of prejudice against the body.

Joe Rogan 43:00 Mm-hmm.

Edward Slingerland 43:01 The idea that you could be using chemicals to get to a state seems to us like cheating.

Joe Rogan 43:06 Well, it's kind of a foolish notion, right? Because everything is chemical.

Edward Slingerland 43:11 Everything is chemical.

Joe Rogan 43:11 All your food is essentially, in some way or form, it's, it's e- broken down to chemicals, or it's coming in as chemicals.

Edward Slingerland 43:19 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 43:20 You know, it's like-

Edward Slingerland 43:20 So it's not turtles all the way down.

Joe Rogan 43:21 Right.

Edward Slingerland 43:21 It's chemicals all the way down. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 43:23 Your body's a chemical factory.

Edward Slingerland 43:24 Yeah, and-

Joe Rogan 43:25 And that's the crazy thing about music, right? Like a great song, you know, you hear Ozzie Osborne. Like, if that's your jam, like, your, your adrenaline rises.

Edward Slingerland 43:35 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 43:36 Right? You get goosebumps. Sometimes you hear a song when you're on the radio, and you're like, "Yeah." You hear that?

Edward Slingerland 43:41 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 43:41 Not the radio. Who the fuck listens to-

Edward Slingerland 43:43 Who listens to the fuck- (laughs)

Joe Rogan 43:44 Jamie does, right?

Edward Slingerland 43:44 Jamie might. Jamie might.

Joe Rogan 43:45 All day, AM. Only AM.

Edward Slingerland 43:46 (laughs) Only AM.

Joe Rogan 43:48 Only AM, uh, political talk.

Edward Slingerland 43:49 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 43:49 But, like-

Edward Slingerland 43:50 But that's all physical, right?

Joe Rogan 43:52 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Something happens.

Edward Slingerland 43:52 So there's sound waves that are being transmitted into your ear.

Joe Rogan 43:55 Yeah.

Edward Slingerland 43:55 That's making something vibrate, that's sending-

Joe Rogan 43:56 It's a drug.

Edward Slingerland 43:57 ... signals. So it's all drugs.

Joe Rogan 43:58 Great music is a drug.

Edward Slingerland 43:59 It's all drugs.

Joe Rogan 44:00 Yeah.

Edward Slingerland 44:00 And, and so I have a quote from Aldous Huxley where he's talking about this prejudice, and he's-

Joe Rogan 44:06 Mm-hmm.

Edward Slingerland 44:06 ... you know, he said, "We, we have this ..." You know, people are, look down at chemical means of attaining ecstasy, but it's chemicals all the way down. It's all chemicals.

Joe Rogan 44:15 Yeah.

Edward Slingerland 44:15 And so whether you do it through meditation or, you know, breathing exercises or whatever, it's, it's all physical.

Joe Rogan 44:23 I think our problem is by not acknowledging that, we, we don't recognize that there's not just strategies, but there's, um, there, there's methods where you do it correctly. That's one of the good things about alcohol. Like, we've had a drink, right? We had a drink.

Edward Slingerland 44:39 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 44:39 And now we have a second drink.

Edward Slingerland 44:40 Now we have a second drink.

Joe Rogan 44:40 And we both know what that means.

Edward Slingerland 44:42 We, we pace ourselves, right? Yeah. Okay.

Joe Rogan 44:44 Yeah, we're pacing ourselves.

Edward Slingerland 44:45 All right.

Joe Rogan 44:45 We're an hour in now.

Edward Slingerland 44:46 Okay. (laughs) All right.

Joe Rogan 44:47 So, but th- we both know how, how much that is. Like a drink of whiskey is-

Edward Slingerland 44:52 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 44:52 ... you know, okay, that's one shot, and this is next.

Edward Slingerland 44:55 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 44:56 Okay. I know exact ... We're modulating correctly. And the, by ... The thing about recognizing the, the correct dosages for all these different things is we have a roadmap, and that's one of the problems with illi- the illegality of certain drugs.

Edward Slingerland 45:14 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 45:14 You know?

Edward Slingerland 45:15 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 45:15 And it's like, it's always been a really big problem with, in Los Angeles with marijuana, because, uh, it's the Wild West there, and especially-

Edward Slingerland 45:22 You never know what you're getting.

Joe Rogan 45:24 Right.

Edward Slingerland 45:24 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 45:24 Especially with edibles.

Edward Slingerland 45:25 Yeah, yeah. Oh, edibles are bad.

Joe Rogan 45:27 (laughs)

Edward Slingerland 45:27 This is, so one of my arguments in the book is that there ... Alco- I call alcohol the king of intoxicants.

Joe Rogan 45:32 Mm-hmm.

Edward Slingerland 45:32 So there are other ways you could do it. You could do it with cannabis. You can do it with kava, which is, is this intoxicating drink they drink in the Pacific. What's special about alcohol is that it's easy to dose. Like you were saying, you kno- ... So it's easy to dose. You know how much you're getting.

Joe Rogan 45:46 Yeah.

Edward Slingerland 45:48 The cognitive effects are similar across individuals, so it does kind of the same thing to different people. Whereas cannabis is really ... Like, I can't ... I've been, my whole life, I, you know, I spent my 20s in San Francisco, and everyone's smoking pot. When I smoke cannabis, it ... I get briefly really paranoid, and then I get horny for about, like, two minutes.

Joe Rogan 46:13 (laughs) You get-

Edward Slingerland 46:14 And then I, and then I fall asleep.

Joe Rogan 46:15 Catch it in, in that two minutes?

Edward Slingerland 46:17 Yeah. If you catch me, if you catch me in those two minutes, I have a great time. But-

Joe Rogan 46:20 (laughs)

Edward Slingerland 46:20 ... other ... That's it, and then I fall asleep. Like all I wanna do is go to sleep. And so, and I ... And everyone's been like, "Oh, you haven't had sativa. You haven't had the right strain." It's bullshit. Like, every strain of cannabis affects me that way, but-

Joe Rogan 46:31 Well, I de- I definitely think there's biodiversity in terms of, like, the way your body responds to cannabis. I've seen it.

Edward Slingerland 46:37 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 46:37 And, uh, there's a guy, uh, Alex Berenson. He was a writer for the, uh, a, 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. But I had him on with this guy, Mark Har- Mike Hart, who is a, a doctor from Canada who prescribed cannabis. And Alex's, his take on it was we, uh, by just pretending that cannabis does no harm, it doesn't do anybody any good 'cause some people have schizophrenic breaks-

Edward Slingerland 47:06 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 47:07 ... while they're on cannabis. And I, I personally know of people that, especially with eating cannabis-

Edward Slingerland 47:12 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 47:13 ... have had schizophrenic breaks and some people who smoked too much of it and smoked it all the time went, went nutty.

Edward Slingerland 47:18 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 47:19 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."

Edward Slingerland 47:28 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 47:28 I ... That's real.

Edward Slingerland 47:29 I have a friend who recently had a kind of breakdown, psychotic break.

Joe Rogan 47:33 Yeah, it's real. It's real.

Edward Slingerland 47:35 And one theory is he was just smoking too much pot.

Joe Rogan 47:37 And this is coming from-

Edward Slingerland 47:38 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 47:38 ... a person who loves pot.

Edward Slingerland 47:39 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 47:39 I'm a pot enthusiast, but I also have a lot of willpower. I'm really good at, like, not doing something and stopping it-

Edward Slingerland 47:47 Right.

Joe Rogan 47:47 ... or, or if I thought that I was fucking up my life with pot, I would just (brake screech sound) I'd hit the brakes.

Edward Slingerland 47:51 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 47:52 If I started n- not blowing off podcasts or-

Edward Slingerland 47:55 Right.

Joe Rogan 47:55 ... you know, canceling things and just sleeping and watching TV or something-

Edward Slingerland 47:59 Yeah, or like drinking during work.

Joe Rogan 48:00 Ah-ha. This is okay for my job.

Edward Slingerland 48:02 This is, yeah, this is for-

Joe Rogan 48:02 Well, for my job, it actually enhances our conversation.

Edward Slingerland 48:04 Yeah, it does. Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 48:05 Right? Which is, leads to your book, right? But this guy, Alex Berenson, he's, like a lot of people, resisted that, and I was like, "No, I think he's right."

Edward Slingerland 48:14 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 48:14 I think he's right, and I think we need to be studying this because the fact that it has been a schedule one drug for so long, our understanding of what it does to different people-... look, I love peanuts. I'm a big fan of-

Edward Slingerland 48:28 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 48:28 ... peanuts. Some people-

Edward Slingerland 48:29 Will die.

Joe Rogan 48:29 ... peanuts kills them.

Edward Slingerland 48:30 Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 48:31 Right? That's not me. It, it... But that doesn't mean that peanuts should be illegal.

Edward Slingerland 48:36 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 48:36 We should understand what the fuck is going on. And the only way we understand what the fuck is going on is if we're honest about it.

Edward Slingerland 48:41 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 48:42 And I think we have to be honest about the effects of cannabis, 'cause they're different with everybody else, w- with, with, with everybody rather, with different people. And for me, I'm okay with it, it doesn't bother me. But I definitely-

Edward Slingerland 48:51 So what is it? What's the effect on you? What is it, when you s-

Joe Rogan 48:54 Well, it depends on what I'm doing, right? It depends on if it's, um, um, before bedtime. But I don't like it before bedtime, 'cause then I don't go to sleep.

Edward Slingerland 49:03 See, that's wei- that's bizarre to me. Like-

Joe Rogan 49:05 I'm a thinker.

Edward Slingerland 49:05 ... the only thing it's good for is to make me go to sleep.

Joe Rogan 49:08 For me, I'm, when I'm on a high, I'm a thinker.

Edward Slingerland 49:10 Okay.

Joe Rogan 49:10 I'm not a, a, a sleeper high, I'm a s- I'm a thinker high. I j- I just go to sleep. I'm a good sleeper. I could go to sleep at a fucking train station-

Edward Slingerland 49:18 Okay.

Joe Rogan 49:18 ... and just lay down on the ground.

Edward Slingerland 49:19 I hate people like you, yeah.

Joe Rogan 49:20 I'm always tired.

Edward Slingerland 49:21 (laughs) Right.

Joe Rogan 49:21 But see, I'm always doing stuff.

Edward Slingerland 49:22 You're always working out, yeah.

Joe Rogan 49:23 Yeah. I'm always working out.

Edward Slingerland 49:23 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 49:24 I'm always tired.

Edward Slingerland 49:24 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 49:24 And I, I, I do like the little, little bit of meditation, but what I really like before sleeping is sauna. I like to go in the sauna-

Edward Slingerland 49:31 Okay.

Joe Rogan 49:31 ... and get wrecked in the sauna. I like to do, like, 25 minutes in the sauna, and then I, I like to sleep.

Edward Slingerland 49:37 So it relaxes your muscles? You know?

Joe Rogan 49:39 Yeah, just... It, it also... It relaxes you, it sends your body a lot of, uh, antiinflammatory, heat shock proteins and-

Edward Slingerland 49:46 Okay.

Joe Rogan 49:47 ... and it's difficult. And I like it that it's a struggle-

Edward Slingerland 49:50 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 49:50 ... and then after it's a struggle, I feel like I earned my rest-

Edward Slingerland 49:52 Yeah, right. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 49:53 ... when I go to sleep.

Edward Slingerland 49:53 When you go to sleep. Right. When you go to sleep.

Joe Rogan 49:54 But, uh, cannabis dep- it depends on the dosage, um, and it really depends on if I eat it or smoke it. And I'm sure you know the difference between-

Edward Slingerland 50:02 Yeah. Eating is weird.

Joe Rogan 50:03 Yeah. It produces... We... I had Rick Doblin on, uh, a couple of days ago from MAPS, you know, a multi-disciplinary, uh, advanced studies of psychedelic substances. What is it?

Narrator 50:16 I tr-... I don't know. I've -

Joe Rogan 50:18 Multi-disciplinary... Anyway, MAPS is an incredible organization that is working to make certain psychedelic compounds, uh, available to people for therapy and to, uh, like, uh, particularly MDMA for people with PTSD-

Edward Slingerland 50:35 Yeah. There's-

Joe Rogan 50:36 ... soldiers.

Edward Slingerland 50:36 I've seen, I've read some of the research on that.

Joe Rogan 50:38 Psilocybin as well-

Edward Slingerland 50:40 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 50:40 ... for a lot of these different things. And Rick Doblin and I were talking about this the other day, that there's this thing that happens when you eat cannabis. It's processed by your liver and it produces 11-hydroxy metabolite, which is five times more psychoactive than THC.

Edward Slingerland 50:54 Oh, interesting.

Joe Rogan 50:54 Yeah, so it really whacks people. And they don't think that it's pot. They think, "Oh my God, I got dosed." Like, "Something's wrong."

Edward Slingerland 51:01 Right, right, right, right.

Joe Rogan 51:02 Because it really has a psychedelic effect. And-

Edward Slingerland 51:04 Yeah, no, I've, I've experienced that. I... The first time, I had a- actually never smoked pot, and I moved to California. So I'm from Jersey originally, and then when I was about 20, I dropped out of college on the East Coast and rode my motorcycle to California and-

Joe Rogan 51:18 Oh, right. Look at you, bro (laughs)

Edward Slingerland 51:18 ... thought I was Jack Kerouac. Yeah, and I was a dick. I was, like, such a self-righteous little dick. I had-

Joe Rogan 51:23 Like, "Who isn't?"

Edward Slingerland 51:24 ... you know, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Joe Rogan 51:26 Yeah.

Edward Slingerland 51:26 Um, yeah, it was not a good time for me. But it was go- it was a good move and I... Moving to California. And I'd never done drugs before that, but I had been... I was out of my apartment in San Francisco and moving into a new one, and I kinda... I rode my motorcycle north and did some camping, and then I got too cold. And so I ended up at this, this youth hostel. And, uh, someone who worked there introduced me to hash cooked into an omelet.

Joe Rogan 51:52 Yo. (laughs)

Edward Slingerland 51:53 And so I, I did it, I ate it, and-

Joe Rogan 51:57 Oh, my God.

Edward Slingerland 51:57 ... I felt nothing. I was like, "That's not affecting me." And then I had to go to s- I had to go to class, so I was, like, at... I was at Stanford. So this was happening up in Point Reyes National Park, like, north of San Francisco. And I had to ride my motorcycle down to school for a class, and about halfway through the ride, I just started tripping. Like, it felt like I was tripping. I was just... The trees started moving and, and-

Joe Rogan 52:20 (laughs)

Edward Slingerland 52:20 ... and I was high for, like, three days. It was horrible.

Joe Rogan 52:24 (laughs)

Edward Slingerland 52:24 It just would not stop. I'd wake up the next day and I'm like, "Am I still high?" I was like, "Yeah, you're still high." So the eating scares me 'cause I, I had such a... It's just an uncontrollable experience that it lasts for so long.

Joe Rogan 52:35 You never, you never know what you're getting.

Edward Slingerland 52:37 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 52:37 It's so inconsistent. And, you know, these goddamn stoners. You know, when they make that hemp butter-

Edward Slingerland 52:43 Yeah, right.

Joe Rogan 52:43 ... they make that stuff and-

Edward Slingerland 52:44 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 52:45 ... they cook in the butter-

Edward Slingerland 52:45 And they c-

Joe Rogan 52:46 ... and then they add-

Edward Slingerland 52:46 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 52:47 ... weed to the food too. Like, ugh. There was a restaurant, um, where was it? Colorado? There was a restaurant that was making marijuana food. They were making food with marijuana.

Edward Slingerland 52:59 So they're just cooking with-

Joe Rogan 53:00 Yeah.

Edward Slingerland 53:00 ... cannabis-infused oils-

Joe Rogan 53:01 Cooking with cann- Yeah.

Edward Slingerland 53:02 ... or whatever, yeah.

Joe Rogan 53:03 And they were s- that was part of the appeal of the place. I was like, "Jesus Christ, it sounds like-"

Edward Slingerland 53:07 It sounds terrible.

Joe Rogan 53:07 (laughs)

Edward Slingerland 53:07 I would never fucking go there. That sounds like the wor- my worst nightmare, right?

Joe Rogan 53:11 It sounds so dangerous-

Edward Slingerland 53:12 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 53:12 ... because at least they have c- certain things. Like, uh, one of the things about the legalization that passed in 2016 in California is that they put limits on edibles. And so the limits on edibles are, I believe it's 10 milligrams.

Edward Slingerland 53:24 Oh, how strong they can it be.

Joe Rogan 53:25 Yeah.

Edward Slingerland 53:25 Okay.

Joe Rogan 53:25 So you could buy a bunch and you could eat 10 of them-

Edward Slingerland 53:27 You could eat (laughs) -

Joe Rogan 53:28 ... and get 100.

Edward Slingerland 53:28 ... 10 of them, yeah.

Joe Rogan 53:29 But the thing is, like, a 10, 10 is, like, a good dose for a lot of folks.

Edward Slingerland 53:33 All right.

Joe Rogan 53:33 It's not that bad, unless you're Jamie. Jamie has this weird thing where he doesn't get high off edibles.

Edward Slingerland 53:39 At all?

Joe Rogan 53:40 No, not at all. Like, he's taking 1,000 milligrams. I've seen it.

Edward Slingerland 53:44 And nu-

Joe Rogan 53:44 I've seen it. It's bananas.

Edward Slingerland 53:45 You've seen that happen? That's weird.

Joe Rogan 53:46 He... And apparently it's the, it is a thing. Just like some people die if they eat Brazil nuts, right?

Edward Slingerland 53:51 Yeah, yeah. So this is the thing about cannabis and all these other drugs, is none of 'em are as predictable as alcohol.

Joe Rogan 53:57 Right.

Edward Slingerland 53:58 So alcohol is easy to make, you can make it out of anything, it's easy to dose, the results are consistent across individuals. Like, what's happening to you right now as we drink this is similar to what's happening to me. We're not having completely opposite experiences, right?

Joe Rogan 54:15 Right.

Edward Slingerland 54:16 And it's gonna wear off, 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. And so the half-life is pretty l- is short. Like, in two hours, we'll be fine.

Joe Rogan 54:30 But it's interesting that different cultures have almost like a...... the, where they d-- if cultures, uh, traditionally don't have, uh, a use of alcohol as a part of their culture, they have lower tolerances.

Edward Slingerland 54:44 They do.

Joe Rogan 54:44 And then individuals, for whatever reason, some individuals are, like, predestined to be alcoholics.

Edward Slingerland 54:50 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 54:51 Which is really weird.

Edward Slingerland 54:53 That's, it's part of the puzzle I'm trying to explain. So the estimate is that up to 15% of the human population has a predisposition to alcoholism.

Joe Rogan 55:02 Wow.

Edward Slingerland 55:03 So they can't-

Joe Rogan 55:03 That's really high.

Edward Slingerland 55:04 ... they can't, it's really high. You can't use... If you have that predispo- you can't use alcohol safely. And so the question is, why has our taste for alcohol been allowed to stay in our gene pool for so long? And so one of those stories I tell is we have... So, uh, one possibility... The standard scientific story about why we like alcohol is it's a mistake. So, uh, it's a way we get a reward for no good reason, and so it's kind of an evolutionary hijack. And so it's, it's, it's similar to masturbation. So, uh, people can get rew- pleasure is our genes' way of getting us to do what they want us to do. So they give us pleasure for things that advance their cause, and they give us pain for things that don't. And the best pleasure you could have as a human being is an orgasm. It's, everything else is compared to that, and it's because that's most directly associated with the thing the genes most want us to do, which is make copies-

Joe Rogan 56:02 Mm-hmm.

Edward Slingerland 56:02 ... and pass it on to the next generation. But it's a, it's not a perfect system because we can get orgasms in other ways (laughs) , right? So we-

Joe Rogan 56:11 Right.

Edward Slingerland 56:11 ... masturbate, we engage in all sorts of non-reproductive sex, but it works good enough because the cost of whatever else we're doing is minimal. The, the point is, over evolutionary history, statistically speaking, orgasms were associated with getting us to pass on genes to the next generation.

Joe Rogan 56:29 Mm-hmm.

Edward Slingerland 56:29 And it's because the, the reason evolution can tolerate all the non-reproductive hijinks we get up to is because they're not costly. It's not imposing adaptive costs on us. In the case of alcohol, especially if you have a predisposition to alcoholism, it's imposing huge costs on you. And so evolution should be really interested in getting... We sh- our taste for alcohol should be eliminated from the human species if it really is only a costly mistake.

Joe Rogan 56:59 Mm-hmm.

Edward Slingerland 56:59 If it's just kind of brain parasite. And so one possibility is, well, evolution just hasn't figured out a solution yet, and that's possible. Like, selection can't work on a mutation that doesn't exist. But there's a gene complex that, uh, evolved separately at least three times, uh, at different points of history and around the world where people don't like to drink. And so, um, the most, I think, people know of it... The most common prevalence of it is in East Asia. So some people from East Asia, if they ha- if they had that first drink we had, like about halfway through that first drink, they would start, they would turn red, they would start to get heart palpitations, they would feel nauseous. They would... That first drink you poured me, about two sips in, they would stop drinking because they would start feeling really uncomfortable. And that's-

Joe Rogan 57:47 Why, why East Asia?

Edward Slingerland 57:49 Well, s- this is, so it's an interesting story. So it seemed to have arro- it arose about 7,000 years ago at the same time as rice agriculture. So something's going on, there's some connection between this set of mutations and rice agriculture, and one theory is that... So what's happening is they have two mutations. So alcohol gets broken down in your body in two steps. So ethanol comes in, this first enzyme called ADH takes it and pulls a couple hydrogens off it and turns it into this substance called acetaldehyde, which is still really nasty, it's still very poisonous. And so then there's another enzyme, ADLH, that takes another couple hydrogens off that and turns it into acetic acid, which is harmless, you can get rid of that real easily. What, what's going on with people with this, these mutations is that first step, their ADH enzyme is hyper-efficient, so they're taking alcohol and immediately turning it into acetaldehyde. But then the second step, that enzyme is not very good. So all this acetaldehyde's building up in their system and it starts happening right away, and that's what's giving them the flushing and the nausea and all this other stuff. The theory is that there's something about high acetaldehyde concentrations in the body that might help with tuberculosis-

Joe Rogan 59:05 Mm-hmm.

Edward Slingerland 59:06 ... or fungal poisoning. And so the theory is this was useful for hunter-gatherers who had just settled down and started to do agriculture. Suddenly you're living in big groups, tuberculosis becomes a problem, suddenly you're storing grain in a wet climate that's gonna start, just gonna start to rot, and so you, you're vulnerable to fungal poisoning.

Joe Rogan 59:29 Oh.

Edward Slingerland 59:29 And so it may be an adaptation to rice agriculture.

Joe Rogan 59:33 This, and you said this is East Asia?

Edward Slingerland 59:35 It's, it's, basically it started in kind of where modern-day Shanghai is, so Southeast China. It's spread... In the book I show a map of the distribution of this gene right now and it's, so it spread to Japan and Korea a little bit, but it pretty much stayed there. 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 evolved for other reasons, this, what's sometimes called the Asian flushing gene complex, this is the silver bullet, this is the solution. Evolution figured out the answer to this. And it's such a good solution that actually a chemical that simulates the same effect of this mutation is used to treat alcoholism. So you give it to alcoholics and they don't wanna drink anymore because they have all these negative effects.

Joe Rogan 1:00:25 What's that called?

Edward Slingerland 1:00:26 Um, disulfide, disulfamine or something like that.

Joe Rogan 1:00:28 Mm-hmm.

Edward Slingerland 1:00:28 It's, uh, it basically creates a chemical version. It, it somehow reproduces the effect of high levels of acetaldehyde in your body.

Joe Rogan 1:00:37 Now, one of the theories about Native Americans is that, um...... they didn't have alcohol as a part of their culture until the Europeans came and, you know, the, what was it, 13th century or whatever-

Edward Slingerland 1:00:51 Yeah, pretty late.

Joe Rogan 1:00:51 ... they first started coming in.

Edward Slingerland 1:00:52 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:00:53 When they started introducing them to alcohol, they didn't have the genes for it.

Edward Slingerland 1:00:57 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:00:57 Does that make sense?

Edward Slingerland 1:00:58 Yeah. So, um, you have to talk about North versus South America. So South America, they've had alcohol for a long time, so they were making-

Joe Rogan 1:01:05 Mm-hmm.

Edward Slingerland 1:01:05 ... Chicha, this beer. But North America is one of the few places in the world where they didn't have indigenous alcohol cultures.

Joe Rogan 1:01:13 Do we know why?

Edward Slingerland 1:01:15 I think that it's because they had a different drug that was doing the same job. So they had tobac- this really... Native forms of tobacco are really powerful. They're much more power. They, they actually get you a little bit high from just the nicotine high, and then they were including, they were mixing in hallucinogens.

Joe Rogan 1:01:34 Mm-hmm.

Edward Slingerland 1:01:34 And so I think they had a, they had a smokable dr- For whatever reason, their cultures hit upon this smokable drug that they used in exactly the same way other cultures used alcohol. You smoked it at treaties, you know, signing, uh, when you needed to get along with strangers, you'd sit down first and smoke... You know, the peace pipe-

Joe Rogan 1:01:54 Yeah.

Edward Slingerland 1:01:54 ... is the calumet. This is where it comes from.

Joe Rogan 1:01:55 In North America, when you include Mexico, there's a long history of consumption of psilocybin mushrooms, right?

Edward Slingerland 1:02:01 Yeah, I don't know how far north it goes. I'm not sure they were doing it in North America. It's possible. They were, the hallucinogen they were including in the, the tobacco was Datura. I don't know what. This, um, it'll, it'll get... Jimson weed. It'll get you high, but it's not psilocybin. As far as I know, psilocybin, uh, was primarily used in kind of n- once you start at Northern Mexico going south.

Joe Rogan 1:02:26 Hmm.

Edward Slingerland 1:02:26 And then it's, you know, it was used in ancient times in, in all those regions.

Joe Rogan 1:02:31 Datura.

Edward Slingerland 1:02:32 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:02:33 Is... Mm... Are, are you saying it right? Is it Datura?

Edward Slingerland 1:02:37 Maybe Datura, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:02:38 Is that-

Edward Slingerland 1:02:39 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:02:39 ... that one that's, like, really oddly dissociative? There's one that, um, I remember reading, uh, it was, it was again, it was McKenna talking about it, where he had to take it, but he had to stop, stop using it because he, um, was talking to a friend at a market and he realized that the friend believed that they were back in his apartment. Like, he didn't recognize that he wasn't outside in a market.

Edward Slingerland 1:03:06 Okay.

Joe Rogan 1:03:06 And this was... I wanna say he was taking it in India.

Edward Slingerland 1:03:11 All right. It could be. I mean, hallucinations do all kinds of crazy stuff, but-

Joe Rogan 1:03:15 But Datura is... Let me- Let's see if we can find out.

Edward Slingerland 1:03:17 Let's, yeah, let's see-

Joe Rogan 1:03:18 I don't remember.

Edward Slingerland 1:03:18 ... what we can find out about these effects of it.

Joe Rogan 1:03:20 Is that it?

Narrator 1:03:20 I found, like, r- he... "I didn't like Datura." Terence McKenna, I've just typed in his name and the drug and...

Joe Rogan 1:03:26 Yes.

Narrator 1:03:27 Oh, this was in Nepal years ago.

Joe Rogan 1:03:28 Right, that's it.

Narrator 1:03:29 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:03:30 Yeah, that is it. Yeah.

Edward Slingerland 1:03:31 Because he felt completely-

Joe Rogan 1:03:33 They felt like-

Edward Slingerland 1:03:33 ... disassociated.

Joe Rogan 1:03:34 ... you have, really have no idea what reality is. Like, y- like say if you took Datura and we were in this room doing this podcast-

Edward Slingerland 1:03:40 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:03:40 ... you might think we were back at your house, or you might think we were at the bus station.

Edward Slingerland 1:03:45 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:03:45 Or you might think, you know, we were in the movie theater. Like, you, you really have no idea what the fuck is going on and, uh, the reality that you perceive through your eyes is completely distorted in some... I-

Edward Slingerland 1:03:55 Psilocybin does that too (laughs) .

Joe Rogan 1:03:57 Sort of, but it doesn't put you in a different place in terms-

Edward Slingerland 1:04:00 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:04:00 ... of, like-

Edward Slingerland 1:04:00 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:04:00 ... you don't think you're at the movie theater.

Edward Slingerland 1:04:02 Right, right.

Joe Rogan 1:04:02 Like, this guy, I remember this, he was discussing it with this guy where that's when he realized it was way too odd. This guy didn't know that they were at the market. He's like, "Hey man, we're at the market. We're not at your house."

Edward Slingerland 1:04:13 Yeah. Have you ever done ketamine?

Joe Rogan 1:04:16 No, I have not.

Edward Slingerland 1:04:17 I did it once, and it sounds a little bit like that, where I was, like, in a d- I was convinced I was just in a different universe now.

Joe Rogan 1:04:25 Yeah.

Edward Slingerland 1:04:26 And it's not a universe I was thrilled about.

Joe Rogan 1:04:29 (laughs)

Edward Slingerland 1:04:29 It's fucked... It's kind of a fucked up universe, and I was never coming back. Like, it was... I was just filled with this-

Joe Rogan 1:04:36 Dread.

Edward Slingerland 1:04:36 ... "Fuck, why did I walk through that door? And now I'm in this universe and I'm stuck here-"

Joe Rogan 1:04:41 Hmm.

Edward Slingerland 1:04:41 "... and I will never get back to my old universe."

Joe Rogan 1:04:44 Wow.

Edward Slingerland 1:04:44 It was really strongly dissociated feeling that was unpleasant.

Joe Rogan 1:04:48 I wonder if that's real. 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... Well, like, we know that there's more, there's more to the universe than what we can observe. Like, if you wave your hand over the top of an earthworm, it has no idea you're there.

Edward Slingerland 1:05:15 Okay.

Joe Rogan 1:05:16 Like, we... How, how many of those senses do we lack to perceive... Like, how many senses to perceive things that exist, but that, for whatever reason, we don't have the instruments to pick up? How much of that we... We can only imagine, right?

Edward Slingerland 1:05:34 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:05:34 We can imagine that what we see and what we can measure and what we observe with our eyes and ears and, you know, our, our senses, that this is all that exists. But that's just speculative. We really have no idea. 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.

Edward Slingerland 1:05:53 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:05:54 And, and then there's weird things like the, the concept of multiverses and the concept of parallel dimensions-

Edward Slingerland 1:06:02 Yeah, I, yeah, I saw you had Sean Carroll on the show.

Joe Rogan 1:06:03 Oh my God.

Edward Slingerland 1:06:04 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:06:04 He, he hurts my brain.

Edward Slingerland 1:06:05 Yeah, yeah (laughs) .

Joe Rogan 1:06:05 Sean hu- Last time we, we talked, you hurt my brain.

Edward Slingerland 1:06:08 Yeah, the idea-

Joe Rogan 1:06:09 Sean.

Edward Slingerland 1:06:09 ... of multiple universes is, is trippy.

Joe Rogan 1:06:11 Yeah, yeah.

Edward Slingerland 1:06:13 I don't... So this is... I think there's a pre- There's almost, it gotta be a genetic predisposition to being attracted to these ideas and not... And so I have a good, I have a good friend, Jonathan Schooler, who's a social psychologist, who is convinced that consciousness is all that exists, and there could be multiple universes, um, consciousness is real, it's actually the only real thing. 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.... 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.

Joe Rogan 1:06:55 Yeah.

Edward Slingerland 1:06:55 We're a bunch of physical chemicals. There's no meaning in the world. Humans create meaning 'cause we're built to create meaning, but there's no inherent meaning in the world, and consciousness is just an epiphenomenon. So it's something that evolved for a certain reason 'cause it helps us regulate ourselves and communicate to others in a certain way. Um, and he looks at the same data and says, "No. It's, consciousness is all there is." (laughs) And there are other universes and this physical life is just one life. So it's interesting-

Joe Rogan 1:07:24 Jim, do we have any more of these, uh, notepads? Do we have one of these for me?

Edward Slingerland 1:07:28 You wanna just... Here. I'm just doodling.

Joe Rogan 1:07:29 I just want to write that dude's name down.

Edward Slingerland 1:07:30 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:07:30 No, it's okay. You should have one.

Edward Slingerland 1:07:32 All right.

Joe Rogan 1:07:32 Okay. That, 'cause I wanna write his name down. Did- does he have a book out or anything?

Edward Slingerland 1:07:36 No, no, but he's a, he's a fun guy to talk to. You'll like him.

Joe Rogan 1:07:42 And does he, um... Where is he at?

Edward Slingerland 1:07:46 He's at, uh, he was my colleague at UBC in Vancouver, but he's at Santa Barbara now.

Joe Rogan 1:07:50 Jonathan Schuler?

Edward Slingerland 1:07:51 Jonathan Schooler. So yeah-

Joe Rogan 1:07:52 Schooler?

Edward Slingerland 1:07:52 ... like schoolhouse, Schooler, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:07:56 And what- what, uh, leads him to that conclusion?

Edward Slingerland 1:08:00 (sighs) (laughs) He's got a lot of funny ideas.

Joe Rogan 1:08:07 But why?

Edward Slingerland 1:08:08 Um, so he thinks... He, one of his, um, research projects is on the decline effect. So you do a study and it works, and then you do it again and it doesn't work as well, and then you do it again and it works even less well. And my interpretation of that is that it's not a real effect. You got a random, you know, it looked good randomly initially, and then-

Joe Rogan 1:08:32 Mm-hmm.

Edward Slingerland 1:08:32 ... the whole thing about statistics is that it washes out. If it's not a real effect, it goes away because-

Joe Rogan 1:08:38 Right.

Edward Slingerland 1:08:38 Um, but he thinks the universe gets tired of effects. (laughs) He's like, you- you- you know, the universe gets bored with this and that's why the- the effect is happening. Um, and I understand like, intellectually, you can't rule that out. I can see how a kind of mind-only view of the world... There's no, there, you can't point to any particular bit of empirical evidence that rules it out. But the st- kind of stuff that sways me is, um, selective brain deficits. So I knock out a part of your brain with a stroke. So you have a stroke and some part of your brain gets knocked out, and now you can't use proper nouns or you can't use verbs. Like really, the- the brain subserves consciousness in such a really specific way that I have trouble imagining that consciousness is something, is anything, first of all, ontologically like really in the world separate from the brain. And is really anything more than a- a kind of, um, effect you get. It's a, it's... 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 re- the only real description is the chemicals all the way down, one, is my view.

Joe Rogan 1:10:04 And what is, uh, just- just because when you do studies over and over again that the- the effects don't work, that can't be with every study.

Edward Slingerland 1:10:13 No, no.

Joe Rogan 1:10:14 So-

Edward Slingerland 1:10:14 And I'm probably misquoting Jonathan. Okay.

Joe Rogan 1:10:15 Okay.

Edward Slingerland 1:10:16 So you'll have to ask him about it, but yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:10:17 That's, it's just a weird conclusion to draw, but here's... The take that I'm, uh, well, one of the things that makes me curious about it is the idea of a simulation theory.

Edward Slingerland 1:10:27 Okay.

Joe Rogan 1:10:27 Right? Now if you, if you believe the- p- in the possibility of the simulation theory, and, uh, you know, Elon fully believes in it-

Edward Slingerland 1:10:35 Lay- lay that out for me. So what's the theory?

Joe Rogan 1:10:36 The simulation theory is that if w- what, like we can do now, we can have virtual reality. And I don't know if you've never experimented with like the HTC VIVE or any of these things. 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.

Edward Slingerland 1:10:55 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:10:56 But they're way better than Pong.

Edward Slingerland 1:10:59 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:10:59 Right?

Edward Slingerland 1:10:59 Yeah, we're old enough to remember Pong. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:11:00 Right, I remember Pong. (laughs)

Edward Slingerland 1:11:01 Space Invaders and yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:11:03 Yeah. Doop doop, doop doop.

Edward Slingerland 1:11:03 Yeah. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:11:03 Right? So we played that-

Edward Slingerland 1:11:04 Which was really engrossing at the time, right? Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:11:06 Oh my God, you couldn't believe it, right?

Edward Slingerland 1:11:07 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:11:07 You're like, "I can't believe I'm playing something on the TV. I'm making the TV move."

Edward Slingerland 1:11:10 Yeah, yeah. (laughs) Right.

Joe Rogan 1:11:11 But now, you got Call of Duty and it's like way more engrossing, and Halo and all these crazy games. If you, uh, extrapolate that with this sort of HTC VIVE, um, or, uh, Oculus technology, you would imagine that one day there's going to be an artificial reality that's indiscernible from regular- regular reality. When you talk to people like Elon Musk about Neuralink, right? And they're going to, uh, es- essentially wire your brain. So they're gonna reach areas of your brain and stimulate them with some sort of energy, electricity. I don't know what kind of, what- what they're doing to do that. It hasn't been really clearly demonstrated how exactly they're- they're planning on ramping this up into the future.

Edward Slingerland 1:11:57 Okay.

Joe Rogan 1:11:58 But one of the things that Elon said to me, "You're gonna be able to communicate without words," which is kinda terrifying, but also fascinating.

Edward Slingerland 1:12:04 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:12:05 But I would imagine-

Edward Slingerland 1:12:06 I'm not sure I would like that.

Joe Rogan 1:12:07 Right.

Edward Slingerland 1:12:07 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:12:07 I would imagine-

Edward Slingerland 1:12:07 I don't like having words, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:12:09 ... that this sort of, uh, this innovation is also going to apply to things like artificial reality and virtual reality, 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.

Edward Slingerland 1:12:26 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:12:26 If that's the case, how do we know if we're not already there? If it one day becomes indiscernible and virtual reality or artif-, uh, uh, simulation of reality is indiscernible from regular reality-

Edward Slingerland 1:12:40 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:12:40 ... how will we know? Well, uh, Nick Bostrom, uh, who was, who i- is another guy who broke my brain, who was on the podcast, was arguing that according to probability theory, we are in a simulation.

Edward Slingerland 1:12:55 Okay.Okay.

Joe Rogan 1:12:56 And this is where it gets really weird, and, like, very-

Edward Slingerland 1:12:59 But why-

Joe Rogan 1:12:59 ... intellectually masturbatory.

Edward Slingerland 1:13:01 ... would, why would whoever ... Yeah. This is where, like, why would those people create us as a simulation?

Joe Rogan 1:13:07 I don't think that's what they're saying.

Edward Slingerland 1:13:08 Like, we're pretty. Okay.

Joe Rogan 1:13:08 They're saying, "We did it."

Edward Slingerland 1:13:10 We created ourselves as a simulation?

Joe Rogan 1:13:11 The idea is that h- well, we're, look, look at, let's imagine that a simulation doesn't exist.

Edward Slingerland 1:13:15 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:13:16 Okay? We're not in a simulation.

Edward Slingerland 1:13:17 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:13:17 This is just, uh, w- regular-

Edward Slingerland 1:13:18 We're actually here in Austin talking.

Joe Rogan 1:13:19 Right. We're here in Austin.

Edward Slingerland 1:13:20 Okay.

Joe Rogan 1:13:20 Carbon-based life form. We're really drinking whiskey.

Edward Slingerland 1:13:23 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:13:24 If human beings don't blow ourselves up, or we don't get hit by another asteroid-

Edward Slingerland 1:13:29 Sure.

Joe Rogan 1:13:29 ... 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. I can't imagine.

Edward Slingerland 1:13:39 Would we, would we do this conversation? (laughs) So-

Joe Rogan 1:13:41 Why wouldn't we? Right? Why wouldn't we?

Edward Slingerland 1:13:43 This is the thing. I-

Joe Rogan 1:13:43 I, look, I love conversations. Why wou- if I, if I-

Edward Slingerland 1:13:46 Why wouldn't we do new things, though? This is what I ... As, I guess-

Joe Rogan 1:13:48 New things in what way?

Edward Slingerland 1:13:49 ... I think, I think I've heard about the simulation theory before. But what I wouldn't, I don't get is why ... So let's say it's a thousand years from now, we have the technology to do that.

Joe Rogan 1:13:59 Okay.

Edward Slingerland 1:13:59 Why wouldn't we just simulate new things we haven't done already?

Joe Rogan 1:14:02 Maybe we are doing that.

Edward Slingerland 1:14:04 Simultaneously.

Joe Rogan 1:14:04 Maybe we haven't done this. All right. Yeah, I mean-

Edward Slingerland 1:14:06 Oh, okay.

Joe Rogan 1:14:07 But here's the thing. Uh, l- uh, if you could do simulation, what do you think Westworld is?

Edward Slingerland 1:14:14 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:14:14 The show Westworld-

Edward Slingerland 1:14:15 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:14:15 ... is you're going back and living like it's 1840.

Edward Slingerland 1:14:17 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:14:17 And that's really engrossing for people. It's really, uh, uh, people are very attracted to that idea.

Edward Slingerland 1:14:22 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:14:22 I would be attracted to that idea. 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.

Edward Slingerland 1:14:32 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:14:33 What is this, Jamie?

Narrator 1:14:33 This is the new, uh, background Unreal Engine 5.

Joe Rogan 1:14:37 Oh my God.

Narrator 1:14:38 Um, I just, I tried to get a good spot here so when they put the lights on here in a second, that's-