Joe Rogan Experience #1663 - Edward Slingerland

1. 0:00 – 15:00

   (drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast,…

   1. JRJoe Rogan0:00

      (drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.

   2. NANarrator0:04

      The Joe Rogan Experience.

   3. 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) .

   4. ESEdward Slingerland0:20

      (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?

   5. JRJoe Rogan1:18

      Mm-hmm.

   6. ESEdward Slingerland1:19

      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.

   7. JRJoe Rogan1:58

      Mm-hmm.

   8. ESEdward Slingerland1:59

      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.

   9. JRJoe Rogan2:49

      Mm-hmm.

   10. ESEdward Slingerland2:49

       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.

   11. JRJoe Rogan3:18

       Yeah.

   12. ESEdward Slingerland3:18

       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.

   13. JRJoe Rogan3:33

       And it has to be modulated correctly.

   14. ESEdward Slingerland3:36

       Oh-

   15. JRJoe Rogan3:36

       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.

   16. ESEdward Slingerland3:46

       Yeah. (laughs) I know. That's the problem.

   17. JRJoe Rogan3:47

       (laughs)

   18. ESEdward Slingerland3:47

       So that's why alcohol is super dangerous. Uh-

   19. JRJoe Rogan3:49

       Yeah.

   20. ESEdward Slingerland3:49

       ... especially that kinda alcohol. Distilled liquor, super dangerous.

   21. JRJoe Rogan3:52

       Buffalo Trace.

   22. ESEdward Slingerland3:53

       Yeah.

   23. JRJoe Rogan3:53

       I feel like we should have a drink.

   24. ESEdward Slingerland3:54

       I, I think it, we would be remiss-

   25. JRJoe Rogan3:56

       I think we have to.

   26. ESEdward Slingerland3:56

       ... if... I think we're professionally-

   27. JRJoe Rogan3:57

       If we're doing, if we're doing a podcast-

   28. ESEdward Slingerland3:58

       ... obligated to drink. Yeah.

   29. JRJoe Rogan3:59

       Hit it, right? (glass clinks) There we go.

   30. ESEdward Slingerland4:00

       That's nice.
2. 15:00 – 30:00

   Hmm. …

   1. ESEdward Slingerland15:00

      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.

   2. JRJoe Rogan15:18

      Hmm.

   3. ESEdward Slingerland15:19

      Is that-

   4. JRJoe Rogan15:19

      That's crazy.

   5. ESEdward Slingerland15:20

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

   6. JRJoe Rogan15:27

      (laughs)

   7. ESEdward Slingerland15:27

      ... 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.

   8. JRJoe Rogan16:04

      Hmm.

   9. ESEdward Slingerland16:04

      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-

   10. JRJoe Rogan16:18

       That seems wild.

   11. ESEdward Slingerland16:18

       ... and that's how you would get corn.

   12. JRJoe Rogan16:20

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

   13. ESEdward Slingerland16:25

       Well, pro-

   14. JRJoe Rogan16:26

       Did we have like a, like the, the, you know, the first, the atom

   15. ESEdward Slingerland16:30

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

   16. JRJoe Rogan16:37

       Mm-hmm.

   17. ESEdward Slingerland16:37

       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.

   18. JRJoe Rogan17:06

       Are you aware of, uh, Brian Muraresku's work?

   19. ESEdward Slingerland17:09

       No.

   20. JRJoe Rogan17:10

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

   21. ESEdward Slingerland17:15

       Okay.

   22. JRJoe Rogan17:16

       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-

   23. ESEdward Slingerland17:27

       Yeah, yeah.

   24. JRJoe Rogan17:28

       Yeah, so they were, they were tripping balls.

   25. ESEdward Slingerland17:30

       I have heard about this theory, yeah.

   26. JRJoe Rogan17:31

       They were adding psychedelic compounds to their wine.

   27. ESEdward Slingerland17:35

       Yeah.

   28. JRJoe Rogan17:35

       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.

   29. ESEdward Slingerland17:44

       (laughs) Right.

   30. JRJoe Rogan17:44

       They solved a lot of the world's problems.
3. 30:00 – 45:00

   Yeah, so, you know,…

   1. JRJoe Rogan30:00

      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?

   2. ESEdward Slingerland30:07

      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-

   3. JRJoe Rogan30:20

      Mm-hmm.

   4. ESEdward Slingerland30:21

      ... 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.

   5. JRJoe Rogan30:30

      So, how do we know how much energy it's, it's using specifically?

   6. ESEdward Slingerland30:34

      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-

   7. JRJoe Rogan30:48

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

   8. ESEdward Slingerland30:53

      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.

   9. JRJoe Rogan31:19

      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.

   10. ESEdward Slingerland31:27

       Okay.

   11. JRJoe Rogan31:27

       No drinking, no boozing.

   12. ESEdward Slingerland31:28

       No drugs at all?

   13. JRJoe Rogan31:29

       No bo-... No drugs at all.

   14. ESEdward Slingerland31:30

       Okay.

   15. JRJoe Rogan31:30

       Um, we're allowed to smoke cigars though, which me and Ari both agree-

   16. ESEdward Slingerland31:33

       Okay. (laughs)

   17. JRJoe Rogan31:33

       ... is kind of cheating.

   18. ESEdward Slingerland31:34

       Is kind of cheating, yeah.

   19. JRJoe Rogan31:35

       It's kind of cheating. But not enough that it's-

   20. ESEdward Slingerland31:37

       Can you drink caffeine?

   21. JRJoe Rogan31:38

       Yes.

   22. ESEdward Slingerland31:39

       Okay, all right, all right.

   23. JRJoe Rogan31:39

       You're allowed to drink coffee. You just can't get fucked up.

   24. ESEdward Slingerland31:42

       All right.

   25. JRJoe Rogan31:42

       Which, as a comedian, you know, it's-

   26. ESEdward Slingerland31:43

       Yeah, that's hard.

   27. JRJoe Rogan31:44

       ... it's... Well, it's normal. It's, wasn't... It's not hard.

   28. ESEdward Slingerland31:46

       Okay.

   29. JRJoe Rogan31:46

       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."

   30. ESEdward Slingerland32:24

       That must be really motivating.
4. 45:00 – 1:00:00

   Yeah. …

   1. JRJoe Rogan45:00

      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.

   2. ESEdward Slingerland45:14

      Yeah.

   3. JRJoe Rogan45:14

      You know?

   4. ESEdward Slingerland45:15

      Yeah.

   5. JRJoe Rogan45:15

      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-

   6. ESEdward Slingerland45:22

      You never know what you're getting.

   7. JRJoe Rogan45:24

      Right.

   8. ESEdward Slingerland45:24

      Yeah.

   9. JRJoe Rogan45:24

      Especially with edibles.

   10. ESEdward Slingerland45:25

       Yeah, yeah. Oh, edibles are bad.

   11. JRJoe Rogan45:27

       (laughs)

   12. ESEdward Slingerland45:27

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

   13. JRJoe Rogan45:32

       Mm-hmm.

   14. ESEdward Slingerland45:32

       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.

   15. JRJoe Rogan45:46

       Yeah.

   16. ESEdward Slingerland45:48

       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.

   17. JRJoe Rogan46:13

       (laughs) You get-

   18. ESEdward Slingerland46:14

       And then I, and then I fall asleep.

   19. JRJoe Rogan46:15

       Catch it in, in that two minutes?

   20. ESEdward Slingerland46:17

       Yeah. If you catch me, if you catch me in those two minutes, I have a great time. But-

   21. JRJoe Rogan46:20

       (laughs)

   22. ESEdward Slingerland46:20

       ... 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-

   23. JRJoe Rogan46:31

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

   24. ESEdward Slingerland46:37

       Yeah.

   25. JRJoe Rogan46:37

       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-

   26. ESEdward Slingerland47:06

       Yeah.

   27. JRJoe Rogan47:07

       ... while they're on cannabis. And I, I personally know of people that, especially with eating cannabis-

   28. ESEdward Slingerland47:12

       Yeah.

   29. JRJoe Rogan47:13

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

   30. ESEdward Slingerland47:18

       Yeah.
5. 1:00:00 – 1:14:41

   What's that called? …

   1. ESEdward Slingerland1:00:00

      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.

   2. JRJoe Rogan1:00:25

      What's that called?

   3. ESEdward Slingerland1:00:26

      Um, disulfide, disulfamine or something like that.

   4. JRJoe Rogan1:00:28

      Mm-hmm.

   5. ESEdward Slingerland1:00:28

      It's, uh, it basically creates a chemical version. It, it somehow reproduces the effect of high levels of acetaldehyde in your body.

   6. JRJoe Rogan1:00:37

      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-

   7. ESEdward Slingerland1:00:51

      Yeah, pretty late.

   8. JRJoe Rogan1:00:51

      ... they first started coming in.

   9. ESEdward Slingerland1:00:52

      Yeah.

   10. JRJoe Rogan1:00:53

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

   11. ESEdward Slingerland1:00:57

       Yeah.

   12. JRJoe Rogan1:00:57

       Does that make sense?

   13. ESEdward Slingerland1:00:58

       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-

   14. JRJoe Rogan1:01:05

       Mm-hmm.

   15. ESEdward Slingerland1:01:05

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

   16. JRJoe Rogan1:01:13

       Do we know why?

   17. ESEdward Slingerland1:01:15

       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.

   18. JRJoe Rogan1:01:34

       Mm-hmm.

   19. ESEdward Slingerland1:01:34

       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-

   20. JRJoe Rogan1:01:54

       Yeah.

   21. ESEdward Slingerland1:01:54

       ... is the calumet. This is where it comes from.

   22. JRJoe Rogan1:01:55

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

   23. ESEdward Slingerland1:02:01

       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.

   24. JRJoe Rogan1:02:26

       Hmm.

   25. ESEdward Slingerland1:02:26

       And then it's, you know, it was used in ancient times in, in all those regions.

   26. JRJoe Rogan1:02:31

       Datura.

   27. ESEdward Slingerland1:02:32

       Yeah.

   28. JRJoe Rogan1:02:33

       Is... Mm... Are, are you saying it right? Is it Datura?

   29. ESEdward Slingerland1:02:37

       Maybe Datura, yeah.

   30. JRJoe Rogan1:02:38

       Is that-

Episode duration: 2:45:54