Joe Rogan Experience #1663 - Edward Slingerland

(drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.

The Joe Rogan Experience.

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) .

(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?

Mm-hmm.

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.

Mm-hmm.

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.