The Joe Rogan Experience - #1663 - Edward Slingerland

Episode Date: June 8, 2021

Edward Slingerland is the Distinguished University Scholar and Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia. His newest book, “Drunk”, is available now.

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. So what possessed you to write a book about getting hammered? That's a really good question. Like, my colleagues are flabbergasted when they see the topic. So my day job is early Chinese philosophy, and I do comparative religion, and then I'm writing this book on alcohol. It actually grows organically out of work I've done before.

So 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 a spontaneous state. It's kind of 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 is 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 want to 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? You want to be spontaneous. You're not being spontaneous. How do you get from A to B?

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 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 them really can be 100% effective because when you're trying not to try, cognitively you're activating the part of your brain

that you want to shut down. Dan Wagner, the social psychologist, talked about 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're a stand-up comedian and you're choking, like everything's falling flat, the audience is turning ugly, you're getting nervous, and part of your brain's like just relax, just do your stuff, be funny. How do you be funny if you're not feeling funny? How do you force yourself to do that? And so this is a real tension. And that's what my previous work focused on. But there's a story in one of these texts,

this Taoist text, where Zhuangzi, this early Taoist thinker, compares the person who's in Wei to someone who's drunk. They kind of lose a sense of self. 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 a way. You want to be spontaneous. You want to be relaxed. You want to just be loose. But thinking about it's not going to get you there. Alcohol is a way to kind of directly reach into your brain and just turn down your prefrontal cortex a little bit so you can relax. And so that's what started me thinking about alcohol as a cultural technology to enhance spontaneity. And it has to be modulated correctly. That's the thing about alcohol, right? One of the

things about alcohol is when you start drinking, the moment you start to lose your inhibitions, you also lose the inhibition to drink too much. Yeah, that's a problem. That's why alcohol is super dangerous, especially that kind of alcohol. Distilled liquor is super dangerous. Buffalo Trace. I feel like we should have a drink. I think we would be remiss.

We have to. I think we're professionally obligated to drink. That's nice. If we're doing a podcast about drinking, it just makes sense. We should have at least a small. So historically, there's been a safety feature built into alcohol. So we've been drinking. Thank you.

Cheers. Cheers, yeah. Let's try this. Woo. Yeah, that's nice. That'll start your Monday morning. That'll start your Monday. That's the way to start a Monday morning, yeah. So, that's nice. That'll start your Monday morning. That'll start your Monday. That's the way to start a Monday morning.

So this stuff is new. So having alcohol that's this strong is something we've only had for a couple hundred years. Really? 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. 2% to 3%? Yeah yeah that's historically it's typically what beers came in at um grape wines you could get up to like eight to ten but there's a built-in limit to 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 hardy yeast. So like nowadays you can get an Australian Syrah up to like 16% ABV. Wow. Which is historically really unprecedented. That's crazy. But that's as high as you can get because then the alcohol shuts down the yeast. But a way around that is distillation. So you take that wine, you heat it up.

Ethanol is really volatile, so that comes off first. And if you can figure out how to capture that vapor and turn it back into a liquid, you've got this. You've got really concentrated alcohol. Do they do that with wine? They do it with wine or they'll take something that's naturally fermented, so a weak beer or wine, and then they distill it. And what do they call that when they get it on the other end? Distilled liquor. That's what liquor is.

Oh, okay. So it's just a kind of liquor? Yeah. So liquor or spirits refers to something that's been distilled. So you've 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.

It's just really, we're not equipped to, so what you're talking about, you know, 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 going to be just volume limit to how much you can consume. It's also 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 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. Right. And if you down your beer real fast, you've got to 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 want to think of it that way. But then all of a sudden you get this kind of stuff. You get really strong liquors, and you can have that in your house. That's when alcohol gets really dangerous. And it's only been the last couple hundred years. Yeah, distilled liquors weren't – because the concept's really simple.

Aristotle described distillation. But technologically it's really hard to do because you've got to to do because you have to have metallurgy, you need to be able to heat liquids and keep them at a certain temperature. That makes sense. They're pressurized. So in Prohibition, when people created stills at home, it was like early 20th century version of meth labs. They were constantly exploding and people were getting scalded with hot liquid because it's really dangerous. So it's hard to do.

So we only mastered it. I mean, I'm telling an evolutionary story. So my story begins 10 million years ago with primate ancestors who adapted to alcohol. 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 15, 1600s in Europe. So that sounds like a long time ago, but really evolutionarily, it's yesterday. We really haven't had time culturally or genetically to adapt to access to this kind of alcohol. And a long time ago when people were drinking beer and drinking wine in particular, like a lot of what they were doing, like if they

were carrying it around with them, they would carry beer or wine when they were going on trips because it didn't go bad the way water would, right? Unhopped beer goes bad pretty quickly. Like a couple of days, a couple of days. Yeah. There's a theory that beer might've been useful in some cultures because fermenting water purifies the water. So if you've got bad water from a pond or something like that, and then you ferment it and make beer out of it. Yeah, yeah. So that's one of the stories. 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 really costly. 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. In fact, it's looking likely that we were doing this before agriculture and that it's possible that the desire to make beer and wine is what motivated agriculture.

So hunter-gatherers were making beer before they had agriculture. Really? Yeah. So they're making clay pots? Yeah. 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 what's present-day Turkey, the site called Gobekli Tepe, is this really cool ritual site. It's these huge stone. Have you seen pictures of it? Yeah, I'm super familiar with it because of Graham Hancock, who's been on my podcast multiple times. And he's obsessed with ancient civilizations. And that is sort of the Rosetta Stone of ancient civilizations because it's at least 12,000 years old. And the thought process was at that point in time, no one could build the kind of structures that those people built.

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 ascension and then resets usually through catastrophic disasters like asteroid impacts so his theory um it it it's not really just his theory it's the younger dryas impact theory okay and the younger dryas impact theory it's not really just his theory it's the Younger Dryas Impact Theory and the Younger Dryas Impact Theory it's pointing to the end of the Ice Age which coincides with real proof of impacts on Earth

in the sense of they take soil samples and when they go down to the same amount of time where the Ice Age ended they find this stuff called nuclear glass or tritonite. And this stuff, it occurs at blast sites where they test nuclear weapons, but it also occurs

at asteroid impact sites. And they find it all over the place at around 12,000-ish years ago. And so this theory is that at the end of the Ice Age, what had happened was we passed through an area in our solar system that is rich with comets, and then we were hit, and that it literally restarted civilization, killed off a massive amount of people, stopped civilization's dead in its tracks, and then there's a period of rebuilding.

So is Gobekli Tepe the rebuilding period? No, they don't know, right? It's all speculation because Gobekli Tepe was for sure covered on purpose somewhere around 12,000 years ago. But that doesn't indicate how long ago before then it was built. Right. 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 to leave.

And there's also, like, animals in it that aren't even supposed to be from that part of the world. Okay. They find that pretty fascinating. I didn't know about that. Yeah, there's some pretty cool shit to it. And it's huge. You know, they've only uncovered, I think, like 10% of it so far. It's a cool site.

So the role it plays in my story is that they're hunter-gatherers, the people who built this place. They used to think that, but they're not necessarily sure of that. This is the theory that Graham Hancock is proposing. All right. He believes that civilization predates that. So they were like, they had full-on agriculture and they were... This is just completely theoretical.

All right. And very disputed. Okay. Because you're dealing with, you know, it's like so long ago. It's hard. Like, what evidence is there? This was always the evidence against something like Gobekli Tepe. Yeah.

Where's the evidence of sophisticated structures 12,000 years ago? Yeah. And then finally they found Gobekli Tepe. So now they're like, okay, well, now's the evidence of sophisticated structures 12,000 years ago? 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 they're resisting that. And they're thinking this Younger Dryas impact theory may indicate that there was something that happened that, you know, if you look at Egypt, there's clearly more than one era of building styles. There's like an old

kingdom style and a lot of the old stuff is like deep under the sand when they're finding it. And it's their position that a lot of this stuff is thousands of years older than the pyramids. Okay. So my understanding of the site is that- It's a hunter- a lot of this stuff is thousands of years older than the pyramids. Okay. So my understanding of the site is that it was- It's a hunter-gatherer site. It was hunter-gatherers. 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 erect these pillars and stuff. And they were having blowout feasts. So they have all these remnants of feasting. And they have these big vats that almost certainly contained beer and possibly hallucinogen-laced beer. So a lot of early people. So these hunter-gatherers, they weren't growing the hops or whatever they made the beer out of. They were just finding it wild?

They're making it out of wild grains. But the argument – so the standard story about alcohol is we invent agriculture. Then sometime after that, we note that, you know, someone leaves their sourdough starter out too long and it starts to turn into beer. And they're like, oh, this actually tastes all right. That's the standard story. So we had agriculture and then we get alcohol. and then we get alcohol. Around the 1950s or so, some archaeologists started to argue, you know, sites like this one and other sites around the world suggest that hunter-gatherers were gathering and making alcohol before agriculture. And so this is the beer before

bread hypothesis. That's crazy. Is that what motivated people to settle down and start focusing on making these grains more productive was they wanted to get high, not because they wanted to make bread. And it jives, you see the same pattern in other parts of the world. So in South America, they make this 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 is 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 because the grains don't make very good grain products to eat.

But it makes great beer. 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 and that's how you would get corn that's like what was the do we know what the original thing that they got high with was? Do we have like the first, the atom?

Yeah. I mean, certainly we're getting a little bit drunk on just naturally fermenting fruit. So 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 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 Gopal Ekle Tepe.

And this is in modern-day Israel. They have traces of beer production. So people were clearly fermenting beer. Are you aware of Brian Murorescu's work? No. He wrote a book called The Immortality Key, and it's all about ancient Greece and the Eleusinian mysteries. Okay.

And he has proven through examination of these vessels that they used to carry their wine in that the wine was laced with ergot. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so they were tripping balls. I have heard about this theory, yeah. They were adding psychedelic compounds to their wine. So they were doing these things where they would have these ceremonies where everybody would get together and they would,

I mean, and this is where they figured out democracy. They solved a lot of the world's problems. You get a lot of new ideas when you're doing hallucinogens. That's very common. So in Europe, a lot of the beers were clearly mixed with hallucinogens. Yeah. He talks about beer as well. And I think the Golden Triangle, it's called, this region in Turkey around 12,000 years ago,

there's a carving from a site near Gobeke Tepe that has a picture. It's a carving of a human dancing with these two dancing turtles. Wow. And it's hard to imagine seeing that on 2% to 3% near beer. There's got to be something else going on. Right, right. And so I think it's likely that they were lacing their beer with hallucinogens. It's really a common thing to do. Well, they were all probably

eating mushrooms too, right? And they were possibly eating mushrooms as well. Yeah. Why turtles? I wonder why. Is that like that? Look at this. Oh yeah, there it is. Yeah, that's great. Yeah. It's dancing with turtles. So does that look like people on two to 3% beer? It doesn't. That looks like something my kid would make when she was four. Okay. And so, I mean, what intoxicants are doing to you is returning you to a state of a four-year-old. Interesting.

Do we know how old this is? That's around, I think, 12,000 years ago. Now, when did they, you know, what's that wacky theory that the Earth is suspended by turtles? It's turtles all the way down? It's on the value of turtles all the way down, yeah. I don't know if they had a mythology like that. So that's interesting. Go back and look at right there. Scroll down, Jamie.

Down. No, no, no. Either way. Yeah. That image with the cat. Yeah, right there. That's one of those Gobekli Tepe things. There's a three-dimensional image that's carved into the stone or taken the stone all around it to leave it there.

That's super sophisticated stuff for 12,000 years ago. 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 going to mess them up so they could have these kind of ceremonies. I guess that makes sense if you think about their everyday existence being very difficult. You're just trying to find food. You get food.

You eat it. You try to keep neighboring tribes from coming in and stealing that food. And then you bond through these hallucinogenic experiences or these alcohol experiences or any altered state, right? Well, so it's doing a lot of different things for you. It's helping with creativity. So one of the functions of alcohol and hallucinogens is it's, you mentioned a four-year-old. So there's good work on creativity and development by Alison Gopnik, who's a child psychologist at, child developmental psychologist at Berkeley.

And she's got this great task where you've got to, you have to figure out this really counterintuitive problem. And she's got a graph that I reproduce 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 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 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 what allows you to not focused on a task. It's what

allows you to not meander in a conversation and actually stay focused on what you're talking about. But it's an enemy of creativity, for one thing. So it seems to interfere with your ability to think out of the box or think laterally. Doesn't this also coincide, though, with responsibilities in life? Yeah. Yeah. The timeline? Well, it's the other... I mean, in a way, it's the other way around. So you get more responsibilities because you can handle them because you actually have a prefrontal cortex. But is that really what's going on? Or is it just that you actually have a family and you have to feed them 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? think much more pragmatically. I mean, what came first, the chicken or the egg, right? I think they're happening. They're co-happening. So it's developing the way it's developing because evolution has a problem it needs to solve. The prefrontal cortex is the enemy of spontaneity. It's the enemy of creativity. It's the enemy 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 want to meet my stuffed animal? Kids are just, they're open, right? That's a good trait for some things. But kids also can't tie their freaking shoes and get to school in the morning, right? And so 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, 25, is when 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 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 for a few hours. And this is how you do it, right? 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. That explains comedians. That explains comedians.

I mean, it's central to comedy. I mean, it's got to be the case. Do you use... You must use alcohol in writing. 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. It's like don't give a fuck sauce.

You just go out there and be loose. So you do that before you go out? Yeah. I like to have a shot and smoke a little sauce. You just go out there and be loose. So you do that before you go out? Yeah. I like to have a shot and, uh, smoke a little weed. 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, 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 a bartender, and told him, yeah, I've got to go do this lecture tomorrow. I'm really nervous about it. He was like, dude, bring a flask and do a shot before you go out there.

I was like, well, it's 10.30 in the morning. He was like, it doesn't matter. Just do it. I'm dating myself here. You're old enough to remember this. Remember with film photography, you had those little plastic things you put film in? I filled one of those with vodka 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 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. 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 want to be relaxed and funny, but how do you but how do you try to be relaxed and funny?

A couple of drinks helps with that, right? It relaxes, turns down the prefrontal cortex. 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, 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 true. You actually rate other people as more attractive when you're a little bit drunk. You're feeling connected with them. So there's actually some good experimental evidence that people who, you get people drinking together in small groups and they just start to like each other more and feel like, oh, we're really a team and I like these people I'm hanging out with. So it's a tool for getting, we're primates.

Our nature is to be kind of selfish and suspicious and hostile. Like if you took, I've never met either of you guys, and if we were chimpanzees and someone just threw three chimpanzees into a room together, you know, one of us would walk out maybe and there would just be blood left. We would tear each other apart. But humans solve this problem all the time. I sat on an airplane coming here with a whole bunch of other people. We all sat in our seats, behaved ourselves. Must not have been a Southwest flight.

It wasn't a Southwest flight. Yeah, it wasn't. Thank God. 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 this trick of getting primates to cooperate in this ultra cooperative way. And

the argument in the book is alcohol is one of the tools we've used to do that. What do you say about sober people that are also very cooperative? What techniques are they using if they're not using alcohol? There's a lot of ways you can get into these kind of 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 religious traditions that, for various reasons, decide they don't want to use chemical intoxicants usually substitute some other way to do it.

I like that you said stay up all night because I used to be on this sitcom called News Radio, and the writers, they had that strategy. It was an 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 kind of crazy, and they would stay up until like 4 o'clock in the morning playing video games and then start writing.

That's crazy. So sometimes we would show up, maybe call time would be 9 or 10 a.m., and they were just done with the first draft of scene one. Yeah. You know, and we're like, what are you guys doing? Like they were all fucked up and their hair was a mess. They were barefoot. They were animals.

But they, it was a strategy. Yeah. The strategy was to get overtired and really, really silly. Yeah. And then they would come up with some of the most preposterous scenarios for, and oddly enough, they weren't getting high these people were getting high that way yeah no you can do it through sleep deprivation that's yeah yeah literally how they did it on purpose which 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 it's like i'm hanging out with my friends and i've been up like and it's four o'clock in the morning we just laugh at anything yeah You get fall down silly. That's the PFC being – Shut off. Playground monitor. Right, right. You don't care anymore.

Playground monitor. Interesting. You want to get rid of that playground monitor if you want certain types of things to happen. Exercise, we were talking about that earlier, that that seems to have some sort of an effect that's similar like that's where runner's high comes from right? Yeah so you know extreme like if you're running doing any kind of extreme exercise at a certain point your body is like

we don't need the prefrontal cortex prefrontal cortex is a really expensive organ it's sucking up a lot of energy from your body and so at a certain point you're like we don't need the prefrontal cortex anymore so it gets turned down by your body because you need to send it to your lungs and your heart and your muscles. So how do we know how much energy it's using specifically? You can look at kind of fMRI studies. You get a sense of how much blood flow is going through

the brain, let's say. And you get a sense it's a proxy then for how much energy it's using, because that blood's delivering nutrients to it, right? Oh, so they've done fMRIs on people that are really tired and loopy, and you can see it shut off? Yeah, so that's interesting. I'm trying to think, the guy who's done work on Runner's High is called Arne Dietrich,

and I'm trying to remember now if he was putting, I don't know how he would get people, maybe he would stress them physiologically and then stick them in an fMRI machine. 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. Me and my friends a few years back did this. We do this thing every year.

We do sober October. So the whole month of October we don't do anything. No drinking, no booze. No drugs at all. No drugs at all. We're allowed to smoke cigars though, which me and Ari both agree is kind of cheating. It's kind of cheating. It's kind of cheating.

But not enough that it's- Can you drink caffeine? Yes. You're allowed to drink coffee. All right. You just can't get fucked up. All right. Which as a comedian-

Yeah, that's hard. Well, it's normal. It's not hard. 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 MyZone. It's a heart strap that works with an app,

and it measures how much time you are in what percentage of your max heart rate. So how much time you are at 80% max heart rate, it puts you in the yellow zone and then you rack up points for every minute that you're in this state. And we did this competition where we were competing 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, Bert got 600 points too. That must be really motivating. Yeah, it was crazy. So we were just like all day.

Like one day I did seven hours of cardio in a day. It was crazy. That's crazy. Yeah, I just decided to just bury everybody. I watched all these movies. But the point is that the feeling that you get when you do that is incredible in terms like how much you don't give a fuck.

You're so relaxed and calm. And my friend Tom Segura was saying the same thing. He's like, man, it cuts all the chatter down when you do that. Yeah, you want to get rid of the chatter. But it cuts it all down where you're like really calm. And I was always trying to figure out like is it because you're so tired that you don't have time for nonsense? Is your brain, 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. Yeah. Like that's so taxing that when it's over, your body doesn't have any time for any stupid nonsense. Like monitoring you. Yeah. It doesn't want to monitor you anymore.

Yeah. You're not worrying about like an email that you sent. Was that the wrong tone? You know what I mean? Yeah. You know the kind of things that? Did that person at the store? Dude, if I don't work out for a few days, I second guess everything that I do. Yeah, I get crazy too.

It's the worst. 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. Yeah. And I get the same if I do a really good workout.

I get that feeling of kind of not giving a fuck. 100%. That's really relaxing. I wrestled in high school as well, but only one season. But what I did do for many years is jujitsu. And I still do. And jujitsu gives me that feeling. Yeah.

And jujitsu, when I'm done with a hard jujitsu session, do and jujitsu gives me that feeling yeah jujitsu when i'm done with a hard jujitsu session first of all i am so friendly like i'm the friendliest person i'm so friendly when i'm done i love everybody i want to hug everybody i don't have any aggression in me and i wonder if it's the human this is my theory and obviously i haven't studied this so these are just guesses but you, you know, without 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. So it's like if you don't have problems in your life, your body creates those problems for you. So the way I always like to point it out to people is like I make my own problems. Yeah. You stress your body. Yeah, they're not real. But one of the things I like to do is hit a bag, like hit a heavy bag.

And I have one of them electronic timers. It syncs up with your phone, and I have one of them electronic timers. It syncs up with your phone and I set it for like 15 three-minute rounds. Oh, I use that for sprinting. Yeah, so I do sprinting. Like I do like really intense sprinting. I hate running. Like long distance running is boring as hell.

But sprinting is awesome. Long distance running is boring as hell. But if you can do cardio in front of a TV, this is the secret. Ari Shafir figured this out when we were doing the Sober October thing. He's like, watch movies. You watch movies and two hours is gone before you know it if it's like a really good movie. Right. Because like especially if you have headsets on, it's because you're like completely engulfed in the film and you're watching it and

you don't you barely even realize but you get the same effect by sprinting really hard oh yeah no for sure and i'd rather just do that oh yeah listen i'm a big fan of tabatas yeah that's what i use yeah i love those those are great that's a great way to build real usable cardio too i mean it's amazing. But the point about distracting the mind 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,

I swear you can run faster. Oh no, absolutely. I have special music that I actually only use it for a workout because I don't want to fuck it up. I don't want to waste it, right? Because if you listen to it and you're not working out, you get used to it and it's kind of not as, so I save it. I have special music that I only allow myself to listen to

when I'm working out. Yeah, well, I'm lucky that I have a lot of music like that and don't have to worry about wearing it out. Running out of it. But yeah, there's some songs like Ozzy Osbourne, like Crazy Train. Crazy Train. There's something about that song, you know,

and any Wu-Tang Clan song. Yeah. There's something about that., you know, and any Wu-Tang Clan song. Yeah. There's something about that. So music's doing that too, right? It's taking you. So there's a Greek term. So the word ecstasy comes from Greek, ekstasis, getting out of yourself. And there's something humans crave it.

Humans really like the experience of getting out of their own heads. Yeah. really like the experience of getting out of their own heads and either getting absorbed into something bigger than them or just almost oblivion, right, where you're not thinking about anything. And it's beyond the just functional. So I'm arguing in the book that intoxication has all these social functions. So it makes us more creative. It makes us more trusting, helps us to solve these cooperation dilemmas, which is why people who, you know, I want to make a treaty with you or I want to sign a business deal. I'm not going to just talk to you on the phone. I'm going to come to where you are in person and we're going to drink. And only then am I going to trust you. So people use alcohol that way.

But there are lots of other ways to do it. And you can use music, you can use dance. But you're talking about the treadmill, do a treadmill for 12 hours. That works. Staying up, religious traditions that have you stay up all night dancing and singing hymns, that's another way to do it. But you could 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 doing it other ways. And so there's something to this chemical path that's always been appealing for people. Terrence McKenna had a great story that he would tell about this monk who practiced a city of levitation for decades. So you know what that is. It's like a meditation.

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 a city of levitation and now I can walk on water. And the Buddha says, yeah, but the ferry's only a nickel. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, there you go.

And they serve beer on the ferry so why don't you just fucking do that like that has always been the argument about enlightenment like you can can you achieve enlightenment through meditation and all these different things yes you you i mean well whatever night means you can achieve a state of elevated consciousness let's put it that way because the term enlightenment to me always um it always sounds like you're done. Yeah. Right?

I don't think you're done. No, you're not done. But you can get into an altered state through meditation. An elevated level of consciousness. That can be achieved. But there's ways to help that along, and you can help that along. There's stuff that people figured out. It's like you don't have to chop a tree with a knife yeah they figure axes and saws and the reason why is like they're like hey this time's

gonna be better than this fucking knife yeah it's huge I've been working on it for a month you know yeah and so you mix in a little bit of alcohol to a lot of these other things and they work better yeah so religious traditions use intoxicants they're doing they're doing the dancing and the singing and all that stuff. Right. They're moving in synchrony. They're chanting. All that's great.

But they're also slowly turning down their prefrontal cortex with chemicals. Yeah. 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 kind of weird puritanical discomfort with chemical intoxication. Where do you think that comes from?

I don't know. It's this weird kind of distrust of pleasure that baffles me. I have a theory on that. What's your theory? I think it comes from the idea that some people are not going to chip in and do the work that needs to be done because if you're in a tribe of 150 people or so, everyone has a crucial role. And if you're a person that likes to lay around and get drunk and fuck off,

you're not going to be the person that gets up and gathers food or hunts the food, and you're going to be a non-contributor or you're not going to contribute your part. So we think of people that engage in these frivolous activities, not just normal, like, you know, not ritual things where everybody does it together, but normal frivolous activity, like it's a part of a normal everyday life for you. You're not going to be as productive. Yeah. It's also, I mean, drinking, getting intoxicated alone is historically really weird.

We've never done that. We always do it in groups. It's a George Thorogood song. Yeah, I know. Well, that's the reason that's so effective is because it's weird, right? So I drink alone. This is the guy who also wrote Bad to the Bone. If you drink alone, there's something a little bit off about you. Nobody else. Nobody else, right? It's weird. People are suspicious of that. Cultures are suspicious of people who drink alone.

So we always do it in company with others. Yeah. But I think part of the reason we're suspicious of pleasure is mind-body dualism. if I want to get into a great state of mind, relaxed, open, friendly, loving people, if I do it through meditation, if I meditate for 10 hours and get there, 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 – Eliotto was this famous religious studies scholar who wrote a lot on mysticism.

And he talks about these mystical states of ecstasy where people are feeling outside of themselves, no self, one with the universe. 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 prejudice against the body. The idea that you could be using chemicals to get to a state seems to us like cheating. Well, it's kind of a foolish notion, right? Because everything is chemicals. Everything is chemical.

All your food is essentially in some way or form, it's broken down to chemicals or it's coming in as chemicals. Yeah. It's not turtles all the way down, it's chemicals all the way down. Your body's a chemical factory. And that's the crazy thing about music, right? Like a great song. You hear Ozzy Osbourne. If that's your jam, your adrenaline rises.

Yeah. Right? You get goosebumps. Sometimes you hear a song when you're on the radio and you're like, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not the radio. Who the fuck listens to it? Who listens to it?

Jamie does, right? Jamie White. All day. AM. Only AM. Only AM. Only AM political talk. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not the radio. Who the fuck listens to it? Who listens to it? Jamie does, right? Jamie, right. Jamie, right. AM, only AM. Only AM. Only AM political talk. Yeah. But that's all physical, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there are sound waves that are being transmitted into your ear. That's making something vibrate. It's a drug. That's sending signals. So it's all drugs. Great music is a drug. It's all drugs.

Yeah. And so I have a quote from Aldous Huxley where he's talking about this prejudice and he's, you know, he said, we have this, you know, people look down at chemical means of attaining ecstasy, but it's chemicals all the way down. It's all chemicals. And so whether you do it through meditation or, you know, breathing exercises or whatever, it's all physical. 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's methods where you do it correctly there's one of the good things about alcoholic we've had a drink right we had a drink

and we have a second second drink and we both know what that means. We're pacing ourselves, right? Yeah, we're pacing ourselves. We're an hour down. But we both know how much that is. Like a drink of whiskey is, you know, okay, that's one shot. I know exactly. We're modulating correctly. And the thing about recognizing the correct dosages for all these different things is we have a roadmap. And that's one of the problems with the illegality of certain drugs.

Yeah. And it's always been a really big problem in Los Angeles with marijuana because it's the Wild West there. You never know what you're getting. Right. Especially with edibles. Yeah. Especially with edibles. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, edibles are bad. So one of my arguments in the book is that I call alcohol the king of intoxicants. So there are other ways you could do it. You could do it with cannabis. You can do it with kava, which is this intoxicating drink they drink in the Pacific. What's special about alcohol is that it's easy to dose. Like you're saying,

so it's easy to dose. You you're saying, you know, so it's easy to dose, you know how much you're getting. Yeah. 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 twenties in San Francisco and everyone smoked pot. When I smoke cannabis, I get briefly really paranoid and then I get horny for about two minutes and then I fall asleep. Catch it in two minutes? If you catch me in those two minutes, I have a great time. But that's it.

And then I fall asleep. All I want to do is go to sleep. And everyone's been like, oh, you haven't had sat sativa you haven't had the right strain. It's bullshit like every strain of cannabis affects me that way well I definitely think there's bio Diversity in terms of like the way your body responds to cannabis. I've seen it yeah, and there's a guy Alex Berenson He was a writer for the 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, Mike Hart, who is a doctor from Canada who prescribed cannabis.

And Alex's, his take on it was we, by just pretending that cannabis does no harm, it doesn't do anybody any good. Because some people have schizophrenic breaks while they're on cannabis. And I personally know of people that, especially with eating cannabis, have had schizophrenic breaks. And some people who smoked too much of it and smoked it all the time went nutty. 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. Yeah. That's real. I have a friend who recently had a kind of breakdown psychotic.

Yeah, it's real. One theory is he was just smoking too much pot. And this is coming from a person who loves pot. I'm a pot enthusiast. But I also have a lot of willpower. I'm really good at like doing something and stopping it. Or if I thought that I was fucking up my life with pop, I would just hit the brakes.

If I started not blowing off podcasts or canceling things and just sleeping and watching TV or something. Or drinking during work. This is okay for my job. My job, it actually enhances our conversation, which leads to your book, right? But this guy, Alex Berenson, a lot of people resisted that. And I was like, no, I think he's right.

I think he's right, and I think we need to be studying this because the fact that it has been a Schedule I drug for so long, our understanding of what it does to different people. Look, I love peanuts. I'm a big fan of peanuts. Some people, peanuts kills them. Yeah. Yeah. Right. That's not me. But that doesn't mean that peanuts should be illegal. 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. Yeah. And I think we have to be honest about the effects of cannabis because they're different with everybody else, with everybody, rather, with different people.

And for me, I'm okay with it. It doesn't bother me. So what's the effect on you? What is it? Well, it depends on what I'm doing, right? It depends on if it's before bedtime. But I don't like it before bedtime because then I don't go to sleep. See, that's bizarre to me. I'm a thinker. The only thing it's good for is to make't go to sleep. See, that's bizarre to me.

I'm a thinker. The only thing it's good for is to make me go to sleep. For me, when I'm high, I'm a thinker. Okay. I'm not a sleeper high. I'm a thinker high. I just go to sleep. I'm a good sleeper.

I could go to sleep at a fucking train station. I could just lay down on the ground. I hate people like you. I'm always tired because I'm always doing stuff. You're always working out. Yeah, I'm always working out. I'm always tired. And I do like a little bit of meditation.

But what I really like before sleeping is sauna. I like to go in the sauna and get wrecked in the sauna. I like to do like 25 minutes in the sauna, and then I like to sleep. So it relaxes your muscles? Yeah, it also relaxes you. It sends your body a lot of anti-inflammatory heat shock proteins, and it's difficult. And I like it that it's a struggle, and then after it's a struggle, I feel like I earned my rest. Yeah, right.

And then I go to sleep. Be ready to go to sleep. But cannabis, it depends on the dosage, and it really depends on if I eat it or smoke it. And I'm sure you know the difference between. Yeah, eating is weird. Yeah. eat it or smoke it. And I'm sure you know the difference. Yeah, eating is weird. Yeah, it produces we I had Rick Doblin on a couple days ago from maps, you know, a multidisciplinary advanced studies of psychedelic substances. What is it? Multidisciplinary. Anyway, maps is an incredible organization that is working to make certain psychedelic compounds available to people for therapy and to, like, particularly MDMA for people with PTSD, soldiers.

I've read some of the research on that. Psilocybin as well 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-hydroxymetabolite, which is five times more psychoactive than THC. Oh, interesting. 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. Right, right, right.

Because it really has a psychedelic effect. Yeah, no, I've dosed. Like something's wrong. Right, right, right. Because it really has a psychedelic effect. Yeah, no, I've experienced that. The first time, I had 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 thought I was Jack Kerouac. Look at you, bro. Yeah, and I was a dick. I was like such a self-righteous little dick.

Who isn't? It was in the art of motorcycle maintenance. Yeah. Yeah, it was not a dick. I was like such a self-righteous little dick. It was in the art of motorcycle maintenance. Yeah. Yeah, it was not a good time for me. But it was a good move, and I moved into 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 kind of – I rode my motorcycle north and did some camping, and then I got too cold.

And so I ended up at this youth hostel. I rode my motorcycle north and did some camping, and then I got too cold. And so I ended up at this youth hostel. And someone who worked there introduced me to hash cooked into an omelet. Yo. And so I did it. I ate it. Oh, my God. And I felt nothing.

I was like, no, it's not affecting me. And then I had to go to class. So I was at Stanford. So this was happening up in Point Reyes National Park, like north of San Francisco. And I had to ride on my motorcycle down to school for 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 I was high for like three days. It was horrible. It just would not stop. I'd wake up the next day and I'm like, am I still high? It's days. It was horrible. It just would not stop. I'd wake up the next day and I'm like, am I still high? It's like, yeah, still high. So the eating scares me because I had such a, it's just an uncontrollable experience and it lasts for so long. You never know what you're getting.

It's so inconsistent. And, you know, these goddamn stoners, you know, when they make that hemp butter, they make that stuff and they cook in the butter and then they add weed to the food too. Like, oh, there was a restaurant. Where was it? In Colorado? There was a restaurant that was making marijuana food. They were making food with marijuana.

So they're just cooking with cannabis infused. Yeah, cooking with cannabis. Yeah. And that was part of the appeal of the place. I was like, Jesus Christ, that sounds terrible. I would never fucking go there. That sounds like my worst nightmare, right? It sounds so dangerous.

Because at least they have certain things. Like 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. Oh, how strong are they going to be? Yeah, so you can buy a bunch, and you can eat 10 of them,

and you get 100. But the thing is, like, 10 is like a good dose for a lot of folks. It's not that bad, unless you're Jamie. Jamie has this weird thing where he doesn't get high off edibles. At all? No, not at all. Like, he's taking 1,000 milligrams. I've seen it.

I've seen it. It's bananas. That's weird. And apparently it is a thing, just like some people die if they eat Brazil nuts, right? Yeah, yeah. So this is the thing about cannabis and all these other drugs is none of them are as predictable as alcohol. Right. 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?

Right. And it's going to 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 short. Like in two hours, we'll be fine. But it's interesting that different cultures have almost like where they – cultures traditionally don't have a use of alcohol as a part of their culture. They have lower tolerances.

They do. use of alcohol as a part of their culture. They have lower tolerances. And then individuals, for whatever reason, some individuals are predestined to be alcoholics, which is really weird. 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. Wow. That's really high. It's really high. 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 one possibility, the standard scientific story about why we like alcohol is it's a mistake. So 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 similar to masturbation. So people can get 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. 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 and pass it on to the next generation. But it's not a perfect system because we can get orgasms in other ways, right? So we 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 point is over evolutionary history, statistically speaking, orgasms were associated with getting us to pass on genes to the next generation. And it's because 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 – our taste for alcohol should be eliminated from the human species if it really is only a costly mistake, if it's just kind of brain parasite. 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 evolves separately at least three times at different points of history and around the world where people don't like to drink. And so 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 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. Why East Asia? Well, so it's an interesting story. So it seemed to have 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 of 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 of hydrogens off that and turns it into acetic acid, which is harmless. You can get rid of that really easily. What's going on with people with 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 is 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 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 going to start to rot. And so you're vulnerable to fungal poisoning. And so it may be an adaptation to rice agriculture.

And you said this is East Asia? Basically it started in kind of where modern-day Shanghai is, so southeast China. In the book I show a map of the distribution of this gene right now. And so it spread to Japan and Korea a little bit, but it pretty much stayed there. And so part of my argument in the book is that if alcohol is just an evolutionary mistake, if it's just hijacking reward networks in our brain that evolve for other reasons. This, what's sometimes called the Asian flushing gene complex, 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 want to drink anymore because they have all these negative effects. What's that called? Disulfamine or something like that. It basically creates a chemical version. It somehow reproduces the effect of high levels of acetaldehyde in your body. is that they didn't have alcohol as a part of their culture until the Europeans came in the 13th century or whatever. Yeah, pretty late. When they started introducing them to alcohol,

they didn't have the genes for it. Yeah. Does that make sense? Yeah. So you have to talk about North versus South America. So South America, they've had alcohol for a long time. So they were making chicha, this beer. But North America is one of the few places in the world where they didn't have indigenous alcohol cultures.

Do we know why? I think that it's because they had a different drug that was doing the same job. So they had tobacco. Native forms of tobacco are really powerful. They're much more powerful. They actually get you a little bit high from just the nicotine high. And then they were including, they were mixing in hallucinogens. And so I think they had a smokable, for whatever reason, their cultures hit upon this smokable drug that they used it exactly the same way other cultures used alcohol. You smoked it at treaties, you know, signing. You needed to get along with strangers. You'd

sit down first and smoke, you know, the peace pipe is the calamite. This is where it comes from. In North America, when you include Mexico, there's a long history of consumption of psilocybin mushrooms, right? Yeah. I don't know how far north it goes. I'm not sure they were doing it in North America. It's possible. The hallucinogen they were including in the tobacco was Datura. I don't know what. It'll get you. Jimson weed. It'll get you high, but it's not psilocybin. As far as I know, psilocybin was primarily used in kind of once you started in northern Mexico going south. And then it was used in ancient times in all of those regions. Datura.

Yeah. Are you saying it right? Is it Datura? Maybe Datura, yeah. Is that that one that's like really oddly dissociative? like really oddly dissociative. There's one that I remember reading. Again, it was McKenna talking about it, where he had to take it.

He had to stop using it because he was talking to a friend at a market, and he realized that the friend believed that they were back in his apartment. He didn't recognize that he wasn't outside in a market okay and this was I want to say he was taking in India all right it could be I mean hallucinogens do all kinds of crazy stuff but the Torah is see if you can find us yeah let's see what about the effects of it I found like I didn't like the Torah Terence McKenna I've just typed in his name and the drug and yes all this was in Nepal years ago right yeah that is it yeah because he felt completely they felt like you really have no idea what reality is like you like say if you took the Torah and we were in this room doing this podcast you might think we were back at your house or you

might think we were at the bus station. Right. Or you might think, you know, we were in the movie theater. Like you really have no idea what the fuck is going on. And the reality that you perceive through your eyes is completely distorted in some. Psilocybin does that too. Sort of, but it doesn't put you in a different place in terms of like you don't think you're at the movie theater. Right.

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. Yeah. Have you ever done ketamine? No, I have not.

I did it once. And it sounds a little bit like that. Where I was convinced I was just in a different universe now yeah and it's not a universe I was thrilled about it's kind of a fucked-up universe and I was never coming back like it was I was just filled with this fuck why did I walk through that door and now I'm in this universe and I'm stuck here and I will never get back to my old universe Wow it was really strongly disassociated feeling that was unpleasant.

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 of chemical gateway. dimension and experience some sort like a chemical gateway into what we know that there's more there's more to the universe and what we can observe like if you wave your hand over the top of an earthworm it has no idea you're there okay 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 can only imagine, right? We can imagine that what we see and what we can measure and what we observe with our eyes and ears and our senses, that this is all that exists. 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.

And then there's weird things like the concept of multiverses and the concept of parallel dimensions. I saw you had Sean Carroll on the show. Oh, my God. He hurts my brain. Yeah. Last Oh my God, he hurts my brain. Yeah. Last time we talked, you hurt my brain. Yeah, the idea of multiple universes is trippy. Yeah, yeah.

I think there's almost got to be a genetic predisposition to being attracted to these ideas and not. And so 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. 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. We're a bunch of physical chemicals. There's no meaning in the world. Humans create meaning because 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 because it helps us regulate ourselves and communicate to others in a certain way. And he looks at the same data and says, no, consciousness is all there is. There are other universes and this physical life is just one life.

Tim, do we have any more of these notepads? Do we have one of these for me? You want it just here. I just want to write that dude's name down. No, that's okay. You should have one. All right. Okay.

Because I want to write his name down. Does he have a book out or anything? No, no, but he's a fun guy to talk to. I like him. And does he, where's he at he's at uh he was my colleague at ubc in vancouver but he's at santa barbara jonathan schuler jonathan schooler so yeah like schoolhouse schooler yeah and what what leads him to that conclusion he's got a lot of funny ideas but why 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 the whole thing about statistics is that it washes out. If it's not a real effect, it goes away. Because, but he thinks the universe gets tired of effects. He's like, you know, the universe gets bored with this and that's why the effect is happening. 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, you can't point to any particular bit of empirical evidence that rules it out but the 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 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 kind of effect you get. We can talk about human level things and conscious level things in a way that makes sense to us because it's more efficient. But the only real description is the chemicals all the way down one, is my view. And what is, just because when you do studies over and over again that the effects don't work, that can't be with every study. No, no, and I'm probably misquoting Jonathan. Okay. So you'll have to ask him about it, but yeah.

It's just a weird conclusion to draw, but here's the take that I'm, one of the things that makes me curious about it is the idea of a simulation theory. Okay. You know, if you believe in the possibility of the simulation theory, and, you know, Elon fully believes in it. Lay that out for me.

So what's the theory? The simulation theory is that if, like we can do now, we can have virtual reality, and I don't know if you've ever experimented with 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 convincing you that this is reality. Right. But they're way better than Pong.

Yeah. We're old enough to remember Pong. Right. We remember Pong. Space Invaders. Yeah. Right. So we played that.

Which was really engrossing at the time oh my god i couldn't believe it right you're like i can't believe i'm playing something on the tv i'm making the tv move yeah but now you get 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 or oculus technology you would imagine that one day there's going to be an artificial reality that's indiscernible from regular reality. When you talk to people like Elon Musk about Neuralink, right, and they're going to essentially wire your brain.

So they're going to reach areas of your brain and stimulate them with some sort of energy electricity I don't know what kind of 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 but yeah one of the things that Elon said to me you're gonna be able to communicate without words which is kind of terrifying but also fascinating. But I would imagine that this sort of, 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. If that's the case, how do we know if we're not already there? If one day it becomes indiscernible and virtual reality or a simulation of reality is indiscernible from regular reality, how will we know? Well, Nick Bostrom, who is another guy who broke my brain, who was on the podcast, was arguing that according to probability theory, we are in a simulation. Okay. And this is where it gets really weird and very intellectually masturbatory. Whoever, yeah. This is where, why would those people create us as a simulation?

I don't think that's what they're saying. It's saying we did it. We created ourselves as a simulation. The idea is that, well, let's imagine that a simulation doesn't exist. Okay. We're not in a simulation. This is just regular. We're actually here in Austin.

Right. We're here in Austin, carbon-based life form. We're really drinking whiskey. We're here in Austin, carbon-based life form. We're really drinking whiskey. Yeah. If human beings don't blow ourselves up or we don't get hit by another asteroid and we last another million years, I can't imagine a world where we don't have something that you can plug into that's indiscernible from this.

I can't imagine. Why don't we do this conversation? Why wouldn't we? Right? Why wouldn't we? Look, I love conversations. Why wouldn't we do new things, though? we? Look, I love conversations. Why wouldn't we do new things though? This is what I, I guess. New things in what way? 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. Why wouldn't we just simulate new things we

haven't done already? Maybe we are doing that. Maybe we haven't done this. All right. Yeah, I mean. But here's the thing. If you could do simulation, what do you think Westworld is? Right. The show Westworld is you're going back and living like it's 1840. Yeah.

And that's really engrossing for people. It's really, people are very attracted to that idea. 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. What is this, Jamie? This is the new background Unreal Engine 5. Oh, my God.

I tried to get a good spot here so when they put the lights on here in a second. Let me pause. Let me pause and explain to him. Do you follow video games at all? No. Okay. I haven't done video games since Paul. The Unreal Engine, the most recent version of the Unreal Engine is absolutely sensational.

Okay. It's so good and so vivid. And the dynamic lighting, is that what it's called? Dynamic lighting? Yeah, yeah. Do you have shadowing? Do you have stuff on or are you just looking at it? No, this is just visual.

You could. You could. You could. They'd use it as the heart, like the engine. That's why it's called an engine of a virtual reality game if someone so chose to use that. Oh, so someone can do it in a VR game. So what it is is it's so, you know the Uncanny Valley? Yeah. Okay.

This is really close to bridging the Uncanny Valley. So let's play some of it. This is fake. I mean, this is, this is watching a video right so this is a guy he's fucking with all the different you don't do it just let it play out yeah he's fucking with all the different textures and all these the lighting like this is all real man yeah that's cool it's crazy so it has dust in it it has uh lighting effects due to the sun traveling over the the place yeah i mean it's fucking incredible and look at the textures

and the details of this yeah they're so close they're really really close but you know again if you look forward if if you see this, you sort of extrapolate and say, okay, well, what will this be like a thousand years from now? Well, then you're going to feel things and smell things. And that is certainly inside the realm of what you can imagine. Yeah. Right. Especially when you can see something like this, where they can have the sun moving across the sky and changing all the shadows. I mean, it's incredible. You can also have that by going to Arizona

and just walking around. Some people can't, though. So this is the thing. Yeah, of course you can. I don't get that. But hey, of course you can. But that doesn't mean this isn't fucking insane. Yeah.

Of course you can go there, but the mean this isn't fucking insane. Yeah. Like, of course you can go there. But the idea that you could put on a headpiece, like some sort of Oculus Rift headpiece. And be transported to full immersion. So now he's changing it to a different place. So he's going to look at all these different textures and all these things. Go way ahead. Yeah, there's one thing. They went, I don't know if this is the exact video I was watching. I think it is.

They turned it from Utah like it is we're watching and then hit medieval lighting and it goes to Lord of the Rings with the same shapes and everything. Mordor now. You're looking out for Sauron.

What they can do now just with video games is pretty incredible. But again, like if I'm looking at this, I'm like, oh, she's not real. Yeah. She's too uniform in her movements. Yeah. People have like weird little sort of herky-jerky variabilities. This is even easier for us to now.

We could mo-cap you, Joe, and get your body movements in there and it probably an hour less than an hour half an hour like joe and it would be joe's movements joe's kicking and walking and jumping a video game i mean that ufc game they've already done that really yeah yeah i'm in a ufc video game um but that's trippy it looks that's not nearly as good as this in terms of like the uh the visuals and even the movements of the characters. The point is, as technology advances, they're going to have that shit dialed in where you're going to feel it. There's going to be haptic feedback.

Have you ever done anything with haptic feedback? No, but I understand the concept, yeah. There's a company in town called Sandbox, and there's all these cool games you can play, and one of them is this wild zombie game called Deadwood Mansion. So you put on virtual reality headsets. My family loves to do it. At one time I had third place in the world. I was the third place zombie killer on earth.

Some motherfuckers have beat my score badly since then. You'll come back. It's just one of those, I'm not going to come back. These fucking kids, they're too good. But the point is they put you in a haptic feedback vest and they give you these goggles and you have this gun like this plastic gun and these zombies come running at you and when they grab you feel it in your chest it's very crude yeah but it gives you this huh it gives you just enough of a

job where it makes it extra funny but But again, it's like Pong. Right? Boop, boop, boop, boop. And then go from Pong to Unreal Engine. Yeah. No, I can see it. I could buy one. Oh, you could buy one. That's a haptic feedback. It works wirelessly with a lot of different VR things. It does enhance the experience.

It definitely does. It gives you a little bit extra fun. But it's so crude in comparison to something that one day, like Ready Player One. Are you familiar with that movie? I have not. No. I have not played video games or really done much. No, Ready Player One is a movie.

Is a movie? Okay. It's a Spielberg movie. And it's about immersive video games in the future. People's lives just completely revolve around these immersive video games. And all of the money they're chasing is all this virtual money in these games. That's now, right? A lot of people are addicted to video games.

Yes. The way they lay it out, though, in Ready Player One, it's amazing. And it makes you realize, like, wow, this is not, this isn't too crazy. You know, like The Matrix, when it came out, was crazy. Yeah, yeah. But The Matrix today, you're like, maybe that's not that crazy. And Ready Player One is, in my eyes, a really excellent example of what we may be looking at 50 years from now or 100 years from now or whatever it is. All right.

whatever it is. All right. And the haptic feedback suits that the lead character has on in this film allows this girl that he has a relationship with in the game to touch him. Yeah. And he feels it through the suit. Yeah. You see the suit lighting up. That's what my partner and I need.

It's pretty wild. She's in the east coast of the US. I'm in Canada. We're across a closed border. Oh, you need some sort of haptic. We need a haptic. Face time's good. You need to move the fuck out of Canada.

So I just need to do this. I need to get the fuck out. There's goddamn tyrants up there. That's true. What are they doing with You need to move the fuck out of Canada. There's goddamn tyrants up there. What are they doing with people? But Jamie, you just read Ready Player Two, right? You're reading the movie? The books are more in-depth and more than the movie was even capable of doing because the IP, I guess they would have had to pay for, just impossible in what they were doing. they were inserting people in the movies,

reenacting things with your favorite movie characters. You had to memorize the lines and perform them in the exact way that was done in the movie or you'd fail and had to restart again. That kind of stuff is very close to almost being able to be done. They're working on something like Ready Player One in real life called the Metaverse. I was trying to look it up. I've heard about it sort of with NFTs and

we might be on the way there. I don't know how much computing power it's going to take. So in the Matrix movie, they want to escape the Matrix. Some people do. Remember that one dude? The one dude does it and he's a pussy, right? We hate that guy. He's a

we don't like him, right? And why is that? He just wants to be rich and he wants to eat steak. He wants to eat steak and have the women, but it's all fake. So we want the real world. We want the real world. But what is the real world?

That's the question. What is the real world? I think it's this world. So, I mean, I completely grant the intellectual point that, I mean, this is an old philosophical problem, right? So in philosophy, there's always been this idea that we could be deceived about everything we think we know. So Descartes talked about the demon, right? So this demon, I think that I'm sitting in front of a fire in this inn and that I just ate this food and that I'm drinking this beer. But it could be the case that there's an evil demon who's deceiving me about all this,

and it's all an illusion, and I can't really know it. And so this is an ancient idea that everything— and actually Zhuangzi, this early Taoist philosopher, talked about— he used dreams to kind of get us into the same thing. But dreams are basically like a low-tech version of what you're talking about, right? Sure. You dream about a thing, and you think it's real, and you cry, and you get scared, and you feel these emotions. Then you wake up, and you realize it was just a dream.

And so how do we know that we're not in a dream now? It's exactly the same problem. So philosophers have been thinking about this for, you know, whatever, over, he was four years, so 2,500 years. Sure. But? But, so the, it's Occam's razor. So it's just, what's the most parsimonious explanation that we have?

So it could be the case that we are all simulations in our future selves' lives, or we're actually in tanks, and these aliens are farming us out for our electricity, and we're not really here. It just seems to me the most plausible explanation is the simplest one. I'm not necessarily sure I agree. Here's why. How about your friend, Jonathan Schooler? You're going to super get along with Jonathan. I bet I am. I'm thinking I agree. Here's why. How about your friend, Jonathan Schooler? You're going to super get along with Jonathan.

I bet I am. I'm thinking I am. But how about we have this attachment to the idea that all of our life has been real. And so since it's been uniform in its realness, we assume that it's real. We assume that the touch and the textures and the tastes and the sounds and the emotions and the pains and the joys have all been very similar or at least recognizable, that this is what we have. But there's so many variables and there's so much we don't know. Like, what the fuck is going on when we go to sleep? We're just guessing. We're completely guessing.

We shut off every night and we like it and we look forward to it. We look forward to like going blank and disappearing and traveling to wherever the fuck the mind goes to while the body just lays there prone. You know, it's odd. while the body just lays there prone. You know, it's odd. Like I went to check on my daughter the other day to see if she was asleep, and I'm looking at her lying there. And I was thinking it's so strange

that this is a normal thing that people do. We just shut off. And we just lay there with our mouths open and our eyes closed. We're doing stuff. Yeah, we are doing stuff. We're reorganizing information. And we're repairing. we're doing stuff. Yeah, we are doing stuff. We're reorganizing information. And we're repairing.

We're repairing stuff. We're actually. But it's fascinating that the human animal, and not just the human animal, but most mammals. And my dog does this too. It's an incredibly vulnerable thing to do. Yeah. And yet we all do it. It's like what purpose has it served in evolution? Like how

come sharks don't do it? Sharks just keep moving. They're stupid as fuck. They're stupid as fuck. So we need it because dolphins are really smart. But they swim. Animals that are smart need it. So we need to consolidate. I mean, I don't, this is outside my area of expertise, but my understanding of the function of sleep and dreaming especially is that it's allowing us to consolidate the information, the data we've acquired over the course of the day. And that's really crucial for smart animals that are accumulating knowledge. And that is not a shark. Sharks are just a pretty simple chomp-chomp.

You don't need to learn that. But don't dolphins swim while they're sleeping? Apparently not. It says they're motionless on the surface of the water. They need eight hours sleep a day. And shifts, weirdly. Oh, the right half gets four hours of sleep, but the left half also gets four hours of sleep just at different times.

So they're doing... Whoa. So that's an adaptation to the fact that they're in water, but they're air-breathing mammals like us. So they need to have part of their brain on. Fucking danger everywhere. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So I think there's stories you can tell about why we dream, why we sleep that are completely consistent with the idea that I am the same body I was when I was little. The scar I have on my forehead really is from the George Lloyd hitting me with a snow shovel. Says who? That guy's a part of your memory. It is totally. I understand a priori. Just think about how bad memory is.

No, memory is bad. Terrible. But the body is not bad. The body records things. Imagine if memory is that bad because it's like a built-in design to keep you confused. Yeah, no. You're going to super get confused. Yeah, no. You're going to super get a lot of the time. His friend, the only thing I Googled about him, he has a very interesting theory about memory.

Yeah? Oh, what is it? That verbalizing it fucks up the accuracy of it. Yeah, verbal overshadowing. Yeah. That's for sure true because how many friends have told you like a story from childhood and you're like, bitch, that did not happen that way? Yeah.

Like you know things didn't happen that way. No, that's different. So his research actually looks at the fact that if you have an experience and then you try to describe it in words, it fucks up your recall of the experience. Of course, yeah. So if the classic study they did was on jams,

so you have people taste jams, and which jam do you want to take taste jams and rate and you know which jam do you want to take home which one tastes the best if you have them then you taste the jams but you have to write down tasting notes on the jam and you rate them yeah you rate them then you get really confused and you take home a shitty jam because you're thinking about it too much has messed up your appraisal well that's one of the things that people always say about psychedelic experiences and that you, in describing the psychedelic experience, you then become

attached to the narrative of the description of the psychedelic experience. Yeah. That's, I mean, psychedelic experiences are interesting. So I talk about them in the book as well. You had Michael Pollan on at one point and I watched part of that show and he repeated an analogy that he uses in his book that I quote in my book, which is that psychedelics are for cultural evolution what mutagens are for genetic evolution. So genetic evolution needs mutations to work on and usually mutations suck, right? They usually don't work very well and those organisms die. But every once in a while, you get a mutation that works and that can get selected on and become the new normal. And for cultural evolution, this is possibly what psychedelics are doing. So we need humans. Part of the argument in the book

is that humans are uniquely dependent on creativity, unlike any other species. So, you know, cheetahs chase gazelles. They have their claws and their teeth. They don't need to think up new technologies for catching gazelles, right? And they can get better, but it's through genetic evolution, not cultural evolution. Humans are helpless without tools. So we are, we're literally helpless without tools. So one, the most basic tool is fire. So at some point in our lineage, we tamed fire and fire allowed us to cook food. And once you can cook food, you can digest it a lot better. Cooking is basically pre-digesting your food for you. It's almost like a parent bird chewing up

food for their chicks. It allows you to digest it better. And then our genes change. So once we have fire, our jaws change. So our teeth get less robust, our jaws less robust than our ancestors were. And actually our guts change. So our stomach and our intestinal system is shorter than it would be in a primate that ate raw foods. So we're so dependent on fire that we biologically have adapted to eating cooked foods. We could not survive without cooked foods anymore. Just like our bodies have biologically adapted to clothing. Yeah. So, yeah, so the hairlessness.

And so humans need tools, and we need constantly evolving tools because the environment is changing. Even if the environment is staying the same, we have other cultural groups that are trying to exploit that environment in competition with us. And if they do a better job, then we're out of luck. And so we're uniquely dependent on creativity in a way that no other primate is, no other species is really. And so we need innovation. And Pollan's point is that one way we could get that is occasionally completely scrambling. So what psychedelics are doing

is just de-patterning the brain completely. So just parts of your brain are talking to other parts of the brain that normally doesn't happen at all. And as he points out, that usually results in bullshit. So, you know, I did a lot of psychedelics in San Francisco in my 20s, and I used to go up to Mount Tam and do mushrooms or LSD. And this one trip, I always brought a notebook with me. I talk about this in the book that I was convinced during one trip that I had solved everything. I was a Ph.D. student at the time. I was convinced that once I published this thing I was writing, they would give me my PhD, they would give me a tenured full professorship,

and that was it. And it was because I had proven that truth is the color blue. And I had like a 20-page treatise where I laid this out. It had diagrams and there were mathematical equations. And I really came out of the trip thinking, this is it. I'm fucking solved it. And then I, you know, the next day I looked at it, I was like, oh yeah, I probably won't publish this. So, so most of what comes out of trips is complete nonsense because it's just like- But maybe it was a kernel of information there. There's a kernel of something. There was, and actually the kernel of information I took out of that particular trip, I kind of remember, was about my personal life. So it helped me figure out a relationship I was in.

What did it have to do with the color blue? Nothing at all. The color blue was nonsense. So it was this complete – so Pollan's point is that most of what gets produced is nonsense. But every once in a while, it might be useful. And so basically in terms of evolution, it's a high-risk, high-payoff strategy. Was there something that had to do with your confidence in having achieved some sort of revelation that maybe you were trying to seek the same thing or find some sort of understanding

about your own personal life and you chose to do it through a proxy. Like you tried to seek it out through this thing and thinking that if I solve. Could have been an analogy for. Yeah. That's possible, it's possible. But the actual argument was bullshit.

It's nonsense. It's not publishable. But was there anything in there that like, where you go, wow, I had a real good point here? No. I'll send it to you. No. You can publish it. Don't.

It might scramble my brain. Yeah. So I think Pollan's right that psychedelics are scrambling stuff. But then every once in a while, something really cool and new comes out. And my argument, and I actually don't explicitly make this argument in the book, but listening to him on your show is what I thought, is that alcohol is a way to do that in a slightly lower risk way, right? Lower risk. So we're scrambling our brains a little bit right now, but we're still pretty much connected to reality.

So the innovation level is going to be lower because we're not completely de-patterning our brains. But the likelihood that we're going to come up with something useful is higher. And so what I would argue is chemical intoxicants all have this role to play in accelerating and enhancing cultural evolution. Hallucinogens have a place in that ecosystem, right? But typically, hallucinogens are used very rarely. So in cultures where everyone does them, they do them every once in a while. So typically, there's like an annual ritual or semi-annual ritual where everyone takes hallucinogens and gets really messed up. Another way to do it is have a special class of people whose job it is to get messed up on hallucinogens pretty regularly and then bring their insights back to the group. How are you going to trust those guys, though?

Those are shamans, right? Yeah, right. So those are these people. Shamans are supposed to guide you through it, right? They can, but I mean traditionally in, they do the hallucinogens. You come to them and you say, we're not catching gazelles anymore. We go out to the usual hunting grounds and there are no gazelles. Everyone's hungry. What are the gods? What do the gods say? So it's always couched in terms of communications from the supernatural realm. So what I think is going on is there's this problem we have a problem

that we haven't figured out as a culture we need some insights and so we go to the shaman we say what have we done wrong what are the gods angry with us and the shaman goes and gets completely lit up on psychedelics and spends whatever two days in the woods and writes a thing about truth that's color blue and writes a thing about something completely random. But maybe somewhere in there, they have an idea that we've angered the gods because of X, Y, or Z. And that works. Like actually doing one of those things gets us to the new hunting ground where we can get gazelles again. So sometimes it's a particular class of people whose job it is

to do intoxicants in a much more serious way. And that would normally impair you, like you wouldn't be able to hold down a normal job and do stuff. But that's okay, because that's their job and the culture, that's their niche that they fill. So you think that there's some sort of benefit to having some people that are professionals do that work rather than the general population? If you're talking about seriously messing yourself up, yeah. So I think, and you know, you could argue that maybe in modern large scale societies, artists fill some of that role, right? But why? Here's the thing, like why would you pawn it off on somebody else? Don't you think the more people that have these revelations, the better? And the more people that have these revelations, the more people are going to sort of understand some of the dilemmas that we face and maybe what's happening with the ego and various parts of the psyche that are tripping us up?

us up? Yeah. I mean, I think now in modern society, maybe we have a luxury where everyone can figure this out for themselves. But I think in a traditional society, like if your job was hauling stones to build the pyramids, like you getting more insight into stuff is not going to be very helpful. You need to just haul stones. If you have to haul stones. If you have to haul stones. If you're working as a slave. Yeah. So I think now we have more egalitarianism and people have access to resources in a way that maybe this is something everyone should be doing. I don't think – I used to say that, everyone, but now I've changed my tune because I think some people are just not wired right for it. And I don't know why.

I only know how I'm wired. Everybody's wired differently. You know, I've talked to people that, you know, they'll have some sort of a weird interaction with people online and they have to get on medication. Yeah. I know quite a few people like that. Like, you know, they'll do a podcast and the podcast goes sideways and they get on fucking anti-anxiety pills. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, human cultures are clearly ecosystems, right? Yeah.

So we have people with different personality traits. Sure. And they all play different roles. And they're important. Everyone's important. Super sensitive people are important. Yeah. Just like the super callous people are important.

Yes, you need some super callous people. You need people that can handle anything and you need people that they have a really difficult time with everything. And sometimes those people make beautiful songs, you know, like you don't, there's a place for everybody in this strange, weird soup of humanity. And, uh, I'm always very wary when people dismiss certain things as being trivial or certain experiences being non-necessary. I don't think, you know, and again, I used to be way more cocky about this because I think I was operating on limited information, and then I think I had less control of the ego.

And I say less because I certainly don't. When in your life? When I was younger, when I first started taking psychedelics, like early in my 30s. Yeah, I think I had a distorted perception. Not think, no. I know I did. I still do, right? No one has a real clear understanding of what the fuck is going on when you're tripping on DMT.

You're just guessing. the fuck is going on when you're tripping on DMT, you're just guessing. But one thing that I've gotten out of it for sure is that to be more open to the idea that everyone is going through a different experience. And that we're all, you know, I've had people say, like, I couldn't imagine being, you know, whatever, a fireman.

Or I couldn't imagine being a musician, singing on stage in front of all those people. Or I couldn't imagine being, you know, whatever, a fireman. Or I couldn't imagine being a musician, singing on stage in front of all those people. Or I couldn't imagine being a professor, giving a lecture in front of all those people. But some people, you know, I couldn't imagine being a bricklayer. I couldn't imagine being a motorcycle mechanic. Like everybody has a different fucking thing in this world. And we're all this weird container of chemical soup yeah and everybody's

genes and life experiences and all these things play a part of what it means to be you or to be me or to be jamie or anyone who's listening to this thing and we all like to look at the world like oh i see the world and you need to live the way that I live because I figured this out about the world. But I've only figured out that part about the world, like how it works for me with my peculiar genetics and my peculiar life experiences and sensitivities or lack thereof. Everybody's so different. Yeah. There's this concept in evolution of frequency dependent selection and so if you're in a population let's say so I'm introverted it's a bit of a puzzle why introverts

exist because we're not very good at social stuff I like to spend a lot of time alone don't you think you think a lot when you're probably probably we think more so you sort things out more So you probably come up with ideas that are beneficial to the rest of the tribe. Right. But how does that help me? It helps you because you're an integral part of the tribe. Because genes only care about me. Yeah. So there's probably, so there may be group level effects and there's clearly an effect where if I'm in a culture where introverts are rare, there's going to be a marginal advantage to being an introvert because I can bring things to the group that other people can't. So what that's going to end up – what you're going to end up with is a mix of people. So you're going to have introverts and extroverts.

You're going to have people who are very conscientious and people who are incredibly not conscientious. And each of them are going to play some role in the culture. Well, I have a theory about today's culture, is that one of the things that is unfortunately happening is that we have become so kind and compassionate that we've allowed certain personality traits and certain people to exist unchecked. And it's certainly not talking about introverts,

but I am talking about sloths. You know, we've allowed a lot of like really, like the homeless situation, right? Clearly some of the homeless situation is mentally ill people. Clearly some of the homeless situation is people with drug dependency. But it's also, some of it has got to be people that have no desire for growth. They just decide to lay down on the concrete floor

for whatever reason. I'm not judging them. I'm just saying this based on their current state. They could have been abused as a young person. They could have gone through personal trauma. They could have been, who knows what happened to them. But whatever it is about our culture that coddles that, San Francisco is a fantastic example of how that's a disaster for everybody else and bad for the tribe. Whereas the perceptions, I don't believe that there are more people that don't

have their shit together today than did in 1930. But I do believe there's more homeless people today than there were in 1930 per capita. And I think it's because we're more compassionate. And in being more compassionate, more understanding, and more kind, that's all great. Like I love that. I want to live in a world where people are more compassionate more kind however i think there's an argument that opens up the door for a lot of people to take advantage of those things like we all know someone who says like man i'm too nice fuck people fuck me over i'm just i've got these mooches and all these people in my life because i'm too nice

we all know people like that. I think a society can be too nice. I think there's a real argument for that. I think it's just like from the microcosm, if you look at it in the macro, I think those things, they're analogous. They work. You can make these connections between the way human beings live their life with people fucking up their problems.

I mean, how many of us have people like that in our lives? You know, like, I know quite a few friends that are like, they will tell you, I am too nice, I have too many people that are trying to take advantage of me, and they're always doing this, they're always doing that, and they want this, they want that, and they're always selfish. I think that's the same thing with our culture.

There's people that don't wanna contribute, and they don't want to be a part of society in any meaningful way, but they think the society owes them something. And that has accelerated in modern times because we've placed value on being compassionate and being kind, which is a great thing. But the side effect of that, the imbalance is that we've created this time where we have unprecedented numbers of people camping on the sidewalk, which is wild. But I think they're connected. And I think you could look at human beings that have problems like that in their lives,

and you could look at a culture that has problems like that in their streets. And I think it's kind of the same thing going on, that I love kind, compassionate people. But it always frustrates me when I have friends that can't get mooches out of their life and can't get vampires. Like my friend Duncan Trussell calls them emotional vampires because they really are like vampires. Duncan Trussell calls them emotional vampires because they really are like vampires. They will cling to you and suck your life's blood and they will take energy

from you to feed themselves and they don't contribute to your existence. They just distract from it. They just detract from it. Alright. Yeah, it's a complicated issue. I mean, San Francisco, some people are homeless because to live there you have to make a million dollars. You don't have to live there.

You don't have to camp out in the middle of a fucking mission. You can go wherever you want. You don't have to live there. People also have access, unlike the 30s, they have access to really powerful drugs. And so this is the modern life. Modern life is weird. So in traditional societies, you had very limited access to intoxicants. So if you were living in a traditional society, you would get access to alcohol or hallucinogens in a very controlled ritual environment. So there would be times when you would do it.

You would do it with other people. In a lot of cultures, when you drink, there's a kind of toast master or someone who's in charge of the pace at which you're drinking. So like in a traditional Chinese banquet to this day, you don't just drink as much. We don't sit here drinking out of coffee mugs as much as we want. It's sitting there in front of you, and then someone makes a toast, and that's when you're allowed to drink.

And then you put your cup down, it gets refilled, but it sits there until someone makes a toast. And that's a way to control alcohol consumption. So alcohol has always been consumed in these communal, ritually organized ways that help to, there were safety measures. It's like a seatbelt. And that's gone in modern societies. Like the fact that you can drive into a drive-in liquor store and have your SUV filled up with vodka and scotch and firearms and cannabis probably and some Cheetos, whatever. You take that all back to your house. And you have it in your house. And you can just consume it whenever you want. That is something that we're not evolutionarily equipped to do.

It's never happened before. And it's gotten worse with COVID. So I don't talk about this too much in the book. But I talk about it in some other pieces I've written more recently. That COVID has made this so much worse because it's driven drinking totally into the household. And all the normal social cues that you have to help control your drinking are gone. Well, not just that. People are trying to cope.

Yeah. And people are depressed. It's very bizarre, strange. Not so much now, but, you know, 12 months. It was bad. Unless you're in Canada. Thanks, dude you're in Canada. Yes, thanks, dude. They still live in March of 2020. But if you're going back to, you know, last year, like April of last year, I found myself drinking a lot. I was drinking a lot of wine. Like every night I'd

have a, you know, three or four glasses of wine with dinner because I think I was trying to calm myself. Yeah. And there's not, and you're not going out doing other things that are distracting. I've got, I had, you know, my partner's in the States. And so we've been doing the long distance thing across the closed border. Every time I go to see her and I come back to Canada, I've got to quarantine for two weeks. Do you teach in Canada? Is that what it is? Yeah, but I've been on sabbatical.

Can you teach on Zoom from the East Coast? Yeah, but my daughter's in Vancouver. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah, but I've been on sabbatical. Can you teach on Zoom from the East Coast? You can teach. Yeah, but my daughter's in Vancouver. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah, so I have a reason to be in Vancouver. What does your partner do? Sorry to be prying. She's a neuroscientist, social cognitive neuroscientist. Oh, dating a bunch of smart people, huh?

Yeah. So she's got, we have the same, she has kids in Boston and I have a kid in Vancouver. So we're doing a long distance thing. Got it. So every time I came back from seeing her, I would have to quarantine for two weeks alone. And I've done that now. I've done two with her, but I've done seven alone. So 14 weeks of being in my apartment, not allowed to leave, and with essentially unlimited

access to alcohol because you can order alcohol online, they deliver it to your door. That's really unhealthy. So like when I was writing the book, so it was helpful when I was writing Drunk, it was awesome. The first three quarantines I did, I was still writing and I wish the quarantines would never end. It was great. I'm an introvert too, so I can go long periods of time without seeing people. And I just focused and I wrote. It was awesome. It was really great.

Do you have to specifically stay in a place or you can stay in your own house? You can stay in your own house, but you can't leave. But there's like apartments or hotels that they make some people stay in. That's a new thing. That's a new thing. And that's why I drove to Seattle. A new thing.

They made it worse. They made it worse. And it's a don't get me started. Fucking Canada, what are you doing? Don't get me started on Canadian COVID policy. But how did this happen? I don't understand. It's the Trudeau government wanting to look tough. There's no scientific rationale for it, especially when they did it. Like if they'd done it earlier, it would have made more sense. But now it's just catering to people who feel like they aren't being tough enough. I mean, I'm fully vaccinated. There's no reason for me to quarantine when I go back to Canada. I tested negative here,

right? I'm going to test negative before I go back. They test me at the border. At that point, I am safer than any random person wandering around the streets of Vancouver. But I still have to stay in my apartment for two weeks. Rules are rules. So it's frustrating. But the upshot, the point of this is the solitude, like being alone, especially once the book was done. Normally when I finish a project, I go into this weird, I don't know if you have this, like if you write a show and then you perform it and then you need to do a new thing. I can't do the new thing right away.

Like I go into a state where I just want to not think for a little while. And that's normally when I would kayak or I'd garden or I'd chop wood or do something physical. That's healthy, right? But instead I was stuck in my apartment. So I don't have a project anymore. I can't leave my apartment. It was bad. My drinking got my drink lot. By yourself? Yeah. I mean, I would start drinking earlier. I would drink more than I wanted. And this is not just me. I mean, this has happened to a lot of people. There's good data on this that obviously consumption moved away from bars and restaurants to the home.

And some people initially said, oh, all that's happening is it's shifting from one place to another. But there's evidence now that it's actually gone up in absolute terms. So people are drinking more. There's more drinking disorder problems. People are getting weight. People are feeling that they're not in control of their drinking. Apparently there's more domestic violence

and child abuse as well. Yeah, it's not good. And it's because we're drinking in a social environment that is unprecedented. We never had unlimited private. In my apartment in Vancouver, I'm going to go back and quarantine there when I'm done with this.

I have enough alcohol to kill a mid-sized village of people. Really. I mean, if someone drank all that, they'd just be dead. And it's mine. I can drink as much of it as I want whenever I want. It's evolutionarily weird. Do you plan out what you're going to do when you go back? You have 14 days.

You'll probably get in wicked shape. I work out. Yeah, I've got a lot of stuff in my apartment to work out. I work out a lot. It's hard. It's not normal for people to be isolated like that. No, it's not. And it's also not smart. Especially because when you look at the motivation, you poke so many holes in it. No, I know. don't make you angry we could have a whole show about we should we should have a whole show about Canadian Justin Trudeau drunk Justin Trudeau get him on a podcast and find out what the fuck are you doing

man dude it's part of his problem is he's too handsome yeah yeah big problem but it's been this has been hardest on like my daughter's 14 And that age group, it's been brutal for them because this is the time when they just want to be out with their friends, socializing. It's one of the reasons I moved to Texas. Really? Yeah. Why? Because in California, all the parents were paranoid. They didn't want their kids.

But I'm like, well, look, we know what it does to children. It is statistically safer than the flu, right? If you just look at statistics for kids. Well, both my kids got it. It was nothing. And I know some kids got it and it's not nothing, but usually that's because of pre-existing conditions and you should adjust accordingly. Kids that have all sorts of comorbidities, they're the ones who have real problems with it.

But most kids, they don't have a problem with this particular disease. We're very fortunate because of that. Yeah. It's a cost-benefit analysis, right? And so for kids, the cost is huge of not letting them socialize. Yes. It's a giant cost socially. When you're talking about 10-year-olds, oh oh my God, man, it's just bad for them. How old are your kids? Well, one just turned 11 and one turned 13.

So these young kids that I have that are experiencing this weird new life, it was way more troubling in California because people had a different approach to it. There's less cases here and people just generally have a different approach to it. There's less cases here, and people just generally have a different attitude about it, and they had a different attitude about it back in May.

Yeah. So my kids, like, we were on a lake out here in May, and then we were jumping in the water and playing. Like, we can go outside? This is crazy. And I realized, like, how bad is this for children? We're, like, two months of this shit where you're locked in home worried about an invisible demon that's floating through the air and taking people's lives. And we're all walking around with masks on. Yeah.

It's weird. It's very weird. Well, when they taped off playgrounds, I was just like, what the fuck? It's like the safest thing. As far as we know, even back in spring of 2020, we knew that outdoor transmission was not very common. Well, we heard that, but we were still nervous about it, right? And then we were worried about touching things. Yeah, we were wiping down Amazon packages.

Oh, yeah. My manager was spraying everything with bleach. Spraying vegetables. Yeah. It's like everybody got weird. No, it's still like today, you know, people are constantly in Vancouver. So you walk into a store, they want you to sanitize. And I'm just like, you know what?

Surfaces aren't a thing anymore. Yeah, we know that for sure. This is the thing that's so troubling. But here's the thing that drives me the most bonkers is like this is there's so many opportunities to educate people about strengthening your immune system. There's a reason why it only kills less than 1%. It's because most people recover from it. Well how do you recover from it? Your immune system.

How can we get our immune system stronger? Well it turns out there's a bunch of proven methods. Exercise, sunlight, vitamins, water, healthy food. There's a bunch of different things you can do. Eliminating stress, eliminating stress, or meditation, all bunch of different things you can do. Eliminating stress, you know, eliminating stress or meditation, all sorts of different things you could do to strengthen your body, strengthen your immune system, community. Turns out actually being around people that you love and care about is good for your immune system. It's good for your health. It's good for your mental health. All these things we denied people. It's so weird. It's like what

we did is exacerbate the spread of the disease unintentionally in a lot of ways. With the lockdowns in California, when you force people inside, a lot of times those people, they transmitted inside, unfortunately. Yeah. So I'm hoping that with Canada's finally ramping up vaccinations, so my daughter just got her first shot, which is great. All her kids have their first dose, all her friends in school. So life's going to get back to normal. But I think that you see the toll that it's taken on kids being isolated, and it's hard to know what the long-term effects of that are going to be. Well, I'm hoping kids are generally resilient.

But I really wish there was more time spent about education, about your immune system. You know, and also, you know, it's a long conversation about this. Yeah, so the take-home message is try not to drink alone. Yeah. Drinking alone is really unhealthy. But what about if you're drinking alone because you're trying to achieve a certain result, like you're writing something? to achieve a certain result like you're writing something. Yeah.

So that, it's funny because when I was writing the proposal for the book, I wrote like 10 versions of it and it still sucked. And my agent, every time I'd send her the new version, she was like, eh, no. Really? You got a good agent, huh? She's good. She's this hard-bitten Manhattanite. She's like getting praise out of her is very difficult. What was wrong with it?

When it was finally good, she was like, okay. What was wrong with it? It didn't pop. It needed to pop. Like I had all the facts there. I had the ideas there. It just was boring. Like nothing drew you into it.

And she was right. It didn't pop. And all of a sudden I realized, hey, you know what? I haven't written any of it drunk. I'm not taking my own advice. So in the book, I talk about all this evidence that, you know, when we get to about 0.08 blood alcohol content, you're more creative. You're able to think. That's when you shouldn't drive. That's when you should, just about when you shouldn't drive is when you should write. Because you're actually making connections. You're loose. You're coherent enough that you can still do serious work, but you know, the prefrontal cortex has just been turned down a couple notches

so that you can start thinking laterally. How do they know that it's point O? Why point O? Well, I was quoting a study. So there's one study that was done where they got people drunk. So they got them, they were either doing placebos or alcoholic drinks, and they were trying to solve a lateral thinking task. So this one's called the remote associate test. So you get like three words that seem completely unrelated, and you have to come up with a fourth word that unites them all. And the thing about these lateral thinking tasks is you can't power through it. Like there's no way to like do an algorithm and figure it out. You just have to kind of relax and see the answer. And people who got, they seemed best at this task at about 0.08.

And there's a deterioration when it gets higher? Yeah, there's a deterioration when it gets higher. So there's a sweet spot. So it's funny because I gave a talk about when I was doing the Try Not to Try book tour. I gave a talk about spontaneity and creativity and how they're linked. And I reported this. This study had just come out. And so I talked a little bit about how alcohol might be a shortcut to spontaneity and creativity. And after the talk was over, this was at a Google campus, this guy, his hand shot up and he was like, do you know about the Balmer peak? And I'd never heard of this thing.

But this is almost certainly apocryphal, but supposedly Steve Balmer, the former CEO of Microsoft, figured out that his coding ability peaked at this very particular blood alcohol content. So it's like not good, not good, not good, really good, really good, really bad. That's amazing that it's coding. Yeah. And so supposedly he kept himself hooked up to an IV. No. It's almost certainly bullshit. But it captures this idea.

I don't know if it's bullshit. I don't know. It's almost certainly bullshit, but it captures this idea. I don't know if it's bullshit. I don't know. It captures this idea that alcohol is a tool that can help you solve creativity problems. And so they told me about the Balmer Peak. And then after the talk, they were going to take me on a campus tour. And they came up and they were like, okay, we know where we're taking you first.

And they took me to their whiskey room. So they have this room that is just a wall of really good single malt scotches. It was actually amazing because I live in Canada. I can't get anything in Canada. Really? Yeah. Because everything's like 200% tax on alcohol. So everything's too expensive. 200% tax? Basically. Yeah. What do you mean? So like if a whiskey bottle is 50 bucks, it's 200% tax on that bucks so my favorite so my favorite my standard whiskey is lagavulin 16 year and i can get that at knl wine merchants in san francisco usually for like 70 80 bucks at us and in canada is more like closer to 200 canadian so really yeah so so it's that so anyway i was salivivating over the scotches they had.

But what was important is that this is where they go. So they said that when they run into, so they're working on a problem, they run into a wall. They can't solve this problem. Instead of sitting there at their computers banging their heads against the wall, they stop. They go to the whiskey room. It's got beanbag chairs and a foosball table. And they drink some scotch and they just shoot the shit. They're like, well, what if we did this? What if we did that?

And they said often they come up with a solution. And so especially alcohol is really good at enhancing creativity in groups because it's making me more creative. So I'm thinking of more things, but I'm also less, the playground monitor is off duty. And so I'm also, I'll say it to you out loud. Even if, if I was sober, I might think it was stupid or I might be, this has happened to me in academic situations where we like, we came up with this uh this really multi-million dollar grant to study the evolution of religion at UBC years and years ago and I don't think it would have happened unless they had opened a pub there's no place to drink on campus and they finally opened this pub right

near the bus loop so after work on Fridays me and a bunch of colleagues all from different departments would meet at this pub. And there was no purpose. We were just drinking and shooting the shit. And this huge project came out of it because I think we were both individually more creative, but we were also disinhibited. And so we would say things that we would normally censor ourselves from saying. That might sound stupid. But then I'd say something that maybe was stupid. And then I'd say something that maybe was stupid, and then my colleague who does archaeology would be like, oh, you know what, actually that relates to this other thing that I know about.

And then that relates to the thing that my colleague who does cultural evolutionary theory knows about. And it all kind of gels, but it wouldn't happen unless we slightly turned down the knob. But it wouldn't happen unless we slightly turned down the knob. So I think it's the realization that really successful organizations like Google selectively use alcohol in the workplace in this way really lit a light bulb for me, too. That was one of the motivations for writing the book as well. That's interesting that they're so open-minded. They looked at it that way and chose that approach because that's not just unconventional but frowned upon in a work environment.

Yeah, yeah. Because, you know, oftentimes we think of people drunk as being ridiculous, doing stupid things. And we think about lawsuits, right? Oh, yeah, for sure. So this is the problem is like right now, again, part of the reason for me writing the book is trying to make the argument that alcohol is dangerous.

There are all these bad things. There's addiction. It hurts your liver. It increases your cancer risk. It leads to sexual harassment and all sorts of problems. Drunk driving. Fights. Violence.

So we know about all the costs. Giving. Fights. Violence. Violence. So we know about all the costs. But unless we understand the functional benefits, on the other side, on the positive side, what is there? Right.

We have to look at it for what it really is, like everything else. Yeah. So once we understand, so in addition to fun, we've got enhanced creativity. We have team building. We have trust building. We have all these things happening. So let's put some other things in the positive column. And it may be the case that you still look at it and you're like, nah, it's too risky.

We're not going to do that. But that's fine. At least you're making it. Yeah. And for some people it is. And the other thing we have to do, and this is crucial, is level the playing field for people who don't drink. crucial, is level the playing field for people who don't drink. And so one of the, I talk about this in the last chapter, for all the positive functions of alcohol, there's always this dark side. So Dionysus has this dark side. So the god Dionysus, the god of wine in ancient Greece, could do all these great things for you, but he could also really fuck with you. So he could give you a gift.

He's the one who gave Midas the golden touch. So, yeah, you want gold? Sure, everything you touch turns to gold. And then that didn't work out very well for Midas. So there's always like this danger attached to it. Didn't he touch his kids or something? He touched the woman he loved and she turned to gold and he couldn't touch anyone anymore.

Turned out it was a bad thing. Isn't that Frozen? The movie Frozen? Yeah, it's kind of like Frozen. It touches everything. So it's, you want to bring up Frozen? No. All right.

They ripped that off. So there's a dark side to Dionysus, right? And you need to see that. And you can't see it in its context without understanding the benefits. And so I think, you know, in terms of do you have alcohol at professional events? Do you have it at academic events? Right now, the atmosphere in academia is so prohibitionist. It's just like we can absolutely not have any alcohol. It's so dangerous. When did that start?

I have any alcohol. It's so dangerous. When did that start? I think it started with kind of people finally, I mean, it started for good reasons, right? It's people finally talking about all the abuse that happens and the unfairness of it. So a lot of work at conferences, for instance, really ends up not, it's not being done on the talks. It's being done at the end of the evening when people are at the hotel bar, they're down regulating their PFCs, and they're talking freely about shit. So we're striking up new partnerships. What is PFC?

Their prefrontal cortex. Oh, okay. So we're relaxed, we're talking about new stuff. I mentioned a postdoc opportunity that I have, and you're a grad student who's graduating recently, and you're going to need a job. All this great networking and creativity happens at the hotel bar, but it's mostly dudes doing it. And if you're a woman, you're not going to be super thrilled about hanging out at the hotel bar at 11 p.m. with a bunch of drunk guys. Right. And that means that you are now frozen out of everything that's happening there.

You don't get that postdoc because the drunken PI offered it to somebody after his fifth tequila and you went home because you were uncomfortable. Or you went home because you're a recovering alcoholic and you don't drink. Or you went home because you have to get up early and pick the kids up from daycare. You know, whatever. You don't have time to. It's drinking around the bar late at night is a perfectly comfortable environment for white men. And especially white men who don't have full child care.

I think because there's also, you know, one of the things alcohol does is disinhibit you. And if you've got any prejudices, if you've got any kind of views about outside groups that you don't like, that's going to come out in drinking too. But mainly it's about, it's men. And it makes people who are not part of the in-group not only feel uncomfortable, but actually really genuinely disadvantaged because they lose out on opportunities. Well, because it takes what is a working environment

and turn it into a much more social environment and then a much more uninhibited social environment that leads to air quotes partying. Yeah, some very bad stuff can happen. Right, but also very good stuff. Also very good stuff. So what do you do? Right, what do you do?

Like what's the solution? There's no, I don't think there's a clear answer. So one solution is ban it, which is the current, I think, answer in academia. And I don't think that's right. So I think what we need to do is figure out how to harness the positive functions of it while putting, kind of like bumper cars, like put on some barriers so that it doesn't get out of hand. So like simple stuff like limit.

So it used to be the case that at receptions, at professional conferences, there were open bars. So you could just drink as much as you wanted at these receptions. And shit went south.

Used to be. Used to be. Right. And then it changed to where you had drink tickets. But shit went south.. And shit went south. Used to be. Used to be. Right. And then it changed to where you had drink tickets. But shit went south. Yeah, shit went south. So good things happen, but really bad things happen really quick. Maybe there should be some way of stopping the really bad things from happening.

So drink tickets. So limiting the number of drinks people can have. Making water easily available. So even a simple thing, because sometimes you're talking to someone and you just want to be drinking something, right? Right. And so if all I have is that scotch next to me, I'm going to just drink some more scotch. If I also can pick up this water and drink the water, I will do that too.

And so just simple things like making water available or non-alcoholic drinks. But isn't the real problem personalities? It's persons and situations, right? So personalities definitely play a role. I like to drink. I'm going to tend to drink more than most people. But also if I'm in a situation where I have non-alcoholic options, the situation pushes my behavior in a different direction right or if I'm in a situation if I'm in an open bar situation I'll drink a lot if it's two drink tickets and then I'm not allowed anymore that puts a limit on me that I have that's the situation helping me help myself regulate yeah helping me regulate yeah's the way to put it.

It's funny because it's such a human thing, right? Like a human issue, meaning that there's a lot of human issues that are so messy. There's no clear binary one or zero. There's so many of those things. Yeah, so my goal in the book is just to lay out the complicated nature of it, right? Because right now it's just like alcohol is bad. Right. Let's get rid of it. And it's not that simple. Well, it's certainly not that simple if you have really good friends, right? Like I have a lot of good friends and we like to get together and drink and we have a great time.

Like I have a group of friends where on regular basis is that a word on a regular basis we have a couple of drinks together and have tons of laughs and it's normal yeah you know and it's it's a standard thing but if you get the wrong person in that mix and we've had a few of those guys really the wrong person gets in that mix and all of a sudden they have like shark eyes and they go they go blank and then next thing you know they're naked and sliding across the top of the bar, right? Yeah. You know that guy and that's the 15% that you were talking about.

Yeah. Or just, yeah. I wish there was a way to tell. Like if you had a turkey tester. You know those things that pop up? Don't give this guy more than two drinks. Bob's an alcoholic. Yeah, Bob's an alcoholic. Yeah, Bob's an alcoholic. I mean, alcoholism is such a strange term.

Because, like, is there a spectrum? There's a spectrum. Of alcoholism? Yeah. Is alcoholism, like, maybe you were in the wrong place in time in your life, and you were drinking to try to avoid all the responsibilities that you had, and you called yourself an alcoholic, and now you've got your shit together with sobriety and discipline

and positive mental attitude? And is there also someone who has some weird genetic disposition where they can't have a drink? Yeah. Like, I have friends that I know that can't have two drinks. Yeah. They have two drinks, and then no one's home. There's a strong genetic component.

So the estimate is 60% to 70% is a genetic contribution. Interesting. And so then you need to really be careful. Is there a gene we've isolated? The literature on this is complicated. So there's some candidate genes, and some of them seem to have to do with regulating fear responses or pleasure responses.

There's debate about this. to do with regulating fear responses or pleasure responses. There's debate about this. I wonder if alcoholics, like straight up hardcore alcoholics are better at certain tasks. Wonder if there's an evolutionary advantage to going shark eyes. I think there has to be. We talked about this kind of frequency dependent selection. Like why are introverts allowed to exist?

We're probably also about only 15% of the population. Why are alcoholics? But define introverts because you and I have had an easy conversation the moment I met you. You're not a rabid introvert to the point where you get really uncomfortable. But after this conversation, I'm going to need to go back to my hotel and not talk to a single person for like a day. Really? Yeah, I can be. This is hard? No, it's wonderful.

It's fun. But it takes energy out of me, and then I need to recover. Just talking to strangers? No, so I don't have it. Like with my partner, I don't. It's not a drain. I like how you call your girlfriend your partner. Yeah, my girlfriend.

I don't know. We're fucking 50 years old. I know. It's a funny expression like I call your girlfriend your partner yeah my girlfriend I don't know we're fucking 50 I know it's a funny call her my girlfriend I remember I was listening to a comedian this guy Richard Jenny was brilliant who's uh he's dead now but when he was in his 30s he was talking about his girlfriend and I remember I was in my 20s is she a girl so there's no good term so so what do you call her weird one though partners like you, though. Partner's a weird one. It's like you guys are in business together. You're in a law firm. But what do I call her? My lover? Yeah. Or maybe my friend. My lover. That's kind of hot. Yeah. My lover. There's no good.

Say that with a wink like this. Like raise the eyebrows like Roger Mars. We're all middle-aged people, so she's not my girlfriend. My special lady friend. How about that? But we don't. She's she has introverted tendencies and we don't train each other but it's interesting when i was a grad well you're intimate with each other you know each other very well so you're

comfortable you're comfortable around each other yeah yeah and my daughter doesn't you know so with family but with me i'm burning you out you're not right now no you really aren't i don't i don't notice it i enjoy it so it's kind of like waiting tables. So like when I was in grad school, especially once I got to a point where I wasn't taking classes anymore, my job, like when I was preparing for my comp exams, my job was to sit in my apartment alone and read things and take notes on them. For a year and a half, I did that. And even as an introvert, that's too much. And so I loved, I kept these, I used to, waiting tables and working in bars is how I put myself through

end of undergrad and grad school. But I got to a certain point where I was making a lot more money doing translation. So I know Chinese. So I was translating Chinese to English and that was much better money. But I kept like three waitering shifts a week because I needed to go out and do this kind of shit. Like I would banter with customers. I would have some drinks with my colleagues at the end of the day. So I need doses of it, but then I need to rest. I was much more introverted when I was a kid, much more so to the point where when I was young, in my early 20s, and I had to go to the bank, I would get anxiety that I had to talk to the bank teller.

I can remember thinking that. I would be super nervous waiting in line to talk to the bank teller for no reason. But it was because my interaction with people was pretty limited. Okay. But your nature seems to be extroverted. Like you thrive off of talking to people. I enjoy talking to people because I find it to be extremely beneficial to my perspective. Like I'm a curious person.

You're a curious person. like I like I'm a curious person you're a curious person so that's so when I you know I'd heard of you but I'd never seen one of your shows until my publicist booked me on the show and then I started watching some shows and you're like oh no that's why I was worried at first and then when I as soon as I saw the first one I was not because you know I talked about this idea of way right effortless action the Chinese think that when you're in that state you have this power that there's no good translation for it and unfortunately in Mandarin it's pronounced duh that's hilarious it's called duh yeah but it's I translate it as like charisma so basically when you're in the state of way people like you and if you're if you're a confucian ruler people defer to your

authority and kind of want to follow you without you having to force them to they just they admire you and they want you to like them and they want to do things for you if you're a taoist so like for Zhuangzi the effect of your duh is to relax other people around you. So you're super uptight. You come and interact with me. If I have duh, I relax you, and you become more natural. You start being hung up on the things you were hung up on. And they want that power, so that that power is what allows you to be successful. And that's the tension, right?

How do you get duh if you don't have it? And I was struck by the fact that you seem to have, like you relax people and people will talk. And it's because of a kind of authenticity, right? You actually are genuinely authentically interested in other people. And that's hard to fake. I don't think you can fake that. You can't fake it. And so people relax around it. Well, this whole podcast came about because of genuine curiosity. There was no money in it when I first started doing it. And when I got to interview people,

like Graham Hancock was one of my first guests, one of my first really interesting guests who I talked about earlier. And having people like that where I'd studied his work and read some of his books and I got a chance to all of a sudden I'm sitting down talking to this guy who I would deeply admire. I can just start asking him questions. And my whole life has been essentially completely non-conventional in terms of like my choices. Yeah. It seems like a series of them. But it's all been authentic in that these are the things.

Like you can't pretend to be interested in martial arts. You're either interested in it or you're not. You can't pretend to be interested in stand-up comedy. You're either interested in it or you're not in pursuit of it. You can't pretend to be interested in people. I'm curious about, and sometimes it gets me in trouble because like people like assume that if uh i talk to someone who's like some hardcore right-wing person that i share their beliefs but it's i'm curious just want to know i want to know what they're thinking and i

think i think it's valuable to hear their voice and i think it's dangerous to not hear their voice yeah i think we're in this weird polarizing time where people are scared to talk to someone who has differing opinions than they do because they're worried that people will conflate. Their tribe is going to punish them. Yeah. But that is what happens. And it's because of social media and people without this core tenant of empathy, which I think is one of the most important things that we can have. And, you know, I think we should all like, again, no one's perfect. I'm not perfect.

I've fucked this up many times. But I think we should generally stray or lean towards empathy as much as we can. And so their empathy exists also in the context of understanding people's perspective in conversations. And when I'm talking to someone, I'm trying to draw out of them their thoughts because I want to examine them in terms of like, oh, okay, I see how he's framing this. Oh, I see her perspective. Like she's looking at it different than me. Like we were talking about earlier, we're very different. Like all of my choices i i know that all my choices are fucked up like if i had if i was a different person and i said okay well here's your life here's your

schedule you know you have to commentate a cage fighting match and then you have to go talking on stage in front of thousands of people and then you have to do this podcast where podcast where you're speaking about something you really don't even know what you're talking about. And you're asking questions to someone who is a doctor or a scientist or whatever. So it's clear that it works. Because you're authentic, you send out – so in the book, I talk a little bit about these cooperation dilemmas that we have in life. So we have, they go by different names. So prisoner's dilemma or public goods games or tragedy of the commons. There are a lot of these situations in life where the best payoff for me is to cooperate with you and for us both to work together.

But I don't have a way of verifying that you're going to do the right thing. You could defect in economist language, and then I'm going to be really screwed. And so purely rational agents can't solve the prisoner's dilemma. They get stuck with a suboptimal outcome because they don't trust people. But humans, human, normal humans solve prisoners dilemmas all the time. And the way we do that is we trust people and we trust people based on cues. So emotional signals, smiles. So, for instance, there's a real there's a difference between a so-called duchenne smile is you're genuine when you're really amused that's a duchenne smile and then there's the

fake smile when you're kind of smiling for the camera or something right which is really disturbing it's really disturbing to people they're totally different muscle systems and really yeah oh yeah one of them is is controlled by the PFC, the deliberate one, Smile Now. Yeah. It's time for you to nod and smile. That's your PFC doing it. And then if you say something really funny and I laugh, that's a different muscle system and it's not controlled consciously. And it's hard to fake. Actors can get good at faking Duchenne's smiles. And so part of the story I'm telling is this evolutionary arms race. So people need to trust other people. And we developed this signaling system to do it.

I can tell if you're authentic or not by your eyes and everything else. But then if you can fake that, like if you can fake being trustworthy or being loyal and get all the benefits of that cooperation, but then as soon as the costs come for you, you're out of here, that would be great for you. But it wouldn't be great for you. It would be great for you if you're a defector who's in a minority in the culture, you could get a lot of benefits. Yeah, but see, this is where I disagree, Because I think the benefit is always camaraderie.

But that's because you're sincere. Yeah, but I also think that people should understand this. There's a deep benefit to real genuine love and friendship. And if you are somehow or another getting financial benefit or societal benefit or some sort of status benefit without the actual friendship aspect of it, you miss the whole point. I had this conversation with a friend of mine the other day, a comedian friend of mine. We were talking about this comedian that threw another comedian under the bus.

And I said, I feel bad for this guy because he's a comedian, but he doesn't have any comedian friends. And we were all talking about this in a group chat. We were saying, man, you missed half the fun. Half the fun of being a stand-up comic is being friends with the funniest people on the earth. Like, I have group texts that if they ever got out, I have some fucking real explaining to do. Some of the people have said some horrible things to me and we're laughing but it's just comedians understand each other and to be one of us and to be without any real sincere friendships within this group is crazy right but that's

because just put on your evolutionary goggles for a second. So like put aside the way you feel, which is because you're a sincere human being and you're authentic, you feel like this. But imagine there was Joe Prime, who's just like you in every way, but you're faking it all. There are ways in which you would do well in a population that was full of cooperators. And so the upshot is just there's a danger of Joe Primes faking it. I understand, but I don't think it works in this setting. Yeah. This is my point. Yeah. This is 1,665th? 63rd?

1,663rd podcast not including fight companions and MMA shows. Yeah. There's more than 100, how many MMA shows? 111. 111 MMA shows. That's impressive. A ton of fight companions. Yeah.

You can't fake that much, man. No, you can't fake that shit. People will figure out your weirdness, right? And they'll figure it out faster if you're drinking together yeah this is one of the or if you're high or if you're high is the most that's the most because that just like paralyzes your prefrontal cortex but this this thing of being genuine is it's not it's if you're not genuine and you're benefiting, you're not benefiting.

You're fucking up. You're missing the whole thing. The whole thing, it's like being in a loving relationship where you hope the person dies. What are you doing? You're supposed to hope that person feels great. You want people to feel great because then you feel great. We're all connected. Whether we agree or not, whether we look at it correctly or not,

all the information points, all the evidence points to the fact that we're all connected. And then when you have genuine, loving friendships, they're super beneficial for you. They're good for you, too. They're not just good for the other person, they're good for you. When that person's doing great, it's actually good for you. When you're genuinely happy for your friends, it's actually mutually beneficial. Yeah, I totally agree. You miss all that if you're this actor who's faking it.

So when you're saying that they get all the benefit, I say they don't because I say they're this sad, lonely person with all this financial success, but they don't have all the real success, which is camaraderie. Right. But you care about that because you're a human and you're not your genes. So from a genes perspective. Just in terms of transmitting those genes. From a genes perspective. Just in terms of transmitting those genes. Transmitting those genes, producing a miserable psychopath who's never happy is fine. Like genes don't care about that.

So this is why cultures have to worry about the right. Sociopaths. Sociopaths, right? Yeah. They are going to take advantage of this. And so there's kind of arms race. advantage of this. And so in this, so there's kind of arms race. So the fact that I can tell at an instant, if you're interested in what I'm saying, if we're getting bored, if we need to stop soon, I can figure that out just from looking at your face. That's, that would seem like magic to a chimpanzee. Like it seems like telepathy. The way I can read your mind from facial expressions

is amazing. And I'm actually not that good at it. But don't you think dogs have a little bit of that? Dogs have it too, because they've co-evolved with humans. So they're constantly worried about human intentional states. And so part of my point in the book is we're the end products of this evolutionary arms race, basically between sociopaths and normal people like us. We want to be able to pick out sociopaths. They want to be able to pass for normal people. So you've taken it down to this reductionist perspective where you're looking at, not saying you in your personal life, but looking at it as a scientist. As a scientist, I look at it.

You're looking at it as these traits, they exist in order for people to more successfully transmit their genes or transfer their genes Yeah, so it's a weird mindset because as a scientist I think that as a human I just I like hanging out and talking to you. I You know the same thing with parental care So as a scientist the reason that I love my daughter is because she's carrying half my genes. That's why parental love is implanted in me by my genes. And yet if I really thought that consciously, I'd be weird, right? I love my daughter because I love my daughter.

It's spontaneous. It's natural. It's part of just being a normal human being. Yeah, but I don't buy that. Because my daughter has a little tiny chihuahua and I love him. Yeah. Why do I love him? He's not carrying all my genes.

Your genes are tricking you. I mean, so genes don't care. Is that what it is or is it just love? No, it's love. But so genes are happy with mistakes. They're willing to tolerate masturbation. And they're willing to tolerate adoptive parents loving their kids as much as biological parents do. And even puppies. And even puppies because puppies look like kids,

right? So I have a dog. I love my dog and my dog, again, I genuinely love my dog. Like when he is distressed, I feel distressed. When is your dog distressed? He got, We didn't brush him very well during COVID, and he's like a miniature poodle mix, and we had to shave him down. And he freaked out? No, he was just cold as shit, so he was shivering all the time. Oh, Vancouver gets cold and rainy. Vancouver is cold and rainy, and I just felt so bad for him. We got him a sweater that's quite attractive, actually.

He looks handsome in it. So I feel genuine distress when he's distressed. And so that's my proximate psychology. That's like me as a person. But I can step, I can always step back from that and as a scientist say, well, why would I feel that way? And I'm aware that it's my genes tricking me. Like it's me feeling parental feelings toward. And it's why we love kids like it I live I have a

view of this park where I live in Vancouver and my favorite part of the day is when there's an elementary school on the park and like four or five times a day kids I guess they must do their pee out in the park so they go I'll go out in the park and they run around. And I'm up on the 39th floor, so they're kind of small. So it's almost like Brownian motion, like watching molecules bounce around. I can hear them. You can't really see individuals.

But the motion of kids on a playground is so satisfying. There's like something beautiful about it. Right, just pure joy. Just pure joy. Yeah. They're so free in so many ways. They don't have responsibilities. They don't have. And here's the thing. Like people think that once you get wealthy that, you know, you can kind of have that same childlike joy because you don't have any responsibilities anymore or you don't have any

worries in terms of paying your bills. But that's nonsense. Yeah. It doesn't exist. It only exists in children and in people on ecstasy. Well, and that's because you're chemically making yourself a child again. Yeah. In some ways. Yeah. Yeah. So, so that desire and there's also, it's not just joy, but there's a feeling of wanting to protect that. Right. Um, there's a, you ever read Catcher in the Rye? Yeah. But I haven't since like high school. But that, you know, he wants to be a catcher in the rye where he's like protecting these kids playing in the field and making sure they don't run off the cliff. And, you know, that, that feeling of caring for all kids, like I, you know, I see kids in the airport. So my daughter is 14 now and she's a different,

she's now a quasi grownup and we have a very different relationship now because she's still a kid in some ways but she is negotiating being an independent person right and not being my kid anymore and having independent relationships and i do kind of miss when she was five you know and it was just i was her world and um and so that that intense feeling of loving kids and kind of appreciating kids having fun, you can experience it as a human. But the power of thinking scientifically is you can also abstract from it and understand where it came from. And then that gives you some understanding of how it can go wrong in some people, what the barriers are to it in some people.

So in the book what I'm trying to is, let's say we like to drink. Drinking makes us feel good. We like to hang out with friends and drink. Let's abstract away from that, which we all know, and think about scientifically, why would we want to do that? And getting a scientific understanding of why we would want to do that? And getting a scientific understanding of why we would want to do that then gives us the power to make better decisions. Because then we understand, you know, should we keep alcohol at public events, professional events? Maybe we should,

because, you know, within limits, it has certain functions. So I think putting on evolutionary or scientific spectacles to look at human behavior is valuable. Yeah, I completely agree. And I think we should strive to experience things that exist outside the common plane of existence, whatever they are. the common drone of, unfortunately, most people's lives in society because of the fact that most people are doing something that they probably wouldn't do if they weren't getting paid, and they're stuck in traffic, and they're on their way to an office where they have to deal with office politics, and maybe they have a boss that's not so thankful and appreciative and they have colleagues they don't necessarily enjoy

working with there's there's all these things that exist that are this common plane the common plane of existence when you get hammered with some good friends you jolt outside of that common plane and it gives you a little bit of perspective. And maybe you're sitting outside that bar, and it's 2 o'clock in the morning. You go to get some pizza with your friends. You're sitting there eating. You go, you know what? I'm going to fucking quit this job.

I'm done. And you go, are you serious, Tom? Like, dude, I'm going to quit this fucking job. I'm done. You know what I need to do? I need to save $20,000. If I can save $20,000, that can keep me going for five months. I need five months to get this shit going and this is what you need you need those

moments in life and maybe maybe maybe you get that from running a triathlon you know maybe you do that maybe you you get it from doing a yoga retreat or whatever the fuck it is something that takes you outside that common plane yeah you know and I think I've been very, very, very lucky that my interests all, they all lie outside the common plane. Yeah. But that's just dumb luck and fortune and the fact that I've, you know, I found myself in the right place and time.

But it's also because you pursue what you love. So it's not pure dumb luck. But it was dumb luck because i started doing it when i was young i started pursuing what i loved when i was 15 yeah i guess i had a lot of luck too so for for sure there's fortune involved in this right and i used to deny that too and i think that's very unhealthy to deny fortune you know like um you know obviously it's like so many things could have gone wrong and they do go wrong with people all the time. Where health things, circumstance. Or just random shit.

Random things. So like Martha, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum has a book on what she calls moral luck. And is trying to point out that a lot of our well-being, we have to recognize the extent to which our well-being depends on luck. And if we can do that, it enhances humility in a variety of ways. So, you know, I went out, you know, I used to in San Francisco, I would drink. I worked in this nightclub. I would drink all night, sometimes do hallucinogens. And then I would go joyride my motorcycle downtown because I like going up the really steep hills and going down the other side.

It's so fucking stupid. It's so stupid. I didn't die, right? And so I'm lucky. That's a funny kind of look. It's got to be the case that you and I have both driven. I guarantee you at some point in our lives, you and I have both been driving at over 0.08. And we didn't hit and kill someone. And other people, maybe they only did it once in their life, and then they hit and killed someone and their life is ruined.

So there's all these ways in which we were also born into a certain society where we had certain benefits and privileges. So I think that understanding privilege and luck is important for being humble and realizing that you didn't just do it know, do it because you pulled yourself up by your bootstraps. Oh yeah. Yeah. It is very, very important, but also it can be weaponized against you. Sure. That's a problem as well, because then you get involved with grifters who want to, you know, punish you for luck. I think that you should be humble whenever possible and understand that you're extremely fortunate just to be alive in 2021 especially to be alive and to be living in north america especially to be alive to be living in what is essentially the one percent of the population on earth if you make more than thirty

four thousand dollars a year yeah i mean that's that's hard for people to wrap their heads around but that's the real one percent when people want to talk about the 1%, you make $34,000 a year. You are in America, where we are right now. You make more money than most of the people alive. Yeah. 99% of the people alive are doing worse off than you, which is really interesting because people love to use that term, the 1%. Because fortune is relative.

If we look at someone like Jeff Bezos, we bro we show that guy and you look at the person you're talking to like hey man you make $75,000 a year it's crazy you know crazy you are to say that you wish you were that guy like you're alright man if you budget you're doing pretty good well this is a problem with humans is it's called the hedonic treadmill so we we have this built-in, we're built to be dissatisfied. This is a good example of how our interests and our genes' interests diverge. So our genes actually don't want us to be happy and just give up and kind of relax. They want us to be striving.

And so anything that's pleasurable becomes less pleasurable after a while. I got used to, when I was a grad student, I couldn't afford very good wine. So I kind of got good at enjoying whatever, Trader Joe's, a good deal from Trader Joe's. And then I became a professor. I had more money. I could afford better wine. Then I habituated on that better wine. And then if I was at a party and someone served me Trader Joe's two buck chuck, I'd be like, eh. And it's the same. But I enjoyed two buck chuck back then as much as I enjoyed this better wine now, probably. You just adjust it. You adjust, right? And so you're constantly adjusting your expectations to match your resources. And this makes, if I were my genes, I would make me that way too, because it keeps me striving and trying to get more out of that that hamster wheel of always pursuing the next thing and learning how to actually just be,

realize the value of what you have right now. Well that is the thing that people always pose, the question people always pose about someone like a Bill Gates. Like what keeps that guy working? Like why would he keep working when you have so much money? There's no way you could possibly spend it all. Because it's not really what it is.

It's this strange game. You're internally motivated, right? And there's an odd game. And in his defense, he's turned a lot of it towards philanthropy. But there's this weird game of acquiring currency. And that's the game you played your whole life. And we're built that way. Yeah. And there's good evidence that

your absolute wealth doesn't matter. It's your relative wealth. Yeah. And so you could, whatever, you're making $34,000, you're in the top 1%, but if everyone around you is making $100,000, you feel like shit.

Right, right, right. But if you're living in a place where very few people have any money, but everyone has enough to eat, you'd be amazed at how happy everybody is. Yeah. Right? And the amount of stress that we take on in keeping up with the Joneses versus the amount of pleasure that you get from the actual benefit of the success, boy, if you could look at it on a graph, you'd probably be like, oh, this is terrible. Yeah. And so this may be, I think this is, as you mentioned, like this is one of the functions of intoxicants, right? It gets you, it breaks you, you're on a

hamster wheel and your PFC is keeping you on, your prefrontal cortex is keeping you on that hamster wheel. Because it's about goal fulfillment. Here's a goal. Let's be self-controlled. Let's get that goal. So the PFC is keeping you on the hamster wheel. Intoxicants momentarily pop you off the hamster wheel.

You get drunk with your friends. You start to look at your life in a different way. And you're like, you know what? Actually, I fucking hate my job. And your friends are like, yeah, your job sucks. You should hate your job. You're miserable. We've seen you since high school. You've gotten more and more unhappy. You should quit your job. Like that conversation that that's people, especially good friends in a community helping you to get off the hamster wheel. That's not going to happen drinking coffee. No.

So that's what the job of these substances here, partly, I mean, it's got a lot of functions, but one function for individuals, I think, is helping to pop you off the hamster wheel for long enough that you get some perspective on, do I really want to do this? But like many other tools, there's inherent dangers involved. And if you want to use a bandsaw, you might cut off one of your fingers. Yeah. Or you might build a house. You might build a house. And building a house without a bandsaw would suck for a really long time, right? Exactly. That's a great way to look at it.

We need the tools. Yeah. Dude, I think we should wrap it up? Exactly. That's a great way to look at it. We need the tools. Dude, I think we should wrap it up with that. That's a perfect way to describe it. Hey, man, I really enjoyed this conversation. This was a lot of fun. I really, really did. Thank you. I'm sorry you're going to be tired for a day. I'll recover.

I got time. Yeah, I got some downtime built in. And your book is It's Drunk. It's available right now. It's available right now. Did you do the audio? No, my good friend Jordan did, though. Oh, as long as it's a friend. Someone I trust, yeah. I fucking hate when authors don't do it, but as long as it's a good friend. Oh god, no, someone I didn't know did my first book audio, and it's like painful listening to that. But no, my good friend Jordan did it.

All right, beautiful. Do you have social media? Yeah, so I'm on Twitter. What is it? At Slaterland20 on Twitter. What is it? At Slaterland20. Slaterland20? Sling is it at slaterland 20 slaterland 20 slingerland slingerland 20 yeah oh your name duh yeah basically people could just edwardslaterland.com listen to the way you say it though you hear the way he's saying it he's saying like slinnerland faster than he said a lot of times faster than i've had You would confuse a shit out of us How many buffalo traces are there in my Two We've had two drinks So yeah Edward Slingerland one word Slingerland

No Spell it out I'm from Jersey We just I'm from Jersey too man We make everything short How do you say drawer Drawer

I say draw Well listen I was born in Jersey but I lived there until I was seven There it is Great cover by the way

Yeah it's a good cover Alright So yeah Slingerland Okay S-L-I-N-G S-L-I-N-G Edward

Slingerland Dot com Is my website I really enjoyed our conversation Thank you very much Go get that book Fuckers Bye everybody

Thank you Thanks Thank you.