Edward Slingerland explores alcohol as a "cultural technology" in his book, linking it to ancient Chinese philosophy’s wui (effortless action) and hunter-gatherer sites like Göbekli Tepe (~12,000 years ago), where beer may have fostered social bonding. Distillation’s rise (1300s–1600s) enabled concentrated drinks like vodka, mismatched with human physiology, while genetic adaptations—such as the Asian flushing response—evolved to deter overuse. Psychedelics like Datura or LSD occasionally spark insights but lack ritual control, leading modern solitary drinking to spike disorders and violence. Slingerland argues academic "whiskey rooms" once boosted creativity through trust-building but now face prohibitionist backlash; Rogan counters that authentic connections—even with risks—break societal monotony better than superficial gains. [Automatically generated summary]
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 ui.
It literally means no doing or not trying, but it's a spontaneous, 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's just happening, you're not making any effort, and yet everything works perfectly.
You solve problems, people like you, everything works out.
And the early Chinese thinkers want to get you into this state of wui.
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? And 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.
It's 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 Daoist text, where Zhuangzi, this early Daoist thinker, compares the person who's in ui 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 wu-wei.
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.
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.
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.
And so 10 million years ago, about 20,000 years ago to 13,000 years ago, we started making alcohol seriously, not just relying on fruit lying around that has some alcohol in it.
And then distillation happens probably around 1300s in China and 1500s, 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?
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 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.
Yeah, I'm super familiar with it because of Graham Hancock who's been on my podcast multiple times.
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.
So when they did it, it sort of lent credence to some of his theories that civilization has gone through multiple periods of ascension and then resets, usually through catastrophic disasters like asteroid impacts.
So, his 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 what this stuff called...
It's 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 pass 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 dead in its tracks, and then there's a period of rebuilding.
This is just completely theoretical and very disputed because you're dealing with...
It's so long ago.
It's hard.
What evidence is there?
This was always the evidence against something like Gobekli Tepe.
Where'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.
Then sometime after that, we note that someone leaves their sourdough starter out too long and it starts to turn into beer and they're like, oh, this actually tastes all right.
That's the standard story.
So we had agriculture 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.
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 you see the same pattern in other parts of the world.
So in South America, they make this beer-like substance, chicha.
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.
And I think the Golden Triangle, it's called, this region in Turkey around 12,000 years ago, there's a carving from a site near Göbekli Tepe that has a picture.
It's a carving of a human dancing with these two dancing turtles.
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, right?
You're just trying to find food, you get food, you eat it, you try to keep neighboring tribes from coming in and stealing that food, 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 developmental psychologist at Berkeley.
And she's got this great task where 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 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.
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 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 open, right?
That's a good trait for some things.
also can't tie their frickin' shoes and get to school in the morning, right?
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, 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 Gopnik's work shows.
And so it would be awesome if you could be a grown-up and have a PFC and be able to get to work on time and do everything you need to do.
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.
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.
It just scared the shit out of me.
And I was a waiter.
I worked in the service industry in San Francisco, and I was finishing up a shift having a drink at the bar with a bartender and told him, yeah, I got to go do this lecture tomorrow.
I'm really nervous about it.
And he was like, dude, bring a flask and do a shot before you go out there.
And I was like, well, it's 1030 in the morning.
It doesn't matter.
Just do it.
And 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 try to be relaxed and funny?
Alcohol is doing a lot of things at the same time.
It's turning down your prefrontal cortex.
It's making you feel better, so it's boosting serotonin and endorphins.
It's making you feel...
People who are drunk think they're more attractive, and they see other people as more attractive.
So the beer goggles thing is 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 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, right?
We're—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'd 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.
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 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.
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 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.
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?
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.
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?
It's for like is your brain Like, are you occupying your mind with nonsensical concerns and worries and anxiety?
Is that a function of the fact that you don't have enough real threat and real struggle in your life?
And is doing something that's incredibly physically struggling, like seven hours on the elliptical machine, like that's so taxing that when it's over, your body doesn't have any time for any stupid nonsense.
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 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...
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 a hassle doing it other ways.
And so there's something to this chemical path that's always been appealing for people.
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.
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.
Cultures are suspicious of people who drink alone.
So we always do it in company with others.
Part of the reason we're suspicious of pleasure is mind-body dualism.
We have this kind of sense that If I want to get into a great state of mind, relaxed, open, friendly, loving people, if I do it through meditation, if I meditate for 10 hours and get there, 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.
Eliade was this famous religious studies scholar who wrote a lot on mysticism.
And he talks about these mystical states of ecstasy where people are feeling outside of themselves, no self, one with the universe.
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 – in a way, it kind of prejudices against the body.
The idea that you could be using chemicals to get to a state seems to us like cheating.
Well, I definitely think there's biodiversity in terms of the way your body responds to cannabis.
I've seen it.
And there's a guy, Alex Berenson, he was a writer for the, a journalist for the New York Times, and he wrote a book called Tell Your Children that's highly criticized by people that love cannabis.
But I had him on with this guy, Mike Hart, who is a doctor from Canada who prescribed cannabis.
And Alex's take on it was, 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.
Well, my job, it actually enhances our conversation, which leads to your book, right?
But this guy, Alex Berenson, he's like a lot of people resisted that.
And I was like, no, I think he's right.
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.
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.
And I think we have to be honest about the effects of cannabis because they're different with everybody else.
It produces, 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.
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, There was a restaurant...
Where was it?
Colorado?
There was a restaurant that was making marijuana food.
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.
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.
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 I think people know that 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 turn red.
They would start to get heart palpitations.
They would feel nauseous.
That first drink you poured me, about two sips in, they would stop drinking because they would start feeling really uncomfortable.
Why East Asia?
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.
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 acid aldehyde 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.
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.
Now, one of the theories about Native Americans is that they didn't have alcohol as a part of their culture until the Europeans came in the 13th century or whatever.
When they started introducing them to alcohol, they didn't have the genes for it.
I wonder if you really can, through chemicals, for a brief moment of time, take a poke, just take a peek into a neighboring dimension and experience some sort, like a chemical gateway into, like we know that there's more, there's more to the universe than what we can observe.
Like, if you wave your hand over the top of an earthworm, it has no idea you're there.
How many of those senses do we lack?
How many senses to perceive things that exist but that for whatever reason we don't have the instruments to pick up?
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.
So he thinks one of his 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.
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.
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...
You can't point to any particular bit of empirical evidence that rules it out.
But the kind of stuff that sways me is 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 anything, first of all, ontologically, like really in the world, separate from the brain.
And it's 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.
You're like, I can't believe I'm playing something on the TV. I'm making the TV move.
But now you get Call of Duty and it's like way more engrossing and Halo and all these crazy games.
If you extrapolate that with this sort of HTC Vive or Oculus technology, you would imagine that one day there's going to be an artificial reality that's indiscernible from regular reality.
When you talk to people like Elon Musk about Neuralink, right?
And they're going to essentially wire your brain.
They're going to reach areas of your brain and stimulate them with some sort of energy, electricity.
I don't know what they're doing to do that.
It hasn't been really clearly demonstrated how exactly.
They're planning on ramping this up into the future.
But one of the things that Elon said to me, you're going to be able to communicate without words.
Which is kind of terrifying, but also fascinating.
I'm not sure I would like that.
I would imagine that 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?
Nick Bollstrom, who is another guy who broke my brain, who was on the podcast, was arguing that according to probability theory, we are in a simulation.
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.
If you could do simulation, what do you think Westworld is?
The show Westworld is you're going back and living like it's 1840. And that's really engrossing for people.
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.
It has lighting effects due to the sun traveling over the place.
I mean, it's fucking incredible.
And look at the textures and the details of this.
They're so close.
They're really, really close.
But, you know, again, if you look forward, if you see this, you sort of extrapolate and say, okay, well, what will this be like a thousand years from now?
Well, then you're going to feel things and smell things, and that is certainly inside the realm of what you can imagine.
Especially when you can see something like this, where they can have the sun moving across the sky and changing Changing all the shadows.
People have weird little sort of herky-jerky variabilities, and she's This is even easier for us to now.
We could mo-cap you, Joe, and get your body movements in there in probably an hour, less than an hour, half an hour, and it would be Joe's movements, Joe's kicking and walking and jumping.
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.
But the point is, they put you in a haptic feedback vest, and they give you these goggles, and you have this gun, like this plastic gun, and these zombies come running at you, and when they grab you, you feel it in your chest.
It's very crude, but it gives you this, it gives you just enough of a jolt where it makes it extra fun.
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.
The Matrix when it came out was crazy.
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.
The books are more in-depth and more than the movie was even capable of doing, because the IP, I guess they would have had to pay for, which is impossible, and what they were doing.
They were inserting people into 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 fail, had to restart again.
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?
You dream about a thing and you think it's real and you cry and you get scared and you feel these emotions and then you wake up and you realize it was just a dream.
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.
Sure.
But?
It's Occam's razor.
What's the most parsimonious explanation that we have?
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.
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.
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 going blank and disappearing and traveling to wherever the fuck the mind goes to while the body just lays there prone.
It's odd.
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.
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.
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 George Lloyd hitting me with a snow shovel.
Well, that's one of the things that people always say about psychedelic experiences, in that in describing the psychedelic experience, you then become attached to the narrative of the description of the psychedelic experience.
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're literally helpless without tools.
So 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 or 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.
And so humans need tools, and we need constantly evolving tools because the environment's changing.
Even if the environment's 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 Paulin'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 or 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 was a PhD 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 fucking solved it.
And then the next day I looked at it.
I was like, oh yeah, I probably won't publish this.
So most of what comes out of trips is complete nonsense.
But maybe there was a kernel of information there.
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.
Was there something that had to do with your confidence and having achieved some sort of revelation that maybe you were trying to seek this same thing or find some sort of understanding about your own personal life and you chose to do it through a proxy?
Like you tried to seek it out through this thing and thinking that if I saw...
I think Paulin's right that psychedelics are scrambling stuff, but then every once in a while something really cool and new comes out.
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.
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.
They can, but I mean traditionally in cultures 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 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 anymore.
We need some insights.
And so we go to the shaman and we say, what have we done wrong?
Why 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 there'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 in the culture.
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 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, You getting more insight into stuff is not going to be very helpful.
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?
Yeah.
There's a place for everybody in this strange, weird soup of humanity.
And I'm always very wary when people dismiss certain things as being trivial or certain experiences being non-necessary.
I don't think...
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 I was younger, when I first started taking psychedelics, like early in my 30s, 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.
But one thing that I've gotten out of it, for sure, is to be more open to the idea that everyone is going through a different experience.
I've had people say, I couldn't imagine being a fireman, or I couldn't imagine being a musician singing on stage in front of all those people, or I couldn't imagine being a professor giving a lecture in front of all those people.
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.
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've figured this out about the world.
But I've always figured out that part about the world like how it works for me with my peculiar genetics and my peculiar life experiences and sensitivities or lack thereof.
It helps you because you're an integral part of the tribe.
Yeah, so there may be group-level effects, and there's clearly an effect where if I'm in a culture where introverts are rare, There's going to be a marginal advantage to being an introvert because I can bring things to the group that other people can't.
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.
One of the things that is unfortunately happening is that we've become so kind and compassionate that we've allowed certain personality traits and certain people to exist unchecked.
And certainly not talking about introverts, but I am talking about sloths.
You know, we've allowed a lot of, 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.
Who knows what happened to them.
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.
People fuck me over.
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, How many of us have people like that in our lives?
I know quite a few friends that will tell you, I am too nice, I have too many people that are trying to take advantage of me, and they're always doing this, they're always doing that, and they want this, they want that, and they're always selfish.
I think that's the same thing with our culture.
There's people that don't want to contribute, and they don't want to be a part of society in any meaningful way, but they think the society owes them something.
And that has accelerated in modern times because we've placed value on being compassionate and being kind.
Yeah.
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 street.
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.
My friend 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.
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.
You would – in a lot of cultures, when you drink, there's a kind of toastmaster or someone who's in charge of the pace at which you're drinking.
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.
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, you know, cannabis probably, you know, and some Cheetos, whatever.
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 evolutionary-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 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.
But 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.
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.
But this has been hardest on, like, my daughter is 14. And that age group, it's been brutal for them because this is the time when they just want to be out with their friends, socializing.
Well, one just turned 11 and one turned 13. These young kids that I have that are experiencing this weird new life, it was way more troubling in California because people had a different approach to it.
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.
So my kids, like, we were on a lake out here in May and 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?
Where, like, two months of this shit where you're locked in home worried about an invisible demon that's floating through the air and taking people's lives.
Yeah, there's a deterioration when you get 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.
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!
That's amazing that it's coding.
Supposedly he kept himself hooked up to an IV. It's almost certainly bullshit.
I don't know if it's bullshit.
It captures this idea that alcohol is a tool that can help you solve creativity problems.
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 now.
I can't get anything in Canada.
Really?
Why not?
Yeah, because everything's like 200% tax on alcohol.
So anyway, I was salivating 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.
This has happened to me in academic situations where we came up with this multi-million dollar grant to study the evolution of religion at UBC years and years ago.
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.
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 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.
Right.
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.
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.
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.
One solution is ban it, which is the current 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.
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 a 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.
And it's a standard thing.
But if you get the wrong person in that mix, and we've had a few of those guys, the wrong person gets in that mix, and all of a sudden they have shark eyes, and they go blank, and then the next thing you know, they're naked and sliding across the top of the bar, right?
You know that guy, and that's the 15% that you were talking about.
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?
I have friends that I know that can't have two drinks.
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.
So when I was in grad school, especially once I got to a point where I wasn't taking classes anymore, my job, like when I was preparing for my comp exams, my job was to sit in my apartment alone and read things and take notes on them.
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.
I would banter with customers.
I would have some drinks with my colleagues at the end of the day.
I was much more introverted when I was a kid, much more so to the point where when I was young, in my early 20s, and I'd have to go to the bank, I would get anxiety that I had to talk to the bank teller.
I 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.
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.
Yeah.
Having people like that where I'd studied his work and read some of his books and I got a chance to, all of a sudden I'm sitting down talking to this guy who I deeply admire, I can just start asking him questions.
And my whole life has been essentially completely non-conventional in terms of my choices.
But it's all been authentic in that these are the things.
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.
And sometimes it gets me in trouble because people assume that if I talk to someone who's like some hardcore right-wing person that I share their beliefs.
I want to know what they're thinking and I think it's valuable to hear their voice and I think it's dangerous to not hear their voice.
I think we're in this weird polarizing time where people are scared to talk to someone who has differing opinions than they do because they're worried that people will Their tribe is going to punish them.
Yeah, but that is what happens, and it's because of social media and people without this core tenant of empathy, which I think is one of the most important things that we can have, and I think we should all...
Again, no one's perfect.
I'm not perfect.
I've fucked this up many times, but I think we should generally lean towards empathy as much as we can.
And so 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 where we're very different like all of my choices I know that all my choices are fucked up like if I had if I was a different person and I said okay well here's your life here's your schedule you know you have to commentate a cage fighting match and then you have to go talking on stage in front of thousands of people and then you have to do this podcast where you're speaking you know about something you really don't even know what you're talking about and you're You're asking questions to someone who
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 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.
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 is doing great, it's actually good for you.
When you're genuinely happy for your friends, it's actually mutually beneficial.
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.
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.
People think that once you get wealthy that you can kind of have that same childlike joy because you don't have any responsibilities anymore or you don't have any worries in terms of paying your bills.
But he wants to be a catcher in the rye where he's protecting these kids playing in the field, making sure they don't run off the cliff.
That feeling of caring for all kids.
I see kids in the airport.
My daughter is 14 now.
She's now a quasi-grown-up.
We have a very different relationship now.
She's still a kid in some ways, but she is negotiating being an independent person and not being my kid anymore and having independent relationships.
And I do kind of miss when she was five.
I was her world.
And so that intense feeling of loving kids and kind of appreciating kids having fun, you can experience it as a human, but the power of thinking scientifically is you can also abstract from it and understand where it came from.
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 that's what in the book what I'm trying to do 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 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.
And I think we should strive to experience things that exist outside the common plane of existence, whatever they are.
I think the common drone of, unfortunately, most people's lives in society, because of the fact that most people are Doing something that they probably wouldn't do if they weren't getting paid and they're stuck in traffic and they're on their way to an office where they have to deal with office politics and maybe they have a boss that's not so thankful and appreciative and they have colleagues
they don't necessarily enjoy working with.
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, you know, 2 o'clock in the morning, you go to get some pizza with your friends and you're sitting there eating and you go, you know what?
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.
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.08.
Right?
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 because you pulled yourself up by your bootstraps.
That's a problem as well because then you get involved with grifters who want to 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 1% of the population on Earth if you make more than $34,000 a year.
I mean, that's hard for people to wrap their heads around, but that's the real 1%.
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.
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're like, Bro, I wish I was that guy.
And you look at the person you're talking to, like, hey man, you make $75,000 a year.
And so you're constantly adjusting your expectations to match your resources individually.
And if I were my genes, I would make me that way too because it keeps me striving and trying to get more stuff.
But as a human, it sucks.
And so a lot of the religious traditions of the world are focused on trying to get us out of that hamster wheel of always pursuing the next thing and learning how to actually just realize the value of what you have right now.
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.
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...