Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1663 - Edward Slingerland
Uploaded: 2021-06-08T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1663 - Edward Slingerland' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-06-08. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1663 - Edward Slingerland' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-06-08. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1663 - Edward Slingerland

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.
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 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 ui.
But they have this problem that I call the paradox of ui, 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 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.
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 what's happening when you're
trying not to try cognitively, you're activating the part of your brain that
you want to shut down.
Dan Wegner, 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 is 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 ui to someone who's
drunk.
They kind of lose a sense of their 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 ui.
You want to be spontaneous.
You want to be relaxed.
You want to just be loose.
But thinking about it, 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.
Super 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 for most, we've been drinking.
Thank you.
Cheers.
Cheers, yeah.
Let's try this.
Woo!
Yeah, that's nice.
That'll start your Monday morning off.
That'll start your Monday.
That's a way to start your Monday morning, yeah.
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.
Historically, that's typically what beers came in at.
Grape wines, you could get up to like 8% to 10%.
But there's a built-in limit to natural fermentation.
So the yeast are turning sugars into alcohol, which is a poison.
So the yeast are slowly poisoning themselves, basically.
And we've bred these super hardy yeasts.
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.
I mean, 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 got to be able, 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.
It's really, it's actually kind of dangerous.
So in Prohibition, when people created stills at home, it was like early 20th
century version
of meth labs, you know, they were constantly exploding and people were like
getting scalded
with hot liquid because it's really, it's 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 just so 10 million years ago, about 20,000 years ago to 13,000 years ago,
we start making
alcohol seriously, not just relying on fruit lying around that has some alcohol
in it.
And then distillation happens probably around 1300s in China and 15, 1600s in
Europe.
So that sounds like a long time ago, but really evolutionarily, it's yesterday.
We just, we really haven't had time culturally or genetically to adapt to
access to this 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?
Beer, unhopped beer, it goes bad pretty quickly.
It's like a couple of days, a couple of days.
Yeah.
There's a theory that beer might've been useful in some cultures because it
pure, fermenting
water purifies the water.
So if you've got bad water from a pond or something like that, 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, 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 in what's present-day Turkey, the site called Gobleke
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.
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.
Okay.
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.
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.
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.
They find that pretty fascinating.
I didn't know about that.
Yeah, there's some pretty cool shit to it.
And it's huge.
Yo