#1663 - Edward Slingerland

Edward Slingerland (0:04)

The Joe Rogan Experience.

That's a really good question. Like, my colleagues are flabbergasted when they see the topic. So my day job's 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, I translated it as effortless action. The word is wu wei.

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 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?

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 what's happened, when you're trying not to try, cognitively, you're activating the part of your brain that you want to shut down.

Dan Widener, the social psychologist, talked about what we call 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 standup 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 呆 to someone who's drunk. They kind of lose a sense of themselves, they're relaxed, they can bump into things and not harm themselves. And it's clear that that text is 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 呆. You wanna be spontaneous, you wanna be relaxed, you wanna just be loose, but thinking about it's not gonna get you there. Alcohol's 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.

Joe Rogan (3:33)

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.

Edward Slingerland (3:46)

Yeah, that's a problem. So that's why alcohol is super dangerous.

Especially that kind of alcohol, distilled liquor is super dangerous.

Joe Rogan (3:52)

Buffalo Trace. I feel like we should have a drink.

Edward Slingerland (3:54)

I think we would be remiss.

Joe Rogan (3:56)

We have to.

Edward Slingerland (3:56)

I think we're professionally obligated to drink. That's nice.

Joe Rogan (4:01)

If we're doing a podcast about drinking, it just makes sense we should have at least a small.

Edward Slingerland (4:05)

So historically, there's been a safety feature built into alcohol. So for most, we've been drinking, thank you. Cheers. Cheers, yeah. Yeah.

Joe Rogan (4:21)

Whoo!

Edward Slingerland (4:22)

Yeah, that's nice.

Joe Rogan (4:23)

I'll start your Monday morning off.

Edward Slingerland (4:24)

I'll start your Monday morning. There's a way to start a 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.

Joe Rogan (4:34)

Really?

Edward Slingerland (4:35)

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, grapes.