Edward Slingerland on Intoxication & Civilization

to use any type of drugs. Hello, Psychoactive listeners. So I'll tell you one of the most frequent comments or suggestions I've gotten from friends and other listeners since I started the podcast over a year ago was what about alcohol? What about booze? You haven't done any episodes on that, and that's got to be, you know, in some respects, one of the you know, biggest drugs of them all.

And so I thought the best way to have a first episode that addresses the issue of alcohol would be with Professor Edward Slingerland, who published a book last year called Drunk. The subtitle is How We sit, danced, and

stumbled our way to Civilization. Now. Edward is the Distinguished University's Scholar and Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia and Canada, with adject deployments in Asian studies and psychology, and he's a co director of the Center for the Study of Human Evolution, Cognition and Culture and

director of the Database of Religious History. He's also a sinologist, which means he's not an expert in sinus as he's an expert in china um and that's a lot of his more academic writing, although this is quite an academic book in its own way as well. So I just thought he would be a wonderful interest. Edward, thank you so much for joining me on Psychoactive. Thanks for having me. So what would be the elevator? Pitch the basic argument

of your book in a few sentences. We've long been told that our taste for alcohol and other chemical intoxicants is an evolutionary mistake, and that's not the case. And in fact, there are a host of both individual and social benefits to intoxican use, and these benefits have paid for the obvious costs. So so alcohol consumption is costly, it's it's bad for our bodies. It can lead to

all sorts of social ills, um. But the taste for alcohol has remained in our both genetic and cultural repertoire because of these various individual and social benefits that have been trucial in allowing human beings to make the transition from small scale hunter gatherer societies to these large civilizations

that we live in now. And so, you know, far from being a byproduct or a mistake, intoxication has been at the center of civilization, um for as long as as human beings have been doing anything in an organized fashion as a species. Let me go say the audience, stead of all the books I've read, uh for this podcast, this has to be easily the most enjoyable read. It's not just scholarly and thoughtful, but it's written with an incredible sense of humor and a dry witticisms, and it's

just a pleasure. And one of those little lines that Edward uses at the beginning is he says people like to masturbate. They also like to get drunk and eat twinkies, not typically all at the same time, but that's a matter of personal preference. So why Edward, why is that line right at the top of your book. Well, first of all, that line was written at probably about point oh eight blood alcohol content. So I had been working

on the book proposal. I had written ten versions of it, I think, and my every time my agent would send it back and she's just like boring. Zache read to it and she and she was right. So I had, Um, you know, I had all the science and it all history. The arguments were there, but it was a very kind of plotting aid to B two. See, you know this is a puzzle. This is why it's interesting. Um, it

didn't draw you in. And I realized, oh, you know what, I haven't taken my own advice in the book, which is that if you need a creative insight or you need something new, you need to drink a little bit. So I was on a conference trip. This was pretty pandemic, and I had a couple of hours before I was meeting my colleagues for dinner. So I took my laptop down to the hotel bar and ordered myself a Negroni And by the end of that Negroni, it felt like

I was taking dictation. So that line came to me, and then the rest of that what's now pages one to two of the book just appeared in my head and I just wrote it down. You know, I needed something to draw people in and get them hooked. You know, I start with masturbation and junk food, just because the standard story has been that, you know, alcohol is just like those things, It's just like these other vices. It's

a kind of evolutionary mistake. And the main motive for writing Drunk was to point out that that's not the case. Our our taste for alcohol and other chemical intoxicants is actually qualitatively different from vices like junk food or masturbation.

And it's important to realize that because we can't understand um why it's been so central to civilization with without realizing that that dis analogy, right, I think you you make the analogy partially in the context of saying, there are two major theories about why alcohol has been so prevalent and survived for thousands of years among humankind, notwithstanding

its abundant negative consequences. And you see, there's a hijack theory and a hangover theory, and you kind of disabuse readers of both, so say a little more about that. So hijack theories argue that alcohol is just the ethanol molecule just happens to hijack a reward network that evolved for other reasons, and so that's where masturbation comes in.

Masturbations a classic example of the hijack. So um evolution gives us this awesome reward, the orgasm, for the thing that it most wants us to do, which is pass on copies of our genes to the next generation. So the adaptive target of the orgasm is reproductive sex, and yet humans and other organisms have figured out all sorts of wildly nonreproductive ways to get that reward. So that's a classic hijack. We're getting the reward even though we're

not doing the thing it's supposed to be. For the reason evolution lets us get away with that is because it's not very costly. Despite what you might have been told when you were younger, masturbation doesn't cause you to go blind. It's pretty physiologically negligible in terms of its cost, and the basic system works right. Um evolution is not into perfection, it's into a broke don't fix it. So this is it works well enough um the other type. So that's the dominant story. If you open a psych

one on one textbook. It's going to tell you that's why we we like to drink this this hijack theory. Um mismatches are a different type of evolutionary mistakes. So this is where something was adaptive in our evolutionary past but is not adaptive now, and that's where the twinkies come in. So junk food is a classic example of this.

So having a taste for sugar and fat and wanting to gorge on sugar and fat when we come across it has historically been a very adaptive trait in humans because those things were in short supply and you should gorge on them when you find them. It really only becomes a problem quite very recently in history when we live in these affluent industrial societies where we have access to twinkies and junk food and all sorts of bad things, and it's very costly, So unlike masturbation, it's actually very

bad physiologically. It's to obesity and diabetes and all these problems. But it's a very recent problem and it's still not universal, so there's still plenty of places in the world where getting enough calories is a challenge. So here's a case where um it's it is costly, but it's so recent and geographically localized that evolution hasn't had time to deal with it. So when it comes to alcohol, the problem

is it's not like either one of those things. So it did evolve for a good reason, but now things have changed and it's it's not adaptive. So unlike masturbation, alcohol is very costly physiologically, it's physiologically dangerous, it's economically costly. Unlike junk food, it's ancient. We've been producing and consuming alcohol all over the world, um for you know, probably at least twenty thousand years, probably much longer. So it's

an ancient problem. So evolutions had plenty of time to deal with it, um if it were actually a mismatched type of mistake. And so UM I argue in the book that given the ubiquity and the costliness and the ancientness of our taste for alcohol, there's got to be

something else going on. There have to be some adaptive benefits that are paying for the costs, and so probably the bulk of the book is dedicated to walking readers through both you know, what the challenges are that we face as species, as humans and then how alcohol might

be giving us these adaptive benefits. Right, So, in the book, I mean, you make this fascinating set of arguments about why alcohol and how alcohol has been essential in human evolution, and then bring it up to the present day, which we'll get to later. And you also want to say, we could not have civilization without intoxications. And now without understanding the evolutionary dynamics of intoxic in use, we cannot even begin to think clearly or effectively about the role

in toxic cannon should play in our lives today. So when you say, you know, we could not have civilization without intoxication, it's a bold statement. Say more about that, well, and there's one sense in which, quite literally, intoxication probably gave rise to civilization. So so one thing I'm trying to flip on its head in the book is the standard story that I had learned, which is that our production of alcohol is kind of a mistake. So it's

an evolutionary mistake that we like to drink. And then the fact that we make alcoholic beverages is a kind of byproduct of civilization and agriculture. So the standard story is, you know, we got agriculture, we started civilization and then at some point are you know, excess production. We decided to play around with a little bit and discovered we

could make beer and wine and things like that. Um. When I started to look at the archaeological record, when I started doing the research for the book, I realized that the it's almost certainly the case that it's the other way around. So in the book I talked about this beer before bread hypothesis. So if we want to talk about the Fertile Crescent, so the mid East where probably where agriculture first started, we see these hunter gatherers

coming together, building this massive religious architecture. We don't know what it's for, exactly what they did there, having these feasts, So we have the remains of feasts and then drinking liquids, and they have these big vats that held liquids, and maybe they were drinking sparkling water, but it's really unlikely. Um. We don't have direct chemical evidence from the one site that I talked about in the book, Gobeck Late Tepe, but we know that people were making beer in the region. Um,

we have evidence from thirteen thousand years ago. So this is the Psyche Cobeck Late Tepe is ten tend to twelve thousand years old, way before agriculture we did. We don't have agriculture yet in that region, and yet hunter gatherers are coming together and and brewing beer. And so the idea is that, um, what motivated hunter gatherers to then start settling down and cultivating crops and making them more productive was the desire to make more and better beer,

not to make bread. It wasn't for nutrition, it was for psychoactive reasons. And then you know, I look at evidence from other parts of the world that wherever you look, it seems like the first cultivated plants were chosen for their psychoactive properties, not for a new trition. And so that's a sense in which quite literally the desire to get intoxicated gave rise to civilization. It's what caused hunter gatherers to settle down in the first place. You know,

you reminded me, Edward. You know, when I've over the decades as I've been speaking around the world around drug policy or reform, and I put, you know, oftimes make the point that there's, you know, almost never been a drug free society and human history, UM, which is a relatively few exceptions, and that if you look about it, whether you're looking at alcohol, you know you have basically hunter gatherer tribes living in remote areas, oftentimes with no

contact with other societies, who somehow figure out alcohol. And it seems like you have cultures figuring this out independently, and somewhat the same thing happens with some of the psychedelic plants, and so it sounds like that's partially what you're saying that. So why why do you think the agricultural hypothesis that alcohol came with agriculture became so dominant? I mean, wasn't there enough evidence even before these theories of the agricultural impetus for for alcohol. I don't know

if we had some of this data. So we didn't. Um, we didn't have sites like go Beckley Teppe back then. Um, we didn't have some of this more recent work. We have evidence now and very this is very recent of beer making thirteen thousand years ago in present day Israel. So I think partly it was we didn't have the data. We didn't we hadn't discovered some of these sites. But I also think it's um, it's part of this broader prejudice. Or kind of weird. Um. I call it a kind

of neo pured in blind spot in scholarship. So you see it in religious studies. So that's my my PhDs and religious studies. And let's say we're talking about ritual Um, we talked about you know, synchrony and singing and music and maybe sleep deprivation or how people are using pain you know, painful activities and rituals to enhance their their mood or feeling of bonding. And what no one ever talks about out is these people are often high as

hell when they're doing this. Yeah, and so um, it's this weird blind spot where we're fine talking about piercing and scarification and sleep deprivation, but you want to start talking about psychedelics or about alcohol use, and people get really oddly queasy. I talked in the book about some of the seminal figures in religious studies. So merch Aliata,

who wrote this classic big book on shamanism. Um, you know he's got this whatever, seven eight page book on shamanism, and I think he mentions chemical and toxicans two or three times, and always in a negative way. Um, you know this is kind of fake shamanism is when you're using psychedelics. So there's just it's a weird lacuna in scholarship, and I think it has to do with this kind of this odd puritanism where we don't like to talk

about chemical on toxicans. I mean, at one point you make the argument fact that it's those societies which most integrated alcohol, including getting raucously drunk, that ended up being the more successful ones. Now I was wondering, as I'm reading your book, do you actually have a decent control group that you're comparing all this too and making that statement. But you provide a lot of good examples of that.

So in terms of control groups, UM, the control group is the extinct cultures that we don't know about because they didn't they lost the competition. I mean, that's one of the connections of this book with my earlier work. So I did UM in cognitive science Evolution of Religion. I was involved in a large research group that was trying to explain, you know, what this mysterious thing we do,

which is religion. So you look all over the world and you see people worshiping invisible beings and you know, piercing themselves and do engaging in these painful rituals and cutting off the foreskin of their penis and um, refraining from eating delicious poor and shellfish, and and building these massive, useless monuments. So um. You know what really got me thinking about religion in this way was the first Emperor

of Chin's tomb. I don't know those people were familiar with this terra cotta army they discovered in China's as the person who unified China. Um massive fake army made out of terra cotta, individually made, each soldier carrying real weapons, and then lots of real wealth was thrown in the ground. Gold and these labor bronze vessels, Horses were killed, people were killed and thrown in the pit, and then they buried it all in the grounds for this dead guy

in the afterlife. And I remember when I first kind of learned about that site and realized how much of the gross national product of the state of Chin went into that tomb. You know, I thought this was a period when these these states were in brutal competition with one another. Why isn't the case that there was a state as powerful as Chin, But instead of building a

fake terra cotta army. They built a real army, and instead of throwing all this wealth in the ground, they used the labor to you know, build more effective city walls and do practical things. Why did they not outcompete this culture that was throwing all this wealth in the ground. And the answer has to be there has to be some adaptive benefits to doing that kind of crazy stuff. Um. And so you know, we explored how these kind of costly displays and um sacrifices helped to build solidarity and

and get people past cooperation problems. And I think the same is true of alcohol. You know, an ancient sumer, it's estimated they took half of their grain and turned it into beer. So they're taking really nutritious stuff that could make into bread and turning it into a liquid neurotoxin. Essentially, you would think that groups that didn't do that would out compete groups that did um, that just kept all

their grain for nutrition. And yet that's not the case, because we see that the cultures that survive use psychoactives in this way, So it's got to be doing something for us. Well, let me just stop you one second. I remember hearing reading that if you look in American history, the period when we had the highest levels of alcohol consumption in American history. We're back at the origins in

the late at late eighteenth century, early nineteenth century. But that also one of the factors was that it was that turning alcohol into grain was a good way of preserving it, a good way of transporting it. So that you know, yes, there are these arguments for drinking and then all this, and and there's the arguments about it being safer than water when water was impure, but also easier to preserve and to transport. So how do those things figure into all this? So those are kind of

in the mix of the various mismatch theories. So one of the mismatch theories is the dirty water hypoth This so um, you know, contaminated water has been a problem for most of our history. Is a species. If you take contaminated water and fermented into beer, it becomes possible. So that's one of the mismatch theories is that it was, you know, our taste for alcohol was adaptive in our evolutionary paths because it helped us hydrate in situations where

the water was contaminated. Um. The problem with that theory is that there are lots of ways to to fix contaminated water, including just boiling it. And boiling it is a lot easier than turning it into beer, um, and doesn't have the downsides of you know, the negative physiological impacts that beer it could have. Another of the theories is calorie storage. The problem again, problem with this one is we think while you turn into beer and it

lasts for a really long time, that's actually not true. Um. That's true now because we have hops and other ways to preserve beers, but most historically made beer is actually spoiled quite quickly. Like chea cha beer made out of maize in South America, I think has to be consumed within two or three days. Um, So it actually doesn't last that long. When you're thinking about the American frontier, what you have in mind is distilled spirits, and that

is a really good way to preserve things. Distilled spirits last for a really long time. They're relatively easy to transport because you're packing a lot of ethanol in a small package. Um. But distilled spirits are relatively recent thing too. As I point out in the book, they're really in Europe, really only seventeen hundreds that we had these. But yeah, once you get distilled spirits, you can now preserve your grains in a way that um is not only long lasting,

but compact and easy to transport and trade. And so alcohol really becomes a different type of thing once we figure out distillation. But that can't be part of the story if we're talking about, you know, some behavior that started twenty tho years ago. We'll be talking more after we hear this ad part of the way you also frame this thing, and this gets into i think a

little more. The meat of the argument is you frame some of this is a struggle between two Greek gods, between Apollo on the one hand and Dionysius on the other hand. So lay that out for our audience. Yeah, so Apolo. One way to look at this is Apollo is the god of the prefrontal cortex. So I talked the prefrontal cortex plays a big role in my book. It's really important part of the human being, right, whether it's very physiologically expensive. We wouldn't have it if it

wasn't doing something important. You need it to control your behavior, you need it to be ordered. So you know, a Paulo is the god of order, kind of doing things the right way, symmetry control, you know, it's about control, and the PFC is the center of cognitive control of executive functions. What allows you to um suppress desires or um stay focused on a task and not get distracted. It's what allows you to persevere in the face of

you know, tiredness or boredom. It's everything that a four year old doesn't have, UM, but that a successful adult has to have. And civilizations need this. We couldn't build civilization without this kind of UM, perseverance, focus, self control, and that's all the realm of Apollo. The friends of Apollo chemically are stimulants, so things like caffeine and nicotine, you know, they strengthen our ability to focus and stay

on task. But the Greeks, you know, and the Greeks thought Apollo was really important, but they also worshiped Dionysius, and so UM. You know, Dionysius is the the god that comes out when we thrown the PFC or turn it down a few notches. Dionysus is more like our childlike cells um, so creative, trusting, open to new experience,

willing to try anything, engaged in play. Kids are like this, and adults can be like that temporarily when they essentially reverse uh cognitive maturation and go turn the PFC down and go back to being like like they were when they were little. And what's interesting the reason I find Dionysius useful in the book is the Greeks worshiped Dionysius is a god and recognize the importance of both Apollo and Dionysis, But there were a lot were more worried

about Dionysius than a followed. He's Um, dionys is a little bit scary. Um. He's worshiped as a god, but they're wary of him. And it's I think significant, and that the gifts that that Dionysius can give you can go wrong if you're not careful. They're often two sided. So Dionysus is the one who gave for instance, Midas

the Golden Touch, which didn't work out very well for him. Um. So they respected and worshiped Dionysius, but they also saw the dangers there, and I think that's the right attitude to have. Tour Chemical intoxicans in general and alcohol in particular, is respecting its power, seeing that it's important part of our lives, but also being aware that I can turn you into an animal like like Dionysus. Good you know it.

Recently did an episode with a German writer, normanal Or what a book called Blitz about how the German army was so successful, especially in the Blitzkrieg over Belgian, Netherlands and France, because of the use of meth amphetamy and in all their drug use. There's almost no discussion of the role of alcohol um in modern day the value from modern day armies. So say more about the war fighting abilities of of uh, you know, alcohol and why alcohol was seen as a friend to that more than

an enemy. Well, the crucial thing to get soldiers to fight effectively and your army to be cohesive and effective is getting people to trust each other. Right. I argue in the book that one of the central features of human life, especially in larger scale societies, is the fact that we have to overcome these cooperation dilemmas. They go by various names prisoners dilemma, tragedy of the commons, but the common structure is we we all do best if we trust each other and and if we don't pursue

our im mediate selfish self interest. If we can do that, we actually all end up better in the end. I mean this happens all the time in life, mundane situations like helping your friend and move a couch when he's moving. Um, you kind of the most dramatic example is war. Right, You're literally sacrificing the most important thing your life for

these other people. And so UM, armies are effective to the degree to which they can form these cohesive groups that trust one another and operate well together as a as a unit. And and how do you do that? You look at one an army attacking another army, especially in the pre modern period, UM, the first thing that comes to mind is like ant armies fighting, or you know, you see humans cooperating on a scale that looks like social insects and sacrificing themselves in a way that looks

like social insects. We know how social insects pull that off. It's because they're all genetically the same. They all they're basically one big superorganism. It's puzzling how primates pull that off, because we are not one big superorganism. Um, we're individual primates with primate biology, and yet we behave like social insects sometimes, and the key to that is things like religion,

So religions doing some of that work. But another really crucial um cultural technology that we use to forge individuals into cohesive trusting units is alcohol and other intoxicans. So you know, we get drunk together, we are down regulating

our PFC, so we um we're less able to lie. So, you know, lying or trying to trick another person into trusting you when you're not really trustworthy is a really cognitively demanding task because at the same time, you have to keep in your mind both what the truth is, which you know to be the truth, and then the

fake thing you're telling this person. You've got to make all your facial expressions and emotional reactions fit the fake thing, and you have to suppress any that that applied to the real thing that you don't want them to know about. It's really very PFC heavy task. If you hit the PFC with some methanol, it really impairs your ability to do that. And so you bring people together, you get them impaired cognitively so that they can't lie, they or it's harder for them to lie or act in an

untrustworthy way. Your simultaneously boosting endorphins and sarahtonin these kind of social bonding hormones that make you feel good about yourself but also make you feel good about others and feel connected to others. This is how you forge individuals into super organisms, and at least temporarily, and so you can see why throughout history militaries have used this technique for for forging individuals into units and then also giving them.

You know, the other thing alcohol does is make you reckless, um, and that that's you need a little recklessness if you're going to be fighting against other people. So it reduces um magdola response, it reduces fear, reduces stress, um. The I think militaries have always seen as crucial, and I think that's really only changed recently when warfares become more technical. So alcohol was crucial when we were picking up swords

and rushing into battle to fight other people. Um, It's less helpful when I'm sitting in a control room trying to pilot a drone. So I think that's one of the reasons that we don't see it as much in modern armies, just because the nature of warfare has really you know, it is interesting right, because I firstually you have this great line in the book that those who puked together stay together. I guess that's in some sense of good some nation what you just said. But I'm

thinking about the Navy Seals. I think you mentioned them in the book, and that's you know, one of the great military elite military units in the US in the world, but just recently has been the news because of all the abuses. And that's obviously one where you know, the commanders want their you know, their Navy Seals not just to survive all sorts of brutal forms of training. They want them to get drunk to bond. But then the question is all of that somehow linked to some of

the abusive stuff we've also seen there or not? Yeah, yeah, so they you know, the Navy Seals are on an organization that's not sitting in a control room by autting drones right there doing really physical, dangerous stuff that looks

a lot more like more traditional types of warfare. And so, um, I tell that story about this this Navy Seal commander who after training would take all the group out and get them really drunk, and there's a level of intoxication that you get in UM business meetings or treaty meetings that's more moderate, and that's you know, dealing with this

kind of building trust thing. There's a level of inebriation, especially once you get distilled spirits, where it's going beyond UM so much intoxication per se and becoming more of a costly signal UM. It's almost like you know, scarifying yourself or doing something painful. It's the fact that you're hurting yourself and you know you're gonna be really in bad shape the next morning, but we're all doing it together and we're all doing it voluntarily. That shows that

you're one of the group. So it becomes a kind of hazing. It's a it's a form of hazing really and you can see how that both could be useful in building UM a sense of belonging and a sense of group bonding, but could very easily tip over into abuse. And so that's the nice edge that you're walking when when you're using these type of hazing techniques which all

cultures have used. I mean, there's all sorts of initiation rituals that you know often involve huge quantities of intoxic ins and then often physical pain or danger or fear to get people to bond, and it's a it's a delicate balance to get enough of that so the bonding

happens without tipping over into abuse or arm. Groups that don't use intoxicans, either because they don't have them they live in an extreme environment where it's hard to make them, or they banned them for religious theological reasons, tend to

substitute other practices that get you to the same place. UM. So I talk about the Pentecostals who don't drink, but they have these prayer sessions where they work themselves up into these frenzies where they start you know, falling the floor and start speaking in tongues, or they handle snakes, so they have the same effect and kind of down regulating the PFC and and boosting some of these feel

good hormones. So groups can use that instead. It's just that that's really you know, I think, as I may put it this way in the book, is it's kind of a hassle, Like staying up all night singing and dancing is really time consuming and difficult. Um And so there's a good reason that most cultures are like, yeah, we could do that, but why don't instead we just sit around and drink beer. So there's different routes to that state. But then non chemical and toxican ones um

are much more time consuming. Well, you know when you were when you were both when I was reading your book and then again when you were telling the story about how you came up with that opening line about masturbation and such, you know, into the influence of a fairly high amount of alcohol. But it made me think of some of the books that are out there. I mean, you know, there's a book called The Thirsty Muse about the use of alcohol by famous you know, literary writers.

There's a book called Opium and the Romantic Imagination about how famous writers you know used opium. Uh, there's a book called Cigarettes Are Sublime. And of course you have all the Silicon Valley folks and Nobel Prize winners, you know, who claimed that their psychedelic experience helped ride on the insight that resulted in they're creating, you know, zillion dollar companies are winning a Nobel Prize, and sometimes sometimes cannabis

gets credit like that. I was just hanging with a friend of mine who was one of the leading scholars of international relations in the world, and he credits you know, his occasional cannabis used to being this thing that's given him some of his best insights in flections. So yeah, yeah, Now I talked in the book about this, you know, the there's all over the world throughout history there's a

connection between chemical and toxic ins and creative types. So artists, poets, shamans, you know, people who were coming up with new stuff and and I talked about why that's not a myth. Evolution faced this design trade off where it needed us to have a PFC so we could get to work on time and focus to things. Um, but it also needed us to be creative and trusting and they give you things and um. And one way at dealt with that trade off was by slow walking the maturation of

the PFC. So that's the last part of the brain to mature. UM. It doesn't fully mature until you're in your mid twenties. So it's really the last part of a human to mature. And that keeps kids, you know, flexible and creative and able to learn new things and curious. There's good, both indirect and direct evidence that chemical and toxic ins are a solution to this design trade off.

We we have to have a PFC, but with these substances we can turn it down when we want to and get back to a more childlike state of creativity. UM and being able to see new possibilities and so UM. There's a very good reason that artists and poets and anyone but anyone who needs a new insight. So you know, I talked about my talk. I gave it Google one of the Google campuses, and I was talking about at

some point, alcohol and creativity. The study had just come out showing that if you've got people about point oh eight B A C, they solve lateral thinking tasks better. And they said, well, we know, we're taking you on our tour. And so the first place they took me

on their tour was this whiskey room. They said, when they're working on a problem and they hit a wall they can't figure it out, instead of drinking more coffee or smoking nicotine and sitting in front of their computers and working pulling all nighters, they stop and they go to the whiskey room and they pour themselves a little bit of scotch, and they sit and bean bag chairs

and they just chat. And that's how they tend to um get past these problems because what they need is an insight and and alcohol is helping with that, especially audience that you mentioned something called in that context the Bomber peak. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. So they asked me if I had ever heard of this concept, and this is, UM, I think it's probably apocryphal, but um,

we could find out. We could contact Steve Bomber. But supposedly, you know, Steve Bomber, the former CEO of Microsoft and great coder, um discovered that his coding ability peaked at this very narrow blood alcohol content, like very specific and narrow blood alcohol content, and so supposedly he would keep himself hooked up to an alcohol I V to just be right at that whatever point, you know, zero seven eight seven that he found was the best way to code.

And it gets at this idea that there's an optimal level of inebriation where you're still sober enough to remember what the problem is you're trying to solve, and you know, still you have your faculties intact, but you're loosened up enough that you're you're flexible, you're creative, you're doing new stuff, and humans you know, humans know this, and consciously you're unconsciously we use chemical intoxicants too, as an aid, as a tool, as a kind of mind hack when we

need divergent creativity or we need lateral thinking. Although you know, I'll tell you when I was working on my dissertation, I would occasionally go out of dinner with a friends. You know, I would have a drink or two with dinner, and then I'd have like a double espresso in the evening, Okay, And I racically saw it as my speed bowl. It was my speed and I worked on two, three, four in the morning and the ideas would be flowing in.

Might be a little looser in my writing, but I'd have the energy that You make a fair bit also of the genetic arguments, and you talk about the Asian flushing syndrome infect the numerous places in your book explain why that's significant. So one counter argument, so you know, I say, well, look, our taste for alcohol is ancient, and if it were only a costly mistake, evolution would have done something about it by now. One counter argument

is that sometimes evolution can't fix a problem. Something really is a mistake, and it really is a problem. But evolution can't fix it. And there are two reasons that could be the case. One is what's called path dependence. And I'm using intentional language here, but this is all in process, but previous choices constrained later choices. And so a good example of a mistake like this is the human back. We have all these back problems because are

our backs are terrible for for walking up right. You would never design a bipedal organism with a back like ours, But evolution didn't have the luxury of designing us from scratch. It was taking a tree living primate and gradually hacking it to to walk up right. Um, so that's a path dependence problem. You just you get stuck in a certain value and designed space and you can't get out of it. Another possibility is just that the right variation hasn't come along yet, so selection can only act on

variation that exists. And so it's possible that alcohols is ancient, costly mistake and genetic evolution would love to solve it, but it just hasn't had a solution yet. And so this is where this is why the Asian flushing syndrome plays such an important role in the book, because this is the solution to the problem. Um, so you know why do people like to drink? What? Because it makes us feel good? While the question is why does evolution allow it to make us feel good? And clearly it

doesn't have to. It can make us feel bad if we consume alcohol, and that's what this syndrome does, so it's a What's interesting is this is a set of two mutations to two separate mutations, and they're not linked, so they're clearly getting selected for for some function, and they interrupt our ability to metabolize ethanol. If you consume any alcohol, it makes you flush, it makes you nauseous,

it makes it gives you heart palputations. Basically, Um, if you have this genetic syndrome, drinking doesn't make you feel good. It makes you feel bad. And it actually is so effective and discouraging alcohol consumption that a chemical that mimics its effects is used to treat alcoholism quite effectively. So this is a silver bullet. If our taste for intoxication is a genetic mistake. The solution exists in the gene pool. It's not the case that evolution hasn't come up with

a variation yet. Because essentially it's allowing people to get mildly inebriated, but once you drink too much, it's you feel bad. They can't even really drink enough to get inebriated. Um, they can drink enough to get um. Some of the benefits that are supported to some of these mismatch benefits, right, maybe micronutrients, But yeah, they don't. They certainly don't. They're protected from alcoholism, for instance, because they just don't like

to drink that much. And this gene complex, it's estimated it evolved seven to ten thousand years ago and around kind of where modern day Shanghai is, probably at the same time as the creation of rice agriculture, so it seems to be some adaptation to rice agriculture, and it's possible that it's protective against tuberculosis, could be one of the functions. It's also protective against fungal poisoning, so it could be, you know, an adaptation to dealing with storing

grain and wet conditions. But in any case, it hasn't spread. So this solution to the problem of alcohol has existed for probably ten thousand years, and yet it's remained in this relatively geographically constrained area and hasn't spread very far. And that's not what you would predict if alcohol was just a costly mistake. This would be like if you had a gene that caused people to not like twinkies and love you know, Brussels sprouts and eating their greens.

If twinkies were a scourge that goes back twenty thousand years, that gene would would spread pretty quickly. Um So, to me, this is a very clear case of where you have this supposed problem, you have a very clear solution quote unquote, and yet the solution doesn't spread. So that suggests that the problem isn't just a album, right, There must be adaptive benefits that are coming along with it. M hm. So you say about alcohol, on the one hand, you

see alcohol is more like a pharmacological hand grenade. You also describe it as the king of intoxicainst and the perfect drug. Now you've talked about some of this, but the pharmacological hand grenade is that a good feature? Yeah, it's it probably is is a feature and not a buck. So this is a This phrase comes from Stephen Brown. The Journal with Stephen Brown. He's the one who coined the term pharmacological hand grenade UM, and he compares that

with lasers. You know, the LSD or cocaine is like a laser. It's going in and doing a very specific things to the brain. Alcohols um pressing several different regions of the brain while it's simultaneously rapping up sarahtonin and doorphins and so giving. It's a stimulant in various way. Is this seems to be this mix of effects seems to be a feature of alcohol. UM. I think if I could revise the book, I wouldn't call alcohol the perfect drug. I would call it the least bad drug.

UM in the sense that it's not perfect. But if you gave a cultural engineering team some design specs, you know, you said, look, we need we need it intoxican because we want to down regulate the PFC, we want to up regulate these hormones. It's got to be easy to make. You should be able to make it out of anything. It should be easy to discover. It should have consistent cognitive effects across individuals. It should have a short half life.

There's got to be a mechanism in the body to break it down and get it out pretty quickly, so you can get back to normal quickly. It's got to be easy to dose if you gave them this whole list of things you need. Did alcohols pretty much the ideal solution to these problems. But it's not ideal. I mean, alcohol would be the perfect drug, I think, if it did everything that it does, but it wasn't physically addictive and it wasn't so physiologically harmful. Let's take a break

here and go to an ad. A lot of the books about the benefits of moderate drinking and bonding, but it's also in part about the benefits right of getting drunk um both historically. You know, you talk about the Vikings and they're great drunk fests, and how much massive about alflaking. You get how incredibly successful they were for many, many centuries um, and you bring it up to the present. But I do think that's an important role that alcohol plays,

like assist friendships. The guys I've been friends with since college forty years ago, you know, are the ones I've probably got the drunkest with, and those are the ones where it kind of got in, you know, the the inhibitions you have as a young man in your twenties about sharing very intimate stuff. I mean, we broke through

talking about stuff like that in a way that bonded us. Unfortunately, none of us actually shouldn't say one of us Will already showed signs of it and eventually did become an alcoholic and died of his alcoholism in his fifties. Um, you know, the one British member of our of this, but all the others it was I think a really very substantial in that benefits. Yeah. One of the anecdotes that I ended up taking out of the book, UM

was about that. So it was a good friend of mine, very old friend of mine who um I had a bit of a falling out with. We were going through a tough period and the breakthrough was this was actually during the pandemic, so it was remote. It was over

zoom um. But we got really really drunk unzoomed together and he was finally, you know, we got to a level of in abriation where he could tell me what he was so angry about, and I was in a receptive state of mind where I could, you know, grasp why he was upset and apologize sincerely, you know, and

really feel sorry. And you know, we were able to share emotions I think you know, particularly men um use this in their friendships because it's not for whatever reason, whether it's a genuine genetic gender difference or if it's just because of cultural norms. Um, sharing emotions is not something we tend to do. Hell, you know, you do make me think that. You know, I have to say

alcohol play that pivotal role from me in my twenties. Um, but once I got into my thirties and forties, it was displaced in that regard by M D m A. Okay, I mean in M d A just pivotal in terms of being able to talk about things that are difficult to talk about, being able to listen to things that are difficult to listen about. Um. Now my can't do with the frequency of alcohol, which then again maybe a benefit in some regards. But it's an interesting thing that

alcohol and m D m A do share in comic times. Yeah, and and for similar physiological reasons right there, Um they're ramping. I mean, M D M A is a stimulant, but it's got that Um it's it's flooding you with serotonin, right You're just feeling so good, Um that it's it has a similar kind of expansive. You get that similar type of expansiveness that you get can get with alcohol,

but in a much more targeted way. Um so yeah, I mean that's the I think in a in a kind of healthy grown up life, we'd understand what what various chemical intoxicants are good for and what their various you know, downsides or dangers are, and figure out a strategy for using them when appropriate. And I think those of us who are thoughtful and knowledgele with this managed to do an individual level the the great challenges on the societal level, which brings us more fully into the present,

which we've alluded to and come to occasionally. But you know, there's two things going on your book about the present time. I mean, one is you're basically offering a fundamental challenge to the kind of neo prohibitionist uh you know thinking

and mindset that's out there. And you know, you you reference the the study that came out in the British journal The Lancet in eighteen, the punchline of which was the safest level of drinking is none, and you dismissed, don't know, called it terrible or stupid or something like that,

with which I thoroughly agree. And it's notable that a new study just came out of the Lancet in the last few months in which they acknowledge the potential benefits of moderate drinking, especially among older people, only among zero

benefit if you're under forty. Yeah. And then I see that, you know, you're an American living in Canada now, and I see that the Center for a Substance Abuse and Addiction in Canada just came out of recommendations in September, you know, basically saying, you know, not that drink down almost to the floor. I mean a very not fully prohibitionists, but quasi prohibitionist stake. And so you express your exasperation about all of that, and you know, it's pulling out

the benefits of the office part and all that. But then there's the flip side, and it's your last chapter, right, which I think you called distillation and isolation, and this is just talking about all the harms of alcohol and what's wrong with alcohol and the fact that we've now moved not just from being winded but to distilled liquors. And part of me was thinking, okay, you know, still just trying to cover his ass here, he's already done a celebration of alcohol, you know, but but and so.

But then you make an argument about how distillation and isolation may have changed the game, and that maybe even that old um I can't remember as the hijacker hangover theory may have some application that we haven't quite yet figured out in terms of the future distilled liquors. So lay that out about isolation and distillation and the problems there um for our listeners. Yeah, so the distillation first.

So for almost all of our history with alcohol, we've been drinking naturally fermented beverages, and alcoholic beverages come with a kind of built in safety feature, which is that they just can't get much stronger than a certain level because you know, the easter producing alcohol and at a certain point they poison themselves. They are more resistant than the bacteria are, right, So they're they're engaging in biological warfare against these bacteria that are that are very susceptible

to alcohol. They're tougher, but they're not infinitely tough. And we've been breeding east to get tougher and tougher so we can make stronger and stronger beers and wines. But for most of our evolutionary history, the alcohol content of of these beverages was capped at a pretty low level. So the beers we were drinking, we're coming in about two to three percent ABV, and fruit wines a bit higher, but probably eight nine maybe ten pc a BV. So

those are relatively safe delivery vehicles for ethanol. They're delivering ethanol to our bodies at a rate that we can kind of deal with. And especially like if you're drinking at two to three pc a b V beer and you're a fully grown adult, you can drink that all day long and never get beyond point eight or so b a c. But what were those Vikings drinking at those festival as a line you had from Sunday story

and they died with a cup in their hands or something. Yeah, they were drinking meat, they were drinking meds um that we're getting up to slightly higher alcohol level, and they were just heroically drinking massive quantities of it. I mean, it is physically possible, it's just challenging. You've got to basically be drinking constantly to get really drunk on things

like that. Then, relatively recently so um in Europe, not until the sixteen hundreds or seventeen hundreds, which in you know, the story I'm telling is basically, yesterday, we figure out how to disable the safety feature of naturally fermented beverages by distilling them. Um, so we pull the alcohol off

and we could then produce these incredibly concentrated distilled liquors. So, um, you know, you can get vodkas that come in in the nineties in terms of a BV percentage, and so part of my argument is this is a novel form of alcohol that's so much more powerful it really should be considered a different drug, and it's much much more dangerous. You can, um, you know, the sweet spot, let's say is point oh eight b a c Uh. You're drinking

two to three percent beer. You can drink that at a moderate pace all day long and kind of stay at point away. You're doing shots of vodka, you just blow right past point oh eight into levels where you're blacking out and you know, potentially killing yourself, um quite quickly. So we now have access to a much much more powerful form of alcohol that's order of magnitudes more powerful than anything we've had to deal with before. Um. So

that's distillation. Isolation refers to the fact that historically our alcohol consumption has always been social. Having private access to alcohol is almost unheard of in most societies, and every society that I know of that uses alcohol surrounds its consumption with various formal and informal rituals that help individuals

to control their consumption. So I talked about, you know, the Greek Symposium wine party, where the symposi arc was in charge of mixing you know, the wine to water ratio, and you only drank when the thing got passed around by the symposi arc so they could control the pace of drinking. In Chinese banquets, you don't drink it will. You can only drink when someone makes a toast, and then whoever is in charge of making toasts is um

strictly at least traditionally regulated by ritual. So these are all ways we control alcohol consumption, and even in what seemed like completely unstructured modern situations. So you go to the pub with your friends if you're typically drinking in rounds, so you know, if you drink too quickly, you've gotta wait toward your next drink until we're all done. And the bar keep could not make eye contact with you

if they're worried about how quickly you're drinking. There's all these ways when we're drinking in groups that we can moderate each other's behavior. Once you can go to a drive through liquor store and load up your SUV with a case of vodka and drive at home and have all this, you know, enough alcohol in your house to kill a village full of people, and you're alone, and

you can just consume that whenever you want. That's a really new, evolutionarily novel situation, and a quite dangerous one because I don't think we're well equipped to moderate our alcohol concer emption by ourselves. We need social help. Um And I think you know a natural experiment that showed this is the pandemic. You know, it's it's a great natural experiment. Hey, let's see what happens if we don't let people leave the house anymore, but we still give

them as much alcohol as they want. What's going to happen? And what happened was people problem drinking became really, really serious. And I know a lot of people who are still struggling with with the aftermath of that, trying to get back to sustainable levels of consumption. After indulging. Yeah, I mean you quote the aforementioned Dwight Heath once again, the Brown University anthropologist is talking about one of the greatest indicators of a problem drinking is drinking alone. Yeah, right,

more than almost anything else. And you also make the point that America is particularly bad in this regard. I mean, you contrast the Southern European drinking culture, which you know, drinking you know, wine and beer with food, and you with the Northern drinking, which is more about drinking to get drunk, you know, the skin and Eving countries, Russia, Denmarkets, etcetera. But then you say America seems to do it even

more problematically in the Northern Europeans. Yeah. Well, it's because we've got two separate problems, well maybe three separate problems. One is that we're northern drinking culture. So you know, this is where you're drinking to get drunk. You're drinking primarily distilled spirits. Um, you're often drinking and unisex groups. So a bunch of dudes get drunk together, a bunch of women getting drunk together. You're drinking two with the purpose of getting drunk, and the goal is to be

visibly drunk. There's something wrong with you if you're not visibly drunk as opposed to Southern cultures where we're being you know, really visibly intoxicated. Is kind of shameful. Um. It's not not something you want to do in public. Um. So that's unhealthy. So we've inherited that northern drinking culture.

On top of that, we have a more serious isolation problem because it's more common in America going to live in suburbs where, um, you don't have a local that you go to, you know, on your walk back from the tube, you get in your car at your office park and you drive home to your house and you're drinking alone or most you know, with your family around, but not socially in the way you do in Europe or in major cities in in the U s where you have you know, a pub, a local that you're

going to. Um. So there's the isolation problem. It's higher in the States. Um. And then on top of all that, you have this weird Christian culture of the Puritans. You know, these are the first ones that came over right where they demonize alcohol and therefore have this kind of love hate relationship with it. Um. You know, I quote this anthropologist, Janet Curzan. It's got a great book about um us

drinking culture and the problems with it. We're she's, you know, as an anthropologist in the American South, she noticed that she would go to the liquor store because they have liquor stores and they Baptist drink. But people she had been at church wouldn't make eye contact with her in the liquor store, and she'd like, you know, try to wave to them, and they'd like look the other way and pretend they didn't know her. She was like, let's

this is weird. And then a friend of her said, you know, you don't say hello to someone in the liquor store, UM, in the same way you wouldn't if you were you know, if I ran into you in a porn store, we wouldn't be like, hey, what are you getting? It's shameful to be seen there is shameful UM. And that's just a weird attitude to have towards alcohol. And so you pile all that on top of each other and you get a really pathological drinking culture. M hm.

You know, just making me think of a couple of the counter examples UM historically, right, so one you talked about briefly as the Mornings, who maybe not at their origins, but you know, shortly after the origins, basically are you know, no inebriants. And I guess I'll point out that, you know, there's Mormon tea made from a you know, plant that's kind of feder in it, but I mean basically coffee, alcohol, all that sort of stuff. Yet a very successful um culture.

And then the second one is Islam, which is banned alcohol but been tolerant of other ones um and the Ottoman Empire was, you know, a very successful and powerful empire for centuries. So is it just that, in fact, drinking was always going on and just didn't talk about it like in the South, or was it something else that enabled them to be so successful. We're drinking was not playing a big role in their culture. So I think what's happening with with Mormonism And and scholars have

argued this is the case with Islam too. So in the case of Islam, they're surrounded by these Mediterranean wine drinking cultures and they need to distinguish themselves, and one of the ways they do it is through these kind

of costly displays. So So this is one of the feature years of successful religions is that they make you do counter productive from a practical standpoint, costly things to show that you really believe in the belief system that you're professing you believe in, and also you do things

that distinguish you from non members. And so I think that the Mormon ban on alcohol and caffeine is more like the kind of you know, Mormon underwear and the other things they do that distinguishes them from people around them. It's a very clever, costly demand on adherents. It enhances your sense that you are a group different from the groups around you. But it's it's not directly functionally a response to the problem of alcohol. It's a group marking device.

So you're in the end of this book basically saying the still liquors are a real threat. You're a big fan of the office party. You point out how you know, you and your buddies having some rinks and a lounge help you get all sorts of research brands to come up with great ideas and to bond and to you know, you know, kind of moderate the competition among people and increase the uh the collaboration but are you basically saying that when you're having office parties, I don't put the

distilled liquor out there. Yeah, and sure, or be worried, but be more worried about it. So, in terms of practical considerations, one of the ways writing this book, doing the research for it has changed my behavior is I appreciate beer a lot more. Um. I never was a beer drinker. I'm I'm wine drinker and and and Scotch and various distilled liquors. Um, but I've come to see the benefit of beer and as kind of a delivery device for ethanol, a way to deliver ethanol to your

brain and your friends brains at a sustainable pace. And um, it's changed my behavior. So I had this welcome thing for some new post docs in this product drink that I run, And you know, I made the conscious decision to instead of you know, ordering rounds of cocktails for people, are getting bottles of wine for the table. Um, I got pictures of beer. And I don't really like beer as much as I like those other things. But but I thought, you know, this is actually a more safe

and sustainable social truck. Um. So yeah, I would say be worried about um distilled liquors. I know this is the case. I think in Germany and some other European countries there's different ages when you can legally drink distilled spirits as opposed to beer and wine. Um, you can drink beer and wine younger, and I think that makes

a lot of sense. Yeah, it makes me wonder with these new you know, these canned cocktails that are coming out now, which I think the alcohol content is equivalent to be or wine, and whether that's going to land up making them more like beer and wine than it is like drinking shots of something. Yeah, but it's and competing with beer now. Yeah, and if you're you know, and nearing something that's deliberately low a b v um,

that seems like a sustainable strategy. Mm hmmm. Well we're just so just to finish off here a little bit more about your own evolution. Um. I mean, so you know, you're you're a sinologist, you learned Chinese, you're writing these, you know, brilliant academic books about ancient China or I don't call it ancient, but China long time ago. And then you had a great gause of a care your first of your crossover books before Drunk called trying not

to Try? About early Chinese philosophers, you know, talking and writing about an effortless way of being in the world, which they called way. Did that in any way cause you to open up to write this book about drunk? Or what was the impetus that was directly? It was directly, it was directly related. Um. So yeah, my my colleagues are a bit puzzled while I have suddenly written this book about alcohol. Um, but you know, and trying not

to try. I explore this tension in early Chinese is thought that they want you to get into this state called way or effortless action. Um, this spontaneous state. You're creative, you're in the zone, you're you lose the sense of yourself as an agent, and everything works out, you solve problems, People trust you and like you at this charisma, and and so they want you to get into this state. The problem is there's this paradox I call it the paradox of way or the you know, the version in

the title of the book. How do you how do you try not to try? It's directly paradoxical. So if I'm telling you, hey, relax, stop trying. Um, the part of the brain that I'm activating is your prefrontal cortex. I'm lighting up your prefrontal cortex by asking you to do something agentic, and yet that's the part of the brain we're trying to shut down, so it's directly counterproductive.

The early Chinese came up with various strategies to get around that, essentially giving you stuff to do to distract you, you know, like do this ritual or sit in meditation. But in the course of writing, especially with the trade version of that book, UM, I was talking about this story from the really Daoist text where they compare a drunken person to the Daoist sage, and and they're clearly using it just as an analogy, so you should be

drunk on heaven and not drunk on alcohol. But it did cause a little light bolb to go off my head, and and I thought, well, you know what, you know, if you have cultures that are aware that spontaneity is valuable for certain goals creativity, trust, and yet is also aware that it's paradoxical to to ask people to consciously become spontaneous, what a great work around to find a chemical substance that you could take that will do the

job for you. So you know, it's directly paradoxical to try to use your mind to shut down your mind. It's not paradoxical to drink a substance that you know, completely outside of your control was doing that job for you. So I started to get interested in the idea that UM cultures have figured out that you could use chemical intoxicants as this cultural tool to solve the paradox of how how you can try not to try So, so that that directly led to UM my interest in writing

this book. I'm curious, you know, your book. I'm curious about the reactions you've got into it, not least in the community of alcohol and jog researchers. I didn't do any thorough search, but I'm wondering how it's been received and evaluated by all of the people getting funded to look at the problems with alcohol and all of those alcohol researchers and public health and all that. Yeah, so

it's UM surprisingly positive across the board. You know, I'm I'm not an alcohol specialist by original training, but I am a good researchers. You know, I did my homework. I really spent a long time doing the research for the book, and I reached out to a lot of these specialists in the field. I'm still you know, there's still a kind of you want to think of it as medicalized wing UM. I mean, most of the professional academic publications on alcohol or a medicalized lens, you know,

it's treating it as a physical problem, physiological impact. Those people aren't convinced. UM. And you know, I still, actually one colleague I really respect Randy NeSSI, who's UM kind of the founder of evolutionary medicine. UM remained unconvinced by my argument. So there are people who aren't convinced. And I do get um kicked back from people who say, hey, how can you be celebrating alcohol when it's so damaging and you know, alcoholism such as serious scourge and UM,

but I think I did you know? So that last chapter about the dangers of alcohol isn't just an ask covering add on. It's at the heart of the book. I mean, the whole the whole premise of the book is this is a really dangerous, harmful substance that cultures have always been ambivalent about, So why do we still use it? Um So, the dangers and the potential downsides of alcohol are are motivating force in the argument from the very beginning, I think, um So, I think people

see that as well, and see that. Um Now, even though I'm talking about the benefits of alcohol, it's really just kind of to sit in a corrective space alongside of this. You know, twenty shelves of books about alcoholism and the dangerous of alcohol. Um, we do need a little bit of a counterbalance looking at the positive functions. I'm curious, have any of the big beer wine companies invited you and offered you fat honor arium to come keynote their annual conferences or something, And if so, have

you acceptive taking money from them or not? Yeah, I'm actually doing my first one like that in October at the World World Average Association. I think it's a beer producers organization. And I don't feel bad at all because I think that actually I think they need help and they should get help. Um. I think they've been him this defensive crouch where you know, they've kind of accepted this story that they're peddling something that's no different from

nicotine or pornography or cocaine, And you know accepted. Yeah, you know, it's bad, and but it's a vice that people want and so and I don't think they have to be so defensive. I actually especially beer makers, because beer is the best, the safest form of alcohol. So this is a case where my interest intellectually kind of overlap with the interests of an industry. I think we need to change the public discourse on this. So yeah,

I am. I'm actually doing my first big address to an industry organization, and I think the beverage industry is slowly waking up to my book and realizing, oh, here's some positive arguments for alcohol. And I don't see any problem with with talking to them about it because I believe in it personally. Well, listen, I I think your book was wonderful. As I said, there are a few books I've enjoyed reading more and prepping for this thing. I think the book is important culturally. I hope it

really does get out there. I saw you tweeting recently had just been translated into Korean, so hopefully this has a really substantial global reach. And you know, I hope you don't leave the field because you're really saying something that's very important. So Thank you ever so much for writing this and for taking the time to talk with me and with and our listeners on Psychoactive. No great, thanks for having me. It was a lot of fun.

If you're enjoying Psychoactive, please tell your friends about it, or you can write us a review at Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. We love to hear from our listeners. If you'd like to share your own stories, comments and ideas, then leave us a message at one eight three three seven seven nine sixty that's eight three three psycho zero, or you can email us at Psychoactive at protozoa dot com or find me on Twitter at Ethan natal Man. You can also find contact information in

our show notes. Psychoactive is a production of I Heart Radio and Protozoa Pictures. It's hosted by me Ethan Naedelman. It's produced by Noham Osband and Josh Stain. The executive producers are Dylan Golden, Ari Handel, Elizabeth Geesus and Darren Aronofsky from Protozoa Pictures, Alex Williams and Matt Frederick from my Heart Radio, and me Ethan Nadelman. Our music is by Ari Blucien and Special Things to a bios f

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