Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Ethan Nadelman, and this is Psychoactive, a production
Speaker 1: of I Heart Radio and Protozoa Pictures. Psychoactive is the
Speaker 1: show where we talk about all things drugs. But any
Speaker 1: of view is expressed here do not represent those of
Speaker 1: I Heart Media, Protozoa Pictures, or their executives and employees. Indeed,
Speaker 1: heat as an inveterate contrarian, I can tell you they
Speaker 1: may not even represent my own and nothing contained in
Speaker 1: this show should be used as medical advice or encouragement
Speaker 1: to use any type of drugs. Hello, Psychoactive listeners. So
Speaker 1: I'll tell you one of the most frequent comments or
Speaker 1: suggestions I've gotten from friends and other listeners since I
Speaker 1: started the podcast over a year ago was what about alcohol?
Speaker 1: What about booze? You haven't done any episodes on that,
Speaker 1: and that's got to be, you know, in some respects,
Speaker 1: one of the you know, biggest drugs of them all.
Speaker 1: And so I thought the best way to have a
Speaker 1: first episode that addresses the issue of alcohol would be
Speaker 1: with Professor Edward Slingerland, who published a book last year
Speaker 1: called Drunk. The subtitle is How We sit, danced, and
Speaker 1: stumbled our way to Civilization. Now. Edward is the Distinguished
Speaker 1: University's Scholar and Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Speaker 1: British Columbia and Canada, with adject deployments in Asian studies
Speaker 1: and psychology, and he's a co director of the Center
Speaker 1: for the Study of Human Evolution, Cognition and Culture and
Speaker 1: director of the Database of Religious History. He's also a sinologist,
Speaker 1: which means he's not an expert in sinus as he's
Speaker 1: an expert in china um and that's a lot of
Speaker 1: his more academic writing, although this is quite an academic
Speaker 1: book in its own way as well. So I just
Speaker 1: thought he would be a wonderful interest. Edward, thank you
Speaker 1: so much for joining me on Psychoactive. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: So what would be the elevator? Pitch the basic argument
Speaker 1: of your book in a few sentences. We've long been
Speaker 1: told that our taste for alcohol and other chemical intoxicants
Speaker 1: is an evolutionary mistake, and that's not the case. And
Speaker 1: in fact, there are a host of both individual and
Speaker 1: social benefits to intoxican use, and these benefits have paid
Speaker 1: for the obvious costs. So so alcohol consumption is costly,
Speaker 1: it's it's bad for our bodies. It can lead to
Speaker 1: all sorts of social ills, um. But the taste for
Speaker 1: alcohol has remained in our both genetic and cultural repertoire
Speaker 1: because of these various individual and social benefits that have
Speaker 1: been trucial in allowing human beings to make the transition
Speaker 1: from small scale hunter gatherer societies to these large civilizations
Speaker 1: that we live in now. And so, you know, far
Speaker 1: from being a byproduct or a mistake, intoxication has been
Speaker 1: at the center of civilization, um for as long as
Speaker 1: as human beings have been doing anything in an organized
Speaker 1: fashion as a species. Let me go say the audience,
Speaker 1: stead of all the books I've read, uh for this podcast,
Speaker 1: this has to be easily the most enjoyable read. It's
Speaker 1: not just scholarly and thoughtful, but it's written with an
Speaker 1: incredible sense of humor and a dry witticisms, and it's
Speaker 1: just a pleasure. And one of those little lines that
Speaker 1: Edward uses at the beginning is he says people like
Speaker 1: to masturbate. They also like to get drunk and eat twinkies,
Speaker 1: not typically all at the same time, but that's a
Speaker 1: matter of personal preference. So why Edward, why is that
Speaker 1: line right at the top of your book. Well, first
Speaker 1: of all, that line was written at probably about point
Speaker 1: oh eight blood alcohol content. So I had been working
Speaker 1: on the book proposal. I had written ten versions of it,
Speaker 1: I think, and my every time my agent would send
Speaker 1: it back and she's just like boring. Zache read to
Speaker 1: it and she and she was right. So I had, Um,
Speaker 1: you know, I had all the science and it all history.
Speaker 1: The arguments were there, but it was a very kind
Speaker 1: of plotting aid to B two. See, you know this
Speaker 1: is a puzzle. This is why it's interesting. Um, it
Speaker 1: didn't draw you in. And I realized, oh, you know what,
Speaker 1: I haven't taken my own advice in the book, which
Speaker 1: is that if you need a creative insight or you
Speaker 1: need something new, you need to drink a little bit.
Speaker 1: So I was on a conference trip. This was pretty pandemic,
Speaker 1: and I had a couple of hours before I was
Speaker 1: meeting my colleagues for dinner. So I took my laptop
Speaker 1: down to the hotel bar and ordered myself a Negroni
Speaker 1: And by the end of that Negroni, it felt like
Speaker 1: I was taking dictation. So that line came to me,
Speaker 1: and then the rest of that what's now pages one
Speaker 1: to two of the book just appeared in my head
Speaker 1: and I just wrote it down. You know, I needed
Speaker 1: something to draw people in and get them hooked. You know,
Speaker 1: I start with masturbation and junk food, just because the
Speaker 1: standard story has been that, you know, alcohol is just
Speaker 1: like those things, It's just like these other vices. It's
Speaker 1: a kind of evolutionary mistake. And the main motive for
Speaker 1: writing Drunk was to point out that that's not the case.
Speaker 1: Our our taste for alcohol and other chemical intoxicants is
Speaker 1: actually qualitatively different from vices like junk food or masturbation.
Speaker 1: And it's important to realize that because we can't understand
Speaker 1: um why it's been so central to civilization with without
Speaker 1: realizing that that dis analogy, right, I think you you
Speaker 1: make the analogy partially in the context of saying, there
Speaker 1: are two major theories about why alcohol has been so
Speaker 1: prevalent and survived for thousands of years among humankind, notwithstanding
Speaker 1: its abundant negative consequences. And you see, there's a hijack
Speaker 1: theory and a hangover theory, and you kind of disabuse
Speaker 1: readers of both, so say a little more about that.
Speaker 1: So hijack theories argue that alcohol is just the ethanol
Speaker 1: molecule just happens to hijack a reward network that evolved
Speaker 1: for other reasons, and so that's where masturbation comes in.
Speaker 1: Masturbations a classic example of the hijack. So um evolution
Speaker 1: gives us this awesome reward, the orgasm, for the thing
Speaker 1: that it most wants us to do, which is pass
Speaker 1: on copies of our genes to the next generation. So
Speaker 1: the adaptive target of the orgasm is reproductive sex, and
Speaker 1: yet humans and other organisms have figured out all sorts
Speaker 1: of wildly nonreproductive ways to get that reward. So that's
Speaker 1: a classic hijack. We're getting the reward even though we're
Speaker 1: not doing the thing it's supposed to be. For the
Speaker 1: reason evolution lets us get away with that is because
Speaker 1: it's not very costly. Despite what you might have been
Speaker 1: told when you were younger, masturbation doesn't cause you to
Speaker 1: go blind. It's pretty physiologically negligible in terms of its cost,
Speaker 1: and the basic system works right. Um evolution is not
Speaker 1: into perfection, it's into a broke don't fix it. So
Speaker 1: this is it works well enough um the other type.
Speaker 1: So that's the dominant story. If you open a psych
Speaker 1: one on one textbook. It's going to tell you that's
Speaker 1: why we we like to drink this this hijack theory.
Speaker 1: Um mismatches are a different type of evolutionary mistakes. So
Speaker 1: this is where something was adaptive in our evolutionary past
Speaker 1: but is not adaptive now, and that's where the twinkies
Speaker 1: come in. So junk food is a classic example of this.
Speaker 1: So having a taste for sugar and fat and wanting
Speaker 1: to gorge on sugar and fat when we come across
Speaker 1: it has historically been a very adaptive trait in humans
Speaker 1: because those things were in short supply and you should
Speaker 1: gorge on them when you find them. It really only
Speaker 1: becomes a problem quite very recently in history when we
Speaker 1: live in these affluent industrial societies where we have access
Speaker 1: to twinkies and junk food and all sorts of bad things,
Speaker 1: and it's very costly, So unlike masturbation, it's actually very
Speaker 1: bad physiologically. It's to obesity and diabetes and all these problems.
Speaker 1: But it's a very recent problem and it's still not universal,
Speaker 1: so there's still plenty of places in the world where
Speaker 1: getting enough calories is a challenge. So here's a case
Speaker 1: where um it's it is costly, but it's so recent
Speaker 1: and geographically localized that evolution hasn't had time to deal
Speaker 1: with it. So when it comes to alcohol, the problem
Speaker 1: is it's not like either one of those things. So
Speaker 1: it did evolve for a good reason, but now things
Speaker 1: have changed and it's it's not adaptive. So unlike masturbation,
Speaker 1: alcohol is very costly physiologically, it's physiologically dangerous, it's economically costly.
Speaker 1: Unlike junk food, it's ancient. We've been producing and consuming
Speaker 1: alcohol all over the world, um for you know, probably
Speaker 1: at least twenty thousand years, probably much longer. So it's
Speaker 1: an ancient problem. So evolutions had plenty of time to
Speaker 1: deal with it, um if it were actually a mismatched
Speaker 1: type of mistake. And so UM I argue in the
Speaker 1: book that given the ubiquity and the costliness and the
Speaker 1: ancientness of our taste for alcohol, there's got to be
Speaker 1: something else going on. There have to be some adaptive
Speaker 1: benefits that are paying for the costs, and so probably
Speaker 1: the bulk of the book is dedicated to walking readers
Speaker 1: through both you know, what the challenges are that we
Speaker 1: face as species, as humans and then how alcohol might
Speaker 1: be giving us these adaptive benefits. Right, So, in the book,
Speaker 1: I mean, you make this fascinating set of arguments about
Speaker 1: why alcohol and how alcohol has been essential in human evolution,
Speaker 1: and then bring it up to the present day, which
Speaker 1: we'll get to later. And you also want to say,
Speaker 1: we could not have civilization without intoxications. And now without
Speaker 1: understanding the evolutionary dynamics of intoxic in use, we cannot
Speaker 1: even begin to think clearly or effectively about the role
Speaker 1: in toxic cannon should play in our lives today. So
Speaker 1: when you say, you know, we could not have civilization
Speaker 1: without intoxication, it's a bold statement. Say more about that, well,
Speaker 1: and there's one sense in which, quite literally, intoxication probably
Speaker 1: gave rise to civilization. So so one thing I'm trying
Speaker 1: to flip on its head in the book is the
Speaker 1: standard story that I had learned, which is that our
Speaker 1: production of alcohol is kind of a mistake. So it's
Speaker 1: an evolutionary mistake that we like to drink. And then
Speaker 1: the fact that we make alcoholic beverages is a kind
Speaker 1: of byproduct of civilization and agriculture. So the standard story is,
Speaker 1: you know, we got agriculture, we started civilization and then
Speaker 1: at some point are you know, excess production. We decided
Speaker 1: to play around with a little bit and discovered we
Speaker 1: could make beer and wine and things like that. Um.
Speaker 1: When I started to look at the archaeological record, when
Speaker 1: I started doing the research for the book, I realized
Speaker 1: that the it's almost certainly the case that it's the
Speaker 1: other way around. So in the book I talked about
Speaker 1: this beer before bread hypothesis. So if we want to
Speaker 1: talk about the Fertile Crescent, so the mid East where
Speaker 1: probably where agriculture first started, we see these hunter gatherers
Speaker 1: coming together, building this massive religious architecture. We don't know
Speaker 1: what it's for, exactly what they did there, having these feasts,
Speaker 1: So we have the remains of feasts and then drinking liquids,
Speaker 1: and they have these big vats that held liquids, and
Speaker 1: maybe they were drinking sparkling water, but it's really unlikely. Um.
Speaker 1: We don't have direct chemical evidence from the one site
Speaker 1: that I talked about in the book, Gobeck Late Tepe,
Speaker 1: but we know that people were making beer in the region. Um,
Speaker 1: we have evidence from thirteen thousand years ago. So this
Speaker 1: is the Psyche Cobeck Late Tepe is ten tend to
Speaker 1: twelve thousand years old, way before agriculture we did. We
Speaker 1: don't have agriculture yet in that region, and yet hunter
Speaker 1: gatherers are coming together and and brewing beer. And so
Speaker 1: the idea is that, um, what motivated hunter gatherers to
Speaker 1: then start settling down and cultivating crops and making them
Speaker 1: more productive was the desire to make more and better beer,
Speaker 1: not to make bread. It wasn't for nutrition, it was
Speaker 1: for psychoactive reasons. And then you know, I look at
Speaker 1: evidence from other parts of the world that wherever you look,
Speaker 1: it seems like the first cultivated plants were chosen for
Speaker 1: their psychoactive properties, not for a new trition. And so
Speaker 1: that's a sense in which quite literally the desire to
Speaker 1: get intoxicated gave rise to civilization. It's what caused hunter
Speaker 1: gatherers to settle down in the first place. You know,
Speaker 1: you reminded me, Edward. You know, when I've over the
Speaker 1: decades as I've been speaking around the world around drug
Speaker 1: policy or reform, and I put, you know, oftimes make
Speaker 1: the point that there's, you know, almost never been a
Speaker 1: drug free society and human history, UM, which is a
Speaker 1: relatively few exceptions, and that if you look about it,
Speaker 1: whether you're looking at alcohol, you know you have basically
Speaker 1: hunter gatherer tribes living in remote areas, oftentimes with no
Speaker 1: contact with other societies, who somehow figure out alcohol. And
Speaker 1: it seems like you have cultures figuring this out independently,
Speaker 1: and somewhat the same thing happens with some of the
Speaker 1: psychedelic plants, and so it sounds like that's partially what
Speaker 1: you're saying that. So why why do you think the
Speaker 1: agricultural hypothesis that alcohol came with agriculture became so dominant?
Speaker 1: I mean, wasn't there enough evidence even before these theories
Speaker 1: of the agricultural impetus for for alcohol. I don't know
Speaker 1: if we had some of this data. So we didn't. Um,
Speaker 1: we didn't have sites like go Beckley Teppe back then. Um,
Speaker 1: we didn't have some of this more recent work. We
Speaker 1: have evidence now and very this is very recent of
Speaker 1: beer making thirteen thousand years ago in present day Israel.
Speaker 1: So I think partly it was we didn't have the data.
Speaker 1: We didn't we hadn't discovered some of these sites. But
Speaker 1: I also think it's um, it's part of this broader prejudice.
Speaker 1: Or kind of weird. Um. I call it a kind
Speaker 1: of neo pured in blind spot in scholarship. So you
Speaker 1: see it in religious studies. So that's my my PhDs
Speaker 1: and religious studies. And let's say we're talking about ritual Um,
Speaker 1: we talked about you know, synchrony and singing and music
Speaker 1: and maybe sleep deprivation or how people are using pain
Speaker 1: you know, painful activities and rituals to enhance their their
Speaker 1: mood or feeling of bonding. And what no one ever
Speaker 1: talks about out is these people are often high as
Speaker 1: hell when they're doing this. Yeah, and so um, it's
Speaker 1: this weird blind spot where we're fine talking about piercing
Speaker 1: and scarification and sleep deprivation, but you want to start
Speaker 1: talking about psychedelics or about alcohol use, and people get
Speaker 1: really oddly queasy. I talked in the book about some
Speaker 1: of the seminal figures in religious studies. So merch Aliata,
Speaker 1: who wrote this classic big book on shamanism. Um, you
Speaker 1: know he's got this whatever, seven eight page book on shamanism,
Speaker 1: and I think he mentions chemical and toxicans two or
Speaker 1: three times, and always in a negative way. Um, you
Speaker 1: know this is kind of fake shamanism is when you're
Speaker 1: using psychedelics. So there's just it's a weird lacuna in scholarship,
Speaker 1: and I think it has to do with this kind
Speaker 1: of this odd puritanism where we don't like to talk
Speaker 1: about chemical on toxicans. I mean, at one point you
Speaker 1: make the argument fact that it's those societies which most
Speaker 1: integrated alcohol, including getting raucously drunk, that ended up being
Speaker 1: the more successful ones. Now I was wondering, as I'm
Speaker 1: reading your book, do you actually have a decent control
Speaker 1: group that you're comparing all this too and making that statement.
Speaker 1: But you provide a lot of good examples of that.
Speaker 1: So in terms of control groups, UM, the control group
Speaker 1: is the extinct cultures that we don't know about because
Speaker 1: they didn't they lost the competition. I mean, that's one
Speaker 1: of the connections of this book with my earlier work.
Speaker 1: So I did UM in cognitive science Evolution of Religion.
Speaker 1: I was involved in a large research group that was
Speaker 1: trying to explain, you know, what this mysterious thing we do,
Speaker 1: which is religion. So you look all over the world
Speaker 1: and you see people worshiping invisible beings and you know,
Speaker 1: piercing themselves and do engaging in these painful rituals and
Speaker 1: cutting off the foreskin of their penis and um, refraining
Speaker 1: from eating delicious poor and shellfish, and and building these massive,
Speaker 1: useless monuments. So um. You know what really got me
Speaker 1: thinking about religion in this way was the first Emperor
Speaker 1: of Chin's tomb. I don't know those people were familiar
Speaker 1: with this terra cotta army they discovered in China's as
Speaker 1: the person who unified China. Um massive fake army made
Speaker 1: out of terra cotta, individually made, each soldier carrying real weapons,
Speaker 1: and then lots of real wealth was thrown in the ground.
Speaker 1: Gold and these labor bronze vessels, Horses were killed, people
Speaker 1: were killed and thrown in the pit, and then they
Speaker 1: buried it all in the grounds for this dead guy
Speaker 1: in the afterlife. And I remember when I first kind
Speaker 1: of learned about that site and realized how much of
Speaker 1: the gross national product of the state of Chin went
Speaker 1: into that tomb. You know, I thought this was a
Speaker 1: period when these these states were in brutal competition with
Speaker 1: one another. Why isn't the case that there was a
Speaker 1: state as powerful as Chin, But instead of building a
Speaker 1: fake terra cotta army. They built a real army, and
Speaker 1: instead of throwing all this wealth in the ground, they
Speaker 1: used the labor to you know, build more effective city
Speaker 1: walls and do practical things. Why did they not outcompete
Speaker 1: this culture that was throwing all this wealth in the ground.
Speaker 1: And the answer has to be there has to be
Speaker 1: some adaptive benefits to doing that kind of crazy stuff. Um.
Speaker 1: And so you know, we explored how these kind of
Speaker 1: costly displays and um sacrifices helped to build solidarity and
Speaker 1: and get people past cooperation problems. And I think the
Speaker 1: same is true of alcohol. You know, an ancient sumer,
Speaker 1: it's estimated they took half of their grain and turned
Speaker 1: it into beer. So they're taking really nutritious stuff that
Speaker 1: could make into bread and turning it into a liquid neurotoxin. Essentially,
Speaker 1: you would think that groups that didn't do that would
Speaker 1: out compete groups that did um, that just kept all
Speaker 1: their grain for nutrition. And yet that's not the case,
Speaker 1: because we see that the cultures that survive use psychoactives
Speaker 1: in this way, So it's got to be doing something
Speaker 1: for us. Well, let me just stop you one second.
Speaker 1: I remember hearing reading that if you look in American history,
Speaker 1: the period when we had the highest levels of alcohol
Speaker 1: consumption in American history. We're back at the origins in
Speaker 1: the late at late eighteenth century, early nineteenth century. But
Speaker 1: that also one of the factors was that it was
Speaker 1: that turning alcohol into grain was a good way of
Speaker 1: preserving it, a good way of transporting it. So that
Speaker 1: you know, yes, there are these arguments for drinking and
Speaker 1: then all this, and and there's the arguments about it
Speaker 1: being safer than water when water was impure, but also
Speaker 1: easier to preserve and to transport. So how do those
Speaker 1: things figure into all this? So those are kind of
Speaker 1: in the mix of the various mismatch theories. So one
Speaker 1: of the mismatch theories is the dirty water hypoth This
Speaker 1: so um, you know, contaminated water has been a problem
Speaker 1: for most of our history. Is a species. If you
Speaker 1: take contaminated water and fermented into beer, it becomes possible.
Speaker 1: So that's one of the mismatch theories is that it was,
Speaker 1: you know, our taste for alcohol was adaptive in our
Speaker 1: evolutionary paths because it helped us hydrate in situations where
Speaker 1: the water was contaminated. Um. The problem with that theory
Speaker 1: is that there are lots of ways to to fix
Speaker 1: contaminated water, including just boiling it. And boiling it is
Speaker 1: a lot easier than turning it into beer, um, and
Speaker 1: doesn't have the downsides of you know, the negative physiological
Speaker 1: impacts that beer it could have. Another of the theories
Speaker 1: is calorie storage. The problem again, problem with this one
Speaker 1: is we think while you turn into beer and it
Speaker 1: lasts for a really long time, that's actually not true. Um.
Speaker 1: That's true now because we have hops and other ways
Speaker 1: to preserve beers, but most historically made beer is actually
Speaker 1: spoiled quite quickly. Like chea cha beer made out of
Speaker 1: maize in South America, I think has to be consumed
Speaker 1: within two or three days. Um, So it actually doesn't
Speaker 1: last that long. When you're thinking about the American frontier,
Speaker 1: what you have in mind is distilled spirits, and that
Speaker 1: is a really good way to preserve things. Distilled spirits
Speaker 1: last for a really long time. They're relatively easy to
Speaker 1: transport because you're packing a lot of ethanol in a
Speaker 1: small package. Um. But distilled spirits are relatively recent thing too.
Speaker 1: As I point out in the book, they're really in Europe,
Speaker 1: really only seventeen hundreds that we had these. But yeah,
Speaker 1: once you get distilled spirits, you can now preserve your
Speaker 1: grains in a way that um is not only long lasting,
Speaker 1: but compact and easy to transport and trade. And so
Speaker 1: alcohol really becomes a different type of thing once we
Speaker 1: figure out distillation. But that can't be part of the
Speaker 1: story if we're talking about, you know, some behavior that
Speaker 1: started twenty tho years ago. We'll be talking more after
Speaker 1: we hear this ad part of the way you also
Speaker 1: frame this thing, and this gets into i think a
Speaker 1: little more. The meat of the argument is you frame
Speaker 1: some of this is a struggle between two Greek gods,
Speaker 1: between Apollo on the one hand and Dionysius on the
Speaker 1: other hand. So lay that out for our audience. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so Apolo. One way to look at this is Apollo
Speaker 1: is the god of the prefrontal cortex. So I talked
Speaker 1: the prefrontal cortex plays a big role in my book.
Speaker 1: It's really important part of the human being, right, whether
Speaker 1: it's very physiologically expensive. We wouldn't have it if it
Speaker 1: wasn't doing something important. You need it to control your behavior,
Speaker 1: you need it to be ordered. So you know, a
Speaker 1: Paulo is the god of order, kind of doing things
Speaker 1: the right way, symmetry control, you know, it's about control,
Speaker 1: and the PFC is the center of cognitive control of
Speaker 1: executive functions. What allows you to um suppress desires or
Speaker 1: um stay focused on a task and not get distracted.
Speaker 1: It's what allows you to persevere in the face of
Speaker 1: you know, tiredness or boredom. It's everything that a four
Speaker 1: year old doesn't have, UM, but that a successful adult
Speaker 1: has to have. And civilizations need this. We couldn't build
Speaker 1: civilization without this kind of UM, perseverance, focus, self control,
Speaker 1: and that's all the realm of Apollo. The friends of
Speaker 1: Apollo chemically are stimulants, so things like caffeine and nicotine,
Speaker 1: you know, they strengthen our ability to focus and stay
Speaker 1: on task. But the Greeks, you know, and the Greeks
Speaker 1: thought Apollo was really important, but they also worshiped Dionysius,
Speaker 1: and so UM. You know, Dionysius is the the god
Speaker 1: that comes out when we thrown the PFC or turn
Speaker 1: it down a few notches. Dionysus is more like our
Speaker 1: childlike cells um, so creative, trusting, open to new experience,
Speaker 1: willing to try anything, engaged in play. Kids are like this,
Speaker 1: and adults can be like that temporarily when they essentially
Speaker 1: reverse uh cognitive maturation and go turn the PFC down
Speaker 1: and go back to being like like they were when
Speaker 1: they were little. And what's interesting the reason I find
Speaker 1: Dionysius useful in the book is the Greeks worshiped Dionysius
Speaker 1: is a god and recognize the importance of both Apollo
Speaker 1: and Dionysis, But there were a lot were more worried
Speaker 1: about Dionysius than a followed. He's Um, dionys is a
Speaker 1: little bit scary. Um. He's worshiped as a god, but
Speaker 1: they're wary of him. And it's I think significant, and
Speaker 1: that the gifts that that Dionysius can give you can
Speaker 1: go wrong if you're not careful. They're often two sided.
Speaker 1: So Dionysus is the one who gave for instance, Midas
Speaker 1: the Golden Touch, which didn't work out very well for him. Um.
Speaker 1: So they respected and worshiped Dionysius, but they also saw
Speaker 1: the dangers there, and I think that's the right attitude
Speaker 1: to have. Tour Chemical intoxicans in general and alcohol in particular,
Speaker 1: is respecting its power, seeing that it's important part of
Speaker 1: our lives, but also being aware that I can turn
Speaker 1: you into an animal like like Dionysus. Good you know it.
Speaker 1: Recently did an episode with a German writer, normanal Or
Speaker 1: what a book called Blitz about how the German army
Speaker 1: was so successful, especially in the Blitzkrieg over Belgian, Netherlands
Speaker 1: and France, because of the use of meth amphetamy and
Speaker 1: in all their drug use. There's almost no discussion of
Speaker 1: the role of alcohol um in modern day the value
Speaker 1: from modern day armies. So say more about the war
Speaker 1: fighting abilities of of uh, you know, alcohol and why
Speaker 1: alcohol was seen as a friend to that more than
Speaker 1: an enemy. Well, the crucial thing to get soldiers to
Speaker 1: fight effectively and your army to be cohesive and effective
Speaker 1: is getting people to trust each other. Right. I argue
Speaker 1: in the book that one of the central features of
Speaker 1: human life, especially in larger scale societies, is the fact
Speaker 1: that we have to overcome these cooperation dilemmas. They go
Speaker 1: by various names prisoners dilemma, tragedy of the commons, but
Speaker 1: the common structure is we we all do best if
Speaker 1: we trust each other and and if we don't pursue
Speaker 1: our im mediate selfish self interest. If we can do that,
Speaker 1: we actually all end up better in the end. I
Speaker 1: mean this happens all the time in life, mundane situations
Speaker 1: like helping your friend and move a couch when he's moving. Um,
Speaker 1: you kind of the most dramatic example is war. Right,
Speaker 1: You're literally sacrificing the most important thing your life for
Speaker 1: these other people. And so UM, armies are effective to
Speaker 1: the degree to which they can form these cohesive groups
Speaker 1: that trust one another and operate well together as a
Speaker 1: as a unit. And and how do you do that?
Speaker 1: You look at one an army attacking another army, especially
Speaker 1: in the pre modern period, UM, the first thing that
Speaker 1: comes to mind is like ant armies fighting, or you know,
Speaker 1: you see humans cooperating on a scale that looks like
Speaker 1: social insects and sacrificing themselves in a way that looks
Speaker 1: like social insects. We know how social insects pull that off.
Speaker 1: It's because they're all genetically the same. They all they're
Speaker 1: basically one big superorganism. It's puzzling how primates pull that off,
Speaker 1: because we are not one big superorganism. Um, we're individual
Speaker 1: primates with primate biology, and yet we behave like social
Speaker 1: insects sometimes, and the key to that is things like religion,
Speaker 1: So religions doing some of that work. But another really
Speaker 1: crucial um cultural technology that we use to forge individuals
Speaker 1: into cohesive trusting units is alcohol and other intoxicans. So
Speaker 1: you know, we get drunk together, we are down regulating
Speaker 1: our PFC, so we um we're less able to lie. So,
Speaker 1: you know, lying or trying to trick another person into
Speaker 1: trusting you when you're not really trustworthy is a really
Speaker 1: cognitively demanding task because at the same time, you have
Speaker 1: to keep in your mind both what the truth is,
Speaker 1: which you know to be the truth, and then the
Speaker 1: fake thing you're telling this person. You've got to make
Speaker 1: all your facial expressions and emotional reactions fit the fake thing,
Speaker 1: and you have to suppress any that that applied to
Speaker 1: the real thing that you don't want them to know about.
Speaker 1: It's really very PFC heavy task. If you hit the
Speaker 1: PFC with some methanol, it really impairs your ability to
Speaker 1: do that. And so you bring people together, you get
Speaker 1: them impaired cognitively so that they can't lie, they or
Speaker 1: it's harder for them to lie or act in an
Speaker 1: untrustworthy way. Your simultaneously boosting endorphins and sarahtonin these kind
Speaker 1: of social bonding hormones that make you feel good about
Speaker 1: yourself but also make you feel good about others and
Speaker 1: feel connected to others. This is how you forge individuals
Speaker 1: into super organisms, and at least temporarily, and so you
Speaker 1: can see why throughout history militaries have used this technique
Speaker 1: for for forging individuals into units and then also giving them.
Speaker 1: You know, the other thing alcohol does is make you reckless, um,
Speaker 1: and that that's you need a little recklessness if you're
Speaker 1: going to be fighting against other people. So it reduces
Speaker 1: um magdola response, it reduces fear, reduces stress, um. The
Speaker 1: I think militaries have always seen as crucial, and I
Speaker 1: think that's really only changed recently when warfares become more technical.
Speaker 1: So alcohol was crucial when we were picking up swords
Speaker 1: and rushing into battle to fight other people. Um, It's
Speaker 1: less helpful when I'm sitting in a control room trying
Speaker 1: to pilot a drone. So I think that's one of
Speaker 1: the reasons that we don't see it as much in
Speaker 1: modern armies, just because the nature of warfare has really
Speaker 1: you know, it is interesting right, because I firstually you
Speaker 1: have this great line in the book that those who
Speaker 1: puked together stay together. I guess that's in some sense
Speaker 1: of good some nation what you just said. But I'm
Speaker 1: thinking about the Navy Seals. I think you mentioned them
Speaker 1: in the book, and that's you know, one of the
Speaker 1: great military elite military units in the US in the world,
Speaker 1: but just recently has been the news because of all
Speaker 1: the abuses. And that's obviously one where you know, the
Speaker 1: commanders want their you know, their Navy Seals not just
Speaker 1: to survive all sorts of brutal forms of training. They
Speaker 1: want them to get drunk to bond. But then the
Speaker 1: question is all of that somehow linked to some of
Speaker 1: the abusive stuff we've also seen there or not? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: so they you know, the Navy Seals are on an
Speaker 1: organization that's not sitting in a control room by autting
Speaker 1: drones right there doing really physical, dangerous stuff that looks
Speaker 1: a lot more like more traditional types of warfare. And so, um,
Speaker 1: I tell that story about this this Navy Seal commander
Speaker 1: who after training would take all the group out and
Speaker 1: get them really drunk, and there's a level of intoxication
Speaker 1: that you get in UM business meetings or treaty meetings
Speaker 1: that's more moderate, and that's you know, dealing with this
Speaker 1: kind of building trust thing. There's a level of inebriation,
Speaker 1: especially once you get distilled spirits, where it's going beyond
Speaker 1: UM so much intoxication per se and becoming more of
Speaker 1: a costly signal UM. It's almost like you know, scarifying
Speaker 1: yourself or doing something painful. It's the fact that you're
Speaker 1: hurting yourself and you know you're gonna be really in
Speaker 1: bad shape the next morning, but we're all doing it
Speaker 1: together and we're all doing it voluntarily. That shows that
Speaker 1: you're one of the group. So it becomes a kind
Speaker 1: of hazing. It's a it's a form of hazing really
Speaker 1: and you can see how that both could be useful
Speaker 1: in building UM a sense of belonging and a sense
Speaker 1: of group bonding, but could very easily tip over into abuse.
Speaker 1: And so that's the nice edge that you're walking when
Speaker 1: when you're using these type of hazing techniques which all
Speaker 1: cultures have used. I mean, there's all sorts of initiation
Speaker 1: rituals that you know often involve huge quantities of intoxic
Speaker 1: ins and then often physical pain or danger or fear
Speaker 1: to get people to bond, and it's a it's a
Speaker 1: delicate balance to get enough of that so the bonding
Speaker 1: happens without tipping over into abuse or arm. Groups that
Speaker 1: don't use intoxicans, either because they don't have them they
Speaker 1: live in an extreme environment where it's hard to make them,
Speaker 1: or they banned them for religious theological reasons, tend to
Speaker 1: substitute other practices that get you to the same place. UM.
Speaker 1: So I talk about the Pentecostals who don't drink, but
Speaker 1: they have these prayer sessions where they work themselves up
Speaker 1: into these frenzies where they start you know, falling the
Speaker 1: floor and start speaking in tongues, or they handle snakes,
Speaker 1: so they have the same effect and kind of down
Speaker 1: regulating the PFC and and boosting some of these feel
Speaker 1: good hormones. So groups can use that instead. It's just
Speaker 1: that that's really you know, I think, as I may
Speaker 1: put it this way in the book, is it's kind
Speaker 1: of a hassle, Like staying up all night singing and
Speaker 1: dancing is really time consuming and difficult. Um And so
Speaker 1: there's a good reason that most cultures are like, yeah,
Speaker 1: we could do that, but why don't instead we just
Speaker 1: sit around and drink beer. So there's different routes to
Speaker 1: that state. But then non chemical and toxican ones um
Speaker 1: are much more time consuming. Well, you know when you
Speaker 1: were when you were both when I was reading your
Speaker 1: book and then again when you were telling the story
Speaker 1: about how you came up with that opening line about
Speaker 1: masturbation and such, you know, into the influence of a
Speaker 1: fairly high amount of alcohol. But it made me think
Speaker 1: of some of the books that are out there. I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, there's a book called The Thirsty Muse about
Speaker 1: the use of alcohol by famous you know, literary writers.
Speaker 1: There's a book called Opium and the Romantic Imagination about
Speaker 1: how famous writers you know used opium. Uh, there's a
Speaker 1: book called Cigarettes Are Sublime. And of course you have
Speaker 1: all the Silicon Valley folks and Nobel Prize winners, you know,
Speaker 1: who claimed that their psychedelic experience helped ride on the
Speaker 1: insight that resulted in they're creating, you know, zillion dollar
Speaker 1: companies are winning a Nobel Prize, and sometimes sometimes cannabis
Speaker 1: gets credit like that. I was just hanging with a
Speaker 1: friend of mine who was one of the leading scholars
Speaker 1: of international relations in the world, and he credits you know,
Speaker 1: his occasional cannabis used to being this thing that's given
Speaker 1: him some of his best insights in flections. So yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: Now I talked in the book about this, you know,
Speaker 1: the there's all over the world throughout history there's a
Speaker 1: connection between chemical and toxic ins and creative types. So artists, poets, shamans,
Speaker 1: you know, people who were coming up with new stuff
Speaker 1: and and I talked about why that's not a myth.
Speaker 1: Evolution faced this design trade off where it needed us
Speaker 1: to have a PFC so we could get to work
Speaker 1: on time and focus to things. Um, but it also
Speaker 1: needed us to be creative and trusting and they give
Speaker 1: you things and um. And one way at dealt with
Speaker 1: that trade off was by slow walking the maturation of
Speaker 1: the PFC. So that's the last part of the brain
Speaker 1: to mature. UM. It doesn't fully mature until you're in
Speaker 1: your mid twenties. So it's really the last part of
Speaker 1: a human to mature. And that keeps kids, you know,
Speaker 1: flexible and creative and able to learn new things and curious.
Speaker 1: There's good, both indirect and direct evidence that chemical and
Speaker 1: toxic ins are a solution to this design trade off.
Speaker 1: We we have to have a PFC, but with these
Speaker 1: substances we can turn it down when we want to
Speaker 1: and get back to a more childlike state of creativity.
Speaker 1: UM and being able to see new possibilities and so UM.
Speaker 1: There's a very good reason that artists and poets and
Speaker 1: anyone but anyone who needs a new insight. So you know,
Speaker 1: I talked about my talk. I gave it Google one
Speaker 1: of the Google campuses, and I was talking about at
Speaker 1: some point, alcohol and creativity. The study had just come
Speaker 1: out showing that if you've got people about point oh
Speaker 1: eight B A C, they solve lateral thinking tasks better.
Speaker 1: And they said, well, we know, we're taking you on
Speaker 1: our tour. And so the first place they took me
Speaker 1: on their tour was this whiskey room. They said, when
Speaker 1: they're working on a problem and they hit a wall
Speaker 1: they can't figure it out, instead of drinking more coffee
Speaker 1: or smoking nicotine and sitting in front of their computers
Speaker 1: and working pulling all nighters, they stop and they go
Speaker 1: to the whiskey room and they pour themselves a little
Speaker 1: bit of scotch, and they sit and bean bag chairs
Speaker 1: and they just chat. And that's how they tend to
Speaker 1: um get past these problems because what they need is
Speaker 1: an insight and and alcohol is helping with that, especially
Speaker 1: audience that you mentioned something called in that context the
Speaker 1: Bomber peak. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. So they asked
Speaker 1: me if I had ever heard of this concept, and
Speaker 1: this is, UM, I think it's probably apocryphal, but um,
Speaker 1: we could find out. We could contact Steve Bomber. But supposedly,
Speaker 1: you know, Steve Bomber, the former CEO of Microsoft and
Speaker 1: great coder, um discovered that his coding ability peaked at
Speaker 1: this very narrow blood alcohol content, like very specific and
Speaker 1: narrow blood alcohol content, and so supposedly he would keep
Speaker 1: himself hooked up to an alcohol I V to just
Speaker 1: be right at that whatever point, you know, zero seven
Speaker 1: eight seven that he found was the best way to code.
Speaker 1: And it gets at this idea that there's an optimal
Speaker 1: level of inebriation where you're still sober enough to remember
Speaker 1: what the problem is you're trying to solve, and you know,
Speaker 1: still you have your faculties intact, but you're loosened up
Speaker 1: enough that you're you're flexible, you're creative, you're doing new stuff,
Speaker 1: and humans you know, humans know this, and consciously you're
Speaker 1: unconsciously we use chemical intoxicants too, as an aid, as
Speaker 1: a tool, as a kind of mind hack when we
Speaker 1: need divergent creativity or we need lateral thinking. Although you know,
Speaker 1: I'll tell you when I was working on my dissertation,
Speaker 1: I would occasionally go out of dinner with a friends.
Speaker 1: You know, I would have a drink or two with dinner,
Speaker 1: and then I'd have like a double espresso in the evening, Okay,
Speaker 1: And I racically saw it as my speed bowl. It
Speaker 1: was my speed and I worked on two, three, four
Speaker 1: in the morning and the ideas would be flowing in.
Speaker 1: Might be a little looser in my writing, but I'd
Speaker 1: have the energy that You make a fair bit also
Speaker 1: of the genetic arguments, and you talk about the Asian
Speaker 1: flushing syndrome infect the numerous places in your book explain
Speaker 1: why that's significant. So one counter argument, so you know,
Speaker 1: I say, well, look, our taste for alcohol is ancient,
Speaker 1: and if it were only a costly mistake, evolution would
Speaker 1: have done something about it by now. One counter argument
Speaker 1: is that sometimes evolution can't fix a problem. Something really
Speaker 1: is a mistake, and it really is a problem. But
Speaker 1: evolution can't fix it. And there are two reasons that
Speaker 1: could be the case. One is what's called path dependence.
Speaker 1: And I'm using intentional language here, but this is all
Speaker 1: in process, but previous choices constrained later choices. And so
Speaker 1: a good example of a mistake like this is the
Speaker 1: human back. We have all these back problems because are
Speaker 1: our backs are terrible for for walking up right. You
Speaker 1: would never design a bipedal organism with a back like ours,
Speaker 1: But evolution didn't have the luxury of designing us from scratch.
Speaker 1: It was taking a tree living primate and gradually hacking
Speaker 1: it to to walk up right. Um, so that's a
Speaker 1: path dependence problem. You just you get stuck in a
Speaker 1: certain value and designed space and you can't get out
Speaker 1: of it. Another possibility is just that the right variation
Speaker 1: hasn't come along yet, so selection can only act on
Speaker 1: variation that exists. And so it's possible that alcohols is ancient,
Speaker 1: costly mistake and genetic evolution would love to solve it,
Speaker 1: but it just hasn't had a solution yet. And so
Speaker 1: this is where this is why the Asian flushing syndrome
Speaker 1: plays such an important role in the book, because this
Speaker 1: is the solution to the problem. Um, so you know
Speaker 1: why do people like to drink? What? Because it makes
Speaker 1: us feel good? While the question is why does evolution
Speaker 1: allow it to make us feel good? And clearly it
Speaker 1: doesn't have to. It can make us feel bad if
Speaker 1: we consume alcohol, and that's what this syndrome does, so
Speaker 1: it's a What's interesting is this is a set of
Speaker 1: two mutations to two separate mutations, and they're not linked,
Speaker 1: so they're clearly getting selected for for some function, and
Speaker 1: they interrupt our ability to metabolize ethanol. If you consume
Speaker 1: any alcohol, it makes you flush, it makes you nauseous,
Speaker 1: it makes it gives you heart palputations. Basically, Um, if
Speaker 1: you have this genetic syndrome, drinking doesn't make you feel good.
Speaker 1: It makes you feel bad. And it actually is so
Speaker 1: effective and discouraging alcohol consumption that a chemical that mimics
Speaker 1: its effects is used to treat alcoholism quite effectively. So
Speaker 1: this is a silver bullet. If our taste for intoxication
Speaker 1: is a genetic mistake. The solution exists in the gene pool.
Speaker 1: It's not the case that evolution hasn't come up with
Speaker 1: a variation yet. Because essentially it's allowing people to get
Speaker 1: mildly inebriated, but once you drink too much, it's you
Speaker 1: feel bad. They can't even really drink enough to get inebriated. Um,
Speaker 1: they can drink enough to get um. Some of the
Speaker 1: benefits that are supported to some of these mismatch benefits, right,
Speaker 1: maybe micronutrients, But yeah, they don't. They certainly don't. They're
Speaker 1: protected from alcoholism, for instance, because they just don't like
Speaker 1: to drink that much. And this gene complex, it's estimated
Speaker 1: it evolved seven to ten thousand years ago and around
Speaker 1: kind of where modern day Shanghai is, probably at the
Speaker 1: same time as the creation of rice agriculture, so it
Speaker 1: seems to be some adaptation to rice agriculture, and it's
Speaker 1: possible that it's protective against tuberculosis, could be one of
Speaker 1: the functions. It's also protective against fungal poisoning, so it
Speaker 1: could be, you know, an adaptation to dealing with storing
Speaker 1: grain and wet conditions. But in any case, it hasn't spread.
Speaker 1: So this solution to the problem of alcohol has existed
Speaker 1: for probably ten thousand years, and yet it's remained in
Speaker 1: this relatively geographically constrained area and hasn't spread very far.
Speaker 1: And that's not what you would predict if alcohol was
Speaker 1: just a costly mistake. This would be like if you
Speaker 1: had a gene that caused people to not like twinkies
Speaker 1: and love you know, Brussels sprouts and eating their greens.
Speaker 1: If twinkies were a scourge that goes back twenty thousand years,
Speaker 1: that gene would would spread pretty quickly. Um So, to me,
Speaker 1: this is a very clear case of where you have
Speaker 1: this supposed problem, you have a very clear solution quote unquote,
Speaker 1: and yet the solution doesn't spread. So that suggests that
Speaker 1: the problem isn't just a album, right, There must be
Speaker 1: adaptive benefits that are coming along with it. M hm.
Speaker 1: So you say about alcohol, on the one hand, you
Speaker 1: see alcohol is more like a pharmacological hand grenade. You
Speaker 1: also describe it as the king of intoxicainst and the
Speaker 1: perfect drug. Now you've talked about some of this, but
Speaker 1: the pharmacological hand grenade is that a good feature? Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it probably is is a feature and not a buck.
Speaker 1: So this is a This phrase comes from Stephen Brown.
Speaker 1: The Journal with Stephen Brown. He's the one who coined
Speaker 1: the term pharmacological hand grenade UM, and he compares that
Speaker 1: with lasers. You know, the LSD or cocaine is like
Speaker 1: a laser. It's going in and doing a very specific
Speaker 1: things to the brain. Alcohols um pressing several different regions
Speaker 1: of the brain while it's simultaneously rapping up sarahtonin and
Speaker 1: doorphins and so giving. It's a stimulant in various way.
Speaker 1: Is this seems to be this mix of effects seems
Speaker 1: to be a feature of alcohol. UM. I think if
Speaker 1: I could revise the book, I wouldn't call alcohol the
Speaker 1: perfect drug. I would call it the least bad drug.
Speaker 1: UM in the sense that it's not perfect. But if
Speaker 1: you gave a cultural engineering team some design specs, you know,
Speaker 1: you said, look, we need we need it intoxican because
Speaker 1: we want to down regulate the PFC, we want to
Speaker 1: up regulate these hormones. It's got to be easy to make.
Speaker 1: You should be able to make it out of anything.
Speaker 1: It should be easy to discover. It should have consistent
Speaker 1: cognitive effects across individuals. It should have a short half life.
Speaker 1: There's got to be a mechanism in the body to
Speaker 1: break it down and get it out pretty quickly, so
Speaker 1: you can get back to normal quickly. It's got to
Speaker 1: be easy to dose if you gave them this whole
Speaker 1: list of things you need. Did alcohols pretty much the
Speaker 1: ideal solution to these problems. But it's not ideal. I mean,
Speaker 1: alcohol would be the perfect drug, I think, if it
Speaker 1: did everything that it does, but it wasn't physically addictive
Speaker 1: and it wasn't so physiologically harmful. Let's take a break
Speaker 1: here and go to an ad. A lot of the
Speaker 1: books about the benefits of moderate drinking and bonding, but
Speaker 1: it's also in part about the benefits right of getting
Speaker 1: drunk um both historically. You know, you talk about the
Speaker 1: Vikings and they're great drunk fests, and how much massive
Speaker 1: about alflaking. You get how incredibly successful they were for many,
Speaker 1: many centuries um, and you bring it up to the present.
Speaker 1: But I do think that's an important role that alcohol plays,
Speaker 1: like assist friendships. The guys I've been friends with since
Speaker 1: college forty years ago, you know, are the ones I've
Speaker 1: probably got the drunkest with, and those are the ones
Speaker 1: where it kind of got in, you know, the the
Speaker 1: inhibitions you have as a young man in your twenties
Speaker 1: about sharing very intimate stuff. I mean, we broke through
Speaker 1: talking about stuff like that in a way that bonded us. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: none of us actually shouldn't say one of us Will
Speaker 1: already showed signs of it and eventually did become an
Speaker 1: alcoholic and died of his alcoholism in his fifties. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, the one British member of our of this,
Speaker 1: but all the others it was I think a really
Speaker 1: very substantial in that benefits. Yeah. One of the anecdotes
Speaker 1: that I ended up taking out of the book, UM
Speaker 1: was about that. So it was a good friend of mine,
Speaker 1: very old friend of mine who um I had a
Speaker 1: bit of a falling out with. We were going through
Speaker 1: a tough period and the breakthrough was this was actually
Speaker 1: during the pandemic, so it was remote. It was over
Speaker 1: zoom um. But we got really really drunk unzoomed together
Speaker 1: and he was finally, you know, we got to a
Speaker 1: level of in abriation where he could tell me what
Speaker 1: he was so angry about, and I was in a
Speaker 1: receptive state of mind where I could, you know, grasp
Speaker 1: why he was upset and apologize sincerely, you know, and
Speaker 1: really feel sorry. And you know, we were able to
Speaker 1: share emotions I think you know, particularly men um use
Speaker 1: this in their friendships because it's not for whatever reason,
Speaker 1: whether it's a genuine genetic gender difference or if it's
Speaker 1: just because of cultural norms. Um, sharing emotions is not
Speaker 1: something we tend to do. Hell, you know, you do
Speaker 1: make me think that. You know, I have to say
Speaker 1: alcohol play that pivotal role from me in my twenties. Um,
Speaker 1: but once I got into my thirties and forties, it
Speaker 1: was displaced in that regard by M D m A. Okay,
Speaker 1: I mean in M d A just pivotal in terms
Speaker 1: of being able to talk about things that are difficult
Speaker 1: to talk about, being able to listen to things that
Speaker 1: are difficult to listen about. Um. Now my can't do
Speaker 1: with the frequency of alcohol, which then again maybe a
Speaker 1: benefit in some regards. But it's an interesting thing that
Speaker 1: alcohol and m D m A do share in comic times. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and and for similar physiological reasons right there, Um they're ramping.
Speaker 1: I mean, M D M A is a stimulant, but
Speaker 1: it's got that Um it's it's flooding you with serotonin,
Speaker 1: right You're just feeling so good, Um that it's it
Speaker 1: has a similar kind of expansive. You get that similar
Speaker 1: type of expansiveness that you get can get with alcohol,
Speaker 1: but in a much more targeted way. Um so yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean that's the I think in a in a
Speaker 1: kind of healthy grown up life, we'd understand what what
Speaker 1: various chemical intoxicants are good for and what their various
Speaker 1: you know, downsides or dangers are, and figure out a
Speaker 1: strategy for using them when appropriate. And I think those
Speaker 1: of us who are thoughtful and knowledgele with this managed
Speaker 1: to do an individual level the the great challenges on
Speaker 1: the societal level, which brings us more fully into the present,
Speaker 1: which we've alluded to and come to occasionally. But you know,
Speaker 1: there's two things going on your book about the present time.
Speaker 1: I mean, one is you're basically offering a fundamental challenge
Speaker 1: to the kind of neo prohibitionist uh you know thinking
Speaker 1: and mindset that's out there. And you know, you you
Speaker 1: reference the the study that came out in the British
Speaker 1: journal The Lancet in eighteen, the punchline of which was
Speaker 1: the safest level of drinking is none, and you dismissed,
Speaker 1: don't know, called it terrible or stupid or something like that,
Speaker 1: with which I thoroughly agree. And it's notable that a
Speaker 1: new study just came out of the Lancet in the
Speaker 1: last few months in which they acknowledge the potential benefits
Speaker 1: of moderate drinking, especially among older people, only among zero
Speaker 1: benefit if you're under forty. Yeah. And then I see that,
Speaker 1: you know, you're an American living in Canada now, and
Speaker 1: I see that the Center for a Substance Abuse and
Speaker 1: Addiction in Canada just came out of recommendations in September,
Speaker 1: you know, basically saying, you know, not that drink down
Speaker 1: almost to the floor. I mean a very not fully prohibitionists,
Speaker 1: but quasi prohibitionist stake. And so you express your exasperation
Speaker 1: about all of that, and you know, it's pulling out
Speaker 1: the benefits of the office part and all that. But
Speaker 1: then there's the flip side, and it's your last chapter, right,
Speaker 1: which I think you called distillation and isolation, and this
Speaker 1: is just talking about all the harms of alcohol and
Speaker 1: what's wrong with alcohol and the fact that we've now
Speaker 1: moved not just from being winded but to distilled liquors.
Speaker 1: And part of me was thinking, okay, you know, still
Speaker 1: just trying to cover his ass here, he's already done
Speaker 1: a celebration of alcohol, you know, but but and so.
Speaker 1: But then you make an argument about how distillation and
Speaker 1: isolation may have changed the game, and that maybe even
Speaker 1: that old um I can't remember as the hijacker hangover
Speaker 1: theory may have some application that we haven't quite yet
Speaker 1: figured out in terms of the future distilled liquors. So
Speaker 1: lay that out about isolation and distillation and the problems
Speaker 1: there um for our listeners. Yeah, so the distillation first.
Speaker 1: So for almost all of our history with alcohol, we've
Speaker 1: been drinking naturally fermented beverages, and alcoholic beverages come with
Speaker 1: a kind of built in safety feature, which is that
Speaker 1: they just can't get much stronger than a certain level
Speaker 1: because you know, the easter producing alcohol and at a
Speaker 1: certain point they poison themselves. They are more resistant than
Speaker 1: the bacteria are, right, So they're they're engaging in biological
Speaker 1: warfare against these bacteria that are that are very susceptible
Speaker 1: to alcohol. They're tougher, but they're not infinitely tough. And
Speaker 1: we've been breeding east to get tougher and tougher so
Speaker 1: we can make stronger and stronger beers and wines. But
Speaker 1: for most of our evolutionary history, the alcohol content of
Speaker 1: of these beverages was capped at a pretty low level.
Speaker 1: So the beers we were drinking, we're coming in about
Speaker 1: two to three percent ABV, and fruit wines a bit higher,
Speaker 1: but probably eight nine maybe ten pc a BV. So
Speaker 1: those are relatively safe delivery vehicles for ethanol. They're delivering
Speaker 1: ethanol to our bodies at a rate that we can
Speaker 1: kind of deal with. And especially like if you're drinking
Speaker 1: at two to three pc a b V beer and
Speaker 1: you're a fully grown adult, you can drink that all
Speaker 1: day long and never get beyond point eight or so
Speaker 1: b a c. But what were those Vikings drinking at
Speaker 1: those festival as a line you had from Sunday story
Speaker 1: and they died with a cup in their hands or something. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they were drinking meat, they were drinking meds um that
Speaker 1: we're getting up to slightly higher alcohol level, and they
Speaker 1: were just heroically drinking massive quantities of it. I mean,
Speaker 1: it is physically possible, it's just challenging. You've got to
Speaker 1: basically be drinking constantly to get really drunk on things
Speaker 1: like that. Then, relatively recently so um in Europe, not
Speaker 1: until the sixteen hundreds or seventeen hundreds, which in you know,
Speaker 1: the story I'm telling is basically, yesterday, we figure out
Speaker 1: how to disable the safety feature of naturally fermented beverages
Speaker 1: by distilling them. Um, so we pull the alcohol off
Speaker 1: and we could then produce these incredibly concentrated distilled liquors. So, um,
Speaker 1: you know, you can get vodkas that come in in
Speaker 1: the nineties in terms of a BV percentage, and so
Speaker 1: part of my argument is this is a novel form
Speaker 1: of alcohol that's so much more powerful it really should
Speaker 1: be considered a different drug, and it's much much more dangerous.
Speaker 1: You can, um, you know, the sweet spot, let's say
Speaker 1: is point oh eight b a c Uh. You're drinking
Speaker 1: two to three percent beer. You can drink that at
Speaker 1: a moderate pace all day long and kind of stay
Speaker 1: at point away. You're doing shots of vodka, you just
Speaker 1: blow right past point oh eight into levels where you're
Speaker 1: blacking out and you know, potentially killing yourself, um quite quickly.
Speaker 1: So we now have access to a much much more
Speaker 1: powerful form of alcohol that's order of magnitudes more powerful
Speaker 1: than anything we've had to deal with before. Um. So
Speaker 1: that's distillation. Isolation refers to the fact that historically our
Speaker 1: alcohol consumption has always been social. Having private access to
Speaker 1: alcohol is almost unheard of in most societies, and every
Speaker 1: society that I know of that uses alcohol surrounds its
Speaker 1: consumption with various formal and informal rituals that help individuals
Speaker 1: to control their consumption. So I talked about, you know,
Speaker 1: the Greek Symposium wine party, where the symposi arc was
Speaker 1: in charge of mixing you know, the wine to water ratio,
Speaker 1: and you only drank when the thing got passed around
Speaker 1: by the symposi arc so they could control the pace
Speaker 1: of drinking. In Chinese banquets, you don't drink it will.
Speaker 1: You can only drink when someone makes a toast, and
Speaker 1: then whoever is in charge of making toasts is um
Speaker 1: strictly at least traditionally regulated by ritual. So these are
Speaker 1: all ways we control alcohol consumption, and even in what
Speaker 1: seemed like completely unstructured modern situations. So you go to
Speaker 1: the pub with your friends if you're typically drinking in rounds,
Speaker 1: so you know, if you drink too quickly, you've gotta
Speaker 1: wait toward your next drink until we're all done. And
Speaker 1: the bar keep could not make eye contact with you
Speaker 1: if they're worried about how quickly you're drinking. There's all
Speaker 1: these ways when we're drinking in groups that we can
Speaker 1: moderate each other's behavior. Once you can go to a
Speaker 1: drive through liquor store and load up your SUV with
Speaker 1: a case of vodka and drive at home and have
Speaker 1: all this, you know, enough alcohol in your house to
Speaker 1: kill a village full of people, and you're alone, and
Speaker 1: you can just consume that whenever you want. That's a
Speaker 1: really new, evolutionarily novel situation, and a quite dangerous one
Speaker 1: because I don't think we're well equipped to moderate our
Speaker 1: alcohol concer emption by ourselves. We need social help. Um
Speaker 1: And I think you know a natural experiment that showed
Speaker 1: this is the pandemic. You know, it's it's a great
Speaker 1: natural experiment. Hey, let's see what happens if we don't
Speaker 1: let people leave the house anymore, but we still give
Speaker 1: them as much alcohol as they want. What's going to happen?
Speaker 1: And what happened was people problem drinking became really, really serious.
Speaker 1: And I know a lot of people who are still
Speaker 1: struggling with with the aftermath of that, trying to get
Speaker 1: back to sustainable levels of consumption. After indulging. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean you quote the aforementioned Dwight Heath once again, the
Speaker 1: Brown University anthropologist is talking about one of the greatest
Speaker 1: indicators of a problem drinking is drinking alone. Yeah, right,
Speaker 1: more than almost anything else. And you also make the
Speaker 1: point that America is particularly bad in this regard. I mean,
Speaker 1: you contrast the Southern European drinking culture, which you know,
Speaker 1: drinking you know, wine and beer with food, and you
Speaker 1: with the Northern drinking, which is more about drinking to
Speaker 1: get drunk, you know, the skin and Eving countries, Russia, Denmarkets, etcetera.
Speaker 1: But then you say America seems to do it even
Speaker 1: more problematically in the Northern Europeans. Yeah. Well, it's because
Speaker 1: we've got two separate problems, well maybe three separate problems.
Speaker 1: One is that we're northern drinking culture. So you know,
Speaker 1: this is where you're drinking to get drunk. You're drinking
Speaker 1: primarily distilled spirits. Um, you're often drinking and unisex groups.
Speaker 1: So a bunch of dudes get drunk together, a bunch
Speaker 1: of women getting drunk together. You're drinking two with the
Speaker 1: purpose of getting drunk, and the goal is to be
Speaker 1: visibly drunk. There's something wrong with you if you're not
Speaker 1: visibly drunk as opposed to Southern cultures where we're being
Speaker 1: you know, really visibly intoxicated. Is kind of shameful. Um.
Speaker 1: It's not not something you want to do in public. Um.
Speaker 1: So that's unhealthy. So we've inherited that northern drinking culture.
Speaker 1: On top of that, we have a more serious isolation
Speaker 1: problem because it's more common in America going to live
Speaker 1: in suburbs where, um, you don't have a local that
Speaker 1: you go to, you know, on your walk back from
Speaker 1: the tube, you get in your car at your office
Speaker 1: park and you drive home to your house and you're
Speaker 1: drinking alone or most you know, with your family around,
Speaker 1: but not socially in the way you do in Europe
Speaker 1: or in major cities in in the U s where
Speaker 1: you have you know, a pub, a local that you're
Speaker 1: going to. Um. So there's the isolation problem. It's higher
Speaker 1: in the States. Um. And then on top of all that,
Speaker 1: you have this weird Christian culture of the Puritans. You know,
Speaker 1: these are the first ones that came over right where
Speaker 1: they demonize alcohol and therefore have this kind of love
Speaker 1: hate relationship with it. Um. You know, I quote this anthropologist,
Speaker 1: Janet Curzan. It's got a great book about um us
Speaker 1: drinking culture and the problems with it. We're she's, you know,
Speaker 1: as an anthropologist in the American South, she noticed that
Speaker 1: she would go to the liquor store because they have
Speaker 1: liquor stores and they Baptist drink. But people she had
Speaker 1: been at church wouldn't make eye contact with her in
Speaker 1: the liquor store, and she'd like, you know, try to
Speaker 1: wave to them, and they'd like look the other way
Speaker 1: and pretend they didn't know her. She was like, let's
Speaker 1: this is weird. And then a friend of her said,
Speaker 1: you know, you don't say hello to someone in the
Speaker 1: liquor store, UM, in the same way you wouldn't if
Speaker 1: you were you know, if I ran into you in
Speaker 1: a porn store, we wouldn't be like, hey, what are
Speaker 1: you getting? It's shameful to be seen there is shameful UM.
Speaker 1: And that's just a weird attitude to have towards alcohol.
Speaker 1: And so you pile all that on top of each
Speaker 1: other and you get a really pathological drinking culture. M hm.
Speaker 1: You know, just making me think of a couple of
Speaker 1: the counter examples UM historically, right, so one you talked
Speaker 1: about briefly as the Mornings, who maybe not at their origins,
Speaker 1: but you know, shortly after the origins, basically are you know,
Speaker 1: no inebriants. And I guess I'll point out that, you know,
Speaker 1: there's Mormon tea made from a you know, plant that's
Speaker 1: kind of feder in it, but I mean basically coffee, alcohol,
Speaker 1: all that sort of stuff. Yet a very successful um culture.
Speaker 1: And then the second one is Islam, which is banned
Speaker 1: alcohol but been tolerant of other ones um and the
Speaker 1: Ottoman Empire was, you know, a very successful and powerful
Speaker 1: empire for centuries. So is it just that, in fact,
Speaker 1: drinking was always going on and just didn't talk about
Speaker 1: it like in the South, or was it something else
Speaker 1: that enabled them to be so successful. We're drinking was
Speaker 1: not playing a big role in their culture. So I
Speaker 1: think what's happening with with Mormonism And and scholars have
Speaker 1: argued this is the case with Islam too. So in
Speaker 1: the case of Islam, they're surrounded by these Mediterranean wine
Speaker 1: drinking cultures and they need to distinguish themselves, and one
Speaker 1: of the ways they do it is through these kind
Speaker 1: of costly displays. So So this is one of the
Speaker 1: feature years of successful religions is that they make you
Speaker 1: do counter productive from a practical standpoint, costly things to
Speaker 1: show that you really believe in the belief system that
Speaker 1: you're professing you believe in, and also you do things
Speaker 1: that distinguish you from non members. And so I think
Speaker 1: that the Mormon ban on alcohol and caffeine is more
Speaker 1: like the kind of you know, Mormon underwear and the
Speaker 1: other things they do that distinguishes them from people around them.
Speaker 1: It's a very clever, costly demand on adherents. It enhances
Speaker 1: your sense that you are a group different from the
Speaker 1: groups around you. But it's it's not directly functionally a
Speaker 1: response to the problem of alcohol. It's a group marking device.
Speaker 1: So you're in the end of this book basically saying
Speaker 1: the still liquors are a real threat. You're a big
Speaker 1: fan of the office party. You point out how you know,
Speaker 1: you and your buddies having some rinks and a lounge
Speaker 1: help you get all sorts of research brands to come
Speaker 1: up with great ideas and to bond and to you know,
Speaker 1: you know, kind of moderate the competition among people and
Speaker 1: increase the uh the collaboration but are you basically saying
Speaker 1: that when you're having office parties, I don't put the
Speaker 1: distilled liquor out there. Yeah, and sure, or be worried,
Speaker 1: but be more worried about it. So, in terms of
Speaker 1: practical considerations, one of the ways writing this book, doing
Speaker 1: the research for it has changed my behavior is I
Speaker 1: appreciate beer a lot more. Um. I never was a
Speaker 1: beer drinker. I'm I'm wine drinker and and and Scotch
Speaker 1: and various distilled liquors. Um, but I've come to see
Speaker 1: the benefit of beer and as kind of a delivery
Speaker 1: device for ethanol, a way to deliver ethanol to your
Speaker 1: brain and your friends brains at a sustainable pace. And um,
Speaker 1: it's changed my behavior. So I had this welcome thing
Speaker 1: for some new post docs in this product drink that
Speaker 1: I run, And you know, I made the conscious decision
Speaker 1: to instead of you know, ordering rounds of cocktails for people,
Speaker 1: are getting bottles of wine for the table. Um, I
Speaker 1: got pictures of beer. And I don't really like beer
Speaker 1: as much as I like those other things. But but
Speaker 1: I thought, you know, this is actually a more safe
Speaker 1: and sustainable social truck. Um. So yeah, I would say
Speaker 1: be worried about um distilled liquors. I know this is
Speaker 1: the case. I think in Germany and some other European
Speaker 1: countries there's different ages when you can legally drink distilled
Speaker 1: spirits as opposed to beer and wine. Um, you can
Speaker 1: drink beer and wine younger, and I think that makes
Speaker 1: a lot of sense. Yeah, it makes me wonder with
Speaker 1: these new you know, these canned cocktails that are coming
Speaker 1: out now, which I think the alcohol content is equivalent
Speaker 1: to be or wine, and whether that's going to land
Speaker 1: up making them more like beer and wine than it
Speaker 1: is like drinking shots of something. Yeah, but it's and
Speaker 1: competing with beer now. Yeah, and if you're you know,
Speaker 1: and nearing something that's deliberately low a b v um,
Speaker 1: that seems like a sustainable strategy. Mm hmmm. Well we're
Speaker 1: just so just to finish off here a little bit
Speaker 1: more about your own evolution. Um. I mean, so you know,
Speaker 1: you're you're a sinologist, you learned Chinese, you're writing these,
Speaker 1: you know, brilliant academic books about ancient China or I
Speaker 1: don't call it ancient, but China long time ago. And
Speaker 1: then you had a great gause of a care your
Speaker 1: first of your crossover books before Drunk called trying not
Speaker 1: to Try? About early Chinese philosophers, you know, talking and
Speaker 1: writing about an effortless way of being in the world,
Speaker 1: which they called way. Did that in any way cause
Speaker 1: you to open up to write this book about drunk?
Speaker 1: Or what was the impetus that was directly? It was directly,
Speaker 1: it was directly related. Um. So yeah, my my colleagues
Speaker 1: are a bit puzzled while I have suddenly written this
Speaker 1: book about alcohol. Um, but you know, and trying not
Speaker 1: to try. I explore this tension in early Chinese is
Speaker 1: thought that they want you to get into this state
Speaker 1: called way or effortless action. Um, this spontaneous state. You're creative,
Speaker 1: you're in the zone, you're you lose the sense of
Speaker 1: yourself as an agent, and everything works out, you solve problems,
Speaker 1: People trust you and like you at this charisma, and
Speaker 1: and so they want you to get into this state.
Speaker 1: The problem is there's this paradox I call it the
Speaker 1: paradox of way or the you know, the version in
Speaker 1: the title of the book. How do you how do
Speaker 1: you try not to try? It's directly paradoxical. So if
Speaker 1: I'm telling you, hey, relax, stop trying. Um, the part
Speaker 1: of the brain that I'm activating is your prefrontal cortex.
Speaker 1: I'm lighting up your prefrontal cortex by asking you to
Speaker 1: do something agentic, and yet that's the part of the
Speaker 1: brain we're trying to shut down, so it's directly counterproductive.
Speaker 1: The early Chinese came up with various strategies to get
Speaker 1: around that, essentially giving you stuff to do to distract you,
Speaker 1: you know, like do this ritual or sit in meditation.
Speaker 1: But in the course of writing, especially with the trade
Speaker 1: version of that book, UM, I was talking about this
Speaker 1: story from the really Daoist text where they compare a
Speaker 1: drunken person to the Daoist sage, and and they're clearly
Speaker 1: using it just as an analogy, so you should be
Speaker 1: drunk on heaven and not drunk on alcohol. But it
Speaker 1: did cause a little light bolb to go off my head,
Speaker 1: and and I thought, well, you know what, you know,
Speaker 1: if you have cultures that are aware that spontaneity is
Speaker 1: valuable for certain goals creativity, trust, and yet is also
Speaker 1: aware that it's paradoxical to to ask people to consciously
Speaker 1: become spontaneous, what a great work around to find a
Speaker 1: chemical substance that you could take that will do the
Speaker 1: job for you. So you know, it's directly paradoxical to
Speaker 1: try to use your mind to shut down your mind.
Speaker 1: It's not paradoxical to drink a substance that you know,
Speaker 1: completely outside of your control was doing that job for you.
Speaker 1: So I started to get interested in the idea that
Speaker 1: UM cultures have figured out that you could use chemical
Speaker 1: intoxicants as this cultural tool to solve the paradox of
Speaker 1: how how you can try not to try So, so
Speaker 1: that that directly led to UM my interest in writing
Speaker 1: this book. I'm curious, you know, your book. I'm curious
Speaker 1: about the reactions you've got into it, not least in
Speaker 1: the community of alcohol and jog researchers. I didn't do
Speaker 1: any thorough search, but I'm wondering how it's been received
Speaker 1: and evaluated by all of the people getting funded to
Speaker 1: look at the problems with alcohol and all of those
Speaker 1: alcohol researchers and public health and all that. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: it's UM surprisingly positive across the board. You know, I'm
Speaker 1: I'm not an alcohol specialist by original training, but I
Speaker 1: am a good researchers. You know, I did my homework.
Speaker 1: I really spent a long time doing the research for
Speaker 1: the book, and I reached out to a lot of
Speaker 1: these specialists in the field. I'm still you know, there's
Speaker 1: still a kind of you want to think of it
Speaker 1: as medicalized wing UM. I mean, most of the professional
Speaker 1: academic publications on alcohol or a medicalized lens, you know,
Speaker 1: it's treating it as a physical problem, physiological impact. Those
Speaker 1: people aren't convinced. UM. And you know, I still, actually
Speaker 1: one colleague I really respect Randy NeSSI, who's UM kind
Speaker 1: of the founder of evolutionary medicine. UM remained unconvinced by
Speaker 1: my argument. So there are people who aren't convinced. And
Speaker 1: I do get um kicked back from people who say, hey,
Speaker 1: how can you be celebrating alcohol when it's so damaging
Speaker 1: and you know, alcoholism such as serious scourge and UM,
Speaker 1: but I think I did you know? So that last
Speaker 1: chapter about the dangers of alcohol isn't just an ask
Speaker 1: covering add on. It's at the heart of the book.
Speaker 1: I mean, the whole the whole premise of the book
Speaker 1: is this is a really dangerous, harmful substance that cultures
Speaker 1: have always been ambivalent about, So why do we still
Speaker 1: use it? Um So, the dangers and the potential downsides
Speaker 1: of alcohol are are motivating force in the argument from
Speaker 1: the very beginning, I think, um So, I think people
Speaker 1: see that as well, and see that. Um Now, even
Speaker 1: though I'm talking about the benefits of alcohol, it's really
Speaker 1: just kind of to sit in a corrective space alongside
Speaker 1: of this. You know, twenty shelves of books about alcoholism
Speaker 1: and the dangerous of alcohol. Um, we do need a
Speaker 1: little bit of a counterbalance looking at the positive functions.
Speaker 1: I'm curious, have any of the big beer wine companies
Speaker 1: invited you and offered you fat honor arium to come
Speaker 1: keynote their annual conferences or something, And if so, have
Speaker 1: you acceptive taking money from them or not? Yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: actually doing my first one like that in October at
Speaker 1: the World World Average Association. I think it's a beer
Speaker 1: producers organization. And I don't feel bad at all because
Speaker 1: I think that actually I think they need help and
Speaker 1: they should get help. Um. I think they've been him
Speaker 1: this defensive crouch where you know, they've kind of accepted
Speaker 1: this story that they're peddling something that's no different from
Speaker 1: nicotine or pornography or cocaine, And you know accepted. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, it's bad, and but it's a vice that
Speaker 1: people want and so and I don't think they have
Speaker 1: to be so defensive. I actually especially beer makers, because
Speaker 1: beer is the best, the safest form of alcohol. So
Speaker 1: this is a case where my interest intellectually kind of
Speaker 1: overlap with the interests of an industry. I think we
Speaker 1: need to change the public discourse on this. So yeah,
Speaker 1: I am. I'm actually doing my first big address to
Speaker 1: an industry organization, and I think the beverage industry is
Speaker 1: slowly waking up to my book and realizing, oh, here's
Speaker 1: some positive arguments for alcohol. And I don't see any
Speaker 1: problem with with talking to them about it because I
Speaker 1: believe in it personally. Well, listen, I I think your
Speaker 1: book was wonderful. As I said, there are a few
Speaker 1: books I've enjoyed reading more and prepping for this thing.
Speaker 1: I think the book is important culturally. I hope it
Speaker 1: really does get out there. I saw you tweeting recently
Speaker 1: had just been translated into Korean, so hopefully this has
Speaker 1: a really substantial global reach. And you know, I hope
Speaker 1: you don't leave the field because you're really saying something
Speaker 1: that's very important. So Thank you ever so much for
Speaker 1: writing this and for taking the time to talk with
Speaker 1: me and with and our listeners on Psychoactive. No great,
Speaker 1: thanks for having me. It was a lot of fun.
Speaker 1: If you're enjoying Psychoactive, please tell your friends about it,
Speaker 1: or you can write us a review at Apple Podcasts
Speaker 1: or wherever you get your podcasts. We love to hear
Speaker 1: from our listeners. If you'd like to share your own stories,
Speaker 1: comments and ideas, then leave us a message at one
Speaker 1: eight three three seven seven nine sixty that's eight three
Speaker 1: three psycho zero, or you can email us at Psychoactive
Speaker 1: at protozoa dot com or find me on Twitter at
Speaker 1: Ethan natal Man. You can also find contact information in
Speaker 1: our show notes. Psychoactive is a production of I Heart
Speaker 1: Radio and Protozoa Pictures. It's hosted by me Ethan Naedelman.
Speaker 1: It's produced by Noham Osband and Josh Stain. The executive
Speaker 1: producers are Dylan Golden, Ari Handel, Elizabeth Geesus and Darren
Speaker 1: Aronofsky from Protozoa Pictures, Alex Williams and Matt Frederick from
Speaker 1: my Heart Radio, and me Ethan Nadelman. Our music is
Speaker 1: by Ari Blucien and Special Things to a bios f
Speaker 1: Bianca Grimshaw and Robert BP. Next week I'll be talking
Speaker 1: with Boris Jordan's founder and head of cure Leaf, one
Speaker 1: of the world's biggest marijuana businesses. This is my fifth
Speaker 1: company I've built, and my formula has always never build
Speaker 1: a company to sell it. Build a company to compete
Speaker 1: and be best in class. And that's what I'm doing,
Speaker 1: and I hope I'm successful. But I can tell you
Speaker 1: one thing. I'm not building cure Leaf to sell it
Speaker 1: to a tobacco company. I'm building cure Leaves to be
Speaker 1: a competitive in this world. Subscribe to Cycleactive now, see it,
Speaker 1: don't miss it.