Speaker 1: All right, we're scrapping the cute stuff and cutting straight
Speaker 1: to the chase. I'm Dessa. This is deeply human. Today
Speaker 1: we're talking about drugs and we're already like five and
Speaker 1: a half seconds in. Let's go hit it, James, could
Speaker 1: we speed it up a little. I've just I've just
Speaker 1: got like an insane amount of stuff to get to
Speaker 1: in this episode. Great, thank you. Hey, come on, man,
Speaker 1: don't speed me. You know that always makes me dizzy,
Speaker 1: and you know it, okay. I work as a touring
Speaker 1: musician where it's not considered unprofessional to drink on the job.
Speaker 1: In fact, taking a slug of whiskey on stage often
Speaker 1: elicits a round of applause. This business is full of fascinating,
Speaker 1: brilliant weirdos, and intoxicants are easy to get and sometimes
Speaker 1: hard to avoid. Alexis Stevenson, an author friend of mine,
Speaker 1: once told me I'm not a writer, I just drink
Speaker 1: a lot about it, which I immediately cribbed for a
Speaker 1: song lyric. Sub stant's use and abuse is sort of
Speaker 1: baked into the culture. And that's true at the indie
Speaker 1: level and for the A listers. To quote the late
Speaker 1: great Robin Williams, cocaine is God's way of saying that
Speaker 1: you are making too much money. Even being so surrounded
Speaker 1: by it, there is still something that's sort of paradoxical
Speaker 1: about drugs to me, not just the many hazards of abuse,
Speaker 1: but the very idea of drugs. Isn't every organism supposed
Speaker 1: to be out here fighting for survival. Wouldn't getting messed
Speaker 1: up slower reflexes and make us worse at hunting or
Speaker 1: escaping whoever is hunting us? Why would we choose to
Speaker 1: regularly impair ourselves? And even if you don't drink or smoke,
Speaker 1: odds are you probably had the occasional cup of coffee
Speaker 1: or tea. Caffeine is the most commonly used psychoactive drug
Speaker 1: in the world, So the question of the day, why
Speaker 1: do we use intoxics? My name is I am a
Speaker 1: post doctoral research or at the University of Salford near Manchester,
Speaker 1: and I study primates and how they have adapted to
Speaker 1: eating different foods. Primates includes us, right, yes, that's right,
Speaker 1: we are primates. It turns out that people primates have
Speaker 1: a particular genetic advantage when it comes to digesting alcohol
Speaker 1: a k A. Ethanol. Marika says We may have first
Speaker 1: developed a special interest for alcohol when we transitioned from
Speaker 1: being tree dwelling creatures to a more terrestrial lifestyle. When
Speaker 1: we started living on the ground, we were more likely
Speaker 1: to come across fallen fruit. When fruit becomes overripe and
Speaker 1: has a lot of sugar in it, what tends to
Speaker 1: happen is that yeasts get in there, and yeast will
Speaker 1: start to eat the sugars, and the end product of
Speaker 1: that is ethanol, a substance that smells really strongly, right,
Speaker 1: so it could be almost like an advertisement. It's like
Speaker 1: this this odor plume. It's like, there's sugar here, Eat me.
Speaker 1: And we have a particular genetic advantage that allows us
Speaker 1: to process that ethanol, meaning we can potentially eat more
Speaker 1: energy rich fruit. There's this mutation that humans have, and
Speaker 1: what's interesting about this mutation is that it makes our
Speaker 1: ethanol metabolism really really efficient, like forty times more efficient.
Speaker 1: Early hominids may have been attracted to boozy stuff because
Speaker 1: it was a reliable source of energy. Genetic evidence implies
Speaker 1: this mutation may have surfaced ten million years ago, though
Speaker 1: it could be much longer too, and it's not only
Speaker 1: primates who are interested in this fruity, boozy business. The
Speaker 1: big story, the most famous story, is that elephants go
Speaker 1: for these fermented marilla fruits. And it's a story that's
Speaker 1: so widespread, like it's brought up in these psures for Safari's.
Speaker 1: So there's a famous liqueur that's made out of marilla fruits.
Speaker 1: It's called Amula. Amarula is a lot like Bailey's. I
Speaker 1: have toured South Africa, I have headed over ice and
Speaker 1: it is awesome. I have all heard the stories of
Speaker 1: elephants totally lit up on fermented marula fruit, stumbling around
Speaker 1: and making a mess of themselves like a thirty ton
Speaker 1: bachelor party with tusks. But humans want to see is
Speaker 1: that elephants want to become intoxicated. They want to get
Speaker 1: not the sugar, but they want to get the side effects.
Speaker 1: And it's like this intentionality aspect. It's really really difficult.
Speaker 1: But how do you prove that an animal is trying
Speaker 1: to get faded and not just give food. So there's
Speaker 1: one to study with um something called an II. It's
Speaker 1: a it's a type of lemur from Madagascar. They're they're
Speaker 1: so cool looking and they're really cute. Um that well,
Speaker 1: it's in the eye to beholder. I think I think
Speaker 1: they're cute. Some people don't agree. Wait, hold on google,
Speaker 1: Google search. They have very large ears, and I don't
Speaker 1: know good about it. I don't like that. But they
Speaker 1: have great tails, save these grape bushy tails. And they
Speaker 1: have this amazing middle finger that's all along and spin
Speaker 1: delete that they used to tap on tree trunks with
Speaker 1: to find hollow parts. And then when they found a
Speaker 1: hollow part, they gouge it and usually there's some kind
Speaker 1: of big bug or grub in there that they pull
Speaker 1: out with their spindle a finger and then eat. But
Speaker 1: they don't just eat bugs. They also eat a lot
Speaker 1: of nectar. And the nectar that they consume you can
Speaker 1: tell there's ethanol in it just from smelling it. When
Speaker 1: researchers gave eye eyes the choice between an alcoholic mixture
Speaker 1: and just plain water, they drank twice as much as
Speaker 1: the booze. And in a study on elephants and alcohol,
Speaker 1: researchers allowed them to drink from a boozy trough then
Speaker 1: took detailed notes on their behavior. The things that they
Speaker 1: wrote down were like swaying and increased vocalizations and increased aggression,
Speaker 1: which it's like, are you looking for those things because
Speaker 1: that's what humans do? Or you know, is that really
Speaker 1: how the intoxication manifests while the animals only have access
Speaker 1: to alcohol when they come across naturally fermenting sugars or
Speaker 1: I guess research teams we are willing to fill up
Speaker 1: a trough with booze. But when did people start making
Speaker 1: alcohol on purpose? So, I mean this is when we
Speaker 1: get into archaeological evidence, which I think it's amazing. It's
Speaker 1: just so cool that you can get residues from things
Speaker 1: that are thousands of years old and and find evidence
Speaker 1: that you know, these were used ferment beverages. So it
Speaker 1: goes back like about ten thousand years that we have
Speaker 1: evidence of humans intentionally fermenting foods and beverages. Fermentation practices
Speaker 1: might go back even further, but that's hard to prove.
Speaker 1: Like if a pot was made of wood, it might
Speaker 1: not survive millennia to be discovered. Okay, let's transition now
Speaker 1: from prehistory to the bleeding edge of scientific investigation. My
Speaker 1: name is David Natheimer, a psychiatrist and a psycho pharmacologist.
Speaker 1: So I studied effects of drugs on the nervous system
Speaker 1: and the psychological consequences of those. David is an internationally
Speaker 1: recognized veteran in his field. He spent ten years advising
Speaker 1: the British government on how to create a rational approach
Speaker 1: to drugs and how to minimize their harms, and in
Speaker 1: the UK he's also known for controversy. He was dismissed
Speaker 1: from his position after arguing that alcohol was more harmful
Speaker 1: than a host of other drugs, and to illustrate the
Speaker 1: relative dangers of taking the drug ecstasy, he noted that
Speaker 1: it was no more dangerous than horseback riding. I'd probably
Speaker 1: given more different classes of drugs to human beings and
Speaker 1: possibly anyone ever in the history of the world. I mean,
Speaker 1: there's almost no class of drugs that I haven't studied
Speaker 1: in humans, and humans use a branch of drugs. I
Speaker 1: mean almost no human doesn't take any doctor, tea, coffee, alcohol, tobacco.
Speaker 1: The world's population used and intoxicant or a brain changing
Speaker 1: drive for some purpose, generally for benefits. I think, for example,
Speaker 1: of the reason you might order a drink on a
Speaker 1: first date. Alcohol makes you sociable and makes you convivial
Speaker 1: and relaxed in companies enough to take away the natural
Speaker 1: social anxiety we all have when we're meeting strangers or
Speaker 1: go into parties. Stress is part of human and animal experience.
Speaker 1: But then there's a second thing, which is novelty. I mean,
Speaker 1: the human brain is a is a novelty seeking or
Speaker 1: you know, humans fascinated by new things, which is why
Speaker 1: we are so successful in the world. Because we've discovered
Speaker 1: new things, and we've remembered them, and we've adapted them
Speaker 1: and reinforced them. There's something fundamentally appealing and feeling our
Speaker 1: consciousness temporarily transformed into something less familiar than our work
Speaker 1: day minds. Alcohol has been used in military purposes people
Speaker 1: before they fight, because the alcohol damnfroms down the favorite bonse.
Speaker 1: The reason alcohol is a popular has been so popular
Speaker 1: for so many thousands of years is a really good drug.
Speaker 1: It gets in fast and gets in the brain fast.
Speaker 1: You know, it's reliable in terms of what you get.
Speaker 1: The effect is those related. My very first taste of
Speaker 1: alcohol was probably a sip of a relative's Manhattan cocktail.
Speaker 1: I was maybe eight. It was gross, and I drank
Speaker 1: it anyway as a demonstration of my worldliness. Not too
Speaker 1: long afterwards, I would have sipped wine from a heavy
Speaker 1: metal goblet held by a priest at Catholic mass. Communal
Speaker 1: drinking is often a rite of passage socially and sometimes religiously,
Speaker 1: and pretty soon I was a sneaky teenager trying to
Speaker 1: weasel my way into the liquor cabinet at my friend
Speaker 1: Katie's dad's house. We poured a little bit from every
Speaker 1: bottle to create a seriously unfortunate slurry that include, among
Speaker 1: other things, mid Doory whiskey and Bailey's Irish Cream. So
Speaker 1: how does alcohol actually work? What is it doing to us?
Speaker 1: David Nutt explains that it affects several pathways in the brain,
Speaker 1: and it mimics a particular neurotransmitter called gabba, and in
Speaker 1: humans and all out of primate wearing fact, pretty much
Speaker 1: all vertebrates, gabba calms the brain. Another neurotransmitter called glutamate
Speaker 1: has the opposite effect. It revs you up. And both
Speaker 1: substances are always at play in your brain, and it's
Speaker 1: almost like your your brain is walking a tight rope.
Speaker 1: Too much glutamate and you become hyper excited, and then
Speaker 1: you end up getting anxious or having a seizure, and
Speaker 1: so gaba protects you against that, but too much gabba
Speaker 1: you fall asleep and then you get eaten by a tiger.
Speaker 1: So you've got to get the balance right. When people drink,
Speaker 1: it's like they're putting a thumb on the scale, suppressing
Speaker 1: anxiety by blunt chemical force. But of course there are
Speaker 1: diminishing returns. To share a little poem from the writer
Speaker 1: and Total Boss, Dorothy Parker, I like to have a
Speaker 1: martini to at the very most, after three, I'm under
Speaker 1: the table. After four, I'm under my host. Alcohol impairs
Speaker 1: judgment and cognition, and it can have life destroying chronic consequences,
Speaker 1: disease and addiction among them. To quote F. Scott Fitzgerald,
Speaker 1: First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink,
Speaker 1: Then the drink takes you. Our psycho pharmacologist, David Nutt
Speaker 1: has been in the field of substance abuse for almost
Speaker 1: forty years. I'll give you an example. One of the
Speaker 1: recent patients of mine and his life was to get
Speaker 1: up in the morning and he'd get a bus up
Speaker 1: the road to the supermarket. He'd buy two liters of
Speaker 1: strong cider, which is about two weeks worth of alcohol,
Speaker 1: and the just sit there all day and drink that
Speaker 1: and he was destroying himself. And that's really quite common.
Speaker 1: People drinking alone and or they're using alcohol then as
Speaker 1: an anesthetic to deaden the pain of their lives rather
Speaker 1: than getting any benefit from it. People suffering from addiction
Speaker 1: using toxic ins because it feels like they have to.
Speaker 1: Some people cite the dangers of booze in an argument
Speaker 1: for abstinence, but David is working on inventing a new drug,
Speaker 1: an alternative to alcohol. Alcohol works on multiple neurotransmitter systems.
Speaker 1: It's also a poison. You know. It damages your liver,
Speaker 1: in your heart, and your bloveless is accential alcohol is
Speaker 1: like playing a piano with boxing glove song. David has
Speaker 1: a lab team working to design a chemical substance that
Speaker 1: can imitate the gabba effective alcohol without wreaking as much
Speaker 1: havoc on the rest of the system, like a proper
Speaker 1: piodist that plays the song and then goes home. It's
Speaker 1: not done yet, but in the meantime he's created and
Speaker 1: bottled a prototype that can be concocted from herbs already
Speaker 1: on the market as food stuffs. I met him in
Speaker 1: a corner bar in West London to try something. This
Speaker 1: is a botanical spirit that's it's called Centia, and it's
Speaker 1: made of herbs and a combination that will give you
Speaker 1: an effect like a low dose of alcohol, like maybe
Speaker 1: a glass of wine, without having anything like as much
Speaker 1: impact on the rest of your body. Cheers, cheers. The
Speaker 1: very first thing you notice about Sentia is the color.
Speaker 1: It's a burgundy that very much appealed to the vestigial
Speaker 1: goth teenager in me. And it's a water based drink,
Speaker 1: but to create some of that like alcohol heat on
Speaker 1: the exhale. It has a little bit of pepper in
Speaker 1: it Christmas ee, you know, has that sort of clothy
Speaker 1: aspects to it. And then in a few moments, I
Speaker 1: hope you'll feel that is beginning to have the other
Speaker 1: effects of all, not just the mouth effects, but also
Speaker 1: the brain effects. I admit that I didn't really feel
Speaker 1: a buzz after drinking Centia. I didn't go in very
Speaker 1: hard though, because I was afraid to munk up my
Speaker 1: interview with this very accomplished science guy. David hopes the
Speaker 1: one his new compound hits the market, it might shake
Speaker 1: up our whole drinking culture, which is a tall order
Speaker 1: because that well runs really deep. We just so happened
Speaker 1: to have a cultural historian at this little mixer to
Speaker 1: tell us all about it. Angela McShane researches the history
Speaker 1: of intoxicans and she has some insight on why we
Speaker 1: use them and how they fit into our culture at large.
Speaker 1: She recently curated an exhibit on drinking vessels at the
Speaker 1: Victoria and Albert Museum. Fantastic to welcome were the Vienna
Speaker 1: in London. The Vienna, if you haven't had a chance
Speaker 1: to visit, feels policial, marble staircases, super high ceilings and
Speaker 1: display cases that are the cleanest glass I have ever seen.
Speaker 1: And I know glass is clear, but this was like
Speaker 1: clearer than the air around it. It's just it's just
Speaker 1: really so clean. Angela's display features rows of drinking vessels
Speaker 1: from heavy metal chalices too delicate Venetian glass. The idea
Speaker 1: of the drink display was here was much more about
Speaker 1: what are the concepts behind drink? In particular, how did
Speaker 1: it conn sit with the society. Why did people feel
Speaker 1: the need to drink? Why did they often feel the
Speaker 1: need to drink too much? For tracks of our history,
Speaker 1: drinking was not an off hour's indulgence. It was a
Speaker 1: pre wreck for civic engagement. One of the things about
Speaker 1: the putting this story is the objects together was to
Speaker 1: indicate that drink was at the heart of every part
Speaker 1: of the state. If you're going to demonstrate your loyalty
Speaker 1: to your lord, whether that's an empress or whether that's
Speaker 1: your landlord, the chances are you're going to need to
Speaker 1: have a drink with them to prove that. If you're
Speaker 1: going to go to church, then you're going to drink wine.
Speaker 1: There's also a long history of competitive social drinking, like
Speaker 1: way before a beer pong, people were egging each other
Speaker 1: on and ribbing one another and real invested in making
Speaker 1: sure everyone was keeping pace with one another. There's a
Speaker 1: phrase called taking somebody down a peg or two. It's
Speaker 1: actually a peg peg tankards. I didn't know the word
Speaker 1: tankred before kicking it with Angela at the museum, So
Speaker 1: if it's a new term to you, imagine like um,
Speaker 1: like a heavy beer mug, but made out of metal
Speaker 1: and with a hinged lid on top. When you open it,
Speaker 1: what you can see inside is little pegs light little
Speaker 1: pins in the tankard down where the handle is, and
Speaker 1: these mark off different measures of drink. And that's because
Speaker 1: all of these objects are intended for sharing. And the
Speaker 1: idea is that you measure off one peg, two pegs,
Speaker 1: and you've agreed with the people that are drinking with
Speaker 1: you how many pegs are going to drink and off.
Speaker 1: Then it can turn into a competition, of course, because
Speaker 1: they will say, let's see you drink three pegs in
Speaker 1: one go. Let's see you drink right, So so then
Speaker 1: it becomes a game. And so to take somebody down
Speaker 1: a peg or two is literally to take them down
Speaker 1: the pegs in the tankard. This emphasis on drinking together
Speaker 1: and ensuring that everyone drinks their share goes back thousands
Speaker 1: of years. The phrase in vino veritas is often credited
Speaker 1: to Plenty the Elder, a Roman statesman, and it's quoted
Speaker 1: by Plato in his text Symposium. You may have heard
Speaker 1: it translated to means something like in wine there is truth.
Speaker 1: But what it means is when you read it within
Speaker 1: the context of his book The Symposium, that because people
Speaker 1: will say things they wouldn't have said if they weren't drunk,
Speaker 1: everybody has to be drunk together, and what happens in
Speaker 1: the room stays in the room. Obviously, many people choose
Speaker 1: not to drink for personal reasons, health concerns, or to
Speaker 1: abide by the mandates of their faith. Alcohol, for example,
Speaker 1: is forbidden in Islam. Okay, So in present day Iran,
Speaker 1: what is the what is the legal position on intoxican
Speaker 1: irnly is quite easy. Everything is illegal, even beyond intoxication.
Speaker 1: You know, sexual relationship before marriage are illegal. So every
Speaker 1: and everything you can think about that is you know,
Speaker 1: you know, even fouly cool it's is illegal. So I'm
Speaker 1: Mazzi Mazzi for friends and Enemies. I am an academic
Speaker 1: at the University of Exeter, and I've been working on
Speaker 1: things related to how people intoxicate themselves and why they
Speaker 1: do so in in the Midleast in particular. Mazi grew
Speaker 1: up in Iran, then moved to Italy, but has returned
Speaker 1: to Iran for research trips. He stresses that the laws
Speaker 1: on the books aren't the laws on the boulevard. Total
Speaker 1: prohibition is not the reality of life in Iran. Life
Speaker 1: under the law. It's far more ambiguous and ambivalent. Because
Speaker 1: everything is prohibited in a way, everything is also allowed,
Speaker 1: So people really kind of do all sorts of stuff
Speaker 1: I mean, I've done things that I wouldn't do it elsewhere.
Speaker 1: It's easier to order, you know, a little bag of
Speaker 1: math or any other drugs in Tehran than toward the pizza,
Speaker 1: and pizza is pretty easy to order. The total ban
Speaker 1: on drugs and the serious consequences for getting caught change
Speaker 1: the social aspect of consuming drugs. Drinkers, for example, can't
Speaker 1: simply lounge and linger in a bar, and they're more
Speaker 1: likely to drink spirits than beer or wine because more
Speaker 1: potent drinks are easier to transport and self for profit.
Speaker 1: The first twenty minutes of a drinking session are very
Speaker 1: different from whatever else you've seen elsewhere. So there is
Speaker 1: a person who is in charge of pouring whatever alcoholic
Speaker 1: drink is available. They call him soggy or you know,
Speaker 1: men or women could be so there is also the
Speaker 1: name for dealer, by the way, and he puts the
Speaker 1: drink for everyone, making sure that everyone drinks, and people
Speaker 1: tend to drink in the go, not seeping, you know,
Speaker 1: Russian way, But gentlemen, everyone's drunk. Usually, prohibition laws are
Speaker 1: so commonly broken by so many people that it would
Speaker 1: be outlandish for authorities to even try to penalize everyone
Speaker 1: who did so. The law enforcement do what they do
Speaker 1: basically everywhere they can choose when they need to intervene,
Speaker 1: but Mazzi says they often do so with an ulterior motive.
Speaker 1: In Iran and around the world, drug violations provide the
Speaker 1: state with a pretel next to intervene in the lives
Speaker 1: of people who have been flagged as risky or problematic
Speaker 1: for other reasons. Consider, for example, the seventeenth century Ottoman
Speaker 1: crackdown on coffee houses. Coffee was an exotic substance when
Speaker 1: it arrived, you know, in the Ottoman Empire. The whole
Speaker 1: culture of coffee drinking started around this new substance, you know.
Speaker 1: And because they were also displaces, the coffee houses, where
Speaker 1: people would meet and you know, discuss, there were places
Speaker 1: which were seen as you know, definitely not conventional, but
Speaker 1: also potentially dangerous in political terms, according to Mazi and
Speaker 1: many of his colleagues. You know, in academia, you would
Speaker 1: struggle to find anyone who supports prohibition because you know,
Speaker 1: if you study drugs and addiction, there is no way
Speaker 1: you can say that the current regime of drug prohibition works.
Speaker 1: Your voice changes when you talk about prohibition, like you
Speaker 1: just sound hell aboard? Is it just because it's just
Speaker 1: an abject failure and there's nothing interesting to say about it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And so it's funny that prohibition has been a total
Speaker 1: failure in Iran, you know. Equally as a really little kid,
Speaker 1: I remember seeing a public service announcement on TV, a
Speaker 1: warning about the grave dangers of marijuana, which was prohibited
Speaker 1: then across the US. I ran from the living room
Speaker 1: television set to the kitchen and then back again, and
Speaker 1: found my fears confirmed. The glass object on the kitchen
Speaker 1: shelf was in fact a bomb, which meant that one
Speaker 1: or maybe both of my parents was a drug user.
Speaker 1: I ended up in tears on my dad's lap. He
Speaker 1: admitted the bomb was his and tried to soothe me
Speaker 1: with a hug and some patient words. He asked if
Speaker 1: I thought of him differently, and I told him yes,
Speaker 1: according to the after school TV programming, he was a
Speaker 1: moral hazard and a total deviance. But being my dad,
Speaker 1: he also made the rules about bedtime and dinner menus,
Speaker 1: so I didn't really have a light to stand on.
Speaker 1: Prohibition might not be too effective, but it does say
Speaker 1: something about the intensity of our motivation to use intoxicans.
Speaker 1: People around the world are willing to risk serious consequences
Speaker 1: to get drunk or high. Even if how we use
Speaker 1: them looks different, it seems like we've got a really
Speaker 1: strong universal Why then those drives are varied. When you're
Speaker 1: living Iran, a lot of people have the feeling that
Speaker 1: they are basically living in isolation from everything for everything
Speaker 1: that is happening in the world, and that's interesting, you know,
Speaker 1: they feel that they're losing out, and so drugs in
Speaker 1: a way project you in a dimension which is still yours,
Speaker 1: you know if they don't, and dimension of your everyday life.
Speaker 1: But you're connected, like the people are being high in California,
Speaker 1: you're being high in Tehran. It's a mimicking act. We
Speaker 1: use drugs to feel connected to each other. From communion
Speaker 1: cup to kegstand we all do use drugs. We do
Speaker 1: because fundamentally we try to feel better in the world.
Speaker 1: Some of them are legal, some of them are illegal,
Speaker 1: Some of them are prescribed by you know, our pharmacists,
Speaker 1: and some you know that may be prescribed by our dealers.
Speaker 1: We use intoxicans to blunt our anxieties, to demonstrate our allegiances.
Speaker 1: We use them as part of our ceremonies and to
Speaker 1: compete and connect with one another. And of course, the
Speaker 1: particular in toxicans we choose can also send messages about
Speaker 1: how we'd like to be perceived. Like if a woman
Speaker 1: walks into a bar and shoots a double shot of tequila,
Speaker 1: that just reads differently than if she asks for a
Speaker 1: glass of rose or a corps like tall Boy champagne
Speaker 1: is for celebrating Long Island ice teas, or for utility.
Speaker 1: Some Irish whiskeys are shunned by Catholics and some shunned
Speaker 1: by contestants. Smoking a Virginia slim isn't the same thing
Speaker 1: as smoking a Marlborough red or a Cuban cigar, And
Speaker 1: our appetite for intoxicants is intense. Listener, I don't relish
Speaker 1: relaying this part of the story, but that slurry of
Speaker 1: Katie's dad's booze. It curdled like maybe a product of
Speaker 1: mixing red wine and dairy, and it had to be
Speaker 1: strained through a sock before drinking. That is so gross,
Speaker 1: That is so embarrassing. But I remember that teenage drive
Speaker 1: to feel different, that novelty seeking, thrill, hungry urge to
Speaker 1: change the settings in my head. Intoxicants might not help
Speaker 1: us hunt or escape being hunted, but the desire for them.
Speaker 1: This is deeply human. I don't usually do that, and
Speaker 1: like say the name of the show as a style thing,
Speaker 1: but that's like just this one time. I'm just asking
Speaker 1: for a past point. Whatever is in your cup, tea, coffee,
Speaker 1: tava or water from the tap. I am lifting a
Speaker 1: glass in your general direction in this recording studio. Have fun,
Speaker 1: be careful, and I'll see you next question. Deeply Human
Speaker 1: is a BBC World Service and American Public media co
Speaker 1: production with I Heart Media, and it's hosted by Mesa.
Speaker 1: Find me online at Dessa on Instagram and Dessa Darling
Speaker 1: on Twitter. In Western convention, monogamy is baked into the
Speaker 1: mainstream concept of love and romance. You meet, you catch feelings,
Speaker 1: you share a plate of pasta, and discovery you're eating
Speaker 1: the same noodle, you commit and you've stopped seeing other
Speaker 1: people next time. On deeply Human, we're asking why are
Speaker 1: you supposed to love only one person at a time.