The Case For Drinking Alcohol

TITLE: The Case for Drinking Alcohol CHANNEL: Coleman Hughes DATE: 2026-04-27 ---TRANSCRIPT--- Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. My guest today is Edward Slingerland. Edward is a professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia, and he’s also a leading scholar of early Chinese thought. Edward wrote a book called The Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization. This book represents something that you’ve probably never seen from a serious academic, a defense of drinking alcohol. That’s right. Edward is a fan of alcohol and he thinks it played an important role in the development of human civilization. In this episode, we talk about how alcohol was discovered, what role it played in early civilizations, why alcohol has gotten stronger over the years, and why young people today are drinking less. Along the way, we also talk about Edward’s other area of expertise, Chinese history. So, without further ado, Edward Slingerland. Okay, Edward Slingerland, thanks so much for coming on my show.

Thanks for having me. So, before we get into some of your books, um, I want to get a little bit about your background because you studied China and alcohol, which are two seemingly unrelated topics. Um, I’m more familiar with your book, Drunk, which I listened on Audible, uh, listened to on Audible probably a year or two ago, and, uh, it was a really interesting defense of alcohol, which is increasingly unpopular, and it’s done in a rigorous and thoughtful way and in a way that aligns with a lot of how I think about drinking about alcohol. So, we’ll get to that, but first, how did you come to be interested in uh Chinese philosophy and how did that pivot into an interest in the history of alcohol? Yeah, that’s a good question. My colleagues are wondering about the alcohol book as well. Um, I got into Chinese philosophy as an undergraduate. I just had read some Dowist texts in translation and thought it was kind of cool and um started studying Chinese and just step by step got into it. Um I found it much more appealing than western philosophy as a kind of late teen early 20-year-old and and I still do. So, um, there’s actually a pretty, so my colleagues in my philosophy department are baffled that I wrote a book on the history of alcohol, but it it actually grows pretty directly out of my previous work. So, my specialty is early Chinese thought. So, kind of pre-B Buddhism, uh, warning states 6th to 3rd century B.C.E. so. So, kind of Confucianism, Dowoism, it’s when all the major uh, native schools of Chinese thought got started. And my first book, so my PhD dissertation that turned into my first book and then became my first general audience book uh called trying not to try is about this paradox in early Chinese thought. So they all want you to get into a state in Chinese is called ou translate as effortless action. So it’s it’s a bit like being in the zone in sports. um you’re relaxed, you lose a sense of yourself as an agent, you everything is successful. You everything you’re doing works out, but you’re not really you’re not thinking about it. You’re just doing you’re absorbed in what you’re doing. Um so it’s a state of kind of perfect spontaneity and efficaciousness. So you’re very effective in the world when you’re in this state. So they they all want you to get into this state. The problem is uh there’s a tension and they’re very aware of this the what I call the paradox of wooue or the problem of trying not to try. If you know that being relaxed and spontaneous is good, you want to be relaxed and spontaneous. How do you try to be that way if you’re not? So if I say to you, you’re about to go on a date and I see that you’re tense and you’re nervous about it and I say, “Relax. be yourself. I’m actually It’s not It’s counterproductive because I’m activating when I tell you to relax or when you tell yourself to relax, you’re activating the part of your brain, the roughly the prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain that’s in charge of kind of self-control and planning, conscious action. I’m activating the part of the brain that you you want to shut down. And so that’s why it’s directly paradoxical to try to be relaxed. So the early Chinese thinkers that I look at and try not to try come up with various strategies for getting you around the paradox. So sit this way um do these rituals, count your breaths, whatever they come up, they come up with kind of behavioral strategies to trick you around this paradox so you actually stop thinking about it and can be relaxed. But one of these texts uses the analogy of a drunken person to describe being a wooi. So they talk about someone has been drinking too much and they’re riding on a cart and they fall out of the cart, but they’re not hurt because they they didn’t know they were riding. They didn’t know they fell out. Their bodies relax. They don’t tense up when they hit the ground. Um, and in that text, it’s clearly an analogy for being drunk on heaven, as the text puts it. So kind of being in this spiritual state. But at a certain point in thinking about this paradox, it occurred to me that um being drunk on alcohol is not so bad in the sense that it’s like a um it’s a chemical shortcut to this state. And so that got me interested in how cultures may have developed chemical intoxicants in general and alcohol in particular as a technique for getting us past this paradox. I can’t you can’t consciously make yourself relax on a first date. If you try to make yourself relax, it’s not going to work. You’re going to make yourself more self-conscious and more tense. But if you sit there and drink a glass of wine with your date, gradually the ethanol is going to go in and do that relaxation for you. So, so it’s kind of a shortcut around what is basically a cognitive paradox. So, that’s that’s the kind of direct connection between my my previous work and the the alcohol book. Okay. So, few more questions uh about China. Why is Chinese civilization so old and so continuous? I mean, you hear about civilizations that existed in, you know, 1,00 B.CE, but they don’t exist anymore. They all were either conquered or they dissolved or were broken up. China is is I don’t know if it’s literally unique, as in the only one, but it’s it’s certainly close to unique in in its continuity. What explains that? Um my personal theory is it’s just an accident of the writing system. So Chinese written Chinese is not directly phonetic in the way an alphabet a language is based on an alphabet is. So all human languages change over spoken languages change over time. There’s this kind of phonetic drift that always happens. If your writing system is representing the sounds of spoken the spoken language directly, you’re going to gradually notice that your language is no longer the same as 300 years ago. So if you’re an English speaker and you look at Shakespeare, it looks weird. You can you can read it, but it’s a little hard to read. You go a little bit farther back to Chaucer and it’s almost impossible to read. And then you go back kind of ba wolfs kind of at the outer edges of what an English speaker could comprehend. So because we’re representing the language in an alphabet directly as the language changes the written language changes. So we you know we look at Beaowolf and we don’t feel like that’s our language anymore in with the Chinese because it it has phonetic elements in the characters but it’s not an alphabet. And so the the spoken language can be very different. People could be pronouncing the characters very differently but still feeling like it’s the same word. And so this script because of that this Chinese script has been able to unite China across regions. So if we live in different parts of China we’re speaking wildly different completely mutually unintelligible langu languages. It’s like, you know, difference between English and Russian or it’s they’re ve sometimes very different, but we’re all reading the same texts and we’re we pronounce the character in our local dialect, but we feel like we’re reading the same text and that you get that same continuity then across time. So, the characters don’t change over time, even though the spoken language is changing over time, the same way that other languages do. So there’s it creates a kind of um glue across time and space. So as a modern literate Chinese person, I can we’re digging in my field. We’re digging up these new texts from 300 BC that are written on bamboo strips. It’s kind of cool because it’s uh these haven’t been edited and they’re sometimes new texts we never heard of. You can look at a someone pulls a bamboo strip out of the ground, you can look at it and decipher some of the characters and you get you wouldn’t be able to really read it, but you get some rough sense about what it’s like. So that’s really that’s where the sense of continuity comes from. It’s I I think personal aids because of the fact that the language can because it’s not directly phonetic can make people feel like they’re all part of the same cultural cultural sphere even though things spoken languages changed they live in different regions. Does that mean the continuity is an illusion or that it has actually created a real sense of continuity? Um something in between something in between. It’s partly an illusion. Um, so if you’re a modern person, you think you can read classical Chinese because you recognize the characters, but you don’t recognize that they’ve the grammar’s changed and some of these word meanings have changed. So, in that sense, it’s an illusion. Um, but you can still read these texts if especially if you get a little bit of training in classical Chinese. um people do you know have the same uh sayings and legends and classical illusions. So so I think it’s it’s it has it has forged a genuine kind of continuous cultural identity in a way there’s not really a good analogy in in the western world. How do you think about the history of Chinese religion? You know, from a western perspective, we we have this strict separation between pre-monotheism, the pagan beliefs of basically the indigenous people of Europe and and Arabia and and Africa, and then the introduction of monotheism, whether that’s Christianity or or Islam or Judaism, and then the various sects that emerge, cath Catholicism versus Protestantism, and subsects of different kinds of Protestantism and so on and so forth. Um, Chinese religion you from what I know doesn’t follow that pattern really clearly at all. Um, so how can you give can you give like a highle summary of what religion has been like in China throughout its history and its place in China today? Yeah, it’s a lot. Um, I don’t I don’t necessarily think it’s that different than religion anywhere else. Um there’s what what one of my fields is cognitive science of religion and we talk about what we call theological incorrectness. So this is where officially a religion is supposed to be one way but in practice it’s another. Um, if you actually look at, let’s say, Christianity on the ground, go to Greece, go to Italy, um, people are worshiping local saints. They’re doing, you know, it’s basically kind of paganism with some Christianity slopped on top. Um what is really different is is particularly pro the Protestant Reformation I think is significantly different in that it created a sense of religion that was very much based on believing certain orthodox things and they weren’t as worried about what kind of rituals you did or how you dressed or these sorts of things. it and that’s unusual. Most religions in China and around around the world um are orthopraxis so they tell you what to do. They give you rituals. They give you um restrictions on things you can eat, you know, how you can dress, um how you move your body through space. They tend to got not get too hot and bothered about what you believe intellectually. And that’s where Protestantism is unusual. And it’s not unique. There there are sects of Buddhism that are like that. But I think Chinese religion um didn’t didn’t take this Protestant turn um this kind of invention at a certain point in Northern Europe that and that’s really the outlier. So there’s kind of everybody for all of time around the world and then there’s this kind of weird thing that happens in Protestantism that seems to have been a very powerful cultural move. It enabled um individualism in increased literacy a lot of things that probably led to the creation of modern the modern world. But um I think in this regard there’s it’s not so much that ch Chinese religion is different. It’s that all of religion is kind of different from post whatever certain a relatively recent date in Northern Europe. So what is Chinese religion today? How does it how does it look? It’s um in chi in mainland China itself it um is coming out of the woodwork. So it was you know the communist party is officially atheistic and so religion was suppressed um a lot of the people now who are talking about Confucianism as the Chinese way of life um were smashing Confucian temples and burning Confucian books back in the 70s. Um so there was a big suppression of religion um when during the cultural revolution and gradually things are being loosened now. So you’re seeing um dowist sex, Buddhist sex allowing to establish temples again. Um partly this is uh for tourist purposes. Um but but a lot of it is genuine um local belief that’s being allowed to be practiced again but under very tight government control. Um the government’s still somewhat worried about religion and particularly about dowist inflicted sex just because historically uh rebellions the overthrow of imperial governments was often started by these popular dowist inflicted religious movements. Um, so that’s why Westerners maybe are puzzled. I don’t know if you’ve heard of Fallon Gong, this um, so sometimes people are puzzled like why the Chinese government is so freaked out about them and so repressive about them. Um, it’s because they look a lot like these kind of movements in the past that have overthrown the government. So, so, so the government’s allowing religion again, but tightly controlled. Everyone has to kind of check in with the government. Only official sects are allowed. Um, and so it’s a it’s religion’s back in mainland China, but it’s a somewhat uneasy relationship with a government. So, one aspect of Chinese history that I think Westerners don’t know enough about, even though it was a massive event, is the Taiping Rebellion in the middle of the 19th century. Basically, a a Christian cult arises in China led by this guy who you can give me the details if I’m getting some wrong, but led by this guy who comes to believe that he’s Jesus’s brother, I think. Yeah, something like that. Yeah. And this causes a massive war um whose outcome was genuinely uncertain at points and millions and millions die, millions starve. right around the same time as our civil war in in America. How do you think that China’s trajectory would be different if the Christians had won and taken control of China? I know that’s a huge question, but yeah. Do you think China’s relationship with the West would be different if it were a Christian nation? Maybe. Um, the degree to which the Taipings were Christian in the sense that we’d think of it is something you can question. This is not my period at all. I I work on 600 to 300 BC, so this is pretty far past my area of specialty. Um, but from what I know about the Taiping Rebellion, it was a syncric movement. So, it had these Christian elements. He thought he was Jesus’s brother or whatever, but it also borrowed a lot from Buddhism and traditional Dowist sects. Um, so I’m not sure what it would have looked like if they had won and established a government. Um, I don’t think given kind of the the the gravitational pull of traditional um Chinese cultural forums, I’m not sure it would have ended up that different from, let’s say, a confusion inflicted government. So, but it’s interesting to think about. Um, but that that Taipeing rebellion is a really good example of the kind of thing that makes the Chinese government, current Chinese government really worried when they look at movements like Fong Gong. Mhm. Okay. Final China question. Um, in I was a philosophy major as well and uh a big staple of western philosophy is the debate between Rouso and Hobbes. Rouso representing the view that human beings are fundamentally good and Hobbes representing the view that human nature is fundamentally bad. and and you need a state with a monopoly on violence to to a strong state to keep control of unruly self-interested humans, right? Mhm. Um I was really interested to find I I read this book called the uh history of Western philosophy. Um I forget the author. I can I can find him. And he had a section on Chinese philosophy. And I was surprised to find that there were there was an analog long before Robs and Huso like over a thousand years before between two sort of followers of Confucious, Menus and Shunzi. Menus was the one who believed human nature was good and Shunzi was the one who believed uh human nature was was bad. And uh I’m curious if you you’ve come across these two figures and if I’m interpreting them right as the Chinese Hobbes versus Rouso. Yeah. So this is this actually is in my wheelhouse because these two thinkers are during the period I study. So Waring States period. So they both claim to be the true followers of Confucious but they have these very different views on human nature. Um the way I teach this in my intro to Chinese philosophy um to my students is that it’s this tension. So Hobbes versus Rouso, Menches versus Shenza seems to reoccur in every religious tradition that I know about and it seems to reflect it kind of maps on to roughly cons cultural conservatism versus liberalism. So if you’re rouso/menious, you think human nature is basically good. Uh natural human tendencies are going to lead humans to do good things and be nice to each other. You’re going to therefore give a lot of autonomy to individuals. You’re going to want individuals to kind of tap into their emotions and be themselves. And um if in education policy this would map on to kind of Montasauri schools where you know kids are encouraged to kind of be spontaneous and everyone’s a different flower and people should you know kind of go with their gut. Um you this is a very human nature is good tends to map on to liberal views about cultural authority. Um, if you’re shunza/hobs, you think basic human u motives and emotions are selfish and violent and will lead to chaos. Therefore, you think we can’t trust our intuitions. We can’t trust our emotions. We need to listen to cultural authorities. We need strict rules. We need to retrain ourselves. um educational way this is going to look a lot more like a kind of traditional Catholic school you know spare the rod spoil the child you need to really so Shinsza for instance if you look at the metaphors for self-ultivation that these two confucions use um Menches’s metaphors are agricultural so our nature has these sprouts and we got to you know water them and give them sunshine and help them to grow but then they they want to grow they’re going to grow into these full-blown own virtues. Um, again, it kind of looks like Montasauri school with the idea of little flowers that are going to grow up in the sun. Um, Shunz’s metaphors are carving and polishing and kind of violently reshaping a bad or kind of formless nature. Um, so we’ve got to steam and press the crooked wood of our nature and make it straight. Um, so yeah, it look it does look a lot like the Russo Hobbes debate and that’s not an accident. I think these are kind of uh two very common tropes that come up in religions around the world throughout history. This tension between people who who kind of trust individuals and trust our emotions and people who don’t. Okay, let’s talk about alcohol now. Uh when and where was alcohol discovered historically? Um we don’t know for sure. Uh we the first direct evidence of humans consciously making alcoholic beverages is from about 13,000 years ago in what’s modern day Israel. So, um, but we have earlier, um, stone carvings of people drinking from horns that, um, it seems unlikely they were commemorating having a nice drink of water cuz they were thirsty. It’s probably some kind of ritual setting where they were drinking an intoxicating beverage. Um, and those are from about 20,000 years ago. But it’s probably the case we’ve been doing we’ve been consuming ethanol for as long as we’ve been humans and in fact longer in the sense that our our primate ancestors were almost certainly doing it as well. And there’s some evidence that non-human primates are actually using fermented fruit in ways that are not dissimilar from the way humans use them to kind of reduce tensions and um help people help individuals cooperate. So basically forever. What does it look like before agriculture? Is it like rotting fruit or something like that? Yeah. So for hunter gatherers, it’s primarily rotting fruit. So fruit um can get up to kind of pretty 2%ish um alcohol level when it’s really fermented. Um but there’s also evidence we have evidence from places like um Goeclay Pepe and modern day Turkey. So, this site’s 10 to 12,000 years old. Um, hunter gatherers were coming to this site and it seems like brewing beer from the wild wild grains of various kinds and h building this monumental religious architecture and having these huge kind of feast rave religious parties um thousands of year before there was agriculture. So, so it started with using fermented fruits, but we very quickly started consciously brewing alcoholic beverages. And among archaeologists, there’s a movement that I find quite plausible that argues that in fact the the motivation for settling down and starting agriculture was to make to make beer, not bread. It’s called the beer before bread hypothesis that humans were motivated to start settling down and cultivating crops to make more and better quality beer. And it’s only later that they discover, oh, we could make something to eat out of it, too. So, um, so humans have been consuming and producing alcohol for as long as we’ve been doing anything um, in an organized fashion as a species. What’s the evidence for the beer before bread thesis? sites like Gobecepe. So this uh huge ritual site, this is they’re hunter gatherers. There’s no agriculture at this point of history. Um and they’re feasting. So we have the remains of gazelle bones pile. We know they were consuming large quantities of game. And then there are these huge vats. So huge vats that held liquid of some kind. And we don’t have direct chemical evidence from that particular site of alcohol production, but we do have from like the site in Israel from 13,000 years ago. We know people in the area were making be beer and possibly um beer laced with hallucinogens. So we have sites like that. We have the fact that in South America the um the origin of maze of corn uh the corn was cultivated from a wild ancestor called teocinte and teocente has these really tiny k you wouldn’t even see modern day corn in teocinte it’s got such small kernels so if you were interested in making uh tortillas is you would ignore this plant because its grains are not very useful. But it does have this very starchy, sugary stock that you can make beer out of. Uh so chicha is what it’s called. This alcoholic beverage people brew out of teocinte. Um so it seems like this crop again it wouldn’t make any sense to start cultivating this crop if your goal was to make a food stuff. But if your goal was to ferment an alcoholic beverage, it makes a lot of sense. So when you look around the world, the first cultivated crops seem to have been chosen for their psychoactive properties and not for their nutrition value. So it’s a common pattern you see not just in the fertile crescent where agriculture started in the western world, but you see it um in other areas of agriculture around the world. So in the case of maize or corn, is it that indigenous people in South America or Central America, they cultivated and bred that crop to have bigger and bigger kernels over time? And if so, why did they do that if the earlier version was sufficient for alcohol? Yeah. Um because it it actually the it’s better to have the kernels, too. You can make beer with just the the wild ancestor, but it’s better to make it with maze. Um, so it just over time um that this trended to become um something that had usable kernels and then it started to become useful as a food crop too. And so then people started to focus on that as well. But you see this with um like in North America the first cultivated crop is tobacco. It’s not it’s not a food stuff. and indigenous forms of tobacco in North America were were much more powerful than modern-day tobacco and almost certainly were smoked along with um hallucinogenic herbs. So again, it just this pattern seems to emerge everywhere where it’s people are cultivating crops at first for their psychological effects. H So that’s interesting that tobacco has gotten strong has gotten weaker over time because you you argue that alcohol has gotten stronger over time and I think it’s common knowledge now that marijuana has gotten much stronger since people were smoking it in the 60s and 70s. Um which I think is a bad thing in in my view. Um but can you talk about how the strength of alcohol has changed over over the course of the past hundred years? Few hundred years. few hundred years. Um so for almost all of our history with alcohol, it’s come with these two really important safety features and one of them is uh the communal nature of drinking and we can talk about that if you want. Um so you always only drank in public in ways that were surrounded by ritual restrictions. Um but the other safety feature is there’s a limit on natural fermentation. So uh yeast turn uh starches sugars into alcohol and they’re doing it as a form of biological warfare. They’re they’re vying with this bacteria to get the calories of whatever it is they’re they’re fermenting. They’re more resistant to ethanol than bacteria are. So they produce ethanol as a kind of biological weapon to kill off the bacteria, but at a certain point they shut themselves down because they’re not infinitely resistant to ethanol themselves. Now humans, one thing that’s happened is humans have been relentlessly breeding yeast to get stronger and stronger and be more and more resistant to ethanol. So we can with natural fermentation you can get as strong in the modern world you can get as strong as like 16 maybe close to 17% alcohol by volume ABB. Um so like an Australian Shiraz can get that strong but that’s as far as you can get. So there’s a ceiling on how strong alcoholic beverages can be when they’re naturally fermented. the the way to disable that safety feature is to invent distillation and perfect doing distillation on a large scale. So with distillation, you’re pulling alcohol off of a naturally fermented beverage and concentrating it. And when you do that, you can get 90 something% um vodkas and gins. And these are just so much. So for most of our history, what we’ve been drinking re until pretty much yesterday, what we’ve been drinking has been 2 to 3% ABV beers and maybe slightly stronger fruit wines. A 2% ABV beer, you can drink all day and never get dangerously inebriated. Um, and when a lot of the the benefits that I talk about that alcohol gives to humans, you get them mostly at kind of mild levels of inebriation about 0.08 blood alcohol content. So, right about when you should not be driving anymore is tends to be kind of the peak of the benefits of alcohol. If you’re drinking 2% beer, you’ll never get beyond that. Um, it’s just the limits of how much liquid you can put in your body. Um, if you have access to 95% ABV vodka and you’re doing shots of that, you’re going to blow past 0.08 into really like dangerous kind of blacking out, killing yourself level of inebriation. You can get there in 30 minutes. Um, so it’s we have access um distillation, we’ve known about distillation forever. Um, Aristotle wrote about it in China. they knew about distillation and in the Islamic world they knew about it. Um, but it’s hard to perfect on an industrial scale because you have to have metalergy or glass blowing. You have to be able to keep liquids at a constant temperature. So in the west we did we didn’t have widespread distilled beverages until like the 1600s which you know I’m telling the story that starts with primate ancestors 10 million years ago. So that’s basically just yesterday. Um, and and it it creates this much more dangerous form of alcohol that is still it’s still just ethanol as an active ingredient, but it’s so much more powerful. I feel like you should think of it as a different drug. It’s a it’s a qualitatively more dangerous drug than naturally fermented beers and wines are. Yeah. I mean, I I think of the analogy to marijuana, too. It’s like smoking uh weak marijuana from 50 years ago is technically the same drug as eating a powerful edible today. Yeah. But it’s effectively a different drug. I mean at a certain point the dosage creates such different effects that you should you should view it differently. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Um and you know in the 19th century we had you know whiskey was was uh the you know one of the most popular beverages and people basically you know men especially woke up and just drank whiskey all day long in America. But it was highly watered down and it was almost in some way it was like a way of drinking water that was clean um because you know the alcohol I guess helped it be clean. Is that is that right? That the the whiskey culture in America was a highly watered down whiskey culture. I don’t know actually. Um I don’t think I don’t think always. I think a lot of people drank it drank it neat. Um and you know the whole temperance movement in the US uh you know we think of prohibition as being as being anti-alcohol. Um it and it was but what it thought of as the enemy was whiskey was distilled beverages. So whiskey and gin to a certain extent. Um the the target was saloon culture which was very much based around primarily men um spending their wages getting drunk on whiskey and gin. Um whereas beer and wine were were viewed as a lot less problematic by the temperance movement. Um so yeah it was the the backlash against alcohol that happened in the US was was largely fueled by whiskey whiskey and gin drinking not not someone having a glass of wine over dinner. So you’ve stepped into the role of talking about the benefits of consuming alcohol in the right scenarios and I think a lot of people have the reaction you know even if maybe they agree with you you know it seems like alcohol people don’t need further encouragement to drink alcohol because the benefits are obvious and tactile and experienced immediately and and so forth and so isn’t the wiser thing to sort of focus on the other half of the equation to focus on the health problems the uh you know all the ways in which it can be addictive and problematic. So h how do you think about that that cautionary what the cautionary mindset would would dictate? I I think the reason I wrote drunk is because I think that we’re we’re completely dominated by the cautionary mindset and I don’t think cautionary mindset should be ignored. So alcohol is physiologically dangerous. It’s probably a net negative for you physiologically. There’s debate about this. Um the medical consensus or at least the reported medical consensus has changed recently, you know, at least as recently as like five years ago. Um the whole French paradox thing was still plausible that, you know, a couple glasses of red wine with dinner help, you know, lower your cholesterol and protect you from heart disease. I think the certainly the medical public health community messaging now is that’s wrong and alcohol is a net negative for you. Um, alcohol is also incredibly addictive. It’s a very addictive drug and probably up to about 15% of the population has a genetic propensity to alcohol use disorder. So, has trouble drinking in a safe way. Um, this is we’re all hearing this all the time and I think it is an important thing to hear. Until now, when you talk about the obvious benefits of alcohol, you’re talking about just pleasure, right? People have said, “Okay, there are these dangers, but it feels good.” So there’s on one side pleasure and on the other side all these dangers. If that’s the only it’s your only sense of the calculation, I think you’re going to choose not to drink. Um or at least you’re going to weigh very heavily that um that uh prohibition temperance side of things. But I think it’s a it’s an incomplete view of the situation because you do have all these costs on the one hand um and you do have pleasure on the other hand, but on top of pleasure you have actual real functional benefits that you lose if you don’t allow alcohol to have a role in your life. And I feel very strongly that um you can’t make an intelligent decision about whether or not to have a role for alcohol in your life or in your organization if you run an organization unless you have the whole picture. And the whole picture involves on the positive, on the kind of pro- alcohol side, not just it’s fun or it makes me feel good, which of course everyone has direct access to, but these deep functional benefits that sometimes we have a kind of intuitive sense of, but I don’t think anyone’s ever walked through and laid out clearly before and provided, you know, historical um anthropological scientific evidence for So that’s that’s why I wrote um you know pro- alcohol book I guess you can call it. I mean I end up saying at the end look alcohol is pretty dangerous and it’s actually much more dangerous in the modern world than it has historically been to us. Um so it’s a perfectly sensible decision to decide you don’t you don’t want to have alcohol in your life especially again if you’re genetically predisposed to have trouble controlling your drinking. Um, but I want our conversation about this to become more sophisticated and get beyond just the purely medicalized lens. Um, because, you know, if you stop going to the pub, it’ll lower your risk of um, liver damage. It may also raise your loneliness. And loneliness is really bad for you physiologically. Um, you want to you want to lower your life expectancy, stop socializing is the best way to do that. So, so there there’s a lot of complicated inputs to our mental and physical health and I just want people to have a more sophisticated, better informed way of thinking about this. Yeah. So, I I’m kind of the perfect audience for this message because I enjoy drinking, but I I really enjoy it socially specifically. I enjoy the the pairing of drinking with talking to one or more friends. Yeah. So, I don’t uh I literally cannot remember the last time I drank alone. I like literally it’s probably been many many years. Um, it’s not something I I actually enjoy very much and it’s not something people have historically ever done. Yeah. To me, drinking has always been social. Yeah. I I enjoy I enjoy being alone and doing things that I I enjoy doing alone, but just adding alcohol to my like private work or or hobbies doesn’t add much. Whereas adding alcohol to chatting with a friend or or family member adds a lot. Yeah. And it in particular adds a lot for someone like me that is more of an introvert. Yeah. Because um I I have natural my natural setting on the kind of the walls that are up in my personality and my mind are I think a little higher than average. Yeah. Me too. And so bringing down those walls genuinely makes me like people more and it makes me more likable. It makes me more likely to open up and share my emotions and it makes me uh a better it makes me a better recipient of the other person opening up. And you know, if I hadn’t if I h if I hadn’t done that with so many people, you know, from say 16 years old to now I’m almost 30, I think I would have fewer friends. Yeah. And uh many of my friendships, not all, many of them would be less deep friendships. I would know less about them. They would know less about me. And in most of those cases, um, the the depth of the friendship survives whether we continue drinking alcohol or whether we drink alcohol every time we hang out. In many cases, we don’t drink alcohol every time we hang out or even most of the time. But the fact that we have so many times in the past yields dividends that that outlive, you know, the college the level of like college drinking days or high school drinking days, let’s say. Yep. So to me that seems like an obvious benefit that is beyond pleasure and that’s in particular important for some someone who is not naturally super social. Yep. Yeah. So, I mean, you’re a large part of drunk is giving scientific evidence that your anecdotal comments just now are true, right? Um, we have good evidence that it lowers the barriers to trust. Um, it increases it’s increasing endorphin and serotonin, these kind of feel-good chemicals in your body that make you like yourself more. They make you like other people more. It’s lowering um your barriers to paying attention to another person. So that’s why you’re more open to things they have to say. Um it lowers barriers to you divulging things about yourself. Um so that’s why you with alcohol you very quickly get to can get to deeper levels of communication than just um you know pleasantries or superficial things. Um, it is particularly I’m an introvert so I can do if I do a podcast or I’m lecturing to a auditorium of college students or back when I was a student I would wait tables and have to be on it and social. Um, I can do it for short periods of time but it’s exhausting and it’s not my natural state. I’m I’m a fairly extreme introvert and alcohol is particularly important for people like us because we we that as you say that wall our default setting is pretty closed off from other people. And so one of one of the features of alcohol is that it makes um because of all of these various effects um it pushes introverts to be more extroverted. So I think it’s a particularly important social to tool for introverts but but it is it’s an important social tool for everyone and that really of all the functions of alcohol I talk about in the book I think that’s the most important is this role uh as social lubricant and there’s some evidence as I said in the beginning that even um non-human primates like there’s some evidence in chimpanzees that they they use fermented fruit in this way to kind of because you got a bunch of potentially hostile individuals who have to kind of be nice to each other. Um, getting a little ethanol in everybody’s system makes that easier to do. Yeah. So, I assume you’ve paid attention to the trend um, which I first learned about maybe five or 10 years ago at most, that young people are drinking much less. Um, Gen Z, uh, drinks quite a bit less than millennials and I think millennials may even have drank less than the previous generation uh generation X. Why is it that young people are drinking less? Is it actually that people have soured on drinking or is it that young people are just socializing less and therefore drinking less just because they’re not going out as often but they’re still drinking when they do go out? Yeah, that’s a good question. I get asked about this a lot and I’m not a sociologist so I’m I’m kind of speculating and also basing my knowledge of this generation on my my daughter’s 19 so I guess she’s part of this generation. Um there’s I think it’s a mixture of things. So first of all a big factor is public health messaging. So public health messaging basically public health officials are now portraying alcohol the way they used to portray nicotine. So this is a evil addictive substance. It harms your body. You don’t want to go anywhere near it. And so I think a big part of it is just that the messaging. When I grew up again it was kind of like couple glasses of wine a day is probably good for you. um helps your digestion, helps your heart health. Um that’s not what Gen Z is hearing anymore. So that’s definitely a factor. Another factor is the legalization of cannabis um and more availability of other substances like um micro doing psilocybin or whatever. Um so there’s other drugs that are viewed as cooler and I think it’s just partly a trend thing. you know, people Gen Z doesn’t wear bell bottoms anymore. There’s no deep reason for that other than trends happen. Um, so I think that’s part of it. But the more worrying part in my mind is related to the fact that there’s I don’t know if there I think they are socializing a lot less. Um, they’re having less sex, they’re more anxious, they spend more time alone on their phones. And so I I think it’s related to this kind of um deterioration of the social fabric that we see with Gen Z that seems directly attributable to social media and smartphones like people just getting sucked onto these isolating devices. Um so that so that seems to be I think the biggest factor and the most worrisome factor is people just this generation is more solitary. they’re more depressed, they’re more anxious, and they don’t seem to socialize as much. And then, you know, and the pandemic kind of exacerbated a lot of these trends. Like, it was going in this direction with smartphones and and social media, but then the pandemic, there’s a whole generation of kids who like, you know, a big chunk of when they were supposed to learn how to socialize, they were stuck at home wearing a mask. So, um, the this generation’s been hit by a bunch of bad stuff that is making them less socially adept. So, you talk about the two kind of safety mechanisms that have historically accompanied alcohol and ensured that it the benefits were maximized and downsides were minimized. And that’s communal ritual and and sort of uh like natural ABV limits at at relatively low percentages. Uh in theory, the second one is easy to replicate today, which is just like stick to beer and wine and don’t, you know, don’t do shots. Actually, don’t do shots is one of my personal rules. Yeah, it’s a good rule. And I say this as someone that I drink often. Like I drink several times a week, probably like two times a week, let’s say, or maybe three times, but I don’t do I don’t do shots ever. Mhm. I just don’t do them. Maybe maybe on New Year’s and I often end up regretting it. But yeah, I say no to shots and uh I just, you know, that’s a rule that keeps me safe. Um and it’s a rule I really recommend to people. Um, but what about the second one? Communal rituals. Like how do you replicate communal ritual in an age that is pretty secular? Um, I guess we do maybe have some rituals, but it’s not clear what they are. Um, how do you replicate that safety mechanism today? So, a good example of something we wouldn’t think of as ritual, but that’s protective in this way is what um anthropologists call southern drinking culture. And they’re referring to Europe. So, southern European drinking culture. Um so, northern European drinking culture is doing shots. It’s drinking distilled liquor to get drunk. The goal is to get drunk. You brag about how drunk you are. Um, you’re doing it typically in single sex groups. So, a bunch of dudes getting drunk together or a bunch of women getting drunk together. Um, kids are not allowed to do it or not supposed to do it. So, it’s kind of an adult taboo thing. Um, it’s that type of drinking culture tends to lead to drinking problems, alcoholism, violence. Um, southern drinking culture is focused on beer and wine. So the safe the safe kindness of alcohol you drink with food. So it’s you only drink at the meal table and you often drink twice a day. You often drink with lunch and with dinner but it’s always with food and you don’t take your glass away from the meal table. So you only drink it while you’re eating. It’s a mixed group. So it’s kids, it’s parents, grandparents, everybody’s drinking. Um, so kids get a little bit of wine watered down typically when they’re little, but they they learn that al drinking with food is kind of a normal thing to do. Um, drinking to the point of getting visibly drunk is shameful. People will look at you and judge you if you’re visibly drunk. Um, so so my ex-wife is half Italian and we spent a lot of time in Italy and that has a southern drinking culture. Um, and this there’s really good evidence that this is protective against dangerous forms of drinking. And it it works in subtle ways. So, I remember um my first visit to the family in Italy. We were drinking this really amazing red that was like €4. It was I was like this is because I was living in Canada. I could not get any good wine for any kind of price that was reasonable. Um, so I was a just blown away by this wine and after dinner I wanted to take a I poured myself a glass to take upstairs to my bedroom cuz I wanted to take notes on it. Um, and I poured So I poured myself a glass and I got up and I said, “Good night everyone.” And everyone looked at me like, “What the [ __ ] are you doing? Like are you an alcoholic? Why would you take wine up to your room with you?” And they didn’t they didn’t say that out loud but that’s how they were looking at me. Um and so I very quickly, you know, realized that’s not you don’t culturally do that. Um and that’s helpful, right? It help it helps you drink less. Um so, so we have all these ways culturally or even even if you think about American drinking culture, um we still like tend to if we’re out drinking with friends, we still tend to drink in rounds, right? So, let’s say I have an alcohol use disorder and we order a round of beers and I down mine very quickly because I need the ethanol. Typically, I can’t then just order another one. I’ve got to wait for everybody to finish their beers before we get another round. That’s going to help me pace my drinking and control my drinking. So, we don’t need to like invent religious looking rituals to do this. um pure kind of peer pressure and social norms can do a lot of the work. Humans are very socially attuned. And if I’m drinking more than the people I’m around uh think is okay, I’m going to figure that out very quickly just from body language and little comments. Or maybe they won’t. When they’re passing around the bottle of wine, they’ll kind of avoid my end of the table. Um, that’s how drinking with other people helps us. It it we we help pace each other and and then if the dominant culture that we have is a healthy one. So if it looks more like the southern drinking culture, that helps us as well, right? So it doesn’t have to be a kind of fancy looking religious ritual. It’s just cultural habits and social pressure. Well, it’s clear that America has a northern drinking culture, I would say. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, British Britain British Isles do too. I mean, you go to London, that’s where we got it from. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Go to London, it’s maybe even stronger there than it is here. Um, so it it seems to me that one case where alcohol has been clearly un unambiguously bad for whole societies is in the case of indigenous communities in in the Americas and also Australia. Yeah. And and there are many there are just many tribes and peoples where you know like it’s not an exaggeration to say like a third of the men or more are basically lost to alcohol. Just they’ve been lost in a way that you don’t see as much you like you don’t see that degree of alcoholism destroying the social fabric of societies in most places on Earth. But you really do see that in in many indigenous communities. um is do you share that observation with me and what do you think accounts for for that? Yeah. No, I think that’s true. It’s no accident that you see this in regions. Alcohol is the I call it the king of intoxicants because it’s so widespread. Almost every culture we know uses it as its main primary social drug. But there are exceptions and two of the exceptions are Australia and North America. So in those indigenous cultures, they didn’t use alcohol. There’s there’s some suggestion that genetically they may not have some pre-addaptations that help you to to consume alcohol safely. So they may just be um genetically predisposed to alcoholism in the sense that um cultures that grew up with alcohol had selection pressure to develop enzymes to detoxify alcohol in a way that other cultures might not. Um, but I think really the biggest, so there might be a genetic factor, but I really think the biggest thing is cultural. So you’re a culture that doesn’t use alcohol. Suddenly a bunch of Europeans show up. They completely destroy your social networks. They completely disrupt your traditional way of life. They’ve killed off 75% of your population with smallpox and other diseases they brought with them. And then they give the survivors the most dangerous form of alcohol ever made, distilled liquor, because the type of alcohol that gets they don’t get introduced to, you know, session also. you know, those two safety features I talked about, they don’t have either one of them, right? They don’t have any cultural traditions that would help them figure out how to drink safely and they’re they’re getting exposed to the most dangerous form of alcohol right away. Um, so I think that’s what what accounts for it. And it’s interesting because you see a similar thing with in Australia, you see a similar thing with um cava. So cava is an intoxicant that in some parts of the Pacific. They don’t have alcohol. They use cava um in the same kind of social situations you you’d use alcohol. Cava then gets exported to Australia where they don’t have a native tradition of using cava. And they abuse it there too. And it seems to be for the same reason. In places where they’ve traditionally used cava, they have very helpful, very deeply rooted rituals around its production and consumption that help people to consume it safely. You take this drug out of that cultural context and you just drop it into a community that maybe is already kind of fragmented because people have stolen their land and killed off a lot of their ancestors and they’re kind of they’d be in kind of bad shape anyway because of what’s happened to them as a result of colonialism. And then you give them this drug with basically no safety manual, right? There’s no instructions about how to use it safely. Um you get really bad addiction problems. So there’s a big problem with cava abuse in Australia as well. What is cava? It’s an intoxicant made from this this tuber. Um and it has some of it has I’ve never done it. Uh I have colleagues who have and it seems kind of the effects seem to be somewhere in between alcohol and cannabis kind of makes you a little bit more mellow like cannabis. Um, so it’s it’s an intox it’s an intoxicant that is kind of in the same general spectrum of effects as alcohol and cannabis. Okay. So, how do you how do you think the Quran’s prohibition of alcohol has affected the trajectory of the Islamic world overall? Has that been a positive or or a negative? Yeah, it’s hard to say. I mean, I do talk about um so part of my argument in the book is that successful cultural groups tend to use intoxicants and primarily alcohol, but then you have these counter examples and Islam is one of those counter examples. Um one thing to keep in mind is that um is historically Islam’s relationship to alcohol is a bit more complicated than we think of it now. Um the our best wine poetry in the world comes from Islamic Persia. Um so they were Islamic and they were drinking lakes full of wine. They were drinking a lot. The elites have often um continued to consume alcohol. Um, but one way to look at it, I think the best way to understand the prohibition of alcohol in Islam is that I have a colleague who’s argued that, you know, Islam arises kind of on the edges of the Mediterranean world. That’s very wine-based culture. And this was a way for them to say, we are not those people. It’s a very powerful cultural cultural marker. And so they may encounter some costs by losing the social lubricant value and losing like the creativity boost that I also talk about in the book. So they’re by banning alcohol, they’re they’re incurring some costs, but they may be gaining a lot in terms of um religious solidarity and cultural sense of cultural uniqueness and difference from the neighbor the wine-rinking neighbors around them. Um it’s also um because drinking alcohol is pleasurable. Giving it up is a and again in cognitive science of religion we talk about things like costly signaling. So you want to know we’re both part of this religion X and you want to know that I really believe in it and so if you know things get bad I’m going to still stand by your side and we’re going to fight for religion X together. Um, if I’m willing to give up delicious food, so I won’t eat pork. I’m going to give up this substance that makes me feel really good. I won’t touch it. That’s a very powerful behavioral signal I’m sending you that I’m I believe in our group and you can trust me. So, so I think what they’re gaining, what they’ve lo, what they lose in terms of the functional effects of alcohol, they must be gaining at least as much in terms of solidarity, costly signaling, group cohesion. Um, so I think that’s what’s going on in cases of groups like uh like Islam or groups like the Mormons, the Church of the Latter-day Saints. Um the banning of alcohol is itself functional in a way. Okay. My last question. Um over the past few years there’s been a series of products that have come out that claim to with um I guess various degrees of anecdotal evidence prevent hangovers or cure them. if you, you know, if you drink this um this little tincture before you drink, it’ll cut your hangover in half and so forth. And uh first of all, have you tried any of these? Do they work? And if we one day do get a reliable hangover preventative or hangover cure, how do you think that will influence the cost benefit of alcohol? Because on on the one hand, a hangover is actually a really good disincentive from overdrinking. Yeah. Um and on balance, the promise of a hangover makes people drink less. It just does. You know, if you got rid of the promise of a hangover, I would have to assume rational actors on the margin would drink more, right? So, um how do you think about hangover cures? Uh well, first of all, if you you’re you have a hangover, you drink too much. you weren’t you weren’t following the kind of southern drinking culture rules. Um so that’s one signal that maybe um you want to moderate your drinking. I’ve never tried any hangover cures. Um, what I have tried is there’s a a guy named David Nut who was the health official in the UK and then he got fired for saying that alcohol was more dangerous than LSD, which he had really good scientific reasons for saying, but um he ended up creating this product called Cena that what he wanted to do is try to come up with something that would taste like alcohol that would have he, you know, ideally the the positive cognitive effects of alcohol but not have the addictiveness and the and any of things that would cause hangovers and downsides. Um, and he and I he and I come up get raised by people in interviews, so we’ve known of each other for a long time. And I finally reached out to him and said, “Hey, you know, we should meet.” And he he ended up sending me samples of Cena. So, I’ve tried that. Um, and it’s it definitely alcohol is more fun drinking sencha. Um, but it does um it does replicate the kind of mouth feel of alcohol. Like you get the sense that um you’re drinking something special and um so I think you know tools like that’s something alcohol’s gotten more dangerous because of distilled liquor and even beer and wine is much more powerful than it used to be. But we do have other tools like non-alcoholic beers that actually taste good that you actually don’t mind drinking. Um or things like this that’s supposed to replace spirits. Um that you can use as tools to help control your drinking. Um, so you know, instead of having a glass of scotch after dinner, after you’ve had a wine, glass of wine, glass, two glasses of wine with your dinner, maybe you’re in a habit of then having an after-dinner drink. You substitute something else that gives you that same kind of mouth feel. It gives you that same sense of the meal is ended and I’m digesting, but it isn’t pumping more ethanol into your body. that could be a real useful tool in kind of controlling your your alcohol consumption. So, so if I think if you’re worried if you’re trying to get a hangover fixed, you should there’s other problems. You should actually try to stop the cause um rather than try to fix the hangover. But definitely hangovers are a um a signal from your body that you’ve done something wrong. Okay, Edward Slingerland, thank you so much for coming on my show. And uh your book uh is called Drunk. Your other book uh is called Trying Not to Try. That’s right. Mhm. And uh are you working on anything else that’s in the in the pipeline? Yeah, actually I just started work on a new trade book. So, I just finished an academic book um and I’m starting a new trade book called Simple Things, and it’s going to be about um why getting reconnected with the natural world and natural stuff is something we desperately need to start doing in the modern world. Um so the importance of nature and connection with nature and kind of um getting our body brain systems back in touch with the physical world. All right. Excellent. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.