The Case for Drinking Alcohol

30:14Coleman Hughes: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, because it actually is better to have the kernels too. You can make beer with just the wild ancestor, but it's better to make it with maize. So it just over time, this trended to become 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 like in North America, the first cultivated crop is tobacco.

31:06It's not a foodstuff. And indigenous forms of tobacco in North America were much more powerful than modern day tobacco and almost certainly were smoked along with hallucinogenic herbs. So again, it's just this pattern seems to emerge everywhere where it's people are cultivating crops at first for their psychological effects.

31:33Coleman Hughes:So that's interesting that tobacco has gotten weaker over time because 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. which I think is a bad thing in my view. But can you talk about how the strength of alcohol has changed over the course of the past hundred years? A few hundred years. Yeah, a few hundred years. So for almost all of our history with alcohol, it's come with these two really important safety features. And one of them is the communal nature of drinking.

32:16And we can talk about that if you want. So you always only drank in public in ways that were surrounded by ritual restrictions. But the other safety feature is there's a limit on natural fermentation. So yeast turn starches, sugars into alcohol, and they're doing it as a form of biological warfare. They're vying with this bacteria to get the calories of whatever it is 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.

33:06Now, 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, 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. 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 way to disable that safety feature is to invent distillation and perfect doing distillation on a large scale.

33:50So 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 percent vodkas and gins. And these are just so much. So for most of our history, what we've been drinking, 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. And a lot of 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.

34:38So right about when you should not be driving anymore tends to be kind of the peak of the benefits of alcohol. If you're drinking 2 % beer, you'll never get beyond that. It's just the limits of how much liquid you can put in your body. 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 dangerous kind of blacking out killing yourself level of inebriation you can get there in 30 minutes um so it's we have access distillation we've known about distillation forever um aristotle wrote about it in china they knew about distillation in the islamic world they knew about it um but it's hard to perfect on an industrial scale because you have to have metallurgy or glass blowing you have to be able keep liquids at a constant temperature.

35:36So in the West, we didn't have widespread distilled beverages until like the 1600s, which I'm telling a story that starts with primate ancestors 10 million years ago. So that's basically just yesterday. And it creates this much more dangerous form of alcohol that is 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 qualitatively more dangerous drug than naturally fermented beers and wines are.

36:15Coleman Hughes:Yeah, I mean, I think of the analogy to marijuana too. It's like smoking weak marijuana from 50 years ago is technically the same drug as eating a powerful edible today, But it's effectively a different drug. At a certain point, the dosage creates such different effects that you should view it differently. Yeah, absolutely. In the 19th century, whiskey was one of the most popular beverages. And people basically, 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 because, you know, the alcohol, I guess, helped it be clean.

37:08Coleman Hughes:Is that right, that the whiskey culture in America was a highly watered-down whiskey culture? I don't know, actually. I don't think always. I think a lot of people drank it neat. and you know the whole temperance movement in the u.s uh you know we think of prohibition as being as being anti-alcohol um and it was but what it thought of is 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 spending their wages getting drunk on whiskey and gin. Whereas beer and wine were viewed as a lot less problematic by the temperance movement.

38:04So yeah, it was the backlash against alcohol that happened in the U.S. was largely fueled by whiskey and gin drinking, not someone having a glass of wine over dinner.

38:16Coleman Hughes:If you're like me, you've probably seen a recent headline and wondered, can the president really do that? That's why I recommend checking out the chart-topping podcast, You Might Be Right, hosted by former Tennessee governors from the left and right, Phil Bredesen and Bill Haslam. It's produced by the Baker School of Public Policy and Public Affairs at the University of Tennessee. And fun fact, the show is named after Howard Baker's principal, Always Remember The Other Fellow Might Be Right. Now that's a quote that conversations with Coleman can get behind. On You Might Be Right, the governors tackle timely policy conversations with political luminaries like Al Gore and Judy Woodruff.

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39:32Coleman Hughes:I'm so excited to tell you about a new podcast joining the free press universe. It's a culture show called Second Thought, hosted by the singular Susie Weiss and the hilarious Dan Adut. For listeners who love diving deeper into the world around us and who are frequently overwhelmed by the constant deluge of movies, shows, books, celebrity news, and online drama constantly demanding your attention, this is the podcast for you. Every week they'll be cutting through the noise to explain what actually matters in the world of pop culture, what everyone is watching, discussing, and obsessing over or will be soon.

40:10Coleman Hughes:As someone whose pop culture knowledge begins and ends with NBA highlights and chess, I'll be tuning in whenever I get the chance. So check out Second Thought, available now wherever you get your podcasts. 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, 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 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, you know, all the ways in which it can be addictive and problematic.

41:03Coleman Hughes:So how do you think about that cautionary, what the cautionary mindset would dictate? The reason I wrote drunk is because I think that 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. The medical consensus, or at least the reported medical consensus, has changed recently. You know, at least as recently as like five years ago, the whole French paradox thing was still plausible that, you know, a couple glasses of red wine with dinner helped, you know, lower your cholesterol and protect you from heart disease.

41:54I think that certainly the medical public health community messaging now is that's wrong and alcohol is a net negative for you. 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 it 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 so 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.

42:50Or at least you're going to weigh very heavily that prohibition temperance side of things. But I think it's an incomplete view of the situation because you do have all these costs on the one hand, 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 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 historical, anthropological, scientific evidence for.

44:05So that's why I wrote a 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. So it's a perfectly sensible decision to decide you don't want to have alcohol in your life, especially, again, if you're genetically predisposed to have trouble controlling your drinking. But I want our conversation about this to become more sophisticated and get beyond just the purely medicalized lens. Because, you know, if you stop going to the pub, it'll lower your risk of liver damage.

44:51It may also raise your loneliness. And loneliness is really bad for you physiologically. You want to lower your life expectancy. stop socializing is the best way to do that. So 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.

45:22Coleman Hughes:So I'm kind of the perfect audience for this message because I enjoy drinking, but I, I really enjoy it socially specifically. I enjoyed 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 in 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 it's always been social yeah i enjoy i enjoy being alone and doing things that i enjoy doing alone but just adding alcohol to my like private work or hobbies doesn't add much, whereas adding alcohol to chatting with a friend or family member adds a lot.

46:22Coleman Hughes:And it, in particular, adds a lot for someone like me that is more of an introvert. Because 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 a better recipient of the other person opening up. and if I hadn't done that with so many people from say 16 years old to now, I'm almost 30, I think I would have fewer friends and many of my friendships, not all, many of them would be less deep friendships.

47:26Coleman Hughes:I would know less about them. They would know less about me. And in most of those cases, 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 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 someone who is not naturally super social.

48:10Yep. Yeah. So, I mean, you're a large part of drunk is giving scientific evidence that your anecdotal comments just now are true. We have good evidence that it lowers the barriers to trust. It increases, it's increasing endorphin and serotonin, these kind of feel-good chemicals in your body that make you like yourself more, that 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 pleasantries or superficial things.

49:04It is particularly, I'm an introvert. So I can do, if I do a podcast or I'm lecturing to an auditorium of college students, or back when I was a student, I would wait tables and have to be on it and social. I can do it for short periods of time, but it's exhausting and it's not my natural state. I'm a fairly extreme introvert. And alcohol is particularly important for people like us because as you say, that wall, our default setting is pretty closed off from other people. And so one of the features of alcohol is that it makes, because of all of these various effects, it pushes introverts to be more extroverted.

49:55So I think it's a particularly important social tool for introverts. But 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 as social lubricant. and there's some evidence as i said in the beginning that even non-human primates like there's some evidence in chimpanzees that they they use fermented fruit in this way to kind of just 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

50:39Coleman Hughes:you've paid attention to the trend, which I first learned about maybe five or 10 years ago at most, that young people are drinking much less. Gen Z, it drinks quite a bit less than millennials. And I think millennials may even have drank less than the previous generation, 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.

51:24And I'm not a sociologist, so I'm kind of speculating and also basing my knowledge of this generation on 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 a couple glasses of wine a day is probably good for you.

52:10Helps your digestion, helps your heart health. That's not what Gen Z is hearing anymore. So that's definitely a factor. Another factor is the legalization of cannabis and more availability of other substances like microdosing psilocybin or whatever. 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. 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 they're, I think they are socializing a lot less.

52:54They're having less sex. They're more anxious. They spend more time alone on their phones. And so I think it's related to this kind of 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. 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, a big chunk of when they were supposed to learn how to socialize, they were stuck at home wearing a mask.

53:59So this generation's been hit by a bunch of bad stuff that is making them less socially adept.

54:08Coleman Hughes:So you talk about the two kind of safety mechanisms that have historically accompanied need alcohol and ensured that the benefits were maximized and downsides were minimized. And that's communal ritual and sort of like a natural ABV limits at relatively low percentages. 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 several times a week probably, like two times a week, let's say, or maybe three times.

54:52Coleman Hughes:But I don't do shots ever. I just don't do them. Maybe on New Year's, and I often end up regretting it. But I say no to shots, and that's a rule that keeps me safe. And it's a rule I really recommend to people. but what about the second one communal rituals like how do you replicate communal ritual in an age that is pretty secular I guess we do maybe have some rituals but it's not clear what they are 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 anthropologists call Southern drinking culture.

55:43And they're referring to Europe, so Southern European drinking culture. 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. You're doing it typically in single sex groups, so a bunch of dudes getting drunk together, a bunch of women getting drunk together. Kids are not allowed to do it or not supposed to do it. So it's kind of an adult taboo thing. It's that type of drinking culture tends to lead to drinking problems, alcoholism, violence. Southern drinking culture is focused on beer and wine.

56:29So 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, experience everybody's drinking um so kids get a little bit of wine watered down typically when they're little but they they learn that 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.

57:25And there's really good evidence that this is protective against dangerous forms of drinking. And it works in subtle ways. So I remember my first visit to the family in Italy, we were drinking this really amazing red that was like four euros. Because I was living in Canada, I could not get any good wine for any kind of price that was reasonable. So I was just blown away by this wine. And after dinner, I poured myself a glass to take upstairs to my bedroom because I wanted to take notes on it. And so I poured myself a glass and I got up and I said, good night, everyone. And everyone looked at me like, what the fuck are you doing?

58:11Like, are you an alcoholic? Why would you take wine up to your room with you? They didn't say that out loud, but that's how they were looking at me. um and so i very quickly you know realize that's not you know culturally do that um and that's helpful right it helped 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.

58:53Typically, 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, control my drinking. So we don't need to invent religious-looking rituals to do this. peer 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 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

1:00:04Coleman Hughes:America has a northern drinking culture, I would say. Oh, absolutely, yeah. British Isles do too. I mean, you go to London. Well, that's where we got it from, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Go to London, it's maybe even stronger there than it is here. Yeah. So it seems to me that one case where alcohol has been clearly unambiguously bad for whole societies is in the case of indigenous communities in the Americas and also Australia. And there are just many tribes and peoples where it's not an exaggeration to say 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 don't see that degree of alcoholism destroying the social fabric of societies in most places on earth.

1:01:01Coleman Hughes:but you really do see that in many indigenous communities. Do you share that observation with me, and what do you think accounts 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 some suggestion that genetically, they may not have some pre-adaptations that help you to consume alcohol safely.

1:01:45So they may just be genetically predisposed to alcoholism in the sense that cultures that grew up with alcohol had selection pressure to develop enzymes to detoxify alcohol in a way that other cultures might not. 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've brought with them.

1:02:31And then they give the survivors the most dangerous form of alcohol ever made, distilled liquor. Because the type of alcohol, they don't get introduced to session ales. They get introduced to rum and whiskey and very strong forms of alcohol. So I think it's a perfect storm of just, they don't have any cultural traditions that would help protect them. So 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 getting exposed to the most dangerous form of alcohol right away.

1:03:14so I think that's what what accounts for it and it's interesting because you see a similar thing in Australia you see a similar thing with kava so kava is an intoxicant that in some parts of the Pacific they don't have alcohol they use kava in the same kind of social situations you'd use alcohol kava then gets exported to Australia where they don't have a native tradition of using kava, and they abuse it there too. And it seems to be for the same reason. In places where they've traditionally used kava, they have very helpful, very deeply rooted rituals around its production and consumption that help people to consume it safely.

1:04:02You 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'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. You get really bad addiction problems. So there's a big problem with kava abuse in Australia as well. What is kava? It's an intoxicant made from 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 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

1:05:07Coleman Hughes:Quran's prohibition of alcohol has affected the trajectory of the Islamic world. Overall, has that been a positive or a negative? Yeah, it's hard to say. I mean, I do talk about 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. One thing to keep in mind is that historically, Islam's relationship to alcohol is a bit more complicated than we think of it now. Our best wine poetry in the world comes from Islamic Persia. So they were Islamic and they were drinking lakes full of wine.

1:05:57They were drinking a lot. The elites have often continue to consume alcohol. But one way to look at it, I think the best way to understand the prohibition of alcohol and Islam is that I have a colleague who's argued that 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 marker. And so they may encounter some costs by losing the social lubricant value and losing the creativity boost that I also talk about in the book. So by banning alcohol, they're incurring some costs, but they may be gaining a lot in terms of religious solidarity and sense of cultural uniqueness and difference from the neighbor, the wine drinking neighbors around them.

1:06:57It's also because drinking alcohol is pleasurable, giving it up is, 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 things get bad, I'm going to still stand by your side and we're going to fight for religion X together. 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 believe in our group and you can trust me.

1:07:46so so i think what they're gaining what they've 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 church of the latter-day saints um the banning of alcohol is itself functional in away. Okay.

1:08:19Coleman Hughes:My last question. Over the past few years, there's been a series of products that have come out that claim to, with I guess various degrees of anecdotal evidence, prevent hangovers or cure them. If you drink this little tincture before you drink, it'll cut your hangover in half and so forth. And 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 the one hand, a hangover is actually a really good disincentive from over drinking. And on balance, the promise of a hangover makes people drink less.

1:09:11Coleman Hughes:It just does. 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 how do you think about hangover cures? Well, first of all, if you have a hangover, you drink too much. You weren't following the kind of Southern drinking culture rules. So that's one signal that maybe you want to moderate your drinking. I've never tried any hangover cures. What I have tried is there's a guy named David Nutt 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.

1:09:59But he ended up creating this product called Sencha that what he wanted to do is try to come up with something that would taste like alcohol, that would have, you know, ideally the positive cognitive effects of alcohol, but not have the addictiveness and any of the things that would cause hangovers and downsides. And 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 Sencha. So I've tried that. Um, and it's, it definitely alcohol is more fun drinking Sencha.

1:10:45Um, but it does, um, it does replicate the kind of mouthfeel of alcohol. Like you get the sense that, um, you're drinking something special. And, um, so I think, tools like that's something alcohol has 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 or things like the Essentia that's supposed to replace spirits that you can use as tools to help control your drinking. so you know instead of having a glass of scotch after dinner after you've had a wine glass of wine or 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 mouthfeel it gives you that same sense of the meal has ended it on digesting but it isn't pumping more ethanol into your body that could be a really useful tool and kind of controlling your your alcohol consumption so so if i think if you're worried if you're trying to get a hangover fix 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

1:12:16Coleman Hughes:okay edwards flingerland thank you so much for coming on my show and your book is called Drunk. Your other book is called Trying Not to Try. That's right. And are you working on anything else that's in the pipeline? Yeah, actually, I just started work on a new trade book. So I just finished an academic book and I'm starting a new trade book called Simple Things. And it's going to be about why getting reconnected with the natural world and natural stuff is something we desperately need to start doing in the modern world. So the importance of nature and connection with nature and kind of getting our body-brain systems back in touch with the physical world.

1:13:09Coleman Hughes:All right. Excellent. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same premium wireless for$15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today. I'm told it's super easy to do at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of$45 for three-month plan, equivalent to$15 per month required. Intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See full terms at MintMobile.com.