Offline with Jon Favreau - Dry January, Cali Sober, Soft Sober: Why Gen Z is Breaking Up With Booze

Episode Date: January 7, 2024

Maybe, your friend announced they’re not drinking anymore, or your sister’s now “California Sober,” or maybe your entire office is participating in Dry January. It’s not just you, going sober is the hot new thing, with 41% of Americans aged 18 to 35 saying they don’t drink at all. Today, we explore the changes in drinking culture, in how we think about wellness and health, in how we socialize and spend our free time, and yes, changes in technology, that are converging to make America sober. Max interviews three Crooked Media producers about their relationship with alcohol and then talks to Dr. Edward Slingerland, an expert on humanity’s relationship with alcohol, about why humans drink and what changed about alcohol and our world to make more people choose sobriety. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

Alcohol is not cool at the moment. And I suspect that part of this is just a trend thing. Alcohol is what your uncool uncle drinks. That's his drug of choice. I think especially with cannabis being legal now in Canada and many US states, it's just a cooler, it's a cooler drug. It's what young people do. The idea of microdosing psilocybin seems cool in a way that having a cocktail seems like 1950s Mad Men, you know. It's Christmas dinner and someone at the table announces no wine for them. They're not drinking anymore. They're not in AA or anything. They just stopped. Then maybe your niece or nephew home from college chimes in that a bunch of their friends at school quit alcohol too. Or it's the New Year's party and there are way more people drinking seltzers than they were in past years. Or you're back at work and half the office seems to be doing dry January. It's not your imagination. Sobriety is the hot new thing.

Older Americans are drinking more these days, but everyone else is drinking less, in the case of Gen Z, a lot less, with 41% of Americans aged 18 to 35 saying they do not drink at all. Even the people who do still drink are having 20% fewer drinks on average. I'm Max Fisher, filling in for Jon Favreau. This week, we explore the changes in drinking culture and how we think about wellness and health and how we socialize and spend our free time, and yes, changes in technology that are converging to make America sober. In a bit, we'll hear from Edward Slingerland. He's an expert who has studied humanity's relationship to alcohol through the ages.

We'll talk about what's good and bad about the shift to sobriety, what we gain and lose without booze. But first, three of my sober and sober curious colleagues join me to discuss what motivated them. So pals, please introduce yourselves if you could and tell us how long you've been sober. I'm Brian. I produce Love It or Leave It and minus a little relapse this summer, I've been sober for two years. Two years, okay. Good for you. Hi everyone, I'm Olivia. I produce Pod Save America and I've been sober for five years. I'm Olivia. I produce Pod Save America, and I've been sober for five years. I'm Fiona. I produce or I'm an associate producer on Hysteria, among other things. And I am not sober, like, officially. I had a glass of wine last night, but I did a dry November, which is, like, random, but I felt like I needed it in the middle of last year. And I'm sober curious.

What does sober curious mean? For me, I already don't love alcohol. So I feel like it's not too big of a step. Sober curious for me means I go on the meme account fucking sober on Instagram all the time and think about like the relationship between sobriety and spirituality. It just makes me a lot more conscious about choosing when or when not to drink when it's offered to me. So wait, there's sobriety memes? Oh my God, so many great sobriety memes. And sobriety discourse. If you think the vitriol line is online is bad try just delving into sobriety memes and the

comments of watching people debate what is sober. Yeah. Tell the wrong alcoholic that you had a non-alcoholic beer and they'll be like okay. Do a meeting with you. Or like if you're sober and smoke weed you're not sober. Yeah I get a lot of that too. Or do Molly.

Yeah. Well something i'm really curious about is the kind of rise of like soft sobriety which is i understand is like distinct from people who are in recovery or like can't drink but people who are sometimes i hear the phrase sober by choice is that something that you all identify with the kind of soft sobriety sober by choice or do you feel like you're like hard sober it's it's interesting because i'll add even a little bit more nuance where i think now we're seeing a normalization of people who are sober because they're in recovery like myself but don't go to aa it used to be that like you had to be an aa to be a true like alcoholic in recovery. I am sober because I have a problem with alcohol, but I like am naturally suspicious of like authority and like groupthink and like religious programs.

So like AA is not necessarily where I get my support, but I think it is a great support system for a lot of people. We've just seen a lot of different avenues for people who are in recovery. So your support system is more online, it sounds like. Online, but also people in my community who are sober. I think it's also really rad that we're seeing. I'm such a sucker for self-help books. We're seeing a big rise in like self-help sobriety. So I really like the author Ruby Warrington. Like she's been a great source of inspiration. Sober Curious is the title of her book, right? Yeah. I have a lot of sober friends, which is really rad. It's nice to be in LA and know a lot of

cool sober people, but also things like meditation and spirituality and just like progressive values. Those are what I consider part of my support system. Wait, how is how do progressive values and sobriety align? Oh, don't even get me started. Let's go. So something that Ruby Warrington writes about is like even the language that we use for intoxication, whether it's from alcohol or weed. I do smoke weed. Sometimes I have asthma. But a lot of it is like getting out of your mind. Like I was so gone last night. Like I was like just not here. Lights out. Nobody's home. It's a lot about like losing awareness versus I think progressive values

are about awareness and about intentionality and thinking about, yeah, how do I literally woke, which is like kind of cringe these days to say you're woke, but there really is a dichotomy in that language. And I really like being sober because it allows me to be intentional with like my time and my lifestyle, the community I'm building and like just how I spend my days. And to me that like that intentionality feels inherently progressive. Also, I feel like alcohol is very linked to the capitalist system.

Like it's advertised to us all the time as like the way to take a break from your job and have a good time. I feel like it is progressive to be like, well, capitalism wants me to work hard, play hard, but maybe I can simply relax. Yeah, socialists don't have happy hour. Every hour is happy for a socialist.

And not to be so annoying, but there's like a gender angle, too, where it's like, as women, we can work harder and we like aren't in such a lane anymore. And like there's more abundance in our choices in life that can also then equate to I can drink like the boys like I can have I can work hard and I can go to happy hour and I can get blacked out and like I'm so fun and like I'm evolved but like is that the most evolved I can be as a woman like for me personally the choice I've made is no like I'm actually gonna let go of all that because like I don't know I like to think a little bit more critically about like my gender roles I'm not sober by choice I'm sober kicking and screaming into spry um uh but like when I think about like sober curious or like um uh that kind of like gray area like I think people

kind of talk about it like the way that they used to talk about bisexuality. It's like, okay, he'll be sober soon enough. Like this is like whatever like wiggle room you need to like get to the point where like you're like in a chair in a meeting. But like Livia, I did not do AA. I've been to AA. I've been to like queer, cool AA.

And it's still AA. So it's not really for me because when I would go to AA, I'd have like imposter syndrome. Like I'd be sitting next to someone who like crashed his car and burned down his house and like ruined his marriage. And I was like, well, like I'm like hiding alcohol around the house and like having like seven drinks a day and no one knows. But like I'm keeping my job like I have a boyfriend. Like I and so like even though like I feel like my life's falling apart next to you, it seems like I have it together. And that makes me feel crazy.

Well, I feel like this is one of the things that feels like new about sobriety now to me is sobriety as a kind of like counterculture. Sobriety is an identity. Sobriety is values. I feel like one of the things that is also new, and Olivia, you mentioned this, is the idea of sobriety doesn't mean no substances or no intoxicants but it's specifically about a rejection of alcohol and often that goes with like an embrace of marijuana or other substances yeah i feel like if i were to ever go totally like no alcohol i i can't see myself stopping smoking weed like california sober is definitely a real thing is there is there something you all think about like the way we live now that favors weed or psilocybin or things like

that over alcohol like that has changed well at least for me like weed and shrooms like helped me get sober like they like they like took like the edge off an insane craving they like like once i started smoking like once i like had a hit of a joint like i didn't enjoy the feeling of being cross-faded so like it kind of like killed a uh craving in like a really utilitarian way when i was first trying to get sober and now like being present like when i think about like my biggest regrets about drinking it's like all the time i lost and all the time i robbed from other people when i was like not present and they thought i was present um and I think that I'm not present when I smoke weed. That's like fully a bedtime drug for me.

But like if I go to like a party and I like take a little microdose of shrooms, like I feel like very tuned in. Like I feel like I'm like really communicating with you. Like I feel like I'm my bubbly best self. And I feel like I love your little fuzzy eyes, like being a little like droopy drew over there. But I'm like firing on all cylinders and like being the most charming one at the holiday party.

Are you on shrooms right now? Yes. Happy 10am. Raise your hands Are you on shroom drink? Yes. Happy 10 a.m. Raise your hands if you're microdosing right now. To shout out Ruby Warrington again, something she recommends is almost applying like a Marie Kondo, KonMari method of like, does alcohol spark joy for me? And she, it's a sober curious lens, but she encourages you to largely give up alcohol, but to allow yourself to drink if you know it will spark joy. So for example, like as part of religious rituals or like I used to brew beer. So for like a couple months, I would have a sip of beer, but then I was like, you know

what? I can let go of that too. So I really appreciate that lens of I'm going to actually sit here with this substance and ask myself, does this spark my joy? And so I actually still do that with weed and shrooms. And sometimes I do find like, actually, yeah, I'm going to marijuana out of habit or because it'll make this a little bit more fun, but not necessarily from a place of joy. Whereas other times I'm like, oh, hard. Yes. Like this is going to be so fun. I'm absolutely going to do it. And so that framework has just been so helpful for me. Yeah. I feel like just in general, it's about intentionality and asking why you're choosing to use those things. Like when I do choose to drink, it's for a very

different reason, I feel, compared to when I choose to do shrooms or smoke weed or something. Like usually I'm doing those things like in nature, like with a friend and I'm journaling and making art and like using it to expand my mind and be more present and chill out and whatever. I feel like I have never really gotten those things from drinking. And that is more, I think, the goal that I have when I choose to do something that takes me out of my regular headspace. Oh, interesting. So it's about kind of a change in priorities and values that favors things like weed or sobriety generally over alcohol. Yeah, I feel like it's less like escapism and dependence and more like spiritual. Yeah. And I think you'll probably talk about this in the interview because like I really

loved that book. And I think like he does a really good job of outlining like the reasons like eight people drink, but the reasons like people want to be not sober uh and like like i read that book really early in my recovery and like it really like made me be like oh like i'm not an animal like i'm not crazy like i'm not like completely out of control or like so like abnormal from every other like type of person like people seek novelty and like i think like that's something that people like go to when they're like trying to not be sober and like i think having more options besides alcohol to not be sober but still not like begin an altered state and i think like there's a lot of good reasons to drink like i think and like he outlines those in the book like happy hour like brings you closer to your co-workers like through like trauma bonding or whatever and and like uh like a lot

of like good ideas get passed around and like a lot of like people need like alcohol to feel vulnerable and like they could open up to a partner so like i i like don't like begrudge alcohol anything and i think there's a lot of like good reasons to take it that like are supplementary and like additive. But I mean, like I was like a sad, depressed, lonely drinker. I was not like a party boy drinker. And like then like if you're drinking to feel sad and like to lean into sadness or to like turn off sadness, that's very different than like drinking to feel happy. Yeah. It's not the best sales pitch for alcohol drinking to feel sad. No, no. But sometimes you want to lean in. Yeah. Is there anything that you all miss about alcohol? Yeah.

Every day. I feel like I can't answer this question, but. Sure you can. I mean, you've taken breaks from it. Like what did you when you were taking a break? I don't I don't think I really missed it. Really? Nothing. I mean, I love a fun fun little beverage but like i can get that out of a shirley temple oh my god so true i love a shirley temple yeah it's so sweet though i know yeah i know but i love i mean that's my choice spicy savory have you ever had a non-alcoholic bloody mary you mean tomato juice on a plane that shit's disgusting i do feel like non-alcoholic drinks are really catching up. They're really getting a lot better.

But they're so expensive. They're so good. But they're like so like. Well, so are alcoholic drinks. Yeah, I know. But I don't get anything from a non-alcoholic drink. I get to be drunk when I drink alcohol. But I've had the like Gia drinks and they're like, I think they're good.

And I think they capture what like was missing in non-alcoholic drinks for a long time, which is they just tasted like soda. And you miss that kind of like bitter depth of flavor. And they have that now. Yeah. Yeah. I also love brands like Liquid Death, which is truly just water, but like the tall can,

like feels like you're drinking a tall can of beer. So just the vibe, like the act of carrying that, I feel like helps. Yeah. I really resonate with missing holding a tall boy. Yeah. No else in life do you get to do that.

Like some of life's best memories were holding a tall boy. What do you think it is about that that you missed? I mean, I loved beer. I still drink non-alcoholic beer. So it's been really rad even in my five years of sobriety to see non-alcoholic beer just like boom. Like my big thing was like going to breweries and like trying all their beers and it's so cool that now you can do that like

shout out to Lagunitas like they have amazing non-alcoholic beers and like you can get them in their tap rooms and like there's a local brewery that has the same thing here and uh I'm so grateful for that but I don't tall boys are just like cool. And like to Fiona's point, there's so much marketing and like societal pressure that goes into telling us a can of beer is cool. And like I fall for that shit so hard. When I was first like realizing like, oh, you have a problem. It's like because I would like clock every alcohol commercial. Like every other commercial would blur into the background. And then I'd be like, oh, truly seltzer.

Like, wow, what a blast they're all having. like bopping around the beach with their truly seltzer. Or like I would pass liquor stores and be like, not missing alcohol but like feeling out of place at dinner parties or parties and they're like they're worried that they'll feel pressure people will look at them differently do you feel like that is changing at all and that there's less pressure now or does it feel like it's still a little bit of a stigma attached to not drinking i actually find we're all queer that's cool this panel's queer um it's actually interesting because it's kind of like coming out like totally it is so embarrassing sometimes to be like i'm sober and like having to tell my parents i was sober was oh my god they cried more than i did this is about me it was almost as uncomfortable as coming out because you're sharing something really vulnerable about yourself. But I think that's also why it's become so much of people's identity because like, like queerness, I find that flip side where like,

some people do celebrate that. And like, it, I don't, I don't know, it like doesn't make me cool, but it makes me different. And so I actually really like being taught. I really like talking about being sober online because I get a lot of positive reinforcement. So I don't always feel really put out of place. Like I feel really accepted for it. I feel accepted for the most part, like definitely among like people our age and like my friend group. Like it's very much like I don't give a fuck like older people like if you tell them they're sober

it's they're like are you calling an alcoholic and i'm like no you just outed yourself as an alcoholic yes um but uh there's like a i don't know if this is an aa term but it's definitely a recovery term i like called burn the ships which is like just like when you tell someone you're burning the ships because you can't like untell someone uh and so like i really like telling people just like as an accountability mechanism because like i am a monster and if you don't know that i will drink with you yeah yeah yeah well the the support you get online i do feel like could be an important piece of this right because it is a space where you can find so much validation and support where maybe that wasn't there before yeah and weirdly like i mean's offline, so I'll be vulnerable. But, like, that shit gets the most likes out of, like, anything I post, weirdly.

I don't know why. And so, like, it's very different to be at a work happy hour and not be the one drinking. Like, I mean, it's crooked. So everyone, like, is really chill about it. But you're still kind of out of place. But online, I mean, that's, like, racking up as many likes as like my wedding got and it's so funny like my five-year sobriety post and my wedding i think got like almost equal likes why is that do you think i feel like no idea i mean i probably liked and commented when you posted

about it um i mean i just appreciate people being so vulnerable online. I feel like so much of the time Instagram is just like a highlight reel and it can be very like surface level. People don't usually, you know, write an in-depth caption. But when like I see someone who is using that space and like that opportunity to have people's eyes on them as like a place to talk about something that is like traditionally taboo and usually like hidden. I feel like that is just like a great way to use the platform and the reason why we have like communication tools like this where users can make whatever they want like to step away from the normal like constraints of the way that we like present ourselves in front of other people and i think it is like to a certain extent like easier to be vulnerable like in front of a

million strangers than 10 of your closest friends absolutely like and i and i think that like especially like when i was like first like embarrassed to tell my friends or not even embarrassed just like scared to like repeat like this part of my who i am uh like doing it online it was kind of like doing a dry run of it um and like because like people like were not invested in who i am and didn't care about me and like that was actually like a good thing and i like i remember that like especially at first like i was like why are there no like drugs that help addicts and then like three people online were at like there are they're just never prescribed and no one knows about them because like everyone's afraid to like admit it and talk

about it and like now like i'm on like something called antabuse and like it absolutely saved my life and like no one knows about it um and so i think that like beyond just the like cheerleading and support which like is really really really invaluable uh like people turns out have good ideas totally yeah something that i hear sobriety influencers say, I know, which is a thing, say sometimes is that like alcohol is or should be or is becoming the new cigarettes in the sense of the like social stigma and taboo around them. That's funny. A bunch of my friends smoke cigarettes. I feel like cigarettes are kind of back. Cigarettes are back.

So cigarettes are coming back as alcohol is out? Well, because vaping is cringe now. Really? Yeah. It's circled around already. I feel young when Fiona and I agree. I know, this is great. Yeah.

Is there much overlap between the people who smoke and the people who don't drink? Yes, so much overlap. What? Most of the sober people I know smoke cigarettes. That's outrageous. And people who don't drink use smoking as a permission structure to drink. Oh, oh, interesting. Like people are like, I want a cigarette.

I'll have a drink and then I can have a cigarette. Oh, interesting. Oh, yeah. I mean, that's as old as time. Oh, yeah. For sure. Yeah, but the people who are trying to quit both use one to enable the other. They're like, I only drink when I smoke or smoke when I drink.

So if I do one, then I'll do the other and ha ha. I feel like it's more like I don't drink alcohol and I need some vice. So I'm going to- People don't know what to do with their hands. Yeah. Like that's fully it. Totally. But cigarettes are so bad for you. Yeah, but we're all going to die anyway.

But okay, I agree. Yes, alcohol is bad for you. Cigarettes are bad for you. But it seems crazy to me to give up one of the most common poisons in our culture for the one that is definitely worse. Yeah. I mean, I'm kind of hypocritical. I have multiple family members who like have died from heart attacks and emphysema. And I smoke a cigarette every once in a while. I don't smoke regularly. But then on the other side of that coin, I'm like, maybe I should stop drinking because alcohol is poison. And it's I don't know, I feel like because when you have nicotine in your body, it just it does not feel the same. It doesn't, but not like in the present moment, you know, the consequences kind of come later. And you're like, I'm like, I deserve this treat. It's fine. And I don't suffer crazy consequences immediately after. It's more of a thing that builds up, whereas alcohol, it's way more immediate. Yeah. And like smoking a cigarette is the regret like having a drink is the start of regrets you will have after that right like like the cigarette is itself the reward and the punishment whereas like alcohol is the reward and then whatever you do while you're on it is the

punishment do you smoke as well no i've never had a cigarette because i would love them more than well yeah stay yeah never do it oh no if i had one puff of cigarette i would never be that one as long as i lived yeah um because that personality. Well, my mind is fully blown. Mine, too. I didn't know this. I didn't know that cigarettes were back. Yeah. And it's also interesting, like, none of us talked about health up until this point.

Like, I think sobriety influencers talk a lot about, like, how healthy you are when you don't drink. Like, you're going to get fit and you're going to be so happy and you're and you're gonna like lose a ton of weight and like whatever but that was none of our like motivating factors no i i prayed for hangovers i never got hangovers and they and and like that kept me drinking way longer than i had to be drinking yeah yeah because like the only enforcement mechanism would be like me disappointing my family and friends and waking up reviews like bruises and not having money. But I would feel fine. And so I kept drinking. Wow. Wow. Okay, pals. Well, thank you so much for joining me. This was a real roller coaster ride. Really enlightening. What was it? Am I addicted to podcasts?

Please. Up after the break, I'll be chatting with Edward Slingerland. But before we go, 2024 is here. And this year, turn your resolutions into actions with Vote Save America. After a much needed break enjoying the people and things you love, now's the time to get involved. Help make the difference you want to see this election year. Down ballot races to the fight for the White House. You have the power to bring the progressive change that is needed. So head to votesaveamerica.com to be the first to find out how you can take action in 2024. I'm joined now by Edward Slingerland. He's a professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia

and the author of the wonderfully titled book, Drunk, How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization. Edward, thank you so much for joining us. Sure, thanks for having me. You argue in your book that humanity's long relationship to alcohol isn't just a random accident, but that drinking has actually played an important role in making us who we are. Can you explain that? Yeah. So, the standard scientific story about why we have a taste for alcohol and other chemical intoxicants is that it's an evolutionary mistake.

So the standard, I think if you pick up a Psych 101 textbook, the standard story will be ethanol happens to hijack a reward center in our brain. And we're clever animals and we figured that out. So it's like a mouse figuring out, presses a lever, it gets a little cocaine or it gets a jolt of electricity to a pleasure center. We seek it out because it's pleasurable. But the fact that it's pleasurable is completely accidental. So in the book, I refer to this as the evolutionary hijack theory. So alcohol is just hijacking reward networks that evolve for other reasons. My argument in the book is that this does make sense for something. Some vices that we engage in clearly are evolutionary mistakes.

So I start the book with the example of masturbation, which is a classic evolutionary hijack. So we have this reward network that evolve for very good adaptive reasons. Our genes really want us to get copies of themselves into the next generation. And so they reserve the best reward they have, the orgasm, for the thing that most directly serves that purpose, which is reproductive sex. But it's not a perfect system because we figured out how to hijack it. We figured out that we can get that reward through all sorts of wildly non-reproductive forms of sex. So, it's a great example of a hijack. How wild it is may depend on your personal taste. They depend on what you're into, yes. But humans and other animals want to get pleasure any way they can. And sometimes it's

the result of essentially, at least from an evolutionary perspective, misusing a reward circuit. It was designed to reward a certain type of behavior, but we figured out other ways to trigger it. But that's the kind of classic argument for it. But you have a theory that alcohol actually is something that is actually very central to our evolution, right? Yes. So, the mistake hypothesis makes sense with something that's not very costly. So, you may have not gotten the note on this, but masturbation doesn't cause you to go blind. It's not a particularly dangerous behavior.

Alcohol, on the other hand, is a pretty dangerous substance. It has all sorts of negative health consequences. It can lead to behavioral problems. Some percentage of the human population has a propensity genetically to alcoholism and can't consume alcohol safely. So unlike most evolutionary mistakes, alcohol is very costly. It's also ancient. So we've been producing and consuming alcohol for as long as we've been doing anything in an organized fashion as a species, thousands and thousands of years before we had agriculture, for instance. So instead of it being this kind of evolutionary mistake that happened by accident, my argument is that humans have been producing and consuming alcohol as a species as a way of managing our weird ecological niche that we inhabit. So we are primates.

We are nearest primate ancestors, our relatives of chimpanzees live in small scale communities. They cooperate primarily with relatives or people they know. They're very suspicious of and hostile toward outsiders. If you look at humans, so I'm in San Francisco at a conference right now in downtown San Francisco, and looking out my window, a city like this looks more like a beehive or a termite colony than a settlement of primates. We are primates, but we

cooperate on the scale and with an intensity that looks more like social insects than primates. And it's a bit of an evolutionary mystery how we've managed to pull that off. How do you get primates to cooperate on this scale? And part of my argument is that alcohol has been a key cultural technology that we've used to pull off this trick. So the idea being that we are really unusual as a species because we're social on such a huge scale. We evolved in these communities that are so much larger than other primate communities. And there's some people who think that they are non-hierarchical where other primates live in these rigid hierarchies and that alcohol was kind of part of how we made that work.

Why? What was it about alcohol that was so essential for that? So alcohol has several functions that are useful socially. One of them is enhancing cooperation and trust. So if I'm going to cooperate with you, you're a stranger, we're going to work together on a project. I'm vulnerable to all sorts of what economists call defection. So human cooperation from everyday stuff you do with friends to, you know, at the state level and treaties and things like this are all vulnerable to these cooperation dilemmas that go by various names and prisoner's dilemma, tragedy of the commons. They all have a similar structure, which is that we do better if we can learn to trust each other. So if I trust you, you trust me, we cooperate. We actually individually do better in the end than we would have if we went our own ways. The problem is if I trust you and we cooperate and

then you kind of hold back and you don't do your part, you do great and I suffer a lot. So in these type of dilemmas, the only rational strategy as an individual is to not cooperate and go your own way. If you look at human beings, though, we solve these prisoner dilemmas all the time. And the way we do it is through trusting each other. We have a tendency to trust strangers that is really kind of bizarre. One of the ways we pull that off is through cultural technologies like religion. So my previous research has looked at ways in which we create ersatz families, we create these kind of fake tribes of strangers by believing, imagined communities where we

make costly displays to show that we really believe, and this allows us to get cooperation off the ground. Another way we do it, and we often do it in conjunction with religion, is by consuming substances that make us more willing to trust other people and also make us more trustworthy. So one of the main—alcohol is a complicated substance. It has a lot of different effects on our body brain system. But one of the important ones is that it depresses the function of the prefrontal cortex. So this is this part of our brain that's in charge of everyday adult doing stuff. So, you know, getting to work on time, focusing on one thing,

deferring gratification, all the things that make you a successful adult are the result of this kind of ability to focus you have to engage in executive control, essentially. If I am going to try to lie to you about my intentions, if I want to convince you that I'm your friend and I'm not your friend, I need my PFC to be functioning at full power because I've got to keep track of both what I'm telling you is true and what I know to be true. I have to keep those two things separate. I have to make sure that any emotional reactions I have or any expressions that I'm going to make that relate to what I know is true, but it's not what I'm telling you is true. I have to

be able to suppress those. I have to be able to fake other expressions that aren't natural. This is like a PFC, very heavily dependent function. And so one way to enhance cooperation is to sit people down, give them a little bit of alcohol, and turn this cognitive control region down in their brain. It just makes you less able to lie. It also- So you're saying that suppressing this part of our brain is actually better for us in the long run because it makes us likelier to cooperate? It's better in certain situations where we have to overcome potential distrust. It's important to have, I mean, the PFC is a really important part of the brain. It's very expensive physiologically.

We obviously evolved it for good reasons. If you're sitting alone on a deadline, you need to finish writing an article, you need your PFC functioning well. If you're planning, if you're doing your taxes, you want to have your PFC functioning really well. If you're sitting down with me to suss me out about whether or not you want to go into business with me or whether or not I'm a real fellow believer in your group, you don't want either of us to have fully functioning PFCs. You want there to be a little, you want the, you know, I've compared in the book to when we meet, we shake hands to show that we're not carrying a weapon in our dominant hand. If we meet and we sit down and

we have a few beers or do a couple of shots, it's mental disarmament. We're basically taking our PFC out and putting it on the table and saying, I'm voluntarily giving up my ability to lie and deceive, or at least hampering my ability to do that. So it's a mutual disarmament, trust-enhancing device. goes out for drinks afterwards. And of course, alcohol is a big part of so many social rituals with family, with meeting people for the first time, not just your existing relationships, but building new ones. Some of the evidence that you write about in your book for this idea that alcohol by helping us to cooperate and come together as kind of a building block of civilization is this idea

of beer before bread. Can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah. So the old story was that we invented agriculture first and we settled down, started growing wheat, for instance, to make bread. And then one day someone left their sourdough starter out too long and it fermented and they tasted it and made them feel good. And that's how we got beer. It's, you know, it's structurally not dissimilar to the evolutionary mistake idea, right? Not only is it a mistake evolutionarily that we like alcohol, our discovery of alcohol was also a mistake. The beer before bread hypothesis is one that started gaining traction in archaeology in the 1950s among people who noticed that

the archaeological record suggests that it was the other way around. So, we have evidence that hunter-gatherers were gathering at sites like this site called Gobekli Tepe in modern-day Turkey. So this site is 10,000, 12,000 years old, thousands of years before agriculture in the region. These hunter-gatherers were coming together at these sites, building this monumental architecture. I don't know if you've ever seen pictures of this place. It's really cool. It's got these stone stelae carved with animals. We have no idea what they believed or what they were doing, but they're doing some kind of religious ritual. They're feasting. So, we have the remains of bones of gazelles. So, they're having some kind of communal

feast. And then they're drinking lots of something. And we don't have chemical residue from this site, but we know they were making beer in this region at the time. So they have these massive vats that almost certainly held beer, and possibly even beer laced with hallucinogens. So what we see is these hunter-gatherers coming together, making and consuming alcohol and performing religious rituals thousands of years before they had agriculture. And so the theory is that actually what prompted them to start settling down and getting more serious about growing these crops was the desire for more and better beer, not for bread. And maybe bread was a byproduct of our desire to get beer.

You also see this pattern in other places in the world. So the first cultivated crops, when you see agriculture getting off the ground, seem to be chosen for their psychoactive properties, not for their nutrition. So the ancestor of corn, teosinte, is this wild plant that was cultivated into corn. Teosinte makes terrible flour. If you want to make tortillas, you're not going to even notice this plant. But it's got this starchy stalk that makes excellent beer.

Chicha, it's called in South America. So it's almost certain that this plant was selected for cultivation by hunter-gatherers because they were making beer. And again, tortillas came after that. It does make a certain sense that we would, as a species, start cultivating plants to brew alcohol before we would for food because, as you say, it was so and remains so essential for us as a social lubricant that we kind of need to come together as a community and as a group, even if it means overcoming our innate selfishness. And I want to kind of come back to that and what that means for

our society today and alcohol's role in it. But in the first half of the episode, we talked with some people in their 20s and 30s who, like more and more people their age, are going sober. What do you think kind of explains this trend? Like, why is this happening now? I think that people have more information about the dangers of alcohol, which we didn't have before. I think that medical opinion has changed. So there, you know, as recently as a decade ago, I think the idea that alcohol might be physiologically good for you is still on the table. You know, the French paradox and all the stuff about cholesterol, which has been at least, if not disproven, at least outweighed by negative consequences. So maybe it is good for cholesterol, but it's bad for cancer

and liver damage and all this other stuff. So I think one thing that's changed is that the medical community has reached a consensus that the net physiological effect of alcohol on human beings is negative. And I think young people care about health and they're paying attention to that. The other thing that's important is something I point out in the book, that we've been using alcohol for at least 13,000 years. And for almost all of that time, the form of alcohol we've been using has been 2% to 3% ABV beers, maybe slightly more strong fruit wines. We've also always consumed alcohol in a social ritual context.

So in the pre-modern world, it's impossible, it's unheard of to have private access to alcohol. If you're drinking, you're drinking with other people. And almost always in a ritually regulated ceremony. So there's toasting rules. I talk about the Greek symposium where the host passes around the wine. They decide when to pass it around. They decide how strong to make it because the Greeks watered their wine down. So if things are getting out of hand, you add a little more water and maybe wait a couple more minutes before you pass the bowl around.

In China, traditionally, and today in a traditional context, you only drink when someone makes a toast, and it's ritually regulated who is allowed to toast and when they're allowed to toast. So traditionally, we're drinking weaker forms of alcohol. And we're drinking them in highly regulated social situations. What's new in the modern world is what I call the twin dangers of distillation and isolation. So first of all, we have access to distilled liquors, which are just wildly more

powerful than anything we've ever had. And this is recent. So in the West, we didn't have distilled liquors on a large scale until the 1600s. And I'm telling a story that goes back 13,000 years. So that's basically yesterday. And we have this ability to, you know, I can call up my local liquor store and have them deliver a case of tequila to my house. And I could just have it in my house and drink as much of it as I want, completely unsupervised. So that's this, the fact that we can drink alcohol in isolation is a new thing. So I think this kind of sobriety movement is a response to both health input from health professionals pointing out the negative consequences of alcohol and some inchoate awareness that alcohol has become more dangerous in the modern world. And maybe we need new techniques like dry January, like using non-alcoholic beverages, working them into our social life

in a way we didn't need to in a traditional context. I think that you touched on something really important with the idea that as we get more isolated, alcohol becomes more dangerous and less appealing. And I'm thinking not of changes over the last 10,000 years, but changes over the last five years. You'll often hear it said that people are drinking less as a reaction to the pandemic when there was this big surge in binge drinking and that people are kind of like reevaluating their relationship to alcohol. I feel like that's the explanation I hear the most, but I never quite bought that because the rise in sobriety predates COVID by a few years. So I wonder if maybe the pandemic played a kind of different role that it was one of accelerating our shift from socializing in person

and being around other people when alcohol is going to be really appealing and plays this important function to one where we're much more atomized, we're socializing much more digitally, we're on our screens more, especially younger people who, as chance has it, wouldn't you know, are also the people who are drinking less. So if we're alone more and socializing less, is alcohol just less useful for us? Yeah, that actually makes a lot of sense. And it makes me wonder what we're going to lose if that's the trend. Because there's a real, you know, my faculty meetings have gone on to Zoom. I meet more with colleagues online rather than traveling to see them at a conference and meet in person. It's good for the environment.

You know, it's good in terms of carbon footprint. It's probably much more healthy. But what are we losing? And that's what I don't think we talk about enough. Part of the purpose in writing Drunk was to get us to see that despite its dangers, despite its costs, drinking and drinking with other people is functional. The other function that we didn't talk about yet that I focus on in the book is the creativity enhancement. The fact that by down-regulating the PFC, you're allowing crosstalk in the brain

that enhances your ability to engage in lateral thinking. So engage in creativity where you have to connect things that aren't otherwise connected. So kids are really great at this kind of creativity. We get gradually worse at it as we age. And I have a graph in the book showing that the decline in creativity tracks the maturation of the prefrontal cortex, which doesn't fully mature until we're in our 20s. So we get this fully formed PFC, which is great because it means we

can get to work on time and focus on things and engage in self-control. But the cost is we give up the ability to think flexibly and come up with new ideas. I think the idea of lateral thinking being helpful for creativity makes sense to me. It's when you bring alcohol into it that it feels counterintuitive. I've done a lot of creative work and there are a lot of things that I think I get better at if I have a drink. I think socializing, I think forming relationships, forming bonds with people, and that is really important for all the reasons you say, but I don't necessarily feel more productively creative. It depends on what you mean by productive. So it depends on what kind

of writing you're doing. So I mean, an example that's actually not in the book that I've talked about a couple times in interviews is I wrote probably 12 different versions of the book proposal for drunk before I got it right before my agent was ready to send it out and it was frustrating because I wasn't sure neither of us was sure what was wrong I had had all the arguments there. I had all the scientific evidence. I had the history. I'm walking everyone through, why do we drink alcohol? It's puzzling. Well, here's some possibilities. But she kept sending it back to me. She was like, it just doesn't pop. And she was right. It didn't, it was boring. It was like, it moved very clearly

from point A to point B to point C in the way that the PFC helps you to do. And that's when I had this realization that I hadn't taken any of my own advice. I actually hadn't written any of the proposal on alcohol. And so I was actually, I was on a conference trip. This was pre-COVID. And I had about an hour and a half before I was meeting my colleagues for dinner. So I went down to the hotel bar and ordered a Negroni and had my laptop and just looked at the proposal

and thought, how can I say this in a better way that catches people's attention? And by the end of that Negroni, what's now pages one and two of the book really just popped into my head. The experience I had was that I was taking dictation. People like to masturbate. It's the first line that just came to me. You know, they also like to eat Twinkies and do shots of Jägermeister. These sentences that were short, that were catchy, that draw, people love the first couple pages of the book. That was produced by a BAC 0.08 brain,

not by a brain where the prefrontal cortex was fully in charge. So that's the example. Because you were making better connections, you think? Because I was making unusual connections. Because the parts of the brain that normally don't talk to each other or normally aren't listened to were finally getting to say, hey, how about this? How about this? So, that's essentially what's happening when you take away the playground monitor. You get some garbage, right? So, I thought a bunch of things that were

stupid that I didn't use. But the idea is that by relaxing your cognitive control, you get access to more diversity of ideas that then your conscious brain afterwards can say, that was a good one. So, I edited it after and I didn't use exactly what I wrote on the Negroni, but I wouldn't have had the good stuff without those lateral creativity insights. Well, you know what about that does resonate for me is that I think people often have an easier time being funny if they've had one or two drinks, not if they've had five, then they're funny, but they're usually not. But one or two, they're usually a little more humorous. And I had always assumed that just because like, oh, you're more relaxed and less self-conscious. And I'm sure that's part of it.

But it sounds like it's also maybe you have an easier time being spontaneously creative and making the kinds of connections that a good joke or a good little riff will often have. Yeah, that's absolutely true because humor depends on precisely that, connecting things that aren't normally connected or violating expectations. And that's precisely what you can't do when your PFC is in charge. Well, I do think that the, I mean, you mentioned that there are some things that we lose by giving up alcohol individually or culturally. And it seems like the biggest one of those is our ability to form connections and build relationships. There's a study that you've talked about from Michael Sayet at the University of Pittsburgh that actually tested the effect of alcohol on in-person versus online interactions. What these researchers found is that, of course, when we interact with people in person and

we have alcohol, we have an easier time making connections. It relaxes us and we enjoy the experience more and we feel those social bonds more. But when we do the exact same thing through Zoom, have a drink and try to form a connection with someone, the alcohol actually makes people enjoy the experience less and feel more self-conscious and have a harder time connecting. And that really resonated with me because it feels like both narrowly, like, oh, okay, well, if people are interacting more online, not just in Zoom, but in all apps, if you're sending DMs, you're texting, whatever, instead of interacting as much online,

alcohol actually cuts against that. Okay, it makes sense we're drinking less. But it also just feels like a big data point that as our lives move online, alcohol is just less functional for us. Not just socializing, you're drinking alcohol. It ends up being aversive when it's online. And Syed's theory about that is what's one of the main differences when we're interacting in person versus online is right now I see a huge, my face on the screen, really huge next to me. There's something aversive about being presented with your own image when you're consuming alcohol that is not the case when you're in person, because you're not. I don't have this. I just see you. I think probably part of it as well

is that the kind of connection that gets established in person when you're having a drink or two relies upon these very finely timed interruptions. So we've been talking over each other a lot. This happens anytime you're on Zoom in a big meeting, you talk over other people. That's because our ability to know when you're done talking and you want me to talk or I'm going to add something else to this is the result of this millisecond level sensing not just of your

intonations and details of your voice structure, but also your expressions, your body language. I can see you shifting because I've been talking too long and you want to say something. We lose all of that when we're online, both because of the impoverished medium. So I just can't see as much of you. I don't get all the data that I need. But even with the best internet connection, there's a subtle delay. And the way the dance of our conversations in real life is so finely timed that that little bit of even the slightest bit of delay that you don't notice consciously completely screws it up. So I think really the reason that online interactions, social interactions with alcohol aren't as good is just because they're not as good in general. They're just, they're completely impoverished and we can't get into the flow because we don't, all of our natural mechanisms have been disrupted. I feel like it clarifies a lot for me the idea that people's growing aversion to alcohol or lack of interest in alcohol is, of course,

you're right. The part of it is we're more aware of the health risks, which are, we should say, substantial, but that it's also just if we're more atomized it's less attractive but i wonder if it's also creating kind of a some people would call it a virtuous cycle if they don't like alcohol if they do like it they would maybe call it a vicious cycle where as we shift away from alcohol that also makes us more atomized i mean i know so many people especially who are young who they cut out alcohol and then what they will do instead is marijuana or the you know microdose psilocybin which are you know perfectly wonderful intoxicants but they are maybe kind of you know if alcohol is the drug of social interaction marijuana and psilocybin are a little bit more the drugs of being at home on your screens, which I'm at home on my screen sometimes.

That's fine. But if those are the habits that you are forming instead of saying, well, it's the end of a long day. I want to go out to the bar with some pals and have some drinks. me and be on my phone, that that creates habits, especially among younger people that are just less conducive to socializing and social bonds. And that's really important because loneliness is a health epidemic on the scale of alcohol abuse, arguably. Yeah, it's really interesting. I hadn't thought about the way these other drugs that are more fashionable now, and better for you, they're, they're less physiologically harmful than alcohol are more introspective and isolating. And really, at least for me, you know, you'd use them, as you said, to go home and

sit in front of a video or just scroll on your phone. That can't be healthy in the long run. I worry about, I point to some studies. So there's a correlational study I look at that took advantage of a natural experiment in the U.S., which was prohibition. So I always thought of prohibition as something that happened all at once at the federal level, but I didn't realize it was happening for a long period of time at the county level. So individual counties were going dry leading up to national prohibition. And so this economist took advantage of this fact. So he looked at, he had county level data on when prohibition was imposed on the county, and he had county level data on patent applications.

And so he's using that patent applications as a proxy for kind of group innovation and creativity. And what he found was when a county went dry, patent applications dropped. And they dropped pretty significantly and didn't recover for about two or three years. And he attributes that recovery to speakeasies. So basically, prohibition gets imposed. People didn't stop drinking, right? They just couldn't drink in public anymore. So they'd drink bootleg stuff by themselves in their house.

That's not good for us. And that's not good for innovation, creativity. It only sprang back to previous levels when we invented the workaround, when we invented these underground places we could go drink in public in hidden situations again. So there's that data point. There's one nice study that looked at political science. So collaborations in political science in the wake of annual conferences, because one year the annual conference was canceled. It was

supposed to be in New Orleans and it was canceled because of a hurricane. So people were supposed to come in person and interact in all the ways we do at conferences, and they were prevented from doing, um, not interacting in public in person with others is, is not good for us in terms of innovation and creativity. Um, and then it's gotta be really bad for us in terms of our mental health because we're, we're social animals. I mean, we, one of the worst things you can do to a person is put them in solitary confinement. So this is something I felt during the pandemic that was not well handled by public health officials. We don't want COVID-19 to spread, so we should close down bars. We should not let relatives go to nursing homes to visit their elderly relatives from that perspective. There's no consideration of what the cost, or at least I think inadequate consideration of what the cost of mental health and therefore physical health are on the other side.

People don't get to go to their local pub and feel part of a community and feel friendship and have conversations. That has some kind of impact on your mental slash physical health negative impact. Having people in a nursing home who never get to see their family, you're protecting them from COVID-19. But what kind of psychological torture are you imposing on them in other ways? So I don't think we adequately appreciate how important for physical and mental health sociality is. And when you interfere with sociality in various ways, it's going to have, I think, really negative downstream consequences. It's funny. I feel like that what we're learning about the importance of

socializing, both generally and specifically with alcohol, almost feels like an echo of what we learned about the health benefits, where the kind of for a long time, the conventional wisdom was, you know, don't drink to excess, drink in moderation because it's obviously much healthier and might have some health benefits. Now those health benefits are in question. But the point is that I feel like what we are learning now from the pandemic, and that's such an echo of those prohibition experiments that you mentioned, is that drinking alone, you're maybe not so good, but drinking socially is something that can actually have some real benefits for you because forming bonds with people is something that's good for

you, not just psychologically, but it's good for your physiological, your biological health. And if alcohol can help with that, that's a good thing. Yeah. Yeah. The benefits to moderate drinking were probably the result of that, right? It's not because it's doing things to your cholesterol. It's because you're going to the pub instead of going home after work and you're having chats with your neighbors. Well, you teach at a university. Do you get a sense that your students' relationship to alcohol is changing? Because something that you see in the kind of poll numbers is suggest that some of the biggest shift towards sobriety or against alcohol, specifically, I should say, is among younger people.

Yeah. No, I think there is a definite trend among younger people. I also have a 17-year-old daughter, so I've got some data from that demographic. Yeah, there's this interesting, alcohol is not cool at the moment. And I suspect that part of this is just a trend thing. Alcohol is what your uncool uncle drinks. That's his drug of choice. I think especially with cannabis being legal now in Canada and many US states, it's just a cooler, it's a cooler drug. It's what young people do. The idea of microdosing psilocybin seems cool in a way that having a cocktail seems like 1950s bad men and what your parents or grandparents did. So I think partly it's a trend.

But as I said also, I think young people care about health. They have new data. They have new advisories from the government that are different than what my generation had. So it's also partly that as well. I just really hope that they're figuring out other ways to get the social thing. And there are other ways you can do it. So, you know, I also talk in the book about religious groups that, for whatever reason, ban chemical intoxicants or ban alcohol.

Typically, what you see them doing is replacing, essentially getting the same functional effect of alcohol in other ways. So you can get it through dancing and singing. You can get it through prayer sessions that last a really long time where you're sitting in a very uncomfortable position. So pain, fatigue, moving in synchrony, dancing. There are other ways, inflicting sleep deprivation on yourself. There are many ways you can, all these have the same effect of down-regulating the PFC and up-regulating these kind of feel-good hormones. So this is the other major effect of alcohol is that it is enhancing serotonin, endorphins, things that make us feel bonded to people and make us feel

better about them. So there are other ways you can do this. And this is where organizations that don't want the legal liability of a traditional holiday party with a bunch of booze now sometimes are doing escape rooms or they're doing, you know, some kind of outward bound thing where we're doing something together that can have the same effect, right? You're, you're, you're, uh, stressing your body. You're, you're, you're, you're pumping up these pro-social hormones. You could, you could, there are many ways to get this effect. There are other tools you can use. But you've got to be doing it or you're going to be losing something really crucial to being a human being.

Yeah. Well, I like ending on that idea that the best high that you get from alcohol isn't from the alcohol itself, but from the social connections that it helps you form with people. And however you want to get that, if you want to get that through a martini or through an escape room, it's an important thing to find. Well, Edward, thank you so much for coming on and chatting. It was great. Thanks for having me. It was a lot of fun. Thank you also to our Crooked Media sobriety panelists, Olivia Martinez, Fiona Pestana, and Brian Semel. If you think that you or someone you know might have a problem with alcohol, please visit findtreatment.gov to get help. John will be off again next week.

We will be here and see you then. Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, John Favreau, along with Max Fisher. It's produced by Austin Fisher. Emma Illick-Frank is our associate producer. Andrew Chadwick is our sound editor. Kyle Seglin, Charlotte Landis, and Vasilis Fotopoulos provide audio support to the show. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Michael Martinez, Ari Schwartz, Madeline Herringer, Reed Cherlin and Andy Taft for production support

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