Name: A Brief History Lesson on Alcohol with Author Edward Slingerland
Uploaded: 2021-06-08T17:17:32.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'A Brief History Lesson on Alcohol with Author Edward Slingerland' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-06-08. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'A Brief History Lesson on Alcohol with Author Edward Slingerland' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-06-08. Transcript available.

the Joe Rogan experience I feel like we should have a drink I think it we would
be remiss we have I think we're doing a podcast to drink yeah that's nice we're
doing a podcast about drinking yeah it makes sense we should have at least a
small so the historically there's been a safety feature built into alcohol so
for most we've been drinking thank you cheers yeah whoa yeah that's nice I'll
start your Monday morning I'll start your money is a way to start on a day
morning yeah so this stuff is new so having alcohol that's this strong is
something we've only had for a couple hundred years real yeah so a lot of
people don't realize that so for most of our history we've been drinking like
two to three percent beers great to three percent yeah that's it historically
it's typically what beers came in at grape wines you could get up to like eight
to ten but there's a built-in limit to natural fermentation so the yeast are
turning sugars and alcohol which is a poison so they're the Easter slowly
poisoning themselves basically and we've bred these super hardy yeast so like
nowadays you can get a Australian Syrah up to like 16% ABV Wow which is hot
historically really unprecedented but it's crazy that's as high as you can get
because then the alcohol shuts down the yeast but a way around that is
distillation so you heat you take that wine you heat it up ethanol is really
volatile so that comes off first and if you could figure out how to capture
that
vapor and turn it back into a liquid you've got this you've got really
concentrated alcohol do they do that with wine they do it with wine or they
take
they'll take something that's naturally fermented so a weak beer or wine and
then
they distill it and what do they call that when they get it on the other end
distilled liquor that's what liquor is okay so it's just a kind of liquor yeah
so
liquor liquor or spirits refers to something that's been distilled so you've
you've basically extracted the alcohol out of the mixture and made it into a
pure
form and once you do that you've got like 90 you can get like some vodkas could
be
like 90 something percent abv so that's crazy strong it's just really we're not
equipped to so that what you're talking about you know this it needs to be modulated
it was always modulated historically by the fact that we were drinking beers
that
weren't very strong so there's going to be just volume limit to how much you
can
consume is also modulated by social stuff so we're drinking typically
historically in a
communal situation where there's really clear ritual restrictions on drinking
so
you only drink when someone makes a toast you're you're modulating your
drinking with other people and even you know you think about just even in a pub
you don't just drink as much as you want you order rounds right and if you down
your your beer real fast you gotta wait until everyone else is ready to order
another round so we socially regulate our drinking and then it's been regulated
by
its inherent weakness if you want to think of it that way but then all of a
sudden
you get this kind of stuff you get really strong liquors and and you can have
that in your house that's when alcohol gets really dangerous and it's only been
the last couple hundred years yeah distilled liquors weren't because of the
the concepts really simple Aristotle described distillation but
technologically it's really hard to do because you got to be able you have to
have metallurgy you need to be able to heat liquids and keep them at a certain
temperature that makes their pressurized it's really it's actually kind of so
in
prohibition when people created stills at home it was like early 20th century
version of meth labs you know they're constantly exploding and people are like
getting scalded with hot liquid because it's really it's dangerous so it's hard
to
do so we only mastered it I mean I'm telling an evolutionary story so my story
begins 10 million years ago with primate ancestors who adapted to alcohol and
just so
10 million years ago about 20 thousand years ago to 13 thousand years ago we
start making alcohol seriously not just relying on fruit lying around that has
some alcohol in it and then distillation happens probably around 13 hundreds in
China and 15 16 hundreds in Europe so that sounds like a long time ago but it
really evolutionarily it's yesterday we just we really haven't had time
culturally or genetically to adapt to access to this kind of alcohol and a long
time ago when people were drinking beer and drinking wine in particular like a
lot
of what they were doing like if they were carrying it around with them they
would
carry beer or wine when they were going on trips because it didn't go bad the
way
water would right beer unhopped beer it goes bad pretty quickly it's like a
couple days couple days yeah yeah there's a theory that beer might have been
useful in
some cultures because it pure fermenting water purifies the water mmm so if you've
got bad water from a pond or something like that and then you ferment it make
beer out
of it yeah yeah so that's one of the stories I mean the purpose of my book is
to try to
explain the puzzle of why we do this why do we put poisons into our body why do
we like to drink and it's
it's mysterious because it's so it's really costly it's it's damaging physiologically
it's got all these social potential social problems and yet we've been doing it
forever we've been making and drinking alcohol for just about as long as we've
been doing anything in an organized fashion in fact we that it's looking
likely that we were doing this before agriculture and that it's possible that
the
the desire to make beer and wine is what motivated agriculture so hunter-gatherers
hunter-gatherers
were making beer before they had agriculture really yeah and there's so they're
making clay pots and
yeah there's you know they're pounding the stuff they're malting it to up the
sugar content I think
that's the effect of that and then they're fermenting it and so we have these
sites like and and what's
present-day Turkey the site called go black gate tepe is this really cool
ritual site it's um these huge
stone have you seen pictures of yeah I'm super familiar with it because of
Graham Hancock who's
been on my podcast multiple times okay obsessed with ancient civilizations and
that is sort of the
rosetta stone of ancient civilizations because it's uh at least 12,000 years
old and the thought
process was at that point in time no one could build the kind of structures
that those people built so
when they did it it sort of uh it lent uh credence to some of his theories that
um civilization has gone
through multiple periods of uh ascension and then resets usually through
catastrophic disasters like
asteroid impacts so his theory um it it it it's not really just his theories
the younger driest impact
theory okay and the younger driest impact theory it's pointing to the end of
the ice age which coincides
with real proof of uh impacts on earth in the sense of um they take soil
samples and when they go down to the same uh amount of
time where the ice age ended they find what this this stuff called um it's
called uh nuclear glass or uh tritonite
and this stuff it it occurs at blast sites where they test nuclear weapons but
it also occurs at asteroid impact
sites okay and they find it all over the place at around 12 000 south 12 000 ish
years ago and so this theory
is um that at the end of the ice age what had happened was we passed through an
area in our solar system
that is uh rich with comets okay and then we were hit and that um it literally
restarted civilization
killed off a massive amount of people and stopped civilization's dead in its
tracks and then there's
a period of rebuilding so it's gobleki tepe is the rebuilding no but they don't
know right it's it's all
speculation because gobekli tepe was for sure covered on purpose yeah somewhere
around 12 000 years ago but
that doesn't indicate how long ago before then it was built right but what they
do know is it was
made with some pretty sophisticated methods because a lot of the carvings were
three-dimensional instead
of carved into the stone the stone around it was carved away right right to
leave and there's also
like animals in it that aren't even supposed to be from that part of the world
okay they find that
pretty fast i didn't know about that yeah there's some pretty cool to it and it's
huge you know
they've only uncovered i think like 10 of it so far it's a cool site so the the
role it plays in
my story is that you've they're hunter-gatherers the people have built this
place they used to think
that but they're not necessarily sure of that this is the theory okay hancock
is proposing all right
he believes that civilization so they were like they had full-on agriculture
and they were this is just
completely theoretical all right because and and very disputed okay because you're
dealing with
you know it's like so long ago it's hard like what what evidence is there this
was always the
evidence against something like gobekli tepe where's the evidence of
sophisticated structures 12 000 years
ago and then finally they found gobekli tepe so now they're like okay well now
we have evidence of
sophisticated structures 12 000 years ago which should have been built
according to our timeline by hunter-gatherers
but um they are they're they're they're resisting that and they're thinking
this younger driest impact
theory may indicate that there was something that happened that you know if you
look at egypt there's
clearly more than one era of uh building uh styles there's like an old kingdom
style and a lot of the old
stuff is like deep under the sand when they're finding it and it's their
position that a lot of this stuff is
thousands of years older than the pyramids okay so my my understanding of the
site is that it's a
hunter-gatherer it was hunter-gatherers uh there there's no grain storage
locations they were clearly
gathering they were coming from all over and they were gathering at this site
to build so they were
working to you know erect these pillars and stuff and they were having blowout
feasts so they have all
this these remnants of feasting and they have these big vats that almost
certainly contained beer and
possibly hallucinogen-laced beer so a lot of early so these hunter-gatherers
they weren't growing the the
hops or whatever they made the beer out of they were just finding it wild they're
making it out of wild
grains but the argument so so the standard story about alcohol is we invent
agriculture then sometime after
that we note that you know someone leaves their sourdough starter out too long
and it starts to turn into
beer and they're like oh this actually tastes all right that's the standard
story so we had agriculture
and then we get alcohol around the 1950s or so some archaeologists started to
argue you know sites like
this one and other sites around the world suggest that hunter gatherers were
gathering and making alcohol
before agriculture and so this is the beer before bread hypothesis is that
crazy is that what motivated
people to settle down and start focusing on making these grains more productive
was they wanted to get
high not because they wanted to make bread and it it's it jives you see the
same pattern in other parts
of the world so in south america they make this uh beer-like substance chicha
out of now they make
it out of maize out of corn but they used to make it out of the ancient the
wild ancestor of corn is
called teosinte and what's interesting is teosinte sucks for making grain like
if your goal was to make
tortillas you wouldn't even notice this plant because the grains don't make
very good grain products to
eat but it makes great beer it's really good for making chicha so this plant if
these early people
were looking for something to make food with they would overlook this plant but
if they were looking
for something to make beer with they would focus on it cultivate it start
making it produce bigger
grains and that's how you would get corn that's like what was the do they do we
know what the original
thing that they got high with was well we have like uh like the the you know
the first the atom
yeah i mean certainly we were getting a little bit drunk on just naturally
fermenting fruit
so net you know fruit falls on the ground it starts to rot what the rotting is
is some of it's being
turned into alcohol by yeast and so clear it's easy to discover alcohol because
it's happening naturally in
our environment all the time the earliest evidence of deliberately produced
alcohol is from about 13
000 years ago so a little bit before go back late tepe and this is in modern
day israel they have
traces of of beer production so people are clearly fermenting beer catch new
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A Brief History Lesson on Alcohol with Author Edward Slingerland

the Joe Rogan experience I feel like we should have a drink I think it we would
be remiss we have I think we're doing a podcast to drink yeah that's nice we're
doing a podcast about drinking yeah it makes sense we should have at least a
small so the historically there's been a safety feature built into alcohol so
for most we've been drinking thank you cheers yeah whoa yeah that's nice I'll
start your Monday morning I'll start your money is a way to start on a day
morning yeah so this stuff is new so having alcohol that's this strong is
something we've only had for a couple hundred years real yeah so a lot of
people don't realize that so for most of our history we've been drinking like
two to three percent beers great to three percent yeah that's it historically
it's typically what beers came in at grape wines you could get up to like eight
to ten but there's a built-in limit to natural fermentation so the yeast are
turning sugars and alcohol which is a poison so they're the Easter slowly
poisoning themselves basically and we've bred these super hardy yeast so like
nowadays you can get a Australian Syrah up to like 16% ABV Wow which is hot
historically really unprecedented but it's crazy that's as high as you can get
because then the alcohol shuts down the yeast but a way around that is
distillation so you heat you take that wine you heat it up ethanol is really
volatile so that comes off first and if you could figure out how to capture
that
vapor and turn it back into a liquid you've got this you've got really
concentrated alcohol do they do that with wine they do it with wine or they
take
they'll take something that's naturally fermented so a weak beer or wine and
then
they distill it and what do they call that when they get it on the other end
distilled liquor that's what liquor is okay so it's just a kind of liquor yeah
so
liquor liquor or spirits refers to something that's been distilled so you've
you've basically extracted the alcohol out of the mixture and made it into a
pure
form and once you do that you've got like 90 you can get like some vodkas could
be
like 90 something percent abv so that's crazy strong it's just really we're not
equipped to so that what you're talking about you know this it needs to be modulated
it was always modulated historically by the fact that we were drinking beers
that
weren't very strong so there's going to be just volume limit to how much you
can
consume is also modulated by social stuff so we're drinking typically
historically in a
communal situation where there's really clear ritual restrictions on drinking
so
you only drink when someone makes a toast you're you're modulating your
drinking with other people and even you know you think about just even in a pub
you don't just drink as much as you want you order rounds right and if you down
your your beer real fast you gotta wait until everyone else is ready to order
another round so we socially regulate our drinking and then it's been regulated
by
its inherent weakness if you want to think of it that way but then all of a
sudden
you get this kind of stuff you get really strong liquors and and you can have
that in your house that's when alcohol gets really dangerous and it's only been
the last couple hundred years yeah distilled liquors weren't because of the
the concepts really simple Aristotle described distillation but
technologically it's really hard to do because you got to be able you have to
have metallurgy you need to be able to heat liquids and keep them at a certain
temperature that makes their pressurized it's really it's actually kind of so
in
prohibition when people created stills at home it was like early 20th century
version of meth labs you know they're constantly exploding and people are like
getting scalded with hot liquid because it's really it's dangerous so it's hard
to
do so we only mastered it I mean I'm telling an evolutionary story so my story
begins 10 million years ago with primate ancestors who adapted to alcohol and
just so
10 million years ago about 20 thousand years ago to 13 thousand years ago we
start making alcohol seriously not just relying on fruit lying around that has
some alcohol in it and then distillation happens probably around 13 hundreds in
China and 15 16 hundreds in Europe so that sounds like a long time ago but it
really evolutionarily it's yesterday we just we really haven't had time
culturally or genetically to adapt to access to this kind of alcohol and a long
time ago when people were drinking beer and drinking wine in particular like a
lot
of what they were doing like if they were carrying it around with them they
would
carry beer or wine when they were going on trips because it didn't go bad the
way
water would right beer unhopped beer it goes bad pretty quickly it's like a
couple days couple days yeah yeah there's a theory that beer might have been
useful in
some cultures because it pure fermenting water purifies the water mmm so if you've
got bad water from a pond or something like that and then you ferment it make
beer out
of it yeah yeah so that's one of the stories I mean the purpose of my book is
to try to
explain the puzzle of why we do this why do we put poisons into our body why do
we like to drink and it's
it's mysterious because it's so it's really costly it's it's damaging physiologically
it's got all these social potential social problems and yet we've been doing it
forever we've been making and drinking alcohol for just about as long as we've
been doing anything in an organized fashion in fact we that it's looking
likely that we were doing this before agriculture and that it's possible that
the
the desire to make beer and wine is what motivated agriculture so hunter-gatherers
hunter-gatherers
were making beer before they had agriculture really yeah and there's so they're
making clay pots and
yeah there's you know they're pounding the stuff they're malting it to up the
sugar content I think
that's the effect of that and then they're fermenting it and so we have these
sites like and and what's
present-day Turkey the site called go black gate tepe is this really cool
ritual site it's um these huge
stone have you seen pictures of yeah I'm super familiar with it because of
Graham Hancock who's
been on my podcast multiple times okay obsessed with ancient civilizations and
that is sort of the
rosetta stone of ancient civilizations because it's uh at least 12,000 years
old and the thought
process was at that point in time no one could build the kind of structures
that those people built so
when they did it it sort of uh it lent uh credence to some of his theories that
um civilization has gone
through multiple periods of uh ascension and then resets usually through
catastrophic disasters like
asteroid impacts so his theory um it it it it's not really just his theories
the younger driest impact
theory okay and the younger driest impact theory it's pointing to the end of
the ice age which coincides
with real proof of uh impacts on earth in the sense of um they take soil
samples and when they go down to the same uh amount of
time where the ice age ended they find what this this stuff called um it's
called uh nuclear glass or uh tritonite
and this stuff it it occurs at blast sites where they test nuclear weapons but
it also occurs at asteroid impact
sites okay and they find it all over the place at around 12 000 south 12 000 ish
years ago and so this theory
is um that at the end of the ice age what had happened was we passed through an
area in our solar system
that is uh rich with comets okay and then we were hit and that um it literally
restarted civilization
killed off a massive amount of people and stopped civilization's dead in its
tracks and then there's
a period of rebuilding so it's gobleki tepe is the rebuilding no but they don't
know right it's it's all
speculation because gobekli tepe was for sure covered on purpose yeah somewhere
around 12 000 years ago but
that doesn't indicate how long ago before then it was built right but what they
do know is it was
made with some pretty sophisticated methods because a lot of the carvings were
three-dimensional instead
of carved into the stone the stone around it was carved away right right to
leave and there's also
like animals in it that aren't even supposed to be from that part of the world
okay they find that
pretty fast i didn't know about that yeah there's some pretty cool to it and it's
huge you know
they've only uncovered i think like 10 of it so far it's a cool site so the the
role it plays in
my story is that you've they're hunter-gatherers the people have built this
place they used to think
that but they're not necessarily sure of that this is the theory okay hancock
is proposing all right
he believes that civilization so they were like they had full-on agriculture
and they were this is just
completely theoretical all right because and and very disputed okay because you're
dealing with
you know it's like so long ago it's hard like what what evidence is there this
was always the
evidence against something like gobekli tepe where's the evidence of
sophisticated structures 12 000 years
ago and then finally they found gobekli tepe so now they're like okay well now
we have evidence of
sophisticated structures 12 000 years ago which should have been built
according to our timeline by hunter-gatherers
but um they are they're they're they're resisting that and they're thinking
this younger driest impact
theory may indicate that there was something that happened that you know if you
look at egypt there's
clearly more than one era of uh building uh styles there's like an old kingdom
style and a lot of the old
stuff is like deep under the sand when they're finding it and it's their
position that a lot of this stuff is
thousands of years older than the pyramids okay so my my understanding of the
site is that it's a
hunter-gatherer it was hunter-gatherers uh there there's no grain storage
locations they were clearly
gathering they were coming from all over and they were gathering at this site
to build so they were
working to you know erect these pillars and stuff and they were having blowout
feasts so they have all
this these remnants of feasting and they have these big vats that almost
certainly contained beer and
possibly hallucinogen-laced beer so a lot of early so these hunter-gatherers
they weren't growing the the
hops or whatever they made the beer out of they were just finding it wild they're
making it out of wild
grains but the argument so so the standard story about alcohol is we invent
agriculture then sometime after
that we note that you know someone leaves their sourdough starter out too long
and it starts to turn into
beer and they're like oh this actually tastes all right that's the standard
story so we had agriculture
and then we get alcohol around the 1950s or so some archaeologists started to
argue you know sites like
this one and other sites around the world suggest that hunter gatherers were
gathering and making alcohol
before agriculture and so this is the beer before bread hypothesis is that
crazy is that what motivated
people to settle down and start focusing on making these grains more productive
was they wanted to get
high not because they wanted to make bread and it it's it jives you see the
same pattern in other parts
of the world so in south america they make this uh beer-like substance chicha
out of now they make
it out of maize out of corn but they used to make it out of the ancient the
wild ancestor of corn is
called teosinte and what's interesting is teosinte sucks for making grain like
if your goal was to make
tortillas you wouldn't even notice this plant because the grains don't make
very good grain products to
eat but it makes great beer it's really good for making chicha so this plant if
these early people
were looking for something to make food with they would overlook this plant but
if they were looking
for something to make beer with they would f