A Brief History Lesson on Alcohol with Author Edward Slingerland

the jurogan experience i feel like we should have a drink i i think it we would be remiss we have to take it professionally with a podcast to drink that's nice we're doing a podcast about drinking yeah that 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 cheers yeah let's try this ah whoa yeah that's nice i'll start your monday morning i'll start your monday there's a way to start a monday morning yeah um so this stuff is new so having alcohol that's this strong is something we've only had for a couple hundred years really 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 uh great three percent yeah that's historically that'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 for natural fermentation so the yeast are turning sugars and alcohol which is a poison so the yeast are slowly poisoning themselves basically and we've bred these super hardy yeast so like nowadays you can get an australian syrah to like 16 abv wow which is 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 can 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 oh 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 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 got to 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 the concept's really simple aristotle described distillation but technologically it's really hard to do because you got to be able you have to have metal energy you need to be able to heat liquids and keep them at a certain temperature they're pressurized it's really it's actually kind of dangerous so in prohibition when people created stills at home it was like early 20th century version of meth labs you know they were constantly exploding and people were like getting scalded with hot liquid because it's really it's dangerous so it's hard to do so we only mastered it um 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 20 000 years ago to 13 000 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 1300s in china and 15 1600s in europe so that sounds like a long time ago but 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 um 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 um beer unhopped beer goes bad pretty quickly it's like a couple days a couple days yeah there's a theory that beer might have been useful in some cultures because it pure fermenting water purifies the water 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 drink it so that's one of the story 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 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 the 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 uh so they're making clay pots and yeah there's um 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 goblet tepe is this really cool ritual site it's um these huge stone have you seen pictures of it 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 uh 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 civilization has gone through multiple periods of ascension and then resets usually through catastrophic disasters like asteroid impacts so his theory um it it it's not really just his theories the younger driest impact theory okay and the younger dry ice impact theory it's pointing to the end of the ice age which coincides with real proof of impacts on earth in the sense of they take soil samples and when they go down to the same uh amount of time where the ice age ended they find with this this stuff called um it's called the nuclear glass or 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 civilizations dead in its tracks and then there's a period of rebuilding so it's go blackie tepe telling his rebuilding no they don't know right 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 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 sight so the the role it plays in my story is that you've they're hunter gatherers the people who built this place they used to think that but they're not necessarily sure of that this is the theory that graham 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 twelve thousand years ago which should have been built according to our timeline by hunter-gatherers but um they are 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 building styles there's like an old kingdom style and new can 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 100 it was 100 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 blow out 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 alright 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's 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'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 is 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 did 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're getting a little bit drunk on just naturally fermenting fruit so now 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 i go back late tepe and this is in modern day israel they have traces of beer production so people are clearly fermenting beer catch new episodes of the joe rogan experience for free only on spotify watch back catalog jre videos on spotify including clips easily seamlessly switch between video 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Channel: PowerfulJRE

Views: 2,006,136

Keywords: Joe Rogan Experience, JRE, Joe, Rogan, podcast, MMA, comedy, stand, up, funny, Freak, Party

Id: dCKOByl9EZE

Length: 13min 56sec (836 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 08 2021