I am a person who drinks People who drink need to keep drinking [MatPat] Sure you say That now but after today's episode you Might wanna rethink that policy [Film Theory Intro] Hello internet! Welcome to Film Theory where I thought to myself what better way to celebrate the coming of winter than by talking about the series where winter just never seems to quite arrive, One of my favorite shows here on the Channel: "Game of Thrones." Up to now we've concocted theories around Dany, John, and Jorah. The last of which I still think is incredibly likely to happen, but there's one character who has sadly remained on the sidelines, a character who's been everyone's favorite including mine since season one and by some miracle has somehow been able to escape the wheel of death that George R. R. Martin is hanging on his writing room wall. Yep, today's theory is about none other than Tyrion Lannister. Now, in case you're not familiar with Game of Thrones or this character in particular while I could tell you about him, I think he sums it up best: [Tyrion:] "I drink and I know things." Yeah, that about does it and when he says he drinks, man! can Tyrion drink. The channel "Movie Maniacs" put together a compilation of every Game of Thrones characters' drinking throughout the first four seasons and I get a little woozy just watching it. Roll the tape! MMMM. That's a good red. More wine? Tyrion, buddy, I'm afraid you're drinking is really starting to get out of hand, and I don't mean let's get you to Alcoholics Anonymous I mean more like your liver is a lump of coal and you should be catatonic right now. Tyrion even admits that being as sloshed as he is at all hours of the day is way harder than it looks. [Tyrion:] It's not easy being drunk all the time. Everyone would do it if it were easy. [MatPat:] and it's boasts like that combined with the seemingly endless stream of wine going into Tyrian's mouth hole that has me a bit concerned, so our question of the day just how drunk is Tyrion Lannister? What is this guy's blood alcohol concentration? What kind of health effects should he be experiencing? But perhaps the most important question of all in a fantasy series full of dragons and ice zombies - is the most unbelievable element - Tyrion's ability to handle his liqour? [Tyrion:] No I don't think so. [MatPat:] We'll see my friend ... we'll see. Now don't get me wrong, Tyrion's drinking isn't the kind of behavior that I'm gonna defend here. Heck, when most of my friends were in college out drinking at parties no joke i was trying to start a show choir. Yea, talk about regrettable life decisions and I was sober! Suffice it to say that I can't estimate how drunk Tyrion is from any kind of personal experience so I'll try to prove how drunk he is in the best way that I know how - SCIENCE! and some history and maybe a few leaps of theorists logic but mostly - SCIENCE so the first thing that we're going to need to do if we're going to calculate the level of Tyrion's intoxication is determine exactly what he's drinking. Game of Thrones watchers might know some of these wines by name like Arbor Gold, Arbor Red, Dornish Red but what would the real world equivalents of these be? It's actually a tricky question since the popular types and strengths of wine have changed throughout history and fans of Game of Thrones argue about when exactly the series should be set. Well, the knee-jerk reaction to castles knights and dragons would be to put it into the medieval period which lasted from the fifth-century to the mid 15th century based on my research Game of Thrones is actually taking place a bit later than that. Sure, George R. R. Martin has said that part of the inspiration for the series was the english war of the roses which took place from 1455 to 1487 but there's one piece of evidence that guarantees the events of the show are happening at least 50 years after those dates and for as unimportant as 50 years might seem that little difference matters. In medieval times most wine was relatively weak. We're talking somewhere between grape juice and Mike's Hard Lemonade and that may sound like a joke but it's not because by the 16th century people have discovered a new and magical technology that helped them age wine and preserve it so it would get stronger. That crucial piece of technology and the evidence proving the dates that we're hanging out in Westeros during Game of Thrones is ... THIS. Yep, a cork in season one the wine merchant who tries to poison Daenerys, pulls a cork out of the cast and talks about the need to quote: "let the wine breathe" so clearly Westeros is hip to the newfangled cork trend. That moment coupled with their advanced understanding of Medicine, large cities with standing armies, and global trading system points to the series taking place during the post columbian exchange of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. (laughing) Sorry, I just gotta laugh at moments like this since in order to calculate something as ridiculous as how drunk a fictional character is, we're forced to explore the history of global trade and the evolution of cork-based technology. Ughhhh! That's why i love my job. Anyway, what does any of this mean for our theory? Well, it tells us that royalty like Tyrion Lannister would likely be drinking wines that are aged or fortified IE the really strong stuff. In the 16th century fortifying wine became so popular and so strong it would make a box of franzia look like an oversized juice-box. The most popular fortified wines of the day like Malmsey, Sherry and Port all have alcohol contents of around twenty two percent alcohol by volume. That number, on its own, might not mean a lot to you but by comparison an average bottle of wine nowadays is going to be in the realm of eleven percent alcohol by volume, so the stuff that we see Tyrion drinking throughout Game of Thrones is going to be nearly twice as strong and honestly it can go up from there. In A Clash of Kings, the second novel of the series, Tyrion reveals that when Robert Baratheon was killed by a boar, he'd been consuming fortified wine that was three times as strong as usual which would seem to indicate that it's alcohol by volume was around forty percent which is as strong as a hard liquor like whiskey but he's downing it like wine so for our purposes today we're safe to assume that Tyrion is drinking strong fortified wine at about twenty percent alcohol by volume but of course knowing what Tyrion is drinking is only part of the equation. To determine how drunk he's really getting we need to consider how much he's drinking and how quickly he's drinking it. Our best scenario for this is Tyrion's and Sansa's wedding banquet from season three. Now, obviously we don't see the whole scene but we can figure it out and make some estimates based on what we do see. For one, Tyrion is filling his chalice to the very top which is a bad sign. A serving of wine is typically about four to five fluid ounces but the full volume of this glass is going to be something similar to this modern goblet from Williams and Sonoma for Eighty bucks? Geez, no wonder history invented the Red Solo Cup. Lannisters always pay their debts? Yeah, Lannisters always pay Williams and Sonoma. Man, home goods are way too expensive. Anyway that overpriced vessel for holding fluid has a capacity of 10 ounces, so each time Tyrion fills and empties his glass, he's draining a double serving of wine. In the brief moments of the banquet that we do see Tyrion downs two of those glasses in a matter of minutes, and more importantly he was already drunk to begin with! Tyrion was out pre-gaming! This is the first shot that we see of him at the reception. If that face doesn't say I'm about to regret my life choices, I don't know what does. Now, we can't say for sure how long that wedding reception lasts, but we can calculate both the conservative estimate and an aggressive estimate. Assuming that the banquet is fairly short, say an hour or two, and Tyrion finishes his wine every half hour. Then he's going to consume roughly 30 to 40 fluid ounces of wine or about a third of a gallon, 1.26 liters of alcohol. If he's drinking at the breakneck pace he seems to be polishing off the glass every 15 minutes for upwards of three hours, then maybe drinks as much as a hundred ounces, just under three quarters of a gallon or for those on the metric system just shy of three liters! That is a ton of alcohol. That's more than the amount of diet coke that I drink everyday and whether you're talking about the conservative estimate or the aggressive estimate either way it ain't gonna be pretty, but before we address that and determine the medical consequences of Tyrian's beverage of choice, there's one last factor that we have to take into account, Tyrian's weight. Alcohol tends to affect people proportionately based on their size, so while Tyrion might be able to drink as much as the mountain, his blood alcohol concentration is gonna be a lot higher than that of someone who weighs 400 pounds. Peter Dinklage, the actor who plays Tyrion Lannister, stands at four feet 5 inches tall and is estimated to weigh anywhere between 88 and a hundred and twelve pounds and honestly with as much fizzy lifting drink that Tyrion is pumping into his body a few pounds in either direction is going to make that much of a difference so let's call it a hundred pounds or 35.3 five kilograms so knowing that let's go back to our conservative number. If a man of Tyrion's sighs drinks roughly six glasses of strong fortified wine in the space of about two hours, that person's peak blood alcohol concentration is going to be somewhere between, drum roll please, .30 and .35 percent. Huh, well damn, kinda expected that to be a more climactic moment, but I guess it's really hard to get hyped when every number that you're possibly gonna be talking about is going to be less than 1 because let me impress this upon you dear viewer .3 and .35 are huge numbers when it comes to blood alcohol concentration. Let me try to explain to you how scary these numbers are even if the numbers themselves don't seem all that scary. Well first, take into account that blood alcohol concentration measures how many grams of alcohol are in every hundred milliliters of your blood so having point three grams of alcohol in every hundred milliliters of your blood is a lot of alcohol relative the amount of blood that you have pumping through your veins. I mean any of you watching who passed drivers and should know that the legal limit to drive in the U.S. is point zero eight percent which surprisingly is one of the highest limits of any country. Most others are hanging in the .05 range and that means that Tyrion is at least four times as drunk as someone who would be considered a drunk driver in the US and the scene. In fact, I'm kind of limited by how much I can impress upon you how crazy these numbers are. If you really want to see the world through Tyrian's eyes at that level of intoxication, there's actually a link in the description to a website that I helped work on in partnership with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that simulates going through a night getting progressively more impaired. It's actually really cool and gives you a better perspective at what these numbers translate to. I'll be talking more about that at the end of the video but for now remember that this point three BAC is a conservative estimate and it's already a huge number and already that alone comes with some intense health risks, impaired breathing, impaired heart rate, lapses in consciousness, even a low possibility of death, and honestly the evidence from the show supports our calculation. After the wedding banquet, when Tyrion and Sansa go off to their bedchamber, Tyrion refuses to consummate the marriage if Sansa doesn't want to. He then takes one last swig of wine and passes out cold. That instance of sudden onset unconsciousness, which is played largely to lighten up a very heavy scene, is actually something that occurs when BAC levels reach about .30 If now we switch over to our aggressive estimate and say that Tyrion had been drinking more than that, at a rate closer to what we see in the scenes that the show does put on screen, Then Tyrion's blood alcohol concentration skyrockets to a whopping .84 Again, the number on its own might not seem impressive but think about this, that number shouldn't physically be possible. For most people, a blood alcohol concentration of .45 leads to shutdown of automatic bodily functions. You know, the little things like breathing and getting your heart to beat on its own. Tyrion's BAC at his wedding is nearly double that and that's just one instance how bout when Tyrion emerges from the crate Varys with smuggling him at the beginning of season five. He starts chugging wine, then gives the old boot and rally. There he says that he'd been drinking the entire time on the ship so who knows how drunk Tyrion is at this point. The bottom line is that drinking the way Tyrion does is extraordinarily dangerous especially for someone of his size. The numbers don't lie! Based on the volume of wine he's guzzling and the speed with which, Tyrion should have been the first character to die in season 1 but wait, saying those slightly inebriated viewers watching this during their weekend frat party. If Tyrion's been drinking this heavily for this long wouldn't that mean that he's got like really good tolerance wouldn't that mean that he could survive drinking much more than a normal person and honestly that's a really good question. That's actually one I had myself as I worked on the script but believe it or not that's not how tolerance works. Alcohol tolerance is definitely a thing, but it has much more to do with how inebriation affects someone externally rather than internally. Someone with a lot of experience drinking might be able to stay balanced to not slur their speech with higher BAC's but on the inside they'll be just as drunk as the novice drinker who's had the same amount. Alcohol tolerance doesn't affect your blood alcohol concentration and that's the toxicity that causes those pesky problems like cardiac arrest, breathing issues, and early death. Are there anecdotal instances of people with extraordinarily high blood alcohol concentrations living? Sure! There was this one guy who stole a vehicle full of sheep in South African was recorded with an unimaginable BAC of 1.6 percent not .16 percent 1.6 percent AKA 20 times the legal driving limit. That person had to have been a genetic anomaly. I'm sure Professor X is reaching out to the guy as we speak but in general tolerance doesn't determine your BAC; it just determines how long you can stay conscious enough to get your BAC even higher but surely with how smart and high functioning Tyrion always seems to be in crucial moments of the show, we can at least say that he holds his liquor better than anyone else. Let's give that to the man at least right ? Tyron: Of course of course. MatPat: Well not so fast. Tyrion actually isn't the most impressive drinker in the Game of Thrones universe. In fact he's not even the best drinker in his family. That title belongs to the queen of mean herself Cersei Lannister. Why? Well consider the season 2 episode about the Battle of Blackwater. While Tyrion is leading the defense of King's Landing, Cersei is hiding away in the holdfast getting Dean Martin levels of drunk. Like we did with Tyrion we can perform similar calculations on this episode with similar assumptions but with one big change. Cersei is a woman. Cersei is actually going to have a higher blood alcohol concentration than Tyrion if they both drank the same amount. Why? Well, generally speaking women have a higher proportion of their body weight as fat, sorry no shame it's just a fact, and fat has a very low water content compared to muscle. The water in muscle tissue helps dilute alcohol in the blood stream more, thereby creating a lower blood alcohol concentration so when we account for all of Circe's drinking, the time elapsed, her gender, her weight, all that good stuff. We get a peek blood alcohol concentration of 0.63. Sure its not quite as high as the highest possible calculation that we got for Tyrion but there are two things to consider here. One, this is still a BAC that would kill most people and two, compared to Tyrion, Cersei handles this level of drunkenness like a champ. When Tyrion gets this drunk, he wipes his mouth on a tablecloth and passes out in front of his bride. When Cersei gets this drunk she tries to comfort her son and tell them stories while the city around her collapses. I mean sure she said some really awful things to Sansa in these scenes but Cercei says terrible things when she's sober so I don't think that really counts. [Circe] Every breath you draw in my presence annoys me. [MatPat] So Tyrion might get the award for drunkest in the family but the overall best drinker is undeniably Cersei. Dammit just another crown that she ripped off of someone's head, but hey that's just a theory a FILM THEORY and wait right there because I want to talk about this really cool website that I worked on so full disclosure this is an episode I've had kicking around on my to-do list for a while now and then NITSA the national highway traffic safety administration came a-knockin wanting to partner with Film Theory and it was like the fates had aligned. That seems awfully random, you say skeptically. Why would they want to partner with Film Theory? Well one because we're super cool duh, but to because we specialize in translating complicated educational concepts into fun videos that most people can understand like this one and blood alcohol concentration. They actually asked me to serve as a guide through this really cool 360-degree website that gives you a first-person experience of a night on the town getting more and more buzzed. Maybe you can't get up to Tyrion coma levels of drunkenness like .8 but you can get your BAC to some dangerously large numbers and like I said the episode because so much of blood alcohol concentration depends on perceptual differences that you experience at different levels, this is a great way to experience it firsthand in the safety of your own home and for free! You're not actually have to pay for any alcohol. So give it a go and tell me how it goes. In fact, you'll see me there as I guide you through the experience. Go up against my raging nerd brain in Bar trivia. Just listen to my snarky remarks as I wait there for you to choose a darn drink. Seriously, just pick the darn thing! All in all, it was a fantastic project to work on and it presents a super fun way to learn about the effects of alcohol. A 360-degree choose-your-own-adventure style evening of getting drunk. It's not too shabby so go to the website you see on screen or just hammer the link in the top line of the description to go and check it out. Not just I will thank you but your future self will thank you too, and if Back to the Future has taught me anything when that meeting eventually happens you will have caused a time paradox but it'll be so worth it, so one last time check out this website or click the link in the top of the description to have some drinks, attempt and fail at darts, and try to seduce people while getting sloppy at the counter. All while watched over by your little guardian angel MatPat. Don't worry guys I got you covered. Now if you'll excuse me, next week call me Pippin because I've got some magic to do.
''even when shes sober shes nasty'' shows footage of her with drink in hand..
Had to stop watching. Couldn't stand his voice.
I'm sorry you guys didn't like his voice. Personally he's one of my favorite youtubers next to Jacksfilms. Too each their own.
Pretty interesting. But holy shit that guy is annoying.
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Tyrion and Cersei were bingeing to extreme excess on these occasions, so that's a ridiculous way to establish a "baseline". That undermines every other "scientific" extrapolation. That being said, I usually enjoy The Film Theorists' videos. The youtube content churn is real