Malcolm Gladwell: How to Tell if Someone is Blackout Drunk

the Joe Rogan experience I don't know too much about the actual is there a difference between the way different alcohol affects is does the wine alcohol actually affect you by volume by by by the actual percentage of alcohol does it affect you differently than beer or differently than whisky or differently in tequila cuz that's what people always say oh if I drink tequila I get crazy like people always have these stories but is that true if you have you had a certain percentage of alcohol see we eat yes equalize the the alcohol concentration is it all the same in you yes because for me wine makes me warm and friendly and it makes me sleepy and it mean it doesn't make me energetic whiskey makes me crazy like I think it's a crazy drug I think when people drink shots of Jack Daniels they just want to go whoa they want to get correct they want to do dumb [ __ ] it makes them want to do dumb things shots in particular makes people want to do dumb things makes people get crazy makes you below that makes people Irish right Ben are you saying blobs I mean quarter Irish get away with it for a little while only a quarter that's it yeah mostly Italian well I see you're at the cusp of these two drinking traditions yes yes I see but Rogan you're foolin Irish you're fooling this was Rogan yes yes because if we would think that you were majority Irish with that yes yeah and I could be dark Irish if you looked at my view yeah I'm well I'm you know I'm a reserved English and Jamaican Jamaicans not big drinkers you know in the same kind of the difference actually fascinatingly of the many weird alcohol facts if you look at young people it's like looks like a college age young people in America and look at their drinking habits the black students drink and get drunk markedly less than white kids really differences in drinking behavior by race in at that age Asian students don't drink much either drinking is like a cycle it's like a white thing it's like a crazy white thing increasingly you know or problematic drinking I thought that was fascinating his first name I don't know they I don't know why that's so is it its revered in our culture more it's uh yeah I mean getting [ __ ] up is celebrated in white culture well this you know in the alcohol chapter of my book the I talk about all the strange things that have happened with drinking patterns on campus and I was struck in doing that chapter I was interested in the connection between drinking and drunkenness and sexual assault on campus because all of those the overwhelming majority if you talked to people who study sexual assault on campus they will tell you that you almost never see one of these cases where both parties aren't drunk right it's which doesn't explain them entirely but it's a huge factor in making sense of what happens and when you dig into that you see these like really weird patterns first up when I was in college I did not know and I went to college in Canada not a teetotaling population I did not know a single person who had ever been drugged blackout drunk and then now if you talk to a 20 year old college student in America they will name friends of theirs who get blackout drunk on a weekly basis what is the drinking age in Canada and what was it when you were in college what has ecology was 18 yeah I think that might be a big factor I've been talking to friends about this about Europe about how in Europe particularly in Italy and France you're allowed to drink wine at a very young age yeah and the taboo aspect of it forbidden fruit all that goes away it's a just it's a I don't think young kids should be drinking because I think it's terrible for your brain development but I think there's a thing in keeping them from drinking or making it illegal where it becomes so taboo and so intoxicating that they can't wait until they can legally do it or they try to get a hold of it before it's legal and it has a certain excitement to it that just doesn't it doesn't have in parts of Europe yeah you've given it up kind of so there's all kinds of the things that are new are way less beer and way more hard liquor so yeah hard liquor when I was in school in Canada in the eighties 95% of what we drank was beer not there wasn't any whiskey or even or tequila or vodka in our party such as beer beer kegs cake parties yeah really hard to get blackout drunk on beer I mean blackout to get the blackout you've got to be here you got to get to like I forgotten what the exact number of 10 drinks or something well it's point you got to blow like 0.18 or something I forgotten with is a magic number where people said for everybody because some people they just get gerbil eyes like there's some dudes they'll have a couple of drinks and they get shark eyes you know those those dark yeah like expressionless eyes like hey man he's still here yeah they're just wandering around like like a like a person with doll eyes there's nothin there with these shoes back that is just at what point does your hippocampus shut down and you ceased the ability to have the ability to make memories and that's just that's a very narrow clinical explanation of so there may be a whole different set of manifestations of drunkenness that have to do with alcohols effect on other parts of your brain right but blackout is just about your hippocampus and past a certain blood alcohol concentration your hippocampus just goes offline essentially you just pull the plug on it and then so nothing that's coming in is being stored Wow so you can continue to communicate I could be blackout drunk right now but does it vary with people does it the number well so yes it would it would vary depending I think on drinking history and yeah but I mean is a there is it's there's a kind of a there's a consensus figure where most people I wish I it's in my book I wish I could remember I think it's something like 0.16 or something like that if you think of the if the the love the level legal level for drinking for for driving is 0.008 I think it's roughly 2x that level and most people at that level will be at risk we'll have at least the beginnings of memory impairment mm-hmm so that feeling when you get really drunk at a party and the next morning you can only remember little bits and pieces of what happened that night that's because your your hippocampus was Papa's at your moment of peak intoxication your hippocampus was starting to shut down it just wasn't taking in it's really interesting to because some of our most interesting minds and some of the best communicators relied on alcohol heavily Mike and it made that like Hitchens made it made him a more interesting communicator when he was drunk when he would have a drink you know I mean right like he would be on Bill Maher you could tell he was lit and and and he was so eloquent and so articulate but that beautiful phrasing so remember though that's an interesting point and a crucial point about blackout which is your hippocampus doesn't necessarily control your your how articulate you are or how fluid your speeches it's just about memory so Hitchens could have been the most articulate person in the world and just and but the next morning he would not have remembered a single thing he said on Bill Maher I mean I'm assuming if he was blackout no but you don't know this fascinating stories in the literature about when people were discovering blackout in the 50s and they would there would be these stories like they would some guy would come in he would wake up in Las Vegas and he would say what am i doing in Las Vegas like and he would go and he would see his clothes hanging in the closet and he would say what what's going on and then he would like go down to the desk and say what and they saw you checked in last night and he would look in his wall and he would see he had a plane ticket from Cleveland and they would reconstruct and there's a in fact this very story was told in the you know one of the big medical journals in the 50s the guy reconstructs he's a Salesman living in like st. Louis who gets really really drunk and then his hippocampus shuts down and he continues to function so he goes gets in his car drives to the airport buys a plane ticket goes to Vegas does he does notice in Vegas does whatever he does in Vegas and then wakes up like two days later oh my god like the campus is suddenly back online what am i doing in Vegas that is two days two days so what is like what is he you can you you like I put I could be blackout right now and still communicate you wouldn't know it I don't it's not like you can tell I can't tell whether you have a headache can i right no clue so you don't know what's going I mean until we come up with that machine that you were talking about you can't tell that my hippocampus isn't working except if you answer if you asked me the same question this is how you the only way you can do it you had a party you think someone's blackout ask them the same question over and over again and see if they respond like say why you asked me so literally I would say wait did you say you're uh you're a quarter Irish and then I would you have to wait like say five seconds and say Joe did you see her a quarter Irish and in a certain way you're gonna say Malcolm why stop it if you don't say that you're blackout drunk but if you do if you could you be blackout drunk and still have like a tiny memory no you may just ask me is that okay so the hippocampus doesn't shut down all at once so what it does is it shuts down slowly so let's imagine we're both doing shots so after I mean I'm quite sure you're capacity I'm I mean you like I'm half your weight am i but I don't know what you are you're like 200 pounds I'm 126 okay so we're gonna deal with alcohol very differently but let's assume we're doing shots of tequila there's a point of where things start to get hazy so you might remember that I asked you that question or you might not and then as we keep drinking in our blood alcohol levels get higher and higher at a certain point your hippocampus will completely like the off switch has been thrown so it goes from being sluggish and impaired to just being down like and what brings it back well your blood alcohol level has to fall to the point where it can work again so you fall asleep and over the course of eight hours of sleep you know your alcohol is processed by your liver blood alcohol Falls hippocampus snaps back into action wow what a ridiculous drug to be our most socially acceptable drug yeah totally and then the Vegas thing where they give it to you for free Christian in a place where you can gamble which is really sneaky yeah that's one of the weirder laws ever that if a person could literally lose their house while their blackout drunk [Applause]

Channel: JRE Clips

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Keywords: Joe Rogan, JRE, Joe Rogan Experience, JRE Clips, PowerfulJRE, Joe Rogan Fan Page, Joe Rogan Podcast, podcast, MMA, Joe Rogan MMA Show, UFC, comedy, comedian, stand up, funny, clip, favorite, best of

Id: OwJooUSDah0

Length: 11min 47sec (707 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 13 2019