 We have co-evolved with alcohol. We've been producing and consuming alcohol for as long as we've been doing anything in an organized fashion as a species. There's got to be a reason for that. We've been looking at alcohol consumption through this very distorted lens because we've only been looking at it as a kind of addictive pleasure substance. We haven't been seeing any of the positive social benefits. The point of drunk is to just give us a broader viewpoint, so actually change the way we look at this. The standard story is that alcohol is very much like our taste for junk food or masturbation, right? It's just an evolutionary mistake. The common characteristic is the idea that alcohol was once adaptive in our evolutionary past, but it's not anymore and it hasn't been for a very long time. All of these hypotheses have, I think, fatal problems. None of them are sufficient as an explanation for why the taste for alcohols remained in our gene pool and in our cultural repertoire. Human beings occupy a very unusual ecological niche, unlike other primates. We're incredibly dependent on technology and tool use. We have to come up with insights in a way that no other primate does. We're also incredibly communal. If you look at humans cooperating in large-scale societies, we're cooperating on this massive scale that's just quarters of magnitude beyond what any of our primate relatives can pull off. And it's challenging. So my argument is alcohol is a cultural technology that we discovered very early on as a species that helps us to respond to these challenges. It helps us to be more creative. It helps us to be more communal. It helps us to cooperate on a large scale. It helps to make it easier for us to kind of rub shoulders with each other in these large-scale societies that we live in. So it's solved a bunch of adaptive problems that we uniquely face as a species because of this weird lifestyle we have. The enemy of creativity in the sense of lateral thinking, so seeing unusual possibilities in the periphery or making a kind of creative breakthrough is a prefrontal cortex. So we've got this part of our brain that's really important. It allows us to get up in the morning, get our jobs done. We couldn't function without a PFC. Evolution has this problem where it wants us to be receptive and creative and especially in childhood where we have to receive all this cultural information. We have to learn languages. We need to absorb like a sponge. So basically it holds off on developing PFC for a while to let us be open and innovative as kids. But then at a certain point we need to be able to put our shoes on and get out the door. And so it lets the PFC fully develop. So as adults we face this problem where we're now very efficient, we're very good at self-control. We're very good at delaying gratification, but we're not so good at creative insights. And so one of the functions of alcohol is to reach in and basically turn down our prefrontal cortex a few notches. Temporarily taking us back to being like a four-year-old in terms of our cognitive flexibility. But with all the knowledge and the goals and the affordances of being an adult and it's temporary. So then a few hours later we're back to being adults again. So depressing the PFC increases creativity. It allows parts of our brain to talk in ways that normally they don't. Suppressing the PFC also makes it more difficult for us to lie. Lying is cognitively very PFC heavy undertaking. If I'm lying to you I have to keep in mind what the truth is, what I know the truth to be, and also what I'm telling you is the truth. So I have to keep in my mind two different realities. I need to not let my knowledge of this reality seep into this reality. So I have to suppress emotional reactions or even fleeting thoughts that might show up on my face. It's really hard to lie successfully and you really need your PFC in perfect shape to do it. In every culture I know of, whenever you get potentially hostile strangers or these people with potentially competing interests who have to come to an agreement and figure something out, alcohol is involved. And in places that don't have alcohol they use some other substance that has exactly the same functions. The same way we shake hands when we need to show we're not carrying a weapon. If I sit down and drink a few beers with you I'm basically taking my PFC out and putting it on the table and saying, you know, I'm cognitively disarmed. We have to learn to trust even though it's not rational to trust. And alcohol is a tool for helping us to do that. Not only by disarming our ability to lie and deceive other people but it's also boosting serotonin and dorfins. It's making us feel good about each other. It's bonding us. There's a quite literal sense in which intoxication gave rise to civilization. It was the desire to get intoxicated that first motivated human beings to settle down and start cultivating crops. We've gotten an increasing amount of evidence that humans were making alcohol way before they had agriculture. So these hunter-gatherers were coming together to get drunk and then gradually they realized, oh, we can make better beer if we start cultivating these crops, these wild grains. You see this pattern around the world. So wherever you look in the world the first domesticated crops appear to be domesticated for their psychoactive properties, not further nutrition. In South America, Teo Sente, the ancestor to maize to corn, makes terrible grain. If you were interested in making food you would not notice this species but it has a lot of sugar in its stock and that can be used to brew a beer-like substance called chicha. So clearly it got domesticated to make chicha. So that's a really powerful insight that it was actually the motive for civilization. But then the kind of deeper sense in which it's responsible for civilization is filling all these functions that I talked about in the book. Creativity, communal nature, reducing stress and anxiety. It motivated us to settle down and create civilization and then once we did that it gave us the tool to do that successfully.