>> All the positive aspects of alcohol-based sociality have a dark side.

When people are bonding over alcohol, they can do things that they wouldn't be able to do otherwise.

But then people who aren't joining in that practice can get frozen out.

♪♪ >> Hello and welcome to "GZERO World."

I'm Ian Bremmer, and today I'm cracking open a cold one, which is funny because I hate beer, and looking at the role alcohol -- yes, alcohol has played in shaping today's global order.

How has booze helped bridge social divides and foster diplomatic breakthroughs?

And as global alcohol consumption continues to increase year after year, particularly during this pandemic, is it doing us more harm than good?

Then alcohol isn't the only drug in town.

That's right.

Marijuana, we're looking at you.

Don't worry.

I've also got your "Puppet Regime."

>> Hey, folks, did you miss me?

Of course you did, very strongly.

>> But first, a word from the folks who help us keep the lights on.

>> Major corporate funding provided by founding sponsor First Republic.

At First Republic, our clients come first.

Taking the time to listen helps us provide customized banking and wealth-management solutions.

More on our clients at firstrepublic.com.

Additional funding provided by... ...and by... >> This is the story of two boozy moments in presidential history.

The first -- October 23, 1995, Hyde Park, New York, at a press conference between U.S. President Bill Clinton and Russian President Boris Yeltsin.

Oh, you remember him.

Throughout the day, the two leaders had been engaged in long and difficult talks over a Bosnian peace agreement.

And throughout the day, President Yeltsin had reportedly been throwing back glass after glass of white wine, and that's what we know about.

When the two men finally appeared before the cameras, a visibly drunk Yeltsin attacked the media for, as he put it, calling the summit a disaster.

>> [ Speaking Russian ] >> Well, now, for the first time, I can tell you that you're a disaster.

>> [ Laughing ] Be sure you get the right attribution there.

>> A senior aide later wrote that President Clinton had gone to the extent of doubling over with laughter just to cover for how hammered the Russian president was.

If both leaders appeared to be clowning around, the thinking went, Yeltsin's drunkenness wouldn't be the only takeaway of the high-stakes summit.

Yeltsin, by the way, also once reportedly drunk-dialed Clinton to propose a secret bilateral on a submarine.

But that's a story for another time.

Fast-forward to July 30, 2009, and a stilted but still spirited diplomatic affair.

>> In the Rose Garden today, the three men who ignited a national firestorm over racial profiling sat down for a beer.

Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates and police sergeant James Crowley, who arrested Gates in his own home, were invited by the President to talk about lowering the temperature on race.

>> It was the famous Obama beer summit.

It did not, alas, heal the country's centuries-old racial divides.

That's clear.

But it was an important PR test for America's first black president just months into his first term.

And it's telling that when the going got awkward, President Obama turned to alcohol to bring everyone back to the table.

Then Vice President Biden, himself a lifelong teetotaler, sipped a nonalcoholic beer.

And therein lies the yin and yang of alcohol's role in high-level diplomacy, not to mention in society at large, a dangerous drug that has ruined countless lives, derailed many a global summit.

But it's also humanity's oldest social lubricant, an elixir that can fuel diplomatic breakthroughs well into the wee hours of the night.

As Winston Churchill once said, "I've taken more out of alcohol and alcohol is taken out of me."

Booze is also big business.

Estimates vary, but the global market for alcohol is near $2 trillion, with the United States spending well into the hundreds of billions every year.

Eight in 10 Americans polled by the National Institute of Health in 2019 said that they'd had a drink at some point in their lives.

Well, yeah, and one in four said they'd engage in binge drinking in the past month.

Now, that's a high number.

The pandemic has accelerated these trends because what goes better with depression-inducing lockdown than alcohol?

Nearly a quarter of Americans saying they drunk more over the past year due to stress.

And we're paying the price.

From 1997 to 2017, the number of alcohol-related deaths in the United States doubled.

It's now more than 70,000 a year.

It's not just us.

Globally, alcohol consumption has been steadily increasing as well, by over 70% between 1990 and 2017, according to one report.

Low- and middle-income nations like Vietnam, India and China a driving force behind that trend, with drinking in Southeast Asia rising by over 34% between 2010 and 2017.

And yet, amidst this global booze boom, the world has only grown more and more divided.

Key global alliances have weakened.

And here in the United States, we still can't even agree on who won the last election.

I know, you know, but we can't agree.

If drinking is supposed to bring us together, why are we growing so far apart?

Edward Slingerland is a philosophy professor and Canadian in good standing at the University of British Columbia, and his new book makes the case for alcohol's role in human civilization and modern society.

Here's our oddly dry conversation.

Ted Slingerland.

He's a philosophy professor at University of British Columbia.

Thanks so much for joining today.

>> Thanks for having me.

>> You have established in this book that human beings have been drinking for a very long time and for very deep social purposes.

How did it start?

>> So, I was told and I think most of us are told that alcohol, to the extent we think about the beginning of alcohol, we think of it as a kind of byproduct or accidental discovery after we had agriculture.

The way I thought of it was we got agriculture, we started growing grains, we started making bread.

And then one day someone leaves their sourdough starter out for too long and it starts to ferment and they drink it and think, "Oh, that's kind of interesting."

And we have beer.

So, in that story, alcohol was kind of an afterthought to civilization.

What really surprised me was the archeological evidence suggests it's the other way around.

So hunter-gatherers were gathering together in big groups to have festivals, to do rituals at these really impressive ritual sites with these massive stone pillars, kind of mini Stonehedges, and drinking.

They were drinking.

Some substances are huge vats, along with the remains of the feast that they were eating.

Maybe those vats contained water.

I really doubt it.

We know people were making beer at this point in the Fertile Crescent and probably hallucinogen-laced beer.

So they were gathering and getting intoxicated couple thousand years before we had agriculture.

And so the story now, the so-called "beer before bread" hypothesis, is that it's actually the drive to get intoxicated that motivated people to settle down and start trying to make alcohol in a serious way.

And then we got bread.

[ Chuckles ] So we actually settled down to make beer.

And then we discovered, well, you could also make this thing to eat the next morning and soak up the alcohol.

So that surprised me.

And this ends in a very direct way.

Our drive to get intoxicated is what caused us to create civilization because agriculture is the basis of civilization.

And then once we got into civilization, it gave us the tools for helping us to cope with all the challenges of living in civilized societies.

>> So you talk a lot about alcohol and trust between human beings.

Give us a sense how that works.

>> Well, in the same way that when we meet, we shake hands, right?

We shake right hands.

I'm showing you that I'm not carrying a weapon.

And now we can sit down and I can't harm you.

I'm disarmed.

If you sit down with someone and you do a couple shots of baijiu, the sorghum liquor that is used at Chinese banquets, you're doing the same thing cognitively.

You're taking out your prefrontal cortex and putting it on the table and saying, "I am cognitively disarmed.

I am less able to lie, I'm less able to cheat and I'm more likely to like you.

I've become more open cognitively to you."

And that's an appealing thing.

>> So we have some societies, of course, around the world that have done everything they can to ban alcohol.

What do you think the impact of that is in terms of social interactions, business structure, politics?

What does it mean for society when they do that?

>> They've eliminated a crucial tool for getting people to cooperate.

Subcultures that don't have alcohol substitute something else that does the same thing.

So they substitute another chemical intoxicant.

So, in the Pacific cultures that don't have alcohol use kava, which is this tuber-based intoxicant that has similar effects.

Cultures that ban chemical intoxicants entirely have to be either replacing it with something else or just suffering the consequences of having trouble getting people passed cooperation dilemmas.

If we're doing drinks together, suddenly you look a lot more handsome and charming.

I feel more handsome and charming.

It helps people get cooperation off the ground, especially in situations where cooperation is challenging.

And so how cultures do that when they've banned alcohol and other chemical intoxicants is something I don't know.

Maybe there's substitute practices you could throw in.

But there's a good reason that it's rare for a culture to do that.

>> We certainly have seen in I mean, international summitry, they get together at dinners, they've got drinks.

Not everybody does, of course.

Donald Trump, for example, I mean, just doesn't drink, period.

>> Yeah.

I would predict people are going to trust him less.

What alcohol is doing is paralyzing the part of your brain that's in charge of rational self-interest.

So the prefrontal cortex is how you calculate cost-benefit.

It's how you suppress instincts.

It's how you delay gratification for long-term payoffs.

When you turn that down a bit, you start to let your emotions take over.

You start to see commonalities rather than just pursuing your own interest.

So I'd have to predict that leaders who don't drink are going to have trouble doing that.

And maybe one of the reasons they do it is because they get an advantage.

I mean, if other people are cognitively disarming and you're not, you may be able to pursue your self-interest in a way that could be harmful to other people.

I document the fact that across cultures and throughout history, people have been suspicious of people who don't drink.

People have been suspicious of the one who remained sober when everyone else is getting drunk.

Now, as I think is the case with Trump and I think Joe Biden as well, alcoholism in his family, and so he avoids drinking because he's seen the incredible cost of alcoholism.

Maybe the person who is out drinking is pregnant, or they have to get up early and take the kids to daycare.

So this is a problem.

All the positive aspects of alcohol-based sociality have a dark side.

And so when people are bonding over alcohol, they can do things that they wouldn't be able to do otherwise.

They can reach agreements.

They can trust each other in a way they wouldn't be able to do otherwise.

But then people who aren't joining in that practice can get frozen out.

And that creates some inequity.

And that's what I think organizations have to figure out, is how you deal with that.

How do you get the benefits of alcohol-based sociality while mitigating the inequities that it creates?

>> Yeah, we talk about, in corporate organizations, of course, a lot of this is around bro culture to the extent that there's drinking going on after hours in organizations.

It's caused all sorts of mistreatment, usually gender-based.

And so, I mean, our society is moving as far away from that as possible.

I mean, how much of gender inequity has actually been fostered by the fact that alcohol is a significant piece of letting down your cognitive guard?

>> Yeah, I think quite a bit.

And it's a problem.

And I think people are rightly concerned about it.

So, for instance, if I'm an academic, when we go to conferences, academic conferences, in-person conferences, we go in person and we go in person because a lot of the real work is done outside of the formal sessions.

A lot of this happens at the conference bar after hours.

And that's -- it's great in some ways.

It's allowing a type of sociality to happen that wouldn't happen otherwise.

The problem is it's all dudes.

[ Laughs ] And women are quite understandably reluctant to enter these bro culture, especially late-night gatherings.

And as a result, they're getting frozen out of this.

It's a big problem.

I think the response to this by most organizations has been overkill.

So the response has been, well, let's just make everything dry.

You're not allowed to have these events anymore or if you have them, you can't have alcohol at them.

And I think that's because we don't see the functional benefits of alcohol.

We look at alcohol just as kind of a public health problem.

And at most on the positive side is fun.

So if I'm head of H.R.

and I see on one side potential lawsuit, sexual harassment, sexual assault, drunk driving, all these bad things, plus damage to people's livers, all this possible alcoholism, that's all on one side.

On the other side, what is their fun?

When you put it that way, fun is always going to lose.

So what I'm trying to do in "Drunk" is point out that on the other side is not just fun, it's functional benefits.

It's enhanced creativity.

So we haven't talked about that, but one of the things alcohol does is free your mind up.

You can start to think in a lateral way more easily and share your ideas with others in a freer way.

So it's a crucial element, I think, in group creativity.

You lose that as well.

Now, you may see all those benefits and still say, "Yeah, we're still not -- we still don't want you guys drinking around the hotel bar late at night.

We still don't want to have alcohol at our annual holiday party."

And that's a perfectly justified decision.

But it has to be made with all of the data.

And I think right now, when it comes to making decisions about alcohol, whether to include it in our personal lives, whether to include it in our professional lives, we've been flying blind from an anthropological and from a scientific perspective.

So I'm just trying to correct that and at least get all the data out there for decision makers, and then they can decide for their own organization or you can decide as an individual yourself the extent to which you want to use alcohol in your life.

>> I just wonder to what extent we can really say that the impact of alcohol is so similar, so homogeneous on people when they take it.

I mean, just from a pop culture perspective, you've got the angry drunk.

>> Angry drunks are just angry people [Chuckles] who are finally getting to show their anger.

What alcohol is doing is disinhibiting you.

It's not creating new personality traits.

It's not making you a different type of person.

What it's doing is impairing your ability to conceal or repress what type of person you are.

A kind of ugliness that can come out at a certain point of inebriation is you seeing what people really think or what they really feel.

So I do think there's a lot of work that can be done.

The last part of the book is about all the dangers of alcohol, and there are a lot of dangers.

Historically, we've been drinking relatively weak beers and wines.

So mostly -- most cultures are drinking like 2% to 3% beer-like substances.

Relatively recently, so last few hundred years, we've had access to distilled liquors, which are just wildly more powerful than the stuff we've had access to in the past.

The other problem is we're drinking more alone.

So, again, historically, it's always been the case that drinking was a social act.

It's something you did usually in a actually very tightly controlled ritual environment and you didn't have private access to alcohol.

The only time you had access to alcohol was in a public event where someone was timing the drinking.

They were making toasts.

They were passing around something.

Everything was regulated.

Other people were watching you.

The tendency humans have to overindulge in something that makes us feel good, that hits our pleasure centers in our brain was controlled and moderated by this ritual support.

When you can go to a drive-through liquor store and load your SUV up with a couple of cases of vodka and some firearms and Twinkies and drive home to your house in the suburbs and just have all that sitting around, that's historically unprecedented.

So I think that -- I call this the problems of distillation and isolation.

These two relatively new features of modernity have made alcohol a lot more dangerous.

I think the pandemic has shown that when you make this really extreme, when people can't even go out and drink in a pub or a cafe, drinking gets really unhealthy and dangerous.

Different cultures have healthier and less healthy attitudes and practices around alcohol.

So-called northern European cultures drink a lot of distilled spirits.

They drink to get drunk.

They kind of celebrate drunkenness.

It's kind of manly to be really drunk.

They tend to have really high levels of alcoholism and tend to not use alcohol in healthy ways.

What anthropologists call southern European culture, so Italy is the one I'm most familiar with.

They drink mostly wine and beers.

It's always part of a meal.

You're always doing it at the meal table.

So for lunch or dinner.

Kids get acculturated into it very early.

So you give kids a little bit of wine that's watered down with their meal.

So they understand that it's just part of life, it's something people do, and public drunkenness is frowned upon.

So if you're in Rome and you see some drunk people wandering around, they're tourists.

They're not locals.

So I think if you kind of figure out ways to emulate healthy drinking cultures, you're more likely to be able to get the benefits of alcohol and avoid all or at least most of the negative consequences.

>> Well, like so many things in life, the healthiest ways to approach a challenge are not the quick fixes.

Ted Slingerland.

The book is "Drunk," and he's a professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia.

Ted, thanks so much for joining today.

>> Thanks for having me.

>> Turning now to another substance taking center stage in politics and pop culture these days, marijuana.

American sprinter Sha'Carri Richardson was disqualified from running in the Tokyo Olympic Games after she tested positive for the drug, opening up a whole new debate.

And it comes at a time when public opinion on pot is shifting all over the world.

>> Play faster.

Faster.

>> A lot has changed since "Reefer Madness" hit the theaters in 1936.

The film was financed by a church group and aimed to warn viewers of the dark side of smoking pot.

By the '70s, it became a cult classic on the midnight movie circuit.

Today, the drug is now legal, either medicinal or recreationally, in more than 40 countries and in 37 American states.

And in the most famous marijuana capital of the world, Amsterdam, the Dutch government estimates that 58% of foreign tourists visiting the city do so primarily to light up.

However, that could soon come to an end.

The city's current mayor wants to ban nonresidents from buying marijuana.

Geez, what's she smoking?

Might not be a problem for many pot smokers, as other parts of the world head towards legalization themselves, a move that has tended to bring a lot of money.

Let's start with the United States, where in 2012, Colorado became the first state in the nation to legalize weed.

Since then, the Centennial State has surpassed $10 billion in sales and it's collected over $1.6 billion in taxes in the last six years.

And it's not just blue and purple states that are cashing in on the green stuff.

Solidly red state Oklahoma issued the most pot-growing licenses out of any state in 2020, and 10% of the population of Oklahoma has already registered for medical marijuana use.

With two thirds of Americans now supporting legalization, according to Pew, you can bet that pot-related products are starting to crop up in unexpected places.

>> Carl's Jr. is testing out a new burger in Denver.

>> It has a sauce infused with CBD.

It's called the Rocky Mountain High Cheeseburger Delight.

>> Tonight, the debate over veterinary marijuana, cannabis to treat health problems in your pet.

>> Could the hottest new beauty secret be marijuana?

>> Profits aren't the only thing driving weed legalization.

In 2013, Uruguay became the first country in the world to legalize recreational marijuana.

Officials hoped that this move would blunt the power of drug cartels.

Yeah, that was a pot pun.

Mexico, where cartels have a strong foothold, will soon become the largest legal weed market in the world after its Supreme Court ruled that prohibition was unconstitutional.

And our neighbor to the north has joined the club too.

Canada became the second country to fully legalize pot.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau hoped that this move would address some of the inequalities baked into the country's criminal justice system.

Another pot pun!

[ Laughs ] What about some places you wouldn't expect?

Officials in Thailand want to open up its medical marijuana market to foreigners after the pandemic as a means to help bolster a battered economy.

But they got to get through COVID first.

Oy.

And Malawi Gold -- maybe you've heard of it, maybe.

Even the World Bank has praised this African nation for growing the world's -- and I quote -- "best and finest cannabis sativa."

And with declining tobacco revenue, farmers are welcoming the plant's new legal status.

Even SpaceX is in on the herb.

In 2020, they sent a strain of cannabis with low levels of the hallucinogenic compound THC to the International Space Station so that astronauts could study how zero gravity impacts the plant.

But even as weed reaches new frontiers in the quest for legalization, it remains to be seen just how high public support will grow around the world.

Okay, we're done with that.

And now to "Puppet Regime," where former President Trump is mounting a big comeback and he's doing it all through the power of music.

>> Hey, folks, did you miss me?

Of course you did, very strongly.

That's why this season I am launching a comeback tour.

That's right.

All across this beautiful country, I will be reviving all-time favorites such as... ♪ The radical left will take your guns ♪ ♪ And turn your daughters into sons ♪ ♪ Take our country back ♪ ♪ Don't let it get too brown or ♪ Come on, you know the words.

♪ Socialism ♪ ♪ Healthcare is ♪ ♪ Socialism ♪ ♪ Welfare is ♪ ♪ Socialism ♪ ♪ Be scared of socialism ♪ ♪ Socialism, socialism ♪ ♪ Hunter Biden ♪ ♪ Where's that laptop hidin'?

♪ ♪ The fake news knows ♪ They know.

I tell you.

They know.

♪ Law and order ♪ ♪ Law and order ♪ ♪ Law and order ♪ ♪ Law and order ♪ ♪ Law and order ♪ ♪ Law and order ♪ ♪ Law and order ♪ ♪♪ ♪ Witch hunt ♪ ♪ The election was stolen ♪ ♪ Stolen like a moment from my little black heart ♪ ♪ And it's all so unfaaaaaaair ♪ ♪♪ Whoo!

>> "Puppet Regime"!

>> That's our show this week.

Come back next week, and if you like what you see, check us out at gzeromedia.com.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ >> Major corporate funding provided by founding sponsor First Republic.

At First Republic, our clients come first.

Taking the time to listen helps us provide customized banking and wealth-management solutions.

More on our clients at firstrepublic.com.

Additional funding provided by... ...and by...