The Serious Problems with AI & Why Humans Drink Alcohol

who actually likes to read it? Then AI, what's behind this new wave of technology? What is powering this wave is not major breakthroughs in technology. What is powering the rate wave is enormous amounts of capital, and these companies aren't making money.

They are basically telling us we have to use it because they have invested so much money.

Also, why razor blades are so expensive, and the story of alcohol, and why so many people drink it? The production of a alcohol, dating back 15,000 years, coincides with when we first started to living groups, having to socially interact with other people, one wonders whether alcohol is fulfilled a purpose really since that early time.

“All this today on something you should know.”

Not to don't hesitate to tune in on an "EuroPromonet" of Shopify.de/recoder. So you probably get junk mail, and you may have wondered, why? Who reads junk mail?

Well, you'd be surprised, and that's why we're going to start by talking about junk

mail on this episode of something you should know. Hi, I'm Mike Herrothers, and yeah, people often complain about junk mail, and you might assume that younger generations, Gen Zs and Millennials really hate junk mail, but marketing research shows that Gen Zs and Millennials often pay more attention to physical mail than older generations do.

Unfortunately, because they grew up in a world flooded with digital ads, when everything online is competing for your attention, a physical piece of mail can actually stand out. In fact, surveys from the US Postal Service found that younger consumers are more likely

to read advertising mail and view it as more trustworthy than digital ads.

One reason is simple. Digital ads feel disposable, but a physical catalog or a postcard feels more tangible, and it tends to stick around on the counter or the table longer than an email stays in your inbox. So while junk mail may seem like an outdated marketing tool, for many companies, it's actually

“a way to cut through the digital noise, and that's why you still get junk mail, and”

it's something you should know. It seems like everyone is talking about AI, artificial intelligence. What it can do, what it might become, how it's going to change the world. But the conversation you are about to hear, looks at artificial intelligence from a very different angle.

The concern isn't that AI will suddenly become conscious and take over the planet. The concern is almost the opposite, that AI isn't actually thinking at all, at least not the way many people believe it is, and misunderstanding that may be where the real risk lies. My guest argues that much of the excitement around artificial intelligence is built on a fundamental misunderstanding of what these systems actually do, and what they don't do,

and what's driving all the hype. And essentially what's driving all the hype is money. Emily Bender is professor of linguistics at the University of Washington. She was named in the inaugural time 100 list of the most influential people in AI. She's co-author of a book called The AI Con, how to fight big text hype and create the

future we want. Hi, Emily. Welcome to something you should know. I'm so glad to be here. Thank you for having me on.

“So first I think we need to define what AI hype is, because I'm not sure it's a term that”

people hear a lot, or I don't actually think I've heard it before I saw the cover of your book. So what is AI hype in a couple of sentences? Yeah, so it is hype about AI, and I'd love to try to define AI as well. But hype is this like salesmanship, the sense that if you don't get on board, you are going

there being a real there there.

“Well, there certainly has been a lot of AI hype.”

I mean, there's a million books and podcasts.

I mean, we've had several guests on who've written books about AI and how to use it and what it's good for and all of that. And we hear a lot that it's taking over jobs and that, but what they're does seem from people who use it, they're does seem to be some sense that it really is pretty wonderful that some of the things it seems to do are great.

Well, so we have to talk about what it is though, because the term artificial intelligence doesn't refer to coherent set of technologies. The main thing that everyone is super excited about right now is chat bots, or you might call them conversation simulators, and they are systems designed to mimic the way we use language in many different domains of activity.

And so it seems like we have systems that can do many different things, but actually

we have as a system that mimics the way we use language. Well, it may do that, but it seems like the experience of using it is that it's more than that, that it's deeper than that, that it's doing a lot of things. Well, so what do you have in mind? Well, from my own experience of using it, and the way I use it, it seems as if it's

looking for information that can help me, it's synthesizing that information. It's writing it in a way if I ask it to to make it more effective. It seems like it's doing a lot of things, not just mimicking language. Unfortunately, it's designed to look like it's doing that. There's a system addition called rag, which is retrieval augmented generation, where you

put a query into one of these systems, and the first thing that happens is that your input

is turned into a web search, and then documents come back just the way web search is work in general, and then the system is prompted to basically produce something that looks like a summary of the documents that came back to you. But there's no accountability there, there's no reliability there, and it's not searching the whole internet anymore than an old fashioned search engine does.

But it's certainly giving me information, it would seem that I would have trouble coming up with myself, or would certainly take a lot longer, because it seems to be able to understand what I mean when I want to find out this information, whereas Google, if I'm not using the right words in the right order, I could get a completely different set of websites to look at, and Google doesn't synthesize the websites, it just gives me a list of websites.

Yeah, well, actually, unfortunately, now they do this synthesis thing in their AI overview. That's true, yes, right. But if we want to distinguish sort of old fashioned web search from the so-called AI search or chat interface, the big difference is that, yes, the way you interact with it is instead of putting in some keywords that you hope will match the documents you're looking for,

you phrase the question the way you might ask a person who could understand you, and that helps create the illusion that the system you are interacting with does understand you. But fundamentally, these systems are just set up to repeatedly answer the question, what is a likely next word? And what is a likely next word given that question as input and the various documents that

the web search returned produces something that looks like an answer and is very easy to

“accept as an answer, but we are then cut off from really important sense making work where”

we understand where information is coming from, why somebody may have put those particular pieces of information together, and how to situate all of that in our understanding of the information landscape. And is that really all bad? Unfortunately, yes, one of the examples I'd like to use is imagine you have a medical query,

and let's say you're expecting a child and you discover that they are likely to have club foot. So how do I treat club foot? And if you put that into an old fashion web search, and you got back answers or not answers, but actually links to the Mayo Clinic and a local University Medical Center and something

called WebMD and Dr. Oz's website and a chat room, you probably already have opinions about many of those sites. And if, like me, the Mayo Clinic to you is associated with cancer, you might not know what

“it's got to do with cancer, but also I think of them as a respectable institution.”

So I'm going to go see why they might be talking about club foot. And anything in the chat room, I'm going to take with a grain of salt, but it is extremely valuable to connect with other parents who are going through the same thing. You can, instead, I put this into a chat bot, and I get back something that might have come from one of any of those sources.

I don't know where it came from, so I don't know how to situate it.

different sources, and cut off from the chance to connect with those other people.

In your query, though, you could tell chatGPT, please source all your information, please give me links to those sources, and then you get the summary from chatGPT, and now you can go look at all the links to where it came from. So there's no guarantee that the summary is an accurate representation of those links, so you are better off not reading it and just doing the old fashion source, old fashion

search. Rather than getting the idea of in the summary where it might have dropped a negation, or put somewhere to emphasis, or whatever it is, because there's no accountability there. It has no understanding of what it is processing. It is just giving you likely next words, given that input.

But you're making the assumption that if I read it, I believe it, and therefore I shouldn't

read it. Just to me, I should read everything, and then make my own determination.

“I believe it is important to read many different things, but I think it is dangerous to”

read things that nobody has any accountability for. So go read those different sources, go read a summary that a person has produced, but this synthetic output that we actually can't locate in the information landscape, because it comes from nowhere, is just misleading. Well, like that, it comes from nowhere, you can't point out, well, where did you arrive

at that? In fact, you could ask the same question tomorrow and get a completely different answer. Exactly.

And you can input into the chatbot, how did you get to that?

And it will give you an answer, but that answer is not truthful, right? It's just more likely next words, and so you can go down a big rabbit hole that way. But most likely next, it's most likely next words and not truthful aren't mutually exclusive. It could be truthful, and it could be just next words. Exactly.

So if what comes out is truthful or valuable, that is also by chance. If what comes out is incorrect, harmful, or just misleading, equally by chance. And in neither case, is there any accountability? And so do you then dismiss all of this technology?

“Do you not use chatGPT or any of the other chat bots because of what you're saying?”

For many reasons, I do my very best not to consume any synthetic media. And to find synthetic media. So synthetic media is text extruded from one of these chat bots, or the images that someone has produced using a text-to-image system, the fake videos that are made. I don't want to spend time on things that don't reflect either artistic effort of a person

drawing an image, or the thought processes and accountability of someone writing text. So I want to explain how I use chatGPT and get your views on that. Of the Regency era, you might know it as the time when Bridget and takes place. For the time when Jane Austen wrote her books, the Regency era was also an explosive time of social change, sex scandals, and maybe the worst king in British history.

Fulcher history's new season is all about the Regency era, the balls, the gowns, and all the scandal. Listen to vulgar history, Regency era, wherever you get podcasts. If Bravo drama pop culture chaos and honest takes are your love language, you'll want all about Terry H. Podcasts in your feed.

Hosted by Roxanne and Chantel, this show breaks down real housewives reality TV, and the moments everyone's group chat is arguing about. Braxan's been spilling Bravo T since 2010, and yes, we've interviewed housewives royalty like Countess Luan, and Theresa Judays. Smart recaps, insider energy, and zero fluff.

Listen to all about Terry's podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen new episodes weekly. So Emily, when I do this podcast, one of the things I do is I write introductions to the segments. Usually after the segment is over, so I know what I'm introducing.

And sometimes, you know, some days I just don't have it. It just doesn't come out right, or I'm not explaining it well. So I'll write up pretty crappy intro, and then feed it into chat, GPT, and say, "Make this better, make this more compelling, make this more intriguing, make this snap here." Whatever I say, and sometimes, man, it comes out with something that is really good.

“And I think, wow, I wish I had thought to say that, but didn't.”

And so I'll use it, I'll use some of it. Sometimes I don't use any of it because I think mine was better, but boy, sometimes it really hits it out of the park. Yeah, as you might guess, I have some objections to that, and I sure hope that you don't

And by the time listeners are hearing this, they will have heard whatever it was, right?

But I, so for one thing, you've been doing this show for a long time. You didn't use chatGPT before November 30th, 2022, because it wasn't there. So this is something you can do, but it's also a practice skill.

“And I think every time we do the cognitive offloading of using some system to do something,”

instead of doing it ourselves, we lose that opportunity to practice. We also lose the opportunity to really hone our own unique voices and sort of end up towards this average, which I think is really quite bland. And then on top of that, every time we use these systems, we help build the case for training the next large model for building the next hyper scale data center with all of the economic

labor and environmental impacts that goes into.

Maybe I wasn't clear, but I do, I do do it myself.

I then ask it to see if it could make me be better. If you took this and then re-wrote it, what would it look like? And sometimes I use some of what it gives me, sometimes I don't. But I at least have like another collaborator in the room, and it's not a medical thing. No one's going to die from this, but sometimes it comes up with a better way of saying

what I was trying to say. So you can look at the output and recognize, yes, that expresses the meaning I was trying to express.

“But I think that every time we say this machine, which is making paper mache out of input”

of many, many people's words, some of which are people we respect, some of which are people we really don't, is better than us. We are sort of reinforcing the idea that we need this kind of assistance, that we can't day in and day out, hone our own craft, make it better on our own. And I also object to calling it a collaborator because it's not, right?

That's a personification or an anthropophysation of a system that is just a bunch of math, processing a bunch of words, most of which we're stolen. From a stolen from where? Just scraped without consent. My co-author Alex Hanna likes to phrase it is, they grabbed everything that wasn't nailed

down on the internet. And there you go, there's a bunch of ongoing lawsuits about copyright, for example, is this in OK to OK way to appropriate people's words and work, right? And if you find that it has a nice turn of phrase that's coming out of this system. And you really liked the way that was said, wouldn't it be so much better if you could

have seen that turn of phrase in its original context and be able to credit the actual author of it, rather than saying, oh, I liked that one, thanks, chat, GPT. So Emily, your views on this run contrary to what an awful lot of people are saying. And in some ways, feels like you're trying to stop a wave that you just, you can't stop. That's it, that's it, thank you, that's a new way of phrasing the inevitability argument.

What is powering this wave is not major breakthroughs in technology? What is powering the right wave is enormous amounts of capital that have been invested. And these companies aren't making money. So they have to push it at us every single minute. Every time you open your computer, there's the sparkle emoji.

I see it right now on Zoom, I'll see it on my email and so on and so on.

And they're basically telling us we have to use it because they have invested so much money

on it. Well, that I get, yeah, and that's certainly concerning, but one doesn't negate the other. I mean, just because they're trying to make money at it doesn't mean it's no good. So, the thing that I'm trying to push back on is this idea that this is technological progress, and that is why we all have to get on board.

I don't think it's progress, and I don't think that technological progress is the only amount of progress we should be focused on. The scholar, Chris Gillier, had refers to these as technologies of isolation, that basically anything that encourages us to turn towards machines and towards these products, rather than towards each other and towards strengthening community and connection is anti-progress, really.

So given where we are though, what is your, you could wave a magic wand? What would you want to have happen given that we're this far down the road? So wish number one would be that any company that sets up a synthetic media extruding machine, be a text image video, is fully accountable for everything that comes out of that machine.

So if it gives out medical misinformation, medical malpractice, if it gives out liable, they are accountable for liable as well and so on. Step number one, step number two,

“I would love for everyone to remember that they have their own expertise and to take pride”

in that expertise and not fall for the marketing that says the computer is better at this

Is there, because it would seem to me that there are some relatively simple, low consequence

low risk things that I could spend a long time searching various websites for when chat GPT could probably give me a quick answer, it's not major and consequential and I can get on with my day and it seems like that's not a bad thing. So I think that the muscle that we build and maintain when we do web searches, even if it's

“not consequential, is important. The ability to say, is that a good source for that information?”

And if we only exercise that muscle on sort of the high stakes questions, we're going to have a much harder time doing it well. So this sounds vaguely like and I know what you're going to say but I'm going to ask it

anyway. You know, you could sort of make the parallel argument that this is kind of like

when the calculators showed up and people thought, oh, no, kids are going to get really stupid now. They're not going to have to add and subtract anymore because we've got this machine, but humans adapt and somehow it worked out and no one's complaining about the calculator anymore. So one thing about a calculator is that it's going to be consistently accurate, right? And I believe

that even now in school, you do a lot of your math education with no calculators allowed. And then when you move on to something like algebra, when you're no longer focused on this arithmetic, then it's like, okay, you can use a calculator for the arithmetic because we're focusing on another thing. And that is predicated on a understanding what it is the calculator's doing so that you can, you know, if the output doesn't look right, you can

“back track and see, oh, yeah, I put an extra zero there. That's why that makes no sense.”

And on the calculator being reliable, which these large language models, the synthetic text, extruding machines are fundamentally unreliable because what they are doing is repeatedly answering the question, what's a likely next word. And that's it. Has there been, though, has there been any kind of research when you say they're not reliable, but how often they are wrong?

So you'd have to zoom in on a specific area of concern because one of the problems here is that these are being sold as everything machines, you can ask it any question. Even questions that don't make sense and so therefore should not be answerable, you will still usually get an answer out of the system. If you try to design an evaluation around, okay, what percent of the time is it right? What percent of what time? Where a calculator,

there's a specific spec that we expect, oh, calculators to adhere to, and they do. And

the first minute you see a calculator that is not accurate, you toss it out, right?

How is using chatGPT for finding information? Any worse than just using Google or any search engine to find other websites that have information that may just be as unreliable as what chatGPT gives you? I mean, how is that any different people have criticized that saying Dr. Google, meaning using Google for medical advice is a bad idea? That I think is actually a slightly different thing because Google in its original form was directing you to sites,

and so the accountability lies with the sites that you landed on and then Google has accountability

“for how they are ranking those outputs. And that's what a lot of what Theragorhythm is.”

The problem with Dr. Google is that a person who's experiencing a medical concern can easily end up worrying themselves or looking at very many things because they don't have the expertise to navigate that kind of information. Where you go to a medical professional, they are trained to do that navigation and also find out more do the tests and so on. This is, I think, made worse by the chatBots because you can very easily, the user interface of it allows you to express

your question and then receive something that you are ready to take in as an answer and then become even more convinced. Well, I really enjoyed this because so much of the conversation about chatGPT and those kinds of AI tools and just AI in general is that it's this great revolution that it really is helpful and useful and like with so many other things in life, there's another side to the story and you've presented that side really, really well. I've

been speaking with Emily Bender, she's co-author of the book, The AI Khan, how to fight big text hype and create the future we want. There's a link to her book in the show notes. Emily, thank you very much. Thank you so much. It's been a really interesting conversation.

parenthood and reproductive health. We talk about things like sex add, birth control, pregnancy, bodily autonomy and of course kids of all ages, but you don't have to be a parent to listen. If you like surprising, funny, poignant stories about human relationships and, you know, periods, the longest shortest time is for you. Find us in any podcast app or at Longest ShortestTime.com. Few topics spark stronger opinions than alcohol. Some people enjoy it. Some avoided

completely and most of us have heard the warnings about the health risks. In fact, attitudes towards drinking seem to be shifting. Alcohol consumption in the U.S. is at a historic low, with about 54% of Americans saying they drink today compared with 67% just a few years ago. Yet alcohol is still deeply woven into our culture from celebrations and socializing,

to business dinners and dating. So why do we drink at all? Why is alcohol so powerful,

socially, culturally, and biologically? And why do so many people end up drinking more than they intended to? My guest has a fascinating perspective on this, both as a physician and as someone who has struggled with alcohol personally. Dr. Charles Knowles is professor of surgery at Queen Mary University London, and chief academic officer at Cleveland Clinic London. His book titled "Why We Drink Too Much The Impact of Alcohol On Our Bodies And Culture," explores the

science, psychology, and social forces behind drinking, and why alcohol continues to have such a

“powerful grip on society. Hey, Dr. Knowles, welcome to something you should know.”

Mike, thank you very much for having me on. So first of all, I think most people are aware that there are not a lot of health benefits to drinking, but there is some confusion because there is some talk that, well, maybe a little wine, a glass of wine, might be good for you, or maybe it's just not really bad for you. And then there are people who say, you know, alcohol is poison from start to finish, and you just shouldn't drink at all. So where are you on this? Well, I think the first

thing to say is that I'm not anti-alcohol. I think alcohol's been with us in society for a very, very long time. We've been deliberately manufacturing it for 15,000 years, and there's a reason

“for that, and that is that people, many people gain enjoyment from drinking, and that's why it's”

proved so injuringly popular. In regard to the consumption question and the amounts that you mentioned, I don't agree that alcohol is solely a poison. People say this, and it is a popular way of looking

alcohol, and it's consumption. But the truth is, if it were just a poison, we wouldn't do it.

I think what has changed is an appreciation of the health consequences of alcohol. And here, I'm talking more about the long term health consequences rather than problems of dependence and mental health, particularly in relation to heart disease, cancer, obesity, etc. And actually the data that underpin those observations have been around a very long time, for instance, alcohol has been a

“plus one carcinogen since the 1990s. But I think people are coming to realize that more”

and to critically evaluate their relationship with alcohol as they evaluate their health in general. Well, the idea that alcohol is a carcinogen certainly scares a lot of people, and I think ultimately people who drink who enjoy having a drink wonder how much is too much, and if it's a carcinogen, it seems like what you would be better not to put any carcinogen into your body. So what's the answer here? Let's just start with the carcinogenicity. So as a class one carcinogen is up there with

smoking asbestos radiation, etc. And we've known that since studies in the 1970s, in regard to that,

the most important cancer is breast cancer. And it's relevant to mention this because it's

probably the only health consequence that is associated with an appreciable increase in risk,

of safe consumption. So for a woman, even drinking one small glass of wine every day will increase

“the risk of breast cancer. That's also partially true for stroke. Most of the other health consequences”

only occur with heavier consumption. As a general rule, unless a person is also obese in which case some of those effects are synergistic. Well you've mentioned what is considered the limit to safe drinking. What is that? What is the limit? What is considered safe? Well that depends where you are in the world, Mike. So rather inconveniently and confusingly, both the definition of a unit of alcohol. And the safe limits vary country by country and they vary by a factor of three. They also

vary by men and women. Some countries have the same limits for men and women. And some have different ones. And this is what makes it problematic for an individual to determine whether they're

“drinking excessively either on a weekly basis or on an episodic basis, which we mostly call”

binge drinking. Well we must know though that there's a line somewhere that's based on science rather than where you live. That's actually not entirely true. I mean there is a line. If you book that line a consumption level of 30 plus units a week, which would be 20 standard U.S. drinks, then clearly that is a line where the majority of people were they to consume that would incur health effects from alcohol. But I mean it's not a straightforward relationship at all.

I mean you and I both know people who drink very heavily and have no health consequences from it. So as an individual, you've only a question of probabilities. So is there any good news

“about alcohol that this idea that a little wine is actually good for you? What I think that's”

kind of been debunked to but is there any good news about it? Well it's not entirely debunked. Actually it is a true observation that a small glass of wine or a small amount of alcohol in another form taken daily, at least in white European populations, it results in a lower risk of having of what's called a mycardial infarction, a heart attack. But this doesn't hold true for anything else. There are, there are arguable data on Alzheimer's disease and on several other

rare diseases like kidney cancer where it may also be protective. But the World Health

Organization and any doctor you talked to would basically tell you that there is no safe level

of alcohol consumption. The other thing that people hear is that drinking alcohol kills brain cells, true or false. True, wish. Certainly heavy chronic alcohol consumption is related to a loss in volume of grey matter, which is where the majority of the cell bodies of our nerves are in the brain and it also alters something called white matter connectivity, which are the main connections between areas of the brain. The question really is not so much

whether that occurs, it does occur and there are elegant studies in journals like nature that show that from UK biobang data and other sources, but whether it's significant in terms of one's mental functioning. Clearly in a minority of people it's very significant for their mental functioning and there are conditions like wet brain that result with very heavy alcohol consumption particularly in relation to vitamin B deficiency. But for the rest of us, it's a bit of a lottery

to be perfectly honest. The vast majority of people probably drinking within reasonable limits will not experience a lot of brain cells that will be clinically apparent. What about the difference

between hard alcohol and wine? There's always been that argument that wine and maybe beer

as well because it has less alcohol and it has other things in it that does the body care or is alcohol alcohol? Alcohol is alcohol on the whole. I mean, people who drink spirits may tend to drink more alcohol in which case that matters. But in the most part, it doesn't matter what form you take alcohol in. In fact, the stomach best absorbs alcohol in the sort of wine range. So the you could argue that you get more bang for your buck in terms of alcohol in the bloodstream

around wine being better for your health and for instance other drinks is just simply not true.

And I guess it has a lot to do with the amount of alcohol that's kind of what people think that a hard liquor has more alcohol in it so it must be worse for you. It's more of a math thing than it is science. Well, it may also be a velocity aspect so that obviously you can drink more

“alcohol faster as spirits than you tend to drink as beer. And that's important because the”

liver can metabolise a certain amount of alcohol in an hour. And so if you drink more rapidly then more alcohol appears in the bloodstream than if you drink more slowly. So I mean certainly

my experience, Mike, when I was drinking and I wasn't really a spirit drinker much of the time

but from me enough when I was in the US because I didn't much like the beer I would tend to drink spirits and certainly that didn't result in a great outcome as a general rule. And you don't drink now? I don't have drunk come for 10 years. And that's because that's because I developed dependence and significant mental health problems from drinking and I had to stop and before those 10 years

“I spent seven years trying to stop. Which brings up that whole issue of you know some people seem to”

be able to have a glass of wine with dinner and that's fine and they're done and they don't need any more and other people can't even understand how that could be possible that once you start it's very hard to stop. Yes, I'm an on one of those people who used to watch people drinking one glass of wine

for hours in a park and just think what are they doing here? Because for me the I always drank

for the effect of alcohol on my brain I didn't drink to sip a glass of wine socially. My book of course covers in great detail what differs in terms of risk of people developing that loss of control for alcohol which only a minority do to a level of dependence versus much of the population

“who as you say can just take it or leave it. But I notice I notice that when I drink and I'm a wine”

drinker it's very easy for me not to drink at all but if I have a glass I'm probably going to have another one. Well Mike I don't know about you or you may just choose to have another one and that maybe a perfectly reasonable decision in your particular instance but there are people like me who is experienced as being you have one glass of wine and then it's a bottle of wine and then it's another bottle of wine and in fact I measured my alcohol consumption when I drank wine in bottles

rather than glasses. What is the science say not not just well your your personal story is interesting too but in plays a part but people who don't have a problem with drinking can look at people who do have a drinking problem and not understand but well why don't you just stop if it's such a problem why don't you stop or stop sooner have a couple of drinks and call it a day and and there's an intellectual understanding that problem drinking

is a real real problem but but it's hard to put yourself in that place because if you don't have that problem it's hard to understand that problem. You don't in the sense drink your weight of being an alcoholic you differ to start with. Now part of that's genetic and in fact alcoholism is 50% haritable for instance but a great deal of it is based on the environment you've grown up in particularly during early childhood and to do with psychological drivers that push towards

self-medication. The big ones there that I have for instance are ADHD, depression and neuroticism and they're even stronger drivers like post-traumatic stress disorder 68% of Vietnam veterans have a substance misused problem and the majority of that is alcohol for instance but also skits are free nearby pilot disorder in pulse of disorders certain other personality types. Those are the things that drive abnormal alcohol consumption and dependence. So if you grew up at a

household where there was a lot of drinking that makes you more likely to drink just like smoking if your parents smoked you're more likely to smoke if your parents drink you're more likely to drink.

age of 14 for instance and then that has a difference between say starting after the age of 18

“or 21 but there's not strong evidence that being from a drinking household makes a difference”

over and above that. Alcohol has certainly served a purpose in society in that it lowers in habitions it's a focal point for socializing it it has had positive social effects as well as some pretty devastating negative effects. Yes and I mean this has been extensively studied. I mean from a historical perspective actually the deliberate production of of alcohol

fermentation dating about 15,000 years, co-insides pretty accurately with when we first started to

live in groups. So around that period of time with early agricultural practices people were congregate and live in early civilizations of about 100 to 150 people and one can speculate that that's no coincidence and I mean back in those days there were no mobile phones or board games or anything else to play sitting around the campfire having to socially interact with other people while wonders whether alcohol's fulfilled a purpose really since that early time and of course that's

another really important driver that people who have a drive to consume alcohol to make them more socially fit and by that I mean to be able to engage with other human beings in a manner that fulfills your own self esteem then that's an extremely strong driver of consumption. Yeah because if you remember back to your first drink it probably tastes terrible. I mean if you're a kid and you sip a whiskey it's not going to taste good so why would you ever want it again

but you know peer pressure and the results of of feeling that buzz are pretty strong

“drivers. Well here I think this is where you can get some inkling of where your life is going”

to go from an early age that if alcohol is an immediate solution when you're young and you first try it I think you know the your cards may be dealt for later in life I mean as an adage that you sometimes hear that if alcohol's a problem then you're in with the chance if it's your solution then you've already lost and the for me for example as a child when I first tasted it I loved it I'd had three pints of beer by the time I was extracted at the age of 13 within an hour and that was my experience

from the age of 17 away at boarding school not terribly popular slightly nerdy believed individual alcohol's a revelation for me was a solution to all my problems. It is such an interesting topic because it affects some people as it is affected you and your life so so severely and yet other people as we spoke about you know the woman who has a glass of wine and can

nurse it for hours and never has a problem it's it's so weird it's so strange.

Well if you if you look at the stats about two to three percent of western populations like the US and the UK for example will develop medically diagnosed alcohol dependence like me

“what in old man's terms was called alcoholism. It is important to note though and highly”

topical at the moment the subject of what's called grey area drinking I don't know if you've heard of that might. I have yeah but I don't know much about it. So grey area drinking is not a medical

term is the first thing to say but it probably affects about 20 percent of the population

and these are people particularly the people who are reviewing their relationship in adult have now with alcohol and there are many many groups worldwide community groups for grey area drinking and people who are looking changing that relationship and what typifies grey area drinking compared with dependence is that the situation has reached one of what's described as hazardous alcohol use rather than harmful alcohol use. So it's a person who worries that those harms may be coming down the line.

hangovers. I haven't you know had problems with my obesity yet but worrying about things like your appearance about performance at work relationships amount of money is spending on alcohol but the the yet to yet to happen and at the same time the realization that when you then try to stop or modify consumption that habit isn't as easy to break as you'd thought.

“So if you don't mind me asking what caused you to stop why did you finally stop drinking?”

So after my last night of drinking which followed 24 hours after sitting with a gun and the bottle of Bacardi and considering taking my own life, I woke up in the morning kneeling on the floor to any God that would listen without a whole withdrawal and I reached the

point where I realized I could never drink again. I just was sick and tired of being sick and tired

and that often actually is the way it is. Well you certainly have a unique and interesting perspective on this topic and I appreciate you sharing it and sharing your personal story as well. I've been talking with Dr. Charles Knowles. He is a professor of surgery at Queen Mary University of London and Chief Academic Officer at Cleveland Clinic London and his book is called "Why We Drink Too Much" the impact of alcohol on our bodies and culture and there's a

link to his book in the show notes. Thank you Dr. Thank you very much Mike for having me on. You don't have to go back too far to remember when the razor blade market was totally dominated by two brands, shik and jillette and razor blades were very expensive costing 20 bucks for just a few blades. Then you may recall that dollar shave club and Harry showed up and promised to make razor blades cheap and for a while it looked like they might.

Dollar shave club launched in 2012 with the slogan "Great Razors for a dollar a month." Harry's followed soon after that, selling directly to consumers by subscription which cut out retail markups and forced the big brands to respond. Jillette even cut some prices by about 12% as these newcomers grab some significant market share.

“But razor blade prices never really drop the way people expected. Why?”

Well, because these disruptors eventually became part of the system.

Unilever bought dollar shave club for a billion dollars. Harry's almost sold out to Jillette

but that was blocked by regulators and it's important to consider that the razor blade business is a difficult business to break into with high manufacturing barriers. So the razor revolution did happen. It just didn't cut prices the way people had hoped. And that is something you should know. How you'd be doing me a big favor by telling some people or just can't even just one person

about this podcast and getting them to give it a try and listen? It's a great way to spread

the word and help our audience grow, which we always need. I'm my currothers thanks for

“listening today to something you should know. Hey it's Hilary Frank from the Longest Shortest Time”

and award-winning podcast about parenthood and reproductive health. There is so much going on right now in the world of reproductive health and we're covering it all. Birth control, pregnancy, gender, bodily autonomy, menopause, consent, sperm, so many stories about sperm. And of course the joys and absurdities of raising kids of all ages. If you're new to the show, check out an episode called The Staircase. It's a personal story of mine about trying to get my kids

school to teach sex ed. Spoiler, I get it to happen, but not at all in the way that I wanted. We also talked to plenty of non-parents so you don't have to be a parent to listen. If you like surprising, funny, poignant stories about human relationships and, you know, periods, the longest shortest time is for you. Find us in any podcast app or at longest shortest time.com