https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Szj4Zer3UCA
Yeah, well alcohol is an extraordinarily pernicious drug and if you’re inclined towards it, you can be inclined towards it because you’re sensitive to its anxiety reducing properties or you can be sensitive to it because it enhances social communication or because it produces a psychomotor high like cocaine or all of those at once and if you’re particularly predisposed to alcoholism you can experience all three at once. I had a friend in Montreal Frank Irvin, great old guy, looked like Ernest Hemingway. He had a monkey farm on St. Kitts and him and his his woman Roberta, I can’t remember Roberta’s last name, she was quite a piece of work too, a real cool person. They had this monkey ranch on St. Kitts and they used to go down there and study the effects of alcohol on green monkeys which five percent of whom would drink Tacoma on first exposure and they had videotapes of these damn monkeys drinking and it looked like a frat party you know and but five percent of them on first exposure would drink Tacoma and those were the monkeys that had a biological predisposition to alcoholism and alcohol is a really bad drug you know. 50 percent of murders take place in an alcohol-fueled environment either the victim or the perpetrator or both is drunk. It’s almost the sole cause of domestic abuse, it’s almost the sole cause of so-called date rape. If you dig into criminal behavior deeply enough, well hell you don’t have to dig much at all before you find alcohol. It’s also the only drug we know that actually makes people more aggressive and not merely because they’re not merely because they don’t know what they’re doing. We did experiments at McGill showing that if you took drunk people and put them in a competitive environment where they could be aggressive and had them keep track of their aggression so they were actually conscious of it, they became more aggressive even rather than less. So yeah alcohol is bad news and it can turn perfectly good people into quite the impulsive and dim-witted monsters. Well if you give people that massive boost of sugar and then suppress their inhibitions, that’s going to happen. I was 21 years old in Prince George and I had a night like that and I mean it wasn’t terrible. I just woke up in the morning you know praying at the porcelain altar. I was making that deal with God. If you just make me feel better I’ll stop this. I won’t do it anymore and then I didn’t. I haven’t had alcohol since. Oh really since you were 21. I quit drinking when I was 27. You know I mean northern Albertan culture was pretty damn hard drinking culture like most northern places and a lot number of my friends ended up alcoholic you know and well all the people that I was in high school with and in college with were extremely hard drinkers and I drank quite a lot till I was 27 and then I found that I couldn’t well first of all my life was taking a pretty professional turn and second I found that there was no bloody way I could write seriously and think seriously on an ongoing basis if I was hung over. So and I got married and and I was going to have kids and I thought yeah enough of this and so I had a bit of I thought when I was 50 that I might be able to drink again socially and I toyed with it for about a year and found out that I was probably just as stupid at 50 as I had been at like 25 and decided to dispense with that as that too which was definitely you know I’ve watched too as I’ve gone around the world I’ve I’ve met very very many people in many many social occasions and because I don’t drink anything at all now if I go out and watch people drinking it makes everybody stupid and fuzzy minded and you know the problem is is when you’re drinking you think you’re cool but you know you have those same delusions that that Homer Simpson’s friend Barney had when he was drinking that you’re this kind of you know elegant and and sophisticated comedian and it just makes everybody stupid. I would argue that the real problem is that it does that. Yeah well that’s the first drink does that my dad tells this you know he’s he I hope I get the family story right but he’s a kid of 17 or 18 and he’s kind of struggling at that point with school and he goes to a family function and he’s got that one uncle who’s a real jerk and the uncle pins him down at the dining room table and he says to him he goes so Baz are your grades a function of your inability to commit to work or are you just stupid and it was such a nasty question and my dad immediately you know he blushed and you know people who blush know that they’re blushing and then that causes more blushing which of course causes the eye watering and he just it was a devastating moment for him and then about two weeks later he and his dad are sitting and his dad unfortunately was was an alcoholic and you know didn’t live very long as a consequence but they’re sitting on the on the deck having a little bit of a beer and then he goes in and and uncle does the same thing so we solved the great mystery are you stupid or lazy and my dad did not blush and my dad said you know I would entertain your question if I thought there was any sincerity in all of this I recognize that it’s just through your own smallness that you’re attempting to hurt me I’m going to let it go and then at that point my dad was like it’s socially responsible not to go out with that at least a beer uh-huh right right right right yeah yeah well it definitely it definitely is a confidence enhancing substance but it’s an illusion sensitive to that damn right it’s an illusion yeah