00:00:30For the first time since the temperance movement of the 19th century, which led to the catastrophe of prohibition, alcohol has once again become a very dirty word in the United States.
00:00:40And it happened pretty suddenly, too. No matter where you look, from podcast to television news to WebMD, you'll find the same message, which is genuinely insane.
00:00:50They'll tell you that any amount of alcohol, no matter how small, will poison you.
00:00:54They'll tell you that you'll get cancer if you drink in addition to destroying your sleep cycle and your will to live.
00:10:41It's only a matter of time before he gets cancer.
00:10:43In perhaps the least surprising development of all time, this anti-alcohol panic originated,
00:10:49or at least has been heavily pushed by the World Health Organization, or WHO.
00:10:53Now, the WHO, as we all know, assisted the Chinese government in covering up the fact
00:10:59that their lab, which was funded by Tony Fauci and the U.S. government, had created COVID in the
00:11:04first place. And additionally, the WHO pushed the COVID lockdowns, which ruined tens of millions of
00:11:08lives and served no legitimate purpose. This is easily the least reputable, least ethical public
00:11:14health organization on the planet, which is saying something. But after COVID hysteria died down,
00:11:20they didn't miss a beat. They went right back out there issuing new commandments that they expected
00:11:24everybody to follow without question. So in particular, in 2023, WHO published a statement
00:11:30declaring with absolute certainty that, quote, no level of alcohol consumption is safe for our
00:11:37health. No level. One sip even is not safe. Here's how one WHO official named Karina Ferreira Borges
00:11:47delivered the news. Quote, we cannot talk about a so-called safe level of alcohol use. Doesn't0.99
00:11:53matter how much you drink, the risk to the drinker's health starts from the first drop of any
00:11:57alcoholic beverage. The only thing we can say for sure is that the more you drink, the more harmful
00:12:02it is, or in other words, the less you drink, the safer it is. We need cancer-related health
00:12:06information messages on labels of alcoholic beverages, following the example of tobacco
00:12:10products. We need empowered and trained health professionals who would feel comfortable to
00:12:14inform their patients about alcohol and cancer risk, and we need overall wide awareness of this
00:12:19topic in countries and communities. The first drop, even one drop is not safe. This is what
00:12:27the global health organizations are saying, and the media repeats it uncritically, and pretty soon
00:12:33the podcasters repeat it, and pretty soon the mass of people are also repeating it uncritically.
00:12:38Never mind the fact that it is not true, okay? It's not true. This is obviously a totally
00:12:47irrational, indefensible claim that simply is not true. But we're supposed to accept it anyway
00:12:55and offer no protest or correction because although they're lying, it's all supposedly
00:13:00for a good cause. But I don't really believe in lying for a good cause, and I don't actually
00:13:05agree that this is a good cause. So I must remind you again that aside from maybe the extremely
00:13:11rare case of somebody having like an ethanol allergy or something, there are no documented
00:13:17cases anywhere at all of anyone ever suffering measurable harms to their health from a sip of
00:13:23alcohol. Telling everyone that no amount is safe and the harms begin at the first sip obviously
00:13:30implies that drinking alcohol is like drinking gasoline or sipping a nice glass of battery acid.
00:13:37When they say that one sip is not safe and there is no safe amount of alcohol, they are defining
00:13:43safe in the strictest way imaginable. Indeed, they are defining it in the way that like a
00:13:49paranoid, obsessive compulsive who washes his hands a thousand times a day until they bleed
00:13:54might define it. They are not defining safe in the way that you define it, in the way that normal
00:14:01human beings who desire to live functional lives and don't want to be paranoid, obsessive
00:14:07compulsives describe it. So you can only make the claim that no amount of alcohol is safe
00:14:13if you are defining safe as the total absence of risk. That is for certain the only definition
00:14:24of safe that would make no amount of alcohol is safe a true statement. But the problem is that
00:14:30this definition of safe, if applied to your daily life, would utterly incapacitate you. It would
00:14:37render you unable to do basically anything or eat basically anything or perform any of the functions
00:14:43necessary to be a human being in a human society. Because virtually everything you do carries some
00:14:51kind of risk. By this definition, there's no safe level for sun exposure either. There's no safe
00:14:58level for breathing the air outside, particularly if you live anywhere near a major city. There's
00:15:02no safe level of cake to eat on your birthday. There's no safe level of working out you can do
00:15:08at the gym. There's no safe level of any recreational activity or anything you do for
00:15:13fun. There's no safe level of exposure to whatever device you're using right now to listen to this
00:15:18podcast. By this definition of safe, you certainly could never drive a car. I mean, in a world where
00:15:25no amount of alcohol is safe, driving a car is like it's tantamount to skydiving without a
00:15:32parachute. Driving a car then is like suicide. And yet we all consider driving to be relatively
00:15:39safe as long as we are attentive and obey the rules of the road. Right? If somebody came to
00:15:46you and said, hey, don't go driving today. It's not safe. You would assume they mean that there's
00:15:52something really bad happening out there, like there's a tornado tearing the road apart, or it's
00:15:56the middle of a hurricane or a blizzard. You would assume that there's something else happening.
00:16:02There's some other huge factor that would make it unsafe to go drive right now. And that's because
00:16:09as functional and mentally stable humans, we define a safe thing not as a thing carrying no risk at
00:16:18all, because all things carry risk, but rather we define it as a thing which carries a reasonable
00:16:25amount of risk. And if that is how you define safe, then actually, in fact, there is a safe
00:16:33amount of alcohol, okay? Having a beer with dinner or a glass of wine or a pour of whiskey,
00:16:39God forbid, is by this definition, which is the only sane definition, safe. It is safe.
00:16:48you can go have a drink. It is actually safe. It's safe. You'll be okay. But when who puts out
00:16:56a statement and they don't provide this context at all, they don't attempt to explain what they
00:17:02mean by words like safe and words like risk. This is what they do. And the experts demonstrate
00:17:08no interest in educating you or informing you. They only want you to panic. And that's by design.
00:17:13This is a corrupt institution that specializes in creating mass hysteria.
00:17:19They're not actually concerned about public health.
00:17:22They are European globalists who want power over other countries, especially the United States.
00:17:26And they see public health hysteria as a way to gain that power.
00:17:32And in this case, they want to push Americans away from alcohol and towards SSRIs and other psychoactive drugs.
00:17:37So they released these marching orders, which decree that no amount of alcohol, not even a single drop, is safe.
00:17:45Major hospitals, the media, various podcasters then immediately begin parroting whose message, just as they did during COVID.
00:17:53Something called the Canadian Center on Substance Use and Addiction issued guidance stating that if you consume just two drinks a week, you are endangering your health.
00:18:02If you have a glass of wine after dinner or with dinner on Saturday and then again on Sunday, you are endangering.
00:21:28Now, of course, if all of the health experts were wrong for decades, dangerously wrong, apparently, when they said that moderate drinking was safe, even healthy, then why should we believe they aren't also wrong now when they say that no amount is safe at all?
00:21:47i mean if you were totally wrong completely in your peer-reviewed studies and these long-range
00:21:55studies global studies with all this data and you were totally wrong and you said for decades that
00:22:03not only is it safe to drink alcohol but it actually will lower your risk of mortality up
00:22:06to a point and then it turns out that literally one sip is dangerous well if that's true then we
00:22:15can't trust anything you say. If that's true, then like whatever you're saying right now,
00:22:2110 years from now, you could just say the opposite again. There's no reason to trust anything you say.
00:22:28Recently, our company softball team lost the big game by one run. Then Dale tried to console us
00:22:33with the quote, winning isn't everything. Well, Dale and I are very different. I get early payout
00:22:41from Bet365. If my team goes up big, I get paid out instantly, even if they blow the lead later.
00:22:47Sound familiar, Dale? Thanks, Bet365. Must be 19 or older Ontario only. Please play responsibly.
00:22:52If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or the gambling of someone close to
00:22:55you, please go to ConnexOntario.ca and see supply. And the so-called health experts do this a lot,
00:23:00you'll notice. They declare something with utter certainty, and then they declare the opposite
00:23:06it with equal certainty. And the only consistent message between all of this wild careening back
00:23:12and forth is that we, the rubes and the general public are supposed to follow whatever they say
00:23:18blindly without asking any questions. So now alcohol is poison. It's just too risky. It'll
00:23:25ruin your entire week. You won't be able to podcast. In short, anti-alcohol hysteria has
00:23:30enter the domain of self-parody. It is reminiscent of the worst of the anti-smoking campaigns from
00:23:37the 90s, except somehow this is even more shameless. But I have to admit, when you zoom
00:23:46out and look at how most Americans are responding to the propaganda campaign, it has been very
00:23:51effective, just like the anti-smoking propaganda was very effective. Many of us who are millennials
00:23:57and grew up in the 90s, went to public school in the 90s. We remember this very well. I mean,
00:24:02the amount of fear-mongering they did about smoking was insane. They would drill this into
00:24:08our heads from, like, kindergarten. And they had, I can remember being in third grade and thinking
00:24:15that, you know, smoking one cigarette could get you addicted right away, like heroin. I mean,
00:24:22we were told this in school. Even casual secondhand smoke exposure can kill you,
00:24:29which isn't true, by the way. But this is what they told kids. It was terrifying,
00:24:34but it also worked. And now there are many fewer people smoking cigarettes.
00:24:41And so if you're of the opinion that public health experts can just lie and scare the hell
00:24:47out of you with stuff that is only partially true or not true at all, and that it's okay for them to
00:24:53do it for a good cause, then I guess you have no problem with this. You're also just a total
00:25:01puppet in that case, a sheep. As recently as 2018, just 28% of Americans told Gallup that in their0.87
00:25:08view, consuming one or two drinks a day is bad for your health. The vast majority of Americans
00:25:13saw no problem with having a couple of beers every single day? Okay, that was in 2018, right?
00:25:19By 2025, just seven years later, that number had increased to 53% of Americans. Two-thirds of
00:25:27Americans under the age of 35, 66% of them, now believe that consuming just one drink a day will
00:25:34harm their health. For comparison, in 2018, only 34% of young adults held that view.
00:25:41Now, these attitudes, as you expect, are affecting behavior.
00:25:44Gallup has found that the U.S. drinking rate is at its lowest level in recorded history.
00:25:51Quote, the percentage of U.S. adults who say they consume alcohol has fallen to 54%, the lowest in Gallup's nearly 90-year trend.
00:25:58This coincides with a growing belief among Americans that moderate alcohol consumption is bad for one's health.
00:26:03Now, the majority view for the first time from 97 to 2023, at least 60% of Americans reported drinking alcohol.
00:26:10that figure fell to 62% in 2023, 58% in 2024, before reaching 54% today. Drinking has also
00:26:17declined 11 points among non-Hispanic white adults, while it has been fairly steady at around
00:26:2250% among people of color. Young adults have already become less likely to report drinking
00:26:26alcohol a decade ago, but that trend has only accelerated with the rate falling from 59% in
00:26:312023 to 50% today. This puts their drinking rate below that of middle-aged and older adults.
00:26:36There's also been a sharp drop in reported drinking among Republicans, falling 19 points to 46%, but not Democrats, holding fairly steady at 61%.
00:26:49Now, on the surface, these numbers might appear to be a victory for society at large.
00:26:54After all, even if the negative effects of alcohol are being overstated, and they are vastly so, it still sounds like a good thing for Americans to consume less alcohol.
00:27:04That means, you would think, less domestic abuse, less drunk driving, and so on.
00:27:10But the problem is I have a major problem with the idea that fear tactics and dishonesty and manipulation from the media and health organizations can be a good thing if it scares the public into acting in an arguably healthier way.
00:27:24This line of thinking has gotten us into a lot of trouble, especially recently.
00:27:30This is how they locked down the whole world during COVID.
00:27:32But the real point here is that the fear tactics and manipulation actually aren't causing the public to behave in a healthier way.
00:27:40People are simply migrating to other substances.
00:27:43Alcohol is being replaced with psych meds and weed and other psychoactive substances.
00:27:50And people who are taking these drugs are, in general, much less sociable and pleasant than people who are drinking alcohol.
00:27:57So take a look at this chart showing how many Americans are drinking alcohol as well as smoking cigarettes and marijuana.
00:28:02The data is from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health.
00:28:07There's been a massive increase in marijuana use, huge increase, which has corresponded with a decline in cigarette smoking and alcohol consumption.
00:28:14Marijuana went from being a drug that only around 5 to 8 million Americans were using, and now it's well over 20 million Americans who are smoking it.
00:28:22Weed, which is obviously a carcinogen in its own right, is now more popular than alcohol or cigarettes.
00:28:29It's not even getting into the explosive increase in SSRI prescriptions, which we discussed yesterday.
00:28:34More than a third of mothers in this country are taking some kind of psychoactive medication.
00:28:39These are drugs that have dramatic effects on the brain that no one even really totally understands.
00:28:44Pretty much every school shooter has been taking one of these drugs.
00:28:47SSRIs have been shown to increase violent behavior in control groups that have no diagnosed mental illness,
00:28:52which means the overprescription of these drugs is a major problem.
00:28:56And some of the most common side effects of SSRIs includes a flat effect, as well as a general loss of passion and excitement.
00:29:04You lose your ability to care about anything, including sometimes members of your own family.
00:29:11In some cases, people report losing the ability to feel any emotions at all.
00:33:48But what about the societal, even civilizational scale?
00:33:53Is there reason to believe that a society will function better, be more productive by ditching alcohol?
00:34:00And that becomes a hard case to make when you look at the history of basically every successful country in the world, starting, of course, with our own.
00:34:08As it happens, there's a very well-researched book on this topic.
00:34:11It's called The Alcoholic Republic, and it was written by a historian named W.J. Orabaugh in the 1970s.
00:34:17And what you learn when you read this book is that America would not exist as we know it today without the significant and widespread consumption of alcohol.
00:34:27So from 1790 to 1830, obviously a pivotal period in the history of the United States, Americans drank more alcoholic beverages per capita than at any other point in history before or since.
00:34:38The average adult male was drinking roughly a half pint per day, which, if you're keeping track, qualifies as heavy drinking that could cause cancer under today's guidelines.
00:34:47And in particular, men were drinking much more than women.
00:34:50Half of all adult males in the country were drinking two-thirds of the total amount of distilled spirits that were consumed.
00:35:31We were sending much more gold and silver out of the country than we were taking in due to a trade imbalance with England.
00:35:36So in the absence of hard currency, American merchants turned to rum and later whiskey to trade with each other and the Indians and foreign nations.
00:35:44The importance of the rum trade can't be overstated.
00:35:46It created vast wealth in the colonies, wealth that was used to pay for the rebellion.
00:35:51And when the British tried to tax the ingredients to make rum, thus threatening the American economy, we revolted.
00:35:58Alcohol also helped the colonists bond long before the United States existed.
00:36:02It also allowed politicians to run successful campaigns.
00:36:05In 1755, when George Washington was running for a seat in the Virginia House as part of the colonial government, he refused to buy alcohol for voters at the polls, which was a custom that was known as treating.
00:36:18And three years later, in 1758, Washington pulled out all the stops.
00:36:21He ordered his campaign manager to buy 28 gallons of rum, 50 gallons of rum punch, 38 gallons of wine, 46 gallons of beer, and two gallons of hard cider, coming out to around a half gallon of alcohol per voter.
00:36:37They rolled the barrels of alcohol to the polling place, and what do you know, Washington received 307 votes out of 400, so he won decisively.
00:36:46Now, all this drinking and generosity and hospitality brought the colonists together,
00:36:49which would obviously be important in the rebellion against Britain.
00:36:52And it would give them the courage to carry out some very daring acts of insurrection,
00:36:56including the Boston Tea Party, which was conceived, planned and organized at a tavern in Boston by the Sons of Liberty.
00:37:03It's one of those historical facts they don't really emphasize,
00:37:05but the Sons of Liberty were hammered out of their minds when they came up with the idea of throwing the tea in the harbor.
00:37:12And it turned out to be a very effective idea.
00:37:15might be something to the fact that like a population where people are more likely to drink
00:37:21tends to be less docile. Now, if all those people were sitting around smoking weed,
00:37:29is it likely they would have conceived of this idea and then gone and done it?
00:37:35As we discussed before, the founders were also drunk while they were drafting our constitution,
00:37:40or at least immediately before signing it. They went on a bender at the end of the
00:37:43Constitutional Convention of 1787, as they were finishing the document. For 55 men, they consumed
00:37:50more than 45 gallons of alcohol plus food. That means each man consumed around three bottles of
00:37:56wine, beer, or cider, in addition to some punch from the bowls over a six to 10 hour period.
00:38:02And this was the atmosphere that led to the formation of our government.
00:38:07To the modern public health experts, this would be a super spreader event.
00:38:11everybody's vastly increasing their risk of developing cancer so it's a good thing that
00:38:18no public health experts existed at the time we might not we might not have our constitution
00:38:23otherwise after the colonies uh became the united states warbaugh notes that alcohol directly
00:38:29contributed to the industrialization and economic advancement of the united states as well as many
00:38:33other countries we had more grain than we knew what to do with and the most efficient use of
00:38:39this grain, because it could be done quickly without the need to transport it too far, was
00:38:44to convert it into whiskey. And because whiskey became so plentiful, the labor force began to
00:38:50change. So it is true to say that alcohol helped to build the country. Now, that alone doesn't
00:38:56prove that alcohol is healthy or that you should drink. I'm not saying you should drink. I don't
00:39:00really care if you do or not. The point simply is that basically every flourishing civilization
00:39:06you can name, very much including our own, has been a civilization where people drink alcohol.
00:39:14That doesn't mean that you need alcohol to flourish, but it does seem to strongly indicate
00:39:19that alcohol collectively on a societal scale does not prevent flourishing. And that is the
00:39:26weakest framing. I think you could probably frame it even stronger than that. You know,
00:39:32when you have a large family, as I do, you become very aware of just how many people are counting
00:39:37on you. I have a wife and a lot of kids, six the last time I checked, which means there are a lot
00:39:44of people whose lives would be dramatically affected if something happened to me. It's not
00:39:48exactly a pleasant thing to think about, but it is part of being a husband and a father. My job
00:39:52isn't just to provide for my family today. It's also to make reasonable preparations for the
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00:40:45Recently, our company's softball team lost the big game by one run. Then Dale tried to console
00:40:51us with the quote, winning isn't everything. Well, Dale and I are very different. I get early
00:40:58payout from Bet365. If my team goes up big, I get paid out instantly, even if they blow the lead
00:41:03later. Sound familiar, Dale? Thanks, Bet365. Must be 19 or older Ontario only. Please play
00:41:09responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or the gambling of someone
00:41:12close to you, please go to connexontario.ca and see supply. Last year, researchers in New Zealand
00:41:17and Germany wrote a paper in Nature, which is a journal, and they wanted to know whether there's
00:41:22any kind of causal link here, whether or not alcohol has facilitated the evolution of complex
00:41:28societies facilitated it, not just failed to prevent it. So they looked at a global sample
00:41:35of 186 societies, mostly non-industrial ones, including the Kazakhs and the Japanese.
00:41:40They ranked all these societies based on the number of distinct jurisdictional levels recognizable
00:41:45in the society, meaning they checked if the society had any kind of centralized political
00:41:49authority, and if so, how developed it was. They also built a data set tracking the presence or
00:41:54absence of indigenous low alcohol fermented beverages like early beers and meads in those
00:41:59same societies. And then they looked in particular at societies that weren't heavily dependent on
00:42:04farming so they could be sure that the alcohol was shaping their political development, not just the
00:42:08agricultural industry in general. And here's what they determined. Quote, we find a positive
00:42:14relationship between the presence of indigenous alcoholic beverages and higher levels of political
00:42:18complexity measured by the number of administrative levels. The effect holds even after controlling
00:42:24for several potential confounding variables, including common ancestry, spatial proximity,
00:42:30environmental productivity, and agricultural intensity. Our results support the idea that
00:42:35the group-level social benefits of traditional non-distilled fermented beverages may outweigh
00:42:40their disruptive effects, and that alcohol may have facilitated the evolution of human society.
00:42:46Now, obviously, we should be skeptical of any finding in any academic publication,
00:42:51But this one makes sense based on everything we know about the development of our own country.
00:42:57Alcohol, in many different ways, enabled the creation of the United States.
00:43:03By contrast, no civilization has ever been founded because everybody was smoking weed or taking SSRIs.
00:43:11So we know that great societies can be formed and built up and flourish as the booze flows freely.
00:43:20Can any great society exist where the substance of choice is weed or psychoactive drugs?
00:43:27I mean, there are no examples anybody can name.
00:43:30And the early returns on our own society, as we've recently made that switch, are, to say the least, not encouraging.
00:43:40Now, those are drugs that affect the mind in ways we don't fully understand.
00:46:05In fact, we would discourage heavy drinking,
00:46:07and if you are going to make that decision to drink,
00:46:10You should be aware of the risks, especially if you have underlying risk factors for these certain types of cancers and also drink, you know, in the least amount you can.
00:46:19I mean, clearly, some people are going to continue to drink, but we just want them to be aware of the risk.