Malcolm Gladwell: How to Tell if Someone is Blackout Drunk

I don't know too much about the actual... Is there a difference between the way different alcohol affects you? Does the wine alcohol actually affect you by volume, by the actual percentage of alcohol? Does it affect you differently than beer, or differently than whiskey, or differently than tequila? Because that's what people always say. Oh, if I drink tequila, I get crazy. People always have these stories, but is that true? Have you had a certain percentage of alcohol? I see. We equalize the alcohol concentration. Is it all the same in here? Yes, because for me, wine makes me warm and friendly, and it makes me sleepy, and it doesn't make me energetic. Whiskey makes me crazy. I think it's a crazy drug. I think when people drink shots of Jack Daniels, they just want to go, whoa! They want to do dumb shit. It makes them want to do dumb things, shots in particular. It makes people want to do dumb things. It makes people get crazy. It makes people loud. It makes people Irish. Right? It's better you say it. Well, I'm a quarter Irish. I can get away with it for a little while. Only a quarter. That's it. Yeah, mostly Italian. Oh, I see. You're at the cusp of these two drinking traditions. Yes. Oh, I see. But Rogan, you're fooling us with Rogan now. Yes. Yes, an Irish man. Because we would think that you were majority Irish with that. Yes. Yeah, and I could be dark Irish if you looked at me. If you were. Yeah. Well, I'm reserved English and Jamaican. Jamaican's not big drinkers in the same kind of... The difference, actually, fascinatingly, of the many weird alcohol facts. If you look at young people, it's like a college age young people in America. And look at their drinking habits. The black students drink and get drunk markedly less than white kids. Real differences in drinking behavior by race at that age. Asian students don't drink much either. Drinking is like a white thing. It's like a crazy white thing, increasingly, or problematic drinking. I've always thought that was fascinating. It is fascinating. I don't know why that's so. It's revered in our culture more. It's, yeah, I mean, getting fucked up is celebrated in white culture. Well, this, you know, in the alcohol chapter of my book, I talk about all the strange things that have happened with drinking patterns on campus. I was struck in doing that chapter. I was interested in the connection between drinking and drunkenness and sexual assault on campus. Because all of those... The overwhelming majority, if you talk to people who study sexual assault on campus, they will tell you that you almost never see one of these cases where both parties aren't drunk, right? Which doesn't explain them entirely, but it's a huge factor in making sense of what happens. And when you dig into that, you see these really weird patterns. First off, when I was in college, I did not know, and I went to college in Canada, not a teetotaling population, I did not know a single person who had ever been black out drunk. And then now, if you talk to a 20-year-old college student in America, they will name friends of theirs who get black out drunk on a weekly basis. What is the drinking age in Canada, and what was it when you were in college? When I was in college, I was 18. Yeah. I think that might be a big factor. I've been talking to friends about this, about Europe, about how in Europe, particularly in Italy and France, you're allowed to drink wine at a very young age. And the taboo aspect of it, the forbidden fruit, all that goes away. I don't think young kids should be drinking, because I think it's terrible for your brain development, but I think there's a thing in keeping them from drinking or making it illegal where it becomes so taboo and so intoxicating that they can't wait until they can legally do it, or they try to get a hold of it before it's legal and it has a certain excitement to it that it doesn't have in parts of Europe. Yeah. You've given it a kind of... So there's all kinds of... The things that are new are way less beer and way more hard liquor. Yeah. I remember when I was in school in Canada in the 80s, 95% of what we drank was beer. Right. It's just not. There wasn't any whiskey or even... or tequila or vodka in our parties. It's just beer. Beer. Kegs. Keg parties. Yeah. Really hard to get blackout drunk on beer. I mean, blackout... To get the blackout, you've got to be... you've got to get to like... I forgot what the exact number that's... 10 drinks or something? Well, it's point... you've got to blow like 0.18 or something. I've forgotten what there's a sort of magic number where people... Is that for everybody? Because some people, they just get gerbil eyes. There's some dudes, they'll have a couple of drinks and they get shark eyes. You know those dark, like expressionless eyes, like, hey man, you still here? They're just wandering around like a person with doll eyes. There's nothing there. Well, the issue with blackout is just at what point does your hippocampus shut down and you cease to have the ability to make memories? So that's just... that's a very narrow clinical explanation of... So there may be a whole different set of manifestations of drunkenness that have to do with alcohol's effect on other parts of your brain. But blackout is just about your hippocampus. And past a certain blood alcohol concentration, your hippocampus just goes offline. Essentially, you just pull the plug on the hippocampus. And then... So nothing that's coming in is being stored. Wow. And if I could continue to communicate, I could be blackout drunk right now. But does it vary with people? Does it... the number of percent of alcohol? Well, so yes, it would. It would vary depending, I think, on drinking history and... But I mean, there's a kind of a... there's a consensus figure where most people... I wish I... it's in my book, I wish I could remember. I think it's something like 0.16 or something like that. If you think of the... if the level... legal level for drinking... for driving is 0.08, I think it's roughly 2X that level. And most people at that level will be at risk... will have at least the beginnings of memory impairment. So that feeling... when you get really drunk at a party and the next morning you can only remember little bits and pieces of what happened that night, that's because your hippocampus was... at your moment of peak intoxication, your hippocampus was starting to shut down and just wasn't taking in new memories. It's really interesting too because some of our most interesting minds and some of the best communicators relied on alcohol heavily. Like, and it made that... like, hitchens. It made him a more interesting communicator when he was drunk, when he would have a drink. You know, I mean, right? Like, he would be on Bill Maher. You could tell he was lit. And he was so eloquent and so articulate. But that... Beautiful phrasing. So remember though, that's an interesting point and a crucial point about blackout, which is your hippocampus doesn't necessarily control your... how articulate you are, how fluid your speech is. It's just about memory. So hitchens could have been the most articulate person in the world in just... and... but the next morning he would not have remembered a single thing he said on Bill Maher. I mean, I'm assuming if he was drunk at the point... I don't think he was blackout. No, it wasn't blackout. No, but... But you don't know. There's fascinating stories in the literature about... when people were discovering blackout in the 50s and they would... there would be these stories like they would... some guy would come in, he would wake up in Las Vegas and he would say, what am I doing in Las Vegas? Like and then he would go and he would see his clothes hanging in the closet and he would say, what? What's going on? And then he would like go down to the desk and say, what? And they said, oh, you checked in last night. And he would look in his wallet and he would see he had a plane ticket from Cleveland and they would reconstruct. And there's a... in fact, this very story was told in the... you know, one of the big medical journals in the 50s. The guy reconstructs. He's a salesman living in like St. Louis who gets really, really drunk and then his hippocampus shuts down and he continues to function. So he goes, gets in his car, drives to the airport, buys a plane ticket, goes to Vegas, does... he doesn't know what he does in Vegas, does whatever he does in Vegas and then wakes up like two days later because hippocampus is suddenly back online. He's like, what am I doing in Vegas? That is two days. Two days. So the point is like, what is it? You can... you... like that was my point. I could be blackout right now. And still communicate. You wouldn't know it. I don't... it's not like you can tell. I can't tell whether you have a headache, can I? Right. No clue. So you don't know what's going... I mean, until we come up with that machine that you were talking about, you can't tell that my hippocampus isn't working. Except if you answer... if you ask me the same question, this is how you... the only way you can do it, you're at a party, you think someone's blackout, ask them the same question over and over again and see if they respond. Like say, why are you asking me? So literally I would say, wait, did you say you're a quarter Irish? And then I would just have to wait like say five seconds and say, Joe, did you say you're a quarter Irish? And at a certain point you're gonna say, Malcolm, why stop it? If you don't say that, you're blackout drunk. But if you do... could you be blackout drunk and still have like a tiny memory? No. I can't believe you just asked me that. Okay. So the hippocampus doesn't shut down all at once. So what it does is it shuts down slowly. So let's imagine we're both doing shots. So after... I mean, I'm quite sure your capacity... I'm... I mean, you're like... I'm half your weight. Am I? I don't know what you are. You're like... 200 pounds. I'm 126. Okay. So we're gonna deal with alcohol very differently. But let's assume we're doing shots of tequila. There's a point where things start to get hazy. So you might remember that I asked you that question or you might not. And then as we keep drinking in our blood alcohol levels, get higher and higher, at a certain point your hippocampus will completely... like the off switch has been thrown. So it goes from being sluggish and impaired to just being down. Like... And what brings it back? Well, your alcohol... blood alcohol level has to fall to the point where it can work again. So you fall asleep and over the course of eight hours of sleep, you know, your alcohol is processed by your liver, blood alcohol falls, hippocampus snaps back into action. Wow. What a ridiculous drug to be our most socially acceptable drug. Yeah. Totally. And then the Vegas thing where they give it to you for free... Of course, yeah. ...in a place where you can gamble, which is really sneaky. Yeah. That's one of the weirder laws ever. That a person could literally lose their house while they're blackout drunk.