Barbell Shrugged - Living Alcohol Free w/ James Swanwick, Anders Varner, Doug Larson, and Travis Mash #794

Episode Date: April 16, 2025

Swanwick has worked as a print, TV and radio journalist. He began his career in 1993 as a reporter at The Courier-Mail in Brisbane, Australia. In 1996, Swanwick won the Queensland Media Award for his interview and exposé on Pauline Hanson, one of Australia’s most publicized and controversial political figures. Swanwick moved to London in 1999 where he reported for Sky Sports. In 2003, he moved to Los Angeles where he became a Hollywood entertainment correspondent, writing for newspapers and magazines throughout Australia and Britain. In 2010, he began working as a host for ESPN SportsCenter. Swanwick hosts podcast Alcohol Free Lifestyle, focused on "health, wealth, love and happiness.” He co-founded international media agency, Sports Entertainment Network, which he started with Craig Hutchison in Melbourne, Australia. In 2015, Swanwick co-founded Swanwick Sleep, with brother Tristan, and founded the Alcohol Freedom Formula, which produces programs including 30 Day No Alcohol Challenge and Project 90 to help people reduce or quit drinking. Also in 2015, Forbes listed Swanwick as one of 25 Professional Networking Experts to Watch. Swanwick has been interviewed on podcasts Bulletproof Radio and Ben Greenfield Fitness, been featured in Psychology Today and Yahoo Health.[4] and spoken at health conferences including Paleo f(x). Work With Us: Arétē by RAPID Health Optimization Links: Join 90 Day Alcohol Free Lifestyle James Swanwick on X Anders Varner on Instagram Doug Larson on Instagram Coach Travis Mash on Instagram  

Shrug Family, this week on Barbell Shrug, James Swanwick is coming to the show. We are talking about alcohol. You may even notice me get a little bit passionate about this subject and some of the things that we talk about, the transformation that can happen when you move away from alcohol. The massive shift that I've seen really

in the business landscape over the last three to five years away from alcohol as it not being really like the centerpiece so much anymore and so much of how business gets done as the really successful, powerful executive level has really started to take a notice to their health and realizing that they just cannot keep the alcohol moving with the dinners and still being productive and happy and being able to keep their energy, the brain fog, all those pieces. the alcohol moving with the dinners and still being productive and happy and

being able to keep their energy, the brain fog, all those pieces. And personally you'll also probably hear me open up a little bit on this one in that call it 15-ish years ago when I opened my first gyms. I realized that many of the relationships that I'd kept over the years really focused on going to a bar, watching a game, probably having a couple beers too many, probably making not so great decisions as I was just going through college, going through grad school, just kind of going through the motions of life. And when I really sat down, there was a many, but one particular conversation as many of

us have the voice of reason many times in our life. Our parents and specifically my father, my dad just sent me down going, hey dude, you might be a little bit too good at this thing. I also had started noticing a lot of physiological drawbacks, things that happen, protective mechanisms that your body will go through, your brain will go through when you just get too good at a thing that is very unhealthy.

I by no means had any issues in the way that many, many people do suffer from alcoholism and things like that, but it's kind of one of those moments where the old man sat me down and said, "'Hey dude, if you keep this going for infinity, "'you're gonna be really unhappy with the place you end up "'and it's probably a little bit better of a time "'that we start taking life seriously.'" Which also coincided a lot with me opening my first gym,

trying to take my life more seriously, and it was really one of the very first things to go. And since then, you could probably count the number of drinks I've had in a year on maybe two hands, more likely one. It's just not a part of my life. There's no alcohol in my house. And I can honestly say that that's probably one of the most impactful decisions on just the productivity, the professionalism, the value that I put into my own health. And I think that if you are one of those people

that knows in the back of your mind that this probably isn't the most healthy thing you could do and that there's got to be a better way going forward. Maybe checking out James' program, definitely taking this podcast to heart, maybe just walking away and just saying, hey, I'm going to take a year off of this thing and just starting with day one and getting after it. Again, there's people that have dealt with alcoholism in a real way. I am

not one of those people. I understand that many, many people are affected this in a way more drastic way than I am. But my personal Dorian kind of opinion probably hits home with a lot of people. It's not a real problem, but it's definitely not a benefit to your life. And you know that you would be a much better person, a much more productive person, a much more professional person, a much more serious person, somebody that could just do a lot more and create a lot more good in the world if maybe you just didn't have to rely on that thing. As always friends, get over to rapidhealthreport.com. That is where Dan Garner and Dr. Andy Galpin are doing a free lab lifestyle performance analysis. I hope you love this show. Get over to rapidhealthreport.com. Friends, have fun listening to this one.

Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Anders Varner, Doug Larson, Coach Travis Mast. Today on Barbell Shrugged, James Swanwick. We're gonna be talking about alcohol. And I actually have this conversation more than I've ever imagined I would in my entire life. But talking to our clients, talking to people that I used to do this partying thing, maybe one time in my life I've done a lot of keg stands when I was younger,

had more, not even that much more hair, but some more hair. How little alcohol, when it comes to successful people, is like a thing anymore, from the business scene to athletes. I'm very excited to talk to you today because you run programs on how to get people to stop drinking. I'd love to kind of hear a little bit of background on how you went from what we were talking about pre-show being on ESPN to getting into this world of coaching and reducing alcohol. Well, I'm Australian-American and growing up in Australia, I was a socially acceptable drinker in that I would have two or three drinks most nights of the week. I would drink heavier on weekends and I did that from age 17 for almost two decades up until age 35. Now I wasn't the classic alcoholic, I

didn't get a DUI, I didn't get arrested or wake up in a ditch but two or three drinks a night most nights of the week over almost 20 years that caught up with me when I was 35 and I was in Austin Texas in 2010 I was at the South by Southwest Festival that year. I had two Bomb, Texas in 2010. I was at the South by Southwest festival that year. I had two Bombay Sapphire gin and tonics at an industry party. I went back to my hotel, 20 minutes outside of downtown Austin.

Went to sleep and when I woke up in the morning, I looked in the mirror and I just felt and looked blah. And blah means like a six out of 10, a five out of 10. I was about 35 pounds heavier than what I am now. I wasn't sleeping great. I was envious of other people. I was irritable. I was stressed.

I didn't have great relationships. I was just average. And I went next door to this hotel, to an IHOP, International House of Pancakes, and it dawned on me, what am I doing in an IHOP? That's where everybody goes after they drink. I know. You are with your people.

It's a great place for self reflection. Like how did I end up at this waffle house? Oh. That's right. Oh yeah. My life's not going the direction I want to go here. Yeah. I remember sitting in the booth of this IHOP. I looked out the window and I just said, James, enough.

Like just take a 30 day break from alcohol and just just see what happens because this drift that Napoleon Hill wrote about in that book outwitting the devil, so this drift of life had got a hold of me and I was just meandering along. And so I committed to 30 days stopping drinking. In 30 days, I lost 13 pounds. I had clarity, focus and energy. I had an opportunity to audition to become a Sports Centre anchor on ESPN. To my bewilderment, I got the job and I credit the clarity and focus from being alcohol-free in those first 30 days for helping me land the job. And I just thought, you know what, this is pretty damn good.

I'm going to keep on going. And that was 2010. It's been 15 years alcohol-free. And now I have a book called clear, which helps high achievers to finally break free from alcohol. We have this organization that helps high achievers to break free from alcohol without having to do AA without having to do rehab without having to do willpower. Yeah. If they I'd actually love to get into the AA and the willpower and why those things

aren't maybe the answer. Is that like an identity thing that people just feel like they don't want to go to the AA meeting to say that they have to be a part of that community? Like, where do you kind of find people struggling and having success with like the 12 step program? I researched AA a lot for my book, clear and repeated studies seem to indicate that AA is actual success rate is around 7%. So it's a 7% success rate of people who go to AA attempted and then get-term power over alcohol, which implies a 93 percent failure rate. Right?

So yes, it's helped tens of millions of people over 90 years. It began in 1935. Absolutely it's helped millions of people, but it's helped, I'm sorry, it's been ineffective for 10 times as many people who've attempted it. Now the reason I submit why it's been ineffective, there are a few reasons. Biggest reason is you're lamenting the past, it's talking about shame, you're having to surrender to a higher power, you're in a group of people that you maybe can't relate to. For example, if you're in your mid 40s, 50s, you're an entrepreneur,

you're well educated, pretty successful and you're struggling with drinking, you're an entrepreneur, you're well educated, pretty successful, and you're struggling with drinking. You go to an AA meeting, now you're sitting next to a 19 year old meth addict who's holding up a gas station. There's no relatability there. And so you're not motivated to want to attend, you don't understand these people's stories. Some of these people are like just got horrendous stories, horrendous. But maybe you're the kind of person where your situation isn't horrendous, but your drinking is definitely compromising your life, but you're not getting arrested. You're not holding up a gas station. You're not doing all these shocking things. And so you, AA doesn't work for you. You don't want to go into that environment. Yeah. That's

part of the reason. Um, AA is also free and most people are court-mandated to be there. Same thing, you know, when you pay. That's my point. Right. I feel like a lot of it is when you're making someone go do something that could be a big part of their failure rate is my point. Not that I'm sure there's other things, but when you make someone do something, good chance they're not going to cling to it or it's not going to work.

If it's not your choice, like if I don't choose to quit something, probably not going to cling to it or it's not going to work. If it's not your choice. If I don't choose to quit something, I'm probably not going to quit. I got to make that step. If I go to you and deep down I don't give a shit about quitting, even you probably aren't going to help me. I mean, thoughts? You made a good choice of words there, Travis, and that was choice. So here's how I do things differently and just to be clear I have a 90-day stop drinking process that helps folks to finally get rid of alcohol and rewire their mindset around it because we're inviting them to choose a lifestyle as Opposed to what most people do which is ineffective. They're trying to say no to alcohol. They're trying to be sober

They need to stop. I've got to quit. I can't drink. I shouldn't drink. I need to stop. Now, there's a lot of study of the reticular activating system, which is a bundle of nerves in our brain. And what they've shown through studies of neuroscience is that when we tell ourselves not to do something, we invariably end up doing that very thing.

Yeah. Because the RAS, the bundle of nerves, doesn't understand the no part. It only understands what you're telling it not to do and then ends up doing that very thing. The analogy is, let's say you're skiing down the slopes and you say to yourself, don't steer towards the trees, don't fall over. And we find ourselves invariably steering towards the trees and falling over, even though we said, don't do that.

So over here in AA and willpower, it's like, don't do that. So over here in AA and Willpower, it's like don't drink, I need to quit, I've got to be sober. Whereas what I submit is the more effective way. Dr. Andy Galpin here. As a listener of the show, you've probably heard us talking about the RTA program, which we're all incredibly proud of. It's a culmination of everything Dan Garner and I have learned over more than two decades of working with some of the world's most elite performers, award-winning athletes, billionaires, musicians, executives, and frankly, anyone who just wanted to be at their absolute best. Arate is not a normal coaching program. It's not just macros and a workout plan. It's not physique transformation and pre and post pictures. Arate is something completely different.

Arate is incredibly comprehensive and designed to uncover your unique molecular signature, find your performance anchors, and solve them permanently. You'll be working with not one person but rather a full team of elite professionals, each with their own special expertise, to maximize precision, accuracy, and effectiveness of your analysis and optimization plan. Arrete isn't about treating symptoms or quick fixes. It's about unlocking your full potential and looking, feeling, and performing at your absolute best physically and mentally when the stakes are the highest.

To learn more, visit aratelab.com. That's a-r-e-t T E lab.com. Now back to the show. Whereas what I submit is the more effective way is choosing. I'm only going to drink soda water ice and a piece of lime tonight. I'm going to walk up to the barman and I'm going to say, give me a soda water with a splash of cranberry. Give me a great best alcohol free beer you got. And I'm choosing great

sleep. I'm going to choose good nutrition. I'm going to choose got. And I'm choosing great sleep. I'm going to choose good nutrition. I'm going to choose morning sunlight. I'm going to choose working out in the gym. I'm going to choose a life of appreciation instead of expectation. And because I'm choosing that lifestyle, now the RAS, that bundle of nerves in the brain, understands it. Now it's got a target it can hit.

And now we get to live this beautiful alcohol-free lifestyle. I totally agree. So you're going toward what you do want. You're not trying to get away from what you don't want. It's kind of the big picture there. Yes, Doug. That's exactly what it is. And that's why I think AA is mostly ineffective, at least statistically from what I've researched

and other ways where you're choosing a lifestyle where you've got a target and you're just heading towards that target. That is incredibly effective Totally like when I was competing as an athlete I didn't do any of that because it was not it didn't fit into like my plan and most recently I quit I've put a lot of things that you know, like alcohol being one of them because it just doesn't fit into My life right now. Like I'm trying to optimize Several, you several points of physiology. I'm trying to get in the best shape ever at 51.

And so, one glass, I'm telling you, and you know this, one glass of alcohol can really mess my sleep up. And monitoring one's sleep and seeing just what it does, that's for me was all I needed. I'm like, all right, I stop. I'm not doing this. You'm an HRV in the teens. Couple IPAs will get you there. Yeah, it's terrible.

You're actually you're actually better off drinking for breakfast than you are anywhere close to bedtime because at least then the body's got 16 hours to rid itself of the toxins that you've just digested. But what most people do is they have a glass of wine or two or five at night close to sleep. And what happens is that severely compromises the quality of that sleep. Now the body's working. Essentially when you have a drink close to bedtime, you're clocking the body in for a night's work at a time when the body doesn't want to work. the body wants to rest. And especially if you're into, you know, building muscle and your weightlifting and you're trying to get gains in the gym. One seemingly innocent glass of attractively packaged poison

before bedtime is enough to severely compromise your gains, your output, your experience, how you look, how you feel. And then of course, you know, that shows up now with we feel irritable or frustrated. And what do we want to do when we're irritable and frustrated, we want to go and have a drink to try and temporarily relieve our feelings of feeling frustrated and irritated, and then we get stuck on this perpetual cycle. Yeah, I do want everyone to know that is listening to this show that I was skiing last weekend

with Doug Larson and we drank every night. Three drinks. My HRV never got above 20. Still was able to shred some some mountains. So because you shred them later. But I do think that all of this is very valid. One thing when we were talking, you brought up the 12 step program.

I think it's like number three or four in that is turning your life over to God because you can't control your own actions. And there's probably multiple pieces to that, why it's so high in there. And this isn't really to get into religion specifically, but more about teaching people that they do actually have control over their actions. In your process, process. Do you follow that step? Are you teaching kind of the holding people accountable to their actions? And kind of what does that look like? From your perspective?

We are the exact opposite of AA. Yeah, we're not surrendering to a higher power. We're not saying we're powerless. We're powerful. I submit there are millions of people walking around mistakenly believing that they're an alcoholic and that they're powerless over some disease. Now you might find it interesting to know that in modern medicine, the term alcoholic doesn't even exist anymore. They've stopped using it. The updated phrase is alcohol use disorder.

Now, when you're walking around saying, I'm an alcoholic, nobody's ever called their friends an alcohol use abuser ever. Alcohol use disorder is you're experiencing an alcohol use disorder. Yes, there you go. Sorry. It's disorder. Why? Alcohol use disorder is temporary, right? Yes. There you go. Sorry. Disorder. Why?

Alcohol use disorder is temporary, right? That suggests temporary, which means that you can change that. You're experiencing a temporary experience of drinking too much alcohol. Whereas I'm an alcoholic labels you in an identity that's very hard to shift. Because if you're walking around saying, I'm an alcoholic. I'm powerless. I'm I'm an alcoholic I'm powerless over this disease. Well, you're gonna behave in a way Where you're powerless over this disease and you're gonna keep labeling yourself as an alcoholic I say BS to all of that crap and I can say this with conviction because I've been studying this for ten years and I

put it all in my book and I and I and my book and I have a whole chapter there where I really poke holes in these traditional modalities of quitting drinking. What I suggest is that when you are saying you have a temporary alcohol use disorder, now it means you're powerful. And with a couple of lifestyle changes, in a good environment Rewiring our mindset That alcohol use disorder can be extinguished and exterminated and now our natural self Just gets to come through as opposed to this belief that our natural self is I'm an alcoholic I feel like the the identity labeling aspect of it is it's damaging as an individual if I identify

Myself as an alcoholic and therefore I feel like once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic, then I'll fall into these old patterns. But then even if I don't believe it, if other people believe it, and then they hear me saying, I'm not an alcoholic, they're like, Oh, you're just in denial. You are an alcoholic. And then they're almost like roping you back into it. Even if you feel like you've, you've turned the corner

and you're ready to move on into your next stage of life, that labeling can push you back into that box and perpetuate the problem. Is there any truth to that? Is there any truth to, you're always going to be this, like even once an alcoholic, you're always one of the, when did they come up with that? Like what is it?

Yeah, let me speak to that. So according to the National Institute of Alcoholism and Alcohol Abuse, if what used to be referred to as an alcoholic was in your family, for example, a father, a mother, a grandparent, an uncle, or an aunt, if they experienced an alcohol use disorder, what used to be called alcoholism, then you do have a 50% increased chance of experiencing an alcohol use disorder. However, however, let me backtrack actually. So it is true that we can have a predisposition, a genetic predisposition to experiencing an

alcohol use disorder. However, from the study of epigenetics, what we've learned is that we can change the expression of our genes. We can't change our genetic code or the sequence, but we can change the expression, which means you can take someone experiencing an alcohol use disorder, put them in an environment of healthy people doing healthy things, like focusing on sleep, getting morning sunlight, appreciation instead of expectation, moving, mobility, conscious communication, personal development, and that alcohol use disorder can be completely extinguished and the genetic expression that you pass down to your

children and their children is now influenced by that. In other words, you can stop this genetic predisposition to an alcohol use disorder with lifestyle and environmental factors. Now that is a huge eye opening thing that we should really ponder because people keep blaming this family history. My father was an alcoholic. My mother was an alcoholic runs in the family. Again, giving them this reason to continue labelling labeling themselves as an alcoholic and thereby excusing or explaining their behavior.

Right. So, but scientifically they've proven now that you can like, like you can stop the genetic transfer by changing your own lifestyle. Yes, lifestyle and environment factors. Yes. That's amazing. own lifestyle. Yes, lifestyle and environment factors. Yes. That's amazing. I mean, you can't change the gene. You can't change the genetic code, but the expression of the genes change.

Got it. Imagine like you're a pianist and you plant, there's a keyboard, right? Here's your keyboard and here's your genes. The keyboard are your genes and you're the pianist. But you can change the tune. You can change the way that those notes are expressed. Right? So for example, you guys are all into health and fitness and working out in gym. Like, quickest way to get someone out of shape, quickest way to get someone who's out of shape,

into shape is to put them in the gym with six people who are in shape and just let them hang out with those six people for like 90 days. What's going to happen? That person's going to get in shape, right? It's the same thing with- Every 15-year-old in your gym squats 500 pounds. Yeah, it becomes a zoonetic. You grow up, you smash wine every night for dinner, you're going to get really good at

drinking wine. You're going to know a lot about wine by dinner, you're gonna get really good at drinking wine. You're gonna know a lot about wine by the time you're 15. Just like learning how to squat when they show up to mash a leaf. Yeah, my kids have only grown, like they don't believe that anyone can squat below 500. They just don't know that that's a thing. They're not even allowed to eat protein at dinner

until they get there. Yeah, so you're not allowed to even live in my house if you can't do that. So do all these same, do all these same concepts and rationales apply to abusing other substances? It's like, you're an alcoholic, like, are you a pothead wants a pothead, always a pothead, but do those examples scale out to all the other drugs you could abuse to, to medicate your life and make yourself feel better? They can. Yes. Candidly, my experiences specifically with alcohol, but yes,

the same concept can work. For example, I think smokers get it wrong all the time. They keep saying to themselves, I need to quit. I need to stop. Instead, if I just said, I only ever breathe in fresh air. Yeah. Right. Then they would just naturally quit smoking. It's like, I only allow fresh air in my lungs. Okay. That's now us telling us what to do, but instead all these governments are running these quick campaigns, quit smoking, quit smoking.

Yeah. Have you quit smoking? But we're focusing on the smoking. But instead of, we just say, Hey, the only air that I put in my lungs is natural, beautiful, fresh air, and just say that over and over again, then we end up doing that very thing. Yeah. Totally. A lot of that really, too, gets into the environmental side of it. And kind of like a personal story on that. I dipped for like a decade. And that was like the number of times I quit or stopped in that decade before actually being able to quit was

dozens and The only way that I actually was able to do it was a hundred percent environmentally focused where I stopped going to convenience stores and When you go to the convenience store, where you go to check out, there's always that beautiful little blue can sitting right behind the cashier. And you finish a workout,

you go and get your chocolate milk because that's what I drank for pre-workout when I had $0 in my life. And there it is, beautiful blue can, Skoll and that. That's what I need right now. Post-workout food and little nicotine. Yeah. If you always turn right,

you're going to always continue turning right. If you always go to the convenience store, you have that habit. And as soon as I stopped going to 7-Elevens or going inside gas stations, all of a sudden I just didn't see it anymore. It actually like stopped being a part of my visual like arena.

Like it just never was there. And that was the only way that I was actually able to do it was environmentally. And it goes, you wrote the book Clear and I think it's James Clear that wrote the book. James Clear. I was about to say that, you know, atomic habits. Yeah, go ahead. And that, that, that book came out after not that I'm some genius, but I really had to figure out how do I stop doing this?

What is the trigger that makes me have to go grab a can of dip? Avoid it. Why am I going, you know, and stopping drinking? It's like, uh, why, why do I have to go have the drink? Well, it's because all you and your friends go to the bar together to watch the game. Oh dude, if I go to the bar, I'm having a beer. Yeah. I don't know. What do you do? Your waitress would hate you.

And James clear was clear about saying, you don't say I'm trying to quit. And so when someone is like, I'm not a smoker. It's like that just that change of a mindset was a big part of it. Statistically speaking, that is. Yeah. And really to the question of I'm curious kind of where do you start your process? Is it the identity of I'm not an alcoholic?

Yeah. I are mentally like you need to change the way you drive to work because you're so used to on the way home, stopping off at a convenience store and picking up a six pack like, or what are those kind of like big pillars that allow people to change their environment, change their habits, change their identity? Like where do you start with people? Yeah. James Clear, who wrote Atomic Habits, actually was one of our coaches in our stop drinking process. He came in and coached our clients for a session and we recorded and we made it.

We make it part of our curriculum now. And he was actually talking about changing the visual cues as well. So his suggestion was if you've got alcohol in your home, remove it from the home, go and put it in the garage out the back and to get to it, you have to go to the garage, climb up a ladder, move the luggage behind, get it and then take it all the way in if you're going to drink.

And he said that the time that it takes for you to do that is enough for you to create space between that craving and then the actual action. So that was one tip that he suggested. I mean, he said the best thing you can do is just throw out alcohol from your home, throw out the cork, screws, the glass bottles. If you've got posters on your wall celebrating calls or Budweiser or whatever it is, get rid of those things, get rid of those visual cues.

So that was one of his tips. To answer your question on a broader level, the first thing we do with our members who come and join us is we support them in knocking alcohol off the altar from which it's been worshipping. And most people and all of society is worshipping alcohol. You know that scene in the Raiders of the Lost Ark with running away from the big, big rock and then he's got the idol and then the Nazi takes the idol from him and holds it up and all the tribesmen start bowing down and that allows Indiana Jones to make his mistake, make his escape I should say. That's what we're doing as a society with alcohol. We're worshipping. You go into a hotel bar now, look at the way they've

lit up the alcohol with this gorgeous orange light and yellow light and pink light and we've got these rows of poison just sitting there. It's like this shrine and we're just like worshipping at it and there are smiling assassins everywhere like our friends say, hey you want a drink and I get you a drink, hey let's meet up for some drinks. And it's the waiter and the waitress who comes up to you at the table and says, oh, hello, Doug. Hello, Travis. Hello, Anders. Can I get you started with a glass of attractively packaged poison?

Can I get you started with a poor night's sleep and very low heart rate variability? Can I get you a glass of red? And they're doing it with a big smile on their face, right? That's essentially what they're inviting you to do. So of course, the idea of not drinking becomes so overwhelming for a drinker because now they're thinking, oh, I'm going against society. Am I gonna be ostracized?

Am I gonna be kicked out? Who will I be if I'm no longer a drinker? Will I be dull? Will I be boring? Will people think I'm an alcoholic and that I've got a problem? And that becomes a very big, overwhelming challenge for folks to get over. So what we do is we show them why choosing an alcohol-free lifestyle is the preferable lifestyle to one which involves alcohol. And those benefits that you get,

great night's sleep, the body that nature intended you to have, conscious communication with your wife or husband, you're present with your children, you've got energy, you're not dragging your ass every day. So rewiring the mindset and getting people to embrace

an alcohol-free lifestyle future and doing it with fun and what they're getting as opposed to what they're getting as opposed to what they're going to miss out on. It's really, you're going to get better friends. Your friends are so much more motivated when you get out of that. Like you're going to find training partners. You're going to find the opposite sex of people that are like motivated that you actually

want to be with. It's when I everything in your life, in my opinion, gets better when you stop doing that regularly. When you stop ordering drinks regularly, when you just exit yourself from the bar, when you don't have to have the six pack, when you don't have to have that, like that, just that crutch of like, oh, I got to go get this thing because this is what is my normal life. Everything is better. And it's such higher quality. The very first time I started thinking about like what friendships really, really are was when I stopped drinking regularly

and realizing that like I, all of the people that I was surrounded with were meeting in a specific place to solve specific problems. And we were good at attacking whatever dragon we were trying to slay. And at the time, it was likely trying to find a mate. So we went to the bar where everybody hangs out. That's making loose decisions. And we had drinks.

And that was my hunting buddies and we hunted at the bar we had to go to a place and the problem was finding people of the opposite sex so we all tried to go and solve this place or solve this problem at a common place and we were all good at it and very soon after you say hey guys i'm not going to that place anymore. I'm going to a different place. You have to go get new friends because that party like keeps going. And I think that that is truly like the hardest part is removing yourself from the social group because there's gonna be like months of the,

oh, you're just, you're all, you're going to the gym. Oh, you're gonna be healthy. And then as you, and this was, you're all, you're going to the gym. Oh, you're going to be healthy. And then as you, and this was my own personal experience, but now it's like, I don't even feel the, hey, do you want to have a drink on the weekends thing? I go, nah, I'm good. Let's just hang out. Like there's steps to normalizing it

that take a long time. Like just even the casual drink with a neighbor was probably the hardest one to to overcome for for many years and now I could just have one if needed if if that's fun but the social isolation feeling of that really is challenging to get over. I'd love to kind of dig into like the steps that you think people can take. How do they develop their own confidence to do that? Cause mine was just like a raw, yo, I got a business.

I gotta go run and figure out all this stuff. I got a family I gotta take care of. Like, you know, I'm older. My wife is 13 years younger than me. I better, I better step up. Like that's what got me. No chance. Hell no dude. I'm, I better step up. Like, no chance. I'm trying to keep my wife.

How do you help people deal with kind of that, that, yeah, the loneliness that comes on the other side of changing your life? The perceived loneliness that can come from changing your life and what comes on the other side. So let's go back to when we were roaming the earth in tribes of 160. You may have heard of Dunbar's tribe, and Dunbar suggested that back thousands of years ago, most of our tribes were around 160 people.

Now back then, if you were kicked out of the tribe for whatever reason, that meant almost certain death. The wolf, the bear would kill you or eat you, a rival tribesman would kill you. If you were ostracized from the tribe, you're dead. Now that reptilian brain that still has that fear continues to show up in 2025. It's part of our unconscious. We still have this fear of being ostracised from society. But the reality is in 2025, if we get kicked out of a tribe, and in this case the tribe is our drinking buddies, right, or we choose to leave it, yes, we have the fear of death,

but the reality is that we're not going to die. We're just going to join a new tribe of health conscious people who focus on their sleep, who focus on conscious communication, who focus on nutrition, who focus on working out in the gym, who focus on finding and extracting joy and fulfillment out of living an alcohol-free lifestyle. So I get why people have this fear that they're going to lose their friends. I get it. What happened for me, and as though it was very interesting, when I stopped drinking all the way back in 2010, I used to go to the Jones bar on the Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood

where I was living at the time. And I go there with my buddies, Zach and Tom. And the first couple of weeks, they're like, come on, just have one. What do you do? What do you mean you're not drinking? I thought, wow, this is very interesting. My friends are still trying to get me to drink. Now, I didn't make a choice to cut them off, right? I didn't make a choice that Zach and Tom are no longer friends. But what I found was is that I naturally gravitated towards a new group of friends

who were either non drinkers or drank just modestly. They didn't need the alcohol in order to connect. So for example, I started training for a half marathon and in consultation with that, I also started raising money for some charity. So training for a marathon, half marathon, I'm sorry, raising money for charity, I hung out, raising money for charity. I hung out with all these people on a Saturday morning as we ran around Griffith Park in Los Angeles. I met this woman at the time, had a romantic thing with her. She didn't drink at all, didn't see the big deal of it. And I'm like, well, this is interesting.

And then I went up to Hollywood Boulevard and I joined LA Fitness and I started working out at LA Fitness. And suddenly I met a couple of other guys and I said, Hey, you want to come over to our party? And I said, sure. I went over expecting it to be like this big booze field party, but instead they were offering me like soda water and there was, and like nobody drank or maybe there was one person who drank, but the other people were just having conversation. I'm like, this is interesting. There are all these communities out here where alcohol is not needed for social connection. And I think if people can just take that first step, I know it's scary because social conditioning has this belief that everyone needs alcohol to have a good time or to create romance or to whatever. But if you can just

take that first step, you might find that you naturally gravitate to a much more health conscious uh emotionally conscious fun group of people Yeah um as far as kind of the um I think the uh, I don't I shouldn't say I think I know that the term like functioning alcoholic has been thrown around as if it's like It like normalizes the okayness of having a couple drinks a night or a glass of wine at dinner.

How do you kind of reconcile that with somebody that does have a very successful life that isn't drinking in excess every night, but also like, as you mentioned at the beginning of the show, it's like, you go and do anything for 15 years. Your physiology is completely adapted to pouring alcohol and pouring toxic chemicals down at every single night. How do you, how do you kind of reconcile that with, it's like, well, I'm successful or well, I'm in shape or well, it's not, I'm not, I'm not an alcoholic. In the back of your head, you going oh yeah you you're completely adapted to the

amount of you know a bottle of wine a night. It's death by a thousand cuts. Yeah. You might have a drink or two most nights of the week and in the short term, you don't notice the effects that much, but then weeks, months, years, decades go by. Yeah. Suddenly you're in your mid fifties and you're 25, 30 pounds overweight. You've got high blood pressure. You've got marital strain.

Your kids are not present with you. I always say the definition of success is that your kids want to spend time with you but I got to tell you we get a lot of clients who come to our project 90 stop drinking program and they're wildly successful in business affluent got money very successful well-liked in their community but secretly they're in so much pain because their kids don't want to spend time with them their wife or husband wants to divorce them or at least is threatening to, they've gone to the doctor and they said their liver enzymes are crazy high, they've got high blood pressure, they're not sleeping well, they wake up repeatedly in the night.

And on the outside to most they've got it all together, they're successful, but deep down they know that this need to drink two or three, four glasses of attractively packaged poison each night has taken its toll and the drift has got them. I referenced that book by Napoleon Hill, it's called Outwitting the Devil. He talks extensively about the drift. Man, you get into your late 40s, 50s, you realize the drift has got you. So what I would also say is this, there was a study in 2022 out of the UK of 35,000 middle-aged

adults. And what they found was that even one seemingly innocent drink per day, that's only seven standard drinks a week, okay? That was still enough to destroy white and gray matter in the brain. Now that should be a huge wake-up call to all of us. And then just anecdotally, I don't have any scientific proof of this, my mother's husband has dementia. He's in his early 80s, he's in a home. he's in a home, he drank at least a few beers and wine most nights of his life. He was never an alcoholic. He didn't wake up in a ditch.

He didn't yell and scream. He's a very nice, pleasant man. On the outside, there were no problems, but I got to tell you, I saw him. I saw him for a decade drinking those beers. And then my mum told me that he drank those beers for 20 years before then. And now he's got dementia. And I'm like, okay, maybe it's other factors. But I'm looking at him going, I wonder how his life would have been different

if he hadn't drunk that poison over three decades. Yeah, it'd be nice if you could just run the simulation right next to you to see all the decisions you make and what happens when you get a decade down. How often are you kind of digging into, call it, I wouldn't even say it's the trauma specifically of like a childhood, but the environmental impact of of having alcohol around your house as a kid. I kind of mentioned it earlier of like, you want to have a good golf swing, it's probably best to have Tiger Woods as your dad. If you want to drive a race car,

there's a couple of guys that probably teach you how to do that well. If you want to learn how to drink and hang with the boys, you get some alcohol and everyone kind of sits around and watches the game on Saturday. And that's just like where you grow up in that environment. It's so normalized when your brain is so receptive

to these environmental cues. How do you start to work with people through a lot of those, call them issues that they don't know are root causes? I write about this in the first chapter of the book, actually. If you guys recall when you were seven or eight, nine, 10 years old, you were little boys, right? And either your parents or the adult figures in your life were probably drinking some amount

of alcohol. And you may have requested that you have a sip at some time. And they may have said something along the lines of, oh, no, no, little Doug and Travis and James and Anders, you can't drink now. You can drink when you're older. That's something that the adults do. Now in that moment, that adult figure implanted in our little seven year old mind, alcohol is what I get to do.

Alcohol is what adults do. It's almost like, it's like a rite of passage. And so in that moment, they unknowingly set forth a chain reaction of you normalizing drinking attractively packaged poison because make no mistake, alcohol is just poison. Just a bunch of toxins in a very pretty glass or a very pretty bottle. Right? That's how you get intoxicated, which you don't think about that word. So let me, let me add, that's important though to address and what do you suggest around,

how does one present alcohol at the family? Like we don't talk about it. Do we talk about it? Not a big deal or what do you suggest? Look, I think there's a utopian version of right in my mind, which is you just don't have alcohol in your life. You choose to be an alcohol-free family, right? That's the best.

That's the gold standard. You're an alcohol free family. You talk to your kids about why you choose to be alcohol free. You talk about all the health benefits and sleeping and family and fun and joy. Because all of the struggle is people mistakenly believing that alcohol equals fun and not drinking alcohol is pain and deprivation. I submit it's the other way around, Travis.

Choosing an alcohol-free lifestyle is the joy and the fun and the fulfillment. And drinking alcohol is the pain. But we've got it around the other way as a society, which is why a lot of these 30-day challenges can be ineffective long-term as well, because folks go into dry January, sober October, and they're going, yes, I'm not going to drink for 30 days. I'm going to feel great. But what happens on day 30? They get smashed.

Hammer time. Because they went into those 30 days and they're experiencing not drinking as deprivation and pain and drinking as the release and oh finally and now I get to now I get to like relax and have fun finally and this whole Ridiculous notion gets perpetuated right? So look, you know parents have your, choose to have your own conversations with children. But I think it's just a simple case, Travis, of reinforcing the positive benefits of choosing to be alcohol free and, you know, like talking about the negative consequences of choosing an alcohol-fueled life.

Yeah. Max, I'm actually like super interested in hearing you. Because when you were in when you were getting your master's degree, we all came out to your house. Yeah. Running your gym. You were doing all the work and running an online company and going to grad school and doing all the homework and writing papers and research and all that at like two o'clock in the morning. Yeah.

Being out there and you as Doug and I were about to go to bed, like. Pouring a glass of whiskey because it was time to go like do work. Right. How long I mean, how was it was that because of school stress, habit? I would say the stress of getting out of it. I would not that ended quickly. That did not continue throughout school because I had to find better ways to do it. But you know, that was just at the time was, um, yeah, I'm going to do this to chill so I can like get in my, my groove to study.

But little did I know it would, you know, it made it very hard to retain information. So I didn't do that very long because I had to figure a way to do all this shit without losing my mind. So I didn't do that very long. It's funny you noticed though, but I do have a quick. Crazy. I was crazy. You should have said something. Whiskey right before he's about to do some very high level research and. Why didn't you say something? I would have listened.

before he's about to do some very high level research and. Why didn't you say something? I would have listened. So you were right, man. But let me ask you this. So what is what are the I wonder what the studies would say? Like we're trying to our approach to it is to make it not a big deal at all, but to say the truth. Here's what it does here.

It makes it very hard to retain information. It makes it hard to recover from sleep. It's gonna affect your health, you know at times occasionally It's not so bad for some people But so we're trying not to make it any you know, cuz I don't I know that's what got me What made me want to do it was people say when you get old enough or it was this taboo And so I wanted to be naughty, but what are your thoughts? So I would focus on the benefits of going alcohol free.

And let me just speak to an entrepreneur or a business owner right now. Choosing to go alcohol free can give you one of the greatest ROI's in your business. If you're operating at a six out of 10 compared to your potential because of your drinking habits, you're tired, you're lethargic, you're not sleeping great, you don't fire someone, you don't hire someone, you don't make an additional sales call at the end of the day, maybe you've got a business that generates a million dollars in revenue, just hypothetically, okay? So imagine we've got a business owner,

six out of 10 generates a million dollars revenue a year. Now, if you take that business owner and you help them get alcohol free and now they're sleeping great, they've got clarity, focus, energy, they make an additional sales call, they hire the right person, they create some great strategic thinking and now they generate more revenue streams. They do it more efficiently. They're not even necessarily working harder. They're just working smarter because they're clear. They're no longer foggy. I would submit that person's now feeling like they're operating at an eight or a nine out of 10. Now the difference between operating at a six out of 10 and eight and a nine could be half a million dollars revenue a year. Half a million dollars.

And I got to tell you, I do this calculator in the book actually where I invite folks to go in there and describe how they're feeling and how much money they make and then imagine themselves being alcohol free and then asking them to estimate how much money they would make. And I can tell you having run this calculator now for 10 years with hundreds of business owners, they usually tell me that their drinking habits is costing them between half a million and a million dollars a year. Now even modestly, let's do a little calculation here. I'm going to pull out my calculator guys.

Okay. So we've got my calculator $500,000 a year divided by 365 days of the year. Every day you choose to drink alcohol, you're not generating $1,369. That's what your drinking is costing you. Now a lot of business owners go, oh, I don't spend that much. I might only be dropping a few grand, five grand a year on alcohol. I'm like, you're right. It's not that much, but I'm not so much interested in how grand a year on alcohol. I'm like, you're right, it's not that much,

but I'm not so much interested in how much you spend on alcohol. I'm more interested in what you don't generate because you're drinking alcohol. That's $1,369 a day. Now, if you just have two drinks divided by two, every drink you choose to have in this scenario is actually costing you $684.

Every drink you choose to have in this scenario is actually costing a $684. $684 every drink you decide to have when you have two drinks a day for a year. That's on in here. That should be frightening. Right? So you asked me, how do you encourage people? Sometimes for business owners, the financial motivation can be enough. You say you're drinking habits that cost you half a million dollars a year. So do you think it might be good idea to maybe give that up?

Yep. Wow. For people who aren't business or financially motivated, a couple of warnings here, guys, when you quit alcohol, you do get better looking. You can tell in your skin, people that have been when you turn like 40 years old who kept going. Yeah.

It's like a very, very interesting thing. James, this subject is like one that is truly like near and dear to my heart. Probably like the most impactful thing to setting the rest of my life in motion was actually just not going to the bar and hanging out with my friends. There was probably a few turning points and lots of thanks to my dad going, hey dude, this is a game you don't want to be good at. And you're pretty good at it right now. It's probably better to find another one, which was right about the time that I was opening my first gym and realizing like this, I got to go, I got to go figure out how to

play a better game at a better that that is going to serve me a lot longer. So I have not read your book. I highly recommend it already just because 2010 was the same same year that all of this kind of happened to me at the same time. So you were in Santa Monica and I was down in Pacific Beach and we were both going, this is too much. We got to break free of these chains really quick. So I very much appreciate having you on the show today and would love for you to let people know kind of where they can find you, maybe reach out to you and how to learn where you're at. Thank you very much.

Appreciate that. Yeah, if you want to get your hands on the book, clear, it's available from April 8, wherever online books are sold, or you can go to alcoholfreelifestyle.com slash clear and that'll redirect you where you can buy it. Project 90 is the name of our flagship 90-day stop drinking process. You can check that out at alcoholfreelifestyle.com slash project90. And then I'm on Instagram and I send out a lot of videos and tips on to help folks at least reduce alcohol, have a better relationship with it.

But hopefully my intention is to inspire someone to actually just choose, uh, an alcohol free lifestyle. And you can find me on Instagram at, at James Swanwick. There you go. Coach Travis Mash. Uh, Mashlead.com. Uh, you can, uh, I don't know. Yeah. Just go to Mashlead.com or all my articles are at Jim Ware, but yeah, I don't want. Yeah, just go to messly.com or all my articles are Jim Ware But yeah, I don't know after this show. I don't feel like talking about a sprinting articles This was awesome. So this is more real life Thank you, Doug Larson

You bet James appreciate you coming on the show. You can find me on Instagram Douglas E Larson Oh and is that gonna be audiobook as well? Yeah, it is. Yeah. It took me eight hours to record that damn thing. So if you read it, thank God. It's always better when the author is on book. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. If you can handle my Australian accent for eight hours, then definitely get the audio version of the book. It makes it better. The ESPN anchor voice, you're confident in it already? Do you go off script and add context inside the audio book? Yes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I bring my SportsCenter anchor voice to it. It's Tevo time in Denver. I remember 2000 when Tivo time was huge and I was like commenting on the on the NFL. I must have said Tivo time a lot of hundred times at that time in my life. I love that. Whatever. I can't remember the show where they showed I think it was an actual like maybe even like a weekly episode or something like that, but they'd show the anchors while the highlights were happening.

Because all you ever see is the highlights and you hear like a stupid guy doing his thing. And they showed the anchors. I never knew until I saw that that there was a TV in the desk that you guys watch. Yes. And you probably like your call sheet of what's coming up and the guy in your ear going, yeah, blew my mind. You never see these things. It's like a desk, you're sitting at the desk

and there's a TV monitor in the desk. So you're looking around, you've got your kind of call sheet here and then you kind of sayings like, second quarter, Tebow with the drive against the Steelers, looking for Demerius Thomas and for the touchdown, you know, and so you kind of walk away. Besides James Swarnick,

who was your favorite sports center anchor? Well, you know what? Scott van Pelt, who's still there, was great, very gracious guy. He's got a similar hairstyle to us. Speaking of alcohol, Scott van Pelt may like to hang out in Bethany Beach a little bit. I may have seen him there a couple times in my day. Very fun guy to high five with at 4pm and with a cover band going on. He is a good guy. You know, very sadly, or sorry, I should say, I got to meet Stuart Scott and a few times he actually sadly

passed. He was a former school, died of cancer, but I got to sit next to him in the makeup room two or three nights over a couple of years, which was a real gift because he was a very nice man as well. I'll never forget being like six, seven and eight years old when Olbermann and Craig Kilborn used to do the big show. When I when I read the whole like giant ESPN book of the whole story. And that was like my favorite part. And then I don't know where Craig Kilborn is. Keith Olbermann talks on the internet a lot. And all I want them to do is go back and just do that 30 minutes because it was the best.

So I'm Anders Varner at Anders Varner. We are barbell shrugged, barbell underscore shrugged. And make sure you get over to rapidhealthreport.com where Dr. Andy Galpin and Dan Garner are doing a free lab lifestyle and performance analysis that everybody inside Rapid Health Optimization will receive. You can access that over at rapidhealthreport.com. Friends, we'll see you guys next week.