Dhru Purohit Show - The Top Reasons Why Regular Alcohol Consumption Is Holding You Back And What To Do About It With Ruari Fairbairns

Episode Date: April 29, 2024

This episode is brought to you by Cozy Earth and AquaTru. Alcohol is often featured prominently in celebrations and social gatherings, fostering connections. However, we know that regular alcohol consumption can significantly affect both our physical and mental well-being. Our guest today is poised to explore society's relationship with alcohol, broaden our perspectives on the possibilities of a sober curious lifestyle, and show us what true connections can look like. Today, on The Dhru Purohit Podcast, Dhru and Ruari Fairbairns delve into the impact of regular alcohol consumption, its societal significance, and the transformative effects of prioritizing sobriety. Ruari candidly shares his journey with alcohol, childhood traumas, and the genesis of his subscription-based community. Tune in for insightful inspiration to reassess your relationship with alcohol and explore what lies beyond. Ruari Fairbairns is the founder and CEO of OYNB (One Year No Beer) and a leading figure in the health and well-being space. He was awarded Great British Entrepreneur of the Year for Scotland and Northern Ireland 2020, and OYNB was also named The Spectator’s Economic Innovator of the Year in the UK. Known for his passionate advocacy for healthier living, Ruari has inspired over 100,000 people worldwide to reassess their relationship with alcohol and strive to become the best version of themselves.   In this episode, Dhru and Ruari dive into (audio version / Apple Subscriber version): Regular consumption of alcohol is holding you back (0:0006 / 0:00:006) What shows up when you go 28 days without alcohol (4:54 / 4:54) The need for connection and joining the tribe as a hindrance to stopping alcohol (10:00 / 8:37) Ruari’s relationship to alcohol (16:00 / 14:46) Reasons people choose to numb out with alcohol (23:00 / 20:47) The types of individuals that Ruari coaches (31:30 / 28:11) High-functioning individuals who actively drink and what the goal should be (39:00 / 35:54) Ruari’s childhood and the role of childhood traumas (48:00 / 44:12) What you can prioritize once the focus is off alcohol (1:04:00 / 1:00:53) The vital role of community (1:09:00 / 1:05:40) Adding in to crowd out bad habits (1:19:00 / 1:15:50) What you can make progress in when alcohol isn’t the lead (1:28:00 / 1:24:45) Ruari’s life-changing moments (1:33:00 / 1:29:16) Dhru’s thoughts on alcohol (1:46:00 / 1:42:47) Also mentioned in this episode: One Year No Beer Instagram  One Year No Beer Podcast  Ruari's Episode with Rich Roll For more on Ruari, follow him on Twitter/X, Facebook, and Instagram. Right now, get 40% off your Cozy Earth sheets. Just head over to cozyearth.com and use code DHRUP. AquaTru is a countertop reverse osmosis purifier with a four-stage filtration system that removes 15x more contaminants than the bestselling water filters out there. Go to dhrupurohit.com/filter/ and get $100 off when you try AquaTru for yourself. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The regular consumption of alcohol, it's most certainly holding you back. What are people sacrificing when they're regularly consuming alcohol in their lives? I think this is so huge because I think most people are blissfully unaware. I think they're in the matrix that we've been conditioned over decades, right, of watching aunties, uncles, parents celebrate, commiserate. congratulate with alcohol, right? We've built all these neural pathways up in our brain about what it means, how it's attached to our identity. You know, it's so subliminal. You say, oh, should we meet up? And you know they're talking about alcohol or all of these things. And so because it's so

endemic alcohol, because it's so widely available, it's just accepted. It's normalized that this is just something that everybody does. But when we peeled back that layer a little bit and we ask questions, well, hang on a minute. You know, what is the actual truth about alcohol? What's the real truth? And I think that only now and only slowly are we starting to see the real truth, the real downstream impact of alcohol, which is, you know, that it's a neurotoxin. It's significantly damaging your brain. It's reducing grey matter. It is shrinking our brain. It is, and And even if you look at the, that's just direct alcohol consumption. But from drinking alcohol, the sleep disruption, the drinking a depressant, the psychological

impact on our brain, and anxiousness, depression. And now we're starting to link more and more things to it. So from a physical perspective, you know, alcohol is very, very harmful to our bodies. It's 100% toxic. So the moment you start drinking alcohol, your body goes into, you know, fight or flight mode, panic to try and, you know, process a toxin. If it doesn't, if your body does not process alcohol, you will die. Right. So it's like trying to get rid of a disease from your system. So releasing cortisol, you know, you're in fight or flight, so you're no longer in repair and regeneration.

Your body's in protect mode. And so the downstream impact of regularly consuming alcohol is literally hundreds, maybe thousands of ailments, illnesses, diseases, brain disorders, all of these things that are being either impacted or increased or directly created because of regular alcohol consumption. And I think we need more and more research, more and more funding to go in as we are seeing this funding. And we're now saying, well, alcohol directly causes cancer. like what we now know and is emphatically said, alcohol causes breast cancer, full stop. But, you know, again, why aren't we saying to people, oh, you're sad, you're depressed, you're anxious? Well, that could well be your alcohol consumption. What about your extra weight? You know, you're trying to lose weight. Well, that could be your

alcohol consumption. What about your lack of productivity, just not feeling, you know, motivated in life, not really committed? What about the issues in your relationship? What about your lack of success or fulfillment. What about your, you know, we could go on and on and on. So when I say alcohol is holding you back, this comment is really to say, hey, you, everyone, not just the guys or the people who are, you know, what you might call alcoholics or severe alcoholism, you know, pouring whiskey on their cornflakes in the morning. Oh, oh, that's somebody who has a problem. No, no, no. I'm talking about everyone, everyone who regularly consumes alcohol. If you're regularly consuming alcohol on a weekly basis, any amount of it, then it is holding you back. It is costing you mentally and it's costing you

physically. And I think it's time for us to start asking the question, well, what would it look like if I didn't consume it so regularly? Well, we're going to jump around a little bit, but I just want to give a preview of that. You have an incredible community filled with thousands of people who have gone on these different challenges that you've hosted and that your community host. So give us a little bit of a teaser of what's possible. I'll often ask this in the beginning of the interview just so that people have a sense of, yes, we're going to go deep into the subject because it's something that a lot of people need to hear about. I needed to hear about it at some point in time, even though I grew up not even drinking alcohol.

And I can talk about my story in a second. But what starts to become possible for somebody when they go at least the first 28 days? Yeah. You have a 28 day challenge. That's right. That's right. What starts to become possible for them in their life? They go alcohol free for 28 days.

Yeah. Professor Kevin Moore of the Royal Free Hampstead in London. He did one of the largest ever studies into a four-week break from alcohol. And this is a number of years ago. And amongst the results, you know, he was looking at, he was looking at a significant reduction in cortisol, in cholesterol, a significant weight loss, people reporting feeling happier, healthier, fitter. He reportedly, this was published in the new scientist, he said, if the results of a four-week break

from alcohol were a pill, it would be a billion-dollar success story. Wow. And in that, he was implying that the results of taking a four-week break from alcohol, are what an awful lot of people are looking for. They're trying to lose weight. They're trying to get fit. They're trying to be happier. They're trying to be healthier.

They're trying to have more productivity, more energy, more clarity. Like, people want these things, but they're not attaching it to their drinking. They're not, they don't realize that actually maybe alcohol is causing that thing in the first place. So then when you say, you know, well, what are some of the other stories? I mean, I think you have to look at it like this for me. many, many people. Our regular consumption of alcohol is a sort of numbing. It's a numbing of our life. It's a switching off of the stress or the difficult emotions or the job we don't love or the relationship we're not happy with or the sense of self that we're not fulfilled about.

And that drives us to want to have a drink, to take the edge off, the noise in our head, that we're not living this wonderful life. And the impact of that is that when you get somebody to take a break from that, and they suddenly start to see the truth, well, hang on a minute, I was drinking because I wasn't happy in this relationship. I was drinking because I hate my job. I was drinking because actually I've got some emotions and things that I need to deal with. I need to go to therapy and I need to start sorting my stuff out.

I was drinking because I didn't feel happy about myself. That that begins the catalyst for a complete life change. And this is why people get so evangelical about taking a break from alcohol. This is why people shriek from the rooftops. Oh, sobriety is amazing because it is a catalyst for massive change for people. It's easy to ignore the noise of your, your life being difficult or not or unhappy when you're drinking alcohol. It's easy to pack down those emotions and switch that off. And when you stop doing that and you start changing those things,

that's life changing. You know, you mentioned that alcohol is this number one toxin inside of our body. There's no essential benefit from it. And there's all these different ways that it makes our body say, ouch, so to speak, long term, from everything to women who, who, drink, I think the stats are more than three or four drinks a week regularly, have an increased risk of breast cancer that you were mentioning previously to all the other elements that you're mentioning. It's association with weight gain, cholesterol, et cetera. And on top of that, you also just feel like when you drink on a regular basis. So if alcohol is so toxic and if you regularly feel like and every person who's been in a place in time in their life who's drinking regularly

has said, I want to stop. Why has it become so hard for them to actually not stop or not be able to take a break? What's going on there? Okay, 100%. Just before we dive into the great big world of peer pressure, which is where we're going with that exact question, I want to just quickly back to something you say, which is important, you said there is no benefit to drinking. And I'm going to just change that slightly. I should have said physiological. Yeah, well, physiological benefit. But the truth is, there are lots of benefits to drinking alcohol, right? Alcohol is actually really successful at switching our bloody brains off. Have you seen the crazy world we live in out there? Have you seen how stressed out we are? How our devices are pinging at us? Our central nervous systems are

absolutely in overdrive. We've never been more stimulated, more stress. stressed, more. I mean, come on, the feelings of overwhelm, of not really contributing as well as we could, they're all huge. And alcohol's brilliant as switching all that stuff off. Next minute, you're in fun land. And we can't sit here and say that alcohol isn't fun. I mean, we've probably in this room, right? We've had some of our funniest nights from alcohol. So there are benefits to drinking alcohol. If there weren't, well, nobody would be drinking it, right? The issue, the biggest issue is the trade-off, is not really being looked at, right? The benefit versus the amount you pay, it's way, way greater. How much you have to pay? And there's this great phrase that drinking alcohol is stealing happiness

from tomorrow. And it's not just tomorrow. It's the next day and the next day in reality. And as you get older, it's the next day and the next day. So at some point, we have to evaluate that trade-off and say, how often do I actually want to do that? Now, you asked that, really, really important question. If it is so toxic, if it is so harmful to us, if it does make us all feel so terrible after drinking it, why is it so difficult to change your relationship with it? And this primarily comes down to peer pressure, right? This comes down to this social expectation that this is what we do with alcohol. So if you look at alcohol and the history of alcohol, then it was used as a social elixir, right? It was about getting people together and feeling that

sense of community. And over many, many decades, the alcohol industry has spent trillions of dollars finding ways to market alcohol to greater and wider situations and moments. Happiness, celebration, mummy wine time, sport, whatever it is. It just got reassociated and reassociated and reassociated. And what happens when you spend trillions of dollars on marketing to a society is that society takes that over. It becomes. It becomes. ingrained. It becomes expected. So inside our peer pressure is something really powerful, and that is this sort of innate tribalism. So we all, a lot of us grow up, sounds like you didn't, but we grow up, that alcohol is just ingrained in absolutely everything. And so we start to

build those neural pathways and those beliefs, and we have them in our head. The peer pressure of society becomes something that you actually create on yourself. And often, often, I'm sure lots of people listening to this or watching this will resonate that they can go into the atmosphere and immediately feel triggered that they need to have a drink. Nobody said anything to them yet. Nobody said, are you and why are you not drinking? But they're already going, I need to have a drink because otherwise I'm going to be the weirdo who's not drinking, right? It's inside us and it has been repeated and repeated and repeated. And the brain puts on autopilot what we repeatedly do, what we repeatedly see. That's how it operates. So when we try to change

our relationship with alcohol, what a lot of people do is they say, right, I'm going to stop drinking. And in that moment, they say, okay, I'm going to avoid my social circle because I don't want to go out there where everyone else is. And what happens in that moment is that they actually become more disconnected. And when you become disconnected, right, well, that drives us back. We can't be like that unless you're a sociopath, you can't be disconnected. So again, the only way to feel connected is for you to go back to the tribe. And the tribe drinks. And so this is what so many people do. They take a break from Gai Janury and then next minute they wonder why they're drinking like they were before. And that's because they've just immersed themselves back into that

sense of tribalism. So in essence, our drinking is very, very tribal. It's very socially ingrained. And I think slowly, over decades, I've been at this message for almost 10 years now. And now, you know, people when I started were like, oh, wow, this is so zeitgeist that you're coming into it. But not really. And even now, you know, sobriety movements are alcohol-free alternatives are available. It's more widely available in bars. It's never been as easy, right, as it ever has to choose not to drink of an occasion. but we've still got a long, long way to go

where somebody who's choosing not to drink feels absolutely no peer pressure and feels completely included alongside somebody who is choosing to drink. We have a long way to go. You know, you talk about choosing to drink, choosing not to drink, and those are sort of two,

those are part of the spectrum of different ways of sort of having a relationship with alcohol. Some people say, I'm never going to drink or I never drink. Some people are sober. They've gone through the 12-step program. And some people feel that, hey, I don't have a problem. It's a regular part of my life, right?

What is your relationship with alcohol today? Which is not necessarily what you're advocating for the people who are listening. I just want to give context here of your relationship so that we can add it to the spectrum of essentially options or ways of being that people might have with alcohol. Completely. I drink as much as I want whenever I want. I love saying that. But I usually choose not to drink. And I think the reality is so what does that look like for me is I just tend to rarely have a drink. When I do have a drink, it might be one, two, and I know I'm going to feel it the next day. I know I'll have disrupted sleep. I know I'm going to feel more anxious, less productive, more tired, all of those things the next day. And when I have a large contribution to take to the world and, I'm feeling aligned with my meaning and purpose and what I do every day, I just don't want to feel

like that. Equally, if I want to go to Vegas or Ibiza and let the wheels come off, I can do that too. That's no problem. There's no judgment there, but I just wouldn't choose to do it very often. And what I really discovered, so, you know, for me to put and to where my relationship with alcohol was, I never was what somebody might say is alcoholic or alcoholism. We don't use those words anymore because they specifically identify the disease model. We use in the scientific community, we use alcohol use disorder.

And so absolutely I had alcohol use disorder because I was drinking heavily most weeks. And for me, as an oil broker, lunch could start at midday and finish at 6 o'clock in the morning. And I might do that a couple of times a week. Not every week, but that's just kind of, it was very, very heavy drinking culture. And then I took a break from alcohol. And first of all, it was 90 days. I couldn't believe how good I felt, the clarity, the energy. It was just amazing. And I decided to go on for a year. That year was transformational. You know, transformation of my life. Just, just amazing years. It's something that, you know, the name of my company is one year no beer, OIMB. It's something that we highly recommend to people. It's like, you know, maybe you want to start with the couch to 5K to begin with. That's the 28 day. Then you might want to try. 90 day and really doing a year off is transformational for your relationship with alcohol. And all of our programs today will always recommend that. The longer you take as a break, the more chance you have of fundamentally changing your relationship with it.

But after a year, I was like, well, I never wanted to stop forever. That wasn't me. Also, I was that type of person where if you said to me, no, you cannot do this all the way through my childhood, I would say, fuck you, I'm doing it anyway, especially to my people. parents. And so I knew that that was going to cause an issue. So I decided to go and have a drink again. And I called up some friends and I said, right, you know, I'm going to have some drinks after a year. Let's go to the rugby. And I went to the rugby and, you know, get in there and all the noise and everything else. And I get to the bar and it's like five people deep, you know, one of those. And I think, I'll order two. So I get two pints. And then of course, you know, the evening carries on like

that absolutely past it, following day, throwing up in the toilet with my daughter beside me crying and my wife storming out the door. And this is when I realized something really profound. Abstinence does not equal control. I've just done a year, not drinking, and I don't have control. And so that's what kind of changed the direction for me entirely. I kind of went down this route of saying, well, is control possible? What is it to have control? How do I get there? And, I mean, probably over a good eight years, I did another year alcohol-free, and then after that year I started to just occasionally drink. And I started to really dive into the science behind this. Now, we know from science what drives compulsive behavior. We've known for decades. And yet, it seemed to be that the conversation out there was either you're drinking problematically or you're not drinking. It was just, you know, either you've got a problem or you don't. It just seems so black and white.

And I was like, why isn't there a middle area? Why can't people go from drinking problematically to drinking less? It turns out, right, that there is this incredible intervention out there in the world globally. It's the most successful intervention at taking people from alcohol use disorder to consuming alcohol in a or not having alcohol use disorder. Do you want to want to know what that? intervention is. I cheated because I know your content really well, so I'm not going to steal your punchline, but I'll let you, I'll let you say it. Good. It's time, time. So most people grow out of alcohol use disorder. So if we can grow out with it with time, then how do we shorten that down for people?

And what are the other factors? And so this is really what now, well, my life's work is about, is helping people understand that alcohol is not the problem. Alcohol is how you're treating your problems. That there are underlying drivers in your life that are causing this compulsion to happen, this desire to numb out and take the edge off. And that when you actually take a minute and address those underlying things, you will have a healthier relationship with alcohol. I know you're a huge fan of the work of Dr. Gabor Mate. Yes. He's been on this podcast a couple times. I'm a huge fan as well too. And everybody knows his powerful quote that he always says, which is ask not why the addiction. Ask why the pain.

And as related to alcohol, alcohol is one vehicle that people use to regularly numb the pain in their lives. When you do surveys, you talk to your audience. What are the top things people are using to alcohol to self-medicate for? Hmm. Well, I don't think that people are conscious. They're not conscious. They're not conscious that they have childhood trauma, and that's why that they're seeking a second drink or a third drink. Let's categorize some drinkers for a second. So we've got the, I can't stop at one drinker, right, who maybe could easily do a week or two and is like, well, that's fine. But usually when I have one or two, it goes on to binge drinking. And then binge drinking is really interesting because it kind of causes these more, more public issues, right?

It causes more, well, literally public issues, you know, vandalism and rioting and all sorts of stuff like that, which is why the UK has been changing its relationship with alcohol since 2004, because it's a very binge drinking culture. And then where have you got Germany, which is just steadily climbing, they don't have that binge culture. They have that daily drinking. They just have a beer with things. So both of those have been proven to be as harmful, not exactly as harmful, right?

But if you take the same amount of units drunk in one session of binge drinking and the same amount of units drunk through the week, the same amount of harm is showing up physically and mentally in that individual 30 days later. Okay? So one is not better than the other. So I think those two types of drinkers are not aware that it's childhood trauma or let's just change perhaps the childhood trauma word and talk about. our ego. Okay? So during zero to seven, we have not yet switched on our prefrontal cortex. It is developing. The prefrontal cortex is used for rational decision making, making sense of the world, our morals, all sorts of things like that. So today, when somebody shouts at you or cuts you off at the road, you go, oh, that's somebody who hasn't slept well, I hope.

But as a child, if somebody shouts at you, you don't understand. You can't write. You can't rationalize. So you feel some intense emotions and you pack those down. And meanwhile, you also make some decisions about yourself. Those might be, I'm not worthy, or I'm not good enough, or I'll never amount to anything, or I can't be on my own, or I need somebody to save me, which was mine, or I can't trust men, I can't trust women, I can't trust my mother, whatever it is. So we create these patterns in our brain based on these experiences, and they start to form our ego. And as our ego develops through our life, it creates this picture of how we view the world. And what we don't realize is that a lot of our drinking is actually a direct respondent to this. And there's two kind of ways for that,

is, A, the feeling that it creates, I'm not good enough, I'm not worthy, that feeling, is an interesting body of research, I would say, that shows that our ego, our subconscious, is actually trying to create situations to prove our belief true. So if you have this belief that you're not worthy, you're going to create situations to prove to yourself that you're not worthy. And that might be entering into a higher league where you weren't quite accepted, only for them to say, I'm sorry, you're not accepted this time for you to go, ah, see, the ego will be like, Told you, you're not worthy. And these little patterns are going on all the time. And so not only is that the pattern that's created, but it creates the feeling. And the feeling is very difficult

to handle. Most of us have not learned to regulate our emotions. In fact, we haven't even learned to acknowledge our emotions. Far from it. We've usually been taught to run away from them as fast as possible and pack them down, you know, especially as kids, right? Come on, pick yourself up. Stop crying. They're there. So this packs down those emotions. emotions, those difficult feelings, and that's why we reach for something. And so that happens, that is the most common part for people's habitual drinking or reaching for something. And it's not just drinking. I mean, it's Netflix, doom scrolling through social media, porn, gambling, you name it. Shopping. Shopping. I can't stand the feeling, therefore, I need to take the edge off

with some kind of action. Work addiction. The world's most acceptable addiction. But it's still the same thing. You know, we coach lots of very, very driven, very successful business owners, high achievers, celebs, billionaires on the program. And something that's extremely common is a, you know, often they resonate with being ADHD, ADD, neurodivergent. And we can talk a bit more about that and why that's important. But also that, you know, they're constantly busy, constantly busy, constantly busy. Well, busyness is a great way to avoid feeling. So work addiction is driven from a this avoidance of these difficult feelings of the past. And this is where it creates that negative energy that then you need something to cope. And so what we sort of help people do is understand

that this is primarily driven by your central nervous system. It's primarily driven by you not being able to regulate and finding enough calm and peace during the day that you desiring a drink or needing to take the edge off is not a foregone conclusion. I have this little, a few things really. One is what we want to do is sort of teach people some very simple math. The math is this. A stressed out central nervous system, which does not get any recovery during the day, will always require numbing in the evening. That stressed out central nervous system drives this hyperactive energy, which then creates this busy brain that you just can't switch off. I just can't switch off my brain. I can't switch it off. I'm going to use alcohol. And the problem with using alcohol

is it must be literally the world's worst tool. You know, if you were to market it as the product it is, you say, okay, so you're struggling with a really busy brain. Great. Have this substance here. What it will do is it will knock out your brain for 15 minutes and then it will start to decline pretty quickly. So you'll need to take it again. And then you'll need to take it again and take it again. And the more you take, the more you will feel it again the next day. And you'll feel it 10 times worse the next day, would you actually take that? It wouldn't be a successful product. But this is how we are using alcohol. And it's so unhelpful to us in actually handling that situation. So yeah, it's a lot about calming down that central nervous system. You know,

give us a sense. Again, websites, one year, no beer, right? That's the entire community. And there's a bunch of different ways to go through programs, challenges. We'll talk about some of those. those that are there. But when people come to you, and for those that are listening to this conversation, the thing that I want to highlight is that, again, people are not coming to you because, you know, most people I would think are not coming to you because they've hit rock bottom. And alcohol is not yet, right? It could be down in the future for them. They're not coming to you because they hit rock bottom, that their life is completely chaotic and out of order and that they have been told by multiple people around them that alcohol is this thing is the main thing that's driving that.

I'm sure there's some percentage of people that might be in that category. So if it's not that type of person, who's the person that's coming to you guys? Yeah. Well, it's a very wide sliding scale. And again, I think you could look at, so our messaging, our whole ethos is based on the fact that regularly consuming alcohol and peak performance and optimal health do not coexist. end of story. They can't live together.

They do not live together. And so if you want to double your business this year, if you want to get promoted, if you want to lose weight, be the fittest you've ever been happy, healthy, if you want to be a better parent, I mean, I can go on the list. If you want those things,

then come and change your relationship with alcohol. And so all of our conversation is around that, right, which is about bettering ourselves, finding a better version of ourselves, improving our lives, looking at it from a positive angle. And that's because what we saw in society was the only reason you would stop drinking is because you've reached rock bottom and you've f***ed your life up and now you have to submit yourself to God and be an addict for the rest of your life

because that's who you are. What? No. Let's just talk about it from, hey, we can all be better. This is a personal development journey. I don't know how long that personal development journey is for you. But let's just start taking positive steps forward. And it may not be that you're immediately abstinent. This may be a journey of two years, four years, or eight years of view of personal development. But on that journey, every day, you're getting better.

That's the conversation we are coming at it from. You know, that's my primary relationship with alcohol. And it's tough sometimes to explain when I had it in the past, which is very similar to you. I'm not a regular drinker. It's even tough sometimes when people say, do you socially drink or you have those questionnaires with your doctor sometimes? I never drink or I socially drink. It's like, okay, what is it if you genuinely drink, you know, once every couple months, right? And when I say once, literally it might be like a glass of wine, right?

There's not a good terminology for that. And that's not because I'm not trying to be so. sober, it's actually just the base of my life is set up that I don't enjoy having alcohol on a regular basis. And it really has to be this exceptional situation or maybe somebody wanting to get a chance to introduce me to some type of wine that I haven't maybe tried before or something. And even then, I kind of stole this languaging from Peter Atia. I'll take a sip.

If it's not amazing, I won't drink it. Great. My wife gets frustrated with me sometimes because we'll get this incredibly expensive bottle of wine or somebody might give me something or a host. I'll have a little bit. And I'm like, okay, that's cool. And I don't touch it for the rest of the night. It's like originally, now she's not on that sort of she doesn't do this anymore. But originally it was like, you can't just waste it.

I'm like, actually you can waste it. There's nothing wrong with, you know, there's no rule that says that you have to drink it. Right. Or you can even tell somebody that's host to you and say, You know what, that was great. I enjoy that, but I don't want to drink anymore. Yeah. Right? Or actually, hey, thank you so much for sharing that with me.

I didn't enjoy that. I don't feel like drinking the rest. I hope you're not offended, right? Yeah, but if we put it in the same category as the drugs that it is, like Professor David Moore proved that it's one of the world's most harmful drugs. And let's say it's a bag of Coke. And you say, oh, I'll have a line. Great, have a line.

Come on, finish it off. Finish off the bag. Well, are you not going to finish off the bag? Like, you wouldn't have that conversation. Well, not unless you were proper party animal. But so, and this is the thing, is it's with alcohol, is that you expected and everything else. And I think that's a conversation that needs to change and is changing. And I think the more awareness that we create of this, the more you sharing this message on your podcast,

which is bringing the attention not just to the peer pressure, but allowing people, like not being a part of that conversation. We half created a campaign called Break the Beer Pressure to really. bring awareness to this incredible peer pressure just to say, let's not be a part of that. Let's let anyone, whether they want to have a drink or don't want to have a drink, let's not, come on, what's wrong with you, have one. Let's let go of that. And so many people would find it easier to change your relationship with alcohol. And when you talk about having a glass of wine a month, I mean, come on. This is, I think that's, that's okay, fine. Know that what you're doing is ingesting a toxin. But I mean, how many toxins? My shoes are giving

me cancer, right? The water bottle is giving, you know, every day now where you can't have sugar, you can't have meat, you can't have this, it's every day, isn't it? Well, so I think the reality is with alcohol, if you've got it into a place where you're not regularly consuming every week, and this is the thing, the psychological impact of drinking, I would say, at least two glasses of wine, right? At least two glasses of wine a week regularly, is that is having, still a significant impact psychologically on you. Wine or other drinks. Yeah, one or other drinks, okay?

And if you don't believe me, take a break and then tell me I'm wrong that there was no difference to you after at least, I don't know, 40 or 50 days. And you won't. You'll say, I feel brighter, I feel better because it is so negatively impactful. And so many of us are actually, we think we're at, maybe we think we're at, maybe we think we're at 100%, maybe we think we're at 90%, maybe we think we're at 80%. We're not, right? If you're regularly consuming alcohol, you're at 60.

You could be at 50% of your true potential and not even realizing it because you've been doing this for decades. So I think that's the big thing. There's usually an eureka for people when they take a break. They go, wow, it feels so amazing. You know, I'm going to jump in with a couple things. Number one, just like a random factoid. I don't know if you've got across this at all.

Michael Pollan in his book, he talks about the history of coffee and how coffee, especially here in America and a little bit in the UK, was one of the things that saved us from the regular daily consumption of alcohol. There was a period of time in the early sort of founding of the United States history that our sort of sewage systems, water systems were not great at all. And people would regularly, including many of our founding presidents, they were buzzed all day long because they were afraid to drink water. In fact, there was this whole time period.

And we think that it's one of the bigger contributors to infant mortality during this time. There was this time period where even they would give alcohol to babies because they thought it's going to be safer than giving them water. And it was coffee that came. And the birth of the coffee house, which was also the exchange of ideas, where now people were boiling water. They were having water that way. That coffee was a big part of what ultimately.

got us away from alcohol. I just thought that was pretty interesting. It is. It is. And I mean, and even earlier in the UK, you know, it was, it was very well known to be drunk alcohol instead of instead of water. It just wasn't safe to drink the water for centuries. So it was more of a preferred preferred thing at times. Yeah, I'm just imagining our founding fathers here in the United States, just trying to conduct business and just being buzzed all day long. Well, there's plenty of very driven, very successful business owners who are well, let's talk about that for a second. Everybody knows somebody who's very successful outwardly in their life, whether you look at monetary, you look at career growth, other things. And I'm sure people have come to you and

said, but Rory, I look around and this friend of mine is so successful and they get plastered all the time. Yeah. What do you say about that? Yeah. I mean, 100%. I mean, it's not a direct correlation to how much money you make, right? That's not what we're saying is alcohol is stopping you from making money. That's not at all the case. There's very, there's a lot of very wealthy people from the alcohol industry. But what we are saying is that health and mental health and that's element of physical performance. I think, again, yeah, I think the biggest thing here is for people is we can all point around and say, and justify and go, oh, you know, this person over here and this outlier. I'll give you an example, Blue Zones, that study about longevity,

and they came out and said that drinking alcohol was good for you. It's not good for you. It's absolute b***. It's 100% poison. Like, why are we proliferating? That kind of b-hirt is so untrue. Here is the interesting study behind it, because you're a man who likes talking about longevity.

that, and I also saw, I can't remember his name, but the guy talking about loneliness, when you change your relationship in the vast majority of, and in many societies around the world today, it's lonely. There are not many people who are choosing not to drink. And what happens is, is people feel this sense of loneliness, they become more disconnected, they lose their social circle, the whole community was based around drinking. I know on the west coast of Scotland, where I grew up, that the majority of the community is based around drinking. And if you're not drinking, you're staying at home on your own. So of course mortality and death rates go up with people because they don't have that community.

They don't have that connection. It's not the alcohol. It's the connection. And this is what we have to do more of in society and really encouraging people. You see, in essence, I see millions of people going in search of sobriety as the solution. It's not the solution, right? stopping drinking on its own is not the solution. It's a wonderful tool. It's an amazing tool that will give you energy, clarity. It will give you focus. It will give you the tools that you need to do the

work to fundamentally change the things that we're driving the behavior in the first place. And one of those things for many, many, many people is they have a lack of connection. And so what we have to do when we change our relationship with alcohol is we really need to build meaningful relationships with people who are living how we want to live. And if you don't do that. You just avoid your social circle. You cancel seeing everything and you don't actually build friendships with people who are living in a healthier way. You're always going to go back to drinking. And then what happens is you go yo-yoing from drinking and not drinking and drinking and not drinking. And now what you're doing is aversion therapy, which doesn't work, right? What we've

proven from science, don't think about the pink elephant. Or we're all thinking about a pink elephant now. So now I start to drive the desire more, yo-yoing between drinking, not drinking. next minute I say, oh, every time I drink, it causes problems. So the only solution for me is to abstain and hold on for the rest of my life to be abstinent. But really what we didn't do is address the underlying causes in the first place. And I think that's the bit we need to change. So a couple things on that. You're saying that total sobriety should not really be the goal that we're putting out there.

It's a wonderful goal. It's a wonderful goal for some people. Wonderful goal. At the end of the day, it's a poison. On masses. is primarily because it's actually unrealistic to expect that people are going to be sticking to that. It can lead to yo-yoing and other things. Exactly.

There's another side, which is that, again, for some people, it might be the goal if they are genuinely struggling with such a degree of alcohol use disorder. And there is data on the 12-step program. Absolutely. That the 12-step program does work. And many other programs. And many other programs. We had the guy from Harvard Mass General, I think his first name is Rich.

He did the biggest study on the meta analysis of all the different programs that are out there and looking at 12 step in comparison to a bunch of different things. And it did come back and show that 12 step was the most successful for the extreme situation. And it was interesting to chat about it because, again, it's not that every single person that goes through 12 step is immediately successful. But you're not writing it off. It's just that for the vast majority of people, they, I'm saying this, but you correct me if I'm wrong in the way that I'm understanding you. For the vast majority of people, it's not that their drinking has gotten that bad yet.

Correct. That they need that heavy level of intervention. Exactly. But that heavy level of intervention has worked for some people that have gone down that path. All of the above. And in here, we need to widen out the conversation. Again, we can't say he is that and he has to go there. Okay?

Let's say that I think Bessar van der Kokes says it perfectly. Let us not call it treatment-resistant depression. Let's just say that we haven't found the right solution for the individual. Okay. Now, to say that this is this person and he needs to go to 12-step, I think is not correct. we have had some people who would traditionally be called severe alcohol use disorder. I can think of one gentleman right now. Three times to the Priory, three times after the Priory, which is one of the luxury rehab main ones in the UK,

three times. Within weeks, he was back to problematic drinking as he was before. Three times. Huge investment to go there each time. Very successful business owner runs a property business in London. He comes on our program and you would normally say, well, he shouldn't be. He should be going to 12 step because he's drinking three bottles of wine a day and then sometimes getting onto spirits. Very, very, every day. He comes onto our program and has a massive transformation.

A year later, he comes out to Miyorka, takes my wife, we live in Miyorka, takes my wife and I out to dinner. And he sits there and he drinks half a glass of wine. And he says, most of the time now, I don't, I don't drink. But every time when I do drink, I never finish. because I'm constantly building the neural pathways that I have control. And that makes sense, right? We have to build those neural pathways. Okay, no amount of neural pathway building will undo if you still have the drivers. But we did a lot of work on trauma. We did a lot of work on his lack of connection, his relationships, which were significantly driving compulsion, his sense of meaning and purpose, all of these things. We did a lot of work on those tools. So we have helped

people who would traditionally go down that route. And I think where we're sitting at it is, is, is to say that our sweet spot is for people, just like you said, who haven't reached rock bottom. They don't feel that they have a problem with alcohol, per se. Maybe they do. Maybe they feel like they've got a bit of a problem with alcohol, but they know that alcohol is causing problems. And they know they can be better, and they know they want to be better. And perhaps they've taking a break here or there before, but it's come back each time. That is exactly our sweet spot for helping people. And then instead of, and really what we're doing is teaching them the skills and giving them the tools for them to keep building and improving their lives as a solution.

You know, I'm pulling from a quote because you shared earlier that, you know, this is a quote I've heard you share, our relationship with alcohol is deeply connected to our life growing up as a child. This goes into this idea that you were talking about childhood trauma as being one of the things that are there. The vast majority of people that are regularly drinking with alcohol, as you mentioned, they're not thinking about their childhood trauma. It's sort of in the background. I'd love for you to share a little bit about your childhood growing up that just can be one

example of how certain things that people were exposed to, behavior, patterns, how they were parented, how those all things can contribute to ultimately shaping our relationship with alcohol. Absolutely. Well, I grew up on the west coast of Scotland, which if it was its own country, would be one of the highest drinking countries in the world. So a very heavy drinking culture. Well, obviously I didn't start that as a child. I was severe ADHD, they didn't really know what that was on the island of Mull, very small island off the west coast of Scotland. They just knew they didn't want it. And at six years old, my parents were given an ultimatum, either drugs or counselling. And they chose counselling, which I believe today is one of the reasons

why I'm able to now help so many people is because I've done so much work on myself over decades. I really, really struggle with my head. You know, the hyperactivity, the attention seeking, the showing off, the disruptive behavior, destructive behavior, burning things, setting fire to stuff. I worked out as a family of five siblings with parents who are extremely busy, that one way to get attention is just to set stuff on fire. And so I was pretty wild. And then I struggle with my head, and at 13, I had my first suicide attempt.

And at 14, I really tried to take my own life when I hung myself. and it was a bit of a miracle that I survived, and my parents were really desperate for me to find some hope. And I sort of went through all my teens, very, very troubled, but still wild up on the Isle of Mull. And I was sort of getting some support, and I think the saviour for me, which didn't send me into severe addiction, I think I would have fallen off a cliff into self-destruct if I didn't have those loving, parents. And I didn't have, despite them being very, very busy, and I was predominantly being cared for by either staff or, you know, people who used to be around a B&B, I think I would have got much, much, much, much worse. And then all the way through my life, there was these near-death

things. I mean, I was in search of near-death. I loved it. It was either racing cars, you know, I wrote off my first car when I was 13 years old, used to roll cars with people in them. That's what we do on the Isle of Mull. And so there was a lot of that thrill-seeking, risk-taking stuff, which goes hand-in-hand with ADHD-like behaviour. I always used to say, if I grew up in a city, I'd have gone into care. But on the Isle of Mull, it doesn't matter. You know, it's, it was easier.

So it was, it was a lot of wild behavior. And then when I got into finding alcohol, I think into my teens, that really fit me because I could take it up another notch. You know, it made me more hyperactive. It made me more daring. It made me more adventurous. And some pretty crazy moments ending up in A&E and being very lucky, surfing on the roof of a car and lost all the skin on my arm and my teeth and things like that. And the car turned right and I didn't. Lots of, lots of crazy wild behavior. And despite having that, and then when I got later into my 20s, I found drugs, which again just enabled the party to go on for more days. And despite all of that partying, I was still trying to be entrepreneurial.

I was building businesses, trying to build businesses, failing, and then taking the edge off heavy binge party at the weekends. I think throughout that journey, and I still, into my 20s, I started to do some therapy again, which was great to talk about things. It was great to kind of do, but I don't really feel like it changed me that much. And I don't think it was until I started when I was an oil broker in London, which for me, those two worlds collided, partying and being successful. My job was literally to take people out and get them pie-faced. And so it was great. I loved it. It was wild. Yeah, the guy just said you had like a budget of like $25,000.

thousand dollars a month to go spend on clients take them everywhere partying clubs drinking a lot of fun and yeah so but through that there i met meditation i met the headspace app in 2013 um and although i'd kind of been trying to do a bit of work on myself i was also very very self-destructive i'd met my wife i had the family uh i just starting a family um and and our relationship was very tumultuous, very. She had a very traumatic childhood growing up. I mean, people were like, we give you weeks, weeks. We're still together today, which is a testament to the work we've done together. And why we're such big, big advocates of doing the work in our relationship as individuals. So when I started to get this meditation, that's when the noise

started to calm down a bit, the ADHD noise calmed down a bit. And then I could hear, hear the truth. you know, which was alcohol's holding you back. And that was the catalyst for so much change in my life and then really transform many things. But the meditation in its own, because this ADHD thing, so many people ADHD are like, I can't meditate, I can't meditate. You know, I've tried.

I just can't switch my brain off. And I'm like, look, if I asked you to go and learn Mandarin, assuming you don't know Mandarin, what would be your expectations on yourself of that? Would it be like, oh, you're going to go and put in some headphones and press play for 10 minutes five times and decide that you're not good at Mandarin? No, you're not. You're going to think maybe in three years I'll be able to have a conversation with the barista, right? So why don't have the same conversation?

You have never learned to calm down your brain. You've never learned to regulate yourself. You've never learned to calm down your central nervous system. So all you have to do is practice. And I'm not talking about 10 hours or 20 hours. I'm talking about hundreds of hours. And when you put hundreds of hours as an ADHD or a neurodivergent individual into meditation, it will change your life in profound ways. The reason why I brought all that all that up is because the meditation for me started to leading towards a painful, sharp area in my chest.

And I was like, what's this in meditation? It would get me 10 minutes of meditation. I'd get this painful, painful feeling. And so I googled it a little bit and they were like, keep going, keep going. So then I started meditating for a bit longer, 20, 30 minutes, and the pain started to grow, and it grew and it grew, and it became more and more painful. And as I focused in on this, next minute, I started weeping in meditation. So I'd get there and I'd just start crying. Then every time I closed my eyes to meditate, I would just start crying. It was getting more intense.

And then I really had this enormous release one day, sitting at home on my own, massive. I mean, the room went cold, it was really shocked. I couldn't be. I was really petrified. And what I rediscovered was two things. One, when I was six years old, I had a near-death experience. I had meningitis. And I nearly died. They were flying a helicopter to go for my temperature was so high. And in there, I was kind of fitting and talking in tongues and everything else. And I learned that near-death experiences in children six and under caused PTSD. And this explained the recurring nightmares and all of these kind of things that I had through my 20s that I never understood. I discovered that through. meditation, not through therapy, not through talk therapy, not through hundreds and hundreds of hours of sitting across from a counsellor talking about my life. Did I discover this? I found it through meditation. And then I started to do some somatic work, which is something we use on the program,

wonderful thing created by Peter Levine, which means going into the emotion, right? So I could ask you, you know, tell me about the last time you were feeling about having a drink and you say, oh, well, I came home from work and I was just, and what were you feeling? Well, I was feeling bored. Okay, what does that feel like? What does boredom feel like for you? Well, you feel for it. Is there a sense of loneliness in there? Yeah, loneliness, right? Really powerful emotion. So you would get to the emotion. You describe the emotion. And as you describe the emotion, you start to process it. This is how we process emotions. They need to be felt. And we've all been running away from them our whole lives. So when I started to feel my emotions, I discovered that when I was two years old, and I discovered this, I had a glimpse of a railing, a glimpse of the boat. I didn't really know what it was. And I brought. it up with my parents, my mum, and she was like, oh yes, I remember. Another story that. But I fell off the boat when I was two years old. And when I fell off the boat, my dad had to come up from downstairs and dive down and save me. And this created a pattern inside my head that I needed somebody to save me. And this is why all of those near-death experiences happened. This is why all of

those things. Even when I was building my businesses, I was creating so much suffering in those businesses. I was always looking for either a new employee or an agency or a mentor to come and save me. And when I got awareness of that pattern, what you do is when you get aware of these patterns that you run in your subconscious is you say, hang on a minute, I'm running that pattern again. I don't need to do that. I don't need somebody to save me. I've got this. You can actually track the P&L of my business that when that happened, it transformed my business. So I think this is the this is the thing I'm saying to people is I don't know whether our solution is the right solution for you. What I do know is that the building blocks of our solution are the fundamentals of life.

They are the skills and the tools that we need to deal with our stuff, process emotion, move past our shame, guilt, whatever it is, live a meaningful life, live a happy full life, live a purposeful life, be challenged, have good relationships, have great connection. What is not positive about going all in on fixing those things? And if the byproduct is, you have a better relationship with alcohol, amazing. A couple of questions off your story. If we can pull on that thread a little bit. You were sharing earlier that, you know, there's these narratives that we start to develop as kids. They're almost survival mechanisms that help protect our ego based on the different maybe traumas that we've encountered.

And sometimes that narrative is, I'm not good enough or nobody loves me or something like that. So when you use the phrase, I need someone to save me, is there a narrative that's underneath that? Is there or is that the narrative itself? Like, is there something underneath it? Like, I'm broken. I'm not good enough. Is there something underneath that?

There's definitely, I mean, you know, the thing about. being an ADHD child back then is that my parents would say you're special, you're gifted, and the world would say you're bad and naughty. And so it created this sort of separation of two parts of myself. I never chose to be diagnosed, but I worked with a psychiatrist who said, you're bipolar. And that two parts of the segment in there, there are loads more things inside all of us. There are loads more patterns. I'm broken is a part that I've come to accept. It wasn't necessarily that I'm broken. What I came to say was, I'm sick. My natural state is I'm sick. This ADHD like behavior is a sickness. I choose to say this, right? I'm not brandishing anyone else that.

And because I'm sick, I must take my medication. If I don't take my medication, I get really, really ill. And really, really ill means I'm going to get out there and fuck my life up. All right? That's that self-destruct. I'm going to go absolutely and tear the walls down. I'm just going to smash shit, burn stuff. That's my behavior. In order to stop me doing that, I must take my medication. And my medication is easy. It's exercise. It's meditation. It is calming down my central nervous system and finding calm. That is my medication. So just a clarification off of that, you know, because you're so great about connecting these dots about childhood trauma. And we're talking about it from like a sense of, you know, your example is not going to be somebody else's

exact story, but it's going to give them clues. So you were a child and you were burning stuff. You were doing things. Were you not taking your medication at the time? What was the driving? What was the narrative unconscious? Again, because you're not a child who's waking up and saying, let me f*** somebody's life up today. Let me cause that stress to my parents. What do you think was some of that narrative that was going on in the background that was driving this behavior that. that ultimately led to later on in life, you abusing alcohol to sort of feel that super high of a high that would cause you to be more crazy, adventurous, all the things that you mentioned earlier. So what was some of that narrative that was driving that behavior, do you think?

I think there's lots of factors in there, and that's a really good question. I think sleep deprivation and poor sleep is a major cause of ADHD-like behavior. So physiological. Yeah, I mean, you know, we're now, again, an interesting body of research to show that they actually think a proportion of ADHD is sleep deprivation in babies, that you deprive somebody of sleep for five days, anyone, and they will show up as ADHD in an ADHD test. They're very synonymous with each other. My mom would tell you, oh, brewery, he slept four hours and every 24. So was that the cause of my ADHD? Was it because I wasn't. put into a good bedtime routine that caused ADHD? I don't know. Again, if we talk about Gabor Mate, we talk about childhood trauma, but also inherited family trauma. Was it the stuff my mom went through?

Was it stuff my dad went through? Was it things that happened to me? Was it the falling off the boat? Was it these factors? Then look at diet. I mean, additives and e-numbers. The kids used to give me skittles and it would be like bonfire night at school. It would, there would just be an eruption. So you had to keep those things away from me. We're now starting to understand. There was a study done, forgive me, if these numbers are not completely accurate, but they took severe ADHD children, a large number of severe ADHD children,

and they put them on a very restricted nutritional diet, and 70% of them were showing no signs of ADHD 30 days later. So we're just starting to understand. understand the various collections of things that can create this outcome. And I think when you look at that and you say, oh, that's really interesting. So what we're saying is that alcohol is on the same thing. The desire for alcohol and the consumption of alcohol is a direct result of these many factors in your life.

Yes, that's exactly what we're saying. It's because you're sleep deprived. It's because you're not exercising. It's because of poor mental health and neurodivergence. It's because of lack of meaning and purpose, I could keep going on like a broken record. And I think we're actually just starting to understand that maybe an awful lot of our illness, ill health, mental health, the epidemic of addiction and issues we've got going in society are these holistic things. And we don't need pills to solve those things. What we need to do is have a holistic view at it.

Well, I appreciate you for bringing that up because this goes back to this larger idea, which is when you are taking a break from alcohol, you're not just taking a break from alcohol. You're deprioritizing its role in your life, maybe completely for a temporary period of time. And that naturally creates this opportunity to prioritize other things. What are some examples when you talk about your typical 28-day challenge? What are some examples of things that you're teaching your community members who are going through this in, in, with a bunch of other people that they're part of this turning on? What are some of the things that they're prioritizing now? Totally.

Well, number one is that most people are not doing enough exercise. And that's why their alcohol consumption is high. And I mean, drinking alcohol kind of stops people from exercising. Often you don't go to the gym the next day and things like that. So literally day two of the challenge, book into a physical challenge. there's a few reasons behind this, right? It may be a Spartan, it may be a 5K, it could be an iron man if you really fit.

But it's not only about you teaching your brain to release dopamine in healthy ways, which is why we exercise, especially in the morning. There are so many other factors to it, right? Exercising early in the morning will set you up for a good night's sleep. Good sleep will reduce compulsive behavior and therefore reduce the desire to have a drink of alcohol.

Not only that, but when you say to somebody, hey, why are you not drinking? and you say, oh, well, I'm kind of not drinking at the moment. You're done for. You're drinking. If you come across like that, they will steam roll you every time. They got you. Yeah, they've got you.

But if you say, oh, I'm training for an Iron Man. End of story. No comeback. There's something badass about that. And it doesn't have to be an Iron Man. It could be anything. It could be I'm going to do a 5K for charity. And I really want to do a good time.

It could be whatever it is. But you entering into a physical challenge. Of course, creating goals. We're goal. orientated people. All of our programs are based on positive psychology. It's about giving people the tools, the direction, the vision, the clarity, the tools to climb out of the hole. So that's one thing. I guess, you know, a lot of people drink because of boredom. So that's easy. I mean, we live in one chance at life. Why are you bored? That's the question. Like, why is boredom in your life?

Let's do something fun. Go down to the news agents, stand in front of all the magazines, pick up five that you like. Choose one. Make it a hobby. Take the money you're not spending on alcohol and spend it on the hobby instead. Isn't it awesome to get new cool tech or things or something else? That becomes exciting. And now you're building this thing of like, this is exciting. This is progress. I'm moving in a positive direction. I'm making changes in my life. And that's how we look at this whole, whole journey for people. So then it might be creating projects. Again, we talked about changing the social circle. We're a massive advocate of our alcohol-free drinks. There's great science behind the fact that when you take literally 99% of

the routine without the alcohol, so you opening the fridge at the same time as you normally do, you picking up a bottle that looks the same color, you opening it in the same way you usually do, the smell of it being exactly as you normally would, and then you drinking it would, well, when they took a whole bunch of students and they took, I mean, thousands of students put brain imaging software on their heads, and they gave half of them alcohol-free drinks and half of them alcohol drinks without them knowing, 82% of those drinking alcohol-free drinks were showing signs of being inebriated. So use that to your advantage. Our brain is fooled into thinking it's getting what it's want. Meanwhile, okay, so you could look at that and go,

well, that's terrible. I don't want to feel like I'm drinking. If I'm not drinking, I need to not drink. But wait a minute, what you're doing is building neural pathways that don't include alcohol, which is fantastic. And so that's what we need to be doing. So highly recommend using alcohol-free alternatives during a program like that. And again, on our program, or any of our programs here, what we want to do is ultimately help people create a version of themselves where they absolutely love not drinking. Right? Where not drinking is fantastic. Waking up the next day, feeling fresh, doing something really fun with friends in the morning. Like, if, out of Alcohol-free is as awesome, if not more awesome, than drinking, then you'll always have an easy choice.

But if not drinking is boring, lame, at home, dull, super bored, hate it on Twitter going, I can't wait till the first of February so I can have another drink again. And guess what, pal? You're going to just reiterate that you need alcohol to live your life. Which sometimes the dry January movement has a little bit of that energy. 100% it does. Right? A little bit of that energy of life.

like, okay, I'm doing this for January. I just can't wait for it to be done. Completely. And you're planning out all the things that people might want to drink afterwards versus what you guys are trying to create here is you're trying to, and we're trying to communicate this with the podcast, you're trying to create a lifestyle. That's it. Right. How important to that lifestyle is the idea that you are doing this thing with other people,

other community members? Yeah, huge. I mean, the community is everything. Johann Harry's amazing TED Talk. Everything we know about addiction is wrong. He says the opposite of addiction is connection. And we need to feel connected. So this is why community is such a huge part.

And most people don't want to go and be on, you know, a lot of people don't. I've got no interest in the community part. I don't want to be part of a community. In our high-level program, we put people in a room with business owners, execs, high achievers. And the conversation is not, oh, I woke up this morning and pull whiskey on my conflicts. The conversation is, I want to double my business this year. I want to be a better dad. I want to be running around the garden with my grandkids.

I want peak performance. I want optimal health. I want to have the best relationship with my wife or husband I possibly could. And in order to have those things, I know I need to drink less alcohol. And so when you're in an environment of like that, of people who are seeking to be a better version of themselves, people who you admire or respect, that is a very, very powerful tool. And what most people don't realize is that when you're at the wedding, right, you're at the wedding in that moment and everybody's, you know, getting on the smash and all excited about it and you're feeling all the, oh my God, it's coming, the peer pressure. What are they going to think of me if I'm not drinking? And the dreaded question comes from the guy who's the ringleader and he's like, you, what are you drinking? In that nanosecond, you don't realize that what your prefrontal cortex does is suddenly kind of ask, the rest of your brain, like, should I have this drink or shouldn't I have this drink?

And when you have a community of people that you feel you belong to, that is such a resounding, powerful thing. It's like a foundational platform that gives you the confidence subconsciously in a nanosecond to go, oh, I've got a community I belong to who are living how I want to live. No, thanks. Not tonight. And you don't realize it. And so that is how important community is. equally, just to drive this home, a lot of people try and change their relationship with alcohol on their own. I'm going to do this on my own.

I'm going to keep with this. And a lot of that is based around those negative emotions. Shame, embarrassment, guilt. That is the darkness. And the darkness feeds it. You are feeding the monster. What we've got to do is go to the positive side. We've got to be in the community.

If you're like, hey, I'm choosing not to drink, and it's feeling amazing, and I'm going hiking, and I'm running an arm, wherever those things are. And you're like, oh, that's aspirational. That's in positive. That's in supportive. That's in encouraging. And that's what we try to be in everything we do.

Positive, supportive, encouraging, inclusive. That's amazing. You know, environment is such a big driver of behavior. I've heard you in a couple podcasts reference the work of BJ Fogg. Yes. I've met him before. I went to Stanford. up, well, not to Stanford, but up in the Northern Bay area, in the Russian River area,

he has a workshop that he teaches in his home. The behavior change. Behavior change workshop. And he's been on this podcast before. I'm a huge fan. If I remember correctly, BJ is the author of the book Tiny Habits. A lot of his material also, for those that are listening, contributed to the book, Atomic Habits by James Clear. You know, BJ talks about in life, there are a few things that drive major, you know,

changes in sort of behavior and action long term. Some of them we can't control and some of them we actually have more control of. The ones that are harder to control and are a little bit more fleeting would be things like motivation. Sometimes you get a surge of motivation. Somebody in your life passes away from a heart attack and there's somebody that's been drinking a lot and you have this wake-up call and they're young and they're your peer and you're like, oh my gosh, I need to take action in my life. I think another one inside of that is also is environment, right? You move to a different environment.

A lot of people. I used to live in New York City. New York City is one of those places. You step out and you meet up with anybody for anything. It's drinking, right? Because everybody's busy in the morning and there's not really that, you know, they'll meet up for coffee, but people are usually at the office in the morning. It's always getting drinks.

And that's the sort of environment and culture. When I moved to L.A., L.A. is much more of like a, hey, let's go for a hike. Let's go for a walk. Let's grab some juice. Let's grab some coffee. Let's grab some tea. It's a little bit of a different sort of thing. But you can't always change your environment.

You can. You can. You can. Oh, you can. You can. And actually, when I moved to L.A., I'll say this differently. People don't realize you can change your environment. They're just thinking, well, I'm still working in the same place.

I'm in the same house. I have the same peers. well, my husband drinks a lot. I can't all of a sudden stop drinking. He tells me I'm not just going to drink by myself, whatever it might be. When I moved to Los Angeles and I didn't have like a really strong community, one of the things I did is I started getting a group of people together for a weekly hike. And it just so happened that that hike ended up being on Thursday.

And it was a group of guys on a regular basis, all other men who had their businesses and were high achievers. And we kind of nicknamed it Man Morning. Great. And one of the reasons that somebody started to come. come in and join the group a little bit later on. And they say, why don't we ever meet up in the evenings? And you know, I said, you know, it just ended up happening being the morning, but one of the guys chimed in our buddy Antonio and he said, you know what the powerful thing about meeting

up in the morning is, is that by default our events are alcohol free. Yeah, exactly. Most of the guys that are here have lived somewhere else previously and they're used to, you know, when the guys get together at the pub or whatever, the bar and they're watching sports, there's gonna be alcohol. But here we have the opportunity to sort of shift our environment and have a different way of interacting with each other. So that is a good clarification, is that you can shift your environment. How are the ways that you encourage your audience and your community members to be thinking about how they can shift their environment even if they think they can?

A million percent. So I think one thing that's really important to remember is that we see what we want to see. You know, when you buy that new car, you never saw it before. and now you see it absolutely everywhere. And you just said, everybody in New York is drinking. Come on, right? You know that's not true. I don't know what the population of New York is.

Well, the main island, Manhattan, the boroughs, I think it's like 8 million or something like that. 8 million people. I wonder how many people are not drinking in New York out of 8 million people. Do you think a million? More? Two? Three? I mean, it will be a large number.

And so it is about the places that we choose and the company that we keep. And we gravitate back because it's hard meeting other people. But we live in an amazing connected world today, right? You go to meet up as an example and you find sober or sober curious or whatever meetups. Or you go to the climbing club on Friday night. And people are not choosing to drink alcohol. They're climbing, releasing dopamine. You join a cycling club or a running club.

You join, you enter into a race and people who are training with that. You will always, always, always find people. And the amazing thing about environment, again, linking back into community is you don't need your whole community, not drinking. In order for you to feel that sense of power, that sense of that ability to say no thanks, is that you really only need one or two people who are living how you want to live in order for you to feel more confident with the people who are saturated in it. And on this wonderful journey of changing your relationship with alcohol, which is a journey, is a journey of self-development, it's a journey of progress, it's sometimes up and down, it's like the entrepreneurial journey. Sometimes you're drinking too much, sometimes you're not.

You know, you go in and out of this thing. It's a journey of changing a relationship with alcohol. In that journey, some of you might realize that you were using alcohol to make those friendships fun. and some of you some of those people will come with you and some of them won't and this is the wonderful thing about personal development right is that when you start to go all in on changing yourself you raise your bar and when you raise your bar you kind of change the lens from which you look at the world and as you look at the world you look around at some of your friendships and the things that you do

and the job and you're really whatever it is and you go well that doesn't fit in anymore sorry that doesn't fit in anymore. I'm sorry, I've changed. And that's the wonderful thing about personal development and growth. And so I would say to an encouragement to somebody who maybe, let's say, you're watching this podcast right now and you're on the Isle of Mull, which is a very, very heavy drinking culture, or you're in New York, is that for now, just take one step in front of the other. We don't need to change absolutely everything for you to change your relationship with alcohol. And as you start to make these improvements in yourself, just 1% little bit each day in making these gentle improvements in your life, you'll find that some of that stuff starts to

fall away that you don't want to go to the pub every Friday and Saturday because you're choosing not to drink. In fact, you want to be doing this new hobby that you really love and excited about now, which is more important to you. And that's the evolution. Yeah. It was a great quote by Lewis Howells, a buddy of mine, School of Greatness Podcast. He came on the podcast previously and was talking about some of his methodology when he came out with his book. He said, people often ask me, okay, I want to stop this behavior. I want to spend time as much with the people that are complaining or I don't want to

always be drinking with my friends or whatever it might be or my friends are addicted to reality TV. Like, what should I do instead? So he has this phrase. He says, go to where people grow. What's the thing that you care about, that you want to grow? Is it in business? Is it in the arts?

Where do people go to grow and get better at that thing? Like the meetups that you were talking about. Like the rock climbing gym, like the regular gym. And now be building a base of your kind of new community. Exactly. Because this gets into the idea that often it's very difficult to completely remove things from our life. But if we add in, the adding in crowds things out. Can you talk about that?

100%. I mean, this is again, going back to BJ Fogg, is, you know, we don't, we don't rip out bad habits. Bad habits are like weeds, and they grow over time. So this bad habit of drinking, it starts to infect different areas of us. It infects our reward system, right? It reflects our sense of self, our beliefs, our identity. All these different areas start to get infected. And so those roots grow. And then what lots of people do is they decide to take a break from alcohol, so they just come along to the weed and pluck it out. Well, if you do that to a weed, nine times out of ten, it either grows back or grows back even worse. And so the way we get rid of bad habits, like a bad habit of regularly consuming or consuming too much alcohol, is by cultivating it out with good habits. And so this is the journey of working through those different areas,

bit by bit to create those new, new habits. Whether it's finding more calm, whether it's finding more fun, whether it is releasing dopamine in more healthy ways, whether it's changing how you reward yourself, it's changing your identity. You know, the alcohol thing gets so linked to our identity. It was for me. I was, I kind of created a brand in the alcohol industry

as somebody who really knew his whiskey. And what was great, I come from Scotland. Love a whiskey. But I saw how people's faces would light up when I could tell them about where it had come from and the oak cusks it had been fired in and how rare the bottle was and that this one was still hand-mashed

and the only one and would do all these whiskey tasting. And so it became very, very, very linked. I bought bottles at auction. I had a whiskey collection. And you're like, I don't want to let go of that. So I never let go of my whiskey collection. It's still in my house. I mean, I haven't opened one of those bottles in five years.

I haven't opened one of those bottles. It's like I should just get rid of the bloody things. But it was so linked into my identity. And our identity shifts. And we just keep doing the work, keep progressing forwards. And you're like suddenly looking back and you're going, oh, that's just not a part of me anymore. It doesn't even come up in conversation.

You know, like that association of alcohol and steak night, right? Everyone's like, well, you need to have wine and with a steak never comes up. I mean, I'm predominantly carnival, so I'd be drinking wine all day if that was the case. So, yeah, we do change. Sometimes it just takes a bit of time and progress. One of the things that I think I heard you say, I haven't done your program before, but as part of your programs that you have people go through, you might have them use certain wearables to get clear about the relationship between their body

and how they truly feel and how that's driving certain behavior. Can you chat about that? 100%. So one of the most important parts of changing behavior is awareness. And so really all behavior change starts with awareness. And the more awareness we get, the clearer we are on the bad habit and what impact it's having us and all on that. And there's lots of ways to get awareness, you know, just starting a journal and writing the truth, especially when you're hungover, like write down how you feel. It's, you know, and look back at it and reflect. And as you start to keep this hangover journal, more and more often you go, the price isn't

worth paying. But the thing is, the way our brains work, and if we, if they didn't work like this, we probably wouldn't have children, is that we forget about these traumatic experiences. We forget about the hangover. We poo-poo it. So next minute the drinking happens again. So the awareness is a really important part. Meditation gives us awareness.

That's what changed me. I started to get aware. I couldn't ignore the noise. Hey, really, alcohol's holding you back. In our complete control program, we want to give extreme awareness. I'm talking about dragging the dog back in and holding its nose to the wee

and going, look at what you did, you naughty little dog. That's how I describe my customers. No, I'm kidding. So, and the extreme awareness is, okay, great, an aura ring. So we use the aura ring as an example. Lots of people have aura. Lots of people have woo.

But lots of people go, I talked to a guy last night. And he said, oh, no, no, no, no. I'm not wearing my whoop because he was having a drink. I don't wear it and I'm having a drink. I do not want to know. And you're like, okay. But the thing about, so, first of all, devices are there. We use another device which remotely monitors your central nervous system.

And what we show you in Technicolor is really just how negatively impactful alcohol is on your central nervous system. But more importantly, we show you that your consumption of alcohol, especially for business owners and driven people, a lot of stress, is that your stressed out central nervous system is the main driver of your compulsion for alcohol and any other Netflix, cake, whatever it is, you need to take the edge off. And what we teach people during that whole process is that you must be finding parasympathetic during the day, which is finding calm, meditation, walk, calming down that central nervous system, using breathwork. We must do that. Otherwise, we create this hyperactive state that you can't calm down from, and then you'll desire a

drink. So what I wanted to do was instead of just giving people a pill or labeling them with something or just telling them they had to be this way, I wanted to show people and give them the tools that they could consciously make the choice from an empowered place. Not I reached rock bottom and I have to do this, but oh wow, I really see what that's doing from me. In essence, not just from the wearables. So, you know, the aura ring we use as an ass kicker. So we track people 24-7, if you sleep poorly, we're going to call you and warn you that you're going to be significantly more driven for compulsion, right? Sleep deprivation is a major driver of compulsive behavior. It also compounds our central nervous system and it debilitates your stress coping mechanisms so you get

stressed out way easier, so you want to drink, right? So exercise requirement, meditation, breathwork. So we can monitor all these things. Not only that, I mean, we have seen that people are are getting ill, we actually called an ambulance because we could see some an irregular heartbeat, and the ambulance arrived as one of our members was having a stroke. Very, very lucky. So the devices are predominantly there for awareness and for accountability, extreme accountability, during this program. There's lots of people sign up to things and then they don't really do it, and they're like, half go in, we don't give you that choice. We are literally kicking your ass every day, which is what a lot of people need in a loving way, of course. But overall,

the essence of the program was really to say, look, there are two parts. One, the conscious and the subconscious. No amount of conscious work, no amount of strategy, process, creating neural pathways about having control. No amount of conscious work will ever outdo a self-sabotaging subconscious. So we have to do the work on the past stuff. We have to do the work on those past feelings. And then from the conscious perspective, we're really going to create a true vision for yourself. Okay? The vision is that actually everything that you want to be happy, to be healthy, to be successful,

to increase your business, to be running around the garden with your grandkids, to have longevity, to have peak performance, optimal health, everything that you want is actually being taken away by alcohol. And when you see that in cold, hard data and evidence, and you know that's the truth, most of the time you'll choose not to drink. And that's really the process that we take people through.

Anybody who's taking a break from something that's a destructive behavior, like regularly consuming alcohol, knows that when you start heading in the right direction, there's a spiraling upward effect. Just like if you're heading in the wrong direction, bad habits lead to other bad habits. What are some of the most common things that you've seen in the lives of your community members that start to become possible when they've removed alcohol? What are the other areas of their life that start to make forward progress, even if they weren't necessarily there to specifically work on that? Let's start by saying that I used to be an oil broker making money for myself

and not really, just being part of a big wheel of a system of a process. Now, pretty, pretty much every single day, I'm either messaged or tagged in a post or I'm sent a DM from somebody who will say, you saved my life. Yesterday, evening, somebody who said, I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for you. So we're talking about suicide. We're talking about, I've had a handwritten letter from a son saying, I've got my dad back. Like, what I do now saves lives, changes lives. It's, it's it is unbelievable when you have a life of meaning, when you have a life of contribution, when you are doing something like that,

I don't know if I could do anything else ever again because of the impact it has on other people. And when you look at what, you know, the knock-on impact is of people, God, I mean, one year no beer, OYMB over the last decade, has burst a huge number of alcohol-free drinks coaches, podcasts, sobriety experts,

I mean, the businesses that have been grown from it, the projects that have come from it, people have written books, biographies is a massive, massive knock-on impact. And now, when I look at our core program now, you know, a guy who runs half a billion turnover business, we've had a lady who's got 140,000 employees under her, and I look at what happens when we change the lives of those people,

that it has such a great knock-on impact of people around them. Other people want to change their relationship with alcohol. It's almost impossible that when you go all in on changing your relationship with alcohol, that people around you, that your loved ones, that your friends won't start questioning it. And this is why I get a lot from people. They say, well, you know, what do I, what do I do if I have somebody who needs to change? a relationship with go all in yourself go all in on yourself and more than likely they'll start to turn the corner so yeah the the downstream impact um is so huge for for people kids on kids you know that's

something really that that is amazing and that's talked about so much in the community you know i'm a so much i'm so much a calm a parent now i'm such a better parent now i'm i'm I'm a more attentive parent. I'm a more present parent. What a gift that will change a child's life is to have a more present, less stressed, less anxious, less depressed parent. That's beautiful. You don't want to come back to your story because I feel like we didn't put the sort of

final connecting dots on a couple aspects of it that my audience is probably listening to and wondering sort of how things got left off. So, you know, you talked about your childhood. and that sort of using alcohol to really drive this crazy behavior, being part of your personality, et cetera, social lubricant, all those things. Then fast forward, you becoming an oil broker and literally being as part of your job, your requirement is to treat people to alcohol, to drinking. You know, I think one fact that I heard from you sharing on the Rich Roll podcast, you know,

last minute you got 250 people into like a nightclub that were your clients. you were drinking with all of them and hanging out. And then from what I understand, you were seeing the impact that it was having with your family. In particular, I think there were a few occasions where it really was driving a wedge in your relationship when you had a new child. And you, in fact, missed or showed up super late to one of the early appointments of sort of guiding you.

Parenthood. Parenthood classes. Right? Take us from there at what point in time or what was the, if there was multiple, what were the final rock bottom moments that ultimately led to you saying that you're going to stop. Maybe you kind of covered it previously, but just wanted to put the button on it. And then also tell us inside of that, when you communicated to your bosses that you wanted to stop, they said something interesting to you.

So what did you do from there? Yeah. So that story, I mean, I came from a lunch, which started at midday 6.30. I was like, oh, it's my NCT class, which is the parent class. It's my first one. I mean, I've been drinking heavily and headed on the train. That's when the train incident happened, which has made a newspaper of me hanging my head at the train drunk at 150 mile an hour. And you texted your wife a video of that, thinking it was funny.

She saw the video. Okay. She saw the video. I didn't send it to her, that's for sure. Oh, got it. I sent it to my mates who'd been back at the lunch, who thought it was hilarious. So, yeah, the thing about to put it into context, there is no rock bottom moment. Okay.

There is no rock bottom moment. And I think in AA, or a large proportion of AA, they say, or it's quite common for them to say, go away until you've had enough. And I don't think people need to reach rock bottom. I don't think you need to wait until the wheels come off. Don't wait until your wife leaves you or your husband says he's had enough. Don't wait for you to get the DUI. Don't wait. You don't need to do that.

We don't have to have our arm forced to then suddenly need to go and stop drinking. This is an old, old, old way of thinking about it. We can come at this from a want of being better, being healthier, being happier, wanting more in life. And who doesn't want more? So come at it from that angle. come at it from no i want to make 2024 my best year yet so i'm going to do this one thing so i think that's the first thing i think when it comes to my life you know i mentioned before that my relationship

with my wife was very tumultuous so her getting upset at me for drinking was nothing new and it was part of my job and i remember used to say to her well you want the jimmy choose this is the price you've got to pay of me coming home at five o'clock in the morning and not being able to find my keys. So just having a nap on the doorstep and her opening the door in the morning with our six-month-old child to find our husband asleep on the doorstep. But that was just normalized. I mean, that was hilarious when I got into the office. I'm smirking a bit now. So the signs were there looking back, but in the moment, they were just how it was done. It was a regular part of your life.

You know, I would say, I would come in and I'd be like, she's super pissed off, and they'd be like, all our wives are pissed off. I mean, I worked with a guy who, the closing time, the bell finished, used to be 4.30, and then, you know, they would, they would, sorry, 7.30. And then they moved it to 4.30. It took him two years to tell his wife that the bell had gone three hours earlier, because he spent every day going to the pub instead of going home. So that kind of behavior was pretty normalized.

I was in that world. And so because of that, it's much harder to change. It's much harder to find what's normal, what's not normal. Is this okay? Isn't okay? And I think for everyone out there, if it's not coming from Rockbotton, if it's not coming from the doctor saying,

if you have another drink, you're going to die. If it's not coming from a partner saying, if you have another drink, I'm going to leave you. Then it actually comes from a very, very quiet voice. It's a really quiet whispering of like, I don't want to do this anymore. Or this isn't good for me. And that voice, the only thing you can do is go into that.

If you go into that voice and listen to it and start to get awareness, write down what it's saying. saying, write down what you're feeling. What is alcohol costing you? You know, how is it holding you back? How do you feel when you're hung over? How do you feel on Monday? How do you feel on Tuesday? How much of the week does it take for you to get back to feeling 100%? What percentage of you is showing up on Monday at work? What's that cost to you? Like, if you're showing up at 50% on Monday, then you're a business owner and you're, and it's still 70% on Tuesday and 80% on, Wednesday, what is the cost of that? What is the missed earning, the lost opportunity? And I think

exploring that voice more is the only thing we can do to prevent rock bottom. And then what happens is people come, they have a conversation with us, and then their self-sabotage kicks in, and they're like, oh, I don't want to spend money on this, or I'm not going to invest in that, or it's too much or anything like this, and they go away. And then we hear from them six months later, and their wife has left them, or they've had the DUI, or they've had the DUI, or they've had the rock bottom moment. And so don't wait for a rock bottom moment. Did you have to quit work? I mean, ultimately you did leave your job, but did you have to quit work for you to feel like I need to be out of that environment to have control? No. So you were able to stop and still be in that

position. I was told me, you asked me that question about my boss and he said, you're committing commercial suicide if you stop drinking. And basically you're not going to have any business if you go down that route. No, you won't. You will not have a business. And I built up a very large successful business, the world's largest oil brokerage. They didn't want this to suddenly go down the toilet. And so it took me a long time to pluck up the courage to take the break. And when I did, everything improved. Over the first year of me changing my relationship with alcohol,

I'd already built it to a market-leading business. And we grew the business by another 50%. We reduced our cost by 30%. Who doesn't want those metrics? I mean, that's transformational for a business. And that was because I was the only broker in the market who wasn't pissed on, and suicidally depressed on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.

You know, I was sharp every single day. And then I realized, well, hang on a minute. I know that if I go with this client or that client, they will not do business with me if I don't drink. You might chuckle at that. Some people might be listening and going, oh, that's ridiculous. But that's a fact. I bet you there are people listening to this right now going,

I cannot not drink with my boss. one of the highest peer pressure demographics is women 35 to 50 in London by their bosses. So there's a huge element of this peer pressure. So I lost track. Well, my question for you on behalf of the audience that's listening is, how did you manage it? Did you not work with those particular clients that wanted you to drink? Or did you have other tactics? So I just had to change up how I was entertaining.

And I figured this out pretty quick. So in the beginning, I was like, hey, let's do an event. So I put on a cycling trip. And then I realized that for three months prior, everyone who's coming on the cycling trip was constantly talking about the cycling trip, was training together, was working out. Then I created these spin and stakes.

So what we would do is we would go for a spin class and then we'd have a stake afterwards. And, you know, I might take 10 guys there. We'd release all that dopamine. times out of ten people either didn't drink or they just had a glass when they had it because alcohol wasn't the centerpiece anymore right and so you know i started to build better relationships with people i remember cycling up hills in mioka with a bunch of bunch of guys and building having real conversation about their families and about life and about what they're doing rather than those

sort of superficial conversations that are often often had after lots and lots of drinks in a in a restaurant somewhere. So all of those things actually improve my business. And I think that's my encouragement to people. I was just coaching a lovely lady who is struggling this right now. She's in Dubai. She's at a convention. She's there with partners. She's like, I know they're going to expect me to drink and all of those things. And I'm like, well, when you've got the expectation that you need to drink, you've got two choices. One is stealth drink. We actually created a program to help people's stealth drink. Stealth drinking is basically not letting anybody know you're not drinking alcohol. So you order the alcohol free pint in a pint glass. If somebody gets you an alcohol pint,

you go to the toilet and pour it away. You order the gin and tonic without the gin. You don't let anybody know. That's one way. Crazy that that has to exist. And the other way, which is something I adopted, and that is to say, I am not for one millisecond going to adopt the perception of society that when you stop drinking you become boring and so I'm going to be even more outrageous

even more wild I'm going to shout shots earlier I'm going to get everybody absolutely plastered so I adopted that model probably for the first year I went to multiple stagstice but not you the first stagdo I went to I took two bottles of Yeagermeister

onto the plane and I got everyone absolutely carted. Like this f*** guy, he's not drinking, but he's trying to get all of us to drink? 6.30 in the morning at Europe's largest tech house, I'm there going absolutely crazy loving, no alcohol, no drugs, and they're all just ruined, absolutely ruined. Legendary status, because I'm outlasting everyone. Then I'm herding them all and getting them all home and they're like, oh, thank God

you're here. Boring job. But I didn't want for one second to fit into that mold of, oh, you're boring. Now, that's not for everyone. I'm heavily extroverted. Lots of people discover that they're using alcohol because they're introverted. They use alcohol because they struggle in social situations and they're introverted. Well, introverts don't want to do the socializing.

They've had enough after an hour and a half. Being with groups of people depletes their energy. So go home. Why are you there? People are learning repeating themselves four times over saying the same thing again and again, and they wouldn't even remember you've gone. So I think there's lots of ways of adapting. Those are great. I really appreciate that because there is, there's the practical aspect that people are in a lot of different situations, you know, and they'll get advice well-meaning sometimes where somebody will just say, you just have to quit your job. You just can't be in that industry.

Yeah. You can't be somebody who's managing financial assets and entertaining high-profile clients because it's just not doable that way. So I love all the different options that are there because it's real. It's the reality of the experience of having thousands of people go through a program. When you have thousands of people go through a program, you see what works and what doesn't work. Totally. And people give you feedback on how to make things better and what are possible solutions. And the biggest one here is for everyone out there.

99% of what you fear is and you will figure it out oh they'll fire me they will not fire you your friends are not going to leave you your life is not going to end you're you're not going to become boring right you're you're not suddenly going to get detracted from society

fear false evidence appearing real and so many people are fearful of changing their relationship with alcohol and 99% of that stuff in your brain just doesn't exist. And you figure it out. You start going to events and not drinking. And you're like, well, that was actually way easier than I thought. And I feel great the next day.

So that's why it's worth giving it a shot. You know, when I was listening to as we wind down over here, when I was listening to your conversation that you're a really great episode that you had with Rich Roll. If people haven't heard that, we'll link to the show notes. Not as good as this episode. I feel like you guys have a little bit of a rapport. You know, I'm trying my hardest to make it as good. but it was a great.

It was a great episode. One of the things early on in the episode, I feel like there was this period of time where obviously people who don't know Rich's background, he struggled with being an alcoholic is how he would set it back in the day. And he ended up going through the 12-step program. And that was a big part of his thing. He still recommends it. And he had heard you sort of early on.

I think it was a little bit of a surprise or maybe he didn't know the full story of how your honest relationship with alcohol, which is you've taken, periods of time, an entire year away from it. And now you're in this place where we shared earlier, kind of like me, which is, you know, you're not drinking is the base. And if you want to drink something, great, you'll have it. And then your life returns back to normal, which is mostly a life of not drinking. And it led to this discussion of, you know, well, if you know, if you know it's bad for you and you've gone this period of time of not having it, you know, why don't you just not drink It was just a genuine question that was being asked. And we kind of touched on it previously.

And I feel like one of the reasons that I was so excited to do this episode with you today is that people have asked me that question sometimes. And I never had an issue with drinking. I think I've actually only been ever drunk in my life one or two times. I've never, outside of that, I've never been drunk. I've drank, you know, a bunch in my life. I didn't drink growing up. And a big part of that, I give credit to my parents, my, my dad, dad and my mom, you know, kind of sat me down around that age where people start talking about alcohol. And they said, listen, this is why we don't drink. And obviously I'd seen them and we'd be at family events. So this is why we don't drink, you know, largely. My mom would have maybe

once a year at an Indian wedding that we would go to a half a glass of wine. She wouldn't even finish it. We're not telling you what to do. But this is why we don't drink. And I grew up with that sort of, you know, exposure. And they also, unlike a lot of my friends who had Indian parents, They didn't say, like, we never expect you to drink until you're 21. They're like, you're probably going to end up drinking at some point in time. Yeah, right? My friends whose parents were like so strict on them, they got to college when they were whatever and went crazy.

Of course they did. Went crazy. So I give credit to my parents. I also had a girlfriend in high school who just also was not drinking. She was really into being into her particular religion. She was Christian. And that was a big. driver of why she didn't drink and we just kind of would spend time together and it never became

part of my life in that way. Anyways, I had a little bit of period of time where I moved to New York where I got into wine. I had a friend. She had a restaurant. It was called Pure Food and Wine. And it was kind of cool. It was like cool to try different things and it was a healthy restaurant and it was a social thing, as many things are. Then I got to LA and then it kind of just went away naturally on its own. And I would go out and I would tell people, oh, I'm not drinking right now. And it would get into this discussion, often from people who are extremely sober and that's part of their identity, where they would say, oh, so you're sober. I said, I'm not sober. I just don't drink regularly. I might choose to have a drink maybe next week or this week or that. And I always felt that I had to be sort of in

one camp or another. You're either socially drinking or you are completely sober. And when I heard your message and you talking out there, I felt so excited to share with my community because I feel a lot of people are in the same camp as you are and the same camp as I am. They don't have a quote unquote problem. Correct. They could develop a problem. It may be causing problems. It may be causing problems.

And there's a lot of people that are in, you know, wellness forward that are listening in this podcast who also are asking themselves, should I just completely get rid of drinking? And maybe even feel bad the times they do drink, like they have to repent afterwards. Right. And if you are living a life where it truly genuinely is something that is not a regular part of your life, I think it's okay to tell people like, okay, great. And if you've never done a challenge where you have not gone off of alcohol ever before for 28 days or a year, please go do that because you actually don't know until you do those things. So I just wanted to go on a rant just saying why it's so important for me to have you on the podcast today. Thank you. And

my sort of perspective of where I fit in this world. Thank you. And thank you for having me on. And just following on from that, what you said really important, you know, in this whole launching one year no beer, helping people take a break from alcohol, we were discovering that people would say, you know, it took me two years to sign up to your program. And I was like, what, two years of watching our Facebook ads before they signed up? Why? And they were like, well, just don't want to stop drinking. Don't want to stop drinking. And then we sent out this survey, which now over 40,000 people have taken... I don't want to stop drinking forever, is what they mean.

Yeah, I don't want to stop drinking is how they say it. Okay. And so then we asked them, you know, people, what would you like your relationship with alcohol to look like? 6% said they wanted to stop drinking, right? So 30% said they were fine where they are, and the rest would like a better relationship with alcohol. Various answers of, I'd like to be able to drink less,

I'd like to be able to control it. So this kind of load is on, wow, if we focus on control, then we can help people way earlier and we can help a very much larger proportion of society for people who are looking to reduce or control their drinking. And so this was our complete development and focus as we go forward now. It's like helping people to drink a bit less, helping people to have better control over alcohol. And if you start on that journey, rather than the massive great big goal of, of, okay, I'm going to be sober or I'm going to stop drinking, we can help people much, much, much earlier.

That's fantastic. Yeah. Roy, this has been great. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast, sharing your story. And most importantly, creating this incredible community that gives people an option for a different way to exist. You know, you said it in the beginning. If you're regularly consuming alcohol, it's something that's holding you back in life.

But there has to be a different vision if people don't want to live that way. And that's a vision of what you created. How can our audience go and follow you? And then ultimately, if they want to sign up for one of these challenges, where do they end up going? So, well, you can follow. I find me on most socials, pretty around on Instagram. Our fairbearance, I usually am or Rory Fairbairns. Gosh, that's difficult to spell.

So good luck with that. We'll link in the show notes. I am the only one, though. There's no other Rory Fairbairns is out there. It's a Scottish name, just in case you're wondering. Or OYMB, which is one year no beer. And if you search one year, no beer anywhere, you'll find a pletheum. out of things. We have our podcasts. We have lots of free content and blogs. We have our challenges

which help people take a break from alcohol. And then we have our more in-depth with the wearables advanced program, which is revolutionary. It's having a real impact in the world out there called Complete Control. So, and if I can support anyone anywhere on the journey, reach out. I'm always here with pom-poms on encouraging people to change our relationship with alcohol. Incredible. Well, everything you mentioned will link below. please check it out. And thank you, brother, for coming on the podcast. Thank you for having you on.

Hi, everyone, Drew here. Two quick things. Number one, thank you so much for listening to this podcast. If you haven't already, subscribe, just hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast app. And by the way, if you love this episode, it would mean the world to me. And it's the number one thing that you can do

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