Dhru Purohit Show - Why We (Mostly) Quit Alcohol And The Best Alcohol Alternatives with Antonio Neves

Episode Date: March 9, 2023

This episode is brought to you by Cozy Earth, Mitopure, and Beekeeper’s Naturals.  Today on The Dhru Purohit Podcast, Dhru sits down with Antonio Neves to talk about why more people are quitting or greatly reducing their alcohol intake. They also discuss their personal relationships with alcohol and how it fits into their social lives, the problems with alcohol alternatives, and so much more.  Antonio Neves is an entrepreneur, award-winning journalist, and world-renowned speaker known for helping people get unstuck and confidently make their next move. He is the founder of the Man Morning newsletter, a free three-minute newsletter that provides growth-minded men with thoughtful insights and powerful questions to start their day. He’s also the bestselling author of Stop Living on Autopilot and host of The Antonio Neves Show podcast. In this episode, Dhru and Antonio dive into: -Dhru and Antonio’s current relationship with alcohol (2:14) -Statistics on alcohol and its risks (8:04) -The power of community (25:12) -Where to find a community of growth-minded people (49:05) -Alcohol alternatives (1:05:25) -Walking for mental clarity and connection (1:28:32) -Principles for building a close-knit community (1:43:03) -Reconnecting with friends (1:45:00) Also mentioned in this episode: -Sign up for Try This Newsletter here -Try This: 3 Reasons to Minimize Alcohol Intake -Try This: A Little Reminder -Drs. David and Austin Perlmutter Episode For more on Antonio Neves, follow him on Instagram @theantonioneves, and through his website, https://www.theantonioneves.com. Get his book, Stop Living on Autopilot here. Cozy Earth are the most comfortable, temperature-regulating, and nontoxic sheets on the market. Right now, get 40% off your Cozy Earth sheets. Just head over to https://www.cozyearth.com and use code DHRU. Mitopure is the first and only clinically tested pure form of a natural gut metabolite called urolithin A that clears damaged mitochondria away from our cells and supports the growth of new, healthy mitochondria. Head on over to timelinenutrition.com/dhru for 10% off. Right now, Beekeeper’s Naturals is giving my community an exclusive offer. Head to beekeepersnaturals.com/dhru and enter code “DHRU25” to get 25% off your first order. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The alcohol molecule is one of 13 different things that can cross the brain blood barrier. That means that alcohol can have an inflammatory impact on the brain. And that seems to be part of the reason that a, you know, moderate consumption has some link to dementia and Alzheimer's, which are, you know, inflammatory brain diseases. On this episode of the podcast, my friend Antonio Neves is back to talk about why we quit alcohol, mostly anyway, why we seriously dislike most alcohol alternatives out there and the ones that we actually do like, and most importantly, the importance of leveling up our friendships to help us achieve our goals and dreams in life. Welcome to the Drew Proet podcast, everyone.

Each week we explore the inner workings of the brain and the body with one of the brightest minds in wellness, medicine, and mindset. This week's guest is a friend of mine, Antonio Neves. He's been on the podcast before, and I'm honored to have him back. A little bit about Antonio. He's an entrepreneur, award-winning journalist, and world-renowned speaker known for helping people get unstuck and confidently make their next move. He's the founder of the Man Morning Newsletter, a free three-minute newsletter that provides growth-minded men with thoughtful insights and powerful questions to start their day.

By the way, anybody can sign up. Sign up for it. Even if you're not a man, it'll help your husband, boyfriend, father, brother, somebody that you love in your life level up including yourself. Antonio's also a bestselling author of the book, Stop Living on Autopilot, and he's the host of the Antonio Neves show. This is a fun podcast. Antonio and I have known each other for years, so there's a lot of banter, a lot of back and forth, hope you enjoy it. And by the way, just for those who are sensitive to certain curse words that are out there, totally respect that on today's podcast. We do have a few targeted curse words

that are brought up in the most respectful way we can, but they are out there. I do choose not to bleep it because I choose not to. So if you're worried about that, just know if you have little kids listening around with you, put on the earplugs. And I hope you enjoy today's podcast. Antonio, welcome back to the podcast, brother. Yeah, man, it's good to be here with you. We've got a lot of topics we're going to jump into today. But first one I want to jump into is what's your relationship with alcohol right now? Right now. Right now this moment. Are you drinking some? Is it in your glass? You know, it's interesting. As you know, yeah, I'm drinking. This is straight up all gin right here. Wouldn't that be dangerous? Could you imagine? It's interesting. We were talking before we hit

record. I travel a lot across the country as a speaker and a speaker to organization is big and small. And a big part of my work is you go out to client dinners with your clients. And so I've been gone for over seven days. And so when you say, what is your relationship with alcohol right now is that I've had an alcoholic beverage probably for the past six days because I'm on the road. I'm out with clients, they want to take you out, they want to entertain. And it's interesting because even though I am a grown man, no one can force me to do anything I do not want to do, there is a certain amount of pressure that I feel self-imposed when I'm out and about entertaining or being entertained to sort of join the crowd and have that beverage. Now let's be clear. I said I had like,

I drank six days in a row. Now, am I getting hammered? Absolutely not. But you having that drink probably to maybe put myself a little bit at ease for the guy that's on stage that people may assume isn't an extrovert. People really don't know that this dude is an introvert. So you kind of do that to set the to chill a little bit. But also, I'm not sure if you've experienced this, but also when you choose not to drink, if you're at a table of eight people and then you're the one person that orders that club soda and lime, people are like, come on, have a drink. Just have a quick one. Let's go get another one. So it's this weird balance of the pressure you feel when you're out with folks, and balancing that with what you truly want to do inside. So right now, I'm on a

streak. And the plan is to end that streak tonight now that I'm back home. Now I won't be being entertained or entertaining anyone. And how do you feel in your body? Like, let's say you get on those streaks, right? You have to be out. You feel like you're entertaining clients, especially it's a weird relationship when somebody also is paying you, right? These are people that are paying you to come speak somewhere. And they're like, oh, let's grab dinner afterwards and like they're drinking. And again, it's not New York, it's not L.A., it's not San Francisco. It's not places that might be leaning more into like the latest health trends, which right now the big health trend, which is actually really good,

is a lot of people peeling back from alcohol consumption. So there's a little bit of that, some of that pressure, which is, you know, people feel and is real. But how do you feel? What do you notice in your body when you're on that street? Like, are you not sleeping as well or anything? And be real. Like, you may feel like I don't notice much at all.

Yeah. The good news is that I feel fine based on the amount of alcohol that I consume. I know when to stop. So I'm not having three to five drinks. I may have one or I may have two. So I know when to stop. Also, in the midst of that, I'm consuming lots of water. You know, I will nurse that drink over the course of a good amount of time.

So I'm not just throwing them back left and right. I don't know what age it was. And by the way, let me rewind and say, I'm in my 40s now. So what it takes me to recover from, say, three glasses of wine now versus 10 years ago are two different things. And that sleep can be a little bit rough. It's not as enjoyable. I don't feel as rested when I awake. But also something interesting happens,

and I'm not sure what age it was when it happens, but you'll be out and about you having a good time with friends or with clients or something like that. Then they get ready to order another round, and that drink shows up. And you've been around long enough that you look at that drink and you're like, oh, this is the drink.

This is the one that changes everything. If I consume this, I'm probably going to have a couple more or I'm not going to feel good tomorrow. So I know at this stage of life what that drink is, but also I'm a professional as well. These folks are paying me handsomely, and I have to deliver, like I was on stages in front of 6,000 people.

So one thing I'm unwilling to do, even in those types of settings, is to compromise my professionalism. I still have to get up super early and deliver a professional job. So the good news was I wasn't feeling like beat up and hung over because I didn't consume. that much. Yeah, totally. You know, we wrote a newsletter recently on the topic of alcohol and just like gathering together a lot of the studies and the different things that are there. And it's always

a good reminder because every year, some new study comes out there about how really there's no healthy level of alcohol consumption, right? There's no like healthy level. Now, the flip side of that is that people talk about it and Dan Butner in our sort of world of wellness. He's the guy that wrote the book about the blue zones. It studies the blue zones. He and even just recently, Dr. William Lee was on this podcast. He was another gentleman that also looks at a lot of blue zones in his research. They were both pointing to the fact that like, you know, these longest living societies, right?

They have one in Italy, in Sardinia, Japan, Costa Rica, you know, everyone except for the one in America, which is the Loma Linda community, they all consume some small amount of alcohol. pretty regularly that's there. But then the second layer that comes into it is that is it the alcohol that's contributing to that or is it all other fucking like 10 other things that they're doing? They have strong community. They eat well. They have low stress lifestyles. They have they don't work out per se, but they have regular movement in their life. Right. They have like regular movement and they're built into their life to like go walk to the supermarket, you know, to pick up their food for the day, whatever it might be. So I think that the zooming all out, why am I

this up. The wellness community, I think, is coming to a little bit of a reckoning, and people are coming to a reckoning, even if they're not in the wellness community, that whoever you are in general, probably significantly cutting back your alcohol is going to leave you better off, right? And I'll just read a couple of these stats that we pulled up on our newsletter. I think I have it on my end here, Tessa, but if you want to bring it up too, it's on my website, drewpro.com. And if you click on articles. It's an article called three reasons to minimize your alcohol intake. And I'm just going to read off of the little meme that we put at the top. So a few things that I learned about alcohol and drinking that blew my mind when I was putting together this newsletter. Number one, a study published

in the Journal of Jurontology reported that 57% increase in the risk of dementia in moderate to heavy drinkers and a five-year early onset of a diagnosis of dementia. Crazy. Number two, moderate to heavy alcohol consumption shrinks our brains, specifically the region of our brain responsible for memory and learning. Number three, heavy drinkers tend to have reduced blood flow to the brain, a future predictor of Alzheimer's disease. Wild. And last one, this one, you know, obviously has to be taken into context of the global population, which is now $8 billion. So even though it sounds like a lot, in the context of a billion, globally, 750,000 cancer cases were attributed to alcohol consumption by 2020. And while heavy drinking accounted for most of it, light to moderate drinking

accounted for at least about 100,000 cases. So when you zoom out, and nobody's done this better than Andrew Heerman, I think his podcast on alcohol that he did last year was the second most listened to podcast of all podcasts that came out last year. And you now start to realize like, okay, is this worth it? and are there other alternatives in my life that I can get the end thing that I was hoping that alcohol would bring me in the first place. Well, even before we talked about that, was there something else mentioned in that same newsletter? I can't, I hope I'm pronouncing his name correctly.

Is it Dr. Veney Prasad? He said something interesting in that as well that seemed to, sometimes you can always find a study, right, to contradict another study? Yeah, you want to read it out? Keep on scrolling down, Tess. If you go down, it says a little perspective on alcohol from, from Dr. Veney Prasad. Yeah, I found this fascinating when I first saw it when he, when he shared it on Twitter. He says, Dr. Prasad explains why the research on alcohol can only be taken at face value.

He argues that the endpoints and most studies don't matter in that how long a person lives, how well they live, their own happiness and the happiness of the people in their lives are the only outcomes that should be measured. We can go deeper into that, but I found that really fascinating. And I was glad that he shared that as well. My life is best. better 100% when I'm not drinking, meaning how I feel physically, et cetera. And I got to say I'm having a good time with friends if we're throwing back a tequila or something like that, that 100% is enjoyable. But Drew, you brought up something that is personal for me.

And you mentioned the D word, dementia. And my father, who now at 85 years old, is in a long-term care facility with dementia. Can no longer talk, can no longer walk. can no longer get up, can no longer bathe himself, go to the bathroom on his own, all these things, right? And for me, A, yeah, that breaks my heart as a son. But second, one thing I can tell is that my father, for a great period of his life, was an extremely heavy drinker. Like, what does that look like? Like, heavy means what? Heavy means throwing back quite a few pretty much every single day after getting off of work.

from whether we beer for wine for a certain period but alcohol was pretty much a part of his life he pretty much drank every single day and good amounts of alcohol i mean they get a strong constitution from so many years of drinking uh he hadn't it was interesting always to watch him drink because he could drink so much but it didn't seem to affect him like what he would drink you couldn't keep up with with my dad um i'm not saying that to be to shame him at all because he's also a guy that got up and went to work every single day. He worked as many double shifts as he could. Like, this was a strong, hardworking guy that alcohol didn't have that effect where you think of the person who can't go to work and their life is horrible, et cetera. And I do wonder,

you know, what effect that alcohol consumption for him that he had over the years, what that did? And did that indeed lead to his dementia or not? And at some point when he was realizing his memory was starting to go, when things, when he started to get in a couple of car accidents, when certain things were happening, then he stopped drinking after getting the brain scans and talking to doctors. And maybe by then it was a little bit too late. So for me, when I see something like that firsthand, you think about the studies that lead to dementia and Alzheimer's, you have to ask yourself, is it worth it? And also what's interesting too, man, you know, is the negotiations we have with ourselves. Like we have, what is moderate, right?

Of course, you can look at these studies and I'll tell you what moderate is. When do you have a problem? When don't you have a problem? What is acceptable? Again, we can be really good. And I've done this myself, negotiate with ourselves that what we're doing is okay and it's not a bad thing. But the dementia thing, that's a red blinking light for me because seeing a man who was so proud, so hardworking now rendered just in a bed. It's heartbreaking.

And if alcohol contributed to that, I don't want that to be my outcome by no means. Yeah. You know, and I'm thinking about your dad. We obviously talk about a lot in our men group, man morning. We'll talk about that in a second. And the relationship that we have with alcohol there and how we kind of, you know, set up the group. And you've been writing a lot about that. I think people find that fascinating because we're always talking about what are the alternatives?

What are the social clubs, groups, connections, way of connecting that don't revolve around alcohol. But going back to what you were saying, Rhonda Patrick, recently had a series of interviews that they were kind of talking about this a little bit, but even jumping back a little bit, alcohol is one of, the alcohol molecule is one of 13 different things that can cross the brain blood barrier. So there's a, there's a barrier that is there there between our brain and our body. And our brain does not let everything in there. But for whatever reason, alcohol can cross through that. That means that alcohol can have an inflammatory impact on the brain. And that seems to be part of the reason that a, you know, moderate consumption,

you know, has some link to dementia and Alzheimer's, which are, you know, inflammatory brain diseases that are there amongst other stuff. You know, that's just, that's talking super high level on it. We've had a lot of experts like Dr. Dale Bredesen and Dr. David Perlmutter, who broken down even further. And I think that the question is that's there, is that it's also, you're talking about negotiating with ourselves. When everybody around us is drinking on a regular basis, especially for a lot of young professionals, you know, especially if you've ever lived in New York City, the entire

culture is really based around drinking. Even if you're only drinking a couple times a week or, you know, one time a week, that's still in relationship to everybody around you. So you still feel like you're doing better. than what everybody else is doing. But you also brought up a really good point too, which is that there can be these social aspects. There can be these other aspects where there are people that are out there,

and I don't want to make it pretend. Like I wrote about this in my article. I don't want to pretend that, like, I never drink. Like, I do. And actually, I'm one of those people that can sit down. And if I see a glass of wine that I see a wine from a region that I have never tried before and I'm really curious. Maybe somebody talked about it.

I will order it. This pisses my wife off. Right? We went to a place in Ohio recently for a special occasion, really beautiful restaurant. I saw a wine on the list. And this has been after like probably three months of not having any alcohol, probably two and a half months. I saw something on the menu. I was like, wow, I'm really curious about that. I'm interesting. I'm interested about the taste. So I ordered that wine. I got it. I tasted it. I was like, okay, cool. I get the point. And I didn't touch it for the rest of the meal. I get the point. I didn't touch it for the rest of the meal. My wife was like, How are you going to, like, order that and, like, not drink it? That's like, you know, I ordered it by the glass too. So it was like $18, right? She's like, you're not going to drink that. It's wasteful.

I'm like, but I actually don't want it. I just wanted to like get the point. Now, I completely recognize for a lot of people that's not doable. Yeah. Right. There's a lot of people that are out there going to get it. And that's too much temptation. And they're going to drink the whole thing.

And I'm totally okay with that. But going back to your point because I've jumped around a little bit, I'm actually okay with, you know, I'm not on a crusoe. say it against alcohol. I've had a weird relationship. Like, I never really drank growing up. I didn't even get into, like, wine or anything else until I was about, like, in my early 20s, like probably 24, there's a restaurant in New York, and I was friends with the owner, Pure Food and Wine. And I kind of was into health, and I was into the whole plant-based movement and raw food movement at the time. And I was curious about, like, trying different wines. So we would go there and we'd go, like,

you know, a couple times a month, and I'd try different wines. And it was fun. And it was the first time my life also too that I had gotten buzz. I had never gotten buzzed like growing up in high school or, you know, even in college I wasn't drinking. So it was an interesting experience and kind of like went through a little bit of the rites of passage as a young adult. Then later on in life as I got into wellness, okay, when I don't drink, I sleep better. When I don't drink, I am more mentally sharp. When I don't drink, I can show up way stronger in the gym and lift more and be more focused. Awesome. So now my default is no alcohol. And then if there is a special occasion, wedding, some celebration, a man morning dinner, great.

I might have a little something. But even then, I don't even finish the glass. That's my current sort of state of where I'm at. Yeah, I don't think anyone has ever said, like, man, I wish I drank more last night. Like I've never said, I wish I drank more last night. Like you, I was an athlete, you know, coming up in high school. That's how I paid for a portion of my college education. In college, I judged people.

who drank in college. You know, people were having the frat parties, drinking a lot, and I did not drink at all pretty much until my senior year of college. But I'll tell you, there's an interesting shift that happened. I went from being pretty straight-edge,

not drinking at all in college because I was an athlete and I wanted to compete. But then when I did have the drinks in college, it typically was on Thursday night. That was the big night that we'd go out and go wild in Kalamazoo, Michigan, at Western Michigan University.

But we drank because it was Thursday night, and that's the night that you go out. But you didn't drink outside of that. you know, I think something interesting happens to your point when you're celebrating, you're going to celebrate a special occasion. Something interesting happens when you're using alcohol for a special occasion for your Thursday night with your friends. But then all of a sudden, I don't know if it's through marketing, if it's through life,

through whatever, then all of a sudden it shifts. It stops being that thing you're using for special occasions. It stops being the thing you do on Thursday nights with your buddies. And then all of a sudden it gets until you finish your long day at work. You're exhausted. What do you do? You open up that bottle of wine. a glass or two or you have that scotch or you have that truly whatever people are drinking nowadays

and it becomes that kind of the wind down the day kind of thing which so many people do to separate themselves from you know from work or whatever happened in that day and i noticed that for myself as well especially after my wife and i had kids i was definitely feeling a higher level of stress and responsibility that ever had before in my life you hear that a lot by the way right You hear a lot of people. Kids come. Wine starts flowing. You see the T-shirts.

Mama needs, Mama needs wine. It's Mama's juice, right? Like her dads as well. It became part of my evening routine to wind down to distract myself from whatever I was feeling. But, you know, I think back at that time, I frankly, I wish I would rather would have called a friend and had a cup of tea to talk about what I was feeling, to talk about the challenges, the ebbs and flows, the goods and bad.

instead of kind of pushing them away because I think what I was doing was pushing away certain emotions. I don't think I know. I was pushing away certain emotions that I was feeling. And I don't know about you, but if I'm feeling a bit of anxiety, if I'm feeling a good amount of stress, if I'm feeling some type of worry, all it takes is a glass of alcohol for me for that, for that to go away. And then I don't have to address it. But it's still there. You know, we've talked on this podcast before about what so many people are emotional. We have this backlog of emotions, anger, sadness, fear, joy that we don't let out. And I'm a firm believer that a lot of times alcohol can can block all of those things.

And of course, I found that my mental health isn't the best if I'm drinking on a regular basis. It actually ends up heightening that anxiety. It can heighten stress, depression, etc. You wrote a little bit about this in their man morning newsletter. Yeah. Right? I think there was small vices, big consequences. consequences. I'd love to read it actually a little bit. Tessa, if we have that, I'd love to pull

it up for the folks that are there. We'll link to it in the show notes too. But if you're watching the video on YouTube, we got a new setup over here. Shout out to Tessa and Patrick who helped get it together. But we have a little bit of what we're pulling up here. So give a little background. This is a newsletter. It's called Man Morning. Tell us more about it. Man Morning was founded based on our community here in Los Angeles, which now there are man morning chapters across the United States where we get together on a weekly basis to celebrate one another to talk about life, struggles, challenges. A men's support group.

A men support group. And now what we have is a weekly newsletter called Man Morning, where we provide as much of that as possible in your inbox every single week. And soon there's going to be opportunities for men to connect. Funny enough, as great as this newsletter is for men, I got to give a shout out to all the women that subscribe to this as well. I've been so surprised how many women subscribe to this and they forward this to their brothers, to their spouses, et cetera.

So manmorning.com, check it off. You're trying to level up and build your community. Yeah, and you know, we've been talking about alcohol. And just as people are like learning about this for the first time, it's not a support group around alcohol. It's not like an AA type thing. Not at all. It is an alcohol-free, you know, gathering.

And we'll chat more about that maybe after you listen to this. But really this is for people who are growth-minded in life. Yeah. Specifically men. We're going through a real crisis of men right now. Men don't have a lot of positive mentors that are out there. that men are less likely to reach out and ask for help. You know, men are more likely to feel lonely.

And on these national surveys that we see and these follow-ups, they're more likely not to have a best friend compared to, you know, women. And like, we're at a crisis point and something needs to be done. And man mourning is kind of this template, this open source template where somebody could start a man morning chapter, use the framework, and get high, you know, high value men, growth-minded men together on a regular basis who can help each other level up in life. Absolutely. And you mentioned something, some other data that's important that we've talked a lot about is it's like one in seven men say they don't have a friend, like a close friend in their

life. So I think about the challenges I've gone through, just imagining if I have no one that I can reach out to to share the challenges, the joys, the wins, all those types of things. And I feel so fortunate that we have this community. One thing every single week in the man morning newsletters, We start with some questions that people can reflect on, things that a lot of your friends don't ask you over that beer or over that glass of wine. Again, now that those are bad conversations that take place, but it's really intentional for those folks that want to grow and really get past and beyond status quo and living on autopilot. So I did a survey of the man morning listeners and asked them like what type of content were they like moving forward. And they talked about how to build community, different things you've talked about on here. But one thing they talked about as well is vices, kind of overcoming some of these things.

So I wrote a post that got a lot of responses. And should we share some of this right here? Yeah, read it. I think read the whole thing out. Yeah, let me read this. I'm going to read it right here. Here we go. And the name of this was small vices, big consequences.

Addiction is a powerful force that can turn a small vice into a full-blown problem that can crush your dreams. It can be easy to fall into the trap of seeking out comfort. or pleasure to decrease stress, numb ourselves, or to avoid feeling what needs to be felt. This could look like having a few drinks after work, engaging in recreational drug use, or turning to pornography as a release. Some of these behaviors have been normal by societal standards. However, what starts out as an innocent action for some can turn into a full-blown addiction that could turn your life upside down.

It's important to be honest with ourselves about how these habits can never. negatively impact our lives, even if on the surface things are fine. It's only then that we can face the vices head on before they become larger problems. And this is big right here. Think about any behavior you do that negatively impacts your life, the ones that go against who you are as a man at the core. Then ask yourself these questions. Is having one more drink going to take priority over playing a game with my kids. Will masturbating to pornography destroy intimacy with my life? Will recreational drug use sabotage my career goals? What are the stakes in your life? What could you lose? What could you lose? If you have a small vice that isn't so small anymore or one that has

already spiraled out of control, it's time to seek out help and lean on your allies. Like a story we told before about Damon West, there is a path forward. Don't let a small vice kill a big dream. Then we go on to share some information if folks happen to need some help. Yeah, you know, there's a quote that you shared inside of there from somebody who's been on a podcast before, Gabor Matte. And the quote that he shared many times before on his work is the question is not why the addiction, or he'll sometimes say, do not, don't ask why someone has the addiction, including yourself, right? Ask why is there pain?

Now, when it comes to alcohol, since we're on that subject, obviously there's a whole spectrum. There are people that are genuinely have a deep addiction, but there's a lot of like societal normalizing of light level addiction to alcohol. People who feel genuinely that they can't actually have a good time or unwind unless they have alcohol. And to the degree that they often feel upset

if somebody else is not going to drink. You know, one of the ways that I've handled that, you know, I don't feel that pressure, probably because I got a lot of that pressure growing up. And I was to tell people like, I actually, I just don't drink, right? And I never got into it. But I had nothing against it. I didn't have a problem. I just didn't get the point.

I took sips of alcohol and other stuff. Maybe early on I just felt like, okay, I don't really get it. And maybe wanting to maintain control was a big sort of focus in my life. But even today, if I know that there might be. might be somebody and it's really interesting you know we don't have kids my wife and i yasman we don't have kids yet but i have sometimes seen this with other parents where it's like it's their first night out in a long time they want to get together i'll sometimes shoot a preemptive text i'll say hey you know such and such i'm excited to catch up hey just by the way you know yazma and

i aren't drinking at the moment but like no pressure like you guys do what you want to do right but have you ever been to dinner sometimes with somebody and you're like hey i'm not drinking now and other person's like, you're not drinking? Like, I'm drinking tonight. Like, come on. Like, how am I going to have fun if you don't have fun? It's so real. I mean, I think the best word we can use, you can be bullied in many ways.

In my youth, there were 100% times when I drank when I didn't want to drink because I felt a little bit bullied. And stereotypically, guys, I've been called many things by my guy buddies. Don't be a bitch. Don't be a pussy. Don't be this. 100% when I said I wasn't drinking that night, then you kind of acquiesced and you decided to have that drink.

And that's unfortunate. I wasn't as strong as I wanted to be in those moments. Well, you know, it's funny, I got to bring this up. Please. How, when you go out to drink and say you have that one drink, but then there's that person or that couple that has like six drinks, or they order that bottle of wine that you don't consume. Is it just me?

Or does it piss you off when you got to pay? When you cut the, when the bill comes and you divide it by the number of people at the table, and you're like, I only had one drink, you had four drinks. And I got to pay for your drinks. Man, I've been doing that since high school. I was never the one that was drinking. And so I'm always used to splitting the bill even though I don't drink. I'm all good with it.

Yeah, but I really appreciate you and your wife. I've got that message from me. Like, hey, we're not drinking, but if you want to, hey, it's cool. So it's not awkward. But that's what cool again about man morning. In the mornings, we know we're having coffee, we're having tea. Something else that's really cool is, you know, on an annual basis, we get our group together for a man morning weekend. We'll go somewhere.

We'll do something. And as we've been planning our next one, one of the best things that I read in the email is that, hey, well, you know, of course we're going to schedule our meals and beverages and all those kind of things. But, you know, we're not focusing on alcohol. If there is something that you want to drink, feel free to bring it. Great. But I love that the intention wasn't for that to be the main thing because a lot of things like weekends like these get-togethers with guys, alcohol is such a focal point of these things. And you see the cliche stories of dudes struggling the next morning to make the golf reservation or do this or that. And I love that. That's

not even a challenge for us. But I also love, like, when I go out to dinner with our group of friends, whether it's a large group or just a small, intimate group, it feels good to know that not everyone is drinking because then I'm like, I don't need to drink, I don't feel this pressure to do so.

And I think it's rare to find those communities. But it's also, I think we got to, folks got to encourage folks to have that courage to say, I'm not drinking. Yeah, we're normalizing not drinking. Right. And that doesn't mean that you know, everybody's approved. It doesn't mean this. It's like everybody gets to decide what the

situation is. And it's only like alcohol, right? It's for some reason there's the, it's okay to pressure people to have alcohol. But it's not like you have to say, hey, not doing crack today. Don't, you know, hey, listen, I'm not shooting. I'm not doing heroin right now, right? We don't, we don't have to say that about crack and about heroin, but alcohol, I don't know if it's a lobby because we see so much of it on television. It's just baked into our culture. Baked into our culture. I was talking to someone. I wonder how much we even influenced. Someone, I was talking to someone on my business trip recently,

and they were saying something to the tune of. They're like, you know, I never started drinking bourbon or got into bourbon and Manhattans and old fashions until I started watching Mad Men. So you even wonder how much you think about cosmopolitans going way back to the sex and the city episodes, how much were influenced by the things that we watch. I do, you mention your wife,

so I got to mention my wife and shout out to her. I think one of the best influences that I have in my life, of course, is my wife. But I love that my wife doesn't drink. She chooses not to drink because guess what? We're not like opening up that bottle of wine together and sharing it at home or it's not part of when we go out to dinner. Like it's a win that for me that she doesn't drink. You know, I'll go back to Man Morning. Just give a little bit more context.

Some people have heard our episodes on this. Some people haven't. So probably about like seven years ago, there's a group of us guys. Some had just moved recently in L.A. but everybody was kind of like in a life transformation stage, right? Like some people I just moved, some people are just about to have kids. And in general, a lot of us who are successful entrepreneurs, writers, you know, all different things, coaches, we were looking for more community because we didn't grow up in L.A.

So we didn't have our, like, close group of friends. So what started off, and you were involved since the beginning, we started off as like a random sort of, hey, let's get together and hike. L.A. is a big hiking culture. you know, we go hiking in the morning. It's generally good weather year around. And what started off is like just a random group of hikes turned into like, hey, let's do a weekly hike.

And that weekly hike a few times fell on Thursday. And I think one of the dudes in the group, I think it was Nerov. Maybe you remember differently. Shout out to our buddy Nirov was like, hey, like we should make this a thing. Like we're guys who are meeting on Thursday and we're going like hiking in the morning. We should call this like man morning Thursday. That literally was like how it got started. And then through that, we actually realized the power of what happens when growth-minded individuals,

men or women, in this particular case, it was a group of guys, get together first thing in the morning, and they talk about what are they celebrating in life and what are they navigating, right? What's tough that you haven't had a chance to talk about? Not everybody has a therapist that they reach out to on a weekly basis and is talking about the challenging things that they're going through in their business, their relationship, or being a father for the first time. So to have an outlet with other people are listening to you was, huge. Other crazy thing we realized is that as we continued, and it wasn't 52 weeks out of the year,

but it was like regularly 30 weeks, 35 weeks out of the year. And then we would go on travels together and other stuff. We saw something magical happened. When one person made progress in one area of their life, often they pulled the rest of the group there. Yes. Somebody sees you. You're now an author, best-selling author. Now other people feel more excited and that feels like a possibility for them. Proximity is one of the biggest things that opens up our dreams. Somebody gets a promotion, or in our case, most of the group as entrepreneurs, sees a massive jump in their business in a particular area. Well, when we, we haven't tracked this on a spreadsheet,

but when we have organically talked about everybody progressing in life, we see one person has a big bump in income, another person drags the rest of the group. Everybody sees now what's possible. And our environment, our community, plays a huge role on our influence. I've mentioned it before on this podcast before, but one of the longest studies that was out there on heart health, it's called the Framingham Heart Study out of Massachusetts, Framingham, Massachusetts. And they've parsed, yeah, maybe we could type it in the Framingham study. There's a few different cohorts of it.

There's a cohort one, cohort two, but I think it was over 50 years. Yeah, you can just click on one of those. People can find it inside the show notes. We'll link to it as well. if you're watching on YouTube, we can see the Framingham study, also known as the Framingham Heart Study. Well, it started here in, you can see here, the study began in 1948, 50, with the recruitment of the original Corho, which is 5,209 participants. Proximately half women, half men, between the ages of 28 and 62 years old. And as they're following this group, because they got so much data over the years, even though the study,

from the first cohort finished. And it finished, I believe, I don't know what year, but I think it was like, I think it was that first cohort was like 50 years, right? They're parsing at all the data. One of the big things that came out of there was that are, it's called the social determinants of health. Your, one of the things they looked at was weight gain,

weight gain and becoming obese and obesity. They found that your best friend has more, your close friend has more of an influence on your weight gain than even your wife, your parents, or even your kids. Wow. So when somebody, because they looked at these social networks within the population, this is pre-Facebook, just as normal life social networks, when one person in a friend group gained weight, it was a predictive indicator that the next person in that friend group that they were

closest to was also going to gain weight. That's even more of an influence in your wife. So who you hang out with, you know, we all hear that quote, like look at the people that you spend time with the most, especially your friends, the five people you become the average of them. Well, it turns out in some respects, it's literally, is literally true. That's huge. And on that note, and I want to talk specifically about, you know, friend groups here in a second. But before that, so many people I talk to or going through challenging times in their life, maybe they're stuck and they're struggling. And as a coach, I support these men and women.

And they try to figure out what can I do to turn things around. And we've talked about this before. And I think one of the key components of Mayam morning is that it's on the calendar. You know, it's an opt out versus an opt in. We've talked about this before, but you don't say, hey, who's going to be who's showing up tomorrow morning at 7 a.m. Typically, you only reach out if you're not showing up. We expect you to be there. You opt out.

You don't opt in. So I found that if people are trying to change their habits, they're trying to make things better in their life, one of the greatest predictors is looking at your calendar. Like having somewhere to be will change your life. Guess what? Knowing I'm meeting the man morning crew at 7 a.m. on Thursday, do you think I'm drinking the night before? It changes everything because I have to get up early and have to be there.

So certain behaviors I may do that evening before I'm not going to do. If you sign up, you have to meet with a trainer, you're going to a class the next morning, something like that. Those things that you schedule you put into your calendar are game changers, right? If you know that you have a disposition to have that glass of wine right when you get home at 5 o'clock or 530, maybe if those shoes, those running shoes and that gear is ready to go instead of right next to the door, that can change, right? You can change what your habits are.

So have something on your calendar. Now, going back to basically, you said, if you have a fat friend, you're going to be fat. Is that what you said basically earlier? When your friend starts to gain weight, you start to gain weight too. Because why? you're hanging out at the you're going out to eat together you're spending time together we also too we subconsciously we want to be liked by our tribe we want to be like right yeah and something else can happen too we can go so many different ways with this you got to be careful too and this you pay close

attention with your friends right because sometimes a people your growth sometimes can threaten other people this is another conversation drew but let's get into it I found that some people have actually found when they start to achieve a certain level of success or say they're getting in really great shape. They fine-tune their diet. They've cut out alcohol. They're not eating all those comfort foods that they used to. Sometimes they'll find that that person in their life, that friend you're talking about in many ways will try to sabotage them in many ways. They'll show up and they'll talk about the progress they're making, how they're eating good, they're working out regularly. But then you'll have that person that then will show up with that red velvet cake or they'll show up with

that macaroni and cheese. It's as if their success is threatening them. So they're going to try to do those things to bring you back. So you got to pay close attention to what's going on as you're making progress because sometimes your success, your progress can threaten people and they may not even know it and they can start bringing up some negative behaviors. Oh, look at this person. They think they're better than us. They're not drinking anymore. They're spending time on this. And it really, I feel like, but just even think about that. They're not drinking anymore. They think they're better than us. Like, oh, they stop smoking cigarettes. Can you believe it? Can you believe they're not smoking cigarette like only in our society with somebody we give people a hard time for doing good for making

positive life chat for making positive strides we give people a hard if someone's giving you a hard time for making great decisions you have to check that relationship and have a real honest conversation with that person and let's talk about this because these conversations don't happen enough right um first, I believe that most tough conversations last 15 minutes or less. If we're willing to have the most tough conversations last 15 minutes or less, if indeed you have that friend in your life, as we all do, that gives you a hard time for no longer drinking or eating healthy or like you're not complaining anymore. Not complaining.

Well, my suggestion, my invitation for you is maybe not in a group setting to do this, but to pull them to the side afterwards or before and say, hey look, I'm really committed to making some positive strides in my life. Some of those involved not drinking alcohol or eating a certain way or working out. You name it. I'm trying not to complain as much. I've noticed that when I'm doing these things, you kind of give me a hard time about them or you make some backhanded comments or some jokes.

I know you may be just trying to be funny, but my request is, would you be willing to support me on this? Because this is really important to me. And when you frame it like that with someone, either one, going to get defensive. Some people will get defensive, but some people will say, hey, I'm actually, I'm sorry for doing that. Guess what? Your growth kind of actually, I started feeling a little insecure about myself, so I didn't know I was doing that. I'm sorry. I 100% will support you. So if someone does that in your life, be willing to have that sometimes tough, but awkward conversation.

And it can be brought up like a question, right? Hey, you know, if I was talking to you, hey, Antonio, I, I love starting off with something called the soft starter. right it's something that the gotman institute and the gotmans are really big on it's basically taking the defensiveness off of the person because we all can get defensive when we feel like somebody's trying to correct us or tell us something so it's like hey Antonio I could totally be wrong about this but I've been feeling a little bit like you're not happy with some of the changes that I've been making some comments some other things I've been seeing I just want to check it on you like are we okay is there anything on your mind and when you do that sometimes

people say, you know what? Honestly, I didn't even realize it. But you're right. Maybe I feel like a little bit isolated because I'm not hanging out with you as much. Maybe you got a new group of friends and we used to hang out in a particular way and we're not doing it anymore. I kind of feel a little distant from you. I feel a little lonely. And now you have a bridge that you can kind of merge and have an honest conversation. You welcome them. That was an invitation. It was kind. Most times what we do is we use the one word that makes people incredibly defensive. Why? why do you keep doing that? Why when I'm making progress?

That puts people on their heels and they get defensive. I'll give you a great example of this. As I mentioned earlier, my wife doesn't drink and she has some fellow moms that she spends time with on a monthly basis similar to what we do and, you know, fellow parents of kids at the school. And they had a habit of monthly going out to get dinner. And of course, when they go get dinner, they have a good time, some drinking takes place, et cetera, nothing crazy.

But my wife doesn't drink. She did something. She said, hey, y'all, and I'm not really not much of a drinker, but I really, would love to continue to meet with y'all, but would you be willing to meet for a hike after we drop the kids off for school instead of dinner this month? And first, everyone was like, absolutely, she framed it as a question. And now it's become a thing. Yeah, they still get dinner and all that, but it's become a thing where now they do this other activity because to your point, they're willing to frame it as a question. And I'm sure a lot of people listening right now can

identify someone they need to have that conversation with. And it can be tough because that can a sibling. That can be a close friend that you've known for a really, really long time. But you've got to have those conversations if you're making those types of changes like limiting alcohol in your life. I want to bring up something because you talked about the importance of who we're surrounding ourselves with. If you want to make growth, if you want to make progress, anything in your life. And another extremely important or popular issue of Man Morning, I talked about college football. Now, whether you're a college football fan or not, you're going to appreciate this. But we talked about what the last 16 out of 17 college national football champions had in common.

And guess what? You'll probably see this on the video. But the last 16 out of 17 college football national championships, that's about 95%. They all exist, Drew, in the small region of the country. They're in a small region. of the country of Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, and Florida. This is where they are. And it's this oval that's circled. And so my thing when I wrote this was talking to people about how you have to find your own red oval, where these people exist, where they are succeeding, where they are

thriving. And you can find that pretty much in any key area of your life, whether you're looking from a career perspective, whether you're looking from a relationship perspective, finances, parenting, etc. It takes a little bit of due diligence, but these types of communities, whether they're men's groups or church groups or writers groups or parent groups, they exist. So I invite people to find their own red toastmasters. Toastmasters. What's the quote from Lewis Howells he talks about? Yeah, yeah. Everybody Lewis House says, go to where people grow. Where in life are people growing? That could even be a salsa class. Could be toastmasters. If you're not familiar, that's an organization where people go.

It's super cheap. It's like $39 for the year, $40 a year. It depends on the chapter. But they go there to learn how to become a better public speaker, right? If you want to grow and you're having a hard time finding community, ask yourself, where I live, where do people go to grow? And even if that's not necessarily the thing that you want to get better at, like a yoga class, maybe you don't want to be a yoga teacher. But chances are the people that are going there also want to better themselves. So you're going to end up meeting friends.

You're going to end up connecting with people. And you're going to have people that want to support you in this life of your own growth and your own mission. Yeah. And it makes me, as you said yoga, I was thinking like, you may be asking yourself for talking about alcohol in this episode. If someone's like, yeah, where do people go who don't want to drink in the evenings? So if you're not going to go to the pub at six or seven, you're not going to go to the lounge, there's probably a yoga class. They go to a hot yoga class. Tessa knows all about it.

They go to hot yoga classes or they go to that, some other type of class or they go to that, that sweat yoga. reading right well where are these folks because there there are different behaviors different places that you can go to find these things so people really dug this article because i think they realize that we avoid that that red oval sometimes but it's within reach might have to do some research but it's there you know it's crazy about the history of alcohol and a few people have written about this michael paulin there's been some documentaries so when we started moving into cities right like i'm even talking back to like the roman times and everything like that we started moving into cities and we were sort of sorting out the sewage system in plumbing,

right? I mean, a lot of times people would take a dump. They would pee and they would have a latrine and they would go just dump it in the nearby water. And that same water is where people are getting, they're drinking water from. And so you had in major cities throughout history, you had a lot of people dying from all sorts of different infections they would get from just the water. water not being great quality. And alcohol and having alcohol and a regular, having alcohol was

something that kind of became a more regular part of our society. Of course, there was sort of, more ancient communities that had alcohol and sort of spiritual traditions. That's why we call them spirits. Interesting. Yeah. Wow. Like spiritual traditions, sort of rights of initiation, other things like that, almost in a way that we think of plant medicine, right? But separate from that in these cities, alcohol became a way to ensure that what you were drinking was not going to kill you in the short term. Like, there are literally articles that are out there and biographies that have been written about our presidents that many estimate that our founding fathers were like literally

buzzed all the time. Not because they were trying to stay drunk, but literally because that's what society did even up until like you know 1700 1600s you know early 1800s too we even used to give alcohol to babies right and now when people talk about like oh back in the day people used to die at like 40 and they used to at like 35 and now we're living to like 70 or 80 well a big part of that besides just you know not having antibiotics and other things like that was that alcohol was there and in fact many people believe that the introduction of caffeine which started in Europe and these coffee houses.

So once we switched to caffeine, and caffeine became a regular part of our life and people were having coffee, that was also coincidental with the enlightenment movement. Interesting. We were getting off of alcohol and we were getting on to caffeine and the birth of these coffee houses and the sharing of ideas. So interesting how these two things, drugs, really, caffeine is also a drug too, played a role throughout human history. And I think we're going through another transformation right now, which is that people are

realizing, okay, generally we all have access to pretty good water, right? Knock on wood, there are places out there in the world that's still going, but it's getting better each year. But maybe we don't need as much reliance on alcohol. I'm actually genuinely curious. Sure, there's a whole conversation of what are people replacing that with, but I think that people are realizing that as cheesy as it's sound, there's this old Tony Robbins quote, which is that, you know, nothing tastes as good as being healthy feels, right?

Although a cheesecake tastes pretty good. Cheesecake tastes pretty. No, I agree with you 100%. When you were like firing it off cylinders, if you're doing the clean eating, you're not drinking, when you maybe you limit caffeine, when you wake up in the morning, you just feel different. I think if you ever been a high-performing athlete, even if you don't compete, you know what we're talking about. You know how that feels.

But also, you know, we have to be a little gentle on ourselves as well because, you know, I don't think we probably really take into consideration how much we're bombarded by advertising. and subtle cues of alcohol in our life, whether it be from when you're just going through social media, when you're walking down the street and you see the sign outside of a restaurant, they have their two for one, happy hour, all these different things. Like, we're just invited to put something in our body that's not going to make us feel great. And it's the only thing, like it's something that's not good for you that it seems to be celebrated in many ways. And It's that right of passage when you turn 21 years of age.

So I have to remind myself, what am I being influenced by whether it's TV, advertisements, billboards, halftime Super Bowl show, et cetera. Every single top celebrity influencer feels like they have a tequila company or they have an alcohol company that's out there. Rick Ross, Ryan Reynolds, George Clooney, the Rock, Michael Jordan. And no knock on them. Let's also... Eva Longoria. You know, what was funny is, you know, recently we were trading back and forth an article.

There's a top investor that's out there, one of the most successful investors in history. Mark Andresen runs a VC firm called Andresen Horowitz, right? We've been part of some deals that they've invested into, like levels, the continuous glucose monitor. They were one of the lead investors in that. Is he original PayPal OG with Elon as well, or no? I don't know if he's part of the PayPal Mafia. No, I don't think he was. Netscape was one of his initial thing.

Yes, yes. He was the creator of basically the modern internet. Yeah. Right? He was the creator of modern internet. Anyways, one thing that he was saying, you know, going back to, we shout him out a lot on this podcast, but Andrew Heerman, he listened to Andrew Heumman's podcast on alcohol. And basically, Andrew broke down all the top studies that are out there showing that there's

some benefit and kind of obliterated them, right? Abliverated? I like obliserate, but it's obliterate, though. Obliterate, there we go. Abliserate. We're putting that into the urban dictionary. He obliterated them and said, like, look, there's no healthy level of alcohol. That doesn't mean there's not a lot of reasons why people may not drink.

And there could be social reasons. There could be, you know, other reasons that are out there that people drink. But to say to people, because it goes back to this thing, you remember back in the day, it was always funny. You'd have a doctor that go on TV and say, hey, look, red wine is great for you. By the way, you know, you can have this and, you know, these Italian regions and the resveratrol and other stuff. Well, it turns out, like, to get the level of resveratrol that they talk about in the studies, you'd need to drink a liter of wine or two a day. Wow.

So you cannot get resveratrol from that. It's better to just supplement. But the other thing that they'd always say is that, and by the way, if you're not drinking, doctors don't recommend you start. Do you remember this? No, it sounds familiar, but that's funny. It's like there's all these benefits for alcohol,

but by the way, if you're not drinking, doctors recommend you don't start. We don't want you to start drinking if you're not. It's like, okay, which one is it? So anyways, going back to Mark, Mark Andresen, And in the article, he was also saying, like, I listened to that podcast. I stopped drinking.

But I fucking hate it. Yeah. I hate it because I didn't drink a lot in my early years. And actually this idea of enjoying a little glass of whiskey after a long day and just sitting there and really getting to understand the notes and the flavors, like it was an art form for him. And so even though he feels better, he hates it. he hates it because he's missing that level of fun.

In fact, he challenged Silicon Valley and he said, we need to solve this. We need to come up with another drug, so to speak, that does not have these impacts of being so detrimental to our health. You know, I mean, that's a whole other conversation. And people are trying out psilocybin for that and other things, but we won't talk about that now. But I do want to acknowledge that there is some elements where I'm definitely out. we had a men's group dinner recently and I was feeling like oh actually like I kind of like when

everybody when I have a little bit alcohol we have a little bit alcohol and we're celebrating and we all get kind of like a little bit more like you know we're all a little bit more funny right we're all a little bit more hilarious we have this cadence we're kind of loud you know we're like we have this sort of way of interacting with each other and I'll tell you like I miss a little bit of Right? I miss a little bit of that. And that social lubricant way that people treat alcohol. And I know enough about it that I'm still happy with my decision of not having it on a regular basis. But not going to lie, every so often I threw my sisters a birthday party. Their birthdays on the same day in December. Both my sisters, they are eight years apart. Herschel and Kea. Shout out to them. We rented out this beautiful Mexican restaurant, farm at table, Mexican influence restaurant down in Salana Beach called Alice, I believe, or something like that. I'll link to it in the show notes if you live around there. We ran out of the private room and they made this tequila for everybody, this house margarita, right?

More skinny, but it was organic tequila that they used. And it was the first time that I saw somebody making tequila with honey instead of like agave or simple syrup, right? And everybody in our family loves a good tequila, but we all hadn't drank in a while. and we all had probably like a glass or two of tequila and it was fucking fun. We had a good time. But that was a celebratory moment.

We did that and then everybody pretty much took the rest of December off, right? So that's the realities of going alcohol-free. It doesn't mean that it's still not enjoyable but it's out there. So I just want to acknowledge that so I don't sound like some prude that's just telling everybody not to drink.

I love it. And if you go, maybe you can link to his tweet thread, Mark's tweet thread. Yeah, Mark and Driesen. Can we bring it up? Mark, Andresen on Twitter? Because what I liked about his tweet thread was it was so human.

It was so real. Like, yes, I'm doing this. I feel better. I'm sleeping better, et cetera. And at times it sucks. Because at times I want to have that beverage, I want to do that with my friend. I want to end the evening with that beverage, etc. And so I like that he acknowledged it.

And I know what you're talking about during those moments when I'm not drinking. And I go out and I see everyone else and someone says, you know what? You know, let's go for it. Let's get this so-and-so bottle of wine, the special one. You're like, oh, I really wonder what that special bottle of wine looks like, or they go get a high-end bourbon or something like that. You have a real conversation with yourself, and you're like, I would like that, but I'm going to recommit.

And that's something interesting, Drew, because I don't think we talk about that enough. And that's whether you're sitting at the restaurant and you're committed to eating healthy, you have a choice to make because that menu provides a lot of different options. And it's the same thing with whether you're drinking or not. We talk so much in society about, commitment. One thing we don't talk enough about is recommitment. It's like commitment is not a one-time thing. You have to recommit every single day to what's most important. And sometimes I'll even, I'll tell a friend if I'm going out and about, like I remember when I was when I was out on this

business trip recently, there was a colleague that I was with and I'm close with. We know each other well. And I remember just saying to him in jest, but kind of serious says, hey, look, I have early speaking time tomorrow. If you see me get a second drink. go towards it, stop me. And I said that like kind of ingest being silly, but he's like, I got you. No problem. I didn't have that second drink. He didn't need to stop me.

But sometimes even having that conversation with someone to hold you accountable is huge. Mark Andreessen, the top of that. Yeah, yeah. Tesla brought it up over here. He has this great quote up top, by the way, from W.C. Fields that says, this is money. It says, always carry a flask of whiskey in case of snake bite. and furthermore always carry a small snake. How great is that quote?

I'm trying to figure out one of these paragraphs that's really funny when he's oh, at the end he says something about how great he's feeling. He says it's great and I'm super mad about it. Yeah, I'll just read it here. Since I stopped drinking, I feel much better. I don't need as much sleep, but my sleep is better. Like in general, he doesn't sleep that much. I'm more alert through the day.

I'm cognizant. I'm cogent and focused at all times. I have more energy when I exercise and it's easier to control my diet, right? All these positive things. And he goes back to writing. It's great and I'm super mad about it. I feel like the color has drained out of my evenings. Spending time with people is still fun, but now it's hard to sit and watch a movie, read a book, and unwind at the end of a hard day.

I'm more prone to just work until bedtime. Grump, grump, grump. That is so good. And we haven't even talked about that aspect of it, the aspect of when I'm drinking, I make poor food choices. Not only in that moment, it's like some, like the guard is, it's like all of a sudden all my inhibitions go away and like, oh, I'm just going to eat whatever. But I also found, and I don't know if there's research or studies that back the stuff up,

Drew, but I also find that if I drink, the decisions I make the next day food-wise from a dietary perspective are not good. Well, it throws off your sleep. And when your sleep is thrown off, we had, uh, Dr. David Perlmutter and Austin Perlmutter on the podcast. We'll link to that episode in the show notes. But they said that when you, your sleep is thrown off, you have like a 25% increase in cravings the next day. Wow. Right. So sleep, alcohol, all those things being connected besides the fact that a lot of people when they drink, like there's a lot of calories, right, that you can end up getting

through alcohol that's there. But I want to pivot for one second real quick because there's a real serious topic that we have to chat about for a second. And that's the topic. And that's the topic. of alcohol alternatives. Oh my gosh. He mentioned that as well in this. Okay, let's talk about it because, you know, there is, I'm not going to, you know, name, but we can name the store because there's some good stuff in there, but there's a lot of not right stuff.

Let's not name it. Well, I want to name them because they're doing their best to highlight some of the great stuff. And their stores in New York City. Okay, so the place is called Boisen. I'm not trying to throw them under the bus, right? And these aren't their own products, but Boisen is, Tessa, can we bring that up over here? Boisen, it's pretty much not. too far away. There's a location inside of Los Angeles. A couple of them. A couple of locations

inside of Los Angeles. And one, not too far away from our studio. And first of all, I'm super happy that this exists. And I'm super glad that they're doing well from all their staff that I've talked to. They're doing well. In New York online, they're doing really well. And what they've been doing is they've been putting together and cultivating a lot of the top alcohol alternatives. It's a booming movement, right? There's a lot of companies in the space. And the interesting thing all these companies have figured out is that you make an alcohol alternative and you charge the same amount as alcohol. So if a bottle of tequila that you'd get that's a premium bottle of tequila would cost like $30, $40, guess what? This non-alcohol version costs the same amount of two, right?

Now, you and I did something really interesting, kind of on our own, but then we swapped notes about it, which is we went in and we got a lot of different things to just try it out. I spent a grip on some different types of, quote unquote, non-alcoholic, tequila, bourbon, wine. Wine. I wrote it. My Amex was like, what are you doing? Okay. Before we talk about maybe some of the things that didn't work, I will say that there's a brand in there that they've had that I've tried a few times.

In fact, I went to a wedding this past summer in Sicily that I was invited to, buddy mine. And they had two options at the wedding. They had like an alcohol bar, but also at that bar, they had a list of. non-alcoholic cocktails. And I was so intrigued, and they were using this company called Seedlip. I have no affiliation with them, right? They make these, but it's almost like a botanical essence sort of alcohol replacement, almost think of like a gin replacement, right?

So you'd mix it with like a gin and tonic. Yeah. They have, here it is on our screen over here. Again, no affiliation with them. They have garden flavor, which is like a botanical flavor. They have like a citrus flavor. They have a bunch of different. once. And honestly, the non-alcoholic cocktails they had, fantastic. Like, fantastic. So this is one of

the brands they carry. Shout out to Seedlip. I really enjoyed it. And the way that the, the, the mixologist, right, bartender was putting them together. It was, it was fantastic. So there are some brands that are out there that I think you know how to use them, right? Doesn't mean you just drink it right out of the bottle. It's not going to taste right. You got to mix it in the right way. you can do some really, like, great things and you can have some alcohol alternatives. Okay, now let's talk about some of the stuff that we didn't like.

What did you try? I barely liked anything. And it's funny. So I bought all these non-alcoholic beverages, right? I bought non-alcoholic wine. I bought some non-alcoholic, quote-unquote, tequila. I bought some non-alcoholic whiskey. And I tried all of them,

and I did not enjoy them at all. And it's funny because as I realized I didn't enjoy them, I had to question, what were my expectations? Like, do you really think a fake whiskey is going to taste like whiskey? Do you think that a fake or a non-alcoholic tequila is going to taste like? No, it's not going to. They did their best. But even just on its own, it didn't meet my standard, even just from an enjoyment perspective.

Like, I don't want to drink this. Now, I didn't have the luxury of having someone make a mixologist make an amazing macktail, because I've had some amazing mottails as well that don't. have alcohol in them, but I have not been blown away by pretty much any of the non-alcoholic spirits. If you want to call them spirits, I call them devils because they don't taste anything like a positive spirit to me. I will say, I know you're not a beer person. I've had some pretty great, and Mark referenced this in his tweet as well. I have had some pretty good non-alcoholic beers. Yeah, do you know any brands offhand if anybody's curious about that? I think the Stone I

PA is great. There's a company that's been growing really, really fast to get no affiliation as far as I'm aware of this podcast. Athletic Brewing has some good non-alcoholic beverages, beer specifically. That's the one I wanted to mention athletic brewing. I hate beer. I hate the taste of it. Why I'm mentioning them is there's a guy who I've traded some messages with on Instagram, but he really blew up on Twitter, Sahel Bloom. Yeah. Right. Writes a lot. He's going to be coming on the podcast. Oh, great. Either we'll do it in New York or he'll come to L.A. And he mentioned, athletic brewing company. We can link to them.

Maybe we could bring it up on the screen, Tessa, athletic brewing company, if you Google that. Their award-winning non-alcoholic craft beer, again, no affiliation for them. And apparently people who like beer, like them. I've had their, it's straight up like, yeah, do you get the buzz? Absolutely not.

But if you actually have why you drink, are you drinking because you like the taste of beer or you drink them because you want the buzz? Most people want a combination of the two. I've had these athletic brewing, and it is straight up the real deal. Whatever they're doing is amazing that makes you think. And it looks like a fun brand.

Look at that. Oh, they do a great job from a branding perspective across the board. I know we're talking about non-alcoholic options right now, but I will say, and I'm curious to get your perspective on this, I've had some really good, and I can't break down the science behind how they're produced. I've had some good, I think it's called dry wines or natural wines. And I don't know if those are the plans. placebo effect for me or whatever, but I've had some glass of those and it did not have the same

effect on me that a regular glass of wine. Yeah, they still have alcohol in them, but they typically have no added sulfites. The biggest player in this game is a company called dry farm wines. And so actually dry farming comes from the place of, and so everybody is clear, you know, these are alcoholic beverages, they are wines, they're sourced around the world. So from what I've learned from them, and I've given them some promotional love in the past. I have no relationship with them. But they source from about, there's 500 vineyards across the world that practice something called dry farming, which is how wine used to be made. That means that you only grow the grapes based on the rainfall. You have no irrigation. So what does that

mean? Well, according to them and the farming practices, that means that if you have a good year, you have a good grape. You have a bad year, you don't, and the wines are more natural. But in addition of that, they're mostly known for the fact that in even the U.S., you can add up to something like a hundred additives to wine without putting it on the label. Like, you can literally add any, some wines literally have sugar added to them or chemicals to maybe enhance the taste. So wine now is a, like wine is a super industrialized process. And we're not making wine the way that we used to. And so they screen all their wines for mycotoxins, which is mold. That's a big problem.

There's a lot of mold in all these old barrels, these French barrels that people use. And they screen them for all these additives and they only buy from these dry farm places. That was probably one of my go-toes before I started significantly cutting back on alcohol. And even still, if we know that it's a special occasion, we want to do something, I do. I will order from them because I appreciate their quality. It's sometimes hit or miss, like out of a case of like, you know, six wines that they ship you. Like three will be great. And three will be, oh, okay, that's all right.

It tastes more like kombucha or whatever. But again, it's still alcohol, but I do appreciate their approach to try to make it a better thing. And especially without all those added sulfites and those chemicals in it, you definitely notice like you don't have as much of a hangover or other things. Yeah, wine typically, specifically red tends to give me a little bit of a headache if I have, say, two glasses. And in time that I've had some of these dry wines and I briefly had a subscription from dry farm wines, I definitely did not feel like I had that hangover the next day or that headache that I typically would get. And the best thing that I've had for hangovers is basically just not drinking on a regular basis. How not to have a hangover.

Don't drink. And it was interesting because as we talk about these non-alcoholic options, the question begs, why do we even need a non-alcoholic option? Like when did sparkling water not be good enough or just water or iced tea, right? That is my go-to. Mountain Valley sparkling water and they have flavored sparkling waters. They use like organic flavors inside of there. Mountain Valley specifically does.

They do have a really good, they have a really good sparkling water. And that's still my go-to because of, Other challenge that I have, and I hope that Boison works on this, and again, I'm not throwing them or any of the brands under the bus, but we also want to make sure these things are healthy for us too. My challenge for a lot of the products that are carried there, and not just them, just the non-alcoholic movement in general, non-alcoholic replacements, the wines, the whiskeys, the tequila. If you flip over the bottle and you look at the label, a lot of these things have high of sugar inside of them. And again, sparkling water, just add a little bit of

grapefruit juice to it, a little bit of orange juice, whatever. Now, all of the same, you you have like a little bit of a flavored, you know, sparkling beverage that you want to have. You don't need some high sugary alcohol replacement. The other thing, too, unfortunately, to get that taste of tequila, to get that taste of whiskey, you have to add a shit ton of flavoring inside of it. And I've even seen that some of these things that are alcohol replacements have like yellow dye, red dye, these other things that we know that are loosely associated with neurological issues, you know, behavioral issues and things like that.

So I'd take a very precautionary principle approach to make sure that whatever you're drinking on the back is still actually something that's healthy for you. And when in doubt, sparkling water is a good go-to. Yeah, and I'm a club soda kind of guy. I could probably consume too much of it. But that's like my go-to when I'm not drinking. If I'm going out and I get a beverage, if I go to the bar, I'm getting a club soda. And that might be dangerous to have them put a couple dashes of bitters in there for me,

you know, with that lime. But that's an easy go-to for me if I'm choosing not to drink. Let's go back to Man Morning. You have been writing the newsletter for how long? Almost a little over half a year now. And what's your goal with the newsletter? What's the goal with the content that you're trying to put out there? I was someone who felt lost for a certain period who did not have community.

Didn't have men in my life to encourage me, inspire me, challenge me, push me, hold me, accountable, elevate me, et cetera. If there are men out there. And I know there are so many, as we mentioned with some of the statistics previously, don't have that type of community. I wanted to provide an outlet that shows us. in your inbox once a week that provides that upliftment, that provides that encouragement, that reminds you of the options and opportunities that are available to you.

For those folks that don't want to live on autopilot, that want to continue to grow in their life to ensure the best thing is ahead of them, as opposed to behind them, I wanted them to have that go-to place. If you notice, of course, there's a story in each issue that they can walk away with something that's empowering from a personal growth perspective. And there I'm linking to multiple podcast, YouTube videos, articles, et cetera, that are providing growth for these folks. So it's like a one-stop shop to help men get better that specifically targeted for them. Long term, we're figuring out what the community aspect of this can look like.

So if folks are saying, hey, this is great, but I don't have these men in my community. What could that look like from a virtual perspective, creating some strong virtual communities, maybe some periodic in-person man meetups for people across the country or even internationally as well. But I just saw a gaping void. I saw how empowering and the powerful impact has had on my life. And I want to do the same for all those men out there. You know, for today's podcast, I ask you to bring some of the top, you know, content. We've referenced some of them. You had the small vices, big consequences. You brought a few of the, you know, newsletters that you've gotten like just great feedback and, like, interesting stories and stuff. And you have

some of them printed out in front of you. Is there one on any topic that you feel present to want to share with the audience right now? Yeah, I think it's really, uh, apropos of what we're discussing right now, a very popular issue from not long ago, and the title was calling unsubscribing for success. Now, Man Morning is an extremely popular newsletter. Drew's newsletter, Try This is an extremely popular newsletter. And there are, for you to know if a newsletter is successful or not, Typically, there's a one of the main metrics people use whether or not if it's doing good is the open rate. If Drew briefly described to people what an open rate is for a for a newsletter. Yeah, so when you send out an email to a group of audience, right?

Again, I have a newsletter. Antonio has a newsletter link in the show notes to sign up for both. An open rate is that when you open it, you know, using your Gmail app or your Microsoft email or whatever it is, your work email. There's a ping that gets sent back to the server saying that you opened it. And that's a good indication of people's. interest. And if you typically have, well, you're going to break it down a little bit inside of here. Yeah. Yeah. So you want an extremely high open rate. And if you have a, you know, a good newsletter that has a good following, a lot of times that will lead to whether or not you get sponsors

or not for that newsletter. You can go to sponsor X, Y, or Z and say, hey, we have X amount of thousand people on this newsletter and we have like a 55% open rate or something like that. But something else that's interesting about newsletters is a lot of people will tell you, oh, our newsletter has 50,000 subscribers or 100,000 subscribers. One thing they very rarely tell you is what is the open rate for all those numbers. So if you have 100,000 people on your list, but the open rate is only 10%, right? It's only 10% of people are opening that. So what a lot of newsletters do is they actually will intentionally churn people.

They will go into a newsletter that has a say 50,000 people. And they will identify who is actually not opening their emails. They may find out of 50,000 people, there are about a good 18,000 people who are signed up for, but they never actually open it up. And what does that do? That actually affects what their open rates are. So they will churn them.

They will actually unsubscribe these folks or send a reminder to them. Like, hey, you're not reading this, so we're going to take you off. But if you want to resubscribe, you can. Right. Right. So if not, though, just take them off the list. So what does that do? That increases their open rate.

And so I would rather have a smaller list that, super engaged than a very big list that's not engaged whatsoever. So I share all that background because I want to remind listeners and viewers that the same way we can churn people from newsletter lists, we can turn certain things from our life as well. Now, what we talked about in this newsletter issue was about how we can unsubscribe from certain things. So something we can unsubscribe from in life, we're talking about it right now, is alcohol. If it's a it's not a win for you. Have you decided? Maybe it's time for me to unsubscribe from alcohol in my life. We talked about how we can unsubscribe from going to happy hour. We can unsubscribe

from negative people that bring us down, those energy vampires that one of your previous guest, John Gordon talked about previously. We can unsubscribe from social media if it's having a negative effect on your mental health and your well-being. I've unsubscribe personally from late night eating. I know what it's like to want to get that before I go to bed to eat something. We can unsubscribe from those petty fights that you have with your spouse. You can even unsubscribe from that gym membership that you don't use. So the whole point of this unsubscribing for success are to identify those things that are in your life right now, but you would benefit from if you happen to turn them and if you happen to remove them from your life. A little bit of

like taking inventory and it's okay to tune out from stuff. Yeah, I think another great way to look at this is if you have a computer open and you have a whole bunch of apps. apps running at the same time. As you and I know, if you have a computer running with a whole bunch of apps running at the same time, your processing speed slows down, right? Your RAM slows down. And so what do you want to do?

You want to close all of those non-essential apps so you can run at optimal speed. So I invite people to also look at, you know, how many quote-unquote apps do you have opening your life? And then ask yourself, which ones of these are absolutely essential? Which ones aren't that can be minimized for the time being? I mean, you may go to a happy hour. every single week, but you just go because out of habit, out of routine, but you realize you don't get out of that what you used to get out of it. So, you know, use some really intentional

time to identify what you can unsubscribe from in your life. And when you unsubscribe, it creates so much space to bring more value in your life. You know what? I wrote about this in my try this newsletter. Um, you know, not the word to like keep on going back to that newsletter content that's there. By the way, both these newsletters are free. So like nothing that anybody has to pay for. But in my try this newsletter, it was, I'm trying to remember Tessa so we can bring it up. But it was like a public service announcement of just like about overwhelmed. Like maybe we could search for like try this overwhelmed. Anyways, the gist of it is and we'll find it later and we'll, you know, we'll include in the show notes

was I think another area that this is also important to is even some things that look at like they're good on the surface, right? So like people think, okay, great, I want to get as much health information as I want to. So I'm going to listen to every podcast that's out there. I need to stay on top of it. I need to subscribe to all these newsletters. The thing is that every podcast, including my own, and I try to put out reminders. Yeah, that's the one.

Try this, a little reminder. There you go. Yeah, I'll come back to that in a second. podcast, newsletters, content, social media, everybody has the latest thing that they want to talk about. And when you add up all these list of things, you may have a hundred different individual new action items that people are telling you incorporate in your life. Eat this supplement or eat this food. Try this new thing. Try that.

Stop doing this. Stop doing that. It's overload. Right? It's so much. It's so much overload. And there are plenty of times where even me, I will say, I'm just going to take a breath. and I'm going to focus on the basics.

I'm not going to take on any new behaviors or items. And for me, I'm not listening to a ton of health podcast, but I do take in a lot of health information for my peers and stuff. I even give that a break sometimes and say, you know what, in my own life, I'm just going to focus on the basics. One of the basics, focus on my sleep, focus on just eating right, right? Not trying to get even more, quote, unquote, perfect

with something that somebody's telling me to start doing and like string training and then my community. I'll tune out information for a while just to go more inward. And so I want to get permission to the folks that are listening that it's okay to do that. It's okay to do that because sometimes even wellness sometimes can be big wellness, right? Just like we talk about big food, right? And big food being like heavy on marketing. That's deep.

Wellness can be big wellness. And they want you to get you to do something, to buy a book, to start some behavior, to do some aspect. and they don't focus enough about the basics. So I even have to remind people because I have guests that come on every week that feel like they have a unified field theory that sort of explains the entire universe and that is eating this particular diet

is going to fix everything or not eating these particular foods is going to be the thing that fixes it. And when you really take these people who are good people, you know, maybe in the past it would have been like over a glass of wine, you have them really get a chance to open up about, you know, Does this approach work for everybody? You know, people open up and say, it doesn't always work for people.

And there has to be a personalization. Maybe there's a lot of people that instead of focusing on improving their diet would be so much healthier if they just got an hour extra more of sleep. Or there's somebody out there that is struggling so much with trying to lose weight, but maybe the thing that they actually need is a best friend in their life, who they can go walking with on a regular basis. So I want to remind people that even unsubscribing from health information from time to time can be a very powerful tool in their life. I'll read a little bit

from, you know, my article, if that's okay over here. So good doctors know that almost every dysfunction, every disease has a root cause. And in the world of functional medicine, root causes are addressed by either A, adding in things that are missing or B, removing obstacles that are getting in the way. Most of us are very comfortable with the idea of adding in, whether that means adding in certain nutrients with a healthier diet or adding in a product supplement or even looking to learn something new. Removing is different though. Removing is very different. It's tougher to practice. It's tougher to embody and it's often highly undervalued. The idea that removing something from our lives will help us grow feels counterintuitive. Removing is associated the words less

and loss and seems strange that letting go can actually make us more whole, which is the exact thing that you're talking about as well. And yet sometimes we're moving is exactly what we need. I want to use today's newsletter, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Most information coming to us is designed to constantly leave us feeling overwhelmed. The marketing, the news,

the social media we're all exposed to on a daily basis is often intended to create a void in our lives that leaves us with at least one of these primarily feelings. Number one, I'm not doing enough. Number two, everyone else has it figured out, but I don't. Number three, maybe this product or thing or service will finally fill the void or help me get rid of the pain that I'm experiencing right now. There's nothing wrong with wanting to improve the circumstances of our life. There's nothing wrong with wanting to be healthy and feel better.

But when that wanting gets out of balance or becomes insatiable, that's when we step into feeling overwhelmed. However, it doesn't have to be that way. And I go on further to talk about what I just shared, which is the importance. of taking a break, knowing when to pull back and give yourself a little bit of a break from taking on something new. And that's a number one thing that I think that people that listen to wellness content could benefit from. Even as I'm reading the bottom of this, you said the word loss earlier, right?

I think when we create that space, we feel like we're losing something, but there's something that's highlighted here. It says, if you can slow down every so often, take a step back and tune into your gut intuition like you're doing right now. I promise you that you'll know when to do what. We've lost our intuition so much to your point because we're inundated with so much information coming at us not aside from a health perspective, from a personal development perspective, and beyond that we are not listening to our gut.

You know, and typically we know what we need to do, but we're so distracted, right? I don't think people are as busy as they think they are. We're just distracted and lack focus. but I think we all could benefit from a media detox, one of our friends, T-MAC, Todd McCullough, like, you know, big personality on the internet, on the interwebs and internet, etc. I love that even though he's a, you know,

a public personality has an amazing, you know, fitness company, he intentionally always takes time off from social media each month to get present. I love that our friend Dr. Rangan Chatterjee does the same thing a few times a year. And even a walk a week. Just like our man morning group, we go on a walk.

We go on a walk. And guess what? I wrote about this in the early issue of a man morning. And the feedback was powerful. And it's so basic. But the next time you go for, I'm going to invite everyone to do this. Go for a 30 minute walk without technology. Like put your phone away.

Put your phone away. Leave it somewhere. No earphones. No AirPods. I know Drew doesn't wear AirPods anyways. take your watch off that has dings go for a 30 minute walk with zero technology and when I when I tell my clients to do that when I suggest people do that and post people tell me first they first say those first eight 10 minutes were so hard I wanted to be doing something I wanted to listen

to something I wanted to check my email social media etc but then they'll say those next 20 minutes what happens maybe some emotions come out that they've been kind of been hiding a little bit Some sadness can creep up. Some joy can show up. A lot of times people say, I got an amazing idea that, you know, it's kind of like that shower time when you're in the shower. Some people say, you know, there's a problem I've been trying to solve for the longest time. And finally, I solved it. It's because they gave themselves space without taking in more another podcast.

They gave them space for not reading another article. They gave them space for not being on social media, et cetera. And so few of us are willing to give ourselves that space. So bringing this all the way back to alcohol. And I'm even curious for you, we talked about the benefits of not, you know, drinking alcohol, better sleep, maybe we're going to eat better, et cetera. But I, you know, challenge myself and the listeners as well to say, hey, what am I going to get out of not consuming alcohol for a certain period of time?

And you only know if you're willing to do it for a certain period of time. So maybe we should have a do a no alcohol challenge the same way you did the water challenge and see what people find out. It's allowing whatever your real emotions are to come to the surface. Yeah, which is scary for so many people like, you know, it's like they're going to wake up from a dream like, oh, this is my life. This is the job I go to. This is what I look like. Alcohol is the filter. You don't look like that filter on Instagram, you know? Well, you mentioned something about walking. And the other thing about walking that's there and allowing you to tap into your gut intuition is that there's a biological connection. And there's a researcher named Dr. Francine

Shapiro. You know, we've had some people on this podcast here that are EMDR practitioners, right? Who there's this methodology that was created by her. And it was this researcher who found that when her patients go on a walk or when she actually, I think this story. is that she was suffering from cancer. And she would go on a walk and she would notice that she would feel better. Right? And then she started looking into the research. What is it?

Is it the arms moving back and forth? Is it this? Is it, you know, some other pathway? And what she ultimately found out and she was ridiculed by her industry and nobody like really thought this was true for the longest time, she found out that when our eyes are scanning the horizon and we're looking from left to right, scanning the horizon, that creators, there's a, that creates some sort of biological pathway where our nervous system feels like, okay, whatever's going on in my life, it's all okay because I'm making forward progress.

So think about that. Hunter, gather, planes, everything like that. You don't have enough food. You don't have something, some resource that's not available to you. You're out there walking. You're making progress. You're on your journey. And things are going to get better because you're making forward momentum.

And that relaxes the nervous system. so much to the degree that they created a whole methodology that they use for people that are suffering from anxiety, trauma, other things called EMDR. And you can work with the EMDR practitioner instead of going on a walk with them. They have you do these bilateral movements by moving their hand back and forth or they sometimes have you fixated on like kind of a light and they're having you recall a traumatic time or situation and you're reprocessing those events. So walking is such a powerful way to get us to tap back into our gut intuition, which is another

The reason why when we get together for our man morning days, we're always walking. Always moving very rarely. Are we stationary? If you want to change your mind, like change your body and move. And just briefly, I've experienced EMDR, you know, from a therapy perspective. Was it helpful for you? Very helpful. But also there's another component of it that we did where I'd hold some things and they vibrated as well.

And I wasn't familiar with it. Actually, a doctor you referred me to, referred me to as EMDR practitioner. And I knew nothing about it. It was absolutely amazing. And to your point, it was emotional because it took me back to some traumatic experiences in my life. And we did some things and, if you will, recreated them based on some certain things. It was absolutely amazing. So I invite myself and everyone after you listen to this episode, after, only after, to then go for a short walk.

Get some movement. You know, trade that coffee with your friend next time where you guys sit down together or just go for a walk together. It's huge. What are some other things? You know, we've chat about it before, but just in context, people are listening. And again, whether you want to start a goddess morning, right? You're a woman listening. You want to do a goddess morning.

What do you want to sort of like a, you know, whatever it is, right? Getting whoever is your tribe, your people together, what are some of the other principles that are part of man mourning that other people can incorporate into their own kind of community if they want to have like an intentional mourning and, you know, bring some of this. energy into them. So one of them is phone free, right? Like turning off the devices, turning off the notifications and keeping your phone away. What are some other things that we do that keeps man morning intentional and allows this container where people really get a chance to open up and get a lot out of the value of sharing with other people? Yeah, wanted to reiterate, we do these alcohol

free. So we invite you to do that with some delicious water, coffee or tea or something like that. We recommend you do this in a moving capacity as opposed to being stationary. And I know some people live in places where there may be a lot of snow that can be challenging, but if you can't get up and move, that's absolutely huge. We want you to bring proactive, intentional energy. You know, it's really easy in life when we spend time with friends, if they share something with us, to play devil's advocate. Like, we have so many people in our lives that are really good at playing devil's advocate. One thing that we try to do in May I'm Morning, and this is regardless of your faith, we bring a God's advocate kind of energy. It's kind of the improv, if you will, the yes,

and as opposed as, you know, just being contrarian, you know, let's not be a contrarian today. How can we advance this? How can we move this forward? Something else is really, really key is we try not to solve people's problems. One thing I love about our man morning community is that it's more of a coaching environment. So instead of Drew giving me advice on something, sure, he may share something from his personal experience about what we're talking about. But one thing we're really good at is asking questions.

and saying things like tell me more about that to get people to share more as opposed to just saying, hey, you should do X, you should do Y or you should do Z. No, we're letting that person share. I think the last thing that I'll share is, and this is important for me because one thing I know about myself is that I can be really good at deflecting and using humor sometimes and sarcasm to maybe not directly address something. But we pretty much kind of have a a no sarcasm kind of zone for our conversations. We want to be direct. We don't want to be mean-spirited.

Sure, we'll laugh and we'll chuckle and have a good time. But we do our darnest not to deflect and have sarcasm and that mean energy. And again, positive intentions. And those key components go so far to having a fruitful conversation. And I'll just say for folks who aren't used to having those conversations, you know, definitely give yourself and the fellow folks some grace because it's different. It's a different vibe. It's a different energy. Sometimes we have guests that come on our man morning walks.

And we can tell for a few moments it's an adjustment for them because they're not in these intentional type of environments and these conversations. And also, it's okay if you don't say anything. I think, Drew, you would agree some of the most powerful, you know, mornings that we've had together in groups of sometimes three people, other times eight to ten people. I've had some profound experiences when I didn't even say a word, when I'm just listening to, what other people share that I walk away like, wow, I'm so glad I was there. I didn't share anything about me today. But holy moly, did I get so much out of that experience? We forget it's the nature of humanity.

It's the nature of the human brain to think that our lives are lived in isolation. We forget that other people are going through the same thing, even if they're not going through the exact same situation. Our lives are going through the same themes. And whether you're, you know, somebody who's single, who's trying to figure out what you want to do next in your career, whether you're a dad for the first time who feels like, you know, they're having a hard time facing the reality that like they're scared. Are they going to be a good dad? Because their dad wasn't around when they were younger. And they've always had this fear of like, is something wrong with me?

Am I going to be a good dad? Am I going to be able to do it? So whatever it is, everybody gets a chance to relate. and when you hear somebody opening up, you feel not alone. And I think our world needs more of that energy, that energy of not feeling alone, that we're in it together.

There's other people that are going through it. We live, we're going through this giant human experience, experiment, rather, which is we're all living in these nuclear households. And most of us don't even necessarily have family that's around us, right? So we have to fight, for our tribe. We have to fight to be connected to people. Otherwise, the real question is like,

no matter how much success you have, you go through life and what, you're going to feel alone. Having a strong group of people around you and having a tribe that you meet up with on a regular basis in whatever shape or form it looks like for you, it can have profound impacts on your life. And also, your health too. You know, I was on our broken brain docu-series, which is our documentary series about brain health. And I was being interviewed for the second one. that we put out. And I talked about this town called the town of Rosetta. Rosetta. Let's see if we could Google that, Tessa, Rosetta, Pennsylvania, kind of like Rosetta Stone. I believe that's how you pronounce it. Rosetta, Pennsylvania, the Wikipedia page. You can type in, yeah, Pennsylvania.

And I believe this is the town that's there. And Malcolm Gladwell famously wrote about it. Maybe it's, maybe it is, maybe it is, maybe I'm pronouncing wrong. But we'll find it. Rosetta, type in Malcolm Gladwell, Rosetta, Pennsylvania. Let's see if it comes up and I'll start telling the story while we bring it up. But there was a, oh, there we go. See that article right there? It's how a tiny town in Pennsylvania held the secrets to a longer life. So there's this town in Pennsylvania that was being studied by researchers.

And the story of it is that there was a doctor that went to a bar one time. because he was like I think a local like medical conference was doing something and when he was at the bar he got chatting with somebody who was a gentleman from this town who was I believe another doctor and that doctor was sharing that you know it's crazy they were connecting over a couple beers he said you know it's crazy we haven't had anybody in our town under the age of I think it was like 60 you know die of a heart attack not one wow and the researcher was like really Like, that's odd because at that time, I can't remember the time period here. So the name is Dr. Stuart Wolfe. He's a University of Oklahoma Physicians, studied the effects of social structure on health from 1955 to 61. And what they saw in this town, and I'll jump to, you know, the article back in a second, is that as they were researching the town, they were saying, okay, well, what is it?

He's right. They haven't had people. And this town was a town of Italian immigrants that have all moved here. And because it was a recent move that they all went to this town, they'd maintain a lot of their quality of life, right? They were like had the average male was part of like three social groups in that town. But they were looking at it. And they didn't know that it was the social connections. They were like, is it the water?

Okay, it's not the water. Is it the food? No, they were kind of eating the modern American diet, you know, everything like that. you know, was it something else? Is the error? No. And finally they figured out it was exactly that it was the social connections. Many of the people in this town were individuals where there was three generations, sometimes four, all living in one home together, especially the families that were having kids. Like the kids were in there, their kids, kids were in there. People were part of multiple social groups. And they basically called this the Rosetta Effect. Malcolm Gladwell

wrote about this way back in the day in New Yorker. And they found, I'll read from here, is that he concluded that Rosetta's low rate of heart attacks and mortality, compared to the rest of the region and the national nations attributable to the close-knit community and the generations under one roof, typical of Rosetta at the time. And the crazy thing is,

the researchers kept on revisiting in every decade because they got more Americanized and they weren't living in the same households together. They didn't have the same social groups. They were getting busier. They were working in further, further ways of jobs. And as the social relationship, relationships changed, the town got more unhealthy.

Wow. And by the 80s, I believe it was, their heart attack was the same as the national average. So our social connections and community is not just for us to be less lonely. It's actually a major fucking impact on our health as well. It's huge. And, you know, they say we're in a friendship recession right now. And as we talked about previously, isolation and despair is so high for so many people, especially when it comes to men.

and we need that support. We need those communities. And you mentioned something just briefly, Drew, but I think it's worth bringing back up and there was a man mourning issue on this topic is that sometimes community and building it, it requires being a little bit inconvenienced. It's not always easy.

You've talked previously about how we have to date our friends to build relationships. But I'll tell you, you know, sounds funny. I'm trying to find a different phrase for that. It sounds funny to say, date your friends. Well, you know, well, yeah, we can say date your friends or we can say put effort.

Put in the work. Put in the work. We live in Los Angeles. And boo-hoo us in this beautiful weather year round. But sometimes to go 13 miles, just 13 miles can take you over an hour. So I've had conversations in my head many times when do I want to go meet up with the guys this evening? Because I have to go where we're meeting this time is downtown. Or the inconvenience of going to a new location for a man morning get together.

what I perceive as an inconvenience. It's kind of like when, you know, in this day and age of ride share services, like, do you really want to go pick your friend up from the airport? Absolutely not. However, there's something, once that person gets in the car, everything you were like were stressed about the traffic, it doesn't matter because all of a sudden you're joined by a good friend again. Like if your friend invites you to, hey, help me hang these cabinets in my house this weekend.

Like, do you really want to go hang cabinets? No, but that six hours you spend with your buddy doing that, You know, brings you so much joy. It's not about the cabinets. It's not about the traffic. It's about putting that energy, that effort in to friendships that we don't do as often. So effort is key. And sometimes that means, guess what? You have to get up a little bit earlier to spend time with a friend. Guess what? I'm a person, my wife and now we go to bed early. And guess what? Sometimes that dinner may not start until 8.30 and you normally are like winding down 8.30. But guess what? You got to, I don't want to. I don't want to. I don't want to. I. suck it up is the wrong word, but you got to be willing to be inconvenienced. And very rarely once you get in that sit down with those friends, are you going to be mad that you did? I love it, dude. Well, we talked about a lot of different things. I'd love to leave some practical action items for some folks. And I think one, combining the idea of tribe and also drastically cutting back on your alcohol intake is, you know, text a buddy that you haven't talked to in a while.

text a friend, text a family member you haven't spoke to, but you always felt sympathico. And literally like the template for this text, which is always great. Like I've received this type of text before and it makes my day. You know, hey, I was thinking about you. Don't send this to an X, by the way. Hey, I was thinking about you. I just want to say like, I miss you, right? I'd love to catch up.

Yeah. Right. Nope, no pressure. But whenever you have time, let me know. And just hop back on the phone. And, you know, if you know, if you're, your friend, you know, tell me you were listening to a podcast recently. Tell them that you've been thinking about cutting down on your alcohol.

Like, would they want to, you know, do some crazy? Which is like, do an alcohol-free challenge for, you know, a month and just talk about what other areas of your life that you're both going to put time and effort and energy on, you know, one maybe have it each that you want to put focus on, whether it's hydration or working out or something. Like just reaching out to people, even people that you haven't talked to in forever, there's so much power that's in that. I promise you, they're going to be happy.

and if they're not, then go find somebody else. And you're going to be happier and your life is going to be better for it. So that's one practical thing. And the same way that we scroll social media, one of my favorite things to do is go to my contacts book on my phone. And I'll just like flip it and I'll just scroll, you know, and whoever I land on, if it's somebody that I feel like is a close friend

or somebody that was a close friend, I might text them and I say, hey, it's been forever since we've chatted. I just want to let you know I thought about you, which is true. I just literally thought about them, right? I clicked on them. We'd love to catch up some time.

So reaching out to people and putting in a little bit of that work, that initiation, to just connect and talk about life, there's something beautiful and powerful on that. Any action items you want to leave people with? Well, I love those two. The one action item I have is just put something on your calendar. I have something for you to look forward to each week. That could be scheduling a class at the gym. That could be meeting a group of buddies for a hike.

or for a walk that could be scheduling a date night in advance. We really thrive as human beings by having things to look forward to. And if people are feeling stuck, if they're in a bit of a funk, they've been quote unquote figuring things out for far too long. Again, I invite folks to look at their calendar and see if they have anything on there for them to look forward to. So if that calendar is empty, find one thing on there that you're going to lock in. Maybe you're going to meet somebody to join you.

You'll get a lot of value out of that. I love it, dude. All right, let's go down the list. How can people follow you? Check out your work and most importantly, sign up for Manmourning. Yeah, I'm just going to invite everyone today to head on over to manmourning.com. It's a weekly newsletter is 100% free. It's for ambitious and growth-minded men who aspire to reach a great height of success. And their wives and their sisters, cousins, all the above. Check that out. You can learn more about me. we're on social media at the Antonio Neves. Antonio, it's such a pleasure to have you on. Today, we literally were like, what are we going to talk about? All right, let's start off with alcohol.

And that flowed into all these great subjects, but I think we delivered some strong value to people. Appreciate you. So I appreciate you being here, brother. And now we're going to go not drink anything. Except for some sparkling water. Thanks, everybody. We'll catch you next time.