Sober Motivation: Sharing Sobriety Stories - I Wasn’t Drinking Every Day, But Alcohol Controlled My Life | Todd's Sober Story

Episode Date: June 4, 2026

Todd looked like he had it all together. He had a good job, a family, a home, and no major public consequences from drinking. But inside, alcohol was taking up more space than he wanted to admit.In this episode of the Sober Motivation Podcast, Todd shares how weekend drinking, binge drinking, hangxiety, shame, and constantly thinking about the next drink made him question his relationship with alcohol. He talks about trying to moderate, why quitting felt extreme at first, and the moment his son asked if they needed an Uber home from a baseball game.That question changed everything.Todd opens up about what it was like to stop drinking as a dad, why life without alcohol did not become boring, and how sobriety helped him become calmer, more present, and more connected with his family.If you are sober curious, trying to quit drinking, questioning your alcohol use, or wondering if your drinking is “bad enough” to stop, this conversation will hit home.In this episode:Questioning your relationship with alcoholWeekend drinking and binge drinkingHangxiety and the shame cycleTrying to moderate drinkingSobriety as a parentQuitting drinking before rock bottomWhy alcohol steals time, energy, and connectionLearning how to have fun without alcoholTodd is the author of I Didn’t Believe It Either: One Dad’s Discovery That Everything Is Better Without Alcohol.Connect with Todd on IG: https://www.instagram.com/tkinney111/Sober Motivation Mobile App: https://apps.apple.com/app/sober-motivation-app/id6759266291Sober Motivation Website: https://www.sobermotivation.comSupport the Podcast: https://buymeacoffee.com/sobermotivationContact me anytime: [e-mail] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

If I wasn't drinking, I was thinking about drinking. And if I wasn't thinking about drinking, I was planning when I was going to be able to drink again. And so I spent a lot of time, either one, physically drinking, two, thinking about the next time I would be able to drink. And three, recovering from drinking. Welcome back to another episode. I've got my friend Todd with us today. How are you doing, Todd? I'm good, Brad.

How are you? Yeah. I'm excited, dude. Every time I get to connect with you and hear your insights, man, is always a good day. I feel the same. So we've shared your story from, you know, beginning to where you were then on the show. For anybody who didn't listen to that episode, give us a little bit of a recap, you know, what things were like for you growing up and when you started drinking and what it actually

looked like for you as you went through things. Sure. I had a very normal blessed childhood. I grew up in two parents and three other siblings in Omaha, Nebraska. No real like, you know, childhood trauma or anything like that. We had a very loving home. I was pretty lucky growing up. It was a pretty normal, normal household to grow up in. And my drinking probably started in earnest. You know, I was not one of those persons where I took my first. first drink of alcohol and was just gone for 25 years and like fell in love with the idea of drinking and all that. I drank a little bit in high school. I mean, not a ton, but not probably an average amount for for that time, I would say. In college, it picked up quite a bit because that's what we did in college. And I was at a place where drinking was very commonplace.

binge drinking was, it seemed to me at the time, was, you know, happened all the time without people thinking twice about it. In some ways, my drinking looked pretty normal for a college student. In other ways, the seeds of what was going to be problems later on were there. You know, I would, I would drink too much more often than people. I was usually the drunkest person in the room. I had a hard time finding an off switch. Once I did start drinking, a lot of people have that voice inside their head when they start drinking that says, hey, it's time to slow down or maybe even stop. And my voice inside my head says, hey, it's time to keep going. Like, this is just getting started. And so that was present in college. And the other thing that was present in college that

kind of followed my drinking later on in life was the shame cycle the next morning. When you wake up after you've drank more than you wanted to the night before, I don't, you know, I wouldn't remember some of the pieces from the night before. And I didn't like that. I never liked that. It made me feel bad about myself. It made me feel ashamed. It made me feel embarrassed. I would regret things that I did or said. And I did not like that feeling. But at that time, in college, I didn't really dive into that very much because I didn't think I needed to and I didn't really want to. And so I would just deal with that as it came up and I'd get over it and I'd move on. And then I deal with it again. It was like the same thing over and over and over again. And so as I progressed from college and then into law school

and then professional, my drinking stayed pretty much the same. I mean, I wasn't drinking the same at 30 as I was at 20. But in terms of kind of what my relationship with alcohol was like, that did not change. And even at 20 and 20, 25 and 30, I would still wake up on those Saturday mornings and Sunday mornings and go through that shame cycle. And again, even at age 30, I didn't think much of it. I just, I didn't like it. I knew that. But I just sort of got through it, minimally processed it as much as little as I could. And I talked myself into, you know, well, it's okay to drink tonight. Just make sure that doesn't happen again. And I had those talks with myself all the time. And sometimes my drinking would,

I'd go weeks or even months without a drinking incident and everything would be fine. And my drinking looked fairly normal on the outside. You know, I had a good job, had a good family, had a house. I wasn't getting arrested. I wasn't making scenes in public. It probably looked fairly normal on the, I didn't drink every day. I was mainly a weekend drinker and a social drinker. But what plagued me throughout was alcohol took up a ton of energy and time and space in my head and inside me. And if I wasn't drinking, I was thinking about drinking. And if I wasn't thinking about drinking, I was planning when I was going to be able to drink again. And so I spent a lot of time either one, physically drinking, two, thinking about the next time I would be able to drink, and three,

recovering from drinking. So I may not have drank every day, but it occupied an inordinate amount of time inside me. And I didn't like that. It had control over me to some extent, and that's never good. And I was constantly just, you know, if it was a Tuesday and we had a social event or something on Thursday where I knew we were going to be out. I knew I was going to be able to drink. I was thinking about that night a lot. You know, who was going to be there, what kind of event it was going to be, how much I could drink, what I had going on Friday morning, how late, you know, could I say, I was doing a lot of planning around my drinking, a ton of planning around my drinking, especially on the weekends. And so it, again, it looked fairly normal on the outside, but what?

What was going on on the inside was a lot of turmoil and angst and an internal battle that I dealt with for a long, long time. Yeah. And that was from, you know, that whole process you bring up there too, which I think is so common. How difficult is it to keep that together? You know, that's the part that is really curious to me, right? Because from the outside, consciously or subconsciously, you're not wanting people probably to notice how much you're actually internally struggling with. this. My guess is that that's sort of like another full-time job of like keeping the lid on this thing. Yeah, it took a lot of work. It took a lot of effort. And I think back to, you know,

how I would handle comments or like nights where I drank too much and didn't remember parts of it and was not proud of, you know, how I acted or how much I drank. I would make jokes about it a lot. and I would laugh when other people would make jokes about it a lot. And that was sort of my external defense to deal with it. But yeah, it's crazy because I know so differently now, but for the longest time, I really felt like I was the only person on earth that struggled with alcohol in the way that I did. And it turns out that couldn't be further from the truth.

But at the time, it felt very isolating and very lonely. And so I didn't talk about it. Even with my wife and my closest friends, I didn't talk about it. And so they were, you know, some of them were surprised when I quit and started talking about why. Yeah. And then wrote a book about it. I really probably surprised them. I mean, you've been around this for a bit, right?

And you've written a book, you know, with your experience. And you've talked to a lot of people and you've been a part of some really cool stuff. How many people do you, like, think share a similar journey to what you share and the way you went through it? Because I hear it a ton about people who are wondering, you know, do I qualify for sobriety? It does my life didn't look like what they show in the movies. I don't have seven DUIs. Like, can my life even get any better if I quit? I don't really notice it, you know, being overly terrible except for these moments.

Like, what were your thoughts there? Yeah. Well, first, there's thousands, tens of thousands probably of people out there thinking that exact same thing. One of the comments I get most commonly after speaking or after someone's read my book is, oh my gosh, you described my story. Or that could have been my book. That could have been my drinking history. And so they're everywhere. There's a lot of people out there feeling that same thing.

And one of the things that held me back for a long time was sort of just what you brought up. I thought if I quit drinking, like people like me don't quit drinking. They don't need to quit drinking how I thought of things at the time. The people who need to quit drinking are, to your point, the ones who have 70 UIs and who are crashing their cars and losing their jobs and getting hauled into court and being forced into rehab and all that stuff. Like those are the people that need to go to drinking, not people like me. And so I thought, gosh, if I quit drinking, what are people going to think about what my drinking was like? You know, I was worried that people were going to think I rolled out of bed and took a swig of vodka from the bottle in my bedside table. And I didn't want them to think that.

And I don't care nearly as much about that now as I did then. but that weighed very much on me at the time. Like, if I quit, what does that say about, what does that mean for what people are going to think about my drinking? And that, I use that as an excuse and as sort of a rationale and a reason for a long time to not seriously consider quitting because I thought, well, I'm not that guy.

I don't want people thinking on that guy. So it's better to just kind of keep doing what I'm doing. instead of quitting. And that's obviously not the case, but that's what I told myself. Yeah. And I mean, I think that that's really valid because of the stigma of, you know,

what people believe in somebody who needs to quit. I mean, I think we have made huge strides in a direction of, that's not everybody's story that is going through this or struggling with it too. I mean, when you're going through this, when do you first have like the thoughts of like, you know, questioning yourself, for question you're drinking of like, hey, maybe I should make changes here.

Yeah, it was, for me, it was a long process. It was like a, it was about a six year process that where what I call meaningfully evaluated my relationship with alcohol. Now, there were years before that where I, I had the thoughts in my head about, you know, you know, your relationship with alcohol probably isn't great. I would have those thoughts all the time. I didn't do anything about them. It wasn't until it was 2013 when I went to see a therapist for the first time.

And the reason I thought I went to see a therapist was because my wife and I were kind of in a rut and we weren't getting along really well and we were fighting more than we usually did. And I felt like I needed to address that. And so I went to a therapist and I sit down and she says, tell me why you're here. And I tell her what I just told you about my wife. And we talked about that for like five minutes. and then the rest of the session, we talked about my drinking.

Really? And yeah, and for, I mean, I went to, I went to this therapist for 11 years. And the majority of our sessions were about my drinking. And so I call that kind of the beginning of my meaningful evaluation of my relationship with alcohol. And at that point, quitting was like not even, not even on the radar. I didn't want to quit. I didn't think I needed to. I thought I needed to make some changes.

And so that was the beginning of sort of my process of trying to make changes to the way I drank and my relationship with alcohol because I wanted to do everything possible but quit. Now sharing that, I mean, at the time it makes sense probably when you're going through it, right? It's like, yeah, yeah, I've got to figure this out of life without it. like not possible, not something I'm interested in. But I think looking back now, man, you look at that probably completely different of trying to make things work.

But the other interesting point, too, because it's not the first time I've heard this, is that maybe we have to check things off the list to get to the spot to maybe realize, like, hey, we've kind of tried it all and it doesn't really work out. Yeah. I, if, if, if, if, if I could go back and talk to, to myself in 2013 as I embarked on this process, I, I would say to myself, hey, let me save you some time. None of this stuff you're going to try is going to really fix the problem. You just need to, you just need to give it up. Now, I think if you would have told me that in 2013, I would have been like, you're crazy. No, just back off, like, shut your mouth. Let me, let me do what I'm going to do. And I bet I can fix this. And so you're right. I did have to. I had to get there. I had to get there. And for every person, it's a different timeline. It's a different process. It looks a little different. And yeah, I mean, do I wish it would have taken me six years? No. I mean, in hindsight, I wish I would have quit a lot sooner.

But I don't lose a lot of sleep over that because you get there when you get there. And hopefully you get there before before you do start crashing your car. And you do start. losing your job or you lose your family. Ideally, you get there before then. But yeah, for me, I had to try all the stuff because I eventually came to the realization that like, none of that's going to work. None of that is a solution long term to what I was trying to get to. And it eventually became, you know, clear to me one day. Like my only, my only option, if I wanted to change, if I wanted to change the way things were going, which I did, I got to the point where my only option was to give it up. Yeah. When you go through that process too, right? You're initially going to the therapist about,

you know, things going on with your relationship with your wife. What about keeping alcohol in the picture makes it so difficult to maybe change other areas of our life? Like, if that's relatable at all. That's a really good question. Because if you, removing alcohol from my life has been the most impactful decision I've ever made. It's improved every facet of my life. It's improved my role as a father. It's improved my role as a spouse. It's improved my role as what I do for a living.

It's improved me as a person. And if you would have sort of tried to explain that to me like in 2013, I probably would have looked at you like he had three heads. Because I would not have got it. It would not have. But it, and it's hard to explain unless you've done it. But you're removing something that for me is just, it's just a big bandaid over everything. It's, you know, people talk about grieving, kind of grieving the loss of a friend when you give up alcohol.

I think there's definitely something to that. You're letting go of something that's been there for you, good or bad, but it's been there for you for years, maybe even decades. And it's a crutch. And it's a, what alcohol did for me, I didn't even realize I was using alcohol to do this at the time. But what it did to me was it just allowed me to kind of. of it just allowed me to coast over things that

were not as good as they could be. I wasn't, it was holding me back and it keeps you from me, it kept me from meaningfully evaluating other areas of my life

that could be better. And I just wasn't doing it when I was drinking because whenever I would get to a point where things would start percolating in my head about maybe doing that, I would drink. And then you forget about it. And then you wake up the next day and you think, why did I drink so much? And you go through that. And you do it all over again. And you do this again and again and again. And eventually, whatever those things percolating are, sort of just numb, they numb out and they get quiet. But they don't go away. That's the thing.

They don't disappear. That's not how life works. They're all. always there. And if you don't address them, they're going to come back in some way, shape, or form. And so for me, removing alcohol has just allowed me to, it's just allowed me to move through life better. Everything is easier without alcohol. And that is something that, if I would have heard that, if I would have heard that phrase in 2013, if I would have heard someone say that. I would have said, you're out of your mind. No way things are easier without alcohol. Because I would have said, I use alcohol to make things easier. That's what makes things easier. And that's completely backwards. And it's completely, it's not accurate. You think it is when you're in

the middle of it. I 100% believe that when I was drinking, that my drinking on the weekends, on balance, you know, made my life better and easier. And that couldn't be more backwards. Yeah. I mean, I think that that's a big part of it too. As long as alcohol is in our life, then we sort of have that eject button if we want to take it. So it's like, okay, if the pressure is building our nervous system is like,

okay, we're going to have to go do something uncomfortable, have a tough conversation, whatever it might be, or we have a stressful day. And then it's like, okay, drink a little bit, that helped out. and you rinse and repeat that cycle. I mean, the brain gets used to, okay, when you're stressed out

on Friday night, after a long week, you've worked so hard. So like, of course you drink. And then when you want to not drink, you're going so far against the grain. It's just like,

oh, without support, it's like, oh, I may as well just drink. It's not that bad. Yeah. It feels very uncomfortable

and it feels very foreign. And the easy thing to do is just go grab that drink because that settles all that down. And you mentioned the nervous system. My nervous system is so much calmer since I've removed alcohol. It's crazy. I didn't even know you could live like this.

Yeah. Yeah. It feels like it's on fire, man, when you were drinking. Like it feels like the anxiety is like I remember just having so much anxiety and just wondering where it came from. Like nothing in my life was like anxious. But then it was like, oh yeah, it's the gasoline that I'm drinking, you know, six or eight or ten of. every night is causing this.

It's not actually something in my life that I'm anxious about. Right, right. It's, you know, when I quit, my kids were, two of them were teenagers and two of them were not yet teenagers, but now, now they're all teenagers. And as anyone with teenagers in a house knows, that can be rough waters sometimes. and one of the biggest things I have now in my life is the ability to just stay calmer than I used to and to take a deep breath before a stupid fight with your kids starts that ruins the morning before they walk out the door to go to school.

That doesn't happen anymore. And again, those were things that I thought, I thought that was just, yeah, teenagers push your buttons and then you get in a stupid fight with them. you, the morning's ruined because, because you got in that fight before they, they walk out the door and I thought that just sort of happened with, with teenagers. But I never liked it, but I just thought that was, that's, was kind of how it goes. If they wouldn't be so annoying and push my button so much, I wouldn't yell at them so much. Well, you know, as, as the adult, when you can, when you can stay calm and not take the bait, um, that makes an enormous difference.

And that's been a big plus of removing alcohol from my life too. Yeah, that's beautiful. And I remember, too, you know, your kids playing into sort of what I feel like what I remember is was sort of the event or, you know, the one situation, even though we talked about too. I mean, this is a buildup over the six years of, you know, trying different things and you kind of navigating things too. We'll walk us through a little bit of that story, too, to where you kind of made the jump

and how things have gone for you since. Yeah, my kids, I have four kids, and they were huge in getting me to the point where I decided to quit. They played a huge role in that because what ultimately got me there was I started to realize it was affecting my role as a dad. And that really bothered me.

And that was something I could not run from. I could run from You know, my own personal shame cycle on a Friday morning or Saturday morning, that I could deal with. I didn't like it, but I could, I knew, I was very well practiced in how to deal with it and move on from that. When it started, when it started becoming apparent to me that it was affecting, it was keeping me from, my drinking was keeping me from being the best dad I could be. that really hit home in a way that the other stuff had not hit home up to that point. And one of the moments where it really hit home for me was when my oldest was, I think he was 15.

And it was, we had gone down to, as the, I live in Omaha and we have the baseball college world series every year. And it's a big deal in, in the city. And we were going to one of those games. and it was me and a friend and my oldest and like four or five other kids. His friends and my buddy's friends or my buddy's kids and their friends. So I was driving and we get to the game and then we all have seats in different parts of the stadium so everyone goes and sits by themselves.

And then we meet back up in the concourse after the game. And we met back up in the concourse and my oldest says to me, Dad, do we need to take an Uber home? And I was kind of puzzled because I had not drank very much that day. I was driving. He had not seen me drink very much that day. So I wasn't sure where this was coming from. And I said, no, we don't need to take an Uber.

Why do you ask? And he said, well, sometimes when you and Mr. Jones get together, things can get pretty rowdy. And I just kind of brushed it off at the time. But that, I could not stop thinking about that the rest of the day. It was the first thing I thought of when I woke up the next morning. And what I could not get past was my son didn't know if he had a safe ride home from a baseball game with his dad because he had seen me and my friends drink excessively in the past. And I was like, what am I doing? Like, what am I doing as a dad where my son has to ask me if we need to take an Uber home from a baseball game?

Like, parenting is hard. It's a challenge every single day. But the one thing every parent can agree on is we want our kids to feel safe. And we want to be able to make them feel safe. Like, that's kind of the bare minimum of what you want to provide as a parent. And here I was because of my drinking. not letting my child feel safe about a ride home from a baseball game. And I thought, what, what are you doing?

Like you can do, you need to do better than this. That's, that's not, that's not acceptable. And that, that, that hit me hard. That stayed with me. I mean, I hated, I hated how that made me feel at the time. But, but in hindsight, I'm so grateful. for it because um that was one of those where i was like you you got to take a hard look at what you're doing because this isn't this isn't what i want i don't want my kids wondering if they have a

safe right home from a baseball game and so that was one of the first big nudges that got me thinking um about possibly quitting uh because i just like i said having it affect myself was one thing having it affect my kids, that's like, that's a bridge too far. Now, having said all that, I didn't, I didn't quit the next day. This was still months before I ended up quitting. But that was summer of 2019 and October of 2019. I was when I had my last drink. And so my, my kids, my kids played a huge role in me deciding to quit. And they also played a huge role in some of my biggest moments after I quit that sort of propelled me forward, involved my kids and made me realize I had so many moments with them that made me realize like this is how I want to do life. Not the way I was doing

it as a drinker, but this is how I want to do it with them. I just had more connection. I was more present. I was more available for them. I never realized. I never realized. I never realized. how much, you know, you're on a trip with one of your kids and everybody's having a great time. And I'm having fun. He's having fun or she's having fun. But in the back of my mind, I'm thinking, when can I get a drink? Like, where are we going to go to get my drink? And then when I start drinking, I'm thinking constantly about how many drinks can I have, how many should I have, how many before my son or daughter starts noticing that I'm acting a little weird.

And even if I'm with them and I don't get drunk, it's occupying my mind and my energy and my space that should be going to them or should be spent enjoying whatever it is we're doing. And I never realized how much alcohol monopolized that time and energy. I call it it. It's the biggest thief of time and energy that there is. And once I removed it, it was gone. And that freed up so much space to just be in the moment and be present and be focusing on the important things. Yeah. And that's the, thank you so much for sharing all that too, Todd. I really love that point you made at the end, too, about maybe this is something you only realize on the other side of it.

Because if, like you mentioned there's so many times, if somebody were to come to you in 2013 and say, hey, you know, I mean, save yourself all of this back and forth and just quit now. It'll be so much better. It's like it's hard to believe sometime. It is. It's just like, oh, whatever. You know, I'm going to figure it out. It's all good.

Like, we'll make it work. But then when you get to the other side of it, you can see it for what it really is. And everything you just mentioned there, I've had so many conversations and can relate to everything too. It would just, when I started to drink, something changed up here. And that's all I could think about and worry about.

It was quiet at first, but it was there, as opposed to I'm thinking other people around me that don't, however you want to coin it, that aren't leaning into alcohol or aren't depending on it, or aren't enjoying it or don't have a problem, whatever it is. I think that they are kind of moving on, like they would leave a drink half full. And I'm like, well, that's kind of weird. Like, you can't do something weird like that. Who does that? That's very weird. Yeah, that makes no sense. Yeah, and I just didn't understand that.

But I think you're so right that we want to try to make it work. But it also it also kind of makes me curious about what is so scary about making the jump to not drinking? Because I think for all of us, there was a time in our life where alcohol didn't run the show and then something switched. And now alcohol and a life without it feels meaningless or what's the point or what the heck is everybody going to think? Like, was there anything you put a finger on that it was like, I know you shared earlier about what? people are going to think, but like anything else? Yeah, there were a lot of things. And I have a chapter in my book called None of the Bad Things Happened.

And it's sort of a list of all the things I thought, I just assumed, were going to happen when I quit drinking. And none of them did. But I was, I mean, I was worried about, I thought, I thought mainly I was never going to really have fun again. Like, not drinking. fun. Like, yeah, I'd enjoy getting up on Saturday morning and feeling fresh and getting to the gym early. I thought that would be nice. I thought that would be, I thought I would enjoy that. But really, like,

the kind of fun you have when you're out with your friends, you know, drinking and the stories you tell. I was like, well, that stuff's gone. That's, that's over with. And I thought people weren't going to want to hang out with me. I thought vacations wouldn't be very much fun. I thought all the things that I enjoyed doing, you know, golfing, traveling, hanging out with family, vacations. I thought all those things weren't going to be as much fun if I was not drinking. And it turns out, big surprise, I enjoy all of those things more as a non-drinker than I did as a drinker. All of them are better. And it's not even close. It's not even a, it's not even a contest. And I just thought there are so many things that I thought, I'm never going to enjoy doing this again. Or it's never going to be as much fun as it was as a drinker. And I can tell you, life in general is so much fuller and richer and better with alcohol, not in my. life and I and I say that as someone who genuinely loved to drink for a long part of my life.

But it's everything's better without it and and you couldn't pay me you couldn't pay me to go back to my drinking version and I had a I had a pretty blessed life when I was drinking. I mean I things were good but but you couldn't pay me to go back to that version because this is so much better. So yeah, I had that long list of things that I thought were going to happen and, and none of them did. So if you're out there and you think those things are going to happen, I thought them too. I was 100% convinced that, you know, all those bad things were going to happen. And I was wrong. Yeah. And I think that that's a very common trend. I don't think that's unique to, you know, the two of us. I think that we, you know, we can tell ourselves that all this stuff is going to come true.

And yeah, it ultimately does it. I mean, I hear from people all the time. how much more opportunity comes on this side of things, you know? And how much, you know, beautiful things are. You know, perspective and being present and so many cool things. If you would have asked me, you know, when I was drinking, like, are you present as a dad and as a spouse? I would have said, yeah, I think I'm a pretty present person. And I think I was.

But nowhere, nowhere like I am now. It's like a different level now that alcohol is out of the picture. picture. Yeah. And I think there's so many people, too, that can relate to that as well. Like you might be present and you might be, say, 70, 80, 90%, but there's so much more that not drinking and not worrying about that, all of that can actually provide. And I think just enrich all of our relationships that we do have, you know, really lean into them, especially on vacation. I mean, a lot of people, too. It's like, I don't know, for me where I live today, I don't really get it. I used to get it. You go on vacation. You drink the whole time, feel like shit the whole time. And it's

like, well, what a vacation. You come back exhausted. Yeah. And when I go on vacation now, I see that. And I'm just like, oh, teach their own. I'm not judgmental towards anybody, but I'm thinking like, I couldn't do that. I just, it doesn't, that doesn't make sense to me in my life today. There was a point in time where I was like, that would have been the greatest thing ever, right? Just to not worry about anything and just feel like, you know, shit for three, four, five, seven days. But now, it's like, oh man, that would be so terrible. I couldn't do that. I remember the first time I traveled.

I was by myself, so I don't remember if it was a work trip or what. But the first time I traveled since I quit. And to this day, I remember the feeling I had on the plane ride back, on the plane ride home. I felt so good, I mean, physically and emotionally. But I felt, one, I was just proud of myself for doing it because I, I, I, did something that I, for 25 years before that, would have involved a fair amount of drinking. But just on that plane ride home felt so good about myself that I had, I had, you know, stuck to my guns and not drank. But I was also struck by how physically much better I felt

than had I would have felt if I had drank. And I just, I thought, you got to do it once. You got to do the hard thing so you know. what it so you know what the alternative feels like and i just i remember thinking man this is this is a window into like how life can be if if you decide to do this and it was just it was kind of a jolt of i got i got a i got a i got a glimpse into what it could be like and i really liked what i saw yeah yeah i love it man it almost makes me even think about too of like probably way off topic, but were humans ever designed or built or created to drink all of this alcohol? I know alcohol became a thing like way back in the day, but that's because there

wasn't clean water. So alcohol was used to sanitize and there wasn't, you know, way back in the day, there wasn't clean water like we have now. So it kind of made sense. But I'm like, I don't know, man. Everything it takes. And even in this short, you know, 37 minutes, just what you've shared and what I've heard other people share and all of it that's so relatable is it's just taking it's a stealing thief like you said right time and connection and I think it's sold as this we see it on all the commercials all the sporting events right connect with your buddies and and and come together and like it is so not real it's so like manufactured and it's so surface level it's not like true connection um that we get from from doing it no no and I I I I

thought for the longest time i thought that was i thought going out with your buddies getting drunk laughing having fun i thought that was it that was the connection like that and i and i was really worried like what what happens to that connection when you take when you take the alcohol away i'm never going to get that again and and that scared that scared me but but what you learn is that's not it that's not the connection we think it is the the the the connecting i've done the the connecting I do with people now that alcohol is removed from my life is not comparable to what I was doing before. It's so much better. It's so much more real. It's so much more genuine. It means more. My relationship with my really good friends that I've had for 30, even 40 years, those relationships

have all gotten better since I stopped drinking. You're right. It's a, it's a, it's a, it's sold to us, it's packaged to us. I'm not a marketing person, but I've got to think the the big alcohol marketing campaign has got to be one of the most successful marketing campaigns

in the history of the world, if not the most successful. Because every, from the time we can absorb messaging, we are told, like, alcohol belongs at every single occasion, any, every single reason,

good, bad, happy, sad, weddings, funerals, vacations, get-togethers, dinners, lunches, tailgating for football, you name it. We have been bombarded with messaging that alcohol belongs at those occasions. And we, and so, we think it does. And so the idea of, we get so ingrained in us that alcohol accompanies all those things. And so the idea of doing all those things without alcohol is very scary to people. It was very scary to me. And it's like, how do you even, how do you even do those things? It seems like I wouldn't even know how to go to a football game and not have a few beers. And it's, it is, it is such a

powerful marketing machine. But it's all, it's all a house of cards, in my opinion. Yeah, yeah, it is. I mean, there's so much stuff. I went down a rabbit hole, too, and we'll head towards wrapping up about how many times alcohol is shown in G movies. They did a research into this. 50% of G movies showed alcohol in a positive light. And I think it was 75% of PG movies. That's crazy.

Yeah, so like they're warming you up before you even realize it for this to make sense. And then if you don't do it, maybe not so much today, but go back five, go back 10 years ago. If you're not drinking at the tailgate, you're weird. If you're not this, that's weird. People are wondering, wow, what that's wrong with Brad? Like, this is what this guy do? You know, why is he drinking? What happened?

Yeah, what happened, man. So that was all part of it too. So, yeah, there is that element. I mean, and that's there. I was thinking of this idea way off topic. but I was like, I want to go through my ordinary day and I want to count every time I see alcohol, whether it be a billboard commercial, commercial advertisement on the radio, do I hear it in a song? How many times?

I mean, is it 25? Is it 50? Is it 100 times a day that we're hearing about it? I might do the study soon here and kind of come back. But it all, it's all playing into it, right, to where I think it becomes so socially acceptable in that, hey, you know, I don't have a problem in life. without it is just going to be so dull. Todd, where could people check out their book?

I mean, we only had 42 minutes. We can't cover everything, but if people want to learn more and hear more your story. Yeah, the book is called I Didn't Believe It Either. One Dad's Discovery that Everything is Better Without Alcohol. And it's available on Amazon. Beautiful. I always love to connect with you, Todd.

Love your story. Love the way you share about it, everything that you're doing. So thanks again, man. Thanks, Brad. I appreciate it.