The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - Katie Herzog: The Science Behind Drinking To Get Sober

Episode Date: March 23, 2026

Alcoholism is a scourge on modern society. Every year, 178,000 American die from alcohol abuse, and it has been estimated that over 200 billion dollars is lost from the US economy due to alcoholism, includingcosts of health care, lost productivity, and costs of crime enforcement. Given this immense social cost, it is equally amazing that there is no widely accepted cure. Rather, alcoholics are told they need to abstain from taking a single drink for the rest of their lives, or they are likely to revert to their earlier states of alcohol abuse. Katie Herzog is a journalist whose work I have enjoyed and I was happy to have a conversation with her in general. But even more so after the publication of her recent book, Drink your Way Sober. She discusses there a fascinating science-based approach that appears to provide a ‘cure’ for many alcoholics that actually allows them to drink, if they wish, in moderation, for the rest of their lives. The idea is to use an opioid blocker, in this case something called naltrexone, that basically removes the pleasure response from drinking. A naltrexone pill can be taken a few hours before drinking, and over time, with the correct behavioral management, it has been shown to be effective for many drinking in removing the craving for alcohol.What makes Katie’s book, and our discussion, so poignant is that Katie is not just a journalist writing about alcoholism, she was an alcoholic for most of her life, and her discovery of the work of of the so-called Sinclair Method, after the scientist David Sinclair, whose original work on naltrexone in Finland changed the field, changed her life. Her book intersperses her own experiences with the science underlying this new treatment for alcoholism, and it is thus perfect for our podcast, which connects science and culture. It also makes for a fascinating and informative conversation that I hope will help have a positive impact on treating this international blight. I hope you find it engrossing and as enjoyable to listen to as it was to produce.And there are still berths available on our Greece and Cyprus adventure. Go to originsproject.org and explore the possibilities!As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project YouTube. Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Hello and welcome to the origins podcast. I'm your host Lawrence Krause. Alcohol abuse is a scourge on modern society. In the United States alone, over 178,000 people each year die due to alcohol abuse, and over $200 billion is lost from the economy due to the effects of alcohol abuse, either increased healthcare costs or lost productivity or even crime enforcement. Given that, it's kind of remarkable that this is a disease for which there's claimed to be no cure. The only approach has been to basically help people abstain for life from drinking. Once they're an alcoholic, they can never have a drink again. Given that, I was extremely happy in this episode to be able to have a dialogue with journalists Katie Herzog. I've enjoyed Katie's writing for years, but I was particularly happy to have her on this program because she's written a new book called Drink Your Way Sober, the Science-Based Method to Break Free from Alcohol. And this is remarkable because the book discusses what could be considered to be a cure for alcohol abuse. It involves a simple scientific idea, namely the use of an opioid blocker, in this case something called naltrexone,

that reduces the joy from drinking, and one can take this pill a few hours before drinking and behaviorally produce over time a lost craving for alcohol that allows at least some users to have, a reasonable alcohol consumption for the rest of their life without having to abstain forever. Now, what makes this particularly interesting is that Katie discusses this not just as a journalist, but Katie's been an alcoholic for most of her life, and the use of an altrexone has helped cure her alcoholism. And so this is a fascinating story because it's personal. Her personal story is interjected with the science, and that's one of the things I particularly find useful about this episode, because one of the purposes of the Origins podcast and of the foundation

run is to connect science and culture. And this is a beautiful way to do just that, discussing how the science of opioid blockers and behavioral techniques can be used in principle to affect a huge cultural issue like alcohol abuse. I wanted to talk to Katie, not just about her experience as an alcoholic, but her early life what led her to that and also what led her to a career in journalism. And the discussion was as fascinating and as informative as I hoped it would be. I'm sure you'll find it incredibly enjoyable and potentially useful. And you can watch it add free on our substack site, Critical Mass. And if you subscribe to that site, the subscription fees go to support the Origins Project Foundation, the nonprofit foundation that produces this podcast. You can also watch

it for free if you subscribe to our YouTube channel, or you can watch it or listen to it on any podcast listening site. No matter how you watch it, it or listen to it, I hope you'll find this provocative and inspiring, at least as provocative and inspiring as I did in having that conversation. So with no further ado, Katie Herzog. Well, welcome to the Origins podcast, and I'm extremely excited today to be able to talk to Katie Herzog, who I followed for a while, and I now feel I know her after reading her book, which is called Drink Your Way Sober, and we'll be talking about this along with other things. Katie, it's great to virtually meet you.

Nice to meet you as well, Lawrence. I sense it's been an interesting few weeks for you. Oh, it's been an interesting few months or a few years. Yeah, two years. Yeah. And we'll get, but I know you want to be a journalist and that's good. And I've read your writing as a journalist, you know, your famous detransition paper article, which you got sort of canceled for, right?

It was an interesting, and I thought not dogmatic article about, people who detransition and what their experience is and the fraction that do and don't. And it was it was kind of a fun thing. But it was, it's such a emotionally charged topic that you really got lamb-baseded for it, I guess. I did. Yeah. This was in 2017. So I was the, I was at the time I was a freelancer for the stranger. So that was the all weekly in Seattle. And the cancel, I mean, it was a cancellation campaign. We didn't, I don't think that word had emerged from the lexicon yet. But. There was a big online pile on, both online and offline.

Oh, really? Yeah, so there were stickers in my neighborhood calling me a transphobe and at one point a Jordan Peterson apologist. I wrote a piece saying that I didn't think he was a Nazi. I thought he was sort of a, you know, in some ways a bit of a cult leader. Maybe somewhat of a charlatan, but not a Nazi. I've had Jordan on and I know him, yeah, I think you hit it right. And of course, things have changed so quickly over the past few years.

My take on detransition in 2017 would not be my take on detransition in 2026. I know a lot more about it now. But the piece was very careful. And I said things in the piece that now I think were inaccurate about like rates of regret, which we don't actually know. But I sort of parroted some activist talking points. I was very careful in the piece, but people got quite mad about it. But it was great for my career. Yeah, well, I got a lot of attention. So being canceled was good for you.

No, it absolutely was good for me. In terms of my career, personally, it was more difficult. So I lost a lot of friends, a lot of old friends, and that will never stop being painful to be abandoned by people who I'm sure that you have. Yes, I'm sure you're very familiar with that. Yeah. Yeah. And so that part was difficult. But professionally, my cancellation was the best thing. That has ever happened to me. me. I feel like I need to send my critics of fruit baskets sometimes. They made my career. You should. I'm sure they would appreciate it. It accused me of doxing them. It doesn't always work that way. And yeah, for many of us, I've seen it. But, but, you know, there were things, I know this isn't about that piece, but I was kind of surprised that, that you said between, this was interesting to me that, because a key issue now is sort of that I've been involved with my book, the War on Science, and we had a number of,

of doctors talking about basically the lack of medical evidence for the utility of gender affirming care. And in spite of what people say, they quote studies that are just not studies. But I was interested to learn that when children, that people who sort of want a trans when their children, I don't know if this is still true, but in that article, there were like between 67 and 80% of the kids who want, who think about transitioning with the kids, end up staying with their sex, their birth sex. Yeah.

Yeah, that was based on older studies. I'm sure the data has changed at this point. And that was, I was basically summarizing some of James Cantor's work. But what they found in the early studies, so these were mostly studies coming out of, out of Holland, what they found was that most kids who came to gender clinics would eventually grow out of it, basically when they hit puberty. And most of them turned out to be gays and lesbians. I think that's really important for parents to hear, I think.

Anyway, I thought that was an interesting fact. But we've jumped ahead because we've already been to your – well, we'll get to your podcast a bit, but your career as a journalist. But I want to go back and ask how you got to where you are. And I know you in this book where I learned a lot about you. But well, I was going to say more than you want to know, but obviously not more than you want to know because it wrote it down so we'd all know. I know he went to college, but I want to go back before that.

In fact, you pointed out that when we were talking before that that picture behind you is from your dad's book. I want to find out about your parents. Your dad was an academic or no? Both my parents were academics. My dad was in the psych department. Both my parents were at a sort of B-level state school in North Carolina. My dad, his field is, he's in the psych department, but his field is human-animal interaction. So it's called the formal name is Anthrozoology.

And the picture in my background, that's the cover of his book in German. The book's called Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat, Why It's so hard to think straight about animals. And he's a, I am my father, much to my wife's chagrin in some ways. But he's very interested in why, in a human behavior and why we do and think the things that we do. and I absorbed a lot of that growing up. Yeah, when you talk about your father now and you don't talk about it in the book, I mean, it resonates because it's clear, I was going to say the book, your approach to these things, it sounds very much like what you're talking about.

By the way, it's not an alcoholic, I assume. No, he's not. And your mother's an academic too? Yeah, my mom, she taught in the English department, or the education department at her university. So she teaches. The child of academics, did you ever, did you want to, I remember with my daughter, I mean, well, it'd be interesting to hear what you say.

You either want to be or it turns you off. My parents always told me they're probably, they're slightly older than you, but so you guys came of age at a bit at the same time roughly. And at that time, from what I observed from my parents, this was a really good time to be an academic. So my dad, he, you know, he served in the military during Vietnam. He was not drafted. He enlisted to avoid getting sent to Vietnam.

But when he was released from the military, he had the GI Bill. He went and got his Ph.D. And there wasn't very much competition. So he applied for a master's program. And when he got his acceptance letter, they crossed out the word masters and wrote in Ph.D. Right? That's how competitive it was at the time. And my parents decided that they wanted to live in Western North Carolina.

And they got jobs in Western North Carolina. They got tenure track jobs. They got exactly what they wanted. They had summers off. You know, they liked their colleagues. They had a lot of freedom. They couldn't get fired. And both of them are sort of contrarian rabble-rous type.

They could, you know, probably not best served in corporate America. And so they had great careers. And but by the time my generation came along, it was very clear to them that the golden age was ending, in part because they taught graduate students. and I think seeing, like in my dad's department, they had a master's in psych. Yeah. What can you do with a master's in psych, right? You can go get a PhD in psych, or maybe be a social worker or something like that. You could probably be a therapist with a master's in psych.

Yeah, if you had clinical, yeah. And I think he just felt like we're just producing these students who, they're not going to have jobs. A lot of them wanted to be professors and they just weren't jobs. So I think I sort of dodge the bullet by not being a good enough student to contact me. And, you know, I'm not sure if your parents are older than me, but, but we're, you know, probably almost contemporary. But at least in my area physics, by that, even at my time, it was already, I never expected to get a, I did a PhD and I learned how to juggle and drive taxi because I just figured I'd never get a job because there were no jobs. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah.

So it was already at least, at least, and that was in the, that was in the late 70s, early 80s. And, but yeah, no, it's nice that they were able to get what they wanted. But did you ever think of either? Well, what did you study in college? I studied English literature with an emphasis on creative writing. Okay, good. And so you never thought of doing psych. I know.

I took psych classes. I really enjoyed psychology. But I never considered, I wanted to be a writer. And I didn't have a plan for how I was going to be a writer. But I basically wanted to be an essayist. I wanted to be David Sedaris. So you, you know, you followed your dream in some sense. I did.

It took it was a winding path to get here. Yeah, we'll get to the winding path, which you helped. You helped your lifestyle made it more winding. I did. I did. I threw up some barriers for myself along the way, for sure. That's all right. Well, it's interesting.

I mean, you know, as someone who writes and I loved and I was influenced, become a scientist because of writers. I wanted to write, but it's not the career path I took, and it sort of always amazed me that it ended up being that way. But did you, they encourage reading with a lot of books? Did you read a lot? Yes. Lots of reading, lots of writing from my mom especially. My dad, so he taught evolutionary psychology, among other things. Which is my favorite part of psychology. Yeah. And so he was, I would take walks with him and he would teach me sort of the history of human evolution. You know, by the time I was five years old, I could, I could lecture people on Lucy and

Australia Epithicus to homo sapiens. I got the whole Lucy once, by the way. Wow. Wow. Well, the bones. Yeah, because my, both institutions I taught at had Don Johansen who discovered Lucy. So, anyway, sorry, go on, but it was neat. Yeah.

So I was very encouraged to pursue. At one point, I thought I wanted to be an archaeologist. My parents took me, or my dad took me to a dig. Turns out archaeology is really. boring. Sitting there with a brush. It's really in a lot of cleaning and a lot of digging and nothing happening. Exactly.

Exactly. And yeah, so I had a, I had maybe a slightly atypical childhood just because of who my parents are, but a pretty, you know, pretty standard American. Well, I mean, that's an important point, which you get to later. I mean, you had a fine childhood. When we talk about your alcoholism, it wasn't, you didn't have a traumatic existence as a child. And that's, that's an important thing.

what we'll talk about when you talk about roots of it or when you talk about roots of it. And but so there were lots of readings, but you didn't, do you ever take physics, by the way? I've never taken a physics course. I, you know, I was not, I'm bad at math. I was terrible at chemistry. I was not a great student. I went to pretty bad schools. So I was good compared to a lot of my peers. But I was not a great student. I was good at history. I was good at sort of the writing things, but not the kind of the more just like straightforward analytical. Yeah, yeah. And it always amazes me you can go through life in high school without taking physics.

It seems tragic. At my high school, I could have gotten by without taking math. Yeah, yeah. Now it's amazing. But at least the right, I mean, but I think reading is really important. And a lot of people, I mean, I think that's great when obviously there's a lot of books, a lot of encouragement of reading. Right.

And reading helps you want to be. Right. And of course, you know, I'm in my early 40s, so I was raised before smartphones and home internet. And so just a very different, you know, television was very different. In the summer, we basically didn't watch, you know, you watch a half hour of TV at night, if that. And then on the summer you watch nothing because everything on television is reruns and

your love to your own devices. It was just a very different, different time. I often, yeah, I actually watched an incredible amount of television when I was a kid. And it was really important for me. I used to say, I probably said this on one of the podcasts, but I wouldn't recommend this. But I used to, even when there was a TV in my room, and when I was a kid, even six, seven, eight, I wouldn't, and later, I wouldn't start my homework till after Johnny Carson ended at one. Really? Yeah, yeah.

But I used to watch old movies and it gave me great cultural knowledge. So were your, and your parents allowed this? Did you have sort of a hands-off parenting? It was sort of hands-off parenting. My brother at the time, for a long time, shared a room with me. He went to bed at nine. I think he still does. It was just different.

And I think as long as we were, I mean, we were good kids and we were good school and all that stuff. And so they didn't really care. And for me, that was great. I mean, for some kids, it wouldn't work. But for me, the less intrusion I had in my life, the better. Right. You must have been, that must have been a real rarity for a kid to have a bedroom in his room,

or a TV in his room. It was a little teeny black and white that I remember. And then later on. And I learned a lot. I mean, I'm not saying it's good, but I used to learn a lot. And even when I was in high school, I remember I'd wake up early and watch some of the educational networks on TV. And then at night, I'd watch Casablanca and stuff.

Anyway, it was useful for me. But, again, I wouldn't recommend it for everyone. So you knew you wanted to go to college, though, right? I mean, especially with your parents being college teachers. It was never a question. Sort of no question. my mom at one point did say to me something like have you considered being a hairdresser? And I think she sort of knew that I had low motivation.

It was never really a question that I would go to college at some point. But I only applied to one college. I chose the one that I didn't have to write an essay for. I was not motivated at all. Where did you go to college again? I went to the University of North Carolina at Asheville. So it's a public school. Oh, in Asheville.

Okay. But your parents didn't live in Asheville. They do now. We lived in a town called Colley. So it's like an hour from Asheville. Asheville's great. We talked about it when we were first talking on the phone. I love Asheville.

Yeah. But I see. So you wanted to stay in North Carolina. You didn't want to go away. Well, I didn't want to, I couldn't pay for out of state. Oh, so it was in state. But did you live at college or did you live at home? I lived in college for the first year.

And then I got an apartment. Okay. Okay. When I went to college, we had to live in the dormitory for the first year. Yeah. Mine was the same. And I was just shocked. It was like institutional alcoholism. Oh, yeah. The university, you know, I mean, right from the very beginning, I couldn't believe they'd put a boy's floor together and a girl's floor. That's what I called them at that time. And they'd give them unlimited amounts of alcohol and basically say, get to know each other.

And it was really. So that was provided by the college? What? The alcohol was provided by the college? But was provided by the dorm. Yeah, really. Because this was Canada and the drinking age was 18. So the kids were, I mean, anyway, it shocked me. But anyway. At my dorm, you could, you could smoke in your dorm room if your roommate would agree. That was the, so it was still, it was, you know, it was not that long ago, but it was long enough ago so that you could smoke in a dorm room, not an airplane, but a dorm room. Well, I never said this either, but, you know, you're bringing it out of me. This is totally relevant. But I discovered two thirds of the way,

through my first year that one room in my floor in the dormitory, no one lived in it. It just had ultraviolet lights and it was used for growing marijuana, the entire room. I couldn't, I didn't, because the only reason I found out about it was because in one of my chemistry class is a colleague, a friend, colleague, asked me, he said, I heard you could get marijuana from the dormant, you know anything about it. So I asked, and they said, oh yeah, it's on your floor, just going. Anyway, look for the white light coming out of the area. I was surprised, but that's a different world back then. Okay, so you took English and you knew you wanted to be a writer,

but you didn't start writing right after you got out of college, did you? No, I did. I mean, I always wrote. I didn't publish. And when I was finishing college, this was the time when it was just, you're sort of just transitioning from actual paper, physical mail submissions where you send a you send a copy of your essay to a magazine with a self-address stamped envelope, which was a real barrier for me.

You know, just a few years later, everything went online, and that made things much easier. But yeah, that was a, so I wrote, but I never, I never sent anything. And I did, I was in an essay contest once, a nonfiction essay contest that was judged by Peter Matthiasen judged my essay. And he wrote me a nice note. win, but he wrote me a nice note and said, a contender. And that was basically the only thing that I submitted to, I think, for the first probably three or four years after graduating. Did you, I mean, I don't know, I'm going to ask as a writer. I wrote a lot. I mean,

even though I was a, I mean, I did history as well as before it had signed. So, but I, I wrote and I didn't publish, but in graduate school I wrote, and I always found what, and I still do this. I write something when I get angry or passion. I mean, I do it often just so I can get it off my mind, even if I don't submit it. Do you do that impact? Every once in a while. No, if I'm, if I'm angry about something, I usually just complain to my wife. Yeah, yeah, no, but I find I need to do it to focus on other things. If I just get it out and I used to submit when I was all the time to the op-ed page in New York Times, and it was very frustrating, of course, because they never published it. But I did see my, even though they, they say there's a barrier between the op-ed page and the columnist.

Two or three times I saw my title in a columnist line. Anyway, I don't know. Yeah, I've had that experience as well. It took a long time later. I'm not going to talk about more than something. But okay, so you, but eventually it was, and we'll get to this, it was only when you were like 30 that you decided you wanted to be a journalist, right? Yeah. So I- after a long, winding road of drinking. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So after college, I, moved to Portland from North Carolina right after college and I worked in coffee shops. I did some unpaid internships. I sat at bars and did crossword puzzles and screwed around. I've done, you know, I sort of lived in a, you know, it was a good time to be in Portland at the, this was in the

craft beer. I lived in Portland, as you know, so. Yes. So this was, I wasn't into the craft beer. I just wanted PBR. This was in the early 2000s and it was a good time to be in Portland. It was still inexpensive. You could work part-time and still live right in the city and drink full-time and still live in the city. And so I did that for a few years. And then I moved back to North Carolina, continued to do that just in different locations. And then I started to kind of get my shit together professionally when I was 30. So 2930. It took a while. And I had, oh, I went to grad school too. But I did go to grad school in what? Yeah. Writing? No, I went to, I did. I did it. like a year or maybe less of information science at Chapel Hill.

Information science. I don't know what that. Yeah, it was like in the school of library and information science. I skipped orientation, so I never figured out quite what it was. I know, some of it was tech-heavy sort of database management,

systems analysis. And you thought you'd already gotten in, I mean, that intrigued you? Why? No, it didn't at all. My sister had gotten her master's in library science from the program,

and it was easy to get into. and I was living in Chapel Hill at that point, and I needed to do something. And so I did that. And also because I, you know, when you get a student loan, they give you a big refund check so that you can live on that for a while. So I wanted to live on the poor financial planning. I wanted to live on what felt like free money at the time. It was not free money.

I know. Yeah. I didn't last. And so when did you get married? What age? Let's see. I've been married for it was way later. It was.

You got married after this. I got married. I got married in 2020. Oh, okay. And did you meet Jana? I mean, were you together for a while before that or no? No. I met her.

So I moved back to North Carolina from Portland. Then I left again. I moved to various different cities, sort of bopped around North Carolina. I was living in Durham. and I decided I wanted to start working as a journalist. I wanted to try to get into journalism. And the reason for this, I've always been motivated by pettiness. And the reason for this was at the time I had been dating a journalist, a radio journalist.

And she broke up with me and I was like, I am going to take your job. And I did. Oh, geez. No, I did not literally take her job. But I did want to get into journalism And she had She had sort of none of the quality Like she hadn't gone to college

She had just sort of worked her way up And that was also sort of eye-opening That you did not have to have a degree in journalism So you know I was motivated by spite But did your relationship with her help You get interested in journalism? I had been interested in it before And so but I met her

She broke Then you know we dated for a while She broke up with me And then it was sort of like Okay this is the motivation to kind of get my life together in this sense. I was very depressed about it, and I needed something to sort of push me forward.

And I thought, okay, I'm just going to, I'm going to get an internship. And I got an internship at the local public radio station. Actually, the show I was working for, it was a Canadian show. It was out of UNC Chapel Hill, but the guy who, the host was a Canadian named Dick Gordon.

This show was called The Story with Dick Gordon. It was syndicated all over the country. So I interned with a story for a while. And then after that, I got my first job. in journalism at a public radio station. So you started radio before you went to print? Yes. Yeah.

Interesting. Okay. And then, you know, okay. And then you went to print. You moved to Portland and Seattle. You moved back to Portland. So we're at Portland. Portland to North Carolina to Portland to North Carolina to Seattle.

To Seattle. That's right. Seattle is where you wrote that. Yeah. That's what that Seattle journal. I wrote down a note here that I thought that your desire to be a journalist was related to your drinking? No. Because I got that sense for meeting the book somewhere, that you were basically at some low point and you said, well, I've got to have a career. I got to be a journalist.

I mean, it was, I guess it sort of indirectly was related to my drinking. I mean, it was, I wanted to be a journalist. I had always been a public radio mega fan. So I grew up what I was what's what they call a backseat baby, you know, a kid who sort of grows up with NPR on the, on the radio. Well, you mentioned they like our talk, which I love, by the way. But you didn't like it. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, sorry.

And so I had, so NPR was the public radio was sort of the most common media in my family. You couldn't get the New York Times delivered to our town. The local paper only came out once a week. We got magazines and stuff, but radio was the thing that was always there. I loved radio. I said before I wanted to be David Stadrars. I first encountered David Sederis on his essays on the, this American life. But I never thought I could do it. You know, I didn't go to a good college. I

wasn't a great student. I didn't have any experience. I didn't know how it worked. And at this low point when I was in my late 20s, when I had been dumped by this broadcast journalist, I just, I thought like, okay, well, fuck you. If you can do it, I can do it. And so that was the thing that sort of changed everything for me. And it was. I was motivated by spite. But also, you know, whatever, whatever works. But that was the thing that sort of prompted me.

I had worked, at the time I was working at a publishing house. And, you know, it was a fine job, but it wasn't what I wanted to do. I was editing and things like that. Oh, that's intriguing. You know, I've seen so many, I've written a lot of books and I've met a lot of the junior people in publishing houses. and they're all the same. They all want to write.

Yes. They're working in publishing house. Exactly. That was exactly what it was. And so radio was my way to get into journalism. Okay. And then, well, this may then, this may then, the next question may be natural then. Because I was wondering what led you to podcasting.

Was that because you sort of missed the radio part of your, I mean, now he'd become a writer. And you missed it. Why the podcast? What got you into the podcast? You, Jesse single. what blocked and reported, which is, which is, you've both been canceled at different times. And it's about, I read somewhere that was about internet nonsense. I like the fact, by the way, that this week's episode, or at least I don't know that it's

weeks episode, but the episode that just appeared on my email today was weird science of gender, which is, which is something that we were talking about. Yeah. At the beginning. So, so, yeah, so I started out in radio. Then I moved, I lived in, I got a job at the public radio. station in Charlotte, North Carolina, and I worked there for a year, and I really didn't like Charlotte. Charlotte's a sort of a boring. I probably didn't give it a fair shake, but at the time I thought of

it as a very boring banking town. And so I was looking for their jobs, and a job came up in Seattle at an environmental magazine called Griss. So it's all online. And Griss, the ethos of the magazine at the time was like, we're going to be like, this is about climate change, this is about the environment, but also it's funny. And so that really, appealed to me. And so I applied for a job there. I got the job. I moved out to Seattle. And so that's how I first got, that was my first print job or text job. It wasn't actually in print because it was all online. And so I worked there for a couple years. And the thing about radio, radio, I don't, people, and podcasting is the same way. It depends on the style of podcast. But the way

that you, if you hear like, if you're listening to like this American Life or a radio lab or a show like that, not a talk show as much like this, but these really highly pretty shows, they're is a massive amount of writing that goes into that. And it's a different form of writing. But Jan Abramon, or he's retired now, but whoever's hosting Radio Lab, we'll have a script in front of them. They are reading from a script. Not the whole thing. There's banter and ad lib and things like that. But a lot of it is writing. And so I like that about it. But it's also much harder than print, just in terms of, like, to make five minutes of really good radio can take hours. Of course, and of course there's a vast spectrum. You know, you have Joe Rogan or just the conversation

that we're having now. This is very casual. There's no writing involved. There's no scripting. But for these highly produced shows, there's a ton of writing, a ton of production. It's just a massive amount of labor. Print, you was just fucking right. And so when I moved to print, it felt really easy. You know, there's still research involved. There's still craft involved. But it's just the amount of labor involved is much lower. And so that's, when I got that job, I thought like, why would I ever go back into producing podcast or radio?

It's so hard compared to just saying what I want, editing it and posting it. That's like you take out all of the sort of, I don't know, the manual labor of it. And then so I got laid off at Grist. I went and I got a job at The Stranger, this outlawful. this outlet in Seattle. One of the first pieces that they published was this article on detransitioners, and there was this massive backlash, and people were burning stacks of the paper

and sending me video up, just a truly unhinged backlash. And my bosses at The Stranger were impressed with the way that I handled it because I refused to apologize. There were many demands that I apologized, and I just wouldn't do it because I had done anything wrong. I had to go through this sort of struggle session with members, self-appointed leaders from Seattle's trans community, all trans women, so all male, sort of snapping in my face and telling me I was going to get

trans people killed. And I just refused to see, you know, I just refused to admit that I was wrong because I wasn't wrong. And the stranger, it's not, you know, it's been around for well over 30 years at this point, closer to 40. The founders were the people who founded the onion. They're very Gen X. They appreciated that ethos. The younger staff members did not appreciate it, but the leadership did. And so when I wrote that piece on D-Transitioners, I'd been a freelancer, but that piece got me a staff job. Yeah. So I went and I worked there for a couple years. Then COVID happened. And I got laid off from the paper, which I was glad about. And then Jesse and I, I was doing some freelance writing, but Jesse and I started the podcast, and the timing was right.

I mean, so you know, you started the podcast, but what caused you to want to do a podcast? I just, that was the question I had. Well, I think we just thought it would be fun. And it had been, we had been talking about it for several months. And so we started talking about it before COVID. We were in a group together. Was it writing or your mutual interests or what? Yeah, mutual interest.

So Jesse had, he had written on, on trans issues in a way that almost known. what he was doing at the time. So I had reached out to him when I was working on my piece on detransitioners in 2017. And I wanted to interview him for the article. And he said, no, because he's competitive. And he thought I was going to scoop him, which I did by a year. And then, so that's how we met. We became sort of internet friends. We met in person for the first time at the first heterodox academy conference. So this was in 2018 in New York. And, and Jesse, this was right before his cover story on detransitioners was come out in the Atlantic. I think the last day of the conference, it was a Sunday. His article was coming out on the Monday. And I asked him, you know,

I had been through this experience a year before I'd gotten canceled, this huge stockpile, and I asked him if he was nervous. And he said, no. He was like, it's been fact check. It's so thorough. I spent so much time with it. Nothing's going to happen. And I thought, this man's an idiot. I'll go into business with him. And then, you know, a few years later we started the podcast. So that's how Jesse and I met. He was, of course, very wrong about the reaction to his article. Yeah. And then and you met and you just wanted to talk about, is it really about internet nonsense?

Is there a theme? That is the theme, but it's about, it's sort of hard to describe. When people, when I meet people who have never heard of the show or who aren't super online, and I say it's criticism. It's media criticism. It's political criticism. It's cultural criticism. All of which is true.

But we have over time, so we started the show in 2020, and at the time we were talking a lot about Black Lives Matter, COVID, the things that were happening in the culture at that moment. And over time, it's evolved. And Jesse and I, we don't have meetings. We barely have a calendar. Like, we have no business running a business together. But the show just sort of naturally evolved to these stories that other people. weren't covering. So we talk a lot about these niche internet communities that were not even a part of just because we find them fascinating. And a lot of, and the show for the first four years was a lot

about sort of liberal infighting and progressive meltdowns. So lots, like our audience tends to love shows about like an anarchist coffee shop in Philadelphia that's run by furries. And then the employees try to unionize and the whole thing goes bust. So we've done a lot of stories like that. The Trump administration has certainly changed things because at the time that we started the show, progressives had undeniable cultural and political power. Even if it was 2020, Trump was in office, but the zeitgeist was very progressive. And that is changed in a way that I think if we were still exclusively doing sort of like anarchist, which I still, I love the anarchist cafe shows. But if that's just what we were doing, I don't think it would be an accurate reflection of the world.

Because a lot of the show is about free speech and cancel culture. And no matter how bad you think leftists were on those issues, and I do think many leftists were quite bad on those issues over the period of the awakening, the Trump administration is worse. Interesting. Okay. Well, we should have. Okay. I keep wondering why you haven't had me on from the War on Science book. But, you know, we can have a conversation.

about that because there's two big attacks on science and they're very different. And one is worse in one way and one is worse in the other. I think my own feeling is that the what you might call, I don't want to, I don't like the label left and right, but what you might call the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, is more, is more, is worse in the sense. It's, it's much, going to be much harder to get rid of, um, in the long run. And I think that's because it's ingrained in such way. Okay, well, we've gone on for a long time. Don't you think it's time we're trying to talk about your book, which is, I mean, I think it's important. I thought it was important before I read it. Also, I knew I wanted to get to know you better.

And so I thought, oh, this, you've written this book. And it's drink your way sober. The science-based method to break free from alcohol, but drink your way sober is such an interesting idea. And so counterintuitive, and we'll talk about the countertuitous of it, that I wanted to, I wanted to read it in great depth. And I only have, it turns out, 70 questions. for you. So we'll see. We should be done by tonight. But anyway, the conventional wisdom has always been, as you pointed at the beginning of the book, that alcoholism is, once an alcoholic, you're always an alcoholic. And the only way to go is abstinence. And as you point out in the first part of your introduction of the book, that's wrong. In fact, the first page of your introduction,

that's wrong. And what I was really pleased with, since I'm a scientist, is you immediately say, Science actually is accomplished what once seemed impossible, as if that's a strange thing. But that's what the science is all about. It's really wonderful aspect. But it basically has a cure, you would say. And that is totally goes against the grain of anything in popular culture right now. And I think, but the weird thing about this cure is that, as you point out, is it requires you in general to drink. And therein lies the rub.

That you're being cured from something that's supposed to be bad by doing it. And that, as we'll talk about, affects a lot of people's reactions to it and doctors' reactions to it. And so that, you know, that's the introduction. And it involves a drug called analtrexone, which we'll talk about in depth. But it's a drug that you take before you drink and that will, in principle, change. and that will, in principle, change your approach to drinking. And we'll talk in more detail. I want to let you talk about it, but that's what you clearly start.

But let's start the book. You start the book at rock bottom, and you say you're in denial. Is that a common... I mean, I want to talk about alcoholism and alcoholics as well as the remarkable, many features of the solutions and things you talk about here. But have you found among your fellow... alcoholics, that denial is the norm rather than the exception? Denial tends to be a part of the journey, right?

So you say I start the book at rock bottom, it's true, but I had a lot of rock bottoms, and I had periods of going through denial and periods that I wasn't in denial, and I had periods when I was drinking more and periods when I was drinking less. So it's really not, for me, it wasn't linear, the path in and out of alcoholism. But I do think just thinking off of the top of my head, I know a lot of alcoholics, I would say that a lot of them, while they're drinking, are in denial, actively drinking. And then something happens that maybe they get to a crisis point and then all of a sudden they can't deny it anymore. But it's a very, it's a very destabilizing realization to come to because what I thought, when I first came to that realization, when I thought was that if I'm an alcoholic, I have to quit drinking. That is the only way out of this.

And if you have a drinking problem, if alcohol is the source of your problems, even if alcohol is the source of many of your problems, you probably have a love-hate relationship with it. And quitting that, giving up this thing that seems impossible, it just seems like an impossibility. It seems like I was under the impression that if I quit drinking, I would be left wanting for the wrong. rest of my life. I would spend the rest of my life sort of battling my own nature. Yeah, no, I mean, that's the daunting part. And one of the things you talk about is that, is it, that's probably what turns many people away from trying to get cured because it seems so impossible and seems so daunting. It seems so cataclysmic. And the idea that you might be able to overcome it without actually having to go to that extreme is it should be something that

that is talked about a lot more. Before we get to that, in fact, one of the things you point out is that we don't say, we've used the term alcoholics, but that's now not as, now one rather use, alcohol use disorder, which,

because alcohol has a sort of moral tone about it, whereas alcohol use disorder makes it sounds medical. You want to go into that? Right, but it's just so much longer. So, you know, and you need to have a noun, so it has to be like person with alcohol use disorder, person with AUD and I don't like that. I don't like this sort of euphemism treadmill. I think there are

some valid reasons that clinicians in particular have shied away from the term alcoholism. Stigma, the use of the word spectrum, it describes, or the use of alcohol use disorder describes, more accurately describes a spectrum. And there is a vast spectrum of problem drinking. That's true. It tends to be these days, the only people who reliably use the term alcoholic are, are people in AA. It's still popular there, but most other institutions have moved away from that term, but I use it. Yeah. No, it's, and it's, he point, you point out is that it allows the idea of a spectrum, and there are meant, there's a whole spectrum which you talk about. And of course, that spectrum implies a different, as you might imagine, if there's a spectrum of people,

you might imagine different solutions for different people. It's not to, I mean, if you're, if you're thinking about this rationally, it's not surprising that different things work for different people. Right. But one of the things you pointed earlier in the book is, I mean, is how vast a problem this is. I mean, I guess I never really thought of the numbers. I'll quote some of the numbers you give. A 180,000 Americans die each year from excessive drinking. I mean, that's, that's 180, 178,000. That's more than I think, well, of course, some of them die in car accidents and other things because they're drunk driving. But I think, I think that's more than the number of the dying car accidents in general.

I don't know about car accidents, but it absolutely dwarfs other drugs, except for tobacco. Except for tobacco. Right, but fentanyl. It's weird. You don't think of it as a, I mean, you don't put it in perspective. You know a lot of alcoholics, but you don't realize it's such 178,000 people. And that's just a small person. Those are people who die, but there's also many people who are born and that's a small fracture because

they have disease, they have physical, mental problems. And listen, some people, someone in 2010, it was estimated that cost the economy about $250 billion a year in health, productivity, you know, justice, all sorts of cost to society, $250 billion. And that half the homicides that are reported are probably alcohol-induced and not surprisingly one-third to two-thirds of sexual assaults. So given that, given that it's such an $250 billion, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's an epidemic. Yeah. Yeah. Why isn't a lot more money spent on a cure than there is? Well, a lot, I mean, a lot of money has been sent, been spent on treatments.

Treatments, but why not more on a cure? Why not? Right. So that's a, that's a good question. I think the answer to that is three or fourfold. one just comes back to the dominance of 12-step programs in AA in the culture. So A.A.A. has been around for at this point, almost 100 years. It was founded in the 1930s. And A.A. had a, it had a basically really good marketing. There was one member in particular, one of the earliest women in the program.

Her name was Marty Mann. And she was very well connected in media in Hollywood. And A.A. saved her life and she made it her mission in life to spread the gospel of AA. And she did. And so she got AA in Hollywood films. She got people talking about it. And over the years, it just became this hegemonic force within the culture. And so when you go to a rehab program now, and this has changed a bit, but for a long time, if you go to rehab, rehabs, which can be incredibly expensive, often what you were getting, the care that you were getting was based on AA. It was based on these what are typically free programs. So that's part of it. Just the cultural dominance of AA has sort of edged other treatments out. And I don't think that's intentional. I think it's,

I think it's an organic process. And there have been one thing I learned when writing the book is that there have been many, many, many treatments throughout the history of humankind and our relationship with alcohol to address both sort of short-term withdrawals and chronic alcoholism. And over the years, just as AA became more popular, everything else just got sort of edged out. So that's part of it. I also think the reason that pharmacological solutions, drugs, haven't been more explored or more considered acceptable in American culture as this sort of moralizing. We tend to think, you know, there's people like to say that alcoholism is a disease.

I think it's more complex than that. I don't think it's that. There's just more nuances there. But we still tend to treat it as though it is a moral fan. And we often think as a culture that moral failings need to have, moral problems need to have moral solutions. It has to be something there has to be something at the root of your alcoholism. You have to atone for your sins. A.A. provides that in a way that drugs don't.

So that's part of it. Medical education also in the United States has almost ignored addiction until recent years. Yeah, well, we'll get to that later on. Yeah. I mean, there's a change in medical education. But it is surprising given that, I mean, when I thought about it, I thought, just from a almost from a capitalist perspective, you'd think that if there's this huge disease and you can make, I mean, you know, just like diet now.

And I mean, you can just make all this money from people who have this problem. It is surprising. And we talk about, there's more specific things, especially related to Nalturk's own about why it maybe has not caught more. We'll get to it. But it is a surprising fact. Now, you did say, you said in a way that there was a love-hate relationship with Rikian, And somewhere early in the book, you say you start drinking to feel good.

And I know that's why you started drinking. But in the end, you continue to drink because not drinking feels terrible. So would you want to expand on your own experience there? Yeah. So that's, I think, a pretty common experience, almost cliched in the alcoholism world. At the end of my, so I started drinking young. I was 12 or 13 when I had my first drink. Wow.

Out of the house? Do what? Wasn't in the house, was it? It was that a friend's parent, you know, some alcohol stolen from a, you know, from a friend's parents. I started going to keg parties when I was in high school. I drank a lot in college. And at the time, it was fun and it felt like freedom. You know, I loved college.

I didn't care that much about the education, but I loved the freedom that I felt it afforded me. There was nothing I liked more than to sit on my porch at my first house, my first grown-up house out of, you know, my sophomore year in college. and drink beer and read the New Yorker. I loved it. And that sense of freedom lasted for a long time, but at some point alcohol started interfering with other aspects of my life. You know, my relationships, my job, school, all of it. And it started to dominate my life.

And it started to dominate my thoughts. And it became almost, it became an obsession, right? So for years, you know, I went to school. I went to college. I saw my friends. I did whatever. I lived my life. But in the back of my mind, I was always thinking about drinking. I was always thinking about when I could drink, where I could drink, if I was going to drink. Also knowing that I needed to quit, but being unable to do it. So it was this real, it was an obsession. And people now use the term food noise when they're talking about O-Zempic, how O'Simpic Calm, quites the food noise. I had booze noise. And it was nonstop for 20 years. Yeah. And it just felt impossible. I felt like, that this was never going to end. Like, I would never live a life that was not consumed with alcohol. You know, it's interesting, because that's one's end of the spectrum. One of the things you point out, which I didn't realize is that 10% of the population is on this spectrum of alcohol use disorder. 10% is 30 million people or so, which is huge. But also what I didn't realize is that 70% of them get better

without intervention. So it does indicate there's a huge spectrum. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I didn't realize that so many, yeah. Yeah. If I think back on my peers in college who I had my sort of early drinking days with, most of them graduated from college, went and got a job or went to grad school or moved to a new town. And they just gradually drank less. They got married. They had kids. And they found that alcohol wasn't compatible with their lives. And so they naturally drank left. They didn't have to go to AA. They didn't have to go to AA. They didn't have to. have to go to therapy, they didn't have to take medication, they just drank less. That's really common. It's just called natural recovery. And it's not something that's talked about that much, but it's just,

it's most people's path. Most people who have a drinking problem do not end up having to go to AA or having to quit entirely. They just age out of drinking. Yeah, that's, that was news to me. I thought that was interesting. By the way, since you mentioned it, and maybe been drinking or drinking in college or particularly drinking in high school. I mentioned to you that, well, we talked earlier about my experience when I grew up in Canada, which was where drinking age was 18, and it was for a while in the U.S., I think, too. But, and it's still, I think it's 18 or 19 still in Canada.

But do you think that, I mean, one of the things occurred to me, and I've lived in Europe for a while, is that where kids drink at home and have, you know, wine with dinner, is that part of the problem, and this is, you know, know, anecdotal. But you see kids who, for the, first of all, it's illegal, they're not allowed to, and therefore they want to. And suddenly they have the opportunity to.

And it's like, wow, I'm going to drink to excess. And a lot of kids get sick and get overcoming. But I can't help but think that making it so taboo or at least. And so what do you think about, you know, this fact that it's 21? You can, you can vote. You can go to war, but you can't drink. I mean, it just seemed crazy to me. Yeah.

I think there is something to that. I think the prohibition of it makes it, the taboo makes it more exciting. I would be really, I'm sure that countries like France also have significant over-drinking problems. I would be interested in sort of seeing the statistics about been drinking in college. Do French students actually drink less in college because they are sort of trained from a young age? I'm sure not all of them, but some of them trained from a young age to sort of drink responsibly. Yeah.

Now, it would be interesting. I'm sure the studies have been done. done. But talking about drinking, and you were probably in the top 10%, you said, the top 10% of alcoholics or drinkers drink over 50% alcohol, and they drink over 74 drinks a week. Was that you? Yes, at different times, yes. Yeah, it's amazing to think. And we'll talk about how you got down from 74 drinks a week. It just seems, yeah, wow. But now, I want to go back. You talked about history and one of my questions about what was about Ms. Mann, but but but it is interesting to go back. I was surprised at how far back the records are for alcohol and alcohol maybe consumption.

You want to go back to where it began? Yeah. So the earliest traces of human consumption of alcohol are about 9,000 years old in China. It's probably some variation of rice wine. But of course, just because, you know, one one, one. art of pottery has traces of rice wine that's 9,000 years old doesn't mean that people weren't drinking from really much earlier. You know, even there's some animals that, you know, will eat fermented fruits.

There's a famous moose in Alaska that would eat fermented apples and get wasted on that and sort of terrorize an Alaskan town. So it would not surprise me if there's something innate about the human and possibly the animal condition that not all animals for sure, not all people to be sure. But the history might be much longer. Cats do like catnip. Absolutely. Absolutely.

And then the first, when I was reading the book, as I wrote a note of it, I think the first time there was a treat that recognized as a, well, maybe not the first time, but you mentioned it, that they sort of talked about as a treatment or a disease was 1784. Is that, you want to talk about that for a bit? Yeah. So there's a founding father named Benjamin Rush, who not as famous as Franklin or Washington or Jefferson, but one of our founding fathers down here in the States, he was a physician.

And he started, he was one of the earliest people to describe chronic drinking as a disease. I don't remember the exact language that he used. He had some very floral, floral terms for it, or florid terms for it. And he was, so he started what would become, what would evolve into what were called sanatoriums. So places for people basically. to go dry out. And so these were less about treating the chronic condition, but just people who were acutely drunk, who were going through withdrawals, what would later become sort of drunk tanks. And that was, yeah, I didn't realize it was that early that it was sort of thought of as a disease rather than just some kind of moral condition. When did AA begin? How long, how old is it?

So 1930s, that was the first. Yeah, and there were, there were temperance societies. before A.A. There was one called the Washingtonians. There were different groups that had this sort of peer support or temperance mission. But A.A. was the first one that was really successful. Yeah. And Marty Mann made it more successful. And it's now, yeah, everywhere. It's what you hear about. You see everywhere. And I think it's hard to know someone who hasn't been. I think. I don't know. With my experience is typical. I know many people have been.

Yeah. But okay. So then, but so there's a, and that, and that experience is the 12 steps, you know, the complete abstinence,

the support groups, and the religious overtones, which is always, always gave me queasy bits being, you know, a well-known atheist, I guess. But, but,

but I guess I was willing to, we'll talk about this later a little bit. And for me, I was willing, spend disbelief in science fiction, my feeling was, okay, I don't care about the religious bits if it helps, just like, you know, I didn't care about telling my daughter with Santa Claus for a while. Right, right. And, but in any case, so that created what is now the paradigm, which is, it's an incurable disease.

You, you're a lifetime alcoholic, and the only way is to constantly be reinforced in not drinking with a support group and never to drink, because the minute you touch alcohol again, you're doomed. Then you have John David Sinclair. You want to talk about him and how he... Sure. So let me... So there's this, yes, but before we get that, so I think there's a bit of a misconception

about what A.A. actually says and what sort of our popular conception of what A.A. says. So A.A., one of the founders, his name, Bill Wilson, I forgot it for a second. Bill Wilson was an incredibly open-minded man. And so he was very aware, like he was doing L.E. in the 1950s with Timothy Leary. This is very controversial within AA.

But he, so he was aware that A.A. was not the only way to get sober. He was aware that some people could moderate their drinking, just not people like him. He was aware. He was the person who wrote, you know, someday science may discover a cure for alcoholism, but it hasn't yet. So he was open-minded. But, and that's all in the big book. You can read that for yourself in the big book, which is sort of the central text of A.A. But that message has gotten lost.

And so before I read the big book, I went to plenty of AA meetings when I was younger, but before I read the big book, I thought, okay, so this is what AA says. There's only one way to get sober, and that's through A. A.A. itself never says that. That message persists, but it's not original to A.A. Okay, so John David Sinclair, so he was an American researcher. He did his Ph.D. at Oregon. He originally did his undergraduate work in Cincinnati, I believe.

And then after he finished his Ph.D., he moved to Finland to Helsinki. And he got a job at a researcher at what at the time is called alcohol laboratories. And so this was a state-funded lab, funded by alcohol taxes. At the time, Finland, the state had basically a monopoly on their alcohol supply. So in the same building, they had alcohol distributors. They also had people working to find solutions to the problems that alcohol caused. And so John Davis-Sinclair, he had, you know, done his Ph.D. on this. And he went, he went there and he started, actually, this was when he was working on his Ph.D., and even before, he started doing studies on lab rats.

And he realized a couple of important things. And so one of those was later, he named it the alcohol deprivation effect. But to describe it, there's this idea that if you abstain from alcohol for a long time, then your cravings will diminish. That's not, for most people, that's not actually how it works. Rather, if you abstain from alcohol, your cravings go stronger. Not for everybody. Of course, everybody's different. If you haven't had a drink for 30 years, you probably aren't going to get any cravings for them.

But let's say you're doing something like a dry January and you go through this. 30 days without drinking. What do a lot of people do on February 1st? They binge. And that was my experience, right? And so the longer, so I would have periods of sobriety throughout my, throughout my life, but I always, they never stuck. At some point, there was going to be some craving that was so strong that I was going to give into it. And I just couldn't get past that. And so John David's clear, so he realized this, and he thought, what if there was a way to diminish the desire, for alcohol itself. Because we have all these people, they know they need to quit drinking. They know it's ruining their lives, but they cannot stop because they continue to want to drink. And so he tried various

experiments, basically. And at one point, he gave his lab rats that had been, they had been, they had been bred to like alcohol. Rats don't, aren't naturally big drinkers, but these ones had been. And so he gave them various drugs to see what would happen. And one of these was an opioid blocker called naltrexone. And when he gave the lab rats naltrexone and then gave them access to alcohol, they would drink less. So that was key. He wasn't giving them access to alcohol and then forcing them to abstain, although he did that as well. But it was that combination, alcohol or naltrexone, the opioblicker plus alcohol that he saw in studies lowered their desire to drink, lowered their consumption. And then he repeated this with humans and saw similar.

results. And he just, he discovered that by just trying different drugs. And I mean, I assume he would have thought that, I mean, if it's, he was thinking behavioral science, that he would think, well, what can reduce the, the reward a little bit? What can reduce the, but then as you point out, we'll talk about it more later in the fourth or fifth or sixth hour. No, I'm just, that, that, that, that there's this question. And I think it's still an unwell, I, I guess it's an unanswered question. one version seems eminently more sensual to me, but whether naltrexone reduces cravings or just reduces the rewards. And I guess there's still a debate, an open debate among scientists on which it does. Yes. So the, I would say the foremost researcher, who's also a clinician,

working on this, is Joe Volpicelli. He's outside of Philadelphia. He's fantastic. He was immensely helpful to me when I was working on the book. He wrote the forward for the book. And Joe and John David Sinclair had this sort of friendly debate because Joe thought that Naltrexone worked by preventing cravings. Yeah. And he was also his, so his studies, Nantirxone has been FDA approved to treat alcohol use disorder for over 30 years. And it was his studies along with a woman named Stephanie O'Malley from Yale that were used to get the FDA approval for Naltrexone. So they had this friendly debate. It remains an unsolved question.

Basically, John David Sinclair, he thought it was this process of extinction. pharmacological extinction, and Joe thought there was a more direct path. It just diminishes the cravings. And honestly, who knows if that question will ever be answered? I think for most people it doesn't really matter. Yeah, well, it's an interesting question. I have to say, well, my intuitive version, based on everything I've read in the book and the way it's used is that it reduces the rewards and therefore reduces not so much

the cravings. But in any case, who knows? But it was Naltrexone was actually discovered way before that, in 1960s. You remind us where and how again? Yeah, so it was first synthesized in the early 60s by a small chemical, like family-run chemical company called, I think it was Elko Laboratories. And then they were bought by DuPont. So DuPont had the early patent. And DuPont first started marketing it.

So it's an opioid blocker. Yeah. And DuPont first started marketing it as a treatment for opioid addiction, for hair. for morphine, things like that. And so that was the first, that was the first marketing. It was, it was FDA approved for opioid use disorder, I think 1984, and then 10 years later for alcohol. And I talked to a drug rep who had been at DuPont at the time, and he said that he was so excited. He thought that this was the solution to the problem of morphine addiction or heroin addiction, because unlike drugs like methadone, it's not psychoactive, right?

So you take the drug and you don't get the pleasurable effect of the drug itself, whether that's alcohol or whether that's an opioid. And so one of the problems with methadone, which had cornered the market at the time, was that you can't, like, Naltrexone intended, what he found was that Naltrexone intended to work really well for highly motivated populations and professionals. So like pilots, doctors, nurses, people who can't take some, you know, go get their methadone and then put a plane in the sky. And so naltrexone, because it doesn't have any psychoactive effects, it was less disruptive to one's professional path. And one thing that is helpful when it comes to recovery from drug and alcohol abuse is stability, having a job, maintaining your career.

And so Percy was very hopeful, but he said that methadone had just kind of cornered the market and doctors weren't interested. It also remains true, and this is something to what Chaletalry told me, DuPont's a chemical company. And so DuPont just was not sort of well positioned to market a drug. You know, it's possible if another company had bought Elko Laboratories, if Pfizer had bought them or whatever, there would have been much more success with Naltrexone. I thought, who produces methadone? I don't know. I'm sure it's generic by now. Oh, okay, but I thought DuPont actually had a conflict of interest because they were involved in methadone too, and they didn't want to push one.

I thought I remember that in your book. Maybe I'm wrong, that they didn't want to push Naltrexone when they had a moneymaker like methadone. Well, it's not in my book. It says possible, but it's not in my book. Okay, okay. I remember the reading. But also there was some resistance. Well, you make it also indirectly, it suggests that, look, the treatment industry,

is huge and very lucrative. And there are many treatments, and you point out, the treatments are $28,000, $30,000, etc., and that there was probably some resistance from those as well. Yeah. And I think, again, I think that's organic rather than a conspiracy. I should say that these programs, like Hazleton Betty Ford, so the biggest rehab conglomerate in the U.S., they've shifted their thinking on this. so they will prescribe medications for addiction now.

But those programs tend to be staffed by people who have gone through recovery themselves. And so if you've gone through, and this is my experience, I went to outpatient therapy. I did one-on-one therapy group therapy. I went to AA. I did those sort of conventional programs. And the people who tend to work at them are people who got sober through rehab and AA. And so it's not so when I say it's not a. conspiracy, that's what I mean.

And like, they're just telling you what worked for them. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. No, that's a good point to make. And I'm glad you made it. I want to make clear. Yeah, they're not saying, oh, let's stop this because we, you know, this worked for, this works for us and therefore it's the way we think it should work.

Yeah. Right. But I also think there is some, you know, there's a moral aspect to this too. A lot of people think, and since I published the book, you know, I've gotten this feedback, that addiction, the root of addiction is something else. The root of addiction cannot just be that you enjoy drinking and, you enjoy drinking and you drank too much and you got addicted, which I think is true in my case. The root of addiction has to be some sort of hole inside you and you have to address the root cause, whether that's

trauma or depression or anxiety or whatever. If you don't address the root cause, you're a dry drunk, right? You might not be drinking, but you haven't solved the problem itself. Yeah, that's an important. Yeah, we'll talk about that because you do talk about that. It's really important. And I think it's related to the initial point you made, I mean, which is that it's a spectrum. It's not too surprising that not everyone falls into the same, you know, little box. And so there are root causes for a lot of people, but there may not be. Well, we'll talk about some of the, there's a cause of maybe genetic, too. We'll talk about that.

This is an aside, but I was intrigued by it. I always thought of blacking. I want to jump back and forth, probably because you do in your book, between sort of the history and the science and what needs to be done and the experience of an alcoholic. and which you described. And I, you know, I was talking to my friend of mine who, who just the other day, who blacked out. And I always thought blacking out was just like becoming unconscious.

But it's not. When you drink, the blacking out is a very different experience. You want to just talk about that for a second? Yeah. So there's passing out, which is kind of what it sounds like, you know, basically a heavy sleep. And then there's blacking out. So when you are blackout, and my friend Sarah Habler wrote a book, a memoir called Blackout, that I recommend for people who are interested in this particular phenomenon.

But blacking out is basically a form of amnesia. So you can be completely, you appear completely conscious, you can have conversations, go order more drinks at the bar, go sing karaoke, drive, whatever, but you have no memory of it the next day. Yeah. Wow. It's an amazing and scary phenomenon. You'd think, actually for my friend, it was an experience.

of lacking out that basically changed her the way. I mean, she was very young. And it just, that's what stopped her from excessive drinking. But it must be. Yeah. But you did it often and somehow it didn't, it didn't scare you off. No. And I think it was, you know, in some ways, like if you have no memory of the night before,

a rational person would say, okay, that's a really big problem. I need to stop this. To me, it was like, it was almost like my brain protecting me from whatever embarrassing thing I had done, you know. I don't know. I don't know if anything happened. It seems fine. I don't have any memory of, you know, whatever embarrassing thing I did last night. And other than a bike accident, I guess, I suppose you're fortunate. I mean, it could have been a lot worse, right? You could have. Yes. Yeah. I mean, and you're talking about people waking up in various places. Right. You know, I was never in a car accident. I was never arrested. I had, you know, sort of small

traumas and things like that, but nothing major. You know, the fact that I'm alive and have a job and I'm married and, you know, I pay my taxes on time is sort of a miracle, considering what I did to my body. Yeah, I know, I mean, I was lucky. You know what? I have to say, the first thing I did when I looked at you is thought, well, you seemed pretty healthy for someone who did all that. Yeah.

Anyway, it's very lucky, yeah. It's amazing. Now, you found the Sinclair Method from an article by Gabrielle Glover, I guess. Glasser. In the Atlantic. You want to talk about that? Yeah, so this piece was published in 2015, and it was called The Irrationality of Alcoholics Anonymous. It was mostly a critique of AA, but she had a section in the piece about John David Sinclair

and the Sinclair Method. And she actually went to Finland. He died in, I believe actually 2015, but she went to Finland and she met him and went to a clinic in Finland where the primary mode of treatment was the Sinclair method. And when I read that, I just thought, okay, this is the solution to my problem because it allowed you to continue to drink. And that was the problem. I knew I needed to quit drinking.

I wanted to quit drinking, sort of, but I also didn't want to quit drinking. Right. And that's what always had been my great struggle with abstinence, is I just didn't want to stop. even though I knew I needed to. And so this seemed like the perfect solution. And so I went and I got a prescription for naltrexone and stopped, you know, picked it up at the pharmacy, stopped at a corner store and got a big beer on my way home, took the pill, waited an hour, which is how long it takes to metabolize. And I just felt awful. I had really bad side effects the first time I took the pill. And so I was really disappointed. I thought like, all right, this isn't it. You know, I felt my stomach hurt,

my head hurt. I felt depressed. It's just nauseous. I just really felt bad. And I thought, okay, I can't, I can't do this. This is not going to be the miracle career for me. And so I just stowed my medication away and I continued to drink for the next few years until COVID. And then COVID, sort of my drinking accelerated to the point where it was obscuring every other thing in my life. And I tried again. And it worked. And you point out, we'll talk about this again, maybe. that yeah there are side effects but side effects of course like anything are different you you happen to have been particularly sensitive some people have more side effects some people have less and that and the other thing and it's later on but I guess the more as you took it your side effects wane yeah

right yeah they're manageable there's also so typical most people do not seem to have side effects from this medication people who do tend to have a little bit of nausea a little bit of headache can make you tired. I don't think it makes anybody feel good. It's an endorphin blocker. Yeah. Right. The whole point is not to feel good.

Right. That's the point. But if you do it in this very targeted way, like, don't take naltrexone and go for a run. You know, that's going to, don't do that. But if you do it in this very targeted way, the idea is that it just targets the behavior, the problematic behavior itself, which in this case is drinking. There's some indication that it can also work for things like gambling. cocaine, not cannabis. Cannabis works on a different system. But yeah, you know, to me it was just

sort of the side of, when I eventually did sort of commit full time to doing this during COVID, the side effects, I spent time learning how to manage side effects. I started with a low dose and titrated my way up. Some people take over-the-counter antinagia medication or zofran. Some people have no side effects at all, and so it's not an issue. You know, and I just, sort of reminded myself like, okay, well, this isn't this isn't pleasant, but my life isn't pleasant right now, right? I'm going to die if I continue to drink like this. Yeah, I think we want to get that point.

At some point, it's a set of options. By the way, I have to say, you hit me earlier and I meant to say it. It's fascinating to me that Sinclair was in Finland because I've been to Finland numerous times for physics. and I was never struck more by alcoholism than I was when I was in my first visit to Finland. I'd never seen more extreme versions of alcoholism on the street in the summertime, walking down the street, see people urinating on the street. Women, you know, again, you tend to see more male alcohol.

And just, I remember seeing a woman and I was really afraid for her health because she was totally, you know, I was afraid for what would happen to her. So I, you know, I walked her home. but it's extreme and as a result they also have extreme penalties. At least when I was there the first time, if you were caught driving drunk, you lost your license for life. Oh, wow. Life.

And interestingly enough, by the way, I mean, it was a great place for him to be thinking about alcoholism. The other thing that's interesting is most of the alcoholism and the suicides occur during the summer. I'm not surprised by that. Are you not surprised? Because I'd surprise me until I thought about it. And the idea was that, well, if you have a long winter, when the summer comes, you should be feeling happy. But if you're not feeling happy, you feel even less happy. Right. Or there's also, I think, for, you know, you and I live at probably about the same latitude. And after a long, dark winter, people tend to go a little bit, a little bit nuts in the summer. It was amazing to see it in the summer.

I've been both times. But yeah. So we started. We started to start. You know, we started. It's start talking about why, you know, about why it isn't used more or prescribed more and why people don't use it. There's this, there are a bunch of reasons, but one that surprised me that it's probably an American reason because other countries don't behave this way. But someone told you they didn't want to get prescriptions because if you get prescriptions for an opioid block or goes in your record and insurance companies, if you have a previous kind of condition, won't insure you.

And so that's a reason. You want to talk about it? So that's with life insurance. So as of now, because of Obamacare, this might change, but insurance companies are not allowed to deny people coverage based on preexisting conditions. That's only been the law in the U.S. for the last, what, 10 years. But life insurance companies can refuse your care. And I just got life insurance. And my life insurance was way more expensive than it should have been for a healthy 42-year-old because I have an altruxone on my permanent record.

Interesting. Okay. Oh, interesting. Okay. Now let's talk. There's a bunch of times when I want to go back to science, which of course interests me a lot. Yeah. And that is, the first thing is that they're clearly, well, what he discovered in the rats, just by being able to train rats, or not trained, but being able to breed rats who would become alcoholics, that immediately tells you there's a genetic component to alcoholism. But the point is that it's not, I mean, as anyone should know when we say there's a genetic component to anything, it doesn't, it doesn't determine the future. You know, it's not the, yeah, it's not the same as it doesn't fix things completely. Genetics is a component and it doesn't, and so it's only one component of what makes you alcoholic, but probably half of the risk factors are genetic. The other half are sort of exposure.

Yeah, exposure environment. A big risk factor is just peer group. Yeah, if someone has all of the, you know, the genetic. profile for an alcoholic and they never they never drink they're not going to develop an alcohol problem so so other risk factors you know trauma is a risk factor exposure the age at which you start drinking is a risk factor so in my case I do have a my parents aren't alcoholics but I do have some alcoholism in my in my lineage my I'm from a long line of Irish Catholics I think every Irish Catholic family has that has that in their background drinking more than when I was in

Ireland that's true right and um And so, but I started young. I started drinking it. My exposure was, was very young and also just repeated exposure. So I did have three of the, three of probably the, there's probably four major risk factors, including trauma. And I had four of them. Huh. I'm sorry, I had three.

There's four. Three. They didn't have a trauma. Right. Happily. And I'm very happy. It makes me happy. Thank you.

But, yeah, well, it's interesting. On the other hand, you know, I have two very dear. friends, including my wife, whose parents are alcoholic. And while you think it serves both ways, I think, because yes, it means you have a, there's clearly there's a genetic factor, but both the people I know whose parents are alcoholics are not alcohol specifically because they saw what happened to their parents. So it works both ways, you know. Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah. Now, one of the things that you point out for you and others, a lot of people, is they find out about this Sinclair method and about Naltrexone, not from their doctor, but from the internet. And you want to elaborate on why that is, perhaps? Yeah, so I think that's one of the most interesting things about it is that this, the Sinclair method, in particular in Naltrexone in general, and there are different, I should say, there are different ways to take Naltrexone. Not everybody uses the Sinclair method.

methods. Some people just take it daily. There's also a shot. Some people take it just sometimes. There's lots of different modalities. But I don't know if it's most people, but the number of people who are prescribed or the rate, the percentage of Americans that are prescribed any medication for alcohol use disorder every year is vanishingly small. It's under 3%, which is actually a huge leap from just a couple years ago. And so most people do not know that these options exist. And then when you're at home Googling, you know, how to get sober, you might be lucky enough to come across, come across some information about it, which is how I think most people that I interviewed talked about it just from the internet. There are now, there's now a bit more of a profit motive. So there are companies specifically telehealth companies. So Naltrexone is generic. There's not much, there's not much money in the drug itself. But there are now telehealth companies that specialize in Naltrexone. And so I see. I get a lot of ads for these companies now. There's also a company based out in New York called Orr.

They're running commercials on American TV. And they have a new product. It's a mint. It's a fast-acting mint, which is patented. So they have more of a profit motive. Then, you know, sort of the fact that it's generic. There's not much money in the drug itself, but the mint is, is patented. So I think that is changing.

The message is sort of getting out there. but for a long time, you know, this has been around for, this has been around for decades, and very few people knew that it was an option. Yeah, it's kind of surprising. Well, let's, well, I want to talk about doctors describing you a little bit, but the next bit of science is the brain chemistry, that science of Naltrexone and also the chemistry of getting drunk. You want to just go walk us through that, the chemistry of getting drunk and the chemistry

of what it does specifically. Sure. Sure. So alcohol affects different people in different ways. I sort of, before I started writing the book, I sort of assumed that everybody had the same experience of drinking that I do. But it affects neurotransmitters, as you would expect. Dopamine, serotonin, GABA. You know, you get a rush of dopamine, a rush of serotonin. And then when you start to withdraw, you get waning levels of that. Repeated exposure. It, you know, it fucks up your brain in various different ways.

And naltrexone works by blocking the endorphins, the opioid receptors. So it blocks the endorphins that generally would flood the brain for some people when they drink alcohol. So the experience of drinking on naltrexone is just kind of boring. It's sort of flat. Like when I drink alcohol, I get energized. I get a buzz. Not everybody gets that. Some people get a sedating effect.

But for me, it's always been a very high energy experience, almost like drinking caffeine or something like that. And so naltrexone targets that. So if I drink when my opioid receptors are fully blocked and I'm not getting that endorphin rush, it's boring, right? I can still get, you can still get drunk. You just don't get that euphoric effect. But some people, the reason that naltrexone, it works on, there's some effect for about 75% of people who take the drug. about half of the people who have some effects will have really dramatic results like I did. Some people, they just drink less, they moderate more, but they don't have this sort of dramatic results.

For the 25% of people who get no effect from naltrexin at all, this is sort of unsettled science, but the theory is that they lack one particular allele or possibly, I don't know, know, a multitude of alleles that react to the drug. So, again, this is unsettled science. Everybody's sort of speculating on this. So, you know, you could do if you, to find out if it works for you, you could, you know, do a genetic test, or you could just try it and see how it works. Yeah, well, jump ahead.

I plan to go there later, but there was a doctor who looked at this who actually did develop a DNA test for that allele, LL40 or something. Yeah, yeah. He was sort of ahead of his time, though. This is a doctor in Kentucky. And he was, he went to his, he told me that he, he, he went to his post office. He, he wanted to just get sort of, you know, genetic spit test in the mail. And the, and the, and he talked to his local postmaster and the postmaster said, like, what are you talking about? You can't, you know,

you can't send biological materials in the mail. And he licked a stamp. It said, really? Yeah. And then they said, okay, I love that story. Yeah, I love that story. Well, well, so, I mean, it does, it, it definitely appeared, at least from your discussion in the book, that that allele, not having their right variant definitely was correlated to whether an altrexone would work for you or not. Yeah, and another way to sort of evaluate if people are interested in whether or not it might work for them. So this is information I got from Joe Volpecelli, who I mentioned earlier. So Joe explained to me that there are, to simplify, there are basically two types of drinkers, reward drinkers. So that's what I am.

I mentioned that earlier. People who get this euphoria when they drink, reward drinkers tend to be bins drinkers. And for people like that, Naltrexone tends to work really well. And then there are relief drinkers. And relief drinkers don't get that euphoria. They get a calming, a sedating effect from alcohol. And now trachshone tends to not work for them at all. Yeah.

Again, it makes sense. If you're trying to block euphoria, then if you're not getting euphoria, then you're probably not doing that going to bring for you. But when it comes to prescribing, there were, there's one thing that when, in retrospect, seems remarkable. The other, I mean, seems reasonable. The other seems remarkable. Why don't doctors prescribe it? Another thing you pointed out, and I never occurred to me, of course, until you said it, and then it's obvious, is it, well, they're liable, right? If you, if you, if you prescribe someone, here's a drug for you and you can drink, and then they drink if something

happens, you know, the doctor's meeting and say, well, I can't tell someone to drink, especially when they could, you know, they could become a binge drinker, and later on, I could be scared for it. That kind of thing. Yeah, I think that's part of it. There's various other reasons. Part of it, a big part of it is medical education. So until very recently, the education that most clinicians, unless you specialize in addiction medicine, the education that most clinicians got about drug and alcohol addiction would be to attend one AA meeting. That was it. If they got, if they had that at all. So there was just a real lack of education on this. That's changed. So now it's a part of the board student. Everybody's psych rotation. They learn about

about medical assisted treatments for alcohol and drugs. But this is pretty new and this is mostly in response to the opioid crisis. Yeah, you point out it was really the opioid crisis that helped in some sense the alcohol treatment because opioids, you know, it's such a generic part of life that doctors are now being, the substance abuse is a big part of medicine and it wasn't before. There was also, So after Naltrexone was approved by the FDA, there was also a black box label warning, which is this big, big scary looking box on the drug that basically said that this would lead to, I believe it was kidney damage. That was wrong.

It was based on studies that weren't that I think it was, it wasn't like human, actual human-grade doses of the pill. And they actually removed the block box warning. But I think there is also some hesitation because people think it's bad for the kidneys. Well, and okay, that and then talking about bad medical education, the thing that surprised me is that many doctors who do prescribe naltrexone prescribe it and say you can't drink. Right. Which really defeat the whole purpose. That's the other thing.

So most doctors who prescribe naltrexone are not going to prescribe the Sinclair method. They just prescribe, they tell people to take it daily. And if you take it in the morning, say, the half-life of naltrexone is like six hours. By the time you drink at night or in the evening, there's not going to be any left in your system. So that's also a part of it is just the education that the prescribing education that doctors have gotten is inadequate. And I think there, I think, you know, within reason, plenty of clinicians are fearful of giving their alcoholic patients permission to drink. Yeah. You know, it's a, I would be, I think, if I was a doctor.

Yeah. With a minute you mentioned it, I thought, yeah, if I was in that situation, I'd be very careful, especially in this litigious society. Yes. But this, but it's a nice segue because you talked about, you know, taking it daily. And there are, there are a number of protocols for taking L-Texam, and there are two. And one is your friend, is it Valpolicelli? Is that the how you're right? Vopicelli.

Yeah, Vopicheli. and and versus versus Sinclair Yeah One pro Volpechelli's protocol is to first detox

then take Naltrex on every day and and and whether you're drinking or not right? Yes.

Yes. Whereas Sinclair's is no detox only take it an hour before you're drinking and and don't take it when you're not drinking. The argument being, again, behavioral one, hey, if you don't take it when you're not drinking,

you're not blocking your endorphins, then, hey, then not drinking part of your life will be more fun. Yeah, so I think, so Joe, so among his patients, I think what he has found works best is just people taking it consistently. So they're kind of not messing around, and they can drink or not drink, right? Most people who come to his clinic are probably drinking daily. So Joe wouldn't tell patients to take it in the morning unless they were drinking in the morning.

He would tell, I think he would tell patients, you know, take it in the evening or afternoon before your sort of drinking hour begins. But I think for some people it's just easier to do it every day. I don't think that would have worked for me because I didn't like the, I didn't like the effect of the naltrexone. I didn't want my endorphin blockers or my endorphine. I didn't want my opioid receptors blocked for endorphins. I didn't like the way that it made me feel. And so that targeted, the Sinclair method, this targeted use meant that I only felt shitty before.

And I didn't feel terrible, but I only was getting that effect very specifically for drinking. So I think that just worked better. Yeah, for you clearly. I mean, especially if you like feeling good, then you don't feel good when you're, yeah. There's two statements in your book that. sort of are not conflicting, but it's kind of interesting. In some sense, you say naltrexin is forever because you reach this point called extinction. Why do you talk about what extinction is before we get there? Yeah, so extinction is basically a state of indifference.

And the Sinclair method, the term uses pharmacological extinction because it involves a drug. But that's sort of the goal under the Sinclair method is that you get to a place where you don't care about alcohol one way or another so that booze noise is quieted. And that happened for me. I reached what I sort of called it after nine months. I did the Sinclair Method for seven months and then I decided to take a month off of drinking. I never started drinking again. So after like nine months, I sort of declared myself free and extinct. So I don't take Naltrexon anymore because I don't drink anymore.

If I were to have a drink today and I took it without naltrexone, I think very quickly I would fall back into old habits very quickly. I would go chasing that euphoria. I think very quickly I would be drinking just as much as I was before I went through this process. Some people do this in Clear Method and they don't want sobriety or abstinence. They just want to drink moderately. And it can work for those people as well. I talked to a lot of people who started out thinking, I just want to drink moderately. You know, I want to drink one glass of wine and not the whole bottle. And they found that after they weren't getting any pleasurable effect from alcohol, they just stopped doing it. Yeah, a lot of people who wanted to drink found that wasn't, yeah, they became absent anyway. Yeah, yeah. But I've also talked to plenty of people who did the Sinclair method, who reached extinction. And then for one reason or whatever, they started drinking again without an altruxone and without fail, all of them within weeks or months. were back in the throes of addiction.

And when they started Naltrexone the second time, when they started the Sinclair-Mouth at a second time, it tended to take quite a bit longer. Okay, that's interesting. The second time you become a little near to it. I didn't know that. I don't remember reading that book. That's quite interesting.

But in that sense, extinction is finite. And for you, therefore, it's finite. But if you plan to keep drinking, this is a forever thing. It's Naltrexone for the rest of your life. Yeah. If you, you know, if you, if you want to continue to be responsible and safe about it. You know, if you, if, you know, some people want to destroy their lives and go back

into destructive drinking patterns and that option exists. Well, there's a quote in the book, I was afraid it would work. Yeah. You want to, and maybe that was your quote because you like drinking. Yeah. I think it was actually. So we want to elaborate on that? Yeah.

I think just, you know, I started drinking at such a young age that. alcohol was such a part of my life that the idea of living a life without it was almost incomprehensible. I didn't know what that would look like. And I genuinely thought that life without alcohol was going to be really boring. It's not. It's actually, I have found that it is quite a bit better. It is surprising at how much I like sobriety. Nobody is more surprised about that than I am. But, you know, I genuinely feared that without alcohol, life would be. be miserable. Yeah, no, it's, and I can see that would be, you know, you want to, you don't want

the bad effects, but you don't want to lose the good effects. Right. That's what addiction is. Yeah. That's what addiction is. A part of it also is, is, is habit. Yes. And, and you want to talk about that a little bit.

You know, when you talk about this, I have to say a quote from David Hume came to mind, which is that reason is a slave of passion. And the point is that habits, you have bad habits. habits, but you always rationalize why you have them. So you want to talk about habits and drinking? Yeah. So habits are a big part of the Sinclair method. You know, you can take the pill, but you have to, it's, it is sort of the easy way out of addiction, but you still have to work on yourself and habit change. So for me, once I started taking niltrexone, my drinking gradually over the course of that seven months declined. And I had, I started incorporating more alcohol-free days into my week. And on those

days, I had to find something to do with my time. And so for some people, that might mean taking up new hobbies or starting to work out or a new job or whatever. But it was a, you know, I was in my late 30s at this point and I had lived most of my adult life doing most things, not most things, but a lot of my life was spent drunk. And so I had to figure out what I like to do. I had to figure out how to spend my time. I had to build good habits while trying to extinguish bad ones, which has never been easy for me. I'm not sort of naturally disciplined. And so that was sort of the self-work part of it. Yeah. Now it's, you know, once it becomes a habit, and we'll talk about it, the after you have extinction, the challenges, as you talk about later in the book, we'll get there. For maybe this, because it resonated

for me, you have a little section called on the M-word. Whenever I used to hear the word mindfulness, my mind would turn off. I go, not me, please. I'm not a yoke. No way. And your reaction was exactly the same. And the reason I reacted that I guess I reacted to it is I had sort of a traumatic experience recently. And I began to read about mindfulness and how it could help me in.

And I was surprised that your reaction was identical. You want to talk about that for a second? I'm not a mindful person. My wife goes to meditation every week and she comes back just sort of gloming and I think, God, that looks terrible. I don't like to be alone with my thoughts. I don't like to sit still. I don't like any part of it. Mindfulness, but someone I talked to for the book, she's a Sinclair Method coach and she's on YouTube.

Her name's Katie Lane. She did it herself. When I first started, she talked about sort of the importance of mindfulness. this. And I kind of told her, you know, I'm not, I'm not a mindful. Like, I don't want to meditate. I don't want to do this stuff. And she said, well, you don't have to meditate. Just try to be more intentional about your drinking. When you're drinking, when you're doing these extinction sessions, think about how the alcohol makes you feel. Think about the taste. Do you actually enjoy it? Do you actually enjoy it? Are you having a good time right now? Just sort of observe your surroundings

and just sort of be more conscientious. And so that's how I interpreted this. So I still don't meditate. And I don't think I ever will meditate. Yeah, God forbid. But, you know, the difference is I love, I mean, I have a job. My job, my whole life was to be alone with my thoughts, right? I love being in my, I love getting lost in them.

But what mindfulness guides me is to step back and say, well, what are you, why are you doing this or what are you thinking of that? And that's useful. And why am I saying what I'm saying? I mean, I love to get lost in thoughts, but it's nice to. step back and say, okay, well, what exactly are you doing and how are you feeling when you're doing it? And that's not so bad. Yeah, I think for meditation, to me, the thing that's such a turnoff is that you're not supposed to think at all.

You know, you sort of observe a thought and you let it go. And the goal is the sort of platonic ideal of like the empty brain. I find that extremely challenging. Well, one of my favorite jokes from a friend of mine who, nameless is that he isn't like, he didn't like meditating because he got mellow and then he ripened and then he rotted. Anyway, let's talk about the importance of alcohol-free days.

You know, you talk about it for you, but I think, you know, not just to see that you can enjoyment without alcohol, but also it seemed to me to measure the efficacy. I mean, if you talk about it for a bunch of people, And everyone always seemed to say when I was reading it, I realized they talked about their alcohol free days and the number of alcohol free days that or how long they were. And if you're doing this, of course, and it's behavioral, you want to see progress.

And so one way to target it is to label your alcohol free days, don't you think? Yeah, and that's another reason. So one important element of this is tracking or drinking. And so there's apps for that. You can use a spreadsheet or whatever. You can just write it down. But just it tends not to be a linear process. And so for me, you know, I kept a spreadsheet and I would chart it and there would be spikes in valleys.

But it was really helpful to see the trendlines was down. And so alcohol-free days is a part of that. And also a part of relearning good habits and just sort of learning to live your life without alcohol. Because if you've reached a point where you need something like this, you probably have alcohol. Alcohol is probably intertwined in so much of your life that you do sort of have to have to live without it. Well, and it also seems to me, again, if I were thinking of me, that a day is manageable, a lifetime isn't, but a day is. And so it seems like the first step is possible, at least into scene. Yeah.

You want to mention who Claudia Christian is and what her relevance is? Yeah, so she's an actor. She's an American actor, sort of most famous for Babylon Five. and she had a fairly successful career in Hollywood in her 20s and 30s, but she had a really serious drinking problem and tried to get sober, went to rehab and detox, and all of these things. And her life was really, really falling apart because of alcohol, just a terrible binge drinker. And so at one point she went into a detox, and when she left, she left against medical advice,

but when she was on her way out, she saw a flyer for a drug called Vivitrol. And Vivitrol is basically analtrexone shot. It's quite expensive. You take it once monthly. It's not the Sinclair method because the Sinclair method, you know, it's this targeted. You only take it when you're drinking, Vivitrol, the shots in you for as long as the last. So Claudia, she went home and she started doing some research and she found an article about it, and she found that the active ingredient of Vivitrol was analtrexone.

She reached out to a company to try to get it. The company that was on the flyer, she reached out to them, didn't hear back, didn't hear back, and ended up ordering Naltrexone from maybe Thailand or India or a place like that. And she did the Sinclair Method sort of on her own, and it was really effective for her. And she became a spokesperson for the Sinclair Method. So she started an organization called, it's now called Options, Saves Lives. It was called the C3 Foundation, but they've changed the name. She's a coach, so she works with people who are doing the Sinclair method.

And she also, she's written two books about it, and she did a TED Talk, a TEDx talk in London in maybe 2015, 2014 or so. And the title of the talk was something like the cure for alcoholism or something like that, something very catchy. And she talked about how this saved her life and how this quieted the booze noise. And so she's become really key in this effort to reach the public consciousness. And I should say, so Claudia, in this TEDx talk, she said that her problem in life, like, it wasn't trauma. You know, she was sort of like, she had like a biolog. She had a physiological addiction. And she drank so much she got addicted.

And that's what she thought at the time. And when I was interviewing her for the book, she said that she was wrong about that, that she wished that she could take that back because she realized now that she actually did have trauma. Her elder brother was killed by a drunk driver when he was young. She was sexually assaulted. She had sort of a history of dating the wrong men. She had some bad shit in her past. And so later in life, she did sort of go back. She didn't do therapy, but she did a lot of self-care and sort of.

mindfulness and stuff like that and sort of did address what for her were root issues. But yeah, so she's more than anybody else. She's really been responsible for spreading the word about the Sinclair method. Yeah, no, I think it's great to know that she's been doing that. One of the things you talk about that intrigued me is that I view it as double-edgedged sword, but you would talk about the fact that with naltrosin, a lot of alcoholics, and we'll talk about extinction bursts and things like that, have relaxes. I mean, it's typical.

And as you say, the progress isn't linear. But the good thing about Naltrexone, unlike maybe, I don't want to say unlike A, but if you have a relapse, you just start again with Naltrexone. You just start taking it again, which is a great positive for it. The one thing when I read that made me think is it, but, well, that gives you solace if you've done, instead of the guilt and the trauma, but also, the question is, does it give you an excuse to have a relapse? Oh, look, I can always relapse because I can start again. Does it, yeah, is it a negative feeling too? I think the problem with, so in St. Clair Method

circles, people don't use the term relapse. They talk about drinking noncompliantly. It sets you back. Like, if you repeatedly drink noncompliantly, it's not going to work for you. If your brain thinks that it's going to get a hint of that euphoria, it will keep seeking it out. So it's really important to adhere to the protocol and to take it 100% of the time. I didn't take it 100% of the time. I probably took it 99% of the time. And I didn't have major, major setbacks. But if you talk to people who do not commit for whatever reason or who even don't wait the full hour before they start drinking, they don't reach extinction. It doesn't work. So that's the thing. I mean, you could use it as an excuse to seek out that old high, but it's not going to work for you.

You're basically wasting your time. Now, speaking of that, two things. One, one explain what an extinction burst is because I thought that was intriguing. Yeah, so I didn't experience this, but for a lot of people who are going through this process, after several months, maybe even years of drinking with Naltrexone of following the Sinclair method, they'll experience a sudden and unexpected surge in the amount that they're drinking. And so I've seen lots of drinking logs and charts like this. There's a downward trend.

And then after a year, the spike where they're drinking for maybe it's once, maybe it's twice, maybe it's for a couple weeks. They're all of a sudden drinking way more than they had over the past, I don't know, past weeks or months. And that scares people for a good reason. You think, oh, it's not working. You know, what happened? This was working so well and now it's not happening.

this is typically called, and this is not scientific, I don't think anyone has studied this, but people in this world tend to call this an extinction burst. And they basically explain it as like, this is your brain's last-ditch effort to try to seek out that old euphoria. So you start drinking so much. Your brain is basically trying to force its way back into that state. And then if you keep doing it, if you just work through it, oftentimes people re-react. beach extinction and, you know, a state of indifference soon after that. Yeah, no, it's nice to know that it's good to mention it's there because I would scare me

if I was in the process. And as you point out, it's not linear and that's why it's important to track it and to visualize. Visualization is a big thing. But if you can see a picture and visualize that you're going down, it really makes a difference. But other than this burst, you talked about, you know, not being applied. And you do give a, there was one notable episode where you weren't compliant accidentally, right? Yeah, I just, I forgot my, I forgot my Naltrexone and I had been sort of, I had been looking forward. I was going into Seattle to meet a friend and I, and I forgot my Naltrexone.

And I thought, you know what, I'm just like, fuck it, I'm just going to drink. And I did. I went and I drank. I went to a bar and I drank too much and I went home and felt like shit the next day. But it didn't, you know, I just sort of got back on the wagon. I felt terrible about it. but I got back on the wagon and recommitted to the process. Yeah, so for you was quite dramatic.

I don't know how much it was psychological either. It's hard to know. But just not taking naltrexone, you immediately overdrank the next time you drank. Yeah, but not to, you know, I didn't black out. It wasn't, I think I did wreck my bike on the way home. I think you did. Yeah, yeah.

I remember the episode, but it's not as bad as, there's another experience you related which I found the difference between that and the way you were before. You actually talk about during your drunk period, you actually quit a job because it was a new beer coming out. I mean, I think it wasn't a new beer. It was because it was a happy hour. My favorite beer was a was on sale. I would do that all the, I would do that sort of shit all the time. You know, I worked in minimum wage sort of medial labor for most in my 20s and I did not take employment seriously. Okay.

I thought that was great. Oh, I'm not going to, you had someone call in, I think, and quit the job for you because your favorite craft beer was going on happy hour that day. Yeah. I thought was, that's tip. I mean, when you read, hear things like that, I think that's personalized this. I, I, um, I want to, I want to depart from this for a second because a question came to me. And you talk about at the end of the book, you don't talk much about your wife,

throughout the whole thing because you kept it secret from her. You're drinking secret from her. And I found that, first of all, I found that remarkable. First of all, because we talk about the fact of how alcoholism hurts your relationships and affects your families. And we'll talk about that and even near the end. You know, how much beyond the individual. And I know it again for my friends who had alcoholic parents, how much it affects them.

But your wife, you didn't get your wife involved, which, is remarkable because one of the things that makes this system work often is to have this support as you talk about. But is it, do you think she, what you don't say in the book, which occurred to me is that she must, I mean, I'm amazed if she didn't suspect. It's almost like you're going to ask me about Epstein or something. But, but did you, when you talked about her afterwards and she was very supportive and really happy that you'd done it, did she ever suggest to you that she kind of knew what was going on, but didn't bring it up? No, she didn't know. You just hit it so successfully.

Yeah, and this isn't that uncommon. If you talk to people who have, the secret drinking is a very common behavior among alcoholics. And, you know, you hear about people hiding alcohol. It's, yeah. Yeah, okay. And I think in her case, she had no, it wasn't just that she had no reason to expect. It was like as unexpected as if I had been going out and doing heroin. You know, there was just, it would not have occurred to her.

Wow. Wow, that's great. Well, that says something about you and something about the two of you. That's great. I assume your relationship is better or after alcohol or is it? Yeah. I mean, it's not. A relationship wasn't bad in the beginning.

But, yeah, there's a weight off of my chest for sure not having a, not having a secret. Yeah. Yeah. Now, that's always. Now, getting back on the track of generalities, in the reactions of, there are critics of, Naltrexone and this and they're you know, her dubious. Some of them, of course, are people who AA has worked for them.

And you talk about Jordan, a guy named Jordan, who AA worked for, I think. But before you talk about that, I think it's interesting, as an alcoholic when you talk to him, when it's clear that he had this life-threatening experience that changed

his life and he was now sober. And he was, before he was a drinking pal of yours, right? You resented him. You resented him to being successful. Oh, yeah. I think that, yeah, that was, in my heavy drinking days, anytime anybody got sober, I was resentful of them. It felt like an affront, you know.

Do you think that's common? Because it does it make you feel worse about yourself? Or is that the reason? Yes. And it also is a reminder that it is possible to quit. And why aren't you doing it? Right. Yeah, yeah.

Okay. But then he, but he did react. negatively. He didn't believe because his own experience of what his own experience was, when you talked about Sinclair meth with him, he didn't buy it, right? Right, right. Yeah. Yeah. And I, you know, I don't think that's an uncommon experience either among people who got suburb through AA. I'm sure that he spent a lot of time around drinkers who had convinced themselves that they could moderate and then eventually they end up back in the exact same position. But you do point out.

to make it clear that AA is less, you mean, you always, you pointed out at the very beginning, AA said there were other opportunities, but even over time you claim it's less dogmatic now than it was before. And AA general. Well, rehab is. So rehab is less, is, uh, not every rehab. I'm sort of generalizing here, but group, but, you know, you have companies like Hazel and Betty Ford and they are now incorporating MAT and drugs like Suboxone and treatment for opioid,

um, use disorder. Okay. But what, that's good to know. But one of the other bits of resistance comes from medical community because the protocol is not, even though it works, it's not proven in the sense of the gold method, which is random control trials. Right. And you want to describe one, explain that for a little bit? Yeah. So it's really a, it's sort of a question of technicalities.

Yeah. So there have been study, if you, if you search PubMed for the Sinclair method, you. you won't find any results. If you search PubMed for targeted use of naltrexone, you will find results. You want to explain difference? Because when you talk about it, you don't explain a difference for what they mean by targeted use. It's basically the same thing. So the targeted use of naltrexone is not taking it daily.

It's taking it just before you drink. And so that's the thing. I think there can be some, almost some snobbery among researchers in this field because John David Sinclair. He patented his technique. And what he patented was not like the final form of what the Sinclair method was. But I mean, the point is that there's a lot of data. And he has data.

There was this Finland data of 147 people. You know, 115 of them reduced their drinking 37 a week to 9 a week. 3% had a goal of abstinence, but 26% stopped drinking. So there's clear evidence that's working. but what random controlled trials are is that, you know, you give naltrexone to some people and a placebo. Yeah. And one of the reasons that you pointed out that this wasn't happening is that why wasn't this happening with the Suclary method? Because he was working with rats.

Right, right. He was a, yeah, he was a researcher. He was an animal researcher. And there have been the, when I wrote the book, I don't know if this is still true, but when I wrote the book, the most recent study was out of, I think it was UCSF. And it was basically the Sinclair method, the targeted use of naltrexone, but it was specific to gay men, you know, with moderate to, or with, I think, moderate alcohol use disorder. You know, there were all sorts of sort of factors you had to, qualifications to get involved in the study. So I don't know if we could extrapolate much to the general population there.

But I've talked to a lot of clinicians. I've talked to a lot of people who've done it. And the numbers that they give are generally, this works for about 75% to 80% of people. And again, behaviorally, it makes sense. The only bone I would pick, and the reason I do this is because my first wife has worked with behavioral techniques with autistic kids. And positive reinforcement versus negative reinforcement. You talk about positive reinforcement and negative reinforcement and say, well, and if you do

negative things, people want to do it less. But that's not what negative reinforcement is. In a sense, the Sinclair method is negative reinforcement. Yeah, it takes away the, right. is is is is, um, is, um, is, um, is strengthening behavior by, by removing unpleasant experiences. Right. And that's really kind of what it, what it is, not imposing the unpleasant experience, but removing them strengthens the positive behavior.

And I guess that's the behavioral thing. It really is, right? It's not giving the positives. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, he was a skinner guy. Yeah. Okay. Well, yeah. I heavily influenced when I was younger.

When you're talking about this guy Cox, who did this specific gene allele and now has developed this DNA test, something that you said, resonated with something I've been thinking throughout the whole book. I was thinking, here's a way to make naltrexone more popular. He used it to stop overeating.

And occurred to me, the minute I kept thinking about this, is that diet pills are like everywhere. It's the big thing. But if it's really, if it's targeting the same kind of thing, couldn't, and I don't know if people have done it, but obviously it worked for him, but couldn't altrexone be used as a diet pill? And if so, why not?

I think it could be, as far as I know, there have been no clinical trials on this. And now we have. Popular and much more. Right. Right. But now there's also, there's alternatives that seem to work really well. Yeah. Okay.

And also, you know, food, maybe it could work for binge eating, right? You take it before a particular, like if you're planning on having a binge eating session, although I don't know if people plan binge eating sessions. Yeah. But right, right. But because the half-life is sort of short, I'm not sure it would work all the time. Okay. As opposed to something like Osepaic, you know.

Okay. Anyway, it occurred to me as one way to make it more popular. Maybe it may be more expensive. Yeah. The other thing is that there are other drugs. It's not just an altruxone. And one of the things you point out is antibuse, which basically makes you sick when you drink. And one of the people you talked about named Thomas basically combined the two, right?

A carrot and a stick he called it. You want to describe that a little bit? Yeah. So this was someone who was really struggling with his drinking. and he found that that Vivitrol. So Vivitrol kind of took the, took the, actually no, no, did he do, I'm trying to remember if he did Vivitrol

or if he did the pill as well. He found that, he found that ant, so antibuse is a drug, this was the first drug that was FDA approved to treat alcohol use disorder. It's been around for, it's been FDA approved since either the 50s or 60s. It's been around for a long time. But it makes you really, really ill

when you take, when you drink on it. And for various reasons, it's been really underprescribed. In the beginning, the dosages were really high. So there were actually cases of people dying from taking naltrexone. Or I'm sorry, not naltrexin and abuse. The dosaging has been modified in recent years. So as far as I know, there's no recent examples of anyone dying from it. But it kind of scares people off.

Because if you drink any alcohol, even if you drink any alcohol, even if you, you have food that has alcohol in it with an abuse in your system. People are going to have really, really negative reactions. Like you feel like you get so sick, you feel like you're dying. And so, but it works really well for some people. It works really well. For some people, it's just like, once this is in your system, once you take it. But the other issue is that like Naltrexone, you have to comply. It's also a pill. And so a lot of people just stop taking it because they want to, they want to drink. And they, you know, you have to wait several days or a week to get it fully out of your system, but that's an issue. Okay. We talk briefly about families, but, but

one of the things you say here is that there many, you know, this work for you, and of course, it's different for different people, but a large, even though, you know, A.A. A big part of A.A. is a support group. Neltrexone, you don't need the support group, but if you look at the cases of people have done it, having the support, having families help, all of that helps with this whole procedure if you can get them involved. Yeah. And that one of the things you recommend that families watch is something called One Little Pill. Is that the- Yeah, that's Claudia Christian made a film about it.

Yeah. Okay. And I don't know if it's still the case. You say rehabs are not so bad now, but a friend who you said recently went to rehab, the rehab had never heard of Naltrexone. I think that's very common. It's still very common. I think, well, I think that's changed.

There's a lot more open-mindedness about drugs. And it depends on the rehab as well. There's one of the, and I want to get back to finiteness because there's a quote near the end of the book where someone says, we're an unusual community because other groups want you to be a member for life. We love our members, so you want them to get better and move on with their lives.

So this is finite. For you, it was finite, unless you continue to want to drink, in which case that, but the whole idea, which is kind of interesting, is that if you go to that absence level, which you've gone to, unlike A, where you presumably, even after you're abstinent, you know, for the rest of your life, you go to A meetings. In this case, once you are, you're done. Yeah. Yeah, that's the goal, at least. I think for people who run these Sinclair method groups, for them it's not about sort of restructuring your identity in your life. The idea is that you just do it. You have a problem.

You treat the problem. And then you move on with your life. And a lot of people, you know, go to AA, quit drinking and then stop. But some people go to, you know, quit drinking and 30 years later. They're still going to AA every night. Yeah. Well, I want to spend, I want to close off where we've got up only a few minutes left. I want to talk about your own experiences a little bit more

and then give you the last word literally. Your own extinction experience went from April to December. You said eight months in the book, but eight or nine months. But then you had to deal with, you know, and it was not linear, but the effects of dealing with the fact that you weren't drinking. And I was amused by one, which was it, you learned the great effects of not drinking, the joy of doing all sorts of things, which is wonderful.

But one of the bad ones was that you realized that you couldn't blame your bad qualities on alcohol anymore. Right, right. But, you know, on the other hand, it seemed to me that's a good thing, too, though, because it says, well, you know, then you can't, that means you have to other, that you have to do other things to solve them, right? You got to find other people to blame. But it was too easy to blame everything on alcohol.

And now, now you have to, now you have to, deal with it. Yeah. But, you know, there's something that you said, a quote on page 141, which really resonated with me, which was, you know, you went to lots of, lots of events. Some of them, you did everything you could do.

And some were terrible, but it was just, it was just great to be there. You see, didn't really care if they were terrible. Without alcohol dominating my thoughts, I felt like I was fresh out of prison. And I, you know, I'm, I ruminate and I'm so obsessive, I think all the time. And sometimes I get in a rut and, you know, that feeling of just when you don't, when you

aren't, when all your thoughts don't turn back to the same thing, some negative thing, which you can get caught up in a rabbit hole. And suddenly it seems like you're out of prison, suddenly your mind is free and suddenly you have so much more time. Everything you try and do is, is so much more easy. And so that must have, in your case, was alcohol, but anyone who's obsessed with anything at some level when they're freed from that obsession, it's just such a lovely experience. Oh, absolutely.

Yeah. And but nevertheless, you have to learn how to do things. You met people, you don't seem that shy, but you met people with alcohol and you have to learn how a lot of people have to learn how to actually suddenly meet people and have fun without alcohol. It's not easy if your whole life you've been depending upon it. You want to elaborate on that a little bit, your own experience? Yeah, I found that for me a great way to meet people with dogs. So I recently moved. I'm in a new community and I found a great group of people who, you know, meet every day to walk the dogs on the beach.

They're all retired, so I like that. They've got lots of time during the day. So just finding, you know, sort of getting out of my comfort zone in terms of who I would think my peers would be. Yeah, it's easier for some people to, some people are more social than others. It's easy for some people to just go out and make friends. But apparently it's pretty common for a lot of people. They've relied on alcohol for their opening them up and making them more talkative, but also that was their friends. And you point out, eventually you learn that actually, and you know, so originally it's the alcohol that's fun, but eventually you learn actually the people can be fun. Yeah. And I think that's one of the benefits of AA is, especially for heavy drinkers who need to get out, break old

habits, whether they're using naltrexone or not, AAA provides that sense of community for people. Yeah, no, it's, it's, but nevertheless, I mean, I think that near the end, you stress that what, what strikes you at the very beginning of this book is drink your waist over. It is counterintuitive to think that you have a methodology that can help you stopping an alcoholic by drinking. And I think it's, as long as people realize that that, you know, that's, that's shocking, but it works. It's kind of remarkable. Before I give you this last word, and I want to, I want you to think about someone, but you talked about health and human services. I can't help but ask, because RFK and the presence of that, has that affected any of the, any of the approach towards an altruxone or

substance abuse or anything? I don't know. That's a good question. I mean, they've cut funding for so much. Yeah, I wonder. There's so many ridiculous things that they're involved in. I wondered if they were hurting or helping this, this area. I don't know. That's a good question. I want to, I was taken, you talk about Hank at the very end. And it made me, it, again, resonated with me because I was thinking of my wife's, my father, who I never met, who was an alcoholic and died before I met him. And throughout the book, I kept thinking, wow, what if, what if, what if. Talk about Hank for a second.

And then I, and then I want to, if you don't mind, read the last paragraph of your book. Yeah. So this is a friend of mine from my. I was in my early 20s at the time. He was probably in his early 40s when I met him. And he was a raging alcoholic, very charming man. I knew him from a bar where we were both locals. He was the building, like the super in my building for a while.

And I once walked into my kitchen and he was standing there. He had used his keys to open the door and steal my laundry detergent. And he was a really smart guy, sort of stalled professionally. He was very working class. Actually, his father was, he looked like a logger. If you met him, this is a work, he looked like a mechanic, right? But his father had been a linguist and his mom had actually been a nun. So he, yeah, it was raised in Bloomington, Indiana.

His father had been a professor there. So he was, he came from less humble beginnings that he ended up. Yeah. And he just, he sort of, he drank himself to death. He ended up getting cancer. He also was a heavy smoker. so that might have had something to do with it. And I thought about him a lot when I was writing the book

and what his life might have looked like had he known that something like this existed. And it might not have been any different. You know, he was in, I think he was in great denial about his drinking. And maybe nothing would have changed, but maybe there was that possibility. I think it's, yeah.

And I think all of us know some people like that. We think of it, you know, if only, if only, you know, that had been there, what their life might have been like. I was wondering, After that, I actually look back at the beginning of the book to see if maybe you dedicated to hang, but it might have been a good person. I did not. But let me finish by giving you the last word, and that means me reading it.

Sure. Last paragraph of your book. Of course, there's no answer to these questions, no ways to know. But I hope there's a future where my fellow drinkers, the inebriots, booze hounds, the winos, the lushes, the drunks, all of us suffering from alcohol use disorder, or whatever you want to call it, realize that there's not one path of this problem. There are many. And for some of us, David Sinclair was right.

There's not just a treatment. There's a cure. And I think it's a remarkable thing to learn and it's so important. And I hope that people listening, this may affect people. But I found it lovely. And I knew I'd have a lovely time talking to you. I hope you had a lovely time too. I did.

Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. It's great. Thanks again. And I look forward to being on your podcast too sometime. but you take care. You too. Bye-bye.