The Rich Roll Podcast - The Limitless Power of An Alcohol-Free Lifestyle With One Year No Beer Co-Founder Ruari Fairbairns

Episode Date: January 8, 2024

Through the years, I’ve maintained transparency about my journey with alcoholism—a label I’ve embraced in the solitude of self-discovery. However, this characterization doesn’t resonate with most individuals. The majority of drinkers engage in a marginally excessive indulgence in alcohol. While this behavior may not be catastrophic in the traditional sense, it does raise discernible concerns. The persistent hangovers, lethargy, and resulting melancholy it begets become tiresome. The desire to desist is tangible, but the seamless integration of alcohol into social and professional settings renders the prospect of abstention seemingly insurmountable. Today’s guest found himself ensnared within precisely this behavior pattern. Ruari Fairbairns is a former oil broker from London who—after a falling out with booze—decided it was time to put the plug in the jug. The benefits were so profound that he later walked away from his career in finance to become a full-time advocate for an alcohol-free lifestyle. Ruari, alongside collaborator Andy Ramage (featured in episode 444 in 2019), co-founded a pioneering institution, One Year No Beer, in 2015, a subscription-based bastion of sobriety with over 100,000 global members. Beyond his role as co-founder, Fairbairns co-authored the UK bestseller The 28-Day Alcohol-Free Challenge. He also co-hosts the One Year No Beer Podcast, guiding listeners on a journey of wisdom and sobriety. In this episode, we delve into the gradual transformation of society’s relationship with alcohol, dissecting the negative repercussions on both mind and body. We explore the need for heightened awareness around alcohol, challenging the traditional narrative and embracing a healthier relationship with it. Ruari guides us through compelling discussions on stress, trauma, ADHD, emotional sobriety, and the pivotal role of community in the transformative journey. As we welcome the New Year and the possibilities it presents, I offer this conversation as an encouragement to consider the many ways in which alcohol continues to interfere with your health, hopes, and dreams. Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors: On: on.com/RICHROLL Go Brewing: gobrewing.com/discount/richroll  Birch:https://bit.ly/birchliving AG1: DrinkAg1.com/RICHROLL Squarespace: Squarespace.com/RICHROLL Peace + Plants, Rich

Alcohol is holding you back. Everybody is searching for optimal health, peak performance, more productivity in their work, how to lose weight, and yet they're not realizing that this vision of what alcohol-free could feel like, that is the one thing that will give them what they are looking for. Rory Fairbairns is a former oil broker who, after a falling out with booze, decided to put the plug in the jug. The benefits were so profound he would later walk away from his career in finance to become an alcohol-free lifestyle advocate. Our relationship with alcohol is intrinsically linked to the experiences we had as a child. That's just a fact. Rory co-founded One Year No Beer, a subscription-based alcohol

prevention program that now boasts over 100,000 members. If you want to change your behavior, get around a community of people who are living like that. As we welcome this new year, I offer this conversation as encouragement to consider the many ways in which alcohol continues to interfere with your health, because it's time to put booze in the rear view. Rory, so nice to meet you. Thank you for doing this. What you have to share, what you represent, what you've created, what you advocate for, I think is not only extremely powerful, but also extremely timely as we see mainstream culture start to catch up with what you've been kind of talking about for

quite some time now. There is a definite surge in popularity and enthusiasm for the alcohol-free lifestyle. That is not only an affirmation of your work, but on some level might even be surprising the extent to which it seems to be taking hold. Yeah. Well, Rich, thank you so much for having me on the podcast. And I think like you just said, this has been nearly a decade now, nine and a bit years of spreading this message. And when we first started spreading this message, we were definitely early, right?

We were early. But at the time, I was thinking, oh, this is going to happen now. And people were saying, oh, this is so in the moment. Like what you just said, people were saying that nine years ago. And I think what I've realized is that paradigm shifts like this, like major paradigm shifts where society is completely saturated in alcohol and the world is changing its relationship with alcohol happen really, really slowly. Right. And, um, you know, we'll talk, talk more about this, but that kind of changed how I operated in the business because instead of being focused on right here and right now, like what's happening in the next

few months or the next year, it became, no, this paradigm shift is going to happen over decades. Like you just have to sit in and keep spreading the message and keep coming on amazing podcasts like this and inspiring people and helping them think about things slightly differently. these alcohol-free drinks businesses. I mean, I can think of probably four or five alcohol-free businesses that came from One Year No Beer that we know of, right? So we have been one of the pioneers and early adopters helping make this paradigm shift in the world. And now the momentum is growing and the momentum is growing and the momentum is growing. It's exciting. The podcast that Andrew Huberman did last year on alcohol, I think, was the number one podcast or number two most listened to podcast on the Apple podcast platform across the world for the entire year. Wow. I don't know if you knew that. I didn't know if you knew that. I didn't know it, but I mean, the Huberman podcast is our source of good science that we use to influence the program.

And there are so many elements of that that we've adopted into our programs. And I think that not only is that really telling, but I would say I know most of the people in my industry. We're all friends, right? We chat to each other. I'm not seeing them on the big podcasts out there. I'm not seeing them being interviewed on TV, on radio. I'm not seeing them yet. And I think this is the next evolution. Like you are an early adopter. You had Andy on earlier. You're now having me on to spread this conversation. This would be my sort of my call to arms, if you like, to any other podcast or influencer to say, let's really get this message

out there. There are so many of us who are spreading this message and that message being, do you know what? Alcohol is holding you back. And that's it. It's simple, right? If you are regularly consuming alcohol, it is holding you back. Even if you're only very periodically consuming it, it's holding you back. There is no positive physiological benefit whatsoever that comes from drinking, period. drinking, period. Yeah. And let's talk about that specifically, right? We don't, you know, a lot of people don't want to hear that message, you know, oh, this, my trainers give me cancer, right? You know, everything's all a health issue, but the facts are absolutely there. It's a hundred percent poison. It's neurotoxic. It's terrible for our brains. It's terrible for our bodies. There are no physiological benefits at all whatsoever to drinking alcohol. It was so impactful.

I saw yesterday in the news that Lewis Hamilton has said he's just done four months alcohol-free. And he did it because he's looking for an extra 1% this year, right? Or coming into next year. So, you know, this is really the message is about everybody is searching for optimal health. People are looking for peak performance. They're looking for more productivity in their work. They're looking for how to lose weight. They're trying to get all these things.

And yet they're not realizing that this thing, this daily habit that they're doing, that the whole of society is normalizing, that is the one thing that will give them what they are looking for. The counterpoint to that would be the person who says, I understand everything that you're saying, but when I need to take the edge off or I want to take the edge off, a drink is pretty reliable in doing that. And as an antidote to the loneliness epidemic, if I wanna be social and see my friends, that is something that's sort of de rigueur. Like we go to the bar, we go to the pub, this is how I get to hang out with the people

that I care about. And so you're asking me to sacrifice that when I'm already lonely coming out of a pandemic and deprived of the social interaction required to just be a healthy human. Completely. And that is what the person who drinks alcohol would say are the benefits. Okay? That's the benefits of drinking. Social inclusion. The benefits of drinking are being included in all those things and being able to do that stuff and being able to take the edge off. And so as long as there are benefits to drinking alcohol, people are going to continue seeking it and looking for it. And I think this is part of the conversation that we're going to

have today, which is that if the only option for people is abstinence, right, or drinking problematically or drinking like fish like everybody does, then we're not helping people in that middle lane area. We're not helping people in that area where they have a better relationship. I'm not going to call it a healthy relationship because there is no healthy relationship, but where they have a better relationship with alcohol. And that means that they can still do some of those social things. They can still operate how they were, but it's not having that significant impact, that significant negative impact on their life. What do we know and not know in terms of what alcohol is doing to

our body, to our sleep, to our mental health, et cetera? Yeah. Well, like you said, I mean, the Hooberman podcast was fantastic. And I think, if you look, Dr. Amon is a perfect example. He, Dr. Amon, he says, you know, every time you take a drink, right, so just two units, it starts to dull your prefrontal cortex, which is that melon behind your brain. That's that area of rational decision-making. Moral compass comes from there. So he says, how often do you want rational decision-making and moral compass to go on holiday? And that's effectively what happens when you drink. And now we're talking about not just Doc Arman, Andrew Huberman talking about it being entirely neurotoxic to the brain, entirely neurotoxic to the brain, shrinks the brain over time, causes memory loss. So what we can just draw a line under is say that this is completely toxic. There are no benefits to drinking alcohol. It's going to have a significantly negative impact on your brain, a significantly negative impact on your body. And yet, the thing about that is, is it's so prevalent in society, it's so normalized that the conversation of you have to be abstinent, I think is the conversation which is stopping

many, many, many people from taking just the first one or two steps to change. Things like sleep, as an example. Alcohol is horrendous for sleep. Alcohol stops us going into deep sleep. Deep sleep is that area, that needed part of sleep, where actually the vast majority, what they believe now, the vast majority of neuroplasticity happens. Okay, so that's our brain's ability to learn and learn new things and change behavior. So drinking alcohol is in direct negative correlation to trying to change behavior. It stops you changing behavior. And there's so many areas like this where it holds up back. Let's talk about weight loss, right? Alcohol significantly inhibits your weight loss. It's a% poison,

therefore the liver must process that before it processes other fat loss. So it stops you losing weight, plus there's lots of calories in. Let's take a little example here, okay? Imagine I created a pill, right, that would help you for your headache. And you have a headache, and you go down to the pharmacy and you get the pill. And it's wonderful. This acts incredibly fast. It removes your headache. You feel so much more at ease. And then 15 minutes later, you need to take another pill. And then, so you feel a bit better again, and that's all very good. Then another 15 minutes go by and guess what? Now you need to take two pills. Okay. And this goes on for the evening to try and get rid of your headache. And then you go to bed that night and you fall asleep and you wake up the next day and the headache is 10 times worse.

And you feel low and you feel in more pain than you did before. How successful would that be? Like as a product? Yeah. Not great. Right. So, and this is the thing. Unless you're the person selling the product. That's pretty great. Right. So, and this is the thing. Unless you're the person selling the product. That is pretty great. Yeah, that's another conversation to be had. And this is the thing with alcohol, is it must be one of the world's worst relievers of stress. I recently interviewed a wonderful woman, Dr. Rajita Sinha from Yale University. And she spent the last 30 years studying alcohol and addiction.

Yale University. And she spent the last 30 years studying alcohol and addiction. And they asked her to set up a new department specifically for alcohol abuse studies. And she got six months into this setup of the department. And she went back to the board and said, I don't want to call it Yale University Study for Alcohol Abuse. I want to call it Yale's university study for stress because alcohol is just the outcome. The actual source is the stress and the stress that we have. And so alcohol is a terrible, terrible stress reliever for people. And I think inside all of this is what is keeping this completely stuck together? Like knowing that it's so bad for our health, bad for our mental health. It's, you know, as Professor David Nutt proved and got kicked out of the UK government for proving that alcohol is the world's most harmful drug and significantly

negative on our physical and mental health. Why is it so prevalent? And that is this part that we are trying to challenge. It is the social conditioning. It is $2 trillion of marketing. It is an entire machine which has spent decades upon decades upon decades of programming us to believe that this thing, this substance, is the source of our health, is the source of fun, happiness, of success, of everything. And interestingly, right, you look at the advertising budget for alcohol, right, and the alcohol industry in the UK since 2004. 2004 was peak booze in the UK, okay, the most amount we were drinking. And the advertising budget spent in the UK pretty much follows that trend line, right? The restrictions started to come in place

and all of those things. So all of this advertising, all of this machine has been making us believe that alcohol is this source. There was another study recently, I think this was probably three, four years ago. And there was an audience with a journalist in hiding in. And there was some people trying to put a study together to study whether alcohol was good for you or not. Right. And so they wanted to prove they were on stage saying, we want to prove that moderate drinking is good for you. Okay. And the journalist called this out. I think it was in the New York Times because the room was full of the alcohol industry. Sure. Yeah. So this is all the misinformation, all that stuff out there that has been programming us to believe that it is the source. Well, it's so prevalent to your point, and we're so indoctrinated into a culture where we don't even second guess the fact that it's readily available and has been positioned to be this elixir of good times and something that is considered innocuous in comparison to the drugs that are illegal, when in fact, the facts tell a very different story. that are illegal when in fact, the facts tell a very different story.

Yet, I do think we're seeing this upswing or upturn in especially in younger people who are opting out of this paradigm, which I think is really cool. And I came across a study in researching, to speak to you today, this Sterling University study from 2017 that showed that 93% of people

had a drink when they didn't want to, and 84% had experienced pressure from friends to drink alcohol. So we have, on the one hand, the science, the irrefutable set of facts that show a really negative picture in terms of what this drug is doing to us. On the other hand, the more nefarious foe in this equation really is our social structure that keeps people stuck in behavior patterns that don't serve them for fear of being ostracized by, you know, their, their in-group or their community of people. Yes. And that's adequate enough, strong enough to keep people doing things they don't want to do because the fear of suddenly not being able to participate in that is more than adequate to perpetuate a negative habit.

Completely. And that was our study with Sterling University. Oh, that's right. Did you commission that study? We did. We've done various studies with Sterling University over the years. But I think, you know, that element of peer pressure, like, look at where I came from, you know, the oil broking industry. And my boss telling me that if I took a break from alcohol, I was like, I want to change my relationship with alcohol. I really think it's holding me back. And he said, you're committing commercial suicide if you stop drinking. And here I was built up a very successful business, you know, team of guys with me. And for however many years, maybe 10 years in this industry, I was very focused on being the number one oil broker in the world. Like that was where I was going. And here I was left with this decision to make of like, do I really say goodbye to all of that? And I think this is in part what people are saying. They're like, okay, that's very well. I could see that I could be healthier. I understand that it's a neurotoxin. I understand that it's poisonous. I like the way

it makes me feel. Everybody's doing it. And I don't really want to be ostracized from society if I stop. I don't really want to stop drinking and be the guy who's left out. Here's an example of peer pressure. I've been standing with a group of guys having a drink and they are all playing. They play cricket together and they're chatting away and they're talking about how important this season is, right? And one of the guys goes, look, why don't we get Mark? You know, he's the best player out of all of us. And a bunch of guys are like, we just can't do it. We can't do it because he doesn't drink. I mean, that is the world we live in. I mean, that is the world we live in. So I think as long as that exists, it's going to be very challenging for people to be just completely not drinking. And I think inside this gray area that we've been trying to say is there is alternatives to just not drinking, right? There's actually an

area of drinking where you mostly don't drink. And that's something I choose, right? I choose personally to drink in control. I rarely have a drink. The vast majority of the time I spend alcohol free. Every time I have a drink, I feel absolutely terrible. I might have one with dinner, but it's just rare. All of the associations in my brain that I used to have, like you go for a steak, you need a drink, or you go to the rugby, you need to have pints. All of those associations have disappeared. So what I really call this now is like, it's like having a base of alcohol-free, of knowing and loving that version of yourself, but occasionally tapping into that world where it's so expected, it's so ingrained,

so you can join in with them and then get yourself back out again. It's interesting that you dip your toe back in from time to time rather than just say, like, with everything that you know, why do you still make the choice occasionally to imbibe? For the two things that you talked about earlier, for those benefits that are very real and they are for the vast majority of people. The vast majority of people out there are not in very severe alcoholism. The vast majority of people are sitting on the borderline. They're sitting somewhere between I drink, I drink every day a little bit or I binge drink and the wheels come off, but then I stop drinking for a bit. And they look at this and they say, hang on a minute, I don't want to stop drinking. I just want to be able to drink a bit less. And if we say to them, well, you know, you can't do

that. You can't do that. You have to go and be completely abstinent. Then they'll just go, okay, I'm not going to do anything. And this is what's happening. So the reason why we stumbled on that, and I say stumbled, but it cost us a fortune and years, and it was very expensive in learning it, is that when we were sitting down and talking to our customers, and this is people who came into the challenge, had done the challenge a little bit, and, you know, been successful with it in various different ways. And we were talking to them about their experience. And people would say, you know, I was watching your ads on Facebook for two years before I signed up to the challenge. You know about paid media marketing. That means that cost you a fortune. And in it, we started to ask people like,'s going on so we had another survey done we had

another piece of research done and this is now tens of thousands of people who came through this piece of research and of those tens of thousands of people in countries all over the world 84 percent do not want to stop drinking right so if our only rhetoric is come and stop drinking, come and do 90 days or come and do whatever it is, then we're stopping people helping change their relationship with alcohol earlier. And this is one of the biggest changes in what we are doing now because we talk about control. And if you, in this whole area of prevention, if we can talk about control and say, hey, you can have a healthier relationship with alcohol.

And when they come through a program, help them see that the healthiest relationship with alcohol is to be predominantly abstinent, then we can help people much, much earlier. Yeah, I understand that. Intellectually, I totally get it. Yeah. Yet at the same time, like my brain's lighting up like a Christmas tree

because I'm like a 12-step guy and I come into this from a very different set of experiences because I'm the guy who hears you can drink occasionally and I think, well, if I could drink once in a while and dip my toe in, then I should just drink every day. Like I'm just wired differently. You know, I have a problem

and that problem requires a certain program and set of tools that I have to diligently practice every single day or addict sits in a very different set of circumstances from the people that you're communicating with who don't have that problem or are not necessarily dealing with something severe or acute, just are sick and tired of occasionally feeling lousy, being hung over, being pressured into drinking when they don't want to. And I think the challenge aspect of what you've created

gives people a way to test the reality of what their relationship is. Because to your point about what was it, 84% said they don't want to quit drinking. You know, how many of those don't wanna quit because they have a problem and they don't wanna break up with their best friend versus somebody who's like, this is not problematic for me,

so I don't see a reason to have to quit. There's a deep sort of psychological network of neurons at play that lead people to say things that are not in their best interest. Totally, totally. And believe. Throw up the wall against, you know, making the change that could actually, you know, be the differentiator between the life they're leading and the life they wish to lead. Totally. And I think this is the, again, the widening of the conversation here. Okay. And I think this is the, again, the widening of the conversation here.

Okay. Dr. Judson Brewer, been on this podcast. Sure. Amazing person. He's coming back soon. Yeah. We have him coming back. You're supposed to surf with him. He's also been on our podcast and, you know, we've had part of his work on our programs.

Amazing human being. human being. But he is helping people who have, who might traditionally be considered very severe or severe alcoholism or addiction to change their relationship with that to almost not drinking or not drinking at all using just meditation. Okay. And there is Dr. Joe Dispenza, who is getting people to stand up out of wheelchairs, an entire life in a wheelchair through meditation. Another very successful intervention for people changing their relationship with addictions is boxing, sport, right? Interestingly, the most successful by volume of people, right, intervention in the world for helping people go from alcohol use disorder, severe or severe alcohol use disorder, to abstinent or a better relationship controlled drinking. There is one thing out there in the

world that stands high above everything else. Do you know what that thing is? Running. You would like it to be that. What is it? Time. Explain. Most people grow out of it in time it's the most successful intervention out there and the thing about this is okay so we're using words like you're an alcoholic and this is alcoholism and all of those things is let's just widen up this conversation to say that different people need

different things, that some things might work for some people and might not work for other people. And there is a huge array of tools and understanding that we can apply into this subject matter here that might be able to help someone. And I think if we go with that widening of a place, because like you said, there are some people who say, oh, well, that's not for me. Or, you know, I don't identify with that. I don't think there's only, there's not one way. And that's what's amazing about you, Rich, right? You know, you've brought Andy onto this podcast. This is clearly another way and it's helping people. And you've brought me onto the podcast. This is another way and it's helping people. And there's lots more of us. There's lots more of us that are skating this line of what would be, could be this or could be

that. And yet people are coming out of it and transforming their lives. Time as an intervention is an interesting concept. I can't help but wonder whether that's because everybody has to have their experiences to come to the conclusion that it no longer serves them. And you can't incept that level of willingness into somebody who's not receptive to hearing it. They have to have a certain experience or reach a certain pain threshold before they're ready to make a change

that's uncomfortable. And even if you have a casual relationship with alcohol, it still is like a very reliable friend that you're being asked to break up with or to spend time apart from. And if alcohol isn't directly tied to a series of, you know, chaotic, disruptive events in your life, it's harder to make that argument until that person kind of brushes up against something that makes them reframe that relationship. Yeah. I think, like you said there, a lot of people are waiting for a rock bottom moment. They're waiting for their hand to be forced, the DUI or the partner to say, that's it, I'm leaving. I want to help people before that. I want to prevent that. I want to tickle, scratch, gnaw at the bits inside where they can make a decision, make a change, make a judgment that connects to them and makes them realize that alcohol is the thing. If we swim back upstream a bit more into and look at this prevention piece, people are not looking for not drinking when they are. They're still stuck in the matrix. They're loving drinking. It's not a problem. They don't have a problem. People convince themselves,

right? Right now we're in dry January. They're like, okay, I do dry January every year. Therefore, I don't have a problem. But I also drink three bottles of wine every day at lunch. Now, I know a guy who said that to me, right? You know I also drink three bottles of wine every day at lunch now I know a guy who said that to me right yeah you know he drinks three bottles of wine

at lunch every day probably finishes off with all sorts of whiskey at home later and because he can do dry January it's not a problem because he has proved to himself

that he can quit and put it down when he wants to never mind you know the white knuckling and whatever all of those things

the delusion. Went into just making it to day 30 so he could continue to perpetuate that argument as a form of denial, but yeah. Millions and millions of people, Rich. Millions and millions of people. This is why people who come into Alcoholics Anonymous or 12-step programs will,

once they kind of get well or better, will identify as a grateful alcoholic or addict because the pain was so severe and the habit was so pronounced, they were forced to reckon with it and break up with that lover. And as a result, have been blessed with tools and this brand new life that has created something wonderful

out of, you know, this disease. But for the person who's a heavy user or drinker, who can continue along that path without wreaking inadequate amount of havoc in their life, where they have to confront or, you know, deal with the fact that they might have a problem, they're stuck in a cycle that is harder to break because there aren't circumstances you can point to

to say, it's time, you gotta give it up. And they live their lives, most of them live the rest of their lives in this suboptimal state where they're really not living the life that is freely available to them otherwise. Yeah, exactly. And I think if we can direct the conversation to where people are looking, if they're not looking to stop drinking, then where are they looking? They want to lose weight. They want to double

their business this year. I mean, Lewis Hamilton, right? He wants an extra 1% performance improvement. They want to avoid divorce. They want to be a better father, be a better mother. They want to be calmer, want to be happier. So if we can direct the conversation to there and then help people do the math. Oh, you want to lose weight, do you? Okay. Well, let me just explain about what your regularly drinking alcohol is doing to you. It's a bit of a Trojan horse, right? Because that person is never going to walk into an AA meeting. Never. And if they really do have a problem by kind of welcoming the challenge under the rubric of weight loss or whatever,

the truth will be revealed. As we talked about earlier, either they're not gonna make it or- They get stuck in a cycle. Something will happen and yeah, it will become clear rather soon whether that program needs to be kind of escalated. Exactly.

Well, then that's another widening part again. So it doesn't go from, oh, I tried to do the challenge and therefore I need to go to AA. What we're saying is, okay, so you've tried to do dry January for a year a few times, you've stopped drinking for a month, but then it comes back. Well, there are drivers of compulsive behavior.

Do you know what those are? And are you mitigating those? And are you doing anything about them? Let me ask you, do you have a high level of stress in your life, right? Every time I ask somebody that, what do you think they say? Yeah, of course they do. Well, we just talked about why stress is absolutely intrinsically linked to your relationship with alcohol. It's the most well-used, known, available, readily available tool for dealing with stress. But it also creates stress. Alcohol releases significant amounts of cortisol. In fact, they recently found regular alcohol consumption over time increases the production of cortisol.

Okay. So you're not only releasing cortisol in the moment, but you're producing more cortisol over time. Now, cortisol sends you into fight or flight, right? So your sympathetic nervous system stressed out, you're busy, busy, busy all day, you know, building the business, being successful, whatever it is. And then not only that, but so, so that stress during the day then gets you to that end of the end of the day where you're like, I need something to take the edge off. But what people don't realize is that alcohol consumption over time is reducing your ability to deal with stress, right? So I speak to successful driven business owners all the time. And I say to them, do you have more stress now? Or have you reduced your ability to deal with stress? And I think that's the thing

people are not realizing about it. Let's have a conversation about stress, right? And let's deal with the stress. Let's talk about sleep. Let's talk about these other things, because that's what you are looking for. And in the background, just like you said, we're going to help you change your relationship with alcohol. When we cast our gaze on the emotional landscape even more broadly, the other thing that comes up for me is the difference between abstinence and emotional sobriety. If you really are an alcoholic and you find your way into 12 step,

there is the initial phase of detoxifying your body, right? And perhaps the Trojan horse there is people come in, they're just like, I just wanna learn how to stop drinking. What they don't realize and what comes later is this notion that putting the bottle down is really just the beginning of trying to figure out a way to be emotionally sober.

Because when you no longer have that coping mechanism, all of the uncomfortable emotions flare up and you're left with no tools for how to manage them because the way that you have done it historically has been taken away. So in the case of the people that you have worked with, given that perhaps they're not alcoholics, on some level, everybody is self-medicating with alcohol.

And so when you remove their favorite medication, what is replaced there? And what is the work that needs to be done to identify whatever those triggers are and find healthier ways of processing and transcending the emotional kind of, of what's the word I wanna use, the emotional impulses and patterns that emerge that require redress, because without any kind of tools to redress them, they're gonna wreak havoc. And so perhaps alcohol resulted in angry flare-ups, but if there's a latent anger underneath that you've been

medicating with alcohol to kind of keep under wraps, suddenly that's going to come out and it's probably going to be worse than it was when you were drinking. Yeah. Yeah. And I think this in part was the bit I felt really needed to evolve because I could see that we were helping people to take a break from alcohol i could see that we would we would give them this insight in this vision of what alcohol free could feel like and you know what happens when somebody has been regularly drinking and stops they get all of this positive feeling that you know all these things come back but we weren't really there to help them with this emotional issue or the big T word, right? Trauma, the driver of so much of our behavior. And sok. Right. The body keeps the score. Our relationship with alcohol is intrinsically linked to the experiences we had as a child. That's just a fact. Right. Now, if we called this, hey, come and sort out your trauma program. Sure. I think it would be even less successful than, hey, come and sort out your drinking problem, right?

So we have to do that in the background. Now we use wonderful tools like, oh, you had Dick Schwartz on the thing. So we use IFS, we use somatic experiencing, things like that to help people start to feel these emotions. But more importantly, to link them back to these past experiences that they were that are running on autopilot. Let me give you a little example. So, you know, decades of therapy,

I did psychotherapy, psychodynamic therapy, talk therapy since six years old, right? Tons and tons of counseling and therapy. And I wouldn't say, I said it helped evolve me significantly, but I never really got to, I never really came to find my trauma. And when I went through a meditation, but also in time with that, with some somatic experiencing, I released some stuff and discovered a very old memory that nobody had talked about. My mom and dad didn't talk about it. My siblings, nobody really talked about it. And it was when I was two years old, okay? And I fell off the boat.

Now, when I fell off the boat, my dad was down in the cuddy and he had to come up and he literally had to dive down, swim down and save me, right? Now, that created this imprint in my brain of needing to be saved. I had no idea about this until, you know, like Steve Jobs says, you have no idea until you look back and connect all the dots. So what did it mean for me? Well, through my life, I had all these near-death experiences, including my suicide attempts, almost every single one of those things, I always had somebody nearby there to save me. When I look for partners, I was looking for somebody who would save me. I was so

destructive, so disruptive. I was looking for somebody to come and save me. When I built my businesses, they were always in suffering. And I was looking for, you know, the next freelancer or agency or guru to come and save my business. So this pattern was locked in my subconscious. I didn't even know existed. And this is the power of trauma. And so when I got to understand that and shift it, I got awareness of it. That's the most powerful thing about doing the work, right? I know you're such a big advocate of doing the work and this is it, is once I got awareness, I could say, hang on a minute, I'm running that pattern again. Like I don't need somebody to save me. I don't need somebody to come and save me. Well, the other piece there, of course, and sorry, I don't mean to jump in, but the other piece isn't just needing somebody to save you. It's putting yourself in peril so that you can be saved. So you're actually incurring risk into your life unconsciously for the purpose of whatever the emotional experience of being saved does for you.

Exactly. And that was the pattern of my life, like ADHD, severely destructive, all of those behaviors. So, I mean, that's why I could easily have such addictive behavior and, you know, fit alcohol like a glove coming into that. But now, I'm such a huge advocate of doing the work. Let's put it as simple as this. Alcohol is showing up a bit too prevalent in your life okay let's change that but first of all let's change that by doing the work now you're such a huge fan of doing the work right that's what this podcast is all about is about showing people what they need to do and the things they can do to do

the work and i think when you do the work that is what is going to change your relationship with alcohol but people don't want to do the work but they're up for the challenge yeah you know they're like 28 days if their mates are going to do it i'll do it too we'll see i'll beat you like that sounds fun right and there's an end point on that um so that's a much easier thing to get you know people to subscribe to it is it is the you've got to start nice and gentle. What do you mean the work? Like, I'm just gonna say no to the beer at the pub, but that's how these things have to begin.

And I think what you've done really effectively is just create a welcome mat where, hey, it's nice and warm in here, it's cozy, come on in. There's lots of other people doing it. We're having a good time. We're building community around it. That's the other huge piece, of course, where you feel supported and you don't feel alone or like some kind of insane outlier.

Exactly. In trying to do this. Yeah. The community element is huge. It's so, so powerful. Interestingly, you know, we were talking about dry January and things like like that and what a lot of people when when they do dry january is they hide away right they stay at home they go to the gym they change up their routine and what they're doing with all of this avoid their social circle cancel all that stuff count down the days to the first of february so we can go out and get smashed again and what we're doing while doing that is we are reiterating this belief, right? This whole

social conditioning that we need alcohol to have a good time, that we need alcohol to have a fun life. January is so boring, cold diet, that's why I might not drink, right? And I think that's what can actually create more of an issue with people's relationship with alcohol. The main thing there is what's happening is people are becoming more disconnected, right? Now, unless you're a sociopath, we don't want to be disconnected, right? We want to be connected. And so this is the importance of being sociable, being around people, building a community for yourself who are changing their relationship with alcohol. It's so well ingrained, right? That if you want to change a behavior, get around a community of people who are living like that.

And I think nine, 10 years ago, when I started changing my relationship with alcohol, that community was pretty small. Nowadays, it's huge, right? So don't hide away during dry Jan. Let's get out there. And also the whole point is to develop some level of resilience.

And if you're just isolating and hiding from people, then you're just preventing yourself from having those slightly challenging experiences that if you weather through them will teach you that you can do this thing, right? And it emboldens you and it strengthens that reflex to say no instead of sort of catering to social preference. Yeah.

Well, let's take it back. I wanna hear the whole story. Like I wanna hear how this all came to be because there's some entertaining shit in there like about what happened with you, man. There's- So you grew up on this weird island. Yes. Right?

I'd never even heard of this island. Mull, the Isle of Mull. Like way up in the Northwest of Scotland. You should run a retreat there. Yeah. Oh, it's amazing, beautiful. You like islands. Well, you live in Mallorca,

that sounds like a lot better to me. I like my tropical terrain. Well, I wanted to keep it simple. I moved from one island to another. It was Mull and now it's Mallorca. Yeah, right, well, that makes sense. Is there a direct flight between the two? Probably not. So kid growing up in Mull, I don't know what goes on there, but I presume there's quite a bit of drinking. Absolutely. In fact, West Coast of

Scotland, if you were to put it as a country, it would be amongst the highest in Europe of drinking culture, alcohol per capita. So yeah, very synonymous with drinking culture up there. Now, my parents were originally born in England, moved up to the Isle of Mull. And so- Why was that? Yeah. I think my dad married a beautiful woman and didn't want anybody to nick her off. So he bought a hill farm with sheep. Like a squander away with this woman and make sure she couldn't- That sounds healthy.

She couldn't go very healthy. There's a book about that. She's written one. That's next for me. Well, get my mom on the podcast. Yeah, for sure. I need to know more about this island and you being, you know, absconded with. It's a beautiful, beautiful part of the world. 260 rain days a year though. So, but anyway, so I was very challenged in the head. I think I came out with a bump and now being diagnosed with ADHD.

But back then and on the Isle of Mull, they had absolutely no idea what this was. They just knew they didn't like it. And so at six years old, after being significantly disruptive through school, my parents were given an ultimatum, drugs or counseling. And to me, I feel fortunate. Obviously, everyone is different and make their own choices, but I feel very fortunate that they chose counseling because it started from a very young age, me trying to understand what the hell was going on in here at 9 million miles an hour. So you were just hyperactive, couldn't sit still, couldn't pay attention, couldn't learn. And so all the way through that, my parents were trying to juggle this and five kids and businesses and all of that kind of stuff. So it was very difficult to get attention. And I think quite young, I figured out that when you set stuff on fire, you get attention. So quite disruptive. And, you know, through that, my parents would say, you know, you're special, you're gifted.

special, you're gifted. But the people out there, they were like, you're bad, you're naughty, you're disruptive. And I recently spoke at ADHD UK. I'm very, very passionate about ADHD. I'm very passionate about the conversation here about ADHD. I was just, it just wasn't known, there wasn't support. So when I got to 13 years old and with the noise going on inside my head and not understanding who I was or where I belonged I decided to take an overdose and I was a very very dark place you know I think I've talked about suicide before but I think there's such a great misunderstanding around it. I think the place somebody gets to when they want to leave is such a horrendous place. Like it's, it's, it's a horrific feeling and, and, and there is no option and there's no other alternative.

You're the problem. You're the issue. And you, and the solution is gained by you departing. It's, it's not a conscious decision. It's awful. How old were you at this point? At 13. 13. Wow. 14. I actually stepped off the stairs with a taijutsu belt around my neck. I was determined to go. And my parents were out at an anniversary dinner, very thoughtful of me, and they had an argument and came home early. And they came home as I was dangling on the stairs. And so they brought me down. And coming from that, my dad had worked at, you know, voluntary at Childline, and he was an amazing man and very wise and very knowledgeable. And he knew from working with these kids and also cancer kids and things like that, he'd done a lot of work that when you give a child hope, they're far more likely to pull out of whatever it is they're going through.

So he encouraged me to write a letter to somebody famous. Now, my dad was called Richard. He ran multiple businesses, but one of them was a recording studio and so I was thinking of somebody famous and I thought ah Richard Branson so I wrote a letter to Richard Branson at 14 and I said amongst a whole bunch of stuff about the weather and how many sheep there were on the Isle of Mull I said, and I think this goes to show how separated my brain was from this conversation of being special and gifted and yet naughty and bad. And this special element I wrote into him, I said, I'm going to change the world one day and I'm looking forward to having lunch with you. So that's when I set off to try and change the

world. So I left school before the legal age, set up my first company, determined to be the next Richard Branson, ran that for two years. In fact, by the time I was 25, I'd tried five different companies, the biggest of which employed 10 people for three years. We used to run a call center, a little telecenter in Edinburgh. And I was really desperate to try and make this massive impact in the world and yet here i was just failing again and again and again in fact i called myself a serial failpreneur and back one day on the wonderful isle of mull drinking my sorrows um sitting in the pub i was speaking to a friend there and he said that's interesting story story, Ruri. He said, you know, you should go on that TV program where all failed entrepreneurs go. And I was like, what's that? Didn't really

watch TV. And he said, The Apprentice. So I finished off my fifth pint and took my jovial, half-drunk self up and filled out the application form and whined forward six months, you know, flights to and from london doing interviews and doing all this preparation i'm sat outside the studio for series two in the uk ready to go on the show like who was hosting it at that point alan sugar lord alan sugar you're fired yeah so anyway um this producers are coming in and coming out and they're coming you're going on you're going on, you're going on, you're, you're not going on just yet. Just, just, just stay there. So after four hours of this,

they say, look, I'm really sorry, but you're not going on the show just now. And we'll fly you back to Scotland. And I'm like, I mean, I've told the whole Island I'm going, that's all eight people and the dog. Um, I've told the whole Island I'm going on this show, I can't go back there. So I got to the airport and I saw, oh, look, next flight going to Ibiza. That's a good place to get over rejection. So headed out to Ibiza, put my bags, literally put my bags into check in space, the nightclub. That's a very alcoholic move. Stayed there for three years, three days. Only like, that's something I would have done.

Yeah, I get it. Yeah. Fuck yeah fuck it yeah i'm not going back i don't want to face those people who i made this promise to i'm going to go here where i can you know kind of just drown myself in whatever and distract myself exactly full-on distraction coping um. And so in Ibiza, I bumped into an oil broker and told him my story. And he was like, you should come. As one does in Ibiza. So that's how I found myself down in London as an oil broker. I used to say to my boss, David, God bless him, I used to say, you know, I didn't get hired by Alan Sugar, but I did get hired by you. And he would say, Ruri, there are two types of people who go on to The Apprentice. One have some form of business acumen,

and the other's good at TV. Which are you? And I was like, definitely good at TV which are you and I was like definitely good at TV David there you go so the days of becoming an oil broker you call it an oil trader here right well trade a broker slightly different similar different it doesn't matter who cares the brokers the middleman yeah but this is you know Andy you know Andy explained that lifestyle, but lay it out because, you know, it's very much a Wolf of Wall Street sort of experience, right? Like, you know, I thought the days of liquid lunches had gone the way of the dodo, but apparently not in this subculture

of finance. Absolutely not. Well, not when I started, which was, is now, gosh, how long? 20 years ago, more. I'm getting old. Um, so, um, 18 years ago. Um, yeah, I think when I, when I started in it, people were like, oh, the good old days have gone now. But you know, when I started on that desk, I started with the senior guys and they're all bored. They don't want to go out and entertain. They've had enough in crude, like the biggest desk, the world, you know, the world's largest oil brokerage. And they were like, okay, your job is to entertain our clients. So I was like, okay, well, my budget's gone from five grand a month to 20 now. That's great. Cause I'm doing everybody else's entertainment. So I got really, really good at it. I mean, you know, I was the only guy to get

250 men into a nightclub last minute. Um, you know, like just, I knew all the boun it. I mean, you know, I was the only guy to get 250 men into a nightclub last minute. You know, like just, I knew all the bouncers, I knew the good restaurants, I knew where the places to go. So yeah, it was, it was amazing fun. It was wild. But the drinking was huge. Let me give you another example. We go out, we go out for a lunch, like you said, down to the curry house and I'm drinking all the way through. And, you know, Andy and I used to be thick as thieves, right? So while he's doing little magic tricks over there, making himself levitate and making a fool of himself, I'm busy topping up people's pints with either vodka or champagne, right, to get them more

smashed. And then next minute, I'm looking down at my phone, and I'm like, it's the window. Now, the window is when our office with 15 people in or, you know, 15 people around a desk, all shout at each other to set the crude oil price. Now, 85% of the world's oil is set as a benchmark to that. And the vast majority of us have all come back from lunch absolutely blotto. And here we are setting the world's crude oil price. That's what it used to be like. Yeah. So this is not happening at 10 o'clock at night. This is in the middle of the afternoon. Oh yeah. This is at 4.30 PM. Well, it used to be. at 4.30 PM. Well, it used to be. So, um, and you know, another crude example is, oh, crude, nice pun there, Ruri. Um, I remember taking some customers out to lunch. Um, and my thing always used to be, let's do a whiskey tasting. So, you know, we'd have lunch and then we'd do some

whiskeys and I'm sitting there having, having those whiskeys. And next minute I put it down and I'm like, Oh my God, it's five 30. I'm supposed to be at my NCT class, which is basically newborn child classes. My wife is pregnant and I'm supposed to be there. And I looked at my phone and I'm like, quick, go shoot home, you know, smashed and go to my first parent class. That's not a good look. No, it's not a good look. But you've got a lot of examples of you telling your wife that you're going to be home at six or seven o'clock and then showing up at five o'clock in the morning. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. And then there's, you know, I think that begets itself. There's a lot of people who swing past the pub rather than go home. In fact, you know, we use a wonderful heart monitor to show people's central nervous system, right? So they can see minute by minute whether they're in sympathetic or parasympathetic. And, you know, recently somebody's like, the most stressed I get is when I go home and I have to deal with the kids. Like I'm actually fine at work. And then that stress absolutely spikes in the evening. And so like that, it would come to, shall I go home or shall I go to the pub and pretend that the train was delayed? You know, I worked with a guy,

right, who used to do the night, the close, that time when they set the price used to be 7.30 PM. It took him two years before he told his wife that the time had changed to 4.30. It's not a great look when you don't want to go home. No. Well, that's happened. I think that happens to all of us sometimes. Sometimes, well, maybe not all of us, but I think many, many, many people out there will swing by somewhere before they go home just for a little sharpener, just for a little quiet one before they go home. They need to take the edge off the day before they go home and face that. And with these things, often, you know, they're creating it. That's the thing with alcohol. It not only is used as the solution,

but actually creates it in the first place, right? So, you know, you feel stressed out, but alcohol is causing stress. It's creating more stress. Your relationship, as an example. Well, you feel like you need a drink because of your relationship, but your drinking is causing problems on the relationship. And this is what it's like with so many areas of our life. I mean, it's not just the drinking, it's the lying and then the erosion of trust and the unreliability and the unpredictability, all of that. There's a cascade of dominoes that all fall as a result of that. And there's a difference between the person who goes to the pub and has one pop. maybe you'd be better off if you didn't do that versus the person who goes to the pub on the way home,

fully convinced that they're still gonna make that train and be home on time and shows up at five o'clock in the morning. Exactly. Which would be, I'm that guy. And it sounds like you were periodically that guy. Yeah, I was a bit in that guy. And certainly causing significant disruption in life.

But I think for a lot of people, they say, oh, I'm not that guy. I'm not, and I won't be. I think a lot of people in the preventative space are kidding themselves in part with that. They're like, I'll never, I'm not gonna do that. Well, there's always somebody who's worse. Yeah, exactly.

You can always point to somebody who's further down the line and say, I'll never be that person, or at least I'm not doing that. And those are all crutches to reinforce the, you know, the, the unhealthy behavior pattern that you're trying to protect. Yeah. And all the people who are down at the end of the line, the vast majority of them say, I don't know how I got here. You know, it crept up. It just started to creep up and creep up. Sure. Launching this business was an amazing thing when we, when we, when we

got inspired, like Andy coming on, talking about the challenge and why the challenge, why the challenge works, why that is so significant for people, because I'd spent a long time trying to be, you know, evangelical standing out there and Piccadilly circus with the, you know, with the, with the bell here, ye, here, ye stop drinking. It's amazing. You know, and everyone's like, shut up, go to the pub. And so that's where the challenge fit in so beautifully because it was like, hey, this is cool. This is something to be proud of, right? You want to be fitter, faster, healthier, happier. You want to be a better dad. You want to be a better husband, all of those things. You want to be a better mom. This is from the challenge. um i think when it when it sort of really came into was

um i've probably been a year of investing in this right hundreds of thousands of pounds invested into this business um and i sent a tweet out to a journalist and um they got i got into a bit of a conversation and off the back of that we got a 10 10-minute feature in BBC World News in over 200 countries. Kind of unheard of for a business to get that kind of exposure. But it was amazing. And a friend of mine called me up in Italy. And he said, Ruri, I've just seen you on the news. I think what you're doing is amazing.

I'm meeting the Dalai Lama next week. Would you like to meet him? Right? Just a quick check my diary. Let's have a look. Wow. So I flew over to Pisa and very random, you know, when serendipity and things like that show up, you know, you're on the right path, right? So next minute, all sorts of things happen. And I'm standing on this stage, asking the Dalai Lama a question in front of thousands of people in Pisa, like just unbelievable. So

I asked him, I said, and I just wondered what your advice would be to anyone who is trying to get control of their addictions. And he said, if we teach our younger generation how to develop inner peace and how to tackle when negative emotions come. Then I think through systematic sort of method teaching, a future generation could be better. That's my belief. So I just found wholeheartedly appreciate people like you who really try to help such people. Wonderful.

What we need to do is help children to feel their emotion. Now this is the Dalai Lama's really big thing, right? This is the ultimate prevention because if we can help our to feel their emotion. Now, this is the Dalai Lama's really big thing, right? This is the ultimate prevention, because if we can help our kids feel more emotion, we can prevent all these things. But when he said that to me, I was like, okay.

I remembered back to the letter to Branson. I remembered back about this purpose, about this being, about why I was on here. And I was like, this is it. I know why I've been put on this planet. It's to spread this message. And I went in on Monday morning and handed in my notice as an oil broker. My boss said to me, what are you doing? Like, you've got a successful desk. They'd let me spend 70% of my time for two years building the business on the side. They were like, just carry on,

take the money. I was like, I can't do another day. That day is the worst financial decision I ever made so far. Yeah. Walking away from a really well-paid career where they're actually supportive of you building this other thing on the side. Exactly. And they were, they were so supportive. They saw what impact it was having. But when you're treading those two worlds, you're preventing yourself from really accessing the growth that's possible if you go all in on this thing. So it's a test. There's also something else really important and important. Meaning and purpose is a huge driver of compulsive behavior. Okay. So if you are misaligned to who

you are in meaning and purpose, and you're doing something that you feel is completely meaningless, but you're doing it for the money, I'm telling you right now, it is rotting you inside. And I didn't realize, right, that this daily drink, this drinking, this, all this behavior, like I was commuting to via, via tube to a windowless office, right? I'm born on an island near the sea, right? The environment was wrong. You know what my boss used to say to me?

He used to say, every day, there's a pot of gold put on the table and you just have to reach in and grab whatever's yours. And that was the purpose. That was what we did. And inside me was so much more, right? I knew, I knew that I could help people. Like my dad telling me, you're special, you're gifted. I was like, I'm wasting this, right? I need to help people. And when it comes to this message, Rich, you know, it comes to this message, Rich, you know, I have been tested with this business beyond all belief.

Building a business is so hard. This is the hardest thing I've ever done. And through that journey, I've been questioned so many times, like, why, you know, why don't you go back to oil broking? You made so much more money, you had a better lifestyle, all of those things. Why don't you just make a nice little small thing and not really, you know, a nice little lifestyle? All of those tests have come along the line. And I've asked myself and said, you know, why are you doing this? And it came down to something something really powerful. And that is if some words out of my mouth can help somebody who is regularly drinking alcohol to reconsider their relationship with it, to take the first step to changing that relationship, I can change not only their life, not only their family's life, their, their relationships, their, their businesses, like, their family's life, their relationships, their businesses. And that's it for me.

Well, also, maybe most importantly, their relationship with their kids. Yeah, 100%. And create a situation in which their kids are not victimized by that person's trauma, and as a result, grow up healthier and liberated from the cycle of addiction that destroys so many families. Exactly. We skipped over the part though, where you finally decide to put it down. We skipped over the part, though, where you finally decide to put it down. Finally decide to stop drinking.

Yeah. Yeah. That came about because I got a text message from my wife and saying, you know, I'll be in Sweden with our daughter. And I knew that that's her putting her foot down, which didn't really stop me. In fact, I took it up a notch. But what happened is, interestingly, with Andy's story, he mentioned that a decade or a whole bunch of years earlier, I'd given him the book, which started everything, right, started the whole transformation. And that was Awaken the Giant within Tony Robbins. And similarly, he had said to me, you know, why don't you try this thing called Headspace? That was 2013.

So I just started meditating. And I used it as when I'm on the train and I'm trying to change who I am from the person I needed to be to survive in that business to going home to a loving family that I was trying to grow, good humans. So I did it on the train and that's when the scratching started to get stronger and stronger and stronger. And I think that's what it is for people, right? I think people just have a little scratch at the back of their head, which is like, hey, this alcohol thing, it is holding you back. And I think sometimes they have it quite loud on Sunday morning. I don't know, alcohol is really holding me back. But other times it's just a scratch.

So when I started meditating, that's when that scratch started to grow. And it was growing and growing and growing to the point where I was like, do you know what? I think I'm going to take a break. Told my boss I was doing it. He said, you are committing commercial suicide if you stop drinking. Well, first of all, just to be totally clear here, it's interesting, like, okay, meditation, Headspace, the Tony Robbins book, your relationship with Andy. But leading up to that, there was an incident in which you didn't come home until five o'clock in the morning. The train.

And your wife had had enough. And she said, I'm out of here. She's Swedish. She's leaving. She's going back to Sweden. And this was precipitated, correct me if I'm wrong, by you also like sharing with her a selfie of you leaning your head out the window of a speeding train while you were hammered, thinking it was a good idea and fun. Yeah, that article made the paper.

I know, I saw it. But people are like... Your eyes in that photo, you know. There's emphasis on like, you know, the air going into your cheeks, but I look at the eyes and I'm like, this guy's gone. Yeah, that was on the way home to the NCT class to first time as a dad.

It couldn't have been fun that that photo ended up in all these sort of British tabloid publications. I'm very happy with that. Yeah? Yeah. I will, I mean, not that I'll do anything. I have to be careful what I say. But again, if that sharing that crazy person that I was, and by the way, when people say to me that is so crazy i'm like that's the

tamest thing i did right the other me i'm like it doesn't seem like it's not no yeah i mean i've surfed roofs of cars i lost all the skin on my arm i've i mean no let's not go into the who's who i'm sure you've got some tales of debauchery but that was the sort of instigating set of circumstances that led you into saying like, I gotta, I gotta find a way to rectify this. They were, they were building, but those things were, again, we're all normalized. And I think this is where a lot of people are, right? Where they can hang their head out of a train and send the message to everyone and everyone just be like, ah, it's hilarious. Right. Or, you know, something end up in A&E and everyone be like, you were so smashed last night. You know, that's hilarious. And it's the near misses. It's the nearly thing. And I think for

people it's in there, like they know this is not right. They know it's costing them a bit, but then there's something stopping them from that change. And that's the bit where we want to be there to reach them and help them. You know, I think prevention should always swim upstream, right? So if we swim upstream, the most upstream thing is the hangover. So how can we, how can we help people in the hangover to have better tools, better support, better advice, better guidance, so that they can prevent a more serious relationship with alcohol developing. So you decide to put the bottle down for a bit. I did a year. You did a year. At what point do you bump into Andy though, and realize that he, independent of you, was doing

the same thing? Just around about 90 day mark. And he was more, he was like four or five months in. And, um, he said, he said, I think I'm going to do my 40th birthday and not drink. And I was like, Andy, thick as thieves, Andy. Um, and he did, he, he messaged me afterwards about how amazing he felt doing it. So I was like, okay, well, I've got my birthday coming up and I've got Christmas, I'm going to do those. And that's where the momentum builds. You know, you don't sit at the beginning going, right, I'm going to do a year, it's going to be awesome.

I think you do it bit by bit, by step by step. But you had an accountability buddy. Yeah. Sort of the- An inspirer. The Bill and Dr. Bob, you know, analogy. Yeah. Sort of in your own version. Bob, you know, analogy. Yeah. Sort of in your own version.

Yeah, exactly. And yeah, and I think that we sort of got together and we were like, you know, we need to do something about this. We need to inspire more people. And yeah, that's where we came up with the challenge. That's what gave birth to the whole thing. Yeah.

And so how did that go from an idea into actually being like a thing that other people, that you enlisted other people into participating in? Well, hundreds of thousands of pounds of my own money. I mean, you know,

I'm looking forward to writing a book one day, 10,001 things not to do when starting a business. And because I just made all of all of the mistakes. You know, through the time we had the challenge, we kind of focused on that. And then it came to a moment where, okay, let's take this big, let's raise some money. And that's something I wanted to do. And we both had different opinions there about whether that was the right move. But you know, I was here to impact the masses. So I knew we

needed to raise some cash. And somebody said to me, you know, why don't you send out an email to your list? Maybe somebody knows somebody on there. So I wrote, you know, a powerful bit of email, like, this is who we are. This is what we're trying to achieve. This is what the vision of where we're going is going to be. Do you know any six figure investors out there who might help us seed the round? And I thought, you know, shut the laptop, went home. I thought, I wonder if I'll come into a couple of emails, maybe somebody might know someone. I came in the next day to 74 emails. We raised 1.1 million in five weeks just from our customers. And this was the thing like, oh my God. And people would say to me, Ruri, even if I lose

the hundred grand I'm investing in one year of beer, it wouldn't be equivalent to the value you've given me. I was like, wow, this is amazing. Like, you know, now in all of those years, we've raised over 5 million pounds all from our customers. Well, one external, Joe DeSena. Joe DeSena. Good old Joe. Good for him. He isn't a customer, but I did have to woo him. I know that you guys did a podcast recently. I listened to that. But you were doing, were you doing a Spartan race? Where were you? In Iceland or something like that? Randomly, I got a call to say, um, oh, you don't, you're

doing not drinking thing. Joe will love to hear from you. You should talk to Joe DeSena. So here, so they lined up a call and I called Joe and I go, hi, Joe. Uh, he's right. What do you want? If you can't say it in six minutes, it's not worth saying. I'm like, okay, uh, I'm brewery. I'm one year, no beer. He's like, stop drinking. Great idea. You need to talk to my wife. One second. Talking to his wife. And you know, obviously she's been put on the spot. Anyway, chat to her for a bit, try and inspire her to make a change, which Joe wanted to happen. And then get back onto him. And I say, Joe, I'd love to do a podcast with you. And he says, okay, cool. And I say, I only do them in person, which is a lie, but you know, I wanted to meet

him. And he said, okay. I said, I can fly to Boston. And he said, you don't need to, I'll be in Iceland in December. You can see me then. And he pretty much hangs up the phone and I get off and I go, it's a test. Iceland, Spartan, December, Joe DeSena, what pops up? The Spartan ultra world championships. And I'm like'm like, you know, I know this guy. He is not going to even give me two seconds if I don't enter this thing. Yeah, you can't go there and not do the race. He's absolutely not going to have any time for you.

So I did one lap of the Ultra. But still, that was a serious thing. And that kind of kicked off a relationship, a friendship, actually, with Joe. I've been very close to him since, you know, spent a bit of time together. And, you know, he, well, Spartan was an investor, an early investor into One Year No Beer. And then for a while, we were the finish line of all of their events. We were supporting people there, you know, really trying to inspire people to take a break from alcohol. people there, you know, really trying to inspire people to take a break from alcohol. So. Yeah,

it feels like a natural integration to an event series like that in the same way that a brand like Athletic Brewing can be, you know, kind of, you know, yeah, like embedded into that to shift the paradigm away from like, oh, you have a beer after your race to, no, we're actually doing something different here. Exactly. Also, one year no beer feels like a package that any large corporation, you know, would want to sort of acquire and deploy with its workforce. Is that something that you guys have done? Absolutely. The corporate stuff is huge. And I think, again again in the preventative conversation um with people is to say hey we can just run a challenge together with you guys and and um we

can support people through the challenge i think at these organizations there's a lot of people who will never raise their hand and say i have an alcohol problem in fact even today it's in some people's contracts right if you have a problem with alcohol we fact, even today, it's in some people's contracts, right? If you have a problem with alcohol, we will fire you. And so it's like, you're putting people under all of this pressure, all of the stress in world, and yet the most readily available tool for people dealing with stress, the one that we've been conditioned and programmed to deal with, and is literally everywhere, including many of the social events at organizations still to this day is alcohol right so there are lots of people with a poor relationship with alcohol in these organizations who are not going to raise their hand for fear for stigma and so i think what we've done is create a a simple tool

for an organization to use that helps us pick all that up in the back end they don't need to know they don't need to know that one of their individuals had a more intimate relationship with alcohol and needed a bit more support. They needed coaching. They needed more, you know, whatever. Yeah, it takes all that off the table. It just creates this welcome mat

where there's no shame or stigma. Like, hey, we're doing this fun challenge. And then people come in and it allows people who maybe were thinking about how to do that, but terrified of being found out or whatever. You know, all of those issues are kind of like resolved through that. I recently did a talk at a very large tech business. And it was a huge talk and it was going around to the vast majority of the organization.

So a lot of eyeballs. And again, it was all around this, you know, do you want optimal health? Do you want to be better? And blah, blah, blah. And we'd had a guy who'd come through the program and he was there giving his conversation and it went to him and he's like, so I am significantly happier. I am more driven than I've ever been in my entire 30 year career in this organization. I am more driven than I've ever been in my entire 30-year career in this organization. I have more clarity, more focus. My wife is telling me she's more in love with me than she's ever been. I'm calmer as a parent with my kids. I'm more productive. I know I'm doing better deals. In fact, last night, I was out at one of my client dues and I know I would be

absolutely hanging today if it wasn't for this program. And you listen to that and you're like, how is not every organization investing in that right now? Why is everybody not going all in on that? It baffles me. It's baffled me for nine years. Yeah. I mean, what are the barriers there? I mean, you, I think you, you, we came right up to it, but then you didn't actually say it, which was when you, when you decided to stop drinking and your boss said, this is career suicide. What in fact happened was you expanded your book by 50%. Exactly. Right. So your productivity went through the roof.

Through the roof. Which must have been amazing for your boss to bear witness to, right? Like. He still wanted to deny it in a way. But, you know, yeah, those stats of increasing business. I was the only broker who wasn't pissed on Friday and the only broker who wasn't literally suicidally depressed on Monday and Tuesday because I wasn't drinking alcohol. Well, given the fact that, sorry, given the fact that that culture is so oriented around drinking, how did you overcome the social triggers there to be able to do that without all of your colleagues and the clients wanting nothing to do with you because you were suddenly doing things differently? Absolutely. Step it up a notch, change it, right? Recognize what you're actually trying to achieve. So for me, I wanted to build good relationships. That was really key. I don't

have a high turnover of customers. I actually build these relationships with customers and then, you know, for your career, you work with those individuals. So I changed up how I did things. I mean, I ran a relay race at the Olympic Stadium and that relay race had 40 guys and gals involved in. And every weekend people would be doing park runs together and talking about PBs for months before the event at the Olympic Stadium, which everyone was looking forward to. That built way better relationships with people. I used to take people cycling, which is why I live in Mallorca. So I took people cycling.

The man therapy you can have grinding up a hill. Grinding is probably the wrong word. have grinding up a hill, grinding is probably the wrong word, but you can have sitting on that bicycle, going up a hill, having a conversation with somebody about real life, about the truth of stuff, not the fickle, tiny conversations that all brokers are having at three o'clock in the morning that they can't really recommend, like real genuine connection. So I think that's, it was about stepping it up a notch. And I mean, we've talked about this before. I also had to stealth drink, right? Which, you know, it's crazy. We live in a world where you might have to stealth drink, but this is true. Meaning you would, you would

have a drink that looked like an alcoholic drink that wasn't just so you could dodge that bullet. Yeah, exactly. Yep. And nobody would know. And you become a master of it. I remember this one time, I sit down, I get there early and I tell the barman and I say, look, I'm not drinking. I tip him 50 quid and I say, whatever they bring out, it's alcohol free. Right. So he's like, okay, sure. No, I've got you covered. An income, big customer, right? They love their booze and they're expecting booze to be well had. Beers, everyone. Yep. Yep. Yep. Cool. So their booze and they're expecting booze to be to be well had um beers everyone yep yep yep cool so they come along this plot down a pint plot down a pint plot down a pint plot down a pint plot everyone's got their pints next minute he comes up to me and he's

literally carrying a sequined flowery glass with a little handle on it right and then an alcohol free beer which has got dust on it and he plonks the two in front of me like this. And I'm like, you fucking idiot. So I have to go, what? Get rid of this and give me a pint. How was the pandemic for all of this? What did you learn about people's behavior during the pandemic and the organization and the community of people

um yeah the pandemic decimated society's relationship with alcohol um i speak to people every single day who say that's when it went up a notch um and people haven't been able to get it back down they haven't been able to um reduce because it was just so shocking. It was trauma. And so I think, you know, that has been very detrimental to people. The vast majority of people will mention the pandemic as when it started to get worse. For the organization, something utterly beautiful happened. For the organization, something utterly beautiful happened.

So when we were all stuck at home and initially kicked off, I could see that we had all of these workers, we had these health staff, NHS out there in amongst this craziness, right? And relying on alcohol because it's the tool to deal with stress and difficulties i mean the amount of doctors and nurses and surgeons who come through our program you'd be shocked so i said look hey community we have an opportunity to do good here are you willing to come back like come back into the community engage significantly if we open our doors for free to all NHS staff, health workers, and emergency workers. And the response was unbelievable. I mean, well over 10,000 people like, yep, I'm in, I'm in. It was unbelievable. And so we opened up our

doors for free. And we just had this huge powering. And I was actually speaking to a nurse the other day and she was like, I signed up during that program. And it's the only thing that got me through it was being a part of your community. And that was my vice. That was my addiction. The Facebook group and the community was the release. Yeah. I mean, certainly alcohol sales went up during that period. Alcohol consumption went up during that period. But I think your sign-ups went up like 30% or something like that during that period of time. Yeah.

The world was divided. There were people who fell down the bottle and used an excuse. And there were people like, right, I'm going to use this as an opportunity to change. You see, the big thing in there is when we change our environment, our brain is kicked into neuroplasticity. So it's easier for us to change behavior when we change environment. So that's why it was for some people when they were like, right, no, I'm going to get on top of this and I'm going to make a difference. And I think for lots of people who did some of the work and made

the changes in their life, they've remained having a healthier or non-existent alcohol-free relationship with alcohol. And I think some people have found it creep back since doing that work. And so of all the people that have gone through your program, what do the statistics say about people who continue to not drink versus people who did the challenge and resume some semblance of their previous lifestyle? Like what is the staying power of these kind of challenges and how long do you have to do it before you see an increase in the sustainability of a new way of pursuing your life? the sustainability of a new way of pursuing your life. So when you look at the challenge as an example, the vast majority of people come and they do a 28-day challenge because it's the one that only seems perceivable. And then they go back to drinking for a bit. And then they do the 90-day challenge. And then they might go back to drinking for a little bit. And then they go back to a year. And this is why I wanted to change things up

because what I see in that is that people are drinking and then they go back, not just to drinking, but probably it starts to creep back into a problematic way. And some people that can get worse and worse and worse. And that's why we had to step up the availability of tools and resources to support people in a deeper fashion. Because in a way, the challenge is just like this light touch element of, hey, let's just give this a shot. And getting people to really do the work on changing the things that are driving it, that is, with every fiber of my being, that is how we really, really help people.

Let's talk about emotions, right? Have you ever been taught to deal with your emotions? What about stress? What tools do you use to mitigate stress? Other than just reaching for alcohol, do you meditate? Do you exercise? Do you do breath work? You know, when you come out of a board meeting in the afternoon and it's been stressful for you, do you reach for a coffee, which significantly delays your ability to return into recovery? Or do you just do some breath work to give yourself the same elation, but then bring yourself back into parasympathetic? So I think people don't have these tools. They don't even have the awareness. They don't have the understanding. And so getting people through that experience, giving them the tools to actually mitigate that compulsion, that's what gives them a

far better chance of longevity of changing their relationship with alcohol. From a sales perspective, though, it's a harder sell than to just say it's a 28 day challenge. People understand that, you know, intuitively what that means. And then you're now introducing like, well, actually it's complicated and here's all this stuff. This is very difficult to scale and to sell to somebody who's like, listen, man, I just want to drink less. Like I don't need to go into my childhood with you. Yeah. Let's not talk about that on the front cover, right? Let's go back to the 28 day challenge and let's start there. Because in all of this stuff, we're going to help you to start to see that there are these things. And I think it's a gradual thing, right? It's the cooking of

the frog, right? Do it little by little, gentle by gentle, and the frog will not jump out, right? I think it's the frog or the lobster example. Boiling the frog. Boiling the frog, right? Yeah, you got to boil a frog slowly. So this is where we're meeting people at, right? Let's just start going on this journey. Let's look at this as a journey of changing your relationship with alcohol. And it might take you a few years, right? It might be faster than that. But on that journey, we're gonna keep making changes in your life,

personal development changes. We're gonna help you with these various things and we're gonna help you to have an improved relationship with alcohol along with all the benefits of that. And all the work that you've done around the behavioral psychology piece of this, what have you learned about the difference between breaking a bad habit and forming a new habit?

And where does that understanding inform how you craft these programs? Or how you kind of approach somebody who's thinking about making a change? Wonderful question. The first part here is Professor BJ Fogg, Stanford University, wonderful human being, changed his relationship with alcohol. His research says we change behavior by feeling good, not by feeling bad. And so looking at everything that we do here, it's about being positive, aspirational, right? Oh, I want that. I want to be fitter. I want to be lose weight. I want to be happier. I want to be healthier, right? So if we stay in that positive psychology focus going towards a

direction of aspiration, then I think that's where we meet the vast majority of people in changing a bad habit rather than you have a problem and that kind of language. Let's stay in this part of habit change. The second part, he says, is bad habits are like weeds. Okay. So they grow over time. They start to infect different areas of your brain. They infect your reward system, your identity, your belief system, your emotions. Okay. So do you garden? No. Lucky man. But if you've ever pulled out a weed, right? If you just go and rip it out, then it grows back. Sure. And usually it'll grow back worse,

which is why we actually have to go through the process of cultivating it out. What do we do to do that? We cultivate good habits. Good habits is how we remove a bad habit. And so that's why during all of that, the challenge and all of these other programs, we're pretty ruthless in helping people build habits, the habit of meditation, the habit of exercise, the habit of sleeping well, the habit of eating well, the habit of

gratitude, journaling, like these are the tools that we use to help people. Journaling, like these are the tools that we use to help people. My anecdotal observation on this, which is not clinical in the least, is that people who have a normal, like a quote unquote, like kind of normal relationship with the world in themselves, which is to say they are not addicts by nature. They don't have that addictive impulse. Those people seem to have the capacity to crowd out bad habits by focusing on cultivating new positive habits. And as a result of kind of investing their energy and their enthusiasm in these new positive habits, the bad habits sort of, they just end up falling away. This is something my wife is very good at. And this is also something that I look at with great curiosity because I cannot do this. How do you do that? This is not how I'm wired in the least. And How do you do that? This is not how I'm wired in the least.

And that's because fundamentally my wiring is different. I am wired with a very powerful inclination towards addictive behaviors and things that don't serve me. And so that understanding allows me to approach this differently to say that probably isn't gonna work for me. It's good to cultivate positive habits, but I have to like do triage on the bad habit.

Like I have to address it as the dangerous, acute thing that it is. And no matter how much I pull those weeds out, they're always gonna grow back unless I dig them out completely and make sure that every little, every little, yeah, like tentacle is gone, right? And that requires, you know, a lot of effort and diligence and persistence to do that. difference between the person who's wired in that kind of addictive construct versus the more kind of normal average person, if there ever was one, and wondering how through

the course of working with so many people through this program, you begin to identify who the people are who might need that more kind of acute redress of the issue that they're contending with that a 28-day challenge is not going to resolve? And is there then kind of a pathway to guide them towards a recovery modality that they might be more suited towards? Because I see all of this as complementary to 12-. Like, look, there are many ways to get sober, regardless of your problem. I'm not here to say otherwise. And of course I have my own biases

and I'm very much indoctrinated into 12 step and believe in it and have borne witness to thousands of people who have re-imagined their lives in miraculous ways and overcome, you know, just the most drastic of circumstances to become incredible people. So I'm always the first to say, if you think you have a problem,

you should go check that out and suspend whatever judgments you have or whatever you saw in whatever movie that made you think one way or the other about what this program may or may not be. And I also understand that it's not for everybody. And if you do have just a casual relationship with drinking, maybe AA is not the place for you. But I'm just curious around the hard cases that I'm sure find their way into

your program. Absolutely, they do. And then what happens with those individuals? Okay. Well, we take great care is the first thing. Let me tell you about Keith, right? So Keith, three attempts at the Priory. The first time he went to the Priory, which is tens of thousands of pounds, by the way, to go to the Priory. The Priory being a treatment center. The treatment center, the treatment center for wealthy people in uh the uk or in london the first time he goes to the priory it's a week later he's back into problematic drinking the second time it's probably a couple of weeks right it very quickly went back to problematic drinking i recently spoke to him so he came on our complete Control Program a year ago, okay? And he's one of our greatest advocates. He's like, I just don't feel like it, right?

He says, I occasionally have a drink, right? But most of the time, I just don't feel like it. I don't have that same cognitive load. Now, the thing is, he would absolutely, traditionally, you'd say he is over here. And yet we have been successful with helping him change this. Okay, let's ask each other again in five years and 10 years and see where he is. But I think the greatest thing that about him is, he is now on such a path of self discovery. I mean, he's currently deep in psychedelics,

and learning about going through trauma and discovered he had significant childhood trauma, which he did on the program. And he's now in this full personal development mode of making huge changes in his life, kicked off from this trajectory of saying, hey, maybe there's more to this. Maybe if you try changing some of these things here, this thing might go down or go away for you a little bit, right? So really what I'm saying is there is no black and white. There is no he needs to go here or she needs to go there. There is just, why don't we look at the lifestyle things? Why don't we look at the things that we know that all the science out there says to us that drives compulsive behavior, like stress,

like trauma, like emotions, like connection to people, like meaning and purpose? Why don't we address all of these things with them and then ask that question, right? Let's give the example of depression, right? Somebody feels depressed. They go into the doctor, they say, I feel depressed. Now, the doctor may or may not ask them about their relationship with alcohol. The doctor will most likely, or the psychiatrist will most likely prescribe them a medication for their depression. But every day they are drinking the world's most powerful depressant. And you're not like, hang on, what about sleep? Let's ask them, are you sleeping? Because we now know that sleep deprivation is, I mean, well, we know it's used as torture, right? So sleep deprivation is a

significant driver of compulsive behavior. All these people who are working shift work and late nights and things like that, right? What about mental health? What about ADHD and things like that? Have they been taught how to regulate their central nervous system? No, they've never been taught that. Well, that's why they're using alcohol, because they've never been taught how to regulate their nervous system. Are they, right?

So are they exercising? Are they running? That conversation is not happening. It's here's a pill or you have a problem you need to go here and i think let's just start with this conversation of okay if it's not the challenge then why don't we look at these things together let's look at them with a fine tooth comb actually we use some cool technology the aura ring things like that we help them see in data and evidence and clarity and then we sit at the end of the program

and we have this wonderful traffic light system and it shows our core drivers. We go through all of the data we've captured, all of the evidence. And of those core drivers, there's red, amber and green. If there's lots of reds, then absolutely, whatever you do, stay alcohol-free. You must move those things from red into amber

before even considering trying to control your drinking, which is what they came in for in the beginning. So I think we give people clarity and understanding on what they need to do in order to have a better relationship with alcohol. I'm using the word better. That being said, let's say you came through that program and once again, it comes back to you. Absolutely. You need to go to a treatment center or you need to go to 12 step or you need to find the next thing. But I just think that this is a part where we can help people earlier. All the apps that are available now and the trackers are really effective, I think, in reconfiguring people's relationship to alcohol. Because you mentioned the Oura Ring or you have a WHOOP,

and you can just show people what the data looks like. Like, here's what your night was like last night after two glasses of wine and their HRV is beneath the floor and their resting heart rate is way higher than normal and their respiratory rate is off and the lack of deep sleep and REM sleep, like it's just right there. And I think those interfaces are so effective

at showing the drastic difference between what the previous night's sleep, which was healthy, looks like in comparison. And I think that shocks, that's very effective at shocking people out of whatever they've convinced themselves. Like when you can actually see what your body is doing, how it's responding to that, it reframes the whole thing and it gives people an entry point. Like they don't really have to contend with the fact that whether or not they have a problem, they're just like, I need to sleep better. And in order to sleep better, I need to do this. This is it. It's like different things speak to different people. Exactly. You mentioned weight loss. That's another one, obviously, but.

Well, building a more successful business, you know, I mean, Alex Oromozi out there saying, you know, absolutely. I stopped drinking. It was the best thing. Everything shot up from then. The stopping drinking was the catalyst for huge transformation for me. And to have some, you know, big influencer like that talking about it in that way, I think that's going to reach so many more people. They're like, no, I want to double my business this year. But the difference with like the whoop is like, it's literally immediate. Like it's overnight. You can see this. Yes. Build your business over time. You had a 50% increase. Like these things are real, but they're stories told by somebody else. They're not direct experiences that can be had in a, you know, literally in a period of a couple hours. Exactly. I mean, your man Blake behind the camera there was saying exactly the

same thing. It was, he was looking at it on his whoop and he was like, hang on a minute, this is really costing me. And as a new dad, you've got enough sleep deprivation without having alcohol. Everything's stacked against you as it is already. So explain to me what this complete control program is all about. Complete, yes, complete control. This is confusing to me. Bear with me, Rich. We're doing good. I'm trying, buddy. We're doing good things. Okay. So again, born off the research, you know, what I saw was a lot of people like myself who took a break from alcohol and then went back to problematic drinking. So I knew there was more to this. Like I knew there was more in this. Like I, I knew there was more in the underlying. Um, and what I wanted to do is help people in a more, uh, intimate way. Right. So what would that look like as we sat down as a team?

So, you know, we have successfully unlocked the greatest, um, product ever sold by One Year No Beer is equity, right? That was, That was the greatest product we ever sold. And so if we look at this for serving a different audience in a more impactful way, what is it, right? What is it to help people understand what drives compulsive behavior? Can somebody control their drinking? Well, I mean, I have. I've been able to successfully control my drinking. I usually choose not to drink. I occasionally have a drink. I had a very problematic relationship with alcohol. I know thousands and thousands and thousands of people who've gone on that same journey and been able to achieve the same thing. So what is it to do that? with clarity what is actually driving it. So the idea is to go through an eight-week program. We use some pretty cool technology. We help people see their stress. I'm talking about seeing minute by minute, whether in sympathetic or parasympathetic, and being able to see the

impact that that is having on them. This is like one of the most impactful parts of the program because the vast majority of the people who come to the program are very driven, had celebrities on the program, we've had MPs, very large business owners, director at world's largest banks, you name it. And when they see their stress in data like this so clearly, but they also see how impactful alcohol is when they have a drink. It's very, very compelling for the change. So we take them on this journey. We help them understand what is driving the behavior. And then we kind of coach them through trying to change those various areas of their life. When people come into the program, literally 100% of people are looking for control. They're like, I don't want to stop drinking. I don't want to stop. I'm looking for control. Sure. And the joke that I told you is that this is the great adage of, you know,

the great kind of recursive mantra of every good alcoholic, which is they hold onto this delusion, this great desire to be able to control their drinking, to drink like a gentleman. this great desire to be able to control their drinking, to drink like a gentleman. So if we take just one, two, 10, five, 10% of those people, and we change them and actually achieve that, is that not success? It's success only to the extent that the people who really need more acute help are not deprived of that because they're trying to perpetuate the delusion that this is possible for them. And in that case, yeah, then it's problematic. But what we do with it is say,

okay, thank you so much for coming in and looking for control. Now let's have a look at your life. These are the areas of your life that you need to change. The program is life-changing because we're going to show people the areas of their life that they need to change, right? That we're going to start doing some trauma work. For the vast majority of people who come into here, they've never done any trauma work. They've never done any talk therapy. That in itself is hugely positive, right? To take somebody who's looking for control of their drinking and then bring them to the table to start dealing with this childhood shit that they've been ignoring and packing down their whole life. That's success.

Or what about, we talk about stress a lot, right? What about teaching them how to deal with a much higher level of stress? I've had a guy who built a half a billion turnover business. And he's like, I had no idea, right, that I needed to integrate these tools into my day. And I had no idea of the capacity of stress I could handle until A, I removed the vast majority of my drinking. And I'm talking about the vast majority, right? He now rarely drinks. We caught up with him in Mallorca. He flew over by private jet to take my wife and I out to dinner. And he's like, I'm going to be out here for 15 days and maybe on one day I'll have a drink or two. The rest, I've just got absolutely no interest. And so this is what happens when you show people

the impact of stress, the impact of trauma, the impact of these things, they can change those things. So yeah, I think wrapped up inside, hey, is alcohol causing a bit of trouble in your life? Is it something that you've struggled to change and it keeps coming back? Let's look at some areas of your life and shift those and see if that finally does it for you. Sure. Yeah, I get that. And I totally understand that. I think in the board game of sobriety and abstinence, if one is to pursue this path of complete control and realize time and time again that they find themselves out of control, it's maybe time to not pass go and maybe not go to jail,

but go to step one, which is to embrace the fact that you are powerless over this substance and that your life is unmanageable. Because the real premise of 12-step is acknowledging your inability to control this thing that persists to the level of astonishment. Yeah, absolutely. And it's been hugely successful. It has been one of the most important things in society for a long time for helping people change their relationship with alcohol. And I think where we're coming at this from is just to widen up that

story, to widen up that gap, to widen up that story to say, look, people are different and you don't know what might be the catalyst for finally changing somebody, for finally them putting it down for good, for finally making the changes in their life or their business, whatever it is they need to do. You don't know what that catalyst will be. For some people, you never know, Rich, it could be this podcast, right? It could be somebody listening to this and they've had a significantly problematic relationship with alcohol and they go, do you know what? Fuck this. I'm done. And in that moment, they decide to go and make these changes in their life and go on a personal development journey. And I don't know, go to take some ayahuasca or

do iboga, which I've done nuts by the way, but, and iboga be the thing that stops them, which is very powerful at doing. So we just don't know what will be the catalyst for somebody. And I think when we open up that conversation to say, there are other tools and a wide arrangement of tools, and we have to treat people like that. And I think similarly, that's the conversation in society, right? Is it, is what, at what level is the problem? At what level does the person have to admit there's a problem? And if we turn that conversation around and say, let's not have a conversation about it being a problem, but let's just say, is alcohol causing you problems? Because if it is, why don't you change your relationship with it? What have you learned about the relationship between ADHD and alcohol?

Alcohol. 99.99999999% of people who come to complete control either identify with or are ADHD, ADD, bomb, has been so intrinsic in helping me understand other people and deliver a program which is helping people change significantly. ADHD and that coping mechanism of alcohol are so intrinsically linked. When we look at this in the data, right, what happens with ADHD is we get that hyperactivity, okay? So imagine, are you ADHD? Well, I ask for personal reasons because I'd never thought once about whether or not I was ADHD.

And I did a very intensive week of trauma therapy last year or right around this time where I was- What kind of trauma therapy? Childhood trauma. And basically every skilled practitioner that saw me, and I saw a variety of them over the course of this week, all agreed there was a unanimous consensus that I was ADHD, but I was not a hyperactive kid. It's a whole different set of circumstances, but go ahead. If you don't feel hyperactive as a kid,

then ADD. So there's a couple of things into here. Don't let me lose track. There's a couple of things into here. If you look at the work by Gabor Mate, he says that actually ADHD, ADD, things like that, they're a coping mechanism from a traumatized child. Okay. So, um, this past trauma then drives us as a, as an engine to create this. There's also some really interesting studies out there showing that, you know, um, that, uh, ADHD is very much intrinsically linked with sleep deprivation, sleep deprivation in babies creates ADHD. Now, my mom always said I slept four hours and every 24 as a baby. So I'm like, oh, thanks, mom. You gave me ADHD. No. So. Oh, come on. That's not fair. Well, yeah, exactly. Love you, mom. The thing about ADHD is, imagine it's like a dynamo. You

know, when you push the car like this and the little dynamo, you push and push and push and it goes off into the distance. That's ADHD, right? So our central nervous systems, they get wound up faster. Okay. So the stress that we bring into the day, let's say you drank last night or didn't sleep well, you then increase that level of stress that you have. And as you get into this busyness of the day, you drink coffee, which is very impactful on our central nervous system, once again, adds in more stress, is that we get up into this hyperactive state, which we love because it makes us super busy. In fact, we can do the work of 10 people in a day. And we pride ourselves in this ability to be able to handle stress and do so much work and be productive. The problem comes at the end of the day.

Just like that dynamo, we've been winding and winding and winding and winding and winding. Guess what the preordained outcome is? Your central nervous system needs to numb out now. And what is it? Well, if it's a coping mechanism for a traumatized child, then the truth is a lot of it is emotion, unprocessed, dealt with emotion, which drives through our stress and daily, you know, lots of daily activity like that into a very busy brain. And so people go, I just can't switch my brain off. And alcohol is the most readily available tool out there for helping us switch our brain off.

The issue is not alcohol. The thing is not the problem. What the issue is, is a very stressed out central nervous system, which is not being calmed down. And so in this here, we're literally forcing people to meditate. I'm talking about monitoring them every day and phoning them if they don't meditate. I call this the ass kicker, right? When I said, I want to deliver a program. You're holding up an aura ring for people who are just listening. So this is used for extreme accountability because I get all these business owners, these high achievers, these people coming in and they go, I just, I mean, I just tried to stop drinking and it comes back and I'm like, yeah, but what are you doing about your stress?

Well, I'm very stressed. Yeah, but what do you do? Nothing. So when we teach them these tools and they calm down that central nervous system, that is when all of the change happens. You were talking about doing trauma stuff. Meditation for me is really, I look at it like this and some people might not like this, but it works for me. I'm sick, right? I'm ADHD. I'm sick. If I do not take my medication, then I will get my Uzis out and I will fuck my life up. I'm like, blow everything up. So I must medicate every day. And my medication is really simple. It's exercise and meditation. And so helping people see it from that perspective, who they're like, oh, I tried meditation, but my brain is so busy. I just can't switch it off.

Yeah. That's because you need to meditate. Super interesting. Yeah. Yeah. I have so much more I need to learn about the world of adhd just beginning to kind of understand it my first step there and the first step for me was to get adhd for dummies and i found it really interesting do you know what it was is it was hugely relieving to read about this stuff of like oh so i'm I'm not a fucking weirdo. Are we allowed to swear? Yeah, you can swear. It's the same. I have done a little bit of reading and it is that same experience when you go into an AA meeting for the first time and think you're the only one who has this experience or feels a certain way and you hear your story recounted back to you.

Yeah, exactly. I felt that point of relatability with what I've learned so far. Did you feel that the first time you went in there? To Alcoholics Anonymous? Yeah. Really? Yeah. I wasn't ready to do the work.

No. And I didn't stay, and I didn't get sober immediately. But I knew that I belonged there. So I went to AA, and I walked straight back out. And I was like, this is not me. And I hear this a lot. Contempt prior to investigation, my friend. and there are a lot of people out there who are saying, hey, I don't resonate with that. And I think that's the importance of having this smorgasbord of tools and conversations and things like that to meet people where they're at. I get that.

But I also think it's important to encourage people to set aside their prior convictions and their judgments because often those are misplaced. And I think people go in with already predisposed to not like it and the minute something happens that they can like hang their hat on that. They're out the door and they're like, it didn't work for me.

I mean, I answer emails every single day. I tried that, it didn't work. I'm like, what about it didn't work for me. I mean, I answer emails every single day. I tried that, it didn't work. I'm like, what about it didn't work? And you kind of like deconstruct that and walk them through that. And more often than not, it's their own biases that aren't working for them. So I always wanna make that available for people

and to kind of, do my best to kind of put to the lie, like whatever notion they have about what it is and it isn't. And a lot of people get hung up on the God stuff and we all have our baggage with religion and things that have happened to us. So, I'm sympathetic to that, but I think there's ways around that. And again, I'm saying this from the perspective not to be critical in the least of what you're doing. I think what you're doing is super powerful and it is providing this amazing welcome mat for the, you know, untold millions of people who have some kind of issue ranging from very moderate to somewhat concerning

with respect to their use of alcohol. And you're able to capture those people, redress that problem and produce better lives as a result. And I think that that is a worthy mission for your life. And I think to heed the words of the Dalai Lama and to take that to heart and put them into action is quite laudable. You know, I think it's a beautiful thing that you're doing. And this links interestingly back to ADHD and also emotions. A lot of people who from a young age have a very high level of emotion. We can call some of those empaths, have a high level of emotion.

They then turn to alcohol and drugs, right? Because they struggle to deal with those emotions. But what happens when you remove that from people, you remove the alcohol, you move the numbing, is now you bring back that emotion. Yeah, they're a live wire without any tools for coping with all of those confusing emotions. But they're also highly empathic. And what people find is that, you know what, empathic people usually feel like they need to give back. And they're in jobs or they're in careers where they don't feel like that. And that was me. I didn't feel like I was giving back at all. And so when I made that shift

over to a purposeful life of helping people, that is another level of being able to- Yeah, it's an inoculation against that. I mean, I know what it's like to be in a career, both when I was drinking and when I was sober and not feel fulfilled, not feel purposeful and not feel like what I was doing had any real extrinsic meaning other than like getting a paycheck every two weeks. And when you're in that place, you want to numb out from your life

and those uncomfortable emotions. And you'll find yourself overspending or thinking that you're, you know, if you buy this thing, it's gonna make you feel better. And now being on a trajectory where I really do feel connected to meaning and purpose and service, all of that goes away.

Like that is something that kind of falls by the wayside because you don't feel compelled by it anymore. It doesn't lure you because what you're doing is basically satisfying that craving in a healthy way. I'll give you an example. A guy I'm seeing tomorrow, he was scrolling innocently through Instagram, stumbled across one of our ads. And in it, it says, do you feel like you've got more to give? Do you feel like there's more out there for you and you're just not quite achieving as much as you want to achieve? Then I guarantee you, it's probably alcohol, right? That's the conversation. And he's looking at it and he's

like, well, I've built 300 million turnover businesses. So I don't feel like I've not been successful, but I do feel like alcohol could be holding me back. Right. So that's where it came from for him. He clicks on, jumps in, has a conversation with me. And he says about the program, he's like, you know, I just have a whiskey a day. You know, I come home, I have a whiskey. And then at the weekends, it's, you know, a few more, but it's not a problem. Everyone's doing it. Normally that's just what it is. And we're like, okay, well, that's fine. No problem. But we guarantee you that this is holding you back in a significant way. So he's like, okay, if I come on this program and it has an impact on me, I'm going to help you. So he comes through this thing and once again, we help him find some significant trauma he had no idea about. Right. And he's like, I just can't believe it.

Now, he comes to the end call with our coach, my wonderful wife. She is our lead coach. And he says, do you know what? I believe it's my life's purpose to help you guys grow this program. you know what, I believe it's my life's purpose to help you guys grow this program. And that is the element we're sitting here saying is passively sitting on the couch, just maybe drinking a little bit too much to profoundly life changed when you start to address and help people see that alcohol is not the problem. It's just the outcome. It's the result. It's the result of some things that you're doing in your life. And when you make those shifts, it's life transforming.

You don't have to tell me, man. Exactly. So many lives transformed, as I said earlier, in ways that would just absolutely blow your mind. People traversing from the bottom depths of insanity to leading productive lives of meaning. Like it's a remarkable thing. And when you get to participate in that, it changes you, it changes who you are, and it changes your sense of possibility.

And it also connects you to the value of being in service of that mission, which clearly, clearly you are. Yeah. It's a beautiful one to be on. Cut me open. I know. It's unbelievable, the passion for this subject matter. Like I said, you know, this conversation might be the catalyst for somebody to make that change and, you know, putting families back and things like that. So, you know, never stop having this conversation.

Let's really ramp it up now. Like this is the time, like let's, let's really get this conversation going out there because there are so many people suffering. The very, very, very piece of alcohol is suffering. I mean, you drink any amount and you feel like suffering the next day. Everybody is suffering with hangovers at the weekends. So I think, yeah, let's just keep having the conversation. We never came back around to the letter of unrequited love to Sir Richard Branson? Richie Brie. Yeah, so, well, through all the raising of cash, and we now have over 4,000 investors,

every single pitch, every single conversation I mentioned about this letter to Branson and it being my fuel and what we were here to have an impact. And as I kept bringing out that message, I had a message one day, um, from a guy through, um, Joe Polish, um, who was, who was in Genius Network. And he messaged me and he said, I've just heard your story about Richard Branson. Amazing. Um, I'm going to Necker Island. Do you want to come with me? And I'm like, yes, I'm about to fulfill my life's dream. This is unbelievable. I can't believe it. And he put me in touch with

the organizer and, um, the organizer was like, he'd just done a year alcohol free, not through us, but somebody had mentioned to him about, you know, one year, no doing one year, no, no beer. Um, and so I spoke to him and he was all really excited. And he was like, when you tell Richard Branson this story, he he was all really excited. And he was like, when you tell Richard Branson this story, he's going to love it. Like you sit there, FaceTime your dad sitting next to Richard Branson. Like this is full circle from those suicide attempts to coming through. So it was all lined up to happen. And I was heading off to Necker Island. And then the pandemic happened and the trip got canceled. Um, and two months later, my dad died. And, um, when my dad passed, um, you know, I was very, very fortunate through this organization,

um, thankfully for the business that I spent the last four weeks with him and caring for him. And he was an incredible human. And he always wanted me to believe that I could do more, that I could do something great in the world. And so he was my greatest champion. So I'm very sad that I didn't get to have that moment, but wind forward, you know, some more time, a few months go by, and I heard that some people close to Branson were doing our challenge through various other people. And I was like, okay, we're getting closer. And then I heard that somebody very close was doing the program. and so this got exciting and next minute again another six months year goes by and I'm lying in bed one night one of those sleepless nights you know that happen when you run an organization and I'm looking at my phone and there is you know he's in Mallorca opening up the new hotel so I shot a message to the person I knew like are you here yeah you should come up and then they never responded and I was like come up I thought, you know, fortune favors the brave, just turn up.

So I headed up to there, went to the hotel, couldn't find the person, couldn't see anything, very busy camera crew around people running around. I said, um, I'm going to meet somebody. Can I have a coffee? And they were like, yeah, sure. Just go out onto the terrace. And I kid you not, as I walked through that archway into there I walked out onto the patio and he could have been anywhere in that moment like filming they were doing a tennis thing Richard was standing in the pulpit staring out at the view on his own so I just walked up beside him and I said amazing view he was like it's one of my favorite in the world. I said, hey, Richard, can I tell you a story? And he said, is it funny? I said, no, but I might cry.

And then I started to tell him the story about, you know, suicide and coming back from that and the impact we were having and getting tearful. And he gave me a big hug. And after telling him the story of what we were trying to achieve, you know, he said, well, we won't have that lunch, but how about we have dinner tonight? So yeah, my wife and I, we, she came up as well and we had dinner with him and it was an amazing moment that really taught me one thing. And I think that is that the most important factor when you are trying to change something like this we talked earlier about a paradigm shift happening not in months or weeks in decades right my vision now is in in decades not and the most important thing is one thing

people talk about consistency they They talk about that. No, water will break down anything, any rock, anything over time is persistence. It's just persistence. And that's the thing with this, right? I thought it was all gonna happen very quickly. I'm nine years into this message. I'm now looking at the next couple of decades, just here saying this one thing,

that if you are regularly drinking alcohol, then I guarantee you it is holding you back. And you have these two archangels in the Dalai Lama and Sir Richard Branson on each shoulder. And then Joe DeSantis, I'm here as well. Yeah, shouting in your ear. Rich. Shouting in your ear. Rich. Shouting in your ear. These champions who are helping us keep going and keep sharing the message. You know, one thing, and you may resonate with this, at the darkest moments of running this business, which is the biggest challenge of my life, at the hardest times when you're almost ready to switch the lights off and there's nowhere to go anymore and it's so hard. And I'm crying on the phone to my mom going, what am I doing? Like, why am I doing this?

And she said, when you want to show up big in the world, you're going to have to push through a lot of stuff. So just everyone out there keep assisting. And especially with this message, just keep sharing the message, keep inspiring people to drink less. Keep talking about your sobriety. Keep talking about what you did 2024, by the time this goes up. Yes. In consideration of that and understanding and seeing you as this change agent, which you are, I wanted to kind of close with thoughts that you might want to share with the person who's listening to this, who's entertaining the possibility of making this change for maybe the first time. What are your thoughts on the nature of change itself? Like, how do you approach the process of making that change? What's the best way to begin? And more importantly, maybe, what's the best way to sustain it, to follow through on that process? Great question. So I think that it is small baby steps is what, as how we create change over time

is making small iterations. And so if you're going to, if you are currently in dry January and you're taking a break from alcohol, start to make fundamental shifts in the areas of your life. You know, things like who you hang out with all the time, because if everyone you hang out with all the time is saturated in booze, guess what? You're going to go back to that. All the different things that we touched in here, like start making these improvements in your life because the alcohol coming is a product of how you are living your life and just very gently start taking those steps. I would say to anyone who has been here before and taken a break and found it come back, I would say please, please stop going in search of willpower.

Stop going in search of more, I can do this, I can do this on my own and instead go in search of four things accountability connection support and education and they can come in all sorts of ways they can come in 12 step they can come in reading sober books and alcohol-free articles and listening to podcasts like this so go in search of the tools that will help you change. And I think lastly, I'm just going to scratch that itch again. There are two things people say to me after they've changed their relationship with alcohol. Number one, I had no idea the impact alcohol was having on me until I changed my relationship with it. And number two, I wish I'd done it sooner. So don't be that guy or gal.

Let's not wait. Let's just get on. Thank you. Thank you, Rich. I loved it. It's a beautiful mission you're on and I appreciate you coming here and sharing with me. I think that many lives will be impacted

by what you had to say today. So thank you. And more power to you. I'm at your service. If there's anything I can ever do for you, please reach out. In the meantime, everybody who's listening or watching, if you wanna learn more about Rory and his mission,

you can do that easily by going to oneyearnobeer.com. Your book, The 28 DayDay Alcohol-Free Challenge. Boom, nailed it. That's it. You can buy that anywhere, Amazon, wherever. Anywhere else you want to direct people or anything coming up in January that would be of interest to people that are enjoying this. Yeah, we have all of our challenges to help people who need a self-help course. Check out Complete Control if you feel like you need a little bit more support.

And, you know, we provide tons and tons of free content. Our social media, OYMB, or One Year No Beer, our community, our huge Facebook groups and things like that, they're all part of the challenge. And we also have our own podcast, which you should come and be on, Rich. Yes. The One Year No Beer podcast.

Yes. How long have you been doing that for? Oh, we're now, well, nowhere near your downloads. You've been doing it for a while, though. We've had a lot of guests over now. Nine years? Yeah. Yeah, some really, really good guests over nine years yeah yeah some really really good school really good guests years exactly that's no slouch yeah i don't think

it's nine years i don't think it's nine years it can't be because you started one year no beer in 2015 yes did you start the podcast right away pretty very close i think, probably two years after. Gosh, my memory. But yeah, I think, yeah, so it's six, seven years. Yeah, cool. Ruri's clearly not good at timelines. Ruri, listen to the podcast. Anyway, man, that was great. Thank you. Come back and share some more with me

and let's get you outside so you can enjoy this beautiful weather we got here in Los Angeles, although in Mallorca, it's probably better. But anyway, you're here for a bit. I want you to enjoy your time here. It's the same. I just want to say, Rich, again, huge kudos to you. Huge kudos to you for having us on and sharing this message. I think this is the greatest thing we can do is really share this message to inspire people around this one thing, which, you know, is absolutely going to happen over the next decade or two. The time is up for alcohol. So thank you.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, least I can do at your service again. Thanks, Rory. Thank you. Cheers. Peace. That's it for today. Thank you for listening.

I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com, where you can find the entire podcast archive, as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change in the Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and or comment. Supporting the sponsors who support the show is also important and appreciated.

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Plants. Namaste. Thank you.