Well with Arielle Lorre - 136: Rethinking Drinking with Tom Johnstone of Optimist Drinks

Episode Date: October 25, 2021

In this episode I’m talking to Tom Johnstone, founder and CEO of Optimist Drinks, a non-alcoholic spirits company based in Los Angeles. Optimist Drinks are designed to enhance social connection and to creating a range of products that give people a choice, the freedom to experiment with their drinking rituals and strengthen their social connections. In the episode we discuss rethinking drinking, the habitual nature of drinking and how it is ingrained in our social rituals; why we still feel the need to justify not drinking for any reason; how his experience as a brand strategist for tech companies helped hone the creation of Optimist; why having a purpose is so important for any brand, and so much more.    www.Trybite.com/BLONDE for 20% off your first subscription order. www.Drinkolipop.com/BLONDEFILES for 20% off plus free shipping site-wide. www.Gomacro.com with code BLONDEFILES for 30% off plus free shipping on all orders over $50. www.Piquetea.com/blonde for an additional 5% off your limited time bundle with gifts.   Produced by Dear MediaSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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check out. Hey, welcome to the Blonde Files podcast. I'm your host, Ariel Lori, and I'm here to talk all things wellness. From how to achieve optimal health and well-being to the best beauty tips and everything in between, no topic is off limits. I know there is so much information out there, so I'm here to help you navigate it all and live your best life. Thanks for listening. Let's get into it. Hi, everybody. Welcome to the show. Welcome to a bonus episode of the podcast. and I am excited to bring you this conversation today. I'm talking to Tom Johnston. He's the founder and CEO of Optimist Drinks,

a non-alcoholic spirits company based in Los Angeles. Optimist drinks are designed to enhance social connection and to create a range of products that give people a choice and give people the freedom to experiment with their drinking rituals and strengthen their social connections. And we talk about this, I think, in the episode. I was connected to Tom via my friends over at Air One. And I just really love what their company stands for and what their purpose is, which we also talk about in the episode.

And so we discuss kind of rethinking drinking. And Tom is very clear. Optimist is not an anti-boos movement. Tom drinks himself. But we talk about the habitual nature of drinking and how it's really ingrained in our social rituals. and we talk about why we feel the need to justify not drinking for any reason. We talk about how his past experience as a brand strategist for tech companies helped to create optimist and why having a purpose is so important for any brand and just so much more.

It's a really fun, easygoing conversation. And I think you will come away from this episode inspired to connect with other people. We kind of talk about how we're more. connected and yet more isolated than ever right now. And also maybe to take a look at your own rituals. So I hope that you enjoy the episode. Okay, welcome Tom. So happy to have you here. Thanks for having me. Excited to talk to you today. I'm excited to talk to you as well. And just a little background for guests. We were actually connected through Air One, my happy place, my favorite place. And you and I had a conversation a while ago. And I just found your story and your,

journey, for lack of a better word, to be so interesting. And so I really wanted to hear more. So maybe to start out, you can just tell the listeners a little bit about yourself. Great. Well, yeah, everyone is, as an English person who lives in Los Angeles, everyone is a right of passage. It's a, it's a genre in its own right. And it is a place that people seem to visit almost like a kind of religious experience out here. So it's because I'm getting used to it, it's a great place. Yeah, sure. So I am the co-founder and CEO of Optimist Drinks, and we created distilled non-alcoholic spirits. They were all inspired by Los Angeles and the areas around it, so they're kind of very natural flavors. We launched this year in January, and we talk about rethinking drinking.

So what we wanted to do is make sure that there are great things about, getting together for a drink, the human connection, the positive associations that we all have from sitting across a bar or a table from each other, for us, the least important part of that was the alcohol. It's a really important ritual. And so we created some drinks that had lots of craft in them. We took a year and a half to develop the products. And the aim is if you choose that if you're out or you're at home and you want to make yourself a drink and you decide that for that round or for that day or for that drink or forever that you don't want alcohol in it, then you didn't need to trade down. You could have a drink that had just the same amount

of craft and flavor and intensity to it. And that's where we started from. This is so interesting to me because as I disclosed to you in our conversation and as everybody who listens to this knows being a former alcoholic, I drank to get drunk. So I drank for the effect. But now, obviously that I'm sober, you know, I'm always looking for something to drink if I'm out to dinner or if I am just at home relaxing, just something besides water or something besides, you know, something that's packed with sugar. It seems like you guys really found the gray area because there isn't a lot out there on the market right now. And it's also kind of like, it seems like a risky move because we're kind of in the era of like celebrity alcohols and like it's really being

shoved down our throats. So how did you really land on that decision to do that? Yeah. Well, there's a few things. The inspiration actually came from a really lateral place, which was technology. We all get mobile phones and tech because we want to be more connected. But the weird paradox of that is that we get them and we are less connected and less present than we've ever been. And that's something that as a parent, as someone who my background is as a brand strategist, so I worked with some big technology brands to help them sell mobile phones. and over the years I realized that, you know, there's some brilliant things that can be done with mobile phones, but there is a kind of social division as well as an isolation.

And so that was just an observation that I'd had for a while and being a parent is something that I was very conscious of with my kids too. You can see sometimes our kids, sometimes other kids, you know, when there is a phone on iPad, they kind of get drawn to it. And you can see them kind of sinking away into. that space. And so I kind of had that observation. Just looking at drinking habits, what I found that people were drinking less and less alcohol. And people wanted to still have, even if they were still drinking alcohol, you know, routinely they might, instead of having

three glasses on the night out, they might just want two or one or maybe none for that night. and the options just weren't there. And I guess the other thing to think about, which I kind of mentioned at the top, is that the ritual of getting together for food and drink as an adult is actually one of the best ways that we can get together full stop. It's a way that we learn to have conversations with each other. It's where we do have important debates, important, like, you know, it's where people fall in love.

It's where they, you know, talk things out. They're really important. and having a drink that could go into the heart of, into the center of that, even if you didn't want to have alcohol, was really important. And so that's kind of where it came from. And as you said, I think when you start looking at it like that, the kind of big alcohol industry has done a good job over a long period of time of making us feel like we have to have a drink at that moment,

otherwise we're lacking in some way. So whether it is being at a bar and being invited into a round of drinks or whether it is, you know, toasting something to celebrate and you need to have champagne or, you know, having a glass of wine with a meal, otherwise it sometimes somehow doesn't feel like a complete meal. A lot of those things are kind of impressed on us, but they've never really been questioned. And actually, when you look at them in aggregation, and I'm sure you've found this, I'd love to hear about your experience, actually. but when you look at them all piled up on top of each other, it's really exclusive. If you choose not to drink, the danger is you're excluded from a lot of those occasions.

And you shouldn't be. You're still there with your friends or your loved ones or a group of people that you might all feel collectively, kind of socially awkward about like meeting for the first time. You don't want anything to be more exclusionary there. And there's so many things in society that are making people feel exclusive. anyway, drinking should not be one of them. So really for us, it's not about being anti-boos, because I think actually, you know, I think clearly some people do have a specific issue with alcohol and that's fine. We made some decisions in the creation of our product to not have alcohol

anywhere in the process. So people who have for health reasons, for religious reasons or for whatever reason, didn't want any alcohol, no trace. We could with a clear conscience talk to them. But actually, for me, having the odd drink is great. But I think being able to allow a more inclusive conversation around coming together for a drink and allow people options if they've had one drink and then they might want their second drink to not be boozy. Just providing that was something that was really motivating to us. Well, I think in our culture too, it just becomes kind of habitual. Like you're saying, like you meet for drinks.

That's what you do. And so you're drinking, whether you want to drink. or not. That's something that I found before I went off the rails. But like all of our social get-togethers and whatever, it all revolves around drinking. And so you just kind of do it without even making the decision to do it. Yeah. And I think it's those kind of, you know, we call them like mindless sort of autopilot moments where you're just kind of handed a drink. We've been serving on drinks events as they start to open up in L.A. and in New York over the last a couple of months. and it's amazing when people get to the front of the bar

and they realize that there's a decent non-alcoholic option, they're like, oh, God, thank God. Because, you know, there might be, you know, we've done stuff in the art world where people get to the front and they expect to have to pick up a glass of wine or a cocktail, or it's a kind of an event, and people want to show that they want to be there because it does show that you're kind of part of it

if you have a drink in your hand, but they just don't want it to be booze. It just is assumed that it would be. And exactly that reason. So much of alcohol consumption is sort of on autopilot. And I think it is fine. Of course, you know, if you're having a special meal and you want to have a special wine with it or you're meeting your friends for cocktails or beers or whatever,

then that's one thing. But actually there's so many moments throughout our lives where we've got a glass of alcohol on our hand and we didn't even really need it. It's just a kind of segue into the evening or into the event. And to your point before, when you were talking about kind of the exclusionary aspect of it, I know for myself and for so many people who either I've kind of worked with in recovery or people who follow me on Instagram and are just curious about getting sober or just cutting down on drinking, not because they have a problem, but just because they feel like it's not the right

choice for them or they feel that it's habitual and they're falling into these habits. The main fear is judgment. people are so afraid of what other people are going to think of them if they're not drinking. And they ask me like, well, what should I say? You know, like it's some, I don't know, like it's so out of the ordinary to not be drinking that people think like, what is wrong with this person? It is the only drug that I can think of that people need to justify not taking. Right. And that's one of the things that we're really happy to challenge as a brand is if you happen to not want a drink that day, it's absolutely not.

none of my business or anyone else's business, why? So if you say, yeah, actually, why aren't you doing heroin today? What is wrong with you? Exactly. Can you imagine that conversation? So it is, you know, for female, is like, are you pregnant? Kind of what's going on? Is there some kind of health thing? People get suspicious. Like, oh, you know, maybe, you know, they want all of us to get kind of drunk and they just don't want to kind of be out of control or there's all kinds of weird things that happen when you say you don't want to have a drink. And actually, increasingly, like, you can have a drink that doesn't have alcohol in. You are still drinking if you turn to up to an event and your drink just happens to not have alcohol. You are

participating. And I think that there is a kind of, you know, are you drinking alcohol today? And, you know, I think that there's really, there's a lot of very interesting language that needs to be challenged and will be challenged, I think, over the next few years for that. If you are looking for a good plant-based protein bar or just a good protein bar in general, which, by the way, can be so hard to find, look no further than my absolute favorite, go macro. These have been my favorite for a while. I've had one almost daily for like well over a year, probably coming up on two years here. And they're so delicious, but they also have bars for any and every lifestyle, which is how I initially came across them. So they have mouth-watering flavors like peanut butter, chocolate chip, blueberry plus cashew butter, dark chocolate plus almonds. My personal favorite, the coconut almond butter chocolate chip.

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it is a good place probably to launch this because I think here probably more so than anywhere else in the country, aside from maybe Utah where like Mormonism, they don't drink. You know, people are very health conscious here. They're very kind of tuned in spiritually. And so I think more than anywhere else, people are probably embracing non-alcoholic spirits, beverages, not drinking, not because of an issue, but just because of the. lifestyle choice. I think that's right. And we were very conscious about, and it says that she says Los Angeles on the neck of our bottle, which is a conscious decision. No, it's a really inspiring

place to be, but actually we wanted just to kind of mark the city that inspired the drinks on the bottle itself. I think what we've found is actually the kind of non-alcoholic spirits and other more, I guess, kind of a pair of tivo drinks, the kind of more. I guess, kind of a pair of t-vo drinks, are kind of more like mixed drinks. They actually a couple of years ahead in the UK and in some of the European countries, Australia as well, in terms of their creation. So those markets were where a lot of the movement

of the kind of non-out adult beverages started to be created. The US is catching up really fast. And the thing that I find really inspiring is the health and wellness community out here. and I think if the kind of non-out liquid trend was started in the UK and in Europe, it was probably because so much of life is lived around a bar culture or a pub culture in the UK and actually people needed something to allow them to kind of function a bit bad.

You know, they needed to have a night off a week or a round off in an evening or whatever. And so that makes total sense to me. thing that I find really inspiring here is the kind of the really progressive views, and you're part of this, the really progressive views in what health and wellness actually mean. And I think L.A. has a really big image problem in the way that it shows up when I worked at an advertising agency here. When I first got here, we helped work on the L.A. Olympic bid, really early stage with some key members of the city and the mayor, and it was a really inspiring project, particularly as I first landed and got here. And I got kind of under the skin of the city, and I just fell in love with how

diverse the city was and how interesting. And actually, what struck me is that for a city that everyone feels like they know, even if they've never been here, because they've seen it, it's so well photographed, it's in movies. It actually itself has an image problem. The perception of what LA is like on the outside world, to the reality of living here, I'm sure you find the same. it's really different. And there's loads more texture. It's a really interesting, diverse city where there's lots of different types of people and there's lots of different versions of what's going on. And it's a very experimental place. People are trying stuff all the time. And in terms of health and wellness, I think that there is a view of kind of health that is a traditional

view of it is, you know, that I guess in years gone by or in previous decades, it would be the cool kids who'd party and do play music and be doing creative and interesting stuff. And then there'd be the kind of jocks who would be very sporty and fit. And they were kind of very different tribes. What's great is that that doesn't exist anymore in any way. And I think physical health is now seen as people's sort of self-expression. people and it's part of people's identity. And so we found actually with our drinks,

a lot of the people who got really excited about them early on were like, you know, musicians, really created people who you would associate with a kind of, you know, kind of, you know, rock and roll lifestyle. But actually they're really tuned into how they want their mind to be and how they want their, you know, their energy to be. And so that they are really thoughtful about kind of what they're, putting in their body just because they want to be in the best state possible.

And it doesn't matter that they're, you know, these are not clean cut people. These, yeah, covered in tattoos. They're people who you would not think of in the traditional sense as the kind of health and wellness community, but they are. And I think that there's some really interesting things going on here with, you know, the cannabis community and how that can be used in health. And, you know, it's a big space and it's being used in all sorts of different ways right now. that's a giant experiment that's going on.

But there is some, definitely some good health benefits. There's also, you know, people are doing interesting stuff with psilocybin even. And I think that there's, that, that is part of kind of looking at kind of mental trauma

and some kind of spiritual enlightenment, people kind of looking at that. And so I think that there is a much more holistic view of what being healthy and well is in Los Angeles now. And that's what we're really interested to, be part of it and serve that community because it isn't about opting out of good social occasions. Everyone recognizes even if you're physically really fit, if you're not looking after your kind of social health, if you're not looking after your friendships and going out and meeting people,

then that's part of it too. You need to look at that. And so, yeah, I'm really excited about the health and wellness movement that's happening here and just how fresh it is. Well, yeah, I think that kind of that social engagement and connection that we, have lacked so much over the last almost two years is kind of the foundation of a healthy life. You know, it's kind of the lifeblood. And I love that part of your purpose is to kind of honor that, right? Because I think like we are getting more and more isolated through technology and then through the pandemic and where that's taking us is like what we're doing right now. Why do the studio and sit there face to face when we can do Zoom, it's more convenient. And I think like we're

just kind of headed in that direction. And yeah, to your point about the perception of L.A., I think the perception of L.A. for an outsider is a caricature of what it really is. Yeah. But it really is multifaceted. And it's a lot more substantive than I think people would think. Yeah, big time. And I think you can look at that all across the board. You know, I think there is the culinary scene here, the food scene is really inspiring. There's some great chefs just doing brilliant things and really experimental things. The art scene is amazing here. And yeah, there's just a lot more, there's a lot more culture here than I think it kind of gets great.

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blonde B-L-O-N-D-E to claim this deal for 20% off your first subscription order. And I promise you you will never go back. So let's talk about building a brand. How did you use your experience as a brand strategist to launch optimist? Or did you? I did. I found that over the years, as a brand strategist, working on some big brands, I was increasingly being asked by the brands to help them defy their purpose and what their role was in the world, what their meaning was, what they could do for people, which is a lot of what modern brands will be looking for. And after doing that for brands big and small for a couple of years, one of the things that just struck me really clearly was that you can only get a certain way

if you're, I call it like reverse parking back into a purpose. If it's been live for a long time and it's just been going, yeah, you can try and find something that, is maybe in the history of the brand or maybe in something true to how people use it or like it. It has to be based on truth that can be a purpose. But it's never going to be as authentic as if the brand and the product were created with the purpose at the beginning. And if that purpose is kind of lived every single day in loads of touch points throughout the day. And I think a lot of people can now sniff out a brand or business or person that is in.

inauthentic very, very quickly. And it's a turnoff. It's people don't like it. People want authenticity. Even if there's faults there, people would much prefer to have wrinkles, false issues with something, honesty, than they would have a kind of perfect sheen brand that was kind of slightly inauthentic. And so over the, over time working on brands like that,

I decided that I really wanted to create. my own brand and over many conversations over many years of my wife who is my co-founder, we started looking at kind of really what mattered to us. And we looked at what was going on the world and we looked at social connection being hugely, hugely important. And we looked at mental wellness being hugely important. And, you know, people talking even before the pandemic that we're in about there being a kind of epidemic proportion problem with mental wellness, particularly among young people, but actually across the board, all of us. And so we wanted to do something that could have an impact in that space.

And so actually the purpose kind of came first, and that's why the brand name Optimist is there. It's about believing in a better tomorrow. And the idea that you can make it better, that you can make positive changes. And that actually influenced everything that we did. So we wanted to make sure when we created non-alcoholic drinks, and we have more to come that we're releasing some more early next year

and some more in the middle of next year. It always wanted to be about a positive decision for your physical and mental health. That's what everything that we create will be. And we don't major on it being non-alcoholic, for instance, because being non-alcoholic is apologising for what you're, not. So we just talk about botanical spirits. We talk about we don't apologize for what's not in them. We celebrate what is in them. And so people can make a positive decision for what they're ordering

or what they're consuming rather than feeling like they're ducking something and avoiding something. And so, yeah, the purpose really, I guess anything on a brand strategy level, that really influenced kind of how we did it. And then there's other pieces on design and on we made some design decisions on bottle shape. Bottle shape's really difficult when you start making a drink that is not a gin. It's not, you know, it's not a rum. All those kind of genres have a unique bottle shape that you can have a look at a silhouette of a bottle without a label on.

You can kind of say, oh, that looks like it's a bourbon or that one looks like a gin. So we had to create a unique bottle shape. And then we just wanted to put some, you know, authentic touches to the products too. Our process, we could have done it a lot quicker if we went to a food lab. We could have done it in a couple of months. But we didn't. We went through, I basically had to learn to be a distiller. And we had to learn and create a process to make these drinks that is really hard.

But it means we get a very clean product that doesn't require a load of chemicals in them. So, yeah, it actually, the kind of the brand strategy piece, when you have a good idea of what you're doing, it makes a lot of the decisions as you're starting to execute a lot easier. The bottles are beautiful, by the way. Everybody who's come to my house is like, well, at first they think, oh, my God, she's drinking again. Oh, no. And then they're like, wow, that is, they're like all blown away by it.

But I wanted to ask you how you learned about the botanicals, I'm assuming you outsource some of that or maybe not. and how you decided which ones to put in which drinks as well. Yeah, we studied really hard, to be honest. And actually, before we went into it, we wanted to make, so to the point about not apologising for what we weren't, we wanted to not make a gin without booze and a rum without booze or a tequila without booze

because that always felt like we would be in the shadow of what we weren't. So we wanted to create original flavors. But we worked with some brilliant mixologists and sommeliers, and food writers and chefs. My wife Leicester is an incredible chef cook, and I am like a pretty keen amateur mixologist, plucky, I'd say, rather than extremely good, but I enjoy doing it.

But we had to learn a lot about the process. And in terms of flavour profile, what we wanted to do was create drinks that were original but could fit into people's repertoire. So one of them, which is called Bright, is very citrus-faud. It's got 14 different botanicals in it, including lemon, jasmine and mandarin. And it's got myrrh in it, which is quite hard to find. And that one is, if you're making drinks, you can make it, you can use it like a citrusy vodka.

And so if you talk to any mixologist or anyone who kind of makes drinks at home or anyone who has a go-to cocktail and they say, yeah, I like kind of vodka, then they can reach for that one. It won't be a direct comparison to those flavors, but it will be in the same kind of ballpark. There's another one that's called Fresh, which is inspired by Topanga Canyon after a rainstorm and all the kind of smells you get when the rain stops and the sun comes out, the kind of verdant hit. And that one is more like a kind of very botanical gin. So anyone who's used to making cocktails with the botanical gin knows exactly what to do with that. And then the last one, smoky, which is inspired by being in the high desert in Yucca, is much more like a kind of

mescal or even a kind of, people use it to replace mescal or tequila in cocktails. So that one was by far the hardest to make, and we, we have to distill Lapsang-soucheong tea to get that kind of smokiness. But it's a really unique flavor, and that one's really popular. I think agave-based spirits, people kind of loving right now. So that one, that one people enjoy. I love that one. And like I was saying before, I'm not a connoisseur, but it was very complex, I think, is the word that I would use. Like, you know, that's what one of the things that I think is so amazing about what you've done is that all of these flavors are, I think, more complex than like an alcohol. So it's just, you know, it's really enjoyable and really interesting to drink, if that makes sense. Yeah, thank you. Honestly, so part of that was.

that we wanted to make them flavors that were sophisticated for an adult palette. And, you know, a lot of spirits do have that. There's some real flavor sophistication in them. And often if you order a non-aric drink, you get served a kid's drink. It's like a Shirley Temple with the cherry on top. Yeah, exactly, a great big sugar bomb in a glass that you don't want. So we wanted to do that. But actually, the amount of botanicals are in each one are there,

because you can layer the flavors and they complement each other. And it means that you don't have to use sugars or gums or paste or a lot of the other things that the food industry rely on to give a kind of lasting flavor or complexity. They're using chemicals. By layering in different botanicals, it meant that we could get a complex flavor and not have to put in a load of other kind of shit

that you don't want in your body, basically. So you also have a podcast to round out your brand. Can you tell everybody a little bit about that? Yeah, that's called Optimist in Progress, which is a, I present with Dr. Dreher Lettermendi, who runs the student resilience program at UCLA. And the idea of that was to give people an idea or inspire people with stories of people, inspire people with stories of others who have done really amazing things. But here about the story behind what had to go into them, achieving those amazing things or doing amazing things or just

being a really interesting person. It's almost kind of the antidote to some social media. I think a lot of social media at its worst can be just people showing them at their high moments and it's easy to assume, particularly for young people, you look at that and you go, wow, that just happened. That's amazing. And the reality is, I think if anyone's done anything that's impressive in any way, they've normally worked incredibly hard at it and there's normally been an incredibly difficult journey to get there, even if from the outside it looks like a kind of swan swimming and it's all smooth and it's elegant and beautiful. There's an awful lot of work and commitment and probably some setbacks that have happened along the way.

So we wanted to tell those stories. And we started off just talking to, we talked to some friends and then we talked to some musical artists. I just talked to an Olympic champion and a Grammy award-winning music producer. And what's really interesting hearing these stories is the resilience that everyone needs. And I think that it's a really interesting challenge today that the idea that you do need to be really resilient. If you really want to do almost anything now, there needs to be a kind of resilience, a strength of character that you need to get through things. And there's going to be

so many challenges along the way. We've heard from Alice Smith, who's an amazing singer, who talked about being a young female in the music industry, had a great album, and then it was really difficult for her to navigate the music industry executives and kind of what they wanted her to be versus is what was authentic to her. We've heard the same in business context for people. And so, yeah, they're really interesting. I'd love to have you on, actually. I'd love to hear your story because it's just that they're interesting stories

and they're very human and really different. And everyone has a really different kind of version of how they got to where they got to. But often it is, you know, and you hear what people have had to endure or navigate gate in order to get there. I find it really inspiring. And I think all of us, you know, have days where you just think it's impossible to do what you want to do. And these stories, I find really inspiring. And yeah, you realize that everyone has those days. Yeah, it's so important. It reminds me kind of like an iceberg. You're seeing the tip of the iceberg. You're not seeing everything below the water, below the surface, which is the majority of the work. And,

And it is not linear ever. No. And your podcast is really incredible. I've been listening to it and it really is inspiring. So I recommend everybody go check that out. Thank you. It's called Optimist in Progress. That's fair.

And where can everybody find out about you and your drinks and purchase and all of that? Thank you. Yeah. So at Optimist Drinks is our Instagram and that kind of has information of everything. The podcast is on there. Our drinks ideas are on there. our core kind of launch partner was Erowon. So if you're in Los Angeles, any one of those stores carries our drinks and we'll continue to.

Or you can find us at Optimistdrinks.com where you can get our drinks there. And increasingly we're in different cities too. So on the site, there's a locator for stores that people can find where they can find them. Amazing. Well, thank you so much for coming on. Pleasure. Thanks for having me. Great to talk to you today.

You too. I hope you enjoyed that episode. If you liked it, and if you like the show in general, please take a second to rate, review, and subscribe. It goes a long way, and it's actually the best way to support the show. Also, if you want to see more about each episode, you can head over to The Blonde Files podcast on Instagram. I'm always posting about each episode there

or over on my personal page at Ariel Lorry. Thank you.