The LIMITLESS Power of An Alcohol-Free Lifestyle | One Year No Beer | Ruari Fairbairns | Rich Roll

alcohol

is holding you back, everyone is looking for optimal health, peak performance, increased productivity at work, how to lose weight, and yet they don't realize that this vision of what it can feel like without

alcohol

is the only thing that will give them What they're looking for rwer Fabs is a former oil broker who, after a bout with alcohol, decided to leave The Jug. The benefits were so profound that he would later abandon his career and finances to become an advocate for an alcohol-

free

lifestyle

. Our relationship with alcohol is intrinsically tied to the experiences we had as children, that's just a fact.

Ruri co-founded One

year

No Beer, a subscription-based alcohol prevention program that now has over 100,000 members. If you want to change your behavior, tour a community. of people who live like this as we welcome this new

year

. I offer this conversation as encouragement to consider the many ways alcohol continues to interfere with your health because it's time to put alcohol behind you. I am very proud to present to you. Talk to our new brand partner and check out their line of super comfortable, stylish and durable pieces at on.com. Rory, nice to meet you, thank you for doing this, uh, what you have to share, what you stand for, uh, what you've created.

I think what you're advocating for is not only extremely

power

ful but also extremely timely as we see the mainstream culture starting to catch up to what you've been talking about for quite some time and now there's a definite surge in popularity, uh and enthusiasm. for the alcohol-

free

lifestyle

that is not only an affirmation of their work but on some level might even be surprising to what extent it seems to be taking hold, yeah, well, thank you so much for having me on the podcast and um, you know, I think like you just said, it's been almost a decade, um, nine-odd years of spreading this message and when we started spreading this message, we were definitely early, right, we were early, but at that time.

I was thinking, oh, this is, this is going to happen now and people were saying, oh, this is how it was at the time, like what you just said, people were saying that 9 years ago and I think from what I've gotten The thing is that the paradigm shifts like This is like major paradigm shifts where society is completely saturated with alcohol and the world is changing its relationship with alcohol and it's happening very, very slowly, and you know, we'll talk more about this, but that changed the way I operated in the world. business because instead of focusing on the here and now, like what's going to happen in the next few months or next year, it became no, this paradigm shift will happen for decades, like you just have to sit back and keep spreading the message. and follow Amazing podcasts like this coming soon and they will inspire people and help them think about things slightly differently and I think what's been amazing is seeing all of these sober influences emerge in these non-alcoholic beverage businesses.

I mean, I can think of probably four or five alcoholic drinks. free businesses that emerged a year ago, not that we know of, right, wow, so we've been one of the pioneers and early adopters helping to make this paradigm shift in the world and now the momentum is growing and the momentum is growing and momentum is growing The podcast that Andrew Huberman did last year about alcohol is exciting. I think it was the number one podcast or the number two most listened to podcast on Apple's podcast platform worldwide all year. Wow, I don't know if you knew that I.

I didn't know that, but I mean the Hubman podcast is our source of good science that we use to influence the show and there are a lot of elements of that that we've adopted into our shows and I think not only that is really insightful. but I would say I know most of the people in my industry, we are all friends, right, we chat with each other. I don't see them on the big podcasts out there. I don't see them being interviewed on television or radio. I'm not seeing them yet and I think this is the next Evolution, like you were an early adopter, you had Andy from the beginning, now you're inviting me to spread this conversation, this would be my call to arms if you want. to any other podcast or influencer to say, "let's really spread this message." There are many of us who are spreading this message and that message is: do you know what alcohol holds you back?

And that's it, it's simple, right? if you do it regularly. consuming alcohol is holding you back even if you only consume it very periodically, there is no positive physiological benefit at all, yes, that comes from the period of alcohol consumption, yes, and let's talk about that specifically, 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 is a health problem, but the facts are absolutely there, it's 100% poison, it's neurotoxic, it's terrible for our brains, it's terrible for For our bodies, drinking alcohol has no physiological benefits.

It was so shocking. Yesterday I saw on the news that Lewis Hamilton said that he just finished 4 months without alcohol and he did it because he is looking for an extra 1%. this year or next year, so you know this is really the message: everyone is looking for optimal health, people are looking for peak performance, they are looking for more productivity in their work, they are looking for how to lose weight, they are trying to achieve all these things and yet, they do not realize that this daily habit that they are doing and that the entire society is normalizing, is the only thing that will give them what they are looking for.

For the counterpoint to that would be the person who says: I understand everything you're saying, but when I need to calm down or want to calm down, a drink is quite reliable to do it completely and as an antidote. the loneliness epidemic if I want to be sociable and see my friends uh that's, you know, something that's kind of like doing something like let's go to the bar, let's go to the pub, that's how I can hang out with the people that I like. matter and So you're asking me to sacrifice that when I already feel alone coming out of a pandemic and I'm deprived of the social interaction necessary to be a completely healthy human being and that's what the person who drinks alcohol would say, are the benefits ?

Those are the benefits of drinking, social inclusion. The benefits of drinking fall into all of those things and being able to do those things and being able to relieve stress, and as long as there are benefits to drinking alcohol, people are going to do it. Keep looking for it and looking for it and I think this is part of the conversation we're going to have today, which is that if the only option for people is right abstinence or problematic drinking or drinking like fish like everyone else 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 they can still do some of those social things, they can still operate like before, but it doesn't have that significant impact, that significant negative impact on their lives, what do we know and what don't we know in terms of what alcohol is doing to you? doing to our life? body to our sleep to our mental health Etc. Yeah, well, like you said, I mean, Hubman's podcast was fantastic and I think if you look, Dr.

Arman is a perfect example, he, Dr. Arman, says that you know every time you take a baby right, so just two units start to dull your prefrontal cortex, which is that melon behind your brain, which is the rational decision making area. The moral compass comes from there, so he says, how often do you want rational decision making and the moral compass to help you? go on vacation and that's effectively what happens when you drink and now you know we're talking about not only Dr. Arman Andrew Hubman talking about it being completely neurotoxic to the brain, but over time it shrinks the brain and causes memory loss, so what, what do we do? can I just draw a line under it and say this is completely toxic, there are no benefits to drinking alcohol, um, it's going to have a significantly negative impact on your brain, a significantly negative impact on your body, and yet what happens is which is It's so prevalent in society that it's so normalized that the conversation about "you have to be abstinent." I think it's the conversation that stops many people from taking just the first step or two to change things like sleep, for example, alcohol is terrible for sleep.

Alcohol prevents us from entering deep sleep. Deep sleep is that area that needed some sleep, where actually the vast majority, what you think now, the vast majority of neuroplasticity happens well, so that's our brain's ability to learn and learn new things and change. behavior. so drinking alcohol has a direct negative correlation with trying to change behavior, it prevents you from changing behavior and there are so many areas like this where it slows it down, let's talk about weight loss, right, alcohol significantly inhibits your weight loss, um, it's 100% poison, so the liver has to process that before processing other fat loss, so it prevents you from losing weight, plus there are a lot of calories.

Let's take a little example here, okay, imagine I created a pill that would help you with your headache and you have a headache and you go to the pharmacy and you take the pill and it's wonderful, this, this, it works incredibly fast, it takes away the headache, you feel a lot calmer and then 15 minutes later you need to take another pill and then you feel a little bit. better again and everything is great, then another 15 minutes go by and guess what, now you need to take two pills, okay, and this continues through the night to try to 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. You feel depressed and feel more pain than before. How successful would that be as a product? Yeah, it's not cool, right, and that's unless you're the person. selling the product then it's great, yeah that's another conversation to have and the thing about alcohol is that it has to be one of the worst stress relievers in the world. I recently interviewed a wonderful woman, Dr. Reget Sin from Yale University, and she spent the last 30 years studying alcohol and addiction and she was asked to create a new Department specifically for alcohol abuse studies and she was 6 months in this department setting and he came back to the board and said, I don't want to call it the Yale University study on alcohol abuse, I want to call it the Yale University study on stress because alcohol is just the result, the real source is stress and stress that we have, so alcohol is a terrible stress reliever for people and for me.

I think within all of this is what holds this together completely, like knowing that it's so bad for our health, bad for our mental health, you know, as Professor David Nut demonstrated and he was expelled from the UK government for demonstrating that alcohol is the best in the world. The most harmful drug and significantly negative for our physical and mental health. Why is it so common? And that's the part we're trying to challenge. It's social conditioning. That's 2 billion dollars of marketing. It's an entire machine that 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 for each one, of the success of everything and, curiously, if you look at the advertising budget for the right to alcohol and the alcohol industry. in the UK since 2004, 200 before was the peak of alcohol in the UK, okay, the most we drank and the advertising budget spent in the UK largely follows that trend line, restrictions started to be implemented and all those things, so all this advertising, this whole machine has been making us believe that alcohol is this Source. um, there was another study recently.

I think this was probably three four years ago and there was an audience with a journalist hiding and there were some people trying to They did a study to study whether or not alcohol was good for you and they wanted to prove that they were on stage saying we want to prove that Drinking in moderation is good for you, okay? and the journalist said this. I think it was in the New York Times because the room was full of the AL alcohol industry, right, yeah, so this is all the misinformation, all that stuff that they've been programming us to believe is a source, well, it's so prevalent at its point and we are so indoctrinated in a culture where we don't even doubt the fact that it is readily available and has been positioned to be this elixir of good times and you know something that is considered harmless compared to drugs that are illegal when In reality, the facts tell a very different story.

However, I think we're seeing this increase or uptick, especially in younger people who are opting out of this paradigm, which I think is really cool and I found a study and research.We're talking today about this 2017 Sterling University study that showed that 93% of people drank 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 paint a really negative picture in terms of what this drug is doing to us, on the other hand, the most nefarious enemy in this equation is really our social structure that keeps people stuck in behavioral patterns that don't serve them. for fear of being excluded by their group or community of people, yes, and that is strong enough to keep people doing things they don't want to do because of the fear of suddenly not being able to. engaging in that is more than adequate to, you know, perpetuate a negative habit entirely and you know that was our study with Sterling University, did you commission that study?

We did? We've done several studies with Sterling University over the years, um, but I think you know that element of peer pressure, like look where I come from, you know the oil brokerage industry, um, and my boss telling me if I taking a break from Al was like: I want to change my relationship with alcohol. I really think it's stopping me and he told me you're committing business suicide if you stop drinking and here I was, building a very successful business, you know, a team of guys with me and for many years, maybe 10 years in this industry, I was very focused on being The number one oil broker in the world was where I was going and here I was left with this decision to make.

I really say goodbye to all of that and I think this is partly what people say it is. Well, that's very good. I could see that I could be healthier. I understand that it is a neurotox. I understand that it is poisonous. I like the way it makes me feel like everyone is doing it and I really don't want to be excluded from society if I stop doing it. I really don't want to stop drinking and be the guy left out. Here is an example of peer pressure. I've been with a group of guys having a drink and they're all playing, playing cricket together and chatting. and they're talking about how important this season is and one of the guys says, look, why don't we get Mark?

You know he's the best player out of all of us and a bunch of guys say we just can't. do it, we can't do it because he doesn't drink. I mean, that's the world we live in, so I think as long as that exists, it's going to be a big challenge for people to just not drink completely and I think inside. This gray area we've been trying to say is that there is an alternative to just not drinking. There is actually a drinking area where most of the time you don't drink and that's something I choose well.

I personally choose to drink with control. I rarely have a drink the vast majority of the time. I go without alcohol every time I have a drink. I feel absolutely terrible. um, I could have one with dinner, but it's weird that all the associations in my brain that I used to have like the ones you're looking for. a steak you need a drink or you go to rugby you need to have a few pints all those associations have disappeared so what I really call this now is like having an alcohol base free of knowing and loving that version of yourself but from time to time accessing to that world where it's so expected, it's so ingrained that you can join them and then leave again.

It's interesting that you dip back into it from time to time instead of just saying the same thing with everything you know. Why do you still occasionally choose to drink the two things you talked about before? Those benefits are very real and are for the vast majority of people. The vast majority of people are not in very severe alcoholism. The vast majority of people are sitting on the edge, they're sitting somewhere between um, I drink, I drink a little bit every day or I drink to excess and the wheels come off, but then I stop drinking for a little bit and you look at this and They say wait a minute I don't want to stop drinking I just want to be able to drink a little less um and if we tell them well you no you can't do that that there you can't do that you have to go and be completely abstinent then they'll just go fine, I'm not going to do nothing and this is what's happening so the reason we stumbled upon that and I say stum LED, but it cost us a fortune and years and it was a very expensive thing to learn is that when we were sitting and talking to our customers, the people who participated in the challenge had completed the challenge a little bit and were successful at it in a number of 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 for the challenge and I know about paid media marketing, that means it cost you a fortune and in it we started Ask People what is happening, so we did another survey, we did another research and now there are tens of thousands of people who participated in this research and of those tens of thousands of people in countries around the world 84% do not want to stop drinking correctly , so if our only rhetoric is come and stop drinking, come and do it for 90 days or come and do whatever, then we will prevent people from helping to change their relationship with alcohol sooner and this is one of the biggest changes in what we're doing now because we talk about control and if you're 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 go through a program, help them see . that the healthiest relationship with alcohol is to be predominantly abstinent, so we can help people a lot sooner, yeah I get it intellectually I totally get it, but at the same time my brain lights up like a Christmas tree because I'm like a 12. -stepdad and I come into this from a very different set of experiences because I'm the guy who hears that you can drink once in a while and I think if I could drink once in a while and dip my toe in then I should drink every day like if I was just wired differently, you know I have a problem and that problem requires a certain program and a set of tools that I have to practice diligently every day or I'm in, you know, fear or there you know, I think creating a, ya you know, a serious risk to my health and well-being, as a result, that's a very different individual, the classic alcoholic or addict, is in a very different set of circumstances than the people you're communicating with who don't have that problem or you're not necessarily dealing with something serious or acute, you just know that you're sick and tired of occasionally feeling bad, having a hangover, being pressured to drink when you don't want to, and I think the challenge aspect of what you've created gives you people a way to test the reality of what their relationship is because up to the point of knowing what it was, 84% said they don't want to stop drinking.

Do you know how many of them don't want to quit drinking because they have a problem, they don't want to break up with their best friend versus someone who is like that, it's not a problem for me, so I don't see a reason to have to quit, there is a kind of deep psychological network of neurons at play that leads people to say things that are not in their best interest at all or to raise the wall against them. Making the change that could actually be the differentiator between the life they lead and the life they want to lead. and I think this is again expanding the conversation here, okay, Dr.

Judson Brewer is on this podcast, amazing person, he's coming back soon, make him come back, you're supposed to surf with him, he's been on our as well podcast and uh, you know, we've had some of his work on our shows as an incredible human being, but he's helping people who traditionally might be considered very serious alcoholism or addiction to change their relationship with that to almost not drinking or not drinking at all. in everyone using just meditation, okay, and there's Dr. Joe Despenza, who is getting people out of wheelchairs for a lifetime in a wheelchair through meditation.

Another very successful intervention for people changing their relationship with addictions is the sport of boxing. Curiously, the most successful. by volume of people in invention in the world to help people go from severe alcohol use disorder or severe alcohol use disorder to abstinence or a better relationship with cont

roll

ed alcohol consumption there is one thing in the world that It stands out above everything else, you know? what's working, would you like it to be that, yeah, when is the time to explain that most people outgrow it over time? It's the most successful intervention there is and what happens with this is fine, so we're using words like you. an alcoholic and this is alcoholism and all those things, let's expand this conversation to say that different people need different things that some things may work for some people and may not work for other people and there are a wide variety of tools and understand that we can apply it to this topic here, that could help someone, sure, and I think if we go with that expansion of a place because, like you said, there are some people who say, well, that's not for me. or you know, I don't relate to that um, I don't think there's just one way and that's what's amazing about you, Rico, you know you brought Andy on this podcast?

This is clearly another way and it's helping people and you've brought me to the podcast, this is another way and it's helping people and there's a lot more of us, there's a lot more of us that are skating this line than I could be this or that and yet people are coming out and transforming their lives. MH time as an intervention is an interesting concept. I can't help but wonder if that's because everyone has to have their experiences to come to the conclusion that it no longer serves them and that level can't be accepted. of goodwill in someone who is not receptive to hearing it, you have to have a certain experience or reach a certain pain threshold before you are ready to make a change which is uncomfortable and even if you have a casual relationship with alcohol, it is still like an experienced very trusted friend who you are asked to break up with or spend time apart and if alcohol is not directly related to a series of chaotic and disturbing events in your life, it is harder to make that argument until that person brushes up against something that makes them rethink that relationship, yeah, I think like you said, there are a lot of people who are waiting for a bottom moment, they're waiting for their hand to be forced, the DUI or the partner to say that.

I'm leaving and with all my soul in the depths of my being I want to help people before that I want to avoid that I want to tickle GW in the inner parts where they can make a decision make a change make a judgment that connects them and makes you realize that alcohol is what's important if we swim a little more against the current and look at this prevention piece, people don't look to not drink when, when they do, they're still trapped in The Matrix. I love drinking, it's not a problem, they don't have any problem.

People convince themselves at this point. We are in dry January. They say it's fine. I do Dry January every year, so I don't have any problems, but I also drink three. bottles of wine every day at lunch now I know a guy who told me that, yeah you know he drinks three bottles of wine at lunch every day, he probably ends up with all kinds of whiskey because he can have a dry January, no it's a problem. because he's proven to himself that he can quit, quit whenever he wants, uh, it doesn't matter, you know, the white knuckles and whatever all those things the illusion got into, you know, making it to day 30 so he can continue It perpetuates that argument as a form of denial, but yes, millions and millions of people.

Millions and millions

rich

, that's why you know that people who go into Alcoholics Anonymous or 12ep programs, once you know, they recover or get better. Grateful alcoholic or addict because the pain was so severe and the habit so pronounced that they were forced to reckon with it and, you know, they broke up with that lover and, as a result, they've been blessed with tools and this new life that something has created marvelous. outside of you know this disease, um, but for the person who is a heavy user or a drinker who can continue down that path without wreaking an inadequate amount of havoc on their life where they have to deal with or, or, or, or, or , or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or , or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or,, they have a problem, they are stuck in a cycle that is harder to break because there are no circumstances that you can point to to say that It's time for you to let it go, yeah, and they live their lives, you know, most of them live the rest of their lives in this suboptimal state where they're not really living the life that's freely available to them, otherwise, yeah, exactly, and I think if we can direct the conversation to where people are looking, and 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, wants an extra 1% improvement in performance. They want to avoid divorce. They want to be a better father, to be a better mother. they want to be morecalm people want to be happier, so if we can direct the conversation there and then help people do the math oh, you want to lose weight, are you okay? Well, let me explain to you what your regular alcohol consumption is all about. a Trojan horse, right, because that person will never go to an AA meeting, and if he really has a problem, he accepts the challenge under the rubric of weight loss or whatever, the truth will be revealed as we talked about. before, either they won't make it or they get stuck, something will happen and yes, it will happen.

It becomes clear pretty early on if that program needs to be scaled exactly right, then that's another part expanded again so that it doesn't go from oh, I tried to do the challenge and so I need to go to AA so much, which What you're saying is fine, so you tried having a dry January for a year several times, you stopped drinking for a month, but then it comes back, there are factors that drive compulsive behavior. Do you know what they are and are you mitigating them? And are you doing anything about it? Let me ask you, do you have a high level of stress in your life?

What do you think every time I ask someone what you think they say? Yes, of course they are doing well, we just talked. Why is stress absolutely intrinsically linked to your relationship with alcohol? It is the most used, known and available tool to deal with stress, but it also creates stress. Alcohol releases significant amounts of cortisol. In fact, they recently discovered that regular alcohol consumption increases production over time. of cortisol, okay, so not only are you releasing cortisol in the moment, but you're also producing more cortisol over time, now cortisol sends you into fight or flight, so your sympathetic nervous system stresses your being busy, busy , busy all day, you know, building the business. to be successful whatever it is and not only that, but the stress during the day leads you to that end of the day where you think: I need something to relieve myself, but that people don't realize. is that drinking alcohol over time is reducing your ability to properly deal with stress, so I talk to successful business owners all the time and I say, do you have more stress now or have you reduced your ability to deal with stress? ?

I think that's what people don't realize. Let's have a conversation about stress and deal with stress. Let's talk about sleep. Let's talk about these other things because that's what you're looking for and in the background, just like you said. I'm going to help you change your relationship with alcohol. Every athlete I know will tell you that having the right equipment is key to your performance. If what you are wearing is not well put together, it will only put distance between you and those goals. You owe it to yourself to invest in the best and the best is available.

I'm obsessed with the Cloud Ultra on the trails and just got the new NextGen Cloud Stratus 3 for the trail. I love them, but a They also have this incredible line of lightweight performance clothing that goes beyond anything I've ever known before. It's like this unbeatable second skin. I love rocking the sweat-wicking Ultra Tea and the ultra shorts that have this pocket right at the bottom. the backbone that perfectly anchors your phone without shaking. I'm so proud to partner with and love their vision of the future where their gear is designed for circularity, so check out their incredible line of super comfortable, stylish and durable pieces at on.com as 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 are truly an alcoholic and you find your way to 12ep, there is the initial phase. of detoxifying your body, uh, and maybe the Trojan horse, there are people who come in and say, "I just want to learn how to stop drinking." What they don't realize and what comes next is the notion of what to put in the bottle.

Getting depressed is really just the beginning of trying to find a way to be emotionally sober because when you no longer have that coping mechanism, all the uncomfortable emotions flare up and you're left with no tools for how to handle them because the way you deal with them has been removed. you've done it historically, so in the case of people that you've worked with, since you know that maybe they're not alcoholics on some level, they all self-medicate with alcohol and So when you eliminate their favorite medication, what's replaced there? and what's the work that needs to be done to identify what those triggers are and find healthier ways to process and transcend the emotional, uh, kind of um, uh, what's the word I want to use? the emotional impulses and patterns that arise that require repair because without any kind of tools to repair them they are going to wreak havoc and then maybe you know you know that alcohol caused rage attacks, but if there is a simmering anger underneath that I have been medicating with alcohol to keep it a secret, all of a sudden that's going to come out and it's probably going to be worse than when you were drinking, yeah, yeah, and I think this part was the part that I felt like you really needed to evolve. because I could see that we were helping people take a break from alcohol, I could see that we would give them this idea and this vision of what it can feel like without alcohol and you know what happens when someone has been drinking regularly and they stop, they have all this positive feeling that you know all these things come back, but we weren't really there to help them with this emotional problem or the big T word, right, trauma, um, the driver of a lot of our behavior, um and So that's why we needed to evolve into a more intensive program for people so we could start looking at those underlying things because you're right, let's look at the work of Gabber Mate, who significantly influences the programs here, or Bess de Vandero, right? uh the body keeps score, our relationship with alcohol is intrinsically linked to the experiences we had as children, that's a fact at this point, if we were to call this, hey, come get your trauma program worked out, sure.

I think it would be even less successful than hey. come and solve your drinking problem, that's right, so we have to do that in the background. Now we use wonderful tools like, oh, you had Dick Schwartz in the things that we use, if we use um, uh, experimenting with sematic things like that to help. People start to feel these emotions, but the most important thing is to link them to these past experiences that they had and that are running on autopilot. Let me give you a little example so you know. Decades of therapy. I did psychotherapy, psychodynamic therapy or psychotherapy since I was six years old. tons and tons of counseling and therapy and I wouldn't say it helped me evolve significantly, but I never found my trauma and when I went through a meditation, but also at the same time with some traumatic experience I let go of some things and discovered a very old memory of the that no one had talked about it my mom and dad didn't talk about it my brothers no one really talked about it and it was when I was 2 years old okay and I fell off the boat Now when I fell off the boat my dad was down in the cuddi and he had to come up and he literally had to dive and swim and save me at that moment, that created this imprint in my brain of needing to be saved.

I didn't have You have no idea about this until you know, as Steve Jobs says, you have no idea until you look back and connect all the dots, so what did it mean to me throughout my life? I had all of these near-death experiences, including my suicide attempts, almost every day. one of those things I always had someone around to save me when I was looking for partners. I was looking for someone who had saved me. It was so destructive, so disturbing. I was looking for someone to come save me when I built my businesses. I was always hurting and looking for, you know, the next freelancer or agency or guru to come and save my business, so this pattern got locked in my subconscious.

I didn't even know it existed and this is the

power

of trauma, so when I had to understand that and change it. I became aware of it. That's the most powerful thing about doing the job well. I know you're a big advocate of doing the work and that's when, once I became aware, I was able to say, "Wait." One minute I'm running that patent again like I don't need someone to save me. I don't need someone to come and save me, well, the other piece there of course, and I'm sorry, I don't mean to jump, um, but the other part is not just needing someone to save you, it's putting yourself in danger to that you can be saved, so you are actually unconsciously taking risks in your life 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 those behaviors, so I mean, that's why I could easily have such addictive behavior and you know, alcohol fits like a glove into that, but Now I'm so big. advocate of doing the work, let's put it as simple as this alcohol is appearing too prevalent in your life, okay, let's change that, but first of all, let's change that by doing the work, you're a big fan of doing the work.

Well, that's what this podcast 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's what's going to change your relationship with alcohol, but the People don't. I don't want to do the work but they are up for the challenge. You know they have like 28 days left. If your teammates are going to do it. I'll do it too. We'll see. I will beat you. Sounds like fun. and there's a bottom line to that, um, so it's a lot easier to get people to subscribe.

You have to start right, you mean work, like I'm just going to say no. the

beer

in the pub, but you know that's how these things have to start and I think what you've done really effectively is just create a welcome where, um, hey, it's nice and warm, it's cozy here, come on, there's a lot of others. people are doing it, we're having a good time, we're building a community around this, that's the other big piece of course, where you feel supported and you don't feel alone or like some kind of crazy outlier in trying to do this, yes. the community element is huge, um, it's so powerful, interestingly, you know we were talking about dry January and things like that, um, and a lot of people when it's dry January they hide away, stay home and go to the gym they change their routine and What are they doing with all this?

They avoid their social circle. They cancel all that stuff. They count down the days until February 1st so we can go out and get drunk again and what we're doing while we're doing that is, we're reiterating this belief, all this social conditioning of that we need alcohol to have a good time, that we need alcohol to have a fun life, like Jan is so boring and cold, Dart, that's what I don't drink, like that and and me. I think that's what can actually create more problems with people's relationship with alcohol. The main thing is that what's happening is that people are becoming more and more disconnected right now, unless you're a sociopath, we don't want to be disconnected, right? connected and this is the importance of being sociable, being surrounded by people who build a community for you and who are changing their relationship with alcohol.

It's so well ingrained that if you want to change your behavior, you surround yourself with a community of people who live that way. and I think 9 or 10 years ago when I started changing my relationship with alcohol, that community was pretty small today, it's huge, so don't hide away during dry January, let's go out and the goal is to develop something. level of resilience and if you're just isolating yourself and hiding from people, then you're just preventing yourself from having those slightly challenging experiences that, if you get through them, will teach you that you can do this well and will encourage you and that and strengthen that reflex of saying no.

Instead of, you know, catering to social preferences, yeah, well, let's back up. I want to hear the full story like I want to hear how this all came about because there's some entertainment in there. I like what happened to you there, so you grew up on this strange island, yeah right, I've never heard of this island M, the hall of M, in the northwest of Scotland, you should organize a retreat there, yeah, oh, is incredible. beautiful you like it I like it good you live in myca that sounds much better like keep it simple I moved from one island to another era m and now it's Mala yeah right that makes sense is there a direct flight between the two?

Probably not um, kid who grew up in M. I don't know what's going on there, but I guess there's quite a bit of drinking going on, in fact, um, west coast of Scotland, um, if you put it as a country, it would be at the top. in Europe uh of per capita drinking culture um so yeah, very synonymous with drinking culture up there um now um my parents were originally born in England and moved to the mul hall and um so Des was that, yeah, um, I think My dad married a beautiful woman and he didn't want anyone to take her away, so he bought a farm on a hill that he was going to waste on this woman and okay, he made sure she could, that sounds healthy, he couldn't be very healthy. there's aso here, so they set up a call and I call Joe and say hello, Joe, uh, you're right, what are you doing?

I want, if you can't say it in 6 minutes, it's not worth saying, I'm like, okay, uh, I'm the brewery, your not

beer

, he's like, stop drinking, great idea, you need to talk to my wife for a second , talk to your wife and you. I know they've obviously put her on the spot anyway, I chat for a while trying to inspire her to make a change that Joe wanted to happen and then we talk to him again and I say Joe, um, I'd love to do a podcast with you and he says which is 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 told him I can fly to Boston and he said I don't have 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 go. It's a test. Iceland Spartan December Joe desna what appears is the Spartan Ultra World Championships and I say, you know, I know. This guy is You're not even going to give me two seconds if he doesn't get into this thing, yeah, you can't go there and not do the race that he has. He's not going to have time for you, so I did a lap of the ultra um. and uh, but still that was a serious thing and that started a relationship, a friendship, actually, with Joe, I've been very close to him, you know, we spent a little bit of time together, um and, um, you know he Well, Spartan was an investor. one of the first investors in a year without beer and then for a while we were at the finish line of all their events, we were supporting people there, you know, really trying to inspire people to take a break from alcohol, so yeah, it feels like a natural integration into a series of events like that in the same way that a brand like Athletic Brewing can be, you know, yeah, kind of embedded in that to move away from the paradigm of oh, you have a be after your career to no, we.

We're actually doing something different here exactly and also a year without beer feels like a package that any big corporation you know would want to acquire and implement with their workforce is something that you guys have absolutely done, um, the corporate stuff is huge. and I think again in the preventive conversation with people is to say, hey, we can run a challenge together with you and we can support people through the challenge. I think there is a lot in these organizations. from people who will never raise their hand and say I have a problem with alcohol, in fact, even today, it's in some people's contracts, right, if you have a problem with alcohol, we'll fire you, so it's like If you were putting people under all this pressure it's all the stress in the world and yet the tool most available to people dealing with stress is the one that we have been conditioned and programmed to deal with and that is literally everywhere. parties, including many of the social events organizations to this day, is alcohol, so there are a lot of people with a bad relationship with alcohol in these organizations who are not going to raise their hand for fear of stigma, so I think What we've done is create a simple tool for an organization to use to help we collect all of that in the background, 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 little bit. more supportive, they needed Co, they needed more, you know, whatever. um yeah, take all that off the table, just create this welcome M where there's no shame or stigma like Hey, we're doing this fun challenge and then people come in and let people who maybe were thinking about how to do it but were terrified. from being discovered or whatever, you know, all those problems are solved, yeah, through that, I recently gave a talk at a very big tech company, um, and it was a, it was a, it was a great talk and I was going to the vast majority of the organization, so a lot of eyes and um again it all revolved around this, you know, you want optimal health, you want to be better and blah, blah, blah, and we had had a guy who went through the program and he was there giving his talk and he turned to him and said, I'm significantly happier.

I am more motivated than ever in my 30-year career with this organization. I have more clarity, more focus. My wife tells me that she is more in love with me than ever. I am calmer as a father with my children. I am more productive. I know I'm getting better deals. In fact, last night I was with one of my clients. quotas and I know I would be absolutely stranded today if it weren't for this program and you hear that and you think, aren't every organization investing in that right now? Why isn't everyone participating in that? It's baffled me for 9 years, so yeah, I mean, what are the barriers?

The boss said that this is career suicide, what actually happened was that you expanded your book by 50%, exactly like that, your productivity skyrocketed, which must have been incredible for your boss, who witnessed the right thing as If I still wanted to deny it. in a way, um, but you know, those, those, those business growth statistics. I was the only runner who wasn't angry on Friday and the only runner who wasn't literally suicidally depressed on Monday and Tuesday because, um, I wasn't. drinking alcohol given the fact that I'm sorry given the fact that that culture is so oriented around drinking, yeah, how did you overcome social triggers to be able to do it without all your colleagues and clients wanting nothing to do with you? because you were suddenly doing things differently, stepping up, changing it right, recognizing what you're really trying to achieve, so for me I wanted to build good relationships, um, that was really key.

I don't have a high turnover of clients. I actually build these. relationship with clients and then you know that for your career you work with those people, so I changed the way I did things. I mean, I ran a relay race in the Olympic Stadium and 40 guys and girls participated in that relay race every weekend. People would do park runs together and talk about PBS for months before the event at the Olympic Stadium, which everyone looked forward to, and it built better relationships with people. I used to take people cycling, that's why I live in Mior, so I took people.

Riding a bike is the man therapy you can have going up a hill. Grind is probably the wrong word, but you can sit on that bike going up a hill and have a conversation with someone about real life, about the truth of things, not about little things. fickle conversations. that all runners have at 3:00 in the morning that they can't really recommend as a real, genuine connection, so I think it was about taking a step forward and I mean, we've talked about this before. I also had to do it stealthily. drink, sure, you know we live in a world where you might have to drink stealthily, but this is true, meaning you would have a drink that looked like an alcoholic drink and that wasn't just so you could dodge that bullet, yeah exactly .

Yes, and no one would know and you become a master at it. I remember one time I sit down, I get there early and I tell the barman and I say look, I'm not going to drink, I tip him £50 and say whatever they want. He brings out that it's alcohol-free, so, he's fine, sure not, I've got you covered, a Big C customer with income, right, they love their alcohol and they expect the alcohol to be okay. They had beers for everyone, yeah, yeah, yeah, great, then. Come on, they PL go down a pint, go down a pint, go down a pint, go down a pint, they all have their pints.

The next minute he comes up to me and is literally carrying a sequined flower glass with a little handle on the right and then a root beer that has powder in it and he slams them both in front of me like this and I'm like an idiot , so I have to go get rid of this and give myself a pointer on how the pandemic was for everyone. This, what did you learn about people's behavior during the pandemic and the organization and community of people? Yes, the pandemic decimated society's relationship with alcohol. I talk to people every day who say that's when it went up a notch and people have taken shelter.

They haven't been able to bring it back down, they haven't been able to reduce it because it was so shocking that it was a trauma, so I think you know that has been very detrimental for the vast majority of people. people will mention the pandemic as when it started to get worse. For the organization, something absolutely beautiful happened, so when we were all stuck at home and we initially started, I could see that we had all these workers that we had. These NHS health staff are in the middle of this madness and rely on alcohol because it is the tool to deal with stress and difficulties.

I'm talking about the number of doctors, nurses and surgeons that go through our program. You'd be surprised, so I said, look, hello. Community, we have the opportunity to do good here. Are you willing to return? Get back into the community and get involved meaningfully as we open our doors free of charge to all NHS staff, healthcare workers and emergency workers. The response was incredible, I mean, over 10,000. people like yeah I'm in, I'm in, it was amazing so we opened our doors for free and we had this great power and I was actually talking to a nurse the other day and she told me I signed up during that program and the only thing What got me through it was being part of your community and that was my that was my vice that was my addiction the Facebook group and the community was the liberation yeah I mean certainly alcohol sales increased during that period consumption of alcohol increased during that period, but I think your registrations increased like 30% or something during that period of time, yes, the world was divided, there were people who fell. the bottle and and and I used an excuse and there were people who said, "I'm going to use this as an opportunity to change." You see, the most important thing there is when we change our environment.

Our brain is driven to neuroplasticity, so it's easier for us to change behavior when we change our environment, which is why it was for some people when they said they were right, no. I'm going to get through this and make a difference, and I think for a lot of people. Those who did some of the work and made the changes in their lives, have continued to have a healthier or non-existent alcohol-free relationship with alcohol and I think some people have found that it has regressed since they did that work and so of all people who have gone through your program, what do the statistics say about people who continue without drinking compared to people who did the challenge and then resume some semblance of their previous lifestyle?

What is the staying power of these types of challenges and how long do they last? You have to do it before you see an increase in the sustainability of a new way of living your life. So when you look at the challenge as an example, the vast majority of people come and do a 28 day challenge because it's the one. that just seems noticeable and then they go back to drinking a little bit and then they do the 90 Day Challenge and then they can go back to drinking a little bit and then they go back to a year um and that's why I wanted to change things up because what I see in this is that people are drinking and then they go back to not only drinking but probably start to go back to a problematic way and some people can get worse and worse and that's why we had to increase the availability of tools and resources to support people in a deeper way because in some ways the challenge is like this light element of "hey, let's try this" and getting people to actually do the work. about changing the things that drive you, I mean, with every fiber of my being, that's how we really help people, like, for example, how we talk about emotions.

Have you ever been taught to deal with your emotions? What about stress? What tools do you use? to mitigate stress like um aside from just drinking alcohol you know? do you meditate? do you exercise? do you do breath work? Know? When you leave a board meeting in the afternoon and it was stressful for you? Do you reach for coffee, which significantly delays your ability to get back into recovery or do you just do a little bit of breath work to get that same high but then you go back to feeling parasympathetic, so I think people don't have these tools, not even They have the awareness they need.

I don't have the understanding and so helping people get through that experience, giving them the tools to mitigate that compulsion, that's what gives them a much better chance at longevity to change their relationship with alcohol from a perspective of sales, although 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 now you present it, well, it's actually complicated and here's all this, it's very difficult to scale and sell to someone who says, listen, man. I just want to drink less like me. I don't need to talk about my childhood with you.

Yeah, let's not talk about that on the cover. Ok, let's get back to the 28 day challenge and get startedthere, because in all these things. I'm going to help you start to see that these things exist um and I think it's a gradual thing, right, it's the cooking of the frog, do it little by little, soft by soft, and the frog won't jump, right, um, I think. It's the frog or the lober example, boil the frog boiling, yes you have to boil a frog slowly, so this is where we will meet the people, let's start on this journey, see this as a journey to change your relationship with alcohol and It may take you a few years, it may be faster than that, but on that journey we are going to continue to make changes in your life, changes in personal development, we are going to help you with these various things and we are going to help you have a better relationship. with alcohol along with all the benefits of that and all the work that you've done around the behavioral psychology part of this.

What have you learned about the difference between breaking a bad habit and forming it? a new habit and and and where does that understanding influence how to put together these programs or how to approach someone who is thinking about making a change? Wonderful question. The first part here is, um, Professor BJ Fog Stanford. A wonderful college human being changed his relationship with alcohol. His research says that we change behavior by feeling good, not by feeling bad, so when you look at everything we do here, it's about having positive aspirations, right? Oh, I want that, I want to be fit, I want to be.

Lose weight I want to be happier I want to be healthier, so if we stay in that positive psychology We focus in an aspirational direction, then I think that's where we find the vast majority of people changing a bad habit instead of having a problem and that type of language let's stay with this um part of changing habits the second part that says is that bad habits are like weeds, okay, 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 are fine, you do it in the garden too, you are not a lucky man, but if you have ever pulled a weed well, if you just go and pull it, it will grow back and usually grow back worse, so we actually have to go.

Through the process of cultivating it, what do we do to cultivate good habits? Good habits are how we break a bad habit and that's why during all of that, the challenge and all these other programs we are pretty ruthless. to help people develop habits, the habit of meditation, the habit of exercising, the habit of sleeping well, the habit of eating well, the habit of gratitude, journaling like these are the tools we use to help people, my anecdotal observation on this, which is What's not clinical in the slightest is that people who have a normal, quote-unquote, relationship with the world and with themselves, that is, they are not , they're not, you know, addicted by nature, they don't have that addictive drive.

Such people seem to have the ability to eliminate bad habits by concentrating on cultivating new positive habits, and as a result of investing their energy and enthusiasm into these new positive habits, the bad habits, as you know, simply end up disappearing. This is something that my wife is very good at and this is also something that I look at with great curiosity because I can't do this, how do you do that? That's not how I'm wired at all and that's because fundamentally my wiring is different. I am connected with a very powerful inclination towards addictive behaviors and things that do not serve me and that understanding allows me to approach this differently and say that it will probably work for me, it is good to cultivate positive habits, but I like to make a classification of the bad habit , as I have to approach it as how dangerous and sharp it is and no matter how much I pull out those weeds, they will always grow back unless I pull them out completely and make sure. that every little, every little yes, like a tentacle of yes, goes well and that takes a lot of effort and diligence and perseverance to do so, so I guess what I'm talking about is the fundamental difference between the person who is connected in that kind of addictive construct versus the kindest average person, if there ever was one, and I wonder how, in working with so many people through this program, you begin to identify who the people are who might need that kind more of an acute repair of the problem that they are facing that a 28 day challenge is not going to solve and is there some kind of path to guide them towards a recovery modality that they might be more prepared for because I see that all of this is complementary to 12ep exactly 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 am very indoctrinated in the 12 steps. and I believe in it and I've witnessed thousands of people who have miraculously reinvented their lives and overcome the most drastic circumstances to become incredible people, so I'm always the first to say, you know, if you think you have a problem, you should check it out and suspend any judgment you have or anything you've seen in any movie that has made you think one way or another about what this show may or may not be, um and I also understand that it isn't. for everyone and if you have a casual relationship with drinking you may know that AA is not the place for you, but I'm curious about the hard cases that I'm sure will find their way into your program, absolutely, and then what happens with those people okay, well we're very careful first thing, let me tell you about Keith, so Keith three tries at The Priory, the first time he went to The Priory, which by the way, cost 10s of thousands of pounds. to go to the priory The Priory is a treatment center the treatment center one of the treatment centers for

rich

people in the UK or London the first time he goes to the prior it's a week later and he has a drinking problem again the second time It was probably a couple of weeks, right, very quickly he had problems with alcohol consumption again.

I recently spoke to him, so he came into our full management program a year ago. That's fine, and he's one of our biggest supporters. He says, "I just don't feel like it." True, he says I have a drink from time to time, true, 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 absolutely traditionally you would say he's here and yet. We have been successful in helping him change this, okay, let's ask ourselves again in 5 and 10 years and see where he is, but I think the best thing about him is that now he is on a path of self-discovery.

He's currently immersed in psychedelics and he's learning how to go through trauma and he discovered that he had significant childhood trauma that occurred in the program and now he's in this full personal development mode of making big changes in his life from this trajectory of saying " Hey, maybe, maybe there's more." to this maybe if you try to change some of these things here this might diminish or disappear a little bit for you, so really what I'm saying is there's no black and white, there's no need for him or her to go here. You just have to go there, why don't we look at the lifestyle things?

Why don't we look at the things that we know all of science tells us drives compulsive behavior like stress like trauma like emotions like connection? People like meaning and purpose, why don't we address all of these things with them and then ask that question? Well, let's give the example of depression. Well, someone feels depressed, he goes to the doctor, he says: I feel depressed now, the doctor may or may. Don't ask them about their relationship with alcohol, chances are the doctor or psychiatrist will prescribe medication for their depression, but every day they're drinking the most powerful depressant in the world and you're not like, wait, what's going on? with the dream? them, are you sleeping? because now we know that sleep deprivation is, I mean, well, we know that it's used as torture, so sleep deprivation is a major driver of compulsive behavior, all these people who work shifts and late hours. night and things like that, what's going on? mental health what about ADHD and things like that?

Have you been taught how to regulate your central nervous system? No, they have never been taught so well. That's why they consume alcohol. Because they have never been taught how to regulate their nervous system. They're right, so are they exercising, are they running, that conversation is not happening, here's a pill or you have a problem, you need to go here and I think let's start with this conversation of okay, if it's not the challenge, then why not? Look at these things together, let's look at them with a fine tooth comb, in fact, we use some cool technology, the aura ring, things like that, we help them see data, 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 prime movers, we've reviewed all the data, we've captured all the evidence and of those prime movers there's amber red and green, if there's a lot of red, then absolutely whatever you do, stay alcohol free.

You need to move those things from Red to Amber before you even consider trying to control your alcohol consumption, which is what they came for in the first place. So I think we give people clarity and understanding about what they need to do to have a better relationship with them. alcohol I'm using the word better than said let's say you went through that program and once again you come back to you absolutely need to go to a treatment center or you need to go to step 12 or you need to find the next thing um and I, but I think this is a part where we can help people sooner.

All the apps that are available now and The Trackers are really effective. I think it's to reconfigure people's relationship with alcohol because you mentioned the aura ring or you have a scream, um, and you can show people what the data looks like, here's this, this is what your night was like last night after of two glasses of wine and your HRV is, you know, below the floor and your resting heart rate is much higher. higher than normal and your breathing rate is off and the lack of deep sleep and REM sleep like it's there and I think those interfaces are very effective in showing the drastic difference between what healthy sleep looks like from the previous night compared . and I think shocks are very effective at getting people out of whatever they've convinced themselves of when you can actually see what your body is doing, how it responds to it, reframes everything and gives people a point. from the outset as if they didn't.

I don't really have to deal with the fact that whether they have a problem or not, they're like I need to sleep better and in order to sleep better I need to do this, it's like different things speak to different people. you mentioned weight loss, that's another one obviously, but hey, building a more successful business, you know, I mean Alex Orosi out there saying, you know absolutely I stopped drinking, it was the best, everything has skyrocketed since then, this, This, stopping drinking was the catalyst for a big transformation for me and having a big influencer like that talking about it in that way.

I think that's going to reach a lot more people and they're going to say, oh, I want to double my business this year, but the difference with the scream is like it's literally immediate, like it's overnight, you can see this, yeah, build it. your business over time, you had a 50% increase, like these things are real, but they are stories told by someone else, they are not direct experiences that you can get in a, you know, literally, in a period of a couple of hours exactly, I mean your man Blake behind the camera was saying the exact same thing, he was looking at him with his scream and he was like, wait a minute.

I'm really having a hard time, yeah, um, and as a new parent you have enough sleep deprivation without having it all, everything is already against you, so explain to me what this whole management program is about. Absolutely yes, total control. This is confusing to me. Go ahead, bear with me, Rich, we're doing good, we're doing good things, um, okay, so I was born again from research, um, you know, what I saw was a lot of people like me took a break. of alcohol and then returned to the problem. drinking so I knew there was more to it like I knew there was more to the underlying um and what I wanted to do is help people in a more intimate way so what would that look like when we sat down as a team?

We know that we have successfully unlocked the best product ever sold by anyone, no beer is fair, that was the best product we have ever sold and so if we look at this to serve a different audience and in a more impactful way, what is correct? Is it to help people understand what drives compulsive behavior? Can someone control their alcohol consumption well? I mean, I have been able to successfully control my alcohol consumption. I usually choose not to drink. From time to time I have a drink. I had a very relationshipproblem with alcohol I know thousands and thousands and thousands of people who have taken the same journey and have been able to achieve the same thing, so what is it to do that?

That's why we came up with something that would help people clearly understand what I'm actually driving, so the idea is to go through an 8we program, we use some pretty interesting technology, we help people see their stress. I'm talking about seeing minute by minute if they are in sympathetic or parasympathetic and being able to see the impact. What that is affecting them is like one of the most impactful parts of the program because the vast majority of people who go through the program are very motivated. He's had celebrities on the show. We have had owners of very large MPS companies, um director. the biggest banks in the world, whatever, um And when you see your stress in data like this so clearly, but you also see the impact that alcohol has when you have a drink, it's very, very compelling for change, so the we take on this journey, we help them. we understand what's driving the behavior and then we train them to try to change those various areas of their life when people come into the program, literally 100% of people are looking for control, they're saying, "I don't want to stop drinking." I don't want to stop, I'm looking for safe control at the end and the joke I told you is that this is the great saying of, you know, the great kind of Recursive Mantra of every good alcoholic that Do you hold on to this delusion?

This uh this great desire to be able to control your alcohol consumption to drink like a gentleman, so if we take just one, two, 10, five, 10% of those people and we change them and we actually achieve that, that is not success, It is success only to the extent that people who really need it more. Acute help is not deprived of that because they are trying to perpetuate the illusion that this is possible for them and in that case yes, then it would be problematic, but what we are doing with that is say well, thank you very much for coming and seeking control now let's take a look at your life these are the areas of your life that you need to change now the program will change your life because we will show people the areas of their life that need to change so we are going to start doing trauma work to the vast majority of people who come here, they've never done any trauma work, they've never done any talk therapy like that in itself is hugely positive, it's okay to take someone who is looking to control their alcohol consumption and then bring it to the table to start dealing with this childhood that you've been ignoring and accumulating your entire life that's success or what, and we're talking about stress.

Very true, how about we teach them how to deal with a much higher level of stress? I had a guy who built a business with a turnover of 500 million and he says that he had no idea that he needed to integrate these tools into my day. and that he had no idea how much stress I could handle until I eliminated the vast majority of my alcohol consumption and I'm talking about the vast majority right now, he rarely drinks, we caught up with him in mior, he flew private. jet to take my wife and I out to dinner and he said "I'm going to be here for 15 days and maybe one day I'll have a drink or two, the rest I just have no interest at all and so This is what happens when you show him to 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 little bit of problems in your life I've struggled to? change and it keeps coming back, let's look at some areas of your life and change them and see if that finally works for you, sure, yeah, I get it and I totally get it, I think in the board game of sobriety and abstinence if one wants, now.

You know, following this path of total control and realizing again and again that it is out of control, maybe it is time to not pass, go and maybe not go to jail, but go to the first step which is to accept. the fact that you are powerless over this substance and that your life is unmanageable, yes, because the true premise of 12ep is to recognize your inability to control this, this thing that you know persists to the level of amazement, yes, absolutely, and it has been It's been a huge success, it's been one of the most important things in society for a long time to help people change their relationship with alcohol and I think where we're coming from with this is just to expand on that story. widen that gap widen that story say look, people are different and you don't know what the catalyst could be to finally change someone to finally leave them for good to finally make changes in their life or their business whatever 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 someone listening to this and they've had a significantly problematic relationship with alcohol and See, do you know what I've done and at that point they decide to go and make these changes in their life and go on a personal development journey and I don't know, go do some iasa or do iboga, which have I done? By the way, I'm crazy, but iboga is what stops them, which is very powerful to do so, so we just don't know what the catalyst will be for someone and I think when we open that conversation to say that there are other tools and a broad range of tools and we have to treat people like that and I think similarly that is the conversation in society, at what level is the problem?

At what level does the person have to admit that there is a problem? and if we turn to that conversation and say, let's not have a conversation about whether it's a problem, but let's just say that alcohol is causing you problems, because if so, why don't you change your relationship with it? Mhm, what have you learned about the relationship between ADHD and alcohol? Yes, 99.9999999% of people who achieve full control identify with ADHD or are divergent neurodes. My personal journey to understanding my incredibly destructive ADHD-derived behavior like a nuclear bomb has been so intrinsic in helping me understand other people and comply. a program that is helping people significantly change ADHD and alcohol coping mechanism are intrinsically linked when we look at this in the data, what happens with ADHD is we have that hyperactivity, so imagine, do you have ADHD?

Well, I asked for personal reasons because I had never once thought about whether or not I had ADHD and last year I did a very intensive week of trauma therapy right around this time when I was in what kind of trauma therapy, childhood trauma, and basically every trained practitioner who saw me and I saw several of them over the course of this week and they all agreed that there was unanimous consensus that I had ADHD, but I was not a hyperactive child, like it was a whole of completely different circumstances, but go ahead, if you're not feeling hyper like a child to add so um, there's a couple of things here, don't let me lose track, there's a couple of things here if you look at Gabr Mate's work, he says ADHD actually adds things like that.

A coping mechanism of a child traumatized by TR is fine, so this past trauma drives us as an engine to create this. There are also some really interesting studies that show that you know ADHD is intrinsically linked to lack of sleep. deprivation in babies creates ADHD now my mom always said I slept four hours and every 24 um when I was a baby, so I'm like, oh, thanks mom, you gave me ADHD, no, so, oh, come on, that's not fair, well, yes, exactly I love you mom, um. What happens with ADHD is to imagine that it's like a dynamo you know when you push the car like this and the little dynamo that you push and push and push goes away in the distance, that's ADHD, so our central nervous system activates. faster, okay?

So the stress that we bring into the day, let's say you drank last night or you didn't sleep well, increases that level of stress that you have and as you get busy, you drink coffee throughout the day, which has a big impact on our core. The nervous system once again adding more stress is that we enter this hyperactive state that we love because it makes us very busy, in fact we can do the work of 10 people in a day and we pride ourselves on this power capacity. handle stress and get a lot of work done and be productive the problem comes at the end of the day just like that Dynamo we've been going around and around and around and around and around guess what the default outcome is that your central nervous system needs numbed now and what? it's good if it's a coping mechanism for a traumatized child then the truth is a lot of it is raw emotion, treated emotion that drives our stress and daily, you know, a lot of daily activities like that in a very busy life. brain and then people say I just can't turn off my brain and alcohol is the most available tool that exists to help us turn off our brain the problem is not alcohol the thing is not the problem what is the problem is a very central nervous system stressed that it is not calming down and that is why here we are literally forcing people to meditate.

I'm talking about monitoring them every day and calling them if they don't meditate. I call this the butt kicker, right? when I said I want to hand out a you're holding an aura ring for people who are just listening, so this is used for extreme accountability because I have all these business owners with these high achievers, these people come in and they leave, just I mean. I tried to stop drinking and it came back and I was like, yeah, but what are you doing with your stress? Well, I'm very stressed, yes, but what are you doing?

You don't do anything, so when we teach them these tools and they calm that central. nervous system, that's when all the change happens. You were talking about doing traumatic things. Meditation for me is really. I look at it like this and some people may not like this, but it works for me. I'm sick, right? I have ADHD. I'm sick, if I don't take my medication, then I'll take the drug off and my life will blow up. I'm like everything is exploding so I have to medicate every day and my medication is really simple, it's exercise and meditation, um, etc. help people see it from that perspective who they are oh I tried meditation but my brain is so busy I can't turn it off yes that's because you need to meditate super interesting yes yes I have a lot more I need to learn about The world of ADHD is just starting to figure it out.

My first step there and the first step for me was to get ADHD for Dummies. I found it really interesting. Do you know what it was? It was a huge relief to read about these things. Like oh so I'm not a weirdo, we're allowed to swear, yeah you can swear it's the same thing. I've read a little bit and it's the same experience when you go to an AA meeting for the first time and you think you're the only one who has this experience or feels a certain way and you hear your story told, yes, exactly, I felt that point of relation to what I have learned so far you felt that the first time I went there to Alcoholics Anonymous, yes, really, yes.

I wasn't ready to do the work and I didn't do it. I didn't stay and I didn't get sober right away, but I knew I belonged there, so I went to AA and I walked back and thought, "This is not me and I heard this as a put-down before the investigation, my friend didn't, but What I'm saying here is that I think the part is that you immediately identified with it because you recognize it." those conversations and those stories and there are a lot of people out there who say, 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 I get it, but I also think that it's important to encourage people to let go of their previous convictions and judgments because they're often misplaced, yeah, and I think people come in with um, you know, predisposed to not like it and the moment it happens something and they like to hang their hat, walk out the door and say it didn't work for me.

I mean, I answer emails every day. I tried it didn't work. I like that it didn't work and you like to deconstruct that and guide them through that and most of the time it's their own biases, you know, that don't work for them, so I always want that to be available for people and for, um uh , you know, eliminate, do your best to put the LIE as whatever notion you have about what is and what is not, you know, and a lot of people get obsessed with the things of God and We all have our baggage with the religion and the things that have happened to us, so you know, I sympathize with that, but I think there are ways around it and again I say this from the perspective of not being critical in the At least what you're doing, I think what you're doing is super powerful and it provides this incredible welcome to millions of people who have some kind of problem ranging from very moderate to somewhat concerning with their alcohol use and you are able to capture those people, correct that problem and produce better lives. as a result and I think that is a worthy mission for your life and I think that you should pay attention to the words of the Lama and take that to heart and put them into action is quite audible, you know, I think what you are doing is something beautiful, thanks, yes,years exactly, that's not far behind, yes, I don't think so, I don't think it's nine years, it can't be because you started one year, no. beer in 2015 yeah, you started the podcast right away pretty, really close I think not, probably two years later, God, it's my memory, but yeah, yeah, um, I think, yeah, it's six, seven years, yeah, cool , clearly, is not good at timelines. listen to the podcast anyway man that was great thanks come back and share some more with me and let's get you out so you can enjoy this beautiful weather we have here in Los Angeles although in Mayorca it's probably better but of course anyway you are here for a moment, you enjoy your time.

I just want to say Rich again, you like, I congratulate you so much, you know, I congratulate you so much for inviting us and sharing this message. I think the best thing we can do is share this. message to inspire people around this thing that you know is going to happen over the next decade or two um time's up for alcohol um so thank you yeah absolutely fine at least I can be back at your side service, thank you R, thank you, regards. peace, that's all for today, thanks for listening. I really hope you enjoyed the conversation to learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today.

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.com, where you can also find the full podcast archive. As podcast merchandising, my Finding Ultra books express the change in the form of plant energy, as well as the plant energy meal planner in meals. Ricoroll.com, if you want to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is subscribe to the show on Apple Podcast on Spotify and on YouTube and leave a review or comment supporting the sponsors who support the show. It is also important and appreciated and sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is of course amazing and very useful and finally to get podcast updates, special offers on books, meal planner and others topics, subscribe to our newsletter which you can find in the footer of any page on Rich roll.com Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Cameo with additional audio engineering by Kale Curtis the video editing of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis with the help of our creative director Dan Drake portraits by Davy Greenberg graphic and social media assets courtesy of Daniel CIS.

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