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

alcohol is holding you back everybody is searching for Optimal Health Peak Performance the more productivity in their work how to lose weight and yet they're not realizing that this vision of what alcohol-free could feel like that is the one thing that will give them what they are looking for rwer Fabs is a former oil broker who after a falling out with booze decided to put the plug in The Jug the benefits were so profound he would later walk away from his career and finance to become an alcohol-free lifestyle Advocate our relationship with alcohol is intrinsically linked to the experiences we had as a child that's just a fact ruri co-founded oneyear no beer a subscription-based alcohol prevention program that now boasts over 100,000 members if you want to change your behavior get around a community of people who are living like that as we welcome this new year I offer this conversation as encouragement to consider the many ways in which alcohol continues to interfere with your health because it's time to put booze in the rear view I'm extremely proud to introduce you to our newest brand partner on check out their lineup of super comfortable sleek and durable pieces for yourself at on.com Rory so nice to meet you thank you for doing this uh what you have to share what you represent uh what you've created what you advocate for I think is not only extremely powerful but also extremely timely as we see mainstream culture start to catch up with what you've been kind of talking about for quite some time now there is there is a definite surge in popularity uh and enthusiasm for the alcohol-free lifestyle that is not only a an affirmation of your work but on some level might even be surprising the extent to which it it seems to be taking hold yeah well rich thank you so much for having me on the podcast and um you know I think like you just said this has been nearly a decade now um nine and a bit years of um spreading this message and when we first started um spreading this message we were definitely early right we were we were early but at the time I was thinking oh this is this is this is going to happen now and people were saying oh this is so in the moment like what you just said people were saying that 9 years ago and I think what I've realized is that Paradigm shifts like this like major Paradigm shifts where Society is completely saturated in alcohol and the world is changing its relationship with alcohol happen really really slowly right and um you know we'll talk talk more about this but that kind of kind of changed how I operated in the business because instead of being focused on right here and right now like what's happening in the next few months or the next year it became no this paradigm shift is going to happen over decades like you just have to sit in and keep spreading the message and keep coming on Amazing podcasts like this and inspiring people and helping them think about things slightly differently and I think what's been amazing is to see all of these sober influences come out these alcohol free drinks businesses I mean I can think of probably four or five alcohol uh free businesses that came from one year no that we know of right wow um so we have been one of the pioneers and early adopters helping make this paradigm shift in the world and now the momentum is growing and the momentum is growing and the momentum is growing it's exciting the podcast that Andrew huberman did last year on alcohol I think was the number one podcast or number two pod most listened to podcast on the Apple podcast platform across the world for the entire year wow I don't know if you knew that I didn't know it but I mean the hubman podcast is our source of good science that we use to um influence the program and there are so many elements of that that we've adopted into our programs and I think not only is that really telling but I would say I know most of the people in my industry we're all friends right we we we chat to each other I'm not seeing them on the big podcasts out there I'm not seeing them being interviewed on TV on radio I'm not seeing them yet and I think this is the next Evolution like you are an early adopter you had Andy on early you're now having me on to spread this conversation this would be my sort of my Call to Arms if you like to any other podcast or influencer to say let's really get this message out out there there are so many of us who are spreading this message and that message being do you know what alcohol is holding you back and that's it it's simple right if you are regularly consuming alcohol it is holding you back even if you're only very periodically consuming it it's holding you back there is no positive physiological benefit whatsoever yeah that comes from drinking period yeah and and let let's talk about that specifically right we don't you know a lot of people don't want to hear that message you know oh this my trainers give me cancer right you know everything's all the health issue but the the facts are absolutely there it's 100% poison it's neurotoxic it's terrible for our brains it's terrible for our bodies there are no physiological benefits at all whatsoever to drinking alcohol um it was so impactful I saw yesterday in the news that Lewis Hamilton is has said he's just done done 4 months alcohol free and he did it because he's looking for an extra 1% this year right or coming into next year so you know this is the this is really the message is about everybody is searching for Optimal Health people are looking for Peak Performance they're looking for more productivity in their work they're looking for how to lose weight they're trying to get all these things and yet they're not realizing that this thing this daily habit that they're doing that the whole of society is normal izing that is the one thing that will give them what they are looking for the Counterpoint to that would be the person who says I understand everything that you're saying but when I need to take the edge off or I want to take the edge off a drink is pretty reliable in doing that completely and as an antidote to the loneliness epidemic if I want to be social and see my friends uh that is you know something that's sort of doer like we go to the bar we go to the pub this is how I get to hang out with the people that I care about and so you're asking me to sacrifice that when I'm already lonely coming out of a pandemic and and deprived of the social interaction required to just be a healthy human completely and that is what the person who drinks alcohol would say are the benefits okay that's the benefits of drinking social inclusion uh the benefits of drinking are being being included on in all those things and being able to do that stuff and being able to take the edge off and so as long as there are benefits to drinking alcohol people are going to continue seeking it and looking for it and I think this is part of the conversation that we're going to have today which is that if the only option for people is abstinence right or drinking problematically or drinking like fish like everybody does then we're not helping people in that Middle Lane area we're not helping people in that area where they have a better relationship I'm not going to call it a healthy relationship because there is no healthy relationship but where they have a better relationship with alcohol and that means that they can still do some of those social things they can still operate how they were but it's not having that significant impact that significant negative impact on their life what do we know and not know in terms of what alcohol is doing to our body to our sleep to our mental health Etc yeah um well like you said I mean the hubman podcast was was fantastic and I think um when if you look Dr Arman is a perfect example he um doc Arman he says you know every time you take a drink right so just two units it starts to dull your prefrontal cortex which is that melon behind your brain that's that area of rational decision-making uh moral compass comes from there so he says how often do you want rational decision- making and moral compass to go on holiday and that's effectively what happens when you drink and you know now we're talking about not just doc Arman Andrew hubman talking about it being entirely neurotoxic to the brain it shrinks the brain over time causes memory loss like so what we what we can just draw a line under is say that this is completely toxic there are there are no benefits to drinking alcohol um it's going to have a significantly negative impact on your brain a significantly negative impct on your body and yet the thing about that is is it's so prevalent in society it's so normalized that the conversation of you have to be abstinent I think is the conversation which is stopping many many many people from taking just the first one or two steps to change things like sleep as an example alcohol is horrendous for sleep right alcohol stops US going into deep sleep deep sleep is that area that that that needed part of sleep where actually the vast majority what they believe now the vast majority of neuroplasticity happens okay so that's our brain's ability to learn and learn new things and change Behavior so drinking alcohol is in direct negative correlation to trying to change Behavior it stops you changing behavior and there's so many areas like this where it it holds her back let's talk about weight loss right alcohol significantly inhibits your weight loss um it's 100% poison therefore the liver must process that before it processes other um fat loss so it stops you losing weight plus there's lots of calories in let's let's take a little example here okay imagine I created a pill right that would help you for your headache and you have a headache and you go down to the pharmacy and you get the pill and it's wonderful this this this it acts incredibly fast it removes your headache you feel so much more at ease and then 15 minutes later you need to take another pill and then so you feel a bit better again and that's all very good then another 15 minutes go by and guess what now you need to take two pills okay and this goes on for the evening to try and get rid of your headache and then you go to bed that night and you fall asleep and you wake up the next day and the headache is 10 times worse you feel low and you feel in more pain than you did before how successful would that be like as a product yeah not great right so and this unless you're the person selling the product then it's pretty great yeah that's another conversation to be had and this is the thing with alcohol is it must be one of the world's worst relievers of stress I recently interviewed a wonderful woman Dr reget Sin from Yale University and she spent the last 30 years studying alcohol and addiction and they asked her to set up a new Department specifically for alcohol abuse abuse studies and she got 6 months into this setup um of the of the department and she went back to the board and said I don't want to call it Yale University study for alcohol abuse I want to call it Yale's University study for stress because alcohol is just the outcome the actual source is the stress and the stress that we have and so alcohol is a terrible terrible stress reliever for people and I think inside all of this is what is keeping this completely stuck together like knowing that it's so bad for our health bad for our mental health it's you know as Professor David nut proved and got kicked out of the UK government for proving that alcohol is the world's most harmful drug and significantly negative on our physical and mental health why is it so prevalent and that is this part that we are trying to challenge it is the social conditioning it is $2 trillion dollars of marketing it is an entire machine which has spent decades upon decades upon Decades of programming us to believe that this thing this substance is the source of our health is the source of fun happiness of every of success of everything and interestingly right you look at the the the advertising budget for for alcohol right and the alcohol industry in the UK since 2004 200 before was Peak booze in the UK okay the most amount we were drinking and the advertising budget spent in the UK pretty much follows that trend line right the restrictions started to come in place and all of those things so all of this advertising all of this machine has been making us believe that alcohol is this Source um there was a another study recently I think this was probably three four years ago and there was an audience with a journalist in hiding in and there was some people trying to put a study together to study whether alcohol was good for you or not right and so they wanted to prove they were on stage saying we want to prove that moderate drinking is good for you okay and the journalist called this out I think it was in the New York Times because the room was full of the AL alcohol industry sure yeah so this is all the misinformation all that stuff out there that has been programming us to believe that it is a source well it's so prevalent to your point and we're so indoctrinated into a culture where we don't even second guess the fact that it's readily available and has been positioned to be this elixir of good times and and you know something that is considered innocuous in comparison to the drugs that are illegal when in fact the facts tell a very different story um yet I do think we're seeing this this up swing or upturn in especially in younger people who are opting out of this Paradigm which I think is really cool and I came across a study and researching you know to speak to you today this Sterling University study from 2017 that showed that 93% of people had a drink when they didn't want to and 84% had experienced pressure from friends to drink alcohol so we have on the one hand the science the irrefutable set of facts that show a really negative picture in terms of what this drug is doing to us on the other hand the more nefarious foe in this equation really is our social structure that keeps people stuck in Behavior patterns that don't serve them for fear of being ostracized by you know their their ingroup or their community of people yes and that's adequate enough strong enough to keep people doing things they don't want to do because the fear of suddenly not being able to participate in that is more than adequate to you know perpetuate a negative habit completely and you know that was our study with Sterling university did you commission that study did we did we we we've done various studies with Sterling University over the years um but I think you know that element of peer pressure like look at where I came from you know the oil broking industry um and my boss telling me that if I took a break from Al was like I I want to change my relationship with alcohol I I really think it's holding me back and he said you are committing commercial suicide if you stop drinking and and here I was built up a very successful business you know team of guys with me and for however many years maybe 10 years in this industry I was very focused on being the number one oil broker in the world like that was where I was going and here I was left with this decision to make of like do I really say goodbye to all of that and I I think this is in part what people are saying they're like okay that's very well I could see that I could be healthier I understand that it's a neurotox I understand that it's poisonous I like the way it makes me feel everybody's doing it and I don't really want to be ostracized from society if I stop I don't really want to stop drinking and be the guy who's left out here's an example of peer pressure I've been standing with a group of guys having a drink and um they are all playing they play cricket together and they're chatting away and they're talking about how important this season is right and one of the guys goes look why don't we get Mark you know he's the best player out of all of us and a bunch of guys are like we just can't do it we can't do it because he doesn't drink I mean that is the world we live in so I think as long as that exists it's going to to be very challenging for people to be just completely not drinking and I think inside this gray area that we've been trying to say is there is alternative to just not drinking right there's actually an area of of of drinking where you mostly don't drink and that's something I choose right I choose personally to drink in control I rarely have a drink the vast majority of the time I spend alcohol free every time I have a drink I feel absolutely terrible um I might have one with dinner but it's just rare all of the associations in my brain that I used to have like you go for a steak you need a drink or you go to the rugby you need to have pints all of those associations have disappeared so what I really call this now is like it's it's like having a base of alcohol-free of knowing and loving that version of yourself but occasionally tapping into that world where it's so expected it's so ingrained so you can join in with them and then get yourself back out again it's interesting that you dip your toe back in from time to time rather than just say like with everything that you know why do you still make the choice occasionally to to embibe for the two things that you talked about earlier for those benefits that are very real and they are for the vast majority of people the vast majority of people out there are not in very severe alcoholism the vast majority of people are sitting on the borderline they're sitting somewhere between um I drink I drink every day a little bit or I binge drink and the wheels come off but then I stop drinking for a bit and they look at this and they say hang on a minute I don't want to stop drinking I just want to be able to drink a bit less um and if we say to them well you no you can't do that that there you can't do that you you have to go and be completely abstinent then they'll just go okay I'm not going to do anything and this is what's happening so the reason why we stumbled on that and I say stum LED but it cost us a fortune and years and it was very expensive in learning it is that when we were sitting down and talking to our customers and this is people who came into the challenge had done the challenge a little bit and you know been successful with it in various different ways and we were talking to them about their experience and people would say you know I was watching your ads on Facebook for two years before I signed up to the challenge and I'm you know about paid media marketing that means that cost you a fortune and and in it we started to ask people like what's going on so we had another survey done we had another piece of research done and this is now tens of thousands of people who came through this piece of research and of those tens of thousands of people in countries all over the world 84% do not want to stop drinking right so if our only rhetoric is come and stop drinking come and do 90 days or come and do whatever it is is then we're stopping people helping change their relationship with alcohol earlier and this is one of the biggest changes in what we are doing now because we talk about control and if you in in this whole area of prevention if we can talk about control and say Hey you can have a healthier relationship with alcohol and when they come through a program help them see that the healthiest relationship with alcohol is to be predominantly abstinent then we can help people much much earlier yeah I understand that intellectually I totally get it uh yet at the same time like my brain's lighting up like a Christmas tree because I'm like a 12-step guy and I come into this from a very different set of experiences because I'm the guy who hears you can drink occasionally and I think well if I could drink once in a while and dip my toe in then I should just drink every day like I'm just wired differently you know I have a problem and that problem requires uh a certain program and set of tools that I have to diligently practice every single day or I'm in you know fear or there you know I create I create a you know a a grave risk to my health and well-being as a result that's a very different individual the classic alcoholic or addict um sits in a very different set of circumstances from the people that you're communicating with who don't have that problem or are not necessarily uh dealing with something severe or acute just you know are sick and tired of occasionally feeling lousy being hung over being pressured into drinking when they don't want to um and I think the challenge aspect of of what you've created gives people a a way to test the reality of what their relationship is because to the to your point about what was it 84% said they don't want to quit drinking you know how many of those don't want to quit because they have a problem they don't want to break up with their best friend versus somebody who's like this is not problematic for me so I don't see a reason to have to quit there's a deep sort of psychological network of neurons at play that that lead people to say things that are not in their best interest totally totally or or to throw up the wall against you know making the change that could actually you know be the differentiator between the life they're leading and the life they wish to lead totally and and I think this is the again the widening of the conversation here okay um Dr Judson Brewer being on this podcast amazing person he's coming back soon have him coming back um you're supposed to Surf with him um he's also been on our podcast and uh you know we've had part of his work on our programs amazing human being but he is helping people who have who might traditionally be considered very severe or s alcoholism or addiction to change their relationship with that to almost not drinking or not drinking at all using just meditation okay and there is Dr Joe despenza who is getting people to stand up out of wheelchairs an entire life in a wheelchair through meditation another very successful intervention for um people changing their relationship with addictions is boxing sport right um interestingly the most successful by volume of people right into vention in the world for helping people go from alcohol use disorder severe or severe alcohol use disorder to abstinent or a better relationship controlled drinking there is one thing out there in the world that stands high above everything else do you know what that thing is running you would like it to be that yeah what is it time explain most people grow out of it in time it's the most successful intervention out there and the thing about this is okay so we're using words like you're an alcoholic and this is alcoholism and all of those things is let's just widen up this conversation to say that different people need different things that some things might work for some people and might not work for other people and there is a huge array of tools and understanding that we can apply into this subject matter here that might be able to help someone sure and I think if we go with that widening of a of a of a place because like you said there are some people who say oh well that's not for me or you know I don't identify with that um I don't think there's only there's not one way and that's what's amazing about you rich right you know you've brought Andy onto this podcast this is clearly another way and it's helping people and you've brought me onto the podcast this is another way and it's helping people and there's lots more of us there's lots more of us that are skating this line of what would be could be this or could be that and yet people are coming out of it and transforming their lives MH time as an intervention is an interesting concept I can't help but wonder whether that's because everybody has to have their their experiences to come to the conclusion that it no longer serves them and you can't incept that level of willingness into somebody who's not receptive to hearing it they have to have a certain experience or reach a certain pain threshold before they're ready to make a change that's uncomfortable and even if you have a casual relationship with alcohol it still is like a very reliable friend that you're being asked to break up with or to spend time apart from and if alcohol isn't directly tied to a series of you know chaotic uh disruptive events in your life it's harder to make that argument until that person kind of brushes up against something that makes them reframe that relationship yeah I think like you said there a lot of people are waiting for a rock bottom moment um they're waiting for their hand to be forced the DUI or um the the the partner to say that's it I'm leaving and with all of my soul like deep to my core I want to help people before that I want to prevent that I want to tickle scratch GW at the bits inside where they can make a decision make a change make a judgment that connects to them and makes them realize that alcohol is the thing if if we swim back Upstream a bit more into and look at this prevention piece people are not looking for not drinking when when they are they're still stuck in The Matrix they're loving drinking it's not a problem they don't have a problem people convince themselves right right now we're in dry janary they're like okay I do dry janary every year therefore I don't have a problem but I also drink three bottles of wine every day at lunch now I know a guy who said that to me right yeah you know he drinks three bottles of wine at lunch every day probably finishes off with all sorts of whiskey at because he can do dry January it's not a problem because he has proved to himself that he can quit put it down when he wants to uh never mind you know the the the white knuckling and whatever all of those things the delusion went into you know just making it to day 30 so he could continue to perpetuate that argument as a form of denial but yeah millions and millions of people Rich millions and millions why this is why you know people who come into Alcoholics Anonymous or or 12ep programs will once they you know kind of get well or better will identify as a grateful alcoholic or addict because the pain was so severe and the Habit was so pronounced they were forced to reckon with it and you know break up with that lover and as a result have been blessed with tools and this brand new life that has created something wonderful out of you know this this disease um but for the person who's a heavy user or Drinker who can continue along that path without wreaking inadequate amount of havoc in their life where they have to confront or or or you know deal with the fact that they might have a problem they're stuck in a cycle that is harder to break because there aren't circumstances you can point to to say it's time you got to give it up yeah and they live their lives you know most of them lives the rest of their lives in this suboptimal state where they're really not living the life that is freely available to them otherwise yeah exactly and I think if we can direct the conversation to where people are looking where if 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 um I mean Lewis Hamilton right he wants an extra 1% imp performance Improvement um they want to avoid divorce uh they want to be a better father be a better mother they want to be calmer want to be happier so so if we can direct the conversation to there and then help people do the math oh you want to lose weight do you okay well let me just explain about what your regular drinking alcohol it'sit of a trojan horse right because that person is never going to walk into an AA meeting never and and if they really do have a problem by kind of welcoming the challenge under the rubric of weight loss or whatever uh the truth will be revealed as we talked about earlier either they're not going to make it or they stuck something will happen and yeah it will become clear rather soon whether that that program needs to be kind of you need escalated exactly well then that's another widening part again so it it doesn't go from oh I tried to do the challenge and therefore I need to go to AA what we're saying is okay so you've tried to do dry January for a year a few times you've stopped drinking for a month but then it comes back well there are drivers of compulsive Behavior do you know what those are and are you mitigating those and are you doing anything about them let me ask you um do you have a high level of stress in your life right what do you think every time I ask somebody that what do you think they say yeah of course they do well we just talked about why stress is absolutely intrinsically linked to your relationship with alcohol it's the most well well used known available readily available tool for dealing with stress but it also creates stress alcohol releases significant amounts of cortisol in fact they recently found regular alcohol consumption over time increases the production of cortisol okay so you're not only releasing cortisol in the moment but you're producing more cortisol over time now cortisol sends you into fight or flight right so your sympathetic nervous system stressed out your busy busy busy all day you know building the business being successful whatever it is and then not only that but so so that stress during the day then gets you to that end of the end of the day where you're like I need something to take the edge off but what people don't realize is that alcohol consumption over time is reducing your ability to deal with stress right so I speak to successful driven business owners all the time and I say to them do you have more stress now or have you reduced your ability ility to deal with stress and I think that's the thing people are not realizing about it let's have a conversation about stress right and let's deal with the stress let's talk about sleep let's talk about these other things because that's what you are looking for and in the background just like you said we're going to help you change your relationship with [Music] alcohol every athlete I know is going to tell you that having the right gear is key to per performance if what you're wearing is poorly crafted it's just going to put distance between you and those goals you've set you owe it to yourself to invest in the best and the best is on I'm obsessed with the cloud Ultra right on the trails and I just got the new NextGen Cloud Stratus 3 for the road I'm loving those but an also has this incredible line of lightweight high performance apparel that it's just beyond anything I've previously dawned it's like this second to none second skin I love to rock the sweat wicking Ultra tea and the ultra shorts which have this pocket right at the base of the spine that perfectly anchors your phone no jiggle I'm just so proud to partner with an and I love their vision for the future where their gear is engineered for circularity so check out their amazing lineup of super comfortable sleek and durable pieces for yourself at on.com when we cast our Gaze on the emotional landscape even more broadly uh the other thing that comes up for me is the difference between abstinence and emotional sobriety if you really are an alcoholic and you find your way into 12ep there is the initial phase of detoxifying your body right uh and and perhaps the Trojan Horse there is people come in they're just like I just want to learn how to stop drinking um what they don't realize and what comes later is this notion that that putting the bottle down is really just the beginning of trying to figure out a way to be emotionally sober because when you no longer have that coping mechanism all of the uncomfortable emotions flare up and you're and you're and you're left with no tools for how to manage them because the way that you have done it historically has been taken away so in the case of the people that you have worked with given that you know perhaps they're not alcoholics on some level everybody is self-medicating with alcohol and so when you remove their favorite medication what is replaced there and and what is the work that needs to be done to identify whatever those triggers are and find healthier ways of processing and transcending the emotional uh kind of um uh what's the word I want to use the emotional uh impulses and and and patterns that emerge that require redress because without any kind of tools to redress them they're going to wreak havoc and so perhaps you know you know alcohol resulted in angry flareups but if there's a latent anger underneath that you've been medicating with alcohol to kind of keep under wraps suddenly that's going to come out and it's probably going to be worse than it was when you were drinking yeah yeah and I think this part was the bit I felt you know really needed to evolve because I could see that we were helping people to take a break from alcohol I could see that we would we would give them this insight and this vision of what alcohol-free could feel like and you know what happens when somebody has been regularly drinking and stops they get all of this positive feeling that you know all these things come back but we weren't really there to help them with this emotional issue or the big t- word right right trauma um the driver of so much of our behavior um and so this is why we needed to evolve into more intensive program for people so that we could start looking at those underlying things because you're right right let's look at the work by gabber mate who significantly influences the programs in here or Bess of vandero right uh the body keeps the score our relationship with alcohol is intrinsically linked to the experiences we had as a child that's just a fact right now if we called this hey come and sort out your trauma program sure I think it would be even less successful than hey come and sort out your drinking problem right that's the so we have to do that in the background um now we use wonderful tools like oh you had Dick Schwartz on the on the things we use ifs we use um uh sematic experiencing things like that to help people start to feel these emotions but more importantly to link them back to these past experiences that they were that are running on autopilot let me give you a little example so you know Decades of therapy I did Psychotherapy psychodynamic therapy of talk therapy since six years old right tons and tons of counseling and therapy and I wouldn't say I said it helped evolve me significantly but I never really got to I never really came to find my trauma and when I went through a meditation but also in time with that with some trumatic experiencing I released some stuff and discovered a very old memory that nobody had talked about my mom and dad didn't talk about it my siblings nobody really talked about it and it was when I was 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 down and swim down and save me right now that created this imprint in my brain of needing to be saved I had no idea about this until you know like Steve Jobs says you have no idea until you look back and connect all the dots so what did it mean for me well through my life I had all these near-death experiences including my suicide attempts almost done every single one of those things I always had somebody nearby there to save me when I looked for partners I was looking for somebody who had saved me I was so destructive so disruptive I was looking for somebody to come and save me when I built my businesses they were always in suffering and I was looking for you know the next freelancer or agency or Guru to come and save my business so this pattern was locked in my subconscious I didn't even know it existed and this is the power of trauma and so when I got to understand that and shift it I got awareness of it that's the most empowerful thing about doing the work right I know you're such a big advocate of doing the work and this is it is when once I got awareness I could say hang on a minute I'm running that patent again like I I don't need somebody to save me I I don't need somebody to come and save me well the other piece there of course and sorry I don't mean to jump in um but the other piece isn't just needing somebody to save you it's putting yourself in Peril so that you can be saved so you're you're actually incurring risk into your life unconsciously for the purpose of whatever the emotional experience of being saved does for you exactly and that was the pattern of my life like ADHD severely destructive um all of those behaviors so I mean I I that's why I could easily have such addictive behavior and you know fit alcohol like a glove coming into that but now I'm such a huge advocate of doing the work like let's put it as simple as this alcohol is showing up a bit too prevalent in your life okay let's change that but first of all let's change that by doing the work you're such a huge fan of doing the work right that's what this podcast is all about it's about showing people what they need to do and the things they can do to do the work and I think when you do the work that is what is going to change your relationship with alcohol but people don't want to do the work but they're up for the challenge you know they're like 28 days if their mates are going to do it I'll do it too we'll see I'll beat you like that sounds fun right and there's an end point on that um so that's a much easier thing to get you know people to subscribe to it is it is the you've got to start nice you mean the work like I'm just going to you know say no to the beer at the pub but you know that's how these things have to begin and I think what you've done really effectively is just create a welcome that where um hey it's it's nice and warm in here it's cozy come on in there's lots of other people doing it we're having a good time we're building Community around it that's the other huge piece of course um where you feel supported and you don't feel alone or like some kind of uh insane outlier in trying to do this yeah the community element is is huge um it's so so powerful interestingly you know we were talking about dry janary and things like that um and what a lot of people when when they do dry janary is they hide away right they stay at home they go to the gym they change up their routine and what they're doing with all of this avoid their Social Circle cancel all that stuff count down the days to the 1st of February so we can go out and get smashed again and what we're doing while doing that is we are reiterating this belief right this this whole social conditioning that we need alcohol to have a good time that we need alcohol to have a fun life like Jan is so boring cold Dart that's what I'm not drink right so and and I think that's what can actually create more of an issue with with people's relationship with alcohol the main thing there is what's happening is people are becoming more disconnected right now unless you're a sociopath we don't want to be disconnected right we want to be connected and so this is the importance of being sociable being around people building a community for yourself who are changing their relationship with alcohol it's so well ingrained right that that if you want to change your behavior get around a community of people who are living like that and I think 9 10 years ago when I started changing my relationship with alcohol um that Community was pretty small nowadays it's huge right so don't don't hide away during dry Jan let's get out there go also the whole point is to develop some level of resilience and if you're just isolating and hiding from people then you're just preventing yourself from having those slightly challenging experiences that if you weather through them will teach you that you can do this thing right and it it emboldens you and and it and it strengthens that reflex to say no instead of you know sort of catering to social preference yeah well let's take it back I want to hear the whole story like I want to hear how this all came to be because it's there's some entertaining [ __ ] in there like about what happened with you man there so you grew up on this weird Island yes right I'd never even heard of this island M the aisle of M like way up in the northwest of Scotland you should run a retreat there yeah oh it's amazing beautiful you like I like well you live in myca that sounds like a lot better like keep it simple I moved from one Island to another it was m and now it's Mala yeah right well that makes sense is there a direct flight between the two probably not um so kid growing up in M I don't know what goes on there but I presume there's quite a bit of drinking absolutely in fact um west coast of Scotland um if you were to put it on the as a country it would be amongst the highest in Europe uh of drinking culture alcohol per capita um so yeah very synonymous with drinking culture up there um now um my uh my parents were originally born in England moved up to the aisle of mul and um so Des was that what what yeah um I think my dad married a beautiful woman and didn't want anybody to Nick her off so he he bought a he bought a hill farm which going to squander away with this woman and okay made sure she could that sounds healthy she couldn't go very healthy there's a book about that she's written one um so that's next for me well get my get my mom on the podcast yeah for sure I need to know more about this island and you being you know absconded with it's it's it's a beautiful beautiful part of the world 260 rain days a year though so um but anyway so I was very challenged in the head um I think I came out with a bump and um now been diagnosed with ADHD but back then and on the aisle of M they had absolutely no idea what this was they just didn't know they just knew they didn't like it um and so at 6 years old um after being significantly disruptive through school U my parents were given an ultimatum drugs or counseling um and to me I feel fortunate obviously everyone is different and make their own choices but I feel very for fortunate that they chose counseling because it started from a very young age me trying to understand what the hell was going on in here at 9 million miles an hour so you were just hyperactive sit still couldn't pay attention couldn't learn and so all the way through that my parents were trying to juggle this and five kids and businesses and all of that kind of stuff so um it was very difficult to get attention and I think quite young I figured out that when you set stuff on fire you get attention um so quite disruptive and you know through that my parents would say you know you're special you're gifted but the people out there they were like you're bad you're naughty you're disruptive um and I I recently spoke at um ADHD UK um I'm very very passionate about ADHD I'm very passionate about the conversation here about ADHD uh I was just it just wasn't known there wasn't support so when I got to 13 years old and with the noise going on inside my head and not understanding who I was or where I belonged um I decided to take an overdose um and uh I was very very dark place you know um I think I've talked about suicide before but I think there's such a great misunderstanding around it I think the place somebody gets to when they want to leave is such a horrendous place like it's it's it's a horrific feeling and and and there is no option and there's no other alternative you you're the problem you're the issue and you and the solution is gained by you departing mhm it's it's not a a a conscious decision it's awful how old were you at this point at 13 13 wow 14 I actually stepped off the stairs with a taaj jitsu belt around my neck I was determined to go and my parents were out at an anniversary dinner very thoughtful of me and they had an argument and came home early and they came home as I was dangling on the stairs and so they brought me down and coming from that my dad dad had worked at you know voluntary at child line and he was an amazing man and very wise and and very knowledgeable um and he knew from working with these kids and also cancer kids and things like that he'd done a lot of work that when you give a child hope they're far more likely to pull out of whatever it is they're going through so he encouraged me to write a letter to somebody famous now my dad was called Richard uh he run multiple businesses but one of of them was a recording studio um and so I was thinking of somebody famous and I thought ah Richard Branson so I wrote a letter to Richard Branson um at 14 and I said amongst a whole bunch of stuff about the weather and and how many sheet there were on the AIS of M I also said and I think this goes to show how separated my brain was but from this conversation of being special and gifted and yet naughty and bad and the special element I I wrote into him I said I'm going to change the world one day and I'm looking forward to having lunch with you so that's when I set off to try and change the world so I left school before the legal age set up my first company um determined to be the next Richard Branson um ran that for two years in fact by the time I was 25 I tried five different companies um the biggest of which employed 10 people for three years we used to run a a call center a little tell Center in in in edenburgh um and I was really desperate to try and make this massive impact in the world and yet here I was just failing again and again and again in fact I called myself a Serial fail preneur and back one day on the wonderful Isle of Mal drinking my sorrows um sitting in the pub I was speaking to a friend there and he said that's interesting story rui he said um you know you should go on that TV program where all failed entrepreneurs go and I was like what's that didn't really watch TV and he said The Apprentice um so I um I finished off my fifth pint and took my jovial half drunk self up and filled out the application form and wi forward 6 months you know flights to and from London doing interviews and doing all this preparation I'm sat outside the studio for Series 2 in the UK ready to go on the show like who was hosting it at that point Alan sugar Lord Alan sugar you're fired yeah okay so anyway um the producers are coming in and coming out and they're coming you're going on you're going on you're you're not going on just yet just just just stay there so after 4 hours of this they say look I'm really sorry but you're not going on the show just now and we'll fly you back to Scotland and I'm like I mean I've told the whole island I'm going that's all eight people in the dog um I've told the whole island I'm going on this show I can't go back there so I got to uh the airport and I saw oh look next flight going to IA that's a good place to get over rejection so headed out to IA put my bags literally put my bags into check in Space the nightclub that's a very alcoholic move stayed there for 3 years three days rather only like a like that's something I would have done yeah I I get it yeah [ __ ] it yeah I'm not going back I don't want to face those people who I made this promise to I'm going to go here where I can you know kind of just drown myself in whatever and distract myself exactly full on distraction coping um and so in in IB I bumped into an oil broker and told him my story and he was like you should come as one does in a be oh there's loads of Oil Brokers out there often um and he said you should come and try oil broken um so I that's how I found myself down in London as an oil broker I used to say to my boss David God bless him um I used to say you know I didn't get hired by Alan sugar but I did get hired by you and he would say Riri there are two types of people who go onto The Apprentice one have some form of business Acumen and the other's good at TV which are you and I was like definitely good at TV David there you go so the days of becoming an oil broker we would call it an oil Trader here right well Trader broker slightly different similar oh different doesn't matter who cares the broker's the middleman yeah but this is you know Andy you know Andy explained that lifestyle pretty clearly but lay it out because I you know it's it's it's it's very much a Wolf of Wall Street sort of experience right like you know I thought the days of liquid lunches had gone the way of the dodo but apparently not in this subculture of Finance absolutely not well not when I started which was is now gosh how long 20 years ago more I'm getting old um so um to uh 18 years ago um yeah I think when I when I started in it people were like oh the good old days are gone now but you know when I started on that desk I started with the senior guys and they're all bored they don't want to go out and entertain they've had enough in crude like the biggest desk the world you know the world's largest oil brokerage and they were like okay your job is to entertain our clients so I was like okay well my budget's gone from five grand a month to 20 now that's great because I'm doing everybody else's entertainment so I got really really good at it I mean you know I was the only guy to get 250 men into a nightclub last minute um you know like just I knew all the bouncers I knew the good restaurants I knew where the places to go so yeah it was it was amazing fun it was wild um but the drinking was huge uh let me give you another example we go out we go out for a lunch like you said down to the Curry House and I'm drinking all the way through and you know Andy and I used to be thick thick as thieves right so while he's doing little magic tricks over there making himself levitate and making a fool of himself I'm busy topping up people's pints with either vodka or champagne right to to get them more smashed and um then next minute I'm looking down at my phone and I'm like it's the window now the window is when our office with 15 people in or you know 15 people around a desk all shout at each other to set the crude oil price now 85% of the world's oil is set as a benchmark to that and the vast majority of us have all come back from lunch absolutely Blotto and here we are setting the world's crude oil price that's what it used to be like yeah so this is not happening at 10:00 at night this is in the middle of the afternoon oh yeah this is at 4:30 p.m. well it used to be so um and you know another crude example is oh crude nice pun there rui um I remember taking some customers out to lunch um and my thing always used to be let's do whiskey tasting so you know we'd have lunch and then we'd do some whiskies and I'm sitting there having having those whiskies and next minute I put it down and I'm like oh my God it's 5:30 I'm supposed to be at my NCT class which is basically newborn child classes my wife is pregnant and I'm supposed to be there and I looked at my phone and I'm like quick go shoot home you know smashed and go to my first parent class class yeah so that's not a good look no it's not a good look but you've got a lot of examples of you you know telling your wife that you're going to be home at six or 7 o'clock and then showing up at 5 o'clock in the morning yeah exactly yeah um and then there's you know I think that begets itself there's a lot of people who swing past the pub rather than go home um in fact you know we use a a wonderful heart monitor to show people's central nervous system right so they can see minute by minute where they're in sympathetic or Paras sympathetic and you know recently somebody's like the most stressed I get is when I go home and I have to deal with the kids like I'm actually fine at work and then that stress absolutely spikes in the evening and so like that it would come to shall I go home or shall I go to the pub and pretend that the train was delayed you know I worked with a guy right who used to do the night the the the clothes that time when they set the price used to be 7:30 p.m. it took him 2 years before before he told his wife that the time had changed to 4:30 it's not a great look when you don't want to go home no well that's happened I think that happens to all of us sometimes sometimes well maybe not all of us but I think many of many many many people out there will swing by somewhere before they go home just for a little sharpener just for a little quiet one before they go home they need to take the edge off the day and then and before they go home and and face that and with these things often you know they're creating it that's that's the thing with alcohol it not only is used as the solution but actually creates it in the first place right so you know you feel stressed out but alcohol is causing stress it's creating more stress your relationship as an example well you feel like you need a drink because of your relationship but your drinking is causing problems on the relationship and this is what it's like with so many areas of our life I mean it's not just the drinking it's the lying and then the erosion of trust and the unreliability and the unpredictability all of that there's a Cascade of you know dominoes that all fall as a result of that and there's a difference between the person who goes to the pub and has one pop maybe you shouldn't do that maybe you'd be better off if you didn't do that versus the person who goes to the pub on the way home fully convinced that they're still going to make that train and be home on time and shows up at 5:00 in the morning exactly which would be you know I'm that guy yeah it sounds like were periodically that yeah I was a bit in in that guy um and and you know certainly causing significant disruption in in life but I think for a lot of people you know they say I'm not that guy I'm not and I and I won't be I think a lot of people in in in the preventative space are are kidding themselves in part with that they're like I'll never I'm not going to well there's always somebody who's worse you can always point to somebody who's further down the line and say I'll never be that person or at least I'm not doing that and those are all crutches is to reinforce the you know the the unhealthy Behavior pattern that you're trying to protect yeah and all the people who are down that end of the line the vast majority of them say I don't know how I got here you know it crept up it just started to creep up and creep up sure launching this business um was an amazing thing when we when we when we got inspired like Andy coming on talking about the challenge and why the challenge why the challenge Works um why that is so significant for people because I'd spent a long time trying to be you know Evangelical standing out there in padilly Circus with the you know with the with the Bell here ye here ye stop drinking it's amazing you know and everyone's like shut up go to the pub um and so that's where the challenge fit in so beautifully because it was like hey this is cool this is something to be proud of right you want to be fitter faster healthier happier you want to be a better dad you want to be a better husband all of those things you want to be a better Mom this is um from The Challenge so um I think when it when it sort of really came into was um probably been a a year of investing in this right hundreds of thousands of pounds invested into this business um and I sent a tweet out to a journalist and um they got I got into a bit of a conversation and off the back of that we got a 10-minute feature in BBC World News in over 200 countries kind of unheard of for a business to get that kind of exposure but um it was amazing and a friend of mine called me up in ital and he said ruri I've just seen you on the news I think what you're doing is amazing I'm meeting the Dalai Lama next week would you like to meet him right just a quick check my diary let's have a look wow so um so I flew over to Pisa and very random you know when Serendipity and things like that show up you know you're on the right path right so next minute all sorts of things happen and I'm standing on this stage asking the Daly Lama a question in front of thousands of people in Pisa like just unbelievable so I asked him I said and I just wondered what your advice would be to anyone who is trying to get control of their addictions and he said if we teach our younger generation uh how to develop inner peace and how to De when negative emotion come then I think uh through systematic sort of method teaching a future generation could be better that's my B so I just thought old Huntly appreciate are people like you who really try to help such people wonderful what we need to do is help children to feel their emotion now this is the Dal Lama's really big thing right right this is the ultimate prevention because if we can help our kids feel more emotion we can prevent all these things but when he said that to me I was like okay I remembered back to the letter to Branson right I remembered back about this this purpose about this being about why I was on here and I was like this is it I I know why I've been put on this planet it's it's to spread this message um and I went in on Monday morning and handed in my notice an oil broker my boss said to me what are you doing like you you got a successful de you can they'd let me spend 70% of my time for 2 years building the business on the side they were like just carry on take the money I can't do another day that day is the worst financial decision I ever made so far yeah walking away from you know a really well-paid career where they're actually supportive of you building this other thing on the side exactly and they were they were so supportive they saw what what impact it was having but when you're treading you know those two worlds you're preventing yourself from really accessing the growth that's possible if you go all in on this thing so it was a test there's also something else really pertinent and important meaning and purpose is a huge driver of compulsive Behavior okay so if you are misaligned to who you are in meaning and purpose and you're doing something that you feel is completely meaningless but you're doing it for the money I'm telling you right now it is rotting you inside yeah and I didn't realize right that this daily this drinking this all this Behavior like I was commuting to via VIA tube to a windowless office right I'm born on an island near the sea right the environment was wrong the you know what my boss used to say to me used to say every day there's a pot of gold put on the table and you just have to reach in and grab whatever's yours and that was the purpose that was what we did and inside me was so much more right I knew I knew that I could help people like my dad telling me you're special you're gifted I was like I'm wasting this right I I I need to help people and when it comes to this message rid you know I have been tested with this business beyond all belief uh building a business is so hard this is the hardest thing I've ever done and through that Journey I've been questioned so many times like why you know why didn't you go back to oil Brooking you made so much more money you had a better lifestyle you all of those things why why why don't you just make a nice little small thing and not really you know a nice little lifestyle all of those tests have come along the the line and I've asked myself and said you know why are you doing this and it came down to something really powerful and that is if some words out of my mouth can help somebody who is regularly drinking alcohol to reconsider their relationship with it to take the first step to changing that relationship I can change not only their life not only their family's life their their relationships their their businesses like and that's it for me and well also the maybe most importantly their relationship with their kids yeah 100% and and create a situation in which their kids are not you know victimized by that person's trauma and as a result grow up healthier and liberated from the cycle of addiction that destroys so many families [Music] exactly Julie what would you say to somebody who comes to you and says you know what I find your lifestyle or the way that you eat really aspirational but I'm too busy I just don't have time I don't want to be cracking open cookbooks and trying to learn a new skill when I'm already exhausted after a long day how do you guide this person where should they go the plant power 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Rich roll.com again that's promo code power20 for $20 off at meals. roll.com [Laughter] we skipped over the part though where you finally decide to put it down you finally decide to stop drinking yeah yeah that came about because I got a text message from my wife um and uh saying you know I'll be in I'll be in Sweden with our daughter and I knew that that's her putting her foot down which didn't really stop me in fact I took it up a notch um but what happened is um interestingly with Andy's story he mentioned that a decade ear or a whole bunch of years earlier I'd given him the book which started everything right started the whole transformation and that was awaken the giant within Tony Robins and similarly he had said to me you know why don't you try this thing called headspace and that was 20 3 so I just started meditating and I used it as when I'm on the train and I'm trying to change who I am from the person I needed to be to survive in that business to going home to a loving family that I was trying to grow good humans so I I did it on the train and that's when the scratching started to get stronger and stronger and stronger and I think that's what it is for people right I think people just have a little scratch at the back of their head which is like hey this alcohol thing it is holding you back and and I think sometimes they have it quite loud on Sunday morning like oh Fu now alcohol's really holding me back but other times it's just a scratch so when I started meditating that's when that scratch started to grow um and it was growing and growing growing to the point where I was like you know what I think I'm going to take a break told my boss I was doing it he said you are committing commercial suicide if you stop drinking well first of all just to be totally clear here it's interesting like okay meditation head space the Tony Robbins book your relationship with Andy but leading up to that there was an incident in which you didn't come home until 5:00 in the morning the train and your wife had had enough and she said I'm out of here she's Swedish she's she's leaving she's going back to Sweden um and this was precipitated correct me if I'm wrong um by you also like sharing with her a selfie of you leaning your head out the window of a speeding train while you were you know hammered thinking it was a good idea and fun yeah yeah that that article made the paper um I know I saw it and but people are like your eyes your eyes in that photo you know that there's emphasis on like you know the air going into your cheeks but I look at the eyes and I'm like this guy's gone yeah uh that was that was on the way home to the NCT class um um to first time as as a dad um and could have fun that that photo ended up in all these sort of British tabloid Publications I'm very happy with that yeah yeah I will I mean not that I'll do anything um we have to be careful what I say but um again if that sharing that that that crazy person that I was and by the way when people say to me that is so crazy I'm like that's the test thing I did right the other not on video it doesn't seem like it's not yeah I mean I've surfed roofs of cars I lost all the skin on my arm I've I mean no let's not go into the who's who I'm sure you've got some Tales of debauchery but that was the sort of instigating set of circumstances that you into saying like I go to I got to find a way to rectify this they were they were building but those things were again were all normalized and I think this is where a lot of people are right where they can hang their head out of a train and um send the message to everyone and everyone just be like that's hilarious right or you know something end up in A&E and everyone be like you were so smashed last night you know that's hilarious um and it's the it's the near misses it's the nearly thing and I think for people it's in there like they know this is not right they know it's costing them a bit but then there's something stopping them from that change and that's the bit where we want to be there to reach them and help them you know I think prevention should always swim upstream right so if we swim upstream the most Upstream thing is The Hangover so how can we how can we help people in The Hangover to have better tools better support better advice better guidance so that they can prevent a more serious relationship with alcohol developing so you decide to put the bottle down for a bit I did a year you did a year at what point do you bump into Andy though and realize that he independent of you was doing the same thing uh just around about 90day Mark Mark um and he he was more he was like four or five months in and um he said he said I think I'm going to do my 40th birthday and not drink and I was like Andy thick as thieves Andy um and he did he he messaged me afterwards about how amazing he felt doing it so I was like okay well I've got my birthday coming up and I've got Christmas I'm going to do those and that's where the momentum builds you know you don't you don't you don't sit out at the beginning going right I'm going to do a year it's going to be awesome I think I think you do it bit by bit by step you had an accountability buddy yeah sort of thep the the the bill and Dr Bob you know analogy yeah sort of in your own version yeah exactly um and uh yeah and that I think that's that we we sort of got together and we were like you know we need to do something about this we need to inspire more people and yeah that's that's where we came up bir to the whole thing and so how did that go from an idea into actually being like a thing that other people that you enlisted other people into participating in well hundreds of thousands of pounds of my own money I mean you know I'm looking forward to writing a book one day 10,000 one things not to do when starting a business um and um because I just made all of all of the mistakes um you know through the time we had the challenge we kind of focused on that and then it came to a moment where okay let's take this big let's raise some money um and that's something I wanted to do and we both had different opinions there about whether that was the right move um but you know I I was here to impact the masses so I knew we needed to raise some cash um and somebody said to me you know why don't you send out an email to your list see maybe somebody knows somebody on there so I wrote you know a powerful bit of email like this is who we are this is what we're trying to achieve this is what the vision of where we're going is is going to be do you know any sixf fig investors out there who might help us seed the round and I thought you know shut the laptop went home I thought I wonder if I'll come into a couple of emails maybe somebody might know someone I came in the next day to 74 emails we raised 1.1 million in 5 weeks just from our customers um and this was a thing like oh my God and people would say to me ruri even if I lose the 100 Grand I'm investing in one year no beer it wouldn't be equivalent to the value you've given me and I was like wow this is amazing like you know now in all of those years we've raised over5 million pounds all from our customers well one one one external Joe desna oh Joe desna good old Joe good for him he he he he isn't a customer but I did have to I did have to woo him I know that uh you guys did a podcast recently I listened to that but you were doing were you doing a Spartan Race where were you in Iceland or something something like that randomly I got the a call to say um oh you you're doing not drinking Joe will love to hear from you you should talk to Joe Des Santa so here here so they lined up a call and I call Joe and I go hi Joe uh he's right what do you want if you can't say it in 6 minutes it's not worth saying I'm like okay uh I'm Brewery one your no beer he's like stop drinking great idea you need to talk to my wife one second talking to his wife and you know obviously she's been put on the spot anyway chat for a bit trying to inspire her to to make a change which Joe wanted to happen and then get back on to him and I say Joe um I'd love to do a podcast with you and he says okay cool and I say I only do them in person which is a lie but you know I wanted to meet him and um he said okay I said I can fly to Boston and he said um you don't need to I'll be in Iceland in December you can see me then and he pretty much hangs up the phone and I get off and I go it's a test Iceland Spartan December Joe desna what pops up the Spartan Ultra World Championships and I'm like you know I know this guy he is not going to even give me two seconds if I don't enter this thing yeah you can't go there and not do the race he's got he's he's absolutely not going to have any time for you so I did one lap of the ultra um and uh but still that was that was a serious thing and that kind of kicked off a relationship a friendship actually with Joe been very close to him seeing you know spend a bit of time together um and and um you know he well Spartan was an investor an early investor into one-year no beer and then for a while we were at the finish line of all of their events uh we were supporting people there you know really trying to inspire people to take a break from alcohol so yeah it feels like a a natural integration to an event series like that in the same way that a brand like athletic Brewing can be you know kind of you yeah like embedded into that to shift the the Paradigm away from like oh you have a be after your race to no we're actually doing something different here exactly also one year no beer feels like a uh like a package that any large corporation you know would want to sort of acquire and deploy with its with its Workforce is that something that you guys have done absolutely um the the the corporate stuff is is is huge and I think again in the preventative conversation um with people is to say hey we can just run a challenge together with you guys and and um we can support people through the challenge I think at these organizations there's a lot of people who uh will never raise their hand and say I have an alcohol problem in fact even today it's in some people's contracts right if you have a problem with alcohol we will fire you and so it's like are you're putting people under all of this pressure all of the stress in world and yet the most readily available tool for people dealing with stress the one that we've been conditioned and and programmed to deal with and is literally everywhere including many of the social events organizations still to this day is alcohol right so there are lots of people with a poor relationship with alcohol in these organizations who are not going to raise their hand for fear for stigma and so I think what we've done is create a a simple tool for an organization to use that helps us pick all that up in the back end they don't need to know they don't need to know that one of their individuals had a more intimate relationship with alcohol and needed a bit more support they needed Co they needed more you know whatever um yeah it takes all that off the table it just creates this welcome M where there's no shame or stigma like Hey we're doing this fun Challenge and then people come in and it allows people who maybe were thinking about how to do that but terrified of being found out or whatever uh you know all of those issues are kind of like resolved yeah through that I recently did a talk at a very large Tech business um and it was a it was a it was a it was a huge talk and it was going around to the vast majority of the organization so a lot of eyeballs and um again it was all around this you know do you want Optimal Health do you want to be better and blah blah blah and we'd had a guy who'd come through the program and he was there giving his conversation and it went to him and he's like so I am significantly happier I am more driven than I've ever been in my entire 30-year career in this organization I have more clarity more Focus my wife is telling me she's more in love with me than she's ever been I'm calmer as a parent with my kids I'm more productive I know I'm doing better deals in fact last night I was out at one of my client dues and I know I would be absolutely hanging today if it wasn't for this program and you listen to that and you're like how is not every organization investing in that right now why is everybody not going all in in on that it baffles me it's baffled me for 9 years so yeah I mean what are the barriers there I mean you I think you you we came right up to it but then you didn't actually say it which was when you when you decided to stop drinking and your boss said this is career suicide what in fact happened was you expanded your book by 50% exactly right so your productivity went through the roof through the roof which must have been amazing for your boss to Bear witness to right like he he still wanted to deny it in a way um but you know yeah those those those those stats of increasing business I was the only broker who wasn't pissed on Friday and the only broker who wasn't literally suicidally depressed on Monday and Tuesday because um I wasn't drinking alcohol given the fact that sorry given the fact that that culture is so oriented around drinking yeah how did you overcome the social triggers there to be able to do that without all of your colleagues and the clients wanting nothing to do with you because you were suddenly doing things differently absolutely step it up a notch change it right recognize what you're actually trying to achieve so for me I wanted to build good relationships um that was really key I don't have a high turnover of customers I actually build these relationship with customers and then you know for your career you you work with those individual so I changed up how I did things I mean I ran a relay race at the Olympic Stadium um and that relay race had 40 guys and gals involved in and every weekend people would be doing Park runs together and talking about PBS for months before the event at the Olympic Stadium which everyone was looking forward to that built way better relationships with people I used to take people cycling which is why I live in mior so I took people cycling the man therapy you can have have grinding up a hill grinding is probably the wrong word but that you can have sitting on that bicycle going up a hill having a conversation with somebody about real life about the the truth of stuff not the fickle tiny conversations that all Brokers are having at 3:00 in the morning that they can't really recommend like real genuine connection so I think that's it was about stepping it up a notch and I mean we've talked about this before I also had to stealth drink right which you know it's we live in a world where you might have to stealth drink but this is true right meaning you would you would have a drink that looked like an alcoholic drink that wasn't just so you could Dodge that bullet yeah exactly yep and um nobody would know and you become a master of it um I remember this one time I sit down I get there early and I tell the barman and I say look I'm not drinking I tip him 50 Quid and I say whatever they bring out it's alcohol free right so um he's like okay sure no I've got you covered an income Big C customer right they love their booze and they're expecting booze to be to be well had um beers everyone yep yep yep cool so they come along they PL down a pint plot down a pint plot down a pint plot down a pint plot pint everyone's got their pints next minute he comes up to me and he's literally carrying a sequined flowery glass with a little handle on it right and then an alcohol-free beer which has got dust on it and he plonks the two in front of me like this and I'm like you [ __ ] idiot so I have to go what get rid of this and give me a point how was the pandemic for all of this what did you learn about people's behavior during the pandemic and and the organization and the community of people um yeah the pandemic decimated society's relationship with alcohol um I speak to people every single day who say that's when it went up a notch um and people haven't been able to get it back down they haven't been able to um reduce because it was just so shocking it was um it was it was trauma um and so I think you know that has been very detrimental to people the vast majority of people will mention the pandemic um as a as a as when it started to get worse um for the organization something utterly beautiful happened so when we were all stuck at home and initially kicked off um I could see that we had all of these workers we had these health staff NHS out there in amongst this craziness right and relying on alcohol because it's the tool to deal with stress and difficulties I mean the amount of doctors and nurses and surgeons who come through our program you'd be shocked so I said look hey Community we have an opportunity to do good here are you willing to come back like come back into the community engage significantly if we open our doors for free to all NHS staff health workers and and emergency workers and the response was unbelievable I mean well over 10,000 people like yep I'm in I'm in it was unbelievable and so we opened up our doors for free um and we just had this huge powering and I I I was actually speaking to a nurse the other day and she was like I signed up during that program and it's the only thing that got me through it was being a part of your community and that was my that was my vice that was my addiction the the the the Facebook group and the and the community was the the release yeah I mean certainly alcohol sales went up during that period alcohol consumption went up during that period but I think your your signups went up like 30% or something like that during that period of time yeah is uh the the the the world was divided there were people who fell down the bottle and and and use an excuse and there were people are like right I'm going to use this as an opportunity to change you see the big thing in there is um when we change our environment uh our brain is kicked into neuroplasticity so it's easier for us to change behavior when we change environment so that's why it was for some people when they were like right no I'm going to get on top of this and I'm going to make a difference and I think for lots of people who did some of the work and made the changes in their life they've remained having a healthier or non-existent alcohol-free relationship with alcohol and I think some people have found it creep back um since doing that work and so of all the people that have gone through your program what uh what do the statistics say about people who continue to not drink versus people who did the challenge then resume some semblance of their previous lifestyle like what is the staying power of these kind of challenges and how long do you have to do it before you see an increase in the sustainability of a new way of pursuing your life I so when you look at the challenge as an example um the vast majority of people come and they do a 28 day challenge because it's the one that only seemen perceivable and then they go back to drinking for a bit and then they do the 90-day Challenge and then they might go back to drinking for a little bit and then they go back to a year um and this is why I wanted to change things up because I what I see in that is that people are drinking and then they go back not just to drinking but probably it starts to creep back into a problematic way and some people that can get worse and worse and worse and that's why we had to step up the availability of tools and resources to support people in a deeper fashion because they in a way the challenge is just like this light touch element of hey let's let's just give this a shot um and getting people to really do the work on changing the things that are driving it that is with every fiber of my being that is how we really really help people like how let's talk about emotions right have you ever been taught to deal with your emotions what about stress what what tools do you use to mitigate stress like um other than just reaching for alcohol you know do you meditate do you exercise uh do you do breath work you know when you come out of a board meeting in the afternoon and it's been stressful for you you do you reach for a coffee which significantly delays your ability to return into recovery or do you just do some breath work to give yourself the same Elation but then bring yourself back into parasympathetic so I think people don't have these tools they don't even have the awareness they don't have the understanding and so getting people through that experience giving them the tools to actually mitigate that compulsion that's what gives them a far better chance um of of longevity of changing their relationship with alcohol from a sales perspective though it's a harder sell than to just say it's a 28 day challenge people understand that you know intuitively what that means um and then you're now introducing like well actually it's complicated and here's all this stuff this is very difficult to scale and to sell to somebody who's like listen man I just want to drink less like I I I don't need to go into my childhood with you yeah let's not talk about that on the front cover right let's go back to the 28 day challenge and let's start there um because in all of this stuff we're going to help you to start to see that there are these things um and I think it's a a gradual thing right it's the cooking of the Frog right do it little by little gentle by gentle and the Frog will not jump out right um I think it's the frog or the lober example boiling the Frog boiling yeah you got to boil a frog slowly so this is where we're meeting people at right let's just start going on this journey let's look at this as a journey of changing your relationship ship with alcohol and it might take you a few years right it might take it might be faster than that but on that Journey we're going to keep making changes in your life personal development changes we're going to help you with these various things and we're going to help you to have a improved relationship with alcohol along with all the benefits of that and all the work that you've done around the behavioral psychology piece of this what have you learned about the difference between breaking a bad habit and forming a new habit and and and where does that understanding inform how you craft these programs or how you kind of approach somebody who's thinking about making a change wonderful question the first part here is um Professor BJ fog Stanford University wonderful human being changed his relationship with alcohol his research says we change Behavior by feeling good not by feeling bad and so looking at everything that we do here it's about being positive aspirational right oh I want that I want to be fitter I want to be lose weight I want to be happier I want to be healthier right so if we stay in that positive psychology Focus going towards a direction of aspiration then I think that's where we meet the vast majority of people in changing a bad habit rather than you have a problem and that kind of language let's stay in this um part of habit change the second part he says is bad habits are like weeds okay so they grow over time they start to infect different areas of your brain they infect your reward system your identity your belief system your emotions okay so do you Garden no lucky man but if you've ever pulled out a weed right if you just go and rip it out then it grows back and usually it'll grow back worse which is why we actually have to go through the process of cultivating it out what do we do to do that we cultivate good habits good habits is how we remove a bad habit and so that's why during all of that the the the challenge and all of these other programs we're pretty ruthless in helping people uh build habits the habit of meditation the habit of exercise the habit of sleeping well the habit of eating well um the habit of uh gratitude journaling like these are the tools that we use to help people my um anecdotal observation on this which is not clinical in the least is that people who have a normal like a quote unquote like kind of normal relationship with the world and themselves which is to say they are not they are not um you know addicts by Nature they don't have that addictive impulse those people seem to have the capacity to crowd out bad habits by focusing on cultivating new positive habits and as a result of kind of investing their energy and their enthusiasm in these new positive habits the bad habits sort of you know they just end up falling away this is something my wife is very good at and this is also something that I look at with great curiosity because I cannot do this how do you do that this is not how I'm wired in the least and that's because fundamentally my wiring is different I am wired with a very you know powerful inclination towards addictive behaviors and things that don't serve me and so that understanding allows me to to approach this differently to say that probably is going to work for me it's good to cultivate positive habits but I have to like do triage on the bad habit like I have to address it as the dangerous acute thing that it is and no matter how much I pull those weeds out they're always going to grow back unless I dig them out completely and make sure that every little every little yeah like tentacle of yeah is gone right and that requires you know a lot of effort and diligence and and and persistence to do that so I guess what I'm getting at is is that fundamental difference between the person who's wired in that kind of addictive construct versus the more kind of normal average person if there ever was one and and wondering how through the course of working with so many people through this program you begin to identify who the people are who might need that more kind of acute redress of the issue that they're contending with that a 28-day challenge is not going to resolve and is there then kind of a pathway to guide them towards um a recovery modality that they might be more suited towards because I see all of this as complimentary to 12ep like exactly look there is there there are many ways to get sober regardless of your problem I'm not here to say otherwise and and of course I have my own biases and I'm very much indoctrinated in the 12 step and believe in it and have borne witness to thousands of people who have reimagined their lives in in miraculous ways and overcome you know just the most drastic of circumstances to become incredible people so I'm always you know the first to say you know if you think you have a problem you should go check that out and suspend whatever judgments you have or whatever you saw in whatever movie that made you think one way or the other about what this program may or may not be um and I also understand that it's not for everybody and if you do have just a casual relationship with drinking maybe you you know AA is not the place for you um but I'm just curious around the hard cases that I'm sure find their way into your program absolutely um and then what happens with those individuals okay um well we take great care is the first thing um let me tell you about Keith right so Keith three attempts at The Priory the F first time he went to The Priory which is 10 of thousands of pounds by the way to go to the prior The Priory being a a treatment center the treatment center one of the the treatment center for wealthy people in uh the UK or in London the first time he goes to the prior it's a week later he's back into problematic drinking the second time it's probably a couple of weeks right it it very quickly went back to problematic drinking I recently spoke to him so he came on our complete control program a year ago okay and he's one of our greatest Advocates he's like I just don't feel like it right he says I occasionally have a drink right but most of the time I just don't feel like it I don't have that that same cognitive load now the thing is he would absolutely traditionally you'd say he is over here and yet we have been successful with helping him change this okay let's ask each other again in 5 years and 10 years and see where he is but I think the greatest thing that about him is he is now on such a path of self-discovery I mean he's currently deep in psychedelics and learning about going through trauma and discovered he had significant childhood trauma which did on the program and he's now in this full personal development mode of making huge changes in his life kicked off from this trajectory of saying hey maybe maybe there's more to this maybe if you try changing some of these things here this thing might go down or go away for you a little bit right so really what I'm saying is there is no black and white there is no he needs to go here or she needs to go there there is just why don't we look at the lifestyle things why don't we look at the things that we know that all the science out there says to us that drives compulsive Behavior like stress like trauma like emotions like connection to people like meaning and purpose why don't we address all of these things with them and then ask that question right let's give the example of depression right somebody feels depressed they go into the doctor they say I feel depressed now the doctor may or may not ask them about their relationship with alcohol the doctor will most likely or the psychiatrist will most likely prescribe them a medication for their depression but every day they are drinking the world's most powerful depressant and you're not like hang on what about sleep let's ask them are you sleeping because we now know that sleep deprivation is I mean well we know it's used as torture right so sleep deprivation is a significant driver of compulsive behavior all these people who are working shift work and late nights and things like that right what about mental health what about ADHD and things like that have they been taught how to regulate their central nervous system no they've never been taught that well that's why they're using alcohol because they've never been taught how to regulate their nervous system are they right so are they exercising are they running that conversation is not happening it's here's a pill or you have a problem you need to go here and I think let's just start with this conversation of okay if it's not the challenge then why don't we look at these things together let's look at them with a fine toothcomb actually we use some cool technology the aura ring things like that uh we help them see in data and evidence and Clarity and then we sit at the end of the program and we have this wonderful traffic light system and it shows our core drivers we go through all of the data we've captured all of the evidence and of those core drivers there's red Amber and green if there's lots of Reds then absolutely whatever you do stay alcohol-free you must move those things from Red into Amber before even considering trying to control your drinking which is what they came in for in the beginning um so I think we give people Clarity and understanding on what they need to do in order to have a better relationship with alcohol I'm using the word better that being said let's say you came through that program and once again it comes back to you absolutely you need to go to a treatment center or you need to go to 12st step or you need to find the next thing um and I but I just think that this is a part where we can help people earlier all the apps that are available now and The Trackers are are really effective I think it in in reconfiguring people's relationship to alcohol because you mentioned the aura ring or you have a whoop um and you can just show people what the data looks like like here's here's what here's what your night was like last night after two glasses of wine and their HRV is you know beneath the floor and their resting heart rate is higher way higher than normal and their respiratory rate is off and the lack of deep sleep and REM sleep like it's just right there and I think those those interfaces are so effective at showing the DraStic difference between what the previous night's sleep which was healthy looks like in comparison and I think shocks that's very effective at shocking people out of whatever they've convinced themselves like when you can actually see what your body is doing how it's responding to that it it reframes the whole thing and it gives people an entry point like they don't really have to contend with the fact that whether whether or not they have a problem they're just like I need to sleep better and in order to sleep better I need to do this this is it it's like different things speak to different people you mentioned weight loss that's another one obviously but well building building a more successful business you know I mean um Alex Orosi out there saying you know absolutely I I stopped drinking it was the best thing everything shot up from then the this this the the stopping drinking was the was the Catalyst for huge transformation for me and to have some you know big influencer like that talking about it in that way I think that's going to reach so many more people they're like oh I want to double my business this year but the difference with like the whoop is like it's literally immediate like it's overnight you can see this yes build your business over time you had a 50% increase like these things are real but they're stories told by somebody else they're not direct experiences that can be had in a you know literally in a period of a couple hours exactly I mean your man Blake behind the camera there was saying exactly the same thing it was he was looking at it on his whoop and he was like hang on a minute this is really costing me yeah um and as a new dad youve got enough sleep deprivation without having al already everything's stacked against you as it is already so explain to me what this complete control program is all about completely yes complete control this is confusing to me go ahead bear with me Rich we're doing good good we're doing good things um okay so again born off the research um you know what I saw was a lot of people like myself who took a break from alcohol and then went back to problematic drinking so I knew there was more to this like I I knew there was more in the underlying um and what I wanted to do is help people in a more uh intimate way right so what would that look like as we sat down as a team so you know we have successfully unlocked the greatest um product ever sold by onee no beer is equity right that was that was the greatest product we ever sold and so if we look at this for serving a different audience and a more impactful way what is it right what is it to to help people understand what drives compulsive Behavior can can somebody control their drinking well I mean I have I've been able to successfully control my drinking I usually choose not to drink I occasionally have a drink I had a very problematic relationship with alcohol I know thousands and thousands and thousands of people who've gone on that same journey and been able to achieve the same thing so what is it to do that so that's why we came up with something which would help people understand with Clarity what is actually driving it um so the idea is to go through an 8we program we use some pretty cool technology we help people see their stress I'm talking about seeing minute by minute whether they're in sympathetic or parasympathetic and being able to see the impact that that is having on them this is like one of the most impactful parts of the program because the vast majority of the people who come through the program are very driven has had celebrities on the program we've had MPS very large business owners um director world's largest banks you name it um And when they see their stress in data like this so clearly but they also see how impactful alcohol is when they have a drink it's very very compelling for the change um so we take them on this journey we help them understand what is driving the behavior and then we kind of Coach them through trying to change those various areas of their life when people come into the program literally 100% of people are looking for control they're like I don't want to stop drinking I don't want to stop I'm looking for control sure by the end of and the joke that I told you is that this is the this is the great adage of you know the the great kind of recursive Mantra of every good alcoholic which is they they hold on to this delusion this this uh this great desire to be able to control their drinking to drink like a gentleman so if we if we take just one two 10 five 10% of those people and we Chang them and actually achieve that is that not success it's success only to the extent that the people who really need more acute help are are not um deprived of that because they're trying to perpetuate the delusion that this is possible for them well and in that case yeah then it would be then then it's problematic but what we're doing what we do with it is say okay thank you so much for coming in and looking for control now let's have a look at your life these are the areas of your life that you need to change now the program is life-changing because we're going to show people the areas of their life that they need to change right that we're going to start doing some trauma work for the vast majority of people who come into here they've never done any trauma work they've never done any talk therapy like it that in itself is hugely positive right to take somebody who's looking for control of their drinking and then bring them to the table to start dealing with this childhood [ __ ] that they've been ignoring and packing down their whole life that's success or what about and we talk about stress a lot right what what about teaching them how to deal with a much higher level of stress um I've had a guy who built half a billion turnover business and he's like I had no idea right that I needed to integrate these tools into my day and that I had no idea of the capacity of stress I could handle until a I removed the vast majority of my drinking and I'm talking about the vast majority right he now rarely drinks we caught up with him in mior he flew over by private jet to take my wife and I out to dinner and he's like I I'm going to be out here for 15 days and maybe on one day I'll have a drink or two the rest I've just got absolutely no interest and so this is what happens when you show people the impact of stress the impact of trauma the impact of these things they can change those things so um yeah I think wrapped up inside hey is alcohol causing a bit of trouble in your life is it something that you've struggled to to change and it keeps coming back let's let's look at some areas of your life and and shift those and see if that finally does it for you sure yeah I get that and I I I totally understand that I think in the the board game of sobriety and abstinence if one is to uh you know pursue this path of of complete control and realize time and time again that they find themselves out of control it's uh maybe time to not pass go and maybe not go to jail but go to step one which is to embrace the fact that you are powerless over this substance and that your life is unmanageable yeah because the real premise of 12ep is acknowledging your inability to control this this thing that that you know persists to the level of astonishment yeah absolutely and it's been hugely successful well it's been it has been it has been one of the most important things in society for a long time for helping people change their relationship with alcohol and I think where we're coming at this from is just to to widen up that story to widen up that Gap to widen up that story to say look people are different and you don't know what might be the Catalyst for finally changing somebody for finally them putting it down for good for finally making the changes in their life or their business whatever it is they need to do you don't know what that catalyst will be for some people You Never Know Rich it could be this podcast right it could be somebody listening to this and they've had a significantly problematic relationship with alcohol and they go do you know what [ __ ] this I'm done and in that moment they decide to go and make these changes in their life and go on a personal development journey and I don't know go to take some iasa or do iboga which I've done nuts by the way but and iboga be the thing that stops them which is very powerful at doing so we just don't know what will be the Catalyst for somebody and I think when we open up that conversation to say there are other tools and a wide arrangement of tools and we have to treat people like that and I think similarly that's the conversation in society right is it is what at what level is the problem at what level does the person have to admit there is a problem and if we turn that conversation around and say let's not have a conversation about it being a problem but let's just say is alcohol causing you problems because if it is why don't you change your relationship with it mhm what have you learned about the relationship between ADHD and alcohol yeah 99.9999999% of people who come to complete control either identify with or are ADHD add or neurode Divergent um my own personal journey of understanding my incredibly destructive Behavior derived from ADHD like a nuclear bomb is been so intrinsic in helping me understand other people and deliver a program which is helping people change significantly ADHD and that coping mechanism of alcohol are so intrinsically linked when we look at this in the data right what happens with ADHD is we get that hyperactivity okay so imagine are you ADHD well I I asked for personal reasons because I had never thought once about whether or not I was ADHD and I did a very intensive week of trauma therapy last year right around this time where I was what kind of trauma therapy uh childhood trauma uh and and basically every skilled practitioner that saw me and I saw a variety of them over the course of this week all agreed there was a unanimous consensus that I was ADHD but I was not a hyperactive kid like it's a whole different set of circumstances but go ahead if if you don't feel hyperactive as a kid than add so um I there's there's a couple of things into here don't let me lose track there's a couple of things into here if you look at the work by gabr mate he says that actually ADHD add things like that they're A coping mechanism from a TR traumatized child okay so um this past trauma then drives us as a as an engine to create this there's also some really interesting studies out there showing that you know um that uh ADHD is very much intrinsically linked with sleep deprivation sleep deprivation in babies creates ADHD now my mom always said I slept four hours and every 24 um as a baby so I'm like oh thanks Mom you gave me ADHD no so oh come on that's not fair well there yeah exactly love you mom um the the thing about ADHD is imagine it's like a a Dynamo you know when you push the car like this and the the little Dynamo you push and push and push it goes off into the distance that's ADHD right so our central nervous systems they get wound up faster okay so the stress that we bring into the day let's say you drank last night or didn't sleep well you then increase that level of stress that you have and as you get into this busyness the day you drink coffee which is very impactful on our central nervous system once again adds in more stress is that we get up into this hyperactive state which we love because it makes us super busy in fact we can do the work of 10 people in a day and we pride ourselves in this ability to be able to handle stress and do so much work and be productive the problem comes at the end of the day just like that Dynamo we've been winding and winding and winding and winding and winding guess what the pre-ordained outcome is your central nervous system needs to numb out now and what is it well if it's a coping mechanism for a traumatized child then the truth is a lot of it is emotion unprocessed dealt with emotion which drives through our stress and daily you know lots of daily activity like that into a very busy brain and so people go I just can't switch my brain off and alcohol is the most readily available tool out there for helping us switch our brain off the issue is not alcohol the the the thing is not the problem what the issue is is a very stressed out central nervous system which is not being calmed down and so in this here we're literally forcing people to meditate I'm talking about monitoring them every day and phoning them if they don't meditate I call this the ass kicker right when I said I want to deliver a you're holding up an aura ring for people who are just listening so this is used for extreme accountability because I get all these business owners these high Achievers these people coming in and they go I just I mean I just tried to stop drinking and it comes back and I'm like yeah but what are you doing about your stress well I'm very stressed yeah but what are you do nothing so when we teach them these tools and they calm down that central nervous system that is when all of the change happens you were talking about doing trauma stuff meditation for me is really I look at it like this and some people might not like this but it works for me I'm sick right I I'm ADHD I'm sick if I do not take my medication then I will get my ues out and I will [ __ ] my life up I'm like blow everything up so I must medicate every day and my medication is really simple it's exercise and meditation um and so helping people see it from that perspective who they're like oh I tried meditation but my brain is so busy just can't switch it off yeah that's because you need to meditate super interesting yeah yeah I have so much more I need to learn about the world of ADHD just beginning to kind of understand it my first step there and the first step for me was to get ADHD for dummies um I found it really interesting do you know what it was is it was hugely relieving to read about this stuff of like oh so I'm not a [ __ ] weirdos we allowed to swear yeah you can swear it's the same I have done a little bit of reading and it is that same experience when you go into an AA meeting for the first time and think you're the only one who has this experience or or feels a certain way and you hear your story recounted back to you yeah exactly I felt that that that that point of of relatability with what I've learned so far did you feel that the first time you went in there to Alcoholics Anonymous yeah really yeah I wasn't ready to do the work and I didn't I didn't stay and I didn't get sober immediately but I knew that I belong there so I went to AA and I walked straight back out and I was like I'm this is not me and I hear this a l contempt prior to investigation my friend no but what I'm saying here is that's I think the part is that you identified immediately with it because you recognize those conversations and those stories and there are a lot of people out there who are saying hey that I don't resonate with that and I think that's the importance of having this smorgus Board of tools and conversations and things like that to meet people where they're at I get that but I also think it's important to to to um encourage people to set aside their prior convictions and their judgments because often those are misplaced yeah and I think people go in with um already you know predisposed to not like it and the minute something happens that that they can like hang their hat on that they're out the door and they're like it didn't work for me I mean I I answer emails every single day I try that it didn't work I'm like what about it didn't work and you kind of like deconstruct that and walk them through that and more often than not it's their own you know biases that aren't working for them so I always want to make that you know available for people and to kind of um uh you know remove like do my best to kind of put to the LIE like whatever notion they have about what it is and it isn't you know and a lot of people get hung up on the god stuff and we all have our baggage with religion and things that have happened to us so you know I'm I'm sympathetic to that but I think there's ways around that and again I'm saying this uh from the perspective not to be critical in the least of what you're doing I think what you're doing is super powerful and it is providing this amazing welcome that for the you know Untold millions of people who have some kind of issue ranging from very moderate to somewhat concerning with respect to their use of alcohol and you're able to capture those people redress that problem and produce Better Lives as a result and I think that that is a worthy mission for your life and I think to heed the words of the doy Lama and to take that to heart and put them into action is is quite audible you know I think it's a beautiful thing that you're doing thank you yeah the the the one thing in there is you know once you've discovered um having an impact on people and this links interestingly back to ADHD and also emotions a lot of people who from a young age have a very high level of emotion we can call some of those empaths have a high level of emotion they then turn to alcohol and drugs right because they struggle to deal with those emotions but what happens when you remove that from people uh you remove the alcohol you remove the the numbing is now you bring back that emotion you talking about Live Wire without any tools for coping with all of those confusing emotions but they're also highly empathic and what people find is that you know what empathic people usually feel like they need to give back and they're in jobs or they're in careers where they don't feel like that and that was me um you know I didn't feel like I was giving back at all and so when I made that shift over to a purposeful life of helping people right that is another level of being able to yeah it's an inoculation against that I mean I know what it's like to be in a career both when I was drinking and when I was sober and not feel fulfilled not feel purposeful and not feel like what I was doing had any real extrinsic meaning uh other than like getting a paycheck every two weeks and when you're in that place you want to numb out from your life and those uncomfortable emotions and you'll you know find yourself overspending or thinking that you're you know if you buy this thing it's going to make you feel better and now being on a trajectory where I I really do feel connected to meaning and purpose and service totally all of that goes away like that that is something that kind of Falls by the wayside because you don't feel compelled by it anymore it doesn't it doesn't lure you because what you're doing is is basically satisfying that craving in a healthy way I'll give you an example a guy I'm seeing tomorrow um he he was scrolling in innocently through Instagram stumbled across my one of our ads and in it it says do you feel like you've got more to give do you feel like there's more out there for you and you're just not quite achieving as much as you want to achieve then I guarantee you it's probably alcohol right that's the conversation and he's looking at and he's like well I've built 300 million turnover businesses um so I don't feel like I've not been successful but I do feel like alcohol could be holding me back right so that's where it came from for him he clicks on jumps in has a conversation with me and he says about the program he's like you know I just have a whiskey a day you know I come home I have a whiskey and then at the weekends it's you know a few more but it's not a problem everyone's doing it normally that's just what it is and we're like okay well that's fine no problem but we guarantee you that this is holding you back in a significant way so he's like okay if I come on this program and it has an impact on me I'm going to help you so he comes through this thing and once again we help him find some significant trauma he had no idea about right and he's like I just can't believe it now he comes to the end Cole with um our coach my wonderful wife she he is our lead coach and he says do you know what I believe it's my life's purpose to help you guys grow this program and that is the element we're sitting here saying is passively sitting on the couch just maybe drinking a little bit too much to profoundly life changed when you start to address and help people see that alcohol is not the problem it's just the outcome it's the result it's the result of some things you're doing in your life and when you make those shifts is life transforming you don't have to tell me man exact so many lives transformed as I said earlier in in in in ways that would just absolutely blow your mind people traversing from the bottom depths of insanity to Leading productive lives of meaning like it is a it's a remarkable thing and when you get to participate in that um it changes it changes you it changes who you are and it changes your sense of possibility and it and it also you know connects you to the value of being in service of that of that mission which clearly clearly you are yeah yeah it's a beautiful one to be on cut me open I am it's it's unbelievable the the the the passion for this subject matter like I said you know this conversation might be the Catalyst for somebody to make that change and you know putting families back and things like that so you know never stop having this conversation um let's really ramp it up now like this is the time like let's let's really get this conversation going out there because there are so many people suffering the very the very very piece of alcohol is suffering I mean you drink any amount and you feel like suffering the next day everybody is suffering with hangovers at the weekends so I think um yeah let's just keep having the conversation we never came back around to the the letter of unrequited love to to Sir Richard Branson Richie Bri um yeah so well through all the raising of cash and you know we now have over 4,000 investors every single pitch every single conversation I mentioned about this letter to Branson and it being my fuel and you know what we were here to have an impact and as I kept bringing out that message I had a message one day um from a guy through um Joe polish um who was who was in genius Network and he messaged me and he said I've just heard your story about Richard Branson amazing um I'm going to neker Island do you want to come with me and I'm like yes I'm about to fulfill my life's dream this is unbelievable I can't believe it and he put me in touch with the organizer and um the organizer was like he'd just done a year alcohol-free not through us but somebody had mentioned to him about you know one year no doing one year no no beer um and so I spoke to him and he was all really excited and he was like when you tell Richard Branson this story he's going to love it like you sit there FaceTime your dad sitting next to Richard Branson like this is full circle from those suicide attempts to to um coming through so it was all lined up to happen and I was heading off to neker Island um and then the pandemic happened um and the trip got canceled um and 2 months later my dad died and um when my dad passed um you know I was very very fortunate through this organization um thankfully for the business that I spent the last four weeks with him um caring for him and he was an incredible human and he he always wanted me to believe that I could do more that I could do something great in the world and so he was he was my greatest champion so I'm very sad that I didn't get to have that moment but um wine Ford you know some more time a few months go by and I heard that some people close to Branson were doing our challenge through various other people and I was like okay we're getting closer um and then I heard that somebody very close was doing um the program and so this got exciting and next minute again another 6 months year goes by and I'm lying in bed one night one of those sleepless nights you know that happen when you run an organization and I'm looking at my phone and there is you know he's in miiaa opening up the new hotel so I shot a message to um the person I knew like are you here yeah you should come up and then they never responded and I was like come up where so I thought you know fortune favors the brave just turn up so I headed up to there went to the hotel couldn't find the person couldn't see anything very busy camera crew around people running around I said um I'm going to meet somebody can I have a coffee and they were like yeah sure just go out onto the Terrace and I kid you not as I walked through that Archway into there I walked out onto the patio and he could have been anywhere in that moment like filming they were doing a tennis thing Richard was standing in the pull pit staring out at The View on his own so I just walked up beside him and I said amazing view and he was like it's one of my favorite in the world I said hey Rich can I tell you a story and he said is it funny I said no but I might cry um and then I started to tell him the story um about you know suicide and coming back from that and the impact we were having and getting tearful and he gave me a big hug and um after telling him the story of what we were trying to achieve you know he said um well we won't have that lunch but how about we have dinner tonight um so yeah my wife and I we she came up as well and we had dinner with him and it was an amazing moment that really taught me one thing and I think that is that the most important factor when you are trying to change something like this we talked earlier about a paradigm shift happening not in months or weeks in decades right my vision now is in in decades not and the most important thing is one thing people talk about consistency they talk about that no water will break down anything any Rock anything over time is persistence it's just persistence and that's the thing with this right I was thought it was all going to happen very quickly I'm nine years into this message I'm now looking at the next couple of decades just here saying this one thing that if you are regularly drinking alcohol then I guarantee you it is holding you back and you have these two archangels in the dolly llama and Sir Richard Branson on each shoulder and then joa some here as well and Rich shouting in your ear Rich shouting in your ear these Champions who are helping us keep going and keep sharing the message you know one thing and you may resonate with this at the darkest moments of running this business which is the biggest challenge of my life at the hardest times when you're almost ready to switch the lights off when there's nowhere to go anymore and it's so hard and I'm cry crying on the phone to my mom going what am I doing like why am I doing this and she said when you want to show up big in the world you're going to have to push through a lot of stuff so just everyone out there keep persisting and especially with this message just keep sharing the message keep inspiring people to drink less keep talking about your sobriety keep talking about what you did to change it like let's rise up let's all help each other beautiful um the final thing before we put a close to this um as we welcome uh a new year it's 2024 by the time this goes up yes um in consideration of that and understanding and seeing you as this change agent which you are um I wanted to kind of close with thoughts that you might want to share with the person who's listening to this who's entertaining the possibility of making this change for maybe the first time what are your thoughts on the nature of change itself like how do you approach the process of making that change what's the best way to begin and more importantly maybe what's the best way to sustain it to follow through on that process great question so I think that it is small baby steps is what is how we create change over time time is making small iterations um and so if you're going to if you are currently in dry January and you're taking a break from alcohol start to make fundamental shifts in the areas of your life you know things like who you hang out with all the time because if everyone you hang out with all the time is saturated in booze guess what you're going to go back to that um the all the different things that we touched in here like start making these improvements in your life because the alcohol coming is a product of how you are living your life and just very gently start taking those steps I would say to anyone who has been here before and taken a break and found it come back I would say please please stop going in search of willpower stop going in search of more I can do this I can do this on my own and instead go in search of four things accountability connection support and education and they can come in all sorts of ways they can come in 12ep they can come in Reading sober books and um alcohol-free um articles and listening to podcasts like this so go in search of the tools that will help you change um and I think lastly I'm just going to scratch that itch again there are two things people say to me after they've changed their relationship with alcohol number one I had no idea the impact alcohol was having on me until I changed my relationship with it and number two I wish I'd done it sooner MH so don't be that guy or gal let's not wait let's just get on thank you thank you Rich I loved it um it's a beautiful Mission you're on and I appreciate you coming here and and and sharing with me I think that uh many lives will be impacted by what what you had to say today so thank you and uh more power to you I'm at your service if there's anything I can ever do for you please reach out in the meantime time everybody who's listening or watching if you want to learn more about Ru and his mission you can do that easily by going to oneyear beer.com your book the 28 day alcohol free challenge boom nailed it that's it um you can buy that anywhere Amazon wherever um anywhere else you want to direct people or anything coming up in January that would be of interest to people that are enjoying this yeah we we have all of our challenges to help people who need a self-help um course uh check out complete control if you feel like you need a little bit more support um and you know we provide tons and tons of free content um our our social media uh o MB or one year no beer um our community our huge Facebook groups and things like that they're all part of the challenge and we also have our own podcast which you should come on Rich yes the one the the onee no beer podcast yes how long you been doing that oh we're now well nowhere near your your downloads but doing for a while though a lot a lot of guest Over N years yeah yeah some really really good really good guests nine years exactly that's no slouch yeah I don't think I don't think it's nine years it can't be because you started one year no beer in 2015 yes did you start the podcast right away pretty very close I think no probably two years after gosh I'm my memory but yeah yeah um I think uh yeah so it's it's six seven years yeah cool really clearly not good at timelines you listen to podcast anyway man that was great thank you uh come back and share some more with me and uh let's get you outside so you can enjoy this beautiful uh weather we got here in Los Angeles although in mayorca it's probably better but anyway you're here for a bit you enjoy your time I I just want to say Rich again you like huge kudos to you you know a huge kudos to you for having us on and sharing this message I think this is the greatest thing we can do is really share this message to inspire people around this one thing which you know is absolutely going to happen over the next decade or two um the the time is up for alcohol um so thank you yeah absolutely well least I can do at your service again thanks R thank you cheers peace that's it for today thank you for listening I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation to learn more about today's guest including links and resources related to everything discussed today visit the episode page at Rich roll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive as well as podcast merch my books Finding Ultra voicing change in the plant power way as well as the plant power meal planner at meals. Rich roll.com if you'd like to support the podcast the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple podcast on Spotify and on YouTube and leave a review and or comment supporting the sponsors who support the show is also important and appreciated and sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is of course awesome and very helpful and finally for podcast updates special offers on books the meal planner and other subjects please subscribe to our newsletter which you can find on the footer of any page at Rich roll.com Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Cameo with additional audio engineering by Kale Curtis the video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis with assistance by our creative director Dan Drake portraits by Davy Greenberg graphic and social media assets courtesy of Daniel CIS thank you George wayy for copywriting and website management and of course our theme music was created by Tyler Patt Trapper Patt and Harry mathys appreciate the love love the support see you back here soon peace plant [Music] day [Music]

Channel: Rich Roll

Views: 385,785

Keywords: rich roll, rich roll podcast, self-improvement podcasts, education podcasts, health podcasts, wellness podcasts, fitness podcasts, spirituality podcasts, mindfulness podcasts, mindset podcast, vegan podcasts, plant-based nutrition

Id: 5B-1KZx2oek

Length: 138min 27sec (8307 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 08 2024