A Controversial New Cure for Alcohol Dependence - Katie Herzog

Go see Chris live in America - https://chriswilliamson.live Katie Herzog is a journalist, podcaster, and writer. Expect to learn why drinking might be a viable route to going sober, why white knuckling alcohol isn’t a great option, If AA were invented today what methods would be its first step, the difference between getting sober and living sober, the different reasons people drink and the underlying reasons why people tend to drink more than others, advice for people who need to quit but don’t want to stop, and much more… - 0:00 How Relationships to Alcohol Can Vary 18:36 How Does Alcohol Addiction Manifest in the Brain? 26:58 Building Good Habits to Break Bad Habits 33:53 The History of Addiction Treatment 47:58 Is Medication the Modern Cure for Alcohol Addiction? 01:01:16 Why are Medical Professionals Still Hesitant About Addiction Medication? 01:09:27 Changing Your Relationship to Alcohol 01:22:03 Drinking Cultures are Changing Globally 01:31:53 Find Out More About Katie - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  Talk to me about your relationship with alcohol.

• 0:02Speaker 01

  Oh gosh, it's a complicated question. So my relationship with alcohol started very young. I started drinking, or I had my first drink when I was in middle school. I don't know if this is something that 12 year olds do these days, but, uh, but back in my day, 12 year olds drank, or at least they did in my school. And I, I loved it. I loved it from the very beginning. Even before I was sort of old enough to appreciate the, the taste of a good glass of wine or a cold beer. I liked the effect. And so I drank in, in high school. I drank more in college and by the time I was out of college, I was a barfly. So I spent a lot of time sitting on bar stools from 4pm until late at night, oftentimes with

• 0:45Speaker 01

  men who were, because these were the sort of people who would, who would be at bars drinking during the day, like men in their 50s and 60s. These were, these were my people. Um, and I, I lived like that for a really long time. I was a party girl. So I was a lot of fun back in those days. I gradually got less fun the more my drinking accelerated. By the time I, I quit in my late 30s, early 40s, I wasn't a party girl anymore. Most of my drinking was done solo and in secret. Um, but that was it. And this was not, this was not abnormal among my, my peers and my friends. I, my life was lived in bars. This is what my friends and I did. And there were of course, consequences to this. Some of them pretty terrible.

• 1:28Speaker 01

  Um, I went to the hospital a couple of times. I, I very memorably burned down a porch at one point. I had trouble, I see, I see your, your brow is sort of furrowing here. Do you want to know how I, how I burned down a porch?

• 1:40Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:42Speaker 01

  So this was actually one of the times when I was, I thought I was being a good girl. So I stayed home on like a weekday night, which was rare to me at this period of my life. This was in my late, or my mid twenties. I spent, when I say I went, I was a barfly, I was at the bar almost every day. Luckily, this was at a time when when Pabst Blue Ribbon was a buck fifty, you tipped fifty cents. So I was not, didn't have, my bar tabs were hefty for the amount of money that I was making, but still, my drinks were cheap. And so I stayed home one night, thinking I'm doing the right thing. And I was also a smoker. And I, ironically, I was, I was watching this, this fantastic television show. I can't remember what it was called, but it was about the, the NY, the New York City Fire Department. Dennis Leary was in it.

• 2:26Speaker 01

  So I was drinking at home by myself, taking regular cigarette breaks and watching this TV show. And on one of my cigarette breaks, I failed to extinguish a cigarette. I just like left it burning outside. And it was in an apartment building. I, I walked outside, I saw some smoke and like a, a fairly significant hole in the wall where the vinyl siding had started to melt. I went and got a glass of water first, tried that, splashed it on, it didn't work, went and got the fire extinguisher, tried that, that didn't quite work, it was still burning. And then I called nine one one and they said, you know, this is nine, this is nine one one, what's your emergency? And I said, well, I'm not really sure if this is an emergency, I'm really more looking for advice.

• 3:09Speaker 01

  And so I wanted them to reassure me that, I don't know what I wanted, I just didn't want to get in trouble, basically. Eventually, they did come and I had to bang on all of my neighbors' doors and tell them that the apartment building was on fire. And while the fire department was in my house, dragging a hose through my carpeted living room floor out to the balcony on my bedroom, I was outside in a patch of woods, drinking vodka. And the next day, all of my friends knew about this, I lived in a really small town. I woke up to a friend of mine shouting from outside, what the fuck did you do? So everybody knew about this and frankly, thought it was hilarious because that's the sort of community that I lived in. And I thought it was hilarious, too. I mean, terrible, but also hilarious.

• 3:53Speaker 01

  So I had lots of sort of misadventures like that. I had trouble holding on to jobs. I dropped out of college once. I dropped out of grad school once. I did finish college. I didn't finish grad school. And alcohol just really dominated my life for my teens, twenties, and well into my thirties. And it got gradually, it got less fun and it got kind of more depressing as the, as the sort of friendships evaporated, as everybody else kind of got their shit together or didn't get their shit together and, and died. Frankly, a lot of people I know from those days, from those days are dead. And at some point I realized I was just sort of drinking alone. You know, the last one at the bar, except the bar wasn't a bar, it was my house.

• 4:32Speaker 01

  And I was by myself scrolling on my phone during COVID, drinking alone as much as I could.

• 4:41Chris Williamson?

  I don't know whether you know, but the first 15 years of my adult life was spent as a club promoter. So I ran, I ran nightclubs for a real long time.

• 4:49Speaker 01

  We would have gotten along really well in that period.

• 4:51Chris Williamson?

  I would have made a lot of money from you, yeah.

• 4:56Chris Williamson?

  I often think about this, that

• 4:59Chris Williamson?

  the way that party culture, and I'm not sure if it's the same now. I genuinely don't know if Gen Z has kind of adopted the laughty, Larry drinking culture that I knew and, and you would have known as well. I mean, the British, it's kind of a national sport for us.

• 5:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:14Chris Williamson?

  I often do think about how many people were just in the party, enjoying themselves, these events that I used to run. And most people you expected to kind of age out of them, to sort of graduate out of the young party lifestyle.

• 5:33Chris Williamson?

  But, you know, I did a million, over a million lifetime entries across my career as a, a club promoter. So that's a pretty big sample size.

• 5:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:41Chris Williamson?

  And I do wonder, you know, how many of these people saw the thin end of the wedge, which was, well, this is fun and I'm, I'm with my friends and there's a good DJ on and there's music or this whatever. But that, that is kind of this gateway that out the other side of it introduces them to a frequency of use and maybe not even just alcohol. How many of those people went on to, yeah, kind of be? Uh, more dependent. They were, it was four AM in the nightclub and they were still there, but the club was closed and no one else was around.

• 6:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's probably not an insignificant number. Not that this is your fault. There's probably, people were probably gonna find their way to addiction. Uh, anyway, they'd any, you know, no matter what happened, whether you had been there or not. But, you know, you're right in the, in the fact that most people do actually age out of problem drinking. Most people who binge drank during college, don't continue to binge drink into their forties and fifties. It's called natural recovery. This was a concept I was completely unfamiliar with until I started writing my book. But this concept, natural recovery, this is more common than not. And most of my peers from my college days, did gradually sort of get their shit together. You know, they got into relationships, they got careers, they had children. And the ability

• 6:56Speaker 01

  to be hungover on a Wednesday morning just sort of slowly evaporated and they shifted as their lives did. I didn't. I was stuck in that pattern of behavior until well beyond the, the, the age when I should have been.

• 7:09Chris Williamson?

  So, natural recovery is somebody who drinks heavily when they're younger and then has their ability to drink and be hungover, gets constrained by real world responsibilities? That, is that it in a, in a nutshell?

• 7:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. That's, that's basically it. People who, natural recovery is people who don't take any, any sort of proactive step to recover from alcohol use disorder. Alcohol use disorder, you know, what is commonly called alcoholism, is a vast spectrum. And for a lot of people on that spectrum, they don't have to go talk to a therapist or go to an AA meeting. They just naturally age out of it.

• 7:47Speaker 01

  And that's the ideal. That's what I wanted. I thought, that was my hope. I knew that I was a problem drinker from a very young age. But my hope was that some future me, some older, more mature me, would be able to just sort of, you know, take it or leave it. This doesn't work in my life any, for my lifestyle anymore. I'm done. It just never happened. I took sort of, it's a kind of brute force for me to actually get over my, my habit.

• 8:09Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. So you knew quite early on that this was a- Category of drinking that maybe was even different to some of your friends? That this wasn't just party drinking?

• 8:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I knew from my early twenties, I had my sort of my first come to Jesus moment. My, I was, I believe 24 and I was going through my first really serious breakup. And I had, let's just say, I behaved in some ways that are not optimal to a healthy relationship. I cheated on my girlfriend. And when I was confronted with that fact, when she discovered this, because this was back in the, in the MySpace days, when she, when she read a message that I, that I wrote to a friend of mine, sort of confessing to my friend what I had been doing. My girlfriend at the time, she, she came to the bakery where I worked. I had a brand new job. I was a barista at a bakery in Portland, Oregon.

• 9:02Speaker 01

  And she walked in and she, she said, you fucking cheater. And then she slapped me in the face. That was my first come to Jesus. Then she kicked me out of the house. And so it was like a, you know, like a bad rom com where all of my stuff was, was out on the, on the, on the, on the lawn. And that was my first moment of being like, oh, something is deeply wrong with my behavior. And either I'm a bad person, either I'm a sociopath or I'm an alcoholic. I also, for a brief period, I convinced myself that it wasn't, the problem wasn't drinking. Cause I didn't want drinking to be the problem because if drinking was the problem, then I had to quit. I would convince myself, like I convinced myself that I, I went to a psychiatrist and he told me I was bipolar. Not bipolar two, which is sort of bipolar light, but like bipolar one. And I was like, hell, yes, that's it. I'm not an alcoholic.

• 9:47Chris Williamson?

  My drinking's sick. My drinking actually helps my bipolar.

• 9:49Speaker 01

  Exactly. I'm not bipolar. I kind of, not that I wish that I was, but I'm like, just sort of fundamentally, sort of a low energy person. I'm not bipolar. I was, you know, I'd do things like, you know what? It's my astrological sign. I'm a Gemini. That's just what this is. It turns out I'm not a Gemini. I'm a Taurus and astrology is also bullshit. But at the time I was sort of looking for any, any plausible reason that would explain my poor behavior besides.

• 10:17Speaker 01

  Alcoholism. And I lived in, there's this term, I don't remember where I read it, but this vacillating denial. So at times I would, I was very aware that alcohol was the source of my problem. And then I would sort of convince myself that it was something else. And I did, in, in one of those moments, I did start going to AA, one of those moments of, of sort of realization, I did start going to AA. It didn't work for me. But I went to AA at various times over the years. And so I lived like that for about 15 years, about, you know, sort of knowing that drinking was a problem, doing things to try to curb my drinking, quit drinking, moderate my drinking. But ultimately, I was never able to string more than 30 sober days together.

• 11:03Chris Williamson?

  What makes me really, it's like an odd irony, you having this kind of embarrassing, potentially fatal story where you nearly burned down an entire apartment.

• 11:15Speaker 01

  Oh, that's not even one of the embarrassing ones.

• 11:18Chris Williamson?

  Okay, well, the rabbit hole goes deep. I'm excited to learn more. But my, even the point on that is, what was the response from all of the people around you? And I did, my master's dissertation was on the effectiveness of anti-alcohol advertising on students at Newcastle University. And one of the things that I learned when I did that research was

• 11:39Chris Williamson?

  people, especially in the UK, but we can assume in the US as well, they see those crazy stories as rites of passage.

• 11:48Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 11:48Chris Williamson?

  They're almost like badges of honor that you wear. And, you know, the movie, The Hangover, was an entire movie about this. That's the, the whole narrative was you do stuff when you're drunk, and lol, that's funny, because everybody does that stuff. And it's a weird way of sort of releasing inhibitions, and you're kind of less culpable for what happens the next day. We know that that wasn't the real you, but there's this other version of the world that everybody can kind of step into a little bit. And it was basically that when you see things as a rite of passage, it's very hard to have interventions. Because if you ask somebody, how was your night last night? And they said, dude, it was amazing. John lost an eye. And you're like,

• 12:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:31Speaker 01

  That's a good night.

• 12:32Chris Williamson?

  Really?

• 12:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:32Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, is that because usually, you know, if that was a sports game, that wouldn't usually be that. And it's just a weird upside down sort of topsy turvy world. And I suppose as well, that must allow people who have problem drinking to couch and hide and delude themselves into, well, you know, like, I'm just a fun hang.

• 12:52Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 12:52Chris Williamson?

  Like, I don't have a problem. I'm just a, I'm a vibe. Like, you know, these people are just bores.

• 12:58Speaker 01

  Yes. No, that's exactly how I felt. And that was completely normal within my peer group. And the thing that it took me years to realize is that that's not actually normal. It's not. There are, there are many cultures in this world where alcohol is not a regular part of the culture. Talk to Muslims, you know what I mean? Like, there are just, you do not have, that does not necessarily have to be a part of your culture. It just was such a part of my culture for my entire young adult and adult life that, yeah, I was, I was so judgmental of people who didn't drink or people who didn't drink as much as I drank. Part of that was because I think psychologically, it was a little threatening. Like, anytime I knew somebody who got sober, it felt like a betrayal. How could you? How could you do this to me personally? It's not had anything to do with me.

• 13:43Speaker 01

  Um, you know, but it was also just a reminder that there are other ways to live and that life can be, can be actually better with alcohol, which I genuinely didn't believe. And this is one of the reasons I, I really bristled at AA because I would go to AA meetings and I would hear these, these people who, lots of them old timers, who talked about how much better their lives were sober. And I, I thought they were lying. I genuinely didn't believe it because I could not conceptualize that a life without alcohol would be worth living. It was as though I would, it would, it would be like living without food. How could you do this? I could not conceptualize it because everybody that I knew drank and it was such a part of my identity and part of everybody's identity.

• 14:25Chris Williamson?

  It's woven into your lifestyle, right? Beyond just what the drug is doing to you. It's how you bond. It's the place that you hang out.

• 14:33Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 14:34Chris Williamson?

  It's the social group that you are around. It's the way that you get a sense of self-worth and that you are a part of a community.

• 14:44Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 14:44Chris Williamson?

  It's ritual that you do to get, you know, it's not just the thing.

• 14:47Speaker 01

  And the community is such a vital aspect of that. And I think that is, you know, I'm not, I don't drink anymore, but I'm not one of these people who thinks the world needs to be teetotal. In some ways, that would probably be better. But alcohol and community, it is such a bonding experience. I feel that way about cigarettes, too. Going outside and I think this is, I think the decline of smoking actually has had some negative effects. And part of that is bonding over a cigarette. Going outside and asking somebody to bum a lighter from somebody. You end up in conversation with people. You know, the same thing, the rise of the cell phone. When I, and over the last five years, like if I went to a bar in the early days of my drinking, I might bring a book and I would sit there and read a few pages of the book.

• 15:30Speaker 01

  But really, the book is there as an excuse for somebody to ask you what you're reading so you can enter into conversation with somebody. Other, if I just wanted to stay at home and if I just wanted to read, I'd stay home and read by myself, right? Phones don't work like that. Nobody looks at you on your cell phone and says, hey, what are you scrolling? You know, what meme is that? And so there is, there's such a social aspect of that, of that aspect of, of American and British culture. And I think it really does add a lot of value to people. The problem is just that for some people, it doesn't stop there with making friends. It, it leads to other things, job loss, health effects, legal problems, death, you know, small things like that.

• 16:09Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. You talked about multiple rock bottoms throughout your twenties.

• 16:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:14Chris Williamson?

  Was there something about a final one that really propelled you forward? Or was it a cumulative thing over time?

• 16:22Speaker 01

  Oh, none of, the rock bottoms didn't matter at all. It was really not, that didn't help. There was always a lower rock bottom. And I, I saw a therapist for a while who said to me, you know, this ends in one of two ways, or I guess maybe three ways. It ends in jail, it ends in death, or you, or you recover. And I thought, well. Recovery is clearly the worst option here, doesn't it? Jail, jail sounds fine, I'll just do that. You know, and I think one thing that's common with a lot of problem drinkers is that you sort of, you almost crave the rock bottom because you think, you know, if I, if I go to the doctor and the doctor tells me I need a liver transplant and I get one more drink, that's the one, that's the one's gonna come in, then I'll get my shit together, then I'll quit.

• 17:03Speaker 01

  I need, I just need one more DUI, one more DUI, and then I'll get my shit together. The problem is, even, even that level of consequence, people do respond to incentives, but even for me, negative consequences were never really able to make me moderate or, or quit drinking. I just couldn't do it.

• 17:22Chris Williamson?

  What's the lesson that you take away from that? That if somebody loves alcohol a lot, they need to really, really, really, really hate something else way more in order to be able to compete? And most people that are alcoholics don't hate anything as much as they love alcohol?

• 17:36Speaker 01

  No, I don't think it's that. I don't think it's, I mean, alcoholics do love alcohol, yes, but like, I know that I love my family and my dog especially, more than I love alcohol. I know that cognitively, but no matter how many times I woke up and told myself that today would be different, today I'm not gonna drink, my brain had been hijacked by alcohol. I felt unable to make rational decisions. You know, I wake up in the morning, today will be different, I'm not gonna drink today. By the time noon rolled around, any sort of willpower, any desire, my own, you know, sort of rational thinking desire was out the window and I was out the door on my way to get alcohol. I was completely out of control.

• 18:21Speaker 01

  I mean, there's a very well-known phrase within AA, your life has become unmanageable, you are powerless over alcohol. That's, I did not get sober through AA, but that was absolutely true. It wasn't because I love booze more than I, I love my wife, it's because I had no control over it.

• 18:35Chris Williamson?

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• 19:19Chris Williamson?

  or heading to gym.sh/ModernWisdom and using the code MODERNWISDOM10 at checkout. That's gym.sh/ModernWisdom and MODERNWISDOM10 at checkout. What have you learned about the way that alcohol addiction particularly sort of shows up in the brain? The mechanism of how this works? The reward signaling? The different types of alcohol use disorder?

• 19:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:44Chris Williamson?

  What have you learned about this?

• 19:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I learned a ton about this while I was working on the book. So to simplify things, there are basically two types of problem drinkers, of alcoholics. And alcoholic is a term not a lot of people bristle at, but I use it because everybody sort of can. It's easy to conceptualize what an alcoholic is. And again, alcohol use disorder is a vast spectrum. So this could be somebody who just drinks one glass of wine that she doesn't necessarily want, or someone who's like fully pickled her liver. And I was like somewhere, not on the middle, somewhere on sort of the far side of that spectrum. Not by any means the worst, though. So when I drink alcohol, I got a euphoric buzz.

• 20:28Speaker 01

  It was for me, it was almost taking a little bit of caffeine or a little bit of cocaine, right? Didn't make me sleepy. It made me energized. It made me talkative. It made me obviously make poor decisions uninhibited. You know, I'm gonna go sing karaoke on a some, I'm gonna go like rap the water, the TLC song Waterfalls in front of all of my friends and feel great about it. At one point, now this part is actually embarrassing. I was in a band and my role in the band was not to sing or to play an instrument. I wore a horse head mask and I danced around wearing pasties, holding a machine gun. And I did this on stages in front of other people. That's the sort of thing that I would do when I was drinking, right?

• 21:12Speaker 01

  So very, very energetic, very much the life of the party, at least in the earlier days. In the later days, it was just sort of depressing and alone, but. In my party days, I was very fun. So for people like me, you get you get a rush of endorphins when you drink, right? And that that indirectly affects things like dopamine and serotonin. But you get a high. For other people, and these people can still have a drinking problem, but other people get a sedating effect from alcohol. So they're not getting that big rush of endorphins. What they get, it calms them down. For people who drink because they have like severe social anxiety, alcohol can can help with things like that. So and

• 21:55Speaker 01

  to complicate things further, some people have like elements of both. But so that's one thing that I learned that alcohol really does have very different effects on different people. So my wife, she does not have a drinking problem. She drinks, she'll drink a little like, almost like a shot glass size glass of like sipping wine while she's cooking dinner. It doesn't make her energize. It's not like having a little shot of cocaine or Red Bull for her. It makes her calm. It's a chill thing. It's sedating. And so for people like her, it's just, I don't think she'll ever have a serious drinking problem because she doesn't she she doesn't get the the really strong effects from alcohol. She just sort of gets sleepy and slow and.

• 22:36Chris Williamson?

  Have you got any idea what the difference is between the you bucket and the her bucket?

• 22:41Speaker 01

  I'm sure there's probably some biological response to this. And I think this is still sort of an open question. The drug that I took ultimately took, do you want to get into that now?

• 22:52Chris Williamson?

  Let's let's just round out the the rest of this stuff because it's super exciting. I think the

• 22:56Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 22:57Chris Williamson?

  process that you went through to get sober is just so fascinating.

• 22:59Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 23:00Chris Williamson?

  But I would put myself in a kind of both categories. I think when I was in my twenties, I was probably more you. And in my thirties, I'm probably more your wife.

• 23:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's that's interesting. And there are so there are particular risk factors for people who develop alcohol use disorder. And one of those is is just is just genes. What is your, you know, is there a history? Is there a history of alcoholism in your family? Another one is the age at what you at which you start drinking? And a third and really important one is repeated exposure. Trauma can also be a risk factor. I didn't have any trauma in my background, but those three other risk factors, genetic history, early exposure and repeated use. I had all three of those risk factors. And if I had had two, you know, a genetic history and I started drinking earlier, but I drank once when I was 12 and I just never did it

• 23:53Speaker 01

  again, I wouldn't have developed alcoholism, right? It really was all three. And everybody's different, you know, there's sort of, we make sort of generalizations about this because everybody's different and it's hard to make hard and fast rules.

• 24:04Chris Williamson?

  Why do you think the early exposure thing makes a difference? It's just habituation, it's part of your development?

• 24:12Speaker 01

  I don't know. That's a good question.

• 24:14Chris Williamson?

  Maybe it's selection effect that if you start drinking young, that's because you like it in some sort of a way?

• 24:20Speaker 01

  That could be part of it, but you know, when I was growing up, it was not uncommon for, at least in my sort of, I didn't go to a like a particularly bad Oregon school, sort of a very standard American school. So I guess I mean, sort of bad. And I wasn't, I wasn't really an outlier within my peer group. Everybody drank. And I don't think everybody developed a, you know, an addiction later on.

• 24:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's interesting. And I think you make a distinction between relief drinkers and reward drinkers.

• 24:54Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 24:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 24:58Chris Williamson?

  What would you have put yourself into? Because it seems like, it seems like after a while, anybody that's been a reward drinker ends up becoming a relief drinker, the relief from not being drunk.

• 25:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think you might be, you might be on to something there. I was definitely a reward drinker. Even at the end, I wasn't, for me, it's like the difference between the first drink and the third drink. I would start to get that euphoria right that high, even though I knew that I was gonna regret this later on, chasing that buzz became really paramount to sort of everything that I was doing. I was looking for that. It's not even a long period of time. There was maybe like a 20 minute period between the first drink and the second drink, or the second drink and the third drink. That felt really, really good. And pretty quickly, you know, by the fourth drink and the

• 25:50Speaker 01

  fifth drink, that euphoria is gone. I kept drinking in order to chase that buzz, but you unfortunately cannot recreate it. And then at that point, you know, I would get sort of slower and sloppy. But yeah, a lot of my drinking was in the effort to capture this one very specific feeling, where I think my endorphins and my dopamine is just raging in my brain.

• 26:13Chris Williamson?

  And that's at the very start. So yeah, interestingly, I guess, what is it, the top 10% of drinkers drink half of the alcohol, something like that.

• 26:22Speaker 01

  It's something like that. It might even be more than half. It's a massive amount.

• 26:27Chris Williamson?

  So I wonder how many people, that means that 50% of the consumption is done by 90% of the people, something in that sort of region, which means that maybe lots of people are able to just get that first drink buzz, that one or two drink buzz, and then not continue on. So it's interesting.

• 26:46Speaker 01

  I mean, there is a survey came out recently, this was either Gallup or Pew or something like this, some survey came out recently that, when you look at least, this might be different in the UK, but Americans, the average American does not actually drink that much, right? So only about half of Americans drink alcohol, period. It might be something like 54%. I'm forgetting the exact number. And among that 50 something percent, most people drink within the recommended, you know, CDC guidelines, which is a very moderate amount. I think at this point, it's like three or four drinks a week for women, maybe seven for men a week. So basically, one alcoholic drink a day, no more than three in one sitting ever, things like that. So most people fall into that

• 27:30Speaker 01

  category. The people with, I mean, 1 in 10 Americans fall into the category of qualifying for alcohol use disorder. So it's still a massive number of people. We're talking about 30 million people in the United States, but that means nine out of 10 people. Are basically fine when it comes to this issue.

• 27:50Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm. What did you try before the elusive, mysterious strategy that we're about to talk about? What what were the different things that you did before that?

• 27:58Speaker 01

  So I did AA, could never really stick it out. I did individual therapy. I did group therapy. I did these sort of cognitive behavioral therapy things like moderation, management, smart recovery that have sort of less of a faith-based element. So these are things like tracking your drinks, just sort of strategies to to drink less or to or to take more control over your alcohol consumption. Drinking a glass of water in between alcoholic drinks. That stuff all went out the window for me pretty quickly because as soon like it was on as soon as I had my first drink, like any pretense of of moderation was just on because like that's I drank to get fucked up. I didn't drink to like

• 28:40Speaker 01

  enjoy the taste of Pabst Blue Ribbon, you know, the fine effervescence of a shitty beer was never really my thing. So I did stuff like that. And then I would do these like, like I did the master cleanse at one point, which is this idiotic, you you don't eat solid food for 10 days. You drink cayenne lemon water. I lasted for like three days and then I went to the bar. So I broke my fast with with alcohol. I would do stuff like that. You know, I'm gonna get really into yoga. That's gonna solve my problems. I'm gonna Sam Harris's meditation app is going to save my life. I tried stuff like that. Outpatient therapy. So I like group therapy with other people who had

• 29:24Speaker 01

  who had similar problems. That was particularly, I would say, ineffective for me. And a lot of that was also based on principles of CBT. So going to these therapy sessions and, you know, I have a worksheet and I like write down the names of four people I can trust. And I would write down like my mom, my dad, my sister, and my favorite bartender. So that stuff just it just never really worked for me. And a part of that was honestly, probably because I didn't take it seriously enough. But I did, you know, I'm show up. I I did try things. I never did rehab. But I did try lots of other things.

• 30:01Chris Williamson?

  It sounds like white knuckling it with willpower isn't an option then.

• 30:04Speaker 01

  I tried that. I tried that every day. It just, I'm like a weak-willed motherfucker. I just don't. I don't, I don't, I've said this before, but for me, you know, every day at the gym is day one because there's never a day two. I've never been good at forming healthy habits and quitting bad habits. I sucked my thumb until I was nine. Like, I have always had a very sort of addictive, obsessive personality. And a lot of people who get sober are, this seems particularly true of men, are able to channel that into fitness or adventure sports. Not me. I wish. I really wish. I think maybe if I had, maybe if I start like microdosing testosterone, I'll be like, yes, I'm gonna channel all of that energy into doing.

• 30:49Chris Williamson?

  Gonna become an Ironman.

• 30:50Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. I'm not gonna become, I might like, you know, watch 11 hours of television in a row. I can, I can binge something like that, but I've never been good at sort of the healthy habits.

• 31:00Chris Williamson?

  There is definitely a sense of the guys, the sort of classic mid 30s, mid 40s pivot toward endurance racing.

• 31:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:09Chris Williamson?

  Think, I mean, it's fantastic to, to put your efforts into something which is great for your health and very difficult to do and inspiring and all the rest of it. But I wonder what you're running from. I wonder what, and that's not everybody, but it is, it is, it is lots of people. And I suppose, you know, for me, I have found a bunch of different outlets that, training has been one of them, meditation's been another.

• 31:33Chris Williamson?

  If you don't have the capacity to sort of build that structure together, then that outlet is entirely precluded to you. Like that, that avenue, you don't get to be the guy going and doing an Ironman. You don't get to be the person who, I'm gonna go and do a 10 day silent meditation retreat. My meditation's been so great recently and I've been really loving it. And that's where I've been putting all of my effort. And I actually get dopamine and I get reward chemicals from the progress I'm making in this new avenue here. I'm gonna start a new business or I'm gonna, you know, whatever. Fucking crocheting, you know, whatever you do. If that's not something that.

• 32:10Chris Williamson?

  appeals to you because the bad habits are so hard to break and the good ones are so hard to instantiate.

• 32:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:17Chris Williamson?

  It's it's making it even more of a headwind to try and sort of fly into to get out of this thing.

• 32:23Speaker 01

  Right. And and those things, you know, I don't have kids. I'm married and have a dog that I'm sort of obsessive about, but I don't have kids. I think for most people, like I have the I'm a podcaster by trade. Like I would have time to get like deeply obsessed with fitness if I wanted to. I don't maybe don't have the sort of fortitude to do that. I think for most people, just living life, like taking care of your kids, driving your kids to soccer practice, that shit takes so much time that these sort of other like having a having a hobby that you get deeply obsessed with, like maybe during retirement, but I think for for the average, the average person is probably just trying to, you know, kind

• 33:05Speaker 01

  of get through the day. Like they don't really have time for for that kind of thing.

• 33:09Chris Williamson?

  Alcohol use disorder in that way is kind of a luxury problem to have.

• 33:14Speaker 01

  Well, it it seems like such a it seems like such a silly way of putting it because it's such it's so damaging to one's life. And it is not as though like there's no need to do a privilege disclaimer. Like I have the I had the privilege of becoming an alcoholic because I didn't have children, because so many people you see who who suffer from alcoholism are are truly down and out. Although I although I think like the the stereotypical homeless person, a person living on the street now is probably alcohol might not be. I think I live outside Seattle. So we see more of like the fentanyl lean than we do with like a bottle of wine in this bag these days.

• 33:52Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's a it's unfortunate to think that there is there are sort of different levels of challenge that people come up come up against. How susceptible are you to the substance? And then how? Non susceptible or limited, are you in potential coping strategies or other

• 34:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:11Chris Williamson?

  modes of reward, other avenues that you can go down?

• 34:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, and alcohol, it's sort of a rest development in a lot of ways. So developing those coping strategies, if alcohol is the coping mechanism that you have used from your teenage years into adulthood, when something goes wrong or something goes right, that's one thing about getting sober or recovery, or even getting control over your drinking, you have to learn new coping mechanisms. And that can be hard to do when you're in your 40s or 50s and your response to, to trauma or tragedy, or even, you know, positive news has always been to grab a bottle.

• 34:45Chris Williamson?

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• 35:30Chris Williamson?

  below or heading to saly.com/modernd wisdom and using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's S A I L Y dot com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. What does the history of addiction treatment philosophies look like? From the outside, it seems to me like AA was the gold standard. I, I know that in every TV show that I watch, it's always that. And the person always usually ends up being okay because the community and their faith sort of brings them back around.

• 36:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:05Chris Williamson?

  But it seems evidently like it's not a panacea for everything.

• 36:09Speaker 01

  Right, it's not a panacea for everything. So the history of addiction treatment is pretty fascinating. So in the early days before programs like AA, and obviously alcohol addiction has, has, I think, probably. existed as long as alcohol is and the first traces of of human consumption of alcohol was was found in some like pottery, some clay urn in China from from nine thousand years ago, some traces of rice wine or something like that. So people have been drinking for a long time, right? And you can see in in early writings and the archaeological record that there's some, there's some record of not like long term treatment programs, but

• 36:52Speaker 01

  like somebody that you would, you could, somebody, somewhere that you could go to dry out, right? And so that that was sort of the, the early days of alcohol treatment were not based on long term, long term sobriety or long term recovery. It was just a place to go to dry out, to basically survive withdrawal. So there were, so, so for instance, the, the guy who, who created AA, his name is Bill Wilson, before he created AA, and this is, you know, peer, he wasn't the first person to start a peer group, but, but certainly probably the most successful in, in Western history at least. He went to this hospital in New York called, it was called the Towns Hospital. And he went there four different

• 37:36Speaker 01

  times. And every time he would go, they would give him the, the treatment du jour, which was, it was a, it was belladonna, which is basically a hallucinogen, it's a poison. And they would give, give their patients this and, and, and they would withdraw using this substance. Apparently a pretty, pretty painful, pretty horrible experience. These days withdrawal can be managed with sedatives and benzodiazepams and it's not like, I, I thought going, I'd never done a like formal withdrawal before I started writing this book. And my sense of what withdrawal would be, would be painful, right? You have the

• 38:16Speaker 01

  DT, so the lyrium trimmons, the shakes, you're ill, you're sweating on a floor somewhere. I had to absorb the message of, of alcohol withdrawal from literature and from, from pop culture. These days, it's totally different. You can go to a, go to a, go to a center, basically sit in a recliner for a few days and they pump you full of vitamins and give you some, some medication and you're fine within a few days. This can even be done at home as well. But in the early days, it wasn't like that. And there were all sorts of, of sort of,

• 38:45Speaker 01

  Maybe not super effective kind of miracle cures that were marketed at the time. And then, and then Bill Wilson in the 1930s, so this is, this is a guy who'd been a stockbroker. His life had absolutely deteriorated. And he, he got, he was at the, at this Charles Towns Hospital and he had this sort of come to Jesus moment. He had a, it's might've been a belladonna hallucination, but he had this, this moment where he saw a flash of light and he, and he was sort of reborn in that moment as a sober man. And then at some point, and so he stayed sober for several months. And then at some point within the first, I think, six months, maybe four months,

• 39:26Speaker 01

  he was on a work trip in Akron, Ohio, and he was fighting the urge to drink. There's, um, there's this concept called alcohol, um, excuse me, what's it called? I'm forgetting now. The alcohol deprivation effect, which you might think that once you go through a period of abstinence, the desire for alcohol weakens. But that's not actually what happens for a lot of people. So this concept, the alcohol deprivation of effect basically means that once you go through a period of abstinence, your cravings can return stronger than ever. And so Bill Wilson was going through that. And so he, uh, he had joined what is basically a temperance society. And he called, he called some like locals that he found through some kind of phone tree thing.

• 40:10Speaker 01

  And he, and he encountered this man who was a doctor in Akron, Ohio. His name is Dr. Bob. And they got together and they sat and they just talked about their problems for six hours. And that was the beginning of Alcoholics Anonymous. And so they started doing this. They started having meetings of, of people who had gone through this experience. And just they would sit in a room and they would talk about it. And they came up with these, you know, the, the 12 steps, the 12 traditions, they added some structure. And one of the early members of this group was a woman. She was one of the first members, or the first, she was one of the first female members of AA. Her name was Marty Mann. Good old Dyke. She was a lesbian, although I don't know if they used that word at the

• 40:53Speaker 01

  time. And Marty Mann, she had spent a lot of time in the UK. She came back, passed out on a stretcher, had to be carried off of whatever ship, like Queen Mary HMS, whatever, whatever, had to be carried off this boat, came back to the US and continued to drink, right? And so she was killing herself, like many alcoholics do, just suicide attempts, waking up and drinking gin every day, just life deteriorating. And so her doctor told her that she needed to go to this Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. And she was resistant, but she did it. And she said that she found her people. And Marty Mann was absolutely essential to the spread of the gospel of Alcoholics Anonymous because she had a background

• 41:37Speaker 01

  in PR. She was very well connected. So she used her connections to get AA in Hollywood movies and on the cover of magazines. And she is probably more so than even Bill Wilson or Dr. Bob, the founders of AA, for spreading the gospel of AA. And she also did something else, which she wanted to lessen the stigma of alcoholism, because alcoholism, at this point, was really considered a moral failing. And so she sort of conceptualized the disease model of AA. And a lot of people assume that AA sort of preaches the idea that alcoholism is a moral failing. They actually don't. They really rely much more heavily on this

• 42:22Speaker 01

  medicalized model. I have my issues with that sort of framing. I actually don't think that alcoholism is, I don't think it's very helpful to call it a disease, because it's not like cancer. It's different, right? Anyway, so she spread that message throughout the land. And that is one of the reasons that AA became as popular as it did, because it had a really good PR team. And AA, there were lots of other treatments throughout history. Things like, there was a clinic called Schick-Schadel that did aversion therapy, right? Different, different. Societies, different cultures, lots of cultures have come up with potential solutions to this program, to this problem.

• 43:05Speaker 01

  But AA, at least in the United States, sort of eclipsed all that for almost 100 years. And now, I think what we're seeing is a broadening of the options. Because AA does work really well for some people. It offers, you know, community, support, accountability, a place to go, which can be really important if what you do is go to a bar or drink at home. Just getting people out of their, out of their, their environment is really valuable. And I know many people whose lives have been saved by AA. But it doesn't work for anyone, I'm sorry, it doesn't work for everyone. And so what we're seeing now, with the rise of, of groups like Sober Curious, and there

• 43:47Speaker 01

  are apps, there's one called Reframe that I keep getting ads for on Instagram, is sort of a, a broadening. I think, I think the, the cultural stranglehold of AA is lessening a little bit. That doesn't mean it still doesn't exist on some level. Like, courts can mandate that people who get in trouble with the law go to AA. Professional licensing organizations, if you get, if you're, like, I went to meetings not that long ago where there was a pharmacist there, and he wasn't there because he wanted to be there, he was there because he had a drinking problem and his boss found out and he was gonna lose his pharmacy license if he didn't go to these meetings. Sober houses, they can mandate attendance in 12-step programs.

• 44:29Speaker 01

  So for some people who are, you know, who are getting out of jail and need a place to live, and they're, they need to live at a halfway house, they have to enter 12-step programs. So it is really enmeshed within our legal and criminal justice systems, at least in the United States. I don't know if that's as true in the UK. And it does, to be clear, like, I don't knock AA, it really does work for a lot of people, it just doesn't work for everyone, including me. That's a long answer to your question, sorry.

• 44:56Chris Williamson?

  It's fascinating. I was thinking about how hilarious it would be if somebody was mandated by a judge that they needed to go and do yoga.

• 45:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:06Chris Williamson?

  Or, you know, we need, we need to see that you have completed a 30 day streak on Sam Harris's waking up.

• 45:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, equine therapy. You have to go swim a dolphins, something like that.

• 45:15Chris Williamson?

  Whitney Cummings does that. She says it's really good.

• 45:18Speaker 01

  I'm sure she does.

• 45:21Chris Williamson?

  So is there a particular taxonomy of drinker that you think AA does and does not work for? Is there something about you, given that it is, for some people, for many people, a great saving grace? What is it about you?

• 45:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:39Chris Williamson?

  That it didn't? And what is it about other people that it does?

• 45:42Speaker 01

  I think for me, it's a couple of things. The primary one is that AA never addressed the root cause of my drinking. And that was that I like to drink, right? So it's very simple, but I was physically and emotionally addicted to alcohol. And AA going to meetings did not curb my cravings. I needed something that would take care of my cravings. And AA couldn't do that for me. So I think, I think that is fundamentally it, was just that my cravings overrode any sort of desire to quit. I was completely imprisoned by these cravings.

• 46:18Speaker 01

  I also am not, I'm not a joiner. I'm not predisposed, predisposed to, to any sort of club whatsoever. I also, you know, there's a spiritual element of AA that I found to be a turn off. I did go to, they have meetings for atheists and agnostics. I like those. I found them a little self righteous in a way that I really appreciated.

• 46:42Speaker 01

  But it didn't, it just didn't stick with me. And, and, and also, you know, there's that level of, when you work the steps, there's a level of introspection that is required.

• 46:56Speaker 01

  I don't like introspection.

• 46:59Speaker 01

  Just to be frank with you, I'm like the one lesbian who doesn't like to process in this world. I don't like to talk about my, this is why like doing these interviews and writing this book was very off-brand.

• 47:09Chris Williamson?

  You really chose a difficult thing to be talking about for the next couple of years.

• 47:13Speaker 01

  I did, I absolutely did. I don't like emotional chow-chow. I find it to be like very like uncomfortable. And so anything where I was sort of expected to take like a searing look into my soul. I don't believe in the soul. I believe that I had a drinking problem. I was physically and mentally addicted to alcohol and I just needed to, needed to solve that problem. But for, for a lot of people, that is exactly what they need. And I think that's especially true of people who have done sort of more damage than I have. I did damage. I hurt other people for sure. But I wasn't, you know, I'm not a parent. I didn't, I didn't destroy my family.

• 47:56Speaker 01

  I didn't, I don't think I, there are probably some people who think I should make amends to them. They're gonna be waiting for a while. Not because I, I don't think that's important. I do think it's important for some people, but my way of making amends is to basically remove myself from people's lives. So if I have hurt somebody, my punishment is that I no longer deserve to their presence in my life. Right? That's my way of making amends. Yeah, I, I just, I think like it's some combination of my personality. I'm a skeptic by nature. I'm the, I'm the type of person who would like go into an AA meeting and be like Googling recidivism statistics during the meeting. I just, I'm the sort of person AA was never gonna work for.

• 48:40Chris Williamson?

  Highly non-hypnotizable in that regard.

• 48:42Speaker 01

  I listened to your show on, on hypnotism and I also wanna get my genome map. Yeah.

• 48:48Chris Williamson?

  I I fear that we are both built from the same sort of building blocks there.

• 48:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:54Chris Williamson?

  I think you touch on something that's really interesting, which is most people, when they think about a person who's going to go and attend AA is, well, this person knows that their drinking is bad, but it's just out of their control. And it it's destitute and and the despondent and and they they don't enjoy it, but they they're gripped by this sort of evil thing and it's at the bottom of a bottle. And then there's other people who go, I think drinking is pretty awesome. It makes me feel pretty good. And I need to quit, but don't want to stop.

• 49:31Speaker 01

  Yes, that's the fundamental problem. That's the paradox. I need to quit, but I don't want to stop. I love this thing, but I hate this thing. That's the I think that's the you've captured the the inner monologue of many an alcoholic.

• 49:44Chris Williamson?

  Uh, OK. If AA were invented today with all of the evidence that we know about now, and it didn't have the stranglehold, do you think that meds would be its first step?

• 49:58Speaker 01

  That's a very good question. I think that if Bill Wilson himself founded it, I think yes. So Bill Wilson was extremely open minded. In the 1950s, he experimented with psychedelics. And this was very controversial within AA because the ethos of AA has always been sobriety, full sobriety. And how can you be sober if you're doing psychedelics? And he sort of lost that battle. But he was extremely open minded. And my my book starts with a quote from the big book, which is, which is the Bible of AA. It's the the sort of the big text that everybody reads and studies. And the quote, I'm gonna, I'm gonna butcher it, but it's something like, someday, science might find a cure for the alcoholic, but that hasn't happened yet.

• 50:42Speaker 01

  And the thing, so that was written in the 1930s. I think that science has actually found a cure, or at least for some people. I need to I need to couch that in many ifs. But I think for for some people, there's a cure. And I I it worked for me.

• 50:58Chris Williamson?

  Take it away, explain this super futuristic, experimental, successful procedure. Before we continue, if your workouts feel flat, your recovery's slow, or you've just been feeling off, it might not be your training plan or your diet. It might be something a bit more boring, like zinc. And while supplements like Tongkat Ali can help, zinc quietly plays a huge role in testosterone production, strength, recovery, and energy. And most people are chronically low on it, which is why I'm such a huge fan of Momentus's zinc. It supports testosterone, boosts vitality, and helps keep everything running like it should. Best of all, it's NSF certified for sport, which means it's been independently tested and approved for purity, safety, and zero shady ingredients. So even Olympic athletes can use it, and you too. And if you're still unsure,

• 51:43Chris Williamson?

  Momentus offers a 30-day money-back guarantee. So you can buy it and try it for 29 days. If you don't love it, they'll just give you your money back. Plus, they ship internationally. Right now, you can get 35% off your first subscription and that 30-day money-back guarantee by going to the link in the description below by heading to livemomentus.com/modernd wisdom using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S.com/modernd wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout.

• 52:09Speaker 01

  Okay, so the crazy thing is that this is not futuristic. It's not experimental. So there is a drug, an opioid blocker, that was first synthesized in 1963 by a company called Endo Laboratories. So we are talking about, this is before the Civil Rights Act. This is old shit. And this drug, it was owned by Dewpoint for a long time. They bought the first laboratory that synthesized this, Endo Laboratories. And it's an opioid antagonist, so an opioid blocker. It was initially developed to treat opioid addiction, which at the time would have been like morphine and heroin, less fentanyl and oxy and whatever they're selling on the streets these days. And, but it also works for alcohol use disorder.

• 52:54Speaker 01

  And it works like this. So because it's an opioid blocker, I'll just, I'll explain how it works with alcohol specifically. So.

• 53:02Speaker 01

  You take the drug and it blocks the, your receptors from getting an endorphin rush from alcohol. So it's pretty simple. The molecules sit on your opioid receptors and they prevent you from getting that euphoric high that we talked about earlier when you drink alcohol. Now, there are different ways to take naltrexone. The way that is most commonly prescribed is not the way that I did it. So the way it's most commonly prescribed is for people to take it every day, whether or not they plan on drinking. So you wake up in the morning and you take this drug and it curbs your cravings. And for some people, that works. There's also a long acting form called vivitrol. So it's a shot in the

• 53:46Speaker 01

  butt. It's in you for 30 days. It releases slowly over time. Oh, and I should say, this has been FDA approved for alcohol, the treatment of alcohol use disorder since 1994. So this is not actually a new treatment. This is an old treatment. The way that I took it was developed by a man called John David Sinclair. He was an American researcher who did most of his work. He went to grad school in the US, did his PhD here, but then he moved to Finland and he worked for Alco Laboratories, which was a state-owned, sort of an interesting company, especially from an American's perspective. So it was a liquor distributor that also had a lab, so taxpayer-funded, or funded by presumably, I don't know what the liquor

• 54:31Speaker 01

  taxes were in Finland in the 1970s. But on the bottom floors of this, of this company, they would be selling and distributing alcohol and figuring out how to get more people to drink. And on the top floors where the lab was, or maybe it was vice versa, maybe they put the, maybe they put the researchers in the basement. I don't quite remember at the moment. You had people like John David Sinclair, who were working on treatments for alcohol use disorder. And John David Sinclair, so he did most of his research on, on mice. And he realized at one point that, he was one of the first people to describe the alcohol deprivation effect that I, that I mentioned earlier, where after a period of abstinence, your cravings come back stronger than ever. And he wanted to interrupt that process. So he started out by giving lab rats.

• 55:19Speaker 01

  Opioid block, various drugs, including this opioid blocker, naltrexone. And then he would give them access to alcohol. And what he found was that these lab rats, who, whose opioid receptors were blocked because of this drug, they would over time, and these were, these were a, uh, this was a, a breed of lab rat that had been, and had, it had been bred specifically to have a propensity for alcohol addiction. They, they were bred to like alcohol, which is actually sort of hard to do. Rats don't, and mice don't typically, like, they're not boozers naturally. But so these ones had been specifically, not GMO'd, but, you know, good old fashioned. You take two rats that like to drink. Eugenics. Yeah, you make them fuck.

• 56:01Speaker 01

  So you find the ones that are hanging out the bar late at night, get them together, put them in a room together. And so, um, so he started these experiments. And what he found was that, yes, these lab rats that, uh, that, whose, whose opioid receptors were blocked when given alcohol, they would refuse it. They no longer had any interest in drinking. And this effect lasted over time. And then he started, um, started writing about this. This was later, uh, later started doing human studies. And he developed what is now called the Sinclair method. And so the Sinclair method is very simple. You take an opioid blocker, usually naltrexone, and there are other ones. There's one called naphamine, that's more common in Europe than it is in the US.

• 56:45Speaker 01

  You wait an hour, which is how long it takes for this drug to metabolize in your system, and then you drink as normal. And so that's what I did. I found out about this from an article in The Atlantic. And during COVID, my drinking accelerated to the point where it was becoming very problematic. Um, I, uh, my wife is a nurse, so she was, you know, a essential worker, as we called them back then. When we cared about them. And she was gone a lot. So I used my recreational time. I had been laid off from my job. I was a reporter for, uh, for The Stranger, which was a, is an alt weekly in Seattle. And when I after got laid off from my job, I did what everyone else did. I started a podcast

• 57:27Speaker 01

  and I stayed home and I drank by myself. And I did this for two years. I drank basically every time I like my wife left the house for two years. I didn't tell anybody. I didn't tell her. She had no idea. And then it got to the point where I knew this was I either had to come clean and confess and tell her and maybe go to rehab and probably go to AA. And I didn't want to do that. Or I had to solve this problem on my own. And I had read about the Sinclair method in the Atlantic in an article from several years before. And I decided to do it. And I did it. And it worked.

• 58:01Chris Williamson?

  That's crazy. I mean,

• 58:04Speaker 01

  We're still married, by the way. She's gonna be real shocked when she finds out about this book.

• 58:08Chris Williamson?

  I was gonna say, yeah, what was the, what was the reveal like when you presumably had that conversation? And how much of it was propelled by the potential book coming up?

• 58:17Speaker 01

  None of it. I had not written the book by the time I told her. So I so to like, cut a long story short, I did this for about seven months. I was very regimented about it. I planned my drinking days. I always took my pill. There was a small handful of occasions when I skipped it for whatever reason. But for the most part, I was very regimented about this. And this is one of the things about this, this, this treatment. You can't half ass this. It's like AA in that respect. Like, you gotta go, you gotta 100% commit. Because if you don't take the pill, and you drink without your opioid receptors being blocked, you're, the Sinclair method is basically a process of unlearning a behavior. It's called extinction, or pharmacological extinction, because there's a medication involved. And

• 59:00Speaker 01

  so if you, if you drink without the drug, and you get that endorphin dump, and that, and that dopamine rush.

• 59:06Chris Williamson?

  Everything that you've just learned.

• 59:08Speaker 01

  It's not gonna, it's not gonna be undone overnight. But if you do this, if, if you, if you don't really stick to the protocol, or if you don't wait the full hour for it to metabolize, it's just not gonna work. It's gonna confuse your brain, and your brain will continue to seek out that high. What you're trying to do is to give your brain the message that that high no longer exists. You no longer get pleasure from alcohol. And over time, your brain will stop craving it. And for me, that took about seven months of like actively doing the Sinclair method. And over time, I started, you have to incorporate some habit change and mindfulness, which is not natural for me. I'm not a mindful person. But you have to, you have to do these sort of,

• 59:52Speaker 01

  You have to, you have to make some changes in your life. It's not as simple as just taking the pill and drinking. It's pretty simple, but it's not that simple. And over time, I started like, you know, pushing my drinking, my drinking start time back. So instead of starting to drink at noon, maybe I'd start at two or maybe three. And I started incorporating more alcohol-free days into my week. And alcohol days are, alcohol-free days are exactly what they sound like. So that's days when you're not drinking and you're not taking the pill. And that's what's different about the Sinclair method than sort of the daily use of this drug, taking it every morning, or the shot, VivaTrol, which is in your body for a month. You only take it when you're drinking. And on the days when you're not drinking, you don't take it because you want your endorphin receptors to be keyed up.

• 1:00:35Speaker 01

  And on those days, you go out and you do things that are gonna spur a sort of natural high, you know, go for a hike, have good convers- go eat good meals, get laid if you can. You know, you just, you try to, try to retrain your brain into seeking pleasure elsewhere because you're no longer getting it from alcohol. So I did this for about seven months and then I decided to try for an alcohol-free month. And it was easy. And this had never been easy for me before, but it was, it was uncomplicated. And after that month, I just never started drinking again. And it's been three years since then. Wow. And I didn't tell my wife. I didn't tell her.

• 1:01:16Speaker 01

  I waited an extra, I wanted to like get a year of sobriety under my belt before I told her. And then a year came and went and honestly, I had stopped thinking about drinking. Like I think about drinking now because I'm promoting this book. I wrote the book. It's more a part of my life. But for that period of time between quitting drinking, between my last drink and deciding I was gonna write this book, I just didn't think about alcohol. And that's what I wanted because, you know, everybody sort of knows about the physical effects of alcohol, right? The headaches, the hangovers, the shakes.

• 1:01:53Speaker 01

  But for me, the killer was, was mental because alcohol was on my mind 100% of the time for most of my adult life, right? And for people who haven't experienced addiction, I think the best way to sort of explain it is like, When you have a crush on somebody or you're newly in love with somebody and you, all you think about is that person, like you're going to work, you're having conversations with your, hopefully not with your spouse, but you know, you're like, everything in your mind is focused on this desire. That's what addiction was like for me. So I thought about it. I spent 20 years of my

• 1:02:36Speaker 01

  life thinking about, I still managed to, you know, have a career and a life and relationships, but I spent 20 years of my life thinking about alcohol. Almost every moment of the day, it was in the back of my mind. And the Sinclair method and this drug freed me from that. So I basically stopped thinking about it. And then I, I told my wife after, it was more than a year, I think it was like a year and a half after I told her. She was surprised for sure, but not mad. I like married well above my weight, both physically and morally. And so we're still married. My wife was like sad for me that I'd gone through this thing, but she was also, I think, impressed that I had solved, that I had, I had a problem and I fixed it on my own. And I would

• 1:03:19Speaker 01

  never advise people to be like, do this without social support because in everything that you do, social support is going to make it easier. But I, you know, didn't do that.

• 1:03:29Chris Williamson?

  The lone skeptic again, as is on brand.

• 1:03:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I did talk to people because I was, I was also doing a lot of research about this. And so I'm a journalist and so I would, when I had questions, I would call people. And there's a robust online community. That's sort of one of the ironies about the Sinclair method is that this is one of those cases, and there aren't many of these, where you can get better information typically from like Facebook groups and Reddit and YouTube than you can from your own GP. So I was involved in these, in these online communities and having conversations about it and interviewing people, but I wasn't talking about it with the people who mean most of my life.

• 1:04:08Chris Williamson?

  Why is it that doctors are still hesitant to?

• 1:04:13Chris Williamson?

  Prescribe naltrexone or talk about it or educate about it, even if it's got strong evidence?

• 1:04:20Speaker 01

  So there's lots of answers to that question. The first answer, I think, goes back to medical education. So I don't know how it is in the UK, but in the US, historically, addiction medicine has been a very, very small part of a medical, of medical education. So I talked to doctors who are, you know, in their 40s and 50s, who did four years of, of medical school, then four years of residency, maybe did some extra training. Now they're GPs, they're family doctors, or they work in an ER. So they're seeing people every day who suffer from some kind of substance abuse disorder, whether that's alcohol or anything else. And they're in that, you know, eight years of, of medical training and education.

• 1:05:03Speaker 01

  The entirety of their training on addiction was maybe one hour, maybe they were told to attend an AA meeting. So historically, it has just not been a part of medical education in the US. This is, this is changing. So there are currently three drugs that are FDA approved to treat alcohol use disorder. Naltrexone is one of them. There's also Anabuse, uh, which has been around since the 1950s or been FDA approved for the 1950s. And there's one called, um, Acampristate. So, and there's also various off-label drug, other drugs that are used in an off-label basis.

• 1:05:41Speaker 01

  Now every med student who goes through a psych rotation is going to get education on at least those three drugs. So this is changing and it's changing really rapidly. Part of this has to do with the opioid crisis, I think. So for a long time within, uh, the recovery industry, the idea of harm reduction was sort of anathema. You know, the, nobody, not nobody, but a lot of, a lot of these institutions were based on 12 step programs, 12 step principles. And in 12 step principles, like you don't tell people to go take Suboxone or Methadone. You tell them to seek help from, you know, to, to confess their, their, to admit that they're powerless, to go to meetings every day and sort of.

• 1:06:27Speaker 01

  Will their way through it, but that doesn't work very well for opioid addiction. And so there has been a shift in recent years towards principles of harm reduction and medication assisted therapy. So that's part of it, just straight up. Doctors are not educated. The Sinclair method has an added barrier to uptake, which is that it requires drinking. So naltrexone doesn't require drinking and lots of doctors prescribe it, take it daily and don't drink with it. But the Sinclair method gives people permission to drink and that's going to be a tough sell for a lot of doctors, not just because. Right. And for families and you know, this, it sounds like. You're going to do what? Right. You're going to, you're telling me I can cure diabetes with donuts?

• 1:07:12Speaker 01

  Like it sounds crazy. I understand that. There's also legal reasons, right? So if you're a doctor and your patient comes to you and says, I'm having a drinking problem and you say, okay, here's the deal, take this drug and then go get a six pack of beer, enjoy yourself. And your patient does that and goes and kills someone in their car, you don't want to be legally liable for that. So there are all sorts of barriers specifically to the Sinclair method that prevent this from being better known. Now, there's also economic factors here, right? So naltrexone is a cheap generic drug. It's been cheap and generic for a long time and no drug company is going to pay to market

• 1:07:54Speaker 01

  it because they could just be undercut by the drug company down the street. So there are several factors here. Another one, another theory, there's a guy named Percy Menzies. He was a, he was a drug rep for DuPont. And so he was one of the, one of the, this was back in the, in the eighties. He was one of the first people trying to sell this drug to doctors or, I don't know if, I don't know if drug reps like that term, but trying to get doctors to adopt this drug for use of, of treating heroin addiction.

• 1:08:26Speaker 01

  And Percy found when he would go talk to doctors that they were completely uninterested in it because at that point, methadone had sort of cornered the market. They thought that they had this gold standard and they weren't interested in anything else. The other thing is, this is an opioid antagonist. It has the word opioid in it. And so Percy thinks that doctors could be just straight up turned off by that because it feel, it's not an opioid. It's an opioid blocker, but it sort of emotionally feels like you are giving opioids to your patients. It's not, you know, opioids are sort of a, they're on the outs these days.

• 1:09:02Chris Williamson?

  Yes. Yeah. It's, uh, it's poor branding right now, I would say, to try and get that done. It's so, it feels to me like the whole kind of alcoholic, alcohol use disorder world has been over moralized and under medicalized.

• 1:09:22Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:09:22Chris Williamson?

  I think that that's kind of how it feels.

• 1:09:25Speaker 01

  I think you're completely right about that. It's sort of ironic because, you know, a lot of people will say, if asked, they'll say, yes, alcoholism is a disease, but it's not a disease that we typically treat with medications. And again, I sort of, I have complicated feelings about that framing. I don't think it's particularly helpful.

• 1:09:41Chris Williamson?

  Someone who's unsure that it is a disease, but something that you should treat with medications.

• 1:09:45Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 1:09:45Chris Williamson?

  Or could treat with medications.

• 1:09:46Speaker 01

  Right. And naltrexone doesn't work for everyone. I want to be really clear with this. So earlier we talked about those two types of drinkers, right? Reward drinkers and relief drinkers. And this information, I learned this all from a guy named Joe Vopacelli. He's a, he's this fantastic clinician and researcher out of Penn. And Joe, Joe's studies, some of his, he's been working with naltrexone for decades and his, some of his early studies were used for the FDA approval of this drug. And Joe explained this to me. For people, for reward drinkers, this typically, this is, this, people like this tend to be binge drinkers, right? The people who are going out, going to clubs.

• 1:10:27Speaker 01

  Dancing in the town fountain, whatever, people who get energized from alcohol. Naltrexone can work really, really well. It's almost, he actually used the term miracle pill, which is not something, this is like a, you know, this is a, this is a real doctor here. This is not a term that doctors typically use. It can almost be a miracle pill for, or a miracle cure for that population. For the other types of drinkers, relief drinkers, people who get the sedating effect, it has almost no effect.

• 1:10:59Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 1:11:00Speaker 01

  I think it's, okay, so part of this, this is like sort of an open question, but the theories that I read and I heard from researchers is that it has something to do with one particular allele. So one particular gene variant, it's called ASP40, ASP40, and the mu opioid receptor. For, so

• 1:11:25Speaker 01

  having that, having, possessing that allele does not guarantee that Naltrexone will work for you, but it's a strong indicator that it may work. If you don't have that, have that allele, it's a strong predictor that it will not work.

• 1:11:40Chris Williamson?

  Right, okay. And that, that will

• 1:11:46Chris Williamson?

  tend you toward a particular type of alcohol use and a particular type of response to alcohol, too?

• 1:11:51Speaker 01

  That is the theory, yes.

• 1:11:53Chris Williamson?

  Right, that's interesting. I've just checked. I checked your genetic in lab reports. The ASP40 variant you're asked for refers to the OPRM1 and A11AG polymorphism. Looking through your genetic reports, you do not have the ASP40. Your OPRM1 result shows the AA genotype, SN40, SN40, meaning you do not carry it. So no, so I would be, I would be useless.

• 1:12:16Speaker 01

  You might, it might not, it would be interesting to, do you drink now?

• 1:12:21Chris Williamson?

  No, I, it was an interesting journey, I guess, with regards to alcohol for me. I never had a problem with it in terms of a dependency, but I was a party drinker, you know? Every two weeks I would send it in club promoter fashion. And then it got toward the end, end of my twenties. So what we're talking about now, 28, I think 27, 28? Would have been the first time I did it, so maybe nine years ago. And I know that low and no movements, kind of all the rage and morning ice plunge parties and run clubs and stuff are kind of everywhere. Ten years ago, nine years ago, that really was not the case at all. It was not trendy to be against the grain with regards to even social drinking.

• 1:13:05Chris Williamson?

  And there was just some inclination that I had that alcohol was holding me back. Even though I wasn't using it that frequently, I do get bad hangovers. I think I tend to waddle a mood sometimes and if you do, and then you crank a hangover on top of it, like that's really going to turn it up. And I just had one really bad hangover one day and I was like, I'm not going to drink for six months. And there's had this idea in my mind, so I went six months sober and loved it. And then I was in Bali and had a Corona. I was like, okay, I've done my six months and I'll break it when I'm in Bali and I'll go back to, you know, see what drinking's like. I did it for three months, really didn't like it. So I'm going to do another six.

• 1:13:50Chris Williamson?

  Went back for one or two weeks after that, had one or two, a couple of beer nights out and did it for a thousand days. And then since then, basically I'll drink less than five times a year and it'll be a beer or a couple of beers or something like that.

• 1:14:06Speaker 01

  And I'm curious, when you drink, what is the effect? Do you get high energized sort of fast or does it chill you out?

• 1:14:14Chris Williamson?

  It's a good question.

• 1:14:14Speaker 01

  And it's harder, it's harder to answer than you might think. Like it does.

• 1:14:19Chris Williamson?

  I would say, I would say in the past, it might have been, and this is what I said earlier on, in my twenties, reminded of being more energized and it being enthusing also would have been coupled up with unspeakable, unpronounceable drugs from a guy in a toilet somewhere. Um, which, you know, will supercharge anything.

• 1:14:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, and there's also the social aspect, right? So if you're going out and your friend's around and there's loud music and you're dancing, that's also going to be a natural amplifier of this sort of euphoric effect. And I think it would be hard to parse out, is that the booze or is that the mood?

• 1:14:55Chris Williamson?

  Atmosphere, yeah, the collective effort or it's set and setting for alcohol. The, but whereas now, you know, if I do have a beer or a glass of wine or something, it's as we're trying to work out why everyone's commenting on the Ukraine when they don't have any expertise in it over a good steak at dinner, you know, like that it's,

• 1:15:13Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:15:14Chris Williamson?

  a very different sort of atmosphere.

• 1:15:15Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:15:16Chris Williamson?

  Um, and maybe that is the sort of thing that I want. And also I've generally chilled out.

• 1:15:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:21Chris Williamson?

  Not sending it in the same way that I used to previously. Anyway, um, I made a big song and dance about this because it was as the show was starting and, and it was a big part, going sober, uh, what I called at the time elective sobriety, which was like choosing to as a productivity strategy as opposed to for some sort of need.

• 1:15:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. Sober maxing.

• 1:15:42Chris Williamson?

  Sober maxing, that's it. It's correct. Yes, yes.

• 1:15:46Chris Williamson?

  I, I was, I mean, I still am. I, I don't think I need to kind of fly the flag for it so much anymore, but it was a huge part of my identity for the first sort of three or four years of the show. The reason I don't think I need to talk about it quite that much is it's less of a big part of my life because it's more just habituated and that's kind of the way that I exist. But also I think the world has sort of taken that and run with it. You know, what is it now? I think that the WHO says that there is no safe level of alcohol consumption. This huge meta, meta, meta analysis by The Lancet came back and basically said that there's no such thing as a safe level of alcohol consumption. That one glass of red wine, oh, but the resveratrol that comes from the red grapes. It's like, yeah, but it's being offset by all of the stuff that it's housed in.

• 1:16:28Speaker 01

  You could just eat the grapes.

• 1:16:29Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, exactly. You, and it's not good. There is no benefit. The one benefit that you could see is to go like a Warren Buffett style approach, which is the stress of trying to be perfect will kill you more quickly than your imperfections.

• 1:16:42Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:16:42Chris Williamson?

  And I can see a place for that, but if you're looking just straight up physiologically Huberman pilled, like it's not, this is not the direction to go down. But it was a huge, huge part of me and my life. And I remember even for me, right, as somebody who.

• 1:17:00Chris Williamson?

  Wasn't dependent, wasn't drinking that regularly, was around the party scene a lot. I remember how triggering it was for all of the people that I used to party with when I'd say that I wasn't drinking. And especially if you're in your twenties, and especially if you're the club promoter, you're supposed to bring the party.

• 1:17:17Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:17:17Chris Williamson?

  And that meant that when I said I wasn't drinking, the responses that I got from people were, as far as I could see, really outsized. I was very surprised by how triggered the people were by it, by how mean they got. I was kind of in a fortunate position that I was the top of the tree within this industry. So there was only so far that you could, like, it's like taking the piss out of Joe Rogan for the microphone that he's not using anymore. And you're like, yeah, but he's like the guy that runs it, right?

• 1:17:48Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:17:48Chris Williamson?

  So it's, you know, and it was kind of the same, at least a little bit in the world of club promotion for me. That it's like you could push me a little bit, but not that far. However, one of the things that did happen was people stopped inviting me out.

• 1:17:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're a downer.

• 1:18:00Chris Williamson?

  They didn't want to, and the other thing, which I'm sure that you've seen too, and it must be a difficulty, must be why it's so hard if you're friends with people who use alcohol to get sober, is that your sobriety throws their drinking into sharp contrast.

• 1:18:15Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:18:15Chris Williamson?

  And other people do not like the spotlight being placed on them in reflection of somebody that's making a change. And yeah, I mean, I wrote, I wrote so much about this, about the fact that if the only friends that you can bear to be around are ones that you have to drink to be able to spend time with, then you don't have friends, you have drinking partners. If the events that you're attending are ones that you need to consume alcohol to be able to get through, then the problem is not your alcohol use, the problem is the shitty events that you're going to. Like, you know, just this endless list of very obvious insights in retrospect that were all couched underneath this lifestyle that uses alcohol, like in the UK, I don't know whether this is the same in the US. I haven't seen it here, even though I fly a lot. In the UK, if you go to any.

• 1:19:01Chris Williamson?

  Working class town airport, Newcastle, Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, something like that. If you go to any of those airports between the months of March and October, summer holiday-ish trips, six in the morning, five in the morning, the bar will be open and people will be treating the opportunity to have a beer like it's this, it's like it's naughty, like it's sort of, it shouldn't be allowed, but oh, we're gonna treat ourselves to something. And I always found that so fucking cringe. Like, I always, I always found it, I was like, oh my god, the, the highest point of, of subversive, uh, uh,

• 1:19:44Chris Williamson?

  like anarchistic contribution that you can have is having a beer at five in the morning. And I get it, like, people are allowed to enjoy what they're allowed to enjoy, but I don't think that people are enjoying that. I think they're enjoying the story that they tell themselves about what that means. And I think that that's something which is much easier to change and it's something that I'm seeing. So yeah, again, my long-winded way of saying, oddly enough, even though alcohol was never something that was a, a huge part of my life, um, going sober was massively formative because it allowed me to finally get a fucking meditation habit and finally actually wake up and go to bed at the same time, finally actually get some journaling done, finally start a podcast

• 1:20:25Chris Williamson?

  and do, because I wasn't resetting these very difficult to do habits, right? You're going to the gym and eating well and getting up on time and doing all the rest of this stuff. It's hard enough to do as it is. If you're not shaking the Etch A Sketch every two weeks to reset all the program and then day one, no chance. And day two, eh, still kind of not. And day three, oh, okay, maybe I'm sort of slowly getting back there. And I'd always wondered, like, why am I just, it permanently feels like I'm not making progress at the speed that I should. And, um, the answer was kind of really subtly staring me in the face, which is, well, you're, you're choosing to kind of give yourself an illness for a couple of days, twice a month. And, and that was it.

• 1:21:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I found that after I got sober, I found that it almost felt like a life hack. And this is not, like, I'm not, I'm not a maximizer, I'm not anything pilled. Well, I'm no Trex, I'm pilled. But it did, it did feel like a life hack because I lived for so many years with.

• 1:21:24Speaker 01

  This mental obsession, the physical, the physical effects of alcohol, but especially the mental obsession that was such a distraction from anything else in my life. I couldn't optimize shit. I still can't really optimize shit.

• 1:21:35Chris Williamson?

  How did you get, how did you get anything done? Because I've listened, I've listened to your podcast. You, you seem to have a really fantastic recall. You've got great stories. You were working as a writer. The book's wonderful. I love the pods that you've done in the past that I've heard. Those do not smack to me of a person whose brain has been addled by alcohol, who's never been able to think about anything, who's had their mind cycles captured by worrying about where the next drink's gonna come from, or if my wife's gonna find those bottles that I hid in the back garden or whatever.

• 1:22:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:05Chris Williamson?

  That doesn't smack me as that. So you, are you the, the prototypical functional alcohol use disorder person or what?

• 1:22:11Speaker 01

  Well, I wasn't for a long time. So until I was 30, I worked dead end entry level jobs that I was usually fired from within a few months and spent all of my time at a bar, at the bar. There was one bar I liked in particular. And then at 30, I started to get my shit together. I took an unpaid internship at a public radio station. And I did this purely out of pettiness because I had been broken up with someone who worked in public radio. And I was like, bitch, I'm gonna, I'm gonna get your job and I'm gonna do it better than you. I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna win. That's how petty I am. And, um, and so I started to get my shit together then, but it was still, I was still

• 1:22:55Speaker 01

  working at a deficit because, and I also, I also moved a lot during this period. So I would live somewhere for a few years, maybe I think at the max, at the most like four years. And then I would kind of burn my bridges. I would run out of jobs and then I would leave for a new town and I would start to cycle over again. That was actually a fairly effective way of, of getting clean for at least a little while, like removing myself from the environment that I was in. But so I really did not start. Even really attempting to make career moves until I was thirty years old. And then I got, I did get serious about, I decided I was gonna be a journalist. And I did get serious about that, but I still had many, many setbacks.

• 1:23:36Speaker 01

  And at that point, I had kind of aged out of like heavy like club culture and party culture. Because just like my friends weren't doing it as much, so I did much more of my drinking at home by myself. So I really shifted around that period to like being the girl, being like a party girl who everybody knew as a party girl. To being somebody who had a much more like not like equally problematic, but much more private drinking experience. And there are lots of people who, when I was reading, when I was working on the book, I talked to an entrepreneur who I will not mention his name, but you have heard of him. Who was drinking forty drinks a day, like low alcohol drinks, but forty, forty beers a day. Who also got on milk.

• 1:24:18Chris Williamson?

  Forty low alcohol beers a day.

• 1:24:20Speaker 01

  It's just an immense amount of liquid. He probably had to wear a fucking diaper.

• 1:24:23Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, holy shit.

• 1:24:24Speaker 01

  So, right, and then, and also like, think about the nineteen fifty's, right? When people are having three martini lunches and then going back to the office after this. You know, that has, that has almost completely left the culture. So we're just, our standards really have changed. And then.

• 1:24:41Chris Williamson?

  Go ahead.

• 1:24:41Speaker 01

  Now, I just, we have like, what is acceptable and what is considered problematic drinking? Has changed so much that like, what I consider problematic drinking would not have registered in nineteen fifty.

• 1:24:54Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I remember hearing some story about the introduction of tea houses or coffee houses. I think into Great Britain. And when that changed from being the public house where everybody would go to meet and talk during the day. And that encouraged of.

• 1:25:12Chris Williamson?

  Slightly sloppier type of conversation to then, oh, well, you don't just need to drink the alcohol, perhaps you can drink the caffeine. And this was some sort of springboard boon for idea generation and may have contributed to the Renaissance and stuff like that.

• 1:25:27Speaker 01

  What is, I'm curious, so I did, I did study abroad in the UK when I, and I, I chose it there for two reasons. One, the drinking age was, is what, 18? And I was 20 at the time, or 19 or 20. And two, this is the less important reason, you speak English. And so I, so I did study abroad over there and I had classes on Monday all day and then Tuesday until noon. That was my entire work week, my, like my school schedule ended at Tuesday at noon. And there was a pub on campus, the student union was an actual union. And there was a, there was a pub and pool tables and we drank fucking snake bites, that horrific, like.

• 1:26:06Chris Williamson?

  Half cider, half lager with a little bit of black currant juice in it.

• 1:26:10Speaker 01

  Yes. And it's like worse coming out, coming up the, the next day, it's disgusting. And just the drinking culture there was, I loved it. I absolutely loved it. But I'm curious, I mean, yes, in the US, we have definitely seen, like, we can see this in, in polling, Gen Z is way less boozy than, you know, millennials than my generation was. They're also having less sex, they're seeing each other less, there, there's all sorts of downstream effects, I think, connected to the phone. But, um, has this, has this changed in the UK at all as well? Or are people still boozing it up there?

• 1:26:45Chris Williamson?

  I think it's, it's very similar. My colleagues and ex-business partners from the industry that I spent my life in, it does feel a little bit to me like I sold Bitcoin at $120,000. Because the market has really hit quite a, an aggressive downturn. It's. It's just not the done thing and you know, it is a confluence of all of this stuff because if the nightclubs are less busy because more people, you're not just competing as a nightclub with the darts round the corner or the Huberman podcast telling you that you shouldn't be drinking alcohol. You're also competing with Netflix and HBO and TikTok and just the vegetable culture.

• 1:27:29Chris Williamson?

  I'm just gonna veg out on the couch and you're competing with changing dynamics in terms of what people tell. Well, weed is now more prevalent in the UK. I know it's massively, maybe even to the stage where more Gen Z smoke and drink now, I think. So there's a lot of competition for what your potential substance of choice is, whether it's the environment that you're going to be in, whether it's the people that are around you, whether it's the social norms about that, whether it's the education level that you've got and the understanding of the health effects, whether it's the alternatives that you've got to get a buzz on, whether it's the screens that can stop you from going out of the house at all, whether it's the social anxiety from being arrested development during COVID. It really is, in many ways, a

• 1:28:12Chris Williamson?

  a perfect storm to stop people from drinking. And in many ways, in many ways, that's good. But I mean, we are already seeing how quickly the world's turned. Only a decade ago, for me, it was revolutionary to say that I wasn't gonna drink. And now we have, I think I saw a Scott Galloway clip the other day of him saying, I would way rather someone go out and get smashed than sit in the house and like stare at the screen. Because very quickly, as with everything, the pendulum has swung so quickly back the other way. Well, now we're worried about this thing now. We've got to be concerned about the isolation.

• 1:28:45Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:28:46Chris Williamson?

  So yes, it's vicious.

• 1:28:48Speaker 01

  That's a completely legitimate fear because it's not just that young people aren't drinking, which it's hard to argue that that's not a net positive, but they're also not socializing with each other in person. And I cannot see that as a net positive. They're not having sex, which, you know, maybe there's some net positive there as well for, you know, we want people to be responsible with their bodies. But if we have, you know, generations of people coming up who don't know how to interact with each other in person.

• 1:29:17Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 1:29:19Chris Williamson?

  It was, I mean, that that rite of passage thing that I said, it it really is. And as much as, could I have, could I have learned the lessons that I needed to without going out and partying? Maybe, maybe, but given that whatever it is, you know, maybe 90% or 95% drink 50% of the alcohol, it seems that most people aren't graduating into becoming alcohol dependent.

• 1:29:43Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:29:44Chris Williamson?

  And if that's the case, you can, there's, there's probably a pretty good argument to be made that it is maybe a net positive, that it does sort of expedite your learning. How many people met their partners? I mean, you know, meet your girlfriend in a nightclub. Is that the best place?

• 1:29:58Speaker 01

  At least, at least the girlfriend for the week or the night.

• 1:30:00Chris Williamson?

  That's true. That's true. That's true.

• 1:30:04Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it is a, it probably is. There is certainly something that's been lost from that. And the sort of massive surveillance culture that we have, I think, that made everybody much more worried about messing up or or

• 1:30:18Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:30:18Chris Williamson?

  doing something embarrassing. We used to do this bar crawl called Carnage, which was a T-shirt bar crawl and you wore the T-shirt as your ticket. And then there was tasks on the back that you had to tick off, like pulled a pig, swapped shoes with a random.

• 1:30:33Speaker 01

  Pull a pig?

• 1:30:34Chris Williamson?

  Pulled a pig, like got off with somebody who's really ugly and fat.

• 1:30:37Speaker 01

  Oh, that's terrible. That is

• 1:30:38Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:39Speaker 01

  so awful.

• 1:30:40Chris Williamson?

  It was 2006. Okay, so we were allowed

• 1:30:42Speaker 01

  Makes sense.

• 1:30:44Chris Williamson?

  It was a different world. And

• 1:30:46Speaker 01

  Different, it means a different thing in Austin. That's a, that's a barbecue joint.

• 1:30:50Chris Williamson?

  That's true.

• 1:30:54Chris Williamson?

  That Larry Lauty culture would not, you would not even be able to get two feet down the street with that in

• 1:31:02Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:31:02Chris Williamson?

  the modern world, because this fucking surveillance state run by gullible volunteers, this sort of Starzy for the Angry Birds generation.

• 1:31:09Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:31:10Chris Williamson?

  Would have captured everything. So you Pulling the pig or you throwing up in a bush somewhere, that is immortalized on the internet for the rest of the time.

• 1:31:20Speaker 01

  Well, and at an even younger age, when I was a kid, when I was 15, my parents left me at home for a weekend. I hope they're not listening to this. If they are, I'm sorry. I fucking took their car and I drove around all weekend. I had a giant party at their house. They never found out. Today, they would have a tracker on me in the form of my phone. And every neighbor would have a Ring camera or they would have a Ring camera.

• 1:31:46Chris Williamson?

  Capturing you as you go past.

• 1:31:47Speaker 01

  Capturing you. Yeah. So I don't know how young people today get away with shit. And I do think those are valuable lessons to learn. I'm not sure what the value is, but I think it's still valuable.

• 1:32:00Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. It's fascinating. So is this, what is it that you're hoping to achieve with this? Are you hoping to make more people aware that this is a particular solution for people that are drinking too much? Is it to sort of campaign to make this more widespread among doctors?

• 1:32:18Speaker 01

  All of the above. Yeah. I want, the, the, the main message of the book is, you know, the book is about the Sinclair method and naltrexone. And it is sort of a step by step. This is self-help, which the fact that I, Katie Herzog, wrote a self-help book would shock anybody who knew me 10 years ago.

• 1:32:37Speaker 01

  It's definitely a twist. No one saw this coming. So, but part of it is to give people a guide. Because when I was doing this, there were YouTube videos and Facebook and Reddit and lots of, you can hire coaches who are really helpful in terms of helping people know what to expect, how to deal with side effects and setbacks and things like this. Trying to figure out if it'll even work for you in the first place. But I wanted a book. I wanted something I could read that would tell me what to expect on day one, on month one, on year one. And that didn't exist at the time. So that's part of it, just giving people a guide. But I also, you know, naltrexone isn't going to work for everybody, but there are lots of other options out there.

• 1:33:19Speaker 01

  And I just, I want the conversation to shift from, there's one path out of alcohol use disorder. And that is abstinence only, to just broadening the way that we think about this. Because that, that option does work for a lot of people, but it doesn't work for everyone. And I think the problem. With the AA or nothing narrative, or the abstinence or nothing narrative, is that it keeps people drinking longer. So I thought that for years, I thought that the only solution to my problem was going to be to quit drinking and to quit drinking forever. I did do that in the end, but it wasn't what I expected. And that was such a mental barrier for me that it kept me drinking much longer than I should have.

• 1:34:03Speaker 01

  And had I known that there was a way to continue to drink, because that's what I wanted to do, continue to drink, but do it in a way that was safe and that would extinguish my desire for alcohol, I would have taken this step, I think, a lot earlier than I did. And I would have saved myself some heartache in the process.

• 1:34:23Chris Williamson?

  And you wouldn't have had to write a personal development book. But here we are. We've done it. And it's actually really, really good.

• 1:34:29Speaker 01

  The worst part, yes, yes. I mean, not only did I have to tell my, come out and tell my parents that I had been secretly drinking, I had to tell them that I wrote a self-help book. It's humiliating.

• 1:34:40Chris Williamson?

  The price that you pay to try and help the world become slightly better.

• 1:34:44Speaker 01

  My god.

• 1:34:44Chris Williamson?

  Katie, you're great. Where should people go to check out all of your stuff?

• 1:34:48Speaker 01

  You can preorder the book. It's on Amazon, all that stuff. You can go to my website, drinkyourwaysover.com or org, not sure, Google it. And I also have a podcast. It's called Blocked and Reported. We do not talk about self-help or drinking culture. We talk mostly about the internet and culture. And a lot of talk about furries. We've been on a furry kick lately.

• 1:35:11Chris Williamson?

  Okay, I haven't seen those, but your Blocked and Reported is awesome. And everyone should go and check that out. And so are you. I really, really appreciate what you've done.

• 1:35:18Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me. It's great to talk to you.

• 1:35:20Speaker 02

  Mr. President, my company formed me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd, causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess. And Digger's gonna dig us out. From the director of Birdman and the Ravenhead.

• 1:35:36Speaker 03

  What would happen if I start doing it? You start, you freeze to death. That's what.

• 1:35:41Speaker 02

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:35:44Speaker 03

  I'm not the first then.

• 1:35:45Speaker 02

  Digger, see the trailer online, only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R, under 17, not a middle without parent.