Counting is trained into us. Likes, shares, followers, headcount. The pull for more is constantly advertised. Enough never gets a chance to land. What I do doesn’t run at that scale. It happens one person at a time, on the day they can hear it, and one is what counts.

The first Clear Hour ran on September 1st. I had a number in my head before it started, and I spent that day on the number instead of the hour.

I said it out loud to my roommate after, which was the hard part. He said, you’re one year into this. You’re still learning.

I sat with it. I’d been so focused on how many people were coming that I wasn’t as present as I wanted to be. One person in that room spent forty minutes on something she’d been blocked on for years, and she created it. That was the whole thing, and I was somewhere else, measuring.

Years ago this same day ends with me blasting myself into oblivion with a case of beer. This time it was a difficult conversation, then reflection, then a different read on the day, and I came out of it grateful for something people genuinely enjoyed.

Look at where you’ve set an expectation on something you have no way of knowing yet.

Enough was already in the room.

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Essays

Podcast

A note before this one. Steve talks openly about two stretches when he didn't want to be alive, including an attempt during his time in inpatient care. He came through it and he tells it plainly, without drama. If that's close to where you are right now, this might be one to come back to another day, or to listen to with someone. In the US you can call or text 988. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans is 116 123.

Steve spent 17 years at USAID. 83 projects, 63 countries, more than $500 million moved toward small businesses, women-owned businesses, and the working poor.

He didn’t take his first drink until he was 21. He calls what followed a reverse Benjamin Button. It got worse as he got older, until it was a bottle of wine every night and every promotion arrived with a fresh round of doubt about whether he belonged in the room. He blacked out the night before he had to fire someone. In South Africa the group he drank with went from five people to three to two to alone.

He brought up The Alibis before I did. He said he saw himself in the characters and that they all showed up near the end of his drinking. Listening back, his were the Benchmark and the Closer running as a pair. He wasn’t drinking at work. Nobody around him was saying he had a problem. His performance reviews averaged 4.5 out of 5 and he kept getting promoted, so nothing had fallen over. “I don’t feel like an alcoholic, so maybe I’m not.” He picked a standard and he cleared it every day, which is what an alibi is for.

Then he says the next part himself, out loud, in the middle of the sentence: “It was under control. And it really wasn’t. When you’re drinking a bottle of wine every single night, it’s not really.”

August 4th, 2018 is his sober date. It’s also the day he landed back in the United States after being sent home from South Africa because of his drinking. He stopped because the depression was heavy enough that he couldn’t leave the room. He thought his life was over.

Then came the part sobriety didn’t touch. COVID took the structure away and a diagnosis nobody had caught for 40 years finally surfaced. A high performer with a 4.5 average watched his ratings fall into the ones and twos with no coaching and no explanation. In 2024 he checked himself into inpatient care in Colorado after driving roughly 28 hours with Max and Slushy in the car. He planned on one month. He stayed two. What he carried out of that place was language for feelings, something he’d gone four decades without.

When USAID was dismantled in 2025, the thing he’d been most afraid of losing was gone, and he says that’s what finally let him separate Steve from Steve the USAID worker.

He walks dogs now. Outside Feet, named for what he tells his own dogs at the door before he puts his shoes on. He makes art, which he never thought he had in him. He was a numbers guy, a spreadsheet guy, and the drawing started in art therapy in Colorado with stick figures. He’s building a Renaissance punk world of corvid characters modeled on writers he admires, and at the end of our conversation he screen shared the one he made of me.

His definition of creativity, after all of it: being open and being honest.

You can listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well.

Apple Podcasts

My guest this week is with on September 10 at 11:00A ET

This week I’m sitting down with Dr. Leslie Morrow, a neuroscientist who spent 35 years at UNC’s Bowles Center for Alcohol Studies asking a question most of us only ever ask ourselves at 2am: What is alcohol actually doing in there?

She earned her PhD in neuroscience at UC San Diego in 1985, trained at NIMH, joined the UNC faculty in 1990, and published more than 238 papers on the way to a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Research Society on Alcohol.

Her discoveries around GABA-A receptors and the brain’s own pregnane neurosteroids helped open the door to clinical trials for alcohol use disorder and to brexanolone for depression.

I wanted her on the show because so much of what we call willpower is chemistry we were never taught to see. When you understand what the drink is doing to your stress system, your sleep, your inflammation, and your capacity to focus the next day, the decision to stop starts to feel less like deprivation and more like getting your equipment back.

What I’m Creating

Check out the note below. The piece I made in the first Clear Hour, forty minutes with a pen and no plan, plus what one member said about hers.

The next one is in October. If you want in, leave a comment or hit reply and I'll send you the date and the link directly.

Quitting drinking doesn't give you your life back. It gives you an hour.

For me it was the one after five. I'd been thinking about it since two most days, so the night was decided before I ever got home.

When I stopped, I thought I was getting time back. What I got was the same hour with nothing in it.

The drink had been carrying something, and when I set it down the weight had to land somewhere. I didn’t decide where, so it picked its own spot. Mostly a screen. Sometimes food, sometimes a habit that was easier to defend in front of people and did the same job the drink had been doing.

Here’s what I understand about the craving. It shows up as a demand for action. Underneath it is a restlessness that won't settle on its own, and the body wants it gone in the next few minutes, not hours. Alcohol is the first thing it reaches for, because nothing else works that fast.

The first move isn’t to fill it. It’s okay not to fill it. If you go looking for something that works as fast as the drink did, you’ll find one, and it’ll be your phone. Nothing has to happen at six o’clock. You’re allowed to be bored, and being bored isn’t the start of something going wrong.

Bored only lasts for so long. So you make something. It asks for the same thing the craving is asking for, your hands and your attention and somewhere to put them. It takes an hour instead of a few minutes, which is the point. When it’s done there’s something in the room that wasn’t there before.

One sentence keeps the hour empty. It shows up before anyone tries. I’m not creative. I’ve never been a creative person.

People hand that word to somebody else, to the ones with the studio and the training and a show coming up, and then stand off to the side and watch.

It’s bullshit. You've been doing it all along, just without the name.

You found the way through a problem at work that three other people had walked past, and you never called it anything, because it was just Tuesday. You made the cupcakes for your kid’s birthday and decided what they’d look like before you started. The trip you planned got built around what the people with you would actually want, which took more imagination than most of what hangs on a wall. Dinner comes out of whatever’s in the fridge and it works.

Creativity is the plain human ability to picture something that isn’t there yet and then build it, and every one of us has it. What alcohol does is dim the part of you that does the picturing, night after night, until you stop noticing you ever had it. Then you call the absence a personality trait.

Now the harder part.

Under I’m not creative there’s usually a belief that something is missing in you. That other people got the thing and you didn’t. This goes back further than the drinking does.

Then the drinking stacks on top of it. Because you know what it’s costing you, and you keep doing it, and you carry that. So by the time you’re sober and staring down an empty hour with the idea of making something in it, you’re not starting from zero. You’re starting from underneath two loads at once, one that says you were never able, and one that says look at what you’ve been doing to yourself. That’s a lot of weight to bring to a blank page.

You can’t reason your way out of either of them. What moves it is sitting down and doing the thing, over and over, until there’s a stack of small proof behind you. Which means the practice doesn’t have to be a big thing in your head before it’s allowed to begin. It just has to begin.

Think about what’s in front of a painter. The blank canvas. The colors to pick from, the mediums, the brushes, the composition, and no end to what could be made out of any of it. Then the brush is in the hand and there’s the movement from the brush to the canvas. Flowing. Every stroke a rep.

Mine turned out to be clay.

A few years ago I took a six-week pottery class. It was something I’d wanted to do for years and kept putting it off. I fell in love with it, got a membership, and made a lot of mugs, most of which I gave away.

Here’s what an hour of it looks like. You get your station together. The tools, the water, the sponge that looks like a piece of honeycomb. You turn the wheel in the direction that works for you and set the speed on the pedal. You drop the bat over the pins. Then you cut a one-pound piece off the block, and what’s in your hand is clay and nothing else. You roll it and you knead it and you keep rolling it until it’s a ball. You slap it down on the center of the wheel. You press the pedal. You squeeze the sponge over it and the water runs through your fingers and down into the spin, and something comes out of nothing right there under your palms.

That’s the part the drink could never do. The best thing a drink gives you is a hangover the next day. What you create might be a gift. It might be something you sell, or something you throw away, and none of that matters. Either way it exists, and you’re the reason.

The proof isn’t the finished thing.

I made a mug early on that I was proud of. Put it in the kiln to be fired, came back a week later, and couldn’t find it anywhere on the shelf. I looked for a while before it occurred to me to check the scrap pile. There it was, broken.

My first thought was the time. All those hours, for nothing. And then that passed a lot faster than I expected it to, because the hours hadn’t been about the mug. They were about the making, and that was the part I still had.

That’s where confidence comes from. The shelf of things that survived has less to do with it than you’d think, which is also why the practice gives back far more than the finished product ever will.

Years into this, that hour stopped being something I had to solve at five o'clock.

It moves around now. It turns up in the morning, in the middle of an afternoon that got away from me, on a Sunday with nothing in it. At seven tonight I’ll be winding down and getting ready for bed, which would have sounded like a punishment to the version of me who needed that hour to go somewhere.

I liked the studio when it was empty. That hour on my own was one of the better things in my week.

The class was a different thing. There was an energy in that room that came from being near other people working, seeing how somebody set their station up, how they handled the clay, what they were trying that I wouldn’t have thought of. And every so often somebody would stop and say something good about something I’d made. Nothing formal. Just noticed.

The voice that asks who you think you are gets a lot smaller in a room like that.

So watch for the hour in your day that isn’t doing anything for you. Most of us have one.

The hour is yours to create.

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Steve didn’t take a drink until he was 21. He calls it a reverse Benjamin Button. Most people get their worst drinking out of the way young. His started late, got heavier every year, and by the back half of his 30s it was every single day.

He stopped on August 4th, 2018, after his drinking got him sent home from a post in South Africa. There was no program and no meetings. He was so depressed he couldn’t leave his room, which broke the habit before he ever decided to break it.

Then nothing was fixed. Six years later, still sober, he was diagnosed with ADHD, watched two decades of near-perfect performance reviews collapse, went through termination proceedings, and checked himself into inpatient care in the Colorado mountains because he couldn’t guarantee his own safety.

Almost none of what he found there had to do with alcohol. It had to do with a man who had spent his entire adult life believing he was his job. What he built on the other side of it is a dog wellness company and a world of corvid characters he draws with AI, which is not where a career foreign aid officer expects to end up.

A note before you read on: Steve speaks openly about depression and two suicidal episodes. He gave his full blessing to share it. If any of this hits close to home for you, please reach out to someone you trust.

Show Notes

[02:36] A Late Start That Got Worse With Age

• Steve went to Tulane in New Orleans, a heavy drinking town, and mostly ran with the engineering and finance crowd. He barely drank in college and never blacked out there.

• After graduation he took an internship with the Department of the Army and landed in a cohort with a real drinking culture. Classes ended at three and the group went straight to margaritas.

• He moved every two years, served overseas with soldiers, and drank his way into every new room. He describes himself as a chameleon during those years.

• By the second half of his 30s, it was daily.

Key Insights

“It seemed like a shortcut. So that’s how I kind of just got sucked into it.”

[11:15] When Drinking Flipped From Fun to Function

• Steve rose fast, three years with the Army and then 17 at USAID. Every promotion brought a fresh wave of imposter syndrome.

• He was moved from Washington, D.C. to South Africa to run a large office. He remembers blacking out one night because he had to fire somebody the next morning.

• The circle kept shrinking. Five people at the bar became three, then two, then just him.

• Drinking stopped being about having no responsibilities and started being about having too many.

Key Insights

“It becomes less of a social thing and more of a, this is just something I need to do.”

[14:26] August 4th, 2018

• His drinking started affecting his work. He was sent back to the United States from South Africa.

• The depression that followed was so heavy he couldn’t get out of his room, so he stopped drinking without ever making a plan to.

• He had to leave his dogs behind in South Africa for two months and wasn’t allowed to visit them.

• He never went to AA. He just stopped.

Key Insights

“August 4th is the day I returned to the United States and I thought my life was over.”

[17:45] COVID, ADHD, and the Loss of Structure

• Working from home stripped away the outside structure that had been holding him together. His ratings dropped from an average of 4.5 out of 5 down to threes, twos and ones.

• He wanted to start drinking again. He went to therapy instead and came out with a diagnosis of ADHD and major depressive disorder.

• Leadership gave him no coaching and no useful feedback, and he couldn’t work out what was happening to him.

• Between 2020 and 2024 it built into a crash, and a second suicidal episode.

Key Insights

“What I found out is the lack of structure was killing me and I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me.”

[21:26] Losing the Job That Was His Whole Identity

• Bad reviews turned into termination proceedings. He believed it was all his fault.

• He checked into inpatient care in Colorado expecting a short stay. He thought he was better, wasn’t, and stayed a second month.

• In 2025, USAID was dismantled and his 17-year career ended outright. Having the job taken from him did what he couldn’t do himself.

• He had stayed off social media for 20 years. Substack is where he landed after.

Key Insights

“I was finally able to break Steve away from Steve, the USAID worker.”

[23:07] The Depression Equation

• Steve built himself a simple formula for what was happening to him, and then built his day around beating it.

• His answer was to get outside, so he started walking dogs. It slowly dawned on him that this could be an actual life.

• Buddhist teachings on attachment had been floating around his life for years without landing. They landed now.

• He got obsessed with space, and found the scale of it comforting rather than frightening.

Key Insights

“Depression equals being at home. Being alone and in your own head. So at home plus alone plus in your own head equals depression. It’s just an equation.”

[26:02] Finding Out He Was Creative After All

• Steve was a numbers guy and a spreadsheet guy who was certain he had no creativity in him at all.

• Art therapy in Colorado cracked it open. He drew stick figures and it felt good anyway.

• AI became the tool that closed the distance between what he could picture and what he could make.

• He learned he wasn’t a burden on the people around him, a belief that had shaped how he lived for decades.

Key Insights

“Didn’t think I had any artistic bones in my body or any kind of creativity ever.”

[33:15] Outside Feet, Artificial Idiocracy, and What Creativity Actually Is

• “Outside feet” is what Steve says to his own dogs when he’s putting his shoes on. He built the company name around that instead of a pet pun.

• Artificial Idiocracy started as a joke about being the average person stuck between the pro-AI and anti-AI camps.

• He’s building a Renaissance-punk world of corvid characters modeled on writers he admires on Substack, studying their sites, words and mannerisms before he designs each one.

• He now makes less money than he did at USAID and says he’s happier.

Key Insights

“It’s just being open and being honest is what I think creativity really is.”

[39:07] The Dossier

About forty minutes in, Steve shared his screen and showed me the character he’d made for me.

I’m a rook. He picked it on purpose. Ravens are loud and shouting all the time, and as he put it, “the rooks are a little bit more introspective.” He called the character a sober artigiano, a working artisan, and drew me as a stone sculptor. His description: “creating something out of something very raw, but you’re shaping it into something beautiful.”

He gave it a full dossier. Species, publication, class, a list of traits. Stone Sculptor: shapes new form by refusal. Radical Honesty: drops the alibi. Clear Hour: makes in the empty hour. Creative Reset: builds what sobriety gives back. He’d read enough of my work to pull The Alibis into a panel of its own, put the arm tattoo on the sleeve, and put me sitting in meditation at sunrise. Along the bottom it reads: Perfection isn’t the goal. Presence is.

This is what he does now. He studies a creator’s work, their words and their mannerisms, and builds them a character in a Renaissance-punk world of corvids. “I studied their sights, I studied their words, I studied their mannerisms.” Then he gives it away.

A man who spent 40 years certain he had no creativity in him made this. That’s the whole episode in one image.

Key Quotes

“For me, my entire life, my identity, my worth was tied up with my job.” — Steve

“I just decided I needed to go to inpatient because I couldn’t guarantee my own safety.” — Steve

“I’m not a burden to anybody. In fact, people like helping other people.” — Steve

“The materialism is not the key to happiness. It is something within you and the community around you that has that happiness.” — Steve

“I’m not here to promote anything. I’m just here to be myself. And that’s the greatest thing I can pick up right now.” — Steve

Resources Mentioned

• Art therapy — where Steve first drew anything as an adult, during his inpatient stay.

• Buddhist teachings on attachment — ideas that had been around his life for years and finally took hold after he lost his job.

• Corvids and the Renaissance — the two sources behind his Renaissance-punk character world. Ravens, crows, jackdaws, nutcrackers, rooks and jays.

• The Clear Hour — my free monthly gathering. A short guided practice, then everyone works, then we come back and share.

Where to Find Steve

Outside Feet Daily Dog Wellness

A resource for pet parents and pet caregivers who want to give their beloved pet a quality of life they and you deserve. Covering dog wellness science, the pet sitting industry, and practical tips. Join the movement to demand better services for our pets.

By Steve [Sage-Outlaw-Caregiver]

• Outside Feet: outside-feet.com — daily dog wellness in D.C. and Montgomery County

Artificial Idiocracy

AI Influencer | AI models will be trained on this shit. A journal of whimsical perambulations of my own strange mind. I'm an outsider forging my own path with ADHD, AI, entrepreneurship and complaints about self-actualization. Washington DC

By Steve [Sage-Outlaw-Caregiver]

• Artificial Idiocracy on Substack, where the corvid characters live

• Mostly, he’s in the notes. In his words: “Always happy to talk with people.”

What Steve’s Story Says About Structure

Steve quit drinking in 2018 and stayed sober. Six years later he still crashed.

What took him down was the loss of structure. No outside scaffolding, no daily contact, no one checking in on how he was actually doing. He said it plainly: the lack of structure was killing him and he couldn’t figure out what was wrong.

That's the piece most people skip. They stop drinking and leave everything around it exactly as it was.

The Sober Creative Reset is 30 days of structure while you take alcohol out. Four weekly 60-minute sessions with me one-on-one, daily email check-ins with a reflection prompt, trigger and pattern mapping, and tools to steady your nervous system when it gets loud. When you slip, we adjust the plan instead of starting over.

It’s $497 for the 30 days, about $124 a session, and you can cancel anytime. It isn’t therapy, rehab, or AA. It’s coaching built from having walked this myself.

If you want to talk it through first, book a free clarity session from the page. No pressure either way.

Start your Reset

Thank You

A real thank you to Steve for showing up as himself, yellow glasses and all, and for talking about the hardest parts of the last few years without flinching. And thank you to , , , , and many others who joined us live and hit those buttons. These conversations happen because you show up for them.

Everything I’ve made that mattered came out of hours nobody was watching. The ones after the work, when there’s no task and no one waiting on me.

Alcohol was a scheduling system. It made the same decision about my evening every day for years, so I never had to figure out what I wanted to do with that time. When I quit, I lost the substance and the answer.

So you substitute. Anything fast enough to close the question before you’ve answered it will do. The phone took over and still gets more of those hours than I’d want. Overwork is the same move with applause attached, and it’s the one most of us are running.

Boredom is the part that does the work. What replaces it isn't glamorous. I don't reach for anything at 7pm now. I finish my steps, prep the next day, get tired on my own. None of that would make a good post. What matters now shows up in the morning.

If your output feels thinner than the effort you're putting in, look at your evenings before you look at your discipline. Notice what you reach for at 7pm, and what it costs you by ten the next morning.

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Podcast

My guest this week is with on September 3 at 5:00P EDT

Steve is the founder of Outside Feet and the artist behind Artificial Idiocracy.

He spent seventeen years at USAID as a project manager, 83 projects across 63 countries, more than $500 million aimed at getting capital into the hands of small businesses and the working poor. Serious work with almost no margin for error. For most of that career, drinking was how he carried it.

He put it down on August 4, 2018.

That handled the alcohol. It did not touch what was underneath. During COVID he was diagnosed with ADHD. Working from home had stripped away the outside structure that had been holding him together his whole life. Then came six bosses in four years, termination proceedings against a record with almost nothing on it, and denied leave he had already earned.

In April 2024 he drove roughly 28 hours to a facility in the Colorado mountains with his two dogs, Max and Slushy, and 36 cans of Monster. He expected a month. He stayed two. The first month felt easy because he thought the problem was anger. Anger turned out to be the armor, and inpatient is built to take the armor off. What was left underneath nearly ended things in a hotel room at four in the morning.

What he built after is a dog wellness company named for the animals that kept him alive, and an AI art practice where a whole Renaissance-punk world of corvid characters is taking shape. We will get into why six years sober was only the first layer, what it took to learn the language of feelings at forty, and the three-part pigeon series he made about his own stages of life.

Outside Feet Daily Dog Wellness

A resource for pet parents and pet caregivers who want to give their beloved pet a quality of life they and you deserve. Covering dog wellness science, the pet sitting industry, and practical tips. Join the movement to demand better services for our pets.

By Steve [Sage-Outlaw-Caregiver]

Artificial Idiocracy

AI Influencer | AI models will be trained on this shit. A journal of whimsical perambulations of my own strange mind. I'm an outsider forging my own path with ADHD, AI, entrepreneurship and complaints about self-actualization. Washington DC

By Steve [Sage-Outlaw-Caregiver]

What I’m Creating

This is me working on the guided portion for Tuesday.

The first Clear Hour is this week, September 1, 11:00am ET. We arrive, we make, we say what happened. Cameras optional, mics off, nobody looking at your screen.

You don’t need a sobriety date. You don’t need a finished project. You don’t need to call yourself an artist, and plenty of people there won’t.

Bring something you’re making. Perfection isn’t the goal, presence is.

When: Tuesday, September 1, 11:00am ET. 8am Pacific, 4pm UK.
Where: Zoom. The link goes out to subscribers tomorrow.
Cost: Free.

Subscribe now

When I stopped, the hour didn’t go away. It sat there empty, every day, at the same time.

It was carrying something, and when you set it down, the weight has to land somewhere. If you don’t decide where, it picks its own spot. Usually a screen. Possibly food. Sometimes a habit that’s easier to defend and does the same job.

Mine went to the work. The evenings I’d spent drinking, I spent on projects. The mornings I’d spent recovering, I spent at the gym. There was no plan behind it. Making things was the only thing I could find that was actually mine.

That turned out to be the whole mechanism. Getting sober opened the hour. Creative work is what made the hour worth having. An empty hour with nothing in it is just a longer stretch of wanting a drink.

I’ve kept that hour for myself for a few years now. I want to share it.

Help me pick the hour

First one ran this month. 11am ET is one of the few hours that works for California and London at once, and it’s also the middle of a workday for most of you. Tell me what would work better.

This poll stays open so I can keep adjusting. If you’d come to more than one a month, say so in the comments.

What Happens

First ten minutes. We arrive. Guided. Most of us come to create already spent, carrying the last call and everything unfinished. This is for setting that down long enough that when you open the file, you’re the one opening it. A chair and a space of your own is all you need.

The next thirty. We make. Cameras optional, mics off. Everyone in their own work, together. The chapter, the edit, the song that’s been half-finished since spring. It doesn’t have to be good or finished or going anywhere. Nobody watches your screen. Nobody coaches you. Nobody asks what you’re working on until you want to say.

The voice that shows up when you work alone, the one that asks who you think you are, gets a lot smaller when you can see other people sitting in exactly the same place at the same moment.

The last twenty. We share. What you sat with, where it got hard. No feedback, no critique, nobody fixing anything. Something changes in a piece once another person knows it exists.

Who It’s For

You’ve stopped drinking, or you’re changing that relationship, and there’s something you keep almost getting to.

You’re already deep in the work and you can feel what the fog has been costing you.

You have a practice and no witnesses, and making things alone has started to feel like talking into a drawer.

You don’t need a sobriety date. You don’t need a finished project. You don’t need to call yourself an artist, and plenty of people here won’t.

Nobody teaches you anything. Nobody touches your work. There’s no go-around where you tell your story. You can keep your camera off, pass at the end, or leave early and nobody will ask about it.

The Details

When: Currently the first Tuesday, 11:00am ET (8am Pacific, 4pm UK). That may move based on the poll above.
Where: Zoom. The link comes to subscribers the day before.
Cost: Free
Bring: Something you’re making.

Subscribe and I'll send you the link.

Subscribe now

Between now and the next one, watch for the hour in your day that isn’t doing anything for you. Most people have one. It’s rarely the hour they’re short on. It’s the one they never assigned.

Every day hands you something you don't get to know yet. You send the work out and hear nothing back. You start something without knowing whether it's any good, and you won't know for months. You wait on a number, a call, a decision that was never yours to make. The answer comes when it comes, and you're in the meantime either way.

A drink doesn’t settle any of it. What it does is move you out of the room where the question is being asked. The evening closes early, the waiting goes quiet for a few hours, and that relief is real, which is why it’s so easy to keep drinking. In the morning the thing is still unresolved and you’re a step behind it.

What it takes is harder to notice, because it takes something you never see arrive. Trust in yourself is accumulated evidence. It’s built out of the times you didn’t know how it was going to go and stayed present for it anyway. Every night you close early, that entry doesn’t get made. Do it long enough and you reach a genuinely hard week with no record to draw on, which is why the unknown keeps getting bigger while your capacity for it keeps getting smaller.

It shows up in the work first. Making anything means committing before you have proof, and a person with no evidence of himself under uncertainty will keep choosing the safer project. The one that’s assured. The one already inside what he knows he can do. From the outside that reads as steady output. From the inside it’s a decade of nothing risked.

Staying in it costs more up front. The evening is longer. Nothing gets resolved that night either, and there’s no reward waiting at the end of the discomfort except the fact that you were there for it.

That’s the whole return, and it compounds. You find out that uncertainty moves on its own schedule and that you’re able to sit through the part where it doesn’t move at all. Six months of that and you’ve got a record. A year and you stop needing to be sure before you begin.

The other thing sobriety gives back is what the note was pointing at. Whatever dulls the waiting dulls the arriving too. You can’t be numb only to the parts you don’t want.

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Essays

That note got me thinking about denial and the shapes it takes around drinking.

It feels safe. Something underneath it still doesn’t sit right, and that gets carried.

The discomfort comes up, the drink handles it for a few hours, and a reason arrives to keep the pattern running. There are a lot of reasons. They don’t run out.

I wrote six of them down, each one a version of myself. There’s a seventh, and that one I lived.

Podcast

Erin Gregory is a writer, brand strategist, and the founder of who’s been alcohol free since 2020.

She grew up a good old Irish Catholic girl, in a family where alcohol was never discussed and always present. It was how they celebrated and how they grieved. College handed her a culture that made it official, and when she met Mike, his family operated exactly the same way. She never once saw it as harmful.

Then his father died of cancer after a six-year battle. They had two young girls and were social drinkers, which is the part Erin says nobody talks about. You don’t have to be a full-functioning alcoholic to know something is inhibiting your life. Two drinks a day became three, stacked on top of grief.

Mike quit first. He went to therapy, left a job in the tobacco industry that had been eating at him, got his master’s, and started rebuilding. Erin watched that and asked herself why she was still holding on. There was nothing in it for her, and she was drinking in front of her children. They read Allen Carr and cut it out entirely, no Friday exception, because keeping any of it meant still treating it as a reward.

They moved states, changed jobs, and rebuilt nearly everything. Mike returned to his music and now works for Habitat for Humanity. Erin built a company that gave her real autonomy over her days.

She writes The Self-Led Life on Substack, where she’s telling most of these stories out loud for the first time. Two books are in progress, and she’s delivering workshops to college students on building a life that doesn’t organize itself around a job.

You can listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well.

What I’m Creating

Launching September 1, 2026. The first monthly gathering of The Clear Hour.

There’s an hour in every month that should belong to you. Most people block it and then hand it back the first time something louder asks for it, and the month closes with the thing still not made.

I'm holding that hour open, once a month, for everyone on this list.

11:00. We arrive. Ten minutes, guided. Most of us come to create already spent, carrying the last call and everything unfinished. This is for setting that down long enough that when you open the file, you're the one opening it. A chair and a space of your own is all you need.

11:10. We make. Cameras optional, mics off. Everyone in their own work, together. The chapter, the edit, the song that's been half-finished since spring. It doesn't have to be good or finished or going anywhere. Nobody watches your screen. Nobody coaches you. Nobody asks what you're working on until you want to say. You're not being productive together. You're just not alone.

11:40. We share. What you sat with, where it got hard. No feedback, no critique, nobody fixing anything. Something changes in a piece once another person knows it exists.

12:00. Done. You go back to your day carrying something you didn’t have at 11.

You don’t need a sobriety date. You don’t need a finished project. You don’t need to call yourself an artist, and plenty of people here won’t.

When: First Tuesday of every month, 11:00am ET. 8am Pacific, 4pm UK.
Where: Zoom. The link comes to subscribers the day before.
Cost: Free.
Bring: Something you’re making.

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Somebody asked me once if I was sure I wanted another one.

I said I was fine. That was the whole exchange, and it worked, because nobody keeps pushing a person who says he's good. The question went away. The drink came and the night kept going, and some version of that happened more times than I could count.

Nobody in that room was fooled about how much I drank. They could see the glass. What they couldn't see past was how reasonable I sounded about it.

I wasn't lying to them either. That took me years to understand. In the second I said it I believed it completely, because some part of me had already reviewed the evidence and issued a ruling before my mouth ever opened.

That’s the difference between an excuse and an alibi. An excuse is what you hand your friend, and you know while you’re handing it over that it’s an excuse. An alibi is the story you hold as true. You would sit for questioning on it. You would take it into a courtroom and win the case, and every one of them checks out, which is why nobody ever talks you out of one.

So an alibi was never hiding anything. It was granting permission, and it worked on the room as much as it worked on me.

Mine was never one story. It was a rotation. When the drinking came up at work I had a different story than the one I used at home, and a different one again for the version of the question that showed up in my own head at two in the morning. Each one was built for its own room. Each one was airtight in that room.

So here they are. Six of them, and they’re one man, because that’s what they are. Not six people at a bar. One person with six ways of explaining himself, and the sixth is always ready by the time the fifth runs out.

There’s a seventh at the end. That one was the hardest to let go.

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Everyone has one. The guy from college who’s still posting from the bar at one in the morning. The brother-in-law nobody wants to sit next to at Thanksgiving. He drinks more than you do, and he has for years, and every time the question comes up in your own head, he answers it before you get anywhere near an honest look.

What makes this one hard to shake is that it’s accurate. He really is worse. You aren’t stretching anything, and some part of you knows it, which is why the comparison feels like evidence instead of a dodge.

The move underneath is that you get to pick the standard. And you always pick one you clear.

Facing it means dropping the comparison entirely and asking a smaller question about your own life. What the drinking is taking from you, at your pace, on an ordinary week with nothing going wrong.

He was doing you a service the whole time, and the fee was every honest look you didn't take.

The week really was bad. That’s the part people get wrong about this one. There was a deadline, and the car needed work, and somebody’s mother is sick, and none of that is invented.

Then the following week there’s a wedding. Then the in-laws. Then a stretch at work that everybody warned you about.

Notice what the reason is actually doing. It isn’t causing the drink, it’s clearing it, turning tonight into a response to something rather than a thing you were going to do anyway. And the supply never runs out, because life keeps producing weeks.

Facing this one is simple to describe and uncomfortable to do. Stop asking whether tonight is justified. Look instead at what happens on a night with nothing wrong at all, when the week was fine and the day was fine and the drink shows up anyway.

The reasons were always free. The nights they bought you were not, and you paid for those one morning at a time.

This is the one that holds longest, and it's the hardest to argue with, because the record is spotless.

She finished the double. He ran the meeting and nobody could tell. The kids got picked up, the deadline got hit, the flight got made. Nothing has fallen over, and in a culture that measures a drinking problem by what it wrecks, nothing wrecked means nothing wrong.

Except that performance answers a question nobody was asking. Whether you’re still functioning and whether the drinking is costing you are two different measurements, and one of them has been standing in for the other.

Facing it means looking one level below the output. Not at what got done, but at what it took to do it. How you sleep. How much patience you have left at eight in the evening for the people who actually live with you.

Which means admitting that something can be wrong while everything looks right. Nothing ever fell over. Holding it up took more every year, and the extra came out of your evenings.

He knows the region, the producer, the year. That’s real knowledge and he came by it honestly.

The same move works anywhere a person has built a vocabulary around it. The cocktail with three ingredients and a technique. The bourbon shelf that’s a collection. The two glasses that go with cooking, poured before the pan is even hot, part of how the evening starts.

None of that hides the drinking. It reframes it. The pour becomes a tasting, the bottle becomes a purchase you researched, and the whole thing files itself under something you’re good at rather than something you do a lot of.

Facing it means separating what you know from how much you drink, because those two have nothing to do with each other, and one has been vouching for the other for years.

You can keep the knowledge. You never lost that. What you lost was the count, and the count was the only thing that could have told you anything.

The rule has held for years. That’s not nothing, and the people who run this one are usually proud of it, because they know plenty of people who don’t have a rule at all.

Never before five. Never at lunch. Never on a work night. Whatever the line is, it gets checked every single day, and it gets cleared every single day.

The rule doesn’t limit the drinking. It certifies it. Once five o’clock arrives you’ve passed the only test you set, and everything after that is authorized, which is why the pour keeps growing while the rule stays exactly where it is.

Facing it means measuring what you’ve been leaving out. The size of the pour. The number of nights. How long after five, and how many after the first.

Every evening, that rule handed down a verdict in your favor. It never cost you a night in all those years. A limit you never feel isn't limiting anything.

Beer only. Weekends. Never alone. Two max.

Written down, in some cases, and followed to the letter for years. The people running this one are disciplined, and the discipline is genuine, which is why it works so well as a defense of themselves.

But look at who wrote the rules. Every one was drafted by the part of you that wanted to keep drinking, and every one was built to be passable. A rule that would actually threaten the drinking never makes it onto the list, and if one accidentally does, it gets revised the first time it becomes inconvenient.

So the rulebook isn’t restraint. It’s a permit, written by the applicant, renewed nightly. Following it feels like control because it takes real effort, and the effort is the part that convinces you.

Facing it means asking what a rule would look like if it wasn't written to be kept.

You followed every rule you wrote. The rules kept the drinking.

This is the seventh, and it’s mine.

It didn’t happen at a bar. It happened at six in the morning, alone, staring at the ceiling, telling myself I was done and meaning it completely.

The Promiser is the only story on this list with no audience. Nobody was there to be convinced, which is what made it so confusing, because I wasn’t managing anyone’s impression of me and I still couldn’t hold the promise for a day.

What I understand now is that the promise was made by somebody who wouldn’t be around to keep it. The body repairs itself faster than the memory holds. By five in the afternoon the misery had faded into a story about a rough night, and the man telling that story had different priorities than the one flat on his back at six.

So I tried to solve it with information. For two years I tracked it. Whether I could skip a night when I was in a good mood. Whether I could skip one when I wasn’t. Whether Tuesdays were the problem. Whether staying dry Monday through Thursday would earn me the weekend.

I thought I was gathering data. Every variable I tracked was a way to keep drinking, and I never once tested a version where I stopped.

The negotiating didn’t end. It got more sophisticated.

The Bill

Denial never takes anything all at once. It takes a night, then a morning, then a stretch of months you can’t fully account for, and it bills you for the comfort in payments small enough that none of them ever gets your attention.

It runs on a schedule you never agreed to. The evening is easier, so tomorrow starts a little later. The morning is slower, so the day gets shorter. You are a little less available to the people who live with you, and none of it is dramatic enough to name, so nothing gets named.

Then there’s what the stories cost to maintain. Every one of them has to be watched. You track who has seen how much, and which story you used in which room, and whether tonight lines up with what you said last week. That’s real work, and it runs in the background of every dinner and every trip and every ordinary Wednesday, and it’s exhausting in a way that never shows up as exhaustion.

And the whole time you are getting better at it. The stories get more refined, the answers come faster, and the case gets stronger, which means the thing you built to protect yourself becomes harder to take apart the longer it works.

That’s the cost. Not the crisis you kept watching for and not the wreckage that would have made it obvious. Just the years that went by while you were building the case, and the version of your life that was running underneath it the whole time.

Denial comforts you now and costs you later. Acceptance costs you now and frees you later. Same ledger, opposite direction, and you’re the one choosing which side you pay on.

The bill was always in your name. You signed for it every time you said you were fine.

The Last Negotiation

I went from forty-eight beers a week down to one or two.

That took a long time and it was real. As far as anyone could tell, I had solved it. Nobody was worried about me, and there was no crisis waiting at the end.

But at one or two there was still room to have more, and I was the one who got to decide.

So I committed to a year without it.

I had spent two years trying to control something that was going to do damage at any setting. Control was never the project that would work. It was the project I kept choosing so I wouldn’t have to pick the other one.

Looking back at those two years, I don’t see failure. I was working my way up to quitting. I just didn’t know it yet.

If you’re tracking your Tuesdays right now, that isn’t the wrong instinct. It’s the beginning of one, pointed at the wrong question.

And if that’s where you are, working your way up to something you can’t name yet, that’s most of what I do now. The Reset is thirty days, one on one. Not a test to pass. Thirty days of looking at it with somebody else in the room, which is the one thing I never had while I was building the case against myself.

She grew up Irish Catholic, in a family where a drink was how you celebrated and how you grieved. She was a scholarship swimmer in college, where work hard, play hard was simply the culture. She married Mike, whose family operated the same way. Nobody in her orbit thought twice about it. Then in 2018, Mike’s father died of cancer after a six-year battle, and two social drinkers with young kids at home found out what happens when grief lands on top of a habit nobody questions.

Two drinks a day became three. More tired, more agitated, less motivated. Mike quit first, went to therapy, left his job, got his master’s, and started rebuilding. Erin watched that happen and asked herself a question she’d been avoiding for years. There was no dramatic moment. She just finally committed to something she’d already wanted. By 2020 they were both done.

What came after took time. Mike went back to his music and now works for Habitat for Humanity. Erin built a consultancy that lets her be present for her three girls. They moved states, changed jobs, and started over in nearly every sense.

In this conversation she walks through how they did it, what replaced the ritual, and why she now looks at the alcohol industry the same way she looks at tobacco.

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Show Notes

[02:03] Where “Normal” Came From

• Erin describes growing up “a good old Irish Catholic girl,” in a culture where alcohol was never discussed but always present.

• In her family it was how they celebrated and how they grieved, and she never saw it as harmful.

• As a young adult it became “the forbidden fruit,” then college and competitive swimming folded it into a work hard, play hard identity.

Key Insight: The habits hardest to see are the ones your whole community shares.

“It was really just a part of the society that I grew up in. And I never saw it as something bad or harmful.”

[03:35] You Don’t Have to Hit Rock Bottom

• Erin names a gray area most conversations skip past entirely.

• When Mike’s father died in 2018, they were social drinkers with two young girls. Two drinks a day quietly became three.

• The physical toll compounded the grief: more tired, more agitated, less motivated.

Key Insight: You can be functioning and still be held back by something.

“You don’t have to be a full functioning alcoholic to admit that you’ve got a problem, that something is inhibiting your life.”

This is the exact gray area The Sober Creative Reset was built for. You don't need a label or a bottom to decide something's costing you more than it gives.

[04:41] Mike Quit First

• Mike made the decision first, and it became the start of his healing process. He went to therapy, quit his job, and got his master’s degree.

• Erin had tried to eliminate it before, driven by her own guilt, but found it nearly impossible while surrounded by people who drank.

• Watching Mike rebuild gave her the push. She and Mike cut it out entirely rather than saving it for special occasions.

Key Insight: A moderation plan can keep the story alive. Cutting it out ends the negotiation.

“I was like, why am I still holding on to this? There’s nothing in it for me. I’m literally drinking with my children.”

[05:41] Seeing the Marketing for What It Is

• They both read a book on alcohol, one edition written for men and one for women, and the contrast opened their eyes.

• They drew a direct line between the alcohol industry and tobacco, the industry Mike had been supporting at work and hated.

• From there they started looking at fast food the same way, and noticed how much of what they consumed had been sold to them as fun and celebratory.

Key Insight: The advertising is designed to attach a numbing agent to your proudest moments.

“All of the advertisement is like, this is a celebration. You should have something that basically numbs you from the reward that you just earned through your hard work. It’s so backwards.”

[08:05] The Ritual Is What You Miss

• Erin says what you actually lose is the end-of-day marker, the signal that you’re allowed to relax.

• They had to build other things into that space.

• At parties they bring their own fizzy water, mostly because their not drinking tends to bother other people more than it bothers them.

• Since the pandemic she’s watched sober initiatives grow and the narrative start to shift.

Key Insight: Replace the ritual, not just the drink.

“They say it’s not like the alcohol itself you miss. It’s the ritual.”

[11:10] Raising Kids Around It

• Their kids were eight, five, and two when they stopped, around 2020.

• Erin and Mike deliberately keep alcohol from becoming taboo in their house. Extended family still drinks on occasion, and the girls see it.

• The goal is informed choice at 21 rather than a forbidden thing that gets unlocked on a birthday.

Key Insight: Kids don’t need a rule. They need to watch you make a decision you can explain.

“We don’t want it to seem like this forbidden fruit or like you turn 21 and you get to have it. You’ll have the freedom to make that choice when you’re of age and I hope you make the choice that is best for you.”

[14:32] What Actually Changed at Home

• Erin is clear that the alcohol never caused bad behavior. What it caused was guilt, the kind you carry around doing something you can’t explain to your kids.

• Removing it meant they stopped hiding and stopped masking.

• The relationships got better because she and Mike simply felt better about themselves.

Key Insight: Guilt sits heavier on a household than the drink itself.

“I think our relationships with them are better because we just feel better about ourselves. We’re living more honestly. There’s not trying to hide things or mask things.”

[15:42] The Third Space

• Erin defines a third space as somewhere you go that belongs only to you and your own well-being.

• Hers used to be marathon running. Injuries pushed her to evolve it into gardening and walking. She dug up half her backyard after a hard family stretch and now has more than 300 plants in the house.

• She points to the YMCA and group fitness as accessible options, and to community service as the other half of the equation. Mike works for Habitat for Humanity and volunteers on an arts board.

• Her reasoning: depression tends to grow when you’re stuck inside your own world.

Key Insight: Pick coping tools that pay you back instead of charging interest.

“Addressing life’s challenges with something that is going to better you in the end, instead of make it harder to deal with.”

[24:59] Advice for Anyone Making the Decision

• Erin is direct about the trap of tapering. A drink on Friday becomes a drink on Saturday, then Sunday, then a fresh restart on Monday.

• Find your resource. For them it was the books plus each other for accountability. She notes friends who’ve found real success in AA, including one who introduces herself as a recovering alcoholic in every new room so the boundary is set from the start.

• Josh shares his own turning point at [28:04]: stopping mid-workout at Orange Theory, out of breath, and telling the coach he’d drunk too much the night before. It took two more years of tracking and research before he committed on August 19, 2020.

• Erin’s larger point is that the motivation has to be yours. Theirs was their kids.

Key Insight: Make one clean decision instead of a hundred small ones.

“Whatever that motivation needs to be for you, figure it out and then just make that decision and don’t look back.”

Key Quotes

“You don’t have to be a full functioning alcoholic to admit that you’ve got a problem, that something is inhibiting your life.” — Erin Gregory

“It still felt like we were treating it like a reward or a healing mechanism when we knew it was anything but.” — Erin Gregory

“The last answer I wanted to get them was, Mommy, why are you drinking that? Because there’s no good answer for it.” — Erin Gregory

“It’s not even that the alcohol caused bad behavior. It was just the guilt that you kind of carry along with it.” — Erin Gregory

“We just built a life with intention instead of subscribing to what we had been exposed to in the past.” — Erin Gregory

Resources Mentioned

• This Naked Mind by Annie Grace — the book that helped Josh transition

• Allen Carr's Easy Way to Control Alcohol — Erin and Mike each read an edition written for their own gender

• The third space — Erin’s framework for a place free of responsibility to anyone but yourself

• The YMCA and group fitness classes as accessible community

• Habitat for Humanity — where Mike works now

• AA and Recovery Dharma — Josh facilitated a Recovery Dharma meeting for several years

• Erin’s forthcoming memoir and companion workbook, distilling the work she does with clients on building income in the margins

Where to Find Erin

The Self-Led Life

For experienced professionals building a life with intention who refuse to sacrifice their career, their personal life, or their passion.

By Erin Gregory Creative

Erin Gregory writes The Self-Led Life on Substack, where she covers workforce structure, meaningful work, and building a career around your life instead of the reverse.

She runs a brand consultancy supporting mission-driven organizations, plus a personal branding and coaching practice for people who want to restructure the work they’re in or build something with more room in it. She’s also delivering workshops and keynotes to college students and recent graduates.

“My mission, is to bring awareness to the possibility that is out there if you can think strategically and creatively about your career journey and not just accept what’s on paper.” — Erin Gregory

Ready to Find Out What’s Underneath?

Erin’s story lands because nothing had fallen apart. She was functioning. Two social drinkers, three kids, jobs handled. And underneath it, something was inhibiting her life.

She also named the loop exactly: a drink on Friday becomes a drink on Saturday, becomes a drink on Sunday, then Monday you start over. Cutting back, setting rules, restarting. That loop runs on depletion, and it doesn’t need a rock bottom to keep going.

The Sober Creative Reset is a guided 30-day alcohol-free reset with one-on-one coaching from the first session. Four 60-minute 1:1 calls a month, daily support between them, and a short email every morning with a question to sit with through the day.

You don’t have to identify as anything to be here. You just have to recognize where you are.

Not rehab. Not AA. Not therapy. Not a lifetime vow. We work with your nervous system, map your triggers, and build a rhythm that makes clarity take less effort to hold.

$497 for your first 30 days. Month-to-month after that, cancel anytime.

👉 Start Your Reset

Want to talk it through first? Book a free clarity call.

Thank You

A heartfelt thank you to everyone who joined us live for this conversation, and to Erin Gregory for her honesty and generosity in sharing a story she’s only recently started telling out loud. Your presence and engagement make these conversations possible.

Denial is cheap and it works immediately. It hands you an alibi. You round the number down. You point at the guy at the table who had more. You call it a hard week, and the week before that was hard too, and so was the one before that. Nothing has to be admitted today. Nothing has to change today. That’s the whole appeal.

What it doesn’t advertise is the interest. The bill arrives slowly, in mornings you can’t fully account for, in promises to yourself that carry less weight every time you make one, in conversations you learn to steer away from. An alibi has to keep getting revised to stay usable. Each revision is small enough to justify on its own, and after enough years you’ve lost track of what the first version even said.

The people close to you usually see it before you do. They just don’t have a way in, because keeping the door shut is the entire job.

Radical honesty runs the other direction. It costs everything up front. You drop the alibi and say the true sentence out loud, in a room, to someone, and there’s no taking it back. That’s a bad afternoon. Sometimes a bad month.

It’s also the only thing that makes acceptance possible. Acceptance needs a true picture to work with, and you can’t get one while you’re still negotiating the details. Once you have it, the maintenance stops. You’re not tracking which version you told to whom. The problem is still sitting there, at its actual size instead of the size you’d talked it down to. Actual size is workable.

Almost six years in, here’s what I’d tell anyone still running the numbers. Both options cost you. Only one of them keeps charging.

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Podcast

is a painter, writer, and founding partner of Peak Path Health who’s been substance free and sober since June 2019.

He was three years old when the car accident happened. He and his older brother were pulled out with the jaws of life. His mother and little sister didn’t survive. His family rebuilt around that loss with so much love that Hunter still describes his childhood as beautiful, even while calling it a childhood filled with trauma. He remembers his first drink at eight, a stolen sip at a party that made him feel, for a moment, like everything missing in him had been filled.

The drinking followed him through college and Yale Law School, and by his early thirties he knew it wasn’t normal. He made himself promises he couldn’t keep, only on weekends, only beer, and broke every one of them. Hiding those broken promises built into a shame that locked him into a cycle: rehab at 33, close to seven years sober, a relapse, and then a ten-year spiral that ended in a two-year addiction to crack cocaine and daily heavy drinking.

The thing that finally broke the cycle wasn’t another stint in treatment. It was losing everything. A stolen laptop put twenty years of his private life in front of the world with no context, and the total loss of privacy left him with what he calls a binary choice: get up and live, or find a way to die. He calls it the most humiliating, devastating, and destructive thing that ever happened to him, and also the greatest gift, because it left him with nothing left to hide and nothing left to fear. His wife Melissa saw every part of him during that collapse and stayed. She’s the one who bought him his first paintbrush from a used furniture shop.

He hasn’t stopped painting since, hundreds of canvases deep. He writes about all of it on Substack, and says he hears from readers almost every day telling him it got them through something hard. He’s now building Peak Path Health, a recovery organization focused on the care people need after the first 30 days of treatment, when relapse rates are highest and most programs stop paying attention.

You can listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well.

My guest this week is with Erin Gregory on August 20 at 12:30P EDT

Live Stream Link

My next guest is Erin Gregory, founder of and the writer behind The Self-Led Life.

Her father-in-law died in 2018. Her husband Mike couldn’t put the grief down, and Erin was holding him up along with three kids, two jobs, and a house that never stopped needing something.

They both grew up in families where a beer after work and wine at dinner was simply what you did. Casual, constant, unquestioned. So when the grief settled in, they did what they knew. One drink led to two, and the guilt that followed weighed more than whatever the drinking was covering.

Mike put it down first. Erin watched him get healthier, clearer, more sure of where he was headed, and decided she wanted the same. That meant facing the mess instead of taking the edge off it.

The rest of the country went the other way. That March, liquor sales jumped more than 50% in a single week. Heavy drinking rose about 20% between 2018 and 2020 and stayed up for years. By 2025, Gallup had the share of Americans who drink down to 54%, the lowest in nearly ninety years of asking.

Erin and Mike were early to something a lot of people are only now arriving at. We will get into what opened up once the guilt was gone, why she puts alcohol, fast food, and cigarettes in the same category, and how she’s raising three daughters who can tell when an ad is selling to them.

The Self-Led Life

For experienced professionals building a life with intention who refuse to sacrifice their career, their personal life, or their passion.

By Erin Gregory Creative

What I’m Creating

I’m working on a new piece this week called The Alibis.

Six illustrated panels, one a day, starting tomorrow.

Same man, same bar, six accounts of his own drinking. Every one of them true. Not one of them the truth.

It's about why denial is so comfortable that it can run for years without you ever catching it, what it takes from you while it's working, and what it cost me to put mine down.

There's a seventh and that one's saved for essay.

The essay comes next Sunday.

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What makes this conversation stand out is how plainly Hunter talks about the parts most people would keep hidden. He calls addiction “never an excuse,” but insists it can be an explanation. He traces almost every bad decision he’s made back to fear. He talks about the accident that killed his mother and sister when he was three years old, the decade of relapse that followed his first stint in rehab, and the moment a total loss of privacy left him with what he calls a binary choice: get up and live, or find a way to die.

By the end of the conversation, Hunter has moved past the scandal. He talks about a paintbrush his wife Melissa bought him at a used furniture shop, about finding purpose in a single afternoon of painting, and about why being of service to other people secures his sobriety more than anything else.

This is a conversation about what happens after the worst thing you can imagine happens to you, and what you build with what’s left.

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Show Notes

[00:00] Meet Hunter: From Scandal to the Studio

• Josh introduces Hunter as someone whose entire digital life was leaked from a laptop one October, turning private photos, relapses, and unfinished thoughts into a story other people wrote for him.

• Seven years ago, at a point where Hunter says he could no longer trust his own mind, he picked up a paintbrush and started working in alcohol ink, acrylic, and Pointillism.

• Hunter now paints in Los Angeles and writes about his experience on Substack, correcting himself in public when his memory proves him wrong.

Key Insight: “That was the most beautiful introduction I’ve ever gotten.” - Hunter

[02:08] A Beautiful Childhood, Filled With Trauma

• When Hunter was about three, he and his older brother Beau were in a violent car accident with their mom and little sister. Rescue workers used the jaws of life to free them.

• Hunter’s mother and sister died in that accident. He and his brother spent a month or more in the hospital together afterward.

• His Aunt Valerie, Uncle Jimmy, and the rest of his family rushed in to rebuild their lives, and Hunter calls his dad “the best dad I know.”

• For years, Hunter didn’t let himself believe that early trauma played a role in what came next.

Key Insight: “I had an incredibly beautiful childhood filled with trauma.” - Hunter

[05:01] The First Drink and the Cycle of Shame

• Hunter remembers his first sip of alcohol at age eight, sneaking a champagne flute at a party and feeling like everything missing in him had suddenly been filled.

• His drinking progressed through high school and college, and he went on to graduate from Yale Law School.

• By his early thirties, Hunter knew his drinking wasn’t normal. He made himself promises: only drink on weekends, only drink beer, no Jack Daniels. He broke every one of them.

• Breaking those promises started a cycle of shame that became, in his words, the thing that locked him into relapse.

Key Insight: “When I would break that promise, I decided it was easier to hide that and lie about it than be honest with myself or anybody around me.” - Hunter

[07:42] Rehab, Relapse, and the Ten-Year Spiral

• On September 12, 2003, Hunter’s brother told him he needed to do something about his drinking. Hunter went to rehab and stayed sober for close to seven years.

• After his first relapse, Hunter entered a ten-year cycle that got progressively worse, moving through rehab, short stretches of sobriety, and binges.

• The spiral ended in a serious addiction to crack cocaine alongside daily heavy vodka drinking, which continued for about two years before Hunter got sober in June 2019.

• He’s careful with his language today. He calls himself “substance free and sober,” not “clean.”

Key Insight: “More than anything, though, what I learned is that I wasn’t alone.” - Hunter

[13:56] Radical Honesty Requires Radical Self-Love

• Hunter talks openly about the parts of his story most people keep private, including smoking crack and being in situations involving prostitutes.

• He believes addiction is never an excuse for behavior, but it can be an explanation, both to other people and to yourself.

• He credits an idea from Chase Hughes: real healing takes being “almost delusional in your self-forgiveness,” without giving up accountability or the work of making amends.

Key Insight: “Until you can truly love yourself, it is almost impossible to truly accept and receive love.” - Hunter

[15:43] Seen and Not Abandoned: How Love Rebuilt Him

• Hunter says his healing began when he let one person, his wife Melissa, see every part of him, and she didn’t run.

• Melissa helped him detox at home instead of going back to rehab. Hunter describes her as becoming his “jailer” for a period of time, a role he says was painful for her to take on.

• His family, especially his daughters and his dad, never closed the door on him, which is what let him find a moment of clarity and walk through it.

• He’s clear that unconditional love isn’t love without accountability. It still requires making amends.

Key Insight: “Unconditional love does not mean love without consequences. It does not mean love without accountability.” - Hunter

[21:39] Fear, the Leak, and the Greatest Gift He Ever Received

• Hunter says nearly every bad decision he’s made, sober or using, came from fear: fear of being found out, fear of underperforming, fear of not being lovable.

• In October, someone stole 20 years of his digital footprint and presented the most damaging images and words to the world without context, stripping away his privacy completely.

• That total loss of privacy left him with what he calls a binary choice: get up and live, or find a way to die. He says he knew he didn’t have another relapse left in him.

• Today, Hunter says he doesn’t fear anything or anyone, because there’s no secret left that hasn’t already been exposed.

Key Insight: “The thing that people believe was the most humiliating, and it was, and the most devastating, in many ways it was, and the most destructive, in many ways it was, was also the greatest gift that I ever received in my life.” - Hunter

[28:04] The Paintbrush, the Purpose, and Peak Path Health

• After detoxing at home, Melissa bought Hunter a used table, a roll of Yupo paper, alcohol inks, and acrylics from a furniture shop, and told him he needed to paint.

• Hunter says having his hands occupied for hours at a time gave him something the ritual of using had trained into him: focus, and a way to get out of his own head.

• He believes art only becomes art once it’s shared with another person, and that finding a small, “lowercase p” purpose in each day matters more than chasing one big Purpose.

• He’s now building Peak Path Health, a recovery organization focused on the continuity of care people need after the first 30 days of treatment, alongside his Substack writing.

Key Insight: “There’s nothing that secures my sobriety more wholly and completely than being in service to somebody else.” - Hunter

Key Quotes

“I had an incredibly beautiful childhood filled with trauma.” - Hunter

“When I would break that promise, I decided it was easier to hide that and lie about it than be honest with myself or anybody around me.” - Hunter

“Until you can truly love yourself, it is almost impossible to truly accept and receive love.” - Hunter

“The thing that people believe was the most humiliating, and it was, and the most devastating, in many ways it was, and the most destructive, in many ways it was, was also the greatest gift that I ever received in my life.” - Hunter

“It’s a practice until you share it.” - Hunter

Resources Mentioned

• Alcohol ink, acrylic, and Pointillism — the materials and techniques Hunter uses in his large-scale paintings

• Yupo paper — the material Melissa first bought him to start painting

• Peak Path Health (peakpathhealthfoundation.org) — the recovery organization Hunter is helping build, focused on continuity of care after the first 30 days of treatment

• HunterBiden.com/recovery — an anonymous space where people can share their own experience, strength, and hope with addiction

• Chase Hughes — referenced for the idea of being “almost delusional in your self-forgiveness,” and for the observation that “do not be afraid” is the most repeated phrase across Scripture

Where to Find Hunter

Where's Hunter?

Where the true thing gets said, in my own hand.

By Hunter Biden

• Peak Path Health: peakpathhealthfoundation.org

• HunterBiden.com/recovery

Thank You

A heartfelt thank you to everyone who joined us live for this conversation, and to Hunter for his extraordinary honesty and courage. Your presence and engagement make these conversations possible.

Closer Than It Looks

Hunter’s story played out in public, but the shape of it is familiar to a lot of us: broken promises, shame that keeps you hiding instead of asking for help, the day you finally decide to get up and live instead of just get through it. I knew my mornings were getting harder to show up for, and I was tired of pretending that was normal.

If that’s where you are, The Sober Creative Reset is built for exactly this moment. It’s a guided 30-day alcohol-free reset with one-on-one coaching from the first session, four sessions a month, plus daily support in between. The goal is simple: give yourself a real chance to feel like you again.

Start Your Reset

Culture has a way of relabeling things. Do something long enough, surrounded by enough people doing some version of the same thing, and it stops registering as strange. Not because it changed. Because the label around it changed. That’s what Maté means by dislocation: a way of living that’s abnormal by every measure of what a person actually needs, filed under normal because it’s common.

Alcohol has been classified as a Group 1 carcinogen, the same category as tobacco and asbestos, but somehow it’s the toast at every wedding, the gift at every housewarming, the answer to “I had a long day.”

That relabeling is easy to miss from inside it. It usually takes a clear before and a clear after to know the line was ever there.

Maté names the needs directly: connection to yourself, connection to other people, some sense that any of it means something. Alcohol is what dislocation reaches for. It just made the absence easier to ignore for a few hours.

Sobriety is what it looks like to actually have those three things again: a self worth staying connected to, people worth being present with, days that mean something.

Subscribe now

Podcast

is a writer, connector, and nurturer who’s been alcohol-free for nearly ten years, with her ten-year mark coming on September 1st.

Her first memory of alcohol is from a dinner party at her parents’ house around age five, sneaking sips while the adults were turned away in conversation and eventually passing out on a beanbag while the room laughed above her. By college at UC Davis she was living two lives, sober with a Christian group during the week, drinking and partying every time she drove home, a split she later called more of a rush than the alcohol itself.

She carried that split into her 30s. After moving into real estate in 2006, she built a hidden daily system: sober for school drop-off, drinking through the day, vodka in water bottles during home inspections for over a decade, timed naps so she’d look sober by the time her kids got off the bus. Two DUIs and a therapist calling out her drinking sent her to treatment for the first time in January 2016. It didn’t hold, and she relapsed within months.

Her second treatment stay later that year worked because it required something different, an entirely new identity rather than just stopping the behavior. She’s been sober since, and now writes on Substack as Dana Kay about recovery, grief, and connection.

You can listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well.

My guest this week is with Hunter Biden on August 13 at 3P EDT

Live Stream Link

This week on the podcast, I’m sitting down with .

Before you land on the two words most people reach for when they hear that name, I want you to know what this conversation actually is: a man whose worst chapter played out in public, who found his way back through a paintbrush because it was the one thing left that didn’t ask him to explain himself.

Seven years ago, at what he describes as the point where he could no longer trust his own mind, he started painting: alcohol ink, acrylic, pointillism, gold where the ordinary needed to be made holy.

We’ll talk about the three names he gives to fear: judgment, humiliation, ridicule, and what it meant to face each one by name. Why humiliation stopped arriving in waves and started living in the air around him like weather, and what it took to change that. And what he means when he says you cannot scroll and paint at the same time: presence as the actual mechanism, not a metaphor for it.

This is a conversation about what recovery gives you, told by someone who spent years assuming it would only take from him.

Where's Hunter?

Where the true thing gets said, in my own hand.

By Hunter Biden

What I’m Creating

One of the women from January’s Reset messaged me recently. Still not drinking. Eight months in.

That's the only metric that matters. Not sign-ups, not how the cohort format performed. Whether the thing holds once nobody’s checking in.

So this year I ran the Reset twice, and I recently, I decided to stop treating it as a seasonal offer. It’s year round now, one-on-one from the first session, built the way I wish something had existed for me.

Because the part almost nobody names is that the fog isn’t a character flaw. It’s what happens when alcohol is still in the loop and recovery never fully completes. Tension builds, a drink softens it, the body never finishes the job, and the next day starts a little behind. Do that enough years in a row and it stops looking like a cycle. It just looks like how you are.

I’ve spent over two decades in film, in an industry where drinking was just how things were done, and for a long stretch that pattern felt normal to me too. Six years without it, I found out the energy and clarity I thought I’d lost weren’t gone. They’d been sitting underneath recovery that never finished.

That’s what the Reset actually rebuilds: more consistent energy, clearer mornings, less noise, more trust in your own direction. Not a new personality. The one that was already there, before the fog became the baseline.

Start Your New Normal

By the time she reached her late 30s and early 40s, that early fascination had turned into two DUIs, years of drinking vodka out of water bottles during real estate inspections, and a daily system so precise she could stay “sober” for the school bus pickup every single day. She went to treatment twice in 2016. The first stay didn’t hold. The second one did, and it changed the entire direction of her life.

In this conversation, Dana walks through what actually separated her two attempts. It wasn’t willpower, and it wasn’t a stronger program. It was the difference between trying to stop a behavior and committing to becoming a completely different person.

As she approaches her ten-year sobriety anniversary on September 1st, she shares what that shift required, what she had to grieve along the way, and why she stopped trying to fit her writing into one tidy niche.

Show Notes

[00:00] Welcome and Introduction

Josh introduces Dana Kay as a writer, connector, and nurturer who’s been alcohol-free for over nine years, and the two immediately find common ground.

• Dana has been alcohol-free for nearly a decade, with her ten-year mark landing on September 1st

• Josh and Dana discover they’ve both had a DUI, and neither of them remembers much of the night it happened

• The tone is set early: honest, unpolished, and willing to go straight into hard material

Key Insights: “I got the police report in the mail... and I was reading the police report going, that happened? I didn’t remember.” - Dana Kay

[02:11] Growing Up “Cute Little Dana”

Dana traces her drinking back to childhood, growing up the youngest of eight (two big brothers, five step-siblings) between two very different father figures after her parents’ divorce.

• She had a well-provided-for upbringing but didn’t recognize it until she started paying her own bills

• She followed “the expected track”: graduated high school at 17, college at 21, became an elementary teacher, then moved into real estate in 2006

• She names her own talent and ability to always get hired as a “double-edged sword” that fed her drinking later on

Key Insights: “You can over-rely on your achievements and your talents... and that definitely played into my alcohol use for sure.” - Dana Kay

[04:43] The Beanbag Story

Dana describes her first conscious memory of alcohol in detail: sneaking sips at her parents’ dinner parties around age five or six, and passing out on a beanbag while the adults laughed above her.

• Her parents didn’t send her to bed during parties; instead they gave her small jobs, like bringing guests drinks, which kept her in the room

• She picked up early that drinking was “the absolute cool thing,” because she saw adults enjoying it and wanted to feel what they felt

• Looking back as a mother herself, she’s had to reckon with recreating some of the same environments for her own kids without realizing it at the time

Key Insights: “Instead of worrying or being sad, they were laughing. And they thought it was really cute.” - Dana Kay

[09:22] College and the Double Life

At UC Davis, Dana joined a Christian youth group (originally because the boys were cute) and found faith on a retreat at 18. But she kept a second, separate version of herself for home.

• Her day-to-day life revolved around a sober Christian friend group, while trips back to her hometown meant drinking, flirting, and partying

• She describes the pull of that split identity as its own addiction: “The complete rush was, what can I get away with?”

• After friends celebrated that she’d “never party again,” she made a conscious decision in the car to keep that part of her life hidden from them going forward

Key Insights: “It was a complete rush, more than alcohol itself. The complete rush was, what can I get away with?” - Dana Kay

[15:00] The Rock Bottom Years

By her late 30s, working in real estate, Dana’s drinking became a fully hidden system built around her family’s schedule.

• She lied to her husband about needing to “drop off flyers” or run open houses so she could go drink, and he had no way to track her irregular real estate hours

• She drank vodka out of water bottles during home inspections for over a decade, including with an inspector she’d known for 15 years who never suspected a thing

• She built a daily rhythm: sober and present for morning drop-off, drinking through the day, then timing a nap so she’d appear sober again by the time her sons got off the bus

• One morning in late August, her organs seized and she couldn’t move out of bed; she still told her husband she “just had a tummy ache” before he left for work

Key Insights: “That energy of wanting to get away with it, and fooling everyone, lived more in me than the substance did.” - Dana Kay

[17:49] First Treatment vs. Second Treatment

Dana explains the moment that sent her to treatment the first time, the relapse that followed, and the deeper shift that made the second stay permanent.

• Her therapist stopped a session mid-conversation and said, “we can’t get any further until you’re honest about alcohol,” which Dana had been carefully avoiding

• That night she Googled “how do you know if you’re an alcoholic” and discovered she’d searched the exact same thing on Christmas Eve, in a blackout she had no memory of

• After four sober months following her first treatment, she relapsed on a trip to Europe with her son, telling herself a little drinking wouldn’t turn permanent

• The second time she got sober, a therapist helped her see the real difference: the first attempt focused on stopping a behavior, while the second required building an entirely new identity

Key Insights: “If you’re going to be successful at this, you have to have an entirely new identity.” - Dana Kay

[34:29] Building the New Identity

Dana describes the practical, unglamorous work of rebuilding her life around the new identity, not just the absence of alcohol.

• She had to consciously change her driving routes because her car would automatically head toward familiar bars

• She built accountability into her schedule by not leaving gaps between appointments, and leaned on close friends and her husband to hold her to it

• She started a morning journaling practice, writing down small changes so she could reread her own words later, on the days she felt weak

• She noticed real physical changes, like hitting new personal records at the gym, and had to stop denying that sobriety was the reason

Key Insights: “No, Dana, you know that this is going to lead to that. This feels so much better. You wrote it right here.” - Dana Kay

[38:07] Noticing, Grief, and the Sunrise

Dana connects her recovery to a growing capacity to actually notice her life, and the grief that came with realizing how much she’d missed.

• She began noticing details on ordinary drives, like trees, mountains, an eagle, or a deer, that she says she never used to see

• She describes a memory of watching a sunrise in Mexico while drinking, and realizing only in hindsight that it was really “a place to go hide and drink”

• She’s come to believe that grieving what was missed isn’t just okay, it’s a necessary part of the process

• She also became more honest in her business relationships, without the manipulation she now recognizes she’d been running for years

Key Insights: “Not only is it okay to grieve that, it’s important to grieve that.” - Dana Kay

[41:11] Family Roots, What She Writes Now, and Where to Find Her

Dana closes by connecting her story to her family’s long history with alcoholism, and explains what she writes about today.

• Her grandparents were pillars of the local AA and Al-Anon community, and she grew up helping serve pie and coffee at their meetings, even while her own aunt struggled with alcoholism without full openness from the family

• After years of trying to force her writing into one niche, she’s landed on a simple framework: Connection, Acceptance, and Noticing (C-A-N)

• She writes about sobriety, motherhood of older kids, being single in your 50s, and starting over later in life, all under what she calls the umbrella of love

• She’s active on Substack and Instagram as Dana Kay, offers one-on-one calls, and leads gratitude and connection sessions at retreats she’s invited to

Key Insights: “There is no saying no to whatever your dreams are, whatever you want to do with your life. There’s just no no.” - Dana Kay

Key Quotes

“The complete rush was, what can I get away with?” - Dana Kay

“If you’re going to be successful at this, you have to have an entirely new identity.” - Dana Kay

“My identity took me into relapse because I still wanted to be the pretty, fun, cool girl, mom, friend, daughter.” - Dana Kay

“Not only is it okay to grieve that, it’s important to grieve that.” - Dana Kay

“There is no saying no to whatever your dreams are, whatever you want to do with your life. There’s just no no.” - Dana Kay

Resources Mentioned

• Gabor Maté’s approach to addiction — Dana references his idea that instead of asking “where’s the addiction,” you ask “where’s the pain”

• AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) and Al-Anon — the community Dana’s grandparents helped lead, which shaped her early exposure to recovery

• Dana’s C-A-N framework — Connection, Acceptance, and Noticing, the three principles she now writes and coaches around

Where to Find Dana Kay

Dana Kay

💜all about every kind of love thing. ✨ Connection is the joy. Acceptance is the work. Noticing is the fuel ♾️ 🍯 🕊️

• Instagram: Dana Kay

• 1:1 Calls: Dana offers personal calls for anyone working through what she writes about, from sobriety questions to relationship decisions

• Retreats and Workshops: She’s invited to lead gratitude circles, forest walks, and connection sessions at corporate and soulful retreat spaces

Thank You

A heartfelt thank you to everyone who joined us live for this conversation, and to Dana Kay for her extraordinary honesty and wisdom. Your presence and engagement make these conversations possible.

Your Next Step

Dana’s second treatment worked because she stopped trying to just stop drinking and rebuilt an entirely new identity instead. The first time ran on willpower, and it wore out by June. The second time gave her whole system room to actually recover, and that’s what held.

The Sober Creative Reset is built around that same shift. It’s a guided 30-day alcohol-free reset, with one-on-one coaching from your first session, not a program you follow alone. The fog and depletion so many high performers carry aren’t a discipline problem. They come from recovery that never fully completes. No labels, no moralizing, no lifetime sobriety vow, just real support while your energy, clarity, and follow-through come back online.

Start Your Reset

There are moments we all experience. A bad day, a fight, a deadline, a feeling nobody wants to sit with alone, and a drink shows up to handle it. For a few hours it works. The edge softens, the noise settles, and the problem feels, for a little while, like it left the room.

Then morning comes and it’s back. The fight is still unresolved. The deadline is still late. The feeling is still there, now with a hangover riding along. Almost everyone I’ve talked to who’s stopped drinking landed on the same math eventually: if the reason survives the drink, the drink was never touching it. It was just buying a few hours of distance, charged to tomorrow.

That's the thread running through every version of this story I've heard. Whatever's underneath still has to be faced. Drinking only adjusts the volume while the music keeps playing.

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Essays

In this one I get into how belonging and alcohol got fused together for me long before I was old enough to notice it happening. I trace the wiring back to a first drink I can't fully place, through the escalating chaos of a Daytona Beach spring break, and into the central tension underneath it all: turning down a drink can feel like turning down your place in the group.

I make the case that belonging is the real thread running through nearly every drinking ritual, tailgates, weddings, dance floors, and that pulling alcohol out of those moments leaves the need for connection fully intact and unmet.

I close on The Sober Creative Collective as a working answer, a room built so belonging doesn't run through what's in your hand.

Podcast

is a singer, songwriter, producer, and bass player who has been playing gigs for close to 40 years, a lot of them in the blues scene.

He grew up in Milwaukee, a city that regularly ranks near the top nationally for excessive drinking, and by college in Madison he was drinking roughly a dozen beers most nights, medicating a shyness he calls "criminally vulgar." A five-year stretch living in Cleveland, where drinking culture barely existed, showed him how much of the habit was really the city talking. He moved home, fell back into it, and stayed there through his 20s and 30s.

Nine years ago he left a career in medical physics to chase music full time. About five years ago a stomach problem made alcohol physically unbearable, right as he was already cutting back on his own, and he's had maybe three or four drinks a year since.

These days most of his creative energy goes into Inside Sky Chant, a project built on ancient mantras meant to calm whoever's listening, an outgrowth of the meditation practice he picked up after reading Eckhart Tolle's A New Earth fifteen years ago.

JOMO is a golden monkey in a patchwork waistcoat who teaches meditation online with his creator, Jason, at .

Jason built the show a few years back after his own drinking got out of hand, what he'd call in England being a "sesh head." He learned to meditate to climb out of it, loved what it did for him, and started teaching others, only to find that most people got scared off by meditation's usual look: silent rooms, tricky postures, sunset backdrops.

So he built Jomo, named for the term monks use for the swirl of chattering thoughts everyone is fighting, and made the whole thing simple and a little goofy on purpose. They started on TikTok, where early viewers were confused and occasionally rude, but the audience kept building past 600 live sessions and over two million visits.

Jomo's core message centers on sitting with whatever comes up instead of trying to drown it out, a version of the same work sobriety asks of a person.

You can listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well.

My guest this week is with Dana Kay on August 8 at 1P EDT

This week I’m sitting down with , a writer and connector who’s been alcohol-free for over nine years.

She writes about what addiction actually feels like from the inside: sneaking sips of wine at her parents’ dinner parties at five years old, two DUIs decades later, faking urinalysis results for two years just to stay out of jail. Dana went to treatment in 2016, twice. The first attempt didn’t hold. The second one changed her life, and she’s spent years since figuring out exactly what made the difference.

We’ll get into that, plus the disease-versus-decision debate that follows every recovery story, and how she went from hiding her drinking to building a public life around love, expression, and owning what she calls her “magic.”

Come sit with us Saturday.

Dana Kay

💜all about every kind of love thing. ✨ Connection is the joy. Acceptance is the work. Noticing is the fuel ♾️ 🍯 🕊️

If something here landed and you want to talk about what's possible when you change your relationship with alcohol, let’s explore that together.

Jomo’s origin story starts with Jason hitting a wall. He liked to drink and party until, as Jomo put it, “the bottom of the barrel was in sight.” Meditation pulled him out of it, and it worked so well that Jason wanted to teach it to others. The problem was that meditation looked strange and unapproachable to most beginners. So Jason built a version anyone could try, and gave it a monkey mascot to make the whole thing feel less intimidating and more human.

What Jomo shared in this conversation goes far beyond breathing techniques. He talked about why the mind is the most important tool we have, why meditation is less about being calm and more about clearing the noise so calm can show up, and why he believes people who choose sobriety are some of the bravest people alive. If you have ever avoided sitting with your own thoughts, this one is for you.

[00:50] Meet Jomo, the Meditation-Teaching Monkey

• Jomo is the mascot and co-teacher behind Monkey Mind Meditation, run alongside his human, Jason.

• The name plays on “monkey mind,” a term meditation teachers use for the constant jostling of thoughts and feelings we all deal with.

• Jomo’s approach centers on making meditation feel ordinary instead of mystical or hard to access.

Key Insight:

“Hello, it’s lovely to be here.”
— Jomo

[03:05] From Rock Bottom to Monkey Mind: How the Journey Began

• Jason struggled with drinking and partying before finding meditation as a way out.

• Learning to meditate changed his life enough that he wanted to teach it to others.

• Early students were put off because meditation online looked strange — people in odd positions, dramatic backdrops, nothing relatable.

• Jason built a simpler, friendlier version of meditation and gave it a monkey mascot to make it approachable.

Key Insight:

“He liked to drink and he liked to party. And he realized that the bottom of the barrel was in sight.”
— Jomo

[05:55] Two Million Meditators: Growing an Audience on TikTok

• The show started rough. Early viewers were confused and sometimes rude about what they were watching.

• Growth was slow at first, then it exploded into hundreds of new viewers every week.

• They’ve now done over 600 live sessions and reached more than 2 million people through TikTok.

• New viewers tend to follow the same pattern: confusion, then curiosity, then commitment.

Key Insight:

“When they first come on, they think to themselves, what is this? And then they put the little acronym, WTF, which is a bit rude. But we stick with it. And then a few minutes later, they may say, oh, this is actually quite calming. And then a few minutes later, they’ll say, this is actually working. And then a few minutes later after that, they say, when are you next on? And then they’re a fan.”
— Jomo

[09:05] Why Your Mind Is the Most Important Tool You Own

• Jomo argues the mind shapes the quality of everything else in life, including how we experience reality itself.

• He points out that nobody gets a manual for how their brain works.

• He describes meditation as a kind of daily software upgrade for the brain.

• He calls the practice “a force field for good mental health” that needs to be recharged regularly, since life keeps throwing things at us.

Key Insight:

“I call it a force field for good mental health. Every time we meditate, we recharge that force field.”
— Jomo

[11:10] Sitting With the Monsters: Meditation and Sobriety

• Jomo believes people on a sober journey are some of the bravest people around.

• He connects addictive behavior to an unwillingness or inability to face what’s going on inside our own heads.

• Meditation, in his view, is a way to sit with the parts of ourselves we normally avoid or numb.

• He argues meditation doesn’t create calm directly. It removes noise, and calm follows from that.

Key Insight:

“Meditation helps us look inside. And sit with the monsters. And then when you sit with the monsters, you realize that the monsters just want to be heard. And when the monsters are heard, they go away.”
— Jomo

[13:32] Think Away: Making Meditation Approachable for Everyone

• Jomo teaches people that trying to stop thinking is impossible, and fighting that fact just creates frustration.

• Instead of suppressing thoughts, his method is to notice them and gently return to the breath or a mantra.

• He reframes a common complaint — “I can’t meditate because my mind is too busy” — as the exact reason meditation is needed.

• The format is deliberately ritualized (three deep breaths to start, a wriggle and stretch to close), which he says works especially well for their autistic community.

Key Insight:

“We teach people that you can’t stop thinking. That’s impossible. It’s like saying, don’t think of a pink elephant. And the first thing you do is you think of a pink elephant. So what we say is, think away. That’s okay. We’re not going to thought shame you here.”
— Jomo

[16:56] A Live Guided Meditation With Jomo

• Jomo led a short mindfulness meditation live on the show, starting with three deep breaths.

• The meditation focused on noticing thoughts without following them, comparing them to leaves floating past on a river.

• He guided listeners toward the idea that we are the awareness watching our thoughts, not the thoughts themselves.

• Several listeners in the chat reported feeling calmer immediately afterward.

Key Insight:

“And begin to sense that this breath is not something you’re doing, but something that’s happening to you.”
— Jomo

[26:03] Beyond TikTok: Variety, Reactions, and Where to Find Jomo Next

• TikTok’s algorithm reportedly struggles with their content because viewers stop interacting while meditating.

• Jomo shared a story about teaching meditation to someone with road rage, who learned to notice his anger instead of being swept up in it.

• Their live sessions mix different formats: mindfulness meditations, Zen stories, visualization journeys (Peru, Morocco, even an imagined “Land of Cake”), and a loving kindness meditation to close things out.

• They go live on TikTok Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and have recently started YouTube lives on Sundays at 9pm, with all past sessions archived on YouTube.

Key Insight:

“We start with a mindfulness-based meditation, then quite often we’ll have a little bit of a Zen story, and then after that we have a visualization meditation, so we go to ancient Peru, Morocco, or the Land of Cake we did the other day. And then we finally give people a taste of a loving kindness meditation at the end so that they go away feeling full of good vibes.”
— Jomo

Key Quotes

“When you sit with the monsters, you realize that the monsters just want to be heard. And when the monsters are heard, they go away.”
— Jomo

“It doesn’t make you calmer. It just takes away the noise. Calm follows.”
— Jomo

“And people say, I can’t meditate because my mind is too busy. To which we say, that’s like saying, I can’t go to the gym because I’m too unfit.”
— Jomo

“There’s nothing to achieve here. Nothing to get right. Just a soft arriving into this moment.”
— Jomo

“You’re not the passing thought. You’re the awareness that sees it. You’re not the changing story. You’re the space in which it appears.”
— Jomo

Resources Mentioned

• Monkey Mind Meditation — Jomo and Jason’s meditation practice, live on TikTok and YouTube

• Transcendental Meditation — the practice mentioned as Josh’s own current meditation approach

• Vedic meditation — the tradition Jason teaches, described as closely related to Transcendental Meditation

Where to Find Jomo

The Monkeymind Meditation Club

We're your cheeky, joyous and calming corner of the internet where ancient wisdom meets playful, mindful moments and a lovely gang of friends going on an adventure together.

• TikTok: Live sessions Monday, Wednesday, and Friday

• YouTube: Live sessions Sunday at 9pm, with all past recordings archived

Thank You

A heartfelt thank you to everyone who joined us live for this conversation, and to Jomo for his humor, warmth, and unexpected wisdom on what it actually takes to sit still. Your presence and engagement make these conversations possible.

A Natural Bridge

Jomo’s whole philosophy comes down to one idea: meditation doesn’t hand you calm directly, it clears the noise, and calm shows up on its own once the noise is gone. That’s the same principle behind alcohol and creativity. Alcohol is often the tool people reach for to avoid sitting with what’s actually happening in their heads. Removing it doesn’t hand you clarity right away either. It clears space, and clarity tends to follow from there.

If this episode stirred something for you and you're ready to do that work with support instead of alone, I coach a small number of people 1:1 through exactly this process. Send me a message at and let's talk about what that could look like for you.

I have a hard time remembering when I had my first drink. If there was a choice even involved in that decision.

Working through the fog is a memory of an apartment my brother was living in or visiting. He was sitting poolside in a white cracked rubber chair drinking a tall Budweiser, and said, Here…try this.

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In my teens, having the ability to discern the drug inside this can that I would eventually become addicted to wasn’t ever going to happen. I’m sure I made a face of disgust and wondered how he could keep drinking it.

Given how deeply ingrained alcohol is in society, as a kid, I’m sure I was getting signals all the time. Neighbors. Grocery stores. Ads on TV. The curiosity was building even if I didn’t fully understand what the point of it was.

When I graduated from high school, I went with a group of friends on spring break to Daytona Beach. One of the essentials was a beer bong. I never wanted to be the one who was good at it, the purpose was to get you fucked up quicker. And that’s what really mattered, right?

Beyond all the liquor, beer and beer bongs, a friend had rufees and (little did I know) they were like drinking 8 beers, why not take one of those as well?

It’s all flashes at this point. Bar after bar. Shows. Lights. Pounding music. Eyebrow pierced. Hit the beer bong. Throw up. Hungry. No ride. Friend is passed out on the bed. “Convince” to borrow his car. Drive. Traffic. Crash. Back of a police car. Orange suit. Different kind of bars.

In all of the situations around drinking, there’s an element of belonging. Being a part of a group or experience. Alcohol is embedded in everything. It’s what everyone does. It’s what the cool kids do…(did).

You want to go to parties to be around people, to socialize and connect, so you drink. You go to a sporting event, you tailgate before the game. You go to a wedding and anxiously shake your leg during the vows, waiting to dart over to the open bar. You drink so you can have more confidence on the dance floor, or you drink and watch from the sidelines. What else are you supposed to do with your hands?

The thread is be longing for connection. Being yourself. Being seen.

We aren’t meant to be alone. We’re bound the minute we are born. We thrive through social experiences, so remove the drug that ties so many of those experiences together, what do we have? Fear of isolation. And then the shame spiral starts with the voice in your head that doesn’t stop. Do I choose to drink and be a part of the crowd? Or do I choose not to and take that risk?

How does a person who doesn’t want to drink feel they ever have the choice to say no and still feel accepted? To still feel a part of the group?

The struggle is real, and it makes sense as to why a person would hesitate to let it go. We are slowly waking up, though. There are more choices than ever for NA drinks. The trend of drinking less is going downward, even more so for Gen-Z.1

Back in February, I launched The Sober Creative Collective with the intention of building a community for people who wanted a safe space to create beyond drinking. A room where belonging starts to take shape the moment a person steps in. The same space, you can share some type of creative art, while the next day, share the grief of losing a close friend.

Poetry. Selling out at a bakery market. Holding silence for a setback. WonderWalks.

A choice that each person made for themselves. A choice to belong in a room not defined by the drink in their hand.

What makes Jeff’s story worth sitting with is what he found on the other side. He didn’t just give up alcohol. He learned he’s deeply introverted, sensitive to noise and to the energy of a crowded room, and far less interested in big social gatherings than he ever realized while drinking. He also traded songwriting as an emotional release valve for something different: chant music built on ancient mantras, made to help people feel calm and present rather than to process pain.

In this conversation, Jeff talks about growing up in a drinking culture so strong it shaped an entire state’s identity, why his own drinking nearly disappeared the moment he lived somewhere else, and how a stomach problem sealed a decision his body had already started making on its own. He also shares a theory about sad music that’s worth thinking about, whether you drink or not.

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[1:36] Meet Jeff Harrington: Musician, Nine Years Removed From a Left-Brain Career

• Jeff is a singer, songwriter, producer, and bass player who’s been gigging for close to 40 years, much of it in the blues scene.

• Nine years ago he left his career as a medical physicist to focus on music, even though it’s never been his main income.

• He’s five years sober and has pulled back from playing out live, a shift he traces directly to sobriety.

Key Insight: “We’re supposed to do what we’re really terrified of, aren’t we?”

[3:03] Growing Up in Wisconsin’s Drinking Culture

• Jeff grew up in Milwaukee, which he says ranks nationally for excessive drinking, DUIs per capita, and bars per capita.

• College at Madison took that culture to another level. He describes drinking at least 12 beers a night as normal for everyone around him.

• He used alcohol to manage deep shyness and social anxiety, comparing it to an athlete numbing an injury just to get through the game.

Key Insight: “I think I was literally, my growth was stunted for at least five or 10 years looking back.”

[7:07] The Cleveland Contrast

• When Jeff moved to Cleveland for his first job, he expected a similar drinking culture to Wisconsin. Instead, he found people drank far less, and so did he.

• Looking back, this showed him how much of his drinking had been shaped by the environment around him, not by who he actually was.

• When he moved back to Wisconsin, he eventually fell back into the same heavy drinking patterns.

Key Insight: “I didn’t drink that much when I was in Cleveland. So looking back, I see that that’s who I really was.”

[13:48] Discovering He’s an Introvert

• After quitting drinking, Jeff realized he’s extremely introverted and sensitive to noise and to the energy of the people around him.

• He’s meditated for about 15 years, which he thinks has made him more attuned to these subtler energies.

• His social life shifted from crowds to small, comfortable gatherings that don’t leave him exhausted the next day.

Key Insight: “I’m not somebody who’s going to want to go to a party at this point or any place that’s loud and crowded.”

[15:54] A Stomach Issue Sealed What Had Already Begun

• About 10 years ago, Jeff and his then-girlfriend already cut back on drinking a lot as they got more into health.

• About five years ago, a stomach issue made alcohol physically intolerable, arriving right as he was already drinking less.

• Today he has maybe three or four drinks a year, and calls it fully intentional rather than something he misses.

Key Insight: “If my stomach magically healed, I wouldn’t be drinking at all. I don’t like it in my life anymore.”

[17:09] From Songwriting as Therapy to Chant Music as Calm

• In his 20s and 30s, Jeff used songwriting as one of his only tools for processing intense emotion, since he felt culture raised men to stay disconnected from their feelings.

• Today he writes mostly chant music on his Substack, Inside Sky Chant, built around ancient mantras rather than English lyrics.

• The purpose of his music has shifted from emotional catharsis to something more utilitarian: helping listeners feel calm and present.

Key Insight: “The ultimate goal would be it’s music that would be used to help people just be more calm and maybe present.”

[22:50] A New Earth: Spiritual Growth and Sobriety Growing Together

• About 15 years ago, Jeff read Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth, which he says completely changed his life after years of searching without finding a way in.

• That book led him toward chant music, sound baths, and a spiritual practice he sees as deeply tied to his relationship with alcohol.

• He’s careful to say this isn’t about judging people who drink. For him personally, alcohol just no longer serves what he’s trying to build.

Key Insight: “I think the spiritual growth and the alcohol are very interconnected.”

[28:23] The Hangover, the Brain, and a Theory About Sad Music

• Jeff and Josh discuss how alcohol triggers inflammation in the body, which is part of what a hangover actually is.

• They talk through how alcohol can worsen depression and how the brain’s negativity bias, combined with modern stressors like social media, feeds a cycle of using alcohol to regulate the nervous system.

• Jeff shares a personal theory that he became addicted to sad music the same way people get dependent on alcohol, reaching for it out of habit rather than need.

Key Insight: “I think if people are listening to sad music every day, I really would suggest trying to step back and take a look at that.”

Key Quotes

“I think that’s like a perfect analog to someone who’s shy and they’re drinking.” - Jeff Harrington

“I was someone who didn’t even really want to drink that much. I was probably very influenced by the culture around me.” - Jeff Harrington

“I found out so clearly that I’m extremely introverted and sensitive to all the noise.” - Jeff Harrington

“If my stomach magically healed, I wouldn’t be drinking at all. I don’t like it in my life anymore.” - Jeff Harrington

“I really feel more and more, I feel like people really underestimate how powerful music is.” - Jeff Harrington

Resources Mentioned

• A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle

• Release Your Song (Jeff’s Substack on music and creativity)

• Inside Sky Chant (Jeff’s Substack for his chant music)

• Handpan (the instrument Jeff and Josh discuss in relation to nervous system regulation)

• Sound baths (a guided meditation practice using instruments like handpans)

Where to Find Jeff

Release Your Song

Everything about writing and releasing songs.

By Jeff “H” Harrington

Inside Sky

A Song for Your Mystical Dance Party

It’s midnight under the light of a full moon. You’re walking through a mystical forest. A bear roars in the distance, and you’re momentarily startled. The air feels electrically charged…

Read more

10 months ago · 52 likes · 33 comments · Jeff Harrington/InsideSkyChant

Thank You

A heartfelt thank you to , , , and many others who joined us live for this conversation, and to Jeff for his openness and generosity in sharing his story. Your presence and engagement make these conversations possible.

What This Conversation Points To

Jeff and Josh spent a good chunk of this episode on something worth pulling out on its own: the cycle of reaching for alcohol the moment an uncomfortable feeling shows up, because it soothes that feeling within minutes. Jeff broke that cycle on his own timeline, over years, without a program or a guide walking alongside him.

That’s exactly where 1:1 coaching comes in. If you’re recognizing that same cycle in your own life and you’re ready to shorten the timeline, let’s talk. No pitch, no commitment. Just a conversation about where you’re at and what might be possible.

Schedule a Free Call

Real friends show up before you even ask. They notice you’ve gone silent for two weeks and call anyway, without making you explain yourself first. They sit with you before a hard conversation and stay through it, because that’s what caring about someone actually looks like. None of that requires a drink to happen, and none of it disappears once the night is over.

Alcohol never actually did any of that, even on the nights it felt like it did. It softened the edges and made things feel lighter for an hour, and that relief was real, it just was never the same as being cared for. But it never asked how you were actually doing, and it never remembered the hard week that sent you looking for it in the first place.

A real friend does both of those things, and keeps doing them long after the moment has passed.

🎙️Podcast

is an entrepreneur and author of Wild Ride to Sobriety. He grew up in a family where drinking was the family sport, learned to read a room’s drinks before anyone asked for a refill, and built a career on the idea that alcohol was his edge in sales. In 2017, his rehab used aversion therapy: eighteen shots of vodka, whiskey, red wine, and white wine, swished and spit into a bowl while a nurse he called his bartender kept the pours coming. Ten days later he walked out, drove forty minutes home, and found divorce papers waiting in his garage. He’s since lost 85 pounds, built a morning routine around journaling and cold plunges, and is working on a second book about the friends who shape where your life ends up going.

hosts the podcast The Growth Mixtape and writes The Restless Leader on Substack, for people who built a successful career and now find themselves restless, wondering what the second half is for. He quit drinking on a Monday after Easter in 2022, collapsing into his wife’s arms and telling her he had to stop. Less than a year later, his son collapsed at a restaurant with a mass pressing on his brain, and the family spent a terrifying night in the ER before emergency surgery. Bob says getting sober and nearly losing his son, landing so close together, are why he stopped wasting days. Last month, at 55, he wrote his first song at a songwriting retreat, about the drive with his mother the week he moved her into a retirement home. He heard it fully produced for the first time on a Sunday morning and played it for his family. They all cried.

coaches people through what he calls the second act, the stretch of life after 40 when the setup is finished and the real question shows up: what now. Born with spina bifida and the only wheelchair user in his group growing up, he started drinking at 19 to feel like everybody else. Ten years of going out with his brothers turned into twenty more sharing wine on the couch with his wife. In January 2018, on a flight home from Barcelona, he committed to 100 days without a drink. He hasn’t had one since. He led a team of coaches at One Year No Beer, then built his own practice, the Life Design Collective, arguing against the idea that your life has to be fully figured out by 40. His office in rural Ireland is lined with bookshelves he built before he could really afford them, filled with books he’s been collecting for years.

You can listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well.

My guest this week is with Jeff “H” Harrington on July 23 at 12P EDT

This week I'm talking with . He's a singer, songwriter, producer, and bass player who has been gigging for close to 40 years, a good chunk of it in the blues scene, though he's never made music his main income.

He left his first career as a medical physicist about nine years ago. He hasn't played out much the last couple years, a shift that traces back to sobriety. He's introverted, and once he stopped drinking, he realized he doesn't like crowded rooms much anymore. He hasn't had a drink in around five years. Before that he drank like a lot of Wisconsinites, meaning too much.

What finally got him to stop was a stomach issue tied to the acidity, arriving right as he was already cutting back on his own. He told me growth matters more to him than anything, and alcohol never helped with that.

Looking forward to talking through all of it: the gigs, the pullback, and what's opened up since.

Inside Sky

Inside Sky makes chant music, and there will be a new song every month.

By Jeff Harrington/InsideSkyChant

If something here landed and you want to talk about what's possible when you change your relationship with alcohol, let’s explore that together.

For 26 years, drinking looked completely normal. Nights out with his brothers turned into nearly 20 years of sharing wine on the couch with his wife. Nothing about his life looked broken. He had a steady IT career, a mortgage, and a stable home. At 45, he just noticed something simple: it was getting in his way now.

That one observation, made on a flight home from Barcelona in January 2018, led him to commit to 100 alcohol-free days. He hasn’t had a drink since. Within weeks, he stumbled onto a coaching course and knew almost instantly it was where he belonged. Nearly nine years later, at 54, Gary runs his own practice, the Life Design Collective, helping people in midlife ask the same question he once asked himself: is this it, or is there something else?

[03:06] Growing Up Different in Rural Ireland

• Gary was born and raised in rural Ireland and has used a wheelchair full-time since age 13.

• He didn’t have his first drink until 19, well past the age most of his peers started.

• Drinking made him feel like part of the group in a way he hadn’t before, since he grew up looking different from everyone around him.

Key Insight: “It just made me feel like everybody else.”

[07:04] The Wake-Up Call at 45

• His drinking shifted over time: nights out with his brothers in his 20s, then almost 20 years of sharing wine with his wife on the couch.

• Nothing about his life looked dramatic. He had a steady job, paid his bills, and everything seemed fine on the surface.

• At 45, he simply noticed alcohol was in his way and decided to see what life looked like without it.

Key Insight: “It’s getting in my way now.”

[07:46] From IT Career to Full-Time Coach

• On a flight home from Barcelona in January 2018, Gary committed to 100 alcohol-free days. He never had another drink after that.

• Within about two months, he found a coaching course and knew right away it was what he wanted to do.

• He ran two full workloads at once (coaching and his IT job) for years before finally leaving tech in 2023 to coach full-time.

Key Insight: “I didn’t actually go, okay, I’m quitting my job and I’m going to sell a house and move to Bali.”

[10:57] The Pattern Behind Change That Sticks

• Most people start by naming what they don’t want: hangovers, health problems, tension at work or at home.

• Once that clears, the real work begins, which is figuring out what you’re actually moving toward.

• Change rarely works on the first try. Every attempt adds information, and the streaks get longer as people learn instead of judging themselves for slipping.

Key Insight: “It doesn’t ever really work the first time.”

[13:04] Curiosity Over Judgment

• Gary calls curiosity, instead of self-judgment, the biggest shift he sees in people who make change last.

• Instead of asking why they failed, the useful question becomes what they could try differently next time.

• This mindset reaches far beyond drinking. It’s the difference between staying stuck in a cycle and actually moving forward.

Key Insight: “If you can treat it with curiosity and not judgment, that’s the real game changer.”

[17:00] Creativity, Clarity, and Finding Substack

• Gary spent almost 30 years in software, which he describes as genuinely creative work, even though it was never quite the right fit for him.

• About six weeks into sobriety, he experienced a level of energy and clarity he’d never felt before.

• That clarity opened the door to writing. He’s been on Substack for close to two years and is nearing one full year of his weekly newsletter, Second Act Sunday.

Key Insight: “Creativity almost by default jumps in.”

[21:02] What Happens When the Numbing Stops

• Removing alcohol doesn’t remove hard feelings. It just means you feel all of them, not only the ones you’d pick.

• Gary resisted gratitude journaling at first. “Thank you very much, I’ll pass,” he says of being told to write down three things he was grateful for.

• The practice ended up helping him see what he already had and who he already was, built by parents who raised him to believe he could do anything.

Key Insight: “It did allow me to kind of see what I have and see who I am.”

[29:19] Building a Second Act After 40

• Gary pushes back on the idea that life needs to be fully figured out by 40, and that any change after that is too hard or too late.

• His program, the Second Act Blueprint, is a seven-week experience helping people mostly between 40 and 60 design what comes next. The sixth cohort starts next Tuesday, with two spots still open.

• He didn’t blow up his life to make his own change. He changed slowly, over eight years, while keeping his job, his house, and his marriage intact. He’s now compiling a year of his newsletter with an eye toward turning it into a book.

Key Insight: “It took me, really, eight years of slow change.”

Key Quotes

“It just made me feel like everybody else.” — Gary Allen

“It’s getting in my way now.” — Gary Allen

“If you can treat it with curiosity and not judgment, that’s the real game changer.” — Gary Allen

“I didn’t actually go, okay, I’m quitting my job and I’m going to sell a house and move to Bali.” — Gary Allen

“It took me, really, eight years of slow change.” — Gary Allen

Resources Mentioned

• Life Design Collective — Gary’s own coaching practice, built around midlife redesign

• The Second Act Blueprint — Gary’s seven-week program helping people in their 40s, 50s, and 60s design what comes next (Next Cohort Starting on Tuesday July 21)

• Second Act Sunday — Gary’s weekly Substack newsletter, closing in on its first full year

• Richard Rohr and Arthur C. Brooks — authors Gary reads on the idea of a second act in midlife

Where to Find Gary

Gary Allen

I gave up alcohol at 45, I trained as a coach at 46, and I left corporate life for good at age 50. Now I coach people to change their relationship with alcohol and to make profound and meaningful change in mid-life. I write about all of that here.

Email: hello@garyallen.ie

Website: https://garyallen.ie/

Thank You

A heartfelt thank you to everyone who joined us live for this conversation, and to Gary Allen for his openness and wisdom. Your presence and engagement make these conversations possible.

Building Your Own Second Act

Gary’s story keeps coming back to one idea: change that lasts doesn’t come from a dramatic overhaul. It comes from removing the thing that’s been quietly draining your energy and clarity, then giving yourself time to rebuild from there.

That’s the same work at the center of The Sober Creative Method™, my 90-day, 1:1 coaching experience for people who want to remove alcohol as the barrier to their full creative capacity. No labels, no rock bottom required, just a structured path back to the energy and clarity that’s already yours.

If this episode resonated, send me a message and tell me where you’re at. I read every one.

In this conversation, Bob sits down to talk about what it actually took to break that cycle. He walks through the rules he tried and failed to follow, the Monday-morning mood he lived in for years, and the night he finally collapsed into his wife’s arms and said he had to stop. He also talks about a health scare with his son that reframed everything, and about a discovery he made once alcohol was out of the picture: a version of creativity he’d spent his whole life insisting he didn’t have.

What makes this one land isn’t just the honesty. It’s the specificity. Bob doesn’t talk about sobriety in abstractions. He talks about counting bottles in a fridge at 17, a mood scale that ran from a two on Monday to a nine on Friday, and writing his first song at 55, in a single day, about a drive with his mother.

If you’ve wondered what’s actually on the other side of quitting, this conversation gives you a real answer.

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Show Notes

[02:45] The First Drink and Decades of “Bobby Good Times”

• Bob’s first drink was a stolen Labatt Blue from his dad’s fridge at 17. His mom counted 23 missing bottles because he was acting strange.

• The taste was awful, but the feeling hooked him. It became, in his words, the answer to being the person he wanted to be.

• From 17 to 52, drinking anchored his life. Friday and Saturday nights were automatic, and he was often the one pushing for a Thursday or Sunday too.

• He could count on one hand how many weekends he took off in 35 years.

Key Insights: “It was actually really gross, but I loved the way it made me feel. It just seemed like the answer to being the person that I wanted to be.”

[09:38] When It Stopped Being Fun

• Watching his own sons go through hangovers, Bob now recognizes the anxiety he felt in his 20s and 30s but never had words for. Nobody talked about anxiety in the 80s.

• The real darkness set in during the five years before he quit, at 52.

• Drinking that once made him feel social and connected started making him feel isolated. He was hiding it and lying more.

• COVID sped everything up. The backyard parties were fun in the moment, but when life went back to normal, the drinking never slowed back down.

Key Insights: “It just felt like this thing that used to make me more social and more fun, and make me feel like a part of a group, was increasingly isolating.”

[12:13] The Rules That Never Worked

• Bob negotiated with himself constantly: no beers over 5%, no mixing beer and wine, no drinking on Sunday, no drinking before 4pm.

• Every rule bought him about two weeks before it collapsed.

• He kept waking up next to his wife, unable to remember the night before, promising things would change.

• Eventually he realized the rules were never going to hold, because he was powerless the moment he took the first drink.

Key Insights: “I had tried everything, and the only thing left was: I’ve got to stop. I’m powerless as soon as I have one drink.”

[14:02] Living the Monday-to-Friday Mood Cycle

• For two to three years before quitting, Bob’s whole life ran on a weekly mood cycle.

• Monday mornings he’d cancel meetings and take long walks alone, timed so his family wouldn’t see him.

• By Thursday he’d start to feel human again. By Friday he was ready to go out and do it all over.

• Looking back, he realized that cycle wasn’t rest and recovery. It was survival on repeat.

Key Insights: “Monday I’m a two. Wednesday I’m still pretty low, I’m a five. But by Thursday I’m a seven, and Friday morning I’m a nine.”

[17:19] Two Wake-Up Calls: Quitting and a Health Scare

• Bob quit on the Monday after Easter Sunday in 2022, following a messy family dinner the night before.

• He came home from a walk, collapsed into his wife’s arms, and said he had to stop. That became day one.

• Less than a year into sobriety, a second wake-up call hit: his son collapsed at a restaurant, and doctors found a bacterial mass pressing on his brain. He was rushed into emergency surgery and fully recovered.

• Bob credits being a couple years sober for how he and his wife handled it. If he’d still been drinking, he says he doesn’t know what would have happened.

Key Insights: “Life just gets really simple, really fast. I just didn’t want to waste a single day.”

[21:53] Three Years to “This Is Actually Better”

• Bob describes his first year sober as white-knuckling through every first: his birthday, Christmas, New Year’s, a boys’ trip, a wedding.

• Year two, he started testing whether he could actually enjoy himself sober instead of just proving he could survive it.

• It took a third year before he believed the people who’d told him you could have fun without drinking.

• Losing his friends scared him most. His phone did stop ringing for some things, but the friendships that mattered stayed intact. He’s the only one in his friend group who’s sober.

Key Insights: “Everyone quits, whether you quit 10 minutes before you take your last breath or 10 years before you die, or 20, or 30. Everyone quits. I’m just the one that went first.”

[28:04] Writing His First Song at 55

• Bob spent his whole life telling himself he wasn’t a creative person, even while building a career around surrounding himself with creative people.

• Songwriting eluded him for years. He’d write a couple of lines, decide they were garbage, and quit before finishing a verse.

• A guest on his own podcast, singer-songwriter Peter Katz, mentioned a songwriting retreat. Bob went: Friday for writing, Saturday for recording, Sunday for listening back to a fully produced song.

• The song is about driving his mother to her new retirement home. He played it for his family, and they cried.

Key Insights: “Creativity is inside all of us. It’s just buried under self-doubt and imposter syndrome and fear of judgment. And it’s there.”

Key Quotes

“I had tried everything, and the only thing left was: I’ve got to stop. I’m powerless as soon as I have one drink.” - Bob Mathers

“Monday I’m a two. Wednesday I’m still pretty low, I’m a five. But by Thursday I’m a seven, and Friday morning I’m a nine.” - Bob Mathers

“I’ve realized that eight was actually a six, because I found a 12 and a 13, and I think I found a 15 and a 16. Who’s to say there is a limit on this?” - Bob Mathers

“Everyone quits, whether you quit 10 minutes before you take your last breath or 10 years before you die, or 20, or 30. Everyone quits. I’m just the one that went first.” - Bob Mathers

“Creativity is inside all of us. It’s just buried under self-doubt and imposter syndrome and fear of judgment. And it’s there.” - Bob Mathers

Resources Mentioned

• The Growth Mixtape — Bob’s podcast, with new episodes every other Thursday

• The Restless Leader — Bob’s Substack, written for people who built a successful career and now feel restless

• Peter Katz — singer-songwriter and speaker from Toronto who hosts songwriting retreats

• Rob Zabo — the award-winning producer who produced Bob’s song, and an upcoming guest on The Growth Mixtape

Where to Find Bob

The Restless Leader

For restless leaders curious about what's next, after a successful career following everyone else's rules. I'm a speaker, coach and podcast host fumbling my way through it myself. One thing is for sure - there is no going back.

By Bob Mathers

• LinkedIn: search Bob Mathers

• Podcast: The Growth Mixtape, wherever you listen, new episodes every other Thursday

Thank You

A heartfelt thank you to everyone who joined us live for this conversation, and to Bob Mathers for his honesty and generosity in sharing his story. Your presence and engagement make these conversations possible.

Your Next Step

Bob spent decades telling himself he wasn’t creative. It took removing alcohol, and a lot of honesty about what he was actually afraid of, to find out that wasn’t true. What he found waiting on the other side wasn’t a smaller life. It was a bigger one, with no ceiling he could find yet.

If any part of his story landed for you, that’s worth paying attention to. You don’t need a plan figured out right now. A quick conversation to feel seen and discuss where you are is a great start.

Schedule a Free Call

Ian built a sales career on entertaining clients at bars, casinos, and golf courses. He called alcohol his superpower, the thing that let him build relationships and close deals. From the outside, it worked. From the inside, it cost him his health, his judgment, and eventually his second marriage.

In 2017, Ian checked into a ten-day rehab program built around aversion therapy, pairing real alcohol with a drug that made him violently sick. He walked out on Halloween and was served divorce papers in his garage forty minutes later. Almost a decade on, he’s rebuilt his mornings, his body, and his relationships from the ground up. His biggest lesson isn’t about willpower. It’s about who you let into your circle.

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Show Notes

[00:00] Meet Ian Fee: Life of the Party, Turned Sobriety Advocate

• Ian is the author of Wild Ride to Sobriety, a memoir about what drove him to drink, what got him out, and what he found on the other side.

• He got sober in 2017 after building an entire identity, and career, around alcohol.

• His central argument: sobriety doesn’t take away who you are. It gives you better access to it.

Key Insight: “I caught how to drink very, very well.”

[01:41] Raised on Booze: A Childhood Built Around Drinking

• Ian’s first drink was at age one. His parents dipped his binky in wine and gave him sips of beer as a toddler.

• His parents were, in his words, “social alcoholics” and the life of the party. Daily drinking was never treated as a problem, it was just what everyone did.

• By grade school he could name every neighbor’s drink order and knew exactly when to refill a glass, a skill he says he still has today.

Key Insight: “Things are caught, not taught.”

[04:55] Building a Career (and an Identity) Around Alcohol

• Ian studied hotel management in San Diego and built his sales career on entertaining clients at bars, strip clubs, casinos, and golf courses.

• He believed getting clients liquored up was the key to building relationships and closing business.

• He was hosting people at his house five-plus days a week, sometimes 15 to 20 people on a random weeknight.

Key Insight: “I thought alcohol was my superpower... and boy was I wrong.”

[07:22] The Awkward Shift: Staying Social Without the Bottle

• When Ian stopped drinking, longtime friends and clients assumed something was wrong with him.

• He still takes clients out and stays social, he just doesn’t drink to do it.

• Watching his transformation has made several longtime clients sober curious, and a few have cut back or quit entirely.

Key Insight: “It’s such a ripple effect, the silent impact you’re making that you don’t even realize the reach that you have.”

[10:59] Rock Bottom and Rehab: Inside Aversion Therapy

• In 2017, Ian checked into Schick’s Shadow, one of only two facilities in the country offering aversion therapy for alcoholism at the time.

• The ten-day program paired doses of ipecac with real alcohol, training his body to associate drinking with violent nausea. He says the aversion still works today, almost a decade later.

• He walked out of treatment on Halloween, drove straight home, and was served divorce papers in his garage.

Key Insight: “Unless you’re right, nothing’s going to be right, no matter what you do.”

[16:56] Sobriety Was the Easy Part: Facing the Emotions Underneath

• Ian says quitting drinking was simple compared to processing decades of emotions he’d been numbing.

• He hired an accountability coach right out of rehab and still talks to her every week.

• He rebuilt his mornings around no phone for the first 30 minutes, breath-work, journaling, a cold plunge, and a page of reading before the gym. He lost 85 pounds in the process and credits Atomic Habits for the idea of stacking small changes over time.

Key Insight: “Getting sober was the easy part for me. Today you have all the emotions, all the things I was numbing for 40-plus years.”

[25:28] Creativity, Impact, and the Power of Your Circle

• For Ian, creativity isn’t art or a hobby. It’s making an impact by sharing his story so someone else can become a better parent, partner, or business owner.

• He tells people who want to get sober that their circle is the real obstacle. Changing who you spend time with is uncomfortable, but necessary.

• He’s already sketching his next book, tentatively titled Circle of Four or Power of Five, about how the people you run with decide where you end up.

Key Insight: “Your circle’s your problem.”

Key Quotes

“I caught how to drink very, very well.” - Ian Fee

“Things are caught, not taught.” - Ian Fee

“I was in the fast lane, in the fog, with the emergency brake on. Today it’s sunny skies, no emergency brake, and doing 90 in the fast lane.” - Ian Fee

“Unless you’re right, nothing’s going to be right, no matter what you do.” - Ian Fee

“Your circle’s your problem.” - Ian Fee

Resources Mentioned

Wild Ride to Sobriety - Ian Fee’s memoir, purchase link below.

Atomic Habits by James Clear - referenced as Ian’s model for stacking small habits over time.

Schick’s Shadow - the aversion therapy rehab program Ian completed in 2017, formerly with locations in Seattle and Florida.

Where to Find Ian Fee

Memoir - Wild Ride to Sobriety

Website - https://ianfee.com/

Your Next Step

Ian’s story keeps coming back to one idea: the people around you decide where you end up. Getting sober didn’t just change what he drank, it changed who he spent his time with, and that’s the part most people underestimate.

If you’re sensing that alcohol, or the circle built around it, might be capping what you’re capable of, let’s talk about it. Coaching starts with a single conversation, no pitch, just a look at what’s actually in the way.

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Thank You

A heartfelt thank you to , , , and everyone who joined us live for this conversation, and to for his honesty and generosity in sharing his story. Your presence and engagement make these conversations possible.