The Sober Creative

Podcast

For 14 years, managed money for ultra-wealthy families in Palm Beach, at one point overseeing $4 billion. He grew up on a dirt road in central Florida, never felt like he belonged in those rooms, and drank until he was funny enough to fit in. On August 5, 2024, he was arrested in his own driveway. That day became his sobriety date. In jail, he found his first AA meeting.

On Thursday we talked about what he noticed once he got sober: he had been spending money for the same reasons he drank, to change how he felt and avoid something he didn’t want to look at. That led him to adapt the 12 steps for money. He now coaches people through it with ClearPath Financial Coaching, writes the newsletter Financial Sobriety, and runs The Sober Money Club, a weekly peer-led group. His book, 12 Steps to Financial Sobriety, comes out in February.

We also got into fake shopping sites that let you fill a cart and hit buy without ever spending a dollar, which Greg calls non-alcoholic money. He told me about his 10-day silent meditation retreat, how writing became his creative outlet, and the day his ankle monitor came off, which was also the day he picked up his one-year chip.

“Shame thrives off of secrecy.”

You can listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well.

My guest this week is on Thursday, October 22 at 11:00A ET

Parker got sober more than 23 years ago and has been building his life one slow piece at a time ever since.

At six months sober, Parker told his sponsor he wanted to skip ahead to eight years. His sponsor laughed and said, “You can’t handle eight years.”

Since then, Parker has co-founded companies, taught at Stanford’s d.school, and become an executive coach who has worked with hundreds of founders and senior leaders. He writes The Practice, a newsletter on leadership, inner work, and building a life worth living, and his first book is on the way.

We’ll get into asking for help, being a beginner, and why the things that last are the things that grow slowly.

Who I’m Celebrating

Anna Noelle Rockwell joined us for October’s Clear Hour, and she sent me photos of what she was working on during the hour.

The piece is called Dying Queen of the Night, a working title. It’s 16x20, graphite and watercolor on panel, and the subject is a night blooming cereus, a flower that opens after dark and is gone by morning. In the photos you can see the pencil lines still loose, with red watercolor washes running through them. It’s in progress, and I’m grateful she shared it anyway.

Thank you, Anna, for the time you spent with us and for showing the work before it’s finished. I’m looking forward to next month’s session.

Join us for November’s Clear Hour
A guided practice to settle in, then an hour to make something.

No experience needed.

Save your spot

Episode 073 - Non-Alcoholic Money: Greg Downs on Jail, Recovery, and the 12 Steps of Financial Sobriety

Josh Woll — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 23:09:16 GMT

grew up on a dirt road in central Florida, a kid who never felt like he had a place. At the height of his career he was sitting in Palm Beach boardrooms, managing $4 billion for some of the wealthiest families in the country. From the outside, he had it figured out. On the inside, he was falling apart.

On August 5, 2024, that life ended in his own driveway, where he was arrested. Six months in county jail followed. A card with a Bible verse on a cell table, a cellmate’s AA magazine, and a meeting speaker who told Greg’s own story back to him started something new. When he got out, he walked into a clubhouse less than five minutes from his house and asked for help.

In the rooms, Greg heard shame, fear, guilt, denial, and avoidance described, and he recognized the same feelings in his financial clients. That idea became his book, 12 Steps to Financial Sobriety, coming in February.

In this conversation, Greg talks about self-forgiveness, why shame thrives on secrecy, why you can’t go abstinent on money, and “non-alcoholic money,” the fake shopping sites that give you the buying rush with no purchase.

Show Notes

[02:42] - Growing Up Out of Place

Greg grew up in a small town in Florida, on a dirt road outside it. His parents kept the family busy and supported him, and he describes the childhood as fun.
He skipped a grade, so he was always younger than his classmates. He never felt funny enough for the funny crowd, athletic enough for the athletes, or smart enough for the nerds.
Heavy drinking started around 16 or 17. In college he joined a fraternity, became its president, and lived in a world where nearly every day involved alcohol.
From age 16 until a little over two years ago, alcohol was always there.

Key Insights

“As soon as I started getting a little bit of alcohol in me, all of a sudden I could become who I wanted to be, right?” - Greg Downs

[07:31] - The Driveway, the Cell, and the Clubhouse

Greg left his career at the end of 2023 planning to take a year off. He was living alone in an apartment during a hard stretch with his wife, with no accountability and plenty of money in the bank. For the first six months of 2024, he drank every day from the time he woke up until he passed out.
He went to treatment in June 2024 and was drinking again within 24 hours of leaving. On August 5, 2024, he was arrested in front of his house. In the back of the car, he saw a successful financial advisor on his way to the county jail.
In his cell he found a card with Jeremiah 29:11 on it. Greg is not religious, but the card was deeply comforting. Later, a cellmate with 10 years of sobriety encouraged him to attend an AA meeting, where the speaker was a financial advisor whose story sounded like Greg’s own.
Jail also taught him gratitude. He had taken the cars, the travel, and the success for granted, and losing it all showed him he could still live.

Key Insights

“I think my sobriety journey was walking into that room and raising my hand and asking for help.” - Greg Downs

[14:56] - Managing $4 Billion and Feeling Invincible

Greg went from a kid on a dirt road to meeting with executives, entrepreneurs, and billionaires. At one point he managed $4 billion, and the minimum account size was $25 million.
People asked for his advice and took it. He says his ego was through the roof, mostly on the inside.
His dad, who passed away in 2017, warned him to watch out for the booze. Alcohol was always around growing up, and their house was the one that hosted the holidays and parties.
Josh adds that awareness often arrives only when we are ready to hear it, even when people who love us are saying it out loud.

Key Insights

“Seven, eight years of me not watching out for it and not paying attention and not listening to what the people that loved me were telling me and sharing with me.” - Greg Downs

[18:49] - How the 12 Steps Became a Book About Money

For the first six months after jail, Greg wore an ankle monitor and could only go to AA, the grocery store, and church. The day the monitor came off was also the day he picked up his one-year chip.
He had heard “the steps are designed for living” hundreds of times. One morning it clicked: shame, fear, guilt, denial, and avoidance drove his drinking, and his financial clients had the same heavy emotions around money.
Money doesn’t discriminate. Challenges show up at $60,000 a year and at $600,000. Money is math, and the hard part is the emotion behind how we spend and earn, like the late-night Amazon order we regret when the package arrives.
At its core, Greg says, his book is about self-forgiveness around money.

Key Insights

“You can’t just go abstinent on money.” - Greg Downs

[27:06] - Building a Healthier Relationship with Money

During Sober October, Greg ran “Financially Sober October” with his email list. Once a day, open your account, look at the numbers, and close it. The goal is to see that it’s just a number, which helps people who avoid their accounts. One person who looked too often chose to look once a week.
Greg says personal finance is personal. Budget templates and apps are everywhere, and he wanted to ask a different question: is your relationship with money coming from a healthy place, and can you enjoy it?
The book walks through the same 12 steps, reworded. Readers take an inventory (what you have, what you owe, what comes in, what goes out), check their will and insurance, talk to someone, look at behaviors and outside help, make amends to others and to themselves, and align spending with their values.
Greg started the Sober Money Club, a support group, because community saved his life. He points out that over 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, so we are much more alike than we think.

Key Insights

“Shame thrives off of secrecy.” - Greg Downs

[32:11] - Your Story Is Your Superpower

Greg’s sponsor told him his story is his superpower. Greg used to hide behind it, never reaching out for help and trying to drink problems away.
Sharing has made real connection possible. The more he shares, the more other people open up to him, and that breaks down the shame barrier fast.
Greg and Josh talk about the stigma around bankruptcy. Greg says that for some people it is a really good solution, and that some laws have changed to make it easier than it used to be.
The AA clubhouse Greg attends has a plaque that says “you are not alone.” After he shared a family story at a meeting, a young woman came up to tell him she was living almost the same thing.

Key Insights

“Every time I share, I’ve been met with empathy more than judgment.” - Greg Downs

[37:45] - Writing, Flow, and “Non-Alcoholic Money”

Writing has become Greg’s creative outlet. When he was seven, he wrote a book for his uncle with “Downs Publishing Company” on the inside. In high school he wanted to be a sports journalist, then chased the money instead.
He used to say he wasn’t creative. Writing has brought out a more creative side, and he has felt the flow state people talk about.
The New York Times calls them “dopamine sites”: fake shopping sites like fakehaul.com, where you fill a basket, hit buy, and nothing arrives. A South Korean fake food-delivery site tells you how much money you saved and how many calories you didn’t eat.
Greg jokingly calls it non-alcoholic money. These sites get hundreds of thousands of clicks a month, and he’s curious whether they will last.

Key Insights

“We’re reaching for that same sort of relief and the dopamine that comes from it.” - Greg Downs

[42:14] - Hang On, Pain Ends

Greg says the hard moments have gotten fewer, shorter, and easier to handle than in the beginning.
He learned the acronym H-O-P-E (hang on, pain ends). He now knows the craziness in his thoughts will stop at some point, even when he can’t say when.
In the past, those moments sent him reaching for a drink for immediate relief. Now he goes for a walk, calls a friend, journals, writes, or goes to the gym.
Greg is a big advocate for meditation and went to a 10-day silent retreat earlier this year. Josh shares that he has meditated daily for over 10 years and that consistency matters more than length.

Key Insights

“H-O-P-E, hang on, pain ends.” - Greg Downs

Key Quotes

“I could very clearly see where life was going to go if I didn’t make changes.” - Greg Downs

“All the material stuff was gone, but I was still there.” - Greg Downs

“The 12 steps are a lot about self-forgiveness and recognizing that I’ve made mistakes, but that I’m not a mistake.” - Greg Downs

“You are not your credit score. You are not your bank balance.” - Greg Downs

“Your story is your superpower.” - Greg Downs, quoting his sponsor

Resources Mentioned

12 Steps to Financial Sobriety by Greg Downs: coming in February, with presale expected soon
The Sober Money Club: Greg’s weekly peer-led support group for money
Financially Sober October: the once-a-day “look at your account and close it” practice
“Dopamine sites”: fake shopping sites covered by the New York Times, including fakehaul.com and a South Korean fake food-delivery site
The 12 steps and AA, including the AA Grapevine magazine
Jeremiah 29:11: the verse on the card in Greg’s cell
H-O-P-E (hang on, pain ends): the acronym Greg uses on hard days
Meditation and silent retreats: Greg’s 10-day retreat and a daily practice

Where to Find Greg

Social: Instagram and LinkedIn @gregdownscoach
Coaching: ClearPath Financial Coaching
Book: 12 Steps to Financial Sobriety, out in February. [Add presale link here when it’s live]

When You’re Ready to Look at What You’re Reaching For

Greg’s story keeps returning to one pattern. We reach for something to change how we feel.

Greg saw it in his own drinking, and he saw it in how his clients handled money. The late-night drink and the late-night purchase both bring relief, and both bring regret by morning.

What helped him was honesty, a framework, and people in the room with him. He also learned that painful moments end, and that there are other ways to shift your mood: a walk, a phone call, a page in a journal.

That is the work inside The Sober Creative Reset, a guided 30-day alcohol-free reset with one-on-one coaching from the first session. You get four 60-minute sessions, daily support and check-ins, trigger and pattern mapping, strategies for social and work situations, and help recalibrating after a setback. It is coaching built on having lived through this. You don’t need to identify as anything to be here.

Learn More

Thank You

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

P.S. Missed an earlier conversation or newsletter? The full archive lives at thesobercreative.substack.com/archive. If this one landed for you, forward it to someone who might need it.

What’s Next

New conversations arrive every week on The Sober Creative Podcast. Subscribe for free to get each recap in your inbox.

Clarity of Mind 067: No leaves you more

Josh Woll — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 14:03:54 GMT

Weekly Insight

Dr. Lucy McBride told me there is no moral prize for being sober. She starts with awareness of what a habit does for you and what it does against you, and she looks at the effects on sleep, mood, and clear thinking.

This is where no can do more for you. It can be an answer with information behind it. No to the second glass because you know how tomorrow’s sleep will go. No to the invitation when your body is asking for rest. No to the thing you’ve been saying yes to out of habit.

One of her patients was caregiving for her mother, working a demanding job, and drinking more to get through the days. She came in expecting a lecture. Lucy wrote one word on the prescription pad: self-compassion. A no lands better from that place than from shame.

I’m the type of person who wants to say yes to all the things. A word I’ve been sitting with is capacity. I have limits, and I feel them at the end of the day when I’m wiped out. Understanding those limits is a practice, and saying no comes from a place of care, because I can’t be my best if I say yes to everything.

This week, pick one place where you’ve been saying yes on autopilot and try a no instead.

No leaves you more to work with tomorrow.

Podcast

has been a primary care physician in Washington, DC for 25 years. She trained at Harvard Medical School and Johns Hopkins, writes the newsletter Are You Okay? for more than 43,000 subscribers, and her new book, Beyond the Prescription, came out in August and became a USA Today bestseller.

Her father has been sober since he was 50, and that history shapes how she talks with patients about alcohol. She starts with no judgment. She also points out that a standard checkup tends to shrink the topic to drinks per week, while the more useful questions are what the drinking is doing for you and what it may be doing to your sleep, digestion, mood, and relationships. Lab work can look normal the whole time.

We also covered what she has seen with GLP-1 medications and alcohol cravings in some of her patients, why self-compassion belongs in the toolkit, and how loneliness and drinking feed each other. Her own creative outlets are writing and getting dressed, with a consignment shop where everyone knows her name.

“Just because something’s legal and socially acceptable doesn’t mean it’s good for you.”

You can listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well.

My guest this week is on Thursday, October 15 at 3:00P ET

For 14 years, Greg managed money for ultra-wealthy families in Palm Beach.

He grew up on a dirt road in central Florida and never felt like he belonged in those rooms, so he spent like the people around him and drank until he was funny enough to fit in.

From the outside, he had it figured out. On the inside, he was falling apart.

On Thursday, Greg shares what changed when he got sober and what he found when he looked at his spending with the same honesty.

He talks about the 12 step framework he now uses to coach people through their money, one dollar at a time, and the book he’s writing about it.

The Other Side Of The Mic

had me on The Growth Mixtape, and he turned the tables after I interviewed him on this podcast a few weeks back.

We started with my first memory of alcohol, a tall Budweiser my brother handed me by a pool, and the DUI in Daytona Beach right after high school. We talked about the Orangetheory coach who told me I wouldn’t progress if I kept drinking. That comment was the first click of awareness, and it still took a few years before I stopped. This Naked Mind and One Year No Beer helped from there, and going public with a year off gave me accountability.

From there we got into what sobriety does for creativity. Getting sober gave me more space and time to create, more presence on shoots like the Indy 500, and an easier flow in the edit. We also covered the trek to Machu Picchu, why I think everyone is creative once they sit down and do it, and how the 30-day Reset now works as four weeks one-on-one.

The episode runs just under an hour.

Click here to listen

Episode 072 - The Wrong Question About Drinking With Dr. Lucy McBride

Josh Woll — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 21:47:05 GMT

Most of us know the moment. You’re at your annual checkup and the doctor asks how many drinks you have a week. You give a number, they type it in, and the appointment moves on.

Dr. Lucy McBride has spent 25 years as a primary care physician in Washington, D.C., and she thinks that question barely scratches the surface. Alcohol has been part of her life from many angles. Her dad has been sober since he was 50. Her husband has struggled with his relationship with alcohol. Her late brother struggled with it at various times in his life. She also knows her own pull toward a drink at the end of a hard day.

In this conversation, Lucy explains why normal lab work can hide a relationship with alcohol that’s causing harm. She talks about why some of her patients find out their drinking was never a willpower problem, and why she once wrote “self-compassion” on a prescription pad.

She also opens up about her creative side: a lifelong journaling habit, a love of clothes she picked up from her mom, and a neighborhood consignment shop where everyone knows her name.

Show Notes

[0:00] A Book for People Who Don’t Know Who to Trust

Lucy’s first book, Beyond the Prescription, came out in August with Simon & Schuster and has done better than she ever expected.
She wrote it for the person who feels let down by the medical system and drawn in by the wellness industry, and who doesn’t know how to make sense of it all.
With the publicity rush winding down, she’s sleeping well, back at yoga and feeling calmer and more present.

Key Insights: “It’s not a do as I say book. It’s a here’s how to think about your health book in a nuanced way.”

[4:12] A Family Shaped by Alcohol

Lucy’s dad was a highly functional drinker who went to work every day but “had a real problem.” He has now been sober for more than 30 years.
She doesn’t drink much by “a doctor standard.” Even so, every time she has taken a break from alcohol, she has noticed its effects on her digestion, clear thinking and patience with people.
She doesn’t count her own lack of struggle as a moral win or a sign of better willpower.
Her patients cover the whole range, from people for whom one drink a week is one too many to social drinkers who wonder why she’s asking at all.

Key Insights: “the key for anyone who’s thinking about their alcohol use, as I know everybody here on this call knows, is radical self-awareness of what it does for you and what it doesn’t for you.”

[9:04] What “How Much Do You Drink?” Misses

The insurance system pays for transactions instead of conversations. Doctors get about 15 minutes per patient and, according to the data, interrupt patients within 11 seconds.
Lucy says your relationship with alcohol matters as much as the amount. If you drink five times a week to cope with uncomfortable feelings, or the drinking affects your sleep, blood pressure or relationships, that’s worth talking about.
Shame, blame and absolutism are the reasons many people don’t tell their doctors how much they drink.
Some lab markers can point to alcohol, like a high MCV (red blood cell size). But liver tests can be completely normal in a heavy drinker.
Legal and socially acceptable doesn’t mean safe. Lucy points out that alcohol carries a far greater breast cancer risk than hormone replacement therapy ever did.

Key Insights: “Is it possible that the alcohol you’re consuming is contributing to your, you know, blank, blank, blank, GI distress, migraine headaches, sleeplessness?”

[16:44] Addiction, Biology and GLP-1s

Lucy sees addiction as one big continuum. She separates it from dependence, which is when you need the substance to function.
She uses the biopsychosocial model: addiction can have biological, psychological and social roots, and the mix is different for each person. Knowing the roots helps you pick the right intervention.
She prescribes GLP-1 medications off-label to five or six patients to reduce alcohol cravings. They don’t work for everyone, and they aren’t FDA approved for alcohol use disorder.
For people who do respond, the medication shows them their struggle was biological. Patients using GLP-1s for food describe finally feeling like they’re not walking around “with a tiger on a leash.”

Key Insights: “What it shows people is that their alcohol overuse, dependence, tolerance, addiction, before the GLP one, wasn’t a willpower problem to begin with. It was biology, right?”

[24:08] Slowing Down the Reach for a Drink

Many people who drink more than they’d like haven’t looked closely at the feelings underneath, often because the alcohol gave those feelings a handy place to park.
Lucy asks patients to slow down the moment between feeling like they need a drink and grabbing it, and to notice what’s happening in their body and mind.
Some patients find the question strange. Others say they’ve never thought about it. Either way, she says, “That’s where the insight is born.”
She describes health as bringing together the conscious and unconscious mind. Doing that work is where agency comes from.

Key Insights: “I mean, our thoughts and our feelings drive our behaviors. Our behaviors drive our health.”

[28:44] Coping Tools That Help

Self-compassion first. Lucy told a patient who was caring for her elderly mother, drinking more and blaming herself to “give yourself a break, my friend.”
Exercise doesn’t have to be fancy. “The best exercise program for you is the one that you will actually do.”
Community matters. Lucy believes loneliness and alcohol feed each other, and she encourages even introverts to build routines around social time.
She also strongly supports therapy, AA and Al-Anon, which have helped many of her patients and members of her own family.

Key Insights: “I said, what you need first and foremost is self-compassion.”

[34:57] Writing, Clothes and Creativity

Lucy has kept a journal since she was a kid. Writing things down made her thoughts less overwhelming and kept them from “pinging around like a ping pong wall.”
She loves clothes as self-expression and an art form. Her mom made the family’s clothes and ran a small clothing business.
She never shops with a list: “I’m like a canvas that I’m always like painting on.”
She grew up around creative people, majored in art history, and sees art and music as ways to be in the present moment.

Key Insights: “Writing is my way of taking the noise in my brain and all the subconscious noise that bubbles up and processing it and thinking it through.”

[38:48] Better Questions for Yourself and Your Doctor

Lucy calls her book “a library of questions” to ask yourself and your doctor, so you get more out of a short appointment.
It helps you take stock of your own story, including the things you’re embarrassed to say out loud, and bring a more honest picture of yourself to the doctor’s office.
Her biggest hope is a healthcare system where everyone has a primary care provider “who knows their name, not just their diagnosis codes.”

Key Insights: “But it starts with asking yourself the right questions and asking the right questions to the people responsible for your care.”

Key Quotes

“There’s no moral prize for being sober.” - Dr. Lucy McBride

“But I am very aware of the gravitational pull of alcohol when you’re feeling exhausted or stressed or anxious.” - Dr. Lucy McBride

“You can be completely normal in lab work and have a relationship with alcohol that is problematic, wobbly, causing harm.” - Dr. Lucy McBride

“I think loneliness drives alcohol overuse. Alcohol use drives loneliness.” - Dr. Lucy McBride

“So my argument really is that health isn’t about having all the answers.” - Dr. Lucy McBride

Resources Mentioned

Beyond the Prescription: A Doctor’s Guide to Taking Charge of Your Health by Dr. Lucy McBride
Are You Okay?, Lucy’s free weekly Substack newsletter
Beyond the Prescription podcast
The biopsychosocial model, a way of looking at the biological, psychological and social roots of a health issue
GLP-1 medications (Ozempic and Zepbound)
Dr. Vivek Murthy, former U.S. Surgeon General, and his work on the loneliness epidemic (also on Substack)
Self-compassion as a daily practice
Therapy, AA and Al-Anon

Where to Find Dr. Lucy McBride

Book: Beyond the Prescription on Amazon or anywhere you buy books
Website: lucymcbride.com

Take a Closer Look at Your Own Relationship With Alcohol

When Lucy described her dad as a functional drinker, I recognized myself. During our conversation I said, “I could have eight or nine and then the next day could just crush it with work or whatever.” I also said, “I didn’t ever think I had a problem.”

That’s how alcohol keeps its hold on people who are getting things done. The work still ships. The cost shows up in your sleep, your focus and your mornings, and it’s easy to blame those on being busy.

Lucy’s approach is to slow down the moment you reach for a drink, ask what it’s doing for you and against you, and start with self-compassion instead of shame. That’s the work we do together in the Sober Creative Reset.

The Reset is a 30-day, one-on-one alcohol-free reset. It includes:

Four 60-minute coaching sessions, one each week
Daily support and check-ins
Trigger and pattern mapping, so you can see what’s happening under the surface
Rhythm and energy tools as things settle down
Strategies for social and professional situations
A short morning email with a daily reflection prompt

No labels, no moralizing. It’s $497 for the first 30 days, then month-to-month, and you can cancel anytime.

If your energy, focus or mornings have felt harder than they should, it’s worth looking at what your evenings are doing to them.

Start Your Reset or book a free clarity call if you’d like to talk first.

Thank You

A heartfelt thank you , , and many others who joined us live for this conversation, and to for her honesty, warmth and wisdom. Your presence and engagement make these conversations possible.

P.S. Every past conversation is in The Sober Creative archive, so you can catch up on any episode you missed.

If you’re not subscribed yet, sign up to get every episode and newsletter in your inbox. Upgrading to a paid subscription is the best way to support the show and keep these conversations going.

Clarity of Mind 066: Maybe is enough to start

Josh Woll — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 15:04:30 GMT

Weekly Insight

For years my same path was drinking. Same time of day, same routine, same way of ending the evening. I knew how every night would go, and that felt like control. Looking back, the evening was running me.

When I stepped off it, I had no idea if I’d be okay (probably why it took so long to commit to a full year). There was no one who could promise certainty. The honest answer at the start was maybe.

What I learned is that you don’t get the answer before the step. You get it after. One evening went fine. Then another. Each one was a small piece of evidence that I could trust myself on ground I didn’t know yet.

Steve Munro talks about this on this week’s episode. He calls it map and territory. The map is the life you think you’re living. The territory is where you’re actually standing. When the two stop matching, he writes a new map. He’s done it five times in 33 years of sobriety.

It applies to more than drinking. A job you’ve outgrown. A city. A way of working that used to fit.

Take the next step. You’re still standing.

Maybe is enough to start.

Podcast

spent 25 years drinking, using, and selling drugs. The bottom that finally stuck was a seizure on his apartment floor after walking through the DTs to buy a bottle of vodka. He lived in a residential treatment center for 11 months after that.

He’s 33 years sober now, 71, and living in rural Thailand. In between, he worked as a software executive, raced vintage motorcycles, and ran a business building $100,000 race bikes. Then he sold it all off in two weeks once he saw it had swallowed who he was.

Most of our conversation was about something he calls the Expansion Paradox. Getting sober gives you a bigger life, and nobody hands you the tools to carry it. He found his on a racetrack, in Keith Code’s books on why speed feels terrifying: your brain can’t process information as fast as it’s coming at you. So you drop every input that doesn’t matter and look where you’re going next.

He uses the same idea to check himself. “Map” is the life you think you’re building. “Territory” is where you’re actually standing. When the two drift apart, he writes a new map.

“It’s the difference between focus and obsession. Only you know when you step over the line.”

You can listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well.

My guest this week is with on October 8 at 4:30P ET

Most of us judge our drinking by the number. A glass or two most evenings, a little more on weekends, never in the morning. On paper it looks fine, and plenty of doctors would sign off on it.

has been a primary care physician in Washington, DC for 25 years, and she asks her patients different questions: when they drink, how, and why. In her new book, Beyond the Prescription, she writes about patients whose evening wine never came close to a diagnosis but still showed up in their sleep, their anxiety and their lab work. One of them told her, “I didn’t realize how much my evening wine was affecting me until I stopped.”

Lucy has been through some of this herself. After a month without alcohol, she wrote, “Suddenly, decompressing at the end of the day required effort.”

That’s what I want to dig into this week. If you push hard and make things, your output depends on how well you recover from the push: sleep, mood, focus, and the steadiness to show up again tomorrow. Alcohol borrows from all of those, and the cost is easy to blame on being busy or getting older.

Before the episode, look back at the mornings you blamed on a lack of discipline. Some of them may have more to do with the night before.

The Clear Hour is this Tuesday, October 6, 11am ET.

On Tuesday I’ll have my camera in hand with a macro lens on it. I don’t have a set idea of what to shoot. The plan is one image: capture it, edit it, and show it off at the end. What I love about macro photography is finding what I can't see with my own eyes.

If you want to see where this kind of work has gone before, my macro collections are here.

Bring whatever you’re making. Ten minutes to arrive, thirty-five to work with cameras on and mics off, and fifteen at the end to share what came of it. Free for subscribers, and the link goes out Tuesday morning.

Reply and let me know you’re coming.

Episode 071 - Full Throttle With No Map: Steve Munro is 33 years sober, still redrawing the plan

Josh Woll — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 15:42:25 GMT

spent 25 years drinking, using, and selling drugs before he hit the bottom that finally stuck: a seizure on his apartment floor after walking through the DTs to buy a bottle of vodka. Eleven months in a residential treatment center followed. What came after that is the real story. Steve rebuilt a life across software executive roles, a motorcycle racing career, and a business he eventually had to shut down to save himself.

Along the way he built something he calls the Seventy Framework, a system that started on a racetrack and ended up running his whole life. The idea at the center of it is simple: getting sober gives you a bigger life, but nobody hands you the tools to carry it. Steve calls that the Expansion Paradox, and it’s the thread running through this entire conversation.

This episode moves through blackouts, a $100,000 race bike business, a boardroom sales pitch, and a concept Steve calls “map and territory” that he uses to catch himself before he drifts too far off course.

If you’ve ever felt the life you built start to outpace the person you were when you built it, this one’s for you.

[02:06] Beer Boy to Blackout: The 25 Years Before Sobriety

Steve started drinking and smoking hash at 14, delivering beer by bicycle in a rough Montreal neighborhood
He got into software sales in the 1970s, moved through two marriages, and kept functioning while addiction quietly took over
By the 1980s he was mixing cocaine and alcohol just to find “some level that I could function at,” and the blackouts started

Key Insights: “It’s your brain’s inability to process information at the rate that it’s coming at you. It’s that simple.” - Steve Munro

[08:17] The Seizure, the Welfare Apartment, and Serenity House

His wife left, he became unemployable, and he landed on welfare in the worst neighborhood in Ottawa, believing it was temporary
A seizure after a vodka-fueled walk home convinced him he was going to die
He checked into a residential treatment center and lived there for 11 months, working the steps “organically” rather than debating them

Key Insights: “I was in and out of AA long enough to know what to do next, which was turn it over. I kept turning it over.” - Steve Munro

[13:01] A Ducati, a Stack of Racing Books, and an Unexpected Teacher

Two years sober, Steve bought a Ducati as a celebration gift and started racing, badly and terrified
A friend pointed him to a series of books by racer Keith Code that explained why speed feels frightening: the brain can’t process information fast enough
Code’s method was about discarding every input with no value and focusing only on where you’re going next

Key Insights: “If you drive at 90 miles per hour on an interstate, pretty soon 90 feels like 20. That’s what’s going on.” - Steve Munro

[17:03] The Expansion Paradox: When Success Becomes Its Own Problem

Steve was thriving on paper: sober, racing, succeeding at work, but the pressure of his own expanding life was burying him
He realized people who get sober often don’t have the tools to handle the bigger life that follows
He started pulling pieces from Keith Code’s racing method, reference points, survival reactions, non-negotiable rules, and applying them off the track

Key Insights: “With success comes pressure. And particularly for those of us who do crash and burn or don’t develop properly because of our drinking or drugging, when we do get sober and our lives do expand, we don’t necessarily have all the tools to cope with that.” - Steve Munro

[24:42] Map and Territory: How Steve Catches Himself Drifting

The concept came from a road trip where two pages were missing from a paper travel map, leaving him lost with no way to tell where he actually was
“Map” is the life you believe you’re building. “Territory” is the reality you’re actually standing in
He’s had five periods in his life where the two drifted apart, and writing a new map is what gets him moving again

Key Insights: “There’s no feeling like when your map doesn’t match the territory you’re standing in. You deny it for the longest period of time. And then finally you reject it.” - Steve Munro

[39:22] Losing “Loud Guy”: Shutting Down a Business to Find Himself Again

Steve became a well-known vintage motorcycle racer and builder, running a business building $100,000 race bikes
His identity narrowed to just the bike world. He stopped riding for relaxation and started losing track of who he was outside of it
One day he recognized his map no longer matched his territory, and in two weeks he sold the businesses and shut it all down

Key Insights: “It’s the difference between focus and obsession. Only you know when you step over the line.” - Steve Munro

[49:17] Headroom in the Boardroom: Taking Racetrack Focus into Everyday Life

The same mental state he found on the track, what he calls headroom, carried directly into high-stakes sales meetings
Before walking into a boardroom to sell expensive software, he’d discard every unnecessary input the same way he did before a race
He closes with a reminder for anyone early in sobriety: the life you build from here can be anything you want it to be

Key Insights: “I had no problem executing. I felt fantastic immediately.” - Steve Munro

Key Quotes

“With success comes pressure. And particularly for those of us who do crash and burn or don’t develop properly because of our drinking or drugging, when we do get sober and our lives do expand, we don’t necessarily have all the tools to cope with that.” - Steve Munro

“There’s no feeling like when your map doesn’t match the territory you’re standing in. You deny it for the longest period of time. And then finally you reject it.” - Steve Munro

“I don’t sweat the small stuff. I only sweat the big stuff. And I sweat it on my terms.” - Steve Munro

“It’s the difference between focus and obsession. Only you know when you step over the line.” - Steve Munro

“It’s already there. I just had to learn how to get at it.” - Steve Munro

Resources Mentioned

Racing books by Keith Code, which taught Steve how to manage fear and attention at speed
Large language model tools (Steve mentioned using ChatGPT) to compare his “map” against his “territory” on a weekly basis
The Seventy Framework, Steve’s system for managing attention, overload, and decision-making under pressure

Where to Find Steve

Steve writes Seventy-Life on Substack, where he’s bringing the Seventy Framework to sober adults navigating the Expansion Paradox. He mentioned he’s about to release a demo of the framework. Find him there for updates.

Want Help With What Comes After?

Steve spent years building a framework from scratch because nobody handed him one. Most of us don’t get sober and immediately know how to carry the bigger life that follows.

The Sober Creative Reset is 30 days of structure for exactly that stretch: figuring out what’s actually working in your life right now, what isn’t, and what to build next.

Learn More

Thank You

Thank you to , , , and many others who joined us live for this conversation, and to for the honesty he brought to it. Your presence and engagement make these conversations possible.

P.S. Missed a past episode? You can find the full newsletter archive right here on Substack.

What’s Next: New episodes drop weekly. Subscribe to make sure you don’t miss the next conversation.

065: Clarity of Mind

Josh Woll — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 14:03:36 GMT

Weekly Insight

Nobody hands you a trophy for getting through a slow week. There’s no ceremony for sitting with a bad mood until it passes on its own, or for staying present through an afternoon that has nothing in it worth remembering. That kind of day doesn’t make a good story later.

But it’s the only kind of day there really is, most of the time.

The dramatic ones are rare.

What you’re actually building your life out of is the plain stretch in between — paying attention to it instead of checking out, staying in the room even when the room is boring or hard or unclear.

That’s the whole practice.

Staying conscious for the parts nobody’s watching.

Essays

Podcast

grew up in Boulder, adopted and then returned, adopted again, foster homes in between. She found her footing singing in a church choir, then moved to New York at 19 to study theater and music, working the club circuit at night. She calls those years wild. Cocaine, drinking, the whole tortured-artist package she’d bought into without really questioning it.

A job in the south of France pulled her out of that pace, though she didn’t fully rein it in until her 40s. She’s 60 now, living on Lake Garda in Italy with her husband, pianist Marco Cremaschini. Together they lead a neo-folk group called Hippie Tendencies and write for No Speak, a spoken word jazz project that’s played the Venice Biennale, the Jaipur Literature Festival, and Carnegie Hall. Her song “Shaping the Yet-to-Be” just won the John Lennon Songwriting Contest’s grand prize for best jazz song.

She told me straight away she isn’t sober. She’s cut back drastically, and what she notices most is energy — more of her left at the end of a workday. What we spent most of the conversation on was performing. She used to drink before every show, and she was honest about what that actually cost her: imprecise notes, a thick tongue, dried-out vocal cords. She’s replaced that pre-show ritual with meditation, tea, and sleep instead.

Some of her best songs feel like they came from somewhere else. She's just the vessel. And she can't hear them properly because alcohol closes off the antenna that let them in.

You can listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well.

My guest this week is with on October 1 at 11:00A ET

This week's guest spent 25 years drinking and using before he got sober, then spent the next 33 rebuilding a life he never expected: software executive, entrepreneur, vintage Italian motorcycle racer and builder.

Steve Munro is 71, living in rural Thailand, and a few years into sobriety he found that the bigger life he'd built was starting to overwhelm him. He calls it the Expansion Paradox, and it's the reason he built something called the Seventy Framework.

We will talk about what happens when your sobriety toolkit isn't built for the life sobriety made possible.

Who I'm Celebrating

I had Tiffiny on my podcast a few weeks ago and she was kind enough to send me a copy of her book. It’s SO GOOD! Just look at the photos.

One of the early strips is called “Sober Saturday,” drawn about her first weekend not drinking. Just her and the dog, no plans, no one to explain herself to. She writes about how much she missed being included in the boozy brunch crowd the next morning, mourning the version of herself everyone knew as the fun one, even while admitting what those mornings actually looked like: hungover, sick, faking it through breakfast just to feel normal again. Her husband used to joke she only rented her breakfasts back.

What I love about what she's doing here is she makes it relatable and funny while still telling the honest version of what happened.

The book: The Graphical Bear: Expressing the Feels Through Art

What I’m Creating

Here’s a look into my process of using AI, from idea to execution.

The first sketch, the wrong direction (roots that made it read like sobriety just grows money), the wording changes, the font comparisons, to the three finished versions I ended up choosing between. I chose the watercolor version because it felt more tied into “creative.”

It’s less a design tutorial and more what it looks like to use one of these tools as a collaborator.

The Clear Hour is next week, Tuesday, October 6, 11am ET. Free for subscribers. No agenda, nothing to sell. Just an hour to work on whatever you’re making. If you plan on being there, let me know.

I nearly ran a red light talking about drinking

Josh Woll — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 15:54:01 GMT

Last night, I was driving for work, carrying a passenger to her destination.

Most rides, you sit there in silence or make small talk about the weather. This one wasn’t that. My passenger, let’s call her Mary, got in relieved the week was over. A deep sigh, ready for the weekend. She worked for an ad agency, centered around car dealerships. I asked her about it, and we started talking.

Midway into our conversation, she mentions she’s heading to her girlfriend’s place tonight. Drinks, dinner, the whole thing. It was 5pm on a Friday.

That’s the moment. Do I tell her what I do? Do I tell her I’m a sobriety coach? I’m trying to focus on driving and what I want to say. It’s challenging. Part of me doesn’t want her to feel judged. Part of me wants to help. It’s not my place to tell a stranger what to do with her Friday night. Most of the time when I mention I’m a sobriety coach, people aren’t responding with tell me more.

As I was waiting for it to come back around, that little bit of silence happens, so what do you do? I don’t lead with sobriety coach. I lead with saying I do this part time. I transition to sharing my over twenty years of experience doing camera work, working on documentaries, photography, and running a few businesses. And then, almost like an afterthought, I mention the sobriety coaching.

I could feel it land. She’d just told me she’s about to go drink and now I don’t know if she’s wondering if this conversation is still okay to have.

So I moved. I told her I just hit seventy episodes on the podcast. She thought that was cool. And I told her more about what this work is. Being open to the fact that everyone’s relationship with drinking is different, there’s no one way to do this, and I find people’s stories with it genuinely interesting. Not a lecture. Just genuine curiosity.

That opened something up. She told me she was really into F45, and if she had a heavy night of drinking, she can feel it the next morning, whether she even makes it to the workout. This was the same reason I stopped, I told her. Health. Plain and simple.

Then I said something like, there’s really two ways people drink. One is you’re with friends, having a good time, it’s about connection. The other is you’ve had a shit day, you’re stressed, and you just need something to take the edge off.

She laughed. Said that’s totally her. I asked if her industry was cutthroat, is cutthroat even the right word? And she laughed again and said yeah, kind of is. It’s a business about performance and numbers. Dealerships are stressed about numbers, why something cost too much, why they’re not making money. There’s a lot of pressure.

Then she started talking about family. Whenever I go home it’s, hey, let me get you a drink. And if I ever say no, it’s, are you pregnant? Is something wrong?

I was fired up about this conversation now. I wanted to say, you really don’t feel like you own your choice. And that’s when I ran the red light.

I was so locked in, I didn’t even clock it. Realizing it was red, I hit the brakes, ended up stopped halfway into the intersection. Cars honking. One guy passes me with a WTF face. I’m laughing because I know exactly what I was doing. I was more aware of the conversation than the road.

She was laughing too. Probably a nervous laugh.

I’m a year and a half into this work, and I’m still finding my footing.

You never know where one of these conversations is going to go. Some are flat. Some turn into this.

And when it turns into this, it's not about the drinking anymore.

It’s just two people leaving the car feeling a little more seen than when they got in.

Episode 070 - The Whisper Needs You Awake: Lisa Marie Simmons on Performing, Writing, and Drinking Less

Josh Woll — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 19:31:05 GMT

has been on stage since she was fifteen. She moved from Boulder to New York at nineteen to study theater and music, and she believed what a lot of young artists believe: that the tortured artist needs a drink to get up there and bare her heart. She bought all in. By her own account, she was messed up for most of the five years she spent in New York.

She is sixty now, living on Lake Garda in Italy, writing and recording with her husband Marco Cremaschini. She didn’t get sober. She reined it in, mostly in her forties, and she’s careful about how she describes what changed. “I absolutely have found that reducing it has given me more energy and more clarity.” That’s the claim she’ll make. She won’t make a bigger one.

What makes this conversation worth your time is how specific she gets about the cost. Not the moral cost. The working cost. Dry vocal cords that stick instead of vibrating cleanly. A thick tongue that blurs the words she works hard to enunciate. One more error to avoid on a night when there are already plenty.

And underneath all of it, the thing she keeps circling back to: if the song is arriving from somewhere outside of you, you have to be awake enough to hear it.

Show Notes

[02:38] The Tortured Artist Myth

Lisa names the old trope directly: that artists need to drink in order to write or to perform. She says she was a victim of it early in her career.
Getting on a stage is frightening. She used alcohol as a crutch to get past the fear of standing in front of people and baring her heart.
She now sees the flow-state version of the same myth as a misconception. Alcohol is not the best way to find that state.

Key Insight: “And as you mentioned, I absolutely have found that reducing it has given me more energy and more clarity.”

[05:24] New York in the Nineties

She describes a tumultuous childhood: re-homed after a first adoption, adopted again, then foster homes. “I’m not an original,” she says of the pain.
She arrived in New York at nineteen and let loose. She sees it now as her way of dealing with everything that came before.
She stayed until she was twenty-four, drinking and using, in a scene where cocaine was everywhere. A job singing in the south of France was the first thing that made her start reining it in.
She didn’t really rein it in until her forties.

Key Insight: “And I’d say I was messed up most of that time.”

[09:10] Why the Culture Makes It So Hard

Josh and Lisa talk about music venues where everybody is drinking, and how saying no can feel like getting banished from the pack.
Lisa extends it to the ritual around the gig: a drink and a cigarette while you wait to start, a drink while you break down the stage, a drink to come down from the high.
She lives in Italy and there’s wine, which is part of why she isn’t sober. It’s just no longer a daily thing.

Key Insight: “And I think that’s the thing with alcohol. There’s always a reason to imbibe if you look for one, right?”

[11:05] What “Messy” Actually Means on Stage

Less precision with notes and intonation. Stumbling over words. A tongue that thickens.
She’s a professional with decades of experience, so she doesn’t think the audience sees it. She feels it, and that feeling is what can derail a performance.
Alcohol also dries out the vocal cords. She explains the mechanics: the cords vibrate against each other, then open to let air through. Dry cords stick, and control goes.

Key Insight: “It’s one more error that you have to avoid that you can just easily avoid by not drinking.”

[13:07] Replacing the Pre-Show Drink

Most performers have a routine before they go on, something Lisa calls talismanic. Hers used to include alcohol.
Now it’s meditation. She breathes, gets into a space, and looks for the flow state so she can be as open as possible for the audience.
The rest of the list is plain and practical: tea for her throat, good hydration, sleep the night before, a nap if sleep didn’t happen, clothing that feels good, jewelry that makes her feel protected.

Key Insight: “All of these things are such a great replacement for alcohol.”

[16:36] A Listener Question on Alcohol Advertising

A listener asks whether alcohol ads work against accurate medical information about alcohol’s toxicity.
Lisa’s answer is careful. She says probably, but she doesn’t know. Businesses advertise toward the positive because their bottom line depends on us consuming.
She points to cigarettes as the example: advertised as cool in the thirties and forties, smoked by every movie star, and the public was deceived for decades about the harm.
Josh brings up research on alcohol and inflammation in the brain, and how long that inflammation can last, even after just a few drinks.

Key Insight: “I think there could be studies that are out there about the toxicity of alcohol, of which we’re unaware. That’s possible.”

[21:14] Meditation, the Imposter, and Capturing the Ephemeral

Lisa discovered meditation at fifteen in a high school drama class, under a teacher named Rita Cotter. She had the sensation of leaving her body and looking down at the room, and a sense of peace she calls enormous. She has not stopped since.
She uses it to quiet the imposter voice, the one that says it’s arrogant to think you could be the author of something.
She talks about what she’s actually reaching for: the most honest thing, the nugget of truth, the inner landscape that nobody else can climb inside of.
Josh shares The Clear Hour, a monthly Sober Creative gathering that opens with a guided creative meditation and then lets people make something.

Key Insight: “It is about capturing the ephemeral and gifting it.”

[26:31] The Highway of Creativity

Before the internet, songwriters in different parts of the world would write about the same themes or land on similar melodies. Lisa takes that as evidence of something you can tap into.
The songs she loves most are the ones that feel like they didn’t come from her at all.
This is where her argument about drinking lands hardest. If the material is arriving, you need your antenna working.

Key Insight: “It feels like I’m a vessel for that thing. And again, how do you hear that? How can you be receptive to that if you are drinking?”

[32:22] Morning Pages and Sitting With What’s Uncomfortable

Lisa keeps shelves of notebooks full of scribblings that will never be published. Three pages in the morning, no punctuation, no editing, no deciding whose voice it’s in.
She calls it another way to get rid of the imposter without drinking to do it. Josh points out it might also help around five o’clock, when the craving tends to show up.
The conversation turns to discomfort: that we aren’t built to sit with it, and that the hard passages are where the growth happens if we let ourselves feel them.
On comparing pain, she’s direct. Everybody she knows had something happen in childhood.

Key Insight: “There’s no hierarchy of pain, right?”

Key Quotes

“It is about capturing the ephemeral and gifting it.” — Lisa Marie Simmons
“And I think that’s the thing with alcohol. There’s always a reason to imbibe if you look for one, right?” — Lisa Marie Simmons
“How do you hear it? How does that truth resonate if you’ve got this thing and this fog in front of it?” — Lisa Marie Simmons
“It’s one more error that you have to avoid that you can just easily avoid by not drinking.” — Lisa Marie Simmons
“I’m all about storytelling. That’s how we learn empathy. That’s how we grow. Storytelling is everything.” — Lisa Marie Simmons

Resources Mentioned

Morning pages — the practice of writing three unedited pages first thing in the morning
Meditation as a pre-performance ritual — breathing into a flow state before going on stage
Insight Timer — where Josh has guided meditation practices available
The Clear Hour — The Sober Creative’s free monthly session: a guided creative meditation, then time to make something. Anyone can join.
Lisa’s Substack essay on her mentor Rita Cotter — the teacher who introduced her to meditation at fifteen

Where to Find Lisa Marie Simmons

Website: lisamariesimmons.com
Bandcamp: the best place to support her directly, since artists actually earn from purchases there
Streaming: her music is everywhere under her name, Lisa Marie Simmons
DAWTA The Podcast: her show with Dionne Draper on the transracial adoptee experience

What’s next for Lisa:

October 1–6: in New York for a book launch supporting her friend Phoebe Boswell, and a visit to the Recording Academy, where she has an album up for members’ consideration
November 13: back at Carnegie Hall as a guest of Charu Suri. Tickets are on sale now.

Thank You

A heartfelt thank you to , , , and everyone who joined us live for this conversation, and to for her generosity, her honesty, and for giving us a look inside how the work actually gets made. Your presence and engagement make these conversations possible.

This was episode 70. Seventy people, seventy different paths, and every one of them has given us something worth keeping.

What If the Fog Is the Only Thing Between You and the Work?

Lisa was talking about the songs that carry real truth, the ones with no hiding in them, and she asked how you’re supposed to hear that truth with fog in front of it.

Most of us aren’t asking whether alcohol is ruining our lives. We’re wondering if this next question is worth doing something about it. Is it costing me something in my work that I can’t quite name? More energy. More clarity. A workday that goes further. Those are the things Lisa could point to, and she’s the first to say the rest is hard to quantify.

Thirty days is enough time to find out for yourself.

The Sober Creative Reset is a 30-day 1:1 program built for those who want to test that question without signing up for a lifetime identity. Weekly 60-minute sessions, one on one with me. You bring the work you’re trying to do. We look at what’s actually in the way.

I take five new 1:1 clients a month, and most people start within two weeks.

Start Here

P.S. Missed a previous conversation? Every episode and newsletter lives in the archive at thesobercreative.com. Worth a scroll if you’re new here.

What’s Next: New conversations drop weekly. Subscribe to The Sober Creative on Substack to get each one in your inbox, plus the writing between episodes. Free subscribers get everything published. Paid subscribers keep the lights on and make the whole thing possible.

064: Clarity of Mind

Josh Woll — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 22:09:36 GMT

Weekly Insight

I posted that on a Wednesday morning with nothing in front of me. No shoot, no call I was dreading, nothing to clean up from the night before.

For years boring was the worst thing a day could be. An empty Friday was a problem and I had a reliable way to solve it. Whatever else happened, at least the night had something in it.

Now the day looks like this. The walk as the light rises. Coffee. Reps in the gym and reps on the computer. Work that feels meaningful. Dinner, bed at the same hour, nothing to explain to anybody in the morning.

It took a long time before that felt like anything other than a punishment. Early on I’d sit in a quiet evening and wait for something to arrive. My guest this week drank nine non-alcoholic beers on a Friday because she needed something to do with her hands. I understood that completely.

What I didn’t expect is that boring is where everything gets made. Nothing happened last night, so I get the whole day. That’s the part I wouldn’t have believed.

The beautiful showed up years after the boring did.

If your days have gone quiet and you’ve been reading that as a sign something’s wrong, sit in it longer before you decide.

Six years of work to get to boring, and I'd do it again.

Podcast

draws cartoons. Online she’s the graphical bear. She lives in the Canadian Rockies with her husband and her dog, she has a science degree and a full-time job, and she stopped drinking in May of 2022.

Before that she spent about twenty years as the entertainer. Figure skater, center of attention, the one who made everybody laugh. “All of Western Canada has seen my butt, because I think mooning is hilarious.” The reputation got paid for the next morning, on the kitchen floor, where her husband was the only person who ever saw that part.

In 2014 she woke up at a friend’s house after a Halloween party having spent most of the night in the bathroom, and she drew a bear throwing up in a toilet. At the time she thought it was just funny. She knows now why she drew it. “If I can make it into a joke, and people laugh at it, then it’s okay.”

A year into not drinking she brought the bear back and made her herself again, and started publishing the comic with the story of why she drew it. That’s the part I wanted to understand. Once a feeling was a strip on paper, she could look at it from the outside and then set it down.

The part I keep coming back to is what showed up after the drinking shame was gone. She was meditating, doing yoga, eating well, seeing her coach every week, not drinking. And still having stretches she describes as really low. “I’m doing all this work. How come I’m not feeling better?”

Her doctor told her that sometimes people’s brains are different and they need help. She said she didn’t need that kind of help. It took a couple of bad episodes and her husband telling her he was worried before she took it. “If I broke a bone, I would go to the hospital and have the doctor help me fix it.” She has a therapist now and she’s on medication, and she’s careful to say it’s still a journey. For years before that she figured she was just weak.

A friend of hers in her late sixties read one of those blog posts, silly comic attached, and asked her own doctor about antidepressants. She told Tiffiny her relationship had never been better and that she should have done it twenty years ago. Tiffiny puts her own reach at “tens of dozens of people.” Then: “But it helps. It helped me.”

She grew up on 6 a.m. ice times, so mornings were always hers, and drinking took most of them back. There’s a loop around her street she walks with the dog. In winter the sunrise puts hot pink on the tops of the peaks for about half an hour. At minus thirty she still goes out for it.

The book took her two and a half years of drawing. The last panel is a Venn diagram about success. One side is fame, physical feats of strength, money, a job. The other side is a cozy place to have coffee.

You can listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well.

My guest this week is with on September 24 at 12:00P ET

Lisa Marie Simmons says a song starts as the seed of a whisper. Something arrives in a dream, or on a long walk when the light is doing its thing in the trees, or in the middle of a crowded bar where she grabs a coaster because the idea needs to be tangible right now.

She has been following those whispers a long way: Boulder to New York at nineteen, then Amsterdam, Costa Rica, St. Maarten, France, Central and South America, and finally a lake in northern Italy where she writes and records with her husband, pianist Marco Cremaschini. That path has run through Carnegie Hall, the Venice Biennale, the Jaipur Literature Festival, and five-star reviews in Downbeat. Earlier this month it ran through the John Lennon Songwriting Contest, where her song “Shaping the Yet-to-Be” took the grand prize for best jazz song.

When I first reached out, she told me straight away that she isn’t sober. She has cut back drastically over the last few years, and she was honest that the change is hard to measure. What she could point to was energy. Her workday goes further now. There’s more of her left at the end of it, which matters when you are, in her words, a bit of a workaholic who loves the work.

That’s exactly the kind of conversation this show is for. Lisa and I will talk about making things you can’t control the fate of, about the reckoning with permanence that happens in a recording studio, and about what changes in a creative life when you stop spending your evening energy somewhere else.

Who I'm Celebrating

I met for Coffee & Connection last week and she shared her creative work with me, so I’m sharing it with you.

She published a poetry book called SPILLED, and three of those poems have become songs. The first one is “From My Head to My Heart,” built from a poem of hers called “The Distance of the Disagreement.” Here’s how she describes it:

“It began as a poem I wrote about what it feels like falling into the every day trap of alcohol addiction: saying you won’t drink, believing you won’t drink, and somehow finding yourself doing it anyway.”
“For anyone who has ever said, ‘I won’t,’ and then did. And for anyone learning how to make ‘I won’t’ become ‘I don’t.’”

That last line is the whole thing. I spent years in the first half of that sentence.

This is what those calls are for. There will be more open slots next month, no agenda, nothing to sell each other. I got off that one with a song I listened to writing this week’s newsletter (just after 5 o’clock…song is fire by the way Camille).

The next Clear Hour is Tuesday, October 6, 11:00am ET. Same shape as the first one. Ten minutes to arrive. Thirty-five where we all make something, cameras on, mics off. Fifteen at the end to say what came of it. Free for subscribers, and the link goes out the morning of.

If you commented or replied last week, you’re already on my list and I’ll send it to you directly.

Episode 069 - One Panel At A Time

Josh Woll — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 21:58:46 GMT

For about twenty years, was the one who made the party happen. Figure skater, geologist, entertainer, the girl who would moon a room full of people because she thought it was hilarious. She built that reputation on purpose. And somewhere along the way she stopped liking the person she had built.

She'll tell you there was no rock bottom. Just a Friday at 10 in the morning at a stressful job, when she caught herself already craving the drink she wouldn't have until after work. Then an Instagram ad for a 30-day challenge, which she clicked because it made a joke about alcohol and your bowels. She signed up with a group of complete strangers who had no idea who she was. She stopped drinking in May of 2022.

What came after surprised her. The clear-minded days brought back mornings, hot pink mountain peaks at sunrise, and a version of herself she actually recognized. They also brought a depression she had been calling weakness for years. So she did what she has always done. She drew it. Panel by panel, her character The Graphical Bear became the way she processed what she couldn’t say out loud, and eventually became a book she can hold in her hands.

This conversation covers all of it, including the parts that are still hard.

Show Notes

[02:25] Small Town, Big Reputation

Tiffiny grew up in a small town in northern British Columbia. Her first drink was New Year’s 2000 for the millennium, at 16, at a party in her boyfriend’s dad’s logging truck garage.
She stayed pretty mellow through high school and first year university. Then she got into her geology major, found her group, and found the party culture that came with it.
A figure skater who loved to perform, she leaned into being the center of attention. The more she drank, the sillier the stunts got, and the reputation stuck.

Key Insight: The image took two decades to build and she outgrew it long before she knew how to change it.

“I spent the better part of 20 years really developing and building this kind of image that after a while I really wasn’t happy with but I didn’t know how to change it for quite some time.”

[04:56] Chasing the “Unicorn Amount”

Her dad quit drinking cold turkey in his mid-30s when she was around 10 or 11. Years later, that gave her a model: if he could do it, so could she.
From about 30 to 38, she wasn’t happy with who she was when she drank, but she kept drinking enough to pretend she was. The dopamine hits from the attention were hard to let go of.
She hunted for moderation, what she calls the “unicorn amount.” Her husband was the only one who saw the aftermath, including the nights she ended up on the kitchen floor in what she describes as a puddle of sadness and shame.
Drink two or three was what she calls the TSN turning point. She rarely drank during the week and was, in her words, a classic binge drinker.

Key Insight: The scariest moment wasn’t a rock bottom. It was noticing a craving in the middle of an ordinary workday.

“this is a little weird that I’m having this extreme craving to just go get absolutely shmammered. And it’s 10 a.m. on a Friday because I want to escape what I’m doing right now.”

[09:05] A Funny Ad and a Group of Strangers

Dry January and Sober October never stuck. She would hit three weeks, decide it was dumb, and feel disappointed in herself.
An Instagram ad for an online 30-day challenge caught her because it was funny. She signed up, and it worked partly because the group was completely separate from her real life. Nobody there knew who she was.
On a business trip to Ontario she listened to Annie Grace’s audiobook and related hard, even though she didn’t feel like someone who was falling apart.
When she told a coach she had 10 days, the reaction was immediate and enthusiastic. She realized that felt better than friends clapping when she fell off a stage.
She came home from that trip good at her job and not hungover, and the early wins started stacking.

Key Insight: The community was the variable that changed the outcome.

“I think I wouldn’t have been able to do it had I kept trying to do it alone.”

[13:52] The First Six Months Were the Hardest

She quit in May, which meant summer patio season, birthdays, and mountain bike rides that end in a beer. The Rockies have a short summer and everyone is outside for it.
She drank non-alcoholic beer at the same speed she used to drink, nine in one Friday, mostly to have something in her hands. It showed her how fast she had been going.
She made excuses at first, telling people she was doing a 90-day challenge. Then friends started coming to her privately saying they wanted to slow down too, and asking how she did it.
The hardest part was mourning who she used to be and letting people down who wanted that person back.

Key Insight: The self-consciousness was mostly hers to carry, and almost nobody else was watching.

“helped me figure out that I could be there and no one actually gives a shit if you’re drinking or not. Everyone’s in their own head so much.”

[17:59] Getting the Mornings Back

Sleep improved fast. So did her ability to sit back at a party, listen, and contribute when it mattered rather than run the room.
She learned what she actually enjoys versus what she thought she enjoyed. Live music yes, dancing yes, staying out past 11:30 no. Arm wrestling, also no.
A lifelong morning person from years of 6 a.m. ice times, she had been trading sunrises for hangovers, including the walks where she puked in a snowbank and felt she had shortchanged her dog.
Now she does the “poop loop” around her circle street with the dog, even at minus 30, to catch Alpenglow turning the peaks hot pink. That walk is on the cover of her book.

Key Insight: The mornings turned out to be worth more than she expected.

“Mornings were something that I just value so hard and didn’t really realize how much I liked them in the quiet.”

[26:02] How the Graphical Bear Became a Book

She created the character in 2014, two days after a Halloween party she spent mostly in a friend’s bathroom. The first drawing was a bear barfing.
Calvin and Hobbes was her safe space as a kid when she was scared or anxious, so comics were already where she went to feel better.
She draws by hand and scans it. She loves a Venn diagram, an XY chart, a bar chart, and uses them to show how life’s variables relate.
About a year into quitting, she brought the bear back and started pairing comics with written stories on her blog. Her coach Gary, who joined the episode live, pushed her to put them online. Her aunt, her childhood figure skating coach, was the first to tell her how much she related.
People kept saying the same thing, so she self-published. She later showed the work at the art gallery in Golden for a month and did a book reading.

Key Insight: Drawing it gave her somewhere to put the feeling, and something real to hold at the end.

“I wanted to have something tangible that I could hold and be like, I built that.”

[34:30] The Demon, the Doctor, and Asking for Help

Four and a half years in, she still has hard days, and a lot of them come down to not feeling good enough. In the book, that voice is a character called the demon, sitting opposite the dog like the devil and the angel on her shoulder.
She went to her doctor frustrated. She meditates, does yoga, quit drinking, eats well, sees her coach weekly, and was still crashing. The doctor told her sometimes people’s brains are different and they need help.
She resisted medication at first. After a couple of bad episodes and her husband telling her he was worried, she did her research, talked to her mother who is a nurse practitioner, and accepted it. She also started seeing a therapist.
A friend in her late 60s read the blog and the comic that went with it, then asked her own doctor about antidepressants. She told Tiffiny her life has never been better.

Key Insight: She reframed help the way she would treat any other injury.

“I broke a bone. I would go to the hospital and have the doctor help me fix it. There’s something here that I’ve been trying to fix on my own and maybe I should actually accept some help.”

[40:24] Why It’s Called a Practice

Tiffiny and Josh both landed on the same thing: you can do all the work and still need a lift some days. It ebbs, it flows, and it is never perfect.
She has charts about this. Quality of life trends upward over time, with all the ups and downs still in the picture.
Looking back through three years of comics, she can see comics she drew early that still describe how she feels today, and she can also see the baseline move. She didn’t know art therapy was a thing when she started doing it to herself.
The final comic in the book is a Venn diagram about success, with fame, money, and feats of strength on one side and a cozy place to have coffee on the other.
She has taken close to a year off from comics to paint and do watercolors, but she has a sketchbook and a phone full of ideas, and November in the Rockies is a slow season.

Key Insight: Progress is real even when it doesn’t feel like it.

“Because sometimes the journey is great and you’re on the top of a mountain and you’re getting powder turns. And then all of a sudden you fucking crash into a tree well and now you’re stuck.”

Key Quotes

“Because you’re becoming a new person, and the new person is actually who you are, not who you think you should be.” — Tiffiny Yaxley

“I drew it because I felt so ashamed of myself and so sad that I am doing this all the time that I was like, if I can make it into a joke, and people laugh at it, then it’s okay.” — Tiffiny Yaxley

“Depression’s a real thing, and I just kind of thought I was weak and shitty.” — Tiffiny Yaxley

“And I think partly why I want to talk about it and why I wrote the book is because if you don’t see other people doing it, you’re so much less willing to try it.” — Tiffiny Yaxley

“And there’s no way I would have built this without stopping drinking.” — Tiffiny Yaxley

Resources Mentioned

Annie Grace’s book — the audiobook Tiffiny listened to on her business trip to Ontario, published as This Naked Mind
Calvin and Hobbes — the comics she read as a kid when she felt scared or anxious
Art therapy — a formal practice she discovered only after years of doing a version of it on her own
Alpenglow — the sunrise light on the snowy peaks near her home in Golden, BC

Where to Find Tiffiny

Website and blog: thegraphicalbear.com — new comics posted with the story behind each one, plus a mailing list so you get an email when one goes up
Email: thegraphicalbear@gmail.com
Her book: The Graphical Bear: Expressing the Feels Through Art

Every panel in the book is drawn by hand. It covers about three years of her life, it's funny, and it's honest about the parts most people leave out. She'll tell you the goal was never to make money, which is part of why it's worth supporting. Grab a copy here.

Thank You

A heartfelt thank you to , , , , and many others who joined us live for this conversation, and to for her honesty, her humor, and her willingness to talk about the parts that are still hard. Your presence and engagement make these conversations possible.

Ready for Your Own Reset?

Tiffiny tried to do it alone for years. Dry January, Sober October, the hunt for what she called the unicorn amount. What finally worked was a set window of time, daily support, and people in her corner while she figured out who she was without a drink in her hand.

That’s exactly what The Sober Creative Reset is built to give you.

It’s 30 days of 1:1 coaching designed to help you wake up feeling like yourself again. You get four 60-minute sessions, daily check-ins, trigger and pattern mapping, tools for your energy and rhythm, real strategies for social and work situations, and support when you stumble.

It’s made for people who feel worn down by what alcohol is taking from their work and their energy, and who want clarity without a traditional recovery framework. It’s $497 for the first 30 days, then month to month, cancel whenever you want.

Tiffiny said the first six months were the hardest, and that the wins built on each other once she got a few. The Reset is about getting you those first wins with someone in your corner.

Start Your Reset

Looking for the group part? Tiffiny put it plainly: "I think I wouldn't have been able to do it had I kept trying to do it alone." If that's what's missing for you, The Sober Creative Collective is $49/month for your first three months, then $79/month, cancel whenever you want. Real people, live, with me in the room.

063: Clarity of Mind

Josh Woll — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 19:38:48 GMT

Weekly Insight

Discipline was in my life for years before I could see it. Every attempt to drink less started with a number I set before I left the house and ended with me well past it by midnight. I counted those nights as failures. I was right about the night and clueless about what was collecting underneath it.

Moderating was never something I got good at. What I did over and over was set an intention about my own behavior and come back the next day to set it again after it didn’t hold. That turned out to be the whole skill. I was practicing it on the one thing that was never going to give it back to me.

When the drinking stopped, that practice was already in my hands and it went looking for somewhere to land. Everything after that moved slowly, one thing at a time, most of it too gradual to feel like progress while it was happening.

The part I didn’t expect is how directly it feeds the work. Sleep, food, the gym, the walking. None of it makes a good post and all of it decides what I’m capable of on a shoot day or in a session with a client. When one of them slips, the work is the first place it shows, usually before I’ve admitted anything to myself.

Look at whatever you think you’ve been failing at, and count the number of times you came back to it instead of the number of times it held.

The reps counted before they worked.

Podcast

Dr. spent 35 years at UNC studying what alcohol does inside the brain. More than 238 published papers. Twenty-five years as associate director of the Bowles Center for Alcohol Studies. A Lifetime Achievement Award from the Research Society on Alcohol in 2024.

Most of my guests on this show have told me their story. Leslie told me the mechanism.

She could have spent the hour on technical science. Instead she gave me the one discovery she thinks matters most. A lifetime of heavy drinking leaves inflammation behind, in the brain and in every other organ, and it gets in the way of normal function. That’s part of why control is so hard and craving is so loud. The part that stopped me: it makes your original reason for drinking worse. If you drank because you were anxious, it makes you more anxious. If something hurt, it makes the pain sharper. “So basically, it’s making all the triggers stronger.”

They know this from studying the brains of people who died with alcohol use disorder. The inflammatory markers were high, and the levels tracked with how much that person drank over a lifetime.

I asked whether it reverses. “It’s really hard to get rid of that inflammation. It’s really hard. Once it starts, it can stay your whole life.”

Then I asked about hangovers. The hangover is mostly the immediate effects. What lingers after it lifts is more likely inflammation. Her list: the brain fog, the anxiety, the enhanced sensitivity to pain, the difficulty focusing. Those can last a week or far longer. “When you feel like you’re living with those things and they just don’t ever leave you, to me that’s a sign that you have inflammation that you need to address. And then you’ll be much better able to change your behavior the way you want to.”

For years I thought that fog was a character problem.

Her short list for lowering it is three things. Exercise has the strongest science behind it, and she was specific: more than four days a week, whatever form you actually enjoy. Pregnenolone, a steroid your body already makes and that chronic drinking and chronic stress deplete. A Yale trial with about 300 people ran eight weeks at 300 mg a day and saw normalized stress responses and less craving. And glycyrrhiza, from licorice root, around 400 mg a day, now heading into human trials.

She’s a scientist sharing research, not your doctor. If you take medication or have high blood pressure, that last one needs a conversation with someone who knows your history. She was also clear about buying supplements from a reputable, independently tested source.

Near the end she mentioned that inflammation plays a big role in depression too. A lot of people who drink are drinking because they feel depressed. That was me.

“And by the way, it’s the same pathway.”

You can listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well.

My guest this week is with on September 17 at 11:00A ET

Tiffiny Yaxley draws a bear. The bear is basically her, doing her best to navigate a world that got a lot louder once she stopped drinking.

She's been sober since May 2022, and the clear-minded days brought more feeling than she bargained for, including a depression she had been filing away as "stuff that happened." So she drew it. Panel by panel, her comics became a way to get a feeling outside her own head where she could actually look at it, laugh at some of it, and keep going.

The result is work that's funny and honest in the same breath, full of hand-drawn charts plotting things like how many people she wants to be around as she gets older.

This week she joins me from the Canadian Rockies to talk about what art can carry that words can't, what happened when she finally let herself feel the hard parts, and how she built a life she wants to be awake for.

What I’m Creating

The next Clear Hour is Tuesday, October 6, 11:00am ET.

Same shape as the first one. Ten minutes to arrive. Thirty-five where we all make something, cameras on, mics off. Fifteen at the end to say what came of it.

Free for subscribers, and the link goes out the morning of.

If you commented or replied last week, you’re already on my list and I’ll send it to you directly.

Episode 068 - What Alcohol Actually Does To Your Brain

Josh Woll — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 14:53:17 GMT

Most of what I know about alcohol, I learned by living it. I know what nine beers a day did to my sleep, my mornings, my work, and my sense of who I was. What I never had was the other half of the picture. The part happening at the level of receptors and stress hormones and inflammation, in a place I can’t see and was never taught to look.

Dr. spent 35 years in that place. She’s a John Andrews Distinguished Professor Emerita at UNC Chapel Hill, published more than 238 scientific articles, and served 25 years as associate director of the Bowles Center for Alcohol Studies. Her work on GABA receptors and the body’s own neurosteroids led to clinical trials for alcohol use disorder and to brexanolone for depression.

She could have spent this hour on technical science. Instead she chose to tell us the one thing she thinks matters most, and it reframed how I understand my own decade of drinking. Alcohol leaves inflammation behind. Not the kind you feel in a sore knee. A specific kind, in your brain and your organs, that makes anxiety louder, pain sharper, focus harder, and craving stronger. It can last long after the last drink. And there are things you can do about it.

If you have ever wondered why stopping felt harder than it should have, this conversation offers an answer that has nothing to do with willpower.

Show Notes

[00:00] Why this conversation is different

Instead of one person’s story of what they let go, we went into the biology underneath all of our stories.
Dr. Morrow’s background: PhD in neuroscience at UC San Diego, postdoctoral training at NIH, 35 years at UNC.
I came in with a list of questions I’ve carried for years, including why cutting back fails for people who are trying as hard as they know how.

Key Insight: She chose depth over jargon from the first minute. “What I would like to kind of do is rather go through a lot of technical science that may or may not be useful to people is tell you what I think has been the most important discovery.”

[02:53] The dose matters, and so does what’s already in you

One or two drinks does something very different in the body than four, six, or nine.
Alcohol is a tiny molecule that acts at many sites. At low doses it acts one way. At high doses it’s a toxin.
What alcohol does to you also depends on what you already have going on. Anxiety, stress, and pain change the picture before the first sip.
Alcohol doesn’t act only on the brain. It acts on the whole body.

Key Insight: “If you add a toxin to a situation that’s already working abnormally, it’s going to have different effects than if you add that toxin to a physiology that’s normal.”

[04:24] The discovery she calls the most important

A lifetime of heavy drinking creates inflammation in the brain and in every organ.
That inflammation interferes with normal function, which is part of why control is so hard and craving is so strong.
It makes your original reason for drinking worse. If you drank because you were anxious, the inflammation makes you more anxious. If you drank because of pain, it makes the pain worse.
We know this from studying the brains of people who died with alcohol use disorder. Those brains show high levels of inflammatory cytokines and chemokines, which Dr. Morrow calls “danger molecules.”
This is a specific kind of inflammation. It is not the same as arthritis or a common headache.

Key Insight: “So basically, it’s making all the triggers stronger.”

[10:26] Exercise, the tool with the strongest science

Researchers made rats dependent on alcohol at doses similar to what humans drink, and the rats developed the same inflammation in liver and brain that humans do.
Then they let the rats exercise. Before drinking, during drinking, or after stopping. Every version lowered the inflammatory molecules in the brain and the liver.
Dr. Morrow was clear that this work came from other labs, not hers, and that the science behind it is strong.
The type doesn’t matter. Walking, yoga, weights, whatever you enjoy. What matters is frequency.

Key Insight: “Just make sure you do it more than four days a week, more than half of the days of the week.”

[13:36] Leaky gut, the TLR4 pathway, and licorice root

High doses of alcohol cause leaky gut. Everyone has endotoxin in their gut, and it’s fine while it stays there. When it leaks into the bloodstream, it switches on a pathway called toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4).
TLR4 is what produces the inflammatory molecules. Once it’s on, it keeps turning itself back on and switches on other pathways too.
Those inflammatory molecules change how the brain works and how your normal neurotransmitters behave, which leads to extra anxiety, depression, pain, and craving.
A group at UNC found a natural blocker of this pathway in licorice root, a compound called glycyrrhiza. In animal models it reduced voluntary drinking, blocked brain inflammation, and reduced anxiety-like behavior. Human trials are about to begin.
No medication currently targets TLR4 directly. Natural compounds can’t be patented, so drug companies have little reason to fund them through trials.

Key Insight: “Once you start that inflammatory process, particularly in the brain, it’s not easy to stop it.”

[20:04] Pregnenolone and refilling your own supply

Your body already makes steroids that keep those inflammatory pathways in check. Pregnenolone and allopregnanolone.
Chronic stress drains them. Chronic drinking drains them. When your stress system is depleted, your natural defense against inflammation is depleted too.
Pregnenolone is the precursor to the other protective steroids, and it blocks TLR4 activation directly. It’s available over the counter.
In a Yale clinical trial with about 300 people, eight weeks at 300 mg a day normalized stress responses and reduced stress-induced craving, alcohol craving, and alcohol intake.
You don’t have to take it forever. Two months may be enough, unless a binge, a stressful stretch, or a toxin exposure brings the inflammation back.

Key Insight: “We have an endogenous steroid that helps us relax. We have an endogenous steroid that helps us sleep. We have an endogenous steroid that protects our stress system.”

[21:38] How a neuroscientist ended up studying alcohol

A college professor got her excited about science. That led to neuroscience, then to a graduate lab studying brain receptors.
During her postdoc at NIH she discovered that these natural steroids are powerful activators of GABA receptors. In the last eight to ten years her lab found they also block inflammatory pathways.
She turned to alcohol because alcohol activates GABA receptors too. At one or two drinks, that’s the source of the “ah” feeling, the relief people chase.
Part of the reason was practical. NIAAA funded the work. Then she started noticing how many people around her, including in her own family, had struggled with this.
She called alcohol probably the biggest public health problem in the world, and pointed out that NIAAA is the smallest institute with the smallest budget at NIH.

Key Insight: “I think it has to do with the fact that for a long time, people thought of this as a moral problem, not as a real biological problem.”

[29:15] What lingers after the hangover, and the short list

The hangover itself is mostly the immediate effects of alcohol. The things that stay after the hangover lifts are more likely to be inflammation.
Her list of those lingering effects: brain fog, anxiety, heightened sensitivity to pain, difficulty focusing. They can last a week or much longer.
Inflammation is hard to remove once it starts. In postmortem brains, the levels tracked with lifetime alcohol use.
If you already carry inflammation, even a few drinks a week keeps it going. If you don’t have any and you drink two or three a week, you might be fine.
Her short list for lowering it: exercise, pregnenolone, glycyrrhiza from licorice root. For supplements she stressed buying from a reputable, independently tested source.
She also mentioned that inflammation plays a big role in depression, through the same pathway.
Now retired, her focus is legacy work. Getting this research to the public, because the drug companies won’t.

Key Insight: “When you feel like you’re living with those things and they just don’t ever leave you, to me that’s a sign that you have inflammation that you need to address. And then you’ll be much better able to change your behavior the way you want to.”

Key Quotes

“What a lifetime of excessive alcohol consumption does is causes a lot of inflammation in the brain and in all the organs, in fact.” — Dr. A. Leslie Morrow

“If you started out drinking because you were anxious or stressed, well, those inflammatory changes just make you more anxious and more stressed.” — Dr. A. Leslie Morrow

“It’s really hard to get rid of that inflammation. It’s really hard. Once it starts, it can stay your whole life.” — Dr. A. Leslie Morrow

“Exercise actually counters the effects of inflammation. And we don’t know exactly how it does that, but we know that it does.” — Dr. A. Leslie Morrow

“Maybe you have one bender and you’re beating yourself up because you did that. Well, instead of that, just increase your exercise for the next few weeks.” — Dr. A. Leslie Morrow

Resources Mentioned

Exercise — More than four days a week, whatever form you enjoy. The strongest evidence on the list.

Pregnenolone — Over-the-counter supplement. The clinical trial dose was 300 mg a day for eight weeks, with about 100 mg a day mentioned for continued use. Buy from a reputable, independently tested source.

Glycyrrhiza (licorice root) — Around 400 mg a day. Dr. Morrow noted it shouldn’t affect blood pressure in most people at that dose, but if you have high blood pressure you need to watch that closely. Human trials are about to begin.

The TLR4 pathway — The inflammatory pathway alcohol switches on through leaky gut.

Allopregnanolone and brexanolone — Her discoveries on allopregnanolone led to brexanolone as a treatment for depression.

Bowles Center for Alcohol Studies at UNC Chapel Hill — Where this research happened.

One important note from me: Dr. Morrow is a scientist sharing research, and nothing here replaces a conversation with your own doctor. Before adding any supplement, especially if you take medication or have a blood pressure condition, talk to a professional who knows your health history.

Where to Find Dr. Morrow

Dr. Morrow retired from UNC in February 2025 and is now focused on getting this research into the hands of the people it can help. She invited questions directly: send them to her on Substack. You can also find her faculty page and full publication list through the Bowles Center for Alcohol Studies at UNC Chapel Hill.

Substack

What This Means for the Next 30 Days

For years I blamed myself for the fog. The mornings I couldn’t focus. The anxiety that showed up for no reason. The sense that I was working twice as hard for half the output. I thought that was a character problem.

It was a recovery problem. My system was carrying something it couldn’t clear on its own, and every drink kept topping it up.

Dr. Morrow’s research says something hopeful inside all that hard news. The things that lower inflammation are things you can start doing this week. Stop adding to it. Move your body more than half the days. Give your system a real stretch of time without the thing that keeps reactivating the pathway.

That’s what The Sober Creative Reset is built for. Thirty days, one on one, with weekly 60-minute sessions. We work on the daily practices that let your system come back online, and on the beliefs that made the drink feel necessary in the first place. It isn’t about counting days. It’s about restoring the loop between recovery and the work you actually want to make.

I take a few new 1:1 clients a month, and most people start within two weeks.

👉 Learn more about The Reset

If the fog has become so normal you stopped noticing it, thirty days is long enough to find out what’s underneath.

Thank You

A heartfelt thank you to , , , , , and many others who joined us live for this conversation, and to Dr, on, and for four decades of work and for the generosity of bringing it here in plain language. Your presence and engagement make these conversations possible.

062: Clarity of Mind

Josh Woll — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 15:08:45 GMT

Weekly Insight

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.

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.

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.

The hour after you stop drinking

Josh Woll — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 20:38:55 GMT

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.

Episode 067 - The Part Sobriety Didn't Touch

Josh Woll — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 13:27:50 GMT

on the crash that came six years after he quit, and finding out at 40 that he was creative

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

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.

061: Clarity of Mind

Josh Woll — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 22:01:25 GMT

Weekly Insight

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.

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.

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.

The Clear Hour

Josh Woll — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 13:32:46 GMT

For years, the hour after five belonged to alcohol. Work stopped, the drink started, and everything after that was already decided.

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.

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.

060: Clarity of Mind

Josh Woll — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 19:12:17 GMT

Weekly Insight

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.

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.

The Alibis

Josh Woll — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 16:23:21 GMT

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.