Ruari Fairbairns (Changing Your Relationship With Alcohol) - Episode 944

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So if you want to hear more about 511 and their origin story, go to episode 338 of Behind the Shield podcast with their CEO, Francisco Morales. Welcome to the Behind the Shield podcast. As always, my name is James Gearing and this week it is my absolute honor to welcome on the show former oil broker and the man behind One Year No Beer, Rory Fairbairns.

Now in this conversation we discuss a host of topics from his mental health struggles as a child, his suicide attempts at the age of 14, the impact of a letter to Richard Branson, the destructive journey he took with alcohol through his sales career, the paradigm shift that sent him to sobriety, the formation of his unique peer support based alcohol program, the impact of alcohol on mental health, obesity, sleep, the predatory advertising from big

alcohol, the future of functional drinks and so much more. Now I also want to say I'm recording this intro four days after I did the recording and I am four days into my own One Year No Beer sobriety program. I've been very transparent with my struggles with alcohol, not as a binge drinker, but a frequent drinker and so I'm leaning into his program to try and help myself. Now before he gets this incredible conversation, as I say every week, please just take a moment.

Go to whichever app you listen to this on, subscribe to the show, leave feedback and leave a rating. Every single five star rating truly does elevate this podcast, therefore making it easier for other people to find. And this is a free library of almost 950 episodes now. So all I ask in return is that you help share these incredible men and women stories so I can get them to every single person on planet earth who needs to hear them. So that being said, I introduce to you Ruri Fairbairns.

Enjoy. Well Ruri, I want to start by saying thank you so, so much firstly for connecting with me on Instagram and then secondly to saying yes to this discussion today. I love your Instagram. I absolutely love what you're doing. I'm very connected to the support that you're trying to help and do out there in the world and you've got a sort of cheeky, jappy, funny entertainment, informative, insightful, it's great. It's a great Instagram page. So kudos to you and the mission that you're on.

Happy to be any part of it. Yeah, well, I mean, I'm honored because the ultimate goal is I've never ever once said I'm the SME on anything, you know what I mean? I'm literally standing in the middle with a wire and connecting the people that need it with the experts and this conversation, one of the people that need it is me because I have never drank excessively as far as binge drinking. I don't like even being drunk. However, it has been an emotional crush of me for most of my adult life.

So we'll dive into that, but I'm excited to have you on and kind of share some more solutions for people. Great. We're definitely coming back to that. Okay. Yes, I think we would. I'm going to be vulnerable. All right. Well, I love to start the very well, actually before we even do that, where, because it's interesting, where on planet earth are we finding you despite the Scottish accent? I'm in a studio in Palma in Majorca, which is in Spain in the Mediterranean Sea. Beautiful.

We'll circle around a while you're in Spain a little while, but let's start at the very beginning then the origin story. So tell me where you were born and tell me a little bit about your family dynamic, what your parents did, how many siblings. Cool. So I was born on the Isle of Mull, which is a small island, 50 miles by 25 miles, sort of in the shape of Britain on the west coast of Scotland.

And I was born there in 1980 and both of my parents had been born in England, but my grandparents, three of all four grandparents were Scottish, but had moved down to England. So despite that, I grew up on this island and my dad had bought a, you know, an estate, a farming estate when we were sheep farming and all that kind of stuff, trying to make that work. And my parents had quite posh English accents and I had an English accent.

And back in 1980 in west coast of Scotland, they were just a few years prior to that. They would stone the English to death still. So it was pretty tough upbringing of just not fitting in and being the people who seemed to have money, although we absolutely definitely didn't. And you know, the people who, the English lot. And you know, I came out at 10 million miles an hour and that's how it stayed for my whole life.

And at six years old, going through all of this huge amount of energy constantly, the teachers at the school gave my parents an ultimatum. Then they were like, it's drugs or counseling. And you know, back then they were calling it hyperactivity because they didn't really know what it was. But later I was diagnosed with ADHD and that level of ADHD, that whole destructive thing playing out, I'm very, very lucky. I believe, I think medication works for a lot of people and that's fantastic.

Well done. But they chose counseling. And for me that started this journey of being able to talk, being able to talk about emotions, finding out what's going on with my brain, like trying to understand what was going on. Just to be more precise in the question, I'm one of five kids. So getting attention was really challenging and I had a lot of energy. And I pretty quickly learned that when you set things on fire, you get a lot of attention.

And so that was kind of the route I went down in childhood was just a destructive behavior and wild behavior from a young age. When you talked about setting things on fire, was that a metaphor or were you actually a little arsonist when you were a kid? I was a little arsonist. And you know, there may not have been some animals involved and there may have not been, you know, I mean, 13 years old, I wrote off my first car, my mom's car. And it's amazing.

You go, wow, you were driving at that age and we grew up on a farm. So you kind of, you learn these things pretty early. And it wasn't all bad. I wasn't, you know, too crazy. It was just, you know, there was a lot to do to get attention. I nearly set fire to the whole village. They had the fire engines out one day and all of that kind of stuff, people beating the hills to stop the village going on fire. But you know, this whole sort of destructive thing.

And then I got into my teens, I think, and that's when I started to discover alcohol. I remember the first time discovering alcohol. So I was actually 12 years old, so pretty young. And I'd just gone into secondary school and in secondary school, they were like, what? You've never drunk alcohol? What's wrong with you? And I was like, oh God, this is embarrassing.

And I was from a smaller village away from, so I just went home and you know, I contacted a friend down in the village and I said, look, will you babysit me? You don't need to drink. You know, you don't want to. She was actually younger than me, but will you just babysit me? And I went into the, you know, my parents' alcohol cup and I didn't really know what I was doing, but I knew that they mixed this sort of brownish liquid with this black liquid, right?

Which was my dad drinking a whiskey and Coke. And so I just mixed together whiskey and port and a Coke bottle and headed down to the village. And I just sat there sipping and sipping and drinking and drinking and drinking. And I got about three quarters of the bottle through and then I started to get pretty delirious and I was a bit lost and this girl called my other brothers to come and get me and they didn't believe me. They didn't believe that I was drunk.

And I was just absolutely away with it. Got home, mess everywhere, every end. It was absolutely everywhere. And my parents came back and they're just like, oh my God, what a disaster. Felt pretty horrendous for a while, but that never puts you off, right? That's just the first experience. Most people have a pretty horrendous first experience, but that's just the initiation.

Now what's really interesting I know is there is one single factor over and above all of the factors of demographic or country you grew up in or the amount of alcohol advertising or how much your parents drink or how much you're, you know, out of all of the individual factors that drive problematic drinking. There is one over above everything, which will determine the likelihood of you developing alcohol use disorder. And that is the age you start.

And so when we mentioned how impactful that is, like way over above the other factors of access of everything else, as parents, we must delay that. The brain is so sensitive at that young developing age that holding off the consumption of alcohol is going to significantly diminish or reduce the likelihood of them developing a problem with that in their life.

Staying on that theme for a second, an observation that I've made European versus America is, and maybe this is the other side of that curve that you're talking about, the other side of the bell is that in the States, when they demonize alcohol so much, and obviously we're going to get into why, you know, it's definitely not something you should promote. I almost feel like the archer is pulling the bow back even more.

And so, because I never saw a keg stand or beer pong or any of that stuff in Germany or France or England, you know, and obviously, yes, there's some binge drinking session in the pubs in England, but usually it is, you know, wine with dinner and it's a lot more social. So what are you seeing about that? Have you looked at the American model? Because it seems to me that the, you know, pull, pull, pull, now let go creates this kind of mystery and mystique about drinking.

And there isn't that gentle introduction. Now obviously, abstinence is the perfect example, you know, is the ideal situation. But if kids are going to be introduced, it seems like not talking about it and holding them all the way back to 21 years old could also be detrimental. Yeah, 100%. I think that if like all of these things, like at the end of the day, drugs are getting more and more readily available, more access to it. You can get it on Snapchat these days, who knows what it's laced with.

I know we've got lots of horrible stories around that. Alcohol, like the access for kids is easier and easier and easier and easier. And if you outright, frankly deny it, you're right, you build demand. Like absolute no. As a parent, if my parents said no to me, I just said, fuck you, I'm doing it anyway. That was what happened in my head. And so knowing I have got two young girls and they're growing up and they're getting into that age, everything has to be okay.

But we have to guide them through that of helping them understand what decision that direction will make and everything else. So I don't think it's about 100% abstinence till much later, but I think it's like, hey, if you want to try this, that's once in a blue moon, it's okay. But actually getting into a regular pattern of consumption at a young age is where that is really considered dangerous.

And the other thing you were talking about, because I think this is really interesting about the preconceptions or the ideas that people have about what is good drinking and what is bad drinking. And you're like, well, you know, that's the binge drinking thing, which is bad versus the social thing. Well, that's okay, right? That's okay. But the reality is, you know, let's take two studies. One was a documentary in the UK, two twin doctors, and they decided that one of them was going to drink.

So they stopped drinking for 30 days, I think maybe 60 days prior. And then one of the twin doctors drinks all, and at the time it was 21 units recommended in a week as the maximum, it's now down at 14. So one of them would drink 21 units in one go, the binge drinker, and then not drink for the rest of the week. And one of them would drink the 21 units just nice and gently through the week, which is basically like half a glass of wine each night through the week.

I mean, the other one's having shots and beers and everything else. Now, although the impact 30 days later is different. The truth is both are severely under, you know, inflammation massively increased. You can see detrimental impact on their brain. Like both of those are still very significantly harmful to our brains and bodies.

Now, when you look at society, so as an example, Germany, one of the highest drinking countries per capita in Europe, if you don't include the Baltics, which is now another level, right? So Germany, Germany's alcohol consumption over the last few decades has just been steadily, gently rising, keeps rising, keeps rising, keeps rising versus the UK. 2004 is when we saw peak booze in the UK and then it started to diminish significantly. Why? Because of binge drinking culture.

Binge drinking culture is all over the news. Binge drinking culture is accidents, deaths, dramatic impact and everything else. So the binge drinking culture creates the desire or the change earlier. And it's harder to change when it is just social and socialized and normal. And I think this is a really important thing because you're like, I never was the binge drinker. So therefore I don't have a problem. And therefore it's even harder to change.

But the truth is the negative impact that it's having on you, on your physical health, on your mental health and everything else is still very much the same or at a similar level. So we can kind of be grateful of binge drinking culture in a sort of twisted way because it ends up making people change their relationship with alcohol sooner. Where it's really detrimental for my profession is we are shift workers. So in America we do 24 hour shifts.

Every third day you're more often than not either awake or very, very poor sleep for that 24. And then you go home the next day having not slept. So there's that kind of, I want to unwind and I'm doing air quotes again. And so it will be the wine or the beer or whatever it is. And this is again my example, a couple in that evening, but now you've disrupted your sleep again.

And then the third night you may or may not then because you've got to be up at 5 a.m. to drive 70 miles to the fire station. But now so that's too disruptive sleep because that's the thing I don't think people realize and this is what makes me kind of hard on myself as I know the science behind what alcohol does. So when I make poor choices for lack of a better word, I'm fully aware of what I'm volunteering to do and the detriment that it has.

So when it comes to sleep deprivation and the impact on our hormones and our mental health and these other areas, we're then compounding it with alcohol consumption, whether it's binge drinking, whether it's simply the way I drink. Yeah, it is. I wish there was a bigger word than compounding because it's so much bigger than that that people don't realize. You know, I mean, let's take sleep deprivation. First of all, for shift workers, incredibly difficult.

We're now starting to understand the truth about sleep deprivation. You take somebody perfectly normal health, mental health, all of that, and you sleep the by then of three days. 80% of people will pass an ADHD test. People are now showing severe signs. You know, so the mental health issues and the mental health downstream of sleep deprivation on its own is really detrimental.

But what post people don't realize is that sleep deprivation is up there with the top two or three drivers of compulsion, drivers of compulsive behavior, which is why people reach for alcohol. That's the most readily available tool when we feel that compulsion to go. But it could be cake or it could be Netflix or it could be porn or it's something I need to take the edge off this and I'm feeling compulsive to do something.

So and the, and the, you know, like you touched on into there, we now start to understand just how detrimental even two units of alcohol. So one beer, one glass of wine at night, just one is so impactful on your REM and your deep sleep and people think it gets them to sleep, which it does. So it basically knocks you out because it calms down that brain.

It does the prefrontal cortex and the prefrontal cortex is an area of the brain, which during zero to seven actually much up into your twenties, but pretty much zero to seven, it hasn't switched on and from seven onwards is when it's really starting to develop and all our, a lot of our rumination and thinking and also our morals, our judgment, our understanding, situational awareness, like all of that comes from this prefrontal cortex.

And so when you start to have a drink, it does that down, it quietens that down and that allows you to go back off to sleep. But unfortunately, because you're drinking a hundred percent poison, which is, you know, ethanol, a hundred percent toxic to the body, it's toxic to the brain. It's toxic to the body. It instantly shoots up your heart rate. You are your, your central nervous system now believes it's being attacked.

So you've been injected with COVID and it's now furiously trying to work to get that out of your system. If it doesn't, you will die. Right? So it must process this toxin out of the body and it's doing that while you sleep. And so yes, it knocks you out, but it is costing so much, so much greater. So then of course you're sleep deprived. You wake up the next day. Compulsion is so much harder because again, you drank yesterday and also you didn't sleep well.

So you have these compounding factors, which get people into that routine of, I need a drink, I need a drink. The only way I can keep going and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. When we kind of unwind that, so how do you look at it from a different perspective? This all comes down to the central nervous system and learning to self-regulate.

So imagine for a second that our central nervous system, so, you know, connecting the brain and the body and how we are, how we are interacting, you, it's a bit like a, um, a toy car with a little dynamo in it. Okay. So you wake up in the day and you start to wind that little toy car up at this zoom, zoom, zoom, right? You're winding the toy car up. And normally if you just put it down, it would, you know, trickle across the room, like one of those little wind up toys.

Um, but you know, if you're ADHD or you're, um, you know, neurodivergent, thank you. That's the word that's come back to me. If you are neurodivergent, then you're more heavily geared, right? So the, you only need to wind it a little bit for it to get really wound up. Okay. So why ADHD years, ADD years, why neurodivergence massive increase in addictive and compulsive behavior three times more likely, right? Because our central nervous systems get wound up so much quicker.

So instead of every single day, wind up, wind up, wind up. Now of course, if you're a first responder, right? That the stress, the trauma, the things that you're seeing, the, the moments you have to deal with life, death, communicating with people, seeing that, I mean, it's so huge. And I think we are only just starting to understand in society today, the truth of trauma, right? And how impactful it is to us.

So the coping mechanisms taught to first responders are, I mean, it's nowhere near what level of trauma and stress that you are dealing with. And so you don't have any in reality. We wind up that central nervous system, we get to the end of the day and it's totally wound up and we think, okay, now I'm going to relax and sit down in front of the TV. And you'd be winding up that car all day. You put it down and guess what? It shoots off out the room at 5 million miles an hour.

And this is your brain just going, oh my God, and you're like, oh gosh, I'm going to switch this off. I'm going to have a drink. And it's amazing. Alcohol is amazing at that. Within seconds switched off and you're like, oh, I feel so much better. Problem is that alcohol creates anxiety and it builds that, that thinking in the next day. So the following day, guess what? It's even easier for you to get into that hyperactive state.

So that's the pattern and that's the pattern most people are stuck in. Whether you're stressed at work or in your business or a first responder, we are, we are winding up our central nervous system so much during the day that the only thing we have to do to unwind is, is have a drink. So what do we do? Well, the thing is we now know, right? Sympathetic, parasympathetic, everyone here knows what that is.

Central nervous systems is that we must put our central nervous system into parasympathetic during the day to calm down and reduce that desire for compulsion. On our, one of our programs, we actually use a really cool device and we remotely monitor people's central nervous system. We show them minute by minute, whether we're in fight or flight or recovery, we teach them about their lack of stress coping mechanisms.

We're like, look, you thought you were calmly reading the newspaper, but look how stressed out you are. Like you're, you are stressed out your mind. And so when they see that and then they start to take action to find calm during the day, breath work, meditation, cold shower. Hey, I know you can't jump out the ambulance and go for a cold shower at that moment. I understand that, right?

This is not reality or on the way in the, in going in the ambulance or the, or the fire engine or whatever it is meditating quietly, but you can do breath work. I mean, the physiological side is the fastest way to get your central nervous system to go from sympathetic to parasympathetic. You know, it's, it's an amazing tool and it's something that you can easily introduce. So understanding that and saying, well, hang on a minute.

I don't want to have that desire for compulsion at the end of the day. I want to reduce that down now. And by taking these breaths and finding this calm in that moment, whenever I can just like try and calm that central nervous system, I'm mitigating that inevitable moment of being, Oh my God, I need a drink. Make sense? Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, I want to go back to early life for a second.

When I started this, this podcast, you know, we were losing all of the first responders and that was kind of the origin story. And then as I got a little bit further in and certain guests started talking about the massive impact of childhood trauma or experiences on behaviors as we, as we grow up, it was a massive missing piece of the first responder mental health puzzle, because you have a firefight that was in the Grenfell fire.

Like, well, Steve, you know, the reason you're struggling is you were in the Grenfell fire. Well, you know, thing X, Y, and Z happened before he even ever put the uniform on.

You talked about, you know, obviously the accidental binge drinking, you know, first time story, but then you also talked about, you know, the behaviors as far as the arsenal and some of these other things in 2024 with this wise lens that you have now, when you look back at your upbringing, are there areas of that dynamic that contributed to that? Absolutely.

I mean, the thing is totally, you know, completely misunderstood and not really with the, with the resources and understanding of what was going on for me and how I was trying to get attention and the things that I was going through. And so, you know, they just didn't know what, what was going on. They just knew they didn't like it. And I see the same sort of, not setting fire to things, but same sort of behaviors early in my children. And I know how to mitigate that.

I can see how hyperactive they get at the end of the day. So helping them understand how to regulate themselves is so, is so key that they can help themselves get to sleep, that they can change their, their, their system. So I think that's really important. And then, you know, being way more understanding about diet. I mean, I was just eating sugar and E numbers and everything else and going out of fashion.

And then, I mean, people would give me a pack of Skittles at school and it would be like fireworks, not the Skittles, me. I would just be off climbing walls, breaking something, graffitiing on, I mean, it's just bananas. So it was like having the show. Well, now we know, you know, all those additives and E numbers and sugars and everything else, it's just kryptonite for ADHD.

So yeah, I think, you know, coming back onto, onto that story and going up through there, how, you know, I, oh yeah, I know where I am. 13, 14 years old, really, really struggled with my head. I just didn't fit in and it had been growing divide of being, you know, I'm, I'm bad. I'm naughty. I'm, I'm hearing this. I'm bad. I'm naughty. I'm a bad kid. And my parents being like, you're special, you're gifted and blah, blah, blah. And it was just creating this divide.

And you know, I got to 13 and had my first suicide attempt. I took an overdose and had my stomach pump from that very miserable experience. And at 14, I tried to hang myself. And when I hung myself from the stairs, my parents arrived back early from their anniversary dinner. I know horrible time to choose it and walk back into the room. And in, I was very, very lucky to, to survive that.

And my dad sat me down and he was, he used to work for Childline and, you know, so he had, he had talked a lot of kids down from suicide and he had, you know, spent a lot of time supporting and understanding children. And you know, he was like, look, I need, I know I need to give you hope. So why don't you write a letter to somebody who inspires you? And we sat and we thought, and my dad's called Richard and had a recording studio and he loved Richard Branson.

So I was like, I'll write a letter to Richard Branson. So I wrote a letter to Richard Branson. I said, you know, amongst lots of things, I'm going to change the world one day and I'm looking forward to having lunch with you. And then I kind of set out on this mission to change the world and set up my first business when I was 15, I left school before the legal age to run my first business. Five companies by the time I was 25, I'm all failure, failure, failure, failure.

I just couldn't get it right. And rather demoralized from that, I entered the TV program, The Apprentice, which was series two in the UK, got accepted, went down for the beginning of the show, thought I was going to go on and it was going to be, you know, life changing experience. And then eventually they said, look, we can't explain, but you're not going on the show this time. And so instead of flying back to Scotland, I didn't take the rejection.

Well, I flew out to Ibiza to sort out the rejection and get old party Island. And in Ibiza, I met an oil broker and this is where I ended up becoming an oil broker in London. And for me, two worlds collided, right? I, I always used to party quite hard, although I was very serious and I'd miss a lot of stuff because I was very serious about building these businesses, even though they weren't successful. This is where those two worlds came together, right?

The more I partied, the more successful I was as an oil broker is amazing. So much entertainment, so much fun. That was 13 years of my life in London. And I met my wife, we started to have a family still partying, even though we'd start to have a family, you know, coming home sometimes on Tuesday at five o'clock in the morning, not able to find my keys.

So I just sleep on the doorstep, which is not great when your wife wakes up in the morning with a six month old baby and finds her husband sleep on the doorstep. So that started to wear a little bit thin and in a way she was putting pressure on me either to leave the job or to, you know, the drinking. And I was like, it's the job, it's just the way it is. And then one day I decided to take a break from alcohol. And it took quite a long time.

You know, I approached my boss in the beginning and I said, I'm thinking about taking a break from alcohol. And he said, if you stop drinking, you are committing commercial suicide. And it took me a long time to pluck up the courage, six months or so. And then I took a break and I just couldn't believe it. I mean, fitter, faster, healthier, happier, better dad, better husband, grew my business, every area of my life improved. And that was 11 years ago, 11 years ago.

And it kind of sent me on a mission of how do I help more people realize, you know, the advantages and the benefits of taking a break from alcohol instead of it being this thing that you have to have a problem and reach rock bottom and all of the stuff that was out there. I was like, no, this is a thing to do. If you want to be fitter, faster, healthier, happier, better. So yeah, that was the beginning of the launch of one year, no beer. Two or three, three days ago, I woke up. My wife is down.

She lives in South Florida at the moment. She's in medical school. And so she, you know, and the week she's on there on her own and then weekends, she'll either come home or I'll go down there. And ironically, her phone broke the other day as well. So I wake up five in the morning, Instagram messenger video coming in. And when I answer, she's screaming because someone's trying to kick in her door.

And it was a, it ultimately ended up being a drunk guy who was in the wrong building, you know, going, trying to get in the same number, which absolutely terrifying. He was belligerent as well as he was telling her to F off and all this kind of stuff. And you know that if I had been there that day, that could have resulted in him being dead because you know, that's what happens when you kick in a door in America, you probably going to be facing the barrel of a gun. It's not bravado.

It's just the reality because every bad guy is armed, you know, so it was such a kind of haunting realization of obviously the vulnerability of her, but also that this guy could be dead, whether I punched him down the stairs or shot him or whatever. And again, this is not anything I would want to do, but if someone is kicking in your door and telling you to F off, you assume they have ill intentions and you're going to protect yourself.

So you know, with you talking about lying on the floor, this is the other side, which I was just, you know, glaringly made, you know, aware of is that that just simple intoxication can lead to your demise or demise of someone else as well, which is another important conversation about alcohol. I've been in A and E many times.

And I used to say, you know, getting, it used to be this theme tune in my head, getting away with it all messed up, you know, that James song, because I was like, I just get away with it. I mean, I remember sitting on the roof of a car or my two brothers got on the roof of a car, it's driving down a dual carriageway. And I decided to climb out the back window and hold onto their trousers.

And then we come onto this little lane and the car turns right and I didn't, and I lost my front teeth, lost the skin on my arm, chest in next minute. I'm in hospital and you know, so I was very, very, very lucky. And, you know, absolutely hammer drunk when that happened. And there's a lot of, there's a lot of things like that. So the thing about that is the first responders are the ones who are dealing with the people who didn't get away with it.

And, but the people who get away with it are how many times is it a thousand times? Is it 5,000 times the number of people who don't get away with it? But it's huge. People are getting away with it every weekend, all over the world, all the time. And the first responders are dealing the ones with the ones who didn't in a way or don't. Absolutely. I had a guy on the show who was the author of The Introvert's Edge. And it was such an interesting conversation.

It was actually a book that had helped one of my friends who was an alcoholic turn a corner and I'd never really heard it put this way before. You know, you think about introvert and extrovert and, you know, the extrovert is the jazz hands guy in the pub, you know, and the introvert is the one curled into a ball in the corner. But in the middle is everyone else.

And the way he framed it, I know it's not originally his concept, but if you, you know, where you gain energy from, where you recharge is the kind of personality that you are. And I was thinking, you know, I was kind of like, you know, one foot on each side, but no, I'm, I'm an introvert. So I'm happy to be in a crowd, but I'm the kind of person that you'll turn around in a party and I'm just gone.

Or I'm sitting out in the back garden and everyone's, you know, and it's not that I'm worried about crowds or anything like that. I just, that's how I recharge, you know, intimate dinner with my wife or walking my dog or all these kinds of things. And so in this conversation, it made me realize how many people look at other people who are the life of the party because they've been drinking and go, the only way I'm going to fit in is to drink so I can also be like these cool people.

And especially when you think, which I did when I was younger, when you pregame, I'm going to go out and get drinks. So let me have drinks to get me ready to go out and have drinks. And you look at that and you go, God, why, why isn't this talked about that most of us are actually introverts because in a tribal experience, you're not supposed to stick out. You're one cog in this beautiful machine.

So many people stop drinking or change their relationship with alcohol and realize they're introverted. Oh wait, I fucking hate going out and you just talk same shit all the time. I needed alcohol for you to be my friend, which is, which is extremely common. A lot of people, they have a bit heartbreak around that too. They're like, Oh my God, you know, I thought I really loved these people or I thought this was my thing.

And you're like, well, actually when you come to it, and I think that's about the whole journey is that, you know, using alcohol to make your life okay is the truth. You know, that it's, it's a numbing agent and it's what makes your life okay, but we're only here for one life. So why not make your life okay so that you don't need alcohol? And I think that's what the angle that we're coming at this whole thing with.

I'm really sorry, but there is no disease and the scientific community is pretty aligned with that fact. We don't, we don't have a disease of alcoholism. Okay. We have serious alcohol use disorder. And interestingly enough, the population that gets alcohol use disorder during their lifetime is really big people.

Many, many, many people get alcohol use disorder and the greatest intervention in the world for helping people going from alcohol use disorder to a better relationship or not drinking at all. It's not AA. It's not what I do. It's not what it was. It's time. Most people grow out of it over time. And when you look at what the definition is of alcohol use disorder, most of us have it in our twenties and most of us stopped doing it later on. And so that's not a disease.

Disease doesn't heal with time. So we have to have to kind of rethink some of this stuff here. And I think, I think with this part is, you know, what we are doing and I know we all get onto this is our focus or our realization over the last 10, nearly 10 years now running this organization. I'll put this into the right perspective. So in the beginning, we started helping people take a break from alcohol. That was the thing. I thought if we give people the idea of having a break.

And so we came up with the idea of a challenge, one year, no beer. You know, it's just a challenge. Do it. It's fun. And we had a lot of success growing that over a hundred thousand members in 138 countries. And I mentioned just before this that during COVID, when it kind of really got bad, we kind of saw that there were a lot of doctors, nurses and emergency workers inside our audience.

And they were talking about how fucking hard it was dealing with what was going on in the world and either wanting a drink or going back to drink. And so I came up with this idea, like, why don't we offer it out for free, our program and our support to emergency workers, first responders, NHS. So right in the first lockdown, we announced that. But first of all, I sent an email out to all of our members, multiple emails and lots of posts and I said, look, I need you to come back and re-engage.

I need you to come to the community. We are going to support whoever wants to come in for free. We had 3000 people respond to say that they were willing to support, like, hey, do whatever we can to try and support. Then we opened up our doors. Over the course of three weeks, we had 10,000 people join us. And this is all over the UK predominantly, mostly NHS because we put some NHS stuff together.

Every time I do this and every podcast I mentioned this on, I always get a message into our internal system from someone saying I was one of those first responders. I was one of the NHS workers that came in for free during that thing. And it was amazing to see that community support and all of that. Just amazing. So we kind of were super focused on this and helping people to stop drinking.

And as this time went on, we were speaking to a lot of people who signed up and why they signed up and everything else. And we put a survey out there, which now more than 40,000 people have taken. And part of the survey is just asks random people out there on social media land, what would you like your relationship with alcohol to look like? Six percent say that they want to stop drinking. Okay. 30% said they're fine as they are delusional. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. And yeah, sorry.

The other 64% said that they'd like a better relationship with it. They'd like to reduce how much they're drinking. So this is when I had a massive aha moment. If we're just talking about not drinking, if we're just talking about sobriety, right, which is huge, it's growing out there. Super amazing. We're only talking to 6% of people. Right. And the reason why we had struggled as an organization was because we were saying, come and stop drinking. But people were like, I don't want to do that.

I don't want to stop drinking. I'd like to drink less. And so everything that we are doing now is about helping people to get control of their drinking.

And when you talk about control, when you talk about trying to help people reduce their drinking, if that gets them to come in the door and sit and have a conversation with you and say, come in here and have it, and as you have that conversation, you realize that this is somebody with a very serious problem or even whatever level at our core, we know that the fastest way to get control is by taking a break. Right. And so we have this conversation with them.

We help them understand and see the benefits and everything else. And then we encourage them to take a break from alcohol. And then guess what? Many people go, I don't think I want to go back to that. So we found a way to help people so much earlier and a much wider audience of people. If we can talk about control and we can help people reduce their drinking, we can help them earlier and we can help them prevent more serious relationships with alcohol over time. So that's our main focus now.

I mean, I've had many, many months where I haven't, you know, and this is the thing. It's like when I'm in that groove, it's easy. After a while, you don't have that drink until the one time that you do. And again, it's not like, you know, I'm downing two bottles of wine or bottle of scotch or something, but it just it's insidious. You know, it starts creeping back in again. And now you're like, oh, it's habitual again now, you know, two glasses of wine every evening kind of thing.

So I think by approaching it that way, it just makes a lot of sense. It's like a lot of stuff I try and do with the fire shift work and some other things that we've got to change because it's literally killing our people. You know, you're you're trying to find that kind of middle group of rebel rouses and then you start pushing the walls out.

But again, if you can get someone to dip their toe in, get their kind of knee jerk reflex down so they can actually understand the whole picture and really dig into the why, then the kind of the hook is in the mouth.

And like you said, now you've got the ability to kind of go from reduction of alcohol to no alcohol, which is, you know, I'm going to say this now, I'm going to say at the end, but I'm going to dive into your program and do the one year starting today because I think, you know, I just needed I needed some help, you know, and winging it on my own obviously hasn't worked because, you know, last night I had two glasses of wine. So today is day one. Good man.

Well, so here's something really important. Having now seen, well, tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people do a week, a month, a year. It's an amazing thing to do and then see a huge proportion of them go back to drinking and for it to start to climb back up again. And that is what I've been doing. I'd been getting people to stop drinking only to see them go back to problematic drinking. And I was like, there's something more here.

And so now, and I think this is really, really important. It's not about the alcohol. The alcohol is actually completely irrelevant. It's just the tool that you're using. Right. So if you go in search of abstaining from that thing, you will either build a worse relationship with it. So you will increase your desire because you're trying and you're using willpower and you're forcing yourself away from it.

If you do nothing, if you, if you do no change and we can talk about what's required to change, it will build over time. And they've shown this in all sorts of, you know, rice, rice, mice, lab rats, kind of stuff aversion therapy doesn't work. Don't think of a pink elephant. That's what you're thinking of. Right. So, so that is not the solution, especially not in a world which is absolutely drenched in about it. Don't get me wrong.

If you want to stop drinking and you want to be sober, of course, it's amazing. Well done. You a hundred million percent. That is the best place you can possibly be. And a lot of people are holding onto that with dear life and I don't think they need to do that. So what I'm saying is there are drivers of compulsive behavior and we know what those are and those are the things that we must address. And if we address those things, then you can have a take it or leave it relationship with alcohol.

The truth is the best relationship with alcohol is always leave it because it's a hundred percent poison. If we sat and recategorize drugs right now, alcohol would be right up there with one of the worst. We'd think of it more like meth. How often do you want to take meth, James? Right. And you might say, well, you know, I don't mind trying it now and again, but it'd be once in a blue moon.

And that's probably the reality we should have of such a toxic drug that's so bad for our mental health and our physical health. Okay. So we live in the world we live in and it's absolutely drenched in it in every single way. So that is, that's a positive thing because lots of people don't want to stop drinking forever and we need to address those underlying drivers. Right. Shut up, Ruri. What are they? Now, if I was being truthful about what this program really is, I don't think we'd sell any.

I don't think anybody would sign up. Right. Nobody is wanting rushing through the door to deal with their trauma. Right. But that is the number one core driver of compulsive behavior and trauma. Right. We understand. Let's address trauma for a second. I'm sure you talk about it an awful lot in the podcast. How about I'm going to give part opinion, part belief and specific understandings from world leaders and gurus that I believe in. Besser van der Kolk, Peter Levine, Gaber Mate.

Okay. And what we're talking about is big T and little T, but predominantly we're talking about that age of time zero to seven when you have not yet developed your prefrontal cortex. Arguably, you could also be talking about inherited family trauma. You could also be talking about in utero and things like that. We're still trying to figure all that stuff out and how impactful it is.

But some things happened to you or in front of you that you perceived that you didn't understand as a child and everybody has had that moment. And because you didn't understand it, you weren't able to understand the emotion. You felt intense, insane emotion. And that was hard coded. Now as human beings, we are world class at teaching our children to pack down their emotions and then we become men and we got to be strong and everything else. And we pack down those emotions.

Turns out these emotions are toxic over time. And in fact, they're not just causing addiction. They're causing autoimmune diseases and disorders. They cause brain and mental health disorders, neurodivergence. They cause cancers, illnesses. Our future, right? Our long term future is you're going to walk into the doctor and all the symptoms he'll describe, he'll say, tell me about your childhood. That's the future, I believe, right? Is the significance of trauma.

So what we have is this original part trauma and we have not yet learned to deal with that. We've packed it down and we have these emotions trapped inside of us. And so every time we feel stressed, every time we feel lonely or sad or these emotions we feel today, we immediately connect to the emotions we felt as a child, which were utterly overwhelming and we need a drink or we need something to take the edge off because it's too hard to deal with.

So what we do now is help people release those emotions. One of the tools that we use that we love is somatic experiencing, which is based on helping people feel the emotion, right? Not talk therapy. I did 30 years of it. It's great, but I don't think it really changed me much. I think there's some good stuff with EMDR. I think there's amazing things with psychedelics and absolutely the future of what we're doing will integrate psychedelic therapy. No doubt with that whatsoever.

But I know that a major part of addiction, compulsion behavior, the inability to stop is rooted in you haven't dealt with your childhood shit yet. And you probably don't know what it is. Most of us don't. We hide it. That's what the brain do. It pushes it out. So trauma is the number one driver of compulsive behavior. The second driver of compulsive behavior links directly to trauma. So trauma is impactful on your central nervous system. And guess what? We have daily stress, right?

So if you haven't yet dealt with your shit, you come in with this heightened level of impact on your central nervous system. And then it's really easy for you to get snappy, frustrated, angry, drink a coffee, which drives your central nervous system, drink alcohol, which stimulates your central nervous system. And we're just in this fight or flight, fight or flight, fight or flight all the time. And that's why compulsion is so significant. And those two kind of go hand in hand.

And then just to summarize really quickly, the other main sort of core drivers, our environment, our sense of meaning and purpose. This is huge, right? People who sell their businesses, retire, people who go in between things, people who are in jobs, they fucking hate. Compulsion is massive. Compulsion for me working in the finance industry, just making money for myself was through the roof. And I didn't realize that I have to help people. And that's what gives me meaning in life.

And it calmed down that element of compulsion. Connection is really important. Feeling that sense of connection. What lots of people do is they think, oh, alcohol is the problem. I'm going to stop drinking. So they stop drinking. They do a month. And during that month, I'm not going to see my mates. I'm not going to go over here. And what they're doing is they're becoming more disconnected. Unless you're a sociopath, you cannot be disconnected. So guess what?

The only way to be connected again is to go back to drinking. And they're like, oh, I've got a problem. I don't know what's wrong with me. Well, I do. You just haven't built connections out with the drinking culture. And that's how key it is to reducing compulsive behavior. Few other elements. Emotional health, obviously, is a major driver of compulsive behavior. Emotional regulation is absolutely key in understanding your emotions for compulsive behavior. So it's not disease.

It's not some kind of crazy, weird thing that we don't understand. It's not even the alcohol. I know alcohol is an addictive substance. There's lots of addictive substances out there. But it's about you needing or using or desiring that. And you can change that. You have the power to do that. You have the power to change the things that are driving compulsive behavior. And I think that model, that thing will help so many people avert more serious relationship with alcohol or anything.

I had Johan Hari on the show a couple of times. The first time he discussed Chasing the Scream, which is I think every person should read that book. It's phenomenal. But there's a quote from there. The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The op of addiction is connection. And you look at my population. So especially when our firefighters retire, get hurt, get fired, whatever happens, you're on that rig. In that station, home life and drinking and all that stuff aside, you have purpose.

You have an amazing connection. You're not just around friends. You're literally around people that you would die for. You use this massive power of tribe and then their purpose. You're truly trying to make the world better. You're literally there when people are having the worst day they ever had. But then they go home, whether it's permanently, whether it's from an injury, whatever it is, and all that is taken away.

And I think this is a big part of the first respondent mental health story is that we have such an uber tribe connection purpose that it can be so jarring when they're alone in that apartment or whatever that dynamic is when they're taken from it. And we see a lot of mental ill health, suicide, addiction, alcoholism in the fire service.

You know, partly when we're still in uniform working, but I think it's absolutely magnified when we're removed from that group that we were so proud to be a part of. Totally. And I think when you look at the elements of connection, you know, this is why we produce a community and it's really important for that level of connection. And you've got varying levels, right?

You know, you come into a Facebook group or a social media group like that and you can feel warmth and connection and everything else, but it's not the same as really getting into that connection. And that's why we also run, you know, group, a group support program, which again is just everyone getting onto the zooms and having that conversation and talking it out.

And people don't realize the power of that, you know, so you look at the data behind this and somebody who doesn't have that community, ask the question of go on, just have one, is so many more times likely to crumble because they have that no, that, that, that tribe, that belonging. Um, and, you know, he talks about that in the, in chasing the screen, right? This sense of belonging, this sense of being a part of something.

And yet you could be at that wedding and everyone like, come on, just have a shot. But because you're a part of something, even though it's a Facebook group, right? Or even though it's an online community, but you, you give to it every day, it gives to you every day. I've got, I can think of a few wonderful, we've got a few moderators in there. Who are first responders. I have one paramedic in London, Kate. She's absolutely, I just love her. She's been with us for years and years and years.

I can't tell you how much time she dedicates to supporting people in that Facebook group. And I'm like, you already have an insane job. You already have all of this, this thing in here. And she's like, this, this thing changed my life so much. This one, you know, beer thing changed everything for me. I mean, she ended up getting into wild swimming and then she met Russell Brand in the circuit serpentine one time and it went into the paper and she's super cool lady.

But I think, I think that the, the element of that community of people who are choosing to live how you want to live is really, really, really powerful and really important. And I think we can give that, you know, we will talk about the, how I can support anybody listening to the podcast at some point, I'm sure.

But I think people misunderestimate how powerful that is in their ability to say no, thank you in the moment of pressure, even if the pressure is from themselves, which is huge, you know, go on, just have one. You'll be fine. No, I'm a part of this community and I'm a part of this program. So yeah, it's, it's a big part. I think that's why people struggle during the pandemic, you know, people in uniform that I saw. Yeah, and what it's also, you know, there's a bigger tribe.

If you're in the NHS, and I've always said this, the NHS at its core is the most beautiful healthcare system on the planet, hands down, that we all going to chip in and hopefully be so healthy that we don't need to use it very much. But if someone's having a baby or someone has a car accident or someone's elderly and, you know, getting dementia, we're going to take care of you. That's that's the philosophy. And then watching it kind of getting torn apart by politicians absolutely kills me.

And then obviously the other side, not investing in the health of the people is crippling it. And now we have the same obesity in the UK that we're seeing here in America, which, you know, is why the NHS is failing. It's nothing to do with the people in it. It's the fact that the, you know, there's no leadership and making sure that a tax based healthcare system is creating healthy people. So you don't use it very much. But what I saw, especially in it just, I don't know, it just drove me crazy.

This whole stand outside and clap bullshit at five o'clock every day when what they needed was PPE and more people to help in this. I feel like there was a massive sense of betrayal. It wasn't a tribe because what it did is just throw all the responsibility on the first responder will be clapped. I'm going back to watch Tiger King now. Good luck. You know, so I think that's why a lot of people really struggle and then fast forward a little bit more.

Now you're out there on the front line and now they're telling you they're going to fire you because you didn't take a vaccine. Massive betrayal of your so-called tribe. So that's what I saw as a first responder and I'd already transitioned out. So I wasn't wearing uniform by this point, but you know, it w there was so much lip service and if you're going to be a community, you've got to show up in the best times and the worst.

And what a lot of the people in the UK did is they, they turned their back on the very people that were out there on the front line, especially when it came to, to mandates, you know, people have served 10, 20 years and then they're calling them murderers when they were out in the front line unprotected for a year. So that betrayal I think was really, really toxic in a lot of these people that were selflessly serving at that time. Yeah. Awful.

Yeah. Pretty just not sure what to say to that other than, you know, I think that whole thing just absolutely crazy and genuinely my heart goes out and in support to anything I can do to help first responders and the good work that you guys are doing. We were going to talk about this earlier, but we do have our challenges and as in, you know, the 20 day challenge, the 90 day challenge, the 365 day challenge, and we provide that group support element.

You know, if anybody is a first responder out there and feels like they would like a little bit of support, they'd be very welcome, happy to do a free discount code. So I'll make it, you know, behind the shield discount code. How about that? And it gives free access to the, to the program and the, and the community. And we're just welcome, welcome to support anyone. Absolutely. You're doing good stuff. Well, I appreciate it. And like I said, I'm going to do, I'm not doing the one month.

I'm going to do the year. I think it's the only way that I can really, you know, because I obviously have done a month and I'm like, Hey, good job, James. Now I'm drinking again. So clearly James needs a little bit more than a month to, to, you know, unpack his little mental toy box. When it comes to the pandemic, looking at the other lens and look at just the whole population, I've talked about this a lot.

There was such an incredibly powerful opportunity with a captive audience to really address the physical and the mental health crisis in America, in the UK. But what I, you know, what ended up happening was if you wrote down how to break down a human being and make him more vulnerable to a virus, that's what we did. Don't, don't see other people stay in your house until we tell you to come out, but you can get fast food and alcohol delivered to your home while you binge watch Netflix.

And so, you know, you've created an environment now and I've heard this from so many people that there is an uptick now in mental health challenges post pandemic where it should have been the other way around. We could have been, you know, putting PE programs back in schools and bolstering local farmers to create organic food and, you know, taking the bad food out of schools and cooking food, you know, like we used to a few decades ago. But the, you know, the opposite happened. Nothing happened.

And then it was like, well, we don't want to talk about it now. So talk to me about from the alcohol perspective, have you seen like an increase in alcohol consumption after that, you know, that forced loneliness with, with a delivery service for booze? Yeah, exactly. And so, yes, absolutely massive increase in alcohol consumption, I mean, globally and massive increase in problematic drinking. Yes, more people than ever chose to change their relationship with alcohol.

Amazing, you know, when you know, you saw more signups than ever, more people were trying to get fit and healthy, but that's a small fraction of the population compared to people who fell down a bottle. And you know, most of the people who come to our programs today say it stepped up a notch at the pandemic and I've just never been able to get it back down again. So it was very detrimental to our relationship with alcohol and the alcohol industry.

As always, manipulated governments to specifically in the US and other countries in the world. So in the US, they lobbied to change the licensing laws so that delivery of alcohol was an emergency service and have access 24 seven and alcohol consumption increased by 20% and they're expecting it to increase by another 20% over the next 10 years.

So it is absolutely huge and it is quite surprising because when you look at the media and you look at all that stuff, so many people are going sober and lots of people change their relationship with alcohol and that's not the truth of what's going out there.

You know, alcohol consumption is growing globally and in some countries it's growing pretty fast even in Western countries, it's still growing very fast despite knowing the true cost, the cost estimated to the US economy is 250 billion a year. That's many, many, many, many times the tax part of it and so you say, well, hang on a minute, why is that going on? If the cost is so much, why is it doing it? The biggest drinking demographic are white affluent males who also run the country.

So you know, there's lots of conspiracy ideas and thoughts but ultimately big alcohol does everything it can to keep selling considerable amounts of alcohol. And so you know, 46% of alcohol revenues come from people who drink double the risky limits, so into risky drinking, which basically means that if the alcohol industry achieved what they say they are trying to achieve, responsible drinking, they would half their market, they would half their share value. They're never going to do that.

So it's just lip service. Now, I can talk quite detrimentally about the alcohol industry and yet there is also an opportunity. There's a huge opportunity here. Unlike the tobacco industry, it had nowhere to go. The tobacco industry had nowhere to go, so it just funded misinformation and we proved that right. Massive expose, lots of court orders, all of that kind of stuff for paying for proving that smoking was good for you. And we know the alcohol industry has been doing the same thing.

We know that one of the largest ever studies, which had a preordained outcome of moderation is good for you, the vast majority of the financiers was the alcohol industry. We know there's a load of misinformation out there. So what we have the opportunity to do, and I was actually invited down to number 10 Downing Street and a chat with the chancellor and the PM. And my very brief point was the opportunity here is to incentivize the alcohol industry to find an alternative.

And that is heavily offer tax deductions in R&D into functional drinks. I firmly believe the future is functional drinks. Professor David Nutt has developed Alkarel, which is currently being signed off or whatever by the FDA. And it is a synthetic alcohol. So it gives you the to drink feeling, the feeling of relaxation, of turning your brain off without the hangover. And that's what most people are looking for it for. And it doesn't have all of the negative downstream impact of it.

So I think if we could encourage and steer the alcohol industry into the direction of helping birth the future, that isn't alcohol because it's so detrimental. And you could say, well, why do that really? You know, we don't need that.

Unfortunately, until we're teaching kids at school how to regulate, how to deal with stress, and until we're helping our citizens deal with the level of stress, understand compulsive behavior, all of those wonderful things, maybe we should just teach everyone what we do on our complete control program. Until that happens, people are going to need something to take the edge off. And it could be social media, porn, gambling, caffeine, sugar, whatever drugs.

And so that's why I believe the stepping stone market is functional drinks. I'm talking a little bit later today again with some friends of mine that are in charge of Charlotte's Web and it's a CBD company.

And I had a guest on Dr. Gregory Smith years ago now and his company, Red Pill Medical, but I've used CBD for years, you know, on and off when, you know, there's times where I'm kind of achy and inflamed and I use it or it might be, you know, an evening if I feel like I'm a little wound up just to help me sleep. And it's amazing. But the resistance they've had from the drug companies and the misinformation, like you said, is, I mean, it's made it so hard for people to get it.

Another product which hasn't got the same opposition, but it's probably, I see it being put into cocktails now, mocktails, is the functional mushrooms, you know, the lion's mane and chaga and all these things. You know, you've got Carver, which I had in Fiji years ago with a bunch of villages in the actual Fijian village. So you've got these things that you're able to do without alcohol as well. The irony is though, we're in a first responders uniform and I hear my friends say this all the time.

Like I've never been on a homicide that was weed involved or a fatal accident because someone that's high is driving about two, three miles an hour usually looking for chips. So this is the crazy thing is the thing that's legal for my population, we see that every single day. And it's not just all alcohol, but for example, alcohol and or horrendous lack of education in America, 40,000 Americans die on our roads every year.

And most of those are, you know, a large percentage are teenagers and children. You know, and then obviously all the murders and a lot of the suicides too. Alcohol reduces that inhibition to pull the trigger. We know that does, but then you have the things that work, whether it's CBD, it shouldn't even be, you know, you shouldn't have a kind of like a hurdle to it. You should be able to just go to a store and buy it, but obviously have it regulated and make sure it's pure.

But then you have the MDMA and the psilocybin and some of these things that ironically I did recreationally. MDMA beer, that's my plan. We're a long way off. I don't want to go to prison. So, but yeah. But I think this is what's crazy. I did it recreationally when I was younger and now they're having so much success and I've sent friends to, to ayahuasca retreats who were suicidal before and are now thriving.

It wasn't just the retreat, but it opened that little door and the depths of their psyche that they could then start unpacking and they're continuously doing work. But these are life-saving interventions. So this is, this is what's crazy. We've got prohibition against the things that are working. Prohibition against medicines. Yeah. Prohibition against real, real plant medicines.

And in the meantime, trying to hold off for the pharmaceuticals to develop pill versions of them so that they can make, make as much money as possible. I mean, you know, psilocybin, okay, so we're making it into a pill, but that's mainly because it's more readily available that way. It's in everyone's garden. But the, the session lasts six hours and then people have to do an overnight. So we would just want it to be four hours. So that's why we're tailoring it to, to create a pill for it.

But yeah, the reality is these substances are, are medications. And I think we need a recontextualization of the drug reclassification. That's the word of the drug thing. Well then another thing, very important factor. And it's funny, I was literally watching, I'm rewatching the Ted Lasso series. I don't know if you saw that or not, but such a good show. Every single scene, apart from when they're actually in the locker room and on the pitch, they're drinking.

And I, you know, we were about to sit down and do this. And I'm literally was thinking about, you know, abstaining for a year. And so I'm, you know, and it happens every time I stop, you see it everywhere, every billboard, every film. So talk to me about that, you know, the constant bombarding of someone who's trying to abstain from alcohol in all the media. Yeah. I mean, we are so susceptible to marketing, you know, and that's what I was talking about peak booze.

So advertising dollars into the UK advertising market versus alcohol consumption in the UK attack each other almost perfectly, which is why in 2004 they started increasing the legislation around it. And that's why there was a decline in consumption. So it is a direct result. We know more marketing, the more people will drink. And I think that, again, once you start to, instead of just abstaining from something and avoiding something again, every time you see it, oh my God, I'd like a drink.

If you do the work, right, which we covered earlier is to try and understand why you've got this compulsion. Why do you feel the need to have a drink? Then all of that is irrelevant. I'd never feel like having a drink when I see somebody drinking in a movie. The distance is not even an association in my head. There's no, no, Oh, I'm going to go to the fridge and get a beer. I mean, there isn't any fridge, any beer in my fridge. I do drink. I drink as much as I want whenever I want.

I just usually choose not to drink. And I think once you've removed those associations, the association that steak always goes with a nice red wine. Well, I'm carnivore. So I'd be drinking wine three or four times a day if I had wine with steak. And then you, you know, or socializing. Every time I socialize, I drink. Well, you can either avoid socializing. And then when you eventually do socialize, you're going to crumble or you're going to find it really difficult.

Or you can really go to town with socializing, but without using alcohol and, and let yourself be the person who you are. And I think that's the journey is unwinding, trying to understand what the desire and the underneath part was. Not everyone's going to come on complete control. I'm sure it's, you know, it's not a cheap program. We use devices. We are remotely monitoring people 24 seven. I tell you a really cool story.

So one of the doctors, so we have doctors around the world who, and nurses who monitored this data, you know, at the many one time it could be 500 odd participants around the world who were, who were monitoring. And one of the doctors thought they saw something irregular in the heartbeat, right? Afib, whatever it was. And flagged this and we got a little bit concerned. Now this is a doctor in Ethiopia, a nurse in French Guyana who are talking to each other and a participant who is in London.

And it's like, no, let's call an ambulance. When the ambulance arrived, as this person started to have a stroke, we saved that person's life. Now that is not the service. We are not a healthcare service yet. We are a coaching business, which has a clinical director. We are way beyond what we need to be because we want to be on the right side of the law. We want to be on the right side of protecting people's lives, of making sure that we don't have things like alcohol withdrawal symptoms.

And we're looking careful after people, but it is a part of the service is a part of the thing that we provide. Not everybody will be able to do that, right? So, and if you go to our site, oneyearnobier.com and you scroll down the page, you'll find a webinar which goes into far more depth about the compulsive drivers and those are the things. And they are the things.

So as you go on your year, James, these are the things to be asking yourself are why is, why was that desire there in the first place? And what one of these things is it that I need to address? If you don't want it to pop back up again or show up as something else, this is it. And I think the other really important part here is once we educate people, right, about those drivers and they start to understand themselves better, then they can be preventative for themselves.

Oh dear, I've gone through two or three days of sleep deprivation. I am going to really fancy a drink if I don't mitigate that. And I know I need to do the work to mitigate it. So I'm going to have to just slow down my diary. I'm going to have to find some more quiet. I'm going to have to try and find a way to relax my central nervous system, get a nap in the afternoon if I can. All of those things, right?

I know that right now my environment is toxic and I'm in a job that I have real lack of meaning and purpose. Therefore I need to make sure I sleep well and that I exercise because sleep deprivation is probably the thing that will push me over the edge for compulsion. So when you've given somebody the understanding and the depth of that knowledge, then they look at it in a different factor.

And just coming back onto that other thing as well, I think the other part of it is, you know, once you've taken a break, the hangovers are heavier. As you get older, the hangovers are more difficult and you start to see the true impact of alcohol. And for me, because of the world we live in today, I could never, never not drink ever. I'm not that type of person. I don't want to never be able to drink. If you tell me no, I'm going to tell you, fuck you, I'm going to do it anyway.

So if I do that, I'd probably end up getting a problematic relationship with alcohol. I want to be able to have the juice. If I want to have one, I want to have one. But most of the time I don't want to have one. Why? Because I don't want to feel suicidal three days later, low, depressed, anxious. I don't want to be really struggling, especially when times are difficult. I say this to business owners all of the time.

The time to drink is just after you've rang the New York Stock Exchange bell and your wife has texted you saying she loves you more than she ever has. When life is up here, knock your shoes off because you will feel shit for the following four or five days. It is going to impact you psychologically. You're going to be sluggish and tired and anxious and ruminating and all of those things.

When things are difficult, when you've got challenging times in your life, why would you pour petrol on that fire? Why would you add a depressant into this thing? They reckon one in three people are taking antidepressants. An antidepressant, no antidepressant if you look at Johann Harry's work has ever beaten the placebo. So less than 3% success rate for antidepressants and yet sleep deprivation is 100% successful as a depressant.

Not exercising is 100% successful over time as a depressant on the brain. So three of the most powerful, sorry, not sleeping, not exercising and drinking alcohol, three of the most impactful depressants and then people doing those things go into the doctor and the doctor says, here's a pill. Rather than stop drinking, sleep better and get some exercise. Absolutely. Well, I know that we've got a hard stop coming up.

I want to round the conversation off before we talk about where people can find all your work with revisiting Sir Richard Branson. So talk to me about meeting him decades later. Yes. So, I mean, I kind of forgot about the Branson story. I got overpaid and overworked as an oil broker and then when I changed my relationship with alcohol, I was like, no, I'm here to change the world. I know.

And, you know, I ended up randomly, I ended up meeting the Dalai Lama after we got featured on BBC World News launching One Year No Beer. And I got to ask him a question in front of thousands of people in Pisa. And what he said to me, which is a video you can see on our site, it was like the moment of understanding of who I was as a human being and while I was here. And I knew that this was the vehicle of why I was put on the planet. And I was like, okay.

And I went in on Monday morning and handed in my notice. At the time, that's like a low seven figure job. So earning very well. And my boss is like, what? Are you crazy? He's like, you can keep doing those two things on the same time. Just carry on. And I was like, no, I can't do another day. So far, that's the worst financial decision I've ever made, but the best decision for my life and the impact I'm trying to have in the world. Cut long story short, I'm trying to, I'm sorry.

All the way through running One Year No Beer, we raised quite a lot of money. So we've raised over five million pounds, almost all from our customers. So people would say to me, Ruri, even if I lose the hundred grand I'm investing in One Year No Beer, it wouldn't be equivalent to the value you've given me. And that's the value people feel after they've changed their relationship with alcohol. And they realize the truth that actually this thing is shit. The thing that you love, that you rely on.

The truth is, come for a journey with me and you're actually going to realize that you've been in a toxic relationship your whole life. And just like a toxic relationship, this thing is abusing you. And although you think you love it, and although you think it loves you, you don't. And it doesn't. It's taking everything away from you. It's taking your health, your mental health, your family, your success, your dreams, your goals, your sense of self. That is a toxic relationship.

So getting back onto the story, because I'm terrible at staying on track, as you've seen, I would, every single pitch I would tell people about the letter to Richard Branson. I just kept saying it. I kept saying it. I kept saying about the letter to Richard Branson. And I knew I just kept putting it out to the world. And then one day somebody heard me on social media mentioning about the Richard Branson story in the US. And I'd met him through a friend of a friend.

And he said, Hey, I've just heard your story. I'm going to Necker Island. Would you like to come with me? And I was like, wow, this is amazing. I'm going to go. Can't believe it. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. He was a friend of Richard's. And so I got ready to go on the show and sorry, I got ready to go and meet Richard Branson. And I was so excited, you know, to sit and the guy who was running it was like, Oh my God, I'm going to sit you next to Richard. He's going to love this story.

It's unbelievable. And the impact you're having and you can FaceTime your dad and you can say, look, dad, I made it, you know, from that thing. I was really excited. And then COVID hit and the trip to, um, to Necker Island got canceled. And sadly my dad died two months later. Um, and that was, um, pretty hard moment for me. Um, very, very difficult. He was my greatest champion, greatest supporter and all those things.

So, um, I then carried on, you know, putting out that good word and I started to hear over the next couple of years, Oh, you know, Richard's water sports instructor is doing OAMB. And I was like, Oh my God, we're getting closer. I can't believe it. You know, out there, Richard's cameraman is doing OAMB. And then eventually somebody very close. I heard, and I got in touch with the person very close. And they were like, I've just celebrated one year, no beer. You changed one life.

I can't believe it's absolutely amazing. And I was like, this is so cool. You know, I'm going to meet, but then nothing really happened. Now, as it is with running your own business, I woke up at three o'clock in the morning one day, which is pretty normal. And I saw the local paper here in Majorca or, you know, news online and it said Richard Branson in Majorca launching his new hotel. And I kind of thought, you know, fuck it. I'm just going to go up there.

Um, and so I just rocked up and I messaged this person who I knew and they were like, yeah, um, be great to meet you for a coffee. Just this open vague thing. So I was like, I'll head up. So I headed up there and I was calling, calling, trying to meet this person. I couldn't get an answer. And I thought, okay, um, I don't know what to do. And I asked someone, look, could I just grab a coffee somewhere? And there was like camera crews moving past and all this stuff is busy, busy place.

And they said, yeah, yeah, just go out to the terrace and grab yourself a coffee. And I walk out to the terrace in the terrace, the only person there standing in the parapet, looking out at the view is Richard Branson on his own of all the moments I'd arrived where he could have been. He was waiting for me. So I just walked up beside him and I said, Richard, can I tell you a story? And I said, he said, you know, is it funny? I was like, not really, but I might cry.

And he said, okay, well go for it. And I started to tell him the story about, you know, my journey and everything else. Got tearful and I told him about my dad dying, gave me a big hug. He's so nice. And he was like, look, I'm really sorry you didn't get that opportunity to FaceTime your dad at lunch, but why didn't you stay and have dinner with us tonight? And so, yeah, we stayed and had dinner. My wife came up and joined us. We hung out with billionaires for the evening.

There was a bunch of them. There was a whole bunch of billionaires. It was super cool. And yeah, he was super amazing about it. And then he wrote on his social media about meeting me and what an impact that was, which was really huge for us. And you can see that on my Instagram and things like that.

And I think the underlying message for that for me was, I think when you're doing something good, and I've seen this, you know, not just the meeting Dalai Lama, not just meeting Richard Branson, my team are like, we don't know how you do it, Ruri. How do these things happen? Like, things shift for you. And this is because we are doing something that the universe wants to happen. We are really helping people in the most genuine positive way we are helping people.

And so these doors and these things keep open. And I think more than that, you know, building a business is the hardest thing I've ever done. It's just, you know, never, ever, ever give up. Just keep going. So yeah, it was an amazing experience to meet him and hopefully it's the beginning of something together. We'll see. Beautiful. Beautiful. Yeah, he's someone one day I will get to sit down with him and interview him. It will happen. But, you know, obviously I'm not there yet.

A few more ladders, you know, steps in the ladder. But that being said, though, like I said, I'm going to jump on for the whole year and I'm going to parallel that with a friend of mine who's offered me counseling for a while now. And he's said that these numerous conversations a week are enough, but I think they're not because obviously I keep returning to the bottle, albeit, you know, a smaller version. It doesn't matter. I'm downplaying something that's definitely an issue.

So firstly, I want to commit to that myself. Secondly, for everyone listening, you know, tell them where, you know, what are they going to find on the platform and where can they find it online? And then where can they reach out to you on social media or the web as well? Totally. Well, please do reach out to me. I'd love to hear from you. So I'm on social media, that bastard name Ruri Fairbairns, but I'm R Fairbairns on most. But I mean, I'm not going to spell it out.

You won't remember, but I am the only Ruri Fairbairns. F A I R B A I R N S. I did spell it out there. Go to oneyearnobir.com. One year no beer dot com all written out. There you'll find our challenges, which is like a digital support program access to community. If you use the behind the shield code, it will just knock the price off to zero for you. It's free to help and support you. Our group coaching program, there's an offer to join that as a monthly subscription.

The first month will be free. The main program that we are focusing on now is called Complete Control. It's a bit of a juggernaut. It's a very intensive program. We send technology, we remotely monitor you. We help you understand how stressed out you are. We keep you accountable to good habits. We teach you about good sleep, breath work, meditation, there's hypnotherapy, there's tons of different modalities. We use multiple types of coaching during the program. It is amazing. It's game changing.

It's called Complete Control. You can see it on our site on there. Happy to do a decent discount for anybody from the Behind the Shield podcast. So just ping and mention Behind the Shield podcast. And yeah, reach out to me. I'm happy to hear from you and happy to support in any way I can. Thank you very much for having me on the show, James.