#993 - Katie Herzog - A Controversial New Cure for Alcohol Dependence

25:37It's not even a long period of time. There was maybe like a 20 minute period between the first drink and the second drink or the second drink and the third drink. That felt really, really good. And pretty quickly, you know, by the fourth drink and the fifth drink that euphoria is gone, I kept drinking in order to chase that buzz, but you unfortunately cannot recreate it. And then at that point, you know, I would get sort of slower and sloppy. But yeah, a lot of my drinking was in the effort to capture this one very specific feeling, where I think my endorphins and my dopamine is just raging in my brains.

26:13And that's at the very start. So yeah, interestingly, I guess, what is it? The top 10 % of drink is drink half of the alcohol. It's something like that. It might even be more than half. It's a massive amount. So I wonder how many people that means that 50 % of the consumption is done by 90 % of the people. It's something in that sort of region, which means that maybe lots of people are able to just get that first drink buzz, that one or two drink buzz and then not continue on. So it's interesting. I mean, there is a survey came out recently, this was either Gallup or Pew or something like this.

26:51Some survey came out recently that, what do you look at? This might be different than the UK, but Americans, the average American does not actually drink that much, right? So only about half of Americans drink alcohol period, it might be something like 54 % I'm forgetting the exact number. and among that 50 something percent, most people drink within the recommended CDC guidelines, which is a very moderate amount. I think at this point, it's like three or four drinks a week for women, maybe seven for men a week. So basically one alcoholic drink a day, no more than three in one sitting ever, things like that.

27:28So most people fall into that category. The people with, I mean, one in 10 Americans fall into the category of qualifying for alcohol use disorder. So it's still a massive number of people. We're talking about 30 million people in the United States, but that means nine out of 10 people are basically fine when it comes to this issue. What did you try before the elusive mysterious strategy that we're about to talk about? What were the different things that you did before that? So I did AA, I can never really stick it out. I did individual therapy, I did group therapy, I did this sort of cognitive behavioral therapy things like moderation management, smart recovery that have sort of less of a faith -based element.

28:16So these are things like tracking your drinks, just sort of strategies to drink less or to take more control over your alcohol consumption, drinking a glass of water in between alcoholic drinks. That stuff all went out the window for me pretty quickly because as soon as it was on as soon as I had my first drink like any pretence of moderation was just on because like that's I drank to get fucked up I didn't drink to like enjoy the taste of pap's blue ribbon You know the fine effervescence of a shitty beer. There's never really my thing So I did stuff like that and then I would do these like I did the master cleanse at one point which is this idiotic.

28:54You don't eat solid food for 10 days. You drink cayenne, lemon, water. I lasted for like three days and then I went to the bar. So I broke my fast with alcohol. I would do stuff like that. You know, I'm gonna get really into yoga. That's gonna solve my problems. I'm gonna, Sam Harris's meditation app is going to save my life. I tried stuff like that. Outpatient therapy. So I like groups therapy with other people who had who had similar problems that was particularly I would say ineffective for me and a lot of that was also based on principles of CBT. So going to these therapy sessions and you know I have a worksheet and I like write down the names of four people I can trust and I would write down like my mom, my dad, my sister, my favorite bartender.

29:45So that stuff just it just never really worked for me and a part of that was Honestly probably because I didn't take it seriously enough, but I did you know, I'm show up I I I did try things I never did rehab But I did try lots of other things Sounds like white knuckling it with well power isn't an option though. I tried that I tried that every day It's just I'm like a weak -willed motherfucker. I just don't I don't I don't I've said this before but for me every day at the gym is day one because there's never a day two. I've never been good at forming healthy habits and quitting bad habits. I sucked my thumb until I was nine.

30:27I have always had a very addictive, obsessive personality. A lot of people who get sober, this seems particularly true of men, are able to channel that into fitness or adventure sports. Not me, I wish. I really wish. I think maybe if I had a maybe if I start like micro -dosing testosterone, I'll be like, yes, I'm gonna channel all of that energy into doing towards. I'm gonna become an Iron Man. Yes, yes, I'm not gonna become. I might like, you know, watch 11 hours of television in a row. I can I can binge something like that, but I've never been good at sort of healthy habits. There is definitely a sense of the guys, the sort of classic mid 30s, mid 40s pivot toward endurance racing.

31:09Yeah. I think, I mean, it's fantastic to put your efforts into something which is great for your health and very difficult to do and inspiring and all the rest of it. But I wonder what you're running from. I wonder what. And that's not everybody, but it is, it is, it is lots of people. And I suppose, you know, for me, I have found a bunch of different outlets. that training has been one of them, meditation's been another. If you don't have the capacity to sort of build that structure together, then that outlet is entirely precluded to you. Like that avenue, you don't get to be the guy going and doing an Iron Man.

31:47You don't get to be the person who, I'm gonna go and do a 10 day sign that meditation retreat. My meditation's been so great recently, and I've been really loving it, and that's where I've been putting all of my effort. And I actually get dopamine and I get reward chemicals from the progress that I'm making in this new avenue here I'm gonna start new business or I'm gonna you know whatever fucking crocheting you know People whatever you do If that's not something that Appeals to you because the bad habits are so hard to break in the good ones are so hard to instantiate you It's it's making it even more of a headwind to try and sort of fly into to get out of this thing right and those things you know I don't have kids.

32:27I'm married and have a dog that I'm sort of obsessive about, but I don't have kids. I think for most people, I'm a podcaster by trade. I would have time to get deeply obsessed with fitness if I wanted to. I maybe don't have the sort of fortitude to do that. I think for most people, just live in life, taking care of your kids, driving your kids to soccer practice, that shit takes so much time that having a hobby, having a hobby that you get deeply obsessed with, like maybe during retirement, but I think for the average person is probably just trying to, you know, kind of get through the day. Like they don't really have time for that kind of thing.

33:09And - Alcohol use disorder in that way is kind of a luxury problem to have. Well, it seems like such a, it seems like such a silly way of putting it because it's so damaging to ones. Like, and it is not as though, like there's no need to do a privilege disclaimer. Like I have the privilege of becoming an alcoholic because we didn't have children because so many people you see who suffer from alcoholism are truly down and out. Although I think like the stereotypical homeless person, person living on the street now as probably alcohol might not be, I think I live outside Seattle. So we see more of like the fat and all lean than we did with like a bottle of wine in this bag these days.

33:52Yeah, it's unfortunate to think that there is sort of different levels of challenge that people come up against. How susceptible are you to the substance and then how non -s susceptible or limited are you in potential coping strategies or other modes of reward or other avenues that can go down? Yeah. In alcohol, it's sort of a rest development in a lot of ways. so developing those coping strategies. If alcohol is the coping mechanism that you have used from your teenage years into adulthood when something goes wrong or something goes right, that's one thing about getting sober or recovery or even getting control over your drinking.

34:31You have to learn new coping mechanisms. And that can be hard to do when you're in your 40s or 50s and your response to trauma or tragedy or even positive news has always been to grapple bottle. Before we continue, getting mobile data while traveling is still way harder than it should be. Public Wi -Fi is sketchy, roaming charges are the worst, and buying SIM cards in a foreign language after a 12 -hour flight is about as fun as playing with a dead moth. Which is where, sayly comes in. It's an app that gives you instant access to eSim data plans in over 190 countries so that you can get online the moment that you land no more, fumbling around with physical Sims, no more talking to a human to set it up, and no more holding your phone in the air, like Simba.

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35:47From the outside, it seems to me like A .A. was the gold standard. I know that in every TV show that I watch, it's always that. And the person always usually ends up being okay because the community and their faith sort of brings them background. but it seems evidently like it's not a panacea for everything. Right, it's not a panacea for everything. So the history of addiction treatment is pretty fascinating. So in the early days before programs like AA, and obviously alcohol addiction has, I think, probably existed as long as alcohol is in the first traces of human conception of alcohol was found in some pottery, some clay urn, in China from 9 ,000 years ago, some traces of rice wine or something like that.

36:38So people have been drinking for a long time, right? And you can see in early ratings and the archeological record that there's some record of not like long -term treatment programs, but like somebody that you could, somebody that you could go to dry out, right? And so that was sort of the early days of alcohol treatment. We're not based on long -term, long -term sobriety or long -term recovery. It was just a place to go to dry out, so basically survive with drawl. So there were, so for instance, the guy who created AA, his name is Bill Wilson. Before he created AA, and this is, you know, he wasn't the first person to start a peer group, but certainly probably the most successful in Western history at least.

37:31He went to this hospital in New York called it was called the Towns Hospital and he went there four different times and every time he would go they would give him the treatment dujure which was it was it was belidona which is basically a hallucinogen it's a poison and they would give give their patients this and and they would withdraw using this substance. Apparently a pretty painful, pretty horrible experience. These days withdrawal can be managed with sedatives and benzodiazepams and it's not, like so I thought going, I'd never done a formal withdrawal before I started writing this book. And my sense of what withdrawal would be, would be painful, right?

38:16You have the DT, the lyrium trimmings, the shakes, your ill, your sweating on a floor somewhere. I had to absorb the message of alcohol withdrawal from literature and from pop culture. These days it's totally different. You can go to a center, basically sit in a recliner for a few days and I pump you full of vitamins and give you some some medication and you're fine within a few days. This can even be done at home as well. But in the early days, it wasn't like that. And there were all sorts of sort of maybe not super effective kind of miracle carriers that were marketed at the time. And then Bill Wilson in the 1930s, so this is a guy who'd been a stockbroker.

38:57His life had absolutely deteriorated. And he got, he was at this Charles town hospital and he had this sort of come to Jesus' moment. He had a, it might have been a Beledon hallucination, but he had this, this moment where he saw a flash of light and he, and he was sort of reborn in that moment as a sober man. And then at some point, so he stayed sober for several months. And then at some point within the first, I think six months, maybe four months, he was on a work trip in Akron, Ohio. And he was fighting the urge to drink. There's, there's this concept called alcohol. I'm forgetting now, the alcohol deprivation effect, which you might think that once you go through a period of abstinence, the desire for alcohol weekends, but that's not actually what happens for a lot of people.

39:49So this concept, the alcohol deprivation effect basically means that once you go through a period of abstinence, your cravings can return stronger than ever. And so Bill Wilson was going through that. And so he had joined what is basically a temperance society. And he called some like locals that he found through some kind of phone tree thing. And he encountered this man who was a doctor in Akron, Ohio, his name is Dr. Bob. And they got together and they sat and they just talked about their problems for six hours. And that was the beginning of alcoholics anonymous. And so they started doing this.

40:26they started having meetings of people who had gone through this experience. And just they would sit in a room and they would talk about it. And they came up with these, you know, the 12 steps, the 12 traditions, they added some structure. And one of the early members of this group was a woman. She was one of the first members, she was one of the first female members of AA. Her name was Marty Mann. A good old dyke. She was a lesbian, although I don't know if they used that word at the time. And Marty Mann had, she had spent a lot of time in the UK. She came back, passed out on a stretcher, had to be carried off of whatever ship.

41:05The Queen Mary, HMS, whatever, whatever had to be carried off this boat. Came back to the US and continued to drink, right? And so she was killing herself, like many alcoholics do. Just suicide attempts, waking up and drinking gin every day, just life deteriorating. And so her doctor told her that she needed to go to this, go to this alcoholics anonymous meeting. And she was resistant, but she did it. And she said that she found her people. And Marty Mann was absolutely essential to the spread of the gospel of alcoholics anonymous because she had a background in PR. She was very well connected.

41:40So she used her connections to get AA and Hollywood movies and on the cover of magazines. And she is probably more so than even Bill Wilson in our Dr. Bob, the founders of AA for spreading the gospel of AA. And she also did something else, which she wanted to lower lessen the stigma of alcoholism, because alcoholism at this point was really considered a moral failing. And so she sort of conceptualized the disease model of AA. And a lot of people assume that AA sort of preaches the model, that preaches the idea that alcoholism is a moral feeling. They actually don't, they really rely much more heavily on this medicalized model.

42:24I have my issues with that sort of framing. I actually don't think that alcoholism is, I don't think it's very helpful to call it a disease because it's not like cancer. It's different, right? And anyway, so she spread that message throughout the land. And that is one of the reasons that AA became as popular as it did because it had a really good PR team. And AA, there were lots of other treatments throughout history. Things like there was a clinic called Shake Shadle that did a version therapy, right? Different different societies, different cultures. They, lots of cultures have come up with potential solutions to this program, to this problem.

43:05But AA, at least in the United States, sort of eclipsed all that for almost a hundred years. And now I think what we're seeing is a broadening of the options because AA does work work really well for some people. It offers community, support, accountability, a place to go, which can be really important if what you do is go to a bar or drink at home, just getting people out of their environment is really valuable. And I know many people whose lives have been saved by AA, but it doesn't work for everyone. I'm sorry, it doesn't work for everyone. And so what we're seeing now with the rise of groups like Sober Curious and there are apps.

43:47There's one called reframe that I keep getting ads for on Instagram is sort of a broadening. I think I think the the cultural stranglehold of AA is lessening a little bit. That doesn't mean it still doesn't exist on some level like courts can mandate that people who get in trouble with the law go to AA professional licensing organizations. If you get, if you're like, I went to meetings not that long ago where there was a pharmacist there and he wasn't there because he wanted to be there. He was there because he had a drinking problem and his boss found out and he was going to lose his pharmacy license if he didn't go to these meetings.

44:25Sober houses, they can mandate attendance in 12 -step programs. So for some people who are, you know, who are getting out of jail and need a place to live and they need to live at a halfway house, they have to enter 12 set programs. So it is really a mesh within our legal and criminal justice systems, at least in the United States. I don't know if that's as true in the UK. And it does, to be clear, like I don't know, it really does work for a lot of people. It just doesn't work for everyone, including me. That's a long answer to your question, sorry. It's fascinating. I was thinking about how hilarious it would be if somebody was mandated by a judge that they needed to go and do yoga.

45:06Or, you know, we need to see that you have completed a 30 -day streak on Sam Harris who's waking up. Yeah, equine therapy. You have to go swim a dolphins, something like that. Whitney Cummings does that. She says it's really good. I'm sure she does.

45:21So is there a particular taxonomy of drinker that you think AA does and does not work for? Is there something about you given that it is for some people, for many people, a great saving grace? What is it about you that it didn't and what is it about other people that it does? I think for me it's a couple things. The primary one is that AA never addressed the root cause of my drinking. And that was that I like to drink, right? So it's very simple, but I was physically and emotionally addicted to alcohol. And AA, going to meetings, did not curb my cravings. I needed something that would take care of my cravings.

46:04And AA couldn't do that for me. So I think that is fundamentally it was just that my cravings overrode any sort of desire to quit. I was completely imprisoned by these cravings. I also am not a joiner. I'm not predisposed to any sort of club whatsoever. I also, you know, there's a spiritual element of AA that I found to be a turn -off. I did go to, they have meetings for atheists and agnostics. I like those. I found them a little self -righteous in a way that I really appreciated. But it didn't, it just didn't stick with me. And, and, and also, you know, there's that level of, when you work the steps, there's a level of introspection that is required.

46:56I don't like introspection. Just to be frank with you, I'm like the one lesbian who doesn't like the process in this world. I don't like to talk about my, this is why I like doing these interviews and writing this book was very operant. You really chose a difficult thing to be talking about for the next couple of years. I did. I absolutely did. I don't like emotional child chow. I find it to be like very uncomfortable. And so anything where I was sort of expected to take like a searing look into my soul. I don't believe in this soul. I believe that I had a drinking problem. I was physically and mentally addicted to alcohol and I just needed to, needed to solve that problem.

47:35But for a lot of people that is exactly what they need. And I think that's especially a true of people who have done sort of more damage than I have. I did damage. I hurt other people for sure. But I wasn't, you know, I'm not a parent. I didn't destroy my family. I didn't, I don't think I, there are probably some people who think I should make amends to them. They're going to be waiting for a while. Not because I don't think that's important. I do think it's important for some people, but my way of making amends is to basically remove myself from people's lives. So if I have heard somebody, my punishment is that I no longer deserve to their presence in my life, right?

48:20That's my way of making amends. Um, yeah, I just, I think like some combination of my personality. I'm a skeptic by nature. Um, I'm the type of person who would like go into an A, meeting and be like googling recidivism statistics during the meeting. I just, I'm the sort of person A, it was never going to work for. Highly non hypnotizable in that regard. I listen to your show on hypnotism and I also want to get my genome map. I fear that we are both built from the same sort of building blocks there. I think you touch on some of this really interesting, which is most people, when they think about a person who's going to attend AA, is, well, this person knows that their drinking is bad, but it's just out of their control.

49:08and it's a destitute and the despondent and they don't enjoy it, but they're gripped by this sort of evil thing and it's at the bottom of a bottle. And then there's other people who go, I think Drinking's pretty awesome. It makes me feel pretty good. And I need to quit but don't want to stop. Yes. That's the fundamental problem. That's the paradox. I need to quit but I don't want to stop. I love this thing, but I hate this thing. I think that's the, you've captured the inner monologue of many in alcoholic. Okay. If AA were invented today with all of the evidence that we know about now and it didn't have the stranglehold, do you think that meds would be its first step?

49:57That's a very good question. I think that if Bill Wilson himself founded it, I think yes. So Bill Wilson was extremely open -minded. In the 1950s, he experimented with psychedelics. And this was very controversial within AA because the ethos of AA has always been sobriety, full sobriety, and how can you be sober if you're doing psychedelics? And he sort of lost that battle. But he was extremely open -minded. And my book starts with a quote from the big book, which is the Bible of AA. It's the sort of the big text that everybody reads and studies. And the quote, I'm going to I'm going to butcher it, but it's something like Some day science might find a cure for the alcoholic, but that hasn't happened yet and The thing it so that was written in the 1930s.

50:46I think that science has actually found a cure or at least for some people I need to I need to couch that in many ifs, but I think for for some people There's a cure and I I it worked for me Take it away. I explain this super futuristic just an experimental, successful procedure. Before we continue, if your workouts feel flat, your recovery slow or you've just been feeling off, it might not be a training plan or your diet, it might be something a bit more boring, like zinc. And while supplements like Toncatalee can help zinc quietly plays a huge role in testosterone production. Strength, recovery, and energy, and most people are chronically low on it, which is why I'm such a huge fan of Mementus' zinc.

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52:02A checkout that's L -I -V -E -M -O -M -E -N -T -O -U -S .com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom. A checkout. Okay, so the crazy thing is that this is not futuristic, it's not experimental. So there is a drug and opioid blocker that was first synthesized in 1963 by a company called Indo Laboratory. So we are talking about, this is, you know, before the Civil Rights Act. This is old shit. And this drug, it was owned by DuPont for a long time. They bought the first laboratory that synthesized this into laboratories. And it's an opioid antagonist, so an opioid blocker. It was initially developed to treat opioid addiction, which at the time would have been like morphine in heroin, less setinol and oxy and whatever, they're selling on the streets these days.

52:50And it, but it also works for alcohol use disorder. and it works like this. So because it's an opioid blocker, I'll just all explain how it works with alcohol specifically. So you take the drug and it blocks the your receptors from getting an endorphin rush from alcohol. So it's pretty simple. The molecules sit on your opioid receptors and they prevent you from getting that you fork high that we talked about earlier when you drink alcohol. Now, there are different ways to take Naltryxone. The way that is most commonly prescribed is not the way that I did it. So the way it's most commonly prescribed is for people to take it every day, whether or not they plan on drinking.

53:36So you wake up in the morning and you take this drug and it curves your cravings. And for some people, that works. There's also a long acting form called Vivitrol. So it's a shot in the butt. It's in you for 30 days. It releases slowly over time. Oh, and I should say, This has been FDA approved for alcohol, the treatment of alcohol use disorder since 1994. So this is not actually a new treatment. This is an old treatment. The way that I took it was developed by a man called John Davidson Claire. He was an American researcher who did most of his work. He went to grad school in the US, did his PhD here, but then he moved to Finland, and he worked for alcohol laboratories, which was a state -owned sort of an interesting company, especially from an American perspective.

54:21So it was a liquor distributor that also had a lab. So tax payer funded, funded by presumably, I don't know what the liquor taxes were in Finland in the 1970s, but on the bottom floors of this company, they would be selling and distributing alcohol and figuring out how to get more people to drink. And on the top floors where the lab was, or maybe it was vice versa, maybe they put the researchers in the basement, I don't quite remember at the moment. You had people like John Davis and Claire who were working on treatments for alcohol use disorder. And John Davis and Claire, so he did most of his research on mice.

55:01And he realized at one point that he was one of the first people described the alcohol deprivation effect that I mentioned earlier, where after a period of abstinence, your cravings come back stronger than ever. And he wanted to interrupt that process. So he started out by giving lab rats, opioid, various drugs, including this opioid blocker now, Trexone. And then he would give them access to alcohol. And what he found was that these lab rats, who's opioid receptors were blocked because of this drug, they would over time, and these were, these were a, this was a breed of lab that had been, and it had been bred specifically to have a propensity for alcohol addiction.

55:46They were bred to like alcohol, which is actually sort of hard to do. Rats don't, and mice don't typically, like they're not boosers naturally. But so these ones had been specifically not GMO'd, but you know good old fashioned. You take two rats that like to digs. Yeah, you make them fuck. So you find the ones that are hanging out the bar late at night, get them together, put them in a room together. And so, um, so he started these experiments. And what he found was that, yes, these lab rats, those opioid receptors were blocked when given alcohol, they would refuse it. They no longer had any interest in drinking, and this effect lasted over time.

56:25And then he started writing about this. This was later, later started doing human studies, and he developed what is now called the Sinclair Method. And so the Sinclair Method is very simple. You take an opioid blocker, Usually in Naltrexone and there are other ones. There's one called Nalfamine. That's more common in Europe than it is in the US. You wait an hour, which is how long it takes for the structure to metabolize in your system and then you drink as normal. And so that's what I did. I found out about this from an article in the Atlantic and during COVID, my drinking accelerated to the point where it was becoming very problematic.

57:04My wife is a nurse, so she was, you know, a essential worker, as we call them, Mac then. I won't be cared about them. And she was gone a lot. So I used my recreational time. I had been laid off from my job. I was a reporter for the stranger, which was an alt -weekly in Seattle. And when I got laid off from my job, I did what everyone else did. I started a podcast and I stayed home and I drank by myself. And I did this for two years. I drank basically every time I light my wife left the house for two years. I I didn't tell anybody, I didn't tell her, she had no idea. And then it got to the point where I knew this was, I either had to come clean and confess and tell her and maybe go to rehab and probably go to AA and I didn't want to do that or I had to solve this problem on my own.

57:50And I had read about the Sinclair method in the Atlantic in an article from several years before and I decided to do it and I did it and it worked. That's crazy. I mean, we're still married by the way. She's gonna be real shocked when she finds out about this book. I was gonna say yeah, what was the What was the reveal like when you Regime that conversation and how much of it was propelled by the potential book coming up? None of it. I had not written the book by the time I told her so I so to like cut a long story short I did this for about seven months. I was very regimented about it. I Planned my drinking days.

58:28I always took my pill. There was a small handful of occasions when I skipped it for whatever reason but for the most part, I was very regimented about this. And this is one of the things about this treatment. You can't half -ass this. It's like AA in that respect. Like you got to go, you got to 100 % commit because if you don't take the pill and you drink without your opioid receptors being blocked, you're, this inclement that is basically a process of unlearning a behavior or it's called extinction or pharmacological extinction because there's a medication involved. And so if you drink without the drug and you get that endorphin dump and that dove of mirage, everything that you've just learned, it's not going to be undone overnight.

59:10But if you do this, if you don't really stick to the protocol or if you don't wait the full hour for it to metabolize, it's just not going to work. It's going to confuse your brain and your brain will continue to seek out that high. what you're trying to do is to give your brain the message that that high no longer exists. You no longer get pleasure from alcohol and over time your brain will stop craving it. And for me that took about seven months of like actively doing this and Claire method. And over time I started, you have to incorporate habit change and mindfulness which not natural for me.

59:46I'm not a mindful person. But you have to do these sort of, you have to, you have to make some changes in your life. It's not as simple as just taking the pill and drinking. It's pretty simple, but it's not that simple. And over time, I started pushing my drinking start time back. So when I started starting to drink at noon, maybe I'd start at two or maybe three. And I started incorporating more alcohol -free days into my week. And alcohol days or alcohol -free days are exactly what they sound like. So that's days when you're not drinking and you're not taking the pill. And that's what's different about the Sinclair method then sort of the daily use of this drug, taking it every morning or the shot, Bivotrol, which is in your body for a month, you only take it when you're drinking and on the days when you're not drinking, you don't take it because you want your endorphin receptors to be keyed up and on those days you go out and you do things that are gonna spur a sort of natural high.

1:00:40You know, go for a hike, have good commerce, go eat good meals, get laid if you can, you know, you You try to retrain your brain into seeking pleasure elsewhere because you're no longer getting it from alcohol. So I did this for about seven months and then I decided to try for an alcohol for a month and it was easy and this had never been easy for me before but it was uncomplicated. And after that month I just never started drinking again and it's been three years since that. And I didn't tell my wife. I didn't tell her. I waited an extra. I wanted to like get a year of sobriety under my belt before I told her.

1:01:22And then a year came and went and honestly, I had stopped stinking about drinking. Like I think about drinking now because I'm promoting this book. I wrote the book. It's more a part of my life. But for that period of time between quitting drinking, between my last drink and deciding I was going to write this book, I just did it. Think about alcohol and that's what I wanted because you know everybody sort of knows about the physical effects of alcohol, right? The headaches, the hangovers, the shakes, but for me the killer was was mental because alcohol was on my mind 100 % of the time for most of my adult life, right?

1:02:06And for people who haven't experienced addiction, I think the best way to sort of explain it is like When you have a crush on somebody or you're newly in love with somebody and you all you think about is that person like you're going to work you're having conversations with your hopefully not with your spouse but you know you're like everything in your mind is focused on this desire. That's what addiction was like for me. So I thought about it. I spent 20 years of my life thinking about, I still managed to have a career in a life in relationships, but I spent 20 years of my life thinking about alcohol almost every moment of the day.

1:02:45It was in the back of my mind. And the Sinclair method in this drug freed me from that. So I basically stopped thinking about it. And then I told my wife after it was more than a year, I think it was like a year and a half after I told her, She was surprised for sure, but not mad. I like married well above my weight, both physically and morally. And so we're still married. My wife was like sad for me that I'd gone through this thing, but she was also, I think, impressed that I had solved. I had a problem and I fixed it on my own. And I would never advise people to be like, do this without social support because in everything that you do, social support is going to make it easier.

1:03:26but I didn't do that. I did loads of skeptic again as is on -brand. I did talk to people because I was also doing a lot of research about this. I'm a journalist and so I would, when I had questions, I would call people and there's a robust online community. That's one of the ironies about the Sinclair method is that this is one of those cases and there aren't many of these where you can get better information typically from Facebook groups and Reddit and YouTube, then you can from your own GP. So I was involved in these online communities and having conversations about it and interviewing people, but I wasn't talking about it with the people who mean most of my life.

1:04:09Why is it that doctors are still hesitant to prescribe Dal Trackson or talk about it or educate about it, even if it's got strong evidence? So there's lots of answers to that question. The first answer I think goes back to medical education. So I don't know how it is in the UK, but in the US, historically addiction medicine has been a very, very small part of a medical, of medical education. So I talked to doctors who are, you know, in their fouries and fifties who did four years of medical school, then four years of residency, maybe did some extra training. Now they're GPs, they're family doctors, or they work in an ER.

1:04:50So they're seeing people every day who suffer from some kind of substance abuse disorder, whether that's alcohol or anything else. And they're in that, you know, eight years of medical training and education, the entirety of their training on addiction was maybe one hour. Maybe they were told to attend and AA meeting. So historically, it has just not been a part of medical education in the US. This is changing. So there are currently three drugs that are FDA approved to treat alcohol use disorder. Naltrexone is one of them. There's also anabuse, which has been around since the 1950s or been FDA approved for the 1950s.

1:05:32And there's one called a campusate. So and there's also various off -label drug, other drugs that are used in an off -label basis. Now every med student who goes through a psychrotation is going to get education on at least those three drugs. So this is changing and it's changing really rapidly. Part of this has to do with the opioid crisis, I think. So for a long time within the recovery industry, the idea of harm reduction was sort of anathema. You know, nobody, not nobody. But a lot of these institutions were based on 12 -stripped principles. And in 12 -stripped principles, you don't tell people to go take the box on or method on.

1:06:17You tell them to seek help from, to confess their, to admit that they're powerless, to go to meetings every day and sort of will their way through it. But that doesn't work very well for opioid addiction. And so there has been a shift in recent years towards principles of harm reduction and medication as is the therapy. So that's part of it. Just straight up, doctors are not educated. The Sinclair method has an added barrier to uptake, which is that it requires drinking. So now, Trifxum doesn't require drinking and lots of doctors prescribe it, take it daily and don't drink with it. But the Sinclair method gives people permission to drink.

1:07:01And that's going to be a tough sell for a lot of doctors. Not just because, right, and for families. And, you know, this, it sounds like it's going to do what? Right. You're going to, you're telling me I can cure diabetes with donuts. Like it sounds crazy. I understand that. There's also legal reasons. Right. So if you're a doctor and your patient comes to you and says, I'm having a drinking problem and you say, okay, here's a deal. Take this drug and then go get a six pack of beer. Enjoy yourself. And your patient does that and goes and kills someone in their car. You don't want to be legally liable for that.

1:07:35So there are all sorts of barriers specifically to the Sinclair method that prevent this from being better known. Now, there's also economic factors here, right? So now, Trexon is a cheap generic drug. It's been cheap and generic for a long time. And no drug company is going to pay to market it because they could just be undercut by the drug company down the street. So there are several factors here. Another one, another theory, there's a guy named Percy Menzies. He was a, he was a drug rep for DuPont. And so he was one of the, one of the, this is back in this, in the 80s. He was one of the first people trying to sell this drug.

1:08:15Two doctors, or I don't know if, I don't know if drug reps like that turn, but trying to get doctors to adopt this drug for use of treating heroin addiction. And Percy found when he would go talk to doctors that they were completely uninsertid in it because at that point, methadone had sort of cornered the market. They thought that they had this gold standard and they weren't interested in anything else. The other thing is, this is an opioid antagonist. It has the word opioid in it. And so Percy thinks that doctors could be just straight up turned off by that because It's not an opioid. It's an opioid blocker, but it sort of emotionally feels like you are giving opioids to your patients.

1:08:57It's no, you know, you know, opioids are sort of a they're on the outs these days. Yes, yeah, it's a it's poor branding right now. I would say to try and get that done. It's so it's it feels to me like the whole kind of alcoholic alcohol use disorder world has been over -moralized and undimedicalized. Yes. I think that's kind of how it feels. I think you're completely right about that. It's sort of ironic because a lot of people will say, if asked, I'll say, yes, alcoholism is a disease, but it's not a disease that we typically treat with medications. And again, I have complicated feelings about that framing.

1:09:40I don't think it's particularly helpful. So it's unsure that it is a disease, but something that you should treat with medications. Right. We'll put a treat with medications. Right. And now, Trixon doesn't work for everyone. I want to be really clear with this. So earlier we talked about those two types of drinkers, right? Reward drinkers and relief drinkers. And this information, I learned this all from a guy named Joe Vopacelli. He's this fantastic clinician and researcher out of Penn and Joe's studies. He's been working with now Trixon for decades. And some of his early studies were used for the FDA approval of this drug and Joe explained this to me.

1:10:18For people for reward drinkers, this is, people like this tend to be binge drinkers, right? The people who are going out, going to clubs, dancing in the town, fountain, whatever. People who get energized from alcohol, now trek stone can work really, really well. It's almost, he actually used the term miracle pill, which is not something, this is like a, you know, this is a real doctor here. This is not a term that doctor that we really use, it can almost be a miracle pill for a miracle cure for that population. For the other types of drinkers, relief drinkers, people who get the sedating effect, it has almost no effect.

1:10:58Why? I think it's... Okay, so part of this, this is like sort of an open question, but the theories that I read and I heard from researchers is that it has something to do with one particular allele. So one particular gene variance. It's called ASP40 and the Mew opioid receptor.

1:11:24So having that possessing that allele does not guarantee that NellTrackstone will work for you, but it's a strong indicator that it may work. If you don't have that, have that allele, it's a strong predictor that it will not work. Right, okay. And that will tend you toward a particular type of alcohol use and a particular type of response to alcohol too. That is the theory, yes. Right, that's interesting. I've just checked. I checked it. Genetic and lab reports, the ASP40 variant you're asking for refers to the OPRM1 and A118G polymorphism to looking through your genetic reports, you do not have the ask 40 or OPRM1 results shows the AA genotype, Ascend 40, Ascend 40 when you do not carry it.

1:12:13So no, so I would be useless. You might, it might not, it would be interesting to, do you drink now? No, I, it was an interesting journey, I guess, with regards to alcohol for me. I never had a problem with it in terms of a dependency, but I was a party drinker. But you know, every two weeks I would send it in club promoted fashion. And then it got to the end of my 20s. So what we're talking about now, 28, I think 27, 28 would have been the first time I did it. So maybe nine years ago. And I know that low and no movements, kind of all the rage and morning ice plunge parties and run clubs and stuff are kind of everywhere.

1:12:5610 years ago, nine years ago, that really was not the case at all. it was not trendy to be against the grain with regards to even social drinking. There was just some inclination that I had that alcohol was holding me back, even though I wasn't using it that frequently. I do get bad hangovers. I think I tend to waddle a mood sometimes, and if you do, and then you crank a hangover on top of it, that's really going to turn it up. I just had one really bad hangover one day, and I was like, I'm not going to drink for six months. I just had this idea in my mind. So I went six months sober and loved it.

1:13:35And then I was in Bali and had a corona. I was like, okay, I've done my six months and I'll break it one. I'm in Bali and I'll go back to, yeah, I'll see what drinking's like. I did it for three months, really didn't like it. So I'm going to do another six, went back for one or two weeks after that, had one or two, a couple of beer nights out and did it for a thousand days. and then since then, basically I'll drink less than five times a year and it will be a year or a couple of years or something like that. And I'm curious, when you drink, what is the effect? You get high -energized sort of fast, or does it chill you out?

1:14:14It's a good question. It's harder to answer than you might think. Like it does. I would say in the past, it might have been, and this is what I said earlier on in my when does it remind of being more energized and being infusing also would have been coupled up with unspeakable and pronounceable drugs from a guy in a toilet somewhere. Which, you know, will supercharge anything. And there's also the social aspect, right? So if you're going out and your friends around and there's loud music and you're dancing, that's also going to be a natural amplifier of this sort of euphoric effect. And I think it would be hard to parse out is that the booze or is that the mood?

1:14:56Yeah, the collective effort. Or it's set in setting for alcohol. But whereas now, you know, if I do have a beer or a glass of wine or something, it's as we're trying to work out why everyone's commenting on the Ukraine when they don't have any expertise in it over a good stake at dinner. You know, like that, it's a very different sort of atmosphere. Yes. And maybe that is the sort of thing that I want. And also, I generally chilled out. I'm not sending it in the same way that I used to previously. Anyway, I made a big song and dance about this because it was as the show was starting and it was a big part going sober or what I called at the time, elective sobriety, which was like choosing to as a productivity strategy as opposed to for some sort of need.

1:15:41Sober maxing. Sober maxing, that's it, it's correct, yes, yes. I was, I mean, I still am. I don't think I need to kind of fly the flag for it so much anymore, but it was a huge part of my identity for the first sort of three or four years of the show. The reason I don't think I need to talk about it quite that much is it's less of a big part of my life because it's more just habituated and that's kind of the way that I exist. But also, I think the world has sort of taken that and run with it. You know, what is it now? I think that the WHO says that there is no safe level of alcohol consumption.

1:16:14and this huge meta meta meta analysis by the Lancet came back and basically said that there's no such thing as a safe level of alcohol assumption. That one glass of red wine, oh, but the resveratrol that comes from the red grapes, it's like you have it being offset by all of the stuff that it's housed in. You could just see the grapes. Yeah, exactly. And it's not good. There is no benefit. The one benefit that you could see is to go like a Warren Buffett style approach, which is the stress of trying to be perfect, or kill you more Obviously, the new imperfections. And I can see a place for that.

1:16:44But if you're looking just straight up physiologic, a cubum and piled, like it's not, this is not the direction to go down. But it was a huge, huge part of me and my life. And I remember, even for me, as somebody who wasn't dependent, wasn't drinking that regularly, was around the party seen a lot, I remember how triggering it was for all of the people that I used to party with when I'd say that I wasn't drinking. And especially if you're in your 20s and especially if you're the club promoting, you're supposed to bring the party. And that meant that when I said I wasn't drinking, the responses that I got from people were, as far as I could see, really outsized, I was very surprised by how triggered other people were by it, by how mean they got.

1:17:34I was kind of in a fortunate position that I was the top of the tree within this industry. So there was only so far that you could, like it's like taking the piss out of Joe Rogan for the microphone that he's not using anymore. And you're like, yeah, but he's like the guy that runs it. Right. So it's, you know, and it was kind of the same, at least a little bit in the world of club promotion for me, that you could push me a little bit, but not that far. However, one of the things that did happen was people stopped inviting me out. Yeah, you're a downer. They didn't want to and the other thing which I'm sure that you've seen too and it must be a difficulty Must be white so hard if you're friends with people who use alcohol to get sober is that Your sobriety throws their drinking into sharp contrast.

1:18:15Yes, and other people do not like the spotlight being placed on them in Reflection of somebody that's making a change and yeah, I mean I wrote So, I wrote so much about this, about the fact that if the only friend that you can bear to be around are ones that you have to drink to be able to spend time with, then you don't have friends, you have drinking partners. If the events that you're attending are ones that you need to consume alcohol to be able to get through, then the problem is not your alcohol use, the problem is the shitty events that you're going to. Like, you know, just this endless list of very obvious insights in retrospect that were all couched underneath this lifestyle that uses alcohol.

1:18:53Like in the UK, I don't know if this is the same in the US, I haven't seen it here even though I fly a lot. In the UK, if you go to any working class town airport, Newcastle Manchester Liverpool Birmingham, something like that, if you go to any of those airports between the months of March and October, summer holiday -ish trips, six in the morning, five in the morning, the bar will be open, and people will be treating the opportunity to have a beer, like it's this, it's like it's naughty. Like it sort of, it shouldn't be allowed, but oh, we're gonna treat ourselves to something. And I always found that so fucking cringe.

1:19:32Like I always found it, I was like, oh my God, the highest point of subversive,

1:19:45like anarchistic contribution that you can have is having a beer at five in the morning. And I get it, like people are allowed to enjoy what they're allowed to enjoy, but I don't think that people are enjoying that I think they're enjoying the story that they tell themselves about what that means and I think that that's something which is much easier to change and it's something that I'm seeing So yeah, again my long -winded way of saying Oddly enough even though alcohol was never something that was a huge Part of my life going sober was massively formative because it allowed me to finally get a fucking meditation habit and finally actually wake up and go to bed at the same time.

1:20:22Finally actually get some journaling done. Finally start a podcast and do because I wasn't resetting these very difficult to do habits, right? You go into the gym and eating well and getting up on time and doing all the rest of the stuff is hard enough to do as it is. If you're not shaking the etch of sketch every two weeks to reset all the program and then day one, no chance in day two, still kind of not in day three. Oh, okay, maybe I'm sort of slowly getting back there. And I always wondered, like, why am I just permanently feels like I'm not making progress at the speed that I should. And the answer was kind of really subtly staring me in the face, which is, well, you're choosing to kind of give yourself an illness for a couple of days twice a month.

1:21:04Right. Right. That was it. Yeah, I found that after I got sober, I found that it almost felt like a life hack. And this is not like, like, I'm not a, I'm not a maximizer. I'm not anything piled. Well, I'm not so impilled. But it did, it did feel like a life hack because I lived for so many years with this mental obsession, the physical, the physical effects of alcohol, but especially the mental obsession that was such a distraction from anything else in my life. I couldn't optimize shit. I still can't really optimize shit. How did you get anything done? Because I've listened, I've listened to your podcast that You seem to have a really fantastic recall.

1:21:41You've got great stories. You're working as a writer. The book's wonderful. I love the pods that you've done in the past that I've heard. Those do not smack to me all the person whose brain has been adult by alcohol, who's never been able to think about anything who's had their mind cycles captured by worrying about where the next drink's gonna come from or if my wife's gonna find those bottles that I hid in the back garden or whatever. That doesn't smack me as that. So are you the prototypical functional alcohol used to sort of person or what? Well, I wasn't for a long time. So until I was 30, I worked dead end entry -level jobs that I was usually fired from within a few months and spent all of my time at a bar.

1:22:24At the bar, there was one bar I liked in particular. And then at 30, I started to get my shit together. I took an unpaid internship at a public like radio station. And I did this purely out of pettyness because I had been broken up with someone who worked in public radio and I was like bitch. I'm gonna get your job and I'm gonna do it better than you. I'm gonna win. That's how petty I am. And so I started to get my shit together then, but I was still working at a deficit because, and I also moved a lot during this period. So I would live somewhere for a few years, maybe I think at the max at the most like four years.

1:23:04And then I would kind of burn my bridges. I would run out of jobs. And then I would leave for a new town. And I would start to cycle over again. That was actually a fairly effective way of getting clean for at least a little while, like removing myself from the environment that I was in. But so I really did not start even really attempting to make career moves until I was 30 years old. And then I got, I did get serious about, I decided I was gonna be a journalist and I did get serious about that, but I still had many, many setbacks. And at that point, I had kind of aged out of like heavy club culture and party culture because just like my friends weren't doing it as much.

1:23:46So I did much more of my drinking at home by myself. So I really shifted around that period to like being the girl, being like a party girl who everybody knew as a party girl to being somebody who had a much more like not, like equally problematic, but much more private drinking experience. And there are lots of people who, when I was reading, when I was working on the book, I talked to an entrepreneur who I will not mention his name, but you have heard of him who was drinking 40 drinks a day, like low alcohol drinks, but 40 beers a day, who also thought of the low alcohol beer as a day. It's just an immense amount of liquid.

1:24:21He probably had to wear a fucking diaper. Holy shit. So, and then also like, think about the 1950s, right? When people are having three Marchini lunches and then going back to the office after this, you know, that has almost completely left the culture. So our standards really have changed. And then, go ahead. Now, we have, like, what is acceptable and what is considered problematic drinking has changed so much that like, what I consider problematic drinking would not have registered in 1950. I remember hearing some story about the introduction of tea houses or coffee houses, I think, into a great Britain, and when that changed from being the public house where everybody would go to meet and talk during the day, and that encouraged a slightly sloppier type of conversation to then, oh, well, you don't just need to drink the alcohol, perhaps you can drink the caffeine, and this with some sort of springboard boon for idea generation and may have contributed to the Renaissance and stuff like that.

1:25:27What is, I'm curious. So I did study abroad in the UK when I, and I chose there for two reasons. One, the drinking age was, is what, 18? And I was 20 at the time or 19 or 20. And two, this was the less important reason, you speak English. And so I, so I did study abroad over there. And I had classes on Monday all day. and then Tuesday until noon, that was my entire work week, my school schedule, ended at Tuesday at noon. And there was a pub on campus, the Student Union was an actual union, and there was a pub and pool tables, and we drank fucking snake bites, that horrific... Half -sider, half -logger with a little bit of like her and juices.

1:26:09Yeah, and it's like worse coming out the next day, it's disgusting. And just the drinking culture there was, I loved it. I absolutely loved it, but I'm curious. I mean, yes, in the US, we have definitely seen, like we can see this in polling, Gen Z is way less boozy than millennials in my generation was. They're also having less sex, they're seeing each other less. There's all sorts of downstream effects, I think connected to the phone. But has this changed in the UK at all as well? or people still losing it up there? I think it's very similar. My colleagues and ex -business partners from the industry that I spend my life in, it does feel a little bit to me like I sold Bitcoin at $120 ,000 because the market has really hit quite an aggressive downturn.

1:27:07It's just not the done thing and you know, it is a confluence of all of this stuff because if the nightclubs are less busy because more people, you're not just competing as a nightclub with the darts around the corner or the hubermann podcast telling you that you shouldn't be drinking alcohol, you're also competing with Netflix and HBO and TikTok and just the vegetable culture. Right, I'm just gonna veg out on the couch and you're competing with changing dynamics in terms of what people tell, well, weed is now more prevalent in the UK. I know it's massively, maybe even to the stage where more Gen Z smoke and drink now, I think.

1:27:44So there's a lot of competition for what your potential substance of choice is, whether it's the environment that you're going to be in, whether it's the people that are around you, whether it's the social norms about that, whether it's the education level that you've got and understanding of the health effect, whether it's the alternatives that you've got to get a buzzon, whether it's the screens that can stop you from going out if the house at all, whether it's social anxiety from being arrested development during COVID, it really is in many ways a perfect storm to stop people from drinking.

1:28:15In many ways, that's good, but we are already seeing how quickly the world's turned. Only a decade ago for me, it was revolutionary to say that I wasn't going to drink. And now we have, I think I saw a Scott Galloway clip the other day of him saying I would way rather someone go out and get smashed than sit in the house and like stare at the screen because very quickly as with everything the pendulum has swung so quickly back the other way they're like, well, no, we're worried about this thing now. We've got to be very concerned about the isolation. So it gets it's a completely legitimate fear because it's not just that young people aren't drinking, which it's hard to argue that that's not a net positive, but they're also not socializing with each other in person.

1:28:59And I cannot see that as in that positive. They're not having sex, which, you know, maybe there's some net positive there as well for, you know, we want people to have to be responsible with their bodies. But if we have, you know, generations of people coming up who don't know how to interact with each other in person, I don't know. It was, I mean, that, that right of passage thing that I said, it really is. And as much could I have learned the lessons that I needed to without going out and parting? Maybe, but given that whatever it is, you know, maybe 90 % or 95 % drink 50 % of the alcohol, it seems that most people aren't graduating into becoming alcohol dependent.

1:29:43Yes. And if that's the case, there's probably a pretty good argument to be made that it is maybe a net positive, that it does sort of expedite your learning. How many people met their partners. I mean, you know, meet your girlfriend in a nightclub. Is that the best play? I don't know. At least the girlfriend for the week or the night. That's true. That's true. That's true. Yeah, it is a, it probably is there is certainly something that's been lost from that and the sort of massive surveillance culture that we have, I think, that made everybody much more worried about messing up or doing something embarrassing.

1:30:20We used to do this bar crawl called Carnage, which was a T -shirt bar crawl, and you wore the T -shirt as your ticket, and then there was tasks on the back that you had to take off, like, pulled a pig, swapped shoes with a random... Wait, will it a pig? Pulled a pig, like got off with somebody who's really ugly and fat. Oh, that's terrible. That is so awful. It was 2006, okay, so we were allowed to... Makes sense. It's a different world. And... Different, it means a different thing in Austin. and that's a barbecue joint. That's true.

1:30:54That Larry Lauti culture would not, you would not even be able to get two feet down the street with that in the modern world because this fucking surveillance state run by gullible volunteers, this sort of starsy for the Angry Birds generation, would have captured everything. So you pulling the pig or you throwing up in a bush somewhere, That is immortalized on the internet for the rest of the time. I didn't even younger age. When I was a kid, when I was 15, my parents left me at home for a weekend. I hope they're not listening to this if they are. I'm sorry. I fucking took their car and I drove around all weekend.

1:31:34I had a giant party at their house. They never found out. Today, they would have a tracker on me in the form of my phone. And every neighbor would have a ring camera, where they would have a ring camera. Capturing you as you could pass. Capturing you. Yeah, so I don't know how young people today get away with shit. And I do think those are valuable lessons to learn. I'm not sure what the value is, but I think it's still valuable. It's fascinating. So is this, what is it that you're hoping to achieve with this? Are you hoping to make more people aware that this is a particular solution for people that are drinking too much?

1:32:14is it to sort of campaign to make this more widespread among doctors? All of the above, yeah. I want the main message of the book is, you know, the book is about the Sinclair method in Nell Trek Zone and it is sort of a step -by -step. This is self -help, which the fact that I Katie Herzog wrote a self -help book would shock anybody who knew me 10 years ago. It's definitely a twist. No one saw this coming. So, but part of it is to give people a guide because when I was doing this, there were YouTube videos and Facebook and Reddit and lots of you can hire coaches who are really helpful in terms of helping people know what to expect, how to deal with side effects and setbacks and things like this.

1:32:56Trying to figure out if it'll even work for you in the first place. But I wanted a book. I wanted something I could read that would tell me what to expect on day one, on month one on year one. And that didn't exist at the time. So that's part of it, just giving people a guide. But I also, you know, now, Shrek's on isn't going to work for everybody, but there are lots of other options out there. And I just, I want the conversation to shift from, there's one path out of alcohol use disorder and not as abstinence only to just broadening the way that we think about this. Because that, that option does work for a lot of people, but it doesn't work for everyone.

1:33:36And I think the problem with the AA or nothing narrative or the abstinence or nothing narrative is that it keeps people drinking longer. So I thought that for years, I thought that the only solution to my problem was going to be to quit drinking and to quit drinking forever. I did do that in the end, but it wasn't, wasn't what I expected. And that, that was such a mental barrier for me that it kept me drinking much longer than I should have. And it had I known that there was a way to continue to drink, because that's what I wanted to do. Continue to drink, but do it in a way that was safe, and that would extinguish my desire for alcohol.

1:34:17I would have taken this step, I think, a lot earlier than I did, and I would have saved myself some heartache in the process. And you wouldn't have had to write a personal development book, but here we are. I know. We've done it. And it's actually really good. So, I'm impressed. Yes, yes. I mean, not only did I have to come out and tell my parents that I had been secretly drinking, I had to tell them that I wrote a self -help book. Humiliating, very. The price that you pay to try and help the world become slightly better. Katie, you're great. Where should people go to check out all of your stuff?

1:34:48You can pre -order the book. It's on Amazon, all that stuff. You can go to my website, drinkyourwaysober .com. We're org, not share, Google it. And I also have a podcast. It's called blocked and reported. We do not talk about self -help or or drinking culture We talk mostly about the internet and culture and I'm a lot to talk about furries. We've been on a fur trick lately Okay, I haven't seen those but your blocked and reported is awesome and everyone should check that out So you I really really appreciate what you've done. Thank you for having me as great to talk to you