John Robbins

You know, if I said to you, there's this thing you can do, which will mean you never drink again.

Even if I've come up to, even if I'm saying like, I really want to stop drinking.

Like a lot of people say to me, how do you do it?

And I say, well, the way I did it was to go to 12-step meetings and they're like, oh, no, I'm not sure I'm that bad.

Yeah, I tracked my, for the last sort of six years of my drinking, I always got into sort of this obsession about counting up how many days I had off, how many units I was drinking, trying to get it down and down and down.

And it did go down.

But I was getting more and more obsessed with it.

And what was happening was I was still drinking as much as I did on the days I drank.

I was just, because I was denying myself this thing I wanted through sort of brute force, willpower.

it became more important in my life and made me very difficult to be around made relationships difficult then a big relationship ended and then i just kind of chucked all that and just just was drinking every day so that exhaustion of like i'm so tired of trying to fight this every single day

counterintuitively and I think it's one of the great sort of features of recovery is very often these sort of paradoxes is like by stopping fighting it I then was suddenly had a great deal of power over it because I was like I'm not going to step in the ring with you today because for the past 10,000 days when we've done that you have won so you know like when you see a fight kicking off

Well, I think like in the book, so there's, there's a little, I guess like the tagline for the book is 12 drinks that changed my life.

And each of those drinks, I am trying to find out a different like feature of alcohol, like what it meant to me, why it was a problem for me.

Why did it make me feel better a lot of the time?

Um, and I was only able to do that

when I was sober because I didn't actually realize what an alcoholic was until I stopped drinking.

I just didn't have that information.

And I think it's so crazy.

I remember like how many assemblies we had in school about ecstasy, like about how dangerous ecstasy was.

It was a big thing in the nineties and about smoking.