hello my friend and welcome to another episode of the intentional wisdom podcast I'm your host Greg Campion and I am delighted to bring you this conversation today with Brooke LeBlanc the title of today's episode is sobriety as a superpower and at first glance Brooke is not exactly the typical Persona that you'd expect to see for someone calling themselves sober she's young she's successful in fact she's the CEO of a startup in the non-alcohol space and she's incredibly active we talk about her marathon training in this conversation but this new definition of sobriety is kind of the point Brooke has emerged as one of the leading voices in what I'll call a new wave of sobriety she's made the choice as many others have to forego alcohol in her life and we talk about in this conversation how that one Healthy Choice has had an incredibly positive impact on all other parts of her life including her professional personal and even athletic Pursuits the amount of energy for all things alcohol free is really palpable at the moment and it was a real pleasure for me to speak with someone who is leading by example in this space I'm really excited for you to hear this conversation before we get into our discussion this episode is brought to you by my friends at athletic Brewing Company if you are a regular listener to this podcast or subscriber to my newsletter you already know that I am a massive fan of athletic Brewing Company they're non-alcoholic Brews have been a major part of my own success living an alcohol-free lifestyle for close to a year now I'm a big fan of both the quality and variety of Brews that they have on offer everything from ipas and goldens to extra dark Brews and sours it really runs the gamut which helps to keep things interesting I also love that you can get it delivered straight to your door from athletic room dot com that's super convenient personally I like to mix and match and I'm always trying out their latest bruise while I also come back to some of the Staples which for me are upside Dawn which is a classic craft golden style brew that I absolutely love and athletic light which tastes great and only has 25 calories and 5 carbs so someone trying to live a healthy lifestyle I can feel good about drinking that one just about anytime try athletic Brewing non-alcoholic Brews for yourself use code wisdom to get 15 off your order at athleticbrewing.com that's code wisdom w-i-s-d-o-m at checkout for 15 off your first order near beer exclusions and conditions apply athletic Brewing Company fit for all times alright my friends here is my conversation with Brooke LeBlanc all right Brooke LeBlanc welcome two intentional wisdom Greg thanks so much for having me I'm so happy to be here I'm so psyched to have you here um I've been following you on Twitter for quite a while now and I love all the content that you share there um I feel like whether this is purposeful or not I feel like you've kind of become a leading voice in this whole movement or whatever you want to call it around sobriety or going alcohol-free and so that's been really inspiring to me personally as somebody who's um you know given up alcohol for quite some time now and it's uh it's become like a decision that I've been really happy with in my own life but uh but yeah I mean you know one of the first pieces of content that first introduced you to me and probably to many others because I think this piece of content went super viral was a piece that you wrote called the decision that changed my life becoming sober so tell me about that piece and what inspired you to write that so that's what started everything that came to be becoming a name in this sobriety space and really building a brand um around just me sharing my journey and being really open and vulnerable on the internet which is a scary thing to do nowadays that was published in November 2021 so that was right after my one year of sobriety uh I published it on mirror which is like medium on the blockchain so I actually I didn't edit it and I can't edit it you can't remember oh oh I didn't realize that okay it's like on the permanent record no it's a beautiful it's yeah it's out there in the internet uh for good so that was very risky uh I guess in hindsight but in the moment I really just wanted to answer everyone's question which is why I quit drinking and did I have a problem um and just this is probably good to go ahead and kind of preface before a conversation but I wasn't an addict or an alcoholic um so I was able to go cold turkey when I decided that I wanted to make that choice for myself but yeah that was really awesome um putting that out there in the world and seeing people's reaction um I know the night of I turned my phone off after I published it and put it on Twitter and the next day I woke up with tons of messages um I still get messages and that still circulates around the internet so that that's really cool able to see a piece of content live on and kind of impact people and it's already been almost two years now since I published that yeah and it's in I'm going to link to that piece in the show notes for people who want to go back and check that out I highly encourage you to because it's it's more about it's it's not just about your decision to quit alcohol it's almost like um autobiography autobiographical and that it goes back and looks at you kind of look at how you've personally developed uh over the years and different paths you took and then you talk a little bit about you know alcohol entering your life and you know why it wasn't serving you and things like that so let's talk a little bit about that I'm actually curious um because I was actually thinking about this for myself recently but what what's your first memory of alcohol being in your life oh uh so my parents weren't drinkers for the most part uh we never really had it in the house uh my first memory of drinking alcohol myself rather than it being modeled to me was when I was in late middle school early high school at a party um and I just remember looking up to people who were older and wanting to be like the cool kids and that's really a huge reason as to why I and my peers started drinking younger um is you look up to people and you want to be like them and you have so many social pressures to fit in and you want to belong um so I guess just being at a party being in a social function um and then back in the day at least there wasn't all of this emerging science about the effects of alcohol so really it was just a default mode of becoming an adult it's a rite of passage is to have your drink and to fold a beer with your parent or to go to a social function and take shots with your friends and so it's really just this ritual in the especially in the United States where it's really just prevalent and it's such a default choice for a lot of folks yeah I think a lot of people probably have that similar experience and like what's crazy to think about is like how young that actually is like I I have a son who's about to go into middle school and like it blows my mind to think that like alcohol could be anywhere near any he's still on a young end he's just going into to sixth grade but like I like you like my first memory I think back I'm like I remember being at a party in eighth grade and there were was drinking there and like I might have had a beard there like that might have been my first experience but then right after that into high school like drinking was a major part of the culture and I was thinking about this personally recently I was like I wonder why I started drinking and like why did why did drinking become like a part a big part of my identity for those certainly for those like high school and college Years and a little bit afterwards like I feel like it was like a pretty big part of my identity but that wasn't like it wasn't like strange it was like all of my friends it was a really big part of all of our identities and I was thinking back and I was like really if I really am honest and think about it like back when I was like 14 or 15 years old I was probably had like zero self-confidence was like really uh you know trying to figure things out trying to figure out who I am and all that kind of stuff and it was just like putting alcohol in your body was like a way to like it have some identity but certainly that like help you with the confidence like get you to a point where like you could feel like you could you know socialize with people I mean did you feel like it was like that for you as well yeah and um going back to the theme of having a ritual it's a shared experience to uh cheers with someone or to open a bottle of wine and split it so similar to the way that people treat food I know actually in uh Italian Countryside they call Wine food so they quite literally compare alcohol to food um in the way that they consume it and kind of understand the nature of consuming it so it's it's really a way to build camaraderie with your peers it's a way to fit in um in a time when you're transitioning schools which is a huge leap you're going through puberty so you have like physical changes and identity species uh yeah and it that it was very much so started with friends and it was always something that I kind of consumed while around other people um yeah yeah yeah okay I want to come back to that because that ritual element is really interesting to me and I want to talk to you about like how you deal with that today but maybe maybe before we get into that so um you find yourself in New York City you're working in the kind of tech world you're navigating the pandemic and then you make this decision um that you want to quit alcohol a lot of people are doing the opposite at that time and like really leaning into alcohol so tell me about that and I'm curious like is there one moment when you were like okay I'm making a change here or how did that all come about yeah the exact moment was a weekday it was like a Monday or Tuesday afternoon um and I was sitting in a co-working space and I was transitioning into the tech world but I wasn't going to leave my job at a larger B2B SAS company without having a job lined up so I was working nights and weekends to interview and I just wanted extra bandwidth whether in terms of time or energy so that was when I decided to go one week no drinking um and after one week I found just so much more time in my day to do ordinary things too like hit my workouts daily do my laundry um on a every Sunday night Cadence and just kind of systematize my life and everything moved a lot smoother in addition to kind of work progress and my career advancements so after one week I decided to go dry for a month after the month of October this is October 2020. I decided to go drive for three more months and then at the turn of the new year which is an amazing time to kind of rethink your goals and kind of check back in with yourself and that's why New Year's resolutions are a huge kind of habit building way to kind of reassess how you consume um which has led to dry January which is a huge instance now 230 million Americans every year uh kind of rethink their drinking habits in January and at that point I decided to call myself a sober person and step into the identity of a sober person and it just kind of slowly snowballed from there but that's that was kind of the early stages of my progression wow okay yeah dry January I couldn't believe how and it I don't I sometimes I can't tell how much of it is like just like the internet bubble that I live in but like to me like Drive January was like everywhere this year right did you feel that way yeah I mean there's ways you can kind of quantify that if you look at Google searches it 2.5 bags from the prior year and so every year it's growing like a wildfire wow that's amazing that's amazing okay so they uh so the identity piece so that's really interesting to me that it it sort of transitioned from like okay this is like I don't know if you thought about it this way but I I'm pretty into like streaks and like in like short-term challenges and things like that and that's kind of how I started down this path uh originally as well I kind of started like I wanted to challenge myself back in 2018 to do a year without drinking and I always kind of saw it as like a short-term Challenge and I completed it and I was like great yay this is awesome and it wasn't until like a couple years later where I was like I won't do that again but I wanna I don't really want to treat it like a challenge like I just want to stop drinking basically and so I think for me that's how it kind of transitioned to that identity but tell me a little bit more about that identity piece of it because that's super interesting yeah it's It's tricky because the word sober is very heavy and it means something different to every person you talk to if I went out and in Times Square and took a mic to 100 people they would tell me 100 different answers as to who they know who's sober in their life what sobriety means to them whether or not they're sober themselves so not only does everyone have their own sobriety Journey that leads them to become sober but everyone has their own definition of it um and nowadays you hear the term California sober or weekday sober and that's kind of a wider Market of folks who are looking to just cut back and not necessarily quit as in quit all state changing substances um but yeah I've read James clear's work a study habit building and yeah I think I have this right behind me it's a classic it's yeah it's required reading of just for most people at least in the text phase just because it's it's so brilliant and it really breaks down the fact that if you want to change your life you can but you have to take care of the days how you take care of the days is you focus on what habits you want to create and there's no better way to instill change in your life than deciding to be a person and be that identity own that identity and step into it every day and so by declaring I'm a sober person and by even just going out with my friends I would start to say introduce myself and say hi I'm Brooke I'm a sober queen or I'm sober I'm not drinking and that was one of the first things I would say in the room when I would walk into a club or a restaurant whatever the environment was and then it really what was cool and what I didn't expect initially is that it gives other people permission to raise their hand and say I'm not drinking either let's get mocktails and I can't tell you how many times I've had dinners since then um since kind of stepping into it myself where other people just have a dry dinner or a dry happy hour or whatever the kind of circumstances so that's been really empowering yeah completely oh my gosh you're so you're talking my language on like five different levels there right there but on the on the identity piece I'm I'm completely with you I think um that that's kind of how I've gone about structuring my year and actually down to like my daily schedule uh the last couple of years taking a lot of inspiration from James clear as well and looked at my identities so I looked like I want to be a great dad I want to be a great husband I want to be a really fit person and then breaking that down to like okay what would a great dad do on a weekly and daily basis okay that's telling me what I need to do Etc and sort of like building up my habits that way um but I the identity piece when it comes to drinking is so the way I think about it I can't remember if this is like a Tim Ferriss thing or something else but like the way I think about it is like um you know the it's one decision instead of a thousand decisions right like the Thousand decisions is what kills you like if you have to decide every time you go out if you're drinking or not eventually that's a losing strategy right because eventually like peer pressure is enough where you're in the situation you're like okay fine like fine this this seems like a good exception or whatever but if you make that decision that's more identity focused at some point in your life I don't drink you know like done that's that's decisions is done right um so that's uh that that's the that's the way I think about it anyways but um to me very interesting to hear about how other people reacted I've had similar experiences um to that but tell me a little bit more about that and just what that looks like because you're kind of at a different stage of life than I am in that it's I would imagine it's easier for a guy in his 40s who's got kids who lives in the suburbs to like navigate around drinking a little bit because it's you're more whatever you're at home with kids and on a lot of nights and stuff like that it's a lot less of like a party situation but like being someone um you know in their 20s living in Manhattan et cetera Etc like tell me about that like how do how do you navigate that and how do you how do people generally react yeah so I saw a notable difference in the way that other people reacted to me based on how I felt with myself so um before I adopted sobriety as my identity and I was unsure about it I mean I was still not drinking I was still abstaining but I was very scared and sometimes I would dance around saying that I'm sober and just say that I was training for a road race therefore I couldn't drink this one night and I wouldn't kind of get too into the weeds of my journey um before I was very secure in my identity other people weren't sure either and I kind of got that energy reflected back to me and I would still be offered shots and I would just turn it down or I would be it just it wasn't the right Dynamic um I and I was still I still had the same friend group too so there was a consistency in the city I was living in the friend groups I had my family uh which is crazy because it's such an identity shift to go from a drinker to a non-drinker um but most people you're not introducing yourself again you're not reintroducing yourself as hey I'm a non-drinker now you just have to to accept that other people see you as the new version of yourself it's really hard to make a change in your life and be consistent and like what you said not renegotiate with yourself on going back against it and just kind of sticking it out and seeing does sobriety fit me and my lifestyle and my goals um once I started to accept that identity everything changed because I could walk in the room have confidence that I wouldn't be tempted triggered um and no matter what your projections people might have because there are folks who will still turn to you and say oh did you have a problem and look at you with the face as if there was something deeply wrong and that you're not making an empowered healthy choice because of whatever conditioning that they grew up with or whatever media and messaging that was on a billboard that taught them that alcohol is the only way to have fun and then it's boring not to drink or whatever kind of beliefs that you come up against and you will come up against these beliefs if you stick with sobriety long enough especially if you travel and you experience different cultures and how they treat drinking and not drinking ultimately it all comes down to the way you feel about yourself and the relationship you have with yourself and that really changes kind of the way that your external environment looks but yeah it is it is challenging I'm not gonna lie isn't that interesting that it's that it comes the role that identity and confidence play because I think about uh it's almost like the polar opposite of when you're that 14 15 16 year old kid so unsure of yourself so unsure of your identity just want to fit in and it's like okay yeah it makes sense alcohol enters the equation this is a way to fit in this is a way that maybe it gives me a little more of this like liquid courage what have you and then fast forward to what you're describing I think you got there about 20 years earlier than me but um in terms of the the confidence in yourself and the ability to um to say this is who I am and I'm super comfortable with it and I'm super confident with this choice and like um yeah I mean to me like I walk into a room with friends now and I'm like yeah I'm not drinking like uh you know it's funny I was I was at a work uh thing down in Charleston a few months ago and I just just met the chairman of this company and it was like this whole thing and he was like oh he's like you know we're gonna see how late night you can hang tonight and I was like you are going to be severely disappointed and I can't I ca I came out and he had this whole spread of like alcohol they'd all over the table I'm like this is gonna be super awkward buddy but like I haven't had a drink of alcohol in like six months and I'm not about to start right now but like to your earlier Point like in that situation in many other situations that I have with friends like the reaction was like that's awesome like congratulations and oh by the way I'm thinking about doing that because this this this like I love that you said that you get that reaction and do you are you hearing that more from people these days yeah I I am hearing that more um and I fully resonate with what you said about coven changing consumer Behavior so you could have either double down on your lifestyle of consuming drugs and alcohol or you could have cut back and when you experience a global pandemic no matter how healthy you are you could still be affected by getting coven and so it really made people kind of look twice at their day-to-day habits um and that has kind of stuck with us over the course of the past two to three years so that's why we're seeing a growing interest in medicine 3.0 which is preventative health care and people really wanting to take care of themselves and take agency over their lifestyle choices and drinking is a part of that all right now we're getting into Peter attia which I have that book right behind me as well you and I have the same reading list I love it um so okay yeah I love that I love that now let me ask you this um tactical question um if you're in you're in these social situations uh maybe maybe let's get back to the this idea of the ritual because I really believe that is true so I think one of the real positives and one of the reasons why humans have been consuming alcohol for thousands of years is the ritual nature of it it is a great thing to be able to come together with friends and family and celebrate and you break bread and you traditionally have wine or beer together like what have you have you found any substitutes that kind of can help fill that void for you I wonder yeah uh sharing a meal uh that's really awesome so I've read the book Never Eat Alone uh so that's a principle I try to live by at least with work if I can meet people for a lunch that's awesome if I'm going out on a date I prefer to go for dinner not drinks um but yeah ultimately it just comes down to understanding the root of the connection with the other person so when you strip away drinking um the nights when you have the most kind of vulnerable conversations with the people that you're around whether or not they're friends family members co-workers uh it's really when you get honest with each other and a lot of people think that you have to imbibe in a substance drink alcohol in order to get to that level with someone and you don't and you start to realize you never needed it in the first place so it's also about just your conversation and how willing you are to open up and share and really listen to the other other person that's with you too so I think it has a lot to do with not just sharing meals but also sharing your truth and hearing someone else's truth and seeing them for who they are and practicing that muscle over time it's not just about EQ but it's about just being a good human in the world and treating everyone like your teacher yeah I I agree I think um I think there's a you know possibly related to the the all the media and advertising messages then we've done pummeled with since we were born but I think I think there is a view out there that uh you know I work my nine to five I get to the end of the I get to the end of the week and I need I crave alcohol I want that beer or I want that wine I need it to relax personally I think I think that's really overplayed and I think what we really desire and I think this is kind of in line with what you're saying is what we really desire is like relaxation fun and human connection we really want to just like connect with other people and that is like something that really helps us to recharge um I found that that's really what I'm actually craving not the alcohol and but for me I do like there is still something in that ritual of hanging out with friends and drinking and and so I've substituted alcohol with like non-alcoholic Brews like athletic which I'm a big fan of and they're sponsoring this episode by the way thank you very much guys um but but I like that and I actually had this conversation with the CEO of athletic on this podcast where we talked about I don't know what it is it's almost like a placebo effect or something but like if I am at a party hanging out with a bunch of friends and I'm drinking a club soda then for whatever reason that's not as exciting to me but when I'm I have like one of these non-alcoholic Brews or something similar in my hand I feel like I'm a little more part of the action and I'll in a weird way I feel like I like loosen up more do you have you experienced that effect at all yeah I also consume a lot of caffeinated Beverages and I try out drinks like can you Forex and dishwa and they have state change ingredients in them um which kind of elevate your mood and elfini it's a balancing kind of chemical and Gaba is you know kind of a calming ashwagandha also of an interesting ingredient that I like to kind of consume and those don't contradict with my goals with sobriety so I am happy to kind of try those beverages I think it's an amazing space you can really validate the shift in consumer Behavior based on looking at the numbers of non-alcoholic Beverages and how successful and prolific amazing they are um I recently picked up a pack of athletic Brewing at a very small Bodega so their distribution I mean they're everywhere and so good for good on them and good on the space because it really helps you feel like you're a part of something special when you see a brand that's made for you that says on the packaging that we're for the people who are taking one night off drinking they're taking antibiotics so they can't drink for three months they're trying for a family so they won't be drinking for a year whatever your circumstances to not be drinking um it makes you feel like you're a part of something bigger than yourself and it does build community and kind of replace what you're missing when it comes to not feeling like you belong in a room of everyone drinking and imbibing yeah yeah yeah I mean there's and you I think you can feel a lot better about putting some of that stuff in your body like if you're putting something that's got l-theanine or ashwagandha in your body like that's there's a good argument to to put that stuff in your body anyhow and in certain uh cases so uh I I feel like that makes a lot of sense I feel like it's it's funny that it's taken us this long to get to a place where these types of drinks are so uh common um but yeah there's more and more coming out there's one uh I don't know if you've tried the one called recess before but like why I had like a recess it was like a non-alcoholic Margarita that was really good and that's like nice like okay I'm having a Mexican dinner and like this actually tastes really good and it's got some of these like I guess what I would call like you mentioned mind altering ingredients like I was they're pretty mild I would say but like it's that even that is like probably a little bit of placebo effect they're like okay I'm drinking this it's different than drinking just like a club soda and it's like I feel chilled out you know like so there's something to be said for that um okay so you are Congratulations by the way I believe about to come up on a thousand days sober is that true yeah we're about five days out oh my gosh wait what's the uh what's the official date because I want to see it maybe I can time this podcast release with it uh July 1st is 1 000 days amazing congrats that is exciting um okay so let's say somebody's listening right now and their interest is peaked and they're saying okay you know I may want to start either cutting back on alcohol a little bit or rethinking my relationship with alcohol you're somebody who's kind of a veteran at this stage about to hit a thousand days what would you tell somebody who's who's on day one oh I mean the two best pieces of advice for anything you want to take on any type of Life challenge is to just get started and just keep going um so I would kind of I would make it you can make it smart so you can make it time-bound or actionable um or kind of Center it around something very specific in your life so let's say you're doing 75 hard you can do 75 hard and take 75 days no drinking and see how you feel after um if it's something you want to reincorporate back into your life then do it there are no rules and especially the younger that you go when you experiment with sobriety with Gen Z and this new younger wave of uh kind of breaking out of the boxes and not really wanting to be defined you can make sobriety be whatever you want it to be it doesn't have to you don't even have to call yourself sober you can do whatever you want and you should feel empowered to and there's the tools like the non-alcoholic beverages in place to help you there's also tons of other substances that I don't personally take but I have heard some really interesting research on like micro dosing um so really I think that with consumer Behavior at a younger if you just kind of look at kind of the younger Trends um I think that if you just kind of ask yourself what's most important to me how do I want to feel and you go one weekend off or you take a month off then then that's really useful um something that I will say that helped me a lot and that I would recommend for someone new on their journey is to have a journaling practice or some way to kind of check in with themselves just to make sure that you're on the right track and that you still feel aligned with what you want to do because at the end of the day this is a choice you're making for yourself and your body and your future so I have about six five-minute journals that I've filled out over the course of the past few years and I even have a journal from the first six months of not drinking oh that's cool which is really beautiful to go back in October 2020 and see how exactly how I felt each day every morning and every night just writing a few lines oh wow yeah so adrenaline practice and then just just starting and figuring it out treating it like an experiment um and this is also just to kind of say this one more time just to reiterate this is not for folks who are physically addicted to the substance that's a much different kind of recovery and treatment path but this is really if you just want to improve your life and get healthier yeah totally and um yeah there is a I'm glad you made that distinction that is a big difference I I interviewed a gentleman by the name of Louis rivolo on this podcast and he was somebody who struggled deeply with alcoholism for 20 years and um you know almost almost died from it and that's a whole different can of worms and like so first for instance like someone in that situation I don't think some of the things like we were talking about like the non-alcoholic Beverages and things like that those are probably not great tools for for those types of folks who are who are really struggling with it with um with addiction um I love the recommendation on the journal um the other kind of side benefit there is being able to go back and look at um you know to the extent you're right about things that you're worried about or stressed about like I always think it's like some of the best therapy to go back and look at what was like I completely worried about um a year ago or six months ago and nine times out of ten you look back and you're like wow why was I so worried about that that ended up working out fine so it's it's like another just way to help gain perspective um in your life and try to put all your current stressors um yeah in the in in a little more perspective so I like that recommendation um okay so your thousand days in almost a thousand days in what's been the biggest changes for your life um how have how have things changed whether it's around pursuing Ambitions or interests or like how's life changed for you after these thousand days I will start with how I feel uh I feel as though I've cleared the path to run towards what's most important to me in a way where it didn't feel that way uh on day one most certainly not and the thing is too you didn't re or I personally didn't realize uh how unclear my priorities were or how I wasn't truly genuinely tracking to them in a measurable way um until I started kind of eliminating things that didn't serve me and alcohol was the first pillar that I got rid of um and with not drinking anymore you start to kind of look at your relationships and the people who don't support your drinking or not drinking habits and your transition away from drinking well maybe they weren't great friendships to begin with and so you kind of start to look at all the foundations of your life your career your friends and it's a good thing to take inventory of what's most important to you how are you showing up for them how are they showing up for you and hold everyone and everything in your life accountable to your goals our time here is quite finite and short and it's important to make the most of each day especially in your 20s when you're in a high velocity time period of your life this is when you know the it's right now personally I'm not married I don't have a family so this is when I can take risks and not have beneficiaries that rely on me for support so for instance I've moved to Mexico City for two months La for eight months and I moved back to New York so those are all mini experiments that I ran and that's just based on where I live in the world uh and I've began to build our own comp my own company and we've hired two folks and we're fundraising right now so we're on a whole different trajectory uh in terms of kind of what I'm doing in my career and what we're putting out into the world instead of working for someone and building their Vision I decided to build my own um and that's quite an empowering choice that I don't think I would have had the bandwidth energy or time in my day if I was drinking which also leads to a million other behaviors which just don't contribute to this this more important goal of mine um something else that's always been important to me is Athletics and fitness and without having hangovers or the physical uh repercussions of drinking or even just last night I saw a friend at an event I showed up at 11 PM I went on a run before that at 8 pm for Sunset so just that kind of way that I can turn around time very quickly and kind of over optimize for what's most important to me is really special um and so right now I'm training for a marathon I have the Berlin Marathon this year I'm doing New York Marathon next year and those are more ambitious goals but I feel very capable to achieve them and accomplish them because I've cleared the path amazing amazing oh my gosh that so much good stuff going on um yeah it's crazy that these like healthy habits can bleed from one area of your life to another like it's it's almost like dominoes positive dominoes kind of falling down but I think you nailed it around the energy piece especially um and you know we don't need to get into like all the science like I think you and I have both listened to that huberman uh podcast episode where he goes into the science of um of what alcohol does to your body and how it's not just a one day hangover but it's like throughout the entire week you're it's messing with your mood and your energy levels and etc etc and um yeah I mean my experience is similar in some ways in that especially on the working outside like you just rarely rarely Miss workouts and there's something that I personally love about waking up knowing that that every weekend morning I am gonna wake up feeling great and I'm gonna be able to be out of bed early and like hitting a really intense workout like before my kids are awake you know like and that's a big deal like um I think a lot of people in my situation too with parent you know once you're a parent there's all these other stresses on your time and you want to show up for your kids in a positive way you don't want to have you know you don't want to lack patience et cetera Etc but um I think it's awesome the the marathon training is so so fun um I I just actually had Matt wilpers from Peloton on the podcast recently I don't know if you follow him at all but he's really good when it comes to like marathon training and coaching and all that kind of stuff now are you in terms of tracking your self I think I heard you say somewhere that you are big into like the fitness devices as well are you a big device junkie like I am yeah I'm a total nerd about that space uh okay the only kind of consumer wearable or tool in that world that I don't have yet is the eight sleep mattress oh I'm there I got it so I haven't gotten any sleep yet but that on the list that's on my wish list but right now I'm currently wearing an aura ring a whoop band and my Garmin watch which I use for once I'm impressed I'm impressed I'm impressed uh I'm currently wearing a whoop armband I transitioned to the armband from the wrist uh which is I like it it's a little more like out of the way the Apple watch I got the ultra for some reason I don't know if it does much more but I'm just like kind of a junkie on devices and um and uh and I am into the eight sleep as well um it may be Overkill to have this many devices um but one thing I like about it is I actually like to have multiple readings on things um because like for whatever reason some one device might not get a good reading on something but if like I have if I can look across multiple devices and be like okay my HRV is trending this way or my resting heartbeat is trending this way and things like that I can I feel like I can get a pretty good holistic picture and one thing I'm sure you've learned like I've learned is that nothing throws these devices like into like crazy Haywire as much as um alcohol like uh it absolutely crushes your HRV and really all your metrics like the the lowest reading I've ever had on woop was like one or two percent recovery and it was like the night after I went to a Zac Brown concert and like drank way too much and I was like oh my God like this crushed me not only did this crush me this thing's saying I'm almost dead but it is but it is like but for the for the rest of the week like my metrics were all oh like terrible right I mean are you how are you tracking all that stuff pretty closely yeah well I didn't have these devices when I was a drinker I wish I did because more with more knowledge comes more power and it's really cool to see what's happening in your body in real time um there are ways where I can see my friends who do drink and see what their metrics look like uh sometimes oh interesting yeah yeah yeah yeah and then what's also important to note is that a lot of people say that when you stop drinking you sleep so much better and yes you do but I have also had plenty of nights where I'm just stressed and then I don't sleep well so it's also really beneficial to look at it as a non-drinker just on how to optimize your metrics in your day-to-day yep yep you know the other thing I think is that um I I actually think when you take alcohol out of the equation you actually get a much like purer if that's a word reading on all your stats like in in other words I feel like it's much easier to be like in tune with your body and realize uh when something is off like I can tell now if if I'm starting to get sick or if something is something is a little off I feel like when you're putting alcohol into your system all the time it almost like dulls the your ability to sense that and so when you're not putting alcohol in your body I feel like it's much more fine-tuned um that's just been my personal experience um okay the new business uh I I don't know how much you can disclose but I want to ask you about it because it sounds really interesting I know it's something to do with this space that we've been talking about and the fact that you're hiring and raising money and all that stuff wow that is so exciting so tell me what you can tell me yeah so we're building a company uh it's called Edge and that's a nod to the straight edge movement of the late 80s and early 90s um I'm deeply inspired by The Counter Culture movements of Street skate and hardcore punk and that's kind of where this kind of branding came about for our company um and we're marketing to the Gen Z audience kind of younger people like me who are looking to cut back or quit but they don't really have a solution in place to hold them accountable so we're going to provide you with support groups we're going to pair you in cohorts based on your health goals so it's for people who aren't fully sober or they are fully sober and they just want to be held accountable so we're really going after kind of a new market of people we're going to be able to integrate with their wearable Solutions and kind of give them a better holistic picture of what their sobriety Journey looks like the old Paradigm is very different sobriety was seen as binary UI there we're all in a drinker or all out and completely sober and that's not really what the average consumer kind of looks like in their day-to-day life and it also it works for me because I I don't drink any alcohol and I just count my days um and so I have a cumulative tracker this October will be my three third year of doing that and that works for my journey but that's not what everyone's Journey looks like so we're going to provide a much different structure for how to kind of track your sobriety in a way where you don't sign up for a commitment to be sober for the rest of your life and it feels daunting like oh you're held accountable to a number and then you're de-incentivized or negatively rewarded if you dare break the streak and then you have to start over again so we're gonna make it social fun shareable and much more approachable and lower the bar to getting sober or trying out sobriety wow okay that sounds great um I'm excited to to see that develop and to I'd love to try it myself at some point that sounds really cool um cool okay I'm not going to pepper pepper you with too many questions on that because I think you're still kind of in stealth mode on that so you probably can't answer too much on that but thank you for that appetizer I look forward to uh to to learning more about that um one thing you mentioned and this is something I think about myself is um I have not as much as I have embraced the identity of someone who doesn't drink I have also not said I'm never gonna have another drink in my life um and I had I don't know if you know a guy named Dickie Bush who's like a pretty prolific writer on Twitter in other places but I had him on the podcast he's been probably a couple of years without drinking and he was like you know I he's like I I like I'm thinking about like what what would be exceptions for me and so like his he was he had one where he was like if I'm in Argentina and I have a you know Tomahawk Steak or something like that and like I'm gonna have an Argentinian red or you know wine and I was like okay that's a really good exception and so I was thinking about like to me like there's not many uh I don't want exceptions in my daily life but I think about like if I took my wife to Napa and we toured wineries like would I like to be able to drink then yeah I think I would probably make that exception if I'm in Ireland as much as I love Guinness zero if I'm in Ireland do I want to have a Guinness yeah I think I do so like I'm thinking about like are these are there these occasions or being out of the country is kind of a good one um but but what do you what do you think about that how do you think about that or have you said no alcohol for the rest of my life yeah so different to what I really recommend for other people which is that you should just take it day by day and see what works for you but specific to my life and what works for me is no drinking and that's a commitment that I hope to maintain throughout my entire life cool yeah and I what I wrote in the article at the very bottom is a quote by Ryan holiday which is that every day the dust comes back every day you must sweep and that's still stoicism by heart but really the way that you can kind of digest that and apply it to your life is that every day you have to remake the choice of do I want to be sober it's a it's a commitment you recommit every day that you don't drink um and I I joke with people that my one kind of cheat would be uh having a glass of champagne at my wedding so that would be my moment I suppose but I'm not really sure I would ever come to that and at that point I'd probably just have a non-alcoholic champagne at my wedding that's what I was gonna think that's what I was gonna say you're probably gonna have like companies lining up at that stage too have you have their uh non-alcoholic champagne be the one that you that you drink and I think they're I mean that's another thing like uh that's another growing area is kind of non-alcoholic wines um I've tried a few I've found haven't found one yet that I love but I'm kind of it's kind of fun actually to like be a connoisseur of this non-alcoholic beverage space like and it's kind of cool to see all the new product that's coming out like I I like it it's it's interesting to me um okay well listen you've dropped a lot of knowledge and wisdom here already and I think you're doing some incredibly impressive stuff so um I'm sure that your choice to not drink alcohol has been a big part of that but congrats on on all your success um I do want to ask you my standard closing question which is something I asked everybody who's on this podcast well most everybody I've forgotten to ask two guests by that back accident but um what's one thing that you have learned in life so far that most others might not have figured out yet uh a quote that I come back to a lot and this is a lesson that I apply to almost everything in my life is that the day you plant the seed is not the day you eat the fruit whether I'm training for a marathon or building a company almost all of the rewards are delayed so understanding how to kind of biohack and reward myself at the end of a day at the end of a milestone and remember to celebrate the small wins along the way is a way to kind of maintain a strong sense of self and stay balanced throughout very challenging times so that's something that I've really I can't say I have learned because I think I'll always be learning it it's a process and that's that's something that I would like to part with your listeners is just really take things day by day and if it feels hard in the moment trust that all of the work is accumulative and it will kind of pay off in the end just not necessarily in the way that you might anticipate it will I love that love that celebrate the small wins don't forget to celebrate those small wins along the way um that's that's something I try to remind myself of as well um well that's awesome Brooke thank you so much um for people who want to stay up to date with you whether you're sharing your thoughts on this kind of the sobriety Journey or the new company where can they find you follow you all that kind of stuff I'm online everywhere so Brook LeBlanc I'm most active on Twitter my DMs are open so shoot me a message anytime cool and I can attest to that I think that's how we set this podcast up I'm pretty sure I DMD on that one um awesome Brooke this has been so much fun congrats again on everything you've accomplished so far I personally I'm gonna have a lot of fun watching your career develop uh in the years to come watching everything you're going to build and all that awesome stuff you're going to do but thanks for being a positive voice out there and setting an example I think that's what you're really doing is you're setting an awesome example that it's possible to live this way and to not only live this way but like to really Thrive this way so congrats and um thanks for coming on thank you so much for having me there you have it folks Brooke LeBlanc she is really impressive isn't she go follow her on social media I'll link to her accounts in the show notes uh very cool to see this next Generation making healthy choices and seeing just how powerful those choices can be in all other areas of their lives which is really really cool Brooke is such a great example I'm sure she's going to inspire many many others before you go just a quick plug for the attentional wisdom newsletter go to Greg champion.substack.com to find that it's one email every other week I break down the best of what I'm learning from awesome guests just like Brooke I also share with you everything I'm reading watching and listening to and I break down topics like Zone 2 training HRV alcohol-free living I break them down into simple practical and understandable terms so that you can apply these things for yourself check it out gregcampion.substack thanks for listening and I will see you next time