For 30 years, Brian Rose drank almost every single day. On New Year’s Eve 2019, two years after deciding to try just 30 days without alcohol, he sat down on camera and told the whole story: how it started, how it took hold, and what finally changed.
This is not an interview. It is Brian talking straight to the camera for nearly 20 minutes, and he is clear from the start that it is his story, not a prescription for anyone else.
▶ Watch the follow-up: Brian Rose – Alcohol: A Love Story, How I Stopped Drinking & Started Living
A way of escaping himself
Brian traces his first drink to the age of 13 or 14, a shot of sake taken after slamming his bedroom door. At MIT, fraternity life turned drinking into a daily habit, even while he was getting top grades. On Wall Street and in New York, the culture of excess carried it on.
Looking back, he sees alcohol as a way to get a break from his own demanding inner voice. He calls himself a functional alcoholic: someone who could drink heavily and still show up. The cost, he says, was that he never processed anything. Every breakup and every hard moment went into the bottle, and the pain was simply pushed down the road.
“Alcohol privileges revoked”
Brian is open about his past heroin use, which he covers in his film IRONMIND, and about the moments when he hated who he was when drinking. He borrows an idea from Dennis McKenna: the substance is not the problem, the way a person uses it is. For him, the conclusion is simple. Some people can have one or two drinks; he cannot. Quoting an interview with Brad Pitt, he says he has “got my alcohol privileges revoked” for the rest of his life.
What actually changed
He did not go to AA or follow the 12 steps, though he respects people who have, including London Real guests such as Rich Roll and John Joseph. What changed things for him was connection. Building London Real forced him out into the world, and the more he listened and gave back, the less he felt the need to drink.
The final step came on New Year’s Eve 2017, when he and his partner agreed to stop for 30 days. After 30 days, he did not want to start again. The closest he came to drinking since, he says, was on a holiday where he had nothing to do and felt out of his element.
A battle fought every day
Brian does not claim to have beaten it for good. “Everybody has their kryptonite. For me, it’s alcohol,” he says. To stay on track, he relies on sleep, meditation, gratitude, affirmations, hard work and exercise, and on being willing to feel painful emotions instead of escaping them.
His message to his younger self, and to anyone struggling with drink, drugs, food, shopping or even their phone, is that it will get better, but it means doing uncomfortable things: facing your fears and letting yourself connect with other people.
What to take from it
The most useful thing here is the honesty. Brian’s route will not suit everyone, and he says so. But his central idea, that people often drink to avoid pain and that real connection reduces the need to escape, will ring true for many.
This is Brian Rose’s personal story, not medical advice. If you are worried about your drinking, speak to your GP. In the UK, Drinkline is free and confidential on 0300 123 1110.
Who is Brian Rose?
Brian Rose is the founder and host of London Real. Originally from the United States, he studied at MIT and worked as a banker and trader before moving to London and launching the show in 2011. He has since interviewed hundreds of guests and made several feature films, including IRONMIND.
In January 2024, six years sober, he returned to the subject in Alcohol: A Love Story. You can also watch his film IRONMIND.
See everything Brian Rose has done with London Real on his guest page: Brian Rose on London Real.
More on London Real
Transcript
Transcript: Brian Rose – Alcohol And Me: From 30 Years Of Daily Drinking To Two Years Sober
0:01 Brian Rose: Today I want to talk about one of the most difficult struggles of my entire life: something that destroyed relationships, destroyed opportunities, destroyed my body, destroyed my career, and almost completely destroyed me. And that was my relationship with alcohol. I pretty much drank every single day for 30 years of my life. This is real talk here.
0:37 Brian Rose: Two years ago, right here at this place, which is Center Parcs, a place outside of London (no, this is not a product placement), on New Year’s Eve two years ago, I said to myself: I’m going to try to stop drinking for 30 days and see how that goes. And 30 went to 60, went to 90, and now I’m two years later and I’ve been completely sober for two years.
1:02 Brian Rose: I want to talk about that journey and explain to you what it is for me, and also what it’s not. I do not go to AA meetings. I’ve never been to the 12 steps. I’m also a former heroin addict who had two overdoses in New York City in 2001. I used to smoke unfiltered Lucky Strikes, like a pack a day, back in my day. I’ve tried most drugs as well. This is my story and my journey, and this is by no means something prescriptive for you.
1:32 Brian Rose: I know there are lots of people, friends of mine that have been on the show, like Rich Roll and John Joseph, who have their own stories of sobriety and their own methods of getting there. I totally respect them as well; those just aren’t my stories. This is something I wanted to do a year ago, maybe even a year and a half ago, but it never seemed the right time. I don’t know if this is the right time, but I really need to talk about this, because I really wish the 20-year-old Brian could have listened to what I’m about to say. I think it would have given me a lot of perspective.
2:03 Brian Rose: For most of my life, I had a romantic, dysfunctional, abusive relationship with alcohol. I think my first drink was somewhere around 13 or 14 years old. I had just gone to Japan with my mom and I brought back a bottle of sake, and I got in an argument with her, slammed a door, went into my room and took a shot of sake. I don’t know why. I probably saw tough guys do that in the movies, right? That’s what tough guys do. They drink hard.
2:39 Brian Rose: And Brian soon discovered that alcohol was the way I could escape. I could escape the frustrations I had with this world, and the more I get to know myself, I think it was a way of escaping me. I’m a mean bastard. I’m really hard on everyone around me, including myself. It’s just never good enough. “It could always be better, Brian. You could always do better.” Something deep down inside of me always knows I could do better and could have done more. That can be really beneficial. It creates a high achiever. I’ve done some amazing things with my life that I’m super proud of.
3:11 Brian Rose: But it also means the internal dialogue in my head is sometimes too much even for me to deal with. So for me, having those 12 beers at the end of the day, or those 14 shots of tequila, was a way of getting away from me: taking a few hours’ break from Type A Brian Rose, who was so demanding. It was almost like getting away from an abusive father or mother, but it was me.
3:37 Brian Rose: No excuses there, but I became fascinated with drinking. My mom took us to Europe when I was 15 or 16 and I could drink at a bar. They actually served me a beer, where in America there’s no way; you have to be 21. That was an eye-opener for me. Then I got back to high school, and a college student who lived with us used to buy me alcohol. I’d get drunk when I went out, do shots in the car before going to a movie.
4:02 Brian Rose: But when I finally got to MIT, I got into something called a fraternity: 50 dudes in a house with no supervision. That’s when it all came undone, and I started really drinking professionally. Some nights we wouldn’t even go out. It’d be 25 guys hanging out in the bar, no girls, no need, and we would finish a keg and do drinking games all night. It was some serious male bonding, probably something I really needed as a man, and I love those times. But it also really incubated this culture of drinking every single day.
4:41 Brian Rose: At the same time, I was getting A’s at MIT, probably one of the most challenging institutions in the world, and yet I was drinking every night. I would study till two in the morning and finish the night with some beers. This just became part of who I was. And I started becoming what I would become, which was a functional alcoholic: someone who could drink a lot and still show up, and convince himself that he was showing up.
5:05 Brian Rose: But every time I drank in a difficult situation, it was a way of not processing things. I think that’s really important to remember. When you drink or use or shop or have sex to get yourself out of the pain in your brain, you don’t process it. You just kick the can down the road and you’re going to have to deal with it later. And if you kick it down the road enough times, you’re going to have a major trauma, because you’re not living your life in a congruent way. You never dealt with the pain of the reality of the situation.
5:35 Brian Rose: So this is what happened to Brian. I would have a breakup with a girlfriend and dive deeper into the bottle. When I went to Wall Street, the culture was again one of excess and drinking. And New York City, as Rich Roll would say, is like an alcoholic’s dream: every corner is a bar. I started hanging out with friends who drank as much as I did, and again I was basically drinking every single day. For me it just didn’t make sense not to drink every day.
6:03 Brian Rose: I would just find a way to push through the next day. I remember showing up as a trader in the morning, having a coffee and a Diet Coke, and I was ready to go. This perpetuated itself and it continued. Every day you succumb to this stuff, you dig yourself a bigger hole. I got to a point where I just thought I would never get rid of this thing.
6:28 Brian Rose: And of course, alcohol usually leads to bad decisions. I started hanging out with people who were using drugs, and of course I started doing drugs, and heroin was my drug of choice. If you want to know more about that, watch my movie IRONMIND. It’s on YouTube, it’s free, and you can hear my whole story with that crazy drug.
6:47 Brian Rose: Back to something Dennis McKenna once said to me (we’ve just done a movie with him called Reconnect): drugs aren’t bad. Drugs are just substances. It’s the people who consume them in dangerous ways. Heroin can be used to kill pain and to get people out of really bad situations so we can heal them. But when you’re shoving it up your nose every other day and you stop breathing multiple times and have to go to the emergency room, then that’s a person who has the problem.
7:21 Brian Rose: So alcohol in itself isn’t bad, but I can’t handle it. I read an article recently where Brad Pitt said he got his alcohol privileges revoked. He’s been sober, I think, for a few years, because Brad knows that when he drinks, he becomes a guy he doesn’t like. That’s the way I look at it. For my last two years and for the rest of my life, I’ve got my alcohol privileges revoked. That’s Brian’s journey; it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s your journey.
7:49 Brian Rose: It’s funny. Sometimes I see people who can have a drink or two and then not drink for a few weeks, and I’m like: oh, that’s how normal people drink. For me it was like, let’s have 50 drinks. That was what we always did, and the only thing I knew. There were warning signs all along the way. I had girlfriends who, when they got to know me, would say: do you do this every single day? Do you always have so many drinks? But they would love me and support me. And it just got worse and worse.
8:16 Brian Rose: When I moved to London and finally got off the heroin, I was still drinking. It was such a big part of me that I didn’t know how to get rid of it. And it got to a point where I just hated myself for the person I was when I was drinking. I remember being in [unclear] and going out to buy a bottle of vodka, and looking at the guy selling it to me, and he was looking in my eye thinking: you’re a f*cking loser, you’ve got to buy this bottle of vodka just to make it through your life. Whether he was or not, I don’t know. And I was like: I f*cking hate this feeling of being a loser, and I can’t figure it out.
8:54 Brian Rose: So I just want to say to anybody out there who’s frustrated with a behaviour you can’t control: I get it. I’m supposed to be one of the smartest people in the world. I’m surrounded by great people, by loving parents, by incredible education, and I can’t figure out my own alcoholism. It’s so frustrating. I got to a point where I never thought I would figure it out. I just thought this was going to be me, and I would probably die early, at 60, of liver failure or something.
9:22 Brian Rose: The thing that changed all that was me connecting with the rest of the world. I think a lot of alcoholics feel very disconnected from the world, and when they have their drink, they don’t feel that pain any more. For a lot of them, it’s a way of escaping and disconnecting. I understand that. And funnily enough, London Real forced me to get out there and connect with the world. The more I connected, the more I listened, the more I gave back, the more I became part of this human organism, the less I felt the need to drink as much.
9:57 Brian Rose: The weird thing is, when you look at the media and the world, they tell you it’s all or nothing: you have to go to AA, you have to stop, all that stuff. And look, maybe that works for a lot of people, but that wasn’t the case with me. For me, it just became less of a necessity every day. I became more connected and started walking away from some of these abusive behaviours, because I felt like I had a purpose. I had people looking up to me, and I just felt more loved, maybe more part of this world.
10:32 Brian Rose: About three or four years ago, I was still drinking wine here and there. Sometimes it would be a few nights a week, and then a few more. And I was like: why am I doing this? This is just being lazy now. This is some little comfort you use because you had a hard day or whatever, which is all BS at the end of the day.
10:55 Brian Rose: Then finally, here on New Year’s two years ago, I said to Mariana: babe, let’s stop drinking for 30 days. And she said: OK, let’s do it. Thirty days later she said: let’s have a drink. And I said: no, I’m actually liking this. There have been times when I’ve been like, man, I could really use a drink, because this is just not the funnest day or situation. But I found a way through it and breathed through it.
11:12 Brian Rose: Funnily enough, the closest I ever came to having a drink was when I went on vacation to Bordeaux last year, which is featured in the movie Reconnect. I felt completely out of my element. I had nothing to do. I felt frustrated. I couldn’t work, I couldn’t take action, I couldn’t fill my time. And I said to Mariana: I’m thinking about drinking. And she was like: no, no, don’t do that. But that was the time. A lot of people say I’m a workaholic and I don’t know work-life balance. But if I get into those situations and start drinking again, that’s not good. So I’m also getting to know myself: maybe I know what’s best for me, and not everyone else does.
11:52 Brian Rose: The last two years have been the greatest of my life. I’m so proud of myself when I wake up every day not hungover, just like I was proud of myself every day after I stopped doing heroin. I was like: you’re a f*cking rock star. So proud that I kicked that nasty brown f*cking powder going up my nose. I was proud of myself for years. And every day I’m proud of myself, because this is my battle.
12:20 Brian Rose: We all have a battle. You have a battle. Your battle might be negative self-talk. It could be retail therapy. It could be sex. It could be drinking. It could be binge eating: you’re always shoving something in your mouth because you don’t want to be feeling something. Everybody has their kryptonite. For me, it’s alcohol. It’s something that changes my state to get me out of the moment. And if I can win that battle every day, then I feel great about myself and I can kick ass.
12:52 Brian Rose: I really believe that in this life, it’s not about us becoming greater at certain things. It’s about us fighting our demons and our flaws, and getting up every day and conquering the little demons out there that are gunning for you. And trust me, alcohol and drugs are still gunning for me. They’ve still got me in their sights. If I start to go weak and my power level starts to go down, like in a video game, they’re going to pick me off: “Come on, Brian, let’s have that drink.”
13:21 Brian Rose: So every day I have to be vigilant like a motherf*cker. Every day I get my sleep, I get my meditation, I do my gratitude, I do my affirmations, I go and do hard, meaningful work. I exhaust myself physically. I try to be with any painful emotions. I try to forgive. I try to lead others. I try to give back. And then guess what? The next day, it’s another battle. And the next day, it’s another battle. I’m not naive enough to think I’ve got this thing licked, because I don’t.
13:52 Brian Rose: Maybe there is an equivalent. Maybe alcoholics go to AA meetings every day to remind themselves, and surround themselves with people, so they don’t go back on that track. But I found a way to keep me where I’m at. And I think the main message I want to tell Brian at 20, at 30, at 40 is: look, brother, this isn’t going to be this way forever. I know you were giving up on yourself. You hated yourself. You loathed yourself. You didn’t believe in yourself. Your self-esteem was so low because you couldn’t control this nasty clear liquid you had to shove down your throat every night just to feel whole.
14:27 Brian Rose: And I just want to say, buddy, it will get better, but you’re going to have to do things that aren’t comfortable. You’re going to have to go out there and connect with this world and with the people of this world who could potentially hurt you, or who you think could hurt you. By doing that, you’re finally going to feel connected. And when you feel connected, you’re not going to feel like you have to escape or abuse yourself or get out of the situation.
14:51 Brian Rose: That’s my advice to the younger Brian, and that’s my advice to anyone out there. I know a lot of you are struggling with addictive behaviours, whether it’s drugs or food or sex or retail, or your damn phone. I know people with 15 news apps who are literally addicted to their phone and can’t set it down. That’s not necessarily any worse than some of these other addictions. Sure, you’re not going to rot your liver out, but you might be completely not present and not dealing with tricky emotions for a long time.
15:23 Brian Rose: So every day is a brand new day. Try looking at some of your behaviours, try looking at your fears, and ask yourself why you’re afraid of them, and go into them, because that’s ultimately what it was for me. I was afraid of people hurting me. I moved in with Mariana and [unclear], and I was afraid of being connected with humans who could potentially hurt me. I had these two little boys who are so vulnerable; anything could happen to them, and I would be crushed and devastated. Honestly, that’s what kept me from having kids before, and even from being around humans, because I thought they would hurt me if something happened to them.
16:01 Brian Rose: But now I embrace that as a possibility every day. And I recognise that the joy and the connectivity I get by being willing to be hurt is worth it. Maybe that’s what all of us need to realise: that it’s OK to be hurt, to let our guard down, to be vulnerable, to go out there and be part of this world. Life is pain. Life is joy. Life is all of these things. If we breathe, we’ll find a way through it. There’s a lesson in everything out there.
16:33 Brian Rose: That’s why I don’t necessarily regret my 30 years of hard drinking. I mean, I guess I do, but it brought me to this place where I’m so clear and so focused right now that every minute of every day is so important to me. I could never spend that minute not fully present, not sober. And I could never jeopardise a minute the next day where I wouldn’t be completely present, because I feel like I’m on this mission. I’ve got to do these incredible things for this world, and I’m so grateful that alcohol showed me that.
17:05 Brian Rose: So there’s my story. I don’t know if that was the best version of it, but this is a little bit of what it was like to be me these last 30 years. And again, there is hope for everyone out there. Thank you for keeping me honest, all of you. Being watched by everyone is a wonderful thing. That accountability is priceless. I always say: find some people who will hold you accountable, because all of you out there have held me accountable. No one’s watching me per se to see if I’m having a drink, but I want to be able to tell you: this year I’m two years, next year three years, then four years.
17:42 Brian Rose: The thing is, after about a year, I didn’t even think about it any more. I wasn’t counting the days until it was two years, because now I am a non-drinker. That’s it. I think that’s the definition of when a habit just becomes who you are. So those are my thoughts on alcohol, on drinking, and on any kind of state change that you are not in control of.
18:07 Brian Rose: Are there times when I would still love to have a drink? Yeah, there are social situations where I think: I should have one. But the truth is, you can have a hell of a lot of fun in this life without changing your state, because life is fun. I find I’m actually goofier and sillier in public now than I was when I was drinking. So amen to that.
18:25 Brian Rose: Wherever you are out there, Happy New Year. I hope you can make some incredible moves in 2020 to become the person you want to be. There’s a great line from the movie Wall Street where Bud Fox says to his dad: one day you’re going to be proud of me, Dad. And he says: it’s yourself you’ve got to be proud of, buddy. And that’s the truth. Today, I’m proud of Brian Rose, and I hope you can take steps so you can be proud of you. All right, much love. Bye.
