Stop Drinking Podcast by Soberclear

THEY Are Why You Drink Alcohol (And Can’t Stop)

• Leon Sylvester

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Welcome to the Stop Drinking Podcast, where we help you make stopping drinking a simple, logical, and easy decision. We help you with tips, tools, and strategies to start living your best life when alcohol free. If you want to learn more about stop drinking coaching, then head over to www.soberclear.com. I want you to go back to the last time you unintentionally woke up at 3 o'clock in the morning after drinking alcohol that very same evening. You know the feeling that I'm talking about? The heart pounding, the dry mouth, and then it hits you. That wave of panic and shame washing over you as you replay the night before. You look up at the ceiling in the dark and you make a promise. You say, I'm done. I'm never drinking again. And in that moment, you really, really mean it. But then three days pass. The shame fades and you're having a stressful day. You check your phone, you see an alcohol advertisement, and suddenly that promise is gone. A few moments later, you're at the store or the bar buying the very same poison but expecting a different result. See, for years I blamed myself. I thought I was broken. I thought I had no willpower. But I want you to stop blaming yourself right now. Instead, let's break down this problem using first principles thinking. What if that desire inside you wasn't actually yours? What if your brain was actually being hacked? Today we're gonna look at the cold hard data from 2025 that the industry desperately tries to hide. You're about to see how they have engineered a trap to target your emotions, target your children, and target your future. This is not a conspiracy theory. It's a business plan, and you are the product. A quick introduction, my name is Leon Sylvester. I haven't drank now for over seven years after a decade of struggling. Binge drinking, daily drinking, begging God to help me stop. Nothing worked for me. But seven years ago, everything changed once I reframed how I view alcohol. Since then, I've been teaching people how to do it, like I'm going to show you how to do it now in this video. And I also created soberclear.com, which is a coaching program for business people and professionals to help them get control of their drinking quickly. My approach is scientifically validated by an academic psychologist. We get a 96% client-rated success rate, which is verified by the psychologist. And if you want to see if working together is a good match, I am accepting one-on-one clients right now. So if you want to schedule a time to speak, click the link down below, book a call, and let's see if the SoberClay system could be a good match for you. We've got to start at the very beginning. So to understand why you drink, you simply have to follow the money. In 2023, the global amount of money spent on alcohol advertisements hit$7.7 billion. To put that into perspective, that's over$19 million a day or$800,000 an hour. But the scary part isn't the cash, it's how it's being used. See, most of that money was spent purely on selling you a lifestyle illusion. Think about it. When was the last time you saw a beer commercial that spoke about the ingredients? When did you see a wine ad that talked about the fermentation process? I mean, it happens, but it's pretty damn rare. See, they don't sell the liquid. Do you know why? Because it's ethanol. It's an industrial solvent that burns your throat, destroys your health, and has zero benefits. If they sold reality, nobody would buy it. So they sell the fantasy. They don't show somebody passed out and broke. They show you enjoying the sunset with an ice cold beer in your hand. They don't show you the arguments, the tears and bad decisions. They show you a romantic dinner where the couple looks deeply in love. They don't show you the increased cancer risks, organ failure, DUIs. You get the point. See, instead of showing you the truth, they are doubling down on the lies. See, we have data. From 2020 to 2023, they increased this alcohol propaganda spending by 15%. What they're doing is training your brain to believe that alcohol equals connection. They are teaching you that you cannot be happy, relaxed, or loved unless you have a drink in your hand. They take your deepest desires and glue alcohol onto them. And the crazy part? Alcohol doesn't bring you closer to what you want. It quietly drives it all away and sells you the illusion that it's already yours. For a few hours, you might feel like the person in the commercial. Then the illusion wears off and the real life is the hangover. Now let's talk about a new trick that they're using in 2025. A fresh report from the World Health Organization has declared that there is no level of alcohol consumption safe for human health. It's adopting an approach similar to what governments and health bodies took towards tobacco several decades ago. Now, the industry knows that the tide is turning, that people like you and I are waking up and the industry's lies are finally being exposed. So they're scared. And when they get scared, they get sneaky. Have you heard of zebra striping? Well, it's a buzzword. You might have even seen ads for it. They're now telling you drink an alcoholic drink, then drink water, then drink alcohol. They call it the chill hack or effortless fun. I mean, it sounds nice. It sounds like they actually care about you and just want you to be safe. I'm sorry, but it's all a lie. When you go out and drink alcohol, your body shuts down fast. You get sick or tired, so you head home quicker. But if you have water in between each drink, guess what happens instead? You end up staying out longer and spend more time in the environment where the conditioning actually happens. Zebra striping doesn't make you drink less, it just spreads the drinking out so hangovers are not as bad and you don't pass out. In turn, you build the illusion that you've got alcohol under control and your drinking is actually healthy. And that's why they are pushing this narrative so hard. They want you to think that alcohol is not the problem here. It's you instead. You simply just need to learn how to space out and moderate the poison. Once you do that, then alcohol will gift you with love, success, relaxation. It's delusional, and I hope that you're starting to see through these blatant lies. Next, I've got a quick task for you. Grab your phone and open social media. Scroll for a minute. What do you see? Social media has become the ultimate weapon for the alcohol industry in this modern age. This isn't just about advertisements anymore, it's psychological warfare. They're even using AI to target you in ways that your brain cannot even process. See, the World Health Organization is warning about the growing influence of digital marketing for alcohol products. And these advertisements are increasingly reaching underage audiences, and nobody's listening. As of right now, only a handful of countries in the entire world have any rules about the internet and alcohol, and most of those rules are incredibly weak. Countries like Norway and Lithuania are the only ones doing it right, as they have total bans. But let's look at the United States. In fact, look at most of the Western world. It's the Wild West out there. There are no sheriffs, there are no laws, it's just you and a trillion-dollar industry that wants your money. In places like Kenya, they tried to pass a national policy in July of 2025 to limit children's exposure, but they admitted that they don't even have the tech to enforce it. Greece launched AI tools in November to block underage sales, but that is just a drop in the ocean. And the government's not coming to save you. More often than not, they're protecting the corporations, not your children, and certainly not your liver. So what does this mean for you? It means your phone is a minefield. According to the European Center for Monitoring Alcohol Marketing, the numbers are terrifying. A whopping 82% of young people recall seeing alcohol marketing in just the last month. But here's the trick: it doesn't look like a commercial. More often than not, the content comes from an organic influencer making posts. And this is the most dangerous shift that we have ever seen. It doesn't look like a billboard. It looks like your favorite YouTuber. It looks like the cool girl on TikTok. It looks like a funny challenge or a storytime video. But make no mistake here, it's paid for. The industry is funneling a massive chunk of their digital budget into these influencers because they know something about human psychology. They know that we trust people more than we trust logos. Fully 87% of Gen Z trust an influencer's recommendation to make purchase decisions. We let our guards down. We invite them into our living rooms. But many of these sponsorships aren't even tagged. They're actually hiding the money, making it appear as if it's a personal endorsement. You think I'm making this up? Well, let's take a look at the real-world examples happening right now. In August 2025, huge superstars in Nigeria, like DeVito, flooded social media with posts about luxury cognac and champagne. They racked up millions of views. It looked like a party, but it was a calculated move to hook a generation. In June, Jin from a popular K-pop band, BTS, became the face of a Korean soju brand. The teaser videos of him rediscovering the taste got over 10 million views on Instagram and TikTok. It blended pop culture with drinking so seamlessly that some fans didn't even realize that they were actually watching a commercial. But the ultimate enemy isn't the influencers, it's the algorithm. The AI running these platforms is the silent assassin. Companies like Meta and TikTok, they use something called linger time. Here's how it works the AI watches your movements, and if you stop scrolling on a cocktail video for just three seconds, literally just a pause, the AI tags you. It says, huh, they like this. Then it floods your feed. It creates a feedback loop. It shows you more bars, more drinks, more parties, and this is damn predatory. So how do you fight a machine that knows your brain better than you do? Well, you don't actually have to fight it. If you can really see alcohol for what it is, an addictive, poisonous substance that will slowly destroy your life, once you see it that way, the desire to click on that content dies. You stop feeding the algorithm, and then when you stop feeding it, the alcohol content stops showing up. But if you want to speed up that process, here's what you can do. Firstly, unfollow every account that glamorizes drinking, and any time that you see a post seeing those lies, top the free dots and hit not interested. Then you're not just scrolling anymore, you're training the algorithm manually. Secondly, replace the alcohol propaganda with accounts that actually pull you towards the life you want. If you're on social media every day, and most of us probably are, it's either programming you to drink or it's programming you to grow. So be very mindful of what you interact with. Because the conditioning doesn't just stop on your phone or the TV. The very same people that try to hijack your feed are also working behind the scenes to hijack the rules that you live under. This part you need to understand. And what I'm about to share is incredibly unsettling. See, right now, the alcohol industry is lobbying harder than they have ever done in history. They're pouring millions of dollars into the pockets of politicians to fight. And they want to fight against tax hikes. They want to fight against putting warning labels on bottles. They're using the same playbook that Big Tobacco used in the 1990s. The tobacco companies stood in court and swore that nicotine wasn't addictive. They talked about personal choice. They screamed about freedom. Guess what's happening? The alcohol industry is using those same arguments today. They're saying, let the people choose. This is a free country. But let's look at the cost of this so-called freedom. In 2025, it was estimated that there were 2.6 million alcohol-related deaths globally. And the most heartbreaking part is a disproportionately high percentage of those deaths were young people. These were young people with their whole lives ahead of them. They had dreams. They had potential and they were crushed by this product. And more often than not, it was illegally marketed to them. Yet the lobbying machine doesn't stop. In 2025, we know that their pressure campaign stopped various proposed tax hikes in countries all around the world. One example of this was Colombia, where aggressive lobbying from the industry led to the entire beer and spirits package being scrapped from the government's financing bill. See, Big Alcohol knows that if the price goes up, consumption goes down. They know that tax hikes save lives, but they fought them anyway. So they end up trading human lives for profit margins. They're looking at a spreadsheet, seeing a death toll, and deciding it's an acceptable cost of doing business. Look at what's happening in the UK right now. They have this 10-year health plan. On paper, it sounds amazing. It sounds like a government is finally stepping up. But when you read the fine lines, you see the fingerprints of the lobbyists. All mention of marketing regulation was removed from earlier draft versions of the plan and didn't make it to the final version. Plans for minimum unit pricing were also scrapped. And the only meaningful improvements are the introduction of mandatory nutrition and health warning labels. And as helpful as these labels are, they miss most of the risks. They might put a tiny logo about drinking responsibly on the back of the bottle in a font that's so small that you probably need a microscope to read it. But in reality, the health risks of alcohol are so long that there is no label that can possibly fit them all on. The mask has fallen off. And I'm not telling you all of this to scare you. Fear mongering doesn't work in the long run. I'm telling you all of this because I'm angry for you. I want you to realize that you have been played. That urge you feel, it isn't yours. It was planted there by a multi-billion dollar algorithm designed to turn you into a user. But now you know the truth. Now you're starting to see the illusion. Not drinking alcohol isn't about giving something up, it's about taking your power back from this matrix. The game is rigged, and the only way to win is to not play. Thanks for checking out the Stop Drinking podcast by SoberClear. If you want to learn more about how we work with people to help them stop drinking effortlessly, then make sure to visit www.soberclear.com.

Head Shot

Leon Sylvester

Host