How To Quit Drinking Without Quitting Drinking

The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum

Society & Culture

4.8 • 784 Ratings

🗓️ 8 October 2025

⏱️ 74 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Katie Herzog, co-host of the Blocked and Reported podcast (BarPod), is best known as an anthropologist of, as she puts it, “internet bullshit.” But she’s swerved far out of her lane for her latest project. In her brand new book, Drink Your Way Sober, Katie combines personal history with deep reporting to chronicle a lifetime of drinking and explain how a little-known drug called naltrexone, combined with an approach called The Sinclair Method, finally allowed her to quit for good.

They also get into why young people are drinking less, what the “California sober” trend actually means, and how Katie’s own story fits into the larger debate about moderation versus abstinence. Plus: real estate, dogs, and how we’re feeling about the state of independent journalism and their own longterm survival.

Guest Bio:

Katie Herzog is a journalist living in the Pacific Northwest. She is the host of the podcast Blocked and Reported.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I knew it had to end because if it didn't, it was going to kill me.
0:03.0	Like, it was going to literally kill me.
0:05.0	And either I was going to get some sort of disease, alcohol-related disease,
0:09.0	or something worse would happen.
0:11.0	I knew this couldn't last forever, but I was also, it was so, I mean,
0:15.0	I had been trying to quit drinking for 15 years and nothing had stuck.
0:20.0	And I decided to do something different.
0:27.3	Welcome to The Unspeakable Podcast.
0:29.4	I'm your host, Megan Down.
0:31.4	My guest this week has been on the pod many times.
0:35.2	She is journalist and podcaster Katie Herzog. You know her, of course,
0:39.5	as the co-host of Blocked and Reported. But this time, Katie is here to talk about something much more
0:45.7	personal, definitely out of her lane. And that is her new book. It's called Drink Your Way Sober.
0:53.3	It is the story of how years of heavy drinking,
0:56.7	including a secret two-year period during COVID, led her to an unconventional treatment called
1:03.3	the Sinclair method. We talk about a lot of things in this conversation. We talk about myths
1:08.9	and taboos around alcoholism, about
1:12.0	why AA doesn't work for everyone, and how she finally got free of this mental burden,
1:19.8	obsessive thoughts around drinking. We also touch on the podcasting world. My favorite topic,
1:25.7	independent creation, which would drive anyone to drink,
1:29.5	the state of substack, what is going on in the heterodox space, the sense-making space,
1:35.0	as the sense-making space stopped making sense. As always, it's a spectacular conversation.
	...

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