Nobody asked us why

Happy Thursday, Clubbies,

Last week I promised you the longer Tales recap. Here it is.

Not once did anyone ask us why we weren't drinking.

We weren't hiding it either. Club soda on the rocks with a lime, at basically every bar in the French Quarter, in front of people whose entire livelihood is selling the other thing. Nobody blinked. A few of them poured it double. Some started calling us the Bubble Boyz.

I flew down ready to defend the whole idea. Turns out nobody in those rooms was arguing about it anymore. Everyone in those packed seminars was past the why and deep into the how — glassware, pricing, where it sits on the menu etc.

📖 The full breakdown is below. Nine out of ten people buying alcohol-free drinks still drink alcohol, why the alcohol-free list is still stuck on the back of the menu, and what a bar actually makes when you order a club soda.

🚶‍♂️I’ve been thinking with my feet. One of my goals this year is to average 20k steps a day, which is roughly four hours of walking. Lofty goal. But we're halfway through the year and I'm right there. The surprise wasn't the number, it was how much thinking got done. Some of the best ideas I've had this year showed up while out walking. Stuck on something at the desk? Enter a micro walk and 15 minutes later I've got my answer. More on getting actual work done while walking in a blog post soon, but in the meantime here's why 10,000 steps isn’t the starting point for everyone.

🥂 The shot. Michael and Natalie from Pathfinder made the case that a shot has almost nothing to do with what's in the glass. It's a ritual. It's a hello, a goodbye, a congratulations, a handshake with liquid in it. And that ritual doesn't stop just because drinking trends change. I always ask for a shot of club soda when my friends do a round, so I'm in it too. Hopefully more bars start carrying alcohol-free options like Pathfinder.

🍺 George Clooney’s back at it. Fresh off selling Casamigos for a cool billion, he’s rolling out Crazy Mountain, a 65-calorie alcohol-free lager (and a lime version), brewed so it never contains alcohol rather than having it stripped out. Clooney's line says it all: "We love beer, we just don't always want the effects that come with it."

📱 Club Soda Club app update. The dev team used the week I was at Tales to go under the hood — refactoring, cleanup, and a brand new venue engine built to scale. I've been testing it all week and a new build hits beta testers on Tuesday. Got an iPhone and want in? Reply to this email.

produced by Scott Nixon

Michael Toscano hit seven years last week. In this episode, he talks about taking inventory of his close calls and why being gentle with yourself is the key to making it stick. His take on why one hour, one day, or even a month and a half is always a win is the pressure-free reframe a lot of people need.

Know someone who's thinking about it? There's no membership requirement.

Part-time members, full-time members, "I'm just curious" members. All welcome. So whether you've got a friend who's been saying "I should probably cut back" every Sunday morning for the last six months, or a friend who's already all-in on the alcohol-free life and just hasn't found their people yet — send them your link . They subscribe to the free newsletter, you both win. No pressure, no program, no weird pamphlets.

Basically, if they've ever ordered a club soda (or anything else non-alcoholic) and felt like they had to explain themselves... they're already one of us.

👇👇👇