Show Transcript

0:00:01 - (Kevin Lowe): How does a man who'd been drinking his entire life suddenly stop drinking, find himself signed up for the Tour de France when he didn't even own a bicycle? And did I mention this isn't a young guy. I'm talking about a guy who's 50 years old. Obviously, limitations are off the table today, my friend, you are about to hear one of the most powerful stories from one of the most amazing people you will ever encounter.

0:00:32 - (Kevin Lowe): By the end of todays episode, you will discover the power of resilience, the beauty of self discovery, and how one mans courage can inspire you to conquer your own mountains. It is my utmost pleasure to welcome you to episode 315, my interview with none other than Andy Smith. Welcome to the podcast.

0:00:58 - (Andy Smith): Yo. Are you ready to flip the script on life? Cause those bad days, they're just doors to better days. And that's exactly what we do here at grit, grace and inspiration. Your host, Kevin Lowe, he's been flipping the script on his own life, turning over 20 years of being completely blind into straight up inspiration, motivation and encouragement just for you. So kick back, relax, and let me introduce you to your host, Kevin.

0:01:24 - (Kevin Lowe): Hello, Andy. Man, what a pleasure to have you here today. Welcome to the podcast.

0:01:31 - (Andy Smith): Yay. I'm so glad to be part of this, following your story. What an inspiration. And one of the best things about doing what I do now is I get to meet people like you. So, yeah, look forward to having a great chat.

0:01:48 - (Kevin Lowe): Oh, man. Well, thank you so much, man. That means, means a lot to me. So let's kind of take us back kind of to childhood. I always love to kind of get an idea and I think in your story, you know, it's going to be pivotal to just kind of understanding leading up to, you know, the events of your life. And so take me back, talk me about where you grew up at, what life was like for you as a kid, and we'll work from there.

0:02:15 - (Andy Smith): Amazing. Yeah, I mean, I was born in the north of England, and when I was seven years old, we moved up to the Shetland islands, which for those of you who are not sure where that is, it's a small group of about 100 islands that is basically forms the northernmost part of the UK. It's sort of on the way to Iceland, sort of adjacent with Norway and very, very remote part of the world. I grew up on the island of Bresse, which is about 7 miles by 3300 people on it.

0:02:48 - (Andy Smith): And in the early seventies, when we moved up there, it was like stepping back into a different century. There was no car ferry. If you wanted a car on the island, you had to befriend somebody with a fishing boat who would crane it onto the deck and take it over for you. And just an extraordinary place for a young guy to grow up very free to go and do what you wanted, but not, I guess, by a lot of people's standards, maybe, who've. People who've grown up in a city and things like that. There's not a lot of things to do, so you kind of have to make your own entertainment.

0:03:28 - (Andy Smith): No cinemas. There was only one tv channel when I was growing up. Yeah. So you really were left to your own devices in terms of how you passed your time. But a spectacular place. Loads of wildlife grew up messing about in boats and fishing and going and working on the local farm and all this kind of thing. And I guess one of the things that had come to define my life, a huge drinking culture. I actually grew up in a big old house that we moved into that was more or less completely derelict. And there was, I think, about two usable rooms in this big three story house, about eight bedrooms, and the ceilings were hanging down and. And it was quite an interesting place.

0:04:20 - (Andy Smith): There was rabbits living in it, there was rats, you name it. And so we fixed that up and turned it into a guest house in a pub. What could possibly go wrong for a young guy in that sort of situation? Very, very happy childhood. But from quite an early age, developed quite the taste for what I would call the Shetland diet, which was Tennant's lager and McEwan's export beer washed down with copious amounts of whiskey.

0:04:51 - (Andy Smith): So from probably about 13 years old, I was very much sort of embraced that culture. It was good fun, lots of interesting times, but everything sort of revolved around alcohol, whether it was a dance at the local hall or whether it was watching people in the pub, which was my home, where our very livelihood depended on people consuming copious amounts of alcohol in our house. So it kind of had quite a big impact on me, I think, culturally, to sort of realize that in order to prove yourself as a man, as it were, that as a young man growing up, that the size of your manhood was measured by how far down a bottle of whiskey you could get before you either threw up or fell over, basically. So it was quite the baptism of fire. And very much one of the sort of the phrases was, if you couldn't hard your drink, as they would say up there, then you were a bit of a failure. And that carried with me throughout my whole life of this kind of desire to sort of prove myself.

0:06:09 - (Andy Smith): And drinking was a big part of that.

0:06:11 - (Kevin Lowe): Yeah. Wow. How old were you when you would finally move away from there?

0:06:19 - (Andy Smith): So I went away to university when I was 18, went to Edinburgh, the capital, and studied physics at uni. But again, you know, quite a big part of being a student, certainly, in Scotland, is having a good time. Party. Party. And my folks, I'm very grateful that I'm 58 now and my folks are still alive and they still live up there. So we're actually looking at a holiday to go up. And it's a place that is very dear to me in terms of.

0:06:54 - (Andy Smith): I think there's something very special about growing up on an island. You very much can sort of walk the coastline. You feel part of the landscape, as it were. I always make a point of when I'm going home, of just touching the ground, and it feels very special that you have this thing that is quite separate from the islands around it, but actually is also connected underneath the sea. So it's a very special place. But I live in England now.

0:07:27 - (Andy Smith): I've spent most of my professional career living in various different parts of the UK, but it's where I consider to be home.

0:07:34 - (Kevin Lowe): Yeah. Oh, my gosh. I mean, it sounds absolutely just beautiful in every sense of the word. What a magical place. And so amazing that you still get to go back there today and experience it with your parents. I absolutely love that.

0:07:54 - (Andy Smith): It's a very beautiful landscape. It's a sort of place that, on a beautiful day, I would really challenge any place to be a more beautiful part of this planet. But the weather, obviously, given where it is, is a little mixed, shall we say. It's quite funny when people go to visit, they might say, oh, why are there no trees around here? And you say, well, come back in September and then you'll realize that basically any tree worth its salt is going to get blown flat and, you know, very windy, very wet, so lots of long, dark nights. All the more time for drinking, really, it's.

0:08:32 - (Kevin Lowe): Yes. Wow. Now, one thing I was kind of curious about, growing up in this type of culture, in this environment. Did you always intend on going away to college or did you ever think about not going to college?

0:08:50 - (Andy Smith): Yeah, it's a really interesting question. I think I was probably steered by my parents, I think particularly my dad, who was keen for me to pursue further education. I was pretty bright at school, did very well in all my exams, but I didn't really know what I wanted to do, so physics was my sort of passion. It was what I was good at and it made sense to go and study that at university. And it's interesting, as a father now myself, and having, you know, experienced sort of trying to encourage my kids to go and pursue their passions.

0:09:28 - (Andy Smith): I think my dad saw what was sort of potentially a, you know, a good adventure for me and sort of encouraged, cajoled, kicked me to go and pursue this. Yeah. So I kind of drifted. I drifted into it. And to be fair, I've probably not really been back living there full time since, because just career and things like that now has taken me to other parts of the country.

0:09:55 - (Kevin Lowe): Yeah, absolutely. I love it. What career path would you end up taking after college?

0:10:01 - (Andy Smith): So I went into one of the big, sort of blue chip retailers, a company called Marks and Spencer in the UK, into their sort of management training scheme, which was a quite a good grounding. But then I went to get a sales job in the pharmaceutical industry. And that's probably where I've spent most of my career, in healthcare and gradually becoming more senior in management roles, running divisions of pharmaceutical companies. I've run dental companies, veterinary companies.

0:10:33 - (Andy Smith): So it's just been kind of interesting how I've always sort of drifted towards the healthcare side of things. And given what I do now, it's just. It's kind of funny how life sometimes gives you little clues along the way around where maybe your destiny may lie. And I find myself really putting some of the experience in my kind of earlier career to good use in terms of what I'm doing now.

0:11:03 - (Kevin Lowe): Yeah, I love it. You know what? I love that because I often say that I feel like lives are. Each. Each of our lives are like a Jigdenna saw puzzle. And, you know, all along the way, pieces, they start getting fit together. And many times we don't take an opportunity, though, to ever try and look at things from a big picture until much later on. And I think a lot of times when we do sit back and look at a big picture, we can see exactly like what you said, where there were little clues, there were little things back on. Life have led you to this place?

0:11:38 - (Andy Smith): Well, I love the movie slumdog Millionaire. You've probably come across it. And, yes, I just love the kind of the narrative that everything you go through in your life, good, bad and indifferent, can have meaning somewhere further down the road. And I think it's one of those things that as you get older, you start to see the value in painful experiences. You start to see the value of people who come into your life and they're there for a reason. They're there to teach you something. And sometimes those lessons are uncomfortable, and sometimes they're there to inspire you to go and do other things.

0:12:18 - (Andy Smith): And sometimes it requires a passage of time in order to really understand the value of that.

0:12:26 - (Kevin Lowe): Yeah, absolutely. Talking more about kind of the alcohol side of your story, because I know that's really going to kind of lead us through, really, the rest of our conversation. Will you talk to me a little bit more about that, of it's just impact on your daily life, maybe even career wise? I would love to kind of hear a little bit more about that.

0:12:51 - (Andy Smith): Yeah. And I think, you know, when I was younger, alcohol was very, it was very exciting. It was something that you did with your friends. It was a kind of a social glue. In absence of things like going to the movies or, you know, going to the bowling alley and things like that, none of these things existed. So we would just sit in a little shed somewhere and sit and drink and do various different things. And I kind of carried that narrative through the rest of my life. And then when I started working and I was away working away from home, maybe feeling a little bit isolated, alcohol again felt like a bit of an antidote to loneliness.

0:13:38 - (Andy Smith): I became more and more senior in my roles, and I found that I was using alcohol a lot in terms of relaxation. I was using it in terms of entertaining, and it just became quite a all encompassing. There were very little or very few parts of my life where alcohol didn't play a certain role. And it was fine for a while. And then obviously, you get in a relationship, you get married, kids come along, and all of a sudden you start to feel that there's a slight shift, there's a slight evolution where far from being the kind of the fun thing, alcohol just starts to become something thats getting in the way.

0:14:25 - (Andy Smith): And its interesting how people will twist a narrative on things. And I certainly did that. And I was very successful. I broke records. I won awards for my coaching and influencing and management skills. You know, was perceived as a real high achiever within the industry that I was in. When I moved into dental, I completely rewrote the rulebook in terms of what was possible, took on a poor performing company and transformed it.

0:15:01 - (Andy Smith): Did the same when I went into veterinary. And all the while, I just told myself that to go and drink myself to sleep, basically, let's just call it that, on the sofa every night, was the actions of a high achiever. I work hard, I play hard. I remember when I got my first sort of big job in the retail company after leaving university. My manager at the time. And we're going back to the kind of mid eighties, the late eighties here.

0:15:36 - (Andy Smith): And he was very much, you know, well, you need to work hard and play hard. So I just took that. Took him at his word and assumed play hard meant just go out and obliterate yourself with alcohol. Don't get me wrong, I did lots of other things as well, which were great fun and things like that. But there was just this kind of general presence of alcohol in my life. I got married, a couple of amazing kids who are now 18 and 21.

0:16:08 - (Andy Smith): But then that marriage failed, and alcohol was a big part of that. And I was deeply unhappy in the marriage. And it became my go to in terms of coping with that. And obviously, I think anybody who's listening to this, who's been married to somebody who drinks heavily, would also understand that there is a. A real sort of difficulty that goes with that. So we just. We were in this situation where I was unhappy, so I drank more.

0:16:38 - (Andy Smith): Then things would happen which made me more unhappy, which meant I drank more. And you end up in this kind of crazy cycle. And then that marriage ended, and I moved on. Met this amazing new woman, Louise. And we ended up having a. Having a child together who's now. He's, what, ten as we speak to this. And I tried to use that sort of change in my life as an opportunity to really have a look at myself.

0:17:09 - (Andy Smith): And I did for a little while. And then I remember once, Louise kind of saying to me, do you need to really be drinking as much as you are? And she came at this from a place of love. My ex came at it from a position of judgment. And. And I think when people are kind of really quite critical and things like that, anybody who struggled with any kind of addiction, even though you are doing something that, on the face of it, seems like a choice and you're kind of enjoying doing it. Actually, I think anybody who's really struggled with this would openly acknowledge that you feel terrible about yourself each day.

0:17:53 - (Andy Smith): You say to yourself, right, today is going to be different. I don't want to wake up like this tomorrow morning, and you're full of good intentions, and you go through the day, and then about lunchtime, the excuses start to kind of creep back in as to why. Maybe you could maybe just have a little drink and whatever. And then, hey, presto, off you go again. And you wake up again the following morning, and it's like the movie groundhog Day. You just think, I seem to be unable to break the cycle. And I think if you've ever been in that situation, it is a deeply uncomfortable state of affairs. I used to wake up every morning hating myself.

0:18:32 - (Andy Smith): So if anybody were to judge me on that, I literally. I was full to capacity of self loathing. And so I would be very defensive about it. And, you know, I would almost kind of stick two fingers up. It's like, well, you know, if you're gonna criticize me for me drinking, then just watch. I will go and, you know, really go to town, and I'll give you something to criticize me for. But Louise was very different. She just came at this from a position of concern, of love, and just, I guess, a general sense of, I want you to be around to be a dad for our young son. You're a good dad. I see how you are with your older children, and.

0:19:12 - (Andy Smith): And I'm just really frightened that you're not going to be around for them. But even then, that wasn't enough for me. It took me to get to quite a dark place. And bearing in mind this is a guy who was a supposed high achiever, I think, to look on the outside, looking in. This is a guy who's got the big flash company car, the nice house, you know, looks like he's got it all under control. And yet on the inside, I was just in a terrible state, and I was on antidepressants.

0:19:49 - (Andy Smith): I mean, there's some irony there, you know, drinking something that is an addictive depressant each evening, only to wake up to take a tablet, which is an antidepressant in the morning, is a special kind of abnormal reserved for, you know, people who are struggling with this. But it all kind of came to a head where I was getting a lot of health problems. I was struggling with gout, which I think a lot of people kind of smile or smirk when you talk about gout, because it's seen as kind of self inflicted, bit of a slightly comedy disease.

0:20:21 - (Andy Smith): If you've ever struggled with gout. It is the most painful thing that I have ever experienced. I got it in both knees, in both ankles, and gout in your knee is. It's a bit like somebody ramming a hot poker into the joint and twisting it every time your leg moves. And it is very difficult to cope with. I was on painkillers, I was on preventative medication. And the only thing that would make me feel better if I was in the middle of an attack was to get drunk. It was the only kind of painkiller the irony was, after I quit drinking, three months later, the gout disappeared, and I was able to come off the medication. But at the time, when you're in the.

0:21:03 - (Andy Smith): In the moment, it was terrible. And I had a medical. My blood pressure was through the roof. My cholesterol was through the roof. I was pre diabetic. And I just thought, wow, this is not how I thought I would be at 50 years old as it was at the time. And then it all kind of came to a head with, I was in our local supermarket, and I had a panic attack, and I'd never really had a panic attack. I'd had times.

0:21:35 - (Andy Smith): I was living with a lot of stress and anxiety, but I thought I was having a heart attack. My skin was on fire, my heart was racing out of my chest, and I started to lose consciousness. And I actually fell into one of the fridges in the supermarket and was sort of helped up by this little old lady, this little frail old lady who's, you know, I'm a big guy. And she kind of helped me to kind of sit up, and she said, are you okay? And I was trying to make excuses like I'd slipped or something like that.

0:22:09 - (Andy Smith): And I remember I said, oh, just give me a minute. I'll be okay. And I sat there. Now, I will never forget this moment of just sitting, looking at the floor and going, what are you doing here? This is crazy what you're doing. And so that set me off on a little bit of a voyage of discovery, but again, with the absence of anything. You know, I'd been to AA. I went to a few AA meetings, and. And I just couldn't get my head around the.

0:22:47 - (Andy Smith): The whole liver date time for the rest of your life. And the fact that I was there with people who'd been going to these meetings for years and years and years, and I. They didn't look to me like they were any further forward than I was. And I thought, well, what I'm hearing here was a lot of, you know, sad stories, for sure. And there were some people who were in a terrible situation, and so my heart went out to them.

0:23:16 - (Andy Smith): But I just thought, knowing what I know about problem solving in the business world, this does not make sense to me. It does not resonate with me at all, because there is no kind of place that I've been to before where just sitting talking about a problem ever solves it. And so I went to a few meetings, and there was a really sweet old lady. She bought me a book, and she said to me, after a couple of meetings, she said, oh, how are you getting on? What do you think?

0:23:49 - (Andy Smith): I said, I don't think this is right for me. And she kind of went, ah, thats because you havent hit rock bottom yet. And I was like, well, thats kind of why im here. So I dont. You know, that doesnt. So that doesnt happen. And she was sort of saying that this was your kind of entry ticket, that you had to lose everything. And sure enough, the people that I was in the meeting with were, very few of them were working.

0:24:15 - (Andy Smith): They didnt seem like they had particularly happy and fulfilling lives. They were just kind of getting by. And I've kind of said with my tongue in my cheek in the past that I felt a bit like I'd gone to Weight watchers and only to be told that I wasn't fat enough yet come back. You know, when you're 500 pounds and you've had a heart attack, then we can help you. And so I left that and thought, okay, the answer must be elsewhere. But I just couldn't work it out until I kind of got my own head around what might work for me.

0:24:53 - (Andy Smith): And there was one very interesting day. So not long after the incident in the supermarket, I was running late, and I was running the veterinary company at the time. And I really did not get on with my boss. I was brought in to turn the business around. The business had gone from declining at 30% per year to growing at 80%. And yet this guy just had a real way of belittling everything that I was doing. And I'm a big boy.

0:25:23 - (Andy Smith): I didn't think that it would get to me, but it really did. And it really damaged my self confidence. I was drinking more and more and more. And then one morning I was up early, showered, got a long drive ahead of me, got in the cardinal driving to go and get on the motorway. And this journey takes me past a railway crossing. And as I was driving up, I was about a couple of hundred meters away, and the lights started to flash, indicating that the barriers were about to come down.

0:25:57 - (Andy Smith): So I started to pick up speed. I put my foot on the accelerator to go and try and beat the barriers. And as I got closer, I slammed on the brakes. And I was just like, what are you doing? You know, this is insanity, to go and try and beat the train. So I kind of screeched to a halt at the barriers and sat there kind of stewing in my own juice, knowing I was going to be late for this meeting. Anxiety levels through the roof.

0:26:23 - (Andy Smith): And then a very interesting thing happened, and I was sitting there and listening to the radio, and the Michael Jackson song, the man in the mirror came on. And I've heard that song hundreds of times before, and I'd never really listened to it and kind of understood what the lyrics were all about. And that line in the chorus where it says, I'm starting with the man in the mirror, and I'm asking him to change his ways.

0:26:57 - (Andy Smith): My entire life changed on one word asking, because I'd spent literally 37 years beating myself up about the fact that I was drinking too much and all this kind of stuff. And this moment when I was looking at my reflection in the rearview mirror, I just literally asked myself a question. I just said, are you willing to do what it takes to sort this out once and for all? And it was almost like somebody else answered me back from the mirror and just went, yeah, I'm ready.

0:27:32 - (Andy Smith): And it was the first time I'd really kind of meant it. And then that set me off on quite a voyage of discovery to basically learn what I needed to learn in order to put this to bed once and for all.

0:27:45 - (Kevin Lowe): Wow, what a profound moment. And isn't it crazy how moments like this happened in the most just unlikely of situations, in places, sitting, waiting on a train, listening to Michael Jackson, and you have this moment. That's incredible.

0:28:07 - (Andy Smith): And also, I think that's kind of how life is, isn't it? If you think back to times when things have really shifted, they have rarely been, I think, or certainly from me anyway, but also with the people that I work with, they rarely are things that kind of creep up on you little bits at a time. They tend to be fairly impactful moments of generally quite high emotion as well. And, yeah, sometimes things will just snap into place and you just think, actually, I've had a moment of clarity here.

0:28:45 - (Andy Smith): And it's funny, that didn't give me the answers that I needed, but it just made me ask a different question. And somebody, I was listening to an interview with somebody, and they were talking, not about Alcohol, but they were talking about, when you're battling against yourself, they said, it's a bit like playing tennis and you're on both sides of the net, so it doesn't matter how hard you serve the ball, the ball will come back just as hard.

0:29:12 - (Andy Smith): And your opponent knows your every move. They know whichever shot is coming, they know how to respond to it. So you end up in this kind of war of attrition where you're both leathering the ball backwards and forwards over the net, and it's a zero sum game. And that is how I felt at the time. But then this person that was being interviewed said a really interesting thing. They said, well, but what if you beckoned that opponent over onto your side of the net and you became a doubles team?

0:29:42 - (Andy Smith): You would be invincible because you would know exactly what the other party was doing. You would barely even have to communicate. You would add value to each other and you'd be unbeatable. And that, for me, I think, kind of gives me the essence of the man in the mirror moment. It was just. I finally beckoned myself on my side of the net and it started a very different conversation around, what if I. I got curious rather than full of guilt and shame?

0:30:16 - (Andy Smith): What could make a difference? I just. I felt hopeful, probably for the first time in 30 years, that actually maybe, just maybe, I could do something about this.

0:30:27 - (Kevin Lowe): Yeah. Hope isn't hope. It's such a powerful feeling.

0:30:32 - (Andy Smith): Oh, yeah.

0:30:33 - (Kevin Lowe): For. For us to have hope. So the question we want to know is, what happens when the train finishes?

0:30:42 - (Andy Smith): Well, so this was interesting. I called my boss and said, look, I'm not well, which was not a lie, let's be clear. And I said, I need to take a few days off. And I went back home and I just thought, you know what? I think the answers are within me. And I went back to everything that I'd learned about selling and influencing, about coaching, about things like NLP and thought field therapy, tapping all of these things I'd learned, kind of incidentally, throughout or as part of my career.

0:31:24 - (Andy Smith): And I just thought, you know what? I'm really good at changing how other people feel about things. What if, again, that phrase, what if I was to apply this to me? What would I do if somebody came to me looking for help with this? What would be the process? So I live near a little lake, and it's got a little car park in it. It's a very beautiful little spot. And I literally piled everything into the car.

0:31:49 - (Andy Smith): And I spent three days from dawn till dusk with everything spread out over the dashboard, over the seats, on the floors and everything. And there was something quite interesting about being in a car because I thought, the answers are in here, I just need to find them. And it gave me some real focus. Now, literally, after three days, I emerged with a plan. And some of the things that I decided to push myself through, I had tried before, but just as sort of single interventions, let's say. And they'd helped it a little bit at the time, but they'd not got me the outcome I was looking for.

0:32:28 - (Andy Smith): But what I could see, I'd mapped this out, which was basically a sort of a seven stage process. And it was all right, okay, so we start here, and then we'll do a bit of this, and then we'll throw that in, and then we'll do this because that's the right time for that bit to happen. And then we'll do that, and we'll do that. And then that will set us up for a strategy for kind of moving forward. And so I just made a commitment to myself to start at the beginning, work my way through each part of it and not quit until I got to the end.

0:32:59 - (Andy Smith): And bit by bit as I went through it, I could feel, and I love you know, that you acknowledge these kind of moments and there were just little clicks, just little moments of clarity where I was like, oh, that feels differently. And I remember going back in St. Louis at the end of the third day, I said, you know, something's happened here. I can't quite explain it, but I think I've really made some progress here.

0:33:26 - (Andy Smith): And she kind of side eyed me and kind of went, mm hmm, yeah, okay, well, what's the worry? You know, actions do indeed speak louder than words. And I couldn't. I couldn't make her understand what was going on in my head, which is fine. Nobody can see what's going on inside anybody else's head. But I just felt optimistic and I felt really clear about kind of where I was going to. And days turned into a couple of weeks, and I'm like, you know what? I'm doing okay here. And bearing in mind I was all the baggage that I had from growing up in Shetland around, you're a failure if you cannot drink.

0:34:03 - (Andy Smith): That meant that I didn't want to give up altogether. I just wanted to take a break. I wanted to feel better because I felt miserable, I felt sick, and I needed to make that go away. But actually, now I look back on that with hindsight, I realize that that was a good thing because it meant I didnt put myself under too much pressure from the outset. I was just, again, coming at this from a position of curiosity.

0:34:30 - (Andy Smith): And I was like, right, okay, well, if I took a break, how might I feel? And so days turned into a few weeks. And I remember one morning, probably six or seven weeks in Ijennae woke up. I'd slept really well, and I woke up and I just went, my God, I feel amazing. And, you know, don't get me wrong. Every morning is not like this for me. As I often say, it's not all butterflies and unicorns in Andy world.

0:34:57 - (Andy Smith): But the interesting thing was, I just thought, I can't remember the last time I felt like this. And I thought, I don't want to let this go. It's too profound. Again, it's a moment. And I thought, I could choose to go back to being that guy that was sitting in the fridge in Tesco supermarket, contemplating all of his life choices, or I could feel like this. And it seemed just like a no brainer to me.

0:35:25 - (Andy Smith): And that was when I really sort of committed to. Right, I'm done with alcohol. I've had every hangover, I've had every embarrassing experience. There was one night I sat, when Louise was away with our son, I was sat on my own and I drank a bottle of wine and a litre of gin, which is a lot by anybody's standards. And I couldn't square away the fact that when I woke up in the morning and I was staggered down to the kitchen and I looked at the empty bottle, my overwhelming feeling was actually pride.

0:36:01 - (Andy Smith): I was like, look, go me. I've fulfilled my destiny of being able to drink something that would kill somebody. And I just