True Patriot Love - February 05, 2026


MIKE & BRADIE on Dry January — Honest Talk About Taking a Break From Booze


Episode Stats


Length

23 minutes

Words per minute

202.22241

Word count

4,677

Sentence count

9

Harmful content

Toxicity

6

sentences flagged

Hate speech

3

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Dry January started in the UK but it has made its way around North America and maybe even a good portion of the globe. It started from a marathon runner finding health benefits from it and translated all the way to even having sub-categories like Dry January. You can even be California sober which means you still use plant medicine but you stay away from alcohol during january.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 hello my fellow patriots we just finished dry january and dry january started in the uk but it
00:00:11.120 has made its way around north america and maybe even a good portion of the globe it started from
00:00:15.920 a marathon runner finding health benefits from it and has translated all the way to even having
00:00:20.480 subcategories you can even be california sober which means you still use plant medicine but you
00:00:25.120 stay away from alcohol during january and to talk with me about dry january the driest man i know
00:00:31.600 mike wickson how are you my friend you know what i am dry but that's january for you and i'm going
00:00:37.200 to recommend that you use the right body lotion you'll be okay a little bit of the uh the eczema
00:00:43.520 lotion yeah yeah yes but you're right i i this one only kind of applies to me because i'm watching
00:00:49.040 friends suffer through through it uh i don't drink but uh it is interesting that this year
00:00:56.160 it caught our attention because there's so many articles out so many findings that are
00:01:02.480 you know showing us alcohol is not easy to manage your health alongside that it can have negative
00:01:09.520 effects very quickly that it can have long lasting effects that it can be really detrimental to the
00:01:14.720 longevity of your life apparently it's causing anxiety as they're they're saying now that the
00:01:19.920 hangover could lead on to seven days your hangover and it actually can cause anxiety so we're learning
00:01:25.680 a lot about dry january and this and the stats of how people's health are turning around it seems to be
00:01:31.920 that there's way more people drinking than i ever thought that there was a very heavy amount of
00:01:36.320 drinking not just a casual drink and even myself i very rarely drink but i made it 30 days out of 31 in
00:01:43.920 january but brady honestly that wasn't 31 days in january when's the last time you had a drink
00:01:49.600 like in all nine months it was nine months before that but it's not like you have a problem with
00:01:53.680 alcohol you just don't drink so then when you saw the end of the month coming up the rebellion and you
00:01:58.240 said oh before january ends i must have a drink i am a rule breaker my friend rules are meant to be
00:02:04.960 broken but yeah january 30th i uh started taking the whiskeys back and how many did you have uh not as
00:02:11.040 many as i wanted because a phone died and i couldn't catch an uber home before that but i don't
00:02:15.200 know how many did you have i had three shots and one drink okay so you had four drinks just so you
00:02:19.760 know heavy drinking is reflected by uh seven wait is that heavy is that because i'm so small
00:02:26.720 heavy drinking period you might actually i think that that must have something to do with it i mean
00:02:31.040 your physicality and how much you should or could drink has to come into it that has to come into play
00:02:36.880 and i never stopped drinking because of health mike i i well maybe because of getting into a
00:02:42.240 health could be down the road but um i just get very obnoxious i'm irish i'm small so every drink
00:02:48.000 i have i'm 10 pounds heavier and one foot taller brady i don't you weren't really that obnoxious to
00:02:52.800 be honest with you i told a young man that was working very hard on this shift taking a break that
00:02:57.520 if he's young enough he's 24 he should just do whatever he wants no responsibilities worry about
00:03:01.840 it when he's 35. that is drunken words and he left believing me no i don't think he did that
00:03:07.120 producer nick did he believe me i'm not sure okay well so maybe your perception was off your perception
00:03:14.000 was off okay but going back to dry january i almost made it yeah well good for you uh many people are
00:03:20.160 actually did make it so congratulations to them but uh you know just taking a look at some you want
00:03:25.200 to hear some of the numbers on alcohol because there might be good reason for canadians to take a dry
00:03:29.840 uh a dry moment emily robinson as you pointed out uh uk uh um marathon marathon or a track star
00:03:37.440 uh stopped while she was training for the olympics found that there was some health benefits from it no
00:03:42.480 kidding uh and uh just took the month off and showed so to the newsroom because some of these statistics
00:03:48.240 i had they baffle me yeah it's great uh research thank you check this out uh first of all heavy drinking
00:03:54.640 men uh which is uh for men five plus drinks on one occasion for women is four plus drinks on one
00:04:00.960 occasion uh sexism that i don't i don't endorse but that's how the science handles it uh and apparently
00:04:06.720 6.2 million canadians reported heavy drinking in 2024 up from 6 million in 2023 and down from the record
00:04:14.000 high of 6.4 million in 2022 well we know why that was so high in 2022 it's all we had to do it was
00:04:20.320 covid fatigue yeah yeah uh and then check this out uh 80 of men say they drink 23 of those men
00:04:28.400 are heavy drinkers and 75 of women say they drink and 16 of them say they are heavy drinkers now how
00:04:35.360 much of that is just bottles of red wine i don't know it's funny that you talked about the anxiety
00:04:41.360 though yeah it's a real thing i promise you it is yeah now i don't drink and it's been many years but
00:04:47.120 for several years i did drink professionally uh and i will tell you the hangover as i recall it was
00:04:54.960 the most depressed it's horrible a horrible time of my life uh every single time i drank
00:05:02.320 it caused depression it made me feel ashamed it had physical uh maladies you feel sick and when you're
00:05:10.000 sick when you feel sick you don't do your best you have to overcompensate overcompensating makes you
00:05:14.960 feel anxiety anxiety makes you feel like you're not delivering and then the cycle continues so
00:05:20.880 i do believe anxiety is a real thing it's a poison at the end of the day great alcohol is considered a
00:05:26.240 poison um yeah it's a cleaning product it could be uh used for explosives like it is not i don't know
00:05:34.560 if we should still be drinking alcohol the way that we do as human beings i think a glass of wine maybe
00:05:40.320 you know a beer that obviously the the golden rule is you have a glass of wine uh once a week
00:05:45.200 and you're keeping yourself healthy you have a beer once a day it's not the worst thing for you
00:05:49.440 i don't know if i truly believe that i do think alcohol is a poison i don't see too many other
00:05:54.560 recreational things that are not you know throwing your life out on cocaine or something that causes
00:05:58.880 the amount of side effects that alcohol does all right let's see heavy alcohol use increases the risk
00:06:04.000 of chronic liver disease it does cirrhosis uh it has an impact on cardiovascular has an impact on
00:06:12.480 fine motor skills uh 4 374 deaths in 2023 from chronic liver disease the 10th leading cause of death
00:06:21.040 in canada so there's reason for concern 3125 canadians under 75 died from alcohol and drug use disorders
00:06:29.680 uh excluding overdoses by the way alcohol and drug use disorders cause more deaths under the age of 75
00:06:36.080 than even all motor vehicle accident deaths combined really yeah so it is a staggering little bit of
00:06:44.480 business there and also every month you know what i think has happened and this is the conspiracy
00:06:50.080 theorist in me uh or maybe i'm just observing it but it seems like alcohol in my mind alcohol is
00:06:57.520 something over the holidays that adds a bunch of pounds it makes you feel a little uh a little less
00:07:02.800 than normal as you come out of the holidays the last thing you do before you go back to work is one
00:07:07.040 last party for new year's by the time that hangover is done you're getting in the car you're getting
00:07:11.520 in the car yeah to go to work so uh i think in january people are just exhausted from social so they're
00:07:18.320 not doing things in a social scenario as much reducing the amount that they drink potentially
00:07:22.960 i think they're starting to look at themselves in the mirror at that point and go wow it really over
00:07:26.400 did it uh so january historically and typically has the lowest alcohol sales i'll give you an example
00:07:32.800 this is from uh 2023 okay uh december sales 3.3 billion january sales 1.9 billion so it's got
00:07:41.760 two billion dollar difference it's typically that way wow um the other so the other thing that i have
00:07:47.360 in my mind is alcohol is finally getting its due um justice from the media from the health community
00:07:56.560 where for so long alcohol as an industry had so much money and so much power to stay out of the
00:08:03.280 way of the bad news that they now have reduced their overall uh profits i don't know if this is true i'm
00:08:11.120 just saying and now the realities are starting to bubble to the top of the cocktail showing us the health
00:08:18.400 issues the long-term uh abuse issues the the social uh economic issues the mental issues but you're
00:08:25.840 true though with the alcohol like they're the increase in prices i think if we were looking
00:08:30.000 there is about seven percent alcohol is the price of alcohol is going up now some of that's from tariffs
00:08:34.720 and things like that year over year about 2.3 percent yes so yearly is that counterbalancing the
00:08:40.880 fact that the sales are going down or is this just you know inflation like everything else it
00:08:45.680 seems to me that and we i talked to an activist um mike densmore he came in and that should be
00:08:51.040 already out if you're watching this about cannabis and how cannabis may have taken away from some of
00:08:56.400 these alcohol sales well i wonder this is a kind of the next thing that i get thinking about sure people
00:09:01.360 stop drinking for the month however they're hitting the nick vape california the thc vape uh smoking
00:09:08.320 more joints maybe buying more hash i would love to know if january cannabis sales are up in place of
00:09:16.000 alcohol that would be something we should definitely look into because i would if i was a guessing man i
00:09:20.560 don't think they would have gone up i just think that i dry january doesn't include cannabis for a lot
00:09:25.760 of people i think so i think that california sober thing is uh it's real it's real yeah and california
00:09:31.920 sober doesn't mean just cannabis they mean like mushrooms kratom anything that's considered an
00:09:37.680 organic right stimulant or a medicine they're yeah that's california sober so you could be yes
00:09:44.000 putting down the bottle of whiskey but picking up a bag of magic mushrooms i don't know if that's a
00:09:48.160 good balance but that's considered california sober you're not drinking but you're you're medicating in
00:09:53.520 other ways you're uh feeding whatever addiction or whatever i'll tell you dissociative thing that your
00:10:00.080 body needs with something else one little glass of wine is not as healthy as a low dosage a micro
00:10:07.280 dose of psychosilabin in some people's opinion maybe if you have something else going on and
00:10:12.800 you're not the average person it's good for you i don't know that there's any science behind that to
00:10:16.800 be honest with you and i think that's the problem with this okay if you go dry go dry but don't go
00:10:21.600 dry and try uh weed gummies for the first time maybe because i don't i don't know that the results
00:10:27.280 are going to be what you want you might go back to the alcohol uh if that edible doesn't hit you
00:10:31.600 hit you right yeah i mean it might throw you back into um non-dry january wet january yeah you might
00:10:37.920 find yourself in a state of psychosis for a couple of days and realize that you would have been better
00:10:42.000 off with a glass of wine but it is a real thing dry january is a real thing it's kind of commendable
00:10:47.440 it coincides with people trying to get back into shape getting back on their diets living their best
00:10:52.640 uh selves post new year's resolution a lot of comedians do it joe rogan and those guys they were
00:10:58.640 going uh dry january's i think that set a trend a couple years ago too and i think they just
00:11:02.960 that's true now but they were doing it uh for working out they would all work out together to
00:11:07.200 do saunas things like that but they even had a competition i think at one point it turned into
00:11:10.960 a pretty vicious competition of uh steps in a day or calories in a day or something like that but they
00:11:16.640 were full sober like dry everything but they're sitting there smoking these big giant cigars as they're
00:11:21.680 saying they're sober if you know as well as i do we've been to cigar bars together if you smoke a full
00:11:26.000 two hour cigar you are buzzed yeah there's no doubt about it there is uh there's many ways to offset
00:11:33.840 dry january and i think i mean i commend anybody who does it but i think there's a lot of schmoo
00:11:39.600 between here and there spicy foods during dry january because he likes an extreme amount of
00:11:44.560 spice that gives him sort of an hallucinogenic effect okay so he doesn't even eat the spot he like
00:11:49.120 literally goes full famine style wow some people are really taking this thing seriously i mean it's good for 1.00
00:11:55.600 you members of the staff here i've noticed uh a dry january for certain yeah um because you know
00:12:01.440 most of our team doesn't even partake in alcohol that is true that's a wild thing when you go to work
00:12:06.240 and most of the people there don't drink yeah i i can't think of anybody on our staff who drinks we
00:12:12.720 sound super boring nick drinks and you drink why are we laughing all the time none of this you see you
00:12:18.320 don't need alcohol to have fun with your friends it's true i mean it does help with dancing though that's
00:12:23.440 the one thing can i just say this about dry january there's not a lot of dancing going on a lot unless
00:12:28.560 i'm around i'm just dancing everywhere i go you're dancing fool yeah but you see me in the airport 0.96
00:12:33.760 you add fool to that because you're not drunk you you take fool away and just say that it's a good 0.99
00:12:38.400 dancer when you got a couple of cocktails in you you know what i mean uh but i don't think sober the 0.99
00:12:45.120 hardest thing for me to do is dance really oh man go ahead and comment on this if you're sober is it
00:12:52.320 easy for you to get the dance on well it's not my friend actually while you're commenting let us know
00:12:56.720 if you did dry january nod and how it went for you don't don't be ashamed if it didn't go well you're
00:13:00.960 you at least try yeah brady failed so don't i had a good eight months leading up to it but for some
00:13:07.520 reason the second the month came your defiance is unbelievable you did it in calgary well in all
00:13:12.480 fairness from a rebel you did it i know what threw you off the uh wagon so viciously i've seen owen
00:13:19.600 hurt slammies yeah that's right you see the actual slammies that owen hurt the professional wrestler won 1.00
00:13:25.920 back in the 90s sitting in front of your face the next thing you have to do is say can i have a shot
00:13:30.240 of whiskey i can't deny you uh i can't deny you a little bit of a cocktail a little bit of imbibing
00:13:36.480 in the place you seemed happiest i've ever seen you at uh the hitman bar brett the hitman's uh bar
00:13:42.960 in it was at the cowboy casino in calgary casino the hitman bar yes uh okay let me see what the
00:13:48.640 notes tell me here before we wrap it up if you don't mind uh growing awareness of alcohol's impact
00:13:53.280 on physical mental and spiritual health uh physical inflammation gut health hormone disruption poor
00:13:58.480 recovery lowered energy mental alcohol is a depressant impact on anxiety cycles emotional volatility
00:14:06.000 uh from a spiritual perspective emotional numbness versus presence disconnect from intuition and
00:14:12.080 purpose if that's easy to do when you're drunk i know i did that for a couple of years uh the idea
00:14:16.800 that alcohol doesn't just take time it takes away your clarity and that can that can actually happen
00:14:25.280 in the workplace it carries over you see people hung over they're not delivering their best i've seen a 0.96
00:14:31.760 lot of intelligent people just turn into schmucks on booze like mike you're one of the smartest guys 0.96
00:14:37.920 i've ever met so how long have you been actually sober oh 30 years 30 years plus yeah could you 0.99
00:14:42.960 imagine if you were still drinking do you think you'd be able to no we would be on uh we'd be on
00:14:48.000 a flight to vegas right now you and i yeah or we left calgary and i would somehow have managed to get
00:14:53.600 us a booking at a tattoo shop to get a full-size bust of dean martin uh tattooed on both of our backs
00:14:59.040 matching i think it was a good time i'm so glad you're sober now uh people don't realize uh i'm
00:15:10.160 not broken my nervous system is overloaded and alcohol kind of puts that on the back burner and
00:15:17.280 really it has uh mental effects long term i promise you that so um i grew up like a lot of the kids in
00:15:24.080 in you know i grew up in cambridge ontario just outside of the gta there wasn't much to do it was a
00:15:28.320 hockey town more arenas than there was libraries and that's what we did on the weekend we we we
00:15:33.280 drank beer we had uh bacardi 151 we used to love that stuff because you light it on fire and you
00:15:38.560 only needed a little bit and get the whole group wait you needed to light it on fire for some reason
00:15:42.480 well it was 151 proof it did light on fire i have had 151 proof evenings and i have 151 proof to to to
00:15:48.960 present with it because the net result of 151 proof alcohol is always disastrous it yeah this is why we
00:15:57.200 tried to share the bottle with as many people as we possibly could but i got it all out of my
00:16:00.720 system pretty early yeah like a lot of kids in canada back in the the 90s in the early 2000s we
00:16:05.840 were bored there was nothing to do but by the time i was 25 i had no need to drink anymore drinking was
00:16:11.520 everything in my youth yeah drinking was everything this was the big thing with with my group growing up
00:16:17.120 yeah yeah now it just seems that it's not part of the youth uh process not as much anyway i think the
00:16:24.960 laws around drinking and driving they're a lot more strict how strict it is you can lose your
00:16:29.600 license forever thank goodness um you know i think that there are lawsuits that have happened when
00:16:34.720 people are having house parties uh the news is more aware of what happens in nightclubs with
00:16:39.360 drugging people you're now being um charged when they when they're manhandling some of the patrons
00:16:45.840 even if they are in the wrong the licensing commissions are all over every bar insurance is
00:16:50.800 through the roof right so now we have this culture that doesn't seem as drunk i mean it was everything
00:16:58.400 in my youth i remember showing up on a friday night and then getting home on a sunday and it was
00:17:03.200 just alcohol the whole weekend and a lot of good times can i think can i make a comparison so in those
00:17:09.600 notes it says the number one province and the number one major city that does the most alcohol
00:17:13.920 consumption calgary and alberta really okay hold on i got notes here on and i went to wow i went to a
00:17:20.400 gas station at 12 o'clock at night thinking because i'm from ontario and this has been a normal thing
00:17:24.960 now for the past year that i could get a couple beers no brother they have alcohol specific stores
00:17:30.880 there but i also think too that the reason why we're seeing it in our corner stores here in ontario
00:17:37.440 is because alcohol sales are down and i think this was one of the lcbo sales were done so why not just
00:17:43.920 put it in front of their face when you go to a gas station you see what the counter looks like
00:17:48.640 it's all just clickbait stuff for lack of better words stuff to just grab you while you're standing
00:17:53.040 there it's vital stuff well that's where the beer is now too right it's amazing to me that that's
00:17:57.120 allowed i thought that that would never be allowed and within minutes minutes it happened overnight
00:18:02.320 there's coolers now right at the checkout and it's not just beer and then behind hidden are the
00:18:07.680 cigarettes yeah you can't advertise the cigarettes they have to have rotten feet and hearts and stuff
00:18:12.480 all over them but alcohol can be out in the open with little flowers and bubbles and it looks like a
00:18:16.480 kid's drink yeah it looks like you're actually having the experience yeah in my opinion without
00:18:20.400 looking at this paper i think alcohol sales are on the decline and maybe it is a generation it's not 0.96
00:18:25.280 just though it's not just alberta they come in at about sixteen hundred dollars uh annual spend on
00:18:29.920 alcohol quebec comes in per household yeah thirteen hundred dollars uh no this per person uh about
00:18:37.040 thirteen hundred dollars uh per i thought that was high just for the household okay maybe it is household
00:18:42.240 oh yeah average sorry my bad i'm a little drunk uh average annual household spending
00:18:48.640 seven hundred and forty two dollars from retail stores four hundred and forty one at bars
00:18:54.640 uh canadian households spend more on alcohol than fruit or vegetables no no that can't be a real
00:19:02.880 stat uh apparently we spend about uh a thousand bucks on fruit and uh about a thousand dollars on
00:19:08.560 vegetables uh i spend a lot more than that a year on vegetables good boy way alberta there there you
00:19:13.760 go sixteen hundred and sixty two dollars on alcohol quebec thirteen hundred and seventy two the lowest are
00:19:18.800 saskatchewan they got to get up early in the morning these people they got a lot of work to do in the farms
00:19:23.760 710 bucks in new brunswick they got the fishing to do i guess or foresting uh 835 dollars per year
00:19:32.800 so a big gap almost twice as much yeah in some provinces um but yeah it's it's pretty amazing and
00:19:40.320 you know alcohol remains more expensive than most non-alcoholic beverages which means that if you're
00:19:46.720 going to make a choice for thirst and quenching it may not be a beer it may just be ford's promise a
00:19:52.480 couple years ago a dollar a beer if i get elected buck a beer i never seen it sounded great on a campaign yeah
00:19:58.000 never seen it well it's a bucket beer if you and i split it with nick and a couple of other guys we
00:20:03.040 just pass it around they don't want that on the streets around here no and what's the i don't know
00:20:07.440 if our producer knows what's the average cost of a case of beer now like if i wanted a 24 pack of
00:20:12.320 of molson canadian what would it cost do you know nick nick's on it you're gonna find it out right now
00:20:17.200 because i remember back in the day pretending not to know though i think that's 20 25 to 30 dollars
00:20:21.920 yeah right you get a 24 pack you could get if you're really cheap you can go lucky lager remember
00:20:26.320 lucky lager they were 75 cents a a bottle of beer so you could get affordable beer i just want to
00:20:31.680 know what is the average price what were those affordable beers so it was copperhead there was
00:20:36.560 lager you could if you really wanted to you get labat black ice you can get oe old english the 40s
00:20:44.480 oh yeah it's partake bowl max i gotta be honest i gotta be honest with you brady i i i'm feeling my
00:20:50.240 last hangovers coming on so as a kid i used to order a 24 pack of mike's hard lemonade one
00:20:56.080 liters okay one liter bottle yeah yeah and we would just sit there and drink the entire box
00:21:00.160 you guys were a problem yes we were that's why i'm sober now you know one of the things sorry nick
00:21:07.760 12 packs 30 30 30 for 12 it's double here it's doubled since i was drinking do you want to know
00:21:13.840 what i paid for my last two for i think i paid i could be wrong i think i paid 29 30. and that was
00:21:22.160 30 years ago yeah it was pretty expensive then i thought like he must have been drinking heineken
00:21:26.400 maybe it was less was it 24 it was close to a buck of beer like 24 about about 24 80 or something
00:21:31.200 like that maybe buck a beer so it was for 10 years it was how are we going to go back 30 years to a
00:21:36.320 buck of beer i'm not what was he thinking i don't know he was thinking let me just say whatever i can
00:21:42.400 to get into power but that's a discussion for a completely different show i'm going to tell you what
00:21:46.000 i i'm going to offer up something if i may from a personal note dry january is an opportunity what
00:21:51.920 do you mean well it gives you the opportunity to say i'm not going to drink for j in january
00:21:57.360 and if you have a problem and you make the commitment not to drink in january
00:22:01.600 i'm going to tell you something brady at the end of that month you don't drink anymore yeah you don't
00:22:06.560 and the choice is for you to make at that moment but at that point you've got enough momentum you're
00:22:12.800 feeling better alcohol is not part of your uh extended uh social scenario and after 30 days
00:22:20.800 you've really got an opportunity to become sober and i think that's the coolest thing about dry
00:22:26.400 january is it's it's a soft entry point for somebody to say i think i can do this well if uh anybody
00:22:33.360 watching this has a problem with alcohol we'll make sure that the information is in the uh in the
00:22:37.840 description but please get help please try to dry yourself out whether it's january february march
00:22:43.440 whatever it is you can do it you can do it if there's a problem with alcohol get it out now it
00:22:49.280 is a poison all right thanks for talking dry january with me bless your heart mike thank you for having
00:22:54.000 me download the app at uh the app store the play store or check us out at tplmedia.ca thanks mike for
00:23:02.080 schooling me on dry january