Diving Deep Into Sober Dating & Sober Entrepreneurship with MJ Gottlieb, founder of Loosid App

In this episode, MJ Gottlieb is a guest on the show. He is the founder of the Loosid App and the Loosid Sober Dating App. While the Loosid community app has existed for a long time, and is free for members, the dating app is brand new! MJ noticed a need to create an app where people can connect to others also living a sober lifestyle. In the episode MJ shares both his sober journey and his entrepreneur journey. Right now the Loosid Dating App is available in Los Angeles, and MJ explains in the episode why it's a slow and steady build to reach other states and regions in the world. Check out the app at: https://loosidapp.com/

Transcript

Hi, friend. This is Alex McRobs, founder of The Mindful Life Practice, and you're listening to the Sober Yoga Girl podcast. I'm a Canadian who moved across the world to the Middle East at age 23, and I never went back. I got sober in 2019, and I now live full-time in Bali, Indonesia. I've made it my mission to help other women around the world stop drinking, start yoga and change their lives through my online Sober Girls Yoga community. You're not alone and a sober life can be fun and fulfilling. Let me show you how.

Hello. Hi, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Sober Yoga Girl Podcast. I'm really excited to be sitting here today with MJ Gottlieb, who is the co-founder and he's the CEO of the Loosid Sober dating app. And we were just sharing before we got on the call that I hopped in upon Loosid. It appeared in my email and there was an event that I couldn't go to, but I said I would be really interested in speaking with the founder and just learning more about this because I feel like sober dating is such a big challenge for people out there, like finding people who share similar values and lifestyles.

I'm really happy to have you here today and learn more about your journey and your story, MJ. Welcome. How are you?

Good. Thanks for having me. Good to be here.

Nice to have you here. And how long have you been sober for?

I got sober March 21st, 2012. So it's been about just over 11 and a half years.

Oh, my gosh. Congratulations. That's amazing. Yeah. Incredible. So I was wondering if... So in today's episode, I want to talk to you more about sober dating and the Loosid app and how it works. But I was wondering if, before we get into that, if you could just share a little bit about your journey before sobriety. What was your life like before you got sober?

Yeah. It was pretty much a train wreck. Well, they say... They say, Fun with problems and problems. That's the trajectory. I find that, in my case, to be true. But the distance between the fun, fun with problems and problems was started to escalate super quick. If I really think about it, I got sober because like most people who are in recovery, your life becomes unmanageable, right? And so I had been in and out of the 12-step rooms for so long and going by the just don't drink and go to meetings until I drank. And I was just in so much pain on the inside. And so my life started just getting picked away, person by person, a client by client, just through waking up and realizing what I did, whether it was waking up in an institution, a jail cell in my bed, wondering why there were bruises all over my body. And what's interesting is at that point, I didn't care about myself, and so I was just burning up towns and villages. But what got me sober was I was babysitting the five-year-old son of an ex-girlfriend, and I passed out. The thought of putting a five-year-old in jeopardy, I couldn't even look at myself in the mirror.

I decided to go down to the church basement where I used to go to meetings and put my hand in the air and say the three words that no addict, alcoholic wants to say, which are the very three words that will save his or her life. I need help. That's where my journey began. So it was very, very quickly a train wreck when I really started escalating into my alcoholism and addiction.

Thanks for sharing. And when you started the sobriety journey, you were going to meetings, but what were the other... What were main supports and the tools you relied on to get you through those early days?

Yeah. I have learned, and this is my experience, is that there's an always... And again, I'll talk about the 12 steps a little bit, but I was always told 12 meeting makers make it, and I don't believe that to be true for one second, meaning I would go to meetings and not know why I felt worse and worse. And when I realized that there's actually a spiritual program, because if you remove the spirits, you need to replace it with what? Spirituality. So in the absence of spirituality, I don't know if you're allowed to curse, but you're fucked, right? One of my favorite speakers in the 12-step rooms would say, Hey, when you put down the drink or the jug, life doesn't get better. It gets worse. I was like, What? Are you kidding me? I was really upset. But then I heard on the other side of the comma, what I just told you is you need to replace the spirits with spirituality. And so that's why they said, There's nothing worse than an active alcoholic. There's a dry one. Because my problem was never alcohol or pills or cocaine. My problem was this soul sickness inside of me that made me drink and drug.

And that's the solution from my experience, is being able to resolve or clean up all of that junk that's inside of you to set you free. Otherwise, just going to meetings in and of itself means nothing. It's very important because that's where we find someone to say, Walk us through the steps. Again, this is my experience, but endto end. There's the program, and then there's also service. They also say when all else fails, nothing ensures immunity over alcohol other than intensive work with another alcoholic. I started doing a lot of service work into jails and institutions and detoxes. The more I helped people, the more relief that I got. I think that one of the things that I tell people all the time is throw themselves into service. Service keeps you sober. That's something that my first sponsor said, and it's something that I believe in to this day. Yeah.

Wow. You just had hit so many interesting Nuggets there that resonated with me. And the spirituality thing, it's so interesting because I run my society programs, but I also run yoga teacher trainings. And a big aspect of the philosophy of yoga from thousands of years ago that we've been talking about a lot in my groups is there's this commitment to spirituality. It's actually devotion to a higher power is what it said in the yoga, sutras. And it's interesting because we've been talking about that a lot this month of why is that important for your wellbeing and what does that look like in your life? And I'm a big believer like it can be in many ways. But having some form of spirituality is something that really helped carry me through my sober journey.

As well. That's it. Yeah. Thanks for sharing that. One of my favorite... I have certain texts that I always go to. And outside of the big book, I do Four Agreements and The Untethered Soul. And The Untethered Soul talks about... There's one of my favorite chapters, I think, and I'm going to butcher it, but it's like The Price of Pain, The Price of Freedom or something like that. It basically talks about, because you talked about yoga, they talk about relax and releasing into traumas and letting them go. Then you'll feel like a heat and then you let it pass. They said that that's often called the fire of yoga. That book, The Untethered Soul, I have a friend that has, I think, 42 years of sobriety, and he takes all 17 Spahn's through not only the big book, but through The Untethered Soul line by line.

Yeah, amazing. That was actually our Book Club book about a year ago, but I'll have to circle back to it because I haven't read it in a long time.

Yeah. It's just to me, that and the four agreements, it's so freaking simple.

Be.

Impeccable with your word. Don't think, take things personally. Don't make assumptions and try your best. You're like, Oh, okay, I could read that now. Yeah, but really think about it. Can you go 30 days not making assumptions or not taking things personally? No, you can't. It's not going to happen. There is going to be a level of taking things personally at some point during that. I try to go and take those principles of the four agreements and incorporate that, and it all gets intertwined into this spirituality that you mentioned, because it is, to me, recovery is a spiritual thing. If you don't have spirituality and recovery, I don't think you have a chance. That's my experience.

If.

You're a real alcohol, as they call a real alcoholic, there's a great description of the real alcoholic in page 21 of the big book, which describes, and it's very important I mention this all the time because there's heavy drinkers, right?

Right.

And people that can give them sufficient reason to stop. They could say, Okay, no problem. I could stop. There's a very clear difference between those two groups of people. We need to educate people that there are two groups of people because otherwise wrong information is spread. For instance, I used to have a buddy of mine who used to say, MJ, you just need to stop at five drinks like me. He's a heavy drinker, right? But I was like, Yeah. He's like, You don't have enough willpower. I was like, Yeah. But then I'd keep going and he wouldn't. I'm like, Oh, okay, I need to increase my willpower. No, I was different than him. He's not an alcoholic. It kept me out for much longer because I was being diagnosed by a non-alcoholic, if that makes sense.

Right. Totally. The other thing that you mentioned that helped you in your sobriety lives the role of service. I think that's super important as well. It's like playing a role and giving back to your community and helping others can also help yourself.

Yeah. Am I allowed to curse on this here?

Yeah, you can. Don't worry.

My first sponsor used to say, if you get the gift of sobriety and you don't give back what's freely been given to you, you are a fucking shoplifter. We would be in meetings and he'd say, Shoplifter, shoplifter. But if you really think about it, it's 100 % true because number one, if you stop... If you just think of it selflessly, if everybody stops doing service at this moment, then all recovery programs will disappear probably in six months. Because if nobody is being helped by someone else, then the world is just going to get filled up with untreated alcoholics. The program would literally disappear probably within six months if people just stop doing service. But the whole concept of service keeping you sober, the thing is, well, there's a couple of really interesting things. Number one, service can be making coffee and people can be like, Well, how's that keeping me sober? Well, what's interesting is if you have a coffee commitment on Tuesday and it's Monday and you want to drink, you're like, Oh, fuck, I got to make the coffee tomorrow. And so you stay sober until... And so it's this neat little trick that keeps us sober until we have the willingness to work the steps and work the program.

So that's number one. Number two is my first sponsor used to say, used to make me shake hands and greet people in front of the meeting meetings. I was like, How the hell is this helping people? But years later, people would come up to me and say I saved their life. I'm like, I saved your life. They're like, Yeah, I was coming down the church steps, and then I was going to turn around to go out and use. But you were smiling and said, Welcome. I didn't want to... I said, Fuck it. I kept walking forward. I shook your hand. I went into the meeting and I've stayed ever since. I had no sober time at that time, but I was out front. I was shaking hands. Just a warm smile of someone that's another alcoholic saying, Hey, the words welcome were happy you're here, countless people said that I saved their life and I knew nothing about sobriety, but I was told to go and greet the door.

I love that. I love that because it shows how these tiny actions that we take, we might not understand the impact that they have on others. I just think that's so powerful, that idea that you had that commitment and you gave that service and that helped you stay sober and helped other people stay sober. It's beautiful.

Yeah. No, and it's interesting. It's so important. Even if you think about life in general, even not even recovery, the more you're of service, they say the living is in the giving. If you're giving and trying to be giving to yourself, you get so much back in return with no quid pro quo. If there's like, Hey, I'm going to give this to you because I want you to do something for me in the future, well, then that's fucked up. That's unfortunately the way society as a whole leans into. But if we actually give with no expectation of getting anything back and return, but we actually, in sobriety, that's not true. Because when I used to finish my work with my sponsor and I'd say, Thank you, he would always say, No, thank you. You kept me sober today. I was like, What the fuck are you talking about, dude? He was like, You keep me sober. But it also reinforces your own society, because when I'm taking people through the solution, I'm reinforcing the solution myself. Then I'm saying, You can't hold resentment. Then I'm saying to myself, Oh, shit, I'm holding resentment, while I'm telling the person that you can't.

Then I'll call myself out and I'll be like, But had I not been doing service work, I wouldn't have called myself out to myself.

Yeah, so true. Let's talk about the app. So when did you have an idea to create Loosid? Where did that come from?

Yeah. So my now business partner, I was advising her on acquisitions at treatment centers a number of years ago in 2017. Her whole family has been ravaged by addiction, and so she was trying to do something to help. And so what happened to her happens to less people, right? I said, Even if we open up a thousand treatment centers, great, but with over 300 million people suffering from alcohol use disorder alone worldwide, maybe we'll help 100,000 people if we open up a thousand treatment centers hypothetically. But if there's 300 million people suffering, what are we doing? So why don't we just create something and bring it to something that everybody has, a phone. And I had experience leveraging... I had been fashioned for 17 years, and then I had agencies that we would show brands how to leverage themselves on digital. I said, Let's build an app. Loosid is just to be clear. So Loosid is there's two apps. There's the Loosid community, which is about 130,000 members, right?

Wow.

Talking to one another for fun and for free. Not a penny. It doesn't cost a penny. You just download it, connect with under alcohol. That's incredible. If you wonder you have a question about sobriety and people trying to get sober, say so were questions about sobriety. And then we had built a sober dating because of the pain points that were clearly existed. But we were really focused on the community at first. So when we built the platform, people started connecting and engaging. And again, we left the dating to the side. But then right after COVID, during COVID, whatever, I would say around late 2021, we started... I mean, we were seeing millions of interactions in the dating, but the way in which you do dating, you need to be very hyper-localized in your ad targeting. So when you open it up nationally, you don't get a good response from a conversion standpoint, because you may have one person in New York look at somebody in Idaho. It doesn't do any good. So even though we had millions of interactions, they weren't of any value. So then we said, All right, listen, let's put some very clear focus into dating and let's get a very clear monetization of how we can get into a profitable model in order to flip those dollars to keep the Loosid community 100 % free in perpetuity.

So it's this very cool thing where in order to keep Loosid, because, of course, it's a fortune, everything being relative to keep Loosid free. We have 300,000 sessions per month on the community side. So using the people who are dating to then be able to pay for the community to be 100% free so that way nobody ever has to pay a penny for Loosid if they're struggling. That's the whole circular path of both community and dating. That's what we're doing. We launched Los Angeles April 28th, and we have, I don't know, 30,000 new members.

That's incredible. That's incredible. Okay, so that must be why. I think I got invited to the Los Angeles event, which was related to the dating app, but I know the community app too because I actually downloaded them both on my phone. I saw that you had two apps. That's really cool the way that you've explained the different rules of those two play.

Listen, I hate the fact that people are like, Why are you only in Los Angeles? As far as the dating. It costs a small ransom to open up a territory, right? Yeah. So on the community side, it's one attic helping another. It doesn't matter if it's a person from Ida to Hope connecting with someone in Bali. It makes no difference, even though we are only in US and Canada right now. Totally. But on the dating side, we have to grow. People don't understand that all the companies that you look at, all the dating apps started hyperlocally. The only difference is if you can open up 10 territories at a time and you have the capital to do so, then you could open up 10 territories at a time.

But.

Sometimes it's a $500,000 check for each territory. Think about their capital that would be needed for 10 territories at a time. Right. It pains me that we can't grow quicker and give everybody what they need right away, but at the same time, we have to follow our growth path at the same time.

Yeah, make it sustainable and yeah, absolutely. That's incredible that your community app is free, by the way. I just think that's amazing. I also run a sober community and just know how much resources and time and effort goes into it to be able to offer that for free. That is incredible.

No, thank you. I brought some Loosid members up on Zoom and I started doing it every week, a couple of years back to see how they found Loosid. I remember this one woman said that she found Loosid in a hospital bed after overdosing and had it even cost a penny, she would not have been able to download. So she's like, I just downloaded the app and said I need help. Then everybody came to her side from Loosid. The community just jumped in and helped her and loved her. She's like, Now it's been a year and a half later. I was like, Okay, yeah, I'm never charging a penny ever. For the struggling side. Even as we start to build out premiums models that are... We built a premium model called SAM, Subprident Adiction Mentor, which is like a day-by-day, daily assignment and all this stuff that it does. Was and we are rolling it out, the community is still 100 % free, but it's whatever, 10 bucks a month. But for anyone that doesn't have the financial wherewithal to afford it, we're setting up a foundation where companies and individuals can then sponsor and scholarships to people that don't have the financial wherewithal.

So then everybody can get everything for free forever. No matter what it is they choose within the community, not the dating. People are or not struggling. But in the community side, people need the tools that they need and they don't have the financial resources. Then we want to make sure that we give them ways to utilize whatever they need and with regardless of their financial situation.

That's so amazing. I love that. What have been along the way of building Loosid? What have been some of the biggest challenges that you faced?

Elon Musk. I was watching Elon Musk talk about starting a company yesterday and what it's like. And he said his friend said it best. He said it's like eating glass while staring into the abyss. Meaning you have no idea what's in front of you and you're eating glass. You're just in pain the whole way. I hate to say that, but often there's so much that goes into lifting a company because the principle of Loosid is great and solving that pain point is great, but it's like the amount of effort that it takes to support it and drive it is astounding. It's funny because we get support tickets and we get these funny support tickets that's like, Hey, you should do this. Facebook does it. You should as well. I'm like, What the fuck? I push all my pennies from my piggy bank in. Every penny that I own, I work 18 hours a day. They're like, Oh, well, Facebook does this, and so you should too. I am like, My man. All due respect, shut the fuck up. We're not Facebook. It's painful to, and this is for any startup, I think. I study all the entrepreneurs and the struggles and all of that stuff because there's so much that it takes to push through.

And every single person along the way has been on the brink of giving up a million times. But the fact that there's a driving force from a purpose side behind this. If I was just selling widgets, if I was selling shampoo, unless the shampoo was connected to some social pause that was personal to me, I'm like, Who cares? I would just fold up shop a million times. But when there's a purpose driving the model, then I'll die in the hell. I'll literally die in the hell. What did Ileon Marsh said? You got to have a stomach for it. Literally. You get nauseous in the middle of the night because you think of, Oh, what about this? And what about that? I wake up all throughout the night and start putting stuff in my iPhone notes of agenda for the next day. But again, it all drives to a good purpose, but it doesn't make the job any less hard. It just makes it more worth it, if that makes sense.

I can so relate. I was laughing when you're talking about how Facebook does it because I have an app for my yoga, for my Sobergirls yoga community, and I get feedback all the time of like, You should be able to search through your videos because that's what it's like on Peloton. I'm like, Do you think I have the resources? Peloton? I'm just like a one woman show, watching this budget situation and they're comparing me to this big, this huge corporation. I can totally relate to that.

Yeah. It's not for the faint of heart. Literally, at the end of the day, I'm dizzy. I'm just downright dizzy. Listen, this is a process that I'm not a special snop like it's unique. It's something that the majority of startups... Ben Horowitz says it best. He wrote a book called The Hard Thing About Hard Things. Ben Horowitz from Andreason Horowitz has funded some of the top companies in the world. He talks about the struggle and he says everybody's been through it. He says there's something that happens in every single company no matter who you are. Facebook had happened with Google, it happened with Apple, and it's called Wifio, we're fucked, it's over. How many Wifios do you get? I think he had like 17 Wifios. We're fucked. It's over. Same thought. Sometimes his best advice is just figure out a way to survive until you go to sleep at night. A lot of times, Zuckerberg had to do that, Steve... I'm not comparing myself to that. I'm just saying company. It's like when you know that you're not alone and when you look at these biggest companies in the world and how they succeeded, I hate that they talk about the success without talking about the struggle.

This is why it's so important that people go in with their eyes open because we're like, Oh, we're going to start an app. If they only knew. We made a mistake with hiring a wrong company and we needed to rewrite the entire code base of the app. It cost us an extra million and a half dollars that we needed to find because they wrote it in an antiquated language that nobody else would write it in, which forced us into paying them. We had to bring in an entire internal team, rewrite the code base, and almost didn't come out of that one. Wow.

Well, I've found hearing your entrepreneurial journey so inspiring. I think that's so impressive that you said you have 130,000 members on Loosid, right?

Well, we have 164,000, but the last 34,000 were all dating that.

Came in. Okay, cool. That's incredible. I downloaded the apps earlier today, but I think what it's actually said to me was because I was not in the States or Canada, I couldn't actually use it. I have a VPN on my computer, so I'm going to try.

I'm going to give it a go. I'll tell you what we'll do. We'll go offline and I will personally get you into Loosid. But it's so interesting that you mentioned VPNs. Safety of the community is so important. We found people faking their VPNs, so we blocked VPNs because we saw a high… We looked at… There's always knuckleheads that come in to disrupt communities. People don't understand. I think the number was 450 million accounts per quarter that Facebook throws out. Four hundred and fifty million accounts. We started seeing that they were coming in from faking VPNs. We restricted VPNs. The only reason, by the way, that we're not in Bali or anywhere else is every territory requires different compliance laws. In order for us to open a territory out… For Canada, we had to do another compliance. Europe is a GDPR compliance. The way that you store and manage and discard the data is different. You have to go through different data compliance depending upon the areas that you open. It's just more expensive. Every time you open a territory, you have to go through their own compliance and discard those people's data different than the people in the United States and different from Canada.

You just need more resources.

Right. It's not as simple as just opening or authorizing one place. It's a big task.

Well, yeah. People say, Well, I think it sucks that you guys aren't opening in wherever. I'm like, Bro, you got 100 grand because I need just 100 grand just in legal work for the compliance to open your territory. I'm happy to open if you want to send me 100 grand, but I don't have an extra 100 grand lying around. Every time I open up a new territory, I've got to go through that whole process. People don't think about that because they don't know. You can't blame them. Totally. But it's just comical when they're like, Kind of sucks that you're favoriting. I'm like, No, I'm not. I want to help everybody. But shoot me 100 grand and I'll be good. Right? Yeah.

I have a question for you, which is if you... Well, I guess I'll ask you first before I ask you that question. What's the question I'm trying to ask? When people download Loosid, what do they get from that? Are there community groups? What can people expect when they join your app?

Well, on the community side, it's almost like people call it a sober Facebook, which I hate the analogy because on Facebook, traditional social media people are just posting fake shit in general. Like, Here's my fancy car and my fancy home and my fancy boyfriend. I'm not saying all of them. I mean, obviously you have a great presence on social, but the majority of people do this compare and despair shit, and it's all bullshit, right? People are posting their vulnerabilities. They're celebrating their sobriety. There's a sobriety tracker. People share their sobriety tracker. When they hit milestones, confetti goes off, and then they could share that. There's Recovery Voices, which is over 50 hours of content of me speaking to trauma therapists, CEOs of treatment centers, sober celebrities, you name it. So we're all authors. There's also Daily Gratitude, which is our biggest group. It's not a group, it's our biggest section. People post their daily gratitude every day. There's also a sober tip of the day. It's just a very feature and functionality-rich platform. And then you go on to dating and it's dating. It's sober, singles looking for, which is a huge pain point in and of itself.

I have been on again, off again, single and the woman invariably would say, Oh, my God, you don't drink. How are we going to have any fun? And so much pressure. I don't know if you're single, if you're married, if boyfriend, girlfriend, whatever. But it's been not only my experience, but the experience of countless friends of mine.

Oh, totally. Yeah. Actually, I'm single and I stopped dating for a long time in my sobriety because I just found it so exhausting. And coming into this past year, this is probably how your company got connected with me in the first place because I started something called Sober Dating Diaries. And I was like, I'm going to do 50 sober dates this year. And it's actually been a lot of fun, but I'm super clear in my dating profile that I'm sober. It says something you should know about me is that I don't drink. But if you... What does it say? I don't mind if a partner drinks, but if you drink heavily, you're probably not the right match for me. And so it's super clear from the beginning. And I've had a lot of fun. I think I've done half the dates, 25 dates. I don't know if I'll make it to 50, but the goal was one a week, and I've learned a lot and I've done a lot of different things. But I think it also takes... I'm four years sober at this point. I think it also takes getting to that point and being really confident in your sobriety to get there.

But I know it's been inspiring for a lot of my followers who are in the same boat. It's a scary and tough experience.

Is there a big community in Bali?

Where I live in Bali, it's pretty sober. That's made a difference too. I used to live in Dubai, which was not super sober, and so it was a party area. Ubuid, Bali is pretty sober. I live in the yoga part of Bali, so it is pretty much. And so yes, definitely that creates a leg up for me in the dating world, I would say, is that it's more normal to be alcohol-free.

Here, for sure. Oh, man, I need a trip to Bali and just need to... Oh, my goodness. No, that's fascinating. It's a big challenge.

It's.

Also, listen, it's so funny. I remember when I first got sober. I'm normally not this way. I'm never this way. But I was out with a buddy of mine and we went and had sushi and I don't know, my sushi came to whatever, 20 bucks. I ordered fucking tuna roll and he ordered seven drinks. Bill came to $190. He's like, All right, with Tip, throw in 120 each. I was like, Bro, my shit came to $20 and yours came to $170. Like, really? Dude, come on. Just don't be that way. I was like literally, because I was just flat out broke when I got sober. I had lost everything. I had a pot of piss or whatever. I was just like, Really? And even when I go on dates and if the woman drank, whatever, if the woman doesn't drink, it's, I don't know, $100. If the woman drinks, it's like a $250 bill. I'm like, Are you fucking kidding me? Then you see that they're getting more and more checked out because we used to do that. To me, there's so many components. You're on completely different waves. I have no problem if someone having a glass of wine.

To me, 11 and a half years over, I'm fine there. I'm put it in that position of neutrality. But they do set like, I was dating this one girl and she always needed... She's like, I always need make sure there's a bottle of wine in the fridge at all times. She always had a glass of wine in her hands. It's like you go to the barber enough times, eventually you'll get a drink. I was like, This just is not good. I don't like sobriety is my vocation and my advocate. This is just not good. And so with me, the funny thing is, I got to tell you this. I set up a profile on Loosid dating saying not, and I said, Here to help anybody that has any questions. Chief sobriety officer, right? I hate titles, so I just said, Chief sobriety officer. Suddenly I get calls from these friends saying, Oh, they're saying the CEO of Loosid is using his own platform to date people. I'm like, No, read the profile. It says I'm here to help people. Then I went back in with big capital words to be clear I am not here to date because I won't...

I won't date on my own platform. It is a conflict of interest. So it is funny because someone was joking with me the other day. Isn't it funny that you're sober and single, but the only sober and single app that's in existence you can't use because you own it? And so I'm going out with women that drink. Because the funny thing is... So here's something I don't know if you know. Bumble and Hinge, they tried to capture the silver dating market, but they couldn't. They tried to because they see how valuable it was. But Bumble and Hinge and those guys are known for being all encompassing. So people weren't paying attention to the soap. I don't drink part of the profile. They were just looking at the woman or the man and saying, Oh, and then they go on a date and the person would say, Oh, a round of drinks. I'm like, What are you talking about, bro? I don't drink. They're like, You don't? I don't know if that's been your experience as well.

Totally. It says super clearly I don't drink and I can usually tell when someone matches with me if they haven't read that because I can tell if their profile suggests that they like to drink. It can be really obvious. And usually sometimes people will initially match with me and say right away that they've noticed I don't drink, that's cool, or they're sober or whatever and that's cool. But there's quite a few people that just don't notice it, don't read it. Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. So the sagas, the sagas. But honestly, it is a massive issue because tons of my friends, that pressure that they got led them to the woman or the man pressuring for the drink, they finally said, All right, fuck it. What's one drink? And then they were out running and gunning again.

Totally. My first date when I was sober, I went on a date when I was 21 days sober and the guy was trying to convince me to drink for the first probably half of the date. Then I had to end up... I literally started telling him about my trauma, my sobriety, why I'm alcohol free. By the end of the day, he was like, wow, that's amazing. Maybe I should consider being sober too. But I think that's a rare experience and I know that I'm particularly open and vulnerable. That's part of my personality and so that worked okay for me. But the majority of people would probably not feel comfortable sharing that stuff on their first date with someone.

Actually, what happens with me is when the waiter says, You sure you don't want something outside of a ginger beer or something alcoholic? I always answer the same way, not unless you're willing to pay my bail money. Then they're like, Wait, what? They're like, Okay, this guy is not drinking. I've been saying that for 11 years. If you're willing to pay my bail money, I will have a drink, but it's not going to be cheap. They're like, Okay, this guy... This guy gets no alcohol. So I just lead with it and just... I mean, listen, having a sober platform, I'm very vocal about my sobriety because also I think it's very important that people understand how sobriety isn't about refraining from, but it's about leaning in. It's tip to what you were saying about spirituality and yoga. It's like, no, we don't refrain from, we lean in. So when there's pain, we lean in. And those principles of the untethered soul, we're like, all right, we lean into the pain and figure out how to deal with that pain better. So we actually lean into life as opposed to pull away from. So people think you're pulling away from drinks.

No, bullshit. We're leaning into life. Big difference. The opposite.

I love that. Wow. This has been such an inspiring conversation, and we've touched on so many things from your sober journey to entrepreneurship to sober dating. And yeah, super cool. So I have one last question for you, which is if you had any advice for someone who is maybe starting their sober journey or in the early stages, what advice would that be?

I would say that most people have questions. That's one of the reasons why I started Loosid, because people don't ask questions, like 12-step groups, even though they save my life, you can't ask questions. You can't. It could be like, I have four questions. It's just not how they're set up. So I would connect with a group that if you feel you have challenges, there's this saying, those amongst us, no explanation is necessary. Those not amongst us, no explanation is possible. You need to go to a community that gets it or a person that gets it, because that's where you'll get your best information. It's so dangerous to get advice from a person who doesn't have those challenges. So my recommendation would be to reach out to a community of like-minded others or a person that you know has been through this and be vulnerable. You talked about your vulnerability. The most important thing is to let your ego down, right? I was told your ego is not your amigo, and let humility set in, be open and vulnerable and say, Hey, I don't know what's happening. I need help. I have some questions. Can you help me?

Then that's where your journey begins with those three words. That would be my suggestion.

I've that. Love it. Mj, thank you so much for your time today. I'm really excited about this episode being released because I feel like our listeners will have a lot of inspiration and takeaways and insight. Thank you so much.

Absolutely. I'm going to figure out a way to take my behind out to Bally and you'll be in town.

Yes to that, but I thought you're going to say to get me on Loosid. I was like, Yes, I want to get on Loosid.

I got to figure out how to get it in your area first.

Amazing.

All right. Well, listen, have a wonderful day and thank you for all you do.

Perfect. Thank you so much. Take care.

Take care.

Hi, friend. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Sober Yoga Girls Yoga Podcast. This community wouldn't exist without you here, so thank you. It would be massively helpful if you could subscribe, leave a review, and share this podcast so it can reach more people. If we haven't met yet in real life, please come get your one week free trial of Sober Girls Yoga membership and see what we're all about. Sending you love and light wherever you are in the world.