trump made me go sober, and I thank him for it

On intellectual discernment, identity, and the best decision I've made in a year.

It's just past midnight on June 9th, 2025.

I'm in Bahía de Banderas, Mexico. One of my closest friends is getting married tomorrow on the beach. I've had a couple of drinks that evening. Nothing wild. Just the casual, social kind - the type you don't even think about.

I'm sitting in front of the TV, half-watching a show called The Apprentice - the biographical drama that follows Donald Trump's early career. And there's a scene where Ivana asks him: "You're really not gonna drink anything?"

Trump looks at her and says: "I don't like anything that slows me down."

Seven words.

I put my drink down. I never picked it up again.

The next morning, I got up sober, got dressed, and watched my close friend exchange vows under a flower arch on the beach, with the ocean behind them, in the clearest state of mind I'd been in at a social event in years.

That was one year ago.

I haven't had a drink since. One exception: half a glass of champagne when I got down on one knee and proposed to my fiance (now wife) on November 4th, 2025. We got married on March 8th, 2026. But that moment aside, I have been completely sober. And it has been the best decision I've made in recent memory.

Here's the thing that's going to bother some of you: I don't fully agree with Donald Trump. On a lot of things, actually. And yet - a line from a TV show about his life changed mine.

That is exactly what this article is about.

I - The Man You're Not Supposed to Learn From

Donald Trump is one of the most polarizing figures alive.

People either worship him or despise him. There is almost no middle ground. And that binary - hero or villain, saint or monster - is where most people get stuck. If you love Trump, you defend everything he does. If you hate him, you dismiss everything he says.

Both positions are intellectually lazy.

I'll say that again: both positions are intellectually lazy. And I say that not as a political statement but as a philosophical one. The moment you decide a person is entirely right or entirely wrong, you have stopped thinking. You've handed your discernment over to your emotions and asked them to do the heavy lifting. They will fail you every time.

Here's what I've come to believe: the world's most capable people are rarely admirable in every dimension of their life. And that's fine. You don't need them to be. What you need is the ability to extract the parts that are genuinely valuable and discard the rest - without guilt, without confusion, and without compromising your own values in the process.

I don't agree with Trump on a lot of things he says and does. I'm not here to defend his politics, his character, or his choices. That's not the point of this article.

The point is this: one line he said stopped me from drinking. And I'm grateful for it.

II - What He Actually Said

There's something important about how that line landed.

I had read articles about the health benefits of sobriety. I had seen the data on sleep quality, cognitive performance, liver health, mental clarity. I had friends who'd quit drinking and told me how much better they felt. None of it moved me.

Not because I was in denial. But because none of it spoke to something I actually cared about at an identity level.

"Alcohol is bad for your liver" is a health argument. It targets the part of your brain that processes risk and consequence. And that part of the brain is remarkably easy to override when there's a cold drink in front of you and good company around you. The cost feels abstract. The pleasure feels immediate.

"I don't like anything to slow me down" is a different kind of statement entirely.

It's not a health argument. It's not a moral position. It's an identity declaration. It says: this is the kind of person I am. I move fast. I stay sharp. I don't accept friction voluntarily. The decision not to drink isn't about what alcohol does to your body. It's about what it says about your relationship to your own momentum.

That framing hit me in a different place.

Because I care deeply about my momentum. I build companies. I think obsessively about performance - of products, of teams, of systems, of myself. The idea that I was voluntarily introducing something that slowed me down - even marginally, even socially - suddenly felt absurd. Not dangerous. Not immoral. Just absurd. Like choosing to drive with the handbrake slightly engaged because everyone else does it.

Seven words. One reframe.

III - The Decision Was Instantaneous

People ask me if it was hard to stop.

It wasn't. And I think that says something interesting.

The decision wasn't preceded by weeks of deliberation. There was no plan. There was no "I'll start after the trip" or "I'll give myself until the new year." The line landed, something clicked, and I was done. Immediately.

The next morning was my close friend's beach wedding in Mexico. Surrounded by people drinking, celebrating, toasting. By every conventional logic, that should have been the hardest test. Your best friend is getting married. You're in Mexico. Everyone has a glass in their hand.

I didn't feel the pull.

And that's when I understood something important: the decisions that actually change your life don't happen through discipline. They happen through identity shifts. The moment you become the kind of person who doesn't do something, the willpower question becomes irrelevant. You're not fighting an urge. The urge just stops making sense.

This is the difference between behavior change and identity change.

Behavior change says: "I'm going to try not to drink this month." It's a rule. Rules require enforcement. Enforcement requires energy. And energy is finite.

Identity change says: "I'm not someone who drinks." It's a fact. Facts don't need defending.

What Trump's line did - accidentally, from a TV show, at midnight in Mexico - was trigger an identity shift. Not a behavioral resolution. I didn't decide to stop drinking. I became someone who doesn't drink. In the same moment I heard those seven words.

That's why it stuck.

IV - One Year. What Sobriety Actually Does to You

I'm not going to write a listicle about the benefits of sobriety. You've read those. The sleep improvements are real. The mental clarity is real. The sharpness in the morning is real. I'll acknowledge all of that briefly because it's true and it's worth saying.

But that's not what this section is about.

What I want to talk about is texture.

The texture of your life changes when you remove alcohol from it. Not dramatically, not overnight, but steadily and in a direction you don't fully anticipate. The version of me that existed before June 9th, 2025 and the version that exists today are not the same person.

Sober, you are more present than you realize you weren't before. Not just at events. In conversations. In the quiet moments in the morning before the day starts. In the spaces between things. There is a quality of attention that returns when you stop dulling it, even slightly, on a regular basis. You notice more. You remember more. You feel things more cleanly.

The second thing that changed: my relationship to social pressure.

Drinking is one of the most socially enforced behaviors I've ever encountered. When you stop, people notice. They ask why. Some get uncomfortable, which tells you something interesting about their own relationship with it. Learning to hold that social pressure without caving to it - politely, without making it a whole thing, without lecturing anyone - built a kind of quiet confidence in me that I didn't expect.

And then there's Lauriane.

I stopped drinking on June 9th. Five months later, on November 4th, I proposed to the woman I was going to marry. We wed on March 8th, 2026. I want to be careful not to over-engineer a causal story here. But I will say this: the clarity that came from those five months was not irrelevant to the quality of the decision I made. The version of me that got down on one knee was sharper, more present, and more certain than any version of me that drank regularly.

The one glass of champagne I allowed myself that evening wasn't a relapse. It was punctuation. A moment of celebration with the woman I love, conscious and chosen, not habitual. There's a difference.

I've had exactly that much alcohol in a year.

Zero regrets.

V - The Elon Problem (And Why It's Actually Your Problem)

Let me give you a second example, because Trump alone might feel like a coincidence.

Elon Musk is another person the world has decided you must have a single, total opinion about. You either think he's a visionary genius saving civilization, or you think he's a dangerous billionaire destroying it. The discourse gives you two options. Pick one.

I'm not going to pick one.

What I will say is this: watching one person run Tesla, SpaceX, X, xAI, Neuralink, and The Boring Company simultaneously - and do so with the intensity that he does - is one of the most motivating things I've ever witnessed professionally. Not because I agree with everything he says or does. Not because I want to replicate his personal life. But because what he demonstrates about what is possible for a single human being is extraordinary.

Here's what makes it even more striking: he doesn't need to do any of it. He's the richest human being alive. He has more money than most countries. He could stop tomorrow and live ten lifetimes in comfort. The fact that he doesn't - that he is still possessed, still driven, still building things that didn't exist before - tells me something important about the nature of motivation at the highest level.

It's not about money. It was never about money. It's about the mission. It's about the obsession. It's about being the kind of person who cannot not build.

That quality - the refusal to coast, the obsessive forward motion, the drive to matter regardless of external validation - is something I find genuinely inspiring. And I have chosen to learn from it.

I didn't have to agree with his politics to do that. I didn't have to endorse his personal decisions. I didn't have to become a Musk disciple or defend everything he's ever said on the internet.

I just had to be discerning enough to extract the thing that was valuable and apply it to my own life.

That's it. That's the whole move.

VI - The Framework: Intellectual Discernment as a Superpower

There's a principle - attributed to Bruce Lee, though I want to verify the exact source before I stake my credibility on it - that goes something like: absorb what is useful, discard what is not, add what is essentially your own.

The idea is simple. The execution is harder than it sounds.

Most people operate on binary logic when it comes to the people they admire or despise. Hero worship: this person is great, therefore everything they say is correct and worth adopting. Total rejection: this person is wrong about something important, therefore nothing they say is worth hearing. Both of these are cognitive shortcuts. Both of them are a waste of your intelligence.

The mature version of engaging with another human being - especially a public figure, especially a controversial one - is to treat them as a collection of ideas and behaviors, some of which may be valuable to you and some of which may not be. Your job is to sort them. Not to accept the whole package or reject it wholesale.

Think about what this unlocks.

If you can learn from people you disagree with, your sample size for useful ideas becomes essentially unlimited. You are no longer restricted to learning only from people whose entire worldview aligns with yours. You can extract insight from people across the political spectrum, across industries, across cultures, across moral frameworks - while still maintaining your own values and identity intact.

If you can only learn from people you fully agree with, you have massively constrained your own growth. You've built a wall around your intellectual development and called it integrity. It isn't. It's fear dressed up as principle.

The framework I use is simple:

• Does this idea or behavior, applied to my life, make me stronger, sharper, more effective, or more aligned with who I want to be? If yes, extract it. Use it. Let it compound.
• Does this idea or behavior conflict with my values, harm others, or pull me away from who I am? If yes, discard it. You owe no one loyalty to their worst qualities.
• Am I idolizing this person broadly, or am I learning from them specifically? The distinction matters enormously. No one should be your idol in totality. Domain-specific admiration is healthy. Wholesale hero worship makes you intellectually dependent.

Trump on not drinking: extracted. Applied. Changed my life.

Elon on obsessive mission-driven work: extracted. Applied. Shapes how I approach building every day.

Trump's politics: not mine. Not adopted. Not my responsibility to defend.

Elon's personal life choices: his business, not mine. I'm not running his life. I'm running mine.

This is the liberty of a discerning mind.

VII - The Liberty of a Discerning Mind

We are more intelligent than we give ourselves credit for.

I mean that seriously. The human brain is extraordinary at pattern recognition, at separating signal from noise, at distinguishing what serves us from what doesn't. But we have been culturally conditioned to outsource that judgment. To teams. To tribes. To media narratives that tell us who the heroes are and who the villains are, so we don't have to decide for ourselves.

The all-or-nothing thinking that dominates public discourse about polarizing figures is not wisdom. It's laziness with good PR. It feels like having strong opinions. It feels like integrity. But it is, in practice, a way of avoiding the harder and more rewarding work of actually thinking for yourself.

Nobody gets to own all of you.

Not Trump. Not Elon. Not your political party. Not your culture. Not your industry. Not the prevailing consensus of whatever room you happen to be in.

Your idols - if you have them - should be domain-specific. And even within that domain, they should be instructive, not prescriptive. You take the lesson. You don't take the whole person.

I am a year sober today.

I am married to the woman I love. I am building companies I believe in. I am sharper, more present, and more deliberate than I was a year ago. None of that happened despite clear thinking. It happened because of it.

And it started with a line from a man I don't fully agree with, on a TV I was half-watching, at midnight in Mexico, while holding a drink I was about to put down for good.

The best lessons in your life are not going to come from the sources you expect. They're going to come from the edges, from the unexpected, from the people who unsettle you and the moments you didn't plan for.

Stay open. Stay discerning.

Put the drink down when it's time.

- An