My family did not fall into the pub business. We built it, generation by generation, the way other families build law firms or farms.

It started in County Clare in the west of Ireland, where my grandfather ran a grocery store in a small market town. Next door sat a centuries-old stone building — originally a grain mill, dating to 1865. He converted it into the first secondary school in the region. After that, my uncle and my dad took the same walls, the same high ceilings, and transformed them one more time — into the family tavern, one of the most important music venues Ireland ever produced.

Everyone who was anyone in traditional Irish music played that stage. The Chieftains. The Wolfe Tones. Christy Moore, who later wrote that it was “the best gig in the country” and that the lock-ins were “legendary.” The Furey Brothers played their very first gig there together as a band. Brendan Grace performed on that stage as a teenager. Clannad (the family band from which Enya went solo). Eamon De Valera, future President of Ireland, once gave his first speech to the people of East Clare from the bedroom window of the family home.

After my father helped my uncle with the family tavern he went in a different direction. He bought one of the oldest pubs in Ireland — a medieval stone building dating to 1324, once home to Dame Alice de Kyteler, the first person in Ireland formally accused of witchcraft. There is something darkly appropriate about my family running a pub built by a woman tried for sorcery. What is a well-run bar, after all, if not a kind of spell — an engineered environment designed to make people feel things they would not feel otherwise, want things they did not know they wanted, and stay considerably longer than they planned?

From there, my father moved to Dublin. One of the most famous nightclubs on Dublin’s nightclub strip. Then another venue. Meanwhile my uncle ran a pub on St. Stephen’s Green and a pub in Ringsend. Between us, we had Dublin covered.

I was too young to see the inside of those clubs. But summers meant County Clare, my grandfather’s place, the family tavern. My cousins and I had the run of the bar during the dead hours before opening — the barrels, the taps, the bottles lined up along the back wall like soldiers. We were nine, ten years old, mixing together whatever we could reach. We called our creation the Creamy Lather — a concoction of Harp, Guinness, and grenadine, named for the interesting head it produced. We thought we were mixologists. We were children teaching ourselves to drink in a room built by adults who should have known better. Nobody stopped us. It was not malice. It was the culture. Drink was the water we swam in, and we did not know you could drown in water.

That’s where it began.

When the Irish economy collapsed in the late 1980s, my father did what his people have always done when the ground shifts. He left. But he did not go alone and he did not go blind. His sister — my aunt — had emigrated years before, bartended in New York with her fiancé, and eventually settled in California. She was the scout, the first of the clan to plant a flag on the other side of the Atlantic. When my father decided to move the whole family, she took us in — all six of us — into her modest home in east Southern California, while he got on his feet and found his footing.

Within months he had opened an Irish bar in the beach area. It took off immediately, becoming one of the most popular spots in the county. The Irish had arrived.

I was fourteen years old. And I had brought my taste for the Creamy Lather with me.

I turned twenty-one at that bar. Half my friends celebrated with me on the dancefloor — the legal half. The underage ones came to the after-party at my house. It felt like a coronation. The barman’s son, finally old enough to stand on the other side.

A more instructive night came later. A local production company — the kind that operated along the blurry edge between entertainment and something harder to name — had promoted an event for the venue. The room filled up with their people alongside the usual Irish crowd. Two worlds, one bar, one battleground.

Sometime around midnight one of their guys decided he could not wait for the urinal. He used the rubbish bin instead. A traditional Irish musician who happened to be in the bathroom at the time took exception to this. Words were exchanged. Then a fist. Then a pool ball. Then a chair. Within minutes the bar was a full-scale riot — bodies, glass, furniture. I still vividly remember the owner of the production company, who was on crutches from a broken leg, swinging one of them like a weapon at one of the Irish regulars. In retrospect the image had a certain slapstick quality — a man on crutches trying to fight in a bar riot is not a sentence you expect to write. In the moment it was anything but funny. The police arrived in riot gear and maced half the crowd indiscriminately, which, to be fair, was one way to end it.

Afterwards my brother and I sat in the wreckage at 3am, the bar cleared out, nursing our beers and our dignity, doing the accounting of the night. Then a massive 1970s television came through the window. Sent glass across the entire floor. The production company, upset that some of their people had been arrested, had sent a message.

My brother and I looked at each other across the broken glass.

We poured another drink.

I tell you this story not because it is dramatic — though it is — but because of what we did not do in that moment. We did not question the business. We did not ask what kind of environment produces a room full of people volatile enough to riot over a rubbish bin. We did not wonder why the solution to glass on the floor and adrenaline in the blood was to open another bottle. We were inside the machine. The machine was all we knew.

That bar is where my drinking problem was nurtured. Not born — nurtured. Fed. Grown. By an environment my own family built, using techniques refined across three generations, in some of the most successful licensed premises in Ireland. I was not a victim of strangers. I was the perfect product of the machine I grew up inside.

I got sober in my early twenties. And then I kept bartending.

That decision — to stay inside the machine while fighting my way out of it — gave me something no addiction researcher, no clinical psychologist, no wellness influencer can claim. I watched the dopamine engineers operate from both sides of the bar, in two countries, across three decades. I watched what they did to Dennis, who slid his paycheck across the counter without a second thought. I watched what a crypto platform did to me — a man with 28 years sober — when it turned my legitimate financial instincts into a leveraged gambling addiction I did not recognize until my CPA showed me the wreckage on a tax form. I watched a doctor hand me 50 pills without once saying the word benzodiazepine.

None of it was accidental. All of it was engineered.

Here is the part I have to be honest about, because the book requires it.

I understand the dopamine engineers because I was one of them. For much of my career — behind the bar, managing the nightclub, producing the events, calibrating the cover charge and the bottle minimums and the talent booking to extract maximum revenue from maximum impairment — I was operating the machine from the inside. Not reluctantly. Competently. With genuine skill and no particular moral crisis about most of it.

I did not feel guilty about the liquor flowing. I did not feel guilty about the manufactured scarcity at the door or the three hundred texts from people desperate to get in. I did not feel guilty about the fuck or fight hour, the blood mop, the arrests, the ambulances. These were the costs of doing business in an industry I had grown up inside, and the industry had taught me, as all industries teach their participants, that the costs were someone else’s problem.

The system’s job was to clean up the mess. My job was to entertain.

The only thing that gave me pause — and it came at 4am with the safe locked and the last staff member gone — was the DUIs. Not the ones I knew about. The ones I didn’t. The ones that were happening right now, on the roads between my venue and wherever home was for the people I had just spent the last six hours serving. I had put those cars on those roads. I had filled the drivers with the product. I had made it easy and fun and socially mandatory to consume enough that driving was no longer a rational decision.

I did not stop. The thought would come, sit for a moment in the quiet of the empty room, and then I would go home and sleep and come back the next day and do it again. Because that is what you do when you are inside the machine. The machine does not encourage you to think too hard about the externalities. The machine encourages you to focus on the registers.

I am telling you this because the authority I claim in this book is not the authority of someone who watched the dopamine engineers from the outside and shook his head. It is the authority of someone who ran the operation, understood the mechanics, felt the occasional 4am discomfort, and kept going anyway. I know how it works because I made it work. I know what it costs because I spent years not paying the cost personally while others paid it on the road home.

That is the honest version of my credentials. Take it or leave it.

My authority in writing this book is not a degree. It is not a certification. It is 28 years of living inside this war — watching the weapons get built, watching them deployed, surviving several of them personally — and coming out the other side with enough clarity to draw you a map.

This is that map.

Welcome to SoberWars.