Modern Sobriety: An Interview with Holly Whitaker, Founder of Tempest
Holly Whitaker founded Tempest (formerly known as Hip Sobriety) in 2012 when she was determined to deal with her problem-drinking but found that the recovery program she needed did not exist.
With years of experience in the field of health care service and as a former director at a health-tech startup, Holly’s vision went wide and deep: to create a comprehensive digital platform for the treatment and support for the 90% of alcohol mis-users who are not considered “alcoholics,” either by diagnosis or self-definition. Having served thousands of individuals on their path to recovery through their programs, educational courses, and media, Tempest launches their 14th (!) sobriety school, delivered for the first time through their own internally developed software and with the new brand.
Female Founders Fund recently sat down with Holly to learn about her inspiration in starting Tempest, why we need an AA-alternative, the power of community, what students can expect from the sobriety school, her vision for the future, and more.
What is the story behind your inspiration in starting Hip Sobriety (now Tempest) in 2014? What is Tempest?
The story actually tracks back to 2012, when I was struggling with bulimia, alcohol addiction, pot addiction, and a number of other things (like depression, anxiety). I was working at a healthcare company and my job was to make sure every single person that walked through our doors could use their insurance card and get the care they needed, and I had this very ironic moment of finding myself left out of that equation: my doctor didn’t know how to treat me and suggested AA, and my insurance card didn’t work on the things I ended up using to heal myself. At some point in my recovery, I was getting a grilled cheese at The Melt when it dawned on me that there is more intention being put into how we experience our grilled cheese sandwiches being made than in how we recovery from substance use disorder. That was the story: I needed something, that something didn’t exist, so I built it. Tempest, quite simply put, is a modern, accessible, and desirable digital recovery solution for those who either don’t identify as addicted or alcoholics or who do and don’t want to use the traditional offerings of recovery such as AA or rehab.
Why did you choose to rebrand Hip Sobriety to Tempest? What are the different iterations of the brand? (Hip Sobriety, Tempest, The Temper).
There were lots of reasons, and the main one is because part of the old name (Hip Sobriety) puts too much emphasis on only one facet of the journey — sobriety. Sobriety is a fruit of the labor, not a destination or a measuring stick, and it fails to capture that the work we do isn’t just to free ourselves from alcohol, but liberate ourselves entirely. Tempest — which simply means “a violent storm” — made perfect sense to us, because what we do here is turn and face our storms. Here is where we stop running, start staying, and where we use the storm of our lives in order to build something from it. It is a call to action, a witness to our bravery, a reminder that everything we want starts here. The Temper is a multi-contributor content site, that is under the umbrella of Tempest.
For people who are unfamiliar with the sobriety market, it would be helpful to understand the existing options and the landscape. What are the available options and resources, and why do you believe there was such a need for a new and different version of AA?
Let’s take alcohol alone (leaving out all illicit drugs). About 70% of American adults drink; within this population, about 10% are what we’d call severely addicted and about 10% of those individuals seek treatment. In total, 2.2 million humans seek treatment a year for substance use disorder. Put another way: there are some studies that show around 51 million Americans are on the spectrum of problematic drinking, and at most we are treating 4.3% of those folks.
While there are different approaches of recovery from alcohol use disorder offered today — SMART recovery, Women For Sobriety, Refuge Recovery, medically assisted therapy — the substratum of the recovery world is AA (over 70% of rehabilitation centers are AA based). Almost every solution that someone trying to quit drinking will encounter is informed by Alcoholics Anonymous, which was created in 1935, and was based on one archetype — the white, upperclass, hetero, cis-gendered man. Not all, but enough of AA assumes participants have male privilege, and seeks to break down male privilege.
What I am saying is: The world needed something with a lower barrier to entry, that was more accessible, so we could treat more than just 4 percent of the addicted population. The world also needed something that didn’t assume your problem with drinking stemmed from too much power, too much ego. So we built that thing.
More people than ever before are choosing sobriety. Why the cultural/generational shift? What are the reasons people (who may not typically fall into the AA category) choose to be sober?
Most of us just assume that we are supposed to make alcohol work in our lives; I think a lot of people are starting to understand that it doesn’t have to; that we don’t have to drink or that alcohol doesn’t equal the good life the way the industry or marketers would have us believe. That’s it. It’s a carcinogenic neurotoxic chemical, tied to at least seven cancers, loss of gray matter, shortened life span. It’s the number one date rape drug, tied to anywhere between fifty and ninety percent of all sexual assaults (depending on age). One glass of alcohol will give you about twenty minutes of a good feeling — MAX — before it’s down regulated by the body’s stress response (i.e., dopamine surges and depressant effects are countered with opposite processes (release of adrenaline, cortisol, etc.) that outlast the initial high; no matter how much we drink we are always left worse off. To me the question isn’t “why are we drinking less of something that kills us, assists in sexual predation and assault, shortens our life spans, ruins our memory, eats away at our self-esteem, causes cancer, etc. etc. etc.” — the question is “why is anyone still drinking this?”
For many people, a strong community is essential in getting and staying sober. How do you think about community at Tempest?
AA has grown from a group of a few men in Ohio and New York to an organization that serves nearly three million people in almost every country; this isn’t an accident, it’s genius. People need people; full stop. Our world needs more connection, and not just fleeting encounters through our phones. Connection and community is built into every cell of our being here. It’s the first and last thing.
Speaking of community, Tempest’s members are extremely passionate. Could you share any anecdotes on how people respond to and are involved with the brand?
One thing I was vocal about early on was an idea of social proof — we see people doing something in public, we are more likely to do it. Alcohol recovery has traditionally been “anonymous”: something shameful and something you are expected to handle on your own in the privacy of your own life. The message we get is “handle it, don’t talk about it, don’t ruin the party for other people who can still drink. Fix it, but don’t bother us about it.” I wanted the opposite of that. Social proof is why I bought an iPod years ago; I saw white headphones everywhere, I wanted an iPod, I wanted in on that trend. I tried to conceive of a way to do that with recovery, and came up with a tattoo, a “Tt” tattoo that means “teetotaler” (a teetotaler is another name for someone who doesn’t drink). My podcast co-host and I went and got the tattoo in 2016, and it took off — there are a large number of people who have the Tt tattoo now. I’d say that is one of the best anecdotes for passion. I need to be clear though, the passion isn’t for the brand. It’s for an idea of something that didn’t exist largely until quite recently: pride for our darkest places.
You are launching the first iteration of the Tempest Sobriety School in its rolling format on June 13th. What does that mean? What can people expect from the school/programming?
This will be our 14th sobriety school, delivered for the first time through our own internally developed software and with the new brand. Registration opens May 28th, and school starts June 13th. Anyone joining the school can expect a forever altered relationship with self, and alcohol. We all ourselves a sobriety school but we do so much more: we deliver a new way of living, and one most people don’t consider they’ll ever have access to. We do a damn good job of giving people the space to fall in love with themselves, this world, each other, their life.
When it came to hiring, how did you think about the diversity of experiences your employees had? How do you think about hiring, and how did/does that influence the user experience having students as part of your team?
I think of the word “unconditional” a lot. It’s not even about diversity in terms of ability, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, class — it’s also diversity in that we work with people that get counted out of life. My friends (and I) are people who have done horrifying things — I know a lot of people that have driven drunk with their kids in the car or had their kids taken away; people with criminal records, etc. because we treat addiction through the criminal justice system and criminalize people in pain. Did you know that about 65% of employers believe that anyone who’s suffered addiction is unemployable? 65%. The other part of this is that in historically marginalized and oppressed populations (people of color, LGBTQIA, women, etc.), you have larger than average rates of addiction. Which means: we have to hire for people who count all of us in, who are able to stretch to that place of unconditional acceptance for all students and employees, who are part of the populations we are building for. This means we invest in hiring our students (we offer a living wage — our lowest paying position if $52k a year), and we invest in hiring women and people of color, women, trans and gender non-conforming, and members of the LGBTQIA community. We invested early in DE&I, crisis intervention, and human centered design.
What is your vision for Tempest/Hip Sobriety? Where do you see the company/brand going in the next 5 years?
Adding in additional verticals, like eating disorder treatments, as well as dual diagnosis for sexual assault-related PTSD/SUD and ED/SUD; I see us creating a very big in-real-life presence nationally and internationally, and I see us creating additional brands to capture different markets. We are only focused on women, trans, and non-binary folks at this time (we accept men into the program but we build for not-cis-men).
For those curious in learning more about getting sober, can you recommend a few of your favorite resources (books, podcasts, websites, instagram accounts)?
My instagram account (@holly) and my old blog (hipsobriety.com) and the Temper media (thetemper.com); I love Annie Grace’s work (her book This Naked Mind is phenomenal); Marc Lewis’ work is wonderful (Biology of Desire), my friend Ruby Warrington has a great book called Sober Curious, and Charlotte Kasl’s Many Roads One Journey is brilliant and so ahead of its time.