He Got Sober and EVERYTHING Changed

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My wife and I got married within a year as well. Same thing.
Same thing. When I first met her and I knew I liked her after one date, I said, you know what? I got to be honest.
I don't drink. I don't ever want to drink again.
I've got two years got two years sobriety and also I become emotionally available to love somebody but I am stubborn I can be selfish I hold grudges and I get defensive those are the things about me that I don't think I will ever change because I think it's important to tell somebody you can't be perfect if I've worked on myself to become emotionally available to love you and I've developed empathy and I've taken care of the big picture, some of the small things I'm going to be, I'm going to be defensive. Sometimes I'm going to hold grudges.
And I said, that's who I am. And she's like, you know what? I like that person.
Let's go. Yeah.
Make it look, make it look, make it look. The Ryan Hanley Show shares the original ideas, habits, and mindsets of world-class original thinkers you can use to produce extraordinary results in your life and business.
This is The Way. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the show.
We have a tremendous conversation for you today with Justin McClure. Justin is an entrepreneur.
He's a branding expert. He's built an entire business around social media, and he's also written a book called Daily Sober.
This is 365 days walking you through the process of being sober. It's your guide, and this episode dives deep into what sobriety can do for your life.
Now, I know a lot of you listening. You may have a couple drinks.
You may have a lot of drinks. It may be part of your lifestyle.
But my friends, it is important to at least know what alcohol is doing to our body, doing to our minds, and how it impacts our life. You may not want to hear it, but I promise you are going to learn.
Whether it helps you just keep in check your drinking or maybe you're struggling with

being sober in general, I promise you, Justin, his work, his book, this conversation are

going to help move you forward.

We also touch on a new product that he's launching, that entrepreneurial journey, the genesis

of the idea, how he built, manufactured the product.

This is a full scope episode.

It is fast and furious.

I am a huge fan of Justin and his work and you're going to love this episode.

Thank you for being part of this community. Doing this podcast is a pleasure and I just appreciate the hell out of you for being here.
All right guys, let's get on to Justin McClure. Justin, great to have you on the show, man.
Appreciate your time. Thanks for being here.
Thank you for having me. I'm looking forward to it.
Awesome. So I want to start with your TED Talk from 2019.
The biggest distraction to my success was myself. Watched most of it, loved it.
Can you break this down? Because I love this concept and I love the way that you attack it and I want to share it with the audience. Well, you know, I think a lot of addiction is getting in the way of yourself for me.
So basically, if I had a goal in mind and the goal was here, I had all these other things that I dealt with that wouldn't allow me to get to the goals. Because when you have alcohol and you have addiction, you know, with that brought in women, it brought in seeking for verification, it sought in.
And then with that, you have manipulation, you're deceptive. You have all these character defects that get in the way of pursuing a goal that I found that when I'm sober, I have nothing in the way of achieving the goal because I sleep well at night.
I have no stress. I don't look over my shoulder.
And I think this is really important because in my sober life, it can be quite boring. And I tell people a boring life is great.
Why does it need to be chaotic? Why does it need to be filled with ups and downs? Why did it have to have all these things? There's nothing wrong with being in the middle of the road

because when I'm in the middle of the road,

I can meditate on what I'm trying to achieve

and then go achieve it.

Do you think some of that has to do

with not having a value structure

that you hold yourself to, standards,

or maybe something like a North Star?

I know in the times when I felt the most, we'll say wayward, are also the times when bad habits, not just necessarily alcohol, but other bad habits, binge watching Netflix till two in the morning, even if you have an Ed drink, you know, you have all these bad habits start to creep in when you don't have something that you either, either a baseline that catches you or a North Star that's driving you. Yeah, I mean I think if you don't define your value system, then other people will define it for you.
And that's kind of like – I'll talk about it later, but my book is about breaking bad habits, which I was speaking to myself. So my bad habit was alcohol, chasing women, a lot lot of these things so I didn't have a value system so other people defined it for me that the women that I wanted I shaped who I was so that I could I could earn their affection when I went out with other friends I was I was kind of a chameleon what did they want me to be my value system was it changed from week to week to week.
I did not know who I was. It wasn't until I got sober and I said, these are the things I'm doing.
I will not compromise anymore on these values. For instance, I wouldn't go to bars.
I changed my people, places, things. This is the person I'm going to be.
I can't be it overnight, but these values are what I strive to be. I'm going to work towards that.
Any person or thing or place that doesn't complement that is going to be removed. And it took about a year, but after that year, I had a value system and I did not have one in addiction.
And so I think it's really important to say that again, that if you don't define your value system and those around you will for you, and that's why you'll go back to addiction, you'll relapse, you'll go back to the girlfriend you don't want, you'll go back to the pornography, you'll go back to the binge watching. But if you have a value system, it might be hard sometimes because you have to be disciplined, but at least you know what you stand for.
Yeah, I do drink occasionally today, but I did 75 hard last year. So for 75 days, no alcohol.
That's something I wanted to do. I read about it, and I was like, you know what? That seems the next hard thing that I want to do.
So I heard that was hard. Dude, it's awesome.
Here's the funny part. So for those of you who are listening at home that don't know 75 hard, it's a mental toughness program.
It's not meant to be a fitness program. Sometimes it gets misclassified.
It's two workouts a day, 45 minutes a piece. One has to be outside.
Not defined on what fitness is. All I did was I like to do ruck walks, a 40-pound ruck vest that I wear, 20 in front, 20 in back.
And I would just go for a 45-minute walk, sometimes with no ear pods in, sometimes I listen to a podcast or a book, whatever. It's a gallon of water.
You have to read 10 pages of a book. You have to stick to a diet.
Again, the diet is not defined in any way. All I picked was to limit my sugar as much as possible.
So zero sugar in America today is very, very difficult, but I got as close to it as I could. And then the other one is you take a progress picture and that's mostly just to hold yourself accountable.
And what I actually found out of all of it, I thought the alcohol would be the hardest just because friends, social settings, et cetera. But the hardest part was actually the gallon of water.
That was the hardest part was the gallon of water. A gallon of water, really? Yes, because you think about how much you drink a day, maybe you have a couple Yetis or whatever your water container is, a couple of glasses of water.
A gallon of water is a decent amount of water. And you have to realign your life a little bit.
And this is where everything you're saying to me makes so much sense. I had to realign my life to the fact that like simple truth is I was going to pee like 15 times a day.
You know what I mean? It was just, you know, like simple things like that. You don't want to drink it late at night because then you, you know, you wake up in the middle of the night and you disrupt your sleep, which isn't good.
Yeah. I made that mistake one day.
It was like 11 PM and I. and I had only had like a tenth of the water I was supposed to drink.
And, you know, so I chugged, you know, basically almost a gallon of water in an hour and then that night was wrecked. But my point, getting back to what you're saying, is what I found really interesting during, you know, being sober for 75 days was the people that I actually would want in my life if I were to do a true audit could give two shits that I wasn't having a drink at the party or whatever we were doing.
I, you know, I do some speaking, you go to events and you think like, Oh, what am I going to do if I don't have a beer in my hand or whatever? And I would, you know, you get a seltzer or a glass. No, the people who actually care about you could give two shits, whether you're having a drink or not.
And it creates almost like this automatic filter for who are the people that matter and who don't. Like if someone is actually going to care if I'm having a drink or not, they don't really care about my health.
They don't really care about what I'm trying to do. And that was a really, thankfully, most of the people in my life did not care.
So, but, but that was a really interesting side effect because the few people that did are probably people in the back of my mind. I was like, this isn't a great person to have in my life anyways.
And this just gave me an easy reason to step away from that relationship. Well, you know, once again, you defined a value system there.
That was my value system as well. I just, I helped somebody with this last week.
She's like, Justin, every time I go out with these people, it's work related. And like, it seems like I always have to have wine to be out with them.
And I said, well, how is it work related if you have to have wine? There's nothing about working that's wine related. These are people that if you're trying to be sober and they're trying to encourage you to drink wine, how are they really your friend? Are you tired of endless follow ups and missed opportunities in your sales process? Chasing leads is a losing game.
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And it goes back to the story that I told her. When I got sober, if I had to go to a bar, I didn't have a mixed drink or anything.
I walked around with water proudly because I wasn't trying to drink. I wasn't trying to have something in my hand that looked like.
So if you wanted to engage me in conversation, I was very comfortable saying, I don't drink. I'm having a good time here.
I don't need a drink, but I don't want to talk about it. And I think by doing that and standing my ground, it let people know right away like, well, this guy is here for a purpose and he doesn't drink.
And that's the other thing. When you're at places like that and you have a purpose, you tend to stay there for an hour.
Then you leave and you go do something else. I've been way more productive.
So what I was telling my friend, I was just like, if you're having to be somewhere and drink wine and you're staying three or four hours, one, you need to evaluate who these people are in your life. And two, you need to figure out how this really contributes to work at all.
Yeah. So, so it's kind of the same thing.
It's really knowing what you're here for and your purpose and defining that value system and then, and then letting people around you know that you don't compromise. I had a conversation with a woman from the insurance industry, the show, and she mentioned that she said she basically didn't like the fact that in that industry there were still a lot of deals that happened in the back of a dark bar with a glass of whiskey.
And I said, well, take out the glass of whiskey and what's wrong with having a one-on-one conversation in a private place, right? Just reframing this. She kind of thought about it and I said, to get that deal done, it doesn't have to happen in that spot, right? If that person that you're trying to do business with, if they're the kind of person who needs to have a private kind of exclusive spot that they can feel comfortable speaking to you in, which is really all that setting is for them for the most part, right?

Then just set that up in a place that you don't either one be comfortable not having a glass of whiskey or whatever while they are or to just find another venue that's going to allow you to share that experience in a way that that works for you. just define the terms of that meeting so that that person gets the privacy that they need or whatever,

and you get to be in a setting that works for you. Just define the terms of that meeting so that that person gets the privacy that they need or whatever, and you get to be in a setting that you feel very comfortable in.
I think status, and I don't necessarily just mean it in a hierarchical standpoint, but like status and how people perceive us plays into the pressures that your client or your friend was feeling about having a glass of wine. I wrote about something similar in my book that when I first got sober my first year and I wasn't that strong in my sobriety, I would not go to bars because I didn't belong there.
Once again, value system. My value system was I don't go to bars because I don't belong there because I might be tempted to drink because I'm less than a year sober.
So what happened? Anytime there was a birthday, I, instead of going to the back of the bar drinking whiskey or whatever, I would say, I don't go to bars. How about we take a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge? I lived in New York at the time.
Why don't, why don't we go walk through Lower East Side, whatever it is. So I, instead of adhering to what they wanted to do, I made a suggestion that was better than that for me.
So instead of going to the back of the bar, I said, why don't we talk about our deal walking across the Brooklyn Bridge? Why do we need to be in the back of the bar? So by eliminating a bad place, I also protected myself from doing something I didn't want to do, which was go back to drinking, which would have gone back probably to three or four other things that kind of are downstream from the drinking. Yeah.
And, you know, you said it a couple of times and it's 100 percent true. These are they're they're it's like a floodgate.
Right. If we let one of these these things that we are addicted to and that are a negative impact on our lives, if we open one floodgate, the next one opens easier and the next one opens even easier.
And then all of a sudden you find yourself all the way back in some place that you never wanted to be. And holding true to that is so incredibly important, regardless of what the thing is.
It might be alcohol for some, it might be one that I think is a major problem for people today. Not a judgment, but I feel like because it's now legal in so many places is marijuana, right? I have no problem with it being legal.
That's not a political statement. But just like alcohol, I think people feel like people are starting to let it creep into their day and their lives so much.
And then they make excuses for it. Oh, you know, I can still do this.
Whatever that thing is for you, you know, it could be sex, it could be porn, it could be binge-watching, whatever. It could be eating potato chips all night or whatever their bad habits are, right? The good habits stack on top of each other, right? You do one good habit, wake up every morning and read a book or go for a walk or whatever.
Then it's so much easier to do the next good habit. And it's so much easier to do the next good habit.
Unfortunately, the same exact thing is true with our bad habits. At least that's what I've found.
And you wrote the book, so I'm interested in your take. It feels the same way with bad habits.
You cross that standard line one time and then it's so much easier to do it again and again. And then all of a sudden you find yourself in that place that you didn't want to be.

Yeah, I met a guy at the airport a couple weeks ago in L.A., and we just got to talking, and I'm very open about my sobriety.

I shared that with him, and he was like, huh.

And he started to talk about how he thinks he drinks more than he should.

But he also, so I said, well, what happens when you drink?

And he said, well, I'm a bit unproductive. And I'm like, you will always be unproductive.
And then I shared this. And then he asked me, he said, well, Justin, why don't you drink? Like, what's like, how do you really define that you don't drink and why? And I said this, I said, do drink I could lose everything I will never gain one thing and I said here's the analogy if I start drinking again this Friday maybe I get so drunk that I cheat on my wife she finds out about it she files for divorce on Monday my life is over I've lost everything in one day.
In one weekend, I lost everything. Now, drinking, I could lose a wife, a house, a car, my kids.
You will never gain any of those things by drinking. So you will never gain.
So as a smart person using logic, I said, I told him, why would I ever drink again knowing that, that I could lose everything? I will not gain anything. I'm not a 22-year-old man anymore.
There's no time for that in my life. I want to be productive.
I want to achieve. I want to accomplish.
So I have to remove the things in my life that are taken from me, and I have to keep doing the things where I'm able to be productive. I think also, and this is why I'm so glad that there are books like yours out in the marketplace, is there is a lack of understanding of the impact that alcohol has on our body, particularly as we age.
And certainly it has an impact when we're younger, but as we age in particular, if you're even drinking a beer every night, your sleep is that much less, right? Just to say it's 10% less, it's probably more, but say you have, and I actually did a, I wore a whoop strap for six months this year, just to track sleep and other things. And what I found is I could have one drink and it would have a mild impact.
But if I had any, and that's one standard drink, not the quadruple pour that most of us put in a cup and say it's one drink, right? Like one standard drink and it would have a mild impact on my sleep. The next one would basically destroy my sleep for the night.
I would barely drop into a room. It's very fragmented.
Yeah, it's very fragmented. And so here we are, we're thinking, oh, I had a stressful day or a long day, and it's a Tuesday, and I'll have a couple beers just to wind into the evening, and the kids will play, no big deal.
I'm at home. I'm not going to get any trouble.
It's all good. Except the next day we wake up and we're a little frosty for those first two meetings.
And then that starts to snowball. And now every day we're waking up and having to deal with these effects that are compounding on each other because we're not sleeping well.
We're not productive those first few hours. You know, we're not going for that walk, et cetera.
And then we wonder why we don't hit our goals. Now, I think you can insert that for a lot of things, not just alcohol, but it's, we lack an understanding of the impact on our lives.
These small decisions have, you know, you know what I, this is probably my most passionate subject. Um, I'm probably, most people consider me a biohacker.
Like I, I know so much about the body, how it works, the chemistry

of the body. And a lot of that is because I don't want cancer.
I don't want to die of heart attack. So I educate myself, how does the body work? And how does sugar affect it from insulin to diabetes to all these different things? How does alcohol affect it? Well, alcohol is fermented and in the it's converted into acylldehyde which is a poison for your body so basically alcohol is a straight up poison now what i did in my book is my book is 365 daily lessons twice a month i talk about what alcohol does to certain parts of the body So here for August 8th, alcohol's impact on the heart.

So I get into the technical side of if you drink alcohol and it's a chronic problem, well, this is what it's going to do to your heart over time. And so in my book, I go through the liver, I go through sleep, I go through the pancreas, I go through the brain.
If you choose to drink and you indulge too much, this is what it's going to do to your body. And by doing that I want to let people know that it's not out of sight, out of mind, out of body.
What you do affects your body. If it's sugar, if it's fasting, if it's doing good things for your body, alcohol is a straight-up poison.
Because food, nutrition, is something that enhances the body and provides nourishment. Alcohol does not do that.
Therefore, it is a poison, just like other things. So if you choose to do that, two, three, four, eight drinks a week, your life is going to be cut shorter by doing that.
So once again, why would I want to do that if I want to live long and I want to be healthy? I got to cut it out. Yeah.
Hmm. I think, you know, and, you know, I know for me.
When I look back on today, kind of 2017, I had a health scare to a certain extent and I really went, I dropped 25 pounds. I, you know, kind of really got in shape and probably not biohacker quite to yourself, but I'm fairly dialed in on fitness and discipline and, you know, all the things I need to do to keep myself in the right spot.
What was your thing in 2017? What What happened? I had been eating poorly, not prioritizing sleep, not working out and drinking way too much. So I was 30.
At that point, I was mid thirties, 36, 35 ish. And what happened was I was emceeing a conference that I was throwing two day conference.
The closing session was a fireside chat with myself in one of the primary keynotes. And I went to go on stage and I basically collapsed behind the curtain.
And I barely pulled myself together. I'm seeing stars.
I wobble out. I sit down in the chair.

And before we go live, before we were introduced, I lean over to the guy who was doing the fireside chat with me.

And I said, I might not be able to do this.

It sounds like pre-diabetes.

No, it was just purely – it was too much drinking.

I was about 30 pounds overweight.

I was eating sugar and really terrible stuff.

I wasn't sleeping at all.

I was sleeping four or five hours a day.

I was not working out really at all.

So you were 30 pounds heavier then?

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Easily.

So now I come in like around 190 to 195.

I kind of fluctuate depending on water weight, et cetera.

At that time, I was pushing almost 220.

And, you know, I'm 6'4".

So I'm going to four, so I could hide it a little bit. So I could like look at myself and close and like, you know, being a former college athlete, I could kind of excuse away.
Oh, I'm still in shape. You know, I got kids, all the excuses, right? All the frigging excuses, except I had a moment where I literally went to perform.
My body was like, Nope, sorry. You've, you've already played all your cards.
Like there's no more cards to play here. And you know, I like had, so I dragged my, so he, I'm sitting there basically comatose.
I dragged myself off stage behind the curtain. It's conference is over.
I'm supposed to be out shaking hands, thanking people for coming. You know what I mean? This is like the ending moment and I can't pull myself out from behind the stage.
I'm toasted. And I said, I said, this will never happen again.
Like I am at, I need and should be able to get through two days of emceeing a conference and not pass out on the floor. Like that's completely ridiculous.
Yeah. And change that's when I changed everything.
Um, in terms of all these things and well, you know, you, you had a health scare, but you know what? Do you know the biggest sign of a heart attack? No. Death.
Yeah. So, I mean, if you wait until you're 53, the first sign of a heart attack might be you die.
So what I tell people is that for me, one, I go get all my tests done. I see all my numbers and, uh, even the scary stuff.
I want to, I want to know the scary stuff. And, and, and fortunately for me, I've been very, very healthy.
I've all, I was also an athlete and, um, I cut out alcohol long enough to like, you know, my, my liver got to rebuild all these kinds of things. But you know, the most important thing is that I want longevity in my life.
I don't want to die at 76 and start taking pills at 66 where I have gout and diabetes and I, in my last 10 years are not being mobile. I really think we can die at 94 and just fall over.
Like we just fall over dead. Right.
So I'm trying to set up my life and the education that I'm trying to give people through, you know, the biochemistry of things is that you had a scare and you were able to recover from that probably, probably because you had, you had a life of being an athlete and you're in good shape and you had good metabolism. So your body's able to recover, but there's a lot of people, um, who have done so much damage to their liver from alcohol.
They got fatty liver disease. Now they, they got cirrhosis, all these, all these things are really, really, really difficult to come back from.
So it's not only the education of, hey, you'll have a better life by being more productive and your relationships will be better, your coping mechanisms, your character defects. But really just your health in general will be better if you get rid of the poisons.
And I also put sugar in the same place. I don't do sugar.
I think it's one of the worst things for us. And what I tell my wife and what I tell people is this world doesn't care if we survive.
I mean, if you look at big pharma, you look at hospitals, you look at the FDA, nobody cares. They want to push capitalism and the things that sell so that you can go take another pill.

You can go to the hospital. Nobody wants to see you thrive.
You have to educate yourself and you have to do this on your own. And that's why there's so many people that are sick.
Yeah, I agree. And, you know, and I think it's worse than capitalism.
I think it's elitism. I think it's because what's happening in most of the organizations that you just mentioned, at least from my perspective, has very little to do with capitalism.

It has everything to do with a few people making an incredible amount of money and being willing to tell us whatever they believe we need to hear in order to listen to them. I mean, I say that tongue in cheek and possibly a bit of hyperbole.
But if it wasn't for what happened in the tobacco lobby and the sugar lobby,

coming in and telling us that salt was the problem and not sugar, right. Sugar could be a schedule one drug.
I mean, what it does to your body, the effect that it has. I mean, we look at people having sugar highs and we're like, Oh, that's no big deal.
They're there. You give a kid a candy bar and watch what happens to them.
They literally become a different human being. Look at, look at it yeah, that's why I've been preaching for the longest time.
In schools, it's not ADHD and all these other things. It's kids have too much sugar.
They don't know how to deal with the impact and the effects of this sugar malfunction up and down. I mean, I have kids.
My twins are 11 and my boys 6. They're totally, like, they have no, they're so mild-mannered-mannered and calm, and, and they're great, because they don't have their sugars up and down, because they don't, they don't do sugar.
When, when I'm around these other kids that sugar all the time, they go up and down, up and down, and how does a parent solve the problem? More sugar. Here's more sugar for my kid, and meanwhile, there's kids now that are 11, 12, they're pre-diabetic.
They got fatty liver disease.

I mean, they're really unhealthy.

My son is in Cub Scouts, and I couldn't – 90% of the kids are just overweight.

And you can't believe it until you see it, but you're just like, wow, it is such an unhealthy world that we live in.

Yeah.

So taking this to like an entrepreneurial standpoint, just from – if you're building a company, if you're running a company, if you're a high performer or want to be a high performer, having a foggy brain from ingesting for, you know, doing four and four at Dunkin' Donuts in the morning and being hung over and then stuffing your face with chips for at your brain, like you, you are literally not at your best here. You are saying, you know, I'm building something or I'm running something, or I'm trying to be a high achiever and you are setting yourself up and you know, and not to mention, not maybe not exercising, et cetera.
You, you are putting yourself in a position to be non-optimal. And like, if for no other reason, you know, again, maybe everything in moderation to a certain extent, I'm not going to tell anyone to go cold turkey.
That's their particular opinion. But the closer you can get to zero, right, or go all the way to zero, the higher you perform.
It is go sober for a week. Give yourself seven days.
Tell me how you feel on Monday. Then drink for seven days and tell me how you feel on Monday.
And which one of those two positions are you going to be a better performer for your team, your company, whatever you're trying to do? So, like, even if you, like, are like, oh, I love my booze, that's great. But then you're not setting yourself up to be the best version for even an entrepreneurial standpoint.
Like, if that's what you're trying to do. And that's the part that I've never understood with, you know, Hey, people have addictions.
If you have an addiction, zero is the only way to get out of it. I've dealt with in my own family.
I have alcoholism in my family. Uh, my father went to jail twice, um, for alcohol related things.
Like I'm well aware of the impact that it has on people's lives and how it can destroy them, even if it doesn't kill them. right? Even, you know, non-death scenarios can have major, major impacts on family.
But even if it is going to be part of what you do, doing it in a mild, moderate, and controlled way is, if you go in excess, you are literally setting your business up for failure, your life up for failure. You're not going to have a good relationship with your spouse.
I mean, that's the thing. I've had people tell me, you know, especially so when I and you probably get this more than I do, right? I had 75 day period.
So you get it more than I do. But during that 75 days, everyone would tell you they're, you know, well, you know, my wife and I, you know, we get along better when we have a glass of wine together.
OK, that sounds like a deeper problem to me. then, you know, if you can't have a good time with your spouse at home without having a glass of wine, that sounds like maybe you have a bigger problem, right? If you can't have a good time with your buddies without pounding seven beers on a Sunday, watching a football game, that sounds like a bigger problem with how you communicate and the buddies you have than, you know, than you need a drink, right? There's a bigger problem.
Let me share on that. I mean, my wife doesn't drink.
She doesn't, she never had a problem, but she just chooses not to drink. I don't drink because I have, you know, addiction.
But let me tell you, like, my wife is my best friend. We get along so well.
We never fight. When we do, it's very rarely.
Like if we fight two days out of the month, you know, this is funny. When I tell people this, I say, you know, my wife and I might fight two days out of the month.
And when we do fight, I'm like, let's roll the sleeves up and let's go. Because if there's 30 days in a month and you fight two of those, those are pretty good stats.
So sometimes when we're about to fight, I'm like, okay, is today one of these days? Is today the day? All right, let's go. Let's go.
Let's go. Let's go.
Because my wife can take my phone at any point. Sobriety makes you make good decisions in your life.
I don't hide anything from her. I don't manipulate it all.
I'm very mindful, and she is as well. So if you have to have alcohol in any relationship or business, friendship or whatever, I would question going back to my friend who had all the wine.
I would question, is this really productive in your life? And is it really, really useful? Because alcohol as a utility is not something you need at all. Have you talked to like a 22 or 23-year-old about what constitutes being in a relationship today?

I have a couple of interns at the company, chief marketing officer at a company.

And we have a couple of interns.

You're just chatting with them before we got into the business of a call.

And one of them said, was talking about his girlfriend. And he we're official now we shared our location on our phones and I said you did what and he said oh yeah like a relationship isn't official until you share locations on your phone I'm like I am 43 I've been in a lot of relationships I've never shared the location of my phone with anybody I've never heard of that actually yeah and and I guess this is like a thing now where because trust I think because of abuse of of drugs and and and how commonplace it is I think for all these reasons people are so untrusting of each other that the only way you can feel that it's official is if you literally know where the other human is all the time.
And I was like, I would not want to be in a relationship with a human that not necessarily needed my location, but that I felt I also needed to have her location. I would not want to be in that relationship.
And I think so many of these, you know, this, what we're talking about here is a catalyst to this general just sense of distrust of each other, of lack of true vulnerability.

Like we use it as a social media tactic, but we're not actually being vulnerable. You know, I mean, there's it just and a lot of that comes back to to how we kind of started, which is standards.
Well, yeah, and a lot of people just can't say no to all the engagement on social media because they think, okay, who else might desire me and let me kind of reach out to that and let me kind of engage in that. Next thing you know, you got to hide that from your, you got to hide that because people get on social, they get on Instagram and they start engaging.
And then that opens the door to like, well, now I got to lie about this. And like, does my wife know about this? And it all goes to like the location.
And like, you know, my, my wife shares the location all the time. I don't care.
I don't, I completely trust her. So she gets dressed up and she goes out in Atlanta, uh, you know, and she goes out and does her thing.
I completely trust her and she completely trusts me. And I think having that is one of the, one of the main things that we really, really trust each other because, you know, kind of with that is the alcohol.
My wife is not going to make a bad decision. Like she's going to make a good decision all the time because our family is number one.
Our kids and our family is at the forefront of everything that we do. And I think that's what kind of makes us really successful is we know what's most important from day one to the last day is our family.
Yeah. Wow.
That's amazing. I mean, really getting into and sharing values.
And actually, I was listening to a podcast the other day and Ben Shapiro was the guest and he was talking about, you know, he married his wife three months into knowing her. And the host, it was Chris Williamson's show.
And he asked, you know, how did you do that? how do you marry someone after three months and be married for 17 years or 16 years, whatever it is? And he said, on the first date, I just told her what my standards and values were. And I, if she, and she, for the most part aligned, if she didn't, and she walked away, I would have known that wasn't the person I was supposed to be married to, right? And instead, I think what we try to do is, I like you, so I'm going to try to become or morph myself or massage myself to be this thing I think you want versus this is who I am.
You know, I'm sober or I'm not, whatever. You know, here's, I believe in this.
I believe in God. I don't don't believe that whatever my standards and values are, right.
This is exactly what they are. And then you can choose whether those are things you want in your life or don't want in your life.
And when you do that, you get relationships like what you're talking about. And instead we, we try to like become something that we're not, or a different version of ourselves.
And then we wonder why two, three years down the road, all these cracks start to form. And it's like, because you never, that wasn't built on the place of who you actually are.
Yeah, let me share with that. My wife and I got married within a year as well.
Same thing, same thing. When I first met her and I knew I liked her after one date, I said, you know what? I gotta be honest, I don't drink.
At that time, I think I was almost two years sober. I said, I don't drink.
I don't ever want to drink again. I've got two years sobriety.
And also, this is what I said. I said, I've gone to therapy.
I've become emotionally available to love somebody. But I am stubborn.
I can be selfish. I hold grudges.
And I get defensive. Those are the things about me that I don't think I will ever change because I think it's important to tell somebody you can't be perfect.
If I've worked on myself to become emotionally available to love you and I've developed empathy and I've taken care of the big picture, some of the small things I'm going to be. I'm going to be defensive.
Sometimes I'm going to hold grudges. And I said, that's who I am.
And she's like, you know what? I like that person. I said, so we got married within a year, the same thing because we put it all out there.
She put it all out there. I said, you know what? I like who you are.
You like who I am. We're not perfect.
Let's do this ride together. Yeah.
All right. I want to transition a little bit because you're not just a guru on sobriety and biohacking.
You're also an incredible entrepreneur. And, um, it's funny.
You just came out with a new product, uh, the ultralight. And so you talk, just, I want to talk about this, not necessarily the, it's not out yet.
It'll be out later in the year. Oh, later in the year.
Okay. Sorry.
Sorry. I apologize.
That's okay. We can talk about it, though the it's not out yeah it'll be out later in the year later in the year okay sorry sorry i apologize that's okay we can talk about it though yeah but i guess um tell us as much as you want about the product itself but i'm interested in you know here you are you're not 24 right you're you're you've you've built a career how do you so many, this is where I'm coming from with this question,

right? So many of my peers in my early forties feel like the idea of generating a product idea, starting a new company, like they're like, it's over for me. It's, it's too late.
I'm too, too late to the game. How can I build something? Right? Like how do you Genesis an idea, build it up? Like, where does that come from for you?

And to build this into all the other things that you do in your life? Well, you know, one, I'm 49. So around 44, we had like 2 million subscribers on YouTube.
Like, I'm an expert with social content, filmmaking. I came up with the idea.
I'm like, there needs to be a light that works for the microphone and any device. I'm tired of setting up these lights.
So I came up with it in my mind. I'm like, well, what if it attaches from the bottom and you had an adapter for the phone? It could work with anything.
It could be a ring light. I'm like, wow.
So here's the important part. Here's the important part.
In sobriety, I got time. I'm not wasting time at bars, hungover,

whatever it is. So in sobriety, I put my energy in good places versus in my addiction.
So I said,

you know what? I'm going to figure this problem out. So what did I do? I learned a little bit

of mechanical engineering. I learned a little bit of electrical engineering.
And then I found

somebody to make what I wanted. And then I hired an industrial designer to make this product an

Thank you. engineering.
I learned a little bit of electrical engineering. And then I found somebody to make what I wanted.
And then I hired an industrial designer to make this product in a CAD the way that I wanted. And then I went down the rabbit hole of like, well, how do I find a manufacturer? And I just kept going at it.
It probably took a year and a half. And I just kept going at it because I believed in it.
Now, here's the most important thing is that later down the road, I met Damon John from Shark Tank. And people always say, you know, Justin, are you surprised to meet Damon? No, I'm not.
Maybe you are, but I'm not. And that's not arrogant.
It's humble because of all the years of me putting my head down and not giving up and saying, I'm going to keep at it. I'm going to keep doing it.
I'm going I'm gonna fight through these battles you're gonna meet the people you need to meet when you should meet them so I did so sobriety allowed me to put the time into something that I believed in and I just cared enough that I said I'm gonna figure out everything that I need to figure out and I'm gonna make this happen and so so the light so the light one it's a solution to a problem so there's a problem here's my solution boom it's gonna be a winner I know that it is so I always believed in it and I had the support of my family but the main thing is I knew that if I gave up it would never happen. So I just had to work through the tough days Just like I worked through the tough days of early sobriety when I wanted to go back to drinking or I wanted to go bang a girl I said listen you your way got you here So stop doing it if today is tough then then sit in it and be sad sit in it be angry but angry.
But don't go do the thing. And so once I do that, I can apply that to everything I do in my life.
Just like I tell my kids, I try to teach my kids how to work hard. Because if they can learn the ability to work hard, they can apply that to everything in life and be successful.
So the light is we've been successful as entrepreneurs in social media for a long time. We got 15 million subscribers.
We get a million views a day on YouTube. And I said, I want to invent a light that's going to make this process easier.
And so that was the culmination of me learning a lot of things on my own. Yeah.
I love the advice of sitting it. One of the best piece of advice that I ever got in my life was a little after the moment that I described before, I had a mentor of mine say, go get a counselor.
Someone can't be your family. You know, this is, go get someone.
Set up an appointment for every other week for the rest of your life and just go see them, whether you're happy, whether you're sad, whether you're excited, whether you're depressed, whatever it is, just go see them and talk. And what I learned through that process is exactly what you just said.
Every negative moment that I've had, and now I've kind of learned to do it myself, but early on she helped me a lot. One of the instances was my.
Three years ago, I got divorced. It was completely blindsided me.
And within two months, I was operational again. Not because I was happy about the situation.
I wasn't. But the first thing she said to me when I sat down and I told her was, just let it flow through you.
She's like, all the pain, all the frustration, all the hurt, the guilt, or whatever the feelings are that you're having, like, feel them all. Be sad.
Be guilty. Be shameful.
Be whatever those things are that come to you. Be those things.
Like, experience it. Live it.
Sit on the couch face down with drool coming out of your mouth for a day. You know, take a day off from it.
Because if that's what you need, go through it. Don't bottle it up.
And yeah, it was shitty for six, seven weeks. And then I woke up one day and I was like, okay.
I mean, I'm not happy. You know, I don't like what's happening, but I'll survive.
I'm going to be okay. I can move forward now.
Right. I'm good.
I told somebody that recently. And I also, I mentioned, I've told a story in here.
I was helping somebody one time in sobriety and her dad died and she drank and then she got sad.

And she told me she drank because her dad died.

And I said, no, you didn't.

You drank because you wanted to.

And now you're sitting on the bed and you're trying to escape by going shopping.

I said, don't go shopping. Sit on your bed and cry until you don't cry anymore.
That's what I believe. And I believe as a stoic that when I feel a certain way, if I'm sad, I need to sit here and say, you know what, I'm sad right now and it sucks.
But as soon as you can really feel it, you go up from there. That's as far as, so that's what I tell people, like, I had a friend who had, you know, stage four cancer.
I'm not the type of person to say, you're going to beat it, you're going to beat it, you're going to beat it. What I told this person was, I said, man, this is really scary.
How does it really make you feel, and what if you don't beat it? Like, how does it make you feel? And that person, it brought them to here, but then they were able to talk about it and they were able to work themselves up higher than that because they really understood the reality of something. Sometimes the reality isn't good.
We're sad. We're sick.
We're angry. We can't escape that.
And we also, we cannot appreciate the view from the mountaintop until we've been in the valley. And sometimes when you're in the valley, it sucks.
And you've got to be there until you find your way out. Just like three years ago when you found yourself at the conference and you almost fainted or whatever, that was your low point.
And then you said, you know what, I've got to figure out a way to get out of this and be better and be healthier. Yeah, you can't escape it.
You can kick the can, but it's still there waiting for you. You know, You can hide in drugs, alcohol, whatever, porn, sex, whatever thing you want to hide in.
You can hide in it for a while, but it's just waiting. It's just sitting there waiting for you.
And that's what she said. She goes, you have two options.
Go through it. Love it.
Or kick the can and go through it because you're going to go through it eventually. And, uh, and, and that deflection, that repression that causes so much internal pressure, so much internal stress that then can come out in yelling at your kids when they don't deserve it or making a bad business decision or doing something that you would never do, you know, that, that making a make, you know, gambling or whatever it is to try to hide from that thing.
And the only way, you know, it's, it's cliche, but the only way out is through. And, um, and I'm, I'm glad you brought up stoicism.
I love stoicism. Uh, uh, you know, for me, it's like the Bible meditations and then Jordan Peterson's 12 rules for life.
You know, if you, if you stack those three books on top of each other, you got pretty good way to pretty good, pretty good lessons to live your life by. Yeah.
Let me also mention the same as you. When I got sober, my first six months of sobriety, I was dry sober, meaning I was sober, but I didn't.
My mind started to after six months of sobriety, I said, I need to fix the problems in here. So I went to therapy and I did therapy every Wednesday for a year.
and that was the best thing for me because it helped me figure out how did I let myself get to this point in life? Because when I got sober, I was kind of like what you said earlier, I thought I was just a crazy guy. I'm like, I'm that crazy guy.
I get an excuse because I'm that crazy guy. But then when I got sober, I said, no, no, no, you're not that crazy guy.
You are crazy, but you did not see the problems that had been here for so long. You got to fix this.
So I went to therapy for every day for a year on Wednesday. And after a year, I said, you know what? I'm so glad I did this because now I understand more of how I let myself get here.
yeah the things you learn about yourself when you actually just talk like when you you you the words

like when you're actually in a place that you can just speak what you're feeling, what you're thinking, what's going on inside you, and you hear things, you hear it come out of your mouth. You almost don't even need the therapist to respond sometimes.
I mean, sometimes you do, but sometimes you don't even need them to respond. You hear it come out of your mouth, and you're like, wait a minute.
That's not who I want to be. Well, that's why meditation can be so good.
Cause a lot of times you're just saying things to yourself and like you're figuring out your own problems. Yeah.
Justin, this has been incredible. The book is daily sober.
Uh, we can get on Amazon. Where else can people, I mean, I know you're on all the socials and guys, social media is incredible.
You bring your family into it. It's funny.
It's fun, educational, tons of amazing things. I'm a fan of all the social that you have going on.
Where's the best place to connect? Like the first place you want them to kind of get into your world and learn more about you? I mean, you know, if people like YouTube, you can find us on YouTube, Mighty McClure's. But if you want to contact me personally, you go to Instagram and type in Justin McClure, JK McClure.
You can get to my Daily Sober there, the ultralight, whatever it is. And I'm here to always help people.
If it's sobriety or how I can help people maybe find a manufacturer for their product, I'm here to, I want to see people win. And that's how I became partners with Damon John.
He's like, Justin, what I like about you is you don't mind other people winning around you. I'm like, no, because there's no threat to me.

Nobody can take away from me what's mine.

So I want to let other people win as well because when you win, it makes me happy.

So I want to see other people win as well.

So feel free to reach out to me.

And hopefully this helps somebody or touch somebody.

And that's kind of the main point.

I love it, man.

Well, you got a fan.

You got at least one fan coming out of this conversation.

So appreciate you, brother. Be good.
I appreciate it, man. Well, you got a fan.
You got at least one fan coming out of this conversation. So appreciate you, brother.
Be good. I appreciate it, man.
Thank you.

Let's go. Yeah.
Make it look. Make it look.
Make it look.

Thank you for listening to The Ryan Hanley Show.

Be sure to subscribe and leave us a comment or review wherever you listen to podcasts. Ain't anything for me.
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