--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah, let me share with that. My wife and I got married within a year as well. 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 sobriety and also 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 defensive. Sometimes I'm going to hold grudges. I said, "That's who I am." And she was like, "You know what? I like that person. Let's go."
--:-- [Intro music plays]
--:-- Ryan Hanley: 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 has 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. And 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 and 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. I love you for being here. 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.
--:-- Justin McClure: Thank you for having me. I'm looking forward to it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: 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.
--:-- Justin McClure: Well, I think a lot of addiction is getting in the way of yourself. For me, 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. When you have alcohol and you have addiction, with that brought in women, it brought in seeking for verification. 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. 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. 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.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: 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 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, all these bad habits start to creep in when you don't have something that either catches you or a North Star that's driving you.
--:-- Justin McClure: Yeah. I think if you don't define your value system, then other people will define it for you. My book is about breaking bad habits, which I was speaking to myself. My bad habit was alcohol, chasing women, a lot of these things. So I didn't have a value system. Other people defined it for me. The women that I wanted, I shaped who I was so that I could earn their affection. When I went out with other friends, I was kind of a chameleon. What did they want me to be? My value system 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 compliment that is going to be removed. It took about a year, but after that year, I had a value system and I did not have one in addiction. I think it's really important to say that again: if you don't define your value system, 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.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: 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 like the next hard thing that I want to do."
--:-- Justin McClure: Dude, it's awesome.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Here's the funny part. For those of you 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. It's not defined on what fitness is. All I did was ruck walks, 40-pound ruck vest that I wear, 20 in front, 20 in back. I would just go for a 45-minute walk, sometimes with no ear pods in, sometimes I'd listen to a podcast or a book. 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. 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.
--:-- Justin McClure: A gallon of water, really?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yes, because you think about how much you drink a day, maybe you have a couple Yetis or whatever your water containers, a couple of glasses of water. A gallon of water is a decent amount of water. You have to realign your life a little bit. This is where everything you're saying to me makes so much sense. I had to realign my life to the fact that simple truth is I was going to pee like 15 times a day. Simple things like that. You don't want to drink it late at night because then you wake up in the middle of the night and you disrupt your sleep, which isn't good.
--:-- Justin McClure: I made that mistake one day. It was like 11 PM and I had only had like a tenth of the water I was supposed to drink. So I chugged basically almost a gallon of water in an hour. That night was wrecked.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: But my point, getting back to what you're saying, what I found really interesting during 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 do some speaking, you go to events and you think, "Oh, what am I going to do if I don't have a beer in my hand?" 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. It creates almost this automatic filter for who are the people that matter and who don't. 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. Thankfully, most of the people in my life did not care. 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.
--:-- Justin McClure: Well, once again, you defined a value system there. That was my value system as well. I helped somebody with this last week. She said, "Justin, every time I go out with these people, it's work related and it seems like I always have to have wine to be out with them." 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?"
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--:-- Justin McClure: 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 something else. 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." By doing that and standing my ground, it let people know right away, "Whoa, this guy is here for a purpose and he doesn't drink." 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. What I was telling my friend was, 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. It's really knowing what you're here for and your purpose and defining that value system, and then letting people around you know that you don't compromise.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I had a conversation with a woman from the insurance industry on the show, and she mentioned that 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. I said, "Well, take out the glass of whiskey. What's wrong with having a conversation in a private place?" Just reframing this. She kind of thought about it. I said, "To get that deal done, it doesn't have to happen in that spot. If that person that you're trying to do business with is the kind of person who needs a private, exclusive spot that they can feel comfortable speaking to you in, which is really all that setting is for them for the most part, then just set that up in a place where you either are comfortable not having a glass of whiskey while they are, or just find another venue that's going to allow you to share that experience in a way that works for you. Just define the terms of that meeting so that person gets the privacy they need, and you get to be in a setting that you feel very comfortable in."
--:-- Justin McClure: I think status, and I don't necessarily just mean it in a hierarchical standpoint, but 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. 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, instead of going to the back of the bar drinking whiskey, 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 we go walk through Lower East Side?" 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?" 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 are downstream from the drinking.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: You said it a couple of times and it's 100 percent true. They're like a floodgate. If we let one of 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. Then all of a sudden you find yourself all the way back in some place that you never wanted to be. 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 because it's now legal in so many places, marijuana. I have no problem with it being legal. That's not a political statement. But just like alcohol, I think people are starting to let it creep into their day and their lives so much and then they make excuses for it. "Oh, I can still do this or I can..." Whatever that thing is for you, it could be sex, it could be porn, it could be binge watching, it could be eating potato chips all night. The good habits stack on top of each other. You do one good habit, wake up every morning and read a book or go for a walk, then 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. You wrote the book, so I'm interested in your take. It feels the same way with bad habits. You let yourself cross that standard line one time, and then it's so much easier to do it again and again. Then all of a sudden you find yourself in that place that you didn't want to be.
--:-- Justin McClure: Yeah. I met a guy at the airport a couple weeks ago in LA, and we just got to talking. I'm very open about my sobriety. I shared that with him, and he was like, "Huh." He started to talk about how he thinks he drinks more than he should. I said, "Well, what happens when you drink?" He said, "Well, I'm a bit unproductive." I said, "You will always be unproductive." Then he asked me, "Justin, why don't you drink? How do you really define that you don't drink and why?" I said this: "Because if I do drink, I could lose everything. I will never gain one thing." 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. Drinking, I could lose a wife, a house, a car, my kids. You will never gain any of those things by drinking. You will never gain." So as a smart person using logic, I told him, "Why would I ever drink again knowing 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 taking from me, and I have to keep doing the things where I'm able to be productive."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I think also, and this is why I'm so glad that there are books like yours out in the marketplace, there is a lack of understanding of the impact that alcohol has on our body, particularly as we age. 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. Just to say it's 10% less, it's probably more. I actually did wear a Whoop strap for six months this year just to track sleep and other things. 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, one standard drink would have a mild impact on my sleep. The next one would basically destroy my sleep for the night. I would barely drop into...
--:-- Justin McClure: It's very fragmented, yeah.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: It's very fragmented. 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 in 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 that starts to snowball. 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 being productive those first few hours, we're not going for that walk. Then we wonder why we don't hit our goals. I think you can insert that for a lot of things, not just alcohol, but we lack an understanding of the impact on our lives these small decisions have.
--:-- Justin McClure: You know what? This is probably my most passionate subject. Most people consider me a biohacker. I know so much about the body, how it works, the chemistry of the body. A lot of that is because I don't want cancer. I don't want to die of a heart attack. So I educate myself. How does the body work? How does sugar affect it from insulin to diabetes to all these different things? How does alcohol affect it? Alcohol is fermented and in the liver, it's converted into acetaldehyde, which is a poison for your body. So basically alcohol is a straight up poison. In my book, it's 365 daily lessons. Twice a month, I talk about what alcohol does to certain parts of the body. For August 8th, alcohol's impact on the heart. I get into the technical side of if you drink alcohol and it's a chronic problem, this is what it's going to do to your heart over time. 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. 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. 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.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I know for me, when I look back on today, kind of 2017, I had a health scare to a certain extent. I really dropped 25 pounds. I kind of got in shape and probably not biohacker quite to yourself, but I'm fairly dialed in on fitness and discipline and all the things I need to do to keep myself in the right spot. What was your thing in 2017? What happened?
--:-- Justin McClure: I had been eating poorly, not prioritizing sleep, not working out, and drinking way too much. I was mid-thirties, 35, 36 ish. What happened was I was emceeing a conference that I was throwing, a two-day conference. The closing session was a fireside chat with myself and one of the primary keynotes. I went to go on stage and I basically collapsed behind the curtain. I barely pulled myself together. I'm seeing stars. I wobble out. I sit down in the chair. 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."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: It sounds like pre-diabetes.
--:-- Justin McClure: No, it was purely too much drinking. I was about 30 pounds overweight. I was eating sugar and really terrible stuff. I wasn't sleeping at all, sleeping four or five hours a day. I was not working out really at all.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So you're 30 pounds heavier then?
--:-- Justin McClure: Yeah. Easily. Now I come in around 190 to 195, I kind of fluctuate depending on water weight. At that time, I was pushing almost 220. I'm 6'4", so I could hide it a little bit. I could look at myself in clothes and being a former college athlete, I could kind of excuse away, "Oh, I'm still in shape. I got kids." All the excuses. All the freaking excuses. Except I had a moment where I literally went to perform and my body was like, "Nope, sorry, you've already played all your cards. There's no more cards to play here." I dragged myself off stage behind the curtain. Conference is over. I'm supposed to be out shaking hands, thanking people for coming. This is the ending moment. I can't pull myself out from behind the stage. I'm toasted. I said, "This will never happen again. I need and should be able to get through two days of emceeing a conference and not pass out on the floor. That's completely ridiculous." That's when I changed everything in terms of all these things.
--:-- Justin McClure: You had a health scare, but do you know the biggest sign of a heart attack? Death. If you wait till you're 53, the first sign of a heart attack might be you die. What I tell people is that for me, I go get all my tests done. I see all my numbers, even the scary stuff. I want to know the scary stuff. Fortunately for me, I've been very, very healthy. I was also an athlete, and I cut out alcohol long enough that my liver got to rebuild all these kind of things. But 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 my last 10 years are not being mobile. I really think we can die at 94 and just fall over. Just fall over dead. So I'm trying to set up my life and the education that I'm trying to give people through the biochemistry of things. You had a scare and you were able to recover from that probably because you had a life of being an athlete and you're in good shape and you had good metabolism. Your body's able to recover. But there's a lot of people who have done so much damage to their liver from alcohol. They got fatty liver disease. Now they got cirrhosis. All these things are 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. I also put sugar in the same place. I don't do sugar. I think it's one of the worst things for us. What I tell my wife and what I tell people is this world doesn't care if we survive. 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. That's why there's so many people that are sick.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I agree, and I think it's worse than capitalism. I think it's elitism. 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 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, sugar could be a schedule one drug. What it does to your body, the effect that it has. We look at people having sugar highs and we're like, "Oh, that's no big deal." You give a kid a candy bar and watch what happens to them. They literally become a different human being. That's why I've been preaching for the longest time in schools. It's not ADHD and all these other things. These 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 have kids. My twins are 11 and my boy is six. They're so mild-mannered and calm and they're great because they don't have their sugars up and down because they don't do sugar. When I'm around these other kids that have sugar all the time, they go up and down, up and down. How does a parent solve the problem? More sugar. "Here's more sugar for my kid." Meanwhile, there's kids now that are 11, 12, they're pre-diabetic. They got fatty liver disease. They're really unhealthy. My son is in Cub Scouts and 90% of the kids are just overweight. 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."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Taking this to an entrepreneurial standpoint, 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 four and four at Dunkin' Donuts in the morning and being hung over and then stuffing your face with chips at your break, you are literally not at your best. Here you are saying, "I'm building something or I'm running something or I'm trying to be a high achiever," and you are setting yourself up to be non-optimal. Not to mention maybe not exercising. If for no other reason, 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?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: 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 even if you like, "Oh, I love my booze." That's great. But then you're not setting yourself up to be the best version for an entrepreneurial standpoint. And that's the part I've never understood. People have addictions. If you have an addiction, zero is the only way to get out of it. I've dealt with it in my own family. I have alcoholism in my family. My father went to jail twice for alcohol-related things. I'm well aware of the impact it has on people's lives and how it can destroy them, even if it doesn't kill them. Non-death scenarios can have 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 key. 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've had people tell me, and you probably get this more than I do, during my 75-day period, everyone would tell me, "You know, my wife and I get along better when we have a glass of wine together." Okay. That sounds like a deeper problem to me. 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. 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.
--:-- Justin McClure: Let me share on that. My wife doesn't drink. She never had a problem, but she just chooses not to drink. I don't drink because I have addiction. But let me tell you, my wife is my best friend. We get along so well. We never fight. When we do, it's very rare. If we fight two days out of the month, that's funny. When I tell people this, I say, "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. Sometimes when we're about to fight, I'm like, "OK, is today one of these days? Is today the day? All right, let's go."
--:-- Sobriety makes you make good decisions in your life. I don't hide anything from her. I don't manipulate at all. I'm very mindful, and she is as well. So if you have to have alcohol in any relationship or business or friendship, I would question, is this really productive in your life? Is it really useful? Because alcohol as a utility is not something you need at all.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Have you talked to a 22 or 23-year-old about what constitutes being in a relationship today? I have a couple interns at the company. I'm the chief marketing officer. We were just chatting before we got into the business of a call, and one of them was talking about his girlfriend. He said, "We're official now. We shared our location on our phones." I said, "You did what?" He said, "Oh yeah, a relationship isn't official until you share locations on your phones." I'm like, "I'm 43. I've been in a lot of relationships. I've never shared the location of my phone with anyone. I've never heard of that actually."
--:-- Justin McClure: Yeah, I guess this is a thing now. Because of trust, I think because of abuse of drugs and how commonplace it is, people are so untrusting of each other that the only way you can feel it's official is if you literally know where the other human is all the time.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I would not want to be in a relationship with a human that I felt I needed to have her location. I think so many of what we're talking about here is a catalyst to this general sense of distrust of each other, of lack of true vulnerability. We use it as a social media tactic, but we're not actually being vulnerable. A lot of that comes back to how we started, which is standards.
--:-- Justin McClure: Well, yeah. A lot of people just can't say no to all the engagement on social media because they think, "Who else might desire me?" Let me reach out to that, let me engage in that. Next thing you know, you've got to hide that from your wife. People get on Instagram and they start engaging, and that opens the door to lying. It all goes to the location. My wife shares her location all the time. I don't care. I completely trust her. She gets dressed up and goes out in Atlanta and does her thing. I completely trust her, and she completely trusts me. I think having that is one of the main things. With that is no alcohol. My wife is not going to make a bad decision. She's going to make a good decision all the time because our family is number one. Our kids and our family are at the forefront of everything we do. I think that's what makes us really successful—we know what's most important from day one to the last day is our family.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: That's amazing. Really getting into and sharing values. I was listening to a podcast the other day, and Ben Shapiro was the guest. He was talking about how he married his wife three months into knowing her. The host asked, "How do you do that? How do you marry someone after three months and be married for 17 years?" He said, "On the first date, I just told her what my standards and values were. 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."
--:-- Instead, I think what we try to do is, "I like you, so I'm going to try to become or morph myself to be this thing I think you want," versus "This is who I am. I'm sober or I'm not. I believe in this. I believe in God. I don't believe in God. Here are my standards and values." Then you can choose whether those are things you want in your life. When you do that, you get relationships like what you're talking about. Instead, we try to become something we're not, and then we wonder why two, three years down the road, all these cracks start to form. It's because it wasn't built on who you actually are.
--:-- Justin McClure: Let me share on that. My wife and I got married within a year as well. Same thing. When I first met her and I knew I liked her after one date, I said, "I got to 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. Also, 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." I think it's important to tell somebody you can't be perfect. I've worked on myself to become emotionally available to love you, and I've developed empathy and taken care of the big picture. Some of the small things, I'm going to be defensive. Sometimes I'm going to hold grudges. I said, "That's who I am." She said, "You know what? I like that person." So we got married within a year because we put it all out there. She put it all out there. I said, "I like who you are. You like who I am. We're not perfect. Let's do this ride together."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I want to transition a little bit because you're not just a guru on sobriety and biohacking. You're also an incredible entrepreneur. You just came out with a new product, the Ultralight. I want to talk about this. Not necessarily the Ultralight—it's not out yet. It'll be out later in the year.
--:-- Justin McClure: Later in the year. Sorry. I apologize.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: That's okay. We can talk about it though. Tell us as much as you want about the product itself, but I'm interested in this: here you are, you're not 24. You've built a career. So many of my peers in their early forties feel like the idea of generating a product idea, starting a new company—they're like, "It's over for me. It's too late. I'm too late to the game." How do you genesis an idea, build it up? Where does that come from for you, and how do you build this into all the other things you do in your life?
--:-- Justin McClure: Well, one, I'm 49. So around 44, we had like 2 million subscribers on YouTube. 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, "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."
--:-- Here's the important part. In sobriety, I got time. I'm not wasting time at bars, hungover. So in sobriety, I put my energy in good places versus in my addiction. I said, "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. Then I found somebody to make what I wanted. Then I hired an industrial designer to make this product in a CAD the way that I wanted. Then I went down the rabbit hole of how to find a manufacturer. 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.
--:-- Here's the most important thing. Later down the road, I met Damon John from Shark Tank. People always say, "Justin, are you surprised to meet Damon?" No, I'm not. Maybe you are, but I'm not. 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 fight through these battles." You're going to meet the people you need to meet when you should meet them. Sobriety allowed me to put the time into something that I believed in. I cared enough that I said, "I'm going to figure out everything that I need to figure out, and I'm going to make this happen."
--:-- The light is a solution to a problem. There's a problem, here's my solution. Boom. It's going to be a winner. I know that it is. 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, your way got you here. So stop doing it. If today is tough, then sit in it and be sad. Sit in it. Be angry. But don't go do the thing." 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 them 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.
--:-- The light—we've been successful as entrepreneurs in social media for a long time. We have 15 million subscribers. We get a million views a day on YouTube. I said, "I want to invent a light that's going to make this process easier." That was the culmination of me learning a lot of things on my own.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I love the advice of sitting in it. One of the best pieces of advice 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. 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, sad, excited, depressed, just go see them and talk." What I learned through that process is exactly what you just said.
--:-- One of the instances was my divorce. Three years ago, I got divorced. It completely blindsided me. 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 told her was, "Just let it flow through you. All the pain, all the frustration, all the hurt, the guilt, whatever the feelings are that you're having, feel them all. Be sad, be guilty, be shameful. Be whatever those things are that come to you. Experience it, live it. Sit on the couch face down with drool coming out of your mouth for a day. Take a day off. If that's what you need, go through it. Don't bottle it up." It was shitty for six, seven weeks. Then I woke up one day and I was like, "Okay. I'm not happy. I don't like what's happening, but I'll survive. I'm going to be okay. I can move forward now."
--:-- Justin McClure: I told somebody that recently. I told a story in here. I was helping somebody in sobriety. Her dad died, and she drank, and then she got sad. She told me she drank because her dad died. 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. As a stoic, when I feel a certain way, if I'm sad, I need to sit here and say, "I'm sad right now, and it sucks." But as soon as you can really feel it, you go up from there.
--:-- I had a friend who had stage 4 cancer. I'm not the type of person to say, "You're going to beat it, you're going to beat it." What I told this person was, "Man, this is really scary. How does it really make you feel? What if you don't beat it? How does it make you feel?" That person, it brought them to here, but then they were able to talk about it. They were able to work themselves up higher 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. We cannot appreciate the view from the mountaintop until we've been in the valley. 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. That was your low point, and then you said, "I've got to figure out a way to get out of this and be better and be healthier."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: You can't escape it. You can kick the can, but it's still there waiting for you. You can hide in drugs, alcohol, porn, sex, whatever thing you want to hide in. You can hide in it for a while, but it's just sitting there waiting for you. She said, "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." That deflection, that repression, causes so much internal pressure, so much internal stress that can come out in yelling at your kids when they don't deserve it, making a bad business decision, or doing something you would never do. The only way out is through.
--:-- I'm glad you brought up stoicism. I love stoicism. For me, it's the Bible, meditations, and then Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules for Life. If you stack those three books on top of each other, you've got a pretty good way to live your life.
--:-- Justin McClure: Let me also mention, when I got sober, my first six months of sobriety, I was dry sober. I was sober, but 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. That was the best thing for me because it helped me figure out how I let myself get to this point in life. When I got sober, I was kind of like what you said earlier. I thought I was just a crazy guy. "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 have been here for so long. You've got to fix this." So I went to therapy every Wednesday for a year. After a year, I said, "I'm so glad I did this because now I understand more of how I let myself get here."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: The things you learn about yourself when you actually talk. When you're in a place where you can just speak what you're feeling, what you're thinking, what's going on inside you, and you hear it come out of your mouth, you almost don't even need the therapist to respond sometimes. You hear it come out of your mouth and you're like, "Wait a minute, that's not who I want to be."
--:-- Justin McClure: That's why meditation can be so good. A lot of times you're just saying things to yourself and figuring out your own problems.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Justin, this has been incredible. The book is Daily Sober. We can get it on Amazon. Where else can people connect? I know you're on all the socials. Your social media is incredible. You bring your family into it. It's funny, fun, educational, tons of amazing things. I'm a fan of all the social you have going on. Where's the best place to connect? The first place you want them to get into your world and learn more about you?
--:-- Justin McClure: If people like YouTube, you can find us on YouTube, Mighty McClures. But if you want to contact me personally, go to Instagram and type in Justin McClure, JK McClure. You can get to my Daily Sober there, the Ultralight, whatever it is. I'm here to always help people. If it's sobriety or how I can help people find a manufacturer for their product, I'm here. I want to see people win. That's how I became partners with Damon John. He said, "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. When you win, it makes me happy. So feel free to reach out to me. Hopefully this helps somebody or touches somebody. That's the main point.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I love it, man. You've got a fan. You've got at least one fan coming out of this conversation. Appreciate you, brother. Be good.
--:-- Justin McClure: I appreciate it, man. Thank you. Let's go.
--:-- [Closing music fades in]
--:-- Ryan Hanley: 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.
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