The Sober Creative

Most of us know the moment. You’re at your annual checkup and the doctor asks how many drinks you have a week. You give a number, they type it in, and the appointment moves on. Dr. Lucy McBride has spent 25 years as a primary care physician in Washington, D.C., and she thinks that question barely scratches the surface. Alcohol has been part of her life from many angles. Her dad has been sober sinc...

Steve Munro 🇨🇦 spent 25 years drinking, using, and selling drugs before he hit the bottom that finally stuck: a seizure on his apartment floor after walking through the DTs to buy a bottle of vodka. Eleven months in a residential treatment center followed. What came after that is the real story. Steve rebuilt a life across software executive roles, a motorcycle racing career, and a business he eve...

Lisa Marie Simmons has been on stage since she was fifteen. She moved from Boulder to New York at nineteen to study theater and music, and she believed what a lot of young artists believe: that the tortured artist needs a drink to get up there and bare her heart. She bought all in. By her own account, she was messed up for most of the five years she spent in New York. She is sixty now, living on L...

For about twenty years, Tiffiny Yaxley was the one who made the party happen. Figure skater, geologist, entertainer, the girl who would moon a room full of people because she thought it was hilarious. She built that reputation on purpose. And somewhere along the way she stopped liking the person she had built. She'll tell you there was no rock bottom. Just a Friday at 10 in the morning at a stress...

Most of what I know about alcohol, I learned by living it. I know what nine beers a day did to my sleep, my mornings, my work, and my sense of who I was. What I never had was the other half of the picture. The part happening at the level of receptors and stress hormones and inflammation, in a place I can’t see and was never taught to look. Dr. A Leslie Morrow spent 35 years in that place. She’s a...

Steve [Sage-Outlaw-Caregiver] on the crash that came six years after he quit, and finding out at 40 that he was creative Steve didn’t take a drink until he was 21. He calls it a reverse Benjamin Button. Most people get their worst drinking out of the way young. His started late, got heavier every year, and by the back half of his 30s it was every single day. He stopped on August 4th, 2018, after h...

Erin Gregory Creative did not hit rock bottom. That’s part of why her story is worth sitting with. She grew up Irish Catholic, in a family where a drink was how you celebrated and how you grieved. She was a scholarship swimmer in college, where work hard, play hard was simply the culture. She married Mike, whose family operated the same way. Nobody in her orbit thought twice about it. Then in 2018...

In this episode, Josh sits down with Hunter Biden , a painter and writer based in Los Angeles who built a first career in law and business long before most people knew his name for anything else. Then one October, a laptop turned his private life into public property overnight. Every family photo, every relapse, and every unfinished thought got picked up by strangers and rearranged into a story he...

Dana Kay ’s first memory of alcohol is from a dinner party when she was five or six years old. She spent the night sneaking sips while the adults were turned away in conversation, and by the end of the night she’d passed out on a beanbag in the middle of the room. Nobody worried. Everybody laughed. It became a family story people told for years, and it planted something in her that took over four...

Most guests on this show are people who found their way to sobriety and creativity through hard-won trial and error. This week’s guest is a small golden monkey in a patchwork waistcoat who has never had a drink in his life. His name is Jomo, and he teaches meditation to millions of people on TikTok alongside his human, Jason, at The Monkeymind Meditation Club . Jomo’s origin story starts with Jaso...

Jeff “H” Harrington has been playing bass and writing songs for close to 40 years. He grew up in Milwaukee, a city he describes as one of the heaviest drinking cultures in the country, and spent his 20s and 30s using alcohol to manage a shyness he calls “criminally vulgar.” Nine years ago he left a career in medical physics to chase music full time. Five years ago, he stopped drinking almost entir...

Gary Allen had his first drink at 19, a pint of Harp he didn’t even like. He kept drinking it anyway, because for the first time, he felt like everybody else. Gary grew up in rural Ireland, the oldest of three, and has used a wheelchair full-time since he was 13. Alcohol became the thing that closed the distance between him and the room. He didn’t fully realize that’s what it was doing until decad...

Bob Mathers spent 35 years being “ Bobby Good Times .” He was the guy other people kept on speed dial for a good night out, the one always up for an extra day of drinking when everyone else had called it quits. He built a career as a speaker and coach. He raised two sons. From the outside, it looked like a full life. On the inside, he was running on a weekly cycle of shame and recovery that had be...

IAN FEE took his first drink at age one, handed a sip of beer by his own dad while sitting in a highchair. He grew up in the 1970s and 80s, when parents dipped a baby’s binky in wine and nobody thought twice about it. By the time he hit his twenties, drinking wasn’t just a habit. It was the whole architecture of his social life and his career. Ian built a sales career on entertaining clients at ba...

Jen Benford grew up carrying more than most people ever have to carry. Adopted at age two or three, moved through four homes before then, her aunt and uncle raised her in those first few formative years. Not finding out until she was 19 that she had six or seven half-siblings out in the world somewhere. Through all of it, she kept moving forward and kept the weight of it buried. When alcohol enter...

I almost got off the bus. Sitting there before we took off, bags being loaded, heart racing, I seriously considered stepping out and calling the whole thing off. Five and a half years sober, and fear still shows up in the body the same way it always did. What changed is what I do with it. I kept breathing. The bus started moving. And the shift happened. This is the story of a five-day, 40+ mile tr...

Jill DePhillip, CRNP-PMH has spent years sitting with people at the hardest parts of themselves. As a certified registered nurse practitioner in psychiatric mental health, specializing in ADHD and addiction recovery, she brings something most credentials don’t come with: she’s been there. Six years sober — since April 20, 2020 — she built a clinical practice, a writing life, and a clear understand...

Marya Hornbacher came out of rehab in her mid-20s not knowing how to make dinner. She could earn a graduate degree, but she couldn’t change a tire or make a doctor’s appointment. She’d been drinking and using since her early teens, and by the time sobriety arrived, basic life skills were largely theoretical. What she built from that point forward is more than something. New York Times bestselling...

Jenn Ocken is a photographer, brand builder, and the person who gave language to something she calls creative adaptive intelligence — the human capacity to navigate uncertainty without abandoning yourself. She didn’t arrive at this framework through a research institution or a credential program. She got there through lived experience: a family where alcohol was completely normal, a father who wen...

James Martin | Made By James has spent 20 years building brands for some of the world’s most recognized companies. But the most important brand he’s ever built is his own — and he’ll tell you sobriety had everything to do with it. In this conversation, James opened up about getting kicked out of school at 17, a two-year bender that nearly derailed his life, and the moment on September 5, 2021 when...

Jess, The Creator is the kind of person who does not slow down. A family nurse practitioner, former pediatric oncology nurse, competitive hockey player, stock market analyst, and full-time Substack writer — she has built a life that runs on discipline, curiosity, and a refusal to stay average. But behind all of that output was a year that nearly unraveled everything. In this conversation, Jessica...

Cory Gerlach did not follow the script. Teenage punk. Community college. Harvard PhD. Senior federal scientist. Congressional advisor on COVID-19. And then—in 2024—he and his husband rebuilt a dilapidated sailboat by hand, quit their jobs, and sailed away from the lives they had built. He has been sober for 18 years. He got sober at 20. He never had a legal drink in the United States. What comes t...

Jonathan Hoban has spent years trying to understand why he kept sabotaging himself when things were going well. The answer wasn’t where he expected to find it. It was hiding in plain sight — in the word most people dismiss as weakness: sensitivity. As a psychotherapist, author, and founder of Sensitivity Management, Jonathan has built a framework that reframes sensitivity not as a flaw to fix, but...

There’s a version of Shelly’s story that looks like a series of detours. Mechanic to content creator. Dealership to Substack. Substances to sobriety. But spend twenty minutes with her, and you realize those weren’t detours. They were the path. Shelly is the writer behind Cozy Clarity, a Substack she describes as “a space where soft and strong collide.” Her work sits at the intersection of personal...

Carolina Wilke has spent decades studying what most of us ignore. The signals our bodies send. The tension we carry without naming it. The emotions we skip past because sitting with them feels like too much. As co-founder of Sacred Business Flow and a master bioenergetics practitioner, Carolina came to this work through her own body. Years of chronic migraines that started at age five. Hospital vi...