What To Do After You Lose It All (And An Honest Conversation About Steroids) w/ Ryan Niddel #TheOnePercent

It had to be the truth in everything, not just situation, not just in like the quiet dark recesses of our home where I'm confiding in Lindsay, where I'm just telling the truth there. I have to adopt this mindset that even when it's uncomfortable, I have to tell the truth to everybody. So how I'm doing the one thing with Lindsay of telling the truth is how I have to do it with everybody.

It takes one free person to create change. This is the show for them. We are the creators of the free world. This is capitalism.com and we are the 1%.

A few months ago, I was browsing the top itunes podcasts in the world, and number one was Malcolm Gladwell. Number two was Joe Rogan. Number three was Ryan Knidell. Number four was revisionist history. Wait a second. Who the heck is Ryan Neidell? Well, if you were anyone else, you might not care or be surprised by this, but Ryan Neide, an old buddy of mine that I grew up with, kind of when we were cutting our teeth in this world of entrepreneurship back in Akron, Ohio, and back then, Ryan's life was not put together. Ryan was up to no good, we might say, hanging out with the wrong crowd. Ryan was not the person that he is today. So my perception of Ryan when I see that he had the number three podcast in the world was kind of like you might expect if you're screwed up. Buddy who was betting on sports games all of a sudden became a millionaire in business. Now, that's not Ryan's story, it's just an analogy, but it was kind of like what my experience was. So I called up Ryan and was like, I need to hear about your transformation. Because if you look at his life on social media today, he's married and has a beautiful family. He has a thriving business with a huge audience. He is in tremendous health. But that was not the case three years ago. And it was even worse when I knew him growing up in Akron. Ohi he talks a lot about that, about being in the gutter, if you will, several years ago, about being caught in multiple relationships. Now, I have friends who have multiple relationships, but they're honest about it. That was not the life Ryan was living. He was on steroids. He was not healthy. He was broke. And so we talk all about that. We talk about this transformation of having nothing, of losing it all, of being found out to building a life that is really the envy of a lot of of his peer group. Now, now, the original title for this episode was an honest conversation about steroids because the social media post that inspired me to invite ryan onto the 1% was where he opened up about steroid use. And I wanted to talk about that because I have friends who take steroids and think it's the greatest thing in the world. And I have other peers who say that it is incredibly damaging to long term health. And I wanted to hear the perspective of someone who was on it as an abuser, somebody who no longer takes them, but has kind of a well rounded view of them. So it's a topic that I find interesting just selfishly. But we spent most of the conversation talking about Ryan's turnaround. And this is really the perfect episode. If any of you feel like you are rebuilding your life or, you know, somebody who is going through a transformation or particularly we address the issue of who's ready to combust, who is about to lose it all. Spoiler alert. It's the person who is building their house on sand, the person who is building on lies. And so I asked Ryan who's lying unconsciously because that was him. So this is a story of turnaround and it's a story of some controversial topics. And it's going to be entertaining either way. Enjoy this chat with Ryan Nidell.

Ryan Nidell, welcome to the 1%. Excited to hang out with you, bud.

Man, it's truly an honor to be here. This is such a wild ride we're on.

It is a wild ride, and I want to give you my perspective here, Ryan. And forgive me for if I'm being hard on you publicly, but when we last spoke, literally the last time we spoke, besides a few Facebook messages, your life was, like, kind of in shambles. I don't know if you were restarting, but, I mean, you were hiding a lot for sure. You are not on the path that you're on now. You didn't have a following. And then all of a sudden, I'm scrolling the itunes feed one day and it's like, Joe Rogan, Malcolm Gladwell, Ryan Neidell, revisionist history. I'm like, wait, what? What in the world is like my buddy from Ohio who, like, doesn't have his life together, and all of a sudden it was like, oh, my goodness, he's a different person than he was when he grew up. So, yeah, how is the Ryan today different than three years ago?

Oh, man, Ryan, it's night and day. I'm unrecognizable to the man that I once was, a man that you would have known. And admittedly, I came into you And I have known each other from, gosh, way back in the direct response world in Akron and the hosting world and all that stuff. But then I believe last time you and I spoke, I remember was you had that Amazon based supplement company, Sheer Strength.

Yeah, yeah.

And just were killing it and looking for people to help get that message out and the brand out. And I came to you humbled, like, look, I had created some level of wealth or success or the aura of this at the hosting company that I was a part of from Mark and Vinny. And I squandered everything I had from lying and cheating and manipulating and multiple girlfriends and paying for cars and trips and bottle service and name something here I had this opportunity to align myself with people that would have helped catapult me to the next evolution of life. But I was too, you know, young, dumb and headstrong to realize the greatness I was in front of. And so I thought I could do everything myself. And as the wall started imploding and crashing down and I'm left with, you know, a truck getting repossessed and no money in the bank and being caught cheating and all these things, you're literally just barely extending your hand just enough to say, like, buddy, like, here's, you know, we got a little spot that you might be able to help us out with super passively. And that was the last time I remember you and I really catching up was back then, and it was even then, you were like supremely focused, locked in, just growing that thing to no end. And it was really almost like I was having to beg or borrow time from you, which I can completely get from where I sit. Not an attack in any capacity, just like, you know, to get you on the phone. You were. You were growing up, what was it, an eight figure business, right?

Yeah.

You know, that takes a certain level of dedication and focus that most people aren't familiar with. And all you were doing was exhibiting that. I could see that from where I sit now. But the moment, I'm like, shit, even Ryan Moran now, you know, our buddy from up in Akron, he doesn't even have time for me, which just went into this vortex of negative emotions and self deprecation and all these things that, you know, really had limited my growth from far back as I can remember, up until, you know, three years ago, really.

But Ryan, your life is totally different now. I mean, we've been out of touch since that time, and you've built a following that is huge. You have completely turned your life around. Your life is completely Transparent in public. You're married. You have a beautiful family. What the hell happened to you?

I would love to say it was. I woke up and realized that I was going to be a better person, but that'd just be a lie. And that's really the start of this whole journey is just to stop lying. Like, stop lying to myself, stop lying to everybody else. Just fight through some of that pain and some of those tough conversations that I'd ran from for so many years. And so what happened was my wife now, Lindsay, her and I got. Just started dating. Gosh, July, August, doesn't even matter the date and time, really. But three to four months into our relationship, she spent the night at my house. I wake up Saturday morning, she needs a cup of coffee. I have never had a liking to coffee. It's never been my thing. Never cared to try it, really. So I hop in my car, go to the local Tim Hortons, grab her cup of coffee, come home. As I'm pulling into my neighborhood and seeing my house just down the road, I see my now ex girlfriend's car parked in my driveway. The same car that I had paid for for her.

Oh, boy.

Like, my stomach sinks. I'm like, man, what is. What's the. What's this gonna turn out to be? So I slowly creep past, and I don't notice the front door open. There's not two women outside yelling. So I concoct this story in my mind that maybe she's just, like, walking around the house because she thinks I'm out of town. The ex girlfriend now, who at that given moment, Ryan was fully convinced that I was her one and only. And Lindsay, the same. My wife one and only. They never met each other before. And here what ends up happening is I'm driving around the corner and like, man, maybe I'll get away with this still. And I don't get away with it. Lindsay calls me and says, hey, you need to come here. So and so's at the house. We need to have a conversation. And in that moment, I had a gated courtyard in my house. I opened the gate, and the ex girlfriend now runs to me and gets pretty verbal and aggressive, like, physical. I put her through a number of things over our three years together, all rightfully so. Again, I'm not. I don't want to take this platform to certainly degrade what somebody else's raw emotions were in that moment. She was acting out of passion and pain, things that were driving her in that moment. But on the other side of this, who's just sitting on the steps to my front door. Just look at me in disbelief. Like, almost like this was a low light reel playing out. I can't call it a highlight reel because that would of course not be true. But, you know, here's the situation playing out. And I just knew in that moment, like, man, she's not freaking out, she's not crying, she's not yelling. I'm gonna go over and talk to her. And so eventually the ex left and had a few hours to spend with Lindsay. And then she left the house. And I thought, okay. For the first time in longer than I can remember, I just felt light again. I wasn't having to lie to anybody. All the stories were out in the open. The truth had set me free. And so as this truth, quote, unquote, sets me free, I'm still a slow learner. And Lindsay comes back to my house. Oddly enough, she calls me eight or nine o' clock at night, that same night, and says, look, I don't know why I want to come back, but I have some more answers I need from you. Do you care if I stop back over? Oh, sure. And she came over. We continue to progress our relationship. Literally from that evening. She never fully walked out on me. She kept instilling in me that I was capable of doing more and being more. That this path I had been on and these lies and these stories of things from my upbringing, of my mother telling me at 14 that I was basically on my own, that I could raise myself now or needed to raise myself, that she spent the past 14 years raising me and she'd had enough. My father walking out, chasing a career versus pouring into me and sharing love and affection with me. And some of the physical interactions between him and I and some of the mental health, gosh, just. I'll just say debauchery that he put me through, those were all I can see now were limiting the way that I was able to communicate and exist as an adult man. And so these aren't necessarily justifications or reasons, just things that were present that I never spent the time to focus on. And so Lindsay's starting to open up this Pandora's box of all these old emotions that I had stuffed and started slowly peeling the back. And neither one of us were course really equipped with how to navigate those waters, really. You know, it was just these things were coming out. But again, as I may have mentioned, I'm still a slow learner. So I had this really twisted view in my head that I could somehow still be Friends with my ex because she had, you know, a few children that I had become obviously friendly with, you know, in three years time period. They're people that I care about and I thought I could, you know, kind of tiptoe and tap dance and make all this work the right way and I couldn't. So by November, Lindsay and I moved into the same house together. She had just went through a divorce. On the backside of divorce, she was looking for a place to live. I said, look, this doesn't make any sense. There's something different with you than anybody else, at least for the time being, let's move in together. So really pretty quickly, about six months into our relationship, but then that's the second night in our house come home at that point, Ryan I had a merchant processing like an ISO business that I'd started all for the really high risk space, really the crazy stuff, the wild west stuff, and was just convinced that I had this math figured out that oddly enough, go figure, I didn't at that point have figured out at all and ended up just the company basically capsized. I didn't have enough money in reserve to offset chargebacks and refunds and we go down that rabbit hole another time. But I'm coming home knowing that I'm going to have to shut down this business, knowing that the funds that I had saved up from my previous successes were pretty much depleted. Pulling the driveway, it's a cold, especially in Ohio, you know, cold November's day, dark out at like 5 o'. Clock. Park the truck in the driveway, hop out, walk in and she's sitting on the couch by herself, just deadpan looking. One of her friends had seen me with this now ex girlfriend walking around the mall just that past weekend and had called her to tell her and she looked at me and she says, look like this is it. It's not an ultimatum. This isn't something we can't figure out. But this has to stop. Like what's this story you've concocted as to why you're still having communication? And communication was just that, like I might have been walking with her at the mall, but there wasn't intimacy, there wasn't that feeling wasn't there. It was more of trying to just stable the water, stabilize the water. So in my mind I could have a friendship, didn't need one. But in my mind I'd convinced myself I did. And so that was like the start of the new Ryan was back then. And that was pretty close to the same time that you were, you Know, really diving deep into sheer strength. And so, you know, I'm starting to recalibrate and put together those pieces, starting to establish the new operating system which I'm going to live my life by. And it's a painful process. Like I remember all the way until February, March of that next year. Still having thoughts and just things crossing my mind of my ex, the one that was before Lindsay, like what she doing? Is this a good move? Should I go back? And she was much older than I was. She was 20 years my senior, Ryan. So of course I can probably even older, maybe 23 or 24 years. I see, like I can see now from where I sit that I had this really strange mother complex, if you will. And it wasn't that I could see that in the moment, you know, we, her and I shared our time together and I think she's for who she is and what she was able to provide me and the growth of my relationship. She's a wonderful person. Houston's been remarried and I trust she's doing incredibly well. But you know, it wasn't like this door just swung open and I saw this new opportunity. It's been consistent work in progress.

Okay, so let's go there because you know what you're basically outlining is you got caught red handed and you, you had also so you basically you had a country song played out where you lost your money, you lost your, you lost all of the surface level stuff that you had based. Your ego is attached to multiple relationships, money, status, the truck. And so now you're basically starting over. If we fast forward three years, your life is completely different. But it's not as though the door swung open like you said and you got a new life. You had to go build that sucker. So what habits did you start focusing on to then build the successful business? You're much healthier now, from what I understand. And we're definitely going to go there. And you have an amazing family, you live a completely different life than you did three years ago. And it started when you stopped lying, you said. So first I want to address how is your life different now? And then I have some other clarifying questions for you.

Of course my life's different now, Ryan, where I had convinced myself for years that I was a night owl, that I couldn't get up in the morning, that gym happened after work and I was the guy that was staying up till 2 or 3 in the morning and I would quote, unquote, get work done. That was my story. And then this interim period between digital marketing success failure and then current digital marketing was custom clothing. I knew I could sell things. I knew I had the ability to get in front of people. I certainly didn't have any issue going up and talking to strangers. So got into custom suits and apparel, all handmade stuff out of England. And for that I almost got to be my own version of Napoleon Hill where I'm dealing with these uber successful people. You know, typically, you know, someone that's income level of 3, 400 grand a year or more seems to be that type of shopper. And I'm getting to spend quality intimate time with them and I'm able to just ask them questions and just honest questions, you know, once I earn their trust and just openly say, like, look, I'm trying to better my life right now. I used to have some successes, I've had some pitfalls. Like I'm owning the fact that selling custom clothing is not my end. All to be all. It's an ends, it's a means to an end. Do you mind sharing just some things that you do every day? And it wasn't at that point. I hadn't even read Napoleon Hill's book, as crazy as that sounds. And so I'm just asking these wealthy individuals, like, what's your habits? What are your success habits? And most of them had some sort of the same methodologies of reading something impactful every day and reading something they could apply to their life, whether it's a marketing book or a business book or a self help book or personal development. Maybe it wasn't reading, it was consuming a podcast like this. It was making sure they sweat, you know, worked out at some capacity in the morning, got their endorphins running and did something that way. It was making sure they fed themselves high quality foods, you know, things that made them feel better on the inside. And then it was focusing on business and almost doing some sort of, I'll say, time blocking time chunking, where when you're at work, you make it about work, when you leave work, you try to make it about your family or whatever's next. And some of these things started to click because I'd been that guy that after college just was convinced I never had to read again, like why would I on a magazine or if it's not something that has a half naked woman on the front, I'm probably not all that interested in it. And man, was that just a complete fallacy. Like, Ryan, I've read a book a week for the past going on almost two years now. A little bit of everything. What I found is just the fact of being able to condense time down and learn lessons other people have learned before I have to learn them is massively impactful. And not only that, like, reading is all well and good, and it just so happens that I allow enough time in the morning, in the quietness of our house that I can read at that rate. It's not like I set out like, oh, I have to read a book a week. You know, some weeks I'm reading a heavier book and it takes two or three weeks. But the application of what I read is what's important. I keep a journal next to my books. I. I take out, I read for that nugget of information that I can apply to that day. And then I don't really believe in the 27 days to create a habit. I'm much more than 90 days to create a lifestyle type of guy now. So I'll journal something if I can implement it for 90 days in a row. Well, now it was something of value, now something I'm holding onto, that, sure, I might have read it from a book, but now it becomes my own and I can make it and massage it into what fits my life and what serves me the best.

So, Ryan, you said something interesting there, which was you believe in what we might call time collapsing. Learning from other people getting amazing results in shorter amounts of time. I like the quote that everyone's life is either an example or a warning. And what I'm hearing is that you've lived both. Before your life was a warning and now your life is an example. And the transient point was when you got caught in your lies and then you are exposed. I've had experiences like this before. Maybe a business deal doesn't go so well. A breakup happens. Something exposes you and it makes you feel, you said lighter. There's like all the things that you were holding onto that you were defending, you can't defend anymore. And so you're just left with you, which hurts, and then you're kind of freed from them. So I want to know, from your perspective, what are most people, men in particular, since that's going to be our bias, what are they lying about that they are also lying to themselves and covering up. What are they unconsciously lying to themselves about?

Oh, Ryan, this is the one. It's going to be tough to come up with one thing, but I'll say the biggest lie that I believe has been told to men for generations is to not show their emotions. And I believe it's something that we've all held onto. Like, if I go back and uncover the things that I truly believe between the ages of 4 and 14, as we go through that developmental period in our lives as men, we're sponges. We're consuming everything that's around us. And it's good or bad. You don't have that choice at that age. You know, your parents are pushing that upon you. Society is pushing that upon you. Really, the tribalism starts then, the things that we believe and form our belief systems with. And so in that if your father figure is telling you consistently, don't show emotions. Like, to be a quote, unquote man is to keep a stiff upper lip and don't cry and be stoic and don't show emotion. Well, emotion exists for all of us. Like, in every aspect of life, there's an emotional response. And if men were told to swallow it up and just hold onto it in our soul, that energy has to go somewhere. It has to push out in one direction or another. And so that lie, like, for me, the lie was the fact that I was okay with basically moving out at 17 and living in my car, putting myself, you know, graduating high school by myself and putting myself through college. Like, that was this lie that I had told myself. Like, oh, it made me tougher. Well, no, really, what happened is I never forgave my parents for the decisions I made during that time. And I didn't realize until really, not all that long ago that the tools and structures that they had in place in their life weren't built in such a way that they could combat what was going on. The demons they were fighting in their own mind were so much larger than they had the capacity to handle. That their way was to handle it was the way that they handled it. And it can't be good or bad. Like, for so long, Ryan, I gave credit or detriment. All the negativity that I could carry around was angled towards my parents. But I never stopped to position that the other way and view it from the backside, really, of the screen. Like, I can't give them credit for the good or for the bad if I don't also give them credit for the good. Because that same drive that now I have to be successful, the same relentless ability to work, you know, 60, 78 hours a week, 90 hours a week, pick a time where it doesn't faze me is because when I moved out, I had no choice but to do that in order to put food in my mouth. You know, it's that yin and yang principle, I think, you know, truly that energy balances itself all across the universe. But I was so hell bent on just focusing on the negatives and they just kept kind of repeating themselves. Like I never broke free from those negative emotions of the past. And as I know this sound starts to sound woo woo, or, you know, all types of metaphysics or whatever you want to say. And yes, I believe in all that. But at some point, it's just been the most freeing thing in the world to start really reevaluating what happened in my childhood, which I use this example all the time. And I don't know if it's the best or the worst, but it's an example nonetheless. My childhood trauma is just mine. Some of the stories I've just told. Ryan, the biggest thing that could have happened in your life was your mom could have yelled at you at 6 years old, don't touch the stove, it's hot. But she said it in such a way that it's stuck in your memory. Well, still, until you can make peace with that exact moment, I have a firm belief that it eventually ties into how you operate as an adult man. It doesn't mean that that was that my trauma is more or less than yours. We just had different traumas. We had different things that formed us.

As my buddy Aubrey Marcus says, it's like a little piece of software code gets in there and it starts to become a virus and it changes the whole system. And it could have started as a perfectly benign piece of software code that was made to do good, but it got in there and affected the whole system. And what I'm hearing you say is that you were in denial about the things that were keeping you in that place and not processing them, both emotionally and just mentally, and being able to reframe them in a way that served you. Is that right?

That's exactly right. I mean, Ryan, it's everything from the stuff in the childhood to developing late throughout high school and being like the laughingstock because I was skinny and didn't go through puberty until really my junior or senior year. So I didn't have my way with women. And so when I did finally get the attention of women, I didn't put a lot of value in it because I thought it was always going to be taken away because my mother had walked out, my father had walked out, mentor I had walked out. So there's this perfect storm where, again, please take this if you're listening, not as a justification, just as an understanding of the actions I was taking. It's like, man, if I could have just stopped and someone could have sat down and said, you do realize that there's a slightly better way to operate if you'll just listen to it. There's some habits you're exhibiting that could be broken if you want them to be. It's like, man, I pissed away, literally from 19, Ryan. Until 30. Basically 30. Like multiple girlfriends at the same time, just lying, cheat. Like, the stories that you and I could go into, which I'm happy to share again, that's part of. I'm sure what we'll get into is the success of the podcast and all that good, happy stuff is because now there's no filter. Like, how you do one thing is truly how you do everything, in my opinion.

So let's go there, because this is always a phrase that I have kind of pushed back against. I just don't feel like maybe I'm in denial about it being true for me. So I want to hear you comment on this because you seem to be smashing it in all areas of life now. You seem to have it all. You have the family, you have the successful business, you have the body. People are starting to really admire you. And yet this phrase of how you do anything is how you do everything.

Why do you think that is the case? And how is it showing up for you?

Because for me, Ryan, I've been my own best case study. Like, when I stopped lying. Or we can flip that around and say, when I started telling the truth, it had to be the truth in everything. Not just situationally, not just in, like, the quiet, dark recesses of our home, where I'm confiding in Lindsay, where I'm just telling the truth there I have to adopt this mindset that even when it's uncomfortable, I have to tell the truth to everybody. So how I'm doing, the one thing with Lindsay of telling the truth is how I have to do it with everybody. And that can be then said for the extreme nature in which I live my mornings. I get up like clockwork in between. Really, the alarm goes off at 4:07 every morning. There's no justification for 407. It's just where I swiped in the.

And I've never changed it. So, you know, especially when I start really looking at time as something that we created, that exists, but only because we made it exist. Like, who really cares if it's 407 or 403? Like, whatever. So, you know, the alarm clock goes off at 4:07. I get up, I hop in the shower right away, have some gratitude in the shower. I'm truly grateful for all the things that I have because I have experienced the opposite. I have had the antithesis of the warm water on my back. I haven't had the house that we have now. I haven't had the wife in the bed and the daughter in the bedroom across the hall. And so I'm truly in that moment expressing immense gratitude for what I have versus what I used to have. But also being grateful for the things that are about to come. Because why not be grateful for the future? Why not give that a shot? And so in that I leave that, I drink a green smoothie of some capacity every day. Whether it's a fresh one or I put powder in a shaker and drink it up from there. I meditate for at least 20 minutes. Most times it's more like 35 or 40. From that meditation I journal a little bit, get out the thoughts and self defeating things over my head, Spin that into making sure that Lindsay and Gianna, my wife and my daughter, know how much I love, honor and appreciate them, that they truly are of value. So I take something that they did the day before that is special to just them and I let them know through a text message or written note, like how valuable they are to me. But it's from the heart. It's not because I feel like I need to. It's because there's some gift to be had every day. And I truly believe this. Now there is something, if I'm open to receiving it, that it could be the fact of Lindsay looking at me with that glowing loving look or the sexual energy as she walks up the stairs. And it touches me. So I want to share that with her. So I get more of that. And then from there I go into the reading and I read that book for the message every day and I jot down the message and then I do something about it. I apply it to my day. And so I started practicing that extreme ownership of the morning. Like that truly, like that is my time. You cannot fuck with me from 4:00 in the morning until 7.

My cell phone's not on, it's not around me. Like everything that you might see on social media is because I scheduled a post or have somebody else doing it. That is my time to clear my head. And I never made that time before. I always felt like I was on somebody else's schedule. And so now that I have these non negotiable time blocks, I feel Like I've applied that to every other aspect of my life. And so I'm no longer operating this mindset of scarcity and I'm operating from a fact of being on my toes versus my heels. Like I was ready for our phone call or our interview here like 35 minutes ago because I leave half hour before and a half hour after every phone call. So I'm never rushed. Like I leave the house half hour earlier than I should for any appointment because I don't want that negative energy and that cortisol spike as we get into the body. You know what we're going to cover. I want to just live a very happy, fulfilled life. But it all starts from my morning.

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And here is what I'm taking away from what you're saying. You have moved from a reactive way of being to a intent based being. You are now doing everything that you do on purpose. There is no more reactivity to it. There is intent and there is choice behind each piece of it. Now Ryan, you mentioned that it all changed when you started telling the truth. And one of my mentors, Dan Sullivan, will say that all progress starts when you tell the truth. And I'm curious, from your vantage point, that doesn't mean that conflict doesn't come up or conflicting values don't come up. And this has been difficult for me as I consider myself to be a fairly honest person. But there are times that I feel very conflicted and I don't know what's true for me. I don't know what the right thing to do is. I don't know what I really want. How do you evaluate that or how do you make decisions when you're in that mode of being?

Yeah, and Ryan, this is the polarizing topic. I have shed the whole right from wrong confine that we all live under. You know, our entire lives we've been taught, you know, something's right and something's wrong. Well, what's right for me in this moment might be wrong for you in the same moment. So if that's the case, we're forced to have conflicting opinions on any given topic. But if I'm operating every day under what's serving me versus what is not serving me, then things become much more clear.

So if it serves me to wake up at 4 o', clock, well, I know that for me that makes me happy. I can't really impress upon you, Ryan, your life shit, if you don't wake up at 4 o', clock, that might not be your sweet spot, that might not be your thing. I would encourage you to consider the possibility of trying it, but it doesn't necessarily have to be. And so some of this conflict and conflict resolution. So my pendulum is still swinging very aggressively in towards conflict because for so many years, Ryan, especially with my father being rather aggressive as a young man, like somewhat physically, definitely mentally, verbally, I almost say abusive. I was so against conflict that I would physically run from it. I just would not have any tough conversations. It was like really, that was the story of my Life up until 2930. And so in that the pendulum is still swung the other way, where I'm probably pretty quick and pretty blatant to have some uncomfortable conversations. Not in the fact of wanting to prove myself to be right from wrong, just knowing that that time under tension is only going to make me better. And just like with you saying how you do one thing is how you do everything, you having that, that carnal response, you don't agree with that. I love having the conflicting opinion so I can expand my capacity. Like being minded is not going to help any. Like I lived close minded for a long time. I want that expansive mindset of, well, gosh, why is it, Ryan, that you believe what you believe? Can I take off my social blinders and just listen and receive what you're giving me? And then maybe it's going to shift my viewpoint, like holding on to these rules. We'll call them the bullshit rules of life. You know, take a term out of mindvalley's book, go to the extraordinary mind. Those limit our growth, in my opinion. And so why not have the tough conversations and healthy debates and figure out what really makes you tick. And as you said, Ronnie, being a little confused or not knowing what you want in some situations, man, I would have said, especially as I've known you and you've went through your religious pilgrimage, I'll call it.

That's a great word. I might steal that from you. Thank you, Ryan.

Or the anti religious pilgrimage, whatever you want to call the path you've been on. I'm in this current path where when I meditate and I do it consistently, my intuition increases. And some could say that's depending on your viewpoint. Sure, maybe it's God communicating with me, maybe it's a higher power. Or maybe for all I know it's a unicorn somewhere in the world. I don't know what's coming into me, but I know when I can quiet down my mind consistently and I can receive that and then I take action on it. My life has gotten consistently better consistently. It has not changed at all since I've made that a practice. And so my religion, my religious belief right now is more of one of that we're all unified, that we all have a oneness about us. And I'll say there's a God. I don't believe he's in a white robe and a beard waiting for us to arrive somewhere. I just believe that we're all connected in some capacity. And if we're all connected, then why would you want to do something bad to somebody else? Why would you want them to feel pain? And sure. This is. We can, I'm sure you and I could go on for three hours on this particular topic. Oh yeah.

So I want to summarize what you said up into this point, which is, you know, where I was really fascinated by your transformation was I knew you when you were, when you had lost everything, when you were covering up a lot of things, when you were managing multiple lives, when you did not have things together. And I have watched you lose it and then create a beautiful family to create an abundant business, to have an audience, to having health, to basically having it all. And the thing that changed for you is when you started telling the truth. And that came forcibly because you got found out and you replaced your bad habits with good habits, which meant living life on purpose, carving out intentional time to practice the habits that you knew would create success based on what you learned in previous occupations. You started doing the things that came natural to you, which were leading an audience, which were speaking in front of a microphone, and you started telling the truth in all areas of life. And that leads me to my next question, which is going to take us down a different rabbit hole because in kind of your quest of telling the truth in all areas, you put up a social media post that was basically a picture of you while injecting steroids. I think it was an injection gone horribly wrong. And this opened up kind of a can of worms of questions of me both in. I really fascinated to know what led you to take so many chemicals. And I am really, really curious to know your perspective on steroids on the other side of things because I know like you have, I think, intentionally lost mass at this point in search of health. So from a health perspective, I'm very curious if you think steroids are positive, negative. I have a little bit of skinny kid syndrome. Probably not as bad as you because I've never injected steroids, but I still.

Think about that a lot.

And so selfishly, I'm curious to hear the mental racket around this topic.

Of course, as we're having this interview right now, I'm down from. I was 305 pounds of my heaviest and still had abdominal definition. Not so much that I would have had a washboard six pack, but enough that I had I taken off my shirt, been like, all right, that guy is not a beer belly. Certainly, you know, as we have this recording now, this interview down to 260, 265, chemical free in every capacity. The reason I originally jumped on the chemical bandwagon is again, Ryan, because I was a late bloomer. I was a guy that in high school football I would work out and lift. And I graduated high school at my height, which is about 6:1, maybe 6:2 and 170 pounds. I just couldn't gain weight. And maybe that's a story that I'm telling because I didn't know the nutritional protocols. I know now I didn't know how to exercise the right way. There was certainly a disconnect in information that I wasn't even really willing to Search out. And so as I go to college my freshman year, University of Cincinnati, I get a meal plan that allows for unlimited eating, essentially, which is a blessing, especially from essentially living in my car at some point, really just four or five months prior. Super exciting for me that way. And then a guy that I knew loosely just said, hey, see me in the gym consistently. He said, hey, why don't you try some steroids? Why don't you try some testosterone? Why don't you try some Windstraw? One's oral, one's injectable. I'm like, man, I'm afraid to death in needles. I can't do that. Only junkies inject themselves. I'm not ready for that. He gives me a bottle of Winstrol. Windstrol is an oral supplement, and I take it. I can't say, admittedly, Ryan, that I saw that much of a difference back then. Them this one little 30 day cycle of windstraw, that was back when pro hormones were still on the market. Pro hormones, come to find out, really were one or two molecules away from a steroid and were probably more toxic on your liver and kidneys than anything else someone was taking.

At the time. Nobody knew that. So I switched over and went the M1T route. Methyl 1, testosterone. Then all of a sudden it's like, wow, I went from 170 to 195. I bought this at GNC and I'm like, I found the holy grail. Like, I'm in. I'm now like, I feel good. Now some of this body dysmorphia, or maybe, you know, the small man syndrome, as you call it, was slowly being unraveled. Like, I'm starting to fill out shirts a little bit. I'm not the tall, skinny, lanky guy anymore. And this prompts me going into the second half of my freshman year to talk to the same guy that talked about steroids. I'm like, look, I'm ready for the needle. I'm ready. Let's do this. So it gives me testosterone, doesn't give me. I have to pay for it, of course, but testosterone and deca and Diana Ball and those three substances together are proven to add a lot of mass in a short period of time, or at least a lot of size. And so I start this process probably 190, 195. By the time I go home my freshman year, I'm up to 250 and literally put on 55 pounds in the course of four months, three months. Now, this was not quality weight. Like this is red faced, puffy, probably could have put a needle in me like a pin in me and it looked like it would have deflated. And I come home and I think I'm king shit at this point. And I'm not like I don't have the discipline, I don't understand how to work out the right way. I certainly don't know anything about dietary requirements or how to optimize utilization of anything I'm putting in my body, food or otherwise. And so I just kind of give up lifting. And this goes back and forth all the way through college and into my professional career where, you know, summers I would lift and get involved in school and I'd lift more and I take steroids and unfortunately Ryan, I didn't break that cycle until really last November, last October where I was consistently taking. I competed in amateur bodybuilding contest and I had created this story that I needed to win, I need to become a professional bodybuilder because I don't really have that mid switch in my life. Like I'm an extremist by nature. I realize that now. And so I try to use that to my benefit versus my detriment. But I don't know how to do something halfway.

So if I'm going to use anabolics, why wouldn't I use every anabolic I could find? Why wouldn't I get as big as possible? Why wouldn't I want to be a competitor and then why wouldn't I want to win a national show and then become a pro? It's just a logical path for me. And so I went down that path until I'm out on an event in California, actually an event that, you know, I think you and I both know the guy. Garrett J. White from Wake Up Warrior out there in. It's a big event, it's a 500 person event and we do some physical training in the morning and they have us bear crawling across this 30 yard field. I go down to bear crawl here. I'm a 33 year old man, I haven't bear crawled since high school football and I don't make it 10 yards. I'm out of breath, my elbows hurt, my wrists hurt, everything is shot and I'm like gasping for air. What is going on here? Try to continue through the PT and I'm struggling in every capacity, literally get done with this physical training. Call my fiance at that point, now my wife, and say I'm done. Like this story that I've concocted in my head doesn't serve me in Any capacity. I don't really want to be a pro bodybuilder. There's nothing about my real actions on a day to day basis. My consistency is not there, my enjoyment's not there. This is some bullshit story. I've told myself for years that if I do this I'll be more than I am today. But more to whom, like, not more. To me, I'm still the same man. I had been convinced that the outside adulation from the world, if I'm holding up this little sheet of paper that says I'm an ifbb pro, that this now will make me more of who I am. And it doesn't. And so I call and tell her like, I'm over, I'm done, no more. And she's happy because of course she's got her own concerns with my health and things like that. So I get home and you know, throw away whatever supplies I have and throw away the things that I have sitting around. And for those of you that don't know much about the anabolic world, there's typically a protocol to come off of anabolics. You do some certain things to re jump start your natural testosterone production, get your testicles to fall back down to the normal place. There's just some things you do. I didn't do any of those. Go figure. Again, hard headed. Whatever you want to say. And so come December, my sex drive is zero. I have a very beautiful wife and I'm biased of course, but you know, I'm very attracted. Our sex life is very healthy across the board. And it goes from healthy to non existent. And having my past life of lies and deceit, her mind starts racing. Not necessarily that I'm cheating on her, but like, could this be happening? Like why aren't you attracting me? All of a sudden I am attracted. Just my utility belt's not working. You know, things aren't lining up. They should. And so that's Ryan on the backside of that picture. I decide in early January, look, I'm just gonna take a shot of testosterone. I can get a bottle of testosterone. I don't want to be called a steroid junkie. I just want to be able to function like a normal 33 year old man. But of course I do it in such a way that I'm just convinced I don't really need to go to a doctor. Like I understand hormones at this point on a very, very finite level. I understand really how to optimize most parts of my body. And so I understand how much I should take just 250ml a week, 1cc of a long estrotestosterone. So I take the first shot, take my shoulder. Week one, no issue. Bam. By the end of the week, sex drives back on, start feeling better, have more energy. Like, yes, finally getting back to my old self. Week two, I put that shot on my outer left thigh and it hurts going in. No big deal. Sometimes that happens. And so as the week progresses, I start to feel like I'm getting the flu. Oh, boy, that strange time.

It.

Yeah, it's January, so, you know, whatever, fight it off. Hot sweats, cold sweats, the whole deal. Well, it progresses into the weekend and Lindsey has to go to Washington, D.C. to see her brother do some things there. So I'm at home alone on the couch, and now I lift up my shorts and my leg is, you know, normally at that point, I'll say my legs were probably 30 inches. Pretty close. 30 inches of muscle on my leg. At this point, my left thigh is probably 33, 34 inches. Like it's swollen. I almost can't lift up my shorts. And it's red and there's this big. I mean, I have a very decent sized hand and it's bigger than my hand from edge to edge. And it's hot to the touch. I'm like, oh, gosh, I have an abscess. I know what this is now. I do enough research. I hop on Dr. Wikipedia, self diagnose myself sitting on the couch. And fortunately or unfortunately, Lindsey used to be a very specialized veterinary nurse. And in that specialized veterinary nursing practice, she had access to all types of different things to help transfer blood. Something like, look, I'll get a PICC line and I'll get some big 18 gauge needles and I'll just put them in the abscess. Oh, dear God, drag out all the stuff that's in there. This will create relief for me. And for that we have some amoxicillin or penicillin sitting around, like old prescriptions of stuff that are sitting there. I'm like, complete meathead. Like, I just got this, I'll figure this out. And so I go through 18 different needles, like the tips of needles, 18 gauge needles, pulling out the stuff. And that's the post on my social media page. Ryan was this, you know, I had two Tupperwares full of this pussy fluid. Obviously infection. And then like all these holes in my leg. And it's. When it's done, I can't pull any more pus out. I can't massage it. And get any more out? I feel good. I have mobility back. It's not swollen anymore. Yes, I finally beat this. Well, kind of. So that's Friday evening. As we get on a Saturday and Sunday, all that happens. That infection comes back worse and it comes back with a vengeance. It's literally two or three times as bad as it was. I can't bend my leg. It's down to my knee. It's coming up to my groin. I consistently feel like I have the flu. So I get a hold of my local doctor, who's a very specialized sports medicine doctor here, show him a picture. I'm like, what do you want me to do? It's like, you need to get in my office tomorrow morning, 6am immediately. Like, don't do anything else. So get there. He looks at him, you know, of course, calls me a dumbass and all the things I mean, he's notable, super good guy, but, you know, gregarious, but understands what's going on and says, look, you probably should go to the hospital. Fuck, I don't, I don't want to go to the hospital. He's like, all right. So he puts a little bit of lidocaine in both spots, takes a surgical scalpel, sticks it in my leg, and just pulls it back towards my hip. A good four and a half or five inch incision, and then goes back in and makes it wider. So here I have this now really ugly. It's about a 5 by 2 inch wide. It's a scar, Ryan. It's a big, ugly purple scar on my left leg where they, him and his intern eventually pull all the pus out of my leg and they have to leave it open. So they put packing gauze in it. I was having to go back to this outskirt, you would know it as Pickerington, this outskirt of Columbus, about a 50 minute drive twice a week. Because they were taking out the packing tape that's in it, the surgical tape, and repacking it with more gauze. I had that going for two or three weeks where I have, you know, my body's not healing quickly enough from the inside because of how massive this infection really was. Off to the races. I go with this big ass scar, which is now the permanent reminder that I don't ever have to go down that path again. Where it's funny, I went in for just a normal blood panel 10 days ago, maybe even two weeks, and my testosterone levels are a little bit lower than they should be. For a healthy man, that's a 34 year old guy. But my plaque levels are good and my platelets are good and my cholesterol, good and bad, is good. I've had the best blood panel at this moment that I've had in my entire life, other than the fact that my testosterone now is still low. The doctor actually wants me to prescribe me a shot of testosterone a week. Wants me to come in and literally put the needle in me, do it for me. And I'm still on this fence where it's really weird with this old story that I've told myself. I would of course want to optimize how I feel. I would not think twice of wanting to feel like a 20 year old man every day. That leads you at least up to here. Now, how far down the rabbit hole do you want me to get into actually using anabolics and the benefits and detriments?

Well, what I'm curious about is you just made a statement. Of course you would want to optimize to feel as best as possible. Of course you would want to optimize to feel like a 20 year old all the time. You went kind of to the opposite extreme. I mean, taking Winstrol, Testy and Diana Ball all at the same time is, well, a lot, right? I mean, so it's so far on the other extreme. And I've heard the opinions of some who say, you know, steroids are really not nearly as detrimental as some people would say. And then there's some people who say, if you're going to take them, be prepared to have your hormones out of whack for the rest of your life. And so as someone who has been openly honest about this conversation, I just wanted to hear somebody who has gone down the rabbit hole on both sides, both now being away from them and also being completely in them. What is your take?

My opinion on that is much like alcohol, I choose right now not to drink. Could I have a glass of wine or maybe a cocktail with dinner? Of course I'm not an alcoholic, it doesn't have any control over me. But if I were to have a six pack or a 12 pack of some sort of beer every evening, that would eventually lead to negative ramifications. Not only my health inside my body, but probably in the external factors of my life. That excesses, I think we'd all agree probably not healthy for anybody. The same plays true in the way I've used steroids. Like you said, I'm not taking testosterone. Every ester of testosterone, all four esters of testosterone, tremblone acetate, tremblone enantate, windstrol, deca, dbal, nandrolone, phenyl propionate, growth hormone, insulin. Name something and I've been a human guinea pig and or petri dish. That level of excess is completely nonsensical. The majority of us never get at the level that we need that many substances to optimize how we look. So some of this comes down to my opinion. Ryan, is the steroid use for you going to be or for a listener, vanity based or health based? Because there are two dramatically different paths. Like right now, the path that I would be on, the path that I think every man should be on, is to optimize your hormone levels by the fact of the plastics that we ingest during our time on this planet, by the stress factors. Our testosterone and estrogen axis are always trying to find an equilibrium. At any given point, one could be higher than the other, which our bodies are always fighting for some level of homeostasis. So we need to be able to have that balance. And sometimes from external environmental factors, divorce, drinking, bad food. Your estrogen levels are so high, until you can start to pull those estrogen levels down and start to slowly increase your testosterone, whether it be from a product like a HCG that's going to increase your natural testosterone production or whether it's from an intramuscular injection of testosterone, there's big benefit there to me because again, I believe more in that. Dave Asprey Biohacking how do I become the best version of myself now all the time? What can I do to think the most clearly, have the most energy, get the best sleep, and if it's out there and I can do it and it's not a detriment to my health, why wouldn't I do that? And then that puts us into that detriment side of things. Well, what is a detriment like? There's still the debate. Is red meat good or bad for you? I don't know that. I really know that. I know my personal experience with steroids that I've had blood panels done at least once a year for the past certainly five or six years. My 20s, I was not diligent about it at all. The negative ramifications of anabolic use were pretty negligible. Of course, high blood pressure. Absolutely increase cholesterol. But there's a debate on whether that was because of anabolics or that was the mass amount of protein I was eating every day. You can't have. I'm eating 400 to 500 grams of protein every day. Every day that taxes your body a lot. There's a lot of digestion that goes on there. Same thing with that.

You can probably only process that because you were on a bunch of chemicals at the same time, correct?

Absolutely. And that and Ryan, I was the guy that was towards the end setting alarm clocks. I wasn't getting up in the middle of the night, but I was eating seven, eight meals a day every two hours apart, taking digestive enzymes consistently, trying to really consciously chew my food depending on the time of day versus how much sleep I had gotten versus where I was on my workout schedule, was determining what type of protein source I was eating for the maximum digestibility. There's a lot that goes into this. That again, as a 19 year old kid in college, I had no idea because I wouldn't have taken that path certainly had I delayed taking any sort of anabolic. Had I been as natural as I could have been for as long as I could have been to gain all the size I could have gained, the results I would have had from those steroids in the second half of my twenties would have probably been twofold as significant.

Do you think that you will revisit use now that you're not using them but you feel like you can be smarter about them? Do you think that you would revisit use as a way to optimize health in the future?

Yes, I have the support now when I make decisions like this, I run them past my wife. It's a whole different methodology from me and it's yes, under extreme doctor supervision with blood panels scheduled every 30 days with how my mind works, I would want to keep my testosterone level at an 800 or so and there's no FDA approved level. Like this is what your testosterone should be. Because from birth you and I, Ryan, have different levels of testosterone. Like it's just we all have our own level that's appropriate for us. The bigger thing for me is the estrogen rebound. When you start really looking at some of the cancer causing agents inside of men, it's high levels of estrogen over a long period of time, which also creates that stomach fat, the love handle fat, the saggy rear end we get as men, that's actually an overabundance of free estrogen in your body, which, that's the part I'm more concerned about is how do I optimize my estrogen level, as funny as that sounds, but how do I keep that in such a range that I'm healthy for the long run? And by the nature of my Estrogen being suppressed or baseline or stable, my natural testosterone should raise to the peak level that it's able to. Now, if that doesn't get me to that 700 or 800 level, that's an arbitrary level, but only so much because that's just a healthy below sports performance level for someone in our age bracket. Urine age bracket. Ryan, that 33 to 35 range. The answer for me is yes, I definitely will consider it just something that I'll have to go to someone to do the injections. Like, I don't admittedly, now that I've had so long off of having to stick myself with a needle, I really don't ever want to go back. It's just not fun. Like it's, you know, it was, it was sexy for a while and then I thought it was funny and then it was like, I'm just a pin cushion. Like, I don't want to do this anymore.

So for someone who does not want to be injecting themselves with needles, who has kind of.

I have friends who take steroids and.

Think they're the greatest thing ever and think I heard one friend say, man, people who don't take steroids don't realize how great life can be like that kind of thing where it's just. They see it as almost like a biohack. And so I'm curious, as someone who would like to not go down that route myself, what do you focus on now that you are off chemicals in order to optimize your hormone levels and to stay in the shape that you want, what do you do instead?

This is coming at a perfect time. If I recall yesterday or two days ago you had a post about mushrooms.

Yes.

And adaptogens, the adaptogenic, I'll say lifestyle or a lot of that mindset methodology that goes into those. I believe there's so much, and especially with you being friends with Aubrey, there's so much that comes from plants, so much medicine, so much medicinal benefit from things that we just brush past every day that there's some really easy ways, like Ashwagandha, a big thing to balance your thyroid production, things like that, which has a trickle down effect into that whole system of your body. You start getting into greens and we can call coffers greens. But really looking at a product called dim D I m, I think you're familiar with dim in some capacity. Large levels of dim just help your body find its natural hormone balance. It's actually found in most women's sections, grocery stores, women's knead sections, because it helps your body process estrogen more efficiently. Certainly you can have copious amounts of broccoli with every meal and you'll get the same benefit. But I only like broccoli so much. So I try to have a pretty healthy. Let me rephrase this and say what it really is. I don't eat any fried food. I haven't had fast food in more than a year. If it's not something that I really pretty much know where it came from, I tend to stay away from it. Of course there's the occasional pizza meal and stuff like that with the family. And I'm not anal retentive to the point of like, I just won't go out to dinner if I don't know where the food comes from. But given the fact to make a healthy choice, I live more of that ketogenic esque lifestyle where I know carbs cause inflammation for me, I know when inflammation happens, estrogen deposits increase. I know when estrogen increases, testosterone decreases. I know those are both precursors to long term cancer. I know if I have lower testosterone, my energy levels are lower, my sex drive is lower, and I accumulate more fat when I backtrack in, start at the end and work my way to the front. I can stop that by just not having a shitload of carbs. Not eating like an asshole is really what it comes down to. Putting your body filled with greens, proper supplements, proper nutrition, a whole plethora of different adaptogens that we can certainly dive into and really just eat for what feels good. And we'll take this pretty deep down the rabbit hole. I consciously look at my stool every day.

Doctor, who's hungry?

Keep going, right? But if, no, think about it. I mean, if your stool is not consistent, if you're eating, give or take the same things, and some days it's more difficult to use a restroom and some days it's, we'll just say, a little more quick, a little more easy. What are the reasons as to why? How conscious can you be in the moment of what happened the day before and how your body's responding to it? Because again, I truly believe that if you have the same stimulus towards your body in every 72 to no more than 96 hours, your body's struggling and always pushing for that homeostasis, that base level, just because what worked three days ago worked the same timetable, reference points, amounts might not work the same way today. So it's a lot of conscious awareness and trial and error.

Ryan, I want to ask you one more question to conclude because you have been. I'm just going to call you a student of life at this point of like a lot of research and development that has led you to the point at, you know, 33 or so really starting to consciously build your life. There are people listening who feel like they are you a few years ago where their life is in shambles or they're afraid of being found out, or they feel like they're living a lie or they're just not getting the results that they would want. As somebody who has come full circle on this, how would you coach and advise that person?

That's a twofold answer, Ryan. First fold is you're not alone. Especially as a man. I believe that we have told ourselves for years that we're all alone. I truly believe I was the only person that was lying to anybody. I was the only person with multiple relationships, the only person taking steroids. Of course I knew I wasn't at some level, but I had built this shield and this wall around me that I had to be the only person on the planet doing this in that I felt compelled to hide it from everybody. That whole pain shared, this pain divided concept. I didn't have anybody to share the pain with, didn't know who to communicate with. Which then leads me into the next part. Honest with it. I always had a mentor of some capacity. This is not some shameless plug for coaching or any of that stuff. This is true, honest, heartfelt. Like, go back to when I was running car dealerships. I found the best sales guy or the best manager or the general manager of the store. And I wanted to become friends with him and I wanted to learn from him. I wanted him to be able to answer my questions. As we jumped in digital marketing world, Mark, Jenny, you, Ryan. I was around some really incredible people that had I fully utilized them, would have answered any question possible. That's when I got that egotistical side of me that didn't think I needed anybody. And then as it's worked into this evolution of life, paying for coaches and mentors and personal development people to bounce ideas off from a higher perspective than I'm able to see. Imagine this arbitrary ladder that we're all climbing. Someone that's had more success than you, that's at a different rung on the ladder, can just see the game being played from a different perspective. So why not ask him to toss you down a wire and play the old telephone game we used to play as kids where you put the cup in the wire? Why not have that one on one line to him or her so they can help you navigate the water for a period of time. And again, it doesn't have to be tens of thousands of dollars in this life transformation thing. You just need somebody to understand that you're not alone in to help answer the questions you don't know where to find answers to. I think it's really almost just as simple as that. Like we overcomplicate all this shit. Like, sure, read every day. Okay, well great. But if you don't have me to share the reading with and you don't implement it, what the fuck good is reading?

We are social creatures. We become like those that we hang out with and as a result, we are biologically wired to become like the tribe. And so the fastest way to literally hack who you want to become is.

To change who you surround yourself with.

And I think what you are doing and sharing this transformation is helping make it easier for other people to have their own transformation. It's why I wanted to highlight your story. I'm so impressed with the transformation that you've had. It's something that has made me want to be a better person, to make me be more relentless in my focus. And I just want to publicly edify what you have done and what you are doing. And I'm excited to share this with. So where can people follow along and where can people start to awaken their own transformation by following you? Yeah.

Thank you, Ryan. So every social media handle is the same. It's Ryan Nidell. N I D D E L looks like niddle. Type into Instagram, Facebook, Twitter. It's really everywhere, all encompassing. I have ryanidell.com where I have some free content that I give out from there. I have a podcast, as Ryan mentioned that that's 15 minutes of freedom. I'm saying that laughingly. It's an iTunes top 20 overall. A couple million people listen to it. Just little 15 minute increments of these type of stories, like the real truth of the bad shit that's going on every day and stopping running from it and just sharing those life stories and how they can affect you, the listener, how you can gain some knowledge from it. Those places, Ryan, are great places to start.

Ryan, thanks so much for hanging out with us.

I can't wait to watch your growth over the next couple of years because I know you're just getting started. My man. Excited to watch your journey.

Thanks Ryan. I appreciate the time with you. Always great catching up.

All progress starts by telling the truth. And when you are exposed or you finally, do tell the truth. You realize how true that statement is. We really can't grow until we are really honest about where we are. For Ryan, that was being found out. My hope in highlighting his story is that some of us don't have to be found out before we realize that we're lying to ourselves in certain areas. Sometimes it takes an outside perspective to highlight where we are missing the mark, where we are ignoring our health, where we are ignoring the deficiencies in our business, where we are lying to ourselves about what we can accomplish or what we're focusing on. Once we've lost that crutch, all of a sudden clarity comes in and we can start moving forward. It's why I say that freedom comes on the other side of chaos, because once there's chaos, we realize what's true. Once we allow the structure to crumble, once we allow the facade to fall away, we can start to trudge our way through the mud. We decide what's important.

Important.

The reason for that is because intent is what builds momentum. True clarity followed by intentional action is how we create that momentum to have the lives that we want. You know, previously we had Craig Ballantyne on the show. You might want to dial back and listen to that episode if you missed it, but he talked about reverse engineering the goals and the visions that we want. If you want to have a $50 million company in three years, you can absolutely have that. We just need to reverse engineer that and intentionally build the habits that will allow us to have that. And so often we just say that as a goal, but we're lying to ourselves. Are we really committed to that? Are we really structuring our lives to have that? Or are we lying to ourselves just to make ourselves feel good? I think that has ultimately been Gary V's greatest contribution to our little world, is that idea of self awareness and being really clear and honest about what it is that you want. If you want to sit on the beach, go for it. You can do it. You can sit on the beach and do whatever you want as long as you're not beating yourself up for comparing yourself to everybody else's measure of success. You know, we also recently had Loretta Bruning on the show where we talked about the different happy chemicals that are fired when we compare ourselves to other people. We're constantly comparing ourselves in different areas of life, to social media, to those around us, either positively or negatively, to get a serotonin kick or to get a cortisol kick. The thing that says we need to get our butts in gear and get moving. But we're using different measuring sticks in all of these different areas. You could be making $5 million a year or $10 million a year, but not have a six pack and feel bad about yourself. Ask me how I know. Or you could have the opposite. You could have the perfect body and the perfect family, but not making the money that you want and compare yourself to those people. The panacea to all of this is knowing exactly where you want to go and reverse engineering what habits it takes to get there and to stop lying about the things that you don't want. That was Ryan's experience, and I think the opposite experience is to be very, very clear on what it is that you want, which takes an immense amount of self awareness, practice and intent in order to get clear on. It's something that I have to revisit about once a quarter in order to ensure that I'm being honest with myself. My experience, which I've shared here on the podcast, has been that I often have fallen into the temptation of structuring goals and habits based on what I think it will give me in terms of my comparison to other people. That's not honest. It might give me a feeling for a short amount of time, but ultimately it's built on sand. Ultimately that is threatened if somebody else is doing better than me. Our goals have to be self motivating. They have to be for what we want, not how we want others to perceive us. And so it's something that I have to be very honest and get away from the noise and, and to revisit frequently if I'm going to do it in a way that is sustainable. And my hope for you is that by hearing Ryan's story, you're hearing both a warning and an example. A warning of how your life might turn out if you continue down a path that is built on lies versus the example of building an intent based life. Hope you enjoyed today's podcast. Let me know what you thought. I'm at Instagram, @ryandaniel Moran. Shoot me a message. Let me know your thoughts.

Thanks for listening.

Hey guys. You know that my financial strategy is to build businesses and to invest the profits. And when it comes to investing the profits, I look for cash flow. I look for it to be backed by something real and I look for tax efficiency. It's why when I recently sold a business, I I called the good folks over at Four Peaks Capital Partners. And today's episode is brought to you by them. You've heard them on the podcast before when I interviewed Mauricio Rauld on the topic of Mailbox Money and why investment funds could be a source of passive cash flow for some entrepreneurs. I use investment funds like Four Peaks as part of my long term strategy, and I'd encourage you to go listen to the episode called How Rich People Generate Mailbox Money and you might want to check them out if you're looking for opportunities. Right now with asset prices as high as they are, I am mostly looking at cash flow opportunities, which is why I had them on the podcast. So make sure you check out that episode on Mailbox Money with Mauricio Rauld.