You're Stronger Than You Think w/ Ryan Blair

how does one become a ceo of a company is there a school you go to to study where that's your job i'm curious how you became the ceo i wanted to be the ceo it was my soul's calling to be a ceo but i had no skill i hadn't gone to business school had no real world experience in running a company i was straight out of a gang so i had a lot of street smarts a lot of fight in me huge ambition and desire and i believe my soul came here to create through entrepreneurship i brought in some capital i lost after i exited skype pipeline i blew all my money very quickly i never saw my father again after i was 13 as a result of drugs and i lost my mother as a result of alcohol so you know i paid a tremendous price for my own drugs and alcohol that i got involved in in your timeline and your story you you talk about your mom having an accident and finding out that she's in a coma while trying to launch this book nothing to lose everything you gain and also learning that your son has autism i see you getting choked up talking about your son and reflecting if it's somehow maybe punishment for failing for not doing whatever it is you're supposed to do the universe saying we're gonna throw the toughest challenge at you and also the importance that you put on being a better father to your own child than than the one that you had so ryan i'm really kind of curious about your whole story there is some connection between what i've learned about you about being a dad about raising an autistic son but also the company that you found not founded but purchased sold and bought again sold again i think couple different rounds by salus because one of my friends actually did work for you so when i saw that pop up by email i'm like i think i know who this person is so let's take it there for people who don't know who you are can you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your story my name is ryan blair i'm an entrepreneur and i'm an author as well i write about entrepreneurship and you know since i've i was 19 years old i set my sights on becoming an entrepreneur and i started my career at around 20 years old and i'm now 44 going on 45 so i've been doing this for about 25 years now and prior to being a legal entrepreneur i was an illegal entrepreneur and i was involved in all kinds of street hustles and things like that as a result of living in poverty and being involved in a gang so i have a pretty vast experience in the subject of entrepreneurship both the illegal aspects of it and the legal aspects of it now as i track along your story yours is quite interesting because you were living middle upper middle class family life things that happened with your dad and then you fell into poverty and you've kind of going back and forth between those two states for me as a first generation immigrant all i knew was poverty for a while until i got out of it and never returned so i'm fascinated by this when we have something to measure ourselves up against in terms of like how things used to be you talk about the clothes and the the accoutrements of just living an upper middle class life and when you lose that how do you process that as a teenager you know it's a great question because just yesterday as fate would have it i was traveling back from one of my clients and i got rerouted and next thing you know i'm on my old childhood street when i lived in the middle class and i told the driver i said let's go i want to look at my old house that i grew up in i lived in this house up until i was about 13 years old and and i drove down the street i looked at the nice yards people had boats in front of the their houses you know there were kids riding around on their bikes and i saw a bunch of kids you know traveling up and down the street riding on their their different dirt bikes and mountain bikes and that was me i lived in that middle class environment and when i pulled up to the house it was really odd because for the first time it really had sunk into me yesterday like what i had lost because i went from this beautiful neighborhood this beautiful environment and the driver that i was with is a person i'm mentoring and so he had come from poverty himself and he was you know looking at how beautiful the neighborhood was and he was commenting on like what a beautiful environment that you lived in this middle class environment but that was the outside but on the inside the amount of violence that happened in that house the drugs that my parents did in that house the the fear that i had living in that house the intimidation the bullying the loss just the tragedy that happened in that house was devastating and it was really ugly and in fact i've had many nightmares about that house so to pull up to it and take a look at it and to see how beautiful it was from this perspective that i now have today and to see how beautiful the neighborhood was was an interesting deep dive into my past and my psychology around it so to answer your question specifically it was terrible to be raised in a certain way with a certain set of beliefs and values and an identity and then have that identity ripped away from you at 13 years old and when you're 13 years old you know you measure yourself by your peer group by the way other people see you by your teachers by the authority figures in your life by the sports teams you play on by a lot of things they are your identity because you have yet to form your own identity you know you're simply drawing from your environment and you're stashing away little elements of your identity left and right and things that feel good when someone compliments you or you do good on a sports team or you know a girl likes you or you know you're popular in school those are the things that make you who you think you are and then to have that all ripped away you're no longer popular you're no longer cool you no longer dress well you no longer have nice clothes teachers no longer respect you you're now bigoted because you're poor you live in a bad neighborhood i told the person driving me i said i went from this neighborhood to a neighborhood where i walk outside and there's guys drinking 40 ounces you know smoking weed getting high all day long and the moment they see you they want to rob you i went from a neighborhood where you're riding you know bikes free with the kids at you know 10 11 12 and 13 riding around with free reign my mom would tell me at 8 00 am you know just be back by dark to a point where the moment you step foot outside your front door you could face uh extreme violence you're exposed to drugs alcohol and all kinds of you know of evil basically and so it's funny you asked this question because i have it's brand new territory that i've just you know ventured into as a result of yesterday's experience but seeing that house was just uh an interesting deep dive into what had happened to me in a way that i hadn't dived into there prior so what i'm getting from what you just told me was from the outside the appearances would seem like this is the idyllic way to grow up and to figure out who you are in life but you said appearances are kind of deceptive because in that household while you're growing up there was violence there were there was drug abuse and so when you went from one neighbor to the next it seems like it's the same environment just with the different exterior yeah without money right you really learn a lot about yourself when there's no money you know zero money my mom was a homemaker we had a pool in our backyard you know neighborhood kids would come over and want to play at the house because we had the pool table a ping pong table a nice pool in our backyard with a water slide and a diving board and so you know i was a popular kid because i had all these neat things that people wanted to enjoy and experience and then all of a sudden you're poor and people don't want to come to your house because you live in a very poor house you know your mom's miserable and she's suffering you're suffering so the exterior and the interior is a complete disaster so i went from having a beautiful exterior and a terrible interior having both a terrible interior and a terrible exterior do you think those experiences those challenges that you had growing up made you who you are and what did you learn from that they did make me who i am but they've also contributed to characteristics so i've had to work hard on changing you know when you rip a the identity away from a young child when you abuse a young child when you bully a young child when you when i was beaten pretty bad a number of times by my dad and you know i lived in a very difficult situation when you do that to a kid you know you you create some some code to use a you know a technological term that isn't always the most efficient most optimized most harmonious code and so i have had to pay a price for some of that code in my adult years and i've spent a lot of time now most recently trying to reverse engineer some of those you know some of those beliefs that i had built and those misconceptions and those ways of being that weren't you know ways of my highest self and you know so although it did give me a strategy that helped me elevate my socioeconomic status to a high degree above anywhere where i had ever dreamed of and anywhere any anywhere in that neighborhood i could buy a hundred of those houses in that neighborhood now but with that came some real difficult when you talk about growing up an environment like that it does change you and there's things that you carry with you some good some not so good can you give us examples some of that code that is something that you're like you know i wish i didn't have it or respond in this way yes you know i'll tell you at first i adopted immediately to you know the gang environment the poverty environment and so on the good side i learned to adapt you know because i had no choice but to and on the bad side i then adapted to this environment that environment and i you know i was constantly seeking approval status seeking seeking popularity caring tremendous amount about what other people thought about me seeking power in ways that were not that you know that victimized others like i became a perpetrator when i lived when i was in a gang so there is certainly a tremendous amount of bad that comes from putting a child through that type of experimentation basically for lack of better words and you know my and then as i became successful you know i started drinking and doing drugs and partying and you know i saw myself going exactly to where my parents had gone and i never saw my father again after i was 13 as a result of drugs and i lost my mother as a result of alcohol so you know i i paid a tremendous price for my own drugs and alcohol that i gotten involved in but i also you know witnessed tremendous agony and pain as a result of drugs and alcohol so even though you grew up in that environment and you saw the destructive power of drugs and alcohol and violence when you became successful you sort started to exhibit the same behaviors you were parting like an animal i assume yeah you know i had an energy about me that would be best described as like uh my ex and our friends and she texted me and she said you used to be like a hurricane and she gave me a great compliment that i was grounded but i guess and there's probably people that have known me throughout my journey that i had this hurricane-like energy and now i would say that i'm certainly more grounded as a result of the deep work and meditation and practices like that but i always had an unstable energy to me even in entrepreneurship and the way i would try to stabilize that energy which is a failed strategy was through drugs and alcohol also i had this insatiable desire to be loved and to be admired and the easiest love and admiration comes from people doing drugs and alcohol along with you and so i sought some fairweather friends and i you know i pursued experiences that were intensely pleasurable and i think i became addicted to pleasure and so it wasn't only drugs and alcohol it was sex drugs and that entire lifestyle that became you know truly appealing to me because the amount of pleasure that i could receive from it powered by my vast amounts of money and you know and notoriety and the other things that i had created turned into a very decadent life that i was living i want to dig into that a little bit deeper but for a lot of people who aren't aware of your story let's go back in time a little bit i understand that you became the ceo of a company called physalis and when i was a younger person i was like how does one become a ceo of a company is there a school you go to to study where that's your job i'm curious how you became the ceo my first entrepreneurial endeavor i worked as an engineer at a company and i convinced them to spin out a division of it that i was running at the time as the manager of their data center operations and i convinced them to spin it out into an entity that i would be the founder of and i would run and i'd provide the services of that data center to the community and they agreed to do it but they didn't agree to give me the title of ceo because i was too young and inexperienced so they gave me the vp title i was like vp of market research or something and i hated that i wanted to be the ceo it was my soul's calling to be a ceo so i left that company and started skype pipeline i bought it actually for fifteen thousand dollars and i became the ceo of skype pipeline i raised venture capital and then i expanded that into a you know an entity that you know still provides you know service to this day and uh sold it in a 25 million dollar deal when i was 24 years old from there after i exited skype pipeline uh the visalus opportunity came my way and i first joined as the chief strategy officer but i realized there was a real absence in you know the existing ceo just wasn't a great ceo it wasn't being run you know to the standard that i wanted to run it at and so i you know told my co-founders that i was going to become the ceo and it was an awkward thing because you know we were equal owners and equal partners but all of a sudden i had taken a higher degree of authority in the title although we were equal in terms of ownership and in terms of you know our desire to build this thing you know it was an interesting thing it created some conflict and and it taught me a lot and i gained a lot as a result of that experience so there's no school for it you just have to claim it basically and that's what i did at first they didn't want to give me the title there was some resistance to it i remember at one point in time i've never shared this publicly i told them that you know it is my soul's calling to be a ceo and i'm either going to be the ceo of this company or the ceo of another one and that's your choice so it's either me or go find somebody else to be the ceo and at the time the other two founders were not ready to be the ceo of the company later on when i would exit i handed the title of ceo off to my co-founder nick and he became the ceo of visalus in 2000 in late 2016 early 2017 he took over a ceo of the entity but i ran it for 12 years basically as the ceo somebody who's listening to this who's like wait what what just happened there you were brought on as the chief strategy officer and you also then invested in vice alice so you're a part owner yeah i didn't invest i brought in some capital i lost after i exited skype pipeline i blew all my money very quickly i was bottle service and my credentials made me appear much more wealthy than i was and i used that bait to suit a lot of fish and spent a lot of money on lavish trips and and shopping sprees and things like that for a company that you know that was along for that ride i'm not uh criticizing him whatsoever because i completely created this persona and this identity to attract exactly what i was looking for and and i attracted it and so when it came to the founding of visalus i had gone to a very hump or when i took over i got into a very humble place and i had made a decision i was going to serve and when they showed up i saw it you know as a spiritual gift basically and i took advantage of it and i aided them in acquiring the company and through that process i brought in capital i helped raise capital for it and as part of raising that capital i secured my position as ceo and an equal owner in the company and you you mentioned it was like your life's calling to be the ceo you wanted to be the ceo of this company but it didn't matter because you'll find it somewhere else what is it about you or what is it about the title that has meaning for you i believe that some people are just born to do certain things and i believe my soul came here to create through entrepreneurship i have been an entrepreneur even when i was on the streets i was an entrepreneur prior to that i had lemonade stands and paper routes it is in my soul to be an entrepreneur like i believe this is the craft that i came here to learn and to understand and to be a ceo and an entrepreneur requires a high degree of responsibility it's a lot of stress it is very difficult requires growth requires you to scale as your business skills there's a lot in there i didn't know it at the time but now as you're you know pulling this out of me there's just a lot in there when you choose to you know be a chief executive officer and i was able to do so through the vehicle advice else at a very high level because we eventually were acquired by a publicly traded company and so i had to be the ceo of a publicly traded company and i had to go through a you know a very rigorous training process and development process by my board of directors and investors and wall street for that matter to learn a lot about the the levels of being a ceo and so i've played that game at a very high level and you know i continue to iterate and innovate you know in that particular game because you know there's many levels to it and i've accomplished some pretty high level activity but there's plenty more for me to do just to follow up on that i think a lot of entrepreneurs don't get the opportunity to become a ceo or become one and do it poorly so can you can you go into a little bit more about what gave you the confidence that i think you're still in your 20s here that you can come in and run this big company with partners and investors and carry all that weight on your shoulders what does one have to do to be successful at it because you also mentioned the previous eo from your perspective wasn't doing a very good job what weren't they doing well so to answer your question i as the ceo of skype pipeline i got my ass kicked non-stop by my investors they were some of the most professional um sophisticated investors and i didn't know anything about you know financial reporting analysis presenting strategy making your numbers setting your numbers i was green these four guys you know they basically had a 21 year old kid that knew nothing i was straight out of a gang so i had a lot of street smarts a lot of fight in me huge ambition and desire but i had no skill i hadn't gone to business school i actually i went to business school for a little bit but left to do this but i you know wasn't credentialed didn't have an mba had no real world experience in running a company i did have some leadership experience prior to doing skype pipeline and that i you know ran a data center but it was a small operation and so i i really got beat up and so when i went into you know visalus i saw that they weren't running a high level business with the high standard of excellence in their operations by any means not from a financial standpoint a legal standpoint and a strategy standpoint and some of the key you know areas that i was very knowledgeable and as a result of the very difficult experience that i'd gone through at skype pipeline learning from some of the best and they were intolerant of you know of of my ignorance and amateur nature so at visalus i'd made a decision to really turn pro back to your original question you know i just knew that i was i was to be the ceo of something and that i had that capacity within me and that i had to develop it somehow and there's no better way to learn than to do and so that's what i did i think you asked uh another question about what gave me the conviction you know because i'd been in a gang and when you're in a gang well and i was a leader in the gang so i had about a hundred people working for me and some of them were grown men and you basically have to be afraid of people killing you betraying you hurting you hurting your family uh ratting you out getting arrested going to jail there's a lot of things that can happen to you when you're in a gang that you have to be very careful of and every move you make has to be very calculated and so that experience led me to when i started becoming a legal entrepreneur to realize that the attributes of a legal entrepreneur are far less risky than the attributes of an illegal entrepreneur and the characteristics that that i had to develop and learn the gap between being successful as a legal entrepreneur versus an illegal entrepreneur was easy to learn you know because if i could learn how to survive on the streets i could learn how to survive in combating against mbas and ivy leaguers that are just soft people like i would show up to board rooms and look at them and i would be like if if you only knew what i could do to you if we were left to our devices and as i went through this journey you know i'd sit there many times and hear these people talk and i would just you know in my head i was thinking about these people are very weak people and they're not strong and they don't know you know they might have the theory down but they don't have the practice down they have no idea what it takes to be you know an entrepreneur that operates at a very high level and so i had that deep confidence inside of me that i had a deep degree of street smarts and a high degree of of survival skills that you know my opponents did not have when you shared that experience it reminded me a little bit of something i heard robert kiyosaki say where he was a helicopter pilot in vietnam war where he says like bullets couldn't kill me uh wall street's not going to kill me either you could survive this you could survive anything so did you while go ahead i was just going to say when you i have been shot at i have based the flash of a muzzle and survived and you know i know what it's like to you know to have your heart drop and you think this might be it it's over i'm dead and i'm very spiritual i've had times where i've been rescued by my guardian angel no doubt there's no way i could have got out alive i got out alive and you know and so i have to tell you that knowing that from a spiritual level i didn't really have it figured out until now about the spiritual side of this but i believe that i was being spiritually guided through all of these these endeavors i've never been shot at nor do i ever want to be in a position where i'm staring down the barrel of a gun what did you learn about yourself in that moment where you think this could be it well like i said i have a guardian angel for sure and i have must have a deep purpose on earth if i've been spared what has been the demise of many others and i was spared prison i was spared death and and many other you know endings that would have been far worse and you know the pain and consequences that i did face for the actions that i took so i learned about my higher power during those moments and i didn't always live a spiritual life and i didn't quite understand it until more recently but in retrospect looking back i can see the you know the uh the hand of god guiding me to learn through suffering and then to now be a teacher to help people get through their suffering of their own wonderful i think this would be a perfect opportunity to tap into one of the themes i want to talk to you about which is it seems like you've gone through a process of adapting to your environment and reinventing yourself many times over and so somebody's listening to this and i'm gonna ask a question for for them or on their behalf which is how do you reinvent yourself and align yourself around your purpose i've not been in a gang i've not been shot at i've not had to live this life can we distill some of the learnings from that life that seems pretty extreme to something that's more say more commonplace what can we learn and extrapolate from your experience there's a lot of people in the world and so you can just decide you want to become a new person and get rid of all the old people and start over tomorrow if you're looking at yourself in the mirror right now and you're like all right i want to become an artist great you know go out there and you know buy the the paintbrush and the palette and get to work and declare that you are now an artist it's easier than you think now once you make the decision the hard work begins because you're gonna face resistance you're gonna face resistance from your friends from your lower self you're gonna face a ton of resistance when you make the declaration that you are going to step into a higher version of yourself and a new calling in your life you know it's there's a lot of resistance that you'll face and you have to fight back against that resistance each and every single day and for the first year or so it's painful and then eventually you get better at get better at it you have new people show up into your life you attract people to help you on your journey and you become this new person so it's easier than you think to make the decision to do it after you make that decision to do it it's hard work but at the other end of it you will look back at it and you'll realize that you know the reward was far worth the risk and that the 20 people that you left behind to go be a new person will attract 20 new people or even more that are even more pleasurable and exciting and inspiring to be around and so when you get about a year into the reinvention you will realize that you made the right decision but for the first year you got to be prepared to fight resistance each and every single day every step of the way i'm now two years into starting alter call and my reinvention to be of service through entrepreneurship and to lead with my spirituality and i can tell you that it's like it's a dream come true and i look back at the past two years and realize wow i had to overcome a lot of resistance at first there was a ton of forces lined up against me you know for the first year i had people you know trying to stop me i had people trying to poison what i was doing i had people laughing at me saying i had become super religious that i had hyper religious they said they said i'd over corrected i traded one addiction for another there was a ton of that and now those very same people that criticize me will say wow look at all the people you're helping you know and and i've bumped into these people as fate would have it and they're you know they're they're my they're cheering me on now that they've seen me power through the resistance not realizing that their role was to provide some resistance to me so that i could build some strength i would then be able to apply you know to this day so you know the resistance is going to come and and that's where you know the deep work you know comes in and anytime you step into a new calling and you make a new declaration of the self you're going to be met with opposition and you know this is what i teach people you know to to develop the fortitude to work through that opposition basically i imagine that you've worked with lots of people and have touched a lot of lives have you noticed some theme that keeps people from making that first bold big decision and taking their first like step towards changing their lives because i struggle with this right because there's an abundance of information out there self-help books videos courses workshops things that you can do but it's not because there's a shortage of this information it's the shortage of the desire to actually take action to change your life have you found any kind of common themes with why people are stuck in the state of attachment and are resisting so much you know they have some opposition and everyone has opposition you know and there's tremendous cultural opposition there's tribal opposition cultural opposition you know right now you are being fed nonsense by the news you're being your attention is trying to be subverted onto instagram and facebook and twitter and youtube as we speak like your soul might be like every word ryan is saying i need to hear and yet there's another voice saying oh tune out of this and tune in to youtube right now and tune out of this and go check your instagram and go check your email right and so you have a constant force that is trying to distract you from doing the work and you are alone in this fight you have cheat you have the most experienced sociologists psychologists neurologists scientists galore that are working in think tanks at facebook and google and twitter and a variety of others and and they're looking at you and they're saying how can we get you away from your life's purpose they literally are trying to figure out how to distract you so that they can sell your attention to an advertiser and in order for you to be successful you have to be able to control and focus your attention onto one thing for a long enough period of time until you get to a level of mastery it's that simple for any profession whether you want to be a pianist or you want to be an entrepreneur you have to have focus and attention in order to do that and these external things that are trying to steal and monetize your attention is literally theft they're literally stealing your attention they're using every psychological trick in the book to do so every technical trick in the book to do so they're studying you at length over you know 5 000 data points that you've voluntarily given them about you to try to figure out how to get you off of this podcast right now and on to a cat video or onto a self-help video that you know that you you know you think is going to be the thing that's going to change your life so you are up against tremendous forces at work that you cannot see there's spiritual forces at work there's your lower self that's at work there's the cultural forces at work there's capitalism at work there's you know your tribal group at work that wants you to go drink a beer with them and get high with them and and you know and not get high with them get low with them right because you're not really getting high you're getting low there's all these forces at work and so the big theme that i have seen in the hundreds of people that i've mentored since i started you know alter call two years ago is that people just don't know how to inoculate themselves against those forces and the second theme is they don't want it bad enough they they claim they want it but they really don't want it bad enough they want it but they're not willing to step out of their comfort zone they want it but they're not willing to change their morning routine they want it but they're not willing to change their diet they want it but they're not willing to change how they work out or exercise they want it but they're not willing to change themselves their identity they're not willing to address their ego they're not willing to look at their shadow they say they want it they tell me ryan i want it so bad i i want to be rich i want to be successful and i know truth down you know deep down they really don't want it because i wanted it i wanted it so bad that i would change anything about me including my name i would change anything about me i would change my identity i would change the way i walked the way i talked the way i dressed the way i spoke i would change anything that's how bad i wanted it and when i started altar call i went back to those roots and i said you know to my higher power god i said i will change anything about me to be able to serve at my highest capacity because as an entrepreneur at running by sales i was able to serve a lot of people but i was never at my best i never there was always a gap between what i could have been doing and what i was actually doing and i i was an amateur at visalus i was not a pro now as an amateur i created you know billions of dollars in sales so i had some gifts and talents that i was able to play with as an amateur but i never really went pro at visalus and when i made the declaration that i was going to become a new version of myself and starting altar call i went all in and i burned the bridges burned my old identity and said i'm i'm you know i'm going pro and i'm starting new brand new and you know did the work basically and people are just not willing to do the work i tell people you know they'll come to me and they'll say this is what i want this is what i'm going through here's the challenges i'm facing here's the obstacles and you know just yesterday i was with the guy who has you know 100 million dollar company and i'm like i'll give you the solution you want to solve your problem you have to get internal clarity before you can get external clarity and the way you get internal clarity is you got to meditate each and every single day and you got to do minimum of 30 minutes that's it it's that simple 30 minutes a day meditate i guarantee you the guy i talked to yesterday isn't gonna do it he just doesn't want it bad enough he's not willing to make the changes he'll hear me say it you'll hear a hundred other people say it that internal you know extra clarity comes from internal clarity he's missing external clarity right now let's go get some internal clarity he's not gonna do it so people know what to do they just don't do it do you think when they're seeking advice or help if they need to hear what they think the solution is going to be and anything that doesn't sound like it they're not going to do i think that people right now are guru shopping you know they're they're looking for a little piece of my buddy grant cardone a little piece of my buddy tony robbins a little piece of my friend gary vaynerchuk and they're trying to go guru shopping and you know eventually they might see a pattern that pretty much every single one of us is saying the exact same thing you know we're just saying it our own different way through our own relative experience and there's a few maybe you know areas of focus that each of us have in our work but we're all pretty much getting down to the same exact thing and you know and we're in the age right now of a million messengers which is a beautiful thing and so you know i think that maybe each of us in our own way are planting seeds in the lives of these people listening in right now and over time maybe those seeds will grow but if you're not in the right environment you don't have you know human beings are like plants if you're not in the right environment you know you don't have the right sun the right water in the right soil the plant's not going to grow and so while people are they're getting seeds from you know all these gurus that are out there myself included they're they're not in the right environment for those seeds to grow and so they're just constantly filling themselves with more information that's basically uh going nowhere it's like throwing seeds on the ground without doing the work to till the soil it's it's not going to do anything and so you know the age of the messenger is beautiful and it's showing some patterns and some common things among themes among all of us but it's also you know it's also creating a whole lot of people that have a great degree of input but little degree of output going back to the question about how one reinvents themselves i think step one was to kind of silence the distractions and they come in many forms uh some are technological so you can just cut yourself off from the distractions some of them are cultural some of them can be related to you because they're pulling you into a different direction preventing you from making that change but the thing that was kind of intriguing to me the thing i have a question to you about is you went through a lot of stuff you went through the distraction phase yourself with drugs and parting chasing a lot of different things but you emerge a stronger more resilient person i mean could you imagine telling your younger self when you were 16 17 in the gangs saying hey young ryan don't do this do this other thing i'm not sure you would have listened to yourself so the question i'm asking is does a person need to go through this arc their own journey to only then discover the hard way that that was the wrong path yes i i tell people when they come to me and they talk about the pain they're in i smile and i'm like oh you got a better mentor than me right now because your mentor is suffering and suffering is one of the best mentors you could ever have like suffering is the best teacher there's no better teacher than suffering i'm not nearly as good of a teacher as suffering is i'm i'm in a different college right now you're in the college of suffering and once you graduate from the college of suffering then we could talk about the college of the light and you know the college that i that i'm a professor in but i know the college of suffering i've been in that college i graduated from it and i no longer need to be taught by suffering to the same degree that i used to and we all learn from pain and suffering that's part of the human condition so to answer your question you know directly it's like when i see a person that's still smoking weed even though they they want a great career and they have a lot of potential in them and they're not when i see a person that you know is self-medicating when they know that self-medication isn't the way for it you know i just you know i smile and i say let me know when you're done with the teacher of suffering and then i can work with you but until then i love you i embrace you you're in for the ride of your life and it's going to be you know you're going to learn a lot from it and so i can't wait to compare notes with you once you've graduated from the school suffering i like that sentiment a lot let me know when you're done with the teacher of suffering it's empathetic we we're also saying like everybody's got to go through their own thing and when you're ready it's going to be this beautiful wonderful thing i'd love to accompany you and be a friend a mentor and a guide to this other place so i guess people do have to go through their own the dark knight of the soul before they're ready to climb out right if you want to be a hero you have you're going to have to go through you know the darkest night you have to go through isolation you're going to have to live in a cave for a while you're going to have to have people attack you and crucify you i mean this is the formula that the universe uses to create heroes and it's been the same formula for thousands of years and every every legend that we talk about has a very similar formula so you're going to have to go through it it's up to you as to how fast you want to go through it so you're going to have to go through it i tell i had a met a student that lost his company because you know he had broken from his integrity and his values and i was like you're going into the wilderness i love you but you're going in how long you're in the wilderness is up to you right i can't help you not go into the wilderness you you signed up for this class right i see you're going there you're losing your company it's going to fall apart you're not going to pick it back up you're not going to save it the more you keep digging the more painful it's going to be surrender and enter the wilderness and then ask yourself how long do i need to be in here and the way you speed up the duration and get out of the wilderness quicker is you know you commit you do the work you work on the self you go deep you heal you you contemplate you meditate and you do the work every single day consecutively and if you do that you can grow yourself out of the wilderness but there's only one way out of a hole and that's to grow so anytime that i've been in a hole you know i'm at rock bottom or i'm in a place i don't want to be i have to increase my amount of growth to get out of it what happens is is people go into the wilderness and then they suffer from suffering and this is a interesting distinction you got to be very careful about it sucks when you lose your company it sucks when you fail it sucks when you get a divorce or you get cheated on or you get laughter and then you suffer about the suffering and that creates a loop and that loop reprograms you and it actually shifts your state to more negativity in your life and then you're going to stay in the wilderness even longer so if you want to get out of the wilderness if you want to get out of the hole you got to stop suffering from suffering and you got to start growing and the faster you grow the faster you're going to get to the other side of that that adventure you talked about being in the hole um in your timeline and your story you you talk about your mom having an accident and finding out that she's in a coma while trying to launch this book nothing to lose everything you can gain and also learning that your son has autism i think he was two years old at the time that's a lot to be going through highs lows and challenges i want to talk a little bit because as i watch the documentary film that you're in i see you getting choked up talking about your son and reflecting if it's somehow maybe punishment for you being for failing for not doing whatever it is you're supposed to do the universe saying you're we're going to throw the toughest challenge at you and also the importance that you put on being a better father to your own child than than the one that you had so the reason why i want to talk to you a little bit about your autistic son is i can see you trying to connect with them trying to play with him and he's just not responding to you and my nephew my younger brother's son is autistic and it was like as if he's not paying attention or he's angry something is off and it's just we want to connect especially to our own child tell me about the mindset that you're going through at that point and then catches up and get us up to speed as to what's happened since then wow like that's that's a great question it's deep and you're gonna get me to choke up now because you know i i didn't realize that that was what was on the film you know i was trying to connect with him and i just wanted nothing more than to you know feel this love and give this love that i have within me and i couldn't express my love the way i wanted to and him having autism he couldn't express his the way he wanted to either so it was a very very difficult time i cried a lot there were times where i had to restrain him from hurting himself for many hours of the day like uh one time i counted out of a 12-hour day i had been holding him back against himself for like 10 of the 12 hours meaning you know trying to soothe him and stop him from scratching his face and hitting and banging his head against the wall and these you know very terrible difficult situations that he was going through i'll tell you that the pain that he is going through was far greater than the pain that i was going through though although in the documentary he was so young i have to tell you that he was going through it by the result of the spiritual work that i have done he has had a tremendous amount of healing his mom and i have got got him early help we got him all kinds of therapy you know we threw as much love as him as we at him as we possibly could and as a result of how much love we gave toward him and you know in the therapy and the spiritual work he's no longer suffering from autism whatsoever and i have the deepest connections with him literally most nights you know he has his own room he's 13 years old but many nights he crawls up and he's like dad i want to sleep in your bed and i'm like come over here and we have a very intimate very beautiful connection he no longer shows any signs of autism whatsoever it is a true miracle that i have to give credit to god for and my son had something inside of him that was stopping him and it was tormenting him and torturing him and that something left him uh when my mother passed away after she had awakened also a miracle from the coma she had a few years where she was severely handicapped and in a very difficult state although i could talk to her uh we could share some things and there were some beautiful moments that occurred after she woke up from the coma very beautiful it was still highly traumatic so i had for seven years i had some severe family events in my mother's coma my stepfather and mentor passing away tragically in my arms my son's autism and all of those things happened as i became you know ultra successful very wealthy and had a significant amount of notoriety as a result of the success of my books and my companies and so i had this wonderful duality and that duality was like a pressure cooker and to escape that duality i you know turned to pleasure and decadence and self-medication and sex and drugs and a variety of other advices to try to escape that pressure cooker and when my mother passed away basically i i for lack of better words i would say i went nuclear my company wasn't was failing at that point i had this ultra toxic relationship with my son's mother which we've healed and beautiful now but it was bad uh my son wasn't healthy and my mother was gone and i i looked myself in the mirror and i realized that i would have given any of those late nights parting by late nights those benders you know five-day benders parting i'd have given any of them back to have another moment with my mother and so i was mad at myself i was mad at those people that had taken my time away from my mother i was mad at those people that had used guilt that you know to persuade me to work and i was mad at the world and i was most importantly mad at myself and from that though i was able to strip the layers of darkness that i had accumulated and make it and get to the root of the light of where my soul was at and make a decision that i was going to make some changes in my life and literally from that point forward my whole life has changed to be blessed and filled with abundance and and a lot of deep healing and a lot of deep work wow i mean that's a lot to process i mean i can only imagine dealing with one of those challenges but all of them stacked together and simultaneously as your career was on some meteoric rise to the top your personal life was just heading the same velocity in the exact opposite direction it's it's a miracle you're still here and that didn't tear you apart because i can feel like maybe that's like two forces quite literally pulling you one opposite directions yeah it is a miracle that i'm here the only reason why i'm here is because i love my son so much that i wasn't gonna take my own life because i wouldn't do that to him i knew that he needed a father and i knew that i had to you know i went through a custody battle and i wasn't allowed to see him for six months and so this is when my real reinvention was born i said that i'm going to become such a different person i'm going to shine so much light that there's not going to be a court or a judge or a lawyer that's going to stop me that i'm going to get so you know heal and strip down everything that i possibly could cause i didn't know for sure that i'd get him back i didn't know that i could convince the judge or the attorneys or you know these things can take years and these things can be devastating to a father particularly in the california court system and so the strategy my attorneys laid out for me could be a multi-year process and it could be a disaster and so i said i'm not going to follow the advice of my attorneys i'm going to get so deep into my spiritual and personal growth that there is no way that i can be stopped because the light that i will shine will be so bright that it will paint the sky blue and that my son will know that i'm you know that i'm the father that he needs and everyone else in the world will too and so i had a level of conviction to do the healing work and to fix the things about me that had created this toxic situation that i was in because i was certainly responsible for my fair share of it and i did the work and got my son back and and i've been doing the work ever since with the same level of commitment and with the same desire to now not just be the father to my son but be the father to as many people as i possibly can in the entrepreneurial field you mentioned something in the film about the love that you give to the world is with conditions there are strings attached there's a caveat but with your son it's unconditional meaning without strings and i think about these things as the dad myself i have two boys and the only people i would exchange my life for literally i would exchange my life if i could step in front of the train to save their life i would do that and there's no one else that i would do that for and to then try to pour your love and your energy and everything about you to heal yourself and to heal your child and then to see this kind of miraculous transformation i've never heard anybody say my child is now autism free or no longer autistic like there's levels of autism because also my nephew has he's a pretty adjusted kid he doesn't have the same challenges because of the same help and attention and love and it's quite wonderful to actually see this healing process happen so do you feel like at a certain point in your life that your child is the thing that helps to keep you grounded to make sure you have your priorities straight is that the thing that stop you from being a hurricane to being grounded yeah he came here to teach me you know i i like to think spiritually he was sitting there saying all right this is my exact time to come in to stop this guy from going off the rails and i'm going to come in with these illness and i'm going to come in with this to try to steer ryan on course so he teaches me as much as i teach him that's for sure and that level of responsibility when you do have a child with special needs it heightens your level of responsibility it also changes you you have to adapt to them you have to understand how they learn and you know you can't just parent by default you have to be very active parent when you have a child with special needs and so a child with special needs teaches you more about yourself than you could ever imagine and it is a gift it is a true gift i've learned more from my son than from any other mentor that i've ever imagined and my son is very gifted so i actually go to him for counsel you know i'll talk to him about my business i'll invite him into the numbers i'll i'll ask him what do you think i should do here and he'll give me some wisdom sometimes that i think is divinely appointed and i take it you know there's there's been plenty of times where i've been seeking clarity and i'll say what would you do if you or me and he'll give me the exact answer i need and i'm like all right let's go so i have the benefit of having a son that is a tremendous survivor of of having overcome great difficulties and he has some beautiful wisdom in him that he now shares with me and i invite him to actually share that with some of my students as well so good okay i see it we have a few more minutes together i would like to build a bridge to the next part and then we probably could end it on this many of us fantasize about making more money than we know what to do with like fu money more money than god is the expression goes you've actually achieved that in 2012 you sold the company for 792 million dollars i have to ask the question why work why not be a philanthropist why not just enjoy the rest of your life and spend every moment with the people that you care about what compels you to do the next thing well i am a philanthropist um the for-profit model is the very best way to effect change i'm actually on the board of a non-profit and you know national angels we support 3000 foster kids and i'm very familiar with the nonprofit model and having donated to a lot of charities you know i'm very familiar with it there's just no better way to effect change than the for-profit model so this is the way that i'm affecting change and right now in our company we're innovating on technology that you know is going to revolutionize the coaching space and we're deep diving into various psychology and research studies and you know it's time of my life when it comes to innovation experimentation and growth there's no better way to grow than an entrepreneurial vehicle it's gonna test you and even though i've had experience in the success in the past starting you know a brand new company means you got to start over and so i gotta you know i can grow through things much easier this time around because i've already built a house and so now i know how to build one so i'm building it much more efficiently and i'm able to weather some storms and build the house in preparation for those storms in ways that i didn't know to do before but nonetheless there's no greater adventure than to create a company and to see that company make an impact in the world and to have a company and a team of people that are aligned in values and to grow as they grow i grow and so forth so there's nothing more exhilarating and adventurous than building and growing a company it's the time of my life right now i did try to uh not work i you know i took two years off and i did nothing for two years i resigned from all boards i liquidated all investments i had zero i sold homes i reduced you know i had a fleet of cars i had a bunch of homes i had a jet i had you know all kinds of things that i collected it was like all kinds of stuff and all that stuff had owned me and it had actually stopped me from being creative because the way my mind worked i spent more time thinking about protecting and insuring my stuff then i and collecting more stuff than i did in actually creating and so i as i'd gotten to that level of wealth you know i did what i thought i should do which is you know buy art and you know and do this and do that and buy homes and live in luxury and i realized that all of that had stunted my creative growth and so during the two years i went down to zero not financially because i you know still had wealth but i went down to zero in terms of the work that i did i went down in terms of zero in terms of you know spending money and collecting stuff and consumerism i you know i wore gym clothes every day i didn't care about you know twenty thousand dollar coats and hundred thousand dollar watches and all those things that i had cared about and i said all of that stuff you know it was great it was an experience i'm gonna focus on getting to the roots of my creativity and so i went down to a place where you know i zeroed out everything and i spent two years doing nothing but connecting to nature my spirituality my son and myself and after a period of time i realized that i was now suffering again you can do that you know that amount of work uh because there's something in it for you but after you get to a level of healing you can't spend the rest of your life in tranquility and seeking tranquility particularly if your soul is here you know to make an impact and to inspire and contribute to making some change in the world and so eventually i realized wow i'm suffering again after two years it was my son who told me he says dad you need to get a job again i was like what do you mean i need to get a job and he's like you are he says you're not happy and you're bored and you need something and i'm like well what should i do and i gave him a piece of paper and a pen and he went he drew a hospital and he said in this hospital you're gonna have a healing center because i had like sound bowls and i was meditating and i had all these healing things going on in my house and he designed out this hospital and what he'd actually designed was what we call the house of transformation which is the house i'm in right now where we literally have healing activities happening 24 7. we have events happening in the house you know we have people coming in and out of the house all the time to receive healing and growth and to learn how to heal and grow as entrepreneurs and so forth so you know he he basically told me dad you got to go back to work because you're unhappy and and when he told me that i realized all right you know it's time to go back to work so your son the person who grounds you is also the person who's like dad is time you got to go do something else yeah it's time i work with some entrepreneurs that you know they also go deep into their healing journey especially for those of us that had the privilege to take that type of time and invest that type of time into it and you know the strategy works and then all of a sudden it will stop working once you've gotten everything you can out of the strategy and then you have to have a new strategy now my strategy is to you know it's two things i optimize my productivity and my generosity and the balance between my productivity and generosity is how i'm able to enjoy life to its fullest i don't sacrifice time with my son i don't buy into the the myth that i need to you know work 18 hours a day seven days a week i think that that's just nonsense you know if you're a highly skilled highly talented person you can attract highly skilled and highly talented people and you don't need to work 18 hours a day seven days a week to be able to manifest you know your your soul's calling there's a lot of entrepreneurs that i know that prescribe that and that is not the way you know i do work 17 hours a day seven days a week but i probably spend six hours of that each day working on myself and then on saturdays and sundays i spent 24 hours of that enjoying myself and as a result of that i show up to my work with great energy excitement enthusiasm and high level of conviction and a great deal of satisfaction and happiness and that radiates and attracts people that vibe with that and so we do great work more so than we ever did when i prescribe to the idea that i should work myself to death will altar call be a greater financial success than visalus it'll be ten-fold ten-fold ourselves if not more okay you guys heard it here the prediction has been done um ryan i want to thank you for being on the show i've been talking to ryan blair he's an author a serial entrepreneur a philanthropist probably most importantly a dad he's also written the best-selling book nothing to lose everything to gain how i went from gang member to multi-millionaire entrepreneur and also rock bottom to rockstar thank you for being my guest where can people go to find more about you if you just go to altercall.com it's a-l-t-e-r-c-a-l-l.com or you can uh catch me on instagram i'm in the dms it's me i'm at realrianblair on instagram thank you so much awesome thank you chris i'm brian blair and you are listening to the future