Shawn Ryan Show - #73 Bedros Keuilian - Discipline, Motivation & Wisdom that Made a Multi-Million Dollar Empire

Episode Date: September 4, 2023

This week on SRS, Bedros Keuilian tells us all about business. Bedros is a serial entrepreneur and investor in over a dozen industry leading brands and businesses. He’s the founder of Fit Body Boot Camp, three times listed in Inc Magazine as well as Entrepreneur Magazine’s 100 fastest growing franchise brands in the world. Bedros is the author of the Wall Street Journal Best Selling book "Man Up – How To Cut The BS and Dominate In Business and In Life." This episode explores his childhood as a immigrant, escaping communism and finding opportunity in the United States. Bedros takes us through his formative years as an early entrepreneur; wins and losses. Shawn and Bedros get into heavy topics like society, values, faith and how to get the country back on track. If you are interested in business or investing, the episode is for you. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: https://lairdsuperfood.com - USE CODE "SRS" https://puretalk.com/ryan https://gcu.edu/military https://1stphorm.com/srs https://helixsleep.com/srs - USE CODE "HELIXPARTNER25" for 25% on Labor Day https://betterhelp.com/shawn https://goldco.com/ryan | 855-936-GOLD #goldcopartner https://bubsnaturals.com - USE CODE "SHAWN" Bedros Keuilian Links: Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/bedroskeuilian Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/bedroskeuilian YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/user/KeuilianInc Twitter - https://twitter.com/bedroskeuilian Website - https://bedroskeuilian.com Please leave us a review on Apple & Spotify Podcasts. Vigilance Elite/Shawn Ryan Links: Website | Patreon | TikTok | Instagram | Download Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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My next guest is living proof that the American dream is alive and well. He fled communism as a young boy, grew up on the streets in the US of A, and built himself a business empire. I personally learned a lot from this episode. I think you will too, especially if you have an entrepreneurial mind. Ladies and gentlemen, if you get anything out

of these shows, please head over to Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Leave us a review. Tell us what you thought of the show for my patrons out there on Patreon. Thank you so much. It's because of you this show even takes place. Thank you. I love you all. Ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, please welcome Bedros Cullian to the Sean Ryan show. Bedros, welcome to the show. Thanks man, thanks singer. I'm a great singer. I'm a great singer. I'm a great singer. I'm a great singer. I'm a great singer. I'm a great singer.

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I'm a great singer. I'm a great singer. I'm a great singer. I'm a great singer. I'm a great singer. lots and lots of knowledge when it comes to entrepreneurship. And so I've been really excited about this interview for a long time. Thank you. Thank you for being here. And I got to say that as we were talking about before the camera started to roll, like your show and your evolution has just blown me away. The way you evolved as a speaker,

and now as an interviewer, and the content that you're putting out. It's like, there's probably like two or three shows that I'll watch and this is one of the ones that I'll watch consistently. And we're talking like you have to commit two, three, four hours to some of your episodes. So anyway, great job on what you do.

Thank you. That means a hell of a lot coming from you. I really appreciate that. Yes, sir. But we're here to talk about you. So let me give you an intro here real quick. You're a serial entrepreneur and investor, founder of Fifth Body Boot Camp, featured in Entrepreneur and Inc. 500 magazine for the fastest growing companies in the country. Business industries are software, digital advertising, education, platforms, and consulting services, motivational speaker, you're the author of the book,

Man Up, Proud Husband, Father, and Family Man, immigrant, you escape communism at a young age, patriotic American, and I believe your newest venture is you're the founder of the project. Yeah. Do you want to talk about the project for a minute? Yeah, yeah. So the project, when I wrote my book, Man Up, in my book, I talked about how I put myself

through these six week challenges. The started probably 13 years ago. I decided that I'm going to run a marathon. Maybe I always tell yourself, like, I'm good at lifting weights, but I can't run or someone says, I'm a runner, but I can't lift weights. I'm not made for that. And I started thinking about how many ways we put ourselves in a corner or in a box

by saying, I'm not able to do that, or I don't remember names, right? And so my whole thing was, I'm not a good runner. I've never been a good runner. So I was like, I'm gonna break that fallacy by hiring a running coach, training for six weeks, and running the San Diego marathon. And I did.

It was painful, it was awful, it was all of it. Everything you would imagine, how in discomfort, it was everything, because it's such a short amount of time, and I'm not a small dude, six foot, 230 pounds, like that's a lot of weight to carry 26.2 miles. And so I talk about how I do these challenges. Every time I do a challenge, jujitsu challenge, MMA challenge, rock climbing, guitar lesson, salsa dancing, anything that's out of my comfort zone, right? Each time I would see improvements in other areas of my life, right? Relationships, business, just being

more stoic because you learn a lot about yourself as you go through discomfort and anyone knows that it's you, what you do as a as a as a as a seal. And so these dudes started who read my book would reach out and say, dude, if you put together some kind of challenge to help us develop in these areas, like we'd love it. And I'm like, well, just pick a six-week challenge and do it, right? I talk about it in my book. You keep hearing something long enough and you realize, I think I'm like, well, just pick a six week challenge and do it, right? I talk about it in my book. You keep hearing something long enough and you realize, I think I'm gonna put together something

for dudes who wanna develop physically, mentally, emotionally, financially. And in that time, when I was in those six week challenges, I also had dealt with some trauma as a kid and started working with a therapist and that unpacked a lot of shit. So lo and behold, we put together the project.

It's a 75 hour experience, Ray, cash care, former Navy SEAL, leading instructor, Steve Eckart, another leading instructor, myself. And we take men who are entrepreneurs, first responders, former military, they want to go through something hard, physically, mentally, emotionally, but too also want to develop financially in their relationships, overcome traumas, and probably are not likely to go work with the therapist. And so, and I'm not a therapist, but I've worked enough with the therapist and my therapist has helped me journal and figure things out.

So we take this 75 hours great experience. It's like a crucible where Ray and Steve put him through physical evolutions, truck pulls, ice bath, hikes with logs and stuff, things that you were probably very familiar with. And then I teach time management, life management, stress management, entrepreneurship, how to create multiple income streams. Because I think whether you're a cop, you're a firefighter, you have a career,

you're a sea level executive, or you're an entrepreneur, you might want to create a second, third, fourth income stream. So we take the best of all the skill sets to the three of us have as instructors. And now we've got other instructors that come in with specialized skills. One guy is a seer instructor. He was a seer instructor in the Air Force, so he'll teach that. So it's really cool stuff, like dude stuff.

And guys get to build a brotherhood, which is missing today. Everyone is an island, right? And so the guys that graduate end up being part of this project brotherhood and this 12 month coaching program that I've created, a mastermind where I help them in their money and their meaning. Because that's, I realized all men,

we need money and meaning. Money gives us the ability to give our families security and experiences and look after them and be good to people with our money. And then meaning, if something is not meaningful, if we don't have a sense of purpose or significance, a dude will go and find ways to sabotage his life, alcohol drugs, infidelity, pornography, whatever. And so the 12-month mastermind for the graduates of the project is just focused on increasing

their purpose, their meaning, and increasing their sources of money. And when I do that, we have a better man on the other side of it, and they're plugged into a brotherhood. The funny thing about that is that class number one. So we've now, over the last four years, we've run 17 classes. We're about to run the 18th. For class one, Ray goes, hey, we're gonna need a bell. I said, Ray, why would we need a bell?

He goes, well, in buds, now keep in mind, I'm a civilian, I don't know anything other than like what I read about, Navy SEALs and buds on social media, especially at the time, being around you guys more. I definitely understand your world more. And I go, why would they need a belt? These guys are paying a lot of money to go through this 75 hour experience. And they're

really, they seem committed. They're going to go through it. He goes, we're going to have quitters. I'm going to make people quit. And I reluctantly said, well, get one, but you're going to see it's a waste of money. And man, I was wrong. First class had two dropouts. Since then, we've had quitters in every class, but the guys that graduate just become new human beings. They operate at a higher level, develop self mastery, and I just love seeing that. Yeah, I've seen a couple of clips on,

I believe Instagram a very, just, whoa. He's got a gift. He's good at that. He's really good. Do you mind if I do mind if I put one of those clips up in the interview? No, absolutely man. I love to Shut up one more fucking word. You're gone. I'm not Shut up stop rolling your fucking eyes stop asking for fucking electrolytes and be a fucking man I don't give a fuck what you do when you're home. You are not impressing me here with your little f**king machines and shit.

You're good because you have all these f**king comforts. Shut the f**k up at being a team player and go f**king join your team. You say another f**king word, you're gone. And by the way, I have to, when people see those clips of Ray going off and Ray is like just, he's a bull. And he goes off at these guys and it comes from a place of love. But when people see a 30 second or 60 second clip

on Instagram or YouTube wherever, and they don't realize there's a 75 hour, this is a 75 hour experience, and they go, man, I would punch that guy, that Navy SEAL in the mouth if he talked to me like that. It's like, yeah, but there's hours where he's loving up on these guys. There's hours where he's crying with them.

There's hours where we're just like journaling with them and talking about the deepest, most painful parts of their life. But that's not beautiful to put on Instagram. What is sexy to put on Instagram is radio and what Ray does best, which is getting up someone's ass. Yeah, for anybody that doesn't know Ray Cash, you should follow him on social media.

But what very animated profile? I love that guy. Right. But who's your, so who's the demographic that signs up for this? So I thought it was going to be male entrepreneur. I only want meant to go through this But who's the demographic that signs up for this? So I thought it was going to be male entrepreneurs. I only want men to go through this because men have no place that's a society specifically for them anymore.

And everything's been infiltrated. And men have been, we're called toxic. If God forbid, you have some ambition, you have some drive, you try and open the door for someone, you say, please, and thank you. You stand up in shake hands. You're toxic. You say what's on your mind and heart, you're patriotic, you try and open the door for someone, you say, please, and thank you, you stand up in shake hands, you're toxic. You say, what's on your mind and heart, you're patriotic, you're toxic. Hell, you might even be a domestic terrorist, especially you because you have

a, you have a military background, which just blows me away. It's absurd. So I thought it was just going to be for male entrepreneurs who are doing their successful in business, but their marriages are falling apart. They have addictions and vices, and they are alone. They're an island. And I always say it's for the guy

who's suffering in silence, who's white and not going through life, but financially doing well for himself. He doesn't have a brotherhood to belong to. He doesn't have core values to live by. And again, as men, if we don't have that brotherhood and that purpose, that sense of purpose and meaning, we're just making money and we're good at it. Well, now that money's going to get into it.

Money's an accelerant. So now if you're drinking, doing drugs, effing hookers, you're going to do more of that with money because it gives you access, right? And so I developed it for men who are that. So about 60% of the class are entrepreneurs male. The other 40% are former military who had a community, had a sense of purpose and meaning, but lost it when they left the military,

or first responders who maybe are feeling the stress of their work as a cop as a firefighter, will never go and talk to a counselor or a therapist, but they realize that they can talk to someone here, they can, they want to do the self-work. And so about 30, 40% are a former military first responders, and it's a really cool experience, man, because who I built it for, male entrepreneurs, but who are serving now, which is entrepreneurs and former military and first responders who want to again reengage with the brotherhood, develop purpose as a civilian,

because I realize like when you have a team, when you have purpose, you have meaning, that's valuable. Like with what I do, I've built a big brand and I've got a leadership team and I've got employees and we're on a trajectory to somewhere. So I'm not going to go off track. But when a dude doesn't have something to lock on to, we end up going off track in the weirdest ways. So that's who we serve. And I would literally do this for free.

We charge for it because it costs us a lot of money. But truth is, of the 17 classes of the project that we've run, only one class has made us money. I think we made like 8 grand after it was all said and done. But that's a beautiful thing about being an entrepreneur. I make a lot of money here so that I could do what I believe is my life's work, which is helping men develop a higher level of self-mastery on this side of the fence. Yeah. develop a higher level of self mastery on this side of the fence. Yeah, we had a conversation, maybe six months ago now, and the demographic really,

it surprised me, but you also have something for fathers and sons, which really resonated with you. I'm going to be honest, when I first saw the clips, I was pretty standoffish. And then after talking to you, I was like, oh, man, this is really needed. You know, and there's a couple of these programs out there that I've run across, but yours seems to be making the most impact. Look, I want to, can you talk about the father son of them a little bit? Yeah. So that one's called the Squire program. And again, I'm an entrepreneur, so I'm always thinking about solutions to problems because that's what entrepreneurism is, right? Like you saw a problem in the world

and you're like, no one's documenting history accurately and no one's sharing this part of history. It's almost being suppressed, in fact it wasn't. So you saw a problem, you created the solution, the Sean Ryan show. So my brain just works that way. And so as guys were graduating the project, men were graduating the project,

they go, man, if I had all these stuff that we're learning here as a kid, I would have done so much better because I come from a fatherless home. Well, I come from a home where my dad was there, but he was absent. And so I realized, well, we got a 50% divorce rate. So half the dads are not always around.

Is that the country? It's a 50% divorce rate? Yeah, that's what I hear. Wow. 50% divorce rate. And I didn't know that. My own personal belief is of the 50% who are together, the dads, half of those dads are mentally

and emotionally absent. They just feel like, what, I'm providing from a family. Dude, that's the bare minimum to provide. Like, you got to mentor, you got to coach. Let's not forget that for thousands of years, every culture in New Guinea, the aborigines, everywhere, that for example in New Guinea, the dad would take his most closest confidence who he shared core values with from the tribe. And when the sun was about 13, 14 years old, he would take the sun out of the house and

they'd go to the edge of a forest just as the sun's going down. And the dad would take a knife and he'd just make a small cut on that boy's arm so he starts bleeding. He hands him the knife and he says, go into the forest and don't come out until the sun comes up the next morning. We'll be here waiting for you. And when you get out here,

you've wanna see that the table for us to forge you into a confident, capable, courageous young man because that's how the tribes lived on, right? Today we don't have that. There's no right of passage. That was a right of passage. And in every culture, cultures that were like tens of thousands of miles apart would do this. In New Guinea, it was the opposite. The dads would take the kid out of the house. They'd have these masks on, demonic looking masks, and they'd start beating up the kid. And the idea was that mom, the whole, it's a very tribal experience.

And mom would, no, don't steal my kid. And so they would pull the sun out of the house. And they'd start beating the sun up. At some point, the sun starts fighting back. The dad lets him win. Then the dad takes the mask off of his face, puts it on the sun's face, and it welcomes him to a seat at the table. As in, now we're going to forge you into a man

because there's something physical that happens to a young girl when she becomes a woman. She has a menstrual cycle. She begins to develop breasts. For young boys, what really happens that's physical that says you are now a man, nothing. So there has to be a right of passage. And in the absence of that right of passage, a young man grows up and just wonders, do I have what it takes? Do I have what it takes to be a man? Because he still has a desire to be a man.

He has a desire to have ambition, to acquire things, to have a beautiful woman in his life, to lead a tribe. But he doesn't know if he has what it takes because he hasn't been shown that, right. A young girl immediately, she develops this, her body develops, she has a menstrual cycle, she realizes one of my life's purposes, my core purpose is to raise a baby. We don't have a life's core purpose. A dad has to guide us into that and tell us that, you know, find a purpose and your purpose

will develop through the seasons of life as you get older. But in the absence of purpose, you'll end up sabotaging yourself. And so that's why Knights had squires, right? It was the Knights job to teach that young squire, as I read about this. There's a great book out there by Robert. I forget his last name, Robert, whatever. The book is called Raising a Modern Day Knight. whatever the book is called, Raising a Modern Day Night.

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there's a lot of stuff that I don't know. That point, I'm 30 years old. My wife's pregnant with our first child. And I don't know a lot of these things. I don't know how to create a right of passage. I don't know how to mentor my son into core values, into moral authority, developing moral authority, helping him develop and find his purpose. And so, as I'm reading the book,

so I can help my son, I realize this book is helping me. And while my mom and dad were together, and my dad is a great dad, he was one of those dads, which was just, he was working, because we came to this country, where immigrants were foreigners, barely have any money, so he's working multiple jobs, he's just providing for us, but there was no mentorship.

There was no development of character, of core values. And so I ended up getting into a lot of trouble. And so as I'm reading this stuff, I'm like, holy cow, I need to learn to become a modern day night so that I can teach my son this. And so through that, we created the Squire program because there is no right of passage now. This is why, by the way, young boys, it's always the young boys who come from a single family

where there is a single mom raising them. There is no dad who end up joining a gang, end up in prison, many end up in the military. All of those things, by the way, is a right of passage. All young boys are looking to the older boys who seem to have their shit together. Maybe a gang doesn't, but maybe the military does. And so they're always looking to the older boys in the community for a right of passage.

Just internally, that desire is there. And so if a dad doesn't fulfill that, an older brother doesn't fulfill that, it's going to be fulfilled through crime, gangs, some avenue of that. So when we created the Squire program, well great, this is for fathers and sons. 12-hour experience, there's no ringing the bell and quitting, you know, it's just fathers and sons go through really cool experiences together, hikes, tough things, problem solving, etc. And then we teach core lessons and then we separate the fathers and sons,

and then I get to pour into the dads and kind of let them know, like, as a dad now, this is the right of passage. But now, here's how you coach them along. Here's how you coach your guy along. You're a little dude along, which is just meaningful work for me. Each time I'm helping men, each time I'm helping fathers and sons, I'm helping myself as well, and I realize that. And mom started to reach out and they go, I love the Squire thing you guys are doing,

the Squire program, but I'm a single mom. There is no uncle for my son to come with. Grandpas too old. I was like, shoot. What do I do? So I started reaching out to all my friends who are former military. By this point, Jason Redman and Sean Rogers, a former Green Beret, and Ray, all these guys introduced me to so many people now. I'm so familiar with your world, like, oh my God, dude, I've got friends and special operations who are vetted, who I know are solid human beings, Nick Kumelastos, another dude. And I just would call him up and go, hey, there's a mom who's got a son. Would you mentor him through the Squire program?

And I was like, dude, I'm in. And now that young man goes through the Squire program with that former military person. And then afterwards, they build that relationship. They just talk, they connect. And now that young man has a father figure in his life. And at the end of the day, doesn't matter who your dad is,

as long as you're getting mentored by a male who's got a direction, who's got a path, who's got core values. And that's what I realized is it takes a tribe. And the absence of a dad, if your dad was just a sperm donor, and then he's no longer around, like find other father figures. And that's really what the Squire program is.

How many of those are you doing here? We're doing two of those a year, and now we've started licensing those out across the country to fathers and sons who have gone through it. Darnel, for example, he's a firefighter out of Houston. He went through the Squire program with his son. He loved it so much.

It transformed their relationship so much. He's now running the Houston Squire program. We've got this gentleman named Chad, who's also a firefighter ironically. He and his two sons went through. He went through it two rounds. He's running the Phoenix one. Nick Kumalasos went through with his nephew, because nephew doesn't have dad in his life. And Nick is a former marine raider out of North Carolina. He's now running one out there. So this thing is just growing. And I suppose it's because

there's a necessity. I'm not actively promoting it. Like dads and sons who go through it go, hey, there's, can you do one of my state? I go, no, but you can and I'll show you how. And so, dude, I think if we do this right, like we're gonna really impact the next generation and it just feels so freaking good. How long have you been doing this? Squire program's been going on for about three years.

Yeah. One thing I noticed with the, I don't know about the, with some of the younger generations is very, I mean, most people are anyways, but it seems like it's even, there's even more with the younger generation. They're terrified to take risks, terrified. Yeah. And they victimize themselves. And do you see the people that go through your program, whether it's whether it's the project or the Squire program, do you see more risks being taken? And how are they handling failure? Are you seeing more people take risks through your program?

After the events. After the events, absolutely. Because that's one thing we tell them is that in life, there is no failure, unless it's death, it's just a temporary defeat. Everything's temporary defeat. Again, something that I've learned from your community, I think it was Jason Redmond that said it. You guys have like good, better and best case scenario.

If you're going to a destination, he said, there's something called a time wheel or pin wheel or whatever it's called, we're in, you know, worst case scenario, it's gonna take us this long, best case scenario this long and meet him. But either way, he says we're getting to the destination and mission's gonna get accomplished. And so these young men haven't been taught that.

And if it's not taught that, then they, and they're overly bubble wrapped, the training wheels have stayed on too long, everyone's done everything for them. Food shows up on an app, right? So they don't even have to leave the house and deal with humans at a restaurant to say please and thank you open doors. And so these social skills that you and I grew up with, the ability to deal with a little bit of conflict in life, you know, it's gone away. And so now they're growing up stunted in their development. And when we bring them into the Squire program, we let them know that

you're gonna have to take risks and sometimes things don't work out in your favor. And when they don't, that doesn't mean you failed. It's just a temporary defeat. You can actually pivot and change path and reaccomplete the outcome if you want, or you could stay down. And they'll pout in the beginning. It's great. In 12 hours, you see such an evolution of these young men.

And what I can tell you is oftentimes, you would think that it's supposed to be the young men, the boys getting the experience, the dads always pull me aside afterwards. And like, dude, those lessons you guys were teaching, that applies to me. I need to start reframing defeat or failure into a temporary defeat. I need to start taking more risks. I need to start looking for more adventures in my life and not just grinding away at work, but then letting my child get raised by the television.

And so we encourage these dads, like, hey, why don't you every three or four months, like, go on an adventure with your son, go do something, go on a surf excursion, go on a hike that's away, like overnight in camp. Well, I don't know how great. There's YouTube videos that teach you how to, how to camp and survive overnight. Go do it and figure it out together. And that creates a bond because men, unlike women, don't just sit around at a table and openly freely connect and have meaningful, deep conversations. It's factory installed for women to do that. What's factory installed for us is to go, hey, Sean, how are things? You go, good. And I go, yeah, everything's good for me too. One in reality,

my life might be a mess. But unless we are doing something physically together, where you're helping me, I'm helping you, where headed towards a common thing that I might go, hey, bro, by the way, this is what's happening in my life. And you're like, oh, dude, I've been through that. Here's how I might be able to help you or have you considered this. So men need to be doing things together. You're hiking, you're building, you're changing the tire. I was like, go and change your car. Like rotate your own car's tires.

You're like, I don't know how. Figure it out. Yeah. Right. So we teach them all those things. And it's so cool for a light bulb to go on. And I know it's common sense. And this is a scary part. People go, you're teaching common sense stuff.

I know. We are. But that's how far removed commonsense is. It's not so common anymore. Not so common anymore. Well, I love what you're doing, and I want to get into some of the problems with masculinity or lack thereof here

and here at the end of the interview. But real quick, everybody always gets a gift. On the show. Thank you you sir. There you go. Any guesses? There they are. There they are. The gummies. That's right. The legendary gummies. Thank you man. You're welcome. You're welcome. And now I've seen a lot of people ask on the show so I do know that it's not going to get me high but it will get me high on life. Yes. So we actually had somebody email him once that said they were on their third bag and they still don't feel it.

They don't feel it. But yeah, those are legal in all 50 states, made the USA and they love it. Thank you. They're delicious, you're welcome. So, Pedro's, your upbringing and journey to entrepreneurship is fascinating. And I really want to dive in there. I love stories like yours because I think that not just men, women too, I think the majority

of this country victimizes themselves into, in one way or another, some more than others, but everybody seems so mentally stuck and wherever they're at in life. And they feel very discouraged. And I'm not exactly sure where that comes from, but it's stories like yours that can rewire that thinking, you know, and from where you've come from and what you've built yourself up to.

So I'd like to just start with your childhood. Where did you grow up? Well, I was born in Armenia, which in 1974. So I'm 49 now, right? And in Armenia, which in 1974. So I'm 49 now, right? And in 1980, we escaped. And Armenia was part of the Soviet Union. And my dad was a member of the Communist Party.

And people always ask me, man, you guys escaped. You came to the United States. Yet your dad was a member of the Communist Party. Why would he accept that? Because yes, they asked him if he wanted to was a member of the Communist Party. Why would he accept that? Because yes, they asked him if he wanted to become a member of the Communist Party. But if you say no, you end up in Siberia, right? So as my dad tells us the story, he goes, I had to accept that honor, right? Because if I didn't, I'd end up in Siberia.

And so at the time... What was going on in Siberia at the time? Well, Siberia is basically where you disappear to if you denounce communism, if you stand up against the government, the Soviet government. And since Armenia was under Soviet rule at the time, Siberia was basically where everyone goes to die. They send you to die. Okay. At the time. And also at the time, Siberia was basically where everyone goes to die. They send you to die at the time. And also at the time, the Soviet Union was at war with Afghanistan. So the irony, if we know our history, we know that the Soviet Union during those times,

late 70s, early 80s, was at war with Afghanistan. And my dad, his mindset was, one, I don't want to be a communist party member. They asked me so I said yes because I don't want to get shipped off to prison essentially. Number two, I don't want my kids to grow up in oppression. Dude, my dad was so clever. He worked at a men's suit manufacturing plant, and he ended up working his way up to be the director of this plant. Hence became a member of the Communist Party. And as a director of the plant, he figured out that they gave so much material to make so many suits, and he had his seamstresses and tailors put these suits the material together so closely on the pattern,

cause they have to cut out a pattern of a pants, pattern of a jacket, pattern of a vest. He's a tailor by trade. He put the pattern so close together so as not to waste a lot of material. And for every like 15, 16 suits they would make, they would have an extra material left over for one more suit.

My dad would steal that, bring it home, and make suits and sell it on the black market for extra cash. That is how he ended up paying off some officials in the Soviet government to allow us to escape into Italy in 1980. In fact, several months before escaping, there was a knock on our door. We lived in an apartment, a nice apartment. We did well for ourselves. But

my dad just didn't like and appreciate the communist way. And he knew that we were going to be limited. He knew that my brother was going to end up going to to Afghanistan and fighting. My brother was 19 at the time. You turned 20 and you go into the military. And so I'm six years old. My brother's 19, my sister's 22. And my dad's like, I got to escape this place. Take my kids to freedom. And make sure that my oldest son doesn't go and fight this war in Afghanistan for the Soviet Union. And at the time they were losing like these, just like we saw, having over the last 20 years here, there was these soldiers coming back with limbs missing.

And my dad's thing was, this is not our war. And this is a war that they're fighting that's never going to end. And Ironic how it all happened again, happened again, right here. And so with that in mind, my dad saved up enough money from making all these suits. And I asked him, I said, who would you sell it to? He goes, it's usually other officials in low-level government. The black market, they knew it was cheaper to buy off the black market than its stores, and so they would buy off the black market.

Interestingly enough, one of those officials that he sold to was a KGB agent in the region that we lived of Armenia, in Yerevan, the capital. And I remember there was a knock on the door. Several months before we left, right as the sun went down It was already getting dark. There's a knock on the door and Two agents come to our house now. It's not like here where they have to be I knocks and they have to have a warrant none of that This is the Soviet Union the KGB knocks you let them in and they knock and they go we hear That you were making stuff on the black market

One of these agents are one of the guys that have bought a suit for my dad. So he knows here that you were making stuff on the black market. One of these agents are one of the guys that have bought a suit for my dad, so he knows. But they're not here looking for what he's making. They're here because they've heard that he's trying to escape. And again, this guy knew, that agent knew. And so they were looking for evidence that my dad was making, so they were looking for like a meter stick,

chalk, thimble, sewing machine, anything that would show that he's making stuff on the black market. And my dad was really detail oriented. He would hide everything. So they searched the entire apartment and they've got us lined up in the hallway along the wall. Myself, my mom, my older brother, my older sister. My dad, he speaks filing. We just so in Russian He's speaking to them and he's saying look you know goes search here go look there

And wherever you want me to give you access to more than happy to this obviously some misunderstanding and I'm just listening to my dad Absolutely lying to these guys Scared because I could sense that my mom is tense my brother and sister are tense and They couldn't find anything so my dad says well what I want to make your trip here, an absolute waste, I've got a bottle of vodka. So they sit together in the kitchen and our little apartment in Armenia, and they brush off this bottle of vodka to three of them, the two KGB agents of my dad, shake hands and hug.

A couple months later, we're in Rome, Italy, as though we're on vacation, because remember, Italy, their sympathizers of communism back then, and so it would make sense that you're going on vacation to Italy. It would make sense that we're going on vacation to the United States. So we're going to Rome, Italy, at this, I had just turned six, and we just took two suitcases with us and a family of five. And my dad spent 10 days at the American consult in Italy and Rome.

They pumped him for information and being a member of the Communist Party in all. And we said that we're political refugees. If you guys send us back to the Soviet Union in Tarmina, like my dad's like, they're going to kill me. We want to come into the United States. We believe in the American way. We want my kids to have opportunity that I haven't had.

And so they said, where do you want to go? And my dad knew one person, kind of a friend of a friend and that person wasn't California. So he said, California, I hear it's warm. And I know one guy there. And so, like, to ask him, it's like, dad, you know, you moved us into a state that later became very communist like.

He goes, I didn't know. All I knew was, I knew there was one person that I knew a friend of a friend. So at least there was one Armenian there. And he goes, I knew that it was a warm state and I was tired of dealing with the snow. There's a lot of snow in Armenia. It's fair enough. And so, you know, we grew up, I grew up in Section 8 housing once they came here. Like, it was literally the opposite of the Cinderella story.

Because we had a decent life there. My dad being a member of the Communist Party, when no one else had food, we had access to food because he had his connections. Why did nobody have access to food because he had his connections. Why did nobody have access to food? Well, because at the time it's the Cold War, there's all these sanctions. There's not a lot of food coming into the Soviet Union. And what food there is coming into the Soviet Union goes to the mainland, doesn't really go to their adopted

little countries like Armenia that they've taken over, right? Like Latva, Lietva, Estonia, Armenia, all these little countries they took over, we got the scraps. So what little food came into the Soviet Union first goes into Moscow, Leningrad, all those places, and then comes to the outlying areas. And so the stores were always empty. I remember as a kid going to the stores with my mom, the shelves were bare. Like bare, people were in line in the snow. My mom would wait in line,

and then when we get to the front of the counter, even though the shelves were empty, they somehow had bread and butter and cheese for us. I later found out it was through my dad's connections. And that's the problem with the corrupt government. It was the corrupt system. And so, socialism doesn't work, and that's proof of it,

because they keep stuff behind the counter for the people that matter. And for the rest of the civilians, you don't get access. And so, I literally remember eating, it was like this beautiful sourdough bread pieces that my mom would put out every morning with butter on it and caviar, like Russian caviar. I grew up on Russian caviar.

We come to the United States, I'm six years old. Bro, I want the same breakfast that my mom gave me. Hot tea, sourdough bread, butter and caviar. We don't have that. Now it's government cheese. We're living in section eight housing. It's like this horrible, horrible tasting peanut butter. Bread is just completely dry

because it's the eighties, we're immigrants, we're broke. And I share that because it took some assimilation for me not to just learn the language and the culture, but to realize that we just went from, my parents told me we're coming to a country of freedom of opportunity. There's abundance. Yet my quality of life as a six-year-old just diminished. I lost my friends. I'm being picked on. There's gangs all over these sectionate housing communities. They're beating a crap out of me, because I'm the foreigner. I don't speak the language.

And the delicious food that I used to eat is no longer available. I'm reading government food. And so it was a pretty rough upbringing from there. How long was the transition from Italy into the US? Ten days. That's it? Just ten days.

And there was hotels in Italy owned by people that were anti-communist that dedicated like wings of rooms to escape these. Really? Bro, it's such a crazy story. Here's a power of social media. As toxic a social media can be recently a woman who's from Italy reached out and she says, my mom and dad ran one of those small little boutique hotels where Armenian refugees would come through. And I heard your story that you came through in June of 1980.

You may have stayed at the hotel that my mom and dad ran. And she says, I was a little girl during that time. And she's Italian, but she speaks fluent Armenian. I'm getting goosebumps talking about this because she would always interact with the Armenian kids. I don't remember whether I met her or not, but I asked my mom and dad, I said, were there hotels that, like, where are we,

I know we stayed somewhere, but they said, yeah, there's dedicated hotels that would take in refugees who were escaping communism and we stayed in one of those during those 10 days. Wow, that's incredible. Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, yeah. Wow. Wow, that's incredible. Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. Wow.

Well, let's talk about, I mean, so you get to the US, you're in Section 8 housing. I know you're, you struggled a lot. Yeah. You were, you were a trouble, you turned into a troublemaker. Yeah. How, how did that come about? Well, that comes about because again, you're the foreigner, you're the immigrant, you don't speak English,

your mom cuts her hair and it's like a bowl haircut. And she dresses you funny, like the clothes that I was wearing, we found like by the dumpster, the one of the apartments we lived in. And so my pants were always too short for me. I had the sweatshirt that was really tight, and it had Herman Munster. Do you remember Herman Munster from The Munsters?

I did. And so it said Herman Munster on it. And so people started to call me Herman. And I didn't know any better, so I started to respond to Herman, to the point where it's school teachers would call me Herman. And so we're living in Section 8 housing. There's a lot of gangs in Santa Ana, California,

especially the gang that was really prominent is called F-Troup. Yeah, F-Troup is a very violent gang. They're still going strong there. And dude, they would just bully anyone. And I remember my dad found like a bike. Was this like a Armenian gang? No, man, they're Mexican gang.

Mexican gang. Yeah, yeah. San Ana is, especially at the time, even now parts of San Ana are very highly Hispanic and F-troop runs large parts of the gang-infested parts of San Ana. And so those sectionate housing complexes were in those parts of town. I get it.

It was cheaper to live in, so that's how that was. But because of that, they would steal my bike. My dad found this broken up bike. He pieced it together and I had a bike rusted, completely broken. They stole it from me. These gangbangers stole it from me. These gamebangers stole it from me. And I know I am not the only one out there that struggles with sleep. I had a major problem sleeping. In fact, I didn't sleep much at all. I wake up in the middle of the night with a sore back, a sore neck, sweating

because I, for some reason I sleep hot. And then, on top of that, when you do wake up in the morning, cause you always get like that last 45 minutes before you know you got to wake up, right? And it's like the race against the clock to try to get a little bit of sleep. Then you get the sleep. Then you got to spend, at least I did,

my first 45 minutes of the day, stretching, wandering around the house, and all kinds of weird positions, just to try to loosen my back up, so I could put my shoes on to go to work. Well, then I started going to mattress stores and you guys get it, you go to the mattress store and you get like 20 different sales pitches

on why you need to buy the $6,000 mattress. Well, I had a friend tell me about this company Helix mattresses. So I went to the website, they got 20 something mattresses to choose from. They're all memory foam. They have cooling technology that keeps your body cool at night. That way you're not waking up sweating like I am. And the cool thing is they actually have a test. Don't worry, you're not gonna fail it. But it's just a questionnaire and they ask you a little bit about your sleep routine,

what positions you're sleeping in, and then they make a recommendation on what they think the best mattresses for you. On top of that, they have a hundred day test period where you can sleep on the mattresses. If you don't like them, you can return them, exchange them, whatever you want to do. I'm telling you, Helix was a game changer for me. Now, I don't have to wake up and wander around the house doing my stretching. It just, look, I don't even know what it does. It just works. Don't just take my word for it guys.

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to get their 2023 free gold IRA kit today. That's gold code dot com slash Ryan. Performance may vary, consult with your tax attorney or financial professional before making an investment decision. First, they beat me up and then they stole it. I go home crying. By this point, I'm six and a half years old going on seven. I go home, my dad comes home, where's your bike? Like they stole it. He's pissed off. He gives me a beating because that's just how it is.

That's like that part of the world beats their kids for discipline. I'm not saying it's right, that's just how it is. And I've since forgiven my dad. He gave me a beating. Just imagine how you're in your 40s, you come to a new country, you don't speak English, you live the good life, now you want to give your family a good life,

but you're, he had a paper out, he worked at a busboy as a busboy at a pizzeria, and then he was pumping gas in the middle of the night, right? Three jobs, and now he got his kid a bike, and I lose the bike within the first week. And so he gives me a beating and then he hands me a flathead screwdriver and he says, go get your bike back and the next time someone tries to take it, stab him. Like, okay.

And so I know I don't want a beating again. So the next time that someone tries to take my bike, I have to do what my dad said. And that exposed me to violence pretty early on. How old were you? Seven? Going on seven. Going on seven. Now, in Armenia, to kind of go back a couple of years, between the ages of four and six. And this is something I would never have talked about if we were doing this two years ago, three years ago, this show, but I've since have been doing a lot of healing, working with the therapist, but in Armenia, between the ages of four and

six, I was molested by two older boys, and this would happen on a daily basis in the car ports, you know, they would kind of pull them into the car port and have their way with me. And I was, I was much younger than them. They were probably 13, 14 years old. I was four, five years old and it happened for a couple years. So my mom and dad didn't even realize by escaping the Soviet Union, they saved me from that.

So I already had this like, I was always anxious and angry as a kid growing up, because I couldn't do anything about that. So I already had this like, I was always anxious and angry as a kid growing up because I couldn't do anything about that. And now I'm getting bullied and beat up by gangs. My dad gives me a flathead screwdriver and says, this is the answer. And so I realized it was almost like it was in the cards for me to end up like them. And so soon as I learned the language, stayed around in that community long enough. They've kind of adopped you. I was never in the gang, but they kind of adopped you as a friend and you start running with them. And when they start cardjacking, so as I got into my teens, they start cardjacking. I realized there's money to be made in cardjacking

people. You steal a at the time Honda Civics and Honda Accords, we can park them out and give them to auto body shops, those parts instead of buying it from the dealership, like a fender for let's say a 1985, 1986 Honda Civic would cost whatever, say 200 bucks from the actual dealership, they get it for 50 bucks from us. And then they sell it to the customer for 100 bucks. So they make more profit instead of having to go

through the dealership. And so we would car jack people. And before we know it, now I'm car jacking. Now I'm getting involved in robberies of homes. No, shh. Yeah. And when I look back, it's just kind of snowballed because the guys that were on my enemies beating me up, as I started to make friends with them, and it was harmless.

Like, we just run around playing Ding Dong Ditch-Him and just play Lating to the Night in the apartment complexes. One of the apartments we lived in was called Shade Tree Apartments, Massive Man. And so it was almost harmless fun. But then it was, hey, we're going to go do this thing. You want to come with us. And first you're just kind of riding along. Then you're getting out of the car and pulling someone out of their car and jumping into their car. And then of course the so we would stop at a red light. If the

car that we want is just Honda Civic, we would stop at a red light back up so that they can't take off to their front bumper, just kiss their front bumper. Now while they're panicking, like, oh shit, the guy in front of me just bumped into me. I get out of the passenger's side to come around his car and pull him out of his car, and then we take off and we spend all night stripping down the car. And then that auto body place gives us a ton of money for it, and we split it up. So you start off as a passenger,

you're just hanging out with your friends. Next thing you know, you're stealing a car. Next thing you know, it makes sense to go into a house and steal VCRs and, you know, jewelry, cutlery, anything that you can sell at a pawn shop. And that ended up leading to when I was 18 years old. This time, that particular day, I was the Getaway Driver. There was supposed to be a robbery of this house.

I was the Getaway Driver, so I parked across the street and five houses back and I could still see the house From where I am, but I'm not across the house my friends get out of my pickup truck They go into the house that case the house earlier. No one was supposed to be home They'd kind of figured out the pattern of these people. They weren't supposed to be home They hop the fans go around back and I know it normally takes Five minutes fastest ten minutes max, they're coming out with stuff. Dude within like 30 seconds, they're running across the street

and they're like step on it. So jump in the truck and I start driving. I'm like, what happened? There was a lady inside the house. Grandma was there, right? She makes eye contact, she panics. She starts screaming. So now a robbery becomes a home invasion robbery. I've got a 79 Toyota

pickup. I'm trying to get away. She's called the cops. And within about five miles, I'm like, fellas, I think that helicopters, the helicopters on us, that's that's that's for us. Like no way, dude, make a right hand turn. I make a right hand turn the helicopter turns I Make a left the helicopter turns pro. It's a 79 to go to pick up four cylinder engine This thing's not going fast and I'm trying to get into a high-speed chase here I look in my mirrors and I can tell these are unmarked cars white unmarked cars on either side of me So my dudes I'm not gonna hit the highway. We're not gonna get away with this or only best chances I'm gonna pull into that gas station

when I do everyone run anyway you can. Well, that plan failed because soon as I pulled in, the unmarked cars wedged their bumpers right into our doors, pull us out. Another cop car brings that lady who's in the house. And then she's literally across the parking lot at the gas station. They've got me and my three friends sitting on the front hood of the unmarked car.

She's across the parking lot with another police officer and she points to the first guy and nods her head. Yep, that was him. I saw him. Second guy. Saw him. Third guy. Saw him. Points to me. Shakes her head. I don't recognize him. Cause I was the getaway driver.

I realized that was to fork in the road for me, man. Like that day, they ended up getting arrested, going to jail. I ended up just having my car impounded and spending a night at the police station and the holding cell. Wow. That was the difference.

And that day I decided if things don't change. And I felt every time we do these, by the way, whether it was a car jacking or a home invasion and just want to go on record, by the way, because people go, dude, that's pretty bad. We made sure that the houses were empty. Like, this was, obviously we did a horrible job this time around. So we didn't want to be violent towards anyone. I especially didn't.

At this point, I had a lot of influence with my friends and I was like, dude, we don't need to do anything violent. Let's just take cars, steal property, but we don't need to be violent towards people. And then every time someone would put up a fight when we're trying to take their car, we would just jump back in the car and take off. But the idea was to come at them so aggressively, so, so quickly, because they're confused because

the car in front of them just bumped into them. So while they're trying to process what happened there, you come around and drag them out of their car. If they're putting up a fight, let's just take off. We're not looking to get into any kind of violence with anyone. So, and maybe that's what I used to justify all this, whatever the case was, but each time we would do these things, whether it was car jacking's or these robberies of homes, I felt guilty. And so I would listen to talk radio afterwards,

after I drop off my friends or we'd strip down a car all night, I would listen the next morning, would listen to Dr. Laura Sles messenger. She was a talk radio host. Oh man, I just listened to her. Do you remember that? Yes I do. I do. And you know she would talk a lot of great moral sense into her collars, right? And I remember one of her collars calling and saying, you know, it was a guy and he says, hey my wife's pregnant, I'm gonna have a boy.

I had a horrible relationship with my dad growing up so I don't know how I'm gonna father my son. I'm nervous, I'm scared. And he was just asking her for her opinion. And she said, you know, you've got two chances at a father-son relationship. Once when you're the son, once again, when you're the father. And I realized, holy smokes.

While my dad was there, he was, you know, again, I understand man, he came from a very troubled background of himself as a kid. He was beaten. He's seen some stuff, you know. We come to a country and now he's trying to fend for us and provide for us. And so he's just always angry.

And all he knows is violence. And so that's how he kind of for us. And so he's just always angry. And all he knows is violence. And so that's how he kind of raised us. And so it was Dr. Laura that taught me, that I first learned about karma. Like, I'm either gonna fill up the Karmic bank account or I need to fill up the Goodwill bank account. But if you fill up the Karmic bank account,

it's gonna come at you at some point. You're gonna pay your Karmic debt. And so I'm listening, literally listening to Dr. Laura to absolve my guilt and unbeknownst to me, she's coaching me and mentoring me through the radio. Like 18, 19 years old, I'm listening to AM talk radio. Like that should not be happening. But something in me felt such guilt.

And that day when my friends got arrested at that arco gas station and I just got my car impounded and went to the police station overnight. I realized that's a fork in the road. And that was literally the last time I hung out with them. That was the last time I did anything that was outside of the law to that level in terms of car jackings and robberies. And I decided that I'm going to better my life.

I don't know how I'm going to do it, but I'm going to better my life. I don't know how I'm gonna do it, but I'm gonna better my life. And that was a fork in the road. Let's rewind real quick. Back to the flathead screwdriver. Did you ever have to use that? Yeah. You did. And my dad said use it on the biggest guy.

So, gang's traveling groups through four or five, right? It's just the more powerful in groups because they're actually very insecure and they lack confidence, but in a pack, they're louder and they're intimidating. And so he said, when this happens, like they're gonna steal something from you, stab the biggest guy,

and stab him as hard and as often as you can, and the rest of them will run. And to his credit, it proved to be true. Can you go through that event? Well, the first time when I went to Stab, I pulled it out and I was hoping that that's all I had to do. And I always had it in my pocket. And I was hoping that's all I had to do.

When I went to Stab this guy, and by the way, they always had bats with them and knives with them and they would threaten you. They never once cut me with it, but I've plenty of times been threatened with bats and knives. So it wasn't just like they came with their fists. And so because of that, plus you were seven. Yeah. Six, seven years ago.

Yeah. Exactly. And I get it. That's what they're predators, right? So they're going after young kids and taking stuff that they don't even have to fight for. But I know that if I lose this toy, whether it's a bike or a ball or whatever, I've got to deal with my dad. And I don't want to deal with my dad.

And I don't want to let him down, right? And so he gives me this flat head screwdriver, stab the biggest guy and stab him off. And well, dude, I pull it out just to hope into myself. They're gonna leave. They're gonna, they don't. So I go to stab the biggest guy. And I, I'm a lefty, so I swing. And I probably didn't swing hard enough

or I didn't really want to stab him. I didn't realize how hard you have to stab someone to really penetrate. It bounced. The flathead, like, hit him. He was used for running a t-shirt and bounced. I didn't realize how hard you have to stab someone to really penetrate. It bounced. The flathead hit him. He was just wearing a t-shirt and bounced and he looks at me and I look at him and he just attacks me, man.

And so now I'm trying to stab him as much as I can and he realizes now like I'm going full force. He jumps off of me. All his friends are just watching. They go running and I realize in that moment, like violence does work and you have to really go all in on it. This was the first time that I got in a fight in my life. I've been in many fights and lost many of them in my life.

But this was the first time I realized that when it's time to get violent, you can't just kind of hope to threaten them. You can't just half-ass try and stab them. And it's weird saying this. And I've said this to my son, when you have to go violent, just go to 10. Go to 10. And that's what I have to do. But at this point, I was in a deficit.

Now he's on me. He attacks me. I'm on the ground. And I'm just trying to stab him. And as I was trying to just work up his body to his head. And I'm going as hard as I could He just jumps off they all take off and my reputation begins to change and at that point I started to build confidence It was after that that I still got attacked by other gangs and

just punks and But I started to build a reputation, which I liked because I wasn't in their game. I didn't have many friends. We would move around a lot in that community, but you're still in the same community. So you get to see the same kids at the 7-11, at the McDonald's, and at the school track.

Like there was a track where the kids would go and they'd ride their bikes and stuff. It was like a high school, a magnetite high school. And so now you've got a reputation where, hey, this kid's tough, he's violent. They start making friends with you because now they want to be an ally. And now they pull you into their circle. And I realized I wanted a friendship. I was alone. We move around to all these different departments, but we're always in the same community. So I say, all these guys have them fun.

I want to join them. And so it was easy enough for me to want to join them, even though months earlier, they were attacking me and stealing my shit. Now I realize at least I have friends. Now I'm part of a pack. And this is truly like when I look back into my life and we talked about the Squire program, like this was my right of passage. This was my right of passage. And these

older gangs, these older guys, I don't know, maybe they were testing me, trying to see what I was made of. But I felt better when I was in the click with them than when I was an outsider, always worried that something's going to be taken away from me. The sun's going down. I better go inside because in the summertime, sun doesn't go down till eight o'clock at night. And so like, I want to be able to stay out. I want to play.

I can hear them out there playing, but I always felt terrorized until that day. And so violence became a tool. And I got good at it with a gang and I got intimidated or I became intimidating. I realized you can steal cars, you can steal stuff from people and most people aren't going to do anything when you approach them with violence and you never even have to use it. And it was a worse thing for me because it reinforced a bad behavior over and over again. One I had friends, like I got good outcomes from it.

I had friends. I started making money. I started to get respect in the community. And so it reinforced doing bad things to get the desired outcome until that day at the gas station with the police helicopter chase. Did you, did you ever tell your dad that you used the flathead? Oh yeah.

How did he respond? He just said good, like good for you. Like that's what he's supposed to do. Let's backtrack to sexual abuse. How long was that going on? That happened out probably for a year and a half, two years. I eat two years. Yeah, yeah.

It's starting out for four to six. Four to six, yeah. Yeah. Did you ever tell your parents about that? They still don't know. My parents are still alive. They still don't know. I don't want them to carry the weight of that now.

To carry the guilt of that. I understand that. And I didn't tell anyone until I was 38 years old. I had this massive panic attack at 38. I'm 49 now, so this was 11 years ago. And it just like worked related. I was building my businesses, my companies, and I was in massive debt because got myself into a lot of debt, maxing out credit cards, refinancing our house, and had this massive panic attack. And so I ended up working with a therapist, while they put me on doctors, put me on Xanix. And I didn't like how I felt on Xanix. I just felt numb, no creativity, no desire to work.

So I asked the doctor, I was like, hey man, yeah, I don't feel anxious, but I also don't feel any desire to work. And this is not good considering I'm in debt and I'm trying to build a, build a company. He said, well, have you tried talk therapy? I'm like, that's for broken people. He says, well, you know, good therapist can give you tools to deal with your stress and your anxiety. So I found a good therapist and I started working with him. And he said, yeah, within three or four sessions, we can give you some tools. I was like, cool. And he taught me things like halt, hungry, angry, lonely, tired.

When you're halting, when you're hungry, angry, lonely, tired, an alcoholic is more likely to go back to the booze. A drug addict is more likely to relapse to drugs. You're more likely to have your panic attack when you're hungry and you're only tired when you're stressed out. And so take care of those things. Basically, it's self-care. And then he also taught me that anxiety

is anticipation of future pain and that action alleviates anxiety. I was like, okay, anxiety is anticipation of future pain. Yeah, I see why I had that anxiety attack. I was anticipating this with my business partner that I was having a fallout with. I was anticipating that with this thing with my I was having a fallout with. I was anticipating that with With this thing with my debt that I owed that was coming up. There's all these things to anticipate

On the human brain always anticipates the worst case scenario Like I need to go up to my business partner and tell him that we shouldn't work together anymore And he's gonna hate me. We're gonna end up fighting. It's gonna be expensive When in reality when I really did talk to him about it, he was like, you know what, I felt the same way, man. And you're right, we should part ways. Let's figure out the finances. It wasn't anything like I anticipated,

but I had so much anxiety for months, right? And so anyway, Kevin, my therapist, Kevin Downing, he gives me these tools. And I know it sounds stupid, but when I was hungry, angry, lonely, or tired, I just addressed them, I would sleep. I took pride in, I'm not gonna sleep until I get all my emails done.

So I'd be like one in the morning, I'm still grinding away emails. Or I'm hungry, but I'm not gonna get up off my laptop to eat or I'm thirsty, I'll get water after I do these things. And you end up kind of almost getting into the red, not even realizing it until you either snap at your wife, snap at your kids, snap at your employees, or end up having some kind of a panic attack where you just melt down, right? And so when I had that first of several panic attacks,

pro, it felt like a heart attack. Like my throat started to close up, my arms were tingling. And I realized like this is not, this is more than just feeling anxious. I thought I was having a heart attack. Went to the doctor, he said, your heart's fine, but we're going to put on Xanix, that led me to Kevin Downing to therapist. He's like, three, four sessions, I'm going to give you some tools. You do these things, have the conversations instead of anticipating a negative outcome, like have the tough conversations. In fact, the title, man up came from I just had this little mantra in my

head, dude, just man up and have that conversation, man up and do that thing. Instead of constantly putting it off like I used to and then anticipating a negative outcome and then having a panic attack or flipping out on my wife. Like I'm not proud to say that. That's how it was. And so four sessions in, Kevin's like, dude, how's your anxiety level?

So I'm like, Kevin, I feel great. I feel like I've got control of everything. I'm having conversations and advance. I've got my halt under control. You know, like, this is great. I'm sleeping. I'm rested. Self-care. I'm literally signing the credit card receipt. His last, for the last session with him. I'm standing at his doorway. It's on the two-story building office building. And it was a room

about this size. And we would just sit across from each other just like this. Except when I'm seated on his couch, to my right is a window. And I could see my SUV at a GMC Yukon. And I could always see it out the window. And then to my left is his door. I'm standing at his door, signing the receipt. And he goes, hey, by the way, since this is your last session, is there anything else you want to talk about?

I was like, nope, everything's fine, Kevin, peace. I'm ready to go. I'm a very outcome driven, so he helped me deal with my anxiety. I'm good to go. He goes, what about your parents? I was like, listen, Kevin. My dad was a communist.

He was heavy-handed and he would beat me a lot. He would just get very angry, but I've moved past that, plus what happened to me It was heavy handed and he would beat me a lot. He would just get very angry. But I've moved past that. Plus, what happened to me as a kid in Armenia was even worse than the beatings my dad gave me. I threw that out there. Keep in mind I had previously never talked about being molested, not to anyone, not even my wife.

It's like I would hate when my wife would come behind me and try and hug me from behind. Really? It would trigger me. And so I would just turn around very quickly and behind me and try and hug me from behind. Really? It would trigger me. And so I would just turn around very quickly and just hold her that way, right? And she'd be like, what's the matter with you? I'm like, nothing, just hug me here and not there, right?

Because in your head, the last thing you wanna do is talk about that, share that, have to bring it back out. I'd rather just avoid it. And I thought I dealt with it. So I told Kevin, I go, plus what happened to me as a kid in Armenia was worse than the beatings. My dad gave me. He's like, well, what happened?

Dude, I just started bawling. Grown-ass man, 38 years old, standing at his doorway, got a pen and a receipt in my hand. And I can't move. I'm literally petrified. I'm bawling. And I'm looking out his window at my truck at my SUV and he's like, were you abused? I just nod my head yes because I can't, words aren't

coming out of my mouth. Was it sexual abuse? Not my head yes. Were you raped? Not my head no. Were you molested? Not my head yes no. Were you molested? Not in my head, yes. Was it by a babysitter? No. And finally the words rolled out by two older boys. Just kind of rolled around off my tongue. I'm just crying, man. Looking at my cars, just thinking like if there's any way I can just fling myself through that pain-glass window to get to my car and not have this conversation, but I'm stuck. I can't go down his staircase. I can't fling myself out of this window right now. I don't want this conversation to happen,

but I'm stuck here. And I realize now in hindsight, in those four weeks, Kevin built such trust and rapport with me. He's older, so he's probably in his 60s. Grey hair, it kind of looks like Einstein with no eyebrows. It's the only best way I can describe him. And very kind soul.

In those four weeks, he built such rapport, trust with me that for the first time ever, I felt safe. I felt okay. I felt not judged to say that. And but now that it's coming out and I'm crying, I don't wanna be there. I wanna either backtrack down the staircase, fling myself out his window, I can't do either.

And when I say, it was two older boys and he goes, I'm sorry. Now I'm crying even more, like, it's not everything. I'm like, this is nuts, man. Like the internal conversation is suck it up, clean yourself up and leave. Like you're done. This is your fourth and final session with him.

He goes, are you okay? I said, Kevin, what happened to that little boy I've dealt with? He says, can I tell you something? It's sure. He says, can you say, I've healed. I start crying again. And then there's like the internal conversation is like, I hate this man right now.

I don't wanna be here. I don't wanna be talking about this, but it also feels like I need to be. Like he's the guy I need to be talking to about this. And so he goes, can you say that? And I just shook my head, no. And he goes, I want to let you know that the way you said it is called disassociation. In other words, what happened to that little boy?

I've disassociated myself. And he said, disassociation is the first step into creating multiple personalities into having a multiple personality disorder. Now I'm like, I can't, like, all right, I come here for a dealing with anxiety. I'm trying to build this like big franchise business. I'm in debt. Now we just took the,

broke the seal on this thing that happened to me when I'm like four or five years old, right? Hey everybody, I am excited to tell you about my new veteran-owned sponsor this thing that happened to me when I'm like four or five years old, right? Hey, everybody. I am excited to tell you about my new veteran owned sponsor to the Sean Ryan show pure talk. You guys know, I love veteran owned companies. Pure talk is a wireless company, four Americans by Americans and their customer service.

It's right here in the US of a. Here's the best part. The coverage is fantastic and it's the most dependable 5G network in America. And if you're with Verizon, AT&T or T-Mobile, you can most likely cut your bill in half. They want to kick off their partnership with me with a great offer. Here it is. Sign up for unlimited talk text and 15 gigs of data for just $35 a month. In Pure Talk, we'll send you a free 5G Samsung Galaxy. This phone has a 2-day battery life, gorilla glass, and an edge-to-edge display. You will absolutely love it. Just go to puretalk.com slash rion for your free super durable 5G Samsung Galaxy when

you switch to Pure Talk. Again, visit puretalk.com slash Ryan to make the switch today to America's most reliable 5G network Pure Talk wireless 4 Americans by Americans. This episode is sponsored by Better Help. A lot of you know that we talk about mental health consistently on this channel. And I've personally disclosed my mental health issues after leaving the military in a career at CIA combating all that comes with going to war. I came back home, I got myself into therapy, it was a tough time, but I was able to redirect my entire life onto a better trajectory. I give therapy a lot of credit.

And that's why I want to talk to you about better health. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give better help, but try. It's entirely online designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and switch therapists at any time for no additional charge. Let therapy be your map with BetterHelp.

Visit betterhelp.com slash Sean today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp. H-E-L-P dot com slash Sean. Part of me is I do need to talk about this. The other part of me is like not now, maybe a decade from now when the wheels are back on the bus with the business,

like this thing is moving along, like a moment the growth trajectory of a business. But universal timing, God's timing, who's ever timing it is, the timing was then. It had to be then and Kevin had to be the guy. We spent the next 15 months unpacking all of that. Because the last thing I wanted to do was have a personality disorder

where I can't even say what happened to me. I'm saying what happened to that little boy I've dealt with, right? Delt with. And so we spent the next 15 months. Every Monday I was on his couch, talking about what happened, and he really kind of, he's so good at putting words to the things

you're feeling. And I realized that's what a good mentor, a good, good therapist does, a good healer does. They're able to put words to what you're feeling. And he goes, are you feeling shame and rage and confusion? Yes. Shame because I can't believe this happened to me. Like no one can find out. Like it's embarrassing. No one can find out that happened to me. Like I think I'm broken.

Rage, how did this happen to me? In the Armenian culture, in the Russian culture, the Babushka's, the Grammaz, they're kind of the caretakers of the communities. When all the men are working and the factories and stuff, the community grandmas, so like your grandma will leave a door open. My grandma would leave the door open. All the families live together. And I can walk into your apartment, and there's always food sitting out and eat. And so the grandmas were very vigilant

in taking care of the young kids in the community, making sure we're fed, we're clean, looking after each other. And I was angry because, I'm telling this to Kevin, I'm like, they would grab me by my ear, bro, and drag me to the restroom to wash my hands if I came into someone else's house and started eating.

They would drag you to wash your hands. They'd slap you across the mouth, and then they feed you, right? That's just how the Babushka's rolled. They were that vigilant about that. I'm being molested in the carport underneath the complex. They never looked out after me. And I'm telling this to Kevin and he kind of leans back

and he goes, what do you think would have happened if those grandma saw that? Like, oh, they would have tore those boys to shreds. She goes, do you think that maybe they didn't see? They didn't know that was happening. So for 30 years, man, I was carrying the weight, this rage, right? Of why didn't anyone protect me from that?

Like these old ladies would be so vigilant in making sure my hands were clean before I eat. Yet I'm being molested over and over again, and they're turning a blind eye to it. When in reality, they never saw it. Because if they did, they would have done something about it. So the shame, rage, and confusion, the confusion was, like, am I gay?

Did I somehow invite these guys to do this to me? Am I secretly gay and I don't know? Oh, man. And so you go through your life with the soundtrack of like shame, rage, confusion, shame, rage, confusion, but then you're trying, you're ignoring it, but it's always playing in the back of your head. So now try and have a marriage, try and raise kids, try and launch a business, try and rage, confusion, but then you're trying, you're ignoring it, but it's always playing in the back of your head. So now try and have a marriage, try and raise kids, try and launch a business, try and have a friendship.

You can't, you can't because you're constantly playing this loop of shame, rage, and confusion in your head. And you can't let it talk to anybody about it because it's the most embarrassing part of your life. most embarrassing part of your life. Do you have any, there are, there are a lot of kids that are going through that right now, a ton of them. And even in these interviews, I'm finding more and more men who've all overcome it here on that have been in this show. I ask everybody that's been through something like that, what advice do you have for

a kid who's growing up in a broken home that's going through that right now? Yeah. I think the best advice, two parts, whether it's sexual abuse or physical abuse, understand that it's not your fault. You did nothing wrong. Like Kevin did such a great job explaining that. Because you internalize it. Like I probably did something to make them do that. Just like when a parent is beaten their kids because the parents insane or stressed out, the kid begins to believe that I did something for this, I deserve this beating. And so you begin to carry the weight of that. So one, realize that it's not your fault. You did nothing wrong. Those people are fucked up, whether you're getting beat,

or sexually molested, or emotionally abused. By the way, they've done cat scans over and over again on tens of thousands of subjects. And they found that whether it's sexual abuse, physical abuse, or mental and emotional abuse, the same part of the brain lights up. The fight-of-light system lights up like a Christmas tree. So when people are like, Pedro, you're so brave,

you're talking about being molested, brave, you're brave. I was just beating. I wasn't molested. I'm like, listen, you and I, the same part of my brain light up. Like, I'm not any more brave than you. Like, what happened to me?

It's just different. What happened to you is different, but we're having the same thing. We carry this weight of it. We feel like we're broken. We feel like we're unlovable and unworthy. And so you've got this soundtrack constantly running while you're trying to have a high performing life or trying to have a decent life, right? And it's impossible. Those two dots don't connect. They're opposing thoughts. And so one, it's not your fault. You did nothing. Those people are fucked up and it's their fault. Like you were just the receiving end of their abuse, right? The other part of it is

this. And this is again, another beautiful thing about social media. Find a mentor, find a good replacement dad, a replacement older brother, someone who can help you heal because through YouTube, Instagram, there's platforms out there of great healers, therapists, interviews like this where people realize like, oh, if I actually do the work, like, dude, this, if this was my timeline of life, that incident, a me being molested by two older boys, was a mountain, not just a little road, like a little bump, it was a mountain on the timeline of my life. Today it's maybe a little speed bump. Like that's how much impact or influence it has on me.

Zero. That I could sit here on a show that's going to get millions of eyeballs and talk about it. I can get on stage and talk about it. Whereas before you'd have to kill me and I'd choose death over acknowledging that. And so you can heal, and if you don't wanna go and work with the therapist right now, cool, I get it. Start looking for answers in books on social media platforms

or great therapists. There's great shows out there that really will guide you through a process very similar to this. And when you start doing the self-work and realizing, oh man, I deserve to be loved. I'm not broken. I did nothing to invite this into my life. You began to shed this weight. I'm not kidding. After those 15 months of working with Kevin, dude, people would walk up to me who hadn't seen for a while. They go, dude, you look younger,

you look different, you look more vibrant, something's different about you. There was almost like this dark energy that was lifted from me, because I constantly carried shame and rage and confusion. And when you're walking around with that, and I'm not a woo-woo tree-huggy type of person, but it does show up. People can sense an energy.

And I probably had this dark energy I was giving off. Now they're seeing me years later as I've talked through it and I've healed through it and I can talk about it publicly. I did, did you lose weight? You somehow got younger, did you cut your hair or whatever? In my head, I know the answer. I know the answer because I keep hearing that over and over again. Well, I really appreciate you digging in and reliving that and imparting your wisdom on the millions of kids that are going through it right now. But on that note, let's take a quick break and when we come back, let's get into some much newer stuff.

Yep. Thank you for listening to the Sean Ryan Show. If you haven't already, please take a minute, head over to iTunes and leave the Sean Ryan Show review. We read every review that comes through and we really appreciate the support. Thank you. Let's get back to the show. Alright, Bejoes, we're back from the break. I wanna get into some entrepreneur stuff.

So you are, I mean, you're a serial entrepreneur, extremely successful, coming from the childhood that we just went through. What was it that got you into business? Or let's actually, let's rewind a little bit farther than that. What, where did you go that day that your friends got arrested? Well, what happened? What was the trajectory after that?

Yeah, so that was, I just graduated high school. Okay. So my friends got, all of us got arrested. It's just they ended up going to jail. I ended up end doing community service. I ended up doing community service just staying at the police station overnight and then having my car impounded

because that woman wasn't able to identify me. But I made a decision, it's funny, right? There's always a bottom, like they say, an alcoholic has to hit rock bottom, an event has to happen and you're like, this is it, this is the Berlin is drawn. For me, that was it, man. That was, I was like, I'm not, my dad didn't escape.

Soviet Union bring us here for me to end up being some dipshit. I didn't like what I was doing, but I kept doing it because that's just what you do when you're with that crew. And so one, I knew I had to separate myself from them. And two, I knew that I needed better influences. Right around late high school, that always been kind of a chunky, stocky kid.

So right around late high school, I started working out. I wanted to get in shape, ask the screw in the kayak to the prom senior year. So I figured if I was in shape, there's more like, she's gonna say yes to me when I ask her out. So I got in shape, but by the time senior year came around, to say yes to me when I ask her out. So I got in shape, but by the time senior year came around, I didn't have the balls to

ask her out. So I never went to the prom. But I was like, man, working out has really changed my life. So I figured, all right, what else do I like to do? I love working out. So what if I become a personal trainer? Because at that point, now I'm 19 years older. So I became a personal trainer.

And at the time I started working at Disneyland as a bus boy, which I got fired from there. That's a interesting story. What'd you get fired for? Dude, I got fired from Disneyland because I, so picture Main Street Disneyland, Main Street. When you're walking towards the castle castle on the left-hand side, there's a restaurant called Carnation Cafe. Next to that is the Blue Ribbon Bakery. I work at Carnation Cafe as a bus boy. In the summer times, in the 90s, during the Main Street electrical parade, like all 80,000 people at Disneyland were on Main Street for that parade.

And so that restaurant carnation cafe is a zoo, a zoo. And as a bus boy, at the end of the night, it's your job to clean the place up, clean the kitchen, et cetera, make it presentable for the morning crew when they come in. Was it turns out I was going to open, I was closing that night, but I was going to open the next morning. And if you don't have the right closing crew with you as a bus boy, like if you're good and the two other dudes are slow, you're not getting out of there till like 3.34 in the morning. But if you're with some good dudes, when the park closes the midnight,

you could be out of there by one o'clock, get four or five hours of sleep, be back in there at 6 a. 6am when the park starts to reopen. And so I knew like these guys are so slow, we're never going to wash all these dishes, pots and pans, ladles, like it's an industrial kitchen, right? And so if you kind of convicted Disneyland, well, if you're walking towards the castle, Carnation Cafes on the left hand side. If you have an aerial view, the Jungle Cruise Adventure Land is right behind Main Street on the left.

The Jungle Cruise, where they parked those Jungle Cruise boats, are right behind Main Street USA, behind Carnation Café. It's like this canal, and there's two rows of the Jungle Cruise boats. And that Jungle Cruise water is very murky. They made it look like the Amazon. The whole idea is you're going through the Amazon.

And never even dawned on me. Those things are on a track because the little sailor who's driving it right or along, you know, he's navigating it, but he's talking to you and showing you the hippopotamus and showing you this. And that obviously it's on a track. So that night, I'm taking just giant bus tubs of pots and pans and ladles and I'm dumping it into the jungle cruise river, right? So the boat broke. I'm an asshole.

The boats had already parked, because the park shut, they put them in that canal, they don't just leave them out and they open. And there's these like fake walls that open up in the morning and then the boats come out as the guests line up to get on them. The morning, apparently, when they open up the gates to bring the first set of boats out, they both derail because there's a ladle sitting right across the track. When I get there at 6am to start setting up the restaurant,

there's divers and full on tanks, wetsuits coming out with pots, pans, ladles, six pans, quarter pans. And like everyone's lined up. All my managers from Carnation Cafe, they're all lined up just like, what the hell, right? Well, I needed to do that. I shouldn't have done it, but I needed to do that

so that I can get out in time and get there in the morning in time. And so we washed half the dishes, the other half. I was just like, hey guys, don't worry about it. You guys just keep busing the tables, all washed these. But I wasn't washing them. Half of them I'd washed the other half. I just dumped into the jungle crew.

And like in this Disney, they got money. So you didn't realize it was gonna derail a boat. So it derails the jungle cruise boats. They take all day to like get these boats back on track, right? So I just imagine like some poor family comes from like, you know, Iowa to enjoy Disneyland. And some little girls like, I'm gonna go on the jungle cruise ship or the ride.

And this knucklehead, I've derailed it, right? And so word gets around that I, that was my fault. And so I was immediately fired. But that also taught me I'm unemployable. So anyway, I was working at that time. I was working. I got a job at Disneyland, and I needed to make extra money. And Disneyland has a high gay population. And so a lot of my co-workers were gay. And one day I'm telling them, I got all these nieces and nephews, man, we're our menion. I got a lot of nieces and nephews. The holidays are coming.

I got to buy them gifts and bus boy income isn't going to cover it, you know? I just started my personal training career, but I had like three or four clients at LA Fitness and a big box gym. And I'm asking these guys, like, do you know anyone that's hiring and this guy Randy Randy, goes,

well, you're around this case all day long. If you don't mind being around more gay people, there's a gay bar down the road that's hiring called Oz off the five freeway. I'm like, dude, putting a good word on there. They go, yeah, it pays really well, like 17 bucks an hour. This is in the 90s, early 90s, man.

And like any other bar, like as a balancer, you're getting paid $9, 10 bucks, 17 bucks an hour, right? I'm like, I'm there. So we put something good word, I get hired. I get hired at Oz the gay bar. First week, everything goes fine. Well, the first week the gay dudes are trying to test you

if you're gay or not. And once the word gets out, that you're not, everything's good. They're keeping their hands off you. Everything's fine. Second weekend, I'm working there. So I would work there Friday, Saturday, Sunday nights. Second weekend, I'm working there.

And the head balancer is like, hey, we're gonna need all the balancers in the parking lot before we let all the patrons out. How come? Skinheads are there with bats, with lead pipes, with chains, and they're looking at gay bash, right? And so I realize every weekend, we're getting into fights with skinheads

who are looking at gay bash because they don't agree with that lifestyle. I'm just trying to make 17 bucks an hour, bro. I'm trying to throw out a drunk gadeute. I'm not trying to get into a fight with a group of skinheads in the parking lot. And so it didn't last long, like probably a couple months of working there.

I'm like, do this isn't for me. I got to figure out how to make more money as a personal trainer. And so I was literally one of my four personal training clients and I had already been fired from Disneyland at that point. One of my four personal training clients, his name is Jim Franco. And he would drive up and I would look outside LA

fitness the double doors and I would see him like, one day he drives up in an SUV, the next day is like a Mercedes, the next day it's an old classic muscle car. I was like, Jim, how many cars do you have? He's like several. I was like, wow. how many cars do you have? He's like, several. I was like, wow. He goes, you're allowed to have many cars.

I'm like, yeah, I guess for you, you're rich. Oh, I'm like, you're really getting by with that truck. He goes, well, because you're a lousy salesman. And I said, I bet to differ, man. I sold you a six month personal training program three times a week. You paid like four grand for this thing. He goes, you didn't sell it to me.

You're an order taker. He goes, I came in here looking for to work out three times a week for six months. You just filled out the order and took my credit card and the gym charged me. You probably got a commission, like, yeah, you're right. He goes, you probably get paid what, 12 bucks an hour.

I go, yeah, 13 bucks an hour to train you, you know. He goes, yeah, I see you turn away, people left and right, that you should be selling. You're horrible at what you do. And in a condescending way, I go, well, teach me. The next day, he shows up with three books, one from Brian Tracy, one from Tom Hopkins, and another one from Zig Zigler, like sales books, right?

He's like, read these. And then he brings in like these cassette tapes, listen to these, the psychology of selling by Brian Tracy. I remember those ago, flat thing with like, read these. And then he brings in these cassette tapes. Listen to these. The psychology of selling by Brian Tracy. I remember those ago, flat thing with eight cassette tapes in it. And man, a whole new world opened up to me. I went from being this employee minded, thinking someone else controls my income,

to realizing I've got a built-in mentor. Like, one of my personal training clients owns a company, has multiple cars, like comes in at two o'clock in the afternoon, like I didn't know anyone that could leave work for that long. Like, aren't you gonna get fired, Jim? It's like, no, I own the company.

Get fired, like after I leave the gym, he goes, I'm done for the day. I'm like, you work half days? Yeah. And just, this whole new world is opening up to me, right? My dad had taught me work, I'm done for the day. I'm like, you work half days? Yeah. And just there's whole new world is opening up to me, right? My dad had taught me work ethic. My dad, I'm so grateful he brought me to this country man. Like he risked his life.

My dad had three jobs at any given time, right? And he ultimately opened up his little tailor shop and he worked six days a week, 13 hours a day. Like I've got work ethic for my dad, but Jim Franco taught me how to actually create wealth. And he taught me how to sell. He taught me how to influence. He taught me that I could actually open up my own personal training studio. He actually helped fund it. And he said, I'll give you a loan, make me your business partner. Basically, I'm going to be a silent business partner. And he would just coach and mentor me.

And so that was a catalyst of me becoming an entrepreneur. But the thing that led me to always want, I always knew I wanted to make a lot of money. What led me to that? It's always trauma. Do trauma will lead you to your greatest things. Like there's some kind of deep seated trauma is why someone ends up doing something so great and meaningful in life. When we had first come here, remember I said we lived in Section 8 housing.

My sister, so I was six years old when we got here, my sister at that time is 21. My brother was 19. She was 21 or 22. My sister had a job at the same pizzeria, my dad worked at my dad worked there in the early evenings, my sister worked in the afternoon. The owner of that place was, for a lack of a,

he would just sexually harass her, right? She were foreigners, they're getting paid under the table. We're still applying for our green card at the time. He would sexually harass her. She would come home crying. And my dad would say, just tough it out a few more months. Like, we're now getting on our feet. Tough it out a few more months. Like, we're now getting on our feet, tough it out a few more months,

you won't have to work there. And, you know, when you're six, seven years old, you feel helpless. And I remember one day as my sister was crying, and keep in mind, so she was in her teens when I was born. So she helped raise me. So she's my older sister, because she's 16 years older than me,

but she's also like a mom figure to me. Yeah. And so when you see this, your sister, your mom figure crying and you feel helpless, and you know that she can't quit because we need money. And my brother's working multiple jobs, my dad's working multiple jobs, my mom's trying to stay with me and has a job of her own.

I went up to her and I said, hey, one damn, I'm gonna make so much money that you'll never have to work again. Something that I guess a kid would say because I just needed to somehow have some power there in that moment, have some control. Because I felt like there's nothing I could do to help her. So I tell her this, hope she'll stop crying.

Fast forward now, I realize, for the last, gosh, 13 years, my sister works for me full time, from home, offer laptop, doing the most basic customer support, makes an obscene amount of money. And in fact, now both my mom and dad are dealing with dementia and she just tends to them while she's on my payroll and my healthcare and all that. And I share that with you because again, always in hindsight, I look back.

I was always hell bent on making money. It didn't matter if it was carjacking, robbing homes. I needed to make a lot of money because money is something we kept running out of. I kept hearing my dad say we would run out of money before we run out of month. And so he would always have to decide whether we're paying the gas bill, the electric bill, the water bill, but we couldn't pay all the bills, right? And this is what living in section eight housing. This is what is finding food in the dumpsters

behind grocery stores. Like we're trying to make it work, man. You were literally... Eating out of dumpsters. Dive in dumpsters. Yeah, looking for food. Looking for food. Because my dad had figured out,

so where the gas station was that he worked at, there was an alpha beta, a grocery store. They're no longer in business. Behind that grocery store, giant blue dumpster, and they would throw away food that had expired, but hadn't necessarily gone bad or had gone bad, but it just had some mold on it. The bread would have mold, the cheese would have mold,

and it even sounds weird saying this, because till this day, I'll find something in the fridge and it's got mold, the cheese would have mold. It even sounds weird saying this, because till this day, I'll find something in the fridge and it's got mold, like cheese. I'll just pluck it off and eat it. My wife's like, what are you doing? You could afford a whole dairy, like just throw that away, Marlin,

our house manager will go buy more. This is a good cheese woman, like this is fine. I'm gonna eat it. To me, it's just like I'm programmed, like just picked them old off and eat it, right? And I'm fine. And so anyways, but till this day, that's just how I roll because I've been brainwashed

by that, but we were like dumpster diving, man. And I think about that, it's like a set, different life. It's almost like a movie that I see when I think about it. And there's always been this great pain to make a lot of money to be able to take care of the people in my life. And so with that, when Jim Franco kind of opened up the world of entrepreneurism, like, hey, you could own your own personal training studio, you could have other trainers working for you.

Like, you worked for LA Fitness. I was like, holy shit, I could. Like to me, that was just like, I'd never even thought of other people working for me, right? So before I know it, I ended up opening up my gyms throughout San Diego County. I had 10 to 12 personal trainers in each one. It was all just, whoa.

Yeah, whoa, whoa, whoa. Open up multiple gyms. Let's, how about the first gym? Okay, the first gym was a struggle. So the first gym, premier results, again, Jim Franco loaned me the money. He was like 50,000,000 bucks. And he charged me 8% interest,

and he owned 50% of the business. So, some of the entrepreneurial lessons that I've gotten in my life have been because I've got such a ruthless mentor. Like today, you know, if you ask me, like, hey, Bader, someone wants to charge me 8% interest on a loan, and then after I pay it back,

there's still my business partner. I'm like, Sean, that's nuts. Like if they're gonna be your business partner, you don't pay back that, it's not a loan. That's how they buy in. But Jim Franco was like, hey, I'll give you 50 grand for 8%, and I'll be your 50-50 business partner.

I'm like, deal. So I pay him back with 8%. But my first gym, and he literally taught me, like, right, you need leads. I do, yeah, I do, you're right. What do I do? He goes lead boxes. So I would put up lead boxes.

Like, I picked 200 stores over a five mile radius of my, so it was like a 2,300 square foot facility in San Marcos, California. And it was all one-on-one personal training. Jim's like, by the least amount of equipment you need, you're gonna do 30 minute personal training sessions and not an hour. I was like, ooh, that's brilliant.

Gonna maximize our time. You're gonna sell long-term packages and not just one or two sessions at a time. Cause back then, the personal training industry was all about one or two sessions at a time. He's's like, so long term packages like LA Fitness was doing. I was like, that's right. I could do that. So before you know it now, I'm actually making money. I've got personal trainers delivering the service. Jim Franco is mentoring me and having me put lead boxes out. I go through and I pick up all the lead boxes and I start calling people and he gives

me a script. Hey, this is Pedro's cool Ian, premier results. You put in your name and phone number to get a free week of personal training. We want you to come in. We're located in San Marcos, California. Here's our address. And they would come in. We train them for three sessions, three times in one week. And then on that third session, we'd give them an offer of two, three or four times a week with a personal trainer for 12 months, right? Dude, we were selling $4,000, $6,000, $7,500 personal training packages. And that to me was like making millions because I had never seen that kind of volume of money move. And I realized there's, Jim Franko's not an anomaly. There's people that just have a ton of money and they will spend that to work out with a personal trainer or some other kind of coach

learning a skill, whatever the skill is. And when I realized that, and Jim Franko was just constantly coaching me, all right, now we're gonna do this. Now you need to have people start referrals. So you gotta ask your clients for referrals. Like I never thought of that. These things that were just natural for him, because he's an entrepreneur, he would tell me,

and I would just execute. He would tell me, and I would execute, and I would see the results. And the things that I wouldn't get results from, I would tell him, hey, I tried that, it didn't work. He goes, all right, let's try this instead. But the whole thing was having a mentor who's already been where you are.

And he wasn't even in the fitness industry. He's in the automotive industry. He owned like software. So if you go like an auto parts store and you're like, Hey, here's a, I need an oil filter for my car. They'll find you the part number and they go, that's, that's the oil filter, right? He owns that software for all the independently owned auto parts stores across the country called autolog. But he would take the same concepts from a different industry, teach it to me. And it would work. And I saw that really it's formulaic entrepreneurship, financial success is formulaic. You don't have to be born here to be successful. You don't need to have a college degree to be successful. You don't have to be white collar to be successful. You don't

have to come from a pedigree of entrepreneurs to be successful. My dad was always working class. Ultimately, he did have a little tailor shop that he opened up, but he still owned a job. If he decided to close the shop down, he's not getting paid. He couldn't just go on vacation with that closing the shop down. Jim Franco told me that you want to take a little bit of money from a lot of people. And I didn't realize that a little bit of money could be thousands of dollars

when those people are insanely rich. And those parts of San Diego, like there's people that had a ton of money, man. Like we're serving attorneys, we're serving accountants, and they're wives. And we're seeing each of these. So I was like, Jim, I ran out of capacity. He goes, open up a second location.

Like, I don't even know how you can, you can open up a second location like I don't even know how you You can open up a second location just never crossed my mind. So I open up one in Encinitas Open up another one and Mirrietta open up another one for you know, there's five premier results throughout that greater San Diego North County South County area Lone behold one day a new brand of gyms are growing across the country, and they make me an offer to buy out my five gyms. So what I do, I call it Jim Franco, my mentor. Jim, you're not going to believe this, this brand, I signed an NDA, so I can't talk about it,

but this brand, this brand is coming through and they want to buy us out. He's like, good. but this brand is coming through and they want to buy us out. He's like, good. Let's start talking about valuations. Now I'm learning valuation, how to evaluate a business, how to negotiate. And I've got Jim Franco helping me negotiate, teaching me these things. And I walk away with $670,000 dude

for selling my gyms. Wow. Like early 30s. How many gyms? Five. Five gyms. Five gy Five. Five gyms. Five gyms. And the reason for that is Jim Franco forced me to change the model.

Instead of selling one-off sessions, like five sessions at a time, 10 sessions at a time, and then once you use up those five or 10, sell another five or 10, he said, do what a big box Jim does. Sell a big package and then break those payments down over 12 months. The reason that company wanted to buy me out is because we have what's known as recurring revenue, receivables, scheduled to come in.

People on a 12 month contract. They bought my receivables, man. And had I ran, if I was running the business the old fashion way, the gyms run, which is five and 10 sessions at a time, there's no receivables, there's no predictability, they wouldn't buy me out. And there are so many great lessons there.

And, you know, I don't have a college education, I barely made it out of high school. I just had a mentor who I trusted and did everything he said. And when I hit a problem, a bottleneck, I would just go to him and have him teach me and show me the way. And soon I realized there's got to be other mentors in this industry, in my industry, who are doing that at a bigger scale. And that's where the idea of franchising set in. And that just took my whole brand and organization to a new level. So is Jim still your business partner? No. So when premier results got bought out, he got his half of the money, right? Interestingly enough, this past April was his 80th birthday. So

I talk about him in my book. I've had him on my podcast once just to give you an idea how influential this man is in my life. Sean, when I told you I had a Yukon, Denali, right? A GMC Yukon Denali. And that's because when I was this personal trainer, he drove one of his cars was a Cadillac Escalade. So I didn't like how the Cadillac Escalades were, but the sister of the Cadillac Escalade is that Yukon Denali.

So I bought that fast forward years later. I would stay in contact with Jim, but now I'm running my franchise, doing my thing, got my podcast, the Empire Show, at the time. And my book had just come out and people were reaching out and saying, hey, Jim Franco's still alive. It'd be great if you had him on your show to interview him.

I'm sure he's proud of you. I'm like, yeah, he's proud of me. We still talk on the phone, but I don't see him as often. So I call him up, I'm like, Jim, do you know what a podcast is? No kid, I don't. Great crusty old man. Oh shit. Okay, Jim, you know how people get interviewed on TV?

Yeah, yeah. I'm gonna interview you, so I'm gonna be on TV, no Jim. This is gonna be cameras, but it's a podcast, we're on YouTube, and then we're gonna strip the audio out. Okay, where do you need me, kid? At our corporate office in Chino Hills. At this point, I'm driving a Nissan GTR. Pretty expensive sports car.

Jim Franko rolls up in a Nissan GTR. Get outta here, I swear to God, we still have the pictures, right? Dude, this man is, I'm getting goosebumps. He's my rich dad. It's like Robert Kiyosaki's book. I got my poor dad who taught me work ethic and who risked his life to bring us here.

I got Jim Franco. He's got three daughters, two daughters, Jamie and Tiffany. And I think he just saw me as a son, you know, during the personal training sessions. And I truly did see him as a father figure. I didn't have to, I did what he was paying for his sessions. He didn't have to hang out afterwards and mentor me, but he saw something in me.

And so he mentors me, right? And I built five gyms, and then he helps me negotiate the deal, and I sell them, and then I bring him on my show, and he rose up in a Nissan GTR like a decade later. And I'm blown away, and I realized like this man has so much influence.

I went and bought a sports car that I subconsciously knew that he would buy, right? And so I had him on my show when he's just super proud of me. And so here we are 23 years later. He celebrated his 80th birthday few months ago. And he called me and said, hey kid, it'd be great if you came to Tiffany's house. They're celebrating my 80th birthday. I'm like, Jim, I'm there. And I show up and he called me and said, hey kid, it'd be great if you came to Tiffany's house. They're celebrating my 80th birthday.

I'm like, Jim, I'm there. And I show up and he's just introducing me to hundreds of people. And he's as proud of me as he is of Tiffany and Jamie, his daughters. And it's just a crazy feeling because then his grandsons come up to me. They're teenagers.

They're like, oh my God, we wanna take a picture with you. We follow you on social media, we watch your show. And I'm like, dude, your grandpa taught me everything I know. Like, he's the real gangster here, you know, and it just comes full circle, man. If I had not had that mentor, I would have never been able to build Fitbody Boot Camp to an international franchise

and supplement companies and apparel brands and coaching and software. Like one dude decided to see something in me when I saw nothing in myself, other than I needed to make money and I'll do whatever it takes. And he mentored me and years later I ended up actually mentoring this young African-American kid. His name was Layton.

He was 10 years old when I had an outdoor boot camp. So at this point, I'd sold my gems. I had an outdoor boot camp in Chino Hills. This is before Fitbottie boot camp was created. Like in the park, I was running a workout program in the mornings in 2005, 2006. And his mom was a nurse. So she would work the night shift and then come to the morning boot camp. It was like 20 women that I would put through a workout fast pace at

the park. And she would bring her son with her. And her name is Tori. And I said, toy, why, why are you bringing your son? He was well, you know, he know, he wakes up in the morning, I work late at night, and he still go to school right after this, so I haven't get ready. He gets himself ready. I'm like, wow, no one helps him get ready, huh?

Like 10 years old, that's impressive. Yeah, dad's out of his life, and I later find out dad was in prison. So dad's out of his life, so I bring him here. I want him to have some good influence. So I want him to meet you and stuff. I'm like, oh, cool. So I would just talk to him after boot camp.

And when he's 10 years old, he's writing around on a skateboard while I'm working out with his mom and a group of women training them. I stay in his life over those years. As he gets older, he gets a job, but he decides he wants to become an entrepreneur. So he asks me if he can come to my office to ask me some questions about entrepreneurship. He does. I go come at five o'clock, we'll spend 30, 40 minutes, I'll answer whatever questions you need.

So I realize I'm kind of becoming the Jim Franco in his life, I've known him since he was smaller. And I go, why don't you just come once a month? He's like, yeah, that's not gonna be a problem. I'm like, no, dude, I feel I need to pay it forward. This goes back to Dr. Laura, when she talked about carmic bank account and Goodwill bank account. Wow.

Bro, I realize I'm getting, I realize that this woman, Dr. Laura, had such a profound impact on me. I had such guilt, carjacking and robbing homes that I would then listen to her show, hoping that I would feel less like a piece of shit. And she talks about Carmichael and Goodwill Bank account and you need to pay off those Carmichael debts in life

and you do it by filling up that good will bank account. I'd never even heard that terminology. It's just like I grew up like a feral animal in section eight housing. And then years later, Jim Franco just sees something in me, has no reason to mentor me at all. Like busy entrepreneur, like he should just get his training and leave, but he sticks around and he talks to me and coaches me and gives me advice. And so I just start paying it forward to latent.

I didn't even realize that's what I was doing. I just felt called to and I did. So now he's in his 20s and he's coming to my office for a few years. Once a month, asking questions. And one day I'm like, Clayton, your little business is growing. However, I think if you worked with me here in my building, you're going to have environmental exposure. And we are like high performers here. We are selling tens of thousands of dollars a week in franchises, in coaching business, millions of dollars in business every month is happening out of this building

across my various brands. Like if you're in here, it's going to be the best mentoring for you instead of once a month. So come sell for me. I'm going to teach you how to sell. He's not on how to sell me. I'm going to teach you. So I teach him how to sell. So now he sells for me. He's making 25, 30 grand a month on some on as good months, probably 15 to 20 on as bad months, even more crazy when my son wanted to learn to box. I had introduced latent, latent's mom to this guy Aaron Weatherspoon. Dude, this is how crazy the universe is. Aaron Weatherspoon was at the time the he he fought in the king of the cage, right? He was a Walter Wait fought him King of the Cage, right?

He was a Walter Wait fighter for King of the Cage, Black Dude, Quiet, Humble, but a frickin' menace on the mats. And I wanted to do a six week challenge and I wanted to do MMA training. So I knew of him from the gym. I was like, hey man, can you teach me MMA for six weeks, three times a week, and then,

pretty much fight me at the end of that six weeks and test me out, which that was a great thing because I did a six week challenge with Aaron Weatherspoon learning MMA. On the tail end of that challenge, my family and I went to Maui on a vacation, flying back from the vacation, or over the Pacific, it's like 11 o'clock at night. We took, we were taking the late flight home

to Southern California, Cheena Hills, LAX, and we're sitting in the back of first class way up there in the front of first class. This guy starts going bananas, like just nuts. He's doing the gun gesture to the guy in front of him, hitting the seat. People have cleared out And my wife is across the aisle for me. So it's me and Andrew

And I was sitting on the aisle me and Andrew next to each other my wife is across the aisle Sitting next to Chloe Chloe sound asleep my wife looks at me. I'm just like what the hell's going on? Right? Just trying to pay attention down to sleep, my wife looks at me, I'm just like, what the hell's going on, right? Just trying to pay attention. The guy behind my wife, he and I make eye contact and it's that eye contact where like, okay, if shit goes down, we got each other's back. No words were spoken.

I see the flat attendants starting to make their way down and as they're getting closer and they're going down my aisle, they had zip cuffs, black zip cuffs interlaced together. And so I stopped them like, ma'am is everything okay? like anything I could do to help and it's this older lady the flight attendant and two other women She goes well, we have to ask him to put this on He's a flight risk like oh, okay, is there anything I could do? She goes well, we have to ask him to put this on

Okay, so she cuts with a galley creates like a human barrier between her and the cockpit. And she goes in front of him and says, sir, you gotta put this on. The dude stands up and now he's just foaming it to the mouth, going bananas, make me, I dare you to make me. Like, she looks up towards me in this guy and just yells help.

We go running. Now this is like post 9-11, you know, this is like, so Andrew was six years old, so I don't know, 2009, 2010, 2011. I'm thinking as post 9-11, this is like, so Andrew was six years old, so I don't know, 2009, 2010, 2011. I'm thinking as post 9-11, we're all about to get dog piled. I'm thinking since me and this guy are gonna be one of the first ones there,

how am I gonna breathe under the stack of humans, right? Is what's running through my mind? Yeah. I'm wearing flip flops, because we're coming from Hawaii, and we're in a helo- hatty shirt, floral shirt and shorts. I had a couple of my ties in me to be honest with you. At the time I hadn't stopped drinking yet.

All right. So now I'm sweating profusely, like I'm nervous. So I cut across the galley just like she did. I get in front of him and I'm looking towards her, like, tell me what to do. And he goes, what are you gonna do? And he goes to push me. And I did exactly what Aaron Weather Spoon taught.

I just pushed his arms out of the way and I got behind him in a rear naked chokehold, right? I got him in a rear naked chokehold. He's a taller dude. Now he's bucking like a Bronco, the other guy who was sitting behind my wife. Now he's got the zip cuffs. I'm choking this guy out.

I'm thinking to myself, I'm scared, I'm nervous, I'm sliding out of my flip flops, I should have worn another pair of shoes and not flip flops, right? Like, bro, I'm Armenian. God's blessed me with a lot of hair and sweat glands. Like, everything else is earned, but I can sweat like no one's business. And so I'm sliding out of my flip flops, and so I'm choking up on him. He finally collapses, but now I'm on his back, and this guy is trying to bring his arms back behind him, but my gut is on him.

So he's like, dude, you got to move so I could zip time. I'm like, bro, he's still bucking, right? And in my head, I was thought it was gonna be a dog pile, and it's just a two of us, and I'm thinking, shit, everyone is watching this thing go down. Like, there's gonna be like phones out, right? So I'm like, all right, what would Aaron do? Okay, Gia team chokehold.

So I swing around just like Aaron taught me and got him into Gia team chokehold, Sean, this works, right? Just a tiny bit when I was training with Aaron, I'm like, well, of course he's gonna let me get him in arm bars and chokeholds. I'm paying him for the six week challenge, but with this really work working real life, right?

That skepticism just kind of lingered in my head. Now we're on a plane 30,000 feet over the Pacific and it's working and it's working. Oh my God. The dude zip ties him and we put, the flat attendance told us to put him way in the back by the window and then me and the dude spent the rest of that guy spent the rest of the time sitting security with him. So, and then my wife and his wife got all the hummus and chips and wine that they

could drink on the flight for free. The funniest part of this story is as we're leaving their plain landed, you know, cops are there, cops bored and they tell everyone, hey, no one get out, you know, we walk him out with the cops and the pilot and the co-pilot want to thank us. So so now it's the guy who helped me is in front of me, his wife, me, and then my wife and kids, we're all walking out. Now we already took the bad guy out. And the flight attendant points to the guy who helped me

and she goes, here's hero number one, to the pilot, he shakes the hands, and then she points to me and goes, here's hero number two, and my wife hits me in the back of the head, she goes, here are number two. Right, you can't even be here on number one. Yeah. Right. But so all that to say that those skills

that I was doing just as a challenge to see if do I have what it takes, right? Came in handy on an airplane. So years later, I introduced Aaron Weatherspoon or Aaron's, I introduced Aaron Weatherspoon to Toy, Layton's mom, right? Because Toy wanted him to learn self-defense. I figured why not introduce him to an African-American man

who could also have a positive impact on him. Because I'm not black, Aaron is. I might be able to have different influence on him, but Aaron could have a positive influence. They become fast friends, they're still friends, we're still friends. Now're still friends now latent works for me has Is married with two kids has a third kid on the way. He's got two daughters and He's mentoring my son. He's so good at boxing now because Aaron taught him so much when my son wanted to learn to box

I go andrew latens like a pro boxer now. He's like, no kidding. So, you know, we call it Layton, like, hey, L, will you train the Andrews? Like, yeah, of course, he had already trained the Andrews to ride a skateboard because Layton's really talented, great skateboard rider. So, Andrew and Layton start boxing together at my gym. And now, Andrew's getting really good at boxing. So, when Layton announces to us to me and Andrew,

he's like, guys, my wife's pregnant. So, Layton's now 27, right? So 17 years, the story's been going on. He's not working for me. Wife's pregnant with the son. So as soon as latent sends a text message to me and Andrew, that his wife's pregnant with the son, Andrew comes running down from his room, he's like, Dad, Jim Franco mentored you. You mentored Layton. Layton mentored me. Now I get to mentor his son.

Holy crap. Wow. Dude, talk about full circle there. Right. Heading, man. Is that nuts? All because, like, Dr. Laura's talking about filling up the goodwill bank account and just getting rid of your

carmic debt. And I decided to do what Jim Franco did, which has just come with the servant heart. Quaker State Full Synthetic Motor Oil keeps your engine running in perfect harmony, which means you don't have to worry about your car, and you can concentrate on other stuff. Like working out what the heck is going on in that true crime podcast, or putting the finishing touches to that playlist you've been working on for months. Finishing touches to that playlist you've been working on for months. Energize your engine with Quaker State, available at your local Canadian tire. That's incredible.

You're going to get Dr. Laura on your podcast. I would love to. That woman has literally stopped me from life of crime. That's amazing. Well, let's dig into FitBody Bootcamp. How did that start? So again, as entrepreneurs, what do we do? We're always looking to solve a problem that exists.

The fastest solution to making money is solve a problem and exchange for money. And so I realized that when the housing market crashed in 2008, people couldn't afford one-on-one personal training anymore. At least not a lot of people couldn't afford one-on-one personal training anymore, at least not a lot of people couldn't. In fact, at that point, a lot of one-on-one personal training gyms were starting to go under. And years earlier, I was doing this outdoor boot camp, right, which is where I met Layton's mom, Toy.

And I was like, man, I'm charging $229 a month. I got 20 women working out here in the morning. I get to use the park. Only problem is I live in California. So states like California and Florida, where the weather is permitting, you can run boot camps outdoor year round. Make money.

But if you get too big, the city's gonna stop you or in all the other states, you're dealing with the weather, with rain, with snow. So it's not a business model. So I'm like, all right, if I were to create another business model, because I'd already sold my gyms at this point, if I were to create another business model, the economy has failed.

People still want personal training, but they just can't afford to pay $6,7,800 a month for one-on-one training anymore. What if I take that outdoor concept and bring it indoors? So we took that outdoor bootcamp model in 2010, so two years after the housing market crashed and brought it indoors. So we took that outdoor bootcamp model in 2010. So two years after the housing market crashed and brought it indoors. And I wasn't sure if it's going to work. So here's a great business lesson. Test small, if it works, scale big. And so I didn't want to sign a lease because I knew if

I signed a lease, now I'm on a hook for three years or five years. So I went to a gymnastics center and I said, hey, in the mornings, your place is empty because all these kids are at school. Gymnastics start normally done after school. Can I pay you guys like 500 bucks a month to use your gymnastics center? Do I have a gas share? Of course, no problem.

I go, can I bring some dumbbells and some battle ropes and some TRX straps? It's like, yeah, sure, no worries. So I literally had some tubs that I would had these battle ropes in and TRX and dumbbells in and at a gymnastics, all-star gymnastics in Costa Mesa, California.

And, do now we're making 10 grand a month, 11 grand a month, 12 grand a month. We're using equipment. No one's gonna kick us out because we're not at the park, we're at a place. This is weather proof. So we open up a second one inside of a different gymnastics center. That works.

We open up a third one by signing a lease. Now this is working. And I'm seeing gym owners who are running one-on-one personal training, starting to kind of, they're curious in what I'm doing. So I go, hey, what if I license out my model? So, pay us, at the time, it was like 5 grand and it was 5 grand and then $500 a month

and you can license out my system. I'll teach you how to sign a lease and build out a boot camp and I'll coach you guys along as you're running your boot camp and give you the marketing systems and sales systems, all the processes that I've developed up to this point. And so, of course, at this point, I had probably 118. So it took about two years. Now we're coming up close to 2012, about a year and a half. And I had 118 locations licensed out across the country, United States at this point. We weren't internationally yet. And the state of California reaches out to me and says, you are operating as a franchise,

and you are not a franchise. And therefore, we're gonna find you $2,500 times 118 locations that you have. Bro, I was charging five grand by in fee and then $500 a month. I had a handful of employees, I'm paying off debt. I didn't have $2,500 times $1,18. And so I went back to you, all right, what would Jim Frank will do? Well, he'd probably

negotiate with them. So I go to the mega look, why are you guys doing this? They said, well, you're operating as a franchise by giving a protected territory. The only reason I was giving my franchise or licensees a protected territory is I saw how CrossFit was operating. Like you can CrossFit is a licensing program as well. They just call them affiliates. Brilliant business model. But a CrossFit, you might open one right across the street from another CrossFit. And it's basically the survival of the fittest. Where it runs the better business, makes the money. The other guy goes bankrupt, closes down.

I didn't want my licensees, my Fitbody Bootcamp owners to end up competing. I wanted them to compliment one another. So I figured if I give like a five or six mile radius, you can't open another one up close to another location. So give everybody a protected territory. Well, apparently that's one of the check marks that the Federal Trade Commission has for a franchise.

And, right? So I crossed the line into franchising, unknowingly, state of California wants to find me because that's how California rolls. $2,500 times, 118 locations. So I wanted to Jim Franco mode, my guy, Jim Franco would negotiate. So I went to the mindset, look,

one, if you find me, I'm just gonna have to go So I went to them, I said, look, one, if you find me, I'm just going to have to go out of business because I can't pay the fine, which means these 118 locations that have signed a lease that are counting on me to coach them and mentor them and teach them their monthly marketing strategy, they're going to be on their own. So now they're going to go out of business, or at least a good amount of them. But if you let me make it right, I'll become a franchise. Don't charge me this fee. Give me time to turn into a franchise. And I won't sell a single new location until I become a franchise. To my surprise, they said, fine,

do it. I thought it would be a simple form online that I would fill out. And I'm a magic way of franchise due to took nine months to become a franchise. $85,000 because you have to work with the franchise attorneys. Standard operating procedures. You need an FAA, a franchise agreement, and an FDD franchise disclosure document. The Federal Trade Commission governs all franchises. I had no idea what I was stepping into. So it was a blessing because if you had told me Bader's do you want to franchise and these are the complexities of it? I'd be like, forget it, bro. I'm going to come up with an easier business model, right? But because I felt obligated to

these 118 locations in California decided to go with my idea of not finding me, instead letting me become a franchise, I franchised, so by 2012, we're officially a franchise. I turned to all my licensees and I said, would you guys sign a franchise agreement? About half of them did. And so all of a sudden we have like 50, 55 franchise locations, overnight, virtually overnight, we're doing a couple months, right?

That got the attention of these magazines, these publications that keep track of fastest growing franchises, fastest growing donut places, fastest growing sandwich franchises. I'm familiar I read them all the time. There you go. So I, sometimes I believe I've got a rabbit spit up my ass because that process, like having a good mentor is one thing. Like I realize, okay, I got a rabbit's put up my ass because that process, like having

a good mentor is one thing, like I realize, okay, I got a good mentor, he's helping me and I'm doing the work. But I got so fortunate that California didn't find me, that they agreed to me, agreed to work with me. I became a franchise and overnight virtually my 55 or so of my licensees became franchisees. I had no idea that when you become a franchise, it's tracked somewhere. And so all of a sudden, we're on the Inc. 5000 list

the next year. Like, I'm on the Inc. 5000 list, right? Well, now the next year, we keep selling more franchises and those other 50 converted. Year two, I'm on the list. Year three, I'm on the Inc. 500 list. Year four, I'm an entrepreneur magazine's 200 fastest-growing franchises. 50 converted year two on the list, year three on the ink 500 list, year four on an entrepreneur magazine's 200 fastest growing franchises we were 142 one year

114 fastest growing franchise the next year and all this is happening and each time it happens we get more franchisees on board and so now this is starting to test my leadership because I went from having three employees to like nine, 13, 18, 20, 22, it's growing. I'm dealing with personalities. I've got my own shit to deal with, right? I haven't worked with the therapist up to this point.

That's when that big anxiety attack hit as Fitbody Bootcamp in 2015, where just over 300 in some odd locations, I get this massive panic attack. I start working with Kevin. Half of my team quits because I'm just a horrible leader. I just outgrew my ability to lead and manage. I didn't realize that you need to hire a second

and command and get an assistant. I was trying to do it all. I just had some employees like, okay, they're doing data entry. These people are doing, you wanna get equipment, great, will help you order equipment from here, but I was doing the sales, the marketing, the franchise support, all that stuff. And had it not been for that anxiety attack, I wouldn't have gone to a therapist,

had Kevin not been such a great therapist, I wouldn't have talked about being molested as a kid. Had I not worked through that, I would have never become a better leader because then Kevin Downing turned me on to all these, you know, you're talking to him about what's happened to you as a kid, but you also talked to him about the rest of your life, your marriage, your kids' life. And I'm like, man, this leadership thing, running a company's heart, he's like, oh, have

you read this book? Have you read that book? And so 21 irrefutable laws of leadership. Oh, wow. You know, what about you know, Jim Rowan has that book. Have you read this? No, what about and next thing I know I'm reading all these books on leadership and he's introducing me to these different courses and Cameron Harold Cameron Harold started or he was a second in command for 1-800-GOT-JUNK, right?

They come and take your junk away. He was a VP of that. So he's like, you know, he's got a few great books out. He's turning me on to these books on leadership and management that I was so locked on with Jim Franco learning to market and sell. Forgot there's a other tool you need as your business grows, which is to lead and manage. And my team grew faster than my ability to lead and manage and then it collapsed on itself.

For a period of time, FitBody Bootcamp had a pretty tarnished reputation. How did it collapse? Well, I had a mass exodus one day. I was a very passive-aggressive leader. So I wouldn't necessarily say, hey, Sean, I need this done by this date. I would say, hey, dude, can you make this website?

And you go, yes. And you say, when do you need it? I go, as soon as possible. Well, you're the technician. You know, as soon as possible, it's gonna be four months to make what I wanted. It's very complex. As soon as possible to me, it's two weeks.

So now there's that disparity. I'm expecting two weeks. You think it's gonna be four months because you're the expert. Now, each time I walk by you, because you're my web guy, I'm passive aggressive because you haven't delivered it to me. Hey, is it ready yet? No, not yet. Right? And again, when your dad is a communist and he calls it the five brothers, the five brothers, you know, the backhand manages

everything, you're taught to be seen and not heard. And so I'm not a great, I wasn't a great communicator at that time. I didn't know how to set my expectations. And so my employees didn't really know what I wanted because they can't read my mind. And yet I'm being passive-aggressive towards them because they're not meeting the deadlines that I have in my head that I haven't conveyed to them. And so I was like became more and more passive-aggressive with them and then would snap at them. One day I come in and three of my employees decided to quit on one day. And it's not like I had 70 employees at that time.

Yeah. I had maybe 20 employees, like under 20. Three of them quit on one day. I'm like, what the hell, right? A week later, my head of operations, the lady who was, kind of takes our franchise contracts and files them away, I commend as she's gone. Like, her desk is cleared off, man.

And I could smell something. I could smell like chemicals. And I'm looking around at the other employees. At this point, it's like 15 employees because I got people quitting left and right. So I went from 20 to 15. She's got her desk is clear. No one's making eye contact with me. I smell chemicals in the air.

I see two big trash bags in the corner. As I get closer, I could smell chemicals. I opened them up. It's all of our franchise contracts. In the restroom, we had carpet cleaning solution, fluid. She dumped all the carpet cleaning fluid, and then we had a coffee machine. She dumped out a pot of coffee in there, tied it up, walked out.

That was her great big fuck you to me for being a horrible leader. Like, leadership, bad leadership has a cost. And that's the price I paid. Myself, Joan, who's now my assistant, and now the VP of my company. This was good, within the first year

that Joan, my assistant came on board, and I'm like, God, man, I got one good employee. She's gonna quit now, Joan. And myself, my wife and Joan are peeling apart franchise agreements. Like credit card numbers are running. Oh man. These are numbers that we need to process every month

for royalty fees, right? We're laying it out on the carpet, trying to blow it off and try it. I'm just like, what the hell is going fees, right? We're laying it out on the carpet, trying to blow it off and try it. I'm just like, what the hell is going on, dude? It was on the heels of that that I had that massive panic attack because everything was crumbling around me. Franchisees are leaving because the brand has grown

and I told them that, hey, every month you get to do a coaching call with me, but I've got more franchisees than I've got time to deliver coaching calls. So I keep putting off their calls. Well, they paid money for that. So now the reputation of the brandy's eroding, my staff is eroding, I'm in debt.

And every business will hit that point where they grow so quick. It's a hockey stick where they grow so quick that the expenses grow faster than the revenue and then the cracks in your skill sets and your traits. So skill sets like marketing, sales, leadership, traits like decisiveness, communication, productivity. You start seeing the painful cracks, almost like a speeding race car. Like the faster it goes, the more likely it is for something to happen to it.

Like, if there's a crack in that engine, you're going to see it then during a 150 mile an hour race. And right around that 2015, 2016 mark, man, is when I was franchise locations were closing down faster than I was opening them. And that is a kiss of death for a franchise. You never want to have locations closing faster than you're opening them. And when you lose a franchise,

you have to disclose that in your FDD, franchise disclosure document. So now if Sean Ryan wants to come and open up a Fitbody Bootcamp, when we send you the FDD, you get to read all of the failed locations and their addresses and their contact info And you're calling them and going hey, so why did you close down your Fitbody? Oh, man My like I would sit in a car in the parking lot and go what is the most effective way to kill myself? so that

My family's not traumatized and I couldn't figure it out So I would drag my ass into the office and work another day and the next day I would sit in my car so that my family's not traumatized. And I couldn't figure it out, so I would drag my ass into the office and work another day. And the next day I would sit in my car and go, how do I kill myself? And we had like $100,000 in life insurance on me. So I was like, I got to find a way to kill myself,

where the family can cash out on the life insurance. And so my wife and kids aren't traumatized. I couldn't figure out a way. So I would drag my ass back into the office. But all that while, I'm also working with Kevin and developing myself and developing my skill sets through the leadership books and management books that he's recommending to me.

And it was about a two year, two and a half year turnaround. And so that blessing of hitting all the, you know, Inc. 5,000, Inc. 500 entrepreneur magazines, while that was a blessing and we grew fast, it showed so many of the stress cracks in my skill sets and traits, which since I couldn't kill myself, I had no choice but to fix those skill sets and traits. The rest of it is time under tension. You stay under the weight long enough and you will just learn how to squat. And it was just time under tension and good mentors and doing the work and then it just kind of worked out. Is there any particular reason to work out?

What did you change with your leadership? Do you hire somebody to manage more? Take the load off? Yeah. So the first thing I did was I realized my vision had to be shared. So I improved my communication skills. And that, to me, was hard. Start reading books on communication.

Leadership book led to management book. Management book led to, hey, most managers can't manage their people because they don't know how to communicate to different personality types. I'm like, shoot, I bet you that's me. So now I'm reading communication books. Communication books tell me, communication isn't just a one way. It's a dialogue, right? You're not just telling.

It's a dialogue and it's setting expectations and real communication is tell, show, do. I'm gonna tell Ryan what my expectations are, what I want, I'm gonna show you what I want it to look like to end result, then I'm gonna ask you for a due date tell, show, do. Like, can you do this by this date? And if the answer's no, you're gonna give me a due date.

Now, I'm not gonna be adjured to you by being passive-aggressive because you didn't meet some false expectation in my head. And I realized it was, you know, tell show do. And I realized that communication was a dialogue. So I'm taking communication classes. I took toast masters to learn to speak better. I took improv classes because some of the books recommended to take improv classes to be able to communicate thoughts, feelings, ideas. I started casting a vision like, all right, where's FitBody Bootcamp gone? All right, we're going for 2500 locations by the year 2026, got it. Now I need to convey that to my team. Now if we know that we're going for 2500 locations,

what is our daily wins? Dude, I don't have any of that. If you back then, if you had told me, how do you want a FitBody Bootcamp to look? I would say I want a ton of locations. And you would say, well, when you want to buy, I would say as soon as possible, as soon as possible, it might be a year for me, it could be five years for you. And so no one had any clarity on vision.

And so I was emotionally undisciplined. I was indecisive. I had no real specific direction in terms of vision until I learned that I needed a cast of vision, share it with your team and then reinforce that vision daily, weekly, monthly, hourly. And then you need to bring people to share your core values with you.

And then I develop core values. Like, all right, I'm a hard worker. Okay, that's one. What else? I'm deciding I'm developing discipline. Great. What else? We communicate no matter what.

Okay, great. I need to get better communicators. And so now I realize part of being a good CEO, good leader means you're literally mentoring your team. So now it's not just go get mentorship. Now you're mentoring your team. They look at you as a father figure. They look at you as someone who's going to help them. Even though you're paying them and they're supposed to do the job,

you still have to coach them along and help them level up. As your business gets faster and more sophisticated, you create more process and systems. The bigger your business gets, the faster it moves, more complex the processes and systems, which means that if if Badegross is able to run it moves more complex the processes and systems, which means that if

if Badegross is able to run the operations department with a hundred locations, but at 250 locations, there's more complexity, I haven't grown as an individual, you're going to fire me. So it's on you to develop me so that I could run the operations department to that capacity and beyond. And so when I realized all of that and all of that was a byproduct, so like there is a one thing that I did that turned to corner. It was literally becoming a better leader, a better manager, a better communicator, more decisive, emotional discipline. Instead of reacting, I've learned to respond and the difference between

an emotional reaction is either getting passive aggressive or snapping at you, which means you're going to shut down and probably go look for another job. Or I could just take five minutes, clear my head, and just respond and go, Hey, I probably didn't do a good job explaining my expectation. Sean, so I apologize for that. Here's what I was looking for where else do you need clarity on like if you just respond to a situation This doesn't have to be in workplace. This could be in a in a marriage Like instead of that fist going through the drywall, which is a re-emotional reaction It's going to shut down your wife if you just take five minutes ten minutes a day off and then respond with

Hey, I think here's how I screwed up. And here's where the communication breakdown was. You will actually find the outcome that you want in that marriage or that business or that partnership. And so no one ever told me that entrepreneurship involves so many soft skills. I just was like the hard skills that I need

are market and sell. There's like hundreds of soft skills you need that without them, it's going to implode and implode and implode until you want to take your own life. I'm learning a lot right now. What did, what is the football team boot camp today? How many locations? Yeah. Well during the pandemic, we lost 218 locations.

Oh man. Yeah, the pandemic was not good to us. But this again speaks volumes to Jim Franco's mentorship of me. He had told me that once you create your primary business, create multiple income streams. And he recommended a book to me many years ago by Robert Allen. And the book talked about how to buy homes with no money down, but one of the, which I've never bought a home with no money down, but I did learn in this book that he's got multiple income streams.

Because in this book, he talks about buy this course, get this coaching from me, you know, buy my other book. I was like, man, this isn't his only thing, huh? He's got like several other books. He's got a course. He's trying to upsell you like a live seminar. He's trying to get you to do his high-level coaching program. This dude's got multiple income streams. I bet that gives him more financial security than just this one source of income. And so Jim Franco had, and I seen Jim Franco develop multiple income streams. Well, he's doing this for the automotive industry. What if I could also

solve this problem in that industry and that problem? And so as Fitbadi Bhukam grew, I created truly in supplements. My simple monkey brain said, well, you've got all these clients across hundreds of locations. So you've got tens of thousands of clients working out. They need supplements, protein, hydration, greens, wellness shots, create supplements, sell it through your franchise locations, your franchisees will make money, you'll make money. Dude, we launched truly supplements late 2018.

2019 has started to gain traction. We're just selling it through our franchise. 2020, the pandemic happens. I have done March 16th, 2020, I do a Facebook live to all of our franchise these because we have them in a private Facebook group. And I go, guys, we need a flat in a curve, right? Because it's the pandemic. We hear it's a death virus. We need a flat in a curve for two weeks. We need to shut your locations down. And at the time, Bryce, who's now the CEO of Fitbody Bootcamp, he was my VP. I turned to Bryce and I'm like, dude, I come from a communist background, so I can't really

trust the government that this is only going to be for two weeks. Let's assume that it's going to be two weeks, but let's go and make some workout videos so that if this thing lasts longer and we don't reopen our locations, our franchisees can put their clients in a private Facebook group and then drip feed daily workout videos in. So let's start making workout videos in the filming studio downstairs. He's doing that with one of our best coaches while we're hoping that things open up. Two weeks become three weeks, three weeks become four weeks. All right guys, we're gonna make this pivot, right? So we make the pivot

and we're doing online training at that point. Most of the clients still stay, some of them start leaving because clients are leaving franchisees start leaving. So we went from selling six to eight new franchise locations a month. That was the rate of our growth. All the way to March 15, 2020. On March 16th, all sales stop by two months later. So late May, we start losing franchise these. Two, three, four day, five a day, six a day. Oh, man. And they're like, hey, I'm shutting down.

I know I've got a contract with you guys. Sue me if you want. I'm like, man, I'm not going to sue you. Like, this is some weird thing happening in this pandemic. Like, I get it. You're in a state like California, you're in New York, you're in Michigan, you're in Washington, all these states, Pennsylvania.

Like, they are not letting you open your doors. Half of your clients have left. You can't afford to pay me. I get it. You can't afford your royalties. You can you open your doors. Half of your clients have left. You can't afford to pay me. I get it. You can't afford your royalties. You can't afford your rent. You're bailing out. I'm not gonna sue you.

By the time the 10 months were up of the pandemic, we had lost 218 locations. Whoa. Yeah. And that tested my leadership, my ability to communicate, to inspire, to cast a new vision every month. I was casting a new vision.

And about three months into the pandemic, the vision was, we just need to stay alive one more day. That was it. There wasn't anything heroic. There wasn't anything dramatic. We just need to stay alive one more day. To my staff, and then I would pop my phone into the little tripod, and I'd go live twice a day, every day to our franchise, these in that Facebook group.

Guys, I'm not sleeping well at night. I'm drinking a little bit more than I should be every night. I'm stressed, I'm worried about your business and my business in our country. But we just need to go one more day. So here's the message you're gonna send to your clients so that they continue to pay you so that you continue to stay in business.

And I would just be fully honest. If I didn't sleep for three days straight, I would let them know. I haven't been sleeping well. And then they would just chime in the comments. Like, dude, you're a great leader. I'm like, how am I a great leader? I'm telling you, I don't have the answer,

but we need to stay alive one more day. Go try this. I hope it works. Sorry if there's bags under my eyes and I can't string together words. I haven't slept the answer, but we need to stay alive one more day. Go try this. I hope it works. Sorry if there's bags under my eyes and I can't string together words. I haven't slept for three days. And oh, by the way, I've been drinking a little more than I should, just being fully transparent.

That's what they needed to hear apparently at that time. And that's what I was bringing. And there's one day at a time. So we lost 218 locations. We only gained six new locations throughout that entire year of 2020, which shocked me. So I'm like, who's buying franchises during a pandemic when you can't open up gyms? Gyms are shutting down. But there was a lot of people that have entrepreneurial skills and experience and they realized this too shall pass. And they were

buying franchise from us because they were negotiating a smoking deal on storefronts that they were gonna run their locations in. Like 12 months of free rent. Like storefronts were given away 10 to 12 months of free rent. They were paying out for build out. They were just signed a lease with us during the pandemic and we'll figure out the future. Wow. And so these people knew that sooner or later

this pandemic will end and they're now, they've got a good deal. But dude, it was a painful time. We've since regained all those locations, run our way to 600 locations again. Um, we're international now. We're in Canada. We're looking to go to Europe now in UK and Australia. Those are next three frontiers. Uh, but I had I not created truly supplements late 2018, launched them in 2019 to our franchise ease and then went direct to public. We are a website in 2020.

Our trueling supplement brand kept our franchise from tanking. Dude, Vulture's were literally circling FitBotibou camp. We had private equity reaching out to us earlier in the year. In 2019, they evaluated us 80 to 90 million. Now they were offering me six to 10 million from my entire franchise. That's it.

Yeah. Right? And I know that sounds like a lot to people watching and listening to this. But if you've put your life on the line, literally, financially, your relationship for 15 years you've been building this thing and you just had it evaluated at 80, 90 million,

almost 100 million. And now, private equity knows that you're running out of money that they're circling and they're gonna buy this up for pennies on the dollar because they're gonna outlast the pandemic and then turn it back around. I was like, I would rather this thing burn to the ground than sell it to them. Yeah.

And so I just stayed in the fight and I had such a great second-in-command, Bryce, and we got to test him out as a leader. I got tested out during that entire year. My franchisee's and I and us, we just got super tight, the ones that stuck around and went through it. I don't blame any of them that shut their doors. They're small businesses and

they have their own life issues and their own debt and their own, like, I get it, like, they have their own problems that they have to deal with and they had a different view on the pandemic. Some of them literally shut their business down because they want nothing to do with me. Because I kept going on Fox News Talking about how this is a this is literally a play out of the communist manifesto handbook and all they're doing right now I was killing small businesses and creating oppression and getting controlling compliance over citizens I Think all small businesses should open up and each time I was on Fox News we'd have a handful of franchises quit

So majority shut down because they just couldn't outlast the pandemic. We lost probably 20, 25 locations because of my big mouth. But I'm not about to come to this country and then not exercise my freedom of speech. Mm-hmm. Good for you. Wow. It's quite the comeback. What are? What's the software company?

So the software company is a Fit Pro tracker and Here's how success begins to stack on itself for entrepreneurs. I think this is gonna be a real good masterclass for anyone wanting to create a business or scale their business. As you begin, as you lock down and you do one thing really good, in my case, was franchising. And I told myself that once we get to about 500 locations, then I'll create truly supplements. So one, lock down and you'd be really good at one thing, be the master of one thing. And then if you're going to create the second thing, set a goal.

When I get this first thing to this goal, in my case, 500 franchise locations, then I'll create truly supplements, which I did. Thankfully, I did because that helped us through the pandemic in terms of revenue. That grew while FitBodyBoucamp shrink. But it became another source of income. But in addition to that, sorry, what was the question? You asked me question.

Software company. The software company. Right around that time, as if this thing wasn't painful enough, the pandemic, the software that we were using to run our gym. So all gyms have a front desk system, right? Like to check in clients, to process payments and all that. I'm not going to mention the name. It's not worth mentioning.

I don't want to get a lawsuit from them. But one of the big, there's two big software companies that do this. One of them is Mind Body Online, which we didn't use. We've used them in the past. They weren't good for us. This other one was awful. They promised a unicorn and sold us a donkey. And turns out they did this with other franchise brands as well. And so our franchisees were having trouble with this front desk system. Like it would just randomly not charge clients, like half your clients, their payments for the month. So you got to go through manually figure out who it is.

And as a franchise or that lands on me, they don't just complain about the software. They complain about me because I'm the one that brought the software on board, right? And so lo and behold, one of my franchisees, she runs a location in just outside of Phoenix. I think their location is in Chandler, in Chandler, Arizona, Fitbody Boot Camp location. Her husband was in the army and he was doing computer programming for the Army. He got out of the Army, went into work for Intel, the processing company, software processors, computer processors.

So she's telling her husband like, man, Fitbody Bootcamp, this software they have to run the system, it just freezes up, melts down every other month. So on the side, on the weekends, he's just like making this new software to help his wife out with her location. She starts using it and coaching him up. Well, it also needs to do this and needs to do that.

We also have this and we have, well, there's sessions and there's, and there's merchandise and so we also need to process payments and we need marketing automation. We're just working on it while working at Intel. Loan behold, she reaches out to me and she says, Hey, my husband's doing this thing. I talked to him about it. And I see the product. It's called Fit Pro Tracker. And it's amazing.

Still had some bugs to work out, but it was amazing. I was like, Dude, when you have resolved the majority of these bugs, I will get rid of, even if I've deal with the lawsuit, I'll get rid of that other software. And I will bring in Fit Pro Tracker into Fit Body Bootcamp. That's gonna bring revenue into you

because we're giving money to that other company for a broken product. I'd rather give that money to you, and now you can hire more programmers and build this thing even better. All I ask for is equity. Can I have some equity? So he gave me a good amount of equity in the company. Because he gave me equity, I brought it into FitBody Bootcamp. I now introduce him to other gym owners. I help open doors to other franchise zords. Even though those other franchise zords are my competition on the gym side, on the software side, I want you to use the software that I have equity in. So now our software gym

management software fit protractors growing really quickly and down the line we'll have a big financial exit there. And you know, here's a guy who was in the military and then had a job and became quite the entrepreneur and his building of a business simply because he just wanted to solve his wife's problems because she's a FitBitibu Camp franchisee. And that got my attention and I took partnership in it and we just started to scale it even bigger. And so, yeah, it's just crazy how successful began the stack on itself.

That's amazing. Let's take a quick break, and then when we come back, we had a couple personal questions for you. Sure. I wanna give a big thank you out right now to all the vigilance elite patrons out there that are watching the show right now.

Just wanna say thank you guys. You are our top supporters and you're what makes this show actually happen. If you're not on vigilance lead patron, I wanna tell you a little bit about what's going on in there. So, we do a little bit of everything. There's plenty of behind the scenes content

from the actual Sean Ryan show. On top of that, basically what I do is I take a lot of the questions that I get from you guys or the patrons and then I turn them into videos. So we get right now there's a lot of concern about self-defense, home defense, crimes on the rise, all throughout the country, actually all throughout the world. And so we talk about everything from how to prep your home, how to clear your home, how to get familiar with a firearm, both rifle and pistol. For beginners and advanced, we talk about mindset, we talk about defensive driving, we have

an end-of-the-month live chat that I'm on at the end of every month where we can talk about whatever topics you guys have. It's actually done on Zoom. You might enjoy it. Check it out. And if Zoom's not your thing, or you don't like live chats, like I said, there's a library of well over a hundred videos on where to start with prepping, all the firearm stuff, pretty much anything you can think of. It's on there. So anyways, go to www.patrion.com slash vigilance.lead or just go on the link in the description. It'll take you right there. And if you don't want to and you just want to continue to watch the show, that's fine too. I appreciate it either way.

Love you all. Let's get back to the show. Thank you. All right, we're back from the break. How many companies do you own? Or are you a part of currently seven companies that I'm a part of and then I'll have small I guess I'm small pieces of equity in six, six others. Oh wow.

Where I don't run the day to day. Like ones that I founded and started, seven of them. And then ones that I have equity in were kind of fit per tracker that I talked about in the software. They run the day to day. I'll make introductions, open up doors or whatever, but I. They run the day-to-day, I'll make introductions, open up doors, or whatever, but I'm not in the day-to-day with it.

How do you balance it all? I mean, you get six, seven companies, you own six companies, you're invested in, you get a family, and then you gotta have at least a little bit of personal time. How do you do that? Structure. Like, the structure that I have at least a little bit of personal time. How do you do that? Structure. Like, the structure that I have is bananas.

Every day I wake up at 5.30 in the morning. And that doesn't mean everyone should wake up at 5.30. I want to go on record and say that. It just works for me. Because I like working out in the morning. I don't enjoy working out at night. I'm not in my best headspace at night, I'm exhausted. So, I get a lot of work done in the morning. I don't enjoy working out at night. I'm not in my best headspace at night. I'm exhausted. So I get a lot of work done in the morning. I have a pretty tight morning routine. Well, I'll wake up at 5.30 by 6.30

6.45 at my kitchen table with my laptop getting really focused work done on my companies answering emails that only I could answer, you know, phone calls that only I could do, connecting to the lawyers, future business partners, new territories that we're gonna go into with our franchise, et cetera.

And then by 9 a.m. I'm heading to my gym. And I'll work out for an hour, go across the street to the park, get two to three miles of kind of fast paced walking in, get some outdoor time, listen to podcasts, yours, Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, whoever, listen to an audiobook in that time. And I'll head to HQ by 1130 or so, our Fitbody Bootcamp headquarters, and I'll take a shower there, and I'm ready to start doing meetings with my team. If that's what's scheduled,

everything's run by a calendar. There's no, now I'm gonna go do this. Like I already know the night before I can look at my calendar and realize after my workout, everything is scheduled. And the morning, it's all me, it's my time. That's where I do my deep focused work on emails and stuff.

If I'm gonna write a blog post, if I want to write an email broadcast for my team to send out, I don't even write the emails anymore. I have people that write for me now. But after 12 o'clock, I'm theirs. So Joan, my system has everything squared away. If I'm going to do zooms, they're all going to be back to back. If I'm going to do in-person meetings in our conference room, I sit at the head of the conference table, the leaders change. So, trueling leadership team, FIP out of boot camp leadership team,

project and squire leadership team comes through. Fuel hunt, zoom, right? So, everything's all my coaching calls with clients, with my coaching clients happen on Tuesdays, Thursdays, from 12 to 5 p.m., 30- calls with 10 minute breaks in between. And it's a lot of structure. I don't, there's nothing spontaneous. I can't look at the surf line app and go, man, the waves are great today. I'm gonna grab the long board and go to Dana Point. I literally schedule, hey, Joan, schedule a surf session for me in the morning, right?

I'm gonna go surf at Dana Point. How many hours do you need? Three hours drive surf back. She might schedule it three weeks now from now. That day, the ocean might be flat. I'm just paddling. Or if the ocean's really wavy, because I'm not the best surfer,

I'm just trying to not drown. It's because, you know, this, the waves don't work to your schedule. There's a wave report, and you gotta read the wave report and go out. So I don't get to have normal life, like other people, that's spontaneous, but I also don't like spontaneity.

And I don't like too much time, free time on my hands, like structured time, because the devil lives within me. And I realize that I can very easily go down rabbit holes very quickly. I'm fine. Reason I'm asking is I have one company and it sucks up all of my time, all of my energy. I am completely overwhelmed. I have a real problem with handing over any control of anything.

I'm getting a little better at it, but I don't, I mean, how do you find somebody to run your company? Yeah, and I think that's what allows me to scale. So I'll give you a great example. I started FitBody Bootcamp, right? And I said once we get to 500 locations, then I'll start a supplement line. Because dude, it's fun.

It's sexy to be creative. When you're an entrepreneur, when you're doing this kind of stuff, you're part artist. It's part work, part art, right? Like I look around in this room, how the cameras are set up, the lighting, like everything's perfectly set up,

the way you visualize it in your mind's eye. Same with my franchise, like exactly how I envisioned it is how the hundreds of locations are running it, which is awesome. So you start with that one thing, but then you got to set a goal because it's so easy for the idea of failure to come and start giving you new ideas because we are a part artist. And so that's where we need to use structure and discipline to go, alright, I want a supplement company because I think it'd be cool to have supplements that are grass-fed, way protein instead of just way protein. It'd be cool to not use artificial fillers and this, and the other. But discipline says 500 locations then, right?

So I'm going to earn my reward to start a new company. So I got 500 locations this time instead of starting it myself, like I did with FitBody Bootcamp. Now I had enough money because of my franchise and my coaching business. I'm going to find a leader. So I put feelers out like on my social media, I'm looking for someone to

run a supplement company for me. You got to understand direct response marketing, social media marketing, you got to be able to lead and manage people. And if you have supplement background experience, great, if not, no worries, I can teach you I can find a mentor for you. So it took some time. So there and indeed, and you start recruiting from wherever you can. And so you interview a lot of people, you find the right person, hopefully,

and then we launched the business around that one person. I was like, hey man, I'm gonna put about a million dollars in to build you a team to get the trademarks, to create the products, to do the Shopify, the ShipMonk, which is the fulfillment house. We're gonna ship out from East Coast and West Coast so that we can compete with Amazon. We're gonna need a team of four

and we're gonna build this brand around you and your budget is a million bucks and I'm gonna coach you as though you're one of my coaching clients, but you're an employee. And I like to give my leaders a phantom equity. Now, I am not a lawyer. So I'm going to tell you that right now, but I have a lot of lawyers who work for me. And all of them were like, what the hell is phantom equity? I'm like, well, you're going to draft up an agreement that says, this person gets, let's just say 10% equity. They're not putting any money in whatsoever. But they get 10% equity,

which means when there's profits, they get 10% profit share. If I end up selling the supplement company, he gets 10% of the money that comes in from the sale. If there's quarterly shareholder distribution, he gets 10% of that. But if he quits or he gets fired, he owns exactly zero percent. They're like, well, and you're calling it phantom equity, I go, yep, they go, well, that's not a term, but we can create an agreement. So part of it is just getting creative. In other words, hey, you're not putting any money in,

but I want to handcuff you to my business. So I'm gonna give you a good salary, and I'm gonna give you phantom equity because I don't know you that well and I hope I'm optimistically be cautious that you're going to be a great leader and I'm going to coach you and and guide you along but on the off chance you go off their deep end you can't have 10% equity. But so on a piece of paper on a contract it says they have to you know whatever their percentage of equity is and when you find a good leader

You want to handcuff them to your business with a decent salary With an opportunity for them to have a bite of the apple if there's an exit or when there's profit share Right and all businesses as I was telling you when the cameras weren't rolling you got to build every business as though You're gonna sell even if you never plan on selling it every business should be built as though you're gonna sell. Even if you never plan on selling it, every business should be built as though you're gonna sell it. Because in my case, I remember telling Andrew and Chloe a few years ago, if you guys want, you guys can run Fitbody Bootcamp. They're like, no, we hear you talk about

how there's so much bureaucracy, red tape, with the Federal Trade Commission and with all the government bodies, we don't wanna do that. We wanna do some creative. We have all the creative stuff you do. We like the coaching side, we like all the experiential events you run, we don't want to do that. We want to do some creative. We have all the creative stuff you do. We like to coaching side, we like all the experiential events you run, we like to, you got a podcast,

we're probably gonna do stuff like that. And so if I didn't build FitBody Bootcamp to sell one day, or my supplement company, or the apparel company, or the software, then you can't just assume my kids are gonna take over. And you can't assume that it's always gonna be there because your passion might change. One day you might decide you don't wanna do this, right?

Like Sean Ryan 1.0 that I saw on YouTube was teaching pistol rifle tactics, 2.0, very different. Who knows what 3.0 is? But how great would it be if had you been able to sell that first business, right? I don't know if you did or not or if you're been able to sell that first business? Right? I don't know if you did or not or if you're still running. But my point is, I did.

Okay. So, you had built it to sell, because if you were running training and you're having people coming out, now you replace yourself, you get an instructor, they're still preaching to the Sean Ryan ethos, et cetera. They could have been something sellable. Same with this. And maybe, you know, you look at Blaze TV, right? You look at all these different platforms

That exist like this is just another media network and you're doing a phenomenal job building it so to me my mind always works that way Can I is this company have the potential to have legs as in to grow and to sell at the answers? Yes That's one of the checkmarks. Do I have a leader who I can build a company around because I'm not about to go back and to the trenches anymore. I did that with my kids or babies. I'm not willing to lose time with them ever again. So if I can't have a leader, I will just stay in a holding pattern until I found the leader to build a business around. If that's a yes, then the third thing is does this company generate reoccurring revenue? Can I sell once and get paid over and over again? So with our supplements, it's a consumable. If you like it, you're going to buy more of it. Right? Now, in fact, we're getting,

we've got, I think, 2300 of our customers at Truline, in our Truline tribe, which is, I think, a 20% off when the supplements are delivered to them because they're on the reoccurring payment thing. So it just shows up to their door, I think a 20% off, and a portion of that money goes to my favorite charity trying to children's hospitals. So they're doing a lot of good, they're getting a discount. It's a consumable, you're gonna buy it anyway,

you might as well join the tribe and not just buy one off. So if those three things are met, then I'll start the company. If it's not, then I'm like, cool, but I'm not starting the company because it doesn't meet my criteria to scale sell and move on.

Okay. Do you feel, I guess you probably don't anymore. Did you look, I feel a, I get a lot of anxiety when I'm not in my business. And it really affects my life. It affects my fitness. It affects my home life, it affects my hobbies. This is my hobby. My business is my hobby. I want other hobbies, but

my anxiety, I mean, I can't even commit to a workout every day because I will lose my mind if I'm not in my business. And business. Yeah. And I hate that. I don't like it. Right. Did you, did you, did you experience that? You're right where you should be. The difference is you shouldn't live here as long as you're probably going to. So I'm just going to pretend for a moment you're my coaching client. I lived in that state for about almost a full decade, about eight years, where I have to have my hands and everything. I can't go to the gym if I do.

Something might fall apart. I'm so anxious about it. I'm not even getting a decent workout. My sleep, if I'm out on, if I was out on date night with the wife, I'm not even focused in thinking. So this isn't working out. You're supposed to be there in the beginning. Like it is your infant and you are Papa Bear.

But we fail to realize that this thing has a potential to grow. And yes, you can father it and you certainly have the work ethic and you've got everything it takes to be in the trenches and let it grow. But at what cost, the cost of your peace of mind, maybe relationship, maybe your fitness, other hobbies, other opportunities that you might have to say no to, right? Which as we talked about earlier, at breakfast, you ought to say right now you're in a place

where I think you should say no to many opportunities that show up because they're really distractions in disguise. But where I live there for seven, eight, nine years, right now, you ought to be looking for a second in command, who takes everything off your plate, everything, nine years. Right now, you ought to be looking for a second in command who takes everything off your plate. Everything off your plate. I mean, you ought to just come in here and sit down. Like we should have had breakfast and my mind's either way it goes.

We have breakfast, we come in here. You introduce me to a crew of two, three, four. They're so competent. Everything's set up to Sean's expectations. You go, hey, you ready? I go, yes, we both sit down and off we go. That's how it goes and that's how it's supposed to go. In order for you to scale, now if you're like,

hey, man, I'm an artist and this is what I want to do. And so like, I got to be hands on great. But if it's costing you anxiety, which you fully said it does, then you know what you need to do, bring in a second in command, make sure you have a competent team. You don't need a big team.

You just need a competent team who knows don't need a big team. You just need a competent team who knows exactly what is in Sean's mind's eye and they know how to replicate it. What will surprise you is they will end up doing things better than you when it's the right people. And you're like, holy shit, I had no idea the Sean Ryan show can become this. Because you're just looking through it, through a silo. They see it with outside eyes. I have a couple of those guys that have the same vision. I don't believe I have somebody that can run the entire company. How would I find that?

Your place to start actually might be, you've got a big audience. And many of you, like I told you, I was looking for a second in command for FitBody Bootcamp. Bryce, our CEO, who now is the man. Like he runs FitBody Bootcamp better than I ever did. He leads them better than I ever did. He manages them better than I ever did. He was one of my franchisees.

He was in my network the whole time, yet I went and found three other leaders to try and plug in over the last whatever, seven, eight years before I found Bryce, and none of them worked out. Which that doesn't mean you should stop, because it's funny, like in a dating situation, I was like, well, I'm looking for a spouse, the first chick that you don't hit it off with, you don't just stop and go, I'm going to stay celibate the rest of my life in single, you keep looking to

find a spouse to build a family with, et cetera. We fail to do that in business. We go, Oh, this didn't work out. Because it didn't work out, it's proof that I need to stay in the trenches and run it. Don't look for that evidence because you always find what you're looking for. Instead we go, All right, that guy didn't work out. Got rid of him. Got a second guy.

Didn't work out. Got rid of him. Got a second guy. That third guy. That didn't work out. Got rid of him, got a second guy. Didn't work out, got rid of him, got a second guy. That third guy, that didn't work out. Finally found Bryce within my ethos, my network. I'm like, I need someone who has my own belief system, who shares my core values, who understands, what if I just put this out to my network instead of trying? You just put it out to your network.

Yeah, dude, there's someone who's commenting on your shows right now, who's like, put me in, coach, I watch all your episodes. I believe in what you're doing. I'm a freaking patriot. Put me, I hate my job, and I'm running someone else's multi-bizillion dollar company, and there's no opportunity for me to grow,

but I don't wanna be an entrepreneur. I don't wanna take that risk. Put me in, coach. There's somewhere in your ethers right now. Our job is to sift them, find them, bring them in here. I think, yeah, you're going to have to coach them and mentor them. But it's going to be a lot easier than you think because they're not just some person off the street who had never met you.

They literally will run through a wall for you. And that's what I can say about all my leaders. They will run through a wall for me. Do that's what I can say about all my leaders. They will run through a wall for me. Do you think that person needs to be local? Yes. 100%. 1000%. Virtual employees give you virtual results.

And Elon Musk has proof of that. When he bought Twitter, he fired 80% of the employees. And in a recent interview, somebody's like, Twitter is running with 20% of the employees. He's like, yep. But if you remember recently, he said, one of the factors that determine whether you have a job at Twitter or not is if you're going to stay with us in person here or if you're going to be virtual. He fired everybody virtual, given the opportunity to come in and everybody was virtual. So he's

running a company, a massive company like Twitter with 20% of the employees that it had, but all of them are in person There is something about proximity that is powerful the culture the energy the What they feel from you the transference of feelings and energy they feel from you, right? Like holy cow man like but if they're just virtual There are too many distractions for them to fully commit. Not saying that there aren't people who can kill it for you, virtually, but it's a needle in the haystack in my experience.

Interesting. How long did it take you to give her that anxiety from being out of your business. So I had Bryce attached to my hip for a whole year and then out the second year I said all big decisions like it's a $50,000 or more decision It's gonna have a potential of cost of $50,000 either in a lawsuit or an expense or a lost business or a new business

run it by me first, second year, by third year, I was just kind of watching from the outside doing weekly meetings with them. They're called L10 meetings. There's a program called EOS entrepreneurial operating system. Great book out there by Gina Wickman called traction. operating system. Great book out there by Gino Wickman called Traction. Gino Wickman created EOS entrepreneurial operating system. One of the things of EOS is the level 10, the L10 meeting. And so we run all of my businesses with EOS through that framework. And so EOS says you have a leadership meeting. And so then I was just on the Tuesday leadership meetings with Bryce and the leadership team. And so EOS says you have a leadership meeting. And so then I was just on the Tuesday

leadership meetings with Bryce and the leadership team. And then one day Bryce goes, so by year three, he goes, dude, I don't even think you need to be here on a weekly basis. You're just in here scrolling through your phone answering other texts and emails. How about I just in EOS, I was the visionary. This is visionary. He's the integrator. And then there's the rest of the team. He goes, what if we move you into the owner's box in EOS? There's a thing that Gina Wickman created called the owner's box. Because let's elevate you to the owner's box and then you and I can just meet once a month.

I'm like, dude, are you serious? He goes, yeah. I'm like, okay. For the last year or now, year and a half, I've been in the owner's box and meet with them once a month. I see him at HQ. We fist bump, right? When I'm in town, we see the team, but I don't interact with them, not the supplement team, Truline, not the Fitbody team, I just meet with the leaders. And so it's this phase out method. You're mentoring them, you're coaching them, you're course

correcting them, you're showing them, and then soon you see like, all right, they're actually doing the job like I am, so I'm gonna step away, and now I can exploit this opportunity and go do that new hobby. And that's what a business is supposed to do, right? It's supposed to improve your lifestyle. Not to say this doesn't, like what you're doing or so many. And people go, hey, Bader, it's like, so what, you surf?

I go, yeah, randomly, one wheel. If I can't surf, I bought a one wheel, which is a, think of a skateboard with one big go-cart tire that's motorized, all one wheel around town, if I can't go surf, but I don't have a lot of hobbies. I love what I do. I kind of love this.

I love serving humanity. So I also don't believe I need a lot of hobbies, but ever now, again, if I want to decompress, all one wheel or I'll go surf, and then I work out every day, and I'm good. I don't need a of hobbies. But ever now, again, if I want to decompress all one wheel or I'll go surf, and then I work out every day, and I'm good. I don't need a million hobbies. I don't need a tour Europe. I don't give a shit.

I love what I do. I love what I do, too. I mean, this is, I'm not saying it's a bad thing that this is my hobby, because I really I love, it's a great outlet for creativity for me. It does, ever since I've had my son, that's where the real anxiety, maybe a little bit of resentment towards my business comes in.

I found that the resentment first pulls up with guilt and then it goes to resentment. Is that absolutely right? On that, because I've been there. That's why I said, you know, Andrew and Chloe were puppies. They were babies when I built Fitbody Boot Camp. There was guilt.

And then there was resentment. I was like, I need a second in command because I can't resent my business. It's given us this lifestyle. But I also can't work at this speed because I'm having panic attacks. And so my hand was forced, and now I always tell friends or coaching clients,

like don't wait for your hand to be forced. Like you can actually, let's not forget that Elon Musk who runs a much bigger empire than we do. SpaceX has a CEO, Twitter has a CEO, Tesla has a CEO, Nurlin has a CEO,

boring company has a CEO, he's the visionary. So if he can do that, holy hell, you and I can certainly run a few million dollar business. Very true. Very true. I appreciate the advice. So let's get into the demasculinization of men. I know that's a,

it's a passionate topic for you. What, how is this happening? This has been going on. I've seen businesses pop up that are, I guess you would call combating the demasculinization of men for probably close to a decade now. And at first, I got to be honest, I didn't think it was a real problem.

Fast forward 10 years, it's a real problem, a big problem. Yeah. Would you agree that it accelerated after the pandemic or during the pandemic, this whole tearing down of masculinity? Yes. Right? I would. Yeah.

And I saw that too. And up until the pandemic, you know, dude, I love talking about business. I told you during breakfast, I have a very narrow zone of genius and it is to create businesses and make lots of money. That's my zone of genius. And so I had a podcast called the Empire Podcast, where I was like, hey, everything I'm doing in business, I'm just gonna teach freely on this podcast

and build an audience, and I might get some coaching clients out of it, or I might get someone who wants to give me equity in their business that I can help scale. But in the meantime, I'll give free information, because I could also create about that and create what it's served people. So for four years, man, I'll give free information because I could also create about lead and create what it's served people. So for four years, man, I had the Empire podcast

and was just teaching business and entrepreneurship, leadership, making money, scaling, et cetera. During the pandemic, but I always saw, I always saw that there's something happening with tearing down masculinity. And I started thinking to myself that if I wanted to, if I wanted to take all my friends who are former military across all the different branches,

and all you guys who are special operations, I'm like, hey, each of you from special operations are gonna lead us civilians into this attack on to Canada. Just bear with me here. We're gonna attack Canada. We're gonna take to Canada. Just bear with me here. We're gonna attack Canada. We're gonna take over Canada. And you guys that have the military background to lead us, we're gonna be your military.

Now, if we're gonna do that, and we're gonna attack Canada, we're worried about the children of Canada being our opposition, probably not. We're worried about the elderly in Canada being our opposition? Probably not. We're worried about the elderly in Canada being our opposition. Probably not. We can overthrow them. What about the women?

We can definitely not worry about them. No offense to them, women are strong, but they're not about to be opposition to a military force that's coming in. The only hope for Canada are probably the military-aged men who are going to stand up against us as an opposition while we're evading. But instead of invading, if I'm like, hey guys, let's go ahead and spend the next three, four, five years softening them up first. Not by bombing them, carpet bombing them

or whatever it is that, you know, be conventional way. But let's use propaganda in the source of media, television, social media, movies, churches and schools. Let's go ahead and use that as well to indoctrinate and educate. And let's slowly encroach on their freedoms. Let's start with their freedoms of, no, you know, let's say communication of expression. So that first amendment. And then let's go ahead and encroach on their second amendment, which is there to defend the first. Now let's assume

Canada had the same constitution that we do. So now we're, and let's go ahead and take what is factory installed in a man, a desire to test his strength, to have courage, strength, mastery of something, to acquire. Like all these things are healthy, man, they're normal. It's also men that have built buildings and empires and power plants and cruise ships like a giant building full with 5,000 people on it floating in the ocean. Like that is pretty damn impressive. It was some dudes idea to build that.

Wow. But all that. Desired of build and to erect a monument to himself. Because we men know that we are also instinctively, interestingly, instinctively, and it's a very intrinsic thing. We know without anyone ever telling us that we're also going to disappear as men. And when we do, yes, we might have kids who live on, but there's this desire, like, did I leave my fingerprint on this planet through a book, through a monument, through a thing that I built, that people are using a school system through a education platform.

Is there some a bridge named after me? Do I live on? Right? It's just somehow it's in every man. I don't know why that is. And I think it's tied to our purpose. Now that I think about it, it is tied to purpose. And the reason for that, as I keep exploring this,

is because a woman has factor installed purpose. Like she knows, like since she was a little baby, she's everything is a baby, a puppy is a baby, she's nurturing, addressing, changing the dolls, everything, because it's in her DNA to wanna to have a baby and then nurture that baby. Like, that is factoring install purpose. You and I don't have factoring install purpose. We don't. We have to develop our purpose. We have to find it, develop it, grow it, build it, to be like, this is my life's work. This is why I'm on this planet. Who wants to join me, right?

We don't have factoring install purpose. and so we find it and build it. So the bottom line is all these things that men want, significance, legacy, purpose, acquisition of things. Like you got some pretty cool stuff here that you acquired. I bet most women would be like, eh, but dude, you got a pistol over there.

There's like gold plated. During all the breaks, I just stand there and I look at it. And then you got, I don't know, some machine gun there. And I'm like, I don't even know what it is, bro. Like, I've got normal stuff, like civilian stuff. You got a cool shit in here.

I don't even know what it is, but I just, as a man, I'm like, wow, that's rad. Those coins, I'm just like, looking at them. A woman would probably just walk by and that's okay, man. That's cool. So you've got this desired acquire, like the samurai sword. All these things, we want to acquire. It's an amans DNA to acquire, to build,

to have a legacy, to have a finger print left on the planet. Now all those things are being told that those are toxic things. Oh, you want to be big and bulky and muscular and grunt? That's toxic. You don't have to open the door for me. I'm independent woman, I could do it myself. You're toxic.

Oh my God. Dude, I was driving in a few years back. I was in a Walmart parking lot. This lady had a flat tire. She's in her trunk trying to find all the things. Just rolled down my window. Ma'am, can I help you fix that flat tire? And in my head, I'm already starting to turn

into the empty spot next to her. Something that's just, that's a for sure yes. No, I could do it myself. Okay. All right, throw it off, all right? And so everything that is factory installed in us, when they tell you it's wrong and it's toxic and it's threatening.

And you hear it from all the places that you trust, the movies that you watch, the TV shows, the social media platforms and the influencers and thought leaders that you might follow, the school that you go to, the church that you're in, the leaders that you might have voted for, soon you begin to suppress that. So if we spend three,

four years doing that to all the men in Canada, we could literally just cross the border and take over. And so I think what's been happening over the last 15 years, got even faster a decade ago, and it's been put on hyperspeed since the pandemic is the de-mascalization of men with the intent to gain greater amount of control and compliance of the citizens. And is it a one-world government? I don't know, but I can tell you this. The goal is to homogenize everything. I can tell you it is money related. And I love making money,

cause I do a lot of good with it. But money can also expose and enrage bad traits greed. And so it's money related. And let's face it, if we can stop you from being competitive and trying to create the other thing. Like we just want big corporations to create everyone to have the same iPhone,

the same Tesla to drive. Nothing wrong with iPhone or Tesla or whatever. But give me choices, man, I want options. And if I think there's a better Tesla to be built, let me go out there and build it. Don't create so much bureaucracy, where now it's in regulation, where now it's near impossible for me to go compete,

unless I'm one of the important ones who's connected. And that's really what it is, is they want controlling compliance, and the fastest way to do that is to strip away all the things that make you stand out and stand up against the opposition, which is masculinity. And then we say it's toxic,

that term toxic masculinity doesn't exist. You're either a toxic man or you're a masculine man. A toxic man is passive aggressive. He doesn't know how to set boundaries and expectations. He doesn't know the pleas and thank yous, he won't stand up to shake hands, he won't make eye contact, he won't open the door for someone to go through.

I'll open the door for a guy, for a woman, for a child. It doesn't matter. My dad taught me to do the right thing. That's what a man does, right? I'll roll down my window and say, man, you need help changing that tire. That's what a man does, right? I'll roll down my window and say, ma'am, you need help changing that tire. That's what a man does. But now, I might think twice about it because I'm being told from everywhere that this is toxic, that there's equality. And how do you take over the last free standing country? Well, why bomb it to death when you can literally erode it by taking away the

masculinity in the men who are going to stand up against the opposition. And I think that's what's been happening. And I think we all, all of us who are awake alert, see what's happening, see the writing on the wall. We have a duty in an obligation to say something about it, to help other men, because we are truly the only line between socialism and communism stepping in, or democracy and capitalism thriving on. How much do you think of this issue as to do with deadbeat dads or no dads at all. There's a lot of that in this country. I always wonder that, right?

Like, did the opposition, I always call them the opposition. People go, what are the opposition, Bader? So I always say the opposition. I go, well, how about this? Big government, but big government is just people who can make laws and mandates rules and et cetera that we need to follow. And they are managed by big corporations, you know, maybe the military complex industrialized complex, big pharma, big food.

And so they have influence over media and people watching media, whether it's social media, television, whatever. I don't know if the opposition is taking advantage of the deadbeat dads or the absent dads are like, shoot, look, half the dads are absent and the other half who are there aren't even paying attention. Now's the time to strike. Or if they've been tearing down families. Part of me thinks they've been tearing down families

because right until about what is it the late 60s, early 70s, it was always like a single family home. Mom had influence over the children. Mama Bear was always watching. Mama Bear knew the family's core values and made sure the kids complied. Well, if we can talk about feminism, and if we can empower you,

you should be out there making money. You ought to be out there doing something. Wait a minute, man. As a woman, you've got the most important job of all. I can't bring a baby onto this planet. I know they say I can, but I can't. It's the mom. And then once that baby's born, you've got a response

of it's in there, DNA. I can't tell you how many women I hear from who want to get business coaching from me. Their plan is always, how do I exit my business? Because I feel so much guilt some away from my kids. Dad's, we don't have that much guilt. We still do, but not as much as a mom,

because a mom is connected in ways that a dad can never be with a child. I mean, they grew in that woman for nine months. And so when you turn the house into a two-income household by feminism encouraging that, well, now where are the kids gonna stay? Well, now they're gonna get indoctrinated. They're gonna be latch key kids like I was, you know, just home by yourself until parents

come home. You might do some after school program that'll indoctrinate you. The television at home might indoctrinate you because no one's telling you not to watch that channel. And so one of the smartest things I think the opposition did is create feminism and promote feminism to get both mom and dad, not only out of the house and out of the kids' life, but also to create an adversary relationship

between the mom and the dad. Let's start tearing them up first. And then a decade and a half, two decades, three decades later, we'll get to tearing people apart through religion, through politics, through those that love and hate the cops, those that get the job or the don't, the black and the whites. I don't think we have as big as problems as they say they do.

They take tiny little things and they magnify it to divide us in every way, like this Barbie movie that came out. I haven't seen it, my daughter went to see it, and she's like, Dad, it's crazy. They were talking about how would the world be, wouldn't it be a better place if it was a world without men? Right?

Are you serious? Yeah, and like my daughter is so tuned in, man. She's like, yeah, I wanted to go see it because she knows what's happening out there. Like she's an athlete, she told me, she taught me the term trauma dumping. She goes, I got friends who are on so many medications for their emotions and they just trauma dump on you.

I was like, baby, what's trauma dump? She goes, oh, when they take pride and they feel validated when they can just tell you all their problems and all the different emotional psychiatric drugs they're on. She goes, I don't know why they don't just work out and get into sports and that, I'm like, baby, you're absolutely right. So anyways, she saw the Barbie movie.

I just asked her how it went. She went with a group of friends and she goes in there with the right filters on though, just looking to see what other message is being driven other than the typical Barbie movie. And it's like, hey, can we have a, what would the country look like without men? What would the world look like without men?

Or if men weren't as aggressive and we, we all were treated equally. We can't be treated equally. I've heard this message set a million times, like if there's a big giant thud and there's men and women in this building, everyone's going to look to the most like violent men, the men who can bring the most violence to go figure out what that thud was, and we're not going to look to the women. On the flip side, if we probably need someone to take care of injuries, a woman, we all have factory installed components that make us different. And so this movie, and I would argue that most men and women realize that we all have separate roles and both roles are very necessary for a household, for a healthy household, for raising kids. But Barbie movie will take that tiny

little fringe, will magnify it and make it a movie, and then gets people to think that, yeah, maybe men shouldn't be in charge, maybe how in the world look without men in it. And it's brilliant if I'm the opposition to start planting those seeds of doubt that create separation and fall out because the idea I believe it is to soften the hearts and minds of men to strip away courage and strength because that is the only way

they'll get control and compliance. That's interesting. While you were talking, I came to the realization, they are destroying womanhood as well. The woman's role. Well, absolutely. They're destroying masculinity, they're also destroying the role of the woman.

And I gotta be honest with you, I don't see how bad it is because I live in a county that is, look, it is a lot of red-blooded Americans here, not a bunch of fucking post-eats. And I see a lot of, a lot of women here going back to the woman's role, a lot of, a lot of women are coming back to be to taking care of the kids. Traditionally. And being the CEO of the family,

and I mean, my wife just did it. And I think that's the most important role. I do too. I do too. I mean, if it wasn't for my wife, our family would be a complete disaster. But I see it, you know, and you're right. There is more and more and more women are,

it's the, what do they call it? The two person working household. You know, nobody's watching the kids. The parents come home, they're exhausted. They flip them the phone, the tablet, the household. You know, nobody's watching the kids. The parents come home, they're exhausted. They flip them the phone, the tablet, the TV. Right. Yeah, they're exhausted. They don't want to interact with those kids.

They're not going to share any core values with those kids. They just want to tie on a couple of stiff drinks. They've had a rough day. So if no one's CEOing the ship, the most important ship, the household, the four walls that you live in, remember, we go to work so that we can have a house and a family. And if no one is CEOing the ship, no one is driving this ship, it is gonna go astray

unless it is being managed and co-wrist through media, which is exactly what's happening. So then you outsource the care of your kids, like you said to an iPhone, to a television, to even daycare. And those daycares are run by college students who are coming out of universities that are massively socialist and indoctrinate

these college students to hate this country and erode patriotism. And so they do end up brainwashing those kids even unknowingly just by sharing their core values with those kids. And it's a sad statement because all because it's a brilliant way to do it. So that's the thing. If you just look at, like if I wanted control of this country, the best thing would be to be patient and to weaken the youngest generation that will eventually not put up a fight when I want to take over. Yeah, guns are bad. Yeah, you shouldn't have to, you shouldn't say

everything that's on your mind. I can't have freedom of speech. No, man, that's hate speech. We should cancel you. We should fact check you first before we cancel you. In fact, it's like, where the hell did that come from? Right? But these kids were indoctrinated to the point where, because the parents weren't available to go, son, actually, no, that's part of our constitution. Freedom of speech is important. It's so important that the second amendment is the right to bear arms. And you need to understand that. But no one's around to teach that.

And the absence of that, that is how we erode society. And feminism was the fastest way to erode the core nature of a woman. And I know women are going to get up in arms with me about that. But feminism is the fastest tool that's been used to erode the core, the nature of who a woman is. No, I mean, a nurturing, loving, caretaking human. My wife taught, she complains about this, you know, and she'll get upset when you just see it everywhere, you know, right now we're six months pregnant. My wife're six months pregnant.

My wife's six months pregnant. I don't know how many times she'll go to the store. You know, when I'm at work, she'll be holding a bunch of groceries. Nobody'll open the door for her. Nobody'll help her take the card out with my two year old son. Right. And I talk to her and she'll get upset.

Like I just can't believe, you know know what happened to shivalry right and And I tell her you know this is This is what they're taught now you can't ex you can't even expect a young man to open the door for you because Just like you just said He'll get screamed at if he opens it for the wrong woman right and that's the thing I hear from these young men. When I say young men, now they're like in their 30s now, right, this is new generation, they're in their 30s,

late 20s and 30s. And I hear from them, because I see them at the project, they reach out to me on social media, and they're like, dude, I wanna do everything you say. But if I do, I'm gonna get screamed at. And so they'll see a pregnant woman with groceries and another child. And instinctively they know it's in a mantlet.

Let me help her out. Let me open the door. Let me walk her to her car. It's like, oh, I can't do that. I can't do that. What if she says, hey, I got this and it takes her iPhone and makes a video and documents it. And then now I get canceled.

Mm-hmm. So you go, you know what? I'm just going to let pregnant lady with the child and groceries fend for herself. And can you imagine how bad you feel for yourself? So then you go home. You feel shitty. You know what, I'm just gonna let pregnant lady with the child and groceries fend for herself. Can you imagine how bad you feel for yourself? So then you go home, you feel shitty. So then that begins to fulfill some other weird cycle of- See, I don't, do you think they feel shitty? I do, I do.

They do. Why do you think there's so much guilt and anxiety and depression right now? Pfft. We could go on and on about that. It is a byproduct of all these dudes feeling guilty for not being congruent with the man they know that they need to be inside. The way your conscience, I'm not a scientist, I'm not a

therapist, so take this for a grain of salt. But I do know myself and I've, and I do know people well enough to know that the way our conscience speaks to us is through feelings and if you start feeling anxiety and depression or guilt That's your conscience telling you you are incongruent with the man that you want to be So they don't open the door for her. they don't help her out with her groceries,

they're driving home. It's probably not a total conscious feeling of like, man, I'm a piece of shit. It's not that, but it is subconsciously. It's a void. It's a void. Like, I had an opportunity to be a decent human being and I didn't take that opportunity.

So I'll do the, now I'm going to start stacking more Ls. What's a little bit of porn? What's a little bit of porn? What's a little bit of weed? Let me just drink myself to sleep tonight. And then now let's compound those days. That's all harmless. That's all legal. It's all harmless.

But now we've got the 34 year old sitting in his mom's basement, playing video games with Cheeto Dust in his belly button. And that's how he ended up there. And he's constantly anxious and he's constantly depressed. Yet he's not doing what he needs to because the answer is go get medicated. There's medications for that. Of course, go get medicated. It's the only way we can fund big pharma.

Like 99% of all anxiety and depression can be cured by just listening to yourself and being congruent. Like we talked about earlier, I was anticipating future pain by not having conversations that I should have. So I just went and had the conversations. And each time I create my teeth, I'd be like, all right, dude, man up and have that conversation. And I would, oh, I didn't go so bad. I was so bad.

Yet I was anxious about it for weeks. Right? So 99% of all anxiety and depression is self-induced and it is your conscience knocking on your door and saying, Hey, man, if you just start living a more congruent life, maybe you start working out, maybe you eat right. You get a little bit of sun. You do what your brain tells you to do. Open the door for someone. Say, please and think you make eye contact.

Shake hands. Like, actually be a valuable asset to humanity instead of just being this liability walking around. That is how you get out of anxiety and depression. I know, I know how you're combating this, you know, in we had spoke at breakfast and you'd said you had hope. I know how you're combating this to the project in we had spoke at breakfast and you'd said you had hope. I know how you're combating this to the project, correct?

Yeah. In the Squire program. Yeah. How, what gives you hope that this is gonna turn around? Yeah, that's a really good question. I'll tell you what gives me hope and you're gonna relate to this. There's not an airport or a gas station,

or wherever I go, Jim, that a young dude in their late 20s or mid 20s, or even early 30s doesn't come up to me and go, you're that guy, right? On YouTube, you're Badras, yep, dude. That episode about self mastery, becoming the 2.0 version of myself of making more money, detaching myself from the opposition that helped me. Thank you. I'm now doing these things. I've got more structure in my life. I'm working out. I'm saying

please and thank you. I got out of this messed up relationship. You probably hear that too on a daily basis. And I realized that as much as it's about who we put in the office, like the main office, right, who we put in there as president, Biden can stay president for the rest of his life. And this country would be fine. If every dude decided to become the CEO of his own life, instead of outsourcing his well-being to the guy sitting in the highest office, deciding that I'm going to create financial sovereignty. I'm going to be physically fit. I'm going to be mentally unshakable. And I'm not saying go through buds and become a Navy seal and tip of the spear and all that stuff. I'm just saying

maybe you work out three or four times a week, maybe you go to Jiu-Jitsu once a week, maybe you learn how to just rotate your tires on a car. Maybe you give your car an oil change. Maybe you learn how to build a coffee table. Maybe you learn some basic, go take an improv class and learn to communicate, right? Transfer feelings. Maybe you just take toastmasters and learn to give a speech.

And when you become that better self, maybe you read some books and you get over your trauma, sexual malastation, rape, you know, beatings, emotional abuse, whatever it was. Are you going to walk with that weight on your shoulders to rest of your life and then pass it along to everybody else that you come in contact with? Are you going to be like the buck stops with me? I'm gonna be a better man. And if you are, you're gonna infect everybody else in your life. And if you do, then it doesn't matter

who's sitting in the top office, because if you have financial freedom, you have the ability to think through problems and problem solve. You have a network of good humans around you that you can lean on because we're not meant to be lone wolves. We are meant to be tribal. We're supposed to have a network of good humans around you that you can lean on because we're not meant to be lone wolves We are meant to be tribal we're supposed to have a team and so they call it the seal teams

And you're gonna be just fine and then what you're gonna be you don't even need a podcast at that point You're just a walking talking role model an example and that's all I did at first. I just became a better human And I became an example to the people around me And then I started mentoring others and that felt good made me feel more confident made me like myself more Got me out of my depression and anxiety So what if I could do this at scale with a podcast from stage with the book But every individual you don't need a podcast to stage your book. Just become a better human and expose yourself to the world. And when you do, just by being an example instead of a cautionary tale, I do have hope that

this world, this country will change. Would it help that we take that goofball out of the office because he's completely incompetent? Can't string sentences together to make a paragraph if his life depends on it, and is obviously bought by foreign countries and entities? Absolutely, but the biggest change we can make is here, the individual. I think that's all the advice.

Well, we'll be the girls. I just wanna say, I really enjoyed this conversation. It was a real pleasure to meet you. And thank you for coming in. How can people find you, get a hold of you? Best way to find me is probably on either YouTube or Instagram at BedgrovesCoolian. And manage them all, I appreciate the opportunity.

And ever since you were teaching tactics all the way to now with the Sean Ryan show, have been a big fan and it's just an honor to sit here and to be able to meet you and to be able to share this message. Likewise brother. Thank you very much. And, uh, blood right. Stacking Benchamins with Joe and his good friend OG, not only has great financial insight, it's laid back with humor too!

The Lent Penzo sandwich survey I wanted to know, was it really cheaper to brown bag it every day, or was it cheaper to go through the school lunch? And the most expensive sandwich of all, 46% increased this the first time a sandwich has ever touched 5 bucks. Before anybody gags on that, it's a great sandwich. Find out more by searching the Stacking Benjamin's podcast. Wherever you listen.