Episode 388 - Richard Ryan

Summary

Cleared Hot Episode 388 - Richard Ryan

Release Date: May 26, 2025
Host: Andy Stumpf
Guest: Richard Ryan
Podcast Description: Andy Stumpf shares his multifaceted journey from military service to entrepreneurship, continuously seeking challenges that push him outside his comfort zone. In this episode, he engages in a deep conversation with Richard Ryan about technology, AI, social media, and their profound impacts on society.

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1. Introduction and Memorial Day Tribute

Timestamp: [00:30]

Andy Stumpf opens the episode on Memorial Day, reflecting on honoring those who have served and sacrificed for the country. He emphasizes living life to its fullest as a tribute to fallen heroes:

Andy Stumpf: "Live a life that would be befitting the sacrifice that other people have made. Do the best that you can. I think that's the best way you can honor them."

2. Richard Ryan’s Background and Achievements

Timestamp: [00:30]

Andy introduces Richard Ryan, highlighting his pivotal role as one of the core founders of Black Rifle Coffee and his significant contributions to growing the company to a $1.7 billion valuation with $396 million in revenue in 2023. Ryan is also recognized as a tech pioneer with expertise in AI and blockchain, and a prolific content creator with his channel "Full Mag" boasting 2.7 million subscribers and 20 billion views.

3. Early YouTube Endeavors and Tech Innovations

Timestamp: [05:28]

Richard Ryan discusses his early days in Los Angeles pursuing an entertainment career, dabbling in stand-up and sketch comedy with the Groundlings. Frustrated by industry gatekeepers, he pivoted towards leveraging technology to disrupt traditional creative processes.

Richard Ryan: "The intersection of technology and entertainment for me was always, always there."

He recounts creating apps to streamline casting notices, automating and aggregating information to empower actors without relying on traditional channels.

4. Conflict with Studios and Ad Agencies

Timestamp: [12:14]

Ryan shares an anecdote about being threatened with a lawsuit by a company whose service he was disrupting with his actor's app, highlighting the resistance faced from established media players.

Richard Ryan: "He was like, 'you're infringing on my service,' and I was like, 'no, actually, people have to sign up for your service so that they can store the credentials in my app.'"

5. Transition to AI and Social Media Critique

Timestamp: [15:19]

The conversation shifts to the evolution of digital marketing and social media. Ryan critiques the shift in YouTube’s algorithms around 2012, which began favoring larger content creators and corporate channels over individual creators.

Richard Ryan: "The reason why I like to put it like that is, is consumers wanted something we wanted. We wanted music easier... and now like the flashlight app and all those other different things that were acquired by or built by Apple or Google."

6. The Dark Side of Social Media and Digital Addiction

Timestamp: [37:22]

Ryan delves into the detrimental effects of social media addiction, discussing how algorithms are designed to maximize user engagement by exploiting psychological vulnerabilities.

Richard Ryan: "The companies that are exchanging the product and buying and selling here is, you know, the social media platforms and the advertisers and your attention is the product."

He highlights statistics on loneliness, mental health decline, and the manipulation of user attention for profit.

7. Building Meaningful Communities and Practicing Gratitude

Timestamp: [75:00]

Both Andy and Richard discuss the importance of community and gratitude in counteracting the isolating effects of digital life. Richard emphasizes gratitude as a powerful tool for mental well-being.

Richard Ryan: "For me, gratitude has been probably one of the more effective tools I've found in this process."

They explore practical steps like maintaining gratitude journals, fostering in-person connections, and redefining personal values to navigate the digital age healthily.

8. Future of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence

Timestamp: [56:56]

The conversation transitions to the future implications of robotics and AI, particularly humanoid robots. Ryan speculates on the economic and ethical impacts, including potential disruptions in various industries and the increasing gap between the technological elite and the general populace.

Richard Ryan: "If you can create a humanoid robot that is able to leverage the known knowledge base of humanity on the Internet... you're looking at potentially disrupting so many different industries."

9. Memorial Day Tribute to Glenn Doherty

Timestamp: [54:01]

Andy pays a heartfelt tribute to Glenn Anthony Doherty, a fallen hero from the Benghazi attack, reflecting on their shared experiences and the enduring legacy of Glenn’s positive attitude and bravery.

Andy Stumpf: "Glenn died serving with men he respected, protecting the freedoms we enjoy as Americans, and doing something that he loved. He is an American hero..."

10. Conclusion and Upcoming Projects

Timestamp: [102:26]

As the episode wraps up, Richard Ryan discusses his upcoming book "The Warrior's Garden," which explores the destructive impacts of the Internet, AI, and social media on humanity. He outlines future projects focused on anti-human trafficking and enhancing transparency in supply chains through technology.

Richard Ryan: "The premise of that is around the world of no till drilling... creating a sponge versus conventional tillage."

Andy expresses interest in Richard's various initiatives and the importance of continued dialogue on these pressing issues.

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Notable Quotes

• Andy Stumpf ([00:30]): "Live a life that would be befitting the sacrifice that other people have made. Do the best that you can. I think that's the best way you can honor them."

• Richard Ryan ([37:22]): "The companies that are exchanging the product and buying and selling here is, you know, the social media platforms and the advertisers and your attention is the product."

• Richard Ryan ([75:00]): "For me, gratitude has been probably one of the more effective tools I've found in this process."

• Richard Ryan ([56:56]): "If you can create a humanoid robot that is able to leverage the known knowledge base of humanity on the Internet... you're looking at potentially disrupting so many different industries."

• Andy Stumpf ([54:01]): "Glenn died serving with men he respected, protecting the freedoms we enjoy as Americans, and doing something that he loved. He is an American hero..."

---

Key Takeaways

1. Impact of Technology on Society: The episode delves deeply into how advancements in AI and social media are reshaping human interactions, attention spans, and societal structures.

2. Personal Responsibility and Community Building: Emphasizing the importance of defining personal values, practicing gratitude, and fostering real-world communities to mitigate the negative effects of digital addiction.

3. Future Challenges with AI and Robotics: Highlighting potential economic disruptions and ethical dilemmas posed by humanoid robots and AI systems, urging proactive conversations and solutions.

4. Honoring Heroes: A poignant tribute to Glenn Doherty underscores the values of bravery, friendship, and sacrifice, tying personal narratives to broader societal themes.

5. Upcoming Initiatives: Richard Ryan's projects aim to leverage technology for positive societal impact, including anti-human trafficking efforts and enhancing transparency in agriculture through innovative tech solutions.

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Final Thoughts:

Episode 388 of "Cleared Hot" offers a profound exploration of the intersections between technology, society, and personal well-being. Through Richard Ryan’s experiences and insights, listeners are encouraged to critically assess their digital consumption, prioritize meaningful relationships, and engage in shaping a future where technology serves humanity rather than exploiting it.

Transcript

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[Andy Stumpf]

We are back. Today is Memorial Day. I hope that you are living your fullest life. So many times people have asked me what is the best way to say thank you not only for people's service who are still alive, but for those who paid the ultimate price giving their life in service of this country. I can give an answer that only counts for me. And that answer is live the fullest life humanly possible. Live a life that would be befitting the sacrifice that other people have made. Do the best that you can. I think that's the best way you can honor them. Now let's talk about today's guest. Today's guest is Mr. Richard Ryan. He is, I was going to say a behind the scenes kind of guy, but not always. I say that because he's got a couple bullet points here. He is of the four, the core four founders of Black Rifle Coffee, he is probably the most unknown involved. From very early on helped grow at its peak Black Rifle Coffee to a $1.7 billion evaluation with 396 million in revenue in 2023. A tech pioneer as well. This is what's cool about Ryan and we talked a lot about this today. He knows his way around the Internet. He knows his way around AI. We didn't really get into the blockchain stuff. He's a blockchain psychopath as well. My words. Not necessarily how he would describe himself, but I'm gonna go ahead and say that. And also a huge content creator. Several channels. One of them called full mag. 2.7 million subscribers across his content channels. 20 billion views. What an asshole. That's right. That's what 20 billion views means. I think we had a really interesting conversation. We covered a lot about the Internet and AI. He has a new book coming out called the Warrior's Garden which is specifically about the Internet, AI, social media, and how it is completely and utterly destroying us as a species. Again, my words not necessarily his fascinating conversation. We were a little bit limited on time because right after this episode that we recorded, not the ad read I'm doing right now or the intro, we flew down and did the backseat rides in the Jets. So I think we talked for about 90 minutes. I'm going to get him back out here. I feel like we could have talked for multiple hours and we're going to do so. But that's today's episode and that's today's guest, Mr. Richard Ryan. Before we get into it, let me do a quick ad. Ready? Today's episode is brought to you by Montana Knife Company. Instead of me talking about or in addition to me talking about how awesome these blades are, let's head over to their website and I can just show you. They have this rotating banner of course, like many sites do. That's their Blackfoot 2.0, the Traditions knife. This is a new one. This is the wooden handle. Man, that is a sexy looking knife. They have obviously apparel. I'm going to call this a staged photo. That's probably a hollow Styrofoam log would be my guess. The Super Cub. I actually have that knife. That thing is a slice and dicer. And let's give it time to get to the last knife. Oh, the boning and breaking butcher knives, I don't have either of those, but I also do a lot of that in stock knives and gear. Well, with this brand, here's the deal, it's really hard to find a lot of their stuff in stock. Tuesdays and Saturdays they launch blades. Sometimes they will do a surprise launch and they have an opportunity on their website to sign up for a text or an email notification when those drops come out. You should do so. Really hard to get if you don't. And this might sound ridiculous, but if you don't practice purchasing something on their website and have your information saved, you will have an experience similar to what I've had multiple times, which is where you try to buy a knife and it comes out of your cart because you're looking at the back of your card manually entering the numbers and somebody else snaps that thing up. Now they are on a quest to get everything in stock or as many knives as possible. And on their website these are the things that they do have in stock. These Speedgoat 2.0s are mostly my absolute go to for sure and tells you right here when the next blade drop is going to be again, this traditions knife with the wooden handle. God, those are sexy. Super cool brand founded by Josh Smith. He's been on the podcast many times. The youngest bladesmith in the United States, Montana Bread. Founded and growing. Even though it's a global brand. The coolest knives out there. Montanaknifecompany.com if you want to pick one up for yourself, they'll ask you at some point in the checkout portal. Where'd you hear about them? Do me a favor. Just click cleared hot or Andy Stump or both or neither of up to you. Back to the show. Okay, I got the red smoke. Sun run north and south.

[Richard Ryan]

West of the smoke, west of the smoke. Okay, copy. West of the smoke.

[Andy Stumpf]

I'm looking at danger close now.

[Richard Ryan]

Come on with it, baby. Give it to me.

[Andy Stumpf]

I mean it.

[Richard Ryan]

Cleared hot.

[Andy Stumpf]

Cleared hot. Okay.

[Richard Ryan]

All right, we're going.

[Andy Stumpf]

We're going to do 90 minutes.

[Richard Ryan]

90 minutes.

[Andy Stumpf]

90 minutes. If we can do shorter, if you want.

[Richard Ryan]

Oh, whatever.

[Andy Stumpf]

Because we have to go conduct our own espionage in Bozeman. And I've yet to be able to get a plan for what the rest of the day is, but they're like, hey, today. Yeah, yeah, like make it here for dinner.

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah.

[Andy Stumpf]

So friend or may name us. His name starts with a B. You know I'm talking about. What's the plan? I'll let you know when I land. Like, that is not an answer that I find to be acceptable.

[Richard Ryan]

No, absolutely. You know, it's funny because he always. He always says he's like you. You and Andy are so much alike. You need so many details. It's like, yes, yes.

[Andy Stumpf]

First off, I don't need so many details. I need pertinent information. That is all.

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You want me to get out of my cave? Just give me some information.

[Andy Stumpf]

Yeah, dude, I know what I want to ask you.

[Richard Ryan]

Okay.

[Andy Stumpf]

To start with.

[Richard Ryan]

Are we going?

[Andy Stumpf]

Yeah, sure.

[Richard Ryan]

Oh, sweet.

[Andy Stumpf]

No one really ever knows your YouTube channel from years ago. Weren't you doing ultra slow motion, like millions of views?

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah.

[Andy Stumpf]

How the fuck did you find your way into that? What was the name of the. Are you still doing any of that stuff?

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah, I just kind of re. Started that, I guess you could say, let's say reignited. Yeah. Reboot. Whatever you want to call it.

[Andy Stumpf]

Okay. Because this is years ago, we were talking at the BRCC office and was it all based around ultra slow motion type stuff?

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah, I mean, there's so much to unpack there because, I mean, if you want to go back even further.

[Andy Stumpf]

And I ask because YouTube is so weird, you can find anything you want to. It's just amazing the. That People gravitate towards.

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah, I. So my background, in case we haven't gone there before, I moved early days, mid 2000s to Los Angeles. The aughts, if you will. Yeah. And so I was pursuing.

[Andy Stumpf]

Hold on. I was gonna say first question.

[Richard Ryan]

Why?

[Andy Stumpf]

Why would you do this to yourself?

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah, yeah. Well, before that, I was living in northwest Georgia and I was. I loved acting. Started editing Final Cut 1. I would drive to the Walker County Science and Technology center and we were Channel One News. I don't know if you guys had that. Anderson Cooper and Lisa Ling were like.

[Andy Stumpf]

Three county has a Channel One News. It may not be the same programming, but they all have it.

[Richard Ryan]

Oh, it was. It was a. Well, I don't want to call it a scam, but what they would do is they put TVs in high schools and middle schools across the country and they would give them to them for free. And they could put them in their local network and run their media department stuff, but they would have to serve those ads during homeroom. So. But anyways, I think. I don't know.

[Andy Stumpf]

The term you used was accurate about. Believe it was a scamme. Yeah, scam. That's right.

[Richard Ryan]

I'm deviating from the point here, but, you know, the intersection of technology and entertainment for me was always, always there. And so I moved to Los Angeles to pursue that entertainment career. I did stand up. I went to the Groundlings. Sketch comedy was a big part of the path that I was going down. And I got really frustrated with the traditional way of asking permission to be creative. Right. You had to go to auditions, you had to schmooze at get togethers and stuff like that.

[Andy Stumpf]

At that time, was there another path around that or. That just was the road that you were on.

[Richard Ryan]

That was the road. There were a lot of gatekeepers.

[Andy Stumpf]

Yeah.

[Richard Ryan]

And it was really gross in a lot of ways. You know, that's where your Harvey Weinstein's. And we're really leveraging, you know, relationships with studios and stuff like that to be able to get things created and studios or media companies could prop up individuals. It was very hard to stand out from the crowd. And for me, I just wanted to vent. Created. You know, I was going to the Comedy Store, going up to the Belly Room, doing open mics and stuff like that. Was at the Groundlings. And I went and auditioned for a sketch comedy group that was going to be on YouTube and ended up getting in. We did a bunch of stuff. It was really successful. It was a top 100 YouTube channel. This was the Days of Lonely island and stuff like that. It was a lot of fun. And when it started taking off, kind of saw the writing on the walls there. YouTube and the iPhone had just came out. So my kind of technology hacker kind of background, I was like, well, I'm going to teach myself C and all these other different things. MySpace was big. So I give a shout out to Tom Anderson and my book because I feel like he inspired a generation of hackers. Because most people who were alive then, during that start of real, like, social media, had to learn HTML CSS because you wanted that really cool MySpace page with like.

[Andy Stumpf]

I missed MySpace completely. I am a late adopter to all of this we're talking. I started paying attention to this stuff, maybe 2015, 2016.

[Richard Ryan]

Oh, okay. Wow.

[Andy Stumpf]

I'm familiar with what MySpace is.

[Richard Ryan]

You were so focused on, you know, serving.

[Andy Stumpf]

I just. I didn't. I didn't understand it. I was aware that it existed. But I would ask myself the question of, what am I going to possibly do with this? And I didn't have a good answer for that, so completely ignored it.

[Richard Ryan]

So it's interesting you say that because that was the mentality of everyone, and specifically in the entertainment industry, they kind of look down on that digital thing. But for us, we were like, no.

[Andy Stumpf]

This is new frontier.

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah, for sure. And for me, I was like, okay, how can I disrupt this and force the change that I want personally? So I created an actors app, which, for those who aren't familiar with it, you would take casting notices from Actors Access Now Casting and LA Casting, and I would aggregate them for an individual because at the time you'd have to make a phone call and hear the casting notices, or you'd have to wait for a monthly breakdown or whatever, and then you would hear all these different people that were completely irrelevant, like, it does not fit your description. And so what I did was I aggregated all that information and I indexed and parsed it so that individuals could take and just see the relevant information for themselves. And you would store your login credentials so you essentially don't have to worry about using their services.

[Andy Stumpf]

These gatekeepers are not going to like you.

[Richard Ryan]

They didn't. But I was like, so it's funny, I got a call from one of the CEOs of. I'm not gonna say the company's name, but he was like, you're a hard man to get a hold of. I was like, I'm like this homeless kid in Los Angeles who's living on a porch building these mobile apps. And stuff. And I was like, okay, who is this? And he's like, well, you. You have that actor's app. I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah. He's. Well, cut the shit. He's like. I was like, what do you mean? He's like, you know, you're. You're infringing on my service and everything else. And I'm like, well, no, actually, people have to sign up for your service so that they can store the credentials in my app and then I can index and parse that. And he's like, well, I'm just going to sue you till you don't have any money left. I was like, all right, cool. And so I.

[Andy Stumpf]

What a lovely gentleman.

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah, yeah, No, I appreciate it. That's the entertainment industry, right? Yeah. And so it was really frustrating for me at the same time building all those apps I was building. I remember I built a. A mobile app that paired with RF emitters so I could control my TV with my phone. And now you do it with Bluetooth. But at the time, like, RF emitters for all the different things, light switches and stuff like that, it was kind of cool. But then I was like, okay, this YouTube thing is really fun. How can I realign some incentives here? And. And at the time, I guess more than 90% of the traffic came from desktop viewing.

[Andy Stumpf]

And that would make sense given kind of what we're talking about. Early iPhone. Yeah, there's a little play Catch up.

[Richard Ryan]

So there was a native iPhone app to the iOS experience. And because it was native, you couldn't monetize on it. It was like the flashlight app. And they had really strict guidelines as to what could be native in there. And so it wasn't until 2012 that they. They actually had their own app in the App Store. So I built one for content creators, and I tied it to ClickUp or AdSense and allowed content creators to make money off of their YouTube videos, because this is the same time that the Partner Program 2007, 2008 was going. And so that led to a good relationship with Google Alphabet. And they started pimping me out, for lack of a better word, to studios and ad agencies, because everyone kind of just didn't like what was happening in the world of digital. They kind of saw it as a threat because they were these gatekeepers. But studios and ad agencies did have discretionary spending for movies, video games and stuff like that coming out. So they would hire me as a consultant to kind of figure out a creative marketing strategy around that. And in doing so, on a Venn diagram. I was kind of the sweet spot. I was a developer, was a content creator and a marketer. And so it was kind of the Wild west and you'd have a movie come out that would have millions of dollars in budget and they'd have this little discretionary budget over here for digital and they didn't really care about if the movie was a success they could attribute to that or whatever.

[Andy Stumpf]

What do you think it is in the modern era? How big do you think that digital bucket is?

[Richard Ryan]

Oh, it's insane. It completely inversed. Right. And it's kind of cool because looking back on it now, it's hard not to. It's hard not. You look at how many social media marketing managers there are and experts and stuff like that. Yeah.

[Andy Stumpf]

And it's like per minute of scrolling.

[Richard Ryan]

I love the arrogance that comes in some of these people because for us, attribution models are everything. Because be it pixels or all these different tracking mechanisms within the apps or the user experience in some way, shape or form, there's an attribution model that can show the journey of the customer in the funnel or whatever you want to call it. Back then there was nothing. There was absolutely nothing. So it was like, hey, we just spent $20 million and this was a successful movie. What worked in digital? We have no idea. It was just an honest gut check. Yes, this was a cool campaign. Great. Which kind of got us to 2012 when the partner program the redesign of the. The YouTube homepage. Again, you probably don't remember any of this, but at one point in time.

[Andy Stumpf]

I bet you I didn't log on to YouTube until 2016.

[Richard Ryan]

Okay, okay. So 2020 12, there was a big shift because up until that point it was really, I don't want to say unknowns, but it was individual content creators and not corporations. And when YouTube change the home page almost overnight, it was who they kind of selected were the winners and growing.

[Andy Stumpf]

Fast, the king makers, if you will.

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah, Vivo was clearly like the Vivo music channels and stuff like that were the big winners in that. And it's kind of interesting to see these, these shifts, be it CDs, Blu Ray to digital and the companies that get made an example of being knowing that there's going to be this inevitable optimization and efficiency. And the reason why I like to put it like that is, is consumers wanted something we wanted. We wanted music easier. We didn't want to go to a music store. Tower Records, if you want. Yeah. So you get your, your Napster and your Limewire and you your kim.coms. and you make examples of those guys, your mega upload or whatever. And it's really unfortunate in that, you know, you see how much the music industry fought tooth and nail, these legal challenges, be it the DMCA. Like YouTube was saved by Google because of the. The Comcast lawsuit. Right. And the whole copyright thing. And if they didn't have the financial backing to fight that, you know, the world might actually look a little bit different, far as YouTube's concerned.

[Andy Stumpf]

And we've been watching Vimeo, sir.

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah, well, I mean, hey, we might be better for it. And it's just, it's. It's just an interesting observation and seeing these things specifically around music, mobile apps and stuff like that. And for, you know, for me, like, coming back to that, your. Your initial question was, you know, I was doing sketch comedy in this really successful YouTube channel. And then he was like, well, why don't you do your own thing so that you can monetize off of that? I was like, well, I don't want to kind of break up the band here, so how could I do a hard 180? And a demographic doesn't take away from, you know, this probably 60, 40 female male demographic split because a lot of it was kind of relationship humor in a lot of ways, too. And a hard 180 and two firearms and explosives, slow motion and stuff like that.

[Andy Stumpf]

That is Indeed a hard 180.

[Richard Ryan]

Hard 180. Yeah.

[Andy Stumpf]

There's not a lot of Venn diagram overlap in that choice.

[Richard Ryan]

But so very true to my personality. I quite literally sat down one day and I was like, what could I do that I could create evergreen content? I could create new stuff because of my existing relationships with the studios and ad agencies. There's a new movie coming out all the time. There's new video games coming out all the time. I could take elements of movies and video games, recreate them in real life. You know, that's how I learned how to skydive was for act of Valor.

[Andy Stumpf]

And which we can just go on record. If there was. If there was a shrine anywhere that was created to recognize dog shit movies. Act of Valor is on there.

[Richard Ryan]

Okay.

[Andy Stumpf]

And no, no, that's all I used.

[Richard Ryan]

Are you saying acting or.

[Andy Stumpf]

Yeah. Oh, for sure.

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah.

[Andy Stumpf]

Here's what happens when you have people as the main actors who aren't fucking actors. Yeah, they look like shit.

[Richard Ryan]

I love how opinionated you are because.

[Andy Stumpf]

I know all these guys. I was an instructor while they were there. And I'm sitting there like, you're Getting paid to do what? How much money are you making off this movie? Oh, the Navy's donating your time and all these assets.

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah.

[Andy Stumpf]

Have you ever taken an acting class? They're like, no. I'm like, you're an idiot.

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah. I mean, when the.

[Andy Stumpf]

It's top three dog shit.

[Richard Ryan]

When the boats. When the boats roll up and the miniguns go off.

[Andy Stumpf]

Stop it. Everybody loves that scene.

[Richard Ryan]

Loves it.

[Andy Stumpf]

Loves it.

[Richard Ryan]

Sure. It's so great.

[Andy Stumpf]

How about the. Let's get a guy who swims underwater and lifts his hands up and we'll take a suppressed shot, ignoring the fact that the fucking supersonic crack would alert everybody more than the goddamn guy falling in. Or that you could really determine where somebody would fall in that manner. No. If there were top three worst movies in the history of cinema. Act of Valor is number one.

[Richard Ryan]

Strong. Strong.

[Andy Stumpf]

There's not even a second and third. That's how shit it is.

[Richard Ryan]

I love it. I love it. God, dude.

[Andy Stumpf]

Okay, So I would rather have Michael shit in my eyeballs than watch that movie. I'm not doing that.

[Richard Ryan]

I love it. I love it. I mean, for me, I can't complain. Cause, yeah, you can.

[Andy Stumpf]

That's a choice.

[Richard Ryan]

No, it, like, it was such a great opportunity because those guys at Relativity, they were so excited because the bin Laden raid just happened and they had acquired that movie at the same time.

[Andy Stumpf]

The amount of military they support they got was unbelievable. It was the top gun of special operations movies.

[Richard Ryan]

Without a doubt. It was. It was remarkable, the support they got. For sure. I think, you know, whether or not we'll see something like that again. Who knows?

[Andy Stumpf]

Let's hope not. There's still room up there on that platform for him. One's there. Two and three aren't even named because there's such a gap in cinematic quality between that dog shit and everything else. Yeah.

[Richard Ryan]

I forget what the deal was. I think they. I don't know if it was. That recruiting was low and the. The DOD was like, hey, look, we're going to allocate resources and budget to.

[Andy Stumpf]

It was a recruiting pitch for sure. Because I believe it was handled through. I know there was obviously direct PAO or public affairs officer engagement. I think the whole thing was actually handled through the recruiting directorate.

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah.

[Andy Stumpf]

Yeah. But when you try to get people who don't know how to act, act. You're welcome.

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah. Hey, I don't know. I enjoyed. It was a fun experience for me.

[Andy Stumpf]

I am glad you enjoyed it.

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah.

[Andy Stumpf]

I got. I learned to skydive mockery of my Professional career.

[Richard Ryan]

It was, it was crazy. They, they actually, they. So I, what I would do is I give a menu of options in a creative kind of marketing strategy or whatever. And I laid out a bunch of different things from breaching to drone.

[Andy Stumpf]

Early drone days.

[Richard Ryan]

Dude. Okay, let me tell you something. I've only taken I think one video down ever.

[Andy Stumpf]

Really?

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah. And so I'm sure the Internet will probably do its thing here. But so I love the hack. Like just building fun things. And so one of the relationships was with Ubisoft and Tom Clancy had a product coming out called Ghost Recon Future Soldier. I think this was 2011, 2012. So this was almost four or five years before DJI was a company. The gist of that was manned drones like the Man Portable. And so it's like, okay, I'm going to build a multi rotor platform that drops bombs to detonate a proximity.

[Andy Stumpf]

Very Ukraine.

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah.

[Andy Stumpf]

2025.

[Richard Ryan]

You know, it's crazy. It's crazy. So I built a hexa platform and this is working through different relationships with Tripwire Operations Group and some other different guys that I've, I've, I've had assist me with different types of explosives. Be it dec cord to data sheet, all sorts of stuff. Exactly. And so what I did was I'm not giving an instruction manual here. I'm just explaining how it was done at the time. But it was a, it was a hexa platform that. And again this is before DJI like to spark fun 3D robotics. It was a hobbyist world. And so building this drone was so much fun. I got a lot of the components from Fry's which I don't think is no longer a company.

[Andy Stumpf]

I think they're dunsky.

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah. And it flew via Google Maps by setting waypoints and everything. And the way that I was building the bombs was with an electric blasting cap. And I would daisy chain a liquid binary explosive with RDX on top of it. And I'd use the sonar sensors to ping the ground using Arduino microchip.

[Andy Stumpf]

I can see why you took this video down just for.

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It wasn't like here's the source code or whatever.

[Andy Stumpf]

Yeah. But you can lead people down the path of stuff. Self discovery for sure.

[Richard Ryan]

For sure. And I don't want to be that guy.

[Andy Stumpf]

Yeah.

[Richard Ryan]

Now it's like it's already out there. People are already doing these things. But I, you know, much like the iPhone app and all these other kind of have a history of being maybe 10 years ahead of the curve in a Lot of it. I mean we hacked a. An Xbox Kinect 2. Because after that video I was like, no more. No more videos or anything like that. That could be construed as general terrorism.

[Andy Stumpf]

I guess I would call it general education slash potential inspiration.

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah, yeah. So. Well, so we were kind of inspiration.

[Andy Stumpf]

From an ideological perspective. Inspiration of. Oh shit, I hadn't thought about doing that. Maybe we need to spend some time looking at it.

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah, yeah. Well, so some of the companies would bring me in to, we'll say, consult for again, more creative opportunities. So I did some more Tom Clancy promotions in the future, I think it was. Or no, that was Watchdogs where I was hacking thermostats and surveillance cameras. This is again, I don't. Not a tutorial or anything, but using facial recognition and well, sheet explosives in the walls and stuff like that. Just a lot of fun. Hacking Xbox, Kinect so you could use the facial recognition and everything like that. Just a lot of fun. I don't know how I'm deviating here.

[Andy Stumpf]

But what was your most popular or downloaded slow motion video?

[Richard Ryan]

I think it's just a 50 Cal versus ballistic or ballistic glass.

[Andy Stumpf]

It has to be just millions upon millions of views.

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah, yeah, well, that's mine. But I think the most viewed one was honestly probably one of the sketch comedy ones are like 65 million or something.

[Andy Stumpf]

Really?

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah. And those music videos and stuff. Yeah.

[Andy Stumpf]

You were an early adopter.

[Richard Ryan]

Well, it's weird is like I have to. Again, I'm like trying to segment the parts of my life here because.

[Andy Stumpf]

Well, that doesn't sound like fun.

[Richard Ryan]

I joke that when it depends on the context of the conversation, like who. Who it is I'm talking with. Because whenever I was in Los Angeles, I was the gun toting redneck. Whenever I was in Nashville, I was the gay love and liberal. And it's like people inherently gravitate towards those things that they disagree with you on and you just have to know your audience. And so for me, you know, it was always. I never wanted to be put in a box. And that's one reason why I personally suck at social media. I don't want to be known as the gun guy. I don't, I don't want to be known as this dude or whatever. I'm. I joke and I tell people I'm a subject matter enthusiast. Like I find things that I'm extremely passionate about. I go hard in the paint.

[Andy Stumpf]

I describe it the same way. I actually use the same terms.

[Richard Ryan]

Really?

[Andy Stumpf]

Yeah. SME. Subject matter enthusiast.

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah.

[Andy Stumpf]

There are Only a few things, categories that I might have gotten close to being considered an expert. But then if you move your attention somewhere else, you know, the deal with currency and competency, it just slowly starts to drift down.

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah, for sure.

[Andy Stumpf]

Like skydiving stuff. I can give relatively in very specific technical answers to stuff, but I don't work in the sport anymore, you know.

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah, yeah, totally get that. Totally get that. And how to clear a room could.

[Andy Stumpf]

Probably give you some good answers. Yeah, I don't do that anymore. I'm still enthusiastic about it.

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah.

[Andy Stumpf]

I'm not on the front leading edge of what people are up to, so.

[Richard Ryan]

Well, I think that passion is important because that's something that I found that stimulates a neural pathway that helps me retain in a way that just brute force, you know. Sitting. I dropped out of school. Like I remember the day I was sitting in a remedial math class and I was like, I. I can't ever see myself using this formula. And then like, I was like, I. I quite literally remember the moment I got up and walked out of college. I was like, this is, I can't. This is paint drying nails on the chalkboard. And now fucking do it.

[Andy Stumpf]

Fast forward to the era my kids are in where you could have the most complicated math program and they pull up an app, just put the camera at it. Not only does it give you the answer, it'll walk you through how you do it.

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah.

[Andy Stumpf]

Are they cheating or are they using the technology of the time? Do I really need to know.

[Richard Ryan]

All.

[Andy Stumpf]

Of the rules of mathematics or do you want the answer? Well, both I think are important. They think that's an interesting.

[Richard Ryan]

Because I think there's a cognitive atrophy that happens. And I mean to give that example, me dropping out, I remember I was out by China Lake and I was making a video and what I was doing is I was taking a 50 cal round and trying to impact the same time as like I think it was 100 foot of deck cord. And I wanted impact target at the exact same time. And so there's some math involved in that. There is, Right. And so what I did was.

[Andy Stumpf]

Or camera angle.

[Richard Ryan]

Well, I took a two by eight piece of wood and I marked it off. Eight feet.

[Andy Stumpf]

Yeah.

[Richard Ryan]

And then I took, you know, the high speed camera. I created a collapsible circuit by taking copper paint on paper and then alligator clips and a flash capacitor from a disposable camera. And so whenever the bullet would puncture the collapsible circuit, it would initiate the blasting Cap.

[Andy Stumpf]

Yep, that makes sense.

[Richard Ryan]

And that would start the propagation of the explosive. And I wanted to impact target at the exact same time as the 50 cal round. Right. So I'm doing this formula and trying to figure out, you know, the velocity of the round and fortunately it's relatively similar because you have a, an a max 50 BMG round going around 2800ft per second. And dec cord PTN is going to propagate around 25, 30,000ft per second. So it's ballpark 1/10 the speed of the deck cord and everything. But I'd be able to get a little bit closer with a high speed camera and measuring how fast the bullet was going. And I remember before I pulled the trigger I was like, I dropped out of college because I hated math and here. But that's, that speaks to me and my, my learning style in the need for applying some type of program that stimulates that enthusiasm for me to be able to retain it and apply it in the future. And I think that's really important. I think a lot of people are lacking this day and age.

[Andy Stumpf]

I would have just called somebody good at math.

[Richard Ryan]

What's that?

[Andy Stumpf]

I would have just called somebody good at math.

[Richard Ryan]

But again, this is kind of early days of I know you were again.

[Andy Stumpf]

On the front leading edge, but maybe Google your college professor like hey man, I just for funsies. Do you want to work on this formula for me?

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah.

[Andy Stumpf]

You seem like a guy that might have your switches turned on by this. Well, run these numbers.

[Richard Ryan]

To be fair, we're in the middle of China Lake out towards Jawbone Canyon. Yeah. And nowhere. Good luck on self service for sure. Yeah, but it was good. Yeah. So I guess coming back to it and everything, I, I, you know, I had a good relationship with the studios and ad agencies and then that, that brought me to the point of, you know, starting rated red with Verizon Hearst Media and doing that joint venture and everything which kind of got us to this point and everything. I had just so many irons in the fire with black rifle coffee, my personal YouTube stuff and everything and just.

[Andy Stumpf]

Yeah, well, all right. You have a very. It's not, I don't think the camera is cropped out enough to see the a perfect mind setup you have in front of us. Yeah, you sociop path. Fire away. What do you want to start with?

[Richard Ryan]

No, so I mean for me, what.

[Andy Stumpf]

Do you got on there?

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah, so, well, I like, so I have stats. I have.

[Andy Stumpf]

What kind of stats?

[Richard Ryan]

Well, what are we talking? Okay, so from this study in 2024, 1 billion hours of YouTube content is viewed daily.

[Andy Stumpf]

That checks out.

[Richard Ryan]

And so what.

[Andy Stumpf]

What do you think is uploaded daily?

[Richard Ryan]

I have no idea at this point.

[Andy Stumpf]

Do you think the uploads exceeds the downloads? If 1 billion is consumed, do you think more than a billion hours is uploaded per day?

[Richard Ryan]

I will. It would depend on when it's being tracked, because I don't know if. If Google is publishing that quarterly or not, because a lot of these statistics, like, I have some statistics on, like, how many views Mr. Beast has and everything else that you take and you extrapolate that out to watch time, like humanity's watch time on that and effort.

[Andy Stumpf]

It's like, it gets really overwhelming really fast.

[Richard Ryan]

Really fast. Yeah, really fast.

[Andy Stumpf]

I kind of know who Mr. Beast is.

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah, right.

[Andy Stumpf]

I'm pretty much on the pulse at YouTube.

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah. So. So these, these things are really meant for perspective.

[Andy Stumpf]

We'll fire away. I like that first step. What else you got?

[Richard Ryan]

Well, so I guess I'll tell you. We were talking about when we were walking over here, you know, the last couple years is going through this existential crisis and, like, trying to figure out what does it all mean to me and why and what am I doing with my life, right? And, you know, I've had the better part of 20 years in building technological things, be it mobile apps to physical products to CPG and stuff like that. But why at this point where, you know, I'd have a conversation with my accountants and stuff, and they'd be like, oh, you know, you spend like 40, 60 thousand dollars a year and everything like. Like, what is. What's comfortable for you? And, you know, what do you want to do? Where do you want to live? And all these other different questions. And I'm like, well, what does it all mean? And you start, like, I don't know, you start, I don't want to say melting down, but, you know, it gets really lonely, like, really quick when you. You get older, you know, friends and families and all these other different things, and you start figuring out what is, well, I don't know, what am I doing? And so I was like, well, what are my skills? How can I. How can I, I don't know, start giving a positive impact in my community and whatever that is? Because shooting an iPhone isn't really a value in my opinion, even though it's something I had fun doing. Maybe entertainment.

[Andy Stumpf]

Yeah, it is.

[Richard Ryan]

But, like, there's so many people doing it now, right? And there's. There's so much, you know, getting to the point where I'M I'm building AI companies and everything. I have an AI company called Pose, where the last two years, I guess this is something you'll find interesting. So around 2012, there was this again. I love looking at algorithmic hijacking and figuring out the different weights of different things to optimize so that you know, you can gain on it. And then at the time there was a way to gain search and related through click through rate. And what I would do is I get on Google Trends and I would try to figure out what was climbing really fast, what was interesting far as articles, videos or whatever. And then I would take, and I would find sexy female mannequins and I would take a static image of them and then I do the annoying orange garbage mask around my mouth and I would dedicate five minutes a day to this and this is all I give myself. And I would do voices and I'd be like, hey guys, what's going on? You know, sexy womannequin here, whatever. And I would, I would, I would whatever that like trending on that first, you know, few hours or whatever. And then I would comment on that and then I'd upload it to YouTube and I'd only give myself like 5, 10 minutes a day on that. And I got to the point where I was getting like millions of views hijacking as a reply girl. And it was really funny because there were these reply girls at the time that would do the same thing. And I was like, are they going to start copying me? And so like, so what I do is I create some honeypot videos, some fake ones, right, Just to see if they would take. And they would take the bait. And they did. It was awesome. So now the last couple years I'm like, okay, what are the next things? What are the next things that I could potentially hijack in that sense and like creating AI slop in that sense. You know, I have about 200 social media accounts that are completely artificial intelligence.

[Andy Stumpf]

What? Yeah, you're the fucking problem on the Internet.

[Richard Ryan]

Well, so I'll tell you, I'll tell you why. I'll tell you why. I'll tell you why. So I'm getting a little ahead of myself here and really like trying to figure out the fundamental problems around social media. And it's incentive misalignment, right? Because most people don't really fully comprehend what it means to be the product and not the customer. And okay, so the, the companies that are exchanging the product and buying and selling here is, you know, the social media platforms and the advertisers and your attention is the product. Right. So that's, that's the thing that they're trading, they're selling. And the unfortunate byproduct of that is they need to create systems that keep you on platform longer so that they can serve you more ads because your attention is the thing that they're selling. That's a misaligned incentive for the individual. Because unbeknownst to you, or maybe it is something that you're, you're aware of, but I would argue to a lot of people that even though you're aware of it, you may limit the amount of time you're on social media. You still may be like going to YouTube to look for a cooking video. Yeah, that cooking video should be maybe one to three minutes to give you the value that you need. But they, they prolong that out to 15 minutes to 20 minutes. A bunch of filler just serves you.

[Andy Stumpf]

Ads in the middle.

[Richard Ryan]

That's exactly it. Because that's what the system's optimized for. And then you.

[Andy Stumpf]

So let me ask you this, and to interrupt your train of thought, let's say you two videos that, whatever. Souffle, to make up a term that I actually don't even know what it is. I think I've eaten one before. It's probably delicious. Yeah, there's a three minute souffle video and a 15 minute souffle video. YouTube behind the scenes, are they going to prop one up more than the other because of the ability to advertise on it?

[Richard Ryan]

So, so this is where understanding the various weights and an algorithm is important. And so it's changed over time as people optimize for it. So what I was doing with the Woman Mannequin channel or whatever was optimizing for click through rate. Now it's a little bit more sophisticated. And that's why you saw a lot of video game channels pick up and now podcast, because a lot of that is watch time on platform. So if somebody clicks through on a video and then they bounce, then that's a negative signal or a higher negative weight in that engagement is another one. A lot of people will be like, oh, like comment and subscribe. I, I joke in the book was like think of how much time in your life, when you quantify that over a period of time has been spent listening to creators tell you to like comment and subscribe to their channels. It's just kind of funny. You probably burn like a day of.

[Andy Stumpf]

Your life, if not more, depending on your usage. For sure.

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah, and so, so for me, I'm like, I'm looking at these, these different things, you know, like the engagement component to it, you know, X and I would say Instagram have different, different attributes in their algorithm that they're optimizing for. So X might be engagement and bringing all the sensational conversation up. So things that are gonna make you angry, maybe Instagram, because it's very visual, maybe the things that are going to make you horny, whatever it is. And these things, you know, I try to explain that I'm not trying to tell people that they need to become, you know, Amish and just forsake all technology and everything. You need to have a healthy conversation with yourself about what do you value in life? And that's the kind of the path this is. My anecdotal experience in a lot of ways is like first I have to look at the insight. So turning on screen time on my phone, my computer and stuff like that and see where my time's being spent and am I subconsciously wasting more time in some areas? I don't know, like just turn it on, let it go for a month before you make a honest assessment about it. And then the second thing is more about defining what your core values are. I mean, mine's clearly enthusiasm, love and integrity. Like I'm, I, I will go the extra mile just to prove my integrity for the people that I care about and stuff like that. But you know, there's a lot of thought exercises that I went through. One was, I'm sure you would have some really good conversations with the 15 year old version of yourself.

[Andy Stumpf]

Oh yeah, I have some insight.

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah. Right. So like just, and I'm not, and I'm not saying to like you have children, I'm not saying with your children, I'm talking about you.

[Andy Stumpf]

Yeah.

[Richard Ryan]

So there's, there's some grace that happens in being able to as an adult, have a conversation with the younger version of yourself, the advice that you would give them and hopefully that helps some people heal through that process as well. There's also another thought exercise in, in, well, a deathbed where you go through very much like a meditation and what's the temperature in the room, who's in the room, the people that you care about, who is still around and stuff like that, and think about your life and how you spent it. Where would the regrets and the time that you spent, would you want to spend it more? Learning another language, visiting another country, I don't know, just fishing with your children, whatever these things are and in this process of like defining your core values, you take and you hold that up against the insight and where your time's being spent in this digital experience and how you're being, well, your life is being extracted from you in a very efficient way. Calculated too, Very calculated. And again, I'm not trying to pass judgment on people and how they spend their time. It's just be a conscious consumer. And if you're, if, you know, scrolling on social media is your thing and you get value out of it, you enjoy it. You do you man. I'm a hardcore individual rights absolutist, you know, you do you man. But I think that a lot of people are going through, not consciously, objectively looking at how they're being used in these situations. And so, you know, going through this, you know, there's. I'm standing on the shoulders of giants like Dr. Anna Lemke, a lot of these dopaminergic studies and, and how to go through detoxing and stuff like that. And that's why I like have all these statistics and stuff, because I was like, I, I feel like I'm so proud of the book and that, you know, working with, with a handful of researchers and everything and being able to cram it full of so much stuff, it's really hard to take in. Like, I love, I love quotes and stuff like that, so I'm stacking a ton of quotes in there and everything. But for me, this, this whole journey was, you know, an enlightening experience and for, you know, documenting the whole thing, like, if, if it's received well, I'll probably go do a couple more books, one on cyber security and another one on artificial intelligence and kind of like, you know, thought exercises around what we are looking at far as the human experience decade to two decades from now and everything. But social media wise.

[Andy Stumpf]

Do you think our society broadly would be better or worse off without it? It's tough because I know it's a tough question. I mean, there's, I see the usage in my children. I mean, I remember my first interactions with the Internet when I was in high school. My children don't, because they grew up with this type. They communicate over it in mediums that you and I probably didn't growing up. There's a level of being unable to detach because social circles are on there and people from across the world like you have access to or they have access to you, depending on how you want to look at it. There is certainly, and I've seen cyberbullying As a real thing for sure. Almost inescapable. This never ending metric, unwinnable, by the way, metric of aesthetic for young women, probably for young men too. There's a lot of. I mean, from mental health complications from all that, like there's a lot of shit. And I'm struggling to think of the benefit other than connectivity. You can explore other ideas and pathways that you might have the ability to do so. Even though I would always tell somebody to take a trip to a country versus viewing a country on the gram, whatever, for sure, totally different. But if you only have the ability to do one, cool. Educate yourself about the rest of the world. But the pros seem to me they do not outweigh the cons. I'm also not an expert on any of this.

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah, no. So. And that's one of the main reasons why I really wanted to have this conversation with you because I love to be able to have that back and forth because I think it's really important for people to do this publicly and privately. So unpacking a few things there that you said, the, you know, Dunbar's number 150 people is what you're typically able to maintain a healthy relationship with. And so if you extrapolate the, the human, I don't know, the social media experience and in amplifying problems all around the world, I don't think that average. Well, I don't think any human is really built for that.

[Andy Stumpf]

There's no way we're capable.

[Richard Ryan]

It's way too distracting.

[Andy Stumpf]

Well, this stuff. Where's my anxiety record rectangle? This thing is. Is advancing faster than humanity. And I've had the same thoughts too. It's not that there wasn't always horrific things happening in the world at all times. You just were not geographically exposed to them. Unless you live right there. I don't think our brain is capable of receiving that bombardment of constant existential. Everything's up. You're definitely about to die by your creatine powder here.

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah, so I mean, unpacking some more things. It's funny you. You brought that up specifically around Instagram. There was like 107 increase in eating disorders from 2018 to 2022. One out of three high school girls contemplated suicide. And you look at body dysmorphia from male to female. I mean, men suffer from it too. I mean, you look at the unrealistic expectations of those jacked up on whatever, not just supplements, but chicken breast and.

[Andy Stumpf]

Protein is usually what I think.

[Richard Ryan]

That's what I always thought when I saw the men's fit like, oh, why isn't this working?

[Andy Stumpf]

Well if I do their stack, which is only seems to be protein powder, a pre workout and creatine, I should look like that.

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah, Ryan Reynolds blade Trinity is like, come on man, chicken and rice.

[Andy Stumpf]

You know what kills me? I'm the same way. Like, live your life like, dude, just be honest if you want to. Like you're telling me Hugh Jackman at the age of 97 got to look like Wolverine like that? Naturally, if he could. Congratulations to you sir. However, I don't give a shit if you were doing enough steroids to kill a fucking donkey. Yeah, just don't lie to me.

[Richard Ryan]

Exactly.

[Andy Stumpf]

Where's the off label shit? Yeah, like, because guess what, I can suspend disbelief and you can be Wolverine in the movie, but motherfucker, I know you're a 60 year old man. Yeah, and maybe I want to try it too.

[Richard Ryan]

So tell me the truth. Yeah, well, and that's the other thing you want to see. You want to see when they're honest about it, whenever those consequences, those side effects do come in, be it shorter life expectancy or whatever those things are, you know, you want the transparency around that, you know, more statistics around that. Since you brought it up, male friendships from 1990 to 2021, down 55% to 27%. Men with six or more close friends.

[Andy Stumpf]

Interesting.

[Richard Ryan]

Down 45 to 22%. Men who reach out to friends in tough times. And then up from 3% to 15% men with zero close friends. Which you see this epidemic of loneliness right now. And I feel like people world described as connected. Yeah, so. So the value proposition I would argue is again, this optimization in communication, you look at the orders of magnitude that have happened in the, the, you know, the printing press, the telephone, the television, all these things were optimizing for some type of communication. Then we get to the Internet and it makes it extremely difficult to parse the signal from all the noise. And now we're getting into the world, you get into these conversations like dead Internet theory, where there's more artificially generated human interactions in the Internet than there are actual human like bots talking to bots. Correct. Or bots talking to humans and stuff like that. Around the 2016 mark is the theory that there is more artificial generated interactions than there were actual authentic human interactions.

[Andy Stumpf]

Do you mean. I'm not arguing with the person in my Instagram comments.

[Richard Ryan]

Well, it's wild because now, now you get to the point of artificial intelligence. You get, you get agents and things that are able to leverage browsers and not just APIs, not just using the back end to create stuff, that's actually using the front end to create experiences and stuff. So we have to have a hard conversation with ourselves as humans and say, what do I get from this and what do I value? And I think these are, these are the conversations that people need to be having now because it's only going to get worse. And we're starting to see the second, third, third order consequences of a generation that has grown up in an entirely digital experience. And, you know, I think you and I can romanticize our childhoods growing up and being able to go get lost in the woods and stuff like that.

[Andy Stumpf]

You know, not intentionally, but it has happened.

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah. I mean, I remember riding my bicycle like 30 miles to a friend's house.

[Andy Stumpf]

My parents saying, just be back before the sun comes down or shortly thereafter. Yeah, that was my guidance. Today's episode is brought to you by Bubs Naturals. I have said for a few ad reads now that there's going to be a time to talk about Glen Doherty. Today is that day. Because this episode comes out on Memorial Day. Before I get into that quickly. Bubs Naturals, collagen based protein. I have been taking this stuff for just over a month at this point. When I talked with their founder, Sean Lake, he was telling me about, you're going to have hair growth, fingernail growth, less joint pain. All of Those things have 100% been true for me. I'm clipping my nails to be safe at Jiu jitsu more often than I ever have before. My hair is actually growing faster than it ever has and turning gray faster. I equate that to my children, not Bubs Natural. Just for clarity and soreness drastically reduced. And I have not reduced the amount of time I've been spending on the mat. Yes, I modulate my pace and intensity, but. But a marked improvement in my recovery by simply adding this collagen protein in the mornings. If you want to go check out their entire offering, head over to Bubsnaturals.com again. Bubs plural b u B S Naturals plural N A T U R A L s dot com. You can use the code cleared hot. It's going to get you 20% off your next purchase. Let's talk about Glenn. I'm going to read this right off of their website. Glenn Anthony Doherty, July 10, 1970 to September 12, 2012. Glen Doherty was one of four Americans killed in a terror attack at the United States Consulate in Benghazi, Libya. On September 12, 2012. Although the attack began on September 11, Glenn fought hard throughout the night and saved many before succumbing to a mortar attack in the early hours of September 12th. Glenn died serving with men he respected, protecting the freedoms we enjoy as Americans, and doing something that he loved. He is an American hero to those who did not know him. But for those who did, he is a best friend who leaves behind a giant hole in our hearts. That's a great summary of how Glenn passed, but I consider myself very fortunate to actually have known Glenn. We went through STT together before it had become sqt. And the best thing that I can say, or what sticks with me the most is that he constantly had a smile on his face. We went through STT in 1980, 1998, and I still remember that smile. It actually might have been late 1997. Infectious smile, incredibly positive attitude. We actually shared skydiving equipment for a short period of time. We would loan it back and forth. Always had an amazing attitude. Always striving to be a better version of himself. An incredible human being.

[Richard Ryan]

Incredible.

[Andy Stumpf]

Left military Service in around 2005, but did not stop giving back and serving this country. He was obviously working for the government in 2012. People could argue whether or not that was a W2 or a 1099, this, that or the other doesn't matter. He was wearing the American flag the night that he got killed. Metaphorically and physically. I wish there were more people like Glenn. There are plenty of people I have met in my life in the year of 1997 and have no recollection of to include people that I went through STT with. And I'm not saying that negatively. There was just a lot of people in that class and I don't remember them all, but I remember Glenn. He was an amazing human being and I wish that there were more people out there like him. How does this tie into Bubs? Sean and Glenn knew each other from early in life. And one of the things that I really like about Bubs is a percentage of the proceeds and 100% of the profits on Veterans Day goes to the Glen Doherty Foundation. So people like Glenn are never forgotten. Get back to the show. I'm sure they asked me, where are you going? But I don't actually remember them saying that. It was more like, hey, wherever you're going, make sure it's not here because I'm tired of your shit.

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah, get out. Just get out. And like talking with my sister and my brother in law and everything, like just go drop My niece off with her friends at the mall or something like get them out of the house, let them go be kids somewhere or whatever. But yeah, I think these are the problems that we're getting to and start looking towards the future. You have humanoid robotics and all these other different things that we're going to have to have these really difficult conversations about what is the value of a human life. I'm extremely opinionated about the AI side of things because you have a few companies that have scraped the known Internet and now they're, they're profiting from, you know, a lot of intellectual property and, and stuff like that. And they're, you know. Yeah, again, I like to say that I'm a libertarian short of anarchy in so many different ways. But now I'm having to reframe that into an individual rights absolutist because I feel like we're, we're rapidly approaching the point of breaking capitalism and I think we've seen the flaws in it in so many different ways through, well, our political processes and, and stuff like that. Be it inefficiencies with, be it lobbying or.

[Andy Stumpf]

It's running super smooth. I don't know if you're paying attention.

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah, right.

[Andy Stumpf]

They say it's running the best it's ever run.

[Richard Ryan]

But let's do, let's do a thought exercise here and where I'm definitely deviating from the, the content within the book and everything. But you know, if you can create a humanoid robot that is able to leverage the known knowledge base of humanity on the Internet and is able to learn through digital twins, you know what a digital twin is? It's just. Okay, so a digital twin is, is, is just a. I find it hilarious.

[Andy Stumpf]

You think I have any clue what you're talking about? So come on, you know me.

[Richard Ryan]

It's crazy, man. Like it's such an excite. Like every week is a breakthrough in science and technology and, and so many different things.

[Andy Stumpf]

Until we work for a fucking robot for a daily water ration. I'm already. Well, here's what I'm getting out of this. I need to develop and carry with me at all times an emp. That's all I've gotten so far.

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah, well, so that's what I'm getting at is like, so what is the value of human.

[Andy Stumpf]

What's a digital twin?

[Richard Ryan]

Okay, digital twin is a, it's a simulated environment of a known thing. So it could be the entire world. It could be a warehouse or whatever.

[Andy Stumpf]

And so something they test models against.

[Richard Ryan]

That's Exactly. Okay. So what they'll do is they'll create this digital twin that mostly for warehouses and stuff like that right now, but it's a training environment for artificial intelligence or robotic systems to be able to simulate how it interacts in that space.

[Andy Stumpf]

Okay.

[Richard Ryan]

And so Microsoft and Nvidia and a lot of different companies are rapidly building these simulated environments around the globe. And when you have a robot that is able to interact and create these simulations that are, that give fairly accurate results in the future, you're looking at potentially disrupting so many different industries. And it will start, I would argue, first with a high risk, high reward ones like mining and stuff like that. Where people are dying from, you know, either trauma or some type of black lung. Yeah, exactly. That's exactly it. So send the robots. Why wouldn't you want to send the robots down there?

[Andy Stumpf]

That's a tough argument against sending the robots down there.

[Richard Ryan]

But so once you do that, then you start looking, then it becomes a cost benefit analysis. So it's like if you can build a robot, humanoid robot. Because the advantage of a humanoid robot over a specialized. Because some people argue specialized robots like a dishwasher or something like that. Well, the form will be very specific to whatever the use case is. But humanoids are going to be able to assimilate to, you know, chairs. Like if you have a tractor, it can sit on that tractor and operate it and everything. And so if you're able to build this thing, Elon says Optimus will be in that 30 to $50,000 price point, which who knows when that will actually come and what the price point will be. But let's say for the sake of it, sub $100,000. How many people in this world make more than $100,000 a year?

[Andy Stumpf]

Very few.

[Richard Ryan]

Right.

[Andy Stumpf]

For now, like shockingly for you, actually. So, so, but if you're talking population of the world.

[Richard Ryan]

No, no, no, no, no, no. I mean like you, like, like US labor, we'll say specialized figure.

[Andy Stumpf]

US Labor. And what do you think the stats are? I don't know, 25.

[Richard Ryan]

I'm speaking out of my ass. But when you're talking about high risk, like mining and Michael, 21 of the population, 30 million people earned at least.

[T-Mobile Advertiser]

A hundred thousand last year.

[Richard Ryan]

Okay.

[Andy Stumpf]

He's optimist.

[Richard Ryan]

So that's 1/5.

[Andy Stumpf]

Yeah.

[Richard Ryan]

And so the global labor force is estimated to be approximately dependent on who, what study or place you're looking. Is around 30 trillion annually. So that's like 1/5 of 30 trillion is like. I mean, and again, yeah, I mean that's again, you're still looking at different sectors, bit farm versus mine and stuff like that. But there is a real conversation that we'll need to have if very few companies are able to leverage all of human knowledge against the individual. Because then, then you start having conversations, people start talking about UBI and stuff like that. And I would argue if you have just a few companies that are extracting all the value, UBIS are relevant because you're, you're giving everyone $1,000 a month or whatever. But then everything becomes more expensive. And again that, that very small percentage of companies that are extracting all the value are, you know, going to be the ones that benefit from it. And so I don't know, not to get dystopian in that sense, but I think that these are the conversations. Right. And we have a lot of mutual friends that spend a lot of time on firearms proficiency, jiu jitsu and all these very physically demanding tasks. But I think there is a massive vulnerability cognitively and psychologically that a lot of people aren't really taking seriously. They like to think as social media and these different platforms as, you know, something that's fun, you know, it's part of my business and all these other.

[Andy Stumpf]

Which both of those could be true.

[Richard Ryan]

It's absolutely. But, but not acknowledging that it could have some type of, you know, downside risk that could have second, third order consequences in the very immediate future for them and their children would be, you know, it'd be, I think, dishonest to your, your future self.

[Andy Stumpf]

And the outside risk could be like the tide receding before the tsunami comes. I don't like the idea of that few organizations having access to the combined knowledge of all humanity and being able to leverage that against the rest of population. Yeah, there's just not really a historic example of that working out.

[Richard Ryan]

Well, no, and that, and that's kind of where I was getting at the, you know, the Internet was the value proposition was, we were, we were giving the value proposition to be able to communicate at scale. And in return we were, you know, we're being leveraged against our time and extracting that from us. You know, that's one of the few things that we have a value you trade your time to, you know, work a job, all these other different things. And if a company can come out and, and do that for fractions of the dollar by leveraging every other human's experience, you know, your data, like your, your, I don't want to say names, but let's say your Heart rate variability and all these other different things and they're using it for medical reasons. It takes, it takes makes it that much more difficult for capitalism to work because the, there's such a big gap between the haves and the have nots.

[Andy Stumpf]

Is it stoppable at this point?

[Richard Ryan]

Man, that's a tough question because those.

[Andy Stumpf]

Three companies, let's say it's three, three to five, they've identified themselves already. No, they know, they've gone through this exercise. They know what the end state looks like for them. They're going to do whatever they probably can, legal, illegal, whatever to get to that point. Is it possible for us to stop them? For anybody to stop them?

[Richard Ryan]

It's tough, yeah. I mean I think most people know Google took their, like in my studio in Texas I have the old Google sign that says don't be evil.

[Andy Stumpf]

Is that what it used to say?

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah, they took it down in their offices. Yeah. But you think about minority.

[Andy Stumpf]

I would have liked to been in that meeting. Hey guys, we need to rebrand here a little bit. We're just going to take the don't be evil part off.

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah, right.

[Andy Stumpf]

And somebody hopefully would say, but why Bob?

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah, well, so you think about the protections that we have in place and one is to prevent monopolies. Well, Google is the number one and number two search engine with YouTube there's no competition in any way, shape or form. And again you start looking at things like lobbying and stuff like that and it makes it extremely difficult for anyone to organize in a way that's effective against them. But you do occasionally get these outliers like Elon who take on, you know, an industrial complex like the automotive industry and they win because he's a, you know, he's a risk taker like 100 million in PayPal or whatever it was. And then we'll put, you know, this into dumps it all in his borrowing.

[Andy Stumpf]

Money to pay his rent.

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah, SpaceX and everything else.

[Andy Stumpf]

Do you worry about a guy like him being captured ideologically, not like in prison. I know that's a different thought exercise.

[Richard Ryan]

I, I, to be brutally honest, I have this conversation with myself all the time. Like who Again, I'm a refiner in so many different ways. But I look at, I look at the people who, the wolves in sheep's clothing are a greater threat to the tribe than the obvious threat because they have the ability to, well, destroy it from within. And the scary thing is is God forbid something ever happens to him. But I would hope that his, he's gave Some given some thought to how to structure his estate in a way that benefits humanity. Because if you look at how he's positioned with Tesla and you just take Tesla from a data standpoint with the, forget about the vehicles, but battery management, potentially Optimus and the humanoid robotics.

[Andy Stumpf]

Is that what he's calling his like I've only seen a picture of. It was like serving a drink.

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then you have SpaceX with the rockets. You have Starlink with global Internet infrastructure.

[Andy Stumpf]

Single handedly responsible for cheating in the election too. I've seen that online. They use Starlink to cheat. I'm like, I don't think that the election computers or infrastructure, first of all, I ask people if they know what Starlink is and they say yeah, that's the system they use to cheat on the election.

[Richard Ryan]

Interesting.

[Andy Stumpf]

Yeah, because he provided a like, oh, it was baked into Starlink. Like Starlink is a portal to the Internet. Yeah, well, election machine does not necessarily.

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah, you take press, neuralink, putting chips in people's heads and stuff like that. He's, he's positioned to be a very, he's already a very pivotal person in the human experience right now. And if ever that's leveraged against humans in some, again, maybe not even nefarious, but just misaligned incentive, be it his estate, his kids or whatever. Like I would hope it's structured in a way that it's, you know, more or less a nonprofit that just benefits humanity in some way shape or form. But it's really scary and I think a lot of people worried for a while about the assimilation between technology and people. This is, this is arguably one of the most inefficient and efficient things that we have in our lives because, well, the addictive component to it, like having a neural link chip in your head would be way more efficient. Having access to that knowledge really, really quick. So you're having to unlock, you're having to pick it up, you see that kind of compulsive behavior around that inefficiency and that's why I say like the Internet is probably good long term in a lot of ways because it is optimizing for these inefficiencies in communication because you know, the phone system versus carrier pigeons and postal mail and everything, all of those were orders of mag smokes of this. Yeah. And so I mean we're getting to these points though where, where you know, we're a global economy now too. And I think that a lot of these different things in the past when a civilization would fail or whatever. It was a, you know, a country, an entity or whatever. There are always redundancies that could come in and take up the slack. But right now, you know, if Covid showed us anything, it really is that the, the world is so intertwined in a way that is very delicate and it impacts everybody.

[Andy Stumpf]

And so I would add to that. It showed us that connection, or I'll phrase it a different way, that isolation is other than some extreme outliers that actually thrive. Being isolated is good for no one.

[Richard Ryan]

Oh, for sure.

[Andy Stumpf]

In a world where we could connect over zoom and my kids did the school zoom experience and all that, it. It didn't provide what people needed.

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah.

[Andy Stumpf]

It's a facade of the actual connection that people need.

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah, I completely agree. So in my whole, like, processes that I went through, very much like I burned through probably 50 books on addiction. So going through substance, alcohol, gambling, addicted.

[Andy Stumpf]

To reading addiction, books, real good job.

[Richard Ryan]

The process is. And trying to figure out like, how do you, how do you attack this thing that's so ingrained in our life? And, and again, there's a lot of people who did some amazing work. But how are you, how are you going to parse all of this down to really find the signal in it? Because it's overwhelming in so many different ways. But to get to your point on that, community is a massive component to it. And figuring that out in person. Community, yeah.

[Andy Stumpf]

This digital marketplace, if you will. Town square maybe would be better where people come together. Yeah. I mean, like, FaceTime is amazing. What a cool way to stay in connection with your family and kids. Is it even a close approximation to being there and hugging them and feeling them, smelling them be like, no. Can it bridge it? Sure. Can it replace it? I don't think so.

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah, I mean, there were some statistics and again, I'm packed so many in the book and everything was Globo gyms versus orange theory and CrossFit and the retention rate just based off of the community component to it there. We are very much community oriented animals. And it is very necessary for the human experience.

[Andy Stumpf]

And I worked for CrossFit for 10 years. I saw it firsthand. I saw the. It was. It morphed over time, especially with the. The rise of the CrossFit Games, which was the expression of professional exercise, which is inspirational but could potentially be singularly useless. I've never been attacked by a barbell.

[Richard Ryan]

I'm.

[Andy Stumpf]

I'm leaving. You know what I mean? Like, I'm leaving it open to the realm of possibility and don't get me wrong, it is inspirational to watch those athletes because I was around them for many years. Fuck. It's incredible. It actually makes you feel like a tub of shit. You're like, well, it's tough. But you know, the communities that were. I mean, you'd see whole families in there. You would events and rallying around people. And you don't see that at Orange Global gyms. People are just in there doing their thing, getting their sets in.

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah.

[Andy Stumpf]

Filming their ass for.

[Richard Ryan]

Well, it's another thought exercise is like. So I try to outline as many different things that you can do. That worked for me. And one was taking the earbuds out, going to the gym because people are so much into the world.

[Andy Stumpf]

You realize though, a lot of women put them in and aren't listening to anything.

[Richard Ryan]

I don't know, that they just want.

[Andy Stumpf]

To be left alone. I've had women tell me this, especially in the corded days.

[Richard Ryan]

Oh, yeah.

[Andy Stumpf]

Where you can see was just like, just tucked into the top of there. I'm like, what are you listening to? Like, absolutely nothing. I just want to be left alone.

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah, I get it. I get it. I mean, to some degree I get it.

[Andy Stumpf]

But I shouldn't say a lot of them there are. That's a contingent. And you know what? Good for you.

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah, play it. Yeah. So I guess for the things that really worked for me, you know, the community component was definitely a big part of it. Accountability, there's some statistics around that too, you know, accountability and creating a plan and helping people do that. The statistics around that, I forget exactly what it was, but it is like you're like 65% more likely to complete something by having that plan in place. 95% chance of achieving that if you have a specific appointment for that, like accountability partner or whatever it is, which means a 5% failure rate on that, which is wild to think. So it's like really getting people to create some type of plan of action around this. And I think the people in our community are really good at that. Be it for prepping survival and, you know, disaster emergency preparedness and stuff like that. But the big one, the big one, that the biggest big takeaway from me in the book that I really want to drive home for people is gratitude. And so this is really, really kind of hard for some people to understand. But I would argue what is one of the most researched statistics out there?

[Andy Stumpf]

Gratitude is. No, what do I think one is the most researched statistics out there? Jesus. Broad question, Mr. Ryan.

[Richard Ryan]

I know, but you're Gonna go. You're gonna. After I give you the answer, you're gonna go.

[Andy Stumpf]

I don't know.

[Richard Ryan]

The placebo effect.

[Andy Stumpf]

That totally makes sense.

[Richard Ryan]

Right. Because it has to be accounted for in just about every single study.

[Andy Stumpf]

Yeah.

[Richard Ryan]

And so I was gonna say, like.

[Andy Stumpf]

How many lesbians play the saxophone? But.

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah, but here's the thing. It's measurable, right?

[Andy Stumpf]

Okay.

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah. They have.

[Andy Stumpf]

They do it all the time, too.

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah. And so what that tells you is the brain's ability to do something is measurable. It has a measurable impact on physical states. And so for me, again, it was one of those things where meditation, breath work was something that was introduced to me probably like 20 years ago. And it definitely helped me kind of clear my mind and stuff like that. The breath work specifically, like, especially when going to the doctor and stuff like that. I like. Like the breath work and lowering my heart rate to set off the alarms.

[Andy Stumpf]

You and I will get along well. That's the type of fun I like to have, too.

[Richard Ryan]

They come running in because my heart rate drops. It's so good. But these things I started doing, I was like, I forced myself in the detox phase to do a gratitude journal. And I was like, ah, there's so many studies around this, but I feel so stupid doing this or whatever. I'm grateful that for this and, like, how do I make this more meaningful for me and everything. And I started doing these things, and you have.

[Andy Stumpf]

Have.

[Richard Ryan]

You have these acts of gratitude in so many different aspects of life for people who are religious, be it before meals, before bed, significant events and stuff like that. And I think. I think it's really important for people to acknowledge that. And so for me, I was like, okay, how can I introduce this in a way that doesn't become, I don't know, just. Just another thing that I'm doing. So I started doing little things. Like whenever I get my truck, I would take just a few minutes, and I would say to myself, or out loud, I'm grateful that I have reliable transportation. I have an opportunity to go somewhere to, you know, do whatever it is that I'm doing. I have fuel. I have the financial means to buy fuel and all these other different things. And it's like, okay, man, you're really getting out there. But I. I did it. And over a period of time, I noticed that whenever I'd be in traffic and construction, there was a thought process that shifted in my. My thinking. And it was, oh, I'm late. Why me? Why me? Like, I started shifting from main Character syndrome to, oh, dude, there's this guy working construction here who has a job in my community. That's awesome. He's improving the roads here so that we have a more effective way to get from. Like. Like, I became more positive. It was like. And again, I can't explain other than just the act of doing that rewired my way of thinking.

[Andy Stumpf]

You're changing your optic.

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah, for sure. And like, so one of the very first books I ever read, because I have, like, some massive ADD or, you know, like, I would. I. I would read a book and then I'd be like, three chapters in, not remember anything. My retention was just trash. One of the first books I ever read was Meditations, and Because I could leave it and come back, as in.

[Andy Stumpf]

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius.

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah, okay. And one of the quotes that always stood out to me was, don't stress about any one thing unless it affects you physically, for the severity of the problem depends on your perception of it. Therefore, you have the ability to make any problem seem minor. So unless somebody's there stabbing you with a knife, the bulk, majority of your problems are psychological. So if you approach it from that standpoint, you have the ability to not necessarily be naive or delusional and. And. And just, you know, disregard them, but you are able to manage them in a way that makes you more effective as a human. And so for me, gratitude has been probably one of the more effective tools I've found in this process. I mean, there's journaling and there's boundaries and stuff like that.

[Andy Stumpf]

But Meditations is a good book. There's a one in there recently that I was thinking about and completely murder the quote, so I won't even try. But essentially it says, paraphrasing, nothing is asking to be judged by you, so feel free to not have a fucking opinion on everything. Marcus Aurelius, I think that last sentence was directly associated with. But I mean, how powerful is that? Yeah, because outrage is a fucking currency online. It is, and it is so true. Absolutely nothing is asking you to judge it. Unless somebody's coming in saying, hey, what's your opinion on this? Give it to them. But I actually enjoy. Now, people, what do you think about this? I have no opinion. And they'll say, well, how can you have no opinions? I don't care. Or it's not that I don't care. I don't have the bandwidth to allocate the time needed to inform myself to be able to have an opinion on that.

[Richard Ryan]

That's, again, that's one of the many reasons why I personally suck at social media. Like, I've always been good at working as or with brands and really optimizing for that stuff. But for me personally, you know, there's algorithmic weight that's given to people who use the platform frequently. Right. So if you're uploading at a cadence of one, three times a day, whatever.

[Andy Stumpf]

It is, that's what they're looking for.

[Richard Ryan]

Content, that's what they're looking for. Right. And so those, those things get rewarded. But, and again, like you say, the things that are going to give the engagement and are going to be the things that tap into that fight or flight response, the things that are a threat to the tribe. And so you're going to be in there a lot longer. You're going to be in a heightened state of whatever it is. And, you know, like Dr. Lemke would say, you're on this dopamine seesaw and, you know, the, the counter to that is going to be pain or the increase of your threshold for happiness. And that's really unfortunate, all things considered, because I think a lot of people, and again, like, we get back to the loneliness side of stuff and everything, people are just trying to make connections in so many different ways. So, you know, fundamentally, I think that we have to, you know, rethink a lot of these systems. And I think that, you know, again, as an individual rights absolutist in so many ways, I think that there's individual responsibility that comes with those and you can't just, you can't just sit off on the sidelines and say, well, you know, that's somebody else's problem. Like, you have to start with yourself. And so for me, you know, I grew up on a farm and the regenerative agriculture component to my life in the last five or six years, like, I love that. So, name of the book is called the Warrior's Garden because of the adage, it's better to be a warrior in a garden than a gardener on a battlefield. Yeah, exactly.

[Andy Stumpf]

I don't know though, because you could teach that gardener some cool shit.

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah, you could. You could, right?

[Andy Stumpf]

That quote leaves a lot open to like, did he start as a gardener and now he's 15 years through a 20 year stint in the infantry? Because that dude would be savage.

[Richard Ryan]

Well, I'll give you a regenerative ag quote then, is it's not, it's not about how much rain you get, it's how much you keep. And so that's a good one. And so, and so the, the premise of that is around the world of no till drilling. So whenever you would tillage, active tillage will break up the soil. Yeah.

[Andy Stumpf]

Topsoil loss and all sorts of stuff.

[Richard Ryan]

So. And most people don't realize that the bulk, majority of erosion comes from wind, not actual water. And so if you're keeping roots in the ground, be it with COVID crops or whatever, you're allowing for mycorrhizal fungi, your, your microbes and everything to live in there. I augment my soil with biochar, which is, it's just, it's taking organic matter and burning it through pyrolysis. So you get the most purest form of charcoal. But the thing is, is that it's extremely porous. And so what you're doing is you're essentially by not tilling up the soil and augmented it in these ways is you're creating a sponge. So when you do get two inches of rain, you retain it becomes a sponge versus conventional tillage. Especially places like where I live in Texas, you will, you'll get cracks in a crust and so that water will just run off into the waterways and you know, maybe even pushing, you know, fertilizer and stuff where you get algae blooms in, you know, wherever the, the mouth runs into and everything.

[Andy Stumpf]

Do you refer to it as the Gulf of Mexico or America down in your parts?

[Richard Ryan]

It's hilarious. I said when, when that whole thing, when that whole thing was going on, I was sitting, I was sending my friends screenshots of like Google Maps every single day. I was like, like, we did it. Yeah.

[Andy Stumpf]

So again, that's why one goes into my category of not everything is asked to be judged by you. Yeah, I just, I guess. Okay.

[Richard Ryan]

I mean, yeah, it was so I, I would, I would hope that people would start looking at their, their psychological states, well being and everything as something like that soil in that sense where you want to cultivate this thing that when the water comes or you know, when conditions get tough, there's a drought or something like that, that you have something that's in place that is, well, it's durable. And I think that a lot of people right now, whether or not they're willing to admit it, are there, there's some, there's some flaws in our existence.

[Andy Stumpf]

How would you recommend, you know, getting back to the book? Because identifying a problem is one thing I'm a huge fan of having, you know, presenting people with the issue and then a potential solution or traction towards it. And you know, I watch my own, my Own usage of electronic devices, my children's usage, or even just the quantity of time that they spend on it. How would you start winding it in the other direction? For some people, it is a legitimate addiction.

[Richard Ryan]

Man. I'm gonna try not to get emotional here, because this is. This is why the thought exercises are so important. Right? So. And again, this was the process I had to go through. Hopefully people will communicate with me things that work so that I can refine this process over time. But insight is the very first thing, right? Like, really, really figuring out just how much of your time is being spent on that stuff, then doing the work on the things that are important to you. And I was like, this is going to sound like probably some of the people out there are going to laugh at this, but some things just hit you like a ton of bricks. And the thing that clicked for me was I heard Neil Degrasse Tyson talking about perspective. Because in the Marcus Aurelius thing, I'm always. I'm always wanting to hear somebody talk about perspective if it gives some new nugget or whatever. And he was talking about time and a dog's life. Most people realize that every, you know, one year of your life is seven years in dogs. But if you take and you quantify that down to a more, you know, digestible statistic, every day of your life is a week of your dogs. And when I heard that, it hit me. I was like, oh, oh, all this traveling and that. I do. Like, I don't want to be away from my dogs more than three days with you. Well, I do. And so a lot of times I travel with a travel trailer, and I just drive.

[Andy Stumpf]

I don't take them on planes. Get him seats. I take my dog on a plane. He's 11 and a half pounds.

[Richard Ryan]

But here's the thing is, like, you know, I rescued one of my dogs. I spent so much time like. Like, this dog was like death's door, right? Yeah. All the. All the rescues wanted to euthanize them and everything. I was just going to foster him for, like, six months, but I was like, you know, missing a week of my dog's life is one thing. Missing a month is unacceptable. Like, I'm gonna play fetch with them. I'm gonna, you know, hang out with them. You take that and you apply that to children. Completely different thing. Like, you, you know, as a father, you only have so many years with your kids in a certain way. Like. Like, you know, as their kids taking them to Disney or going fishing down at the creek, they become Teenagers, they, like, resent you or they rebel from you or whatever. They become adults and they're, you know, like, there's. There's these windows in time that you will never get back. And so you were doing yourself a disservice if you don't do the work and just. Just go through the thought exercises of what is important to you. Define that, and that will help you establish some type of guardrails where it says, hey, look, you know my screen time this week, I spent 12 hours on Instagram. Is that really worth it? How much time did I spend with my kids down at the creek fishing?

[Andy Stumpf]

Zero hours.

[Richard Ryan]

You? Dude, I'm like, yeah, I'm going fishing.

[Andy Stumpf]

Have you ever seen the calendars that list out the average amount of weeks in a lifespan and people cross them off? Was another thing that the. It's another thing that people like Marcus Aurelius really valued, and that was constantly assessing their mortality. Yeah, because it helps you separate the wheat from the chaff.

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah.

[Andy Stumpf]

And I, I don't. I don't want to say it was necessarily him, but it was one of those philosophers in that era, but basically his recommendation was twice a day you should ponder your own mortality.

[Richard Ryan]

Really?

[Andy Stumpf]

Yeah. Not like sit there shaking with a cigarette existentially, like, losing your mind. That might be taking it a little bit too far, even though there may be some benefit to that. But twice a day thinking about your own mortality, what do you want to do with the uncertain, unknown amount of time that you have left?

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah, I mean, I do have the week in your life and weeks poster hanging on my wall.

[Andy Stumpf]

Of course you do.

[Richard Ryan]

Statistics. Average. Average life expectancy in the US is 79 years old. That's 950, 51 months.

[Andy Stumpf]

The average body fat percentage in America is 67 and a half as well. I'm making that number up, but it is higher than it should be.

[Richard Ryan]

Well, you got semi glutides now.

[Andy Stumpf]

Sure, I. I mean, some of these problems are solvable. We can bump those numbers up.

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah, yeah, you can bump those numbers up. But again, I would argue it's quality over quantity in so many different ways, too. Right. So you want, you want health. Healthspan more so than just lifespan.

[Andy Stumpf]

Oh, for sure. And yeah, the last 10 years of your life and you're in a wheelchair and somebody's wiping your ass. Hard pass.

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah, I mean, you might have the humanoid robot to help you with that at some point probably, but me, I'd rather have like a bunch of. Bunch of kids to help out.

[Andy Stumpf]

Yeah, they don't want to wipe your ass, though. I mean, they don't remember you wiping theirs. So they're gonna say this is a. What was the term that you used? Incentive misalignment.

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I don't. I don't want to run too long here. I could. Talking days.

[Andy Stumpf]

Yeah, we'll get out of here at like 1:30. We got, like 20. Whatever, 27 minutes left, but.

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah, so that's.

[Andy Stumpf]

Michael never gets to leave, so we're fine.

[Richard Ryan]

That's the big.

[Andy Stumpf]

That's his bed.

[Richard Ryan]

Oh, really? Where's. Where's the ween?

[Andy Stumpf]

Yeah, he is at the house right now. When I leave him alone at the house, I tell him he's lording. I'm like, you can lord over the house. I find him in the weirdest fucking places.

[Richard Ryan]

So how did you. How did you get him? Like, how old was he?

[Andy Stumpf]

I picked him up the day after he was eligible to be picked up.

[Richard Ryan]

I was a rescue. Was it a breeder?

[Andy Stumpf]

It was a breeder just north of Colorado. I want to say it was either 8 or 12.

[Richard Ryan]

So you've had that breed before, then?

[Andy Stumpf]

Yes.

[Richard Ryan]

Okay.

[Andy Stumpf]

They're the best.

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah. It's typically when people go to breeders, they had that.

[Andy Stumpf]

Don't get me wrong, They're a psychopath. I mean, Michael watches him for us very often. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but the weane is kind of the best.

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah, he's pretty great.

[Andy Stumpf]

Yeah.

[Richard Ryan]

Love it. Love it.

[Andy Stumpf]

He's such a. Like, if he likes you, he's all over your. Like, he's a loving person. And he'll still bark at you, too, but if he doesn't know you, you're gonna get barked at quite a bit.

[Richard Ryan]

Dogs are the best, man. I like it. Again, I equate them a lot to children. Some people hate that. It's just the. The relative, unconditional love that they give you.

[Andy Stumpf]

Yeah.

[Richard Ryan]

On a daily basis. It's.

[Andy Stumpf]

He freaks out when I come home, whether I had the best day or the same. He doesn't give a shit. He's running around making noise, super happy to see me. Yeah, I have incredible conversations with him. He doesn't hold up his end that well, but, damn, he's a good listener.

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah. Well. So you want. I guess we could. We could shift gears, too. You wouldn't talk about dogs. You had Mike Ritland on here recently. Right. And so in this whole existential crisis thing and trying to figure out, are you through it?

[Andy Stumpf]

Are you just in the trenches still?

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah. Yeah. No I mean, I think you're always kind of. I think I've found. For me, I was looking for direction, and I kind of have those in building these companies. Right. So building the AI kind of slop company, the image generation thing, and having a couple hundred influencers online that are all artificially generated. I want to drive the value of posting to social media for clout and all these other different things to zero as fast as possible.

[Andy Stumpf]

So you're trying to increase the static. You're driving gray noise up into that.

[Richard Ryan]

Through the roof. Okay, through the roof. And for me, I was like, how do we get past this and build more meaningful relationships? And I don't want to be out here just building companies for myself and, like, how can I help people that are doing good stuff? So, Mike, you know, started the Warrior Dog Foundation. Y and for people who don't know military working dogs were euthanized up until 2000 when they were retired because they were classified as equipment. We left an insane amount of dogs after the Vietnam War there. And, you know, it's just a travesty in how we treated them as or classified them as equipment for so long. And now, even though working dogs are able to be retired out and adopted, there's still inherent challenges around that. Right. Because an animal that's been focused on doing a singular task is not going to stop doing that. You know, it's going to need a home in a environment that can help facilitate, you know, its retirement. It's not a family pet that's just going to necessarily just go chill on the couch with the kids. And so he's done some amazing work in giving, if not finding a home for him, putting them up when nobody else would. And so I was like, okay, how do we build a meaningful relationship between and cut out as many middlemen as possible. And so I was like, okay, I'm going to build this tech stack where we put RFIDs in the collars of all the dogs, and I put readers in all the kennels and throughout the facility. And so you can go and sponsor one dog, three dogs, all the dogs or whatever. And it creates event triggers so that you can see the dog essentially throughout its. Yeah, you can see what it's up to. Yeah. So that keeps them from having to hire a bunch of people to create media for it, but it also builds a more meaningful relationship between the sponsor and the organization. And so that's warriordog.com and one of the ways I was wanting to kind of scale this up. And again, you know, you look at these problems from 30,000 foot. How do you help small farmers compete with Big Ag at scale? And so by taking that, we're going to take and we're going to build out some use cases this year where we'll put them RFIDs on chickens, ear tags on cows. You'll quite literally see the calving process through the slaughter process if you want to. Kansas City Cattle Co. Been, you know, working with Pat there and trying to get all that stuff set up because you want to build a more meaningful relationship with someone through the transparency and the supply chain. So if you're able to see the ethical treatment of an animal on pasture grazing its entire life cycle and it's documented and he's not having to hire somebody to do that, you're able to sell your product at a premium. Whereas like Big Ag won't technically do that because they're going to put animals on feedlots either way. And there's a lot of blurred lines around the nomenclature and things like grass fed. Well, what does that mean? Did you bring a dump truck in on a feedlot and dump grass to those cows or do they live on pasture where they grass finish and all these other nuances to it? So by providing that transparency and supply chain, it helps a small farmer upsell their product. Restaurants be able to put those QR codes and all those other different things on there. So for me, I'm just trying to find these meaningful, you know, disruptive things that I can build as just a way to just make it and then step back and be like, there you go. And, and there's a lot of people that will say open source and it's not technically accurate now. Definitely want to clear the air around that. Especially in the world of artificial intelligence, there's a massive difference between open weight and open source. So open source is fully transparent code. You can take and fork it and, and make it into whatever you want. Open weight, there's nuances around that and being able to impact certain things. So like, you know, you start taking the, the Chinese LLMs and stuff like that, I would argue it'll be hard to take and make Gigi Ping, Winnie the Pooh because they know that that's what like a lot of the people in the west make jokes about and everything like that. And they, they make it. So even though it's open weight, you're not going to be able to do that because it's not open source. And there's nuances around that with OpenAI and even llama, where you Know, people will say llama's open source, but it's technically open weight. But so as we get into this world where, you know, I don't know, you think about like the individuals who are competing with these goliaths. It's like, I think the, the downstream effects if, you know, good people don't stand up and make a proactive effort, I think that's, that would me, that would be me doing a disservice to my future self. And that's, that's the person I'm constantly trying to please is myself 15, 20 years from now. Because I look back, even six months, I'm like, wow, man, fuck that guy. You know, like that's the way though.

[Andy Stumpf]

At least you're actually taking that reflective look. Yeah, most people probably not taking that look. And I say that as somebody who didn't for a long time. You just assume, you're like, obviously I was the best version of any human that could have been six months ago. Clearly I'm probably just the same or better now.

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah, I mean I'm like, I try to, I have these thought exercises. I love having them with, you know, intelligent people like yourself because I like, I like for them to poke flaws in it and everything. And one of the things I've been thinking about like how do you, how do you leverage capitalism against itself? And, and some of these different things. I've been thinking a lot about pornography.

[Andy Stumpf]

This is the beginning of an interesting sentence.

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah, yeah. And so, so hear me out. How do you attack this problem where you have all these. I'm probably putting a target on my back by even having this conversation. But you look at the world of human trafficking and stuff like that and in just, in just pornography and stuff like that, that's a massive problem. You look at only fans and all these other different things. I think the statistic somewhere around 1 out of 20 women has a only fans account. And you take 350 million people and 1 20th that would be, you know, millions, millions of people. Right. Don't do math in public. But so how do you leverage that against that? I think with artificial intelligence systems like you have, you have all these products that are nerfed right now, your open AI and, and everyone, they're not going to create systems like this. But if we, if again we drive the value to zero, create like some type of non profit that, you know, the way I was posing it to my team was like, if we were to create a non profit, we could take 50% of the, the revenue and Put it towards anti human trafficking organizations and causes and we take the other 50% and we vote quarterly as to if there's a natural disaster or something like that. The money goes to those organizations working on it. Not just, you know, random causes or whatever, but being able to use artificial intelligence. You, you could start by having creators supplement their content and then ultimately get to the point where like you'd be stupid to create your own stuff unless you're just, you know, wanting to. Right. I think a lot of people, a lot of people might be looking at the financial because for me, you know, especially like, you know, don't have any daughters now, but I think about that and you know, forward looking children and everything is like, I want to drive the value of that to zero as fast as possible before my daughters even have the opportunity to consider that. Right, yeah.

[Andy Stumpf]

That's an interesting conversation around that particular platform because again, if you are an individual rights person, it's like fuck, okay if that's how you choose to live.

[Richard Ryan]

Your life, but you leverage capitalism against itself in that.

[Andy Stumpf]

I know, that's what I'm saying. It's an interesting conversation because on one hand I agree with you. Like if you're in a consenting adult, my line for almost everything is if you're hurting kids, I'm gonna fucking kill you. Yeah. But beyond that, if you are a consenting adult, it is not my job to tell you how to live your life. If you ask me for my opinion on something you're doing, I'll be happy to provide it it assuming I know what the I'm talking about. Yeah, but it's, I mean, is the problem, it's so readily accessible is the problem. I mean you're never going to get away from. Unless the human species changes to something I don't understand. Yeah, the sexual desire in nature between whatever pairing floats your boat. Right. Is it the accessibility, is it the economics, is it the addictive nature? Like it's probably all those. Exactly.

[Richard Ryan]

Who.

[Andy Stumpf]

Man, that's a tough one.

[Richard Ryan]

Well, and see and the thing is, is, you know, I look at these things like again, misaligned incentives. You have all of these platforms that exist now have their own algorithms and so that's even more delicate. I haven't really fully unpacked this but you know, how are their search and related algorithms impacting and what are the second third order consequences on those people consuming that? You know, I know there are some studies around like increase in certain statistics and stuff like that, but for me like these are the problems Where I'm trying to shift my focus and like building things that disrupt things. Because right now we're in this era that is very much similar to the early days of mobile where everybody.

[Andy Stumpf]

Mobile phones.

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah, everybody's creating an app, right? Yeah. I don't know. You don't, you know, I don't know if you remember that, but everybody creating an app, everybody. You are, though, you have a podcast.

[Andy Stumpf]

That'S not an app. Sir, I upload this to you.

[Richard Ryan]

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I'm saying, I'm saying there's a lot of parallels. Like a lot of people are creating the things that are ultimately going to lead to something else. And so it's very hard to see when the iPhone comes out and everybody's creating a mobile app, it's like, well, this, There's a surface level value proposition that's being exchanged here. They're just taken in using the YouTube API to aggregate a bunch of YouTube videos. I don't really need that. I'll have one YouTube app in the future or whatever it is. And now like the flashlight app and all those other different things that were acquired by or built by Apple or Google or whatever. So five, ten years from now. The concern for me is that the individuals don't do the work right now and have the difficult conversations about the things that could have really, you know, long tail consequences for humanity. And I think we're really, we're rapidly approaching some very disruptive times with robotics and artificial intelligence. So I think that, you know, to be naive and just say, hey, look, oh, you know, it's just a stupid phone or it's just a stupid digital YouTube thing. Like people aren't going to make movies on YouTube or anything. Like. Yeah, but you're not really going to understand the influence that's going to happen. And so, yeah, for me, that's, that's what this is about, just having these conversations and stuff.

[Andy Stumpf]

So when's your book come out?

[Richard Ryan]

I think we're going to push for May 28th. May 29th. I've been, I've been.

[Andy Stumpf]

Is there particular now you're going to make me look at my calendar.

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah, it's like Thursday or Friday.

[Andy Stumpf]

Are there only 27 days in May?

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah, no, no, no, there's 20, 30. I don't know.

[Andy Stumpf]

I'm just launching on a day that does.

[Richard Ryan]

Well, it was supposed to be, it was supposed to be next week. Okay. And I like ran into some issues with the printer.

[Andy Stumpf]

Okay, so you said 28th or 29th.

[Richard Ryan]

Yeah, so people, you just go to.

[Andy Stumpf]

Essentially 1, 2, 3. This episode will actually come out shortly after that. Actually, you know what, I can accelerate it and try to get it out on the 26th.

[Richard Ryan]

Whatever. Yeah. Warriorsgarden.com okay. Will get people there or whatever. And I'll put links in my bio to all the different projects and stuff that I'm working on, from Warrior Dog to Lazarus and all these other different things.

[Andy Stumpf]

Okay. We need to do another podcast at some time where you explain how the blockchain is a fad and it's almost getting ready to go away. Well, I mean, maybe I know you're passionate about that.

[Richard Ryan]

Well, I mean there may be a, a future in that. Right.

[Andy Stumpf]

Because you know, I'm completely joking. I know you're deeply into that world.

[Richard Ryan]

Well, I mean, so again, we, we talk, we briefly talked about dead Internet theory and like all these different bots and stuff like the, the, the. The.

[Andy Stumpf]

Is that. So I'm actually not familiar with the Dead Internet theory is essentially like everything going on there is fake. So therefore dead.

[Richard Ryan]

It's not everything, but it's the point in which more than half of the, the interactions were created by artificial systems. Okay, but, but for me, like, you know, the, the NFT thing was kind of frustrating because everyone was so focused on expensive JPEGs. When the non fungible token component to it, the unique identifier, I mean your phone has a uu, a UU ID or unique identifiers. Having these unique identifiers for a human in some way, shape or form. These are the things that I really want to push for in the future far as like, how do you get past Web two, Web three? What does it mean to authenticate a human in these social interactions? So we're not having to deal with the problem is what happens though when.

[Andy Stumpf]

The human authenticates himself. And then it was like optimists come over here and then they're just so.

[Richard Ryan]

It's funny because I like, I've thought about these problems and I think the community component to it. So like you said, and I don't want to like kind of give the name out in that sense, but you, you, you incentivize people to have in person experiences and then, and the community authenticates that person, their behavior and stuff like that. You can still use technology and stuff like that, be it your whoops or, or whatever. But you know, I think these are the, you know, these are the conversations that people are going to want to have.

[Andy Stumpf]

I think it's going to drive it all back to face to face. There's always going to be a technology aspect, but I think it's going to drive it even more and more to the value of in person. Maybe the Dunbar's number is going to have to adjust a little bit because again, there's always going to be that technical component, but.

[Richard Ryan]

I agree, but again, like, the pendulum is going to swing back the other direction. And I think the reason why I want to be optimistic about the Internet and social media is because the ability to create any conversation or, you know, use VPNs anywhere in the world or whatever to be able to find those communities so that you can interact with them on a personal level, I think that will be the, the big value proposition in the future is like, yeah, I mean, the odds of your, I don't know, your neighbor being into guns too, or whatever, whatever these things are, being able to find your communities, if it's board games or pickleball, whatever the heck it is, I think that's going to be really valuable to people in the future too. I mean, as if they're not doing it now with Facebook groups or whatever it is. I think it's just the inundation with the inefficient systems that are trying to extract that attention from you has made it so everyone's just exhausted and I think that the pendulum just wants to swing back.

[Andy Stumpf]

I'm pretty sure that my neighbor is part of a sleeper cell and I'm waiting.

[Richard Ryan]

Good or bad?

[Andy Stumpf]

I'm watching these.

[Richard Ryan]

Good or bad?

[Andy Stumpf]

I don't know if it was good. Why would they be sleeping on it?

[Richard Ryan]

I mean, maybe they're just waiting because you never know. You never know.

[Andy Stumpf]

I got an eye on these. They don't know who they're messing with. On that note, you ready to go to Bozeman?

[Richard Ryan]

Let's do it. Let's do it.

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