Mic Drop #9: The Real Reason Men Are Lonely - And What Ryan Herrington Built to Fix It

In these ‘Mic Drops,’ I’ll be spotlighting my favourite, most impactful moments from past episodes of No Bollocks with Matt Haycox. These are the moments that hit hardest, offer the most value, and deserve to be heard again.

Ryan Herrington went sober, lost all his friends overnight, and found himself alone in Bali with no one to call except a stranger from a podcast he'd listened to two years earlier. What happened next became the Bali Brotherhood. 1,000 men, zero marketing, built entirely on word of mouth.

In this Mic Drop, Ryan breaks down why men are lonelier than ever, why the pressure to look strong is quietly costing them everything, and why whatever you're dealing with right now, you're not the only one.

Chapters
0:00 - Intro
0:05 - The Birth of the Bali Brotherhood
6:13 - What Happens Inside the Brotherhood?
8:41 - Have Men Changed Over Generations?

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

So you were you were coaching when you came here? Yeah. And obviously that you know the thing the thing that I I know you for and I I guess I say how we met I and and I'm uh I'm guilty of not being there yet but I f first knew of knew of you because of it is uh is the brotherhood the the brotherhood of I mean is it the brotherhood of Bali or is it Bali Brotherhood? Bali Brotherhood, yeah. And that's well as of Saturday, that's a hundred hundred weeks old now, isn't it? So uh and where where was the genesis for that?

SPEAKER_01 0:29

Yeah, so I think soon after I got to Bali, I had to we talk about this idea of the lone wolf and that if you are going to build a life that most of that everybody else in your life doesn't live, so the typical nine to five, you have to go through a season of solitude. You have to think, right, I can't spend time with them because it pulls me off. So I need to lock in, isolate myself, build the skills, build the business, and just create that space. And then when I got to Bali, it just carried on. Like I spent three years isolating myself to learn and grow, and then I carried on with this loan wolf mentality, and I was lonely, man. I didn't have the boys around me. I've grown up with being a lad's lad, and I had no one around me, I had my missus, but I didn't have any friends.

SPEAKER_00 1:14

So I just I just want to kind of understand that exactly. So when you say you didn't have any friends, are we talking about you didn't have anyone you could go on the piss with? Or you didn't have anyone, let's say, that was that was really there for you when you need needed to be there, because obviously, from what I know of you, you know, you're a sociable guy. Barley's a very easy place to meet people or whatever. Are you saying you literally didn't know anyone, or were we a bit more Well, I stopped drinking.

SPEAKER_01 1:37

Right. I stopped me and my missus stopped drinking, so that was like the season for me to go sober. And then when I stopped being then I went sober, I didn't have any friends because the old version of Ryan would use alcohol to socialise. But because I went sober, I didn't have anyone to socialise with. And it wasn't until I'd done a mushroom trip with some guys randomly.

SPEAKER_00 1:58

I like the word sober and mushroom trip in the sense of.

SPEAKER_01 2:01

Yeah, well, it wasn't drinking, right? Um, I went to um well, I went on a men's retreat for the first time. I was lonely one day and messaged a guy. This is this is this is like how I didn't know anyone. I was lonely, I was like, fuck, I'm lonely. I reached out to a guy I knew, but only from a podcast two years ago that I'd listened to. So there was no one else I could reach out to to connect and just socialise. And he said, Oh, we're going on a men's retreat this weekend. Do you want to come? So I went there three days, camping, it was like lamping, and it was sick. Entrepreneurs, playing a really big game. It was the first time I had a group of men that was like, you guys inspire me. I'm not I'm not thinking, oh god, I should be working on my business, or I'm I'm being pulled off track here. I was like, these guys are going to accelerate my journey because I'm learning from them and inspired by them. Following week, I went on another one and met some guys more my age who were in the same journey as me, and it was so refreshing and just to talk about all the stuff that I'd been so privately learning about personal development and stoicism and all the things that I loved but never had a group of guys I could just shoot the shit with about stuff I actually wanted to talk about outside of going and spend time and was like, I'm not this person anymore. And then a year later we went off. I went to Peru, done ayahuasca, went to Dubai, and then a year later we came back and we had a group chat, Bali Brotherhood, 8 a.m. Saturday morning. Six of us showed up.

SPEAKER_00 3:25

Was was I mean was it even called the Bali Brotherhood then? The first group chat was called the Bali Brotherhood with six of us. But it was it was a group, it wasn't planned to grow, it wasn't planned as a business. It was just like, you know what, I'm gonna get six six lads together.

SPEAKER_01 3:37

Yeah, let's re- that we're all we're all back in Bali again, let's meet up. And then we met, and it was so good, man. It was like all the pressures. The big thing is that the only person I spent my time with were missus or my clients, and I didn't have any other people in my life to offload the stress or the pressure. And it's a very bad idea giving your missus your business stress. She doesn't need to hear it, it tarnishes the relationship, but I didn't have anywhere else I could just express or talk about what I was going through. But then these guys are exactly the same. The highs and lows of being a business owner and entrepreneur trying to provide for your family and your missus, it comes with pressures that we need to talk about, but I didn't have a space for that. And then Saturday we had it and we talked, we just connect, we just shoot the shit, and it was I felt so good after it. I was like, right, the version of me who was lonely a year before needed this, but he didn't even know it existed back then. So I just made a commitment of right, I'm just gonna be keep doing it every Saturday, 8 a.m. Just keep showing up, and then four or six people became 10, 10 became 12.

SPEAKER_00 4:41

But where did these other people come from? Word of mouth, all word of mouth, just one of the six saying to their mates bring a brother, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 4:49

Bring a brother. I haven't had access to Instagram the whole time, and we've got like six posts on there. We haven't even posted anything for a year and a half because the person who started that left and never give us the account back. Um, but it would just keep showing up, and word of mouth grew, and then there was 30 people one week, and then pretty consistently over the past two years nearly, there's been about 30 guys. We don't even do any marketing, we just show up and speak, and then new guys show up every week. We've had guys that come every week, guys that come when they need it, guys that will be in and out of the country. It's 800 guys in the group now. Wow. Probably about a thousand guys have gone through that whole experience now.

SPEAKER_00 5:26

And what's the what's the split between ones that live in Bali and ones that don't?

SPEAKER_01 5:29

It's probably about 50-50, man. I think a lot of the guys are there in Bali and they're like, fuck, I didn't even know about this. I'm like, same thing, I'm locked in. I wake up, work, go to the gym, spend time with my missus. That's it. Over time, yeah, it just reached more and more people. I spoke on stage at a leadership event in front of 700 people about what we're doing. It was the first time I'd spoke outside of the 30 men in front of me, and the reflection from the universe and people in there was so profound, I didn't realise how much trust and goodwill we permeated into the community because so many people knew about it, but I had only ever focused on speaking to the men in front of me and then building my consultancy Monday to Friday.

SPEAKER_00 6:13

And what you know, in one of those gatherings of the 30 people, you know, what's what's going on? Is it just the 30 guys talking to the person next to them having a chit-chat and a and a and a bit of breakfast, or yeah, is is to a guest speaker? Are you the speaker? Is it like uh going to church with a sermon?

SPEAKER_01 6:27

Yeah, so there's two parts of it really. I facilitate, so I speak and I lead and I'll facilitate the conversations, but we have our we it's been lots of iterations, but we start with the guys arrive, they grab coffee, they connect for 20 minutes, we put everyone in, and then we'll do a success circle. So you get chance, what's your win? You just stand up and say, Do you know what? I'm fucking proud of myself at X. Because most of us will lock in, we'll tick the boxes, and then be a month before we've even had a had a minute to breathe. So we stand up, share the win, and then after that we go into breakouts. So we go into breakouts of circles of like six people. So we find different spaces, and we have six six men, you get five minutes on a timer each, and you just share what's on your heart. What are you doing? What's going on? And just allowing that space for men to actually share with no judgment, no shame, no no one trying to fix anything, but just like this is what I'm going through, or this is what what's going on in my life right now.

SPEAKER_00 7:24

We've had you hear do you hear some pretty wild stuff as well? Is it? I mean, is it a lot of I'm having a bad day, I'm pissed off because fucking I lost my PA or through to I fucking killed someone yesterday. I mean all sorts, like anything.

SPEAKER_01 7:35

Because it's like every the the beautiful thing about it is that every man goes through his own challenges at different seasons of life, right? One season you're in a fucking business challenge, next season you're having a you're broken up with your missus or you're going through relationship problems, other times something your health fucked up and you're you're trying to navigate that. Other times you ever the world feels like it's falling apart, other times I'm good, I'm actually good right now. It's nice for me to actually be able to share and check in and just you know what, I'm actually on the green right now, I'm in momentum, things are going well. I'm not trying to find problems to just dig up stuff, but it's the it's the cathartic release of speaking and sharing the emotional stuff that shows up for men because we just don't have it. It's not showing up as a man in the world, especially in business, you have to be a leader, you have to be a high performer, you have to be switched on, you have to be on it. And that the stip the the idea that we are always like robots on it is a false belief, and it just allows a space to be like, I just shake it off like fucking hell, like you'd like you would speak to your friend in the pub, but just without the alcohol, and just like this is what's going on right now. Is that fair enough, mate?

SPEAKER_00 8:41

I mean, I don't know if you're old enough to answer this question, but I was gonna say, you know, do you think that being a man has changed over the last 10, 20, 30, 40 years, and it and it it is it's it's a different thing, it's a harder thing, that's why this is necessary, or is this this concept always been around?

SPEAKER_01 9:00

I think the I think the pressures of men to provide have got harder. I think with the economy and wages, inflation, the pressures of a man to provide spending. Yeah, yeah, depending on the woman, right? But the idea that men or the pressure men feel to provide is getting harder and harder because of the the landscape of AI, of the economy, things have changing so rapidly, and a lot of men aren't capable or aren't armed to deal with what's happening, and the pressure that they feel with the challenge of being able to share or speak vulnerably or share what's actually going on without being weak or without being taken the piss out of, is getting more and more pressure for men. And I think a lot of men, men are very proud, but we don't want to show weakness, we don't want to share what's actually going on sometimes because we want to look strong, we want to look sharp, we want to look like we've got things together, because on the other side of that, we lose opportunities, we lose business, we lose relationships. So all of that mixed in together, it is get, I believe, it is getting harder for men to be equipped with navigating how rapidly the world is changing. And I think the work that we're doing is creating a space for men to know that whatever the fuck it is you're dealing with, you're not the only one, mate.

unknown 10:18

Every day I'm muslim, every day I'm musliming, every day I'm musliming, every day I'm musliming, every day I'm