Friends of the Fire

So, I've been doing some research, and through the things I've found, I think I have a fairly educated guess as to who Mr. Fire's self-sabotaging friend must be.

I think it's Mark Ryan. Here's why.

In Mr. Fire's blog post about his friend, he notes the following.

• It's a close friend. This, to me means that it is one of the Siglos. 
• He's known the guy for 5 years. 
• It's also a business relationship. 
• He planned on doing additional products with the guy.
• It happened before he went to Poland.

Okay, let's see what people he has CLOSE to him, for 5 years, that he does business and products with? I don't know either of them well enough to know if I am right or not, so I have to use what information I can find online.

In terms of CLOSE friends, we've got your standard issue Siglos: Pat O'Bryan, Mark Ryan, Bill Hibbler, and Craig Perrine. It is definitely not Pat, because every other twit or blog post either of them do shows that Pat's nose is still firmly planted up Joe Vitale's ass. I assume Vitale takes his daily dump by first moving Pat's face out of the way.

Bill Hibbler went to the book signing last Friday. If it was him, he'd likely not go to that. So, he seems to be quietly still in the fold. For a while, I thought it might have been Bill because Bill hasn't done any projects with Joe, and he's still pushing his book "Meet and Grow Rich" that he wrote with Joe four years ago, as we can see from his twitter background.

Craig Perrine has been characteristically silent lately, but he is still doing stuff with Pat (assuming that he's the "craig" running his membership coaching site) and he recently did Joe Vitale's blog redesign. We know that this event happened BEFORE he went to Poland or he wouldn't have had conversations with Andrzej about it. But Craig did his blog redesign just before he went to Poland, and Joe promoted Craig's lovely work there AFTER he wrote the post about his self-sabotaging friend.

So, we can be fairly certain that it's not Pat, Bill, and likely not Craig.

Which leaves Mark Ryan, the Seduction King himself. (Though, looking at his seduction stuff, and then listening to some of his last podcasts, it seems he's gotten out of the seduction business because he has a wife and kid now. I do wonder how she deals with knowing about her husband's past as a womanizing seduction guy, who just two weeks ago was posting on YouTube how he is going to use hypnotic videos to collect a harem, but this crowd is full of crazy rationalizations to excuse their behavior and choices.)

So, let's look at Mr. Ryan's recent activity. On a recent blog post about the Sweat Lodge deaths at James Ray's event, he wrote:

I’ve been thinking about this all week. It dovetails with some other recent events in my life, including certain aspects of my visit to Russia where I had to trust other people with my safety and well-being. I had to trust that those people who invited me on this trip had my well-being in mind during all aspectsof the trip. (As many of you know, this didn’t exactly happen. More later on this.)

Well, more never came. At least it hasn't come yet. And the only thing he's written about his trip to Russia was positive which of course contrasts with Joe Vitale's now-sanitized blog post where he blamed his bad trip on everything from his Vice President (Peter Wink) to "Russian wolves" to his, and of course Mark's, beliefs about Russia being a bad place.

That post kind of threw me, though, because in it Joe talks about Mark saving his life and how he'd have been buried in Russia today if it wasn't for Mark. There is an awful lot of gratitude in that post of October 9. But the Ryan post that seems to show some stirring of discontent was October 17.

But there's nothing in Ryan's blog posts that say anything about him having a falling out with Joe. And given his typical method of revealing everything publicly, even some rather unsavory details on his podcasts, it is uncharacteristic of him to not go public with dirty laundry if it really is him.

But there's more evidence that makes me suspect.

It started with his twitter saying that he's reading The Sociopath Next Door and another link about what sociopaths are like. Now, this could be about anybody at all, and might not be about our friend Joe, and I can't figure out the timing from anything either has written online. I am probably reading something into this.

But we do know that Joe does products with Mark, and he intends/intended on doing more projects with him (see the escape Russia post). They have done seminars together, they have done free teleseminars, and they have the Subliminal Manifestation DVDS that they do together. The last one was the Zero Limits DVD. So he fits the bill as close friend and business partner who he wanted to do projects with.

Five years ago, according to these videos, Mark Ryan helped Joe Vitale at his booth at a convention. Sidenotes: it's hilarious to see a hairless Tellman Knudson in the video, and also hilarious to see Joe Vitale give mad props to Kevin Hogan. The feeling here is that Joe and Mark are recent friends, recent enough for Joe to give Mark a pile of his products. There does seem to be a camaraderie between the two of them.

With Ryan's relative silence, it's hard to tell whether or not it is him. But by the process of elimination and these other points, I think it's him.

That post of Joe's saying his close friend is self-sabotaging has been disturbing me since he wrote it. The arrogance that anyone who might not want a close relationship with Joe Vitale is self-sabotaging turns my stomach.

There is a long line of people who were once friends with Joe who now find him distasteful. I could name names, but most people know who they are. There are the friends who wrote the book discounting The Secret to hurt him; this he has spoken publicly about. And there are others... not too hard to find them.

So. That's my best guess.

I emailed Mark Ryan about my suspicions. He didn't email me back. But someone else supposedly close to him did respond to my inquiry, and I'm in the process of vetting them to see if they're telling me the truth.