 It stinks to be in the friend zone. Time to wash that off. With tactical soap, a fair amount of these soap for men, proud channel sponsor of 21 Studios. I'm Anthony Dream Johnson, and I approve this soap. Order now to link below. Use coupon code 21C for 10% off now. George Bruno with the 21 Report in Orlando, Florida. We're talking to Alexander Cortes, who just came off stage at the 21 Convention. We're going to talk to him about his message, get some insights for you, and he's going to talk to you specifically about his message. What was your experience so far with the 21 Convention? It's been really cool. I didn't know what to expect. Since I heard about last year through Twitter, I saw that it looked cool. Some of the mutual friends spoke at it. And then Anthony, he asked me, he's like, do you want to speak at this year? I said, yeah, sure, absolutely. I love to speak. And plus, you have to get in front of the audience this way. But the audience, I'm like, OK, so what's the vibe of me for guys? And I think it's impressive, everybody here is very serious about themselves. They came here to really, like, the process of their personal evolution. They're taking it close to their heart. It wasn't just a meat of guys to hear about bro topics. You had to phrase it that way. It's not a how to get laid conference for four days. You can exhaust that topic in about a three-hour seminar. A presentation, that could be fun. Fun to get rowdy for an hour about that. But for four days now, I think it's old fast. I did notice from last year this year some of the people that I've seen, there's a few guys that are 100 pounds lighter, they have become the best versions of themselves. It's had a positive effect. And I've told many people to pay attention to you because you might flip a switch inside of them and help them become unrecognizable by this time next year, physically, mentally, financially, so forth. I had a few guys come up to me there on my newsletter, actually, meeting them in person. They're like, hey, I read your, I got on your program, skinny, fat, manifesto, I've lost 20 pounds, I lost three pounds, I lost 40 pounds. That's always really cool to hear. It's transformative, isn't it? Well, it is. I mean, the thing with shedding excess weight is anytime you start, as you shed the excess parts of yourself physically, that mental excess that you've accumulated, it starts to come to the surface and it points itself out to you, like, okay, what do I need to get rid of and what do I need to move on from? I mean, that's why physical transformation is always, really, it's a mental transformation ultimately. It's not just, it's the body, but then from that, your mind goes through the same process. What about your message for the general audience today? What were the nuggets that you can take out of that entire presentation that you did? The Meta message to the presentation with archetypes, you have a story and a script to your life. You have a role that you've lived out and that role comes with such characteristics. Maybe you've been a father and a husband, maybe you've been a boyfriend, maybe you've been a manager. You've had a title, so to speak, that you've led and we all have archetypes that we live by, whether we're aware of them or not. If you want to finally change the direction you're like moving forward as a man, you need to approach your masculinity with depth and breadth. There's a lot to it and that comes down to your script, that comes down to your story, whether the archetypes are within you and that the characteristics that I was pointing out is that on a very fundamental level, there's four main characteristics of men. You have leadership of yourself. You have your strength and your being relative to how you appear in the world. You have your mind and your intellect and then you have your ability to have relationships and to love and to be loved by a woman and be loved back and then you can attach a physical representation that you can give to a king, warrior, magician, lover and the reason why I like to use the titles that way are representations because those are things that we can pull from history but those are also things when we're talking about the subject of doing deep inner work. Moving me on to the superficial stuff and okay, I'm angry, I've had these realizations so what do I do about it? How do I really begin affecting change in myself? You can take these things and you can use them as ideals. You can use them as ideals, you can use them as standards, you can use them as values and you can apply a level and layer of excellence to your life that you didn't have otherwise. And then with that, as you start living them out then your story changes, your future changes. You'll change the direction of your life. So you're not destined to be one archetype then? No, no. The thing I think that many people get trapped in is that we always want our past to prove itself into the future. If we were this way before, well, we have to keep being that way and well, that's who I was that way then so maybe that's who I really am. And it's very easy to get in posture syndrome when you're going through changes that way because you remember yourself then well, was that more of the real me? And oftentimes you encounter resistance from people where you're experiencing these things and you're trying to do this for yourself and they're gonna tell you, well, this isn't really you or I don't like who you've become. And it forces you to reexamine your relationships. But how do you overcome that process? Well, you have to have faith that you are, that you do have this within you. I made that point in the reverse, like deep change. It's not that you take elements that are outside yourself and well, I'm gonna be that way. Now I'm gonna be like you, I'm gonna be like George. No, you learn from George. Look at the values that George lives by but what are your values within yourself? Maybe they line up, maybe they are in alignment and you have commonality that way. Maybe they're a bit different but it has to be that internal substance that comes out of your own soul and psyche. When you go through life that's trying to borrow from people then you're just your copycat that way. You're mimicking, that's like a writing joke on Twitter like the Playboy name, there's Crypto Playboy and Crypto Lambo Playboy and there's Miami Playboy and LA Playboy, New York Playboy. What is unique about you truly? Yeah, that's interesting. The archetypes are, would you say that they are things that we name other people or do I name myself an archetype? Does that, like for instance, when I describe myself, there was a time when I described myself as husband, father, stylist, you know, in that order and then the husband thing disappeared and then I was just father, stylist and I found myself, my titles changing by default, not by design and I felt at one point in my life I was no longer in charge of my titles and then I took that power back. There's a man out there who knows he needs to change. He doesn't like who he is. He's allowed his circumstances to define him. You know who you are. Speak to that man right now about change and how it's possible. If you want to change right now, you have titles that were given to you by the people. You were raised in a certain fashion. You were told that you need to believe in certain things. You have had your whole life, you know, maybe presented to you truly where this is what you need to be. This is what you need to be for the family. These are expectations of you. So you have titles and identity laid upon you, not at your feet, but literally upon your soul and maybe that's what you think you are. And you hit a critical point where you try to be that thing and you try to live that out and it doesn't work. It doesn't work. It breaks down. So what does that mean? Well, does that mean that you just keep the titles and then you act a little bit differently? No, you can take titles off and you can put them on again and you can find new titles. And that's the thing with archetypes. You can find a new story. Are you the author of your own script? That's powerful. Who's writing that? Who's writing that? If I give you, here George, here's a script for your life. Here's a script for your life. Oh, I really don't like this a second act. Well, you have to follow it because that's what was expected of you. No, you don't because it's not written pen. It's written pencil. It has an eraser on it. You can erase that. You can take a new paper or you can write out something else. You have that within you and everybody has that within them. The reticence is leaving that first act behind. It's leaving maybe those tiles behind. It's leaving familial expectations behind. Yeah, everybody has those different sets of people. Everybody has those different external desires that get put upon them that you need to be this. It's not about what you need to be for them. What do you need to be for yourself? What do you want to be? That's a question that you can ask yourself and that's a question that you can answer. No, not me. It's not my prescription to you. That's your answer to yourself and that's where your personal power is gonna lie because once you have that answer, nobody can take that from you. I can't affect a man who knows who he is. I can do everything to him. I can take everything from him but so long as he says I am who I am and no matter what you do to me you cannot kill my spirit. That's in the mortal soul. That can't be stopped. Yeah, but as soon as he says to me I will beat what you say. Well then that's somebody that you are living to enslave something else. You're a slave to ideals that are not your own. That's a powerful concept and I hope you took notes with that and you know who you are because this is flipping a switch inside of you that's gonna make you unrecognizable this time next year. What else would you say to, let's say, now I would say that was to a younger person. We have people of all ages at the convention here. What would you say to someone who's older than you? I find myself, I'm at a point where I have a lot of people looking up to me and respecting me and a lot of people don't think that I don't reciprocate that and I learn a lot from people half my age and I'm happy to learn that. I don't, age doesn't make me almighty. I learned from everyone, I'm a student and a teacher. What would you teach an older man who might be frustrated with the way his life has turned out? I would ask him what is within him that he thinks he can teach somebody else? The thing that has always struck me with men as men age and they have life experience and they can speak to wisdom, they have that wisdom and it's locked up within them. You need to be a participant amongst, you need to be a participant amongst generations. You need to be a participant in the sense that are you leaving me behind a legacy? Not just for the sake of saying, well, I have a legacy but are you taking what's within you and really refining and examining it? When any time you're put in a situation where you have to learn something new or you have to teach something that calls into question your own being and your own sense of understanding and I think that's why teaching is very satisfactory for people as they age, at least as it seems to me because I watch them teach and it's not just that they get to pass on, well, here's the lessons I learned. They get to constantly remake themselves and they get to understand themselves that much better. And if you're at a point of frustration where okay, well, what's my life going to turn into? Is there anything that I could teach right now to somebody? And even the process of examination, you can teach yourself because then you start pouring over your life with that fine tooth comb and seeing the details and seeing the past and seeing what the future might turn into and you can spot the patterns for the first time. When you feel like you have nothing to teach people, what are you really saying? Well, you've lost your own, you've lost your spirit to living. What I have learned, what I've done, I guess it's not valuable to anybody. And that's why I think, not that you're a man that must maintain connection to youth youth all the time, but even having a student, having a person that you are a mentor to, that's so critical. And that's something that's really been lost among the current masculine generation is the idea of having a male mentor. Not to be like the man, but to have the man share with you. Here's how I have lived as a man so you can live as your own man. And that's invigorating on a whole different level. That's why a lot of what I do, what I do where I can be extremely sick and start key of times, but when I actually speak to people one-on-one or in person or through email, through text and through phone calls out of people, like here's my number, call me if you're really struggling with this, what am I doing with them? You know, the term we use, we're throwing a rope. I'm throwing them a rope. I'm also calling to question myself and in helping them, I get to help myself as well. And now they get the best parts of me. And that gives me more clarity to how I should live my life. I like that. That's why, as a stick as I can be at times, I am very free with my time that way. At least it seems that the more of myself I give to people, the better that things become for me and the better work I can do for them. And it's a very positive reciprocating relationship. I think next year, now all these speakers after this year are gonna be considered alumni and you're invited back next year. Next year, you may be invited to speak, you may be invited to just be here and be in the audience and someone's gonna come up to you and say, something you said sparked something in me and they're gonna show you a picture of when they were 300 pounds and now they're 185 and they're gonna say that's because of you. And you never know what seeds you're gonna be planting in people. Do you feel like you planted seeds today with some people? I definitely think so. I definitely think so. I got the sense that even after I got the stage that I could tell and within the eyes of them and they're pretty, it wasn't just odd but they hit something within them that resonated. Yes. And if you can give somebody that key, so to speak, you show them where the door is in the maze. Or you show them the path through it. Sure. I would like to hope there'll be some profound change that occurs within some of them for sure. Where do you see yourself in five years? What do you think? Yeah, so the funny thing, I always toss back, doing ballet, which I'm always gonna do. But I imagine at that point, I'd definitely want to have like one or two books out and just expanding the reach in terms of the number of men I get to interact with. It's funny, I have a lot of women I interact with as well, but the primary audience is young men. Young men to older men. And there's definitely, there's a void now in the world in the society where like I said, men need mentors. So if I can continue to serve that role on a larger scale, I know I'm doing something good. What is the best way for someone to access your content? Where can they go? So best way, so my website, which I don't really, I don't blog much, I email. So that's the other website, Alexander Juan Antonio Cortez. Alexander Juan Antonio Cortez. Yeah, with us. Yeah, dot com. There's a contact page. It's also on my Twitter, AJA underscore Cortez. Contact page is there. So I write a daily newsletter, or almost daily. The newsletter, that's where all the in-depth, super deep content is, masculinity, relationships, dealing with toxic people, physical transformation, mental transformation, fat loss, how to work out and to train. These metaphors that we use of pushing yourself forward, pulling yourself back, everything's on the email list. And that's where I've written the content for like the books, or at least the next book, definitely it's coming out. Yeah, that's also where I answer questions. So people that you have some sincere questions, send me an email, reply to one of those emails, and hopefully we can talk about that in a Q and A, or maybe it'll be a subject that I can expound into. And that gives me a pulse too, is what people need and want. And like I said, it also teaches me about myself, or okay, here's, I'll get a chance with things at times, let me really think about this in regards to, I like that, physical questions. So are you a king, a warrior, a magician, or a lover? Those are the four archetypes, right? Those are the four archetypes of masking the soul. Of the masculine soul, what do you wanna be? That's what I got out of this. And that you can change your script anytime. This is George Bruno from the 21 Report, saying thank you to Alexander. Thank you George. I appreciate it. Absolutely, adios gentlemen. Take care.