 People self-sabotaging, they'll start telling you that they don't like what you're doing. The friends will not be supportive. Family issues will arise with like you change your eating habits. Hello, YouTube, and welcome to the first ever art of charm happy hour. Now, as you guys might know, we've been doing our podcast for about 14 years now. And with the frequency that it comes out and everything that we like to do, sometimes the conversations and guests that we'd like to have on that show are a little bit outside of its scope. So here we are opening up a new show for you guys to explore these ideas here on YouTube. And I'd like to welcome our first guest of the show. Good to be here, my brother. Alexander Cortez. Alexander, why don't you say hello to everybody here? What's up everybody? I've been a personal trainer for 10 years. I've been working in the self-development space for about four, yeah, four years, two and five years. And the big focus of my business is getting men upgraded physically, and also upgrading the mindset and presentation as well with the basis being, obviously, your body, your physique, since that's, as I say, the physique, if you can change your body, that's proof that you can change the rest of your life. Well, very direct effect to that, so. Not only are you able to change your life, it's gonna change your perspective of how you see things, it's gonna change your relationships. And I don't know why, but it seems to have gotten, well, at least in an hour crowd, even self-development in itself has gotten a bad name for it. It gets stigmatized at times. It does, it's a strange thing where, and this is like sort of like a generational sentiment, I feel like, where we want to, we're culturally raised, we want to believe that everybody can be successful and aspire to have wealth, riches, material abundance, Instagram lifestyle, we want to look good, we want to be good, we want to do good. But then when it comes down to personal struggles, whether that be with your body, your self-confidence or your charm or how you interact with people, or your sense of being a man, the fact that someone has to consciously work on that, that carries a heavy stigma of, what is it? Like, you shouldn't have to work on that, that should come naturally, or is that something like shameful to need help in that area? It's almost like when people go to therapy, it's like, maybe you need therapy to help. Oh, I could never admit to needing that, but you know that you need it. Why are we making people feel bad about wanting to improve themselves? Well, I think it also comes down to this idea that everyone, this inclusion idea, where everyone needs to be accepted. And that's fine, I think that everyone should be accepted. However, you walk into the room and you realize that there are people doing things that you'd like to be doing, so perhaps it's on you to put yourself in a position to be able to do those things, rather than people handing you those things just because you showed up. That's definitely the entitlement culture. I grew up in the 1990s and I saw that with my generation. That's not even millennials per se, it's just the whole state of culture right now, where there's this element of both entitlement and narcissism, where you're perfect just the way you are, but you're so perfect you don't need to change or work on anything, but also you deserve A, B, C, D, alpha, gamma, beta, delta. You deserve all these things as well, just for existing. So I'm like, oh, where in that is your own ownership for yourself and your actions and consequences and maybe you do need to work on things, like somehow that gets vastly overlooked or just gets discarded. And then people will get mad at you for making them feel bad about themselves in a way that you never even tended. Telling someone it would be great if you got fit and felt good about yourself, well, what does that mean? I should feel bad at myself now? No, but that's a very interesting moment of reversal that's how it makes you feel. So one of my big things with fitness philosophy, I never intend to be a personal trainer. Like, so my goal actually is to be a ballet dancer. That's what I want to do. Which always surprises people, like you don't look like you'd want to do anything. I think I saw you post something about that on Twitter. But that was my goal when I was in high school. Like I got into dancing late around like 15, 16. And I really loved it and I decided, this is why I want to do as a career professionally. I want to be a ballet dancer. I want to perform. And my aspirations were not to be famous or be known or be a leader of men. It was just, I want to do the thing that I'm passionate about. And that didn't work out. That's for reasons I got a bunch of injuries in college to the point where I couldn't dance anymore. You know, foot, ankle, hip, all the whole bunch of things got hurt. So I started personal training as a way to just try to make money. It was like a very like a fallback thing. I'm like, well, I have a degree that's not worth anything. Dance performance, choreography degree, that's not a real degree, it's not. But I was like, what can I do that will pay more than them wage? So it was like personal training. So I started doing that. And what no one tells you is that personal training is not an exercise job, it's a talk job. Basically exercises therapy. So you really have to have a really keen understanding of human behavior. And everyone's gonna come to you with their problems. Because like, why wouldn't they? Like you're spending an hour in a person's face talking multiple times a week, you're gonna have to get to know them. Well, and there's, let's face it, there are reasons why they are going to the gym. And that's usually for everybody, it's to get some perspective on the rest of their day with the challenges they have coming up. Very true. So that, but like I was 20 when I started and I realized it right away that the physical part's easy. Like you can write out sets and reps and exercises. It's the mental game that everyone needs to work on. So I realized, okay, like training is a self-improvement job essentially. Like it is, it is. Whether trainers will say that or not, it is. But that got me sort of studying human behavior. And you kind of go through like the realms of different kinds of psychological theory like Adler, Adler, Freud, Jung, cognitive behavioral therapy and everything kind of has it's useful bits and approaches where you're just trying to have a good conversation with somebody and hopefully often some constructive. Probably the biggest thing I learned was what's called the memetic instinct by, it's renaissance, it's like a French, yeah, new philosophy, but big thing with a mimic instinct and the reason why I bring it up is it's underlies everything is that human beings instinctively, inherently biologically, we always want to mimic and copy and replicate any kind of interaction behavior, dialogue we have with somebody. And we can do it two ways. We can copy it and want to be like the thing or we can react adversely to it and want to make the thing go away. So I mean, if we're friendly right now, if you're talking, if I suddenly get angry that's gonna be a very strange thing of like, why would you switch the interaction all of a sudden? You know, but at the same time, if I'm being friendly to you but you don't like me, you want me to know that you don't like me. So you have to reverse it back. But you see this plat with people's reactions to going back to the self-improvement thing where some people identify with it positively. They want to, yes, I want to evolve, but then you also have the negative reaction. No, I don't want that and that makes me feel bad about myself. And not only do I not want that, but you should not be allowed to express that. And you'll get these really weird antagonistic reactions, especially online in the digital world where people will have to handle about things that you would never presume to even be upsetting. Well, one of the things that I, and when it comes to working out and I'm an advocate, I'm at the gym every morning and I try to do a lot of running as well. It helps me clear my mind. And there, to me, and maybe you can elaborate on this a bit, being a trainer and working in it for so long, I see two realms of physical fitness. Number one is the, well, I just don't want to get fat. There's that guy, right, or a person. And number two is I'm going into gain. So that's a, so there's the begrudging person who goes in because they just don't want to be overweight and they're just trying to maintain. And then there's the person who was going in for mind, body, and spirit to gain wisdom and control over their body. And I personally know the exact moment where that shift was for me. And it was the very first David Goggins interview that I saw in Rogan, where I watched that and I was like, oh, I'm going into the gym with a completely wrong way. You know, there was a sense of always accomplishment and going in, but now there is almost this divine reason of something larger than me of why I'm going in there. There's now a purpose. And what I'm gaining from this is a lot more than I can get anywhere else. And so it makes getting up in the morning so much easier knowing what I'm receiving from going in there. Rather than the, I can't believe I got to do this. I'm going to guess I'll make some coffee. I hope it's not so bad today. Now it's let's do this. Let's fire this up. That's a good, that speaks to the fact that what I've seen from this, there's some interesting clients is, pain is always the catalyzer transformation for most people. Like very, it takes a certain level of self-awareness to want to improve just for the sake of like your own aspiration. So most people, most people there reason for training for physical health, it starts with like a pain, motivation. It's fear-based. I don't want to get fat, which is entirely reasonable. That's a good way to get in there. There's nothing so much, there's nothing really aspirational about that. It's, I'm afraid of this happening so I'll try to stop it versus, I'm inspired to something so I'll build towards it. And yet sometimes the ways I phrase it is like you have sort of a ascendant inspiration and then you have like descending motivations. And the descending ones are just all the fear-based ones. I don't want to be this, I don't want to be that. You know women especially, I don't like this about my body. I don't like this, but I don't like that about my body. Yeah, even men can't have that reaction. Like they don't like themselves and like certainly you get a lot of emotional energy from that, but that burns itself out very quickly because like, okay, well, where does that turn into? If you never get into that vision of like, what am I trying to become, you can circle this drain of sort of self-loathing, resentment, some action that's consistent that you're never really happy about, that can go on forever. And then when you meet some people where they challenge themselves with the sake of what will this turn me into, it's like that's a big mental shift, like, oh wow. And that's what I always try to describe to clients. I'm like, yes, the first part of this journey will probably suck because things might not happen as quickly as you want. The weight coming off, like I can only go, that can only happen so physiologically fast. You're gonna struggle or it's gonna create distance with other people in your life and then you're gonna get sort of this magic of a mirror effect happening where people self-sabotaging, they'll start telling you that they don't like what you're doing, the friends will not be supportive, family issues will arise with like you change your eating habits. If you can move past that, you'll get to a stage where you could say it's like someone actualized, like, all right, I'm actually, I'm evolving now and I'm better than I was before. And this is actually something that I can apply to other areas and then the metaphor makes more sense. Absolutely, well with our classes at The Art of Charm, there is a defeatist idea of people that come in. They're like, I can't believe I have to be here. I'm broken, I need these skills. And much like the fear-reasing or the defensive position of going to gym. I'm getting over way and I guess we gotta go to the gym now. But if you can, as you were mentioning, if you can move past that and realize what you're gaining, because I always tell people for those people who are bummed out that they're here or coming to the show because of a deficiency that they've recognized in themselves that they're upset about. It's like, okay, you can have that idea but what you're about to gain is an inside knowledge of inner workings of human behavior, how rapport works, conversation flow, emotional bids, which makes you that much better. And so rather than thinking that you are here because of a deficiency, know that you are here because of what you're about to gain and who you're about to come through this journey. And it's like, that is such a shift for the guys who, as you were mentioning, who are looking at it from a fear-based thing because if it wasn't for that fear pushing you and you're never gonna learn about all of these things that are out there that make you a better person. No, no you won't. I have seen guys get very far with essentially like a self-destructive motivation. You see it sometimes in competitive sports, mostly strength sports where it's very much like almost like the 97-pound weakling kind of story where the guy was weak, then he got made fun of, he decided to become strong and he was bullied and you can keep that fire going for a while but then in the process of doing that it requires you to stay in that sort of like, you know, like we just talked about that terrorized state of always being angry at yourself, always being angry at somebody else, always needing opponents somehow where things happen to me, you know, because of other people. And I've seen that break guys' lives up even while reaching a fairly high level of success which is always interesting. Like people, you can get pretty far ahead still being, you know, sort of emotionally, you know, whether you wanna say underdeveloping competent in a lot of areas but you're always gonna hit that threshold like you can't go any farther. And the reason is you, it's not because of all these externalities, it's you. And are you willing to address that? You know, in some cases they are and they have a mental shift and obviously some people, the answer is no. Yeah, I don't know how long you can continue that if you don't have that shift. The other thing that you mentioned there is this idea of competition and maybe this will, we can transition into Twitter a little bit. Which, so there is this concept at AOC which is four behavioral patterns that you should understand about yourself and people around you. So you know who to bring into your life and you know who to keep at a distance and it just gives you an inside baseball track of what's going on. Especially upon reading the room. The first one is supplicative. These are people who beg for approval, acceptance and attention and they shrink in moments of challenge. Then there's the combat of people who look to take attention, approval and acceptance from others in any way they can by putting others down, by inflating, putting other people in fear of them. The third is where I get in trouble on Twitter is the competitive people who see everything as a zero sum game and they're rolling into it in there and now they must compete for attention, approval and acceptance. And lastly, the fourth value is cooperative value which is you're going to give value in order to get value. And as you know on Twitter, the more you put out there to other people, the more you get in return. We could talk about that and certainly how we've become here to have this conversation. But anytime that I put out anything about the competitive nature in people and where that goes awry, I have nothing wrong with healthy competition, iron sharpens iron and makes you a better person. However, you cannot view relationships or business relationships as a zero sum competitive game that will get you in trouble. And anytime that I post this out, I always, and then I have to, I had to learn to not engage in this because it's ridiculous. But I always have people lashing out at me of how competition makes you better, you need to be angry, you need to compete at all times. And I'm like, this is where you have stopped evolving in your development. And because of that, until you start realizing that this idea is going to continue creating the same problem for you over and over and over again, you're not going to evolve above that to the cooperative state. And so, and of course, as I said, anytime I put these things out, I naturally get that flashback or backlash. Yeah, I mean, competition from a male perspective, like this like raw masculinity, like men need to compete. Like that brings out, like what does that bring out? It requires you to be strong, it requires you to be self aware. It makes you aware of other people. Oh, that guy's better at being this than that. Maybe I can beat him in this. You know, certainly like what is a sport? What is a game? Like you are playing a competition, but at the same time, like that is a game. If you take that approach to everything in life, you know, what happens, you're going to put yourself at odds with people constantly all the time. Like you're afraid of, well, I don't want to lose. I can't lose. You have to lose, so I do. In certain contexts that can work, like yeah, of course, like there's a winner and loser, okay. But in the context of relationships, or in the context of let's say like building a business, or trying to, like what we've done on Twitter, like the way my business works, and like there's, yes, there, I could say there's thousands and 10,000s like to fitness personalities. They're all over. They're all over. Are we all competing for the same pool of people? And like I have to win, so someone's going to lose. I'm like, if you take that, if you apply that to too many areas, you are, one, you're always going to be in fear, but two, like threshold and competency, you're going to create problems for yourself because you're not going to be looking for areas of growth or cooperation or value creation. You're just going to be looking at things where you can beat a number or beat a metric or I can detract from what you're doing. And then you'll probably start playing the comparison game, which is crippling a lot of athletes. If you, of course, you can tell, I mean, I've trained a lot pro athletes. And a lot of times they'll suffer through that where they start, their performance starts falling off. They just start freaking out. That guy's better at being, that guy's better at being. I don't know what's wrong with me right now. And it just, it becomes this death spiral of just like this, you know, this sort of like this low self-esteem, sort of intuition or not intuition, but like instinct kind of like takes over and it can just ruin their performance, ruin their career. And you're like, that's, that's a big thing that is in sports psychology, which is, which is not like, I'm not going to profess to be a specialist at it, but just in the context of being a person of training, you've got time to study sports psychology, but that's a big thing, big things with like the best athletes, like, yes, you want to be competitive and your very nature should make people better by you being there, but you also have to recognize if you are playing, you know, not even a team sport, but playing anything where you are required to have the support of other people, you need to bring something to the table that makes those people want to invest than you and vice versa. Otherwise, it's going to become a self-structured process and a lot of people flame out that way. That's an old story. The flame out is something that needs to be brought up because that's, we see that happening a lot, especially with social media, you come up with some ideas, you get them out there and then if any, if you get any traction, then you're, you put this pressure on yourself to continue to create at the level that you came into it with, which should help in inspiring you to really dig deep, to get some good stuff, but it is difficult and I see it with the young kids who do YouTube videos or Instagram where they get in that treadmill where you will burn yourself out if you don't give yourself the break of going through the abs and flows of creativity. I've been writing, I guess you'd say, I've been writing professionally for seven years and I think the big divide between like a good creative artist versus a great one, first and then it's a good creative artist. They'll produce good work, but they also will want to withhold anything they think is not good. So they'll be in that trap of like, I want to create and I'm trying to produce, but at the same time, like I keep comparing this to what I did before, maybe I had some success here and like nothing after that has had the same effect or hasn't gone viral the same way or hasn't gotten the same number of reads or likes, comments or shares. You have all these metrics now that you can use them to your benefit or they can just toy screw with you. So then they start like either withholding or they keep trying to copy the same formula and they just, it becomes this, like you said, this sort of treadmill of like you're not really progressing in where the craft versus I think like with a great artist, they just share everything. You know, I've been writing for seven years, I've had a newsletter for three and now I've got a lot of subscribers. I write almost like every other other day. So I can, in the last few years, I've probably written like a million words. Like it's a lot of writing. Some of it's great. I've had people, I've written things. I didn't even think we're good. People will contact me. This was incredible. Thank you for producing this, making this. This is the best thing I've read. This really helped me like you changed my life. And I'm like, wow, I, and I, this is me. Like I realize you can't be judgmental about your work that way or about your actions. Like the creative process, the process of personal pollution, you might think like definitely there's an up and down. You don't necessarily have a perspective on where the up and down is. You can think you're at a low point and maybe you're actually progressing, but you don't like what you're doing. It's like, it's, this is a very weird, you know, situation to try to sort of gain oversight on. But I've written things I thought were totally generic. I'm like, I didn't even like this. And look at an amazing response. I've written things I thought were brilliant and I don't get any feedback. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. I mean, you probably the same thing. Me, you do an episode. Like it was the best episode. Oh, yeah. You hear nothing. Oh, this is going to be a game changer for this drop. Man, I can't believe it. Nothing. I've gotten, it was about a week ago. I got into a place where I was, for whatever reason, the Twitter gods were aligned. I was getting all those engagement things were really fun. And then I had a day where like nothing was happening. And my first paranoid thought is, that's it, I'm being shadow banned. Oh yeah. Yeah. And then the next day everything was back to normal. And I went, maybe just what I wrote yesterday, just suck. Maybe just what I wrote. No, I started tweeting like in 2015. Twitter like, with any social media in general, like again, it's always this paradox relationship. People say like you don't take it too seriously but everybody takes it seriously. Of course. And yet we all somehow know like wow, you can basically change the world, access the global brain, get inspiration, learn new things. You could literally use it. It's a knowledge library and it's an entertainment fee. It's all these things at once. So it's like, no, don't take it too seriously. But be really serious about when you use it. But it's never going to quite align. It's not rational, obviously. But with Twitter, I started tweeting back in like 2015. At that time, I was working at Jim and Florida. And I had always been a very avid reader. I'd always been a writer, obviously. And I used it as sort of like a way to get my thoughts out, fitness thoughts, client conversations and reactions. And I've always been that. I've just had that brain room. I'll have a conversation with somebody, train someone, and then I'll kind of mentally rehearse it afterwards and like, what can I take from that? Could be useful, a lesson, something. So I would use Twitter for that. And I started to grow following them. I thought, oh, this is interesting. And self-improvement Twitter was not a thing then. Yeah, which we get to in a moment. Yeah, much like, you know, like e-com, YouTube. Like a few years ago, you're like, e-com what? Now you can get on YouTube and there's gurus and people telling you how to learn how to drop ship. Oh yeah, it's huge. Just all these things that just didn't exist. But that didn't exist then. But I had that happen like the first time I had a tweet. They got like a hundred retweets in it. Like all these people called me like, wow, this is so cool. And then, you know, but the next day, that doesn't happen. Or like when you have your first like 1,000 retweets, and you look at like, wow, tens of thousands of people read this, but you can't make that happen again and again and again. No. You know, like insight, I sort of like a greasy an idea. Like a lot of them, I think the creative thoughts we have, those, you know, those formulations, I don't think they necessarily come from us. We're sort of accessing them. Like there's always that artistic process where, yes, you can think and you can try and be creative, but some things will just come to you and like it flashes brilliance or just arrives and it crystallizes. And did you really even think it? No, maybe not. It just somehow came out perfectly worded and a perfectly resonate, but you can't replicate that again. Here's the thing that I find fascinating with it. That you, it makes you strip everything down so you can't overcomplicate things. And I certainly have a tendency to overcomplicate things. I think most people have a tendency to overcomplicate things, especially if you work in an analytical problem-solving field or that's just how your mind works. And I think I've learned more in the last few months that I've been very proactive on Twitter than I've learned in the last year just because of its basic functions where, and I'll get up in the morning and realize, oh, I don't have anything coming out today or till later I better throw something together. And I'll be groggy and I'll tweet out something, I'll get it to Jim. I come back and it went haywire, compared to the hour I sat to come up with some philosophical mindblower that I think is going to change the world. I mean, I've had great tweets that went viral that were like even short story things, I remember tweeting something, what was it? It was a, it was like a few years ago and I was, I mean, this was so off the cuff, I was like driving in my car and I can't even tell you what gave me inspiration. It was a tweet out like if you read one hour a day and write one hour a day and like train one hour a day, like that's kind of a formula to like succeed in anything in five years and that went mega viral. But I was like, wow, that's so cool but you can't copy 5,000 retweets, okay, man, apparently everyone in that day thought that was a great idea. Now I've had things where I've tweeted out that went viral that I didn't want to go viral, like that's higher, 12 steps being beautiful women, which was like that went crazy viral, I remember. And I got doxxed and I got media hanging me up and that was actually just like what was that? Actor person, I don't even know who the guy was, he had a list of things like 12 things women don't need to be, I'm like this is so try hard. So I'm like I'm just going to reverse it and tweet it and then that went mega vial or like, so I had four days of just like people telling me to go kill myself and I'm like, all right, fine. So it was one of those days I woke up and social media upset me within five minutes, I closed the lid and I did this whole mental thing where I went through it, I was like, that's just the internet, it's just people being rude. Who knows what's going on with everybody today but real life is not like that and that's a good thing. And then I ended up going to the supermarket and where I don't know, it was just one of those days where the internet was at the supermarket and I was like, that's it, we are definitely doomed. I just saw so much rudeness and the supermarket of all places is not a typical place where you would see that. In fact, a lot of times you see people being very cordial at the supermarket, it was in your way, but this is just day people are yelling at each other, they might as well have been throwing food at each other but it certainly seems like that that it's just getting a bit out of hand and I don't know if we're gonna be able to stop it but one thing that gives me encouragement and this is the place that we're all in on Twitter which is no matter how much negativity, no matter what's going on and of all the other insanity that has happened, there has been I guess a pushback against pop culture and all the insanity where people are like, hey, let's use this to build businesses, build relationships and build ourselves to the best people we could possibly be and this seems to be relatively new or it has definitely been bubbling. We could definitely credit Joe for carrying that torch. We've been around for 14 years. We're sort of in that mix somewhere but it is now, this has gone to a point of mainstream and I think is why we're seeing so much contention because this other faction had held the internet down for so long that they are, I think maybe in fear that they are losing control to better ideas but this is something that you've been working in and I definitely feel that my idea for this is that all young men, well all young people in general have to lose themselves in order to define themselves so let them go off, let them go crazy, that's what young people do. However, when they are ready to pull themselves out of that, they need voices that say, we're over here, when you're ready, let's go build yourself up, let's build you businesses, let's make you successful but why are we who are trying to do that for young people being silenced? This is the interesting thing that I saw happen. I mean, I'm gonna be 31 this year so when I, and this is being me being retrospective but the maturation process of being a young man is very much reflective like the hero's journey. Yes, absolutely. You have the known world which is probably high school, high school, your parents, you have maybe stepping out into the unknown which for a lot of kids college this is a continuation of the known that once you are, let's say, out of that, you're an adult, you're 19, 20, 21, 22, you have to go through a period of experiences and then with that you're gonna realize, okay, I don't know much, like that breaks that teenage illusion that everybody has where you're thinking everything and you know nothing. And then like how do you go about developing yourself? How do you go about becoming the man that you wanna be? The thing that I saw happen over the past decade or so is that whether, I mean there's a lot, you can have tripped a lot of reasons, lack of parental figure, lack of father figures. We've had Warren Farrell on the show and I mean, what an adventure reading the boy crisis was. Okay, there you go. So yeah, see like lack of father figures, men who are just raised by their mom, they didn't have a male role model at all. Then you have guys where the boy crisis in school, they were kind of always marginalized, that's just how it was. So they get to the stage of being, let's say like 18, 19, like that early adult stage and they don't really know how to be a man and that's okay to admit that, like I really don't know what I'm doing. Like that's every adult, like I don't know what to do. Yes, that is every adult. I don't know what I'm doing. So with that said, well then what do you do? Well you probably, it'd be helpful to have a mentor slash father figure, slash big brother figure. Find someone older and reflect on those aspects yourself that you need to develop. And the way I have like sort of why I call it the tower of bro philosophy, which like it's a sort of like this secular, but sort of like sort of deem this sort of like modern, like you know, wire down stoic, you know like from just living in gyms working in the industry, like it's like literal bro philosophy. And like there's four relationships that you have in life, there's four, there's just four. You have your relationship with yourself, which you know for most people that's the most fundamental one. You have your relationship with like your fellow men. And this is speaking to like the male perspective, your relationship with your fellow men, like your brothers, this man in general, how you get along with guys. You have your relationship with women, which for obviously for men that can be a huge area of problems or it could be great, like that goes a lot for women. And then you have your relationship with the one at large, which is are you successful? Do you have status? You know, like how are you seen by people? And like those are the four areas you need to work on. And you know for most guys like well, what's the most important one? The most important one is whatever you feel needs the most work, which when you're young that might be yourself. Yeah, that might be learning to overcome insecurities, developing self-confidence. Yeah, and obviously like women play a big role in that. So confidence for being good with women, but also many get confidence for having no friends and having guys you can rely on, having comrades and brothers in arms and people that support you. And if you have those things happening for yourself, I like who I am, I have a girlfriend or I feel like I'm good with girls. However you want to say it, I've got guys or good guys, you're probably gonna be successful in the world at large. Yeah, but if any of those areas are out of whack, you can have three of them going on and there could be one that just really holds you back. Absolutely. Or it could be all of them. I mean, that's just like the mental model I use, it makes it very, just direct. I'm like, which one is it? Yeah, maybe it's everything, but like which one could you start today? But that's the mental model I use and it's just interesting that I never expected to, yeah it says many times, but like I never expected to be like a leader of men. But I've realized that this a lot of guys, for social reasons, parental reasons, the way they were brought up culturally, they really lack direction and not even just lacking direction, they don't know that they can look in a direction. There's help out there. And that's why the male self-improvement industry, that's a real industry. Mm-hmm, well if there wasn't a need for it, it wouldn't exist. It wouldn't exist, it wouldn't exist. And society is so vast today where I mean we can always romanticize the past and say oh we have simpler times and maybe it was, but the world is large and to function today and to get ahead in life, to be a success or just to be happy yourself, you have competing interests, you have competing narratives, you live in a cultural environment that can be as you said, super contentious. You have all these different influences that are acting upon you at any given time. Yes. So I mean that's a lot to sift through. Like I, during the 1990s when I was growing up, I don't remember it being that way. Like there was a certain level of social stability that just seemed to be there. And if you did the right things and the right steps like you were supposed to get, supposedly what you were deserving of and tiled to, but like that has changed dramatically the last of many years and I mean you could say like, why has it changed, maybe it's globalization, maybe it's economy, maybe it's a great depression. I mean there's just so many things. You know you could go down a laundry list of like it's this and that, but regardless, what do you need to do? What does an individual need to do? You need to be adaptable, you need to be self aware and you need to be ready and willing and wanting to work on yourself and put yourself in the most advantageous position possible. You know and like, and for most guys, it's like the very, and this is super bro and it's basic but it's true, for most guys that starts with, do you like how you look? Do you feel strong? If you can go like this and you're like, I look pretty good, you're in a good place. If you, if looking at yourself in the mirror makes you feel bad about yourself, start there. Start there. It's interesting, for myself growing up, I was on the smaller side of the kids who were in the sports. And when you get to be a teenager, you start to look around and you start to realize, okay, the girls are after those guys. It's obvious that that's not in my future. So I need to either A, I need to either hit the gym and start doing right and do those things or find a different way. Find another outlet that is going to allow me to get attention, approval and acceptance from the opposite sex or what not. For me, it was obvious it's rock and roll, it was playing music. Bad of being an artist. It was to be an artist. I did my, it was funny because it went from, I was already playing music because my dad was in bands and it was, I wanted to be like my dad. That's cool. But the moment that I realized that the girls are not gonna give me any attention unless I signal this new thing. So it went from I play guitar at home to now I carry my guitar to school. Which of course completely worked, right? Cause it's now. We all remember that guy. Every high school, every high school I had that guy and maybe you were that guy. It's like, oh, that's a guy like that guy can play guitar. And like the thing I, I've, you know, attraction and like relationship game. Like it's not my, you know, my area that I see. Like, you know, I coach guys in really. And certain things I just, I've never, yeah, I try to be like very, you know, self-effacing honest. Like there's certain things I haven't started with. Like I've always, I've been always been tall. I've considered to be reasonably attracted by most people being real. Like I've not struggled with girls that way. But relative to like the, you know, the artistic standpoint, I realized that when I got into dancing that oftentimes men think like, when we think of what attracts women, it's like, oh, you know, the big and tall guys. Like, yeah, like it did be, definitely being an athlete that helps people's attention. But you know, with like, if you really get into like the nitty gritty of female psychology, women are really drawn to men that make them feel something. That emotional response. And nothing does that more powerfully than art. Nothing does that. Yeah. Like you can go to a sport, you can go to a stadium or 30,000 people watch football game. You can go to a rock concert and there's a hundred thousand people there and half it's women and they're going crazy. Going crazy. Absolutely insane. Well, also one of the things that I've been trying to promote on Twitter is to start producing and produce more than you are, try to produce more than you are consuming. Now that's a ridiculously difficult task. However, it's not impossible. You can reach there and it's good for you. And it certainly helps with your mental wellbeing and how you feel about yourself and what's going on around you. And it's interesting to see how many people have trouble with just, well, where do I start in creating? Well, what are you into? Just go, just starting grabs. Do you like painting? Go grab a brush and start painting. I think the easiest place to start is just write. Write about yourself. Write about your day. Write about how you're feeling. Write about an event that you're going to and how you feel about it. These are the simple steps that will get you started and we certainly don't see in pop culture of journaling of how masculine or how effective it can be for young men. You've never seen John Wayne come after a day on the range and start journaling. If they showed that, there'd be a line of guys down the CVS looking to get a journal. The creative aspect of being a man, like modern masculinity is very dumb down. It's like, my buddy Sermit always calls it like, it's like boobs and beer masculinity. I like boobs, I drink beer and bacon, like man cave. This is why I've always had a problem with Adam Cruller because as much as I like Adam, he always had a part of the man show which I felt just was the dumbest dumb down thing and which when everyone thinks about it, they're like, oh, man show. That's masculine. That's what guy's like. No, not really. No. In fact, I don't know who that show was for. That's like a media creation. It's like the dumb dad and like the sick kind of thing where you can go back to like 1950s and it's like, what was the show with eight kids? Like the Waltons? Yeah, the father's like this very competent, stoke figure that had to provide guidance and guidance and security and safety and like he loves everybody. Like he's very laconic in how he speaks. And you're like, wow, that's actually a good role model. And he gets like 1990s, 2000s and it's like the Homer Simpson. Yeah, you know, Homer is kind of a parody of like, you know, perhaps the American man, but you could see how it devolved. And all the guys that I'm friends with now, like my circle friends, they have a lot of depth. Like masculinity has depth and breadth. If we go back and look at things that get very idolized by men, Samurai, Samurai were artists. Like they devoted their life to a very defined code of ethics and honored how they spoke and how they acted and how they developed themselves. It was not just fighting. You know, there was a lot to it. You know, same thing with knighthood. You are the same thing even superheroes. Like if you go Batman, read the comic books, which I like, I'm a huge Batman fan as a kid. They're pretty intellectually heavy. Yeah. They're not simple stories, most of them. Especially for Batman during the 1990s, I don't know about now, since I haven't read them in a while since the tonality changed, but like very intensely, darkly psychological. Oh, of course. This is not a shallow character at all. So like, you know, when I see that today, I'm like, this isn't really representative of what a man is. Well, I think this is represented in all the acclaim that a movie like The Joker had gotten. Now, I saw that a movie when it was originally made. It was called Taxi Driver in the 70s. Now, I'm not taking anything away from The Joker, but it is a descent, it's one man's journey into descent and madness from modern society. That's what Taxi Driver was. And whenever we see this and people, I don't, they start freaking out. Well, it's like, well, if you continue, and I think Warren Farrell put it best, boys who hurt others, men who hurt will hurt others. And once again, if you are ignored and you are made to feel invisible and there is no one there to nurture and help you through your own void, which we all have to contend with and do with, that can go sideways. Especially if there has been any abuse or psychological damage done in your childhood that will not allow you to make that journey through. And people freak out. And when we show it on screen, people start losing their minds. So it's like, well, what do you think's going to happen? This is a warning. This is not fantasy. Even Taxi Driver, like, I don't know if that movie would even get made today. No. That's actually an interesting thing where you probably couldn't make Taxi Driver today, because it would be, I mean, it's just, you know, this is a paradox of modern media. It'd be like, you know, this is a terrible film, a misogyny, something, something like, this film's about a tragic character and their descent into the self-destruction. This is not an idol. This is not a heroic figure. But like, when you apply the Joker sort of archetype on top of it, where it's like, okay, well, it's from a comic book. And it's a fictional character. Now we can make it. But like, trauma never goes away. It just changes forms. And that could go, that could be good or bad. Usually it's bad, unfortunately. But you see that film and like, I viewed that as almost like a cathartic moment for a lot of society of like, yes, this is actually how I'm feeling. And there was no violence from that film. Nobody went crazy afterwards. But like, it reflected the state of like, reflected like a large state of modern society. I'm like, yes, a lot of people, especially men, feel very marginalized. It's just also the modern world at large where people feel invisible and they feel stuck in their position and there's extreme, you know, stratification of, you know, whether it may not, all you can say, well, like elitism, power, your ability to be heard. And like, the films reflect the era they're made in. Like, that was culturally relevant and that made a billion dollars. Like that should say something. They're like, maybe we're living through strange times. Yeah. And to go along with that. So right now we're having, what the media is showing to be this epidemic of gun violence through America and these schools. And yeah, it seems that gun violence has gotten younger, but it's, but you've always had stray monkeys who have, whose bolts weren't all quite that right. And who went nuts. When I was growing up, there was this idea of that guy's going to go postal one day. And that was said because there had been several incidences in the 80s where a postal worker came to work and shot up the place. This is nothing new. Now, perhaps maybe the ages are getting a little bit younger from what I can tell, but this is, it's not new. It's always been there. You're always going to have folks who are not quite like the other monkeys. They're a little bit unhinged. And if they do feel marginalized and isolated and the internet gives a lot of these folks an opportunity to converge and talk to each other. Now that was the thing that wasn't there before. And so now this, those moments when this happened, there's others linked to it. And certainly when we hear about this, we hear, oh, he was on these forums and he was talking with these people and he was encouraged to do this and they all knew this was going to happen. Well, that's a part of it, but it's not what created it. It was always there. What created it was their personal experience, but I mean, modern society, one of the things I try to encourage people to do and just speaking to the level of the individual, like modern society in many ways, like it's ugly like it is. And I say that not to be nihilistic, but like you can very much create a social media feed and even like a real life perspective of feeling victimized and persecuted. And you can, it's sort of like a mental virus like the whole world's against you and the world's terrible. That's it's very easy for that to happen. If you want to create a good life, like this is why do I tell my followers, people, like you have to cultivate beauty. Yes. Like, you know, my girlfriend's beautiful, like I'd be beautiful girlfriend, like create a beautiful life, like have beautiful friends, have beautiful moments in relationships and have things were within your dealing and habitment of your space, you can look to and they are satisfying to you and like it makes you appreciate existence. But a lot of people don't have that and I don't know that modern life really gives that to anybody. Well, it's all based on utility over beauty. And that is something that, when being such a person who comes from an artist's background, it's like, where is that? Why does everything have to be built for utility over beauty? In the past, we saw things that were built because the builders wanted to appeal to something that was above man. It was aspirational. It's something that everyone can look towards and want to be a part of. When you dumb everything down to utility, well, that's not very aspiring. No, I mean, efficiency is a false God. Like, it's a bloodless, it's a bloodless instrument that leaves like a bloody trail. When you look at society, let's say 1950s, like, you know, gun ownership. Gun ownership was more widespread in 1950 than it was today. You could, in 1950, 1960, probably up to 1980s even, you could be a kid and you could carry around an undead rifle. Absolutely, yep. You could be in your car. I'm like, the accessibility of guns has decreased with time. That's an increased, yet usable. Gun violence on the rise. Okay, is it the instrument or is it the society that we live in? Yeah, we know, like, for our statistics, like, okay, so teen suicides, like it's doubled over the last few years. Okay, male suicides gone up for X over so many years. All right, female suicides gone up. All right, prescription drug abuse has gone up. Okay, opioid addiction has gone up. And Jonathan Haidt put it together and gave you, basically, gave us a timeframe of when it exponentially hoggies their growth and all these terrible things. Yeah, I see, I mean, you have, yeah, so like, hey, like, you have all these metrics and I'm like, all right, like everything, like human despair, positive future, this is all, everything's getting worse by people's perception and people literally, they're killing themselves at increased rate. Like, that's happening. Is that contributing to people's sensibility that society is something to lash out at? Yeah, it probably is, probably. Like those should all be indicators to you. But yeah, obviously, power is to be like, how's it gonna change? Yeah, I, like I keep saying, like, it always goes back to you. Like, can you, if you can create a life that is, let's just say, a shining example of other people, hopefully that has a powerful effect. Like, you can't control anything outside of that. Yeah, I can't, yeah, I can't, we could talk about all these things, I can't like directly affect any of them. Yeah, but I can have an effect, I can have my life be that effect upon others, hopefully. I can do it for myself and hopefully that's efficient. Well, the other thing to go along with that, though we're seeing these problem areas, the violence overall is going down. Well, that's, you know, on a grand scale, on a grand scale, yeah, so we have these issues but on a grand scale, everything, all the markers are going down and Stephen Pinker laid out great arguments and stats for all that. And once again, this goes back to the media and all that, but I don't wanna roll this conversation in there, I wanted to roll the conversation lastly into something that you have going on, which is you're about to leave the States and one of the reasons why I wanted to get you in here before you head out was that you are planning on living abroad for a while and I would love to tap into that and talk about that because our conversation the other day on the phone certainly brought up some interesting aspects that I'd like to talk about. Yeah, there's traveling abroad, so we talked about these social problems, so this is the sort of experience to continue with traveling abroad, so I spent all of my 20s, I spent all of my 20s working, like I was, you know, personal training in terms of hours, like it's a very long job, you get your first client at six a.m., your last one could be at seven p.m., even eight p.m., it's a long day. I spent all of my 20s working, I built my business to a level where I got freedom and I got freedom in the sense of like, okay, I have financial freedom, I have the freedom to do anything I want whenever I want at any given time. Like, and once you have that, it raises certain questions where, okay, what do I really want to do? And most people, they work to pay bills, they work to, they always have to support people, they work because that's what you do in life. And to be in a position where you can do anything you want at any given day and you are constrained by nothing, well, now what? And so I was like, you know, I want to travel. So I'd gone to Romania last year for like five and a half, six weeks and I was with friends there, you know, Andrew and Tristan Tate, they're very good friends of mine, great guys. But I was with them and I was like really like living it up, partying, just having fun. Yeah. And then being in a place where it was so far away from the United States, it just puts living to perspective. You realize that there are, there's hundreds of countries in the world, well over a hundred. Yeah, there's what, 170 countries. You go to any country, there's a flow to life. Each place is unique. Yeah, and every place has its problems, every place has its pros. And every place can have beautiful moments and beautiful things, beautiful experiences, beautiful people. And you're there and this gives you a sense in a good way of the smallness of one's individual life where you're just one person of many. You're one person of many and what you think are problems may not be problems at all, they may just be this passing transient periods of time. So I came back from that trip and was like, all right, I told my girlfriend, like I'm leaving LA, you can stay here, you can go. Like I'm leaving like I want travel not to find myself or like, oh, I get answers. I'm like, I want to see these different parts of the world and see different cultures and maybe take the best from each or find something I identify with. But just enjoy that beauty that is humanity, just to see the beauty of human existence. So that's my plan. I'm actually leaving in nine days. Nine days that I'm going to Egypt first because I always want to see Egypt. Any, it's like the Indiana Jones thing. I thought I wanted to go and have an adventure. That place sounds cool. Pirates, mummies, a lot of history, from when I was a kid, like that has to be cool, right? It's absolutely. So I'm going there first. But that's the plan. I mean, traveling is like an aspiration for many, of course, and some people, I think falsely do it, hoping they'll get the answers. You don't get answers from traveling. It just is more like a, it's like a very sort of like a harsh mirror where when you're by yourself in a new place and you don't speak the language. It's amazing. And you're there and you just, you only have, you can access your own personal narrative, but you, you know, and that's a struggle to communicate with people. You will find out very quickly what you're made out of. 100%. And your reactions to just whatever happens to you and how people react there. I mean, you pick up on nuances in mind language and how people speak to each other. You're like, okay, like who am I? So it really, I think it really clarifies your identity for you. Hopefully it means should. Yeah, it was a few years ago where I actually had the opportunity of traveling by myself for a long period of time. It was two weeks. And I was in at that time, I was checking out Portugal. And I was very excited because I've traveled a lot, but there's always been influence attached to it. There was always friends around. There was always an agenda of what we were going to do because we were in the company of each other. So I saw this as an opportunity that I would be detached from all influence and the all except for the influence of the beauty and what was around me, the civilization was around me. And so how I was, I planned on going into that started what is a stream of consciousness that I have on my phone on pages that is open. So I would go and I would go to visit these sites and I would just start jotting down what was coming to my mind. What was I thinking? And this is something I mentioned to you on the phone, which is this is amazing to me. You never really truly know just what's going on inside if you have other people around that you're answering towards answering to. And so here I am standing in front of something that was thousands of years old that we don't get to really see manmade thousands of years old here in America. I'm sitting, I'm standing there and I'm looking at it and it's awe inspiring. We don't have very many manmade awe inspiring things. And I'm looking at it and I'm being flooded with so much inspiration and thoughts and I was like I need to capture all this and the only way to do that is to start writing. And I'm writing, I'm just and it's a stream of consciousness. It doesn't matter if it makes sense. It will just be, it'll be what it is but it will be captured. And so I had this started a process that has now a normal thing for me whenever these thoughts pop up I just put them in and which has made for great Twitter fodder. Oh yeah. No doubt. But to be, and so now I want to have these moments more often. So for AJ and myself we're always trying to travel a bit to experience more of those moments. And I'm very excited for you to really have this opportunity as well. I mean obviously it's beneficial but the thing I was, we were mentioning on the phone is we're talking about things that men had decided to do that they weren't even going to see it. They're never going to see it. They're still building it. I mean, I know you live in LA. I lived in LA on off basically the last 10 years. You know, it's, old in LA is something like you'll, you know, maybe you're somewhere and it's like a house or a building. Like that was, you know, when I was built, it was built in 1920. You're like, oh wow. Oh yeah. 30 years ago. Yeah, I remember being in India in 2014. I was there for six months with a client who's a Bollywood actor. His name's very well known Indian actor. So I was there, I was training him for a film role. I've been in India for, you know, basically half the year and we went, I travel all over the country of India and I'm not, I have no connection to the ill actually. I'm just, I'm an outsider, truly an outsider. Don't look like, of course I don't like the people but I'm there and I'm going to temples. I'm going to these historical sites. Then when was this built? This was built in, you know, 180. You know, this was built in, it was built sometime between 300 and 400 BC. And you're looking at, you're like, this is a 2,000 year old building. Yeah. And it took a hundred years to build. And the guys that started building it died probably, let's just say, maybe at the best, a third of the way through the process. So it was built by like their sons and their grandsons and like, and it's still here and people are still coming to it and it's still perfectly maintained. And this makes you realize like their sense of whatever their ethics and values were, that they had the utmost faith and the eternality that they were going to last and endure forever. And they have, and they have. And then you look at, you know, it's like social media things where it's like, you know, did my post get likes today? You're like, this is dust in the wind. This is ashes in a blizzard. It's so ephemeral and so fleeting and so nothingness. And we attach ourselves to it. And we also tend to think that we're smarter than these phones. We think, yeah. Something I want to add to that, not only is all that amazing, then you look at how it was built and you realize that some of the stones were dragged 500 miles away from some weird island. You're like, why would you even, how did you, how did you put this on paper? Go, yeah. This is a great idea. That's great, yeah. We're going to do this. That is something. Talk about aspiring to beauty over utility. I mean, that's, it is for the sake of beauty that that is being done. I mean, because no person in the right mind for utility is like, yeah, this will be good. No one builds an ugly building alas. Like, I mean, yeah, that's why, like Brutalist architecture, even that 20th century aesthetic, it's very inhuman. Yeah, I mean, that's like a whole weird discussion. But like, I have friends that are architects and like, yeah, there's like a subset of architecture there. It's like, we got to be subversive and like make things ugly. Now that stuff is going to endure. It's like, I mean, I've been to like a few communist countries and you know, parts like the old Soviet block housing, like it's horrifying to look at. But it's just straight lines. It's just straight lines and it's gray, like not break, like gray concrete. And you look at it and you're like, this, like this makes you, it makes you sad. It makes you angry. And depressed. It makes you get away from it. It gives you an idea of the mental state of people who were living in those conditions, what they had to contend with. How do you get excited? How do you get fired up? How do you get inspired about each day? If everything around you is square, weird, dull colors, I mean, it's only going to add to the depression that your economic state is in. No, no, yeah, I don't know how you could be happy in those conditions. I, this is like a Roger Scruton kind of, like I'm a very badly paraphrasing, but the thing with beauty and aesthetics, like this is like bodybuilding. I've thought about this for a long time because one of like bodybuilding is like a shell, like I want to look a certain way and I want people to look at me. If you get to like the cultural roots of it, like late 1800s sort of like physical culture, the idea was, and you know, someone can agree or disagree and this is not like a political statement, but like the idea was like, okay, like a man is made in the image of God. You know, a man is a being that he has made to be an aspirational being, an ascended being, and you should be able to embody that and you can embody that and that can be accessed through the training and the trials and tribulations of the body that's entirely, it's attainable and that can be created and built, but then also like an artwork and things you create as well. Like what does beauty capture? It captures what is good. So we know that we live in a world where we can experience joyous moments or loving moments or romantic moments or things that just for, even if it's a short two-minute conversation experience, you walk away and like you have a gratitude for that. Like all that is wrapped into what is a beautiful structure or a beautiful body or a beautiful person, a beautiful building. That's all present, it's all there. And we look at that, you're like, wow, that's amazing. It could be a car. You can look at a car and be like, like you can look at a classic 1971 Corvette. You're like, wow, look at this, wow, man. And it's like, it's not rational. Rationality does not underlie existence. Like it's irrational and you can't quantify it. You can qualify it, you can't quantify it. It will never make sense by any metric truly, but it just triggers something in you where you look at and yours, you're held by it, it captures your attention and somebody you want to interact with it and feel it or drive it. Like you want to put yourself within like the space that it inhabits. And that's just always astounding to me. And you see that, like you travel, like we don't have the United States so much. But like when you travel, you go to, you can go to old European cities, you go to Krakow, you're like, oh my God. Like in Poland, like, my God, look at this city. This is beautiful. Look at this city. Like it's been there for, you know, a thousand something years. And people built that so they could live in it, like, literally just live in it and this look, go out of their home and everything, like, I live in a lovely place and feel good. And like, yeah, it could be, I'm sure it was more than that, but you know, that simplicity of that emotional, you know, experience of being able to wake up and you can look outside in a city, you know, no less, not like a natural setting, but a city. You're like, what a beautiful city. Amazing. You're probably gonna have a good day. Probably, hopefully. I think we'll end it there. Right on. Alexander, thank you very much for being here today and being the first guest for our first new segment, The Art of Charm happy hour. If you guys have any comments, questions, anything you could throw them in the comments below, make sure you hit that subscribe button and we'll be seeing you guys soon. But I feel, oh.