 Welcome to the 21 report. I'm Frank Pesci and I'm here with Zan Perion. Hello. How you doing? I'm author, speaker, relationship expert, and CEO of Ars Amirata. Ars Amirata. Great to be here with you, my brother. ArsAmirata.com. Come find me. Awesome. How you doing? I'm fantastic. My voice is a little scratchy because I did three talks over the last two days, and I just did an interview before, so I'm good. I did the events go so far. I think it's going great. I've had some great discourses with some great men. I think the real thing, like I've been, I've done a lot of speechifying in my 20 years of doing this, and I've done a lot of preaching, you could say, right? And, but where the real conversation happens and the real understanding and the real camaraderie comes in the gatherings, and so I've been hanging out every night. That's why my story's gone, too, because I've been talking until 3 o'clock, 4 o'clock in the morning with the guys, yeah. Interesting. You're joining us from Romania. Yes, I'm Canadian, but I live in Bucharest. Yes. How's life in Bucharest these days? Perfect for me. Yeah. I've shifted into a new phase in my life and getting old now, and I shifted into a new phase where I used to travel and speak and do conferences, and my own conference is all over the world. And now I just sit in Romania in my rocking chair and I'm surrounding myself with books. It's getting higher and higher and higher, which I love. That's the phase. Well, what brought you to the 21 convention halfway across the world, at least, right? Well, I came in 2015 and 2017, and Anthony said, you know, we want to have this kind of this alumni thing you want to come. And I said, sure, I'll go in front of any audience, and I accept all invitations if fossil is my philosophy. Interesting. Yeah, I'm kind of the same way, man. I'm happy to do it because you're fulfilling your purpose and your role in life. If you're doing your devotions in the morning, which people call meditation or setting intention into the universe, whatever, if you're doing that at all, if you're trying to have a purpose driven day with intention, and somebody invites you to something, you have to go. That's what you're asking for, right? How old were you when you felt that you discovered your purpose? Oh my goodness, I never discovered my purpose. Yeah, is that true? Yeah. Okay. I really, I don't think we have to, wow, that's another conversation, but I think Joseph Campbell had the proper alignment with this. Instead of find your purpose, which is a, which is something that people try and do, I think more it's like, follow your bliss, what leads you down a path of light, what invites you forward, you know. So the journey more or less? Yeah, as opposed to the being driven by obligations and stuff to be drawn towards something, which is what we're longing for, you know. Me myself, I have been somebody that's always been, I'd beat myself up, let's say, if I felt like I diverged from my purpose or diverged from the journey in pursuit of my purpose. I think that that might be a common frustration among men, particularly in the times that we're living in now, uncertainty on the horizon and men becoming less valuable to society, right? Well, I mean like young men are unmoored. They're, you know, they're unguided. I mean, like even in the Bible, that the Israelites clamored for a king. We need, we're unrooted here. We need somebody to be a king over us. So they, you know, Samuel got Saul, right, the first king. And because they felt they needed something, they needed that benevolent king over them. And I think that the guidance that, and men don't have a message, young men, you know. So I think there's a lot of, a lot of unrest in the hearts of young men, for certain. Well, I've been doing it for 20 years. I've been talking to men for many, many years, and I've seen it, how it's evolved, how it's changed. I mean, you know, we had, we had 10 years, imagine this, I'm 58. Are you serious? Yeah. I mean, get my wheelchair. All right, I'll just sit back and listen. I'm 58 years old. So I've seen some things. And when I was meeting women back in my 20s, it's analog. There's no digital dating, right? There's no YouTube videos, no dating coaches, no programs, no nothing. You had to straighten your tie and get up your nerve and try and remember her number if you didn't have a pen. And we've had 10 years now of Tinder, I'm approximating. And they ask, say, three years of pandemic. So that entire group of people that are coming to age has never had an analog experience. Their dating is digitally based. So they've never had that, you know, that feeling of trying to go forward and putting myself with intention and authenticity of the world, I think. So it's changed. This is what I'm trying to say. It's changed from when I was first doing it. Absolutely. And what you said when we were talking about purpose is that you see a lot of unrest in young men today. So as a relationship expert, your dating guy, what do you tell these guys? Well, I think we're focusing on the wrong things. That's the truth. And that's why I mean, I mean, I can go into it. My thesis is this, and I really believe this with all my heart. My book, The Alabaster Girl, if you say, what does that book about? It's a book about beauty. And I think in our modern society, our modern age, the unrest and the dissatisfaction and anger that we have, that we feel is because we've turned our face away from beauty. We no longer contemplate beauty. The Bible says, whatsoever things are lovely, think on these things. When I was a kid, you'd do your daily devotions, you'd read a Bible verse, you'd sing a little song, and it sets your intention for the day, right? Your tone for the day. Now you scroll social media and you watch all the unrest, the trouble out there, that sets your tone for the day. So my advice to young men, doom scrolling. Yeah. Aristotle said the only life worth living is one of contemplation. I think that that's what's missing, to contemplate beauty. And where is it? Because beauty exists, independent of us. I think the beauty is a real physical thing as in metaphysics, as in electromagnetic physics. I think it's real. I think it's like gravity. And I think that you look at art. Art used to be about the artist, I mean about the art and giving you a picture into something that makes you contemplate and transcendent. Art has a beauty in art, has a way of dawning on you, because you're in contemplation, you have to think about it. And art is now about the artist. How can I shock you? It says, look at me, look at me. Architecture, how can I shock you now? As opposed to the golden ratio and blending into centuries of buildings and stuff like that. So art, architecture, relationships, politics, it's all, I really do think our deficit is because we've turned our face away from beauty. And that's what I think. Beauty is not at the forefront anymore. It used to be for the Greeks, right? Beauty, truth, goodness. Have you been here for the entire event? I have been busy a lot, it's been going on. I have been here for the entire event, but I haven't been in any speakers. Reason I ask is because there is a prevailing consensus around here, at least at this table, I've interviewed speakers about two main themes. Spirituality, spiritual focus and growth, art. Art has come up several times. As a person who's been in business a long time, lived a long time, seen a lot of things, what do you make of those trends? Does that predict anything for you? Well, I do, yeah, I think so. Nietzsche said, God is dead and everybody knows that quote, right? And he was a staunch atheist and said, Nietzsche, yeah, he's celebrating atheism. But they missed the rest of the quote, which is God is dead, God will remain dead and we have killed him. And what he was really saying was, good luck, because you strip out God and the transcendent, even though he was an atheist, the concept of the transcendent out of society, and this is what you get what we have today. We've lost the anchoring of a good message of a community. Christianity is what the West is built on. And to strip it away, whether you're an atheist or not, you have to believe this. To strip out that sense of family and home and community and responsibility, we used to have responsibility and duty was a word we used to use. My duty to my country, to my family, to, that's gone. It's not like, look at me, what can you do for me? And that's an art that's turned her face away. I could go on and on and on. So when I was in the army, there was a popular cadence. Duty on her country, I'd give my life. Before that, it was duty, God and country. And what do they have now? But like you said, the West was built on these ideals and it was ingrained in who we were. It was a matter of fact of our society, which is what allowed us to be prosperous. And whether or not you conform to Christian ideals from a doctrine perspective, or even if you don't want to believe it, it still provides guardrails for society that creates law and order and morality. And you strip it out. Good luck. And that's what Nietzsche was saying. Yeah. So we've had this, we've turned her face away from anything that I would call the transcendent, which I call beauty, which is the Holy Spirit in my mind. When you look at a painting or you look at the face of your beloved, that's my message to people is like, this is not your significant other, your partner, this is your beloved. If you claim that word, it's a biblical word, but it's real. Because when you have the feeling that this is my beloved, then something shifts in you and something shifts in the partner, 100%. You can feel that. You feel that it's a perspective, a conscious choosing of a different way to look at life and to look at your partner, this is my beloved. She can feel that. Talking as a man, you know. Yeah. And even more so as you behold beauty, what you manifest is love. That's great. If I behold the news all day, negative, I'm going to be short tempered, I'm going to be annoyed, I'm going to be frustrated, I'm going to be... You're going to feel it. Right? And if I behold beauty, I'm just taking what you're giving me, right? That I manifest love and interactions. And I'm not talking about, oh, we should be all nice guys in all the countries all rosy and everything's all, I get it. There's a real antagonistic, warm, wet blanket that's hovering over the earth and there's no light for people to turn to, you know. So you've got to seek it. You've got to... Guys say to me all the time, you say, then you say head toward the light and only the light. Contemplate the things that are beautiful. What if there is no light? Right? What if there is no light? Then you have to be the light. And I think, you know, they're talking about the patriarch here a lot here. And I think what's missing in the hearts of men is the idea that it's incumbent upon them to set the tone of how they want their life to be, you know. So in other words, you choose... It's when we were little boys, if we skinned our knee or were hungry, we run to mom or dad or we could run to somebody and at some point that went away. Now it's on you. You have to run to you if you skinned your knee or hungry. You know what I mean? And there's that anger, like there's this idea of toxic masculinity, which I don't buy. And I think that's a sin that society is saying to us that masculinity is toxic. I think masculinity is divine. God given, we're created that way, you know. And to say that it's a sin, like men are... The tone is that men are one step away from being a rapist, you know. Take some guardrails out and they'll be a rapist. Or if they walk too slowly past the playground, yeah, there's a pedophile there. And that's wrong. That's a sinful thing to say. I really do think that it's wrong. So I'm a crusader against that. And the thing is this, you know, the idea of the masculine... masculinity is not toxic. It's absent. That's the thing. That's the message, right? Amen. Right? It's absent. And so you have this anger and my metaphor is this, you've got a cave here, okay? And the caveman's outside the cave and his loved ones are behind him inside the cave, okay? And he's fighting a saber-toothed tiger with a stick. That's all he's got. And he's going to get hurt. But he has the capacity to do his best to defend and protect what he loves, home, right? And his family. And he has this ability to go out there and he's got danger in his heart. He has the capacity to destroy, okay? Which modern man doesn't have. Well, they do, but let me explain this. So he's out there and he's attacking this tiger, etc. And where it goes wrong is when that anger that is in the heart of men, which is a good thing, that ability to destroy and to protect, and that great energy, that great masculine strength, is turned inward towards the cave. Then you get spousal abuse, molesting children, school shootings, incels, that anger is turned in and not out. And that's my metaphor where we're gone. Dude, I'll tell you what, that is eerily frightening and scary. And I can see very clearly how that metaphor is true in a lot of ways. Yeah, right. So men need a place to direct that energy that is productive. Correct. We need a venue. We need a challenge. We need an opportunity. Something to look forward to. We need to be purpose-driven. Yes, 100%. 100%. If you have nothing, you know, this miasma of depression and stuff that's blanketing the earth is because people have nothing to look forward to. What a thought, you know? Yeah. And my message to men is I say, what exists because of you? Pause and think about that as opposed to what can I get? What exists because of you? Because you're on this earth. And I really do believe that it's purpose-driven. You're driven. You're called. You're called. This is a calling for men. My message that I speak about what I wrote in the alabaster girl, this is a call. I really believe it. I believe with all my heart that there's a call. And I really have a lot of faith in men. I don't have end in women, too. I believe in women. I believe in men. And I don't wander into the social issue discourse at all. I never talk about feminism in 20 years. I never talk about pornography. I never talk about gender, fluidity, all these things. And I get it. It's there. It's impacting everybody's life. I get it. But there's enough voices. I want to talk about this concept of let's reclaim the Holy Spirit and the idea of beauty in our life. It's wonderful. How long would you write your book? How long? Yeah, like when did you first publish it? 2013. Okay, 2013. And at least for myself, when I go look for a book on Amazon, I always look at the published date to see if the information is up to date and accurate. Yeah, yeah. Right? Not to say that time necessarily makes things obsolete. Yeah. I'm just curious to know if you have any updates that you would add to the book or if your views- Well, I'm writing a book right now and I've been struggling with it because I'm not very prolific and the alabaster girl was a book about women. Written to women. And I wrote into there why I explained to women in this book or the guy did. I abstracted it for myself as a guy in the book. And he basically is explained to women why they respond to certain men and not others. What does he do and say that they respond to? So basically that's the premise of the book. And that came out of my years of experience and struggling and trying to figure things out with women. So that came out of my heart. I took me 10 years to write and I didn't read another book while I was writing it. And now I'm trying to write the second book and it's the concept of what is a life well lived? What is my thesis, which we've turned our face away from beauty? How can we restore that in our hearts and minds? What is the creative process? Like, where does that come from? Where does the inspiration come from? I'm writing about all these different things and it doesn't come from my experience. I'm going back to literature and stories and philosophies and stuff like that because that's not my experience. But I want to write about beauty and how it can restore our society and our faith and everything. But I can make a definition of beauty. If all the artists and scientists and physicists and alchemists in the history could never define beauty, who do I think I am? But I can certainly write around it. You know, try and circle it. Well, your book flew off the table as you know, it was very popular. You haven't been here since 2017. That's true. Do you think it's important for men to attend the 2011 summit? And now it's a summit so there are women here at the 2018 summit as well. I do think it's important. I think that what we're missing in this modern age is for certain. And if somebody, I think you were saying that you saw the guy shaking hands and hey, how's your year been? And that sense of camaraderie and gathering that we used to do, we used to gather around the fire to tell the stories of the day, that's missing. That's why men are unmoored, a good part of it because they don't shake hands and say, they don't come together and break bread like we used to. And that's a real, because you don't need to. You've got Zoom and you've got Facebook and stuff like that. You don't need to. But I mean, I have a membership called the Amorati. And I have a conference I do twice a year in Bucharest. We just had it two weeks ago and I had like 60, 70 guys coming from around the world. And we had like this, we have speakers and we have a lot of fun. And I've known some of these guys and they've been part of my membership for 15 years. And you see them every, you see them twice a year. Hey, how are you doing? I was in Bali. I was in Columbia and now they're here. Shake their hand again and you know, and they stay, they come for the weekend, but they come days early and they stay days later because there's a real celebration of coming together like we used to do to congregate and to fellowship. Fellowship is another word we don't use anymore, right? Beloved fellowship, all the devotion, all these words that have gone from us. And if we reclaim these words and start to use them, we'll feel it. Love it. Zan, where can people find you? Um, I'm in zanperian.com and arzamerada.com. Spelled like it sounds, arzamerada, alabastergirl.com. Spell it out, spell it out. Okay, arzamerada is A-R-S-A-M-O-R-A-T-A. Okay, very good. It's fake Latin for this part of it. But if you want a copy of my book signed by me, because I've signed like thousands of coffees by hand and sent them out in the mail, I've probably done 5,000 coffees that I've signed. And I've still got a couple thousand or so books in Romania that are printed there. And every week we send out signed copies. So if you want a signed copy of my book, it's free. It's my gift to you. You just have to pay for the shipping and the cost. Basically, you cover the cost, go to alabastergirl.com. Amazing. Yeah. Okay. And I'll sign it and send it to you. Awesome. Well, for the 21 Report, I'm Frank Pesci with Zanperian. Thanks for joining us. Zan, thank you. Thank you.