 This is Will Spencer from the Renaissance of Men here with the new 21 Report and Tanner Guzzi. What's up, Will? Good to see you, Tanner. Yeah, man. Excited to be here with you. So, this is what, your third or fourth 21 convention? Sixth. Sixth. Wow. Oh my gosh. I've been doing these for a little while. How have you seen it evolve over the years and what do you think about this year's event? Geez, man. I mean, it's crazy how when I first started coming, I came back in 2016 for the under 21 and I felt like a complete outlier. I'm the only guy or one of the only guys that's married that's even interested in this and it was largely a pickup convention. Anthony invited me out because he wanted me to talk about style. Totally appropriate. A lot of my demographic, a lot of my audience at that time was guys who were in the pickup community. They were interested in it primarily for how to meet and attract girls. But then you watch this event go through these iterations to where it goes into a little bit more red pill focus and then you introduce the patriarchy component and the focus on fatherhood and family and then obviously what Anthony did last year as far as introducing 22 and so it's really been cool to see the full evolution of all of this and I would say that the biggest thing, the biggest difference that I noticed this year was this almost a what? Like this calm, mature energy to it. There's still energy. It wasn't like this somber, mopey event by any stretch of the matter but it wasn't, there wasn't the franticness or kind of the desperation or even some of the one-upmanship that you used to get from some speakers, you used to get a lot more from some of the attendees but there's more of this kind of calm maturity and a little bit more of the weight of the mantle of what it is that we're up against and what it is that we're trying to accomplish. I think a lot of it has to do with COVID and all this other stuff that's happening where we realize that I mean we're kind of in really dire circumstances and masculinity is a linchpin to getting this all solved and taken care of. Yeah, the barbarians are at the gates anyway. It's like okay, in a way that at last year's event, it wasn't quite the same. Which is interesting, we were still in COVID but it was different. Yeah, so what did you talk, you spoke at the Patriarch's convention this year, right? What did you talk about there? I talked about the importance of getting your kids and your wife so that they're oriented toward you as opposed to being oriented toward their peers because when we move away, when we did move away from a hierarchical culture where you have the idea of I'm obligated to, whether it's the legacy of my ancestors or submission to God or any God or this submission to these kind of high ideals, not only that I need to live up to that myself but that's also something I need to pass down into future generations. When we move away from this kind of hierarchy into this flat, linear, peer orientation, we lose our rooting not only as a civilization but even people as individuals and it's really hard because everything about the way society is structured right now is geared toward peer orientation. Technology structures us that way, the breakdown of the nuclear family structures us that way, media and entertainment set up peer orientation, the way that schools and daycares are run is all geared towards peer orientation. It was kind of almost as big of a red pill as realizing the gender dynamic between men and women was finding out man as soon as you think about peer orientation versus parent orientation, you see it everywhere and you realize how dangerous it is and how important it is for families to be oriented toward each other and maintain and build their own cultures as opposed to letting your kids have everything about who they are be determined by their friends. Yeah. Would you say that orientation towards institutions is part of peer orientation because there are a lot of people that would orient themselves towards what the CDC says or the FDA and it's not strictly or maybe there's an expression of that in the peers because who cares what the CDC says but all my friends say that it's important. Yeah. It's interesting because I think that's one of the things that we're in this kind of transition generation where it used to be, you know, I heard somebody talking about how our grandfathers who fought in World War II that if vaccine mandates had been a thing back then, they would say that absolutely not, we're not going to do it. And I wonder if that would have actually been the case because there was such a general trust in government, there was a relative understanding that was still a of the people by the people for the people type thing and there was still this orientation towards structures towards institutions. Pastor Michael Foster talks about the institutions of the church, the family and the state and those were largely still believed in and still respected and still supported and we've seen the denigration of both the church and the family and the complete perversion and inflation of the state. And so I wonder if in another 50 years if you're going to have this kind of authority fallacy of the government says so or the CDC says this or whatever else or if we'll be so peer oriented at that point, especially because it's so obvious how many of these institutions are just outright lying to us if it's going to lose even any of that credibility as we just go further into chaos. Yeah. The institution has spent at least the past couple of years and that's if I'm being generous. Right. You know, burning all of its credibility. Yeah, it's got this like credibility capital that it's just spending all of it. That's right. And I think it's kind of hard to avoid that realization. It's like these were the institutions that we as let's say citizens as men put our trust in, you know, because they're the large scale lovers of society, I would say. And then every institution one by one has turned on all the citizens all at once all simultaneously and just burning through everything. And it's just one by one like even down to sports, you know, it's like sports is an institution in its own way. It's like, oh, I can't turn on a sporting event without some amount of propaganda. Yep. Will that ever, do you think that will ever regain the trust? No, no, I think that we are too Balkanized as a culture where the idea of going back to any sort of mainstream agreed upon institutions, I think that's a very like 18th to 20th century construct and we're going through something that's going to completely change that technology. I think too many of us underestimate how big of a lynchpin social media was. I think that you give it a thousand years and people are going to talk about the invention of the iPhone as the same way that we talk about the invention of the printing press. It changes everything. Yeah. Absolutely everything. And so the idea that I can have my little Balkanized tribe of people that think the same way that I do, that believe the same things that I do that speak the same language, that have the same inside jokes, but they're all over the world and everybody has the luxury of doing that so that I don't share the same ideology as my neighbor or that neighbor or that neighbor. I don't think we're going to go unless you get to the point where people actually start to geographically locate again. I don't think we're going to get to the point where you have any sort of like mainstream connected culture at all. I think it's going to be all these little micro cultures and little pockets everywhere. Yeah. I mean we're on a social media platform right now. I was speaking to Ian Smith yesterday and he actually issued a call for men to get on social media. Normally you see a lot of the media arms saying no, get off social media, abandon social media. He made a call to get onto social media and that's been something that you've been working on as well. So just speak of it on social media and this whole world that we're talking about. Social media is not going anywhere. Yeah. It's not. As much as we would like to think that it's something that you can just not engage in, it's not going anywhere. And it may not be that you feel like you have to particularly participate in it, but your businesses do. Your everything else about your life is in some way connected to social media, even if it's only one or two degrees of separation away. And if the only content that's up on social media is the stuff that denigrates masculinity, it trivializes the family, it tears down anything that's good or virtuous or beautiful or lovely, then that's the stuff that's going to continue to be pumped and put out. And so if you want to see less of that, if you want there to be a legitimate counter voice, then you need to either one, be creating that content yourself or two, supporting the people that are creating that content. Because again, it's not going anywhere. And you can't just bury your head in the sand and say, well, I don't like TikTok, so I'm not going to be involved in this. Sorry, dude, I've got kids that are going to be on social media in the next five or 10 years. Any generation is going to continue to be on that evolution. And the idea of them not being involved in it completely removes. I mean, unless you want to go fully Amish and, you know, rock and roll, but otherwise you have to fight the culture war where the battles are being fought. And it's just as irrelevant. I mean, what do you get? Are you going to put an ad in the Yellow Pages? Are you going to put an ad in the coupon books that come out? Like, where else are you going to fight this battle? Where else are you going to create cultural change if you're not doing it on social media? What do you think? So last year, Pastor Michael Foster came and sort of announced the arrival of religion as a subject of conversation here at the convention. Jesse Lee Peterson as well. This year that's expanded massively and you played a role of that. So talk a bit about the presence of religion at this conference. I'm really excited about this change, especially because you get a whole disparate group and a whole set of vastly different ideas about what religion is. You may get different kind of like sex or sub-sex of Christianity, but you get pagans or you get people that may just believe in, I don't know, like moral therapeutic deism or just the idea that you don't even necessarily have to believe in a God, but religion is the worship of ideals and it's manmade. But really what it is is we've recognized that so much of this started with just this kind of one dimensional approach to satisfying our sexual needs, right? But when you get those satisfied, you still realize that there's more. I'm not, my cup isn't full. There's still more that I need and there's more that I want, there's more that I can do. And so then we move to our emotional needs or social needs or financial needs or physical needs. And that's part of the change we've seen not only with the 21 convention but even the men's movement on the internet in general is it moved away from just purely being focused on sex to, I mean how many guys this week talked about you gotta lift. You have to start lifting weights, right? Every single one of them because we recognize the physical power and we're breaking down that dichotomy of the dumb jock or the weak nerd and realizing you have to be fully integrated with your brain and with your body and all of that. And as you continue along that trajectory, there is a blaring hole if you ignore the spiritual aspect of masculinity and you can try and avoid it, you can try and dodge it, you can try and rationalize away from it. This is one of the things that I love about Anthony is even if he's not a religious person himself, he still recognizes the validity and the need for a spiritual focus and he fosters that very well. Yep, and so I think it's inevitable and it's really fun to see a whole disparate group of men that come in and some of them are on this level of I just want to get my sexual needs fulfilled and you get some that are just I want my physical needs or I want my financial needs. But the number who have kind of checked those boxes and are realizing I need to get my spiritual needs taken care of and I need to get that house in order as well, it's been really cool to see that and be a part of that the last couple of years. And there's been some pretty intense conversations going on. Like, you know, I think I've stayed up late, at least the past two nights probably more having very deep religious and philosophical conversations one on one with men. And I know that, you know, you're a member of the Church of Jesus Christ and you've gotten a lot of questions from men about that. What was that like for you? It was a blast. And to be honest, it was something I was kind of praying to have opportunities to be able to share my beliefs and do stuff like that. You know, I would think about that as I was doing my morning prayers or as I was preparing to come in this week. And I think that's one of the coolest things about the way that this environment has been fostered is that there is a there's a willingness to come in and just ask questions. There's not any shame or embarrassment or trepidation of what? Wait, okay. Say that again. You believe what? Elaborate on that for me. Or OK, that's really cool. And we believe this instead as opposed to no, that's wrong. You're an idiot. I can't believe you heretic. You think that way. But it's OK. I think that's totally bogus, but I come at it from this angle. And so there's this mutual respect of the fact that I don't think anybody here believes that anybody else who's here is in any way spiritual or religious on default or on autopilot. There's the respect of understanding that everybody's relationship with the divine is something very thought out, very intentional. Everybody's paid their dues on it to some degree. And so you can respect each other when you do that, even if you arrive at different conclusions and you don't have to get into this milk toast. Well, your beliefs don't matter or my beliefs don't matter. It just matters that we believe something like you can you can go pretty hard on what the doctrinal differences believe on beliefs are. But you can do it with a level of respect because you know that the other person arrived there sincerely and intentionally as opposed to my mom and dad talking about as a kid. Exactly. Yeah, there was the panel that you were on it and Jeff Younger who's an Orthodox Eastern Orthodox, Pastor Michael Foster, Jack, who's Pagan, you know, is how he would identify. So idealist. So, yeah, exactly. These are I mean, almost irreconcilable, you know, kind of perspectives. But what I think what I think was Michael Foster said was that the first thing that happened is all the men tried to find consensus. And that doesn't happen. People of different faiths don't often make step one. Let's find consensus. And I think there's something very masculine about that. Well, and especially because it used to be that we had the luxury of not having to find consensus because we weren't fighting this massive enemy of nihilism. Yeah. And now that's a very common enemy. One of the things I loved about Jack's presentation is he talked about what are the things that we can all agree upon from a culture of excellence or a culture of ideals. We can talk about strength is better than weakness or beauty is better than ugliness or, you know, he had a whole list of all these different things. And yeah, we can get down and into the nitty gritty of how Christ represents this one way or Odin represents that another way or, you know, the Nicene Creed points it this way whereas Joseph Smith and the Restoration do this a different. Like, we can do that. But right now, there's a nihilistic enemy that wants chaos and wants the destruction of everything that is good. And I'm much more interested in you and I linking up and fighting that guy. And then we can hash out what our differences are when we're done. Yeah. Also, there's the addition of fine art and aesthetics here from Arthur Kwan Lee. So stoked on that. I think it was my favorite find this this this week. He's I loved it. Yeah, I mean, that must go. That goes right along with your emphasis on men's aesthetic through style. What an exciting development. It was so cool because then he and I think both felt this way where, you know, he came into I did a workshop on why style matters and how to think about it. And I could just see him nodding and really kind of getting it. And I felt the same way as I was watching him where the idea of focusing on aesthetics and art within or through a masculine lens can feel kind of lonely because most men not only write it off. There's this antipathy for it. There's this hatred for it because that's effeminate or that's gay or that's for wimps or that's for losers or whatever the majority of it is that they want to throw at it. And so to see somebody and this is again why Jack and I are such close friends because we see through that same aesthetic lens and see the value of good noble masculine aesthetics. And so then to see Arthur come in and for him to be as well-trained as he is, for him to be as articulate as he is, for him to do it as well as he does and to be on that same wavelength where we're not rubbing shoulders with each other. He's arrived at this truth independently, kind of reaffirms it's like, yeah, we're not just making this stuff up ourselves. There's real legitimate truth to it. And then he brings in a whole new perspective on it. Like, I love that how we talked about what we need is Greek rationality, Judeo-Christian values and romantic masculinity. And it's just like that. That's exactly what we need. Well, that was in his presentation. And that is we get so focused on the nitty gritty of like just the Greek rationality. If I can throw data or facts and figures or if I can like do this awesome dunk tweet pointing out how the nihilists are not being logically consistent, then, hey, the problem is solved and that doesn't work. You have to get in the aesthetics. You have to get in the culture and the language and the music and the clothing and the architecture and all of these other variables because the emotional component, the spiritual component is how cultures are created. That's how ideas perpetuate across generations. And to hear Arthur get it and bang that drum as hard as I am is so fun. Yeah. How did your conversations go? The one-on-one conversations with the men, the attendees? Man, I feel like I'm a broken record at this point because I've said this for the last probably four years. Every year, the guys level up. And it may be that it's new guys coming in that I've never met before but they're at a different level but so many of them are repeat guys and it's like you are better than what you were last year. You're not warping this. You're not just playing pretend. You're legitimately taking these principles. You're legitimately taking these cultural values that have been created in this space. You're applying them to your life and you're becoming better. And so it's so fun to get to talk to them and hear what they're working on to see how it's improving the lives of their families or it's improving their own personal lives to see them bigger, broader shoulders, dressing better, carrying themselves differently. It's just, I love getting to see that from the attendees. And did you have any interaction with the women from the 22 convention? I didn't get as much of a chance to do that as I would have liked. I talked to a couple of them and that was another difference that I noticed is last year, I mean understandably with the way that it was treated by the media with the fact that it was the first time ever you had quite a bit of trepidation, some timidity, a little bit of fear about what it was or even a couple that came in pretty antagonistic. This year, I noticed quite a few of the women and especially the ones that I was able to interact with there didn't seem to be that. There was a little bit more surety in their femininity and a little bit more excitement to be in an event where that can be talked about, that can be celebrated, they can find other like-minded women. And so yeah, there was more maturity on their side too. Talk about what you're doing with Jack with Chess Magazine and how that's been going. Chess Magazine, it's been a really fun project. One of the things that we've realized, especially within our space, is you can't get a fair shake. If anything, remotely bigger than like your local news and most of the time even if it's your local news finds out about what we're doing, they're gonna throw the worst possible spin on it that you can get. And for so many of the speakers who are legitimately trying to do good things and they're fighting off this void of nihilism, it's really debilitating from a financial standpoint, it's debilitating from a growth and engagement standpoint. It's honestly even debilitating from an emotional or a mental standpoint for the speakers to just go through, you Google search your name and it's just like hit piece, hit piece, hit piece, hit piece, hit piece. And so one of the things that Jack and I have wanted to create is something that is professional and slick and it's authoritative and it's dignified and it has the credibility, but it actually lets us see the goodness of who these men are and what it is that they're trying to do. Not just this one dimensional cherry picking this, twisting that, manipulating this, but actually giving the full picture so that these guys actually have something that when you look them up, you see who they actually are instead of just this mischaracterization of them. The same time the other big mission for chess is you get a lot of reactionaries in our space where they completely define themselves as I am anti the enemy. I'm anti nihilism or I'm anti feminism or I'm anti communism or cultural Marxism or I'm anti this or I'm anti that. And the problem is, yeah, there's an enemy and it's real, but if that's your only focus, fleeing that isn't enough to actually create nobility. You have to have something aspirational that's worth building toward. And so what we've realized is how much of this content that's being put out on YouTube, on Twitter, on blogs, on everything is so reactionary. It's like, can you believe that this is what they're doing? And we don't want the energy to go there anymore. What we wanna focus on is okay, what is it that you want? What is the world that you want to live in? What does that look like? What does that look like aesthetically? What does that look like philosophically? What does that look like socially? What does that look like from a parenting or a marriage or a dating perspective? And how can we actually help create that? And how do we find people that are creating those things? How do we find artists or musicians? How do we find men that are putting, we just had Ian Smith as one of our features on our last issue. That man, the thumos in that man, his willingness to actually go to battle and put his neck out on the line is so admirable. And men need to see that. They need to be able to see the nobility and the goodness that comes from that. And so that's the kind of stuff that we're trying to showcase. And so for now it's an online magazine. We do a new issue every couple of months. The plan is to build it until we get to the point where we do an end of the year print edition and then hopefully get to where we're doing print editions for every issue that comes out. But the support has been awesome. We've got quite a few guys in our pockets that we're really excited to be doing features on in the future. And it's just taking things to the next level because you don't win by being a reactionary. You have to build something that's worth fighting for. Recommend go to find out more about you and what you do. So if you want to find out more, especially because I mean, at this point, like I used to just be the style guy. And if style is what you're interested in, go to my main site, go to masculine-style.com. But so much of it is now is, you know, aesthetics or fatherhood or religion or these other things. And so the best places to find me for that are going to be on Twitter and on Instagram and it's at Tanner Guzzi. Great. Thank you so much. Thanks, Will. It's great talking to you. Yeah, pleasure, man. This is Will Spencer from the Renaissance of Men here with the new 21 Report in Tanner Guzzi. Thanks so much for watching.