 What he represents is patriarchy. We're here to do work as men, as patriarchy. There's nothing more natural than being a father. All right, we're kicking it off. It's go time. You came here for a reason. Let that sink in. You're here for a reason. You're not here just to sit and watch something. You're here to take something away. You're here to take, you're here to gain value and to bring it home to improve your life. Now a lot has changed from the last time we had speakers till now. From the last convention to now a lot. My name changed. I'm Zach. No longer hunters. There's a start for myself. But the world has changed. We have corona. We have quarantines. We have isolation. We have people bringing themselves in, trying to stay away from others. They're worried. There's fear. There's an election. There's a lot going on in the world. But one thing has not changed. And one thing will never change. And that's the importance of a father in a child's life. No matter what happens on global level, no matter what happens in this universe, nothing will ever change that fact. That a father is needed for the optimal development of a child. That a father is absolutely necessary to every single family to ensure that family goes the distance. To ensure that family experiences what an optimal life lived is. A life of connection. A life without fear. A life of purpose. And a life that maximizes and brings out the best of you. Now your chief patriarch is about to take this stage. He'll introduce this event. He'll have his keynote later. We'll be closing this thing out. From this moment on, it's go time, my fellow patriarchs. The man taking the stage has four children right now. One on the way. His beautiful bride is down here. So you'll see her walking around. They'll be doing the Q and A later. He's a family man. He is a man. And notice I said family man, not family guy. We're not talking Peter Griffin. That's not what we do anymore. There's no more Homer Simpsons. I don't want individuals who are going to come up here and represent families like that. That's not who we are. That's not who Tanner is. So understand when this man comes up here, this is a life he has lived. This is not lessons that he watched on YouTube. These are lessons learned throughout his life in raising his family. Without further ado, I present Tanner Guzzi, your chief patriarch. Morning, guys. I'm, as always, I'm very excited to be here. I'm excited to get to talk to you today. The patriarch edition of the 21 Convention is something that it's, this is, special is such a stupid word, but this is, this is a special event for me. I've been involved with 21 Convention since 2016. And as much as I've loved coming to a lot of these different events, in a lot of ways for many years, I felt like an outsider because a lot of it is very related to pickup or spinning plates or all these other things. And it's been a very niche and targeted focus on just the sexual dynamics of what it means to be a man in masculinity. And that matters. Our sex lives matter. The sexual dimorphism and the difference between men and women and how we are attracted to each other and how we relate to each other, that absolutely matters. And at the same time, anybody who tells you that that's the summation of what it means to be a man is really just a horny little teenager that still hasn't gotten it out of a system yet. There's so much more to being a man than just what your notch count is, or whether or not women approve of you. And so for Anthony to take the chance to expand upon this and do it last year, to have Zach be the Chief Patriarch and for him to absolutely knock it out of the park last year, set quite the precedent. And I'll tell you, out of all the events that I've been involved with, with 21 over the years, Patriarch last year was my absolute favorite. I love being able to interact with the men that have come to that event that there's an alignment of what our bigger and our greater purpose is. And so I'm excited for you guys to get to experience that, whether you're experiencing that for the first time or you get to experience that again. Because rather than just being a very niche and targeted focus on masculinity, you get to spend the next four days diving deep in how to really exemplify and develop and become the full measure of what it means to be a man, how to build a legacy, how to establish that, how to relate to more than just one woman or multiple women, but how to relate to other men, how to relate to your children, how to relate to the rest of the world around you. Now it's funny that we live in a time where patriarchy is a scary word, it's a dirty word. And for a lot of people, I know for most of you guys, you probably haven't even said much about this is the event that I'm attending or I'm speaking at. I know even for me with a lot of my normie friends, it's a men's conference. That's about helping men be better men because if you say the word patriarchy, it's terrifying. And in a lot of ways, for a lot of you guys, it may even feel a little bit like a lark, like you're just pretending because the state doesn't recognize any sort of authority anymore. Your church probably doesn't really recognize any sort of authority that you have as a man anymore. And so it does, it feels in a lot of ways like you're pretending, but you're not. Because your ability to lead your family has nothing to do with the government. It has nothing to do with your parents or your spouse's parents or your neighborhood or your church or anything about your community. It has everything to do with the micro culture that you establish within your family. This does not have to be a lark. This does not have to be playing pretend. You can be the head of your family. You can have a fantastic relationship with your spouse, lead your children and be able to create the environment that will lead to the most fulfillment and happiness that your family will be able to experience. And you don't need anybody else's permission to do that. You can create that yourself. That's why I love that you're here because you guys are here and you want to be different. You want to be different than what you are. You want to be better than what you currently are. And you also want to be different from the rest of the world. How many men do you know in your lives that look at what we're doing here and they get uncomfortable about it and they try to joke it off and it's, oh, that's weird. Like, I just want to be a guy or, you know, I just, my wife and I were equals. She does half the chores and I do half the chores and it's because we're afraid of the responsibility. We're afraid of the obligations. We're afraid of the privileges. We're afraid of everything that comes with having to actually step up to the plate and be a man in the full measure of it. But you guys aren't. You men are not. You're here and you're willing to take that on. Now, a lot of people in different parts of the internet will think about what we're doing as some sort of like trad con, save the West and again, LARPing a previous time in a previous era and it's not that. This is not about saving the West. You are not here in these seats. You're not about to listen to all these speakers. You're not about to network and make the connections that you are under some grandiose idea that you're going to save Western civilization. At least I hope not because if you are, then you've wasted your money and your time and you really should just turn around and go because you can at least get your time back. Weak people are the people who hate their lives so much and also feel so powerless about them that what they do is they try to change everything else about the world around them. You know why? Because then when they fail at it, they don't have to worry about it because it's so much bigger than they are and it doesn't matter. But strong people and particularly strong men start on the inside, start with the smallest locus of control they have themselves and then from there they expand out into their families, their marriage, their children. From there they expand into their neighborhood, their church community, their extended families, their friends that they still continue to associate with in their families. From there it can build out to your community and maybe at some point all of us will be able to save Western civilization but you're not going to do it by yourself and you're not supposed to want to do it and if you don't do it, if we don't collectively do it it doesn't matter because you can create an environment in which you thrive, your family thrives and your community thrives. Not just survives but thrives. That is what's within your locus of control. That is something that you can absolutely do and that is something that you're supposed to do. From there hopefully it builds into something bigger but if it doesn't, it doesn't matter. Accept responsibility for what you have control for and again, I'm preaching to the choir on that. You might understand that, that's why you're here and I love that that's the caliber of man that's here in this audience and that I get to speak with and hang out with for the next four days. So over the next four days you're going to be hearing from a bunch of different speakers about a bunch of different things. What I want you to do is to think about those within five different arenas because this is what's going to help you to be able to understand what your field is as far as how you can tend your field and what these different crops are. We're going to use crops in this metaphor a lot as we go through this this morning. So the first one is how you're going to be able to develop physically. That's going to be your fitness, that's going to be the way that you carry yourself, your posture, your body language, your appearance, all of these other things. So the first one is going to be how you develop physically. The second one is how you're going to be able to develop intellectually. How you can change the way that you think. How you can change the way that you learn and establish patterns and grow and develop from a mental perspective. The third one is how you're going to be able to develop spiritually, which is your morals. Whether you believe in God or any God or anything else or not, you should have a moral compass and that should be tied to something much bigger than just what I want right now. So you should be paying attention to how the other men who are up here are going to help you develop spiritually, morally in that regard. I want you to pay attention to how you're going to develop socially. How you will be able to relate to the women in your lives. How you'll be able to relate to the children that you have or that you will have or even your grandchildren. And I want you to very much pay attention to how you can relate to the other men in your lives because that's the secret in all of this. When we learn how to relate well with other men, so many of those other relationships fall into place. So I want you to pay attention to that. And the last one to pay attention to number five is how you're going to be able to develop and grow financially because you will have opportunities to hear that as well. Now some of these things may come directly from speeches and presentations that you get from people. Some of these may be things that just come from conversations that you have with each other with other speakers or things like that. But those are the five arenas that I want you to be able to focus on. Now as you listen to this and as you pay attention to this, you're going to get a lot of information. Most of it is going to be very, very good. Some of it's going to be pretty good. And honestly, some of it may not be good at all. Or some of it may not just be applicable to you at all. So how do you tell the difference? How do you know what's going to work for you and what isn't? You have to take what we're giving you. What we as the speakers are giving you. What you're giving each other is you have these conversations. And I want you to think of them as little seeds. And these seeds, you know what kind of fruit they can bear. Just like if you go to the store and you buy a seed, you know if it's going to be a tomato or an apple or something else like that. And what do you do with the seed? You plant it and you have to put in all the work and the cultivation and the time and everything else to trust if it's a good seed and it's actually going to bear any fruit for you. Because what you're going to get today is not going to change your lives if you don't do anything about it. Zach already addressed that. You're not here to listen. You're not here to consume our experiences. You're here to take those seeds that we're giving you and to plant them yourselves. And then you have to work really, really hard. And you have to have an irrational belief that the seed that you've planted then you're starting to put the work and the energy and the effort into is actually one, going to bear fruit and two, it's going to be good fruit. It's going to be something that is worth your while. I've been involved with the men's community, the manosphere, the red pill, whatever other name we want to use with it. That changes every year, right? But I've been involved with this since 2009. And there are still times when I'm interacting with my wife who's here that I catch myself recognizing, oh, that's something I used to have to, like, force myself to do and in a way kind of pretend to do. But now over the years it's finally become natural and normal. And it's not just an external thing but it's become internalized. And you men are capable of doing that. Right now, you guys are at a stage where you're better than most. Most men in the world are at a stage in their self development, in their familial development where they are unconsciously incompetent. They don't even know that they don't know what they're doing. They don't even know that they should want to know what they're doing. A lot of us here, and I am certainly this way in a lot of arenas, are consciously incompetent. We've had the scales fall from our eyes. We've had, we've taken the red pill. We've recognized this is not what I thought it was. And holy crap, I suck at all of this. I really need to improve. And that's a terrible stage to be in because it can be overwhelming. It can be daunting. And for you men, the stakes are high because to recognize that you're in that position doesn't mean you can just next that girl and move on to something else. You've got skin in the game. You've got obligations and commitments and responsibilities that are very different. And so to be in this position where you realize I'm not as good at this as I think I, as I thought I was or as I should be is daunting and intimidating. And thankfully that's also what gives us the opportunity to thrive because we can either shirk that responsibility or we can step up to it. So we make the transition from unconsciously incompetent to consciously incompetent and then comes the worst stage of all, the stage where you try to get to consciously competent. And that's where the work comes in. This is where the embarrassment comes in. This is where the overcorrection comes in. This is where all these mistakes and all these problems come in. And this is where that seed requires the most amount of effort and energy and it hasn't even sprouted above the ground yet. So you can feel like you're completely wasting your time. But I promise you that if you work through that conscious incompetence to the consciously competent stage and whatever it is that you need to improve on on yourself so that you can improve your family, that seed will sprout. You will start to get something that starts to come up. But you don't get to rest on your laurels there because that still isn't bearing fruit. That little sprout is just the energy boost that you need to be able to recognize that, yes, this is happening. This is growing. And when you experience that, a lot of you have already experienced that. It's, it's like lightning to recognize that these things that you thought were permanent and integral to who you are can change and you can be better. And you can make it so that your family life is better. You can make it so that your work life is better. You can make your community better to realize that you actually have the capacity to do that and it's not some theoretical theorem or something that you've read on Reddit or a blog or on Twitter or something else but you actually have visible proof that that little sprout is there and it happens. It's lightning and it's addictive and you will want to continue to chase that and the amazing benefit of it is that you can continue to put in that effort and it can continue to grow and develop. So from there you get to a point where you become unconsciously competent. It's easy, it's effortless and it started to sprout and it's really started to grow. What I want you to do is to not get comfortable and not rest there because competence isn't good enough. What we're after is mastery. So we go from unconsciously competent and rather than just coasting which is what a lot of men do unfortunately. We go through what used to be the American dream and we check off all the boxes that society gives us. You get a degree, you get married, you have a couple of kids, you buy a house, you got a couple of cars and then what do you do? You coast until you retire. Your ambition stops. Your effort stops, your growth stops. That's when you just stay and maintain and you stagnate on that unconscious competence. But what we're after, what patriarchs do is they get to the level of mastery. You can get to a point where you get to conscious mastery where you have to really work hard to get there and then eventually you get to the point where you get to unconscious mastery where this all becomes second nature. It all becomes intuitive. And then you're not just preaching but you're living it. Your children see you embody it. They want to become like you are. They want to marry men like you are. Your wife can't keep her hands off of you. She can't help but brag about you. And she cringes when she goes out with her girlfriends and hears them complain about their husbands because she doesn't have any idea what it's like to be married to a man like that. That is what you want to establish because not only does it make you better but it makes her better and it makes your children better and it helps everybody else to improve. That is the goal. That is what we're after. Okay, so how do we do it? We've gone through the what. We've gone through this other. How do we do it and why do we do it? Especially because what we're after right now is completely counter-cultural. It's counter to the victim narrative. It's counter to the idea of equality and that this is some God that we're all supposed to worship. But the reality is that what you're trying to do, what you're trying to do within your own lives and with your own families leads to the most happiness on an individual level, on a familial level and really ultimately on a community and on a social level because what it does is allows you and your spouse to be able to develop your natural strengths and weaknesses and to get to the point where you can rely on each other because what we're after is not some old post-World War II 1950s version of patriarchy because that was rife with its own problems. These were great men and they were also broken men because of the horrors that they went through with the war and what their parents went, what their fathers went through with the First World War. That is just as broken in its own way as what this post-feminist and post-modern and everything else that we're dealing with is broken in its own way. We're not trying to go back to the past because you can't. This is not about the preservation of some ashes and worshiping at those ashes of a world that none of us have experienced or if we did, we grew up in it but it's been dead and gone for years. That's not what we're after. What we're after is taking the principles that are solid and integral to what can create a happy family life and that is hard, real and very politically uncomfortable truths like the fact that men and women are different, right? And that we're supposed to be different and we lean into those differences and we embrace them. You take those things and you embrace what it means to be a man and you give your wife permission to embrace what it means to be a woman. You teach your sons to want to grow up to be men. You teach your daughters to want to grow up to be women. We're going to talk about this a little bit more when I give you guys my keynote but one of my favorite things is I've heard my wife do this and this is completely unprovoked by me but she sees how I interact with my son and the ways that we're trying to teach him to especially that I'm trying to teach him to grow up and to be more masculine and embrace his role as a man and she's very consciously thought, okay, well what do I do for our girls? We've got three daughters and a fourth on the way. That's a whole lot more than this one son that we have and so I hear her when she's teaching our daughters and she says our role is to bring beauty to the world. It's beautiful, I love it, right? And so she talks to my daughters about is that kind of talk beautiful or is it ugly? The way that you treat your friends is that beautiful or is it ugly? The way that we have our home, the way that we clean our room, there's this core principle that she's now instilling into our children and that beauty may manifest in a dozen different ways. My daughters are all very physically different as far as how they look. One has red hair, one's got curly hair. They're very different in those regards. They've got different tastes. They've got, their language is different. There's beauty in a bunch of different directions but that doesn't mean that beauty is completely subjective and that anything can be beautiful or that the whole idea of beauty or anything else is completely barbaric or supremacist or whatever else that the postmodern world tries to tell us. And the reason I tell you that is what I want you to focus on are the principles of patriarchy. It may be different. It will be and it should be different in every single one of your lives because you live in different parts of the world. You have different beliefs. Your personalities and your strengths are different. Your spouse's personalities and her strengths are different. But that doesn't mean that the principles of the fact that men are energized and we do best when we are given the responsibility of leading and going out into the world and conquering in whatever way that we can or that women are best when they are given the opportunity to feel safe and to nurture and to support and to build in that regard. That may manifest in a dozen different ways but those kind of principles are real and just as we benefit from that the most important thing that comes from that Socrates put this way a couple conferences ago. He talked about the greatest privilege that you can give your children is two-parent privilege and it doesn't just mean that you have two parents or co-parents or something else. It means that you have a masculine father and a feminine mother and they lean into those dichotomies and to those different ways of interacting with and viewing the world and your boys get comfortable with the feminine and your girls get comfortable with the masculine and your boys are comfortable with the masculine and your girls are comfortable with the feminine rather than this hodgepodge weird mix of whatever else that it may be that the world is trying to throw at us. Focus on those principles. Take those principles. Think about them within those five arenas that we've talked about and benefit from that as you do that this weekend. Now the last thing that I want to tell you guys is that the least valuable thing that you will get out of your time here is what you're doing right now. It's listening to somebody stand up here on stage and talk. It's valuable but it's the least valuable thing. It's the easiest thing and it's what you think you paid for but it's the least valuable thing. If you want to totally wrench every last drop of value out of this conference you need to interact with us and interact with each other in between the speeches and the presentations. You need to go to lunch with each other. You need to go to dinner with each other. You need to be able to talk to the other men that are around you because I will tell you that right now and certainly as you go through the next few days you're going to get a nice little dopamine hit and it's going to feel real good to finally be in physical proximity with men who see the world the way that you do and you're going to be energized and you're going to be ready to go home and you're going to be ready to change things and in three weeks that's all going to be gone because the work is going to set in and you're going to experience the resistance that comes from your neighbors or your in-laws or your children or whoever else and that's when it gets hard because all of the energy and the motivation is gone and you have to tap into the discipline. Now thankfully you don't have to tap into that alone. You can create networks with the men who are here. You can create a sense of camaraderie and brotherhood and support systems with the men that are here. You can do things like join Zach's Returnity of Excellence to be able to interact. He's got 15 men from this fraternity that are here that interact with each other and do it in a way by the way I need an affiliate relationship. Thank you. But do this in a way where this is an online and an in real life friendship and I know that these men because I've interacted with them rely on each other. I've had a multitude of these men become some of my coaching clients because of the relationship that they have with each other. You can do that. You can do that officially through something like what Zach is doing. You can do that organically by just coming out and talking to each other but you can do that. Now, one caveat that I will give you and this is applicable for talking to each other but it's certainly applicable for talking to the other speakers and the presenters that are here. If you want to do this the best way and you want to really develop those relationships don't talk to each other and ask for things. Talk to each other and offer things to each other. Focus on your strengths and what you can do to better the other men around you. Focus on your strengths and what you can do to better the lives of the speakers and the presenters. And then you will all be open to each other and we will be much more open to you so that we can all benefit each other. We can mutually grow and we can build up from there. I promise you if you do that if you make good connections here if you take the seeds that we're giving you you plant them you put in the work and you continue to put in the work until they actually bear fruit not just grow that little bush or that little tree but they actually bear fruit that when you finally get to taste that fruit you'll find that it is good and you will be grateful that you planted it and you will want to share it with everybody else around you. I'm excited for you guys to get to do that this weekend. I can't wait to get interact with you. So welcome to 21Con Patriarch Edition. What he represents is patriarchy. We're here to do work as men as patriarchy. There's nothing more natural than being a father.