 What he represents is patriarchy. We're here to do work as men, as patriarchs. There's nothing more natural than being a father. I'm happy to introduce our first speaker here at the 21 Patriarch Third Annual. And what I like about this man is his wife. And let me explain what I mean by that. Is that I, as a pastor, have to appoint elders in a church. And elders are the leaders of a church. And I've slowly learned over time that you know a gardener by his garden, right? You find out how good he is with the soil, how he takes care of the plants, what his skill is. And there's a lot of people on Twitter that act one way and present really well on YouTube. But when you meet a man's wife and children, you know who the man is at home, right? They can only keep up an actor so long. And when I met Bracaeli Guzzi last year, I thought this is a lovely woman. This is a beautiful woman. She wasn't needy. She was strong. She was at ease. Her presence made me know that Tanner, Tanner Guzzi, is a good gardener. He's a good man. He's a man I'd want as a neighbor. And he's a man, he's a father of children that I'd want my kids to play with. So I want you guys to listen to this man. He's here to help you and he's got the actual skills. So please welcome Tanner. Good morning, men. I want to, I guess, start off with a little bit of a confession today. This is my seventh time speaking at the 21 convention. My third time being able to talk about anything related to fatherhood being involved in the patriarch event. And I've been thinking about this presentation for months. I've been trying to think about what I want to convey. And this is kind of a difficult event to do because we don't... I'm an expert in my field when it comes to being able to help men understand how and why their appearance matters. I'm very good at being able to work with my clients or convey ideas through social media about the power of style, the power of appearance. And it's largely very quantifiable. I can see the good results I get from my clients, both in how they look and even more importantly, how they feel about how they look. And that happens relatively quickly. When it comes to leading a family, when it comes to this idea of loving patriarchy and being the head of the household the way that you're supposed to be, I'm not going to know for a number of years if I've done a very good job with that. I have a wonderful home life right now. I've been very happily married for the last 10 years. We have five kids and my kids are wonderful children. They are well-behaved in the ways that I want them to be well-behaved. They're wild in their own very unique ways, which is wonderful. But my oldest is only nine and I don't know what she's going to be like when she's 20 or when she's 35. I don't know what she's going to be like as a mom. I don't know how she's going to vet the man that she ultimately marries. And so I'm not up here today talking to you guys from any sort of a position of authority or any sort of position of expertise, which is not to say that I don't have any credibility in the field. I absolutely have skin in the game in this. But it's not the same thing, especially because when I think about what my circumstances are, and I've talked about this in previous patriarch events, I'm in a very different level of, I'm on a different playing field than a lot of you guys, especially a lot of the guys who end up watching on YouTube because we don't come to events like this. You don't look up channels like this. If there isn't something that's broken about your relationships, and maybe it's not now, maybe you guys have put in the work and that's part of being here is you put in the work and you've gotten to a point where it's not broken any longer. But you don't go looking for stuff like this unless something is already broken, especially because if you find stuff like this accidentally, the way that we're so conditioned within our modern society, you resent it and you reject it. So you don't want anything to do with it. So even if you do happen to find it on accident, if everything seems to be good in your life, you don't want anything to do with this masculinity content. It feels weird. It feels out of place. It feels very kind of what, counter-cultural and rebellious in all the wrong icky ways. And so again, you're only really here if there's something that at some point has gone wrong. Now I know for me, that was with my first marriage, and I remember stumbling across a few blogs back in 2009 because my marriage, it wasn't working. And like a lot of men tend to do, you kind of take this extreme ownership of it. You think, okay, well, I can fix this. There's something that I can do to kind of make this happen. And so I started looking at ways that I could do this. And ultimately, as much responsibility as I wanted to accept, there were irreconcilable differences as probably the best way I could put it without completely throwing my former wife under the bus. But it doesn't mean that there's not real growth that still comes. It doesn't mean that there aren't still real things to happen. Now I know for me, my circumstances are very different than a lot of yours. There are men here. There are speakers here that are going through absolute hell with what their children have to experience. I remember meeting a man last year from up in Canada where he got home and he couldn't get into his house. And everything about his life completely fell apart. And this coming to this event was kind of like the final nail in the coffin. And I just was talking with him on Instagram a couple weeks ago. It's almost one of those situations where it's hard. How are you doing? How are things going? It's absolute hell. It's misery. My kids have been turned against me. My finances have been completely wrecked. My reputation has been completely upended. And he's suffering. A lot of the men here, you're suffering or you have been at some point. I haven't gone through that same level of suffering. I've certainly had my name dragged through the mud. I've certainly hit my own kind of version of rock bottom. But it hasn't been the same thing as a lot of what you men have had to deal with. And what I want to talk about today, I want it to be received in the right context because I don't want you to feel like, oh man, this is tricky. There needs to be extreme ownership. There needs to be the understanding that the burden of performance and the burden of responsibility is on us as men. It is. We're ultimately responsible for the dynamic within our families and the buck stops with us. And at the same time, our wives or our kids have agency. They can choose what they're going to do. They can choose if they're going to respond to the things that we try to establish and if they're going to do that favorably or if they're going to do it negatively. And so what I don't want you to think is that what I'm offering today, what I'm talking about today is any sort of silver bullet. There are no silver bullets with what we deal with as men. There aren't. I wish that there were, but there aren't. It needs to be taken within the proper context of where you are on your own path of self-development. It needs to be taken within the proper context of where things are with your relationship with your wife. It needs to be taken within the proper context of what your relationship is with your kids. Now that said, there are things that we can do better. There are things that I can do better. What I love about what I'm talking about today is this is stuff that wasn't even on my radar until just within the last year. This is similar to other patriarch events where I've shared things as I'm going through the journey. Jack Donovan and I were talking about this on the flight in yesterday where if you're a, I hate this word, if you're an influencer, but if you do any sort of like social media stuff, there's really kind of two different approaches you can take. You can either be the guy that's already arrived at the top of the mountain, the shaman, the wise man, the guy who's now going to share his information with everybody else, or you can be the guy that says, hey, I'm trying to get to the top of the mountain and I'm going to share my journey with you as I go along the way. Because if you're still down here at the bottom and you try and act like you're the guy on top, nobody wants to listen to you and nobody should want to listen to you, you're a joke. I'm not at the top of the mountain when it comes to this family stuff. I'm also not at the bottom. I've made some progress and one of the things that has really helped me break through a lot of my own kind of plateaus on this journey is some of this stuff that I want to talk about today. Okay, so let's talk about this idea of leading with love. We live in a world that is full of false dichotomies or false dilemmas. It's full of them. It feels like even this idea of the kind of the tribalism or the division that we're experiencing is because we're given very polar ideas of you can have this opinion or you can have that opinion. You can believe this or you can believe that and there's nothing that works in between other than gender. You can do that one in between because that's all messed up anyway too, right? But the point is, is all the things that are actually supposed to have a spectrum are put in polar opposites and the things that are actually supposed to be polar opposites are put in the spectrum. It's this crazy chaos of the world that we live in today. Leading with love is one of these things that the world has created a false dichotomy on. If you look at modern culture, you look at especially post-modern culture, the idea of us leading our families, leading our wives or leading our kids is the opposite of love. It's a power grab. It's oppression. It's domination. And there's no way that you can lovingly do that. The only way that you can love your family is to basically happy wife, happy life or to be able to affirm your kids and whatever it is that they decide to do. Or maybe you get some like milk toast Christian version of it of like servant leadership which is basically I retain all of the responsibilities of leadership but none of the actual authority or none of the rights or anything else and it's not actually leadership either. It's just the fake like Burger King crown as opposed to being something that you're actually wearing for real. Now at the same time, the way that we see a lot of approaches to leadership, this is the way that we saw it with like post-war generations like the greatest generation or the silent generation, you see this a lot in the red pill community today, is this idea that any sort of manifestation of love, any sort of validation, any sort of affection, any sort of expression of love is simping, it's weak, it's beta and the only thing that your family needs from you is a strong hand of leadership and if you lead them and you lead them well, then they will respect you and you don't need love, you need respect and they don't need love from you, they need to be able to look up to somebody that they respect and so the idea of actually approaching it with love from a lot of us on this other side is treated as anathema just like the idea of leadership is treated as anathema to people from the other side and again it's a false dichotomy. We can do both, we need to be able to do both because if you don't have the right kind of attachment between us as spouses or between us as parents to children, then we will lose our kids. We live in one of the most interesting times in the world in that we've gone from a parent orientation and that children received their entire world view from their parents or if not directly from their parents at least from a tribe or a village or even a country or a macro culture in general that supported who the parents were and what they believed in it supported the role of parents being the authority it supported the hierarchy that exists within marriage it supported all of these things and we've moved from a parent orientation to a peer orientation and as soon as I give you guys example of this you're going to understand how easy it is to recognize this you think about, okay, think about how much culture changes every decade you go back and you look through the 20th century and you think about music or language you think about clothing, you think about attitudes and the 1940s were drastically different than the 50s and that was when things were just getting started the 50s were massively different from the 60s and you go to the 70s, the 80s, the 90s and so on to the point where it used to be that you've heard the saying that the past is a foreign culture and that used to be something that spanned over centuries if not millennium now my kids don't recognize something that would have been normal even in the year that they were born because culture is changing and it's growing that quickly and yes a lot of this has to do with things like technology a lot of it has to do with things like politics or globalization and the fact that we pull in all these other cultural elements from everywhere else but the main thing that happens with this or the main reason why we're seeing this quick change in everything is because we've rejected the idea of embracing tradition and building upon it and instead what we do is we focus on the here and the now and we focus on our peers your kids probably do this they probably spend more time with their peers than they do with adults who are actually invested in them and love them they spend more time with them at school they probably spend more time with them in day care if your kids are in day care they spend more time being entertained by this on television they spend more time doing this with their friends and it seeps into the eye it undermines what our role is and what our ability is to communicate with our children as parents so we've gone from this very structured and this very what past looking and future looking this very kind of tradition building and tradition expanding culture that was parent oriented into this very flat pancake version of something that's peer oriented to the point where I mean think about the idea it's normal in your teenage years to rebel against your parents it's not it's common but it's not normal you go back in time a thousand years ago and your average teenager didn't go through his angst phase he didn't reject his dad because his dad didn't understand him he went through things where he wanted to become like his dad and that rebellion wasn't rebellion it was expansion it was dad passed the baton to me I'm ready to take what you've done and go do it myself you even see this with the with the greatest generation the idea of going to war of lying about your age when you're 17 and you're lying to be 18 so you can go fight for your country you don't fight for a country that's based on your peers you don't die for the opinion of just your peers that's because something has been so ingrained in you that you recognize you're part of something bigger and greater than yourself you don't go die for your favorite band in high school you don't go die because you're an apple guy or an android guy we don't die for these stupid things that we orient ourselves based on these really micro-tribal lines that we divide ourselves on we die for these macro things that cross generations we kill for the things that cross generations and we've lost that this is why our kids will never understand even I am ashamed to admit that I don't understand the idea of signing up the way that my grandparents did both my grandpas did to go fight in the war I don't understand that to the same extent that they do and my kids understand that even less this peer orientation it seeps into everything for me this has been one of the man probably one of the biggest red pills that I've taken because as soon as you start to see it the removal of children from the world of their parents and the forcing of them being in their own world together it's everywhere pay attention to the shows your kids watch think about the shows that you grew up watching even little say things like remember Charlie Brown and when the adults would talk it was like the horn sound that type of thing that was a little innocuous way to make it so that the kids were in their own world and the adults were in a world that was separate and so the entire orientation of children was around themselves and around each other this is why I chose this image back here of these baby ducks because imagine if you were to imagine the survival of the ducks if when they hatch they don't imprint on their mother but they imprint on each other and then they start to rely on each other for support, for survival for the ability to understand the way that the world works those ducks aren't going to survive very long at all now we are in a safe society from a survival standpoint and I think that's one of the reasons why we feel like we can defer to peer orientation in fact a lot of times we see it as a good thing I'll tell you I have five kids and it would be really nice to be able to send my kids off to school instead of homeschooling them it would be really nice and it is really nice where you just are kind of frazzled by what you're dealing with to just say why don't you guys go play with your friends don't interact with me don't interact with your mom go play with your friends it's really easy to be able to do that and there's nothing wrong with having friends we just have to get the orientation done the right way but it can create problems if we're always pointing the little ducklings to each other as opposed to allowing them to imprint on the people that can actually teach them how to survive now we're not dealing with physical survival social and moral and emotional survival but we have to be able to orient our kids in the right way if we don't get them attached to us then they're going to seek that attachment from each other and it's empty and here's the thing that here's the thing that really sucks this empty attachment is exacerbated by social media and I find myself guilty of this all the time I hate how big of a dopamine hit it is to be able to hit refresh on Twitter or on Instagram or on TikTok or any other platform and there are new likes and there are new comments because there's a rush that comes with that every single time this is another one of these things I put my plane on airplane mode when we left Salt Lake yesterday about four hours in the air I turned it off airplane mode I had 600 new followers on one of these social media platforms like man the thrill of that the validation that comes from that and it's ridiculous because it's just numbers I don't know who these people are I don't have any sort of real attachment but this stuff matters to me probably because I didn't get validated enough as a kid or because I was dealing with the fear of real attachment because of what happened when I went through my first divorce and I hate to admit how often I ignore my kids or I kind of pay a paltry level of attention to them because I'm too focused on social media because I'm focused on the quantity of attachment as opposed to the quality of the attachment and this is exacerbated by the way that social media works because when you think about the invention of these different cell phones or computers or stuff like that it was never intended to be used for us to attach to each other it was supposed to be for information like business and education that was why these things happened because people are so starved for attachment because we're so pure focused because we're so undeveloped in our ability to know who we are and what it is that we want from the world we created social media we created this void or we tried to fill the void with something that wasn't actually there to fill us up and the thing that's so hard and frustrating about it is that we can gorge ourselves on it I gorge myself on it and it never actually satisfies the way that it's supposed to it's like eating Twinkies over and over and over and over again and they're designed scientifically to trigger a response in you so that you don't ever actually feel so satiated but that you want to eat more and more and more and more social media is designed the exact same way we're capitalizing on our lack of correct attachments from us to our parents, from us to our kids and even in other ways where we don't know our kids friends or their friends parents or these other things we don't have this village of attachment we don't have these correct attachment with shared ideas, with shared goals with shared virtues and so we seek for it in these empty attachments that come from the internet now that's one of the benefits for you guys being here is that you're here to take it out of this empty realm and to turn it into something else because I'll tell you I mean I've got a couple of friends that are here in this room that I would have never have known if it weren't for the internet and social media you can develop real attachments with these guys or with these platforms I love and respect the men that are in here that are friends but they wouldn't have gotten to that point if we never would have actually met in person if we would have never actually shared experiences together if we would never actually done things so this can be this can be Twinkies if we allow it or it can be something deeper if we allow it to be a springboard for what it's supposed to be and this is where we have to think about how we do that with our kids and ultimately how we do that with our wives I know a lot of men whose wives are way more interested in their social media feeds than they are in what their husbands are doing they're more interested in the opinions of the other women in their lives whether that's actually women that they know or their favorite influencers that they follow than they are in the opinions of their husbands or their children they get dressed up to go out on dates not because they want to look good for their husband but because they want to look good for the other women that are in the venue that they don't even know and it's the same thing that our kids can do where they get to the point where they would rather spend time with friends they would rather spend time online they would rather spend time on social media than they would with us or with their siblings or with anything else the irony of this is that this is what creates nice guys this lack of proper attachment because what it does is it makes it so that we don't ever actually fully form who we are when all we have is this empty attachment that goes from peer to peer to peer and it's never actually fully satisfied it's never something that actually allows us to feel confident in who we are because we never actually get to feel vulnerable in who we are so we never actually take any real risks with people because if we do then they may go away really quickly and then I'm abandoned and then it's awful and it's terrifying and it's scary this creates the nice guys syndrome I know for me one of the biggest frustrations that I've heard a lot of the guys in this community talk about is that there's no way to take a preventative approach when it comes to red pill stuff or gender dynamics or understanding these things the only way that you can get guys to get on board with this is after they've gone through hell and that's what I started talking with you guys about that you're here because you've gone through something you're watching because you've gone through something you can't preventatively help prepare people for that and I don't believe that that's true you just can't do it if we're too peer oriented you can absolutely do this if you break the cycle of that peer orientation by becoming oriented towards your own children and helping them get better oriented towards you and helping them get better oriented towards your parents or your grandparents or what their responsibility is going to be when their children nice guys stop existing this idea of the perpetual people pleasing that's a good alliteration right the perpetual people pleasing or the idea of being the doormat that stops existing when you're not so devoid of any meaningful attachment that you're desperate for anyone's approval because maybe somebody will finally like me and maybe somebody will finally validate me when you have proper and healthy attachments you're okay being hated you're okay being rejected you're okay being resented because you're rooted not only in the people that you've been through thick and thin with you've been through hell and high water with and you know that those relationships are real but you're also rooted in yourself you know that you have value you know that you have something that you can offer and you know that people aren't going to abandon you as soon as things get tricky or as soon as things get sticky you know that your parents aren't going to disapprove of you and reject your love because you were a little bit disobedient and your kids are going to know that when it happens from you too when we create these proper attachments there's no need to have to worry about fixing things because we can prevent these things we don't have to fix nice guys we can stop them from ever existing at all and that's ultimately not only so much better for our boys but so much better for the women that they interact with too I think one of the things that's the most challenging about all this is that the way culture used to exist you didn't have to focus that much on creating proper attachments because the culture did the work for you today we have to spend so much more time and energy we have to invest so much more of ourselves into creating the attachment the right way creating this orientation in the right way and only from there can we actually focus on the tactics and the principles and the how tos of parenting now the nice thing is is when you do it right the tactics and the how tos are a whole lot less this may be a poor metaphor I'm totally making this up off the top of my head so hold me to it if it sucks but I was thinking about this as I was showering this morning where I'm on the seventh floor and I turn on the water and it comes out and it's hot and it works because the system is set up really really easily all I have to do is turn it on and I know I'm going to turn it on and I don't have to think that hard about it now imagine if the water weren't running all of the tactics I would have to implement all of the things that I would have to do in order to be able to take a hot shower today I would have to know where there's water I would have to know if it's pure or not and if it isn't how do I purify it I would have to be able to get it up seven floors I would have to know the right quantity that I need to be able to have I would have to know how to heat it and the things that I would have to do in order to be able to take a hot shower if the system didn't work the way that it was supposed to the system used to work it used to be something where you could parent in a different way and I'm not lamenting that we don't spank our kids anymore that there are things about it but it was a different world and the system was all geared around attachment to parents parents didn't have to compete with kids they didn't have to compete with social media they didn't have to compete with so many of the things that we have to compete with because the system worked but that's not where we are today we're on that seventh floor without running water and so our focus needs to be on creating that attachment and doing it in the right way and from there we can then turn around and focus on parenting or we can focus on having a good relationship with our spouse but the attachment is the thing that needs to proceed all of that so what does that look like the first thing that we can do to create proper attachment both for our wives and for our kids is to create our own world and make it appealing this was the entirety of my speech last year on the idea of aspirational fatherhood we hear a lot about you know men should have a mission and your wives should be invited to be part of that mission with you and I 100% agree with that but it has to be a good mission it has to be something that your family wants to go on that mission with you it has to be something that they see potential benefit that you recognize that it's going to bless their lives as opposed to just this selfish idea of I'm just going to go on my mission or I'm on my mission when you're really not on a mission you're just serving yourself by escaping or by doing anything else you have to make your world appealing you have to make it appealing for your wife you have to make it appealing for your kids and this takes courage it takes risk, it takes work most men, most dads don't do it they see that they see fatherhood gosh you hear the same trope over and over again and I get why single guys resent it I just want to travel all the time or I'm just going to see how many notches I can get or I'm going to do these other things because the idea of you get married you get a stable career you pop out a few kids you get a mortgage you die it sucks that is a terrible narrative it's a stupid narrative and it's ridiculous that we've allowed the nobility of family and the incredibleness of fatherhood to turn into this pathetic version of this is what it is and think about that that's the example that we set for our kids if that's what we live up to because if we become Homer Simpson or we become Phil Dunphy from Modern Family and the father of I'm Too Busy it was a hard day at work or I don't really want to have to deal with this right now I just need to be able to focus on me or my back doesn't feel like it's supposed to anymore I'm much more interested in watching the game instead of actually playing a game with buddies or with my kids if we become passive pathetic consumers and that's what we model for our children they're not going to want anything to do with parent orientation because our world sucks why do they want to be part of it? it's a miserable existence of course they're going to be more interested in being oriented to their friends and this doesn't mean be the cool dad it doesn't mean that you have to go into their world and try and acclimate yourself to their world but you have to make your world appealing you have to bring them up to your level and show them what the view is like from where you see it and it damn well better be a good view from where you see it they have to be able to want to be where you are just to get into their world alright? this one's hard for me I love my children I fiercely love my children and playing with them is very hard for me I have a very difficult time my kids are young and the idea of playing the same game over and over and over again of being able to participate with them on their level their times when it's tedious their times when it's exhausting my one son he's going to see this in like 20 years and I'll pay the therapy bill when you do but he he loves Zelda and we kind of dose it out properly and I let him play video games that I've played myself to so that we have some sort of connection there between us I don't know what it is but when I'm driving him and his sister to piano lesson we're going to his wrestling game or soccer practice or something else and he just starts telling me about the latest temple or the latest shrine that he's on like my brain just it just checks out I don't hear a word he says and it's an automatic thing there's this tedium in hearing the way that they talk about these things and I'm embarrassed to that because, one, it's actually something that I understand what he's talking about because I've played the game with him but two, even if it's not I need to be able to connect with him in a way that doesn't sound like I need to get into his world we need to get into their world now for a lot of us as dads there's some sacrifice there this is another one of these things with my son most men are weak and beta how do you get past this how do you be a real man how do you be a husband and a father that has been where we dropped the ball as men is because we're too accepting we're too tolerant I'm calling for intolerance intolerance for evil we need to be able to properly identify with the definition what is masculinity we need men to stand up and do heroic things building a tribe of people who are of like mind who you can depend on and hold you accountable who will call you on your vs I call the official tagline for now with 21 convention America's last stand for masculinity I think it is you come out and you consciously attend and start talking with these people because people who are coming here are coming here to discuss big ideas important ideas not just talking about being masculine but okay you've done all the self development what are you going to do with it it's really kind of fun in fact I could think about both my son and my oldest daughter I didn't really like organized sports I quit playing when I was 14 because I'd found BMX biking and punk rock like give the middle finger to organized sports and really it's just because I sucked at them and I could avoid the embarrassment that way but I've had this kind of antipathy for organized sports for a long time I see the value in them now but there's still some where it's funny to realize like 25 years later that there's still this like emotional response to these and one of them is football I don't know why my dad wasn't really super into football I have a lot of friends who play football there's no antipathy for the people but there is for the game and my son started playing flag football this year and he loves it more than anything else we've had him try he loves it more than wrestling he loves it more than soccer he loves it more than teeball more than skiing more than skateboarding so guess what I'm getting into it's my job to get into football it's not my job to steer him into BMX bikes or to steer him into music or to fly curiously through my son it's my job to see where he is and what he gets excited about and to help him get excited about it too to meet him at his level and to get into his world same thing with my daughter who's been playing soccer with her friends man I don't know how you guys watch college sports and you get emotionally invested in that or professional sports and you get emotionally invested in that when you can watch your own kids play the highs and lows of watching them do that is infinitely more than some stranger who's never going to know your name and so the idea of getting into their world of getting excited about the things that they get excited about for me it helps me attach to them better for us as dads it helps us attach to them better and it also means we need to do that with our wives too doesn't mean you go get manicures doesn't mean you have to go do every little thing that she wants to do but you need to know what her world looks like you need to know the things that she fears you need to know the things that she gets excited about you need to know the things that make her tick and you need to be able to help her move through that or embrace it you need to be part of her world yes she needs to be on your mission but you need to be part of her world you need to attach to her just as much as she needs to attach to you because if there's only one direction of that attachment then it's broken and it's not going to bear the fruits that it's supposed to bear but it will get into their world retain your dignity as a man keep your own world continue to make your world appealing continue challenging yourself continue with your hobbies continue with your friends but absolutely get into their world too because it will help foster that correct attachment even more what all of this leads to is the idea that relationship is both greater than behavior and also that a good relationship is greater behavior you can go back to this idea of parenting the way it used to be done up until 50, 60 years ago and there could be a lot of focus on behavior there could be a focus on tough love there could be a focus on corrective love there could be a focus on behavior because the attachment was already there the relationship was there it was baked into the cake it was never under threat what we deal with now is again another false dichotomy relationship and then that's never going to be a focus on behavior in fact if I put any emphasis on behavior then I'm undermining the relationship and the most important thing I'm frustrated by how many people especially how many women I know that feel this way that it's just my job to love them that's all it is and if I love them then eventually they're going to find their way onto the right path and they're going to make good decisions and so it's my responsibility only to love them and to gently just kind of model but that corrective stuff that's bad we don't do that and we over corrected when we did that most Gen Xers and millennials were raised by silent or boomer parents that over corrected for the way that they were parented and we were raised in these kind of indulgent households and this is why you get snowflake generations this is why you get this crazy level of peer orientation because if you don't feel like the relationship is something that's actually solid it feels like there's a condescending relationship there or that there's no expectation with the love that comes then you don't actually believe that somebody loves you if your parents don't have any expectations of you they don't love you and you don't believe that they love you if they don't have any expectations of you a child is going to understand that on a subconscious level now at the same time if all you focus on are the expectations if all you focus on is the behavior and there's never any real push for non corrective components of what that relationship is your wife or your kids aren't going to believe that you love them either they're going to see you as objectifying them and I don't mean sexually objectifying them but objectifying them in that your whole existence is to bring about my reputation or peace in my household or my idea of what a good family should be or what right or wrong is they become objects or tools to help you get to whatever your desired goal is because they are just their agents of behavior as opposed to people in and of themselves and so there needs to be a balance between both and if you focus on the relationship if you focus on creating that then the behavior corrects relatively well I think about this again with some of my kids where it's so counterintuitive but when they're screaming at each other and they're angry with each other when it's complete chaos and all I want to do is just pound the table and let them know that I've got a bigger stronger louder voice than they do to kind of like shake things up if instead what I do is I get in one of their faces in a kind way and I just remind them that I love them and give them a minute to be able to kind of feel and immerse in that and then help them understand that what they've done is wrong here's a better way to do it but if I start off with this idea of um collecting before I correct them it's amazing how much it changes their willingness to change their behavior because then they're not just doing it to do it they're doing it because they actually buy into it this is one of those things where this is me teaching my daughter to ride her bike, this is my third and what I love about my third is she's absolutely fearless, like ridiculously does not think about consequences fearless but then one of the downsides for that for her is that when she does get afraid she's not very good at overcoming that fear the occasional time it does click on she has a really hard time moving through it and for her riding a bike was this way, we had to try three or four different times and it just wouldn't click because she couldn't get herself to pedal she couldn't get herself to do it and for me, I wanted to focus on you know, well you're not actually pushing down with your feet or you're going too slow or you're too like I'm way too focused on the behavior on what it is that she's doing but the final time that we got it the reason we got it is because when she got scared and she started crying and she got overwhelmed rather than just being frustrated or okay how can I quickly absolve that I moved to the point where we're actually focusing on riding the bike I got down with her and I helped her understand that it's okay to be scared that this is scary yes, there is a potential for you to get hurt and you're fine to be scared and even if we don't ride the bike today I love you my relationship with you is not contingent upon your ability to learn how to ride this bike today and there was something about it that I watched her brain just click her arms and then the fear went away well that's not true, the fear didn't go away her ability to or her inability to manage the fear went away and very quickly after that she was riding a bike and now she's off doing it as frequently as she wants and as fast as she wants and that fearlessness is right back into it we need to collect them before we correct them and we need to do it in a way that they understand it's difficult because we can collect them in the same way that we are on our phones and we're oh yeah that's a good story type of thing where we see this even I mean kids understand this on a level because kids even do this on their own level one of my kids my oldest loves she loves crappy food and it's a real struggle for my wife and I to the point where we only keep good clean stuff in the house, my wife would grocery shop from four different stores to try and find everything that works and even like to facilitate snacks but as soon as my oldest can she's out the door over one of the neighbors houses so she can just eat crap and she loves it and my wife does these wonderful every Sunday she does a big homemade meal where we have the kids try something new and we also have this big dessert and one of the rules is you don't have to finish your plate but you need to try at least everything if you want to be able to have dessert and it's amazing how frequently all of my kids will just try to do the bare minimum of I'm going to take one quick bite and I'm going to make a big dramatic affair out of it and then immediately before we've even had a chance to start our meal because you know she's feeding the baby and I'm cutting it up for the two year old and it's can we have dessert now and it's because they're putting in that token effort into doing what we want as opposed to fully embracing it what we don't want them to just eat good food we want them to appreciate good food we want them to love eating good food and I tell you that because our kids understand it that way too they don't want us to make a token effort at collecting them and having a relationship with them they don't want us to go through the motions of we're having a conversation or I'm making eye contact with you so that we can talk they want us to actually connect with them they want us to actually collect them before we involve any sort of correction in what their behavior is this is one of these things that does feel like it's a silver bullet because if my kids are really struggling especially if it's just one of them if I take five minutes to go sit with them somewhere put them on my lap and it's not a forceful thing but there's just physical contact and calmness on my part they immediately go from anger to a sense of futility which is good because they have to embrace and have things the way that they want that futility is a good thing and then from there they're open to being corrected and not just doing it because they're begrudgingly doing so because I'm not allowed to do this or because I have to do that but because they actually buy in to not only the behavior that we want from them but the mindset around the behavior that we want from them and so when I make it an effort to not give a token approach to what it is that they need from me it facilitates their ability to not just give me a behavior but also give me everything that surrounds that behavior so that they're actually becoming the kind of kids that they're supposed to be okay the last thing that I want to share with this is probably the hardest thing and this is that we need to lead when they need us and this is I don't know how it was for you guys but I know for me when I first got into this marriage especially because Bricale was very aware of my wanting a traditional household and she wanted it too she wanted to be a stay-at-home mom she liked the idea of my being the head of the household this is reinforced by our doctrinal beliefs this is reinforced by by the culture that we're in to some extent and this is also something that she just desired and for me I had this kind of pie-in-the-sky idea of sweet I just get to be the one and I need to make good decisions and I need to be able to do this but I get to lead in ways that I would like to lead and you know the buck stops with me and I get to make this happen the thing that I wasn't ready for was the difficulty of her needing me to lead when I didn't feel like it or I wasn't prepared for the difficulty of my kids needing me to lead when I didn't feel like it because my wife is very different from me even women are very different from each other and children and adults are very different from each other and we have different needs my friends don't need me the way that my wife does my wife doesn't need me the way that my kids do and it doesn't mean that there's something wrong or there's something broken there was one time when we were first married actually it was before we were getting married and we were moving her out of the studio that she was living in and she had this like massive tube TV that weighed 200 pounds and it was just the two of us trying to move it and I'm picking it up on my end and trying to like shimmy it through the door and she can't do it she can't, not both from a strength perspective and from the perspective that she just hasn't moved stuff like this before she hasn't had to do it with friends moving in and out of dorms, she hasn't had to do it with new families that move into the neighborhood she hasn't had to do it with church stuff she just doesn't have any experience with it and I remember getting really frustrated with one of my friends where it's like come on you moron this is not that difficult why can't you just move the stupid TV and for some reason I had the presence of mine that it clicked in my head it's like she's not a defective man she's not incapable of doing this the way that you think it should be done or the way that your buddies are used to doing it with you because she's defective but it's because she's a woman and she does things differently there's a complementary component to it my wife was just tweeting about the same thing talking about how well yeah my husband goes and he brings home the bacon and he does the work but he doesn't do any of the emotional work in the home he doesn't have to deal with kids the same way that I do and there's this lamentation of that and it frustrates my wife to no end because she acknowledges that it's like no you don't deal with the kids emotionally in the same way that I do but that doesn't mean that you don't deal with them or that there's not some emotional lifting that you're doing too I'm not a defective woman because I don't handle the kids the same way that she does just like she's not a defective man because she doesn't handle certain tasks the way that I do and that's where it gets really difficult to lead because leading other men that see things the way that we do that have the same goals that have similar tactics or at least have similar strategies where there's different tactics that's relatively easy to do or even it's not relatively easy it's a challenge that feels what surmountable or accomplishable but leading women who need you in a way that you don't understand that feels totally foreign or leading your kids in a way that feels totally foreign can be very very difficult that's why most people today just get dogs it's so much easier to have dogs because they don't need to be led in a way that you're uncomfortable leading them it's easy to feed a dog it's easy to be able to dress one up and take pictures of it it's really easy to get constant affirmation from a dog it doesn't need to be led in a way that challenges you or pushes you it wants to be led in a way that fits in naturally with your desires for leadership as a man kids are different than that wives are different than that and that makes it a challenge but it makes it a good opportunity for growth too I know from my own experience that as I've learned how to lead them and embrace their need for me in ways that I wasn't prepared for in ways that I wasn't expecting that's where I see exponential growth it feels like I get this really kind of like on a straight line really easy growth that feels very incremental when I'm leading them in the ways that I want to be led where I'm leading my friends or I'm leading my clients in ways that I want to be led and then I hit this wall when it's dealing with something with my wife or with my kids and I hit it again and again and again and then as soon as I embrace that they're not defective or that they need me it's actually in that situation I'm the one that's defective I'm being defective as a leader they need me in a way that I'm not used to and then I embrace the way that they need me so I can still lead them I can still love them that way that's where that exponential growth comes from is being able to do it in a way that it gets you out of your comfort zone so that's the last thing that I've been able to focus on is leading when they need now like I said this is not something these are not all my ideas I've given you my takes on this this is something that we just got turned onto within the last year a really good resource for this is a book called hold on to your kids this is where a lot of these ideas come from I know that a lot of the other men that are here especially the therapists and the other guys are familiar with a lot of these ideas but all I can do is tell you that from my own experience again because I'm not at the top of the mountain I'm moving up the mountain and this got me over a really big hump in how things were with my relationship with my wife and how things are with my relationship with my kids that is as I've focused on helping them get attached to me and helping myself get attached to them rather than this peer orientation it's fundamentally changed the dynamic of what our household is now again I know that I'm in a unique situation because my wife stays home with the kids we're still happily married we get to she homeschools them we don't have to send them off to school we don't have to send them to daycare we're not dealing with a co-parent who's undermining these positions and so I know that a lot of you are in very different circumstances where you don't have everything laid out as well and as easily as we do but I can promise you that if you take these ideas and you implement them to the best extent that you can within the context that's available to you you will have a better relationship with your children if you are still married you will have a better relationship with your wife and you will feel more accomplished and happier as a father you will feel more accomplished and happier as a husband and that ultimately is the goal that we're after is not just that self development but the building of the mission of the family and creating a family that's better so that we benefit everybody around us instead of just ourselves thanks guys okay I guess we've got a few minutes for questions right yep you got 20 minutes put this mic behind by the way I know that we're I like that it's a little bit more intimate this time so I do this when I do my style trainings we got 20 minutes so if you guys have multiple questions let's do multiple so don't feel bashful like oh I already asked one and there's like I'm happy to give you guys the time if you want it if you don't I get that too but yeah so man just come up here if you have a question and if not that's fine too hey good speech thank you so you raised in like a soft let's say protective environment how would you correct that in yourself and then how would you kind of prevent yourself from going to the extreme as a parent for your kids for myself and I was raised in kind of a soft protected environment for sure never gotten a fight in high school never really had to push myself in a lot of ways I was always able to talk myself out of hard situations but you know I fled sports because I could go ride a bike and pretend to get good so I know what you're talking about the first thing is learning how to embrace hardship yourself and it has to be meaningful you may be at a point where you're ready to go all in let's do a combat sport let's go get punched in the face and learn what that feels like or if it's not that it's learning through the pain of discipline learning through the pain of challenge learning through something else but you got to take whatever that incremental level is for you and then be willing to not only get there but do it well enough that you can see the benefits and then start to go and expand beyond that and so that's going to be a very personal thing like what extent you take that too but do hard things challenge yourself find things that scare you and then say I'm going to sack up and I'm going to do this even though it scares me and there's so much power that comes from being able to do that and recognizing you're not as fragile you're not fragile physically you're not fragile socially you think you are nearly as much as you've been conditioned or coddled to believe that you are because of the way that you were raised and that's similar to what I would recommend you do from a parenting perspective is there's a difference between forcing your kids to do hard things and encouraging them to do hard things with you because they see you do hard things you can set the culture within your family if they know that mom and dad are constantly growing or constantly developing or constantly challenging themselves they see you whatever your hobbies are that you're doing and they see you getting better at it they see you improving from a work perspective that's the idea of inviting them into your world where work or hobbies or sports are not things that dad goes and does and we don't know anything about but we get to learn about how he does them and why he does them then your kids will be much more naturally inclined to want to emulate you and so they will find themselves challenging themselves more even just having the confidence of being properly attached to you they will feel more willing to take on those races because they know that there's a default safety that they can come back to rather than this whole world is fragile and that has to be protected and coddled as well does that answer that for you? yes definitely you're welcome you said in the last year leading when they need getting into your wife's world in your kids world how do you do that? oh man I want to think about how to do this in a way that is not I'm not a super private person but my family is a little bit more that way let me think of an example I can share okay I think I can do this in a way that doesn't my wife is she has some habits that she's had for a long time with attitudes about something that her parents had and everything else and it can kind of affect how we are as a family a lot of it's financially related and there was one this actually just happened this week there was one morning when I woke up and I saw the way that she had done some of the things in the account that were contradictory to the way that we have decided and agreed that we want to do some things and my initial inclination because of what my relationship with money or relationship with relationships or anything else is was to just kind of rage because it feels like a betrayal it feels like well this isn't what we agreed upon and why are you doing this and what else are you not being honest with me about like it's amazing how quickly your brain goes in all these different directions and this is something that's been in my mind a lot that's been kind of consciously and deliberately in the front of my mind where it's like dude shut up for a minute give her an account and I saw it give her a minute and just ask her questions and ask her why this is happening this way and see what it is and it's amazing how she woke up and we were talking about it the same idea of collect before you correct and so good morning how'd you sleep what do we have on deck today we kind of snuggled for a little bit and then asked her about it as opposed to like she wakes up why is the account so it's that idea of collect first and then I just treated as I wanted to ask her and it was amazing how quickly because I asked her as opposed to accusing her she knew where she was and she opened up more so than she ever has in the last 10 years about this particular issue of like yeah I need to be better about this and then rather than myself of course you need to be better about this it was yeah how can I help you be better with this and this thing that could have been a big fight between us turned into an opportunity for us to actually get even closer than we've ever been and for us to continue to help her with things and I think part of that comes from rather than her constantly feeling threatened or defensive or I have to hide this or this is shameful it was okay now I can finally acknowledge that this is actually a problem and Tanner's on my side and he's going to help me address this it's great to tackle this as a team that's one of the things that we kind of have to constantly remind ourselves whenever we get in arguments is we are on the same team we are we're totally aligned in what our goals are we may have very disparate ideas about how to get there but we're on the same team and if I can help her understand that if I can help my kids understand that then they respond better whereas and that's the leadership that they need for me is that reminder that we're on the same team whereas a lot of times I don't want to lead that way I would rather just correct and go immediately into this is why this behavior is a problem so that's one of the ways that I found that it works for us or it's starting to work for us that answers my second which is can you collect them in their world not your world or your mission are you able to collect them and then correct tell me give me a little bit more context on what you mean by that just you know you say get into their life like I'm not in the pets or animals or dogs your wife lives and breathes and I see it in this the dog loves her I can piss her off I can annoy her I can do all this stuff the dog doesn't do that the dog's happy when she comes home all of these things so I'm supposed to get into this world then when I am in that world pretending or not I'm there she knows I'm there but I can't if I try to lead in that you don't know you're not a dog person don't talk to him like that right so to try and collect them so I'm into her world it's not my mission I go into that world to try and collect them and then lead in it how can you do that with overstepping man that's a tricky one especially because the dog's part of the family a poor illustration right but kids are on the way that's probably what we're trying for so if I can get this out of the weeds now well I would say that the fact that you guys have dogs means that you don't have the luxury of that not being in your world because it affects you it affects your family and as you guys have kids it's going to affect your kids if dogs are something that she had like in an office or she were a vet or something else she did that on the outside then you could treat it as this isn't part of my world that's me getting into her world and I can take that approach that way but the fact that they're in your home means that it's in your world and you have to be able to correct the behavior of the dogs you have to be able to interact with the dogs to handle that the right way which means what I would do is I would find something that got me interested in them because maybe it depends on the breed that you have or maybe there's different things that you can do depending on those breeds but find ways to actually get interested in that so that it's not just that token effort of I'm into this because my wife is into it and she's making me do it but find something that genuinely gets you excited and at the same time you understand that I'm not the dog person that you are and I understand that and at the same time this is still my house this is still my realm and I have a say in how things happen in here and so if there's a better way to do it based on your experience then help me understand that and help me get there but you can't just talk down to me or tell me that I don't get to be involved with the dogs because they're in my domain and they're in my home too that's probably how I would approach it if I were there thanks Ryan so how do you deal with obviously your wife's had plenty of kids how do you deal with the fluctuations in their self confidence and maybe after the kids and getting back to their pre look before they started having kids and the self confidence issues that most women deal with going through that my fiance deals with that and it's always a touchy conversation for me to have to be like how can I help her or how can I not help her versus I'm not saying you look unattractive I feel like it's that push pull and most relationships doesn't it suck especially because there are times when you do you still find her attractive it drives my wife crazy that I get these pregnancy goggles because every time I go back and I look at photos from when she was pregnant it's like you're really that big she doesn't believe that I didn't see it that way when she was pregnant they really cannot see the way that we still see them they don't believe us when we're being sincere about how attractive we think they are that if I compliment her on her looks not related to her her weight or her changes that way but I compliment her clothing or I compliment her hair or I compliment the way that she smells she has an easier time believing that and so it makes it so that she then that kind of like sets the momentum for being able to believe these other things too at the same time if she expresses any sort of interest which my wife is very fitness focused and she does a really good job of dropping the baby weight and wanting to get to where she is but like for me right now I would I love working out six days a week I'm doing three because I'm giving her the other three so that she can she can have that time and so it's being supportive not only in I love you and I'm attracted to you where you are but I'm also supportive in whatever desires that you have to get back to where you are and a lot of this is even the nuance of what trying to figure out what it is when she's feeling that lack of confidence does she want reaffirmation or does she want a little bit of correction when it's like I understand you feel that way let's get you that gym membership or let me drive you out this time where I'm going to take our daughter this time so that you can fully do it and be focused on that and being a little bit more exploratory and what those questions are but that's a fun one isn't it that's a challenge Hello I'm on the home schooling and also I think with a lot of people that I've talked to I don't have to get to myself but you know the wife is spending all the time with the kids doing the home schooling so then how as the man do you kind of do leadership and the discipline and still have that there Cool, good questions the first thing that I would say is if you can work a remote job I love that not only do I get to control where I work but I get to control when I work I take Fridays off in addition to the weekends and my kids look forward to having me come and do the home schooling with them on that day so that there's that interaction and obviously I love being able to do that too because it reinforces that this is not just a mom thing this is who we are but if you can't do it remotely one of the things that's so interesting about school and you kind of learn this when you do I feel like home school and being an entrepreneur are very similar where you have these very rigid ideas of I work for this set number of hours or I go to school for this set number of hours or I do things according to this structure based on this book or this curriculum or this is the way that things have already been done and as soon as you break free from either one of those it becomes really easy to teach whenever and wherever you are like we do school four days a week with our kids and it's maybe two hours that my wife is actually like in the school room at the table doing that stuff but man, kids are naturally curious I mean a three year old's favorite word is why and that's for every three year old and this is what's so frustrating about regular schooling is it takes this beautiful innate natural godly desire to want to understand the world and it just squashes it because you get stuck up in all this rigidity or it's babysitting and it's all these hours and you have to sit down and shut up and regurgitate and all of that whereas, man, so much of homeschooling is dad, how do volcanoes work? I don't know, let's watch a YouTube video where do crayons come from? I don't know let's go look that up or my son one day started tinkering around on the piano and turns out he's got a really good musical ear and so now part of the homeschool curriculum is we've got him in piano lessons and he practices the piano every day and so you take what their natural inclinations toward learning are and you support that. So again, it's getting into their world. What do they want to learn? You go neck deep in that with them because what's more important than what they're learning is teaching them how to learn and how to continue to love learning and you can do that at any point in time. You can do that at family dinner, you can do it when you're in the car on the way to practice. You don't have to be following your curriculum or in a specific time and so you as a father can do that just as much as their mother can do. Awesome, thanks. Thanks guys, I appreciate the chance to get to speak with you today so we'll do some stuff after but yeah, thanks guys. What he represents is patriarchy. We're here to do work as men as patriarchs. There's nothing more natural than being a father. This is Will Spencer from the Renaissance of Men here with the new 21 report and I'm excited to be here with you. So this is your third or fourth 21 convention? Sixth. Sixth. You'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? 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 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 where we realize that I mean we're kind of in really dire circumstances and masculinity is a lynchpin 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 of 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 is 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 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 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 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 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 have said absolutely not we're not going to do it and I wonder if that would have actually been the case there was such a general trust in government there was a relative understanding that was still 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 every institution has spent at least the past couple years and that's if I'm being generous burning all of its credibility it's got this like credibility capital that's just spending all of it that's right and I think it's kind of hard to avoid that realization these were the institutions that we as let's say citizens as men put our trust in because they're the large scale lovers of society and then every institution one by one has turned on all the citizens all at once simultaneously and it's just burning through everything and it's just one by one even down to sports 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 do you think that will ever regain the trust 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 or something that's going to completely change that technology I think too many of us underestimate how big of a linchpin 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 like 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 we're on YouTube and 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 arm saying no get off social media abandon social media he made a call to get on to social media and that's been something that you've been working on as well so just speak of it out 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 ten 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 then 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 are you going to 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 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 man-made 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 but when you get those satisfied you still realize that there's more my cup isn't full 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 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 if 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 years is 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 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 okay 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 okay I think that's totally bogus but I come at it from this angle of 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 and my beliefs don't matter it just matters that we believe something like you can go pretty hard on what the doctrinal differences 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 I don't know this is what my mom and dad taught me when I was a kid exactly yeah there was the panel that you were on it and Jeff Younger Eastern Orthodox, Pastor Michael Foster Jack, Pagan is how he would identify I think the realist. These are almost irreconcilable kind of perspectives but what I think what I think was Michael Foster said 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 especially because it used to be that we had the luxury of not having to find consensus because fighting this massive enemy of nihilism 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 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 way 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 who was my favorite find this week I loved it that goes right along with your emphasis on men's aesthetic through style what an exciting development it was so cool because he and I both felt this way where he came into 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 is 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 he talked about what we need is Greek rationality Judeo-Christian values and romantic masculinity and it's just like that's exactly what we need right? 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 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 how did your conversations go the one-on-one conversations with the men the attendees? 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 just playing pretend you're legitimately taking these principles you're legitimately taking these cultural values that have been created in the 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 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 I got 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 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 right 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 going to throw the worst possible spin on it 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 a like an emotional or a person like 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 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 the characterization of them and at the same time the other big mission for Chest is you get a lot of 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 is yeah there's an enemy and it's real but 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 want to focus on is what is it that you want 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 man the thumos in that man that's coming 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 as you know aesthetics or fatherhood or religion or these other things so the best places to find me for that are going to be on Twitter and on Instagram and it's at Tanner Guzzi thank you so much 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