 What he represents is patriarchy. We're here to do work as men, as patriarchs. There's nothing more natural than being a father. Welcome back to the 21 convention 2020 here in Orlando, Florida, patriarch's edition. We're about to welcome the chief patriarch to the stage, Tanner Guzzi. When asked to do the intro for this, how do you find the words to bring onto a stage a man that you have the most respect for, the most honor for, and a man you look up to, a man who inspires you? How do you find the words to properly bring them onto the stage? You really can't. Nothing I can say can embody what it is this man represents. Nothing I can say to you will prepare you for what he's about to bring to this stage. I was just telling you guys about this image behind me. A father setting the right example for their sons, because a father, you know, you set the example. The children will follow that example. They're not going to follow the advice you give. They're not going to follow the life lessons. They're going to follow the life you lived. And Tanner lives a life that inspires me every single day. Every single day, I see something that he's written, a photo that he's taken, and I'm like, man, look at that. I want to be like that. That's the kind of dad I want to be to my kids. And I'd say that with all the humility in the world, because I'm a very proud man. I try to set the bar on everything, but when I see Tanner, it's just that lights a fire in me, and I pass that to my children. A simple conversation, not many know this, that I had with him and his beautiful bride, changed my life forever, because that's what the guzzies do. They share, they build, they want to promote others. They don't try to rise by pushing others down. They rise up and bring everybody with them. They are the tide. I'd like to welcome the tide of Tanner Guzzi to the stage. Oh, man, I'm going to get emotional. Okay, I'll tell you guys one thing about me. My wife can verify this, and this is going to kill. I can't wait to see all the YouTube comments. There's something about nobility when I see it, and it doesn't matter if it's in a kid's show, like The Good Dinosaur, when little Arlo the Bronosaurus earned the right to put his paw print up on the silo with the rest of his family, or there's something, but when I see nobility, and I see aspiration, and I see the results of real, honest, godly hard work, that's what gets me emotional. And I'm really grateful to be here among men that are noble men. Elliot just gave the best presentation I've ever heard in any conference I've ever attended in my life. There was so much truth in there. I've had conversations with Jack Donovan, somebody who so many people think he and I should be about as ideologically as opposed as you can get, but I've talked to him as I've prepared for this, and there's so much nobility in what he wants men to be. I hear what Zach is, and I feel the exact same way when I see what Zach does with his children and how he is with his wife, and I see the social media that he promotes. I look up to him, and I'm humbled to hear that he looks up to me. I'm so grateful and blessed that I get to be in a room with you men. The other speakers that I have respect for are men that I've worked with as clients. Some of you I don't know other than that before, some of you are brand new, but I'm grateful to be in your presence, and there's nobility and there's aspiration here, and I really am. I'm grateful to be here. When Anthony first asked me to be the chief patriarch and to come on and to talk again about fatherhood, I knew immediately what I wanted to do was talk about aspirational fatherhood. And I've spent the last eight to nine months trying to rack my brain for how do I present this? How do I talk about this? How do I do this in a way that's engaging? And all I can do is talk about what I hope that I can become as a father and what I hope I can be as aspirational as a father and what my process is for trying to be there and I'm going to pull from some of these same sources that I just mentioned. Because, like a lot of you men, fatherhood wasn't something that was man, I want to say this. I love my father. I have a lot of respect for my father. We have a good relationship. He's admirable in so many ways. And the way he is, especially as a grandfather, the way he is to my children, is absolutely incredible. But fatherhood was never something that was created intentionally. It was never something that I was really told to aspire to other than that this is what we do as members of our church and you're supposed to be a dad. But it was never something that was built up, that was ennoblized, that was, for lack of a better term, even pedestalized. It was just an obligation that I was given that I was supposed to do. And like a lot of you men, I grew up thinking that fatherhood was the death of everything that was good about my life. We see that. And I love the way that Elliot was talking about these different initiations that we go through. And I believe that a lot of this resentment of fatherhood is absolutely intentional. Because what happens is we go through these changes where we're pulled out of the identity of the mother and we recognize that, oh, I'm an individual, I'm myself. And then we get pulled a little bit further and we recognize, okay, I'm not even like mom, let alone the fact that I'm an individual. But I'm like dad. And that's when you have these four, five and six-year-old boys that engage in this hero worship of their father. And when we're innocent, dad is the best. He's absolutely the best thing in the world. And we don't know that he may be a bum or he may be somebody that's laxadaisical or lazy or weak or even effeminate in the ways that Elliot pointed out because we can at least see something that we can identify with. But then what happens when we get to that age of 12 or 13 or 14 when that testosterone starts to come in and there is no initiation into that manhood? Elliot was talking about the old tribal rituals of initiation where the men put on the masks and they pull them away from the mother and there's pain and there's preparation and then there's brotherhood and you become part of the culture of being a man. I didn't get that. None of you probably got that. So I was trapped in this world of not being like mom, never being allowed to really be like dad, never really being even welcomed into my father's house or into the father's house because the father's house was non-existent. It was a ruin. It was a wreck. It was shambles. It was chaos as opposed to the pattern that it should have been. And so what happens? We're trapped in this hedonistic, Epicurean, no man's land of individualism, of I am me and I'm the one, like Elliot said, I am my own God because I'm not accountable to anything else. I'm not even being pulled up into anything else. And we see this happen at earlier ages and we see it happen at later ages. Adolescence, which was that transitory time from when you were pulled out of the house of the mother and brought into the house of the father, used to be a relatively quick transition. Not anymore. Now, adolescence starts earlier and earlier and earlier. It... It pisses me off to no end that I had to have the sex talk with my daughter at seven instead of at twelve or thirteen because of the fact that she could be exposed to porn at friends' houses because of what's on their screens irrespective of how careful my wife and I try to be with what's happening in our home. I should not have to have that talk with my daughter at that age. The world is robbing her of her childhood and her innocence and it's my responsibility and my wife's responsibility to step up and at least usher her in to that adolescence instead of letting the world rip her into it and destroy her as it pulls her into it. I want my kids to be innocent and childlike until they have to be adults. But we have to bring them into that adolescence sooner and if we don't do it intentionally the world is going to do it on their terms and it's going to be hell for our children. But they don't start earlier and then end earlier. No, that adolescence continues on until you're twenty-six or thirty-six and you still quite literally live in your mother's home and she does kiss the boo-boos and make things go away and she makes it happen so that if things get scary or they get hard or they get difficult then you get taken care of and if it's not your literal mom it's Mama Obama who's doing it for you. It's daddy government who's stepping in and taking care of you. It's the system that's designed to make it so that you never never get out of this transitory phase. How many of us knew the moment when we became a man? You ask men what that is and first of all they're just going to chafe at the idea they're going to be uncomfortable at the idea even recognizing themselves as a man how often do you hear terms like boys or with the boys as opposed to the men? How often do you hear sons aspire to want to be men? So many of the males in our society just want to be guys and part of it is because we never get initiated into manhood. The things that were rights of passage, marriage, fatherhood, getting your first job graduating from college they're nebulous, they don't mean anything and a major reason for that is because initiation entering into a new life doesn't actually enter into a new life. I've been thinking for years now with my one son that I have how do I initiate him? What's the right of passage that I would like to help him engage in and I think a lot about the mechanics of it. How do you introduce pain in a productive way and how do you pull him away from mom in a productive way? All of that stuff is important and I want to be able to figure that out but the biggest conundrum that I have in all of this is once he goes through that week or that six weeks or whatever that initiation ritual and process is how do I make his life any different on the other side? Because that's what matters. The ritual is the door way and if the door doesn't lead to anything it's irrelevant. There's no reason to go through all the hassle and the pain and the energy and the effort of going through that door there's nothing on the other side but the same thing that there was all around it and before it and that's the world we live in. There is no difference for us anymore between being men and being children or being men and being women or being men and being this androgynous whatever it is that you think you are type of thing. There's nothing on the other side of this door. It's no wonder that we're trapped in this me, in this epicureanism, in this self action. Why would we go through that when there's nothing there and how do we build something there? That's what aspirational fatherhood is. It's my responsibility to build a structure on the other side of that door. It's my responsibility to actually have a father's house that I can welcome my son into instead of it just being the wilderness of adolescence or trying to turn him back to what his mother's house is. How do we build that? What do we do? What does that look like? Thankfully we don't have to do that on our own. There are myriad traditions and beliefs and morals and things that we can pull from. One of the most common things that gets referenced a lot within our different sphere within our sphere is the idea of king warrior, magician, lover. These archetypes, right? I've uh I've been grateful enough to be able to go through Jack's new book and in it he boils those down into three different kind of archetypes because he combines the king and the magician and there's good reason for that. But he talks about how you have the father, the striker and the lord of the earth and we see this not just in philosophy or in new religions, new solar religions or things like that but you see it in Zeus and Aries and Dionysus. You see it in Odin and Thor and Frey. These different dichotomies of what it is to be a god, what it is to pull from something, to build the father's house have existed forever. When I first read about this I thought, okay well how does that apply to Christianity? Who's the warrior in Christianity? Who's the father? That one's easy. What about who's the lover or anything else? And as I've thought more about this I've realized that Christianity doesn't have a pantheon of gods it has the god and when Christ was Jehovah, that's the striker, that's the warrior that's the fire and brimstone, the god of the Old Testament. When he's born as a meek and lowly lamb and he comes to bring peace and he's in the most humble of circumstances that's him as the cultivator, the lover that's him as Dionysus or the lord of the earth. And when he comes again a second time that's when we will get the omniscient and omnipotent, fully realized fully celestialized god of everything that's our potential is to be like that and it's our responsibility as fathers to build that. And one of the things that I love is that the way that the world has been created through millennia, through generations is that we know that this happens and we can do this in a productive way. We talk about even things like Parseval's quest for the Holy Grail and when he has to face the red knight which is the warrior the white knight which is the lover and the black knight which is the father we see that in the story of Iron John when the young man first goes out to the tournament riding the red horse and he's the warrior and then he goes out riding the white horse and he's the lover and he goes out riding the black horse and he's the father. I think that there is divinity to that timeliness because think about what happens when you first get your testosterone and you're 12 and you're 14 years old you're not going to be a father you're not going to be able to be a leader of a father a patriarch you're not going to be able to do anything else that actually requires wisdom or that magician energy or that king energy or anything else like that and it certainly inappropriate to be doing anything from a lover perspective you don't even understand yourself how are you going to understand women if you haven't built a house of order how in the world are you going to be able to venture into the world of chaos that is femininity and be able to do anything productive with that you don't have to start with the warrior and what's the thing that's killed more often than not in our young boys it's that very first little bit of a seed of a warrior you know fighter I'm a lover I don't like hanging out with other boys I just want girls where I'm just going to focus it on something really masturbatory like video games where I'm going to subvert the fact that that testosterone and that masculine energy and all of that goodness rather than going towards developing my fighter and my warrior and my striker instead I'm going to seek female approval and validation and I'm going to date a bunch of girls and I want to start trying to kiss and make out and get laid and everything at 12 or 13 years old and I'm going to push it all into porn or anything and I'm going to subvert the order in which this should be happening I'm going to skip the red warrior and go right into the white lover and how often do we see that because the white lover is what women want from us that's where we're safest that's where we're most like them so that's what mom wants us to be especially if she is an evil mom which I disagree with the idea that all women are evil and that they can't overcome that but if they are that dark mother they want us trapped that white lover that white knight that never went through the red and never evolves into the black that's what so many of our subverted and demasculinized churches want from us just be the good little obedient boy just follow the commandments just do the things that Jesus would do and we have this incredibly one-dimensional primary school children version of Jesus that all he says is be nice to people that's not a god that's a weakling without all the proper context of the warrior and the father and everything else that comes with it but that's what we're told it is to be good or to be Christ like it's just the white knight there is a time and a place that's appropriate for that and you don't want to be the darkness of the warrior that goes out in rapes and pillages and plunders and then conveniently justifies it as I'm going through my warrior phase it needs to be tempered with morality it needs to be tempered by the elders by the father even to an extent by the mother but we totally skip all of it because we're afraid of the fact that it's dangerous it's painful it's uncomfortable and so we try to pretend that it doesn't matter I want my son to go through his warrior phase I'm pissed that I didn't go through a warrior phase I didn't I'd never gotten to fight in high school I remember there was one time I was in a Wendy's parking lot and some dude was making fun of my hair I was one of those punk rock dragon balls looking outfits and stuff like that and I remember he sucker punched me in the face and I'm trying to laugh it off and I back up and then I feel his friend put his hand on my shoulder there's no way I can get out of this thankfully because I had no fighter spirit I had no cultivation of any warrior ethos in me or anything whatsoever I would have just gotten into the fetal position and just taken it at 16 which is pathetic but it's because there was never any warrior encouraged or cultivated or anything in me and I didn't naturally have it in me that it wanted to come out thankfully his friend was able to back him up and he had his hand on my shoulder to kind of help me out and we got out of it but I never had that until I was 34 years old when I took my first boxing bout and it sucked and it hurt but it started to develop that my son here he doesn't have that natural warrior tendency he's tender he's empathetic he's a validator if you want somebody to cheer you on there's nobody better at it than he is but he's not a fighter it's my job to create an environment in which we can plant and then cultivate those seeds for him to be a warrior that's why he comes and lifts with me that's why we've put him in wrestling that's why we're working with him in sports and other things like that not because that's the end game of the warrior spirit it's not if that becomes the ultimate game like I've said it's masturbatory but it's a good opportunity for him to start and I can tell you men from my own experience and what I've seen from him in his own growth and development is that if you take and allow and cultivate that red warrior it will grow it will grow I've seen him become brave I have a daughter who's fearless and it's because she just doesn't know that she's supposed to be afraid of things she'll throw herself in the swimming pool she'll go off big slides she's a little tank and she'll go around doing anything she wants to and it's adorable but when she does encounter the one or two things in life that scare her she freezes she has no idea how to handle it my son on the other hand is not fearless he's tender and he's timid but he's brave because we've worked with him we've cultivated that warrior spirit that guzzies do hard things and that means that when it's scary that you buckle up you control that emotion you allow yourself to feel it to experience it but like Elliot was saying you don't let it take control you're not emotionally effeminate you don't allow it to take control you feel it, you experience it everywhere and then you take control of it and you channel it in to doing the hard and the scary thing and the thing that's good for you is that 6 has already started learning how to do it I started learning how to do that at 33 wherever you are within your red warrior phase you can cultivate that you can and you can teach your sons to cultivate that it can be the entry into the father's house and the ride of passage of there having to go through pain through fear, through intimidation through all these other things the key that can unlock that door so that they are allowed into the father's house they can become the striker and the warrior and we can cultivate more of that ourselves sadly a lot of people stop there and a lot of different cultures have stopped there but we need to move on to the next level and the next level is that white lover it's Dionysus the earth this is where we go through the phase of being able to provide and you can think about this even with the idea of protect preside and provide where you have protect that's part of this warrior ethos provide is part of this white ethos it's the cultivator it's the developer but when was the last time you saw a man or met a man or knew a man who was actually a cultivator and provided anything other than just goods or not even the goods themselves just the money with which he can purchase those goods I want you to think about something as simple as the way that your home is does your home have your footprint on it or your fingerprint on it does it reflect you I want you to think about this idea of moving into the father's home and the aspiration of it and when you're this boy who's going through this adolescence and you go from the safe comfortable beautiful cultivated home of the mother and you look and you see the decrepit dirty camping chair with a big screen TV with a bunch of cables all over it bachelor pad that's not even an aesthetic bachelor pad but just the pathetic bachelor pad of your father why would you want to move into that why would you want anything to do with that men have always been the cultivators of what it is to be noble the best art the best architecture the best music the best of everything has always been developed by men and the best of the best has always been developed by men as a way to honor their father to honor their god or their gods because you create beauty and structure and order and you do it so that you can reflect what your ideals are and so that you can reflect what you are your ideals are video games and a camping chair and it's cargo shorts and a pair of flip-flops how dare you think that your son will want to aspire to be like that there is something so delusional about thinking that you're creating manhood or masculinity with your apathy and your antipathy for anything that's hard or anything that's uncomfortable your sons will never want to be like you if you're fat and if you're lazy and if all you care about is what some other man is doing on a screen that you can cheer on that's a pathetic house to build for your sons and they won't want anything to do with it they'll resent you for the fact that there was nothing else for them to move into why would they leave their hedonism there's no reason to you need to be able to cultivate and you need to be able to do it from a loving perspective you need to be able to do it from an aspirational perspective we need to build temples we need to be able to create environments and cultivate situations in which our own goodness, our own aspiration and the goodness of God can be exemplified and can be aspired to I don't care about your comfort comfort is the world of this epicureanism there's nothing masculine about seeking comfort as its own end that is what we need to be able to cultivate that is what we need to be able to build you can do it materially you can do it from a philosophical perspective you can do it from an emotional perspective there are myriad ways in which you can do this but you have to build a home for your sons to be able to move toward and to go into otherwise you're abandoning them to themselves and they'll hate you and they'll resent you for it and you'll hate yourself and you'll resent yourself for it and God will punish you for it you can and should do better than that and then from there we move on to the black, the father the patriarch, the presider now this is where I loved how Elliott talked about you go through this midlife crisis and again our diabolical world has to twist everything and infantilize everything and be able to twist it into something that's pathetic when it really is something noble when you get to that age in which you find out that all of this materialism all of these things that we use as signals to represent nobility and everything else they're not the full picture that doesn't mean when you're in this other stage that they're irrelevant it's like training wheels there's nothing evil about training wheels you need them when you need them and then when you don't you can abandon them but the kid who knows how to ride the bike without training wheels should not be ridiculing or making fun of the kid who needs them in order to be able to learn and so when you move into this phase of being able to recognize that I'm not defined by my car or by my position at work or by how expensive my clothes are or what the brand is that's on them or whether or not my yard looks nicer than my next door neighbors or anything else like that when you can move on to something better then you move on to something better and then you need to be the elder that's there to be able to take them and bring them into that and be able to make that work for them you need to be able to I get so frustrated when I think about this because I think one of the reasons why we have to figure this out on our own is because it's like Elliot it's never been modeled for us you think about the the boomers I was watching I was watching a movie on the planet trying to figure out what to watch and of course there's like a million different movies and you don't want to watch any of them I was watching Forest Gump because I haven't seen that since I was like 12 years old and what is it other than a movie about boomers being able to recapture what it was like for them to be youthful we're going to inject Tom Hanks into the hippie beatnik movement into the Vietnam war and we're going to do all this and we're just going to relive our glory days and all this other kind of stuff how much of what we see in Hollywood or anything is the recognition of youth whether that was boomer youth energy and them trying to recapture who they were or this glorification and sanctification of this adolescence of this worship of the self worship of the self and everything else when was the last time you heard a song that came out that wasn't about partying or WAP or it wasn't some email thing about how girls don't like me anymore or anything else like that when was the last time you heard anything that actually inspired any sort of nobility in you how comfortable would you feel right now if you were told to beat your chest and in unison with other men sing a battle hymn could you do that without feeling self-conscious because that's weird because we don't do stuff like that anymore I hate to admit that I would feel self-conscious part of me would feel that way and another part of me would again be in tears of the nobility of finally being in an environment in which that was acceptable we need elders that have actually grown up and become elders that can welcome the others into the next stage in the next phase of the tribe and of the different phase of life we don't have that we don't we don't have it in our government we don't have it in our culture we don't have it in our churches we don't have it so guess what we get to do we get to build it we get to do that ourselves I have no idea how to be an elder and a patriarch that can welcome in the men that are going through this mid-life crisis this middle-aged thing I'm not even middle-aged yet, I'm 36 I'm still waiting to go through that door myself and I know I'm going to have to go through that door on my own or with like-minded friends and we're going to have to storm whatever's on the other side of that together and build our own castle so that we can do it ourselves there anymore but the ruins of what our other civilizations have built for us but I'm going through that door and I want other men to go through that door with me that are willing to do it and build what we want and what God wants for us on the other side but you know what door I am through I'm through the door of adolescence I'm through the door of notch counts I'm through the door of partying or whatever else I don't need that and I am at a stage where I can invite my son and initiate him to come through that door and then it's my responsibility to continue to grow and to develop and to get better and better so that I can go through that door so that by the time I am over here I can bring my son through again and I can help him as he brings his son through that first door and build that legacy again and again and again I want men in my life I want you to have men in your lives that will put on masks and dress up and rip your sons out of their mother's arms and terrify them and force them into the initiation so that they can become men I want you to have that in your lives I want that I'm grateful that I have a couple men that I know will do something like that for me even if they are a little uncomfortable about it at first but I know that they can catch the vision of it and I want to be able to go through this last door and be able to build something out and do it there too we're going to face opposition as we do this there are going to be so many roadblocks and so many problems and that's what makes it fun that's what makes it worthwhile that's the whole initiation of all of it and initiation isn't supposed to be easy yeah we're supposed to have mentors bring us through it and we don't have that too bad that just means it's going to be all that more powerful and impactful when we get to do that ourselves when we get to become the black father the president, the presider the patriarch because to be honest yes we've got four kids and a fifth on the way I'm not a patriarch yet I don't have that kind of legacy my oldest is eight years old I'm a father and I do, I take that very seriously but I have not earned my stripes I've not earned the right to call myself a patriarch yet I'm a prospecting patriarch or a potential patriarch or something of that effect but I'm not because I won't know if I've earned the right to that title until I know what kind of men my daughters marry and how they interact with them and how they raise their children I won't know if I'm able to live up to that role and that responsibility until I see what kind of a man my son grows into and how he treats his wife and how he raises his children and what kind of community is that they can build so yes, right now being the chief patriarch of the patriarch edition of the 21 convention it's a LARP I'm pretending hahahaha but I'm doing my best at the stage where I am and I am unapologetically setting my sights on that and I'm going to storm that castle and I'm going to build that edifice so that I can earn the right to that title I I make people uncomfortable in my neighborhood because I talk about stuff like this you get people who will make fun of you online and cringe about this stuff your wife may chafe at it it doesn't matter because this is so much bigger and so much better and so much more important than what's on Netflix or whether or not BYU is going to have a good season this year because there's only six teams playing college football none of that matters none of it matters it's all consumption it's all pathetic it's all just a way for somebody else and why would our sons aspire to be like that why would our daughters want to marry men who are like that it's a joke because we take these good things this virtue and we allow it to blow itself into something that becomes a vice I don't have a problem with watching sports watch sports enjoy it eat wings enjoy the game we go to a Super Bowl party every year it's fun but if you know more about what your fantasy football team is doing than what your kids are doing your failure is a father you're pathetic and you need to be better if you are able to tell me all the stats of somebody who's your favorite player on your favorite team or whatever else but you can't remember the last time you ran a hundred yards to see what kind of time you could get you're larping and you're not really larping like I am you're just straight up larping be better and do better than that now one of the ways that I want us to be able to do this is a group here and I love one of the things that I've loved about this entire event is COVID has changed things the room is smaller the attendance is smaller than it would have been otherwise but it feels more intimate I look at men who are out here you guys so many of you guys are men that I know men that I respect I admire that I look up to I know that you guys have established these kinds of relationships with each other and if you haven't you need to because we need not just fathers to be the ones that build that house but we need uncles and friends and mentors and other leaders I'll tell you about one of my church leaders the way that our church is set up is as you go as you are in different age ranges 12 to 14 14 to 16 and then 16 you're in different organizations and I remember being frustrated because I had good men that weren't necessarily good at being men who were my leaders in these younger age ranges I remember I hated camping part of it was that my dad hated camping he grew up and it was not part of his culture at all and so I remember going on fathers and sons camping trips and what we would do is we would take the backseat out of the minivan and we would put a TV in there and then we would just watch TV and then we would sleep and we would get up first thing in the morning and we'd leave not a really fun way for a young boy to kind of get into camping or I remember as a boy scout when I was 12 and we'd have our overnight camp outs and we would leave late on Friday because you have to wait for the leaders to get home from work and you get there and it's dark and you hurry up and you set up camp and then you make some sort of crappy food that you don't really enjoy and then you go to bed and the leaders yell at you until you did not do any of that stuff for three hours until it's one in the morning and then they wake you up at six and then you make a crappy breakfast you hurry up and bang out a merit badge and then you get up and leave so that they can be back in time to watch the game that was my boy scout experience that was my camping experience what's the aspiration in that why would I want to be like these men these men who are more interested in learning about how much they hate their jobs the fact that they're overweight they don't do any of the stuff that's really fun to do anyway because they're physically incapable of it and all they want to do is get home so they can consume why would I want to be anything like that but then I had one leader when I was 16 he was in great shape his wife loved him, he had fantastic kids and he was into endurance sports and so he challenged us what you guys used to do, I remember he challenged us it was in April and in October there was a marathon down in southern Utah and he said I want us as a quorum as a group of young men to be able to go and do this and we believed him because we knew that he could do it because we've seen him do it and so we spent weeks up until school got out that every Tuesday night when we would have our activities rather than trying to come up with something to do or anything else like that we'd go run and then it started that we would go run with him on Thursday mornings and then it started that we would go run with him on Saturday mornings and then because you're 16 and school gets out and you're more interested in cars and girls and everything else like that none of us trained at all for the entirety of the summer but we went and we did this together and we all completed this marathon and the best part about it was that Doug was the one who was there and he did it first it wasn't that he was bringing up the rear it wasn't that he was on the sidelines cheering us on or anything else like that Doug was there leading from the front now what hurts for me a little bit is that my dad is also a marathoner my mom is a marathoner my parents both love endurance sports I've been running with my dad once it was never something that he invited me to come do with him because my pace was slow because it was inconvenient and I don't blame him because he was focused on his own goals but it was not something that my dad cultivated in me it's something that this church leader that Doug cultivated in me he was the first person in my life that I looked up to and I thought I actually would like to become like this man he lives the kind of life that I would like to live his wife treats him the way that I would like my wife to treat me he looks the way that I want to look and I want to do he was aspirational in a way so you may not have kids or sons or anything else but that doesn't mean that you don't have opportunities and obligations to be aspirational to be part of the gang that does put on the mask and pull the son out of the house of the mother and again out of the house of himself and into the house of men you can do it and you won't even know necessarily that you're doing it and the way the best way to do that is to do things I don't think Doug has any idea what kind of an impact he had on me I don't know, I haven't talked to him in 20 years right but what he did was he did something he became aspirational himself he didn't just talk about things he didn't just speculate about things or philosophize or tweet about things or anything else like that he divided us to come and do them with him the other thing that I'll tell you that's so important about doing this as more than just a father is the reinforcement that comes with that I've already talked about my son a little bit my wife and I are very deliberate and conscious about what we try to teach him I talked to you guys last year about our guzzy motto and the things that guzzies do hard things and good things and kind things and fun things and this is who we are and we try to embody that and our kids get that to a certain extent but my son was struggling with that a little bit and one of the things that we've tried to do very deliberately because we homeschool is the curriculum that we use is fantastic it teaches from a very good moral perspective but the one problem that I have with it is it's a little girl focused it's a little girly or it's a little that kind of white lover area and it doesn't cultivate courage and bravery and danger and all these other things it doesn't teach my son any of the red so we've gone out of our way I've gone out of my way we alternate putting the kids down to bed every night and so every other night when it's my turn to put my son down we'll read books and we've gone through the hobbit we've gone through the phantom toll booth we've gone through Greek myths and Norse myths and the whole purpose of this selection of books that we have is to try to cultivate these other virtues of not just be polite and be kind and be obedient and things like that which are virtues but these other things and be brave and be strong and be adventurous and be daring and he's really enjoyed a lot of these and then we found the way of the warrior kid by Jaco and a light bulb went off on my son that has been a fantastic game changer this one book for you guys who don't know it's about a little boy named Mark he's fifth grade the school year is about to get out he humiliates himself he's embarrassed because he can't swim so he has to hang out on the shore he's a real party he gets humiliated because he can't do a single pull up and they do a pull up competition at the last day he's not very good at math or anything else like that and he recognizes all of this and he hates it his mom is somebody who loves him but she does what mothers do and his dad even though he exists and he's in the family he's not present he travels a lot for work he doesn't actually get involved he doesn't bring his son into the world of other men but that summer his uncle Jake has to live with them and uncle Jake is a Navy SEAL and uncle Jake and I love the way that Jocko writes this has the perfect balance of expectations and deliberation and hardness but also encouragement and validation and everything else and the other thing that I love about it is uncle Jake gets to lead from the front because he can do pull ups he can swim he has become intelligent and says make sure you have a good time at soccer practice or he's not throwing back a beer and telling his son stop eating your dino nuggets because it's garbage and it's not good for you he leads from the front and so they spend the whole summer together and he learns how to swim and he gets to where he can do ten pull ups and he learns how to be able to memorize all the presidents and get his eight multiplication tables figured out and as I've gone through this with my son normally we read a chapter of something a night dad do another one dad do another one and I'm feeling the same kind of energy where I don't want to stop reading to him I've missed out on a lot of one-on-one time with my wife because rather than doing a ten minute bed time with my son I'm an hour into this in six chapters in because we're both feeling the energy of this, of uncle Jake leading Mark and leading from the front and pulling him into the house of where his father should be but he's not but at least uncle Jake is there and then now we get to reference those things when my son got scared when it was time to swim out and swim back the distance of the pool what would uncle Jake do? what do you think he would expect Mark to do? this becomes a source of reference for us we finished that book halfway through the soccer season and my son went from somebody who was just like I was as a kid which is he's socially intelligent enough to be able to look like he's chasing the ball and trying but he's also timid enough to not actually be chasing the ball and trying and he thinks that he's getting away with it but he doesn't realize his dad was the same way and I know when he's doing what he's doing because I was the same way but I watched that switch flip in him to now he'll hit the ball and he's so pumped and he's screaming at me to do it and he chases and he goes right for that thing and I tell him to get in his wrestling stance he's in the goal and he's doing this and he's chasing the ball around and trying to but the energy and the enthusiasm are there he's become something better and part of it is because he's been brought into a culture where this happens just by reading books just by doing other things and part of it is because I have tried to emulate that myself now the other thing that I'll tell you that's so phenomenal about this is that you will become better as you seek to be an aspirational father I started boxing because I didn't want my first real experience with violence to be when it counted I wanted to have a little bit of a couple reps under my belts before it actually mattered and no I didn't think that if somebody were trying to rob me or my kids or my wife or anything that it's like we're gonna square up but I would at least know what it felt like to get hit in the face and then as I think about what is the example that I'm setting for my kids and I think about this and that's what gets you to get to the point where you're sparring more and doing more and that's what gets you to the point where you take a fight and then it becomes this guzzy thing where guzzies do hard things because that's who we are and that's what we do and so then this last year I decided that I was going to take on triathlon training one of the main reasons is because I got addicted to doing hard things me this lazy lax today's people smart enough to talk my way into or out of anything kind of person got addicted to the challenge of challenging myself and it all started because I knew I needed to do that for my children I needed to set that example and there were days when I had to get up at four in the morning and I had to start riding my bike early and I knew that I was going to be out on the road for five hours to be able to be trained for this event and in my head I'm thinking guzzies do hard things this is what we do this is why we have a home gym I could go work out at the gym and have access to a whole lot more but I want him to see me struggle to lift that up I don't want exercise to be something that mom and dad go do out there and it's something that just happens I want it to be something that they experience with us my son comes out with me every single morning he can't even be bothered to put a shirt on granted there's an example of that but he comes out every morning and he can't wait and now that he started lifting with me Wednesday is deadlift day and I hear from him on Sunday dad three more days till deadlift day I can't wait and I'm not intentionally trying to do this because I really enjoy being out in the gym but I'm not a strong man I'm not a power lifter I'm not well my son is going to be this but when he hit 60 pounds when all he thought he could do was 55 pounds that switch flipped again or when he saw me hit 360 pounds when all he thought I could do was 320 pounds that switch flipped again that becomes that for him that becomes that for me I had a half iron man that I was doing three weeks ago the conditions were nuts it was a bad race you go out in the lake it's 55 degrees outside and you get to the point where this lake is in northern Utah on the southern border with Idaho 6000 feet in elevation and it was the lake that you hated to go to that campsite for scout camp to have to do your swimming merit badges or anything because the water is freezing cold and it was so cold on the day of the race that we actually warmed up when we got into the water to get started and we go out there six in the morning we haven't been out yet we have these buoys that we're supposed to swim around and it's windy it's so bad that the sheriff is a mile away trying to find one of the buoys that had drifted off somewhere within the last 20 minutes it's that windy the current is that bad they about called off the swimming portion of the race so we go through we finally get started and swim it every three strokes I turn around to catch a breath and there's a wave that comes crashing down on me and I swallow my body weight and water every time by the time I'm done and I look like I'm six months pregnant because of the amount of air and water that I've swallowed in that 45 minutes that's in there and guess what I'm thinking the whole time that I'm in there I can't say that guzzies do hard things and I can't reinforce that in my kids if I'm not willing to do this myself I'm a hypocrite if I tell my son he needs to be brave enough to swim to the other side of the pool and back if I'm not willing to get in there because it's cold or because it's a little bit windy go through the whole bike portion of the race it's 56 miles you swim 1.2 miles you bike 56 miles and one of the major parts of Triathlon especially when you're doing these longer distances is that you have to have your nutrition on point because you're exercising for 4, 5, 6, 7 hours straight you need to be able to get your nutrition on point which is really difficult when you've got a gut full of water and air and everything else like that so I'm on the last 15 miles of the race because it's now raining the entire time so it's cold and it's raining I haven't been able to eat anything for an hour because every time I do my stomach feels like I've got needles going through it and knives in it and what am I doing is I'm sitting here pedaling going up this hill vocally to the consternation of the other people who are passing me they hear this weird guy who are we guzzies what do we do hard things who are we guzzies realizing this in my head because I can't quit I can't quit if I expect my children not to quit I can't preach to them about doing hard things if I won't do hard things I feel so bad for the men of the world who resent the fact that they're fathers who see it as the death of their individualism and see it as the death of their identity because they didn't get the fact that it's rocket fuel Zack gets this I've seen him do this and it's so addictive because if I weren't a dad I would be making 30,000 a year working for a credit union as a loan officer hating everybody that I interacted with jerking off to porn having no aspirations and being really good at halo life because that's what I aspire to because that was me trapped in the house of me but because I was a dad because that aspiration was built into me and because I want to be aspirational as a father and I want to be aspirational as a grandfather everything about my relationship with God everything about my relationship with my wife everything about my sense of self everything good everything good in my life comes from the fact that I have the burdens the responsibilities and the privileges of being a father and embracing that for the entirety of what it means it doesn't mean whatever babe you think is a good idea I'm just willing to go along with it or it doesn't mean that I've got the mortgage and I've got the cars and I've got the good career so now I can just coast for the rest of my life and I don't have to think about anything anymore I just wait for retirement when I can do whatever I want that's when the fire goes out but the fire of pushing and growing and developing and deifying in the image in which I'm supposed to be deified instead of in my own image that comes from the fact that I know that he and his sisters look at me I'm setting the example for him of what he can become and also what his relationship with his true father can be I set the example for his sisters and the only thing is that they're capable of marrying and I have no right to polish my shotgun and criticize the boys who come in and date my daughters if I'm a jerk off why would they want anything better than that why would they want anything better than what I am if I'm what's been modeled for them if I want my daughters to marry good men and raise good sons it is my responsibility to be aspirational as a father I love that pressure I love that responsibility and if you have not caught the fire of that you are missing out I hope you can reframe so that you can catch that because everything that is good in your life will come from the burdens, the responsibilities and the privileges of being a father if you will live up to it thank you I got time for questions so let's hear them if you have them alright Jack lay it on me alright brother I was walking and I was like super distracted so this is probably not going to be great so my question is about marriage so I'm divorced, approaching 5 decades on the planet and there is a meaning of marriage the whole point of marriage is stability of culture and in Michael Foster's speech he talked about that as men rise, culture rises as men fall, culture falls well marriage is kind of like one of those cornerstones of culture the foundation stone absolutely marriage is about raising children you are providing stability but then it is not always about children so people who can't have kids we still encourage them to be married widowers, widows encourage them to be married because we are trying to model something for the younger generation to kind of understand then you enter red pill trues you are going to get screwed there is no benefit to me to be married I am not having children those type of things but I think the problem that I struggle with lately is if I want to model a patriarchal society, if we want to make sure that we are giving something for the younger couples to aspire to I guess what do you think as far as we hear about marriage is bad but from your perspective for the older generation that is divorced not really looking at getting back into that whole marriage culture what is our responsibility what do you think our responsibility is to kind of come back in and kind of mirror that as well even though there is a lot not a lot of benefit but there is maybe more risk than we are willing to take absolutely I love that question I am going to disagree with the premise that there is not really a lot of benefit especially because I love that I can say this this year not that I wouldn't have said it before but you are not ready for the fallout but I think that sex outside of marriage is immoral period I do I think that I think that in order for you to be able to get the full benefit of marriage which is not just having children it is becoming one flesh it is being able to create a unit that is bigger than just me it is bigger than just this unit because there is that chaos in me whereas if we move over again into this idea of pattern and culture and patriarchy and everything else like that I think that there is a sense of loyalty and a sense of shared purpose there is a development of unity and everything else like that by still getting married even if it is not necessarily for the production of children I also think that even on a second and third order level of consequences of things where you are you are one of the elders and if my kids can see you and see Jack and say well he just has to play house and he gets to have sex and he gets to live with his girlfriend and he gets to do all these other things and there is nothing bad that happens to him then that undermines the whole idea for them of marriage and everything else like that and so you can think about it as not just beneficial for you as an individual or beneficial for you as a couple but beneficial for the example that you are setting for your children or their children or other families within the community or anything else like that because one of the reasons that we don't see as much of that within our culture is because culturally we do our best to live up to that and it's not because we have any more governmental authority or take on any less legal risk for marriage than anybody else in the world does but culturally we've got both these barriers and these expectations that allow that and we all see that as part of a bigger purpose and function with that so does that answer that? Awesome. Thank you. Hey Tanner how are you doing? Great. So this is kind of a perfect question for you about a son and daughters and a wife so how do you set up effective and healthy boundaries between your daughters, your son your wife for instance it's time to do only the masculine stuff instead of going this is man's business woman like stay out of it so how do you get your wife on board how do you prevent your daughters from getting jealous at the time that only like that man time that you spend with your son so how do you compartmentalize your world to make it work in harmony? Yeah. Okay that's great. I wish all of you guys could marry a woman like my wife because she's on board. I don't have to get her on board she's on board and even as you hear things like Elliot was talking about the woman who plays along as they're pulling her away and she's screaming and everything and at the same time she sees the benefit of that I can tell you guys you look at her right now she can't wait to play that role she can't wait to be able to do that she wants him out of her house and in my house because she sees the benefit of that so I wish that I had an answer for you and part of it okay part of it is that because she wasn't always that way here's another thing that's another one of those red pill trues that it's truth it's not really and that's another one of the things that'll get me in trouble with some of the guys who will see this I think you should get married young I do I think you should get married young because what that means is that you're not calcified nor is your spouse calcified in who and what you are you're much more malleable you're much more impressionable you're much more open to growth she was 21 when we got married and her development and everything her growth is infinitely more than what it been had she been 29 when we got married and so for her to be able to get on board it helped that we started out younger as far as how that works with my son and with my daughters and stuff like that so one she recognizes the value of just having boy time man time stuff like that she also then turns around and reinforces it in our daughters and she reframes it for them where this is an opportunity for us to do girl things to be able to focus on what it is to be feminine to create beauty to be able to do those kinds of things so she helps reinforce it for them and I help establish it for them but then the other thing that's just as important is getting one on one time with my girls because yes it's different and the goal is different and the focus is different and the things that we're doing are very different and so I may have my one of my daughters come with me when I go wash the car whereas my son is who comes with me when I go to Home Depot or something else like that or I may go out and have my daughter come with me when I need to do a four mile run and she's riding her bike alongside me but I'll have my son come with me when we're going to go to the skate park and I'm going to teach him how to bunny hop on a ramp or something else like that just because she's not always necessarily doing those things that are what I'm doing doesn't mean that I can't involve any of the three of them one on one and one of the other things that I'll tell you guys one of the biggest blessings of COVID and being at home and I got to experience this because I already work from home anyway but if you guys get to work from home especially if you have young kids spend as much time with them one on one as you possibly can because you've got more free time even if it's just that on Wednesdays I do lunch with this youngest daughter and we're eating in my office or on Thursdays I have it with this one my two youngest daughters have a much better relationship with me now than my oldest two did when they were at their same age because I'm not off at the shop somewhere I'm home with them they get to sit on my lap or they get to bug me in between calls and we get to interact in things that way and so make one on one time for them make group time for everybody together one of the things that we do now I'm totally on a tangent on your question by the way one of the things that we do now is we do adventure Thursdays where I don't take calls with clients or anything on Thursdays I have that day blocked off they don't play with friends and we'll go up the canyon or we'll build something together or we'll go try and do something together that's adventurous as a family and try to spend that together as a family cohesive unit and then I try and spend one on one time together with all my kids as well Thank you Thank you Tanner that was amazing Thanks Will. I got more nourishing masculinity from that speech than I think I got in the first 20 years of my life so thank you Thank you And I mean that very sincerely Thank you So you mentioned at the start just something I want to share about this I mentioned in the previous speech that I was recently baptized Christian and one of the advantages that one of the advantages of that is that I've gotten to approach Christianity with an adult mindset instead of growing up with a lot of things that I take for granted and you talk about the personage of Jesus and I think one of the things that gets forgotten is that Jesus is in the lineage of King David and I encourage everyone to look up King David. You're looking for the masculine warrior that was the guy Lions, Goliath, all of it Exactly. Well and King Solomon who was a son and then Jesus hung out with John the Baptist The wild man To take a broader picture for the men that are interested in Jesus and Christianity to take a look at that What I want to do is can you describe a bit about your relationship with faith because we talked on Tuesday you came to my podcast thank you so much for that and you talked about your time in the BMX community the punk rock community and then your $30,000 a year aspirations as a man prior to getting married and that to me indicates a man that has lost his relationship with faith to some degree which you seem to have found very much I wonder if you could share more about that with the group Yeah Faith for me is something that I did I grew up totally, I was a fish that didn't realize I was wet I grew up in a culture and I grew up in a family that was very much this way and like a lot of boys do I kind of shaped and resented the rules and the regulations and everything that came from it and I had my times of rebellion and coming back in and coming back in and every time that I rebelled I would come back in largely because I didn't I didn't want to displease my parents and particularly my mom because my mom has a stronger personality of my two parents and then after having gone through my divorce and not handling that the way that I should have and not having started my relationship with my wife the way that we should have in dealing with all of these things where I was not living according to my beliefs, my profess beliefs I had to step back and assess are these actually my beliefs or am I just doing this because it makes things easier when I'm around my parents or because this is what's culturally expected of me because we're in Utah and I had to go through a lot of internal work and then as a result of that in order to be able to get back in good standing within my church I had to go through a lot of kind of humiliating external work as well but what it forced me to do was pick am I in or am I out there was no more of this fence sitting or this 60% or 70% it was either I was all the way in and I was willing to make the sacrifices and this was because this was actually what I was converted to and this is what I actually believed or I was out because I didn't matter if I was displeasing my parents or somebody else anymore I could no longer live in that I'm just pleasing other people type of approach and I'm incredibly grateful that I got answers that what I do believe is real and true and that means that I could be sustained in the work and the effort and the energy to be all in and what's even better about that is that eight years since that process has started is I get more and more convicted and my faith grows more and more every year and every year I look back and go I thought I had it figured out the year before but I have it even more developed now so it does it continues to grow and I think that's one of the things that the God will bless us with is faith to me is loyalty it's loyalty to him because like I said I'm a bogus God I'm really bad at being a God and if my whole idea of what's right and wrong is all based on my very finite understanding of the world as opposed to trusting and being loyal to somebody else who knows more than I am then I'm going to make a lot of mistakes and I'm going to hurt a lot of people and I'm going to hurt myself as I go through the process but if I can submit my finite imperfect will and do it cheerfully and do it willingly and be loyal to somebody who knows more than I do and is bigger and better than I am then because he's loyal to me I get rewarded for that and then in turn I can turn around and reward my family or bless other people's lives for it too and there's virtuous cycles that just continues to build and grow up for me as well thank you so much you are welcome again fantastic speech thank you so I do agree that I think it's better to get married young however as someone who did get married young got divorced young you got to be smart about it absolutely made that same mistake myself by the way yeah so I didn't heal from that properly to use your red white black analogy in order to deal with it my red got toxic and killed the white and I've seen that as a recurring thing in my relationships since then what advice would you give to someone who deliberately killed the white in them and now wants to bring that back and is kind of trying to recover I think you're on the right pace by being here because one of the things that is difficult about a lot of the red pill community in and of itself is that the things that we talk about are true but then we get into a very pigeon-holed focus about how to apply those truths and in a lot of situations that's what kills the white and that's what becomes very poisonous and toxic and bogus and everything else and so don't abandon the new truths that you found but look to men like Zach like Phil like Elliot like others who are establishing these in a way that it does cultivate the fullness of the white as opposed to this pathetic people pleasing the version of the white that we get without actually integrating the red into him so look to other men again I'm going to plug the fraternity of excellence for Zach but be part of this because you have other men who are leading the way and again it's not that the castles already built they're figuring this out as they go but they're doing things and so I would say look to other men who can be mentors even if they're only one or two steps ahead of you but they are one or two steps ahead of you and they can help you catch the mistakes that you're making or catch the bad attitudes or the erroneous assumptions that you have and stuff like that yeah all right let's give it up to the chief patriarch Tana Guzzi 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