 Our next speaker is a veteran and ambassador speaker of this convention, first speaking at the Under-21 Convention for Young Men back in 2016. He's also the keynote speaker of our upcoming Patriarch Edition event, second annual coming next year in 2020. He is the author of The Appearance of Power, and you can find him at masculine-style.com. Please let me welcome to the stage next a proud Patriarch of Four, Tanner Guzzi. Welcome back. Thanks, man. It's good to be back. Thank you, sir. Thanks. Good morning, guys. I am excited to talk to you today, and I'm excited to venture out a little bit differently than what I normally do. This is my fifth time speaking at the 21 convention, and I'm not going to be talking about style stuff today. And I know for some of the guys, that's kind of a surprise. But honestly, for you guys who are here, for the guys who end up watching on YouTube, if you want to see any of the style stuff, I've done hours of this, even at this particular convention. So go watch the other videos. There's good stuff on there. And even though that's not what I'm addressing today, there's still a lot of importance to that. And I'll key in on that a little bit as I talk about what my subject is. And even to kind of lead into that, one of my favorite things about this convention, I was talking to Goldman before he went on yesterday. And it was really fun to see how much he's progressed as a speaker. And that's one of the things that I hope you guys understand is real validity to the caliber of the speakers who are here is you watch these guys level up. We don't just sit here and tell you guys to get on our level and then we just kind of passively hang out and we've arrived. It doesn't work like that. You see these men who come up on stage and they talk about their experiences and they're actively leveling up. They're pushing themselves. They're doing difficult things. Goldman just tweeted before I came up on stage, I saw this about how as a natural introvert, how scary it is for him to get up and do public speaking. I got that impression the first time that he and I spoke at a conference together in Vegas back in 2015. I did not get that impression yesterday because he's a man who stepped up his own personal game and he's improved himself. You see the same thing with Ed and Alexander, Jack Donovan, all these other guys, guys who I've been proud to call friends for the last three or four years. And I see them actively leveling up and it puts pressure on me to do the same. And so I hope you guys recognize the real caliber of the men that you get to learn from and that you get to interact with while you're here because these guys are the real deal. So what I want to talk to you about today is all tied to that same idea. It's choosing to be subjects over being objects. So let me tell you what I mean by that. I work from home and we decided to, we homeschool, my wife homeschools are kids. And so a couple of weeks ago, I was taking a break and I was coming in to have lunch and they do school at the kitchen table in there. And so I'm much numb. Some quest chips trying to get my protein in for the day. And I hear my wife explaining grammar to my seven-year-old daughter who's in second grade. And they're breaking down the idea of what's the difference between a subject and an object when it comes to grammatical structure and things like that. And basically the easiest way to describe it is a subject is the noun and the sentence that does the action. And an object is a noun and the sentence that has the action done to it. Okay? We live in a world that wants us to be objects. It wants us to be things that are acted upon. And we as men are healthier, happier, better, we're better personally, we're better as fathers, we're better in society if we choose to be subjects rather than objects. We have so much inertia working against us but the onus is on us to choose to be subjects over being objects. And so I wanna break that down for you guys today. And before I do that, some of the things I'm going to talk about are wonderful things. Okay? And so for all the dorks who are gonna freak out about what I'm saying is inherently bad, it's not. But the poison is in the dose. Many of the wonderful things that we experience in the world when taken too far become poison. And it's the same thing with medicine. When taken at the right dosage, it's fantastic. If it's taken too far, it does become poisonous. And sadly, so much of what we experience today has now crossed that threshold as far as how we relate to it as men that it has become poison. So let's talk about some of these things that make us objects or want us to become objects. The first one is technology. Technology makes us objects. The entire approach and appeal, the entire marketing ploy of technology is make your life easier, make it more convenient. And again, I'm not advocating that we go back to using science as we're harvesting in our own fields, right? But there's a dosage level of it. As we become increasingly more and more and more dependent on technology, how often do we just naturally take the escalator instead of taking the stairs? This is such a good little metaphor because if I just stand on this one little stair and the escalator moves me up, what am I? I'm an object that's being acted upon. Whereas if I take the stairs, I'm a subject. I'm doing the action. There are health implications for that. There are mindset implications for that. There's so much that ties into that same thing. When you think about the advanced technology of cars and how things are going, how many people know how to drive a manual drive anymore? Pretty soon our kids aren't even gonna know how to parallel park because everything's just done automatically. They won't even know how to drive because everything's done automatically. When you think about finding your way to the airport as you're on your way here, how much do we just rely on Google Maps to get our directions for us? So we don't even need to know the lay of the land. How easy is it for us to just listen to something instead of having to read and actually engage with it? How easy is it for us to be able to just connect with people online and avoid having to do any real work? How easy is it that technology makes it? So even dating is just a matter of maybe we both swipe right and then we can break the ice and get rid of doing the hard things and the hard approaches, okay? Technology is wonderful, but if we rely on it too much, we become objects as opposed to being subjects. We allow it to act upon us as opposed to using as a tool by which we can act and impart our will onto the world. Our culture makes us objects. There's so many different ways that this is applicable so we're gonna dive into a couple of these. Okay, the first one is bread and circuses. I know that you guys have seen this online. It's hilarious to me how often if you have any appreciation for the past or any idea that our current Western society is not a massive improvement in every single way, that you're just a trad conloper or it's, well, okay, why don't you go back and get rid of your penicillin, right? But the idea that we do, we live in a time and it's wonderful as a father of four, I am so incredibly grateful that I don't have to worry about birth mortality rates, the way that people did for thousands of years up until this point. I cannot tell you how grateful I am for that. A blessed I am that I've never had to watch one of my children die. I've never had to comfort my wife as she holds a stillborn or anything else like that. I'm so incredibly grateful for that. And at the same time, just because we are materially more prosperous and just because we have more available to us as far as security, longevity, yes, there is less violence in the world. So from a physical standpoint, we really do live in one of the best times in the world. But when it comes to a moral or spiritual or an emotional standpoint, we're living in very, very perilous times. And this is why we get lulled into a passive sense of security. That as long as I'm safe, as long as I get a number of years, as long as I can increase my life expectancy, it doesn't matter what the quality of those years are, as long as I get a higher quantity of those years. As long as I'm entertained, as long as people aren't turning off my Netflix, as long as I can go out and get Asian food or go get Mexican food or whatever else and it's there and it's convenient for me and Uber Eats brings it in, then what do I have to fight for? What do I have to die for? We're complacent. And again, it makes us objects. It makes us passive. It makes us sit here and take every little thing that's given to us and take it cheerfully because we have our bread and our circuses. We have our entertainment, we have our food and it makes us complacent. How many of us work meaningless jobs? Oh, you deal with the commute, you have to go in and you hate what you do and there's no satisfaction in it whatsoever. I had just on Tuesday, so we just bought a new house and the backyard isn't finished yet and we live in an area where, surprisingly apparently, the weeds grow up to like nine feet tall and so my backyard is totally unfinished and we moved in in June and weeds are down here. Spend all summer trying to get other stuff done and then before I know it, the weeds are literally nine feet tall. So Tuesday, I'm feeling a little bit under the weather. I don't feel like going out and going for a long run as my wife and I were preparing for another half marathon but I wanted to get out and be physically active and do something and so I grabbed a shovel and I went out and I spent two hours trying to just tackle these weeds. I made the tiniest little dent in it. It really was, it wasn't much but the satisfaction of being able to work with my hands, of being able to see the actual progress of what I was doing, of being able to totally disengage from the work itself and just be able to think. I spent a lot of my time actually thinking about my presentation. I spent a lot of my time thinking about how I can improve as a father, how I can improve my business. That was meaningful work for me because I was the one who chose to do it. I remember as a kid, I hated weeding more than anything. I hated, oh, I hated it so bad. I have some pretty embarrassing stories about that but because I chose to do it, it became meaningful work for me. Most of us don't get the benefit of doing meaningful work. Doesn't really benefit anybody else. We certainly don't enjoy what it is that we get to do. I'm very grateful and very blessed that that's not the case for me but most of us don't have that, don't have that situation where we get to love what we do and as men, the idea of going into a job day after day after day, dealing with the insult of dealing with bureaucracy and the fact that the screeching weasel of a customer is always right and all of these other things that go into it, we trade in our dignity for dollars every single day and it's not even work that has any real meaning for it. Really, any real meaning to it at all. It's discouraging. We live in a world that has a lack of beauty. We have a very, very weird relationship with beauty as men because we've totally delegated almost all beauty to women except for the beauty of women which we've entirely sexualized and that's it. So the only way that we as men are culturally allowed to engage with beauty is sexual beauty of women and that's it. Our buildings are ugly, our clothing is ugly, our bodies are ugly, our entertainment is ugly and we laugh at it cynically and we revel in our degeneracy because we think that it's cleverer, it's postmodern or that it's enlightened or whatever else because the sincerity of real beauty, the mastery that goes into architecture or art or anything else, we're above that or we're more nuanced than that or we're more complicated than that. We need to have real beauty in our lives. The act of creating beauty, making ourselves more beautiful, making our environments more beautiful, that's being a subject. Putting up with passively and just engaging in the ugliness of the world, that's being an object. You need to surround yourselves with beauty, you need to create beauty. There's no creation without beauty. That's the difference between creation and destruction, creation adds beauty, it adds functionality, it adds things. Destruction doesn't, it removes all of that. This is a big one. We have a fetish with rationality. And don't get me wrong, rationality is a beautiful, wonderful thing. I just finished reading a book called Alchemy by Rory Sutherland and I cannot recommend that higher. It is an incredible read and in it he talks about this problem that we have where we take something that's so appropriate because honestly when you think about things like building a plane, engineering a bridge, these kind of things where the world works in a very quantifiable and measurable way when we think about that, we want rationality. We absolutely do. But when it comes to other things like the way that we interact as people, the way that we deal with the world around us, when we try and fit everything into the box of logic, it doesn't work. Take chess for example. Chess is a beautiful game of strategy and rationality but it only works the way that it does because the pieces are limited. The game of chess isn't different if it rains or if there's an earthquake going on. Your pieces can only move in certain directions and so you get to perfectly plan out and think about okay well if I do this and my opponent's gonna do that and I need to get nine steps ahead of him and this opens up more opportunities but the world doesn't work like that. Interacting with real people in real situations doesn't work like that. As I was listening to Socrates talk earlier this morning about being a father and planning and preparing for that, it's hard because that's one of the things that we do. We do it with relationships. We do it with parenthood. We do it with our jobs. We think that if I can just quantify what these things are, if I can know that my kid's gonna do A, B, C or D or if I know that the girl that I go talk to is gonna do A, B, C or D, then I know that I can respond this way or I have this line that's gonna work or I can, but it doesn't work like that. We're not limited to these little boxes. We can't quantify these things. There's so many variables that come into this that we can't even understand and the problem is that we, again, this is, I love how Sutherland puts this. We think that rationality is the oval office. We think that our rational brains are what drives our decisions. Our rational brains tell us what to do and we just follow orders. But really what our rational brains are is they're the PR department, okay? We act on instinct. If you were to hear a loud bang go off right now, you're not gonna rationally think, oh, there is a loud bang. That may be danger. I'm going to turn around and look and see what. You do it on instinct and then rationally, you're able to justify that. Oh yeah, I heard a bang. I turned around and wanted to see what it was. The action preceded the understanding. Rationality is a fantastic tool. It's a great tool to use because we're people that interact with each other and we need to be able to explain why we do things. But when we take rationality as something that rather than being a way to post, like after the fact, describe what an action was, but use it as a tool to try and preempt or pre-create what it is. It doesn't work like that. Yes, it works in very limited environments but it doesn't work in every single one of them. And we have a problem where we want rationality to be the king of everything and it's not. The other people around us want us to be objects. They want us to be, that's how they see us. Most people, and we're guilty of the same thing, we see most other people around us as objects. There's something about the idea of we're the heroes in our own stories. We should be, but for so much of us, the other players, the other characters who are in our story are just that. They're set pieces, they're just characters. They're just here to be in and be part of it. And we need to recognize that that's the same way that other people perceive us. As you become more of a subject in your life and less of an object, you will have people in your life who resent you for that. They will try and draw you back. They will tell you that you've changed. Ed was talking about this yesterday about how he went to a wedding and then after that he never saw this friend again. Really what happened is Ed ceased to be an object in a life surrounded by other people who were objects. He became a subject. Ed became a man of action. He started doing his own things and it makes objects uncomfortable. Other people want us to be objects. One, because they're more focused on themselves and two, because it makes them, it provides this glaringly stark difference to them of what it is to be a subject versus being an object. People want us to stay as objects because it's a way to rationalize and justify their own desires, their own fears, or anything else. Okay, so now that we know that that's a problem, what do we do about it, right? What are the next steps here? Because everything that the world does, everything that we experience now as men wants us to be passive, it wants us to be, it wants us to wait, it wants us to rely on our fear, it wants us to treat risk a certain way, but what do we do to actually start to combat that? So one of the things you'll hear the most often is we need to fix our mindsets and mindset is key. Again, this is not to negate, just like I haven't tried to negate technology or rationality or anything else, these are valuable things, but the problem is that mindset in and of itself is not enough. You have to have movement before you can change your mindset. When you think about that ship right there, if you can't steer a ship that's not actually in motion, or if you do, it's incredibly difficult, but if you have a ship that's in motion, then it's much easier to steer, it's the same thing with a vehicle. If your car's parked and it's not moving, good luck changing its direction. The amount of work that you have to put into it, you get a forklift, you get a dozen other guys to pick it up and move it and turn it around, but if it's moving, all you have to do is turn that little wheel, and all of a sudden you can change it in any direction you want to, but we wait. We avoid action because action is scary. Action is something that has consequences. Action is something that has risk. Action is something that has financial risk, or social risk, or physical risk, or anything else, and we convince ourselves that as long as we're working to improve our mindsets, then we're okay because we're preparing. We're waiting to get into the idea of action, but it doesn't work like that. This is where analysis paralysis comes from. You can't just sit and passively wait in order to be able to improve your mindset. You can't plan your way into a perfect life. You have to act. You have to take risks, you have to take chances, and honestly you have to fail in order to be able to get where you want to be too, because you have to be able to recover from that. Movement before mindset. Most of us miss that. We're terrified of movement. Movement means consequences. We want our boss to fire us before we quit. We want our wives to be the ones to initiate change. We want our kids to be the ones to tell us that they're having a hard time. We're objects if we wait to change our mindset rather than actually working on movement. Now action in and of itself isn't enough. Movement in and of itself isn't enough. It needs to have meaning. How many of us engage in action all the time, but without injecting any meaning into it, it doesn't actually do anything? How many of us engage in just meaningless sex, hoping that by getting the validation of women we finally like ourselves and respect ourselves? But because there's no meaning in that, it doesn't actually get us the results we want. How many of us engage, or how many of us grew up, man, how many of us grew up in religious households and hated the idea of having to go through the motions of going through ritual because that ritual didn't have any meaning to us. Ritual can be a powerful thing. Ask Jack Donovan what the rituals and what he takes his men through. How powerful that is. Ask men who are getting ready to go for war and they're banging their chest and they're beating their drums and they're chanting. Tell me that those men, those actions don't have any meaning to them? Absolutely they do. But if we do this here, if you do the same thing, if you just bang your chest without any meaning to it, it doesn't matter. So actions have to be infused with meaning in order to be able to create the right kind of mindset. And again, you can't predict that ahead of time. You can't rationally plan for that ahead of time. You have to act and then you have to try and find the meaning or you have to alter your actions in order to find the meaning. But you can't just sit here and prepare and plan and wait and hope that it's gonna work out the way that you want it to because it's not. Subjects are things that give other things energy. It's one of the things I teach my guys when I talk about style all the time. When you think about the way that most men in the world dress, there's no energy to it. The whole purpose is to just avoid any attention whatsoever. The average man's mindset when it comes to his appearances, as long as I don't look like an idiot, then I'm okay, then I'm good to go, right? Most of us want to just be glossed over. We want to avoid any of the negative. And so what do we do? We just don't have any energy. We don't do anything. How many of our actions are that way? Well, I don't want my teacher to call me out for being one of the bad kids. I don't want to go to the principal's office. So what do I do as a kid? I shut up and I give the right answers when I'm called upon. But I'm certainly not gonna raise my hand if I know the answer, because what if I make a fool out of myself? We absorb energy. We do it out of fear. We do it out of all these other potential risks. Subjects, things that are engaged in motion, things that are doing things, things that are active, they give energy to other things. When you see men who are dressed well, they carry themselves well, they're genuinely interested in other people. They see other people as fellow subjects instead of just mere objects. When you see men like the other speakers who are building businesses, they're sharing their knowledge with you guys, what are they doing? They're giving you their energy. And the coolest thing about this is people is that we have this fantastic and unique ability where when we give our energy, we get more of it. Because if you were to ask any of these speakers, do they feel like they're giving themselves up to you and that comes at any real cost to themself, they'd say no way. None of us are here because of altruism. We're here because by our giving our energy to you, it energizes us more as well. That's the dirty little secret about being an object that people don't understand is when you become a black hole of other people's energy, you don't get any more of it yourself and all you do is drain the rest of the energy from the world around you. You don't give, you don't transmute, you don't do anything, you just absorb and disintegrate it. But if you're a subject, if you're engaged in action, if you're doing things, not only do you take other energy from the rest of the world and actually channel it into something productive, but you amplify it and you give it to more people and as you give them more energy, hopefully you're discerning about who you're giving it to so that they're doing it as well. Don't waste my energy. Don't waste the energy of the other speakers here. How dare any of you, how dare you? How dare any of you be black holes of the energy that these men who are here give to you? It's selfish, it's petty, and it's small. Don't be objects on that. Be subjects, take this energy that we're giving that we're grateful enough to have and that we get to feel, and I love being on stage, I feel energized when I'm up here, but you guys don't waste that by being black holes of the energy. Don't go have lunch with these guys and then waste it by, well yeah, that's a great idea. Maybe one day I'll do something with it, act. Take that energy and actually do something with it. It is better to be a failure in the arena than it is to be a passive spectator in the stands. The world doesn't want us to believe that. The world wants us to rely on the safety, and again the bread and circuses of simply passively being in the stands. You can be a cynic, you can criticize this form, you can talk about how we as a team, you can talk about anything you want to but you get to do it with this false sense of security and this false sense of superiority by remaining in the stands. And what any man in the arena will tell you is that we have respect for the other men in the arena, but most of the time, especially with those who are perpetually in the stands, the hardest thing to do is to not feel just pure disdain for them. And I don't care, I don't care how bad you fail, you need to do something. The failure in and of itself, I know it sounds cliche, but the failure in and of itself becomes a success, it becomes a way to experience success. I had an example of this just within this last year for myself and my first boxing bout. I'm a terrible boxer. I'm old, I'm slow, I have no predatory instincts whatsoever. I'm not a naturally violent person. I get in the ring with this kid. He's 13 years younger than I am, he's got two inches on me, he's probably got four inches of reach. And for only three minutes, because that's how it worked, three one minute rounds, this kid just worked me, right? It's humiliating. All my friends were there, my family was there. Nobody in that room was cheering louder for anybody than they were for me. I had talked about it on social media. I'm gonna go, I'm gonna box. I've been training for three years, I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna do this. I'd been planning, I'd paid money with trainers, I was ready to go, I was ready to do this. I was confident going in, that I was gonna beat this kid, that I was gonna win. And I got worked. I got absolutely wrecked by this kid. And I remember going to dinner with some of my friends and their wives and my wife after. And I'm concussed and I'm bleeding weird and we're all trying to eat. And I just remember feeling so discouraged because it didn't work out the way that I had hoped it would. I remember feeling so frustrated because I had put all this energy into something and it didn't yield the results that I wanted it to. And then I remember going back to the gym the next day or a couple days later and I remember going in and the way that the other guys who were in the gym who had actually fought before, the way that they treated me, it changed. I was now to a very small extent, I was one of them. I was destroyed in the arena, but I was in the arena. And the respect of those men, the guys who were in there, mattered a whole lot more to me than any of the passive aggressive comments or the disdain or Tanner and his delusions of grandeur that all the people in the stands would be throwing at me or not even have the courage to actually throw at me, but they would be saying about me behind my back. You can fail in the arena, you will, you will and you need to fail in the arena and you're going to be better for it because you're in the arena. It doesn't matter if you fail with business, it doesn't matter if you fail with marriage. I've been divorced, I've had marriage failures and it made my family life infinitely better now. I can't tell you guys how many stupid style things I've tried, how many things that I thought that were trends that were coming up that I look back and I just think, what the crap was I doing there? That's ridiculous. Failure is a wonderful thing if we add meaning to the action of failure. If we allow it to just keep us here, thankfully when we're dead in the arena, we're not actually dead, right? And most of the things that we're afraid of, they don't result in death. They don't result in physical death, they don't result in social death. The consequences as we think about them are we make them so much bigger than they actually are and really everything about what we experience is trying to get us to not climb over that wall, to not get down into the arena and we convince ourselves that we're better off up in the stands because we're safer up in the stands. But you need to fail, you need to be willing to fail, you need to recognize that failure is a part of the program. I can't tell you how many programs I've tried and failed. I can't tell you how many different things I've done, trying to build my business and fail and then now that I have success, every failure becomes worth it because you can be intentional, you can be movement oriented with what those failures are. Okay, so the last question is, how long do we do this for? Most of us, especially when you think about what the old American dream was, is pretty easy. You just had a number of things you had to check off, right? You graduate from school, you get a good job, you get married, you have a few kids and then you work until you retire and then you retire by just doing whatever you want for the 10, 20, 30 years until you die. We've been conditioned to think that our life is about build, build, build, build, build, endure and then relax. That's an object life. A life of a subject is build, build, build, build, build, build, build, build, build, build. You're not a God yet. I'm not a God yet. The audacity to think that I've arrived and I don't have to keep working on myself is peak hubris. I can't believe that we have the gall to think that it's 30 or it's 35 or it's 22. Yeah, I've accomplished enough. I just wanna hang out and watch Netflix and I've done enough, I'm just gonna enjoy me for now. That's it, I don't need to improve anymore. Oh, it's so passive and it's so just pathetic that we allow the world to tell us that these are the checkboxes that you need to check and then when we do check them, we think that we've arrived and that we're good enough and we don't need to do anymore. It is, it's pathetic. We're not God yet. We can be better. We can be better every single day and just like we build more energy as we give more energy, the more we build ourselves, the more that building translates into other arenas. If you learn how to fight, you become a better father. You become better at dating. If you learn how to dress well, you become better at work. Everything that we do, the more we become subjects of action, the better we get at everything else. It's synergistic. The talents that we can stack, the things that we can do, they are not mutually exclusive. Yes, as you get older, you're going to have to miss out on things. There are going to be times when you say, you know what, I can't. I can't go back and join the military now or I can't go back and maybe try and make it in the NBA. There are things that we do have to give up but it doesn't mean we have to give up growth and progress and action. Just because we can't have it all doesn't mean we have to stop dead in the water where we are. It's so small and so sad and so emasculating for us to think that we've arrived and that we don't need to build and become more. So I want you, I want you man, I want my friends to be subjects, to be agents of action rather than objects that are acted upon. You are going to fail at it. You are going to suck at it. It is going to be scary. It is going to hurt. That's part of what being a man is. No civilization has ever described the most masculine man as the one who is the most comfortable or the safest or the one who avoided the most amount of risk. Obviously be intelligent about it. Take good risks. Do things that are worth doing. Inject real meaning into what your actions are but stop planning. Stop preparing. Stop thinking and actually just start doing something. Thank you. Okay, I guess we got, I left a little bit of time so you can line up and let's hear your questions guys. Hey, Tanner. Hey. Hey, I remember listening to you. I don't know whether we were having a conversation or what we were talking about the boxing. Were you eavesdropping on me, Tex? Probably so. No, no, no, this wasn't the other night. This was a while back. But you were talking about preparing yourself for violence. Yeah. And not really, we all prepare ourselves for things in life but we don't really know how we're going to react when it actually happens. Right. Can you elaborate a little bit about the boxing experience? Yeah, absolutely. You mean the experience as far as why I prepared or what my experience was when I went through it? Why you prepared and what it was like to actually take the blow. Cool, okay, cool. Okay, so yeah, what Tex is talking about and I'll dive into this a little bit deeper, but okay, being a father of four and recognizing that the roles of being a patriarch and being the head of the family, being a father or protect, provide and preside, it's pretty easy for me to do the provide and the preside stuff. And I've got a wonderful family that those things just kind of fall in naturally. But as far as the protect stuff, this is again another example of how we're objects is we've been able to outsource our protection responsibilities and our protection rights and things like that as men to other men who take care of it for us. But that's not always the case. I hope that I never have to deal with real violence but if I do and it involves my wife and my kids, I mean you guys saw the video a couple weeks ago which an internet time feels like forever of the woman who stabbed the little kid in the eye and then the dad just kind of looked at her like, what are you doing? And I can't imagine responding that way except I could imagine responding that way because that's probably how I would have responded a few years ago because the idea of actually engaging in violence and knowing how to do it was so foreign to me and so I realized that when it comes to my responsibilities as a father, I can't protect if I don't actually know how to protect and I don't know how to do that if I haven't engaged in some sort of violence. I never fought in high school or anything like that and so for me that was why I started boxing is I wanted to get familiar with what it felt like to get punched in the face and I know that that's not the same thing or that's not a real thing but it's still, when you do get punched it's still very real and so as far as my experience when I was up there, the way that the best way I can describe it is before the first round I was just excited. I really was and I was kind of surprised that I was excited as opposed to being a little bit nervous and about 30 seconds in he hits me with this really strong right cross right here. My legs get a little bit wobbly and my vision gets shaky, you see the proverbial stars and I remember thinking, man I have done more than 150 rounds of sparring. I've been hitting the face, I've had a bloody nose multiple times, I've had my jaw almost dislocated but man did that hurt, that hurt so much more than I expected it to and you feel all of that and you think all of that and you get hit in the face again. Oh man it was so brutal. So I went from pure excitement to in between the first and the second round nervousness and then in between the second and third round I was just scared and I didn't wanna go back in and the only thing that kept me going back in was the realization that's like, you gotta do this dude, you committed to this. I'm not gonna throw in the towel and so I knew that I didn't have a chance which I actually did better in the third round than anything else because he kind of gassed out but I knew that I needed to go in and I still needed to act and I really am grateful that I had people in my life that helped me develop more of that tenacity because five years ago I wouldn't have done it. I would have been very content to just say, well I tried, he's better than I am so maybe I'll go in because I don't wanna make a fool out of myself but I'm not actually gonna do anything but everything that I did when I went in there I didn't wait for him, I just kept going after him hard which is probably why I exposed myself too much anyway, I'm proud of what I did and the way that I did it in my mindset was even though as far as a results perspective I just, it was a waste and I got destroyed so hopefully that answers that text. What's that dude? There we go. Okay, there we go, oh that's, okay cool. So one, that what you said about the fear going back in just now your response man, that's like spot on, you just keep going, you don't really have a choice. Yeah, you would know, right? Yeah, you just have to go. But what I was curious about is one, would you ever fight again? And two, if not fight again, would you take on any other challenges that you feel will develop you to continue to, you know, whether it were for you or the example to your children just something that you've never done, it's gonna force you to be difficult and uncomfortable. Yeah, yeah, that's a great question. Okay, so one, I really don't wanna fight again and I can give myself all sorts of reasons and excuses not to, which means I need to fight again. So I will, I don't want to but I will. So, and that's part of it. But two, yeah, the idea of challenges, in fact, one of the things that a buddy and I have started doing is we've done a new, it's called Project M. And what we do is we take on a new challenge every single month. We're doing a YouTube channel and there's a podcast with it as we talk about these things. But one of the things that the guys who are subjects, the guys who engage in action will understand is that action is addictive. It really is. And the idea of challenging yourself and sometimes you fail and sometimes you succeed is really pretty fun and it's really addictive. And so we've done things like, I think next year I'm gonna run a full marathon. I wanna learn how to hunt. I've never done anything like that. Right now this month the challenges we're doing the air-martial pistol tests for accuracy and for time. And so we went out and we did that with a guy who's a professional shooter. We're training for a month and then we're gonna go back in and see what it's like. And that's very intentional on my part and my buddy's part as far as the example that we wanna set for our kids. I want my kids and especially my son to see that dad is somebody who's always challenging himself. Dad is somebody who's always doing new things. Dad is always somebody who's pushing his comforts and then I invite them to come do that with me. My son, he's starting wrestling next week and I love that as tender and as sweet and as passive as my son is, and I still don't think he has any idea what he's in for, which is gonna be great. I told him about a month ago that I had signed him up for wrestling. And without fail every week he counts down and he's so excited. That was the last thing he told me before I got out of the car was six more days till I got to start wrestling, dad. And it's not because he's that excited necessarily about wrestling, but it's because he's excited to be challenging himself and pushing himself and emulating me in that way. And man, the responsibility that I feel when I realize that my son emulates me that way, I just, I can't ever allow myself to be an object instead of being a subject because how selfish would I be to teach my kids that that's okay, that I've arrived, I've now challenged myself enough and I don't want that to be the example that I set for them. So absolutely, and I will definitely continue to find new ways to challenge myself and push myself and fail it a lot and exceed it a lot and it's, yeah, it's a great process. Hey, how you doing? Great. So I guess this is a bit of a multi-faceted question. Great. So a lot of guys who were in the first responder military community, a lot of times with style, we go for ultra functionality, cargo pants, like, hey, I gotta conceal my gun, hey, I gotta carry my badge, super thick Seinfeld wallet on me. So what are some solid style tips to still have that air gravitas but also marry that functionality so you don't always walk around in a graphic tee and some cargo pants? That's a good question, that's a fun one. Well, and especially because a lot of it does come back to this idea of mindset, because a lot of guys who are first responders, they do the law enforcement, they do the tactical thing because that's a tribal signal within that tribe as far as I fit in, I belong with these guys and we lean on functionality as this is the reason that I do it but really it's because we wanna look like all the other L.E.O. guys and I say we obviously don't mean me. But there's, and so you have to really even be able to kind of figure out what's worth it as far as trading all that stuff out. That's one of the things that I've been experimenting with a lot more is, you know, I have a concealed carry permit, I carry most of the time. How do I do that without printing? How do I figure, I'm trying to figure out how do I keep a tourniquet on me without having to worry about making it, you know, do you have to conceal? Is there a way to incorporate it in by actually having it be part of what your aesthetic is? And so the hard answer is it takes a lot of experimentation and it takes a lot of even knowing who your audience is, what the environments are on which you find yourself. And so I'd actually, we should talk after so I can know a little bit more about what your personal details are and then I can help give you some more direction that way because it's very, very contextual and it's dependent on some variables that I can't give a fair answer by just saying, do these things. Yeah, so let's talk after. Thank you, I appreciate it. Yeah, absolutely. Hey Tanner. Hello. Got a question for you. Let's hear it. Earlier you said action without meaning is useless and I totally agree. But for those of us who haven't quite fleshed out our life's mission per se or the meaning that we're aiming for, what do we do with our actions when we don't quite have that meaning defined? That's a fun question because there are plenty of people who do continue to pursue action and they think that if I can just do the action more or do it better, then I'll get meaning. That's where you get guys who get addicted to sex or adrenaline or anything else because really what they're chasing is they're chasing meaning. And so it's a combination of both. You have to be willing to act but then you also have to be willing to think. And one of the things that's hard for most men in our modern culture to even engage with is because it's terrifying, nihilism is really easy. The idea of engaging in some sort of deeper belief, the idea of building a legacy or the idea of being subservient to God or the idea of all these other things that used to grant people meaning, just like our culture tries to make us objects as far as not things that act it also tries to make us objects as far as things that don't have any real meaning in our lives. And so you have to be willing to do things that are very counter cultural and that are very rebellious that way. I would encourage most men to explore religion and explore it sincerely as opposed to just I grew up in it or I can't believe LOL, people still believe in God when we have science or that kind of stuff but genuinely explore and explore multiple different ones, explore brotherhood, explore fatherhood, explore tribe, explore all these other things and do it with the desire of trying to understand what is meaning and where do I get it? I know how to answer that question for me and so I would love to be able to talk in person with anybody who wants to know more about that but it really comes down to sincerely pursuing it and again pursuing it, not just planning for it and you have to try a bunch of different things and most of the time it gets tied up in a lot of those things, family, fraternity, faith, those kind of things, that's where for most of us meaning comes from. I have a question, so you said movement influences mindset. Sometimes we often take steps and it's sometimes a step in the wrong direction. How do you know when to kind of break that off and go a different direction? Because I mean, not all movement points you kind of in the right direction, I mean you can learn from failures as well. Right, yeah so how do you know when to make that change? Yes. You don't, that's a crappy answer but that's the reality of it. You have to, it comes from experience, right? You have to figure out what your own experience and what your boundaries are. There will be times when you hold on to an action for way too long because it's comfortable and that failure is comfortable because it's familiar and the idea of knowing when or how to commit, it doesn't work. Sometimes you pivot away from things too quickly. There are plenty of people who you see them, okay, business is a really good example of this where, okay, I'm gonna start doing a course. Okay, but yeah, there's guys who are talking about dropshipping. Okay, I'm gonna do dropshipping. Yeah, but there's guys who are talking about high ticket coaching. Okay, let's do high ticket coaching and so they're pivoting too much all the time but then you also have guys who don't recognize when the horse is dead and you can stop beating it. And so it really does just come from experience. It comes from being able to, again, understand both the meaning and the action of being able to take your rational brain and acknowledge the results of the consequences but taking your, the way Sutherland calls it is your psychological or this extra logical brain and actually say, I'm going to just try something. I'm just gonna do something and see if I can figure out what the results are. We have to have both. And so a lot of times if you feel like you're stuck in a rut and we're trying to say, you know, when do I make the change or should I make this change or how do I make this change? The right answer is just change something and see what happens with it. And it's never a set time. There's never this like perfect queue where the heavens open up or you get a phone call from your boss or the perfect girl walks up to you and says, I want to marry you. It doesn't work like that. And so you have to be, that's where that risk, that risk affinity comes in where maybe you do leave something that's really, really good and it's working pretty well but it's only gonna get you to this level and you leave it so you can do something else that gets you to this level. And there's no guarantee on it. And that's part of what being a man is, is you act without guarantee. Does that help? Yes, thank you. Awesome. Okay guys, well, I don't see anybody else lining up. So thank you again for the opportunity to talk to you and I'm gonna be here for the rest of the week. I'd love to talk to you guys one on one. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you.