Transcript
Speaker: Hey everybody, welcome to the Exit Podcast.
Speaker: This is Dutch Bennett.
Speaker: I am joined here by Tanner Guzzi.
Speaker: You're not a real doctor.
Speaker: They're going to be so mad.
Speaker: Yeah, every time somebody calls me Mr. Bennett, I like to get theatrically upset with them.
Speaker: Did you know the number of years I went to school to earn this title?
Speaker: Thank you very much.
Speaker: Royal Belize Veterinary Academy or whatever it was.
Speaker: I always make up a ridiculous school.
Speaker: Tanner is an old pro in this content business and in mentoring and coaching.
Speaker: He's, I don't know if there's like specific things you want me to talk about or introduce, but he had an experience of being doxxed early on in the game when it was pretty, it was pretty challenging to be doxxed because other people were not in that situation and sort of not everybody understood what that meant and kind of what people would go after you for.
Speaker: So maybe to start off, tell me a little bit about what's different between now and then as far as like your experience getting doxxed versus kind of what you see happening now, how the challenges are different, how maybe handling it is different.
Speaker: Cool.
Speaker: Yeah, I got I got doxed about nine years ago and I got hit simultaneously with the fact that I had been writing a red pill adjacent blog called Mormon men.
Speaker: And it was all about masculinity and even specifically like game, because back in 2009 to 2011, we were still talking about game and using the cringe terms like alpha and beta and all this stuff that you're doing back then.
Speaker: And so I was trying to write about it within a Latter-day Saint context, especially because obviously we're not about spinning plates or notch counts or any of that.
Speaker: But the ideas that were related to the differences between men and women and hypergamy and all this other stuff still all applied.
Speaker: And there was a lot of validity.
Speaker: And so I was writing a blog to try and suss that out.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: At the same time, this was about a year or two when all this kind of fell out after I'd gotten divorced.
Speaker: And my ex-wife and a bunch of her family had written a bunch of things online accusing me of adultery.
Speaker: And I'd been thrown in jail because of not being able to sell our mortgage or not being able to sell our condo because we were underwater on the mortgage because...
Speaker: of the recession at the time.
Speaker: And so they found me in contempt of court and I served 48 hours in jail.
Speaker: So basically all of this kind of happened and coalesced within a matter of a few months where feminist Mormon housewives found out about my blog, Dox Me.
Speaker: My ex-wife and all of her family started railing on me and I served a little bit of time in jail.
Speaker: So it was summer of 2012 and
Speaker: And if you did a Google search on the name Tanner Guzzi, there was nothing good to find on that at all, especially because I hadn't been doing anything from a content perspective that was using my own name.
Speaker: I wasn't super active on social media.
Speaker: And so there was nothing to combat that from a positive perspective.
Speaker: And obviously with a more unique name, like the one that I have, which very much is my real name, I don't get lost in the fray of other men with similar names or anything else.
Speaker: And so it was a
Speaker: There's a pretty, pretty bad scratch on the record for me with that.
Speaker: What I think is different now is, man, the mobs are bigger and they're meaner and they're coming at you with less.
Speaker: You have to you have to be less incendiary in order to get them to come after you.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Like I had to be at the level where they could actually accuse me of adultery and pull up mugshots and everything else in order to do some real damage.
Speaker: And with what guys are experiencing now, I just saw a tweet today that apparently people are pissed at Carrie Underwood because she liked a tweet from Matt Walsh about his opposition to mask mandates in schools.
Speaker: And just because she liked the tweet, she's now under fire.
Speaker: Like it's insane what the level of totalitarianism that we're dealing with as far as people's attitudes about stuff.
Speaker: And so I had a lot more wiggle room back then than what you guys get to deal with now.
Speaker: Yeah, but maybe, I mean, I also feel like you're less of a pariah maybe because everybody kind of knows that like this could happen to normal people.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And you have much more of a network to tap into.
Speaker: When I was, when I first dealt with all this, there was not the Twitter sphere that was, that were guys that were doing coaching or selling programs or ways to kind of like run your own business just off of social media.
Speaker: Yeah, there were influencers, but you had to be in the
Speaker: six to seven figure followers and you still had to be doing something that was done a particular way and so there was not a lot of the runway that you or a lot of these other guys get now as far as seeing other guys that are that are showing ways that you can actually not only survive this but kind of use it to your advantage yeah did you see more professional fallout or more social fallout in your case and what was that like
Speaker: I don't think I saw a ton of social fallout, which I'm grateful for.
Speaker: My family knew the whole story.
Speaker: My friends knew the whole story.
Speaker: The ones that had already kind of separated or dissipated because of the whole divorce and everything else were already gone anyway.
Speaker: And so I didn't deal with a lot of social fallout.
Speaker: But from a professional standpoint, absolutely, because nobody would hire me.
Speaker: I was stuck working my same crappy like $13 an hour loan officer job, even though I had
Speaker: uh, finished school and I had graduated with good grades and I was pursuing things that were within my field and I had done good internships and worked in, in the industry and everything before nobody would touch me with a 10 foot pole.
Speaker: And, uh, yeah, so there was, there was some real kind of professional fallout and it was done in the very like cowardly way of, they just ghost on you and you just never hear back.
Speaker: And even when you're being good about follow-up and all that kind of stuff, they just treat you like you, uh, like you don't exist.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: Tell me a little bit about the track that you were on, because I found in my experience with this that I didn't love the track that I was on.
Speaker: And so it felt almost good to kind of have my ships burned for me.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So where were you headed?
Speaker: So that's a good question, because what I had wanted to do and what I'd gone to school for and what I'd spent time in internships doing and everything else was I wanted to move into talk radio.
Speaker: And so I had worked for a local station.
Speaker: I had been...
Speaker: an intern on a show.
Speaker: I was going to start producing a show, but the goal was to move in that direction to do more of the like pundit type stuff.
Speaker: And that very quickly fell apart.
Speaker: So then I started looking into, okay, like how do we start doing marketing or because I was not in the position that you were in where I was already fairly well established and had actually gotten my career up and running.
Speaker: I hadn't.
Speaker: I was very frustrated because I was a year out of college and
Speaker: And opportunities weren't panning out the way that they could have been or should have been.
Speaker: And so there was that kind of one pie in the sky aspiration.
Speaker: But even the other things that were ancillary to it, whether it was working PR or doing social media for any of the local companies or anything else like that,
Speaker: It didn't matter what my experience was.
Speaker: Nobody would touch me on it.
Speaker: And now that I'm aware of that, and now that I get to do what I do, that is such a massive blessing to get to do that, to get to experience this the way that I do now, because any of those jobs, I would have hated what I was doing.
Speaker: I would have made less money than I am right now.
Speaker: And I would have been beholden to somebody else.
Speaker: And so I can very much see how big of a blessing it is that this all panned out the way that it did for me.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, there's definitely an element of, like, it's a very challenging environment.
Speaker: I was told that English, you know, was a useless credential, which is perfectly accurate.
Speaker: But also, I sort of conflated that with, you can't make a living writing, you can't make a living in that way.
Speaker: And so like, I think talk radio is similar, any kind of radio is very, very precarious.
Speaker: professionally.
Speaker: And so, and I'm finding this theme with everybody that I talked to where, well, like my first podcast was with a guy who runs a landscaping business.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And like working
Speaker: For a landscaper is like, that's not a, that's not a really lucrative living and it's challenging and precarious and you are beholden to people.
Speaker: But if you're willing to run a landscaping business, you know, the sky's the limit.
Speaker: You can make a lot of money and there are men who make a lot of money doing that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And so you kind of, you kind of have to be cut loose to make, to make those things work.
Speaker: work, whether you're willing to do that for yourself or, or, or have it done to you.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So, so tell me a little bit about how you nosed up, how you, how you recovered from the reputational piece of it, the sort of loss of opportunity piece of it, just sort of like psychologically picking yourself up off the floor after that.
Speaker: Yeah, the psychological aspect of it was pretty hard.
Speaker: I remember the first day that I logged in and I saw my stats on this little blog that I was normally getting like maybe 90 to 120 hits a day.
Speaker: And then I log in one morning and I've already got 1300 hits.
Speaker: And it's like, holy crap, what happened?
Speaker: I'm thinking it's some other like big Manosphere blog that's posted something and I'm getting excited.
Speaker: And you scroll down on your WordPress stats and you see that the main refer is feminist Mormon housewives.
Speaker: And part of me gets excited because I'm so I was, you know, I hadn't even written this.
Speaker: I hadn't done any content on this blog for a while.
Speaker: I'd already moved over to writing masculine style and doing that pseudonymously just under the moniker masculine style.
Speaker: But I would still check in on comments and some of this other stuff within Mormon men.
Speaker: And I'm thinking, sweet, like this is going to be really entertaining to watch them rant and rave.
Speaker: And then they just full on like are naming me and they're they're talking through everything.
Speaker: And it like I remember feeling all that the wind just go out of my stomach like I lost my breath on it.
Speaker: It was like, whoa, holy crap.
Speaker: This is not the Internet anymore.
Speaker: This is very real.
Speaker: And there were three or four days.
Speaker: where it just felt like the perpetual feeling that you get when you're about to go out on stage or you're about to go out and give a presentation or you're about to play a game.
Speaker: And it's not the anticipation, like the excitement.
Speaker: It's just the terror of it where it's like, what's happening?
Speaker: And my whole world feels like it's about to fall apart and collapse on me.
Speaker: Not sleeping great.
Speaker: you know, like you're dealing with all these physiological effects.
Speaker: And then it started to feel like it would kind of ebb down and you would get pulled out into some normalcy.
Speaker: Like I would go play Halo or I would do stuff with my wife.
Speaker: And then you get reminded of it and you just get pulled right back into it again.
Speaker: And so it's this up and down and up and down in this roller coaster for a couple of weeks.
Speaker: But the real benefit of it was that after those few weeks, you kind of go, okay, that was one of the things I was most afraid of.
Speaker: And now what?
Speaker: Like that's it.
Speaker: I just went through the thing that I was, one of the things I was most afraid of.
Speaker: And here we are.
Speaker: Like my wife still loves me.
Speaker: My family's still on my side.
Speaker: I've still got good kids.
Speaker: You know, like none of these things are, you're not nearly as fragile as you think you are.
Speaker: And yes, it absolutely sucked from a job perspective, but that led to better opportunities.
Speaker: But going through the terror of having your name dragged through the mud, of having your rep, like I've really just feeling like,
Speaker: You're actually living the childhood nightmare of I'm naked on a stage in front of everybody and they're pointing and laughing at me.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And then you go, okay, like I've been there, done that, and it's not that big of a deal anymore.
Speaker: And that was one of the most powerful things to get to experience was, okay, if that's the most you can throw at me, let's take the gloves off and let's rock and roll.
Speaker: Like, let's really see what we can do with what this potential is now.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: I, it was similar for me where it was, it was several days of like, I, I, I would realize intermittently that I was forgetting to breathe.
Speaker: Like I was just not, not breathing.
Speaker: Breathe, breathe, breathe.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Like it was, it was, you know, you can kind of make yourself manually need to do that.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And it, but it was like that all the time.
Speaker: I was having to manually breathe.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And now that's passed and I'm sleeping and I'm eating, but I will find that like, I'm about to crack my teeth.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Like my, my teeth are just so tight.
Speaker: So it, yeah, it's, it's a very intense physical experience.
Speaker: And, and from the beginning, like, so I had the vision of exit the day I got fired.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: I, it like snapped into place and I was like, yes, I know exactly what I'm going to do.
Speaker: And so intellectually, spiritually, I was,
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: But your body doesn't know all that.
Speaker: Well, think about it because I don't know if this is the case for you, but it was for me where I was pretty likable and fairly charismatic in high school.
Speaker: And this was my first time ever, even going through all the, everything with my ex-wife or even dealing with like drama with your parents when you're a kid or things like that, where you deal with some back and forth.
Speaker: This was the first time in my life I ever felt like I actually had enemies.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And so it was the first time that that physiological fight or flight response actually feels justified in turning on.
Speaker: And I think it takes our bodies a little while to get used to the fact that it's like, okay, you have people that actually want to do you harm.
Speaker: They're not just mad at you.
Speaker: They're not just being...
Speaker: you know, it's not just retribution for things that they actually are probably justified in being mad or wanting retribution, but like people who legitimately hate you and they want to see you suffer.
Speaker: And most modern men don't experience that.
Speaker: And so it takes a real physical toll on you.
Speaker: The first time you go, okay, this is, this is an actual thing.
Speaker: There are people who want to see me hurt.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And they don't care if it's my kids.
Speaker: Nope.
Speaker: Like it's, it's a, that's how bad they want to hurt you.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: And there's an element of like,
Speaker: So, you know, maybe, maybe where you were at was, was less because like you were saying, it was kind of smaller people going after you.
Speaker: And in this situation, we're kind of like, who even are these people?
Speaker: Who are they connected to?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Like how deep does it go?
Speaker: Like you kind of get into this almost like Alex Jones kind of situation where like, you really don't know what you're up against.
Speaker: and how far they could potentially take it.
Speaker: And that, you know, you're right that it's, what I compared it to is you're being in the room with the tiger for the first time.
Speaker: You're having to go to bed
Speaker: with the tiger in the jungle.
Speaker: You know that it's out there.
Speaker: Danger is now real.
Speaker: It's not a make-believe thing.
Speaker: It's not a fairy tale.
Speaker: Danger is real.
Speaker: And even though we're not dealing with physical danger, although there are times that you wonder that where you go, okay, somebody can find out.
Speaker: It's pretty easy to find out information, enough information that they can come physically do something.
Speaker: And there are people who have a desire to do that to you.
Speaker: No, it was so, uh, they released my address and there were two young guys.
Speaker: So we live way down a gravel driveway in the middle of
Speaker: no place.
Speaker: So nobody has any reason to be on your property.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: Or anywhere near it.
Speaker: There were two guys who were walking back and forth down my driveway.
Speaker: And my wife starts to just sob because she's like, I don't know why they're here.
Speaker: I don't know what they want.
Speaker: And, you know, she, she was aware of what was going on.
Speaker: So I had to, I had to like get ready to go talk to these guys.
Speaker: Um, they, so they turned out to be, um,
Speaker: Seventh-day Adventist and very like sweet kids and like it was total coincidence on timing and everything right it was not a big deal and you know so it was kind of funny but but like in the moment where I'm like do I need to do I need to get the Glock in my car do I want to stay in my car you're having to like make these decisions about like you've never really had to consider before yeah so um
Speaker: So yeah, it's not just reputational danger at this point.
Speaker: It's physical too.
Speaker: And you always hope that they're just talking.
Speaker: Yeah, but you never know because you deal with real crazies that do real stalker level stuff and they send you things and...
Speaker: the amount of time and energy that goes into getting you doxxed or finding out all that personal information, like normal sane people don't do that.
Speaker: And so you can't expect them to be normal or sane in any other respect either.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Or any of the people who listen to them.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So tell me a little bit about when you started building this as a business.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Did you always have in mind that you were going to do that?
Speaker: Or was it sort of like, I've been doxxed and this is how I need to make my income.
Speaker: Yeah, it was a little bit of both.
Speaker: There was never self-employment always kind of mess with my head because I didn't see myself as self-driven or motivated.
Speaker: Like I remember telling my parents this when I was in high school where they're like, why don't you start a lawn mowing business?
Speaker: Like go around and it's no, I need a boss.
Speaker: I need a schedule.
Speaker: I need somebody to like hold my feet to the fire because I'm just not, I'm not driven enough, which was actually very true.
Speaker: But I was when we had our first child,
Speaker: I was making $13 an hour.
Speaker: I'd spent all this time trying to find other jobs.
Speaker: Everything had already been kind of like dragged through and nothing was happening.
Speaker: And we knew that we wanted my wife to be able to stay home full time.
Speaker: And so it wasn't enough to be able to make ends meet.
Speaker: But thankfully I'd been writing masculine style for long enough that it, uh,
Speaker: that it had started to gain some momentum, I realized I was getting fairly consistent emails from guys asking the same questions.
Speaker: And so I put together like the cheapest coaching package.
Speaker: So funny to think about it now, where it's like, I will charge you 25 bucks to put together like a whole PDF for you that was, you know, here's what colors are good.
Speaker: Here's what patterns you should wear.
Speaker: Here's
Speaker: Here's this stuff that you should wear.
Speaker: And I remember the first month I made like 400, 450 bucks.
Speaker: And so it was enough to like close the gap and make ends meet.
Speaker: But we were, we were poor for a long time.
Speaker: We were really poor for a long time.
Speaker: I didn't immediately go from that into self-employment.
Speaker: I had about another year,
Speaker: year and a half that I was doing that.
Speaker: And I was still working on the blog simultaneously, still trying to supplement that income.
Speaker: And then I found a local custom suit company that I reached out ultimately just to try and see if I could do an interview for them for the blog.
Speaker: You know, I remember going downtown Salt Lake, I paid for 20 minutes of parking to go in and introduce myself to the guys.
Speaker: And then I walk out four hours later with the job offer to come manage their shop for them, which is pretty fun.
Speaker: You know, and I remember even telling them it's like, you know,
Speaker: Just so that we go into this with like full transparency, go look me up.
Speaker: Here's here's my mugshot.
Speaker: Here's the story behind all this.
Speaker: And they're just like, yeah, no, we want you anyway.
Speaker: And so I worked for those guys for about four years and loved loved working with them, loved being part of the team and helping the business grow.
Speaker: Still have great relationships with them and, you know, still support the business as much as I can.
Speaker: And there was one point that now about four and a half years ago, I was in the temple and I got a very strong prompting that it's now time to jump and go full time on masculine style on just doing that, which was insane to me because that was 2017.
Speaker: And in 2016, we'd had our third kid.
Speaker: And I remember doing my taxes and I had made $16,000 that year off of masculine style.
Speaker: Like nowhere near enough to be able to supplement what my other income was, nowhere near enough to be able to do anything.
Speaker: And so I remember coming home and telling my wife, it's like, look, this is where we are.
Speaker: And to her infinite credit, that's why one of the reasons why I love her so much.
Speaker: She says, this is great.
Speaker: I wish we would have done this six months ago.
Speaker: Let's go.
Speaker: You know, so she was like all ride or die and fully on board with it.
Speaker: And I remember there's nothing.
Speaker: There's nothing like that.
Speaker: There's nothing.
Speaker: She is on your team, man.
Speaker: And that she believes that you're actually fully capable.
Speaker: She's willing to put her entire comfort, her life, everything in your hands and say, you can do this.
Speaker: And I'm going to not only do that with me, but I'm going to do this with our three kids.
Speaker: And I trust you to know that you can do this and you can take care of us and you can provide for us.
Speaker: I mean, you want to, you want to, you want somebody to light a fire under you, right?
Speaker: The rocket fuel that that is, is incredible because not only does she allow you to fully feel the pressure and the weight of the responsibility, she doesn't try and take that away from you, but then she also fully validates your capacity to carry that load and to get both of those things simultaneously from somebody.
Speaker: You feel like Superman when you get that kind of support from a spouse.
Speaker: It's phenomenal.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: And so you just made the jump.
Speaker: Yeah, we just made the jump.
Speaker: And it was, you know, there were a couple months that it was really hard.
Speaker: There were a couple months I had to kind of debase myself and my parents helped me out with a little bit of money, but it's grown every single year since.
Speaker: And within my second year, I was already doubling what my income was at the previous job.
Speaker: And now I've had multiple months where I make more in a month than I do the entire year that we first had our kid.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So massive blessings from from following that prompting and taking that jump.
Speaker: So if you had it to do over again, would you have still done the gradual approach or would you have jumped off a lot sooner?
Speaker: I think with where I am, I still would have done the gradual approach only because a lot of the autonomy that I got from being in a very small company and just kind of being left like, here's the job, figure out how to do it, along with the expertise and the connections.
Speaker: Like my technical skill within my industry, within clothing and everything else grew massively when I spent that time.
Speaker: And it also allowed me to really flesh out and better understand what my philosophical approach was and what I do.
Speaker: in that regard.
Speaker: So I wouldn't have been ready to make that jump on my own, nor would I have had the right kind of exposure or enough exposure to turn this into what it is now had I not spent those four years working with the custom suit guys.
Speaker: Interesting.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So when it was time to jump off, you know, like anything else, there's, there's momentum and there's, you know, you have to start kind of pushing that ball up the hill or, or were you in a situation where it was already kind of rolling and it didn't take that much extra juice?
Speaker: No, it wasn't.
Speaker: I remember that first year I released an ebook and that didn't do very well.
Speaker: I tried finding sponsors because I have a lot of friends that, you know, I'm grateful that a lot of the, like you think of the biggest style guys on YouTube, the guys that have millions of followers and those are friends of mine.
Speaker: I've been part of, I've been part of organizations with them where the sponsors that want to kind of like trickle down to the smaller creators like me will come down and work with me.
Speaker: And so I would get like,
Speaker: You know, I would make a few hundred bucks off of this ebook or I would make a thousand bucks off of this one video that I absolutely hated doing, but it was enough to feed the family.
Speaker: And then it was about six months in that I realized I could take more of a high ticket one on one coaching approach.
Speaker: But.
Speaker: That was when I found out that my audience was totally the wrong audience.
Speaker: I had spent all this time building an audience on YouTube.
Speaker: I built it up to nothing massive.
Speaker: I think it was like 20,000 subs at the time.
Speaker: But none of these guys were guys who either could afford me or wanted to actually admit that they wanted to hire a coach because they all just prided themselves on being really good at this stuff anyway.
Speaker: And so I did sales call after sales call after sales call.
Speaker: And very rarely would I get anybody who actually signed up.
Speaker: And then I made the jump to talking about this stuff on Twitter, which I had maybe 2000 followers at the time on Twitter and it blew up and it just totally took this massive shift because I found that the, the market fit, um,
Speaker: from both a mindset perspective, but also from a demographic demographic from an income and from everything else perspective was way better on Twitter than it was on YouTube.
Speaker: And so that first year, about six, eight months in is when I made this hard left.
Speaker: And I remember talking to one of my buddies where he said, give yourself permission to just take a month off of YouTube.
Speaker: Don't make any videos go all in on Twitter.
Speaker: And I tripled what my previous month's income was just because of that.
Speaker: And so we've been up and running ever since then.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And what do you think, what do you think makes that difference?
Speaker: Is YouTube younger or, or what's going on there?
Speaker: I think it's younger.
Speaker: I also think that it's, I don't, I don't sell to style guys.
Speaker: I don't sell to guys who are interested in style.
Speaker: They, they don't need me or they're not interested in me or a lot of them are cheap.
Speaker: What I do is I sell to guys who are interested in self-development or in personal development.
Speaker: And they've already found the benefits of doing that with maybe it's their fitness or their finances or their relationships, but they've found some other way that it's like, holy crap, I dial this in and I watch everything in my life level up.
Speaker: And so maybe this style thing can give me a similar benefit.
Speaker: And so it's guys who have already attained some level of success and they've caught the bug and they kind of go, I don't want any lagging areas in my life anymore.
Speaker: And as a platform, at least then, now it feels like there's more and more of that on YouTube.
Speaker: And so it may be time to start pursuing that again.
Speaker: But at least then it felt like that was all on Twitter and not on Instagram, not on YouTube, not on any of these other platforms that most fashion guys spend their time on.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, from, from, from the guys that I've attracted so far, you know, we've got, we've got 60 some patrons right now and the caliber of guy who is able and willing to, to make that kind of sacrifice is like, and like they're like they're pros and they're, they're really smart guys and they have really good things to say.
Speaker: We got a round table to a hot seat to help a guy, but just the level of, of insight that was brought to bear, you know, I,
Speaker: It's not about me, right?
Speaker: It's about this group of guys that are- Exactly.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: They're not here for the Bennett experience.
Speaker: They're here for the community.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: So I'm finding as I'm starting out that exit touches all of my preoccupations.
Speaker: Like everything that I see on Twitter that I'm inclined to sort of complain about or opine about, it's all about like,
Speaker: things are falling apart and we got to get out.
Speaker: Like, there's not like a reform platform for any of this.
Speaker: It's, you got to get out.
Speaker: And I'm trying to gauge sort of like, I'm always essentially talking about this, but how much do I explicitly like post the link?
Speaker: This is what we're doing.
Speaker: Sign up, you know, kind of make the pitch.
Speaker: How hard is too hard to shill?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: What's your experience on that, man?
Speaker: That's one of the things that's so funny, because even like nine years in, I still struggle with this.
Speaker: I still struggle taking pictures of myself for Instagram, and I still struggle with how much I should actually be promoting like
Speaker: the coaching or sign up for the mailing list or all the other stuff that can in any way feel feel like it's shilling.
Speaker: One of the things that I have found is that the more you offer really good value as far as good, good content is concerned, and then tie it into, you know, if you want to learn more, if you're curious to on how to expand on this or, or that, then it feels like a more natural lead in.
Speaker: And the more you do that, the better you get.
Speaker: But at the same time,
Speaker: You have something of value to offer to people.
Speaker: And there's nothing wrong with actually explicitly saying, I can help make your life better by doing this.
Speaker: And if you're interested in that, here's how you can learn more about it.
Speaker: I've gotten to the point where I'm actually working with a business coach right now.
Speaker: And one of the things that we've started doing is
Speaker: We've created a like a content calendar so that like on one week I'm pushing a free live training and that's all I'm shilling and I'm doing it multiple times a week.
Speaker: And then the next week, it's all about the lead magnet to the to the mailing list, which is my archetype quiz.
Speaker: And then the following two weeks, it's all about just coaching directly.
Speaker: And you kind of you just have to embrace that this is part of running a business.
Speaker: It's a marketing aspect of running a business, just like any other business.
Speaker: has a marketing component of it too.
Speaker: And I think that this is where a lot of guys don't see the kind of success that they should.
Speaker: And this is for your guys who are already in the process of building a side hustle.
Speaker: They want to take it to the next level, or they've been docs and they're forced to take it to the next level.
Speaker: But if you treat this like it's a hobby, it will pay
Speaker: you treat it like a legitimate business, then it will be you like it is a legitimate business.
Speaker: And so you have to go into it with much more of a willingness to think about, no, this is a business and I have to treat it that way from a marketing perspective, from a finance perspective, from a time and energy that I'm putting into it perspective, from all of these other things.
Speaker: It's not just talking to cool dudes on a podcast or getting together on a Slack channel.
Speaker: Just like for me, it's not taking pictures of myself
Speaker: and posting it like there's so much more to it than that to actually turn it into a real business.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: And I, you know, I'm finding that like, I've had a couple people like criticize, like, I just kind of taking people's money or whatever.
Speaker: And that's like the easiest objection in the world for me, because I'm like, no, I, if, if, if somebody, if somebody is unemployed and they sign up for this, I'm going to, I'm going to get
Speaker: 60 of my best guys and we're going to get that guy a job.
Speaker: Like we're going to, we're going to provide that value.
Speaker: A hundred percent.
Speaker: Totally.
Speaker: I will make sure that it's worth it to everybody who's involved.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And like, so, so the, the, the value proposition part of it,
Speaker: is not at all difficult for me to pitch.
Speaker: It's more just like fatigue.
Speaker: Like, am I just sort of beating the drum too much?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So that's, it sounds like you're still kind of feeling that out.
Speaker: But as far as generating content, your rhythm for a blog post, a podcast, this, that,
Speaker: How do you set that rhythm?
Speaker: And have you found that like you've had to accelerate that or decelerate that over time?
Speaker: Is it kind of always more contents better?
Speaker: Yeah, I've been I've been all over the place with this.
Speaker: I have had times where I've done daily emails for like a six month stretch.
Speaker: I've had times where I had a YouTube calendar where it was, you know, I'm going to put out three videos a week on Monday, Wednesday, Friday.
Speaker: I've had other times where I only produce content when I feel like it.
Speaker: And so my mailing list will be dormant for like six months.
Speaker: And then finally I get back into it.
Speaker: And I'm still trying to figure out what the right balance is because I don't like to create content when I don't actually feel the content and it feels laborious and it feels like I have to put something out.
Speaker: But at the same time, if I only do it when I feel like it, then that becomes a problem in and of itself too.
Speaker: This is actually one of the reasons why most of my social media shifted away from just being about style to being more just under the Tanner Guzzi brand because I
Speaker: I love this style stuff.
Speaker: I also get really sick of talking about only that all the time because I have more to offer the world.
Speaker: And so when I can talk about fatherhood or I can talk about masculinity, I can talk about spirituality, I can talk about any of the other things that I'm interested in.
Speaker: then I'm still creating content.
Speaker: I'm still making people aware.
Speaker: And ironically, in a lot of ways, it actually makes people more interested in my style stuff too, because I'm fully fleshed out as a man, as opposed to just being this kind of one dimensional shill on this one particular approach.
Speaker: Well, I'll say this.
Speaker: I was not at all interested in any of that stuff until getting to know you better and especially reading The Appearance of Power, which is your book.
Speaker: It is interesting to,
Speaker: to me, to the extent that it plugs into all of this bigger picture stuff.
Speaker: Like there are guys who care about that on like an instrumental level.
Speaker: Like, like, you know, I have this goal and I want to achieve this goal and it'll help me achieve it.
Speaker: For me, the appeal is that it, it fits into a larger sort of philosophy.
Speaker: So, so yeah, I definitely, uh,
Speaker: can attest to that.
Speaker: It makes me more interested in kind of that.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: And those are the men that I like to work with are the guys who, and those are the clients that do the best in my program.
Speaker: They're the ones that I have the most fun with.
Speaker: Those are the ones who can afford to pay what I charge are the ones who appreciate it from the bigger picture perspective, as opposed to the just tell me what shoes I need to wear so I can get laid.
Speaker: Like that's a whole different, that's a whole different game.
Speaker: And I don't, I don't like playing that game anymore.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And so it did.
Speaker: It made it a lot easier to start producing more consistent content as I became more multidimensional myself, as opposed to just I'm going to limit myself to this one particular niche on things.
Speaker: And now I get to do cool shows that a lot of times.
Speaker: they don't want to talk about style at all.
Speaker: They want to talk about fatherhood.
Speaker: They want to talk about my entrepreneurial journey.
Speaker: They want to talk about masculinity.
Speaker: They want to talk about other things as opposed to just, so tell me again about the three archetypes, you know, like it's, it's totally different.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And so I, I get much more of a,
Speaker: of that energy boost out of doing content as opposed to it always being a drain where it's like, okay, let's shield the quiz again in a way that's totally boring.
Speaker: And then you find that as you flesh out in these other things, it actually gives me new ways to approach these same paradigms with style so that it's actually still more fun to talk about style because I'm growing in other ways and you can inject that growth back into the aesthetic stuff again.
Speaker: You make it new.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So when you are scratching your head about, I need to make some content, what am I going to say?
Speaker: What am I going to talk about?
Speaker: Do you have any tricks for like how you develop ideas or, or is that kind of when the muse descends?
Speaker: The only thing that I ever really try and do is how do I take whatever it is that I'm currently interested in and focusing on?
Speaker: And is there a way that I can apply it to style?
Speaker: Is there a way that I can apply it to this?
Speaker: And this is a lot of the same stuff that Adam and I do when it comes to spiritual arson, to our church podcast that we run.
Speaker: where it's okay, how do we take the things that we're dealing with this week, or the things that we're interested in, and the things that we're focusing on?
Speaker: And how do we look at it through a spiritual lens, as opposed to just going through the same thing over and over and over again.
Speaker: And I found that that's what makes life really interesting.
Speaker: Anyway, even if you're not doing it from a content creation perspective, but just trying to make it so that these insights that you have, or these epiphanies that you have,
Speaker: are not domain dependent in, okay, I learned this thing about clothes, but it stays with clothes.
Speaker: No, how does that apply to the way that I talk and the way that I communicate?
Speaker: How does it apply to the way that I perceive my relationships with other people?
Speaker: How does my, like my whole perspective on the temple changed as I got more interested in clothing because you start to understand so much of the stuff that goes on from that regard.
Speaker: And so don't be domain dependent or one dimensional with that stuff.
Speaker: And then it makes it really easy to kind of get out of whatever that funk is, or at least for me, that's the case.
Speaker: Yeah, I like that.
Speaker: Kind of lean into what you're, to where your brain is already at.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: From a time management perspective, do you feel, so a challenge for me, I've never been good at managing my time.
Speaker: And like, while I now have way more drive than I ever did in wage work, I
Speaker: still am like, okay, I'm constantly thinking about what I what's next, what I got to do, what I gotta do.
Speaker: So do you have any secrets for how you how you became more effective at managing your time as an entrepreneur?
Speaker: Like, how do you get good?
Speaker: Yeah, I don't do, the only time management that I do is actually from a limited perspective.
Speaker: Clients can only book calls with me between 11 and three, Monday through Thursday.
Speaker: That's the only time that I'm available for calls or for podcasts or stuff like that, where I really prioritize my time.
Speaker: is we take Fridays off to do stuff.
Speaker: Like I take long weekends so I can do stuff with my kids.
Speaker: This winter, it's all just going to be skiing every Friday.
Speaker: We're going to do that.
Speaker: Sundays are a no-go zone whatsoever.
Speaker: Like I don't respond to clients or talk to anybody about work stuff on Sundays.
Speaker: I'm really consistent about...
Speaker: lifting Monday, Wednesday, Friday, my friends come over at 730 and we do that.
Speaker: And my evenings are very kind of sacred.
Speaker: Every once in a while, I will have to bend on things or I will want to bend on things because the client wants to go shopping on a Saturday or he's trying to get in some stuff because he's got a crunch time.
Speaker: And so we need to do weekend calls.
Speaker: But for the most part, time management is more on the limitation of it.
Speaker: And then what I found is really nice is that means that the time that I do have
Speaker: really kind of fills up.
Speaker: And then I ended up being productive with that time as opposed to man, when I first started, I remember going to the local library for like eight hours.
Speaker: And I'd run out of things to do within an hour and a half.
Speaker: But I felt like I needed to be there for eight hours.
Speaker: And I had to signal to my wife that I'm working hard for eight hours.
Speaker: And it took me a good six months to get to the point where I realized it's like, no, you can do a lot with 20 hours a week and then you're available to do all this other stuff that you don't get to do.
Speaker: I can be more involved as a father.
Speaker: I can be more involved on projects with people in the neighborhood.
Speaker: I can do a lot of other things because I'm not trying to fill 40 hours.
Speaker: I have no idea how much time I've spent working this week.
Speaker: I've in no way considered that.
Speaker: I just try to think about the tasks that I need to get done or the calls that are booked.
Speaker: and being able to take care of things that way.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Okay, good.
Speaker: Because that seems way easier for me to get my head around than trying to sort of regiment.
Speaker: Oh, totally.
Speaker: And you'll have you'll have push weeks where I remember like my first six months, it really did.
Speaker: Like once I figured out what I needed to do and it wasn't just like I've done two hours of work and I don't like once you know what you need to do, then I would put in 60 hour weeks or that's how it was when I was when I was getting the book finished there.
Speaker: You have these kind of like crunch weeks or you develop a whole new program.
Speaker: You have to record the videos and you have to do all this stuff like you have major crunches.
Speaker: But it's easy when you know what you have to do.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: And it doesn't feel like it's just logging time.
Speaker: And then you also have to be able to give yourself permission where it's like, dude, I got like four calls this week.
Speaker: So I'm doing four hours of work this week.
Speaker: And maybe a few things like I could throw up some quick Instagram stories or bang out a quick email.
Speaker: But other than that, I'm just going to enjoy the fact that I don't have a ton of work to do and I just get to relax and hang out.
Speaker: And that's just as good as well.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I think I'll feel more comfortable with that when all the bills are paid.
Speaker: It helps when the money's coming in already, for sure.
Speaker: Right, right.
Speaker: But I'm taking real serious stock of what I would need to cover the bases.
Speaker: And it's not much.
Speaker: I don't have a lot of expensive appetites.
Speaker: And the way that I've seen this thing grow
Speaker: my mentality is I want to take that and throw that back into helping the guys, whether that's, you know, funding better content, whether it's, you know, just, just making the product more interesting and, and more appealing for them because yeah, I like, I I'm a, I'm a pretty basic dude.
Speaker: And, and, and so is my wife, which is fantastic.
Speaker: So we've talked a little bit about how you would go about it if you had to do it again, because you're smarter, because the situation is a little bit different.
Speaker: Let's talk about what's next for you.
Speaker: What do you feel like is a level up for you professionally, personally?
Speaker: Where are you trying to go?
Speaker: This is a fun question because this is the first...
Speaker: I don't want to go anywhere else.
Speaker: I like where I am.
Speaker: I really love my lifestyle.
Speaker: I make good enough money that we can live the life that we want.
Speaker: I work the, I work doing things that I care about, you know, between the coaching and chess magazine and spiritual arson and the other kind of like other side projects that I get to do.
Speaker: I really enjoy the things that I get to work on.
Speaker: And at the same time, when I spend time with my other friends who are doing even more things, you know,
Speaker: I start to feel what legitimately feels like it's a spiritual prompting that I'm being selfish, that I've been able to provide a good life for myself and for my family.
Speaker: But if I would push harder, if I would build more, if I would do more, then I can hire people and I can give them good jobs that are safe and protected from a lot of the other things.
Speaker: I can have deeper networks that I can plug other guys into.
Speaker: I can help shape culture
Speaker: in a way that there is legitimate subculture that can help catch people when they fall through the cracks of mainstream culture.
Speaker: These are all things that I'm capable of doing if I apply myself more and I need to do that.
Speaker: And I feel more of an obligation to do that than a desire to do it, but it's there.
Speaker: And so that's the next question is, how do I figure out what that looks like?
Speaker: Is there a way that I can do that from a pure style perspective?
Speaker: Or does that involve blowing chest magazine up into something else?
Speaker: I've got a few other things that I'm really excited about that some guys have introduced or have asked me to come in and partner with them on that are related to this kind of concept of masculinity in general.
Speaker: And how do you do it by helping young guys appreciate it?
Speaker: How do you help dads get better at it?
Speaker: But I don't know what the answer to that question is.
Speaker: All I know is that I have to protect myself from being complacent about how good my life is right now because I have...
Speaker: I was born with five talents.
Speaker: I have turned those five into 10 and I can turn those 10 into 20, but I can't bury three of those 10 just because I'm comfortable living off of the seven.
Speaker: So I still have to keep reinvesting that and keep redoing, rebuilding and redoing more.
Speaker: Otherwise I'm going to be held accountable for that.
Speaker: I'm not, I'm not going to like how that feels.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Tell me about the vision for chess.
Speaker: What's the story there?
Speaker: How'd you get started?
Speaker: So Jack and I, Jack Donovan, who's my business partner on this, we both realized that one of the things that we've constantly found is frustrating when you go and you speak at conferences, when you do anything that's kind of related to this idea of masculinity.
Speaker: One of the most consistently frustrating things is it's really easy to know what it is that you're opposed to.
Speaker: Like it's really, you know, and a lot of these guys get kind of caught up in we're anti-feminist this, we're anti-liberal that, or we're anti, anti, anti, anti.
Speaker: And it's stupid because there's a big difference between like running away from something and running toward something.
Speaker: And what we found is there's very little talk about what it is that we actually should be or what we should be building or what culture should look like and what it can look like other than let's go back to the past.
Speaker: And you can't go back to the past.
Speaker: We're different people.
Speaker: We've gone through different experiences and culture was never supposed to be stagnant anyway.
Speaker: You're supposed to build upon it.
Speaker: And so chess was very much
Speaker: this idea of we can create a platform
Speaker: where guys who are writing really good books can actually get good features and can get exposure to an audience that's going to be interested in them.
Speaker: Guys that are creating good music or good arts or that are doing interesting things that are very pro the things that we believe in, we can give them a platform for this and then start to shape ideas around this is what this stuff can and should look like.
Speaker: Pay these guys for this stuff.
Speaker: Get involved in doing this stuff yourself.
Speaker: If you like this guy's art style, but you have a different tweak on it,
Speaker: explore that and let us give you a platform to be able to do something like that too.
Speaker: If you like writing, but you think Hemingway stuff, even though it's incredibly masculine, doesn't fit because the world is different and you want to do it in a way that's totally non-dystopian today, write stuff and we will give you a platform for it if it's good.
Speaker: And so it's more about being pro what we want as opposed to being anti what we're opposed to.
Speaker: And so we're trying to create something that is very pro positive masculinity in that way.
Speaker: Very cool.
Speaker: Yeah, very cool.
Speaker: Yeah, because that's, you know, I feel like everybody that I talked to about exit about, you know, what I'm up to, everybody recognizes the need for parallel institutions.
Speaker: Yes, there, there, there is nothing additional interesting to be said.
Speaker: about the failures of the existing.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: That's why like every tweet that points out the logical inconsistency, it's just like nobody cares anymore, dude.
Speaker: We all know they're hypocrites.
Speaker: Do something productive instead of just whining about the fact that they're inconsistent.
Speaker: We get it.
Speaker: Build something instead.
Speaker: And like, you know, I try not to be too dogmatic about it because like there's still people that need to be talked to.
Speaker: Of course.
Speaker: And it's so tempting because it feels so good.
Speaker: And it's so frustrating that they're so inconsistent.
Speaker: I get it.
Speaker: I'm still guilty of it.
Speaker: But do something too.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You got to do both.
Speaker: You got to have.
Speaker: And the former just to me is no longer particularly interesting.
Speaker: It's not.
Speaker: I just don't find it fun anymore.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So when you're taking stock of what we're trying to build and where the direction things are going, are you anticipating sort of catastrophic failure and we have to be prepared for that?
Speaker: Or are you sort of like, I want to be a light in this sort of long, slow decline situation?
Speaker: Part of me feels like I wish we had the luxury of catastrophic failure because that would actually wake people up.
Speaker: But I feel like actually one of Satan's best tactics is to convince us that that's what it's going to be.
Speaker: And so if it's not there yet, we're still okay.
Speaker: We could still be asleep.
Speaker: We could still just go along to get along.
Speaker: And so I feel like it's going to be a long, slow decline until that ceases to lose its effectiveness.
Speaker: And then that's when the catastrophic failure is going to come.
Speaker: And sadly, it still feels like we're a long way from that, which...
Speaker: from a reframe perspective is also really good because that also gives us a much longer runway to build up a counterculture.
Speaker: And maybe this is, you know, my whole like punk rock roots from high school and my early twenties, but I spent most of my formative years being involved in an anti-mainstream counterculture and feeling very much at home and a part of that and really kind of loving the
Speaker: what it felt like to be an insider that's an outsider with the rest of the world.
Speaker: And there's a lot of power in movements like that.
Speaker: And so if we can do something like that, but it's based on things that are good and true and beautiful and noble, as opposed to just ugly and anti and counter, then that's, that's what I want to be a part of.
Speaker: And I want as much of a runway to help build that as I possibly can.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And that goes back to what you were saying about running away versus running toward.
Speaker: If you're running away,
Speaker: You're running away.
Speaker: You can go anywhere.
Speaker: Yeah, it doesn't matter where you go.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: And I feel like a lot of our guys, people that are sort of sympathetic to us,
Speaker: we don't have the luxury of like a shared narrative.
Speaker: It's just, we all hate the same thing.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And you can't like, I mean, there's an extent to which it's a big tent, right?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But as far as coordinating what to do, even within like our little Latter-day Saint sphere, it's sort of constant schism because there's, there's, there's constant like small differences in philosophy and, and we haven't really like,
Speaker: coalesced yet so the task of kind of building those institutions building consensus and like this is what we are affirmatively about right that's what's ahead and and and i feel so you're talking about like what can i build that that other people can be part of because i've kind of made i've kind of made my nest you know and yes and i'm gonna be okay
Speaker: A lot of what I'm seeing in exit is, you know, there are guys there that are trying to get out of their situation.
Speaker: There are also a ton of guys who are like, look, I know how to start a business.
Speaker: I know how to live an expat life.
Speaker: I know how to, you know.
Speaker: take care of myself kind of under any circumstances.
Speaker: I have a, I have the software job that's remote.
Speaker: So if I get fired, you know, whatever, I'll go work for some guy that makes lug nuts in Milwaukee and I'll be his day scientist.
Speaker: And it doesn't matter.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: And there's a huge appetite on both sides.
Speaker: There's, there's the appetite to get out and is the appetite to help guys get out.
Speaker: So, so it's, it's really encouraging to see it's a way of taking that negative and making it a positive.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Because what we what we share is, yes, we oppose this and we want to get out.
Speaker: But we're but we're framing that as we want everybody to to be strong, professionally and personally robust to this.
Speaker: Yeah, it's that I because how often how often do we find that you pull guys out of Babylon and then just leave them in the desert?
Speaker: And that's really not that much better.
Speaker: So we got to build we got to get them to the promised land.
Speaker: We got to get them to where.
Speaker: you know, things can actually be better.
Speaker: And that's a particular place.
Speaker: And there is a path to get there.
Speaker: And we have to, we have to establish that because yeah, it is good to get out, but not if you're just going to wallow and waste away in the desert.
Speaker: And that's so much of what we see is so many of these countercultures or these people that hate the same things that we do.
Speaker: They also hate a lot of the things that we love, or I hate a lot of the things that they love.
Speaker: And I don't want to be, I don't want to be wandering the desert with them any more than, than I want to be in Babylon with them anymore either.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You're going to stay in Utah.
Speaker: For now, it feels like we're supposed to be here.
Speaker: We may end up going up to Eastern Idaho or going out somewhere else.
Speaker: But for now, yeah, we're good in Utah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Cool.
Speaker: You've talked a little bit about being kind of the only zealot in the room.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Can you talk a little bit about that and sort of how that feels and maybe what you're trying to do about that?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I'm really grateful that I've got a solid group of guys in the neighborhood and in the ward.
Speaker: who get it.
Speaker: And a lot of them don't even agree with me on everything, but they're at least gung-ho about what their ideas are.
Speaker: And they're zealous, like there's actual energy for building something good as opposed to so much of, and we do, we live in a fairly, I wouldn't say we're in like a super ritzy area, but
Speaker: You got to be making six figures are pretty close to it to be able to be in our neighborhood and it's most of the wives get to stay home as moms and there's a lot of kids and so most of the families are doing relatively well.
Speaker: And that can be
Speaker: breed a lot of complacency.
Speaker: Like the stereotype of the suburbs exists for a reason where the guy works his data job or his software developer or his marketing job.
Speaker: And then he's just more interested in fantasy football or Netflix, or maybe if he kind of fits some of the masculinity stereotype, then he's about bacon and barbecue.
Speaker: But when it comes to like really pushing and growth from a physical aspect, from a spiritual aspect, from a networking aspect,
Speaker: There are plenty of times that I will make a comment at a neighborhood barbecue or in church on Sunday, and you can kind of feel the air go out of the room where everybody's just like, you're intense, dude.
Speaker: And you can get self-conscious about that because you don't want to be the only one who's like, you know, putting on the war paint and going into battle by himself.
Speaker: But at the same time, I've also found that if you do it and you're still friendly and you still are charismatic, you genuinely like, and I do, I genuinely like the vast majority.
Speaker: I can't think of very many people in my neighborhood that I don't really legitimately like.
Speaker: And then that can kind of rub off on them or it's like, yeah, Tanner's intense, but he's likable and maybe there's something to this too.
Speaker: Yeah, there's one of the pitfalls of being weird
Speaker: and countercultural is that it can breed a lot of contempt and that's not, I don't think that's good for anybody.
Speaker: And, and I think it's appropriate to be honest about like the isolation that you experience without, without like, you know, these guys are all stupid and they don't know they're not apathetic or whatever.
Speaker: It's, it's, I get that I'm extreme.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And, and, and it would be so cool
Speaker: if you could just hand it to them and show it to them.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And, and they would get it.
Speaker: And I, I wonder a lot about what that means when, when I'm the only one who gets it.
Speaker: Like, I don't think I'm particularly special, but, but like, I can't help thinking that this thing that I see is special.
Speaker: And so, right.
Speaker: Like, come on, see it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Or not even that you don't see it because there are a lot of guys who do see it because I get, you know, I get comments all the time after a lesson that I teach where it's like, really love your take on this, really love your approach on this.
Speaker: It's like, yes, thank you.
Speaker: Will you also make those comments and will you vocalize this and will you get on board with this as opposed to just appreciating it from afar and being aligned from afar, but also like.
Speaker: get in on this with me too.
Speaker: So I'm not the only idiot that's waving his flag around here about this right now, but you know, give me, give me a little bit more support, but that also makes it easier for other guys who are on the fence to kind of go, okay, it's not just Tanner.
Speaker: That's the one who's doing this, but there's, there's a little bit of social proof in that too.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: There's a, what is it?
Speaker: The, the, you're not a leader until you got one follower.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: You heard that.
Speaker: So like, it's, it doesn't, it doesn't become a thing until if you're all, if you're all alone,
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: It can be interesting, but it's not.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You don't want to be the one weirdo that's dancing at the wedding.
Speaker: Like you got to get, you got to get a few people in there doing it with you before it actually turns into a thing.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: So you talked about sort of bacon and barbecue.
Speaker: How do you separate and tease out the sort of like masculinity as consumption thing that we see a lot of from like
Speaker: Because your business is you're going to help people buy the right things and wear them correctly.
Speaker: How do you separate that from them and be like, we're not going to grow beards and throw hatchets and drink IPAs and like, you know, there's
Speaker: Do you get what I'm getting at here?
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: Which I actually love having a beard and throwing hatchets, by the way, we may end up doing, we're redoing our backyard.
Speaker: So we may do ax throwing targets back there, but no, I think that there's no, I understand what you're saying.
Speaker: And I think a lot of it, what it comes down to is in this idea with, with clothing a lot, it's a really good example of it where most people get clothing backwards.
Speaker: And this makes sense when you're a teenager, which is one of the most formative times when you like really understand that clothing matters and it sends all these signals, you know,
Speaker: are you the jock?
Speaker: Are you the skater?
Speaker: Are you the nerd?
Speaker: Are you the whatever?
Speaker: But what most people do is that they consume things that give them an identity.
Speaker: It's I'm an Apple or I'm an Android or let's talk all about Game of Thrones or whatever else because my consumption of this thing is what makes me interesting and my ability to talk about my consumption of this is what makes me likable and what makes it so that I can relate to other people.
Speaker: And so it's taking the consumption as the way to create the identity
Speaker: Whereas what you really need to do is you need to create who you are and then use the things that you consume as a way to supplement that or as a way to express it or as a way to share that or something else.
Speaker: And so clothing is this way where I don't buy clothes from the idea of maybe I would be really cool if I wore this because there's a guy in the magazine that looks really cool wearing this, even though it doesn't fit me or my lifestyle or my ideology or anything else.
Speaker: It's who am I?
Speaker: What is the best version of me look like?
Speaker: What are my goals?
Speaker: What are my aspirations?
Speaker: What are my core values?
Speaker: And how can I articulate that through my clothing?
Speaker: And so masculinity, when you can look at it through that, like, please, by all means, barbecue, eat bacon, grow a beard, throw axes, do all that stuff.
Speaker: But don't think that that means that you are now a man and you don't have to actually be proactive about anything else.
Speaker: You don't have to create anything.
Speaker: You don't have to take social risk or spiritual risk or financial risk.
Speaker: You don't actually have to lead your family.
Speaker: You don't have to do all the hard things that come.
Speaker: You just get all the trappings of what this kind of like boomer version of masculinity is.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: So that leads into kind of my last question, which is, as you contemplate the future and the way things are headed, how are you acting as a leader with your wife, with your kids?
Speaker: What are you trying to prepare them for?
Speaker: What are you trying to build with them?
Speaker: What's working?
Speaker: One of the okay so there's two things that we're trying to do here.
Speaker: The first one is help our kids get more oriented toward us than they are toward their peers and that doesn't mean that they can't have friends they do and they've got great friends, but if their primary.
Speaker: impetus for identity is what their friends will approve of, then it's the blind leading the blind and that becomes a real problem.
Speaker: And that's, I don't know if that's how it was for you, but that's how it was for me.
Speaker: I very much rejected my parents because I was more interested in and involved in my friends.
Speaker: And this is like a very 20th and 21st century phenomenon.
Speaker: And that kind of creates this anti-traditionalism.
Speaker: And this is why every decade we have a brand new culture that springs up from scratch because you've got a new generation that throws the middle finger to the one that came before them and tries to create their own culture.
Speaker: Which is not inevitable.
Speaker: And it's not been going on since the Stone Age.
Speaker: No, no.
Speaker: This rebellion and everything of teenagers is not a, this is not a normal thing.
Speaker: It's normal from our very limited perspective, but it's not a guaranteed thing, right?
Speaker: And so that's the first thing that we're trying to do is help them get oriented towards us, towards their grandparents, towards aunts and uncles, towards their friends' parents that are aligned with us on a lot of these things.
Speaker: And then helping them orient towards each other as well, that you take care of your younger siblings, that it's not just,
Speaker: the kids in my same age group.
Speaker: And those are the only opinions that matter to me.
Speaker: And part of that for us is that we have to actually be aspirational as parents.
Speaker: One of the reasons why I was so interested in my friends was because all of my friends' dads were losers that I didn't want to be because fatherhood and adulthood meant working a job you hate, getting fat, not being able to do cool stuff anymore, having kids that didn't respect you and a wife that wasn't attracted to you.
Speaker: And so why would I want to give up?
Speaker: the awesome aspects of being a late teenager or in my early twenties, when that's, what's waiting for me on the other side of a mission or the other side of marriage or the other side of adult responsibilities.
Speaker: And so what, what our job is, especially as fathers is not to be cool in the way that our kids are cool.
Speaker: It's not the like, Hey, I'm the cool dad.
Speaker: I'm going to come smoke weed with you and that stuff, but it's making fatherhood look like it's something that's actually very desirable and very
Speaker: enjoyable and very fulfilling and something that you want to be welcomed into the world of manhood and fatherhood.
Speaker: And it's my job as a dad to make it that way so that my son wants to be that and that my daughter's one of the merry men who feel that same way.
Speaker: 100%.
Speaker: 100%.
Speaker: Couldn't agree more.
Speaker: This has been a fantastic conversation.
Speaker: I really appreciate you taking the time.
Speaker: So is there anything that our guys can check out from what you do, stuff you're working on?
Speaker: I know it's Chess Magazine.
Speaker: What else?
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So, oh man, you guys, I've got so many things going.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Chess Magazine is that you can check out if you're interested in the spiritual stuff.
Speaker: I've got a podcast myself called Spiritual Arson.
Speaker: We do new episodes every Monday.
Speaker: It has a very specific Latter-day Saint bent, but a lot of guys who are not members of our particular faith really love it and get a lot of value out of it.
Speaker: Really, when it comes to social media, because this is where I talk about all this stuff,
Speaker: I'm most active on Twitter and Instagram.
Speaker: And so with both of those, it's at Tanner Guzzi.
Speaker: And I would love to engage with you guys there.
Speaker: And I'm also part of Exit.
Speaker: I'm part of the Slack channel and everything else.
Speaker: And so I'm not as active on there.
Speaker: But if you've got specific questions or topics that you want me to bring up, then I'm happy to post that stuff within the group for you guys who are paid and part of it too.
Speaker: Exit is at patreon.com slash exit underscore org.
Speaker: Our Twitter account is exit underscore org.
Speaker: Check us out.
Speaker: And thanks for coming by, Tanner.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely, Ben.
Speaker: Thanks for having me on, man.
