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EXIT Podcast Episode 02: Tanner Guzy
475 Plays3 years ago
Tanner is a founding member of EXIT and an expert in content creation and online entrepreneurship. After being doxxed in 2011 and frozen out of a career in talk radio, he built a style coaching and mentorship business, Masculine Style. We discuss:
- surviving the first few weeks after getting doxxed
- rhythms in generating and marketing your content
- keeping the lights on while you build your business
- building an affirmative culture, rather than just criticizing The System
- being an aspirational figure for your kids
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Humor
00:00:17
Speaker
Hey everybody, welcome to the Exit Podcast.
00:00:19
Speaker
This is Dutch Bennett.
00:00:20
Speaker
I am joined here by Tanner Guzzi.
00:00:23
Speaker
You're not a real doctor.
00:00:27
Speaker
They're going to be so mad.
00:00:30
Speaker
Yeah, every time somebody calls me Mr. Bennett, I like to get theatrically upset with them.
00:00:35
Speaker
Did you know the number of years I went to school to earn this title?
00:00:38
Speaker
Thank you very much.
00:00:39
Speaker
Royal Belize Veterinary Academy or whatever it was.
00:00:43
Speaker
I always make up a ridiculous
Early Career and Challenges
00:00:45
Speaker
school.
00:00:45
Speaker
Tanner is an old pro in this content business and in mentoring and coaching.
00:00:53
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.
00:01:12
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.
00:01:27
Speaker
Cool.
00:01:28
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.
00:01:39
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.
00:01:50
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.
00:01:57
Speaker
But the ideas that were related to the differences between men and women and hypergamy and all this other stuff still all applied.
00:02:06
Speaker
And there was a lot of validity.
00:02:07
Speaker
And so I was writing a blog to try and suss that out.
00:02:09
Speaker
Yeah.
00:02:11
Speaker
At the same time, this was about a year or two when all this kind of fell out after I'd gotten divorced.
00:02:19
Speaker
And my ex-wife and a bunch of her family had written a bunch of things online accusing me of adultery.
00:02:25
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...
00:02:33
Speaker
of the recession at the time.
00:02:35
Speaker
And so they found me in contempt of court and I served 48 hours in jail.
00:02:40
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.
00:02:49
Speaker
My ex-wife and all of her family started railing on me and I served a little bit of time in jail.
00:02:53
Speaker
So it was summer of 2012 and
00:02:57
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.
00:03:07
Speaker
I wasn't super active on social media.
Social Media and Public Perception
00:03:09
Speaker
And so there was nothing to combat that from a positive perspective.
00:03:13
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.
00:03:23
Speaker
And so it was a
00:03:24
Speaker
There's a pretty, pretty bad scratch on the record for me with that.
00:03:28
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.
00:03:36
Speaker
You have to you have to be less incendiary in order to get them to come after you.
00:03:40
Speaker
Right.
00:03:40
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.
00:03:47
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.
00:04:01
Speaker
And just because she liked the tweet, she's now under fire.
00:04:04
Speaker
Like it's insane what the level of totalitarianism that we're dealing with as far as people's attitudes about stuff.
00:04:10
Speaker
And so I had a lot more wiggle room back then than what you guys get to deal with now.
00:04:15
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.
00:04:24
Speaker
Right.
00:04:25
Speaker
Yeah.
00:04:25
Speaker
And you have much more of a network to tap into.
00:04:27
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.
00:04:41
Speaker
Yeah, there were influencers, but you had to be in the
00:04:43
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
00:05:06
Speaker
I don't think I saw a ton of social fallout, which I'm grateful for.
Career Setbacks and New Paths
00:05:10
Speaker
My family knew the whole story.
00:05:11
Speaker
My friends knew the whole story.
00:05:13
Speaker
The ones that had already kind of separated or dissipated because of the whole divorce and everything else were already gone anyway.
00:05:19
Speaker
And so I didn't deal with a lot of social fallout.
00:05:21
Speaker
But from a professional standpoint, absolutely, because nobody would hire me.
00:05:26
Speaker
I was stuck working my same crappy like $13 an hour loan officer job, even though I had
00:05:33
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.
00:05:43
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.
00:05:51
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.
00:05:56
Speaker
Yeah.
00:05:57
Speaker
Yeah.
00:05:58
Speaker
Um,
00:05:59
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.
00:06:08
Speaker
And so it felt almost good to kind of have my ships burned for me.
00:06:14
Speaker
Yes.
00:06:15
Speaker
Yeah.
00:06:16
Speaker
So where were you headed?
00:06:17
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.
00:06:25
Speaker
And so I had worked for a local station.
00:06:28
Speaker
I had been...
00:06:29
Speaker
an intern on a show.
00:06:31
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.
00:06:39
Speaker
And that very quickly fell apart.
00:06:40
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.
00:06:49
Speaker
I hadn't.
00:06:51
Speaker
I was very frustrated because I was a year out of college and
00:06:54
Speaker
And opportunities weren't panning out the way that they could have been or should have been.
00:06:59
Speaker
And so there was that kind of one pie in the sky aspiration.
00:07:05
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,
00:07:13
Speaker
It didn't matter what my experience was.
00:07:15
Speaker
Nobody would touch me on it.
00:07:17
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.
00:07:31
Speaker
I would have made less money than I am right now.
00:07:33
Speaker
And I would have been beholden to somebody else.
00:07:35
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
Transition to Entrepreneurship
00:07:40
Speaker
for me.
00:07:40
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, there's definitely an element of, like, it's a very challenging environment.
00:07:47
Speaker
I was told that English, you know, was a useless credential, which is perfectly accurate.
00:07:53
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.
00:08:01
Speaker
And so like, I think talk radio is similar, any kind of radio is very, very precarious.
00:08:07
Speaker
professionally.
00:08:08
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.
00:08:19
Speaker
Okay.
00:08:19
Speaker
And like working
00:08:22
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.
00:08:30
Speaker
But if you're willing to run a landscaping business, you know, the sky's the limit.
00:08:33
Speaker
You can make a lot of money and there are men who make a lot of money doing that.
00:08:36
Speaker
Yeah.
00:08:37
Speaker
Right.
00:08:37
Speaker
And so you kind of, you kind of have to be cut loose to make, to make those things work.
00:08:42
Speaker
work, whether you're willing to do that for yourself or, or, or have it done to you.
00:08:47
Speaker
Exactly.
00:08:49
Speaker
Yeah.
00:08:50
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.
00:09:04
Speaker
Yeah, the psychological aspect of it was pretty hard.
00:09:07
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.
00:09:18
Speaker
And then I log in one morning and I've already got 1300 hits.
00:09:20
Speaker
And it's like, holy crap, what happened?
00:09:23
Speaker
I'm thinking it's some other like big Manosphere blog that's posted something and I'm getting excited.
00:09:28
Speaker
And you scroll down on your WordPress stats and you see that the main refer is feminist Mormon housewives.
00:09:35
Speaker
And part of me gets excited because I'm so I was, you know, I hadn't even written this.
00:09:38
Speaker
I hadn't done any content on this blog for a while.
00:09:40
Speaker
I'd already moved over to writing masculine style and doing that pseudonymously just under the moniker masculine style.
00:09:46
Speaker
But I would still check in on comments and some of this other stuff within Mormon men.
00:09:50
Speaker
And I'm thinking, sweet, like this is going to be really entertaining to watch them rant and rave.
00:09:55
Speaker
And then they just full on like are naming me and they're they're talking through everything.
00:10:00
Speaker
And it like I remember feeling all that the wind just go out of my stomach like I lost my breath on it.
00:10:06
Speaker
It was like, whoa, holy crap.
00:10:08
Speaker
This is not the Internet anymore.
00:10:09
Speaker
This is very real.
00:10:11
Speaker
And there were three or four days.
00:10:13
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.
00:10:22
Speaker
And it's not the anticipation, like the excitement.
00:10:24
Speaker
It's just the terror of it where it's like, what's happening?
00:10:28
Speaker
And my whole world feels like it's about to fall apart and collapse on me.
00:10:32
Speaker
Not sleeping great.
00:10:34
Speaker
you know, like you're dealing with all these physiological effects.
00:10:37
Speaker
And then it started to feel like it would kind of ebb down and you would get pulled out into some normalcy.
00:10:42
Speaker
Like I would go play Halo or I would do stuff with my wife.
00:10:45
Speaker
And then you get reminded of it and you just get pulled right back into it again.
00:10:49
Speaker
And so it's this up and down and up and down in this roller coaster for a couple of weeks.
00:10:53
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.
00:11:02
Speaker
And now what?
00:11:03
Speaker
Like that's it.
00:11:04
Speaker
I just went through the thing that I was, one of the things I was most afraid of.
00:11:07
Speaker
And here we are.
00:11:08
Speaker
Like my wife still loves me.
00:11:10
Speaker
My family's still on my side.
00:11:11
Speaker
I've still got good kids.
00:11:13
Speaker
You know, like none of these things are, you're not nearly as fragile as you think you are.
00:11:18
Speaker
And yes, it absolutely sucked from a job perspective, but that led to better opportunities.
00:11:23
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,
00:11:29
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.
00:11:34
Speaker
Right.
00:11:35
Speaker
And then you go, okay, like I've been there, done that, and it's not that big of a deal anymore.
00:11:39
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.
00:11:48
Speaker
Like, let's really see what we can do with what this potential is now.
00:11:51
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely.
00:11:53
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.
00:12:00
Speaker
Like I was just not, not breathing.
00:12:06
Speaker
Breathe, breathe, breathe.
00:12:06
Speaker
Yeah.
00:12:07
Speaker
Like it was, it was, you know, you can kind of make yourself manually need to do that.
00:12:13
Speaker
Yes.
00:12:14
Speaker
And it, but it was like that all the time.
00:12:16
Speaker
I was having to manually breathe.
00:12:17
Speaker
Yeah.
00:12:17
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.
00:12:25
Speaker
Yes.
00:12:25
Speaker
Like my, my teeth are just so tight.
00:12:28
Speaker
So it, yeah, it's, it's a very intense physical experience.
00:12:32
Speaker
And, and from the beginning, like, so I had the vision of exit the day I got fired.
00:12:38
Speaker
Right.
00:12:39
Speaker
I, it like snapped into place and I was like, yes, I know exactly what I'm going to do.
00:12:44
Speaker
And so intellectually, spiritually, I was,
00:12:48
Speaker
Okay.
00:12:49
Speaker
But your body doesn't know all that.
00:12:52
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.
00:12:59
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.
00:13:09
Speaker
This was the first time in my life I ever felt like I actually had enemies.
00:13:12
Speaker
Right.
Building a Business and Family Support
00:13:13
Speaker
And so it was the first time that that physiological fight or flight response actually feels justified in turning on.
00:13:20
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.
00:13:27
Speaker
They're not just mad at you.
00:13:28
Speaker
They're not just being...
00:13:30
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.
00:13:39
Speaker
And most modern men don't experience that.
00:13:42
Speaker
And so it takes a real physical toll on you.
00:13:44
Speaker
The first time you go, okay, this is, this is an actual thing.
00:13:47
Speaker
There are people who want to see me hurt.
00:13:49
Speaker
Yeah.
00:13:50
Speaker
And they don't care if it's my kids.
00:13:51
Speaker
Nope.
00:13:51
Speaker
Like it's, it's a, that's how bad they want to hurt you.
00:13:54
Speaker
Exactly.
00:13:55
Speaker
And there's an element of like,
00:13:58
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.
00:14:06
Speaker
And in this situation, we're kind of like, who even are these people?
00:14:10
Speaker
Who are they connected to?
00:14:12
Speaker
Right.
00:14:12
Speaker
Like how deep does it go?
00:14:14
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.
00:14:22
Speaker
and how far they could potentially take it.
00:14:24
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.
00:14:30
Speaker
You're having to go to bed
00:14:32
Speaker
with the tiger in the jungle.
00:14:34
Speaker
You know that it's out there.
00:14:35
Speaker
Danger is now real.
00:14:36
Speaker
It's not a make-believe thing.
00:14:37
Speaker
It's not a fairy tale.
00:14:38
Speaker
Danger is real.
00:14:39
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.
00:14:46
Speaker
It's pretty easy to find out information, enough information that they can come physically do something.
00:14:51
Speaker
And there are people who have a desire to do that to you.
00:14:53
Speaker
No, it was so, uh, they released my address and there were two young guys.
00:14:58
Speaker
So we live way down a gravel driveway in the middle of
00:15:01
Speaker
no place.
00:15:02
Speaker
So nobody has any reason to be on your property.
00:15:05
Speaker
Exactly.
00:15:05
Speaker
Or anywhere near it.
00:15:06
Speaker
There were two guys who were walking back and forth down my driveway.
00:15:11
Speaker
And my wife starts to just sob because she's like, I don't know why they're here.
00:15:17
Speaker
I don't know what they want.
00:15:18
Speaker
And, you know, she, she was aware of what was going on.
00:15:20
Speaker
So I had to, I had to like get ready to go talk to these guys.
00:15:25
Speaker
Um, they, so they turned out to be, um,
00:15:29
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
00:15:53
Speaker
So yeah, it's not just reputational danger at this point.
00:15:57
Speaker
It's physical too.
00:15:59
Speaker
And you always hope that they're just talking.
00:16:04
Speaker
Yeah, but you never know because you deal with real crazies that do real stalker level stuff and they send you things and...
00:16:11
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.
00:16:19
Speaker
And so you can't expect them to be normal or sane in any other respect either.
00:16:24
Speaker
Yeah.
00:16:24
Speaker
Yeah.
00:16:25
Speaker
Or any of the people who listen to them.
00:16:26
Speaker
Yeah.
00:16:26
Speaker
Yeah.
00:16:28
Speaker
So tell me a little bit about when you started building this as a business.
00:16:33
Speaker
Yeah.
00:16:33
Speaker
Did you always have in mind that you were going to do that?
00:16:36
Speaker
Or was it sort of like, I've been doxxed and this is how I need to make my income.
00:16:40
Speaker
Yeah, it was a little bit of both.
00:16:41
Speaker
There was never self-employment always kind of mess with my head because I didn't see myself as self-driven or motivated.
00:16:49
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?
00:16:54
Speaker
Like go around and it's no, I need a boss.
00:16:56
Speaker
I need a schedule.
00:16:57
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.
00:17:02
Speaker
But I was when we had our first child,
00:17:05
Speaker
I was making $13 an hour.
00:17:07
Speaker
I'd spent all this time trying to find other jobs.
00:17:09
Speaker
Everything had already been kind of like dragged through and nothing was happening.
00:17:13
Speaker
And we knew that we wanted my wife to be able to stay home full time.
00:17:17
Speaker
And so it wasn't enough to be able to make ends meet.
00:17:19
Speaker
But thankfully I'd been writing masculine style for long enough that it, uh,
00:17:23
Speaker
that it had started to gain some momentum, I realized I was getting fairly consistent emails from guys asking the same questions.
00:17:30
Speaker
And so I put together like the cheapest coaching package.
00:17:34
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.
00:17:43
Speaker
Here's what patterns you should wear.
00:17:44
Speaker
Here's
00:17:45
Speaker
Here's this stuff that you should wear.
00:17:47
Speaker
And I remember the first month I made like 400, 450 bucks.
00:17:52
Speaker
And so it was enough to like close the gap and make ends meet.
00:17:54
Speaker
But we were, we were poor for a long time.
00:17:57
Speaker
We were really poor for a long time.
00:17:59
Speaker
I didn't immediately go from that into self-employment.
00:18:03
Speaker
I had about another year,
00:18:06
Speaker
year and a half that I was doing that.
00:18:08
Speaker
And I was still working on the blog simultaneously, still trying to supplement that income.
00:18:13
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.
00:18:20
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.
00:18:26
Speaker
And then I walk out four hours later with the job offer to come manage their shop for them, which is pretty fun.
00:18:31
Speaker
You know, and I remember even telling them it's like, you know,
00:18:34
Speaker
Just so that we go into this with like full transparency, go look me up.
00:18:38
Speaker
Here's here's my mugshot.
00:18:39
Speaker
Here's the story behind all this.
00:18:41
Speaker
And they're just like, yeah, no, we want you anyway.
00:18:43
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.
00:18:52
Speaker
Still have great relationships with them and, you know, still support the business as much as I can.
00:18:57
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.
00:19:11
Speaker
And in 2016, we'd had our third kid.
00:19:16
Speaker
And I remember doing my taxes and I had made $16,000 that year off of masculine style.
00:19:23
Speaker
Like nowhere near enough to be able to supplement what my other income was, nowhere near enough to be able to do anything.
00:19:30
Speaker
And so I remember coming home and telling my wife, it's like, look, this is where we are.
00:19:33
Speaker
And to her infinite credit, that's why one of the reasons why I love her so much.
00:19:38
Speaker
She says, this is great.
00:19:39
Speaker
I wish we would have done this six months ago.
00:19:40
Speaker
Let's go.
00:19:41
Speaker
You know, so she was like all ride or die and fully on board with it.
00:19:45
Speaker
And I remember there's nothing.
00:19:46
Speaker
There's nothing like that.
00:19:48
Speaker
There's nothing.
00:19:49
Speaker
She is on your team, man.
00:19:51
Speaker
And that she believes that you're actually fully capable.
00:19:53
Speaker
She's willing to put her entire comfort, her life, everything in your hands and say, you can do this.
00:20:00
Speaker
And I'm going to not only do that with me, but I'm going to do this with our three kids.
00:20:03
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.
00:20:08
Speaker
I mean, you want to, you want to, you want somebody to light a fire under you, right?
00:20:11
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.
00:20:28
Speaker
You feel like Superman when you get that kind of support from a spouse.
00:20:31
Speaker
It's phenomenal.
00:20:33
Speaker
Yep.
00:20:35
Speaker
And so you just made the jump.
00:20:36
Speaker
Yeah, we just made the jump.
00:20:38
Speaker
And it was, you know, there were a couple months that it was really hard.
00:20:41
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.
00:20:49
Speaker
And within my second year, I was already doubling what my income was at the previous job.
00:20:54
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.
00:21:02
Speaker
Wow.
00:21:03
Speaker
Yeah.
00:21:04
Speaker
So massive blessings from from following that prompting and taking that jump.
00:21:08
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?
00:21:19
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.
00:21:34
Speaker
Like my technical skill within my industry, within clothing and everything else grew massively when I spent that time.
00:21:43
Speaker
And it also allowed me to really flesh out and better understand what my philosophical approach was and what I do.
Finding Market Fit and Content Strategies
00:21:49
Speaker
in that regard.
00:21:49
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.
00:22:02
Speaker
Interesting.
00:22:03
Speaker
Yeah.
00:22:03
Speaker
Okay.
00:22:04
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?
00:22:18
Speaker
No, it wasn't.
00:22:20
Speaker
I remember that first year I released an ebook and that didn't do very well.
00:22:25
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.
00:22:36
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.
00:22:45
Speaker
And so I would get like,
00:22:47
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.
00:22:55
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.
00:23:02
Speaker
But.
00:23:03
Speaker
That was when I found out that my audience was totally the wrong audience.
00:23:07
Speaker
I had spent all this time building an audience on YouTube.
00:23:10
Speaker
I built it up to nothing massive.
00:23:11
Speaker
I think it was like 20,000 subs at the time.
00:23:14
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.
00:23:23
Speaker
And so I did sales call after sales call after sales call.
00:23:27
Speaker
And very rarely would I get anybody who actually signed up.
00:23:30
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,
00:23:46
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.
00:23:55
Speaker
And so that first year, about six, eight months in is when I made this hard left.
00:24:00
Speaker
And I remember talking to one of my buddies where he said, give yourself permission to just take a month off of YouTube.
00:24:06
Speaker
Don't make any videos go all in on Twitter.
00:24:08
Speaker
And I tripled what my previous month's income was just because of that.
00:24:11
Speaker
And so we've been up and running ever since then.
00:24:13
Speaker
Yeah.
00:24:14
Speaker
And what do you think, what do you think makes that difference?
00:24:16
Speaker
Is YouTube younger or, or what's going on there?
00:24:18
Speaker
I think it's younger.
00:24:19
Speaker
I also think that it's, I don't, I don't sell to style guys.
00:24:23
Speaker
I don't sell to guys who are interested in style.
00:24:25
Speaker
They, they don't need me or they're not interested in me or a lot of them are cheap.
00:24:29
Speaker
What I do is I sell to guys who are interested in self-development or in personal development.
00:24:37
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.
00:24:48
Speaker
And so maybe this style thing can give me a similar benefit.
00:24:51
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.
00:24:59
Speaker
And as a platform, at least then, now it feels like there's more and more of that on YouTube.
00:25:04
Speaker
And so it may be time to start pursuing that again.
00:25:06
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.
00:25:16
Speaker
Yeah.
00:25:17
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.
00:25:33
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,
00:25:41
Speaker
It's not about me, right?
00:25:43
Speaker
It's about this group of guys that are- Exactly.
00:25:45
Speaker
Yeah.
00:25:46
Speaker
They're not here for the Bennett experience.
00:25:47
Speaker
They're here for the community.
00:25:48
Speaker
Yeah.
00:25:49
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely.
00:25:50
Speaker
So I'm finding as I'm starting out that exit touches all of my preoccupations.
00:25:56
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,
00:26:06
Speaker
things are falling apart and we got to get out.
00:26:09
Speaker
Like, there's not like a reform platform for any of this.
00:26:14
Speaker
It's, you got to get out.
00:26:16
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?
00:26:28
Speaker
This is what we're doing.
00:26:30
Speaker
Sign up, you know, kind of make the pitch.
00:26:33
Speaker
How hard is too hard to shill?
00:26:35
Speaker
Yeah.
00:26:35
Speaker
Yeah.
00:26:36
Speaker
What's your experience on that, man?
00:26:39
Speaker
That's one of the things that's so funny, because even like nine years in, I still struggle with this.
00:26:45
Speaker
I still struggle taking pictures of myself for Instagram, and I still struggle with how much I should actually be promoting like
00:26:51
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.
00:26:59
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.
00:27:15
Speaker
And the more you do that, the better you get.
00:27:17
Speaker
But at the same time,
00:27:19
Speaker
You have something of value to offer to people.
00:27:22
Speaker
And there's nothing wrong with actually explicitly saying, I can help make your life better by doing this.
00:27:27
Speaker
And if you're interested in that, here's how you can learn more about it.
00:27:31
Speaker
I've gotten to the point where I'm actually working with a business coach right now.
00:27:34
Speaker
And one of the things that we've started doing is
00:27:36
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.
00:27:45
Speaker
And then the next week, it's all about the lead magnet to the to the mailing list, which is my archetype quiz.
00:27:50
Speaker
And then the following two weeks, it's all about just coaching directly.
00:27:53
Speaker
And you kind of you just have to embrace that this is part of running a business.
00:27:56
Speaker
It's a marketing aspect of running a business, just like any other business.
00:28:00
Speaker
has a marketing component of it too.
00:28:02
Speaker
And I think that this is where a lot of guys don't see the kind of success that they should.
00:28:07
Speaker
And this is for your guys who are already in the process of building a side hustle.
00:28:12
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.
00:28:15
Speaker
But if you treat this like it's a hobby, it will pay
00:28:20
Speaker
you treat it like a legitimate business, then it will be you like it is a legitimate business.
00:28:26
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.
00:28:42
Speaker
It's not just talking to cool dudes on a podcast or getting together on a Slack channel.
00:28:46
Speaker
Just like for me, it's not taking pictures of myself
00:28:48
Speaker
and posting it like there's so much more to it than that to actually turn it into a real business.
00:28:53
Speaker
Absolutely.
00:28:53
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.
00:28:59
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
00:29:13
Speaker
60 of my best guys and we're going to get that guy a job.
00:29:15
Speaker
Like we're going to, we're going to provide that value.
00:29:17
Speaker
A hundred percent.
00:29:17
Speaker
Totally.
00:29:18
Speaker
I will make sure that it's worth it to everybody who's involved.
00:29:22
Speaker
Yeah.
00:29:22
Speaker
And like, so, so the, the, the value proposition part of it,
00:29:29
Speaker
is not at all difficult for me to pitch.
00:29:33
Speaker
It's more just like fatigue.
00:29:35
Speaker
Like, am I just sort of beating the drum too much?
00:29:39
Speaker
Right.
00:29:40
Speaker
So that's, it sounds like you're still kind of feeling that out.
00:29:44
Speaker
But as far as generating content, your rhythm for a blog post, a podcast, this, that,
00:29:55
Speaker
How do you set that rhythm?
00:29:57
Speaker
And have you found that like you've had to accelerate that or decelerate that over time?
00:30:02
Speaker
Is it kind of always more contents better?
00:30:04
Speaker
Yeah, I've been I've been all over the place with this.
00:30:07
Speaker
I have had times where I've done daily emails for like a six month stretch.
00:30:11
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.
00:30:18
Speaker
I've had other times where I only produce content when I feel like it.
00:30:21
Speaker
And so my mailing list will be dormant for like six months.
00:30:25
Speaker
And then finally I get back into it.
00:30:27
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.
00:30:38
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.
00:30:44
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
00:30:55
Speaker
I love this style stuff.
00:30:56
Speaker
I also get really sick of talking about only that all the time because I have more to offer the world.
00:31:00
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.
00:31:10
Speaker
then I'm still creating content.
00:31:12
Speaker
I'm still making people aware.
00:31:13
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.
00:31:24
Speaker
Well, I'll say this.
00:31:27
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.
00:31:36
Speaker
It is interesting to,
00:31:38
Speaker
to me, to the extent that it plugs into all of this bigger picture stuff.
00:31:43
Speaker
Like there are guys who care about that on like an instrumental level.
00:31:46
Speaker
Like, like, you know, I have this goal and I want to achieve this goal and it'll help me achieve it.
00:31:51
Speaker
For me, the appeal is that it, it fits into a larger sort of philosophy.
00:31:56
Speaker
So, so yeah, I definitely, uh,
00:31:58
Speaker
can attest to that.
00:32:00
Speaker
It makes me more interested in kind of that.
00:32:02
Speaker
Exactly.
00:32:03
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.
00:32:07
Speaker
They're the ones that I have the most fun with.
00:32:09
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.
00:32:18
Speaker
Like that's a whole different, that's a whole different game.
00:32:21
Speaker
And I don't, I don't like playing that game anymore.
00:32:23
Speaker
Yeah.
00:32:23
Speaker
And so it did.
00:32:25
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.
00:32:39
Speaker
And now I get to do cool shows that a lot of times.
00:32:43
Speaker
they don't want to talk about style at all.
00:32:45
Speaker
They want to talk about fatherhood.
00:32:46
Speaker
They want to talk about my entrepreneurial journey.
00:32:48
Speaker
They want to talk about masculinity.
00:32:50
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.
00:32:56
Speaker
Yeah.
00:32:56
Speaker
And so I, I get much more of a,
00:32:59
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.
00:33:08
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
Time Management and Family Priorities
00:33:23
Speaker
stuff again.
00:33:23
Speaker
You make it new.
00:33:24
Speaker
Exactly.
00:33:25
Speaker
Yeah.
00:33:25
Speaker
Yeah.
00:33:26
Speaker
So when you are scratching your head about, I need to make some content, what am I going to say?
00:33:31
Speaker
What am I going to talk about?
00:33:32
Speaker
Do you have any tricks for like how you develop ideas or, or is that kind of when the muse descends?
00:33:39
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?
00:33:48
Speaker
And is there a way that I can apply it to style?
00:33:52
Speaker
Is there a way that I can apply it to this?
00:33:54
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.
00:34:00
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?
00:34:07
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.
00:34:13
Speaker
And I found that that's what makes life really interesting.
00:34:16
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,
00:34:24
Speaker
are not domain dependent in, okay, I learned this thing about clothes, but it stays with clothes.
00:34:28
Speaker
No, how does that apply to the way that I talk and the way that I communicate?
00:34:31
Speaker
How does it apply to the way that I perceive my relationships with other people?
00:34:34
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.
00:34:45
Speaker
And so don't be domain dependent or one dimensional with that stuff.
00:34:48
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.
00:34:53
Speaker
Yeah, I like that.
00:34:54
Speaker
Kind of lean into what you're, to where your brain is already at.
00:34:59
Speaker
Yeah.
00:35:01
Speaker
Okay.
00:35:01
Speaker
From a time management perspective, do you feel, so a challenge for me, I've never been good at managing my time.
00:35:08
Speaker
And like, while I now have way more drive than I ever did in wage work, I
00:35:15
Speaker
still am like, okay, I'm constantly thinking about what I what's next, what I got to do, what I gotta do.
00:35:21
Speaker
So do you have any secrets for how you how you became more effective at managing your time as an entrepreneur?
00:35:27
Speaker
Like, how do you get good?
00:35:29
Speaker
Yeah, I don't do, the only time management that I do is actually from a limited perspective.
00:35:34
Speaker
Clients can only book calls with me between 11 and three, Monday through Thursday.
00:35:40
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.
00:35:46
Speaker
is we take Fridays off to do stuff.
00:35:48
Speaker
Like I take long weekends so I can do stuff with my kids.
00:35:51
Speaker
This winter, it's all just going to be skiing every Friday.
00:35:53
Speaker
We're going to do that.
00:35:54
Speaker
Sundays are a no-go zone whatsoever.
00:35:57
Speaker
Like I don't respond to clients or talk to anybody about work stuff on Sundays.
00:36:01
Speaker
I'm really consistent about...
00:36:04
Speaker
lifting Monday, Wednesday, Friday, my friends come over at 730 and we do that.
00:36:08
Speaker
And my evenings are very kind of sacred.
00:36:10
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.
00:36:19
Speaker
And so we need to do weekend calls.
00:36:20
Speaker
But for the most part, time management is more on the limitation of it.
00:36:25
Speaker
And then what I found is really nice is that means that the time that I do have
00:36:31
Speaker
really kind of fills up.
00:36:32
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.
00:36:40
Speaker
And I'd run out of things to do within an hour and a half.
00:36:42
Speaker
But I felt like I needed to be there for eight hours.
00:36:44
Speaker
And I had to signal to my wife that I'm working hard for eight hours.
00:36:48
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.
00:36:59
Speaker
I can be more involved as a father.
00:37:01
Speaker
I can be more involved on projects with people in the neighborhood.
00:37:04
Speaker
I can do a lot of other things because I'm not trying to fill 40 hours.
00:37:07
Speaker
I have no idea how much time I've spent working this week.
00:37:10
Speaker
I've in no way considered that.
00:37:14
Speaker
I just try to think about the tasks that I need to get done or the calls that are booked.
00:37:18
Speaker
and being able to take care of things that way.
00:37:20
Speaker
Yeah.
00:37:20
Speaker
Okay, good.
00:37:22
Speaker
Because that seems way easier for me to get my head around than trying to sort of regiment.
00:37:28
Speaker
Oh, totally.
00:37:29
Speaker
And you'll have you'll have push weeks where I remember like my first six months, it really did.
00:37:34
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.
00:37:45
Speaker
You have these kind of like crunch weeks or you develop a whole new program.
00:37:48
Speaker
You have to record the videos and you have to do all this stuff like you have major crunches.
00:37:51
Speaker
But it's easy when you know what you have to do.
00:37:53
Speaker
Exactly.
00:37:54
Speaker
And it doesn't feel like it's just logging time.
00:37:56
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.
00:38:01
Speaker
So I'm doing four hours of work this week.
00:38:04
Speaker
And maybe a few things like I could throw up some quick Instagram stories or bang out a quick
Expanding Influence and Cultural Narratives
00:38:08
Speaker
email.
00:38:08
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.
00:38:13
Speaker
And that's just as good as well.
00:38:15
Speaker
Yeah.
00:38:18
Speaker
I think I'll feel more comfortable with that when all the bills are paid.
00:38:22
Speaker
It helps when the money's coming in already, for sure.
00:38:26
Speaker
Right, right.
00:38:27
Speaker
But I'm taking real serious stock of what I would need to cover the bases.
00:38:36
Speaker
And it's not much.
00:38:39
Speaker
I don't have a lot of expensive appetites.
00:38:42
Speaker
And the way that I've seen this thing grow
00:38:45
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.
00:39:04
Speaker
And, and, and so is my wife, which is fantastic.
00:39:07
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.
00:39:16
Speaker
Let's talk about what's next for you.
00:39:19
Speaker
What do you feel like is a level up for you professionally, personally?
00:39:25
Speaker
Where are you trying to go?
00:39:25
Speaker
This is a fun question because this is the first...
00:39:32
Speaker
I don't want to go anywhere else.
00:39:34
Speaker
I like where I am.
00:39:35
Speaker
I really love my lifestyle.
00:39:37
Speaker
I make good enough money that we can live the life that we want.
00:39:40
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.
00:39:50
Speaker
I really enjoy the things that I get to work on.
00:39:53
Speaker
And at the same time, when I spend time with my other friends who are doing even more things, you know,
00:40:03
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.
00:40:14
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.
00:40:26
Speaker
I can have deeper networks that I can plug other guys into.
00:40:29
Speaker
I can help shape culture
00:40:31
Speaker
in a way that there is legitimate subculture that can help catch people when they fall through the cracks of mainstream culture.
00:40:37
Speaker
These are all things that I'm capable of doing if I apply myself more and I need to do that.
00:40:43
Speaker
And I feel more of an obligation to do that than a desire to do it, but it's there.
00:40:48
Speaker
And so that's the next question is, how do I figure out what that looks like?
00:40:52
Speaker
Is there a way that I can do that from a pure style perspective?
00:40:55
Speaker
Or does that involve blowing chest magazine up into something else?
00:40:58
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.
00:41:08
Speaker
And how do you do it by helping young guys appreciate it?
00:41:10
Speaker
How do you help dads get better at it?
00:41:12
Speaker
But I don't know what the answer to that question is.
00:41:15
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...
00:41:24
Speaker
I was born with five talents.
00:41:26
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.
00:41:36
Speaker
So I still have to keep reinvesting that and keep redoing, rebuilding and redoing more.
00:41:41
Speaker
Otherwise I'm going to be held accountable for that.
00:41:42
Speaker
I'm not, I'm not going to like how that feels.
00:41:45
Speaker
Yeah.
00:41:46
Speaker
Tell me about the vision for chess.
00:41:48
Speaker
What's the story there?
00:41:48
Speaker
How'd you get started?
00:41:50
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.
00:42:02
Speaker
One of the most consistently frustrating things is it's really easy to know what it is that you're opposed to.
00:42:09
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.
00:42:16
Speaker
And it's stupid because there's a big difference between like running away from something and running toward something.
00:42:24
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.
00:42:35
Speaker
And you can't go back to the past.
00:42:36
Speaker
We're different people.
00:42:37
Speaker
We've gone through different experiences and culture was never supposed to be stagnant anyway.
00:42:41
Speaker
You're supposed to build upon it.
00:42:42
Speaker
And so chess was very much
00:42:44
Speaker
this idea of we can create a platform
00:42:48
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.
00:42:55
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.
00:43:09
Speaker
Pay these guys for this stuff.
00:43:11
Speaker
Get involved in doing this stuff yourself.
00:43:12
Speaker
If you like this guy's art style, but you have a different tweak on it,
00:43:15
Speaker
explore that and let us give you a platform to be able to do something like that too.
00:43:19
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.
00:43:31
Speaker
And so it's more about being pro what we want as opposed to being anti what we're opposed to.
00:43:37
Speaker
And so we're trying to create something that is very pro positive masculinity in that way.
00:43:42
Speaker
Very cool.
00:43:43
Speaker
Yeah, very cool.
00:43:44
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.
00:43:54
Speaker
Yes, there, there, there is nothing additional interesting to be said.
00:44:00
Speaker
about the failures of the existing.
00:44:02
Speaker
Right.
00:44:03
Speaker
That's why like every tweet that points out the logical inconsistency, it's just like nobody cares anymore, dude.
00:44:11
Speaker
We all know they're hypocrites.
00:44:13
Speaker
Do something productive instead of just whining about the fact that they're inconsistent.
00:44:18
Speaker
We get it.
00:44:19
Speaker
Build something instead.
00:44:21
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.
00:44:27
Speaker
Of course.
00:44:27
Speaker
And it's so tempting because it feels so good.
00:44:29
Speaker
And it's so frustrating that they're so inconsistent.
00:44:31
Speaker
I get it.
00:44:32
Speaker
I'm still guilty of it.
00:44:34
Speaker
But do something too.
00:44:35
Speaker
Right.
00:44:35
Speaker
Right.
00:44:36
Speaker
Yeah.
00:44:36
Speaker
You got to do both.
00:44:37
Speaker
You got to have.
00:44:39
Speaker
And the former just to me is no longer particularly interesting.
00:44:43
Speaker
It's not.
00:44:43
Speaker
I just don't find it fun anymore.
00:44:46
Speaker
Right.
00:44:46
Speaker
Yeah.
00:44:48
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?
00:45:01
Speaker
Or are you sort of like, I want to be a light in this sort of long, slow decline situation?
00:45:06
Speaker
Part of me feels like I wish we had the luxury of catastrophic failure because that would actually wake people up.
00:45:11
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.
00:45:18
Speaker
And so if it's not there yet, we're still okay.
00:45:20
Speaker
We could still be asleep.
00:45:21
Speaker
We could still just go along to get along.
00:45:23
Speaker
And so I feel like it's going to be a long, slow decline until that ceases to lose its effectiveness.
00:45:28
Speaker
And then that's when the catastrophic failure is going to come.
00:45:31
Speaker
And sadly, it still feels like we're a long way from that, which...
00:45:35
Speaker
from a reframe perspective is also really good because that also gives us a much longer runway to build up a counterculture.
00:45:44
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
00:45:59
Speaker
what it felt like to be an insider that's an outsider with the rest of the world.
00:46:04
Speaker
And there's a lot of power in movements like that.
00:46:06
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.
00:46:19
Speaker
And I want as much of a runway to help build that as I possibly can.
00:46:23
Speaker
Yeah.
00:46:23
Speaker
And that goes back to what you were saying about running away versus running toward.
00:46:28
Speaker
If you're running away,
00:46:29
Speaker
You're running away.
00:46:30
Speaker
You can go anywhere.
00:46:30
Speaker
Yeah, it doesn't matter where you go.
00:46:32
Speaker
Exactly.
00:46:33
Speaker
And I feel like a lot of our guys, people that are sort of sympathetic to us,
00:46:39
Speaker
we don't have the luxury of like a shared narrative.
00:46:42
Speaker
It's just, we all hate the same thing.
00:46:44
Speaker
Yes.
00:46:45
Speaker
And you can't like, I mean, there's an extent to which it's a big tent, right?
00:46:50
Speaker
Right.
00:46:51
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,
00:47:08
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
00:47:32
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.
00:47:39
Speaker
There are also a ton of guys who are like, look, I know how to start a business.
00:47:44
Speaker
I know how to live an expat life.
00:47:47
Speaker
I know how to, you know.
00:47:49
Speaker
take care of myself kind of under any circumstances.
00:47:51
Speaker
I have a, I have the software job that's remote.
00:47:54
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.
00:48:01
Speaker
And it doesn't matter.
00:48:02
Speaker
Exactly.
00:48:03
Speaker
And there's a huge appetite on both sides.
00:48:06
Speaker
There's, there's the appetite to get out and is the appetite to help guys get out.
00:48:10
Speaker
So, so it's, it's really encouraging to see it's a way of taking that negative and making it a positive.
00:48:16
Speaker
Right.
00:48:17
Speaker
Because what we what we share is, yes, we oppose this and we want to get out.
00:48:21
Speaker
But we're but we're framing that as we want everybody to to be strong, professionally and personally robust to this.
00:48:30
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?
00:48:37
Speaker
And that's really not that much better.
00:48:39
Speaker
So we got to build we got to get them to the promised land.
00:48:41
Speaker
We got to get them to where.
00:48:43
Speaker
you know, things can actually be better.
00:48:44
Speaker
And that's a particular place.
00:48:46
Speaker
And there is a path to get there.
00:48:47
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
Leadership and Authentic Masculinity
00:48:53
Speaker
away in the desert.
00:48:53
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.
00:49:00
Speaker
They also hate a lot of the things that we love, or I hate a lot of the things that they love.
00:49:04
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.
00:49:10
Speaker
Yeah.
00:49:11
Speaker
Yeah.
00:49:12
Speaker
You're going to stay in Utah.
00:49:14
Speaker
For now, it feels like we're supposed to be here.
00:49:17
Speaker
We may end up going up to Eastern Idaho or going out somewhere else.
00:49:20
Speaker
But for now, yeah, we're good in Utah.
00:49:23
Speaker
Yeah.
00:49:23
Speaker
Cool.
00:49:24
Speaker
You've talked a little bit about being kind of the only zealot in the room.
00:49:30
Speaker
Yeah.
00:49:31
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?
00:49:36
Speaker
Yeah.
00:49:37
Speaker
I'm really grateful that I've got a solid group of guys in the neighborhood and in the ward.
00:49:44
Speaker
who get it.
00:49:45
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.
00:49:50
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
00:50:03
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.
00:50:15
Speaker
And that can be
00:50:17
Speaker
breed a lot of complacency.
00:50:18
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.
00:50:25
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.
00:50:36
Speaker
But when it comes to like really pushing and growth from a physical aspect, from a spiritual aspect, from a networking aspect,
00:50:45
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.
00:50:59
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.
00:51:09
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.
00:51:21
Speaker
I can't think of very many people in my neighborhood that I don't really legitimately like.
00:51:26
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.
00:51:34
Speaker
Yeah, there's one of the pitfalls of being weird
00:51:39
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.
00:51:45
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.
00:51:58
Speaker
It's, it's, I get that I'm extreme.
00:52:01
Speaker
Yeah.
00:52:01
Speaker
Yeah.
00:52:02
Speaker
And, and, and it would be so cool
00:52:05
Speaker
if you could just hand it to them and show it to them.
00:52:08
Speaker
Right.
00:52:09
Speaker
And, and they would get it.
00:52:10
Speaker
And I, I wonder a lot about what that means when, when I'm the only one who gets it.
00:52:17
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.
00:52:24
Speaker
And so, right.
00:52:26
Speaker
Like, come on, see it.
00:52:28
Speaker
Yeah.
00:52:29
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.
00:52:38
Speaker
It's like, yes, thank you.
00:52:39
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.
00:52:48
Speaker
get in on this with me too.
00:52:49
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.
00:53:00
Speaker
That's the one who's doing this, but there's, there's a little bit of social proof in that too.
00:53:04
Speaker
Yeah.
00:53:04
Speaker
There's a, what is it?
00:53:05
Speaker
The, the, you're not a leader until you got one follower.
00:53:08
Speaker
Right.
00:53:09
Speaker
You heard that.
00:53:09
Speaker
So like, it's, it doesn't, it doesn't become a thing until if you're all, if you're all alone,
00:53:14
Speaker
Right.
00:53:14
Speaker
It can be interesting, but it's not.
00:53:16
Speaker
Yeah.
00:53:16
Speaker
Yeah.
00:53:16
Speaker
You don't want to be the one weirdo that's dancing at the wedding.
00:53:19
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.
00:53:23
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely.
00:53:25
Speaker
So you talked about sort of bacon and barbecue.
00:53:30
Speaker
How do you separate and tease out the sort of like masculinity as consumption thing that we see a lot of from like
00:53:40
Speaker
Because your business is you're going to help people buy the right things and wear them correctly.
00:53:44
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
00:53:51
Speaker
Do you get what I'm getting at here?
00:53:53
Speaker
Absolutely.
00:53:54
Speaker
Absolutely.
00:53:54
Speaker
Which I actually love having a beard and throwing hatchets, by the way, we may end up doing, we're redoing our backyard.
00:53:59
Speaker
So we may do ax throwing targets back there, but no, I think that there's no, I understand what you're saying.
00:54:05
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.
00:54:14
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,
00:54:21
Speaker
are you the jock?
00:54:22
Speaker
Are you the skater?
00:54:23
Speaker
Are you the nerd?
00:54:23
Speaker
Are you the whatever?
00:54:26
Speaker
But what most people do is that they consume things that give them an identity.
00:54:34
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.
00:54:48
Speaker
And so it's taking the consumption as the way to create the identity
00:54:52
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.
00:55:03
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.
00:55:18
Speaker
It's who am I?
00:55:19
Speaker
What is the best version of me look like?
00:55:21
Speaker
What are my goals?
00:55:21
Speaker
What are my aspirations?
00:55:22
Speaker
What are my core values?
00:55:23
Speaker
And how can I articulate that through my clothing?
00:55:27
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.
00:55:36
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.
00:55:42
Speaker
You don't have to create anything.
00:55:43
Speaker
You don't have to take social risk or spiritual risk or financial risk.
00:55:46
Speaker
You don't actually have to lead your family.
00:55:48
Speaker
You don't have to do all the hard things that come.
00:55:50
Speaker
You just get all the trappings of what this kind of like boomer version of masculinity is.
Instilling Values in Children
00:55:56
Speaker
Absolutely.
00:55:57
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?
00:56:10
Speaker
What are you trying to prepare them for?
00:56:11
Speaker
What are you trying to build with them?
00:56:13
Speaker
What's working?
00:56:15
Speaker
One of the okay so there's two things that we're trying to do here.
00:56:18
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.
00:56:32
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.
00:56:38
Speaker
And that's, I don't know if that's how it was for you, but that's how it was for me.
00:56:41
Speaker
I very much rejected my parents because I was more interested in and involved in my friends.
00:56:45
Speaker
And this is like a very 20th and 21st century phenomenon.
00:56:48
Speaker
And that kind of creates this anti-traditionalism.
00:56:51
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.
00:57:01
Speaker
Which is not inevitable.
00:57:03
Speaker
And it's not been going on since the Stone Age.
00:57:05
Speaker
No, no.
00:57:06
Speaker
This rebellion and everything of teenagers is not a, this is not a normal thing.
00:57:10
Speaker
It's normal from our very limited perspective, but it's not a guaranteed thing, right?
00:57:15
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.
00:57:25
Speaker
And then helping them orient towards each other as well, that you take care of your younger siblings, that it's not just,
00:57:31
Speaker
the kids in my same age group.
00:57:32
Speaker
And those are the only opinions that matter to me.
00:57:34
Speaker
And part of that for us is that we have to actually be aspirational as parents.
00:57:40
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.
00:57:57
Speaker
And so why would I want to give up?
00:57:59
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.
00:58:08
Speaker
And so what, what our job is, especially as fathers is not to be cool in the way that our kids are cool.
00:58:15
Speaker
It's not the like, Hey, I'm the cool dad.
00:58:16
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
00:58:24
Speaker
enjoyable and very fulfilling and something that you want to be welcomed into the world of manhood and fatherhood.
00:58:29
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.
00:58:35
Speaker
100%.
00:58:36
Speaker
100%.
00:58:36
Speaker
Couldn't agree more.
00:58:39
Speaker
This has been a fantastic conversation.
00:58:40
Speaker
I really appreciate you taking the time.
00:58:43
Speaker
So is there anything that our guys can check out from what you do, stuff you're working on?
00:58:48
Speaker
I know it's Chess Magazine.
00:58:50
Speaker
What else?
00:58:51
Speaker
Okay.
00:58:51
Speaker
So, oh man, you guys, I've got so many things going.
00:58:54
Speaker
Okay.
00:58:55
Speaker
Chess Magazine is that you can check out if you're interested in the spiritual stuff.
00:59:00
Speaker
I've got a podcast myself called Spiritual Arson.
00:59:02
Speaker
We do new episodes every Monday.
00:59:04
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.
00:59:13
Speaker
Really, when it comes to social media, because this is where I talk about all this stuff,
00:59:17
Speaker
I'm most active on Twitter and Instagram.
00:59:19
Speaker
And so with both of those, it's at Tanner Guzzi.
00:59:22
Speaker
And I would love to engage with you guys there.
00:59:24
Speaker
And I'm also part of Exit.
00:59:25
Speaker
I'm part of the Slack channel and everything else.
00:59:27
Speaker
And so I'm not as active on there.
00:59:28
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.
00:59:38
Speaker
Exit is at patreon.com slash exit underscore org.
00:59:42
Speaker
Our Twitter account is exit underscore org.
00:59:45
Speaker
Check us out.
00:59:46
Speaker
And thanks for coming by, Tanner.
00:59:48
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely, Ben.
00:59:49
Speaker
Thanks for having me on, man.