Self Optimization 3 Speaker Q and A Panel

what he represents is patriarchy we're here to do work as men as patriarchs there's nothing more natural than being a father welcome back to the 21 convention special patriarch edition of orlando florida 2019. the next presentation here is actually not a speech it's a workshop we've added workshops into the event that are private and exclusive for you guys this one happens to be in the conferences conference conference room itself it's going to be starring the one and only tanner guzy aj cortez and ed lattimore all returning speakers veteran in tanner's case to this conference to the 21 convention they're going to be talking to you guys about the three ps of stop top of optimization and an upcoming summit they have later this year without further ado please help me welcome aj cortez tanner guzzy and ed lattimore to the stage okay so now that all feels like nice and official let's again just enjoy this right because it is a workshop it's not a presentation but i want to give you guys a little bit of a background as far as why we're doing this why we wanted to work together for a workshop especially because these two basically came down for this you know it's not like you guys are speaking right um we've all interacted with each other quite a bit on twitter uh both what you guys see but then also quite a bit behind the scenes and it was february of last year that i first reached out to you guys right yeah yeah and we talked about if if there was something that we could do because we realize that the things that we focus on are so complementary and we've also realized that so much of what's really cool about our corner of the internet and especially our corner of twitter is that it's not just guys who are at the bottom trying to get to where they like themselves or why people like them and again there needs to be help for men who are like that there's nothing wrong with with being in that spot and trying to to get to a better position but a lot of times men kind of stall out there where they're not terrible they don't hate themselves therefore they think that they've arrived and that that's kind of it that's as far as they need to climb the three of us are very much more interested in this idea of becoming the best versions of ourselves of optimizing who we are and we all focus on different arenas within that that are very complementary so alexander obviously being a master when it comes to physicality fitness and everything that's related to that i will be talking about and i'll be happy to answer you guys questions about presentation and presence so whether that's style or the way that you communicate the way that you speak the language you use body language all those types of things and then ed is obviously the master of personal branding and so we're going to be diving in with that but like we said before i mean we don't want to just do another presentation we want to answer questions for you guys so do us a favor and tell us before we kind of turn it over to you tell us um where you're from and tell us your name and then we'll kind of dive dive into questions from there so you guys want to say anything before we jump in no no you did a great job okay sweet so who wants to start who can we help out with one of those three arenas okay okay sorry my name is jeff i'm from massachusetts awesome and i was planning on asking tanner privately but since uh this seems like a good opportunity i feel like my personal look is uh boring uh not enough fun lacks any edge i wear a lot of like business casual i think i need a new haircut okay stuff like that kind of stuff so what would you suggest for someone like me who um you know i live a pretty straight lifestyle like nothing out of control and uh i just feel like it's boring why do you want more edge or more personality what's what's the itch that doing that will scratch for you i don't know it just feels like an area i'm lacking like i said um i think one of uh my weaknesses and relationships is that it might be a little bit boring okay so so it's more about i guess is it more about the way that you present yourself to other people or is it more about the way that you see yourself and you don't like that the man that you see in the mirror looks boring and safe uh i have to say uh it's external i'll admit it's external i don't care personally okay so it is more about you presenting yourself to other people a certain way than necessarily how you see yourself correct okay interesting okay there are a lot of things you can do with this i would assume based on what you told me that you probably fall more within like the refined archetype right and so there's a lot of the tradition and everything that goes with that one of the easiest ways to be able to do that is like you said play with your haircut because there are a lot of things that are limited within a dress code and you guys can both kind of attest to this that you can still fall within the guidelines and the expectations of what's required within a dress code but by changing your posture by changing your body language even by like getting some combat experience by changing your grooming or those kind of things like it adds more of an edge to who you are and the way that you carry yourself and the way that you look and so none of that is necessarily a quick fix although i would say having a haircut that has a little bit more discipline and i'll be blunt with you the fact that you're starting to recede a little bit if you just get rid of all of it and you go totally clean shaven that's going to add a whole lot more edge than anything else that you can do the other thing that i would say is dialing in and tightening up your fit a little bit but it's not like you need to necessarily be dressing where you have more color or bolder patterns or you need to add accessories or anything else because it sounds like what you're after is uniqueness through more dominance as far as like that edge of masculinity as opposed to the playfulness of i'm fun or i'm an interesting character is that is that a fair assumption yes okay yeah so i would say start by changing your hair adding that as far as your grooming put on put on more size wear things that are a little bit slimmer that will accentuate the size you already have on and then start to carry yourself and even act with a little bit more authority and that will come across in your presentation a lot more than just necessarily going and buying a whole new wardrobe or accessorizing or anything else like that does that help it does you think i should completely remove the hair try it right try it i mean it always grows back you know and if you don't like it then there's still plenty of other things you can do with it being short and it's not like yours is so far gone it's really not that it's like dude you should have gotten rid of that a long time because it's not that but there is an edge that comes with that that you really can't get in a lot of other ways thank you cool okay guys who's next who wants some help besides them that's fantastic haley whiteboard my name is david is that coming through just speak up a little bit for us yeah okay my name's david i'm from jacksonville um i've been working uh i've lost about 30 pounds recently and i've been working really hard at losing that last like five pounds of fat i don't really see i have a i i'm struggling to um bring my abs through and to really like show the show much more definition with muscle i'm getting results but it's taken me like four months to lose a small bit of fat and so i'm struggling to get to go that last mile so what are what are my options here how long have you been dieting for say it again how long have you been dieting for pretty strictly for about six months you need to take a diet break so when you're talking about changing body composition this goes for obviously everybody the human body is not linear so it doesn't operate obviously a straight line where you're going to have you can create weight loss for a period of time which you've probably hit like for the plateau point where like i can't get rid of the last bit of fat what happens is as you diet for long periods of time is that your metabolism will slowly down regulate itself over and over and over again so what what that basically means is as your body keeps dropping fat and your calorie deprived states you're under you start like dieting is basically controlled starvation you're under eating you're under eating you're under eating your metabolism keeps making little drops and that makes a little drop and you won't notice this but you'll slowly reduce the amount of fidgeting that you do you'll take a few less steps a day you'll be a little less energetic and over time you can have a metabolic maladaptation happen you're starting metallic metabolism let's say it's 2500 calories at the beginning it could be 1800 calories six months later and then dieting becomes very difficult because then you're eating there's a very very small amount of food if this is let's say your first time ever dieting hardcore and you're trying to physically remake yourself you've hit the limit point for about how long you can diet hard what you need to do from this stage on is take three months eat at maintenance increase your training volume so just basically just train like a bodybuilder sets and reps heavy weight moderate weight light weight get in the gym as many days a week as you can do it for three months eat at maintenance and then start dieting again so you've been you've dyed it down this way and now we're going to reverse diet you back up to a normal metabolism like i said about three months and then at that three month mark then you'll diet back down again and that time you'll probably get that last bit of fat off of you but you'll be in a much better place metabolically the other factor with this um when it comes to this revealing abdominal definition or just muscle definition in general the bigger a muscle is the more definition there is to reveal uh for those guys this is like an either or scenario for those guys who naturally have abs they already know this because if they get leaner it's like oh abs if you don't actually have abs you need to treat your abs like a more basic treatment like any other muscle we have to hypertrophy them and get them thicker stronger and that means training them progressively with progressive resistance that means doing stuff like weighted crunches uh weighted twist movements doing things that really challenge the muscle to actually work and express strength uh a lot of times what guys do is they sort of go for those like the reps where it's like i'm gonna do this like 500 reps something like that that essentially just endurance training it's not getting the muscle to be any more prominent so you have to increase the loading increase the frequency of how often you train them let's say three four days a week and then obviously doing this in conjunction with the overall training you're doing do that for three months then start dining again you'll have a much different body this time around so i have a follow-up for that good by going back up to maintenance should he be going up to what the current maintenance is when his metabolism drops or okay not going back up to what maintenance would have been otherwise so hopefully you've been if you've been tracking your calories like this is why you have to use numbers for this kind of stuff because otherwise it's all shot in the dark if let's say you start at 2700 calories and now you're down to like 2 000 you'd shoot back up to let's say like 2500 so this is what a reverse diet is like you don't immediately add on 800 calories somehow your diet you add in like 300 for a month you add in another 300 then you add in 200. so then you have this you know sort of pyramid elevation happening oh perfect um and that's how you can avoid basically like the fear of the fat gain like if the fat comes back that's how you make that not happen so it's not like a case where you diet hard and then this like i said a thousand calories more like yeah that will yield fat gain if you do it slowly though you won't have that happen because you're titrating um the effect that way feel free to answer the question good yeah um oh uh my instinct is to just continue cutting calories and cut down start eating six seven hundred a day and do that for a while that's the the in cling that's always in the back of my mind is that definitively a bad idea yes great that's basically that that's basically girl dieting that that's that's what chicks will do or it's like i need to lose weight fast so they just starve themselves for like a month and they lose weight fast and they get hungry and like emotional and they're probably under fucked and then they eat their feelings and they go back up and wait so like there's this human instinct if you just like keep starving yourself i guess like it will just keep working what will happen is you'll see the surface get like soft small looking and still won't have abs and then metabolically you're willing to play you'll be in a place where your training will basically be doing nothing it'll just be like eating up muscle um and that's how people serve that's how people sometimes will diet themselves down to like a skinny fat state where like they die they dieted for too long yeah like i said like dieting is not something you can do you know forever cool okay guys who's next who's up so i uh like to play tennis so that's one way that gives me a good cardio and the second thing which i like to do is you know i should actually do more of is weight training but the question i have or you know the challenge i am facing is basically i uh lose motivation you know i mean at the beginning of the year january i'm motivated to work out in the gym three or four times a year but at certain point of time i you know i'm in midway through the year i start losing motivation towards working out in the gym but tennis is something which i'm you know particularly uh i carry it on because it's more fun it's social thing for me but what can i do some tips you can give me to sort of maintain my motivation on weight training i always call this motivation games um you know like on the psychological side i could tell you to like dive into your identity and like you know what is your vision of yourself and that could go on forever from the external motivational side there's two factors you need to say if you're going to do something you want to commit to it setting a goal like a concrete goal around what it is you're doing that is cliched but it does work you know very often times as a man you know as men like we all there's things we want to do i'd like to improve this part myself if you're not putting pressure on yourself where you have to keep yourself accountable it's probably not going to happen it's very nice to idolize and think that i'm internally driven and i don't need motivation everybody needs motivation on some level you know even your internal motivation is like your internal drive is motivation enough so creating a goal around your training that could be like something substantial working out with a partner not getting like someone to train with you you know whether it's personal trainer or a buddy that's very motivating because you know bros you have to be very cliche when you have a bro there that's you know watching your progress you're watching his progress again like you get that um you know sort of that fire going in you yeah the other factor that this goes into like this is the details of it depending upon how you're training if it's not that effective it's very easy to become demotivated from lack of results and that's something i see with a lot of older guys where they're still training how they learn to train 20 years ago in high school um you know or you know whatever it was like yeah let's say in college maybe and so you're doing these workouts and it's kind of working it's kind of not working you know maybe you're doing like damn like let's say three by five training which doesn't do anything for a lot of people um and you're expecting like this outcome to have happen and it's not happening it's like you know what like i'm not really feeling this now yeah had you trained effectively you might have gotten much greater results it's like you know what i like doing this and it's working so i will continue on doing it so like i mean the lack of motivation that i've seen in most people you know like i said it's either from lack of pressure or what they're doing just isn't working if you're getting a return on something there's usually an instinct to want to keep doing it because it's substantial you can see it if it's not happening at all like yeah anyone will want to quit something they feel like they're making no real progress yeah how fun would it be to play tennis if you sucked at it right i mean you wouldn't keep doing it if you didn't enjoy it and it's the same thing in the weight room where the better you get at it the more you enjoy going and then it's i mean i don't i'm certainly not at these guys level but i don't have to motivate myself to go to the gym i hate days when i don't get to go anymore because i enjoy it that much i assume that's the same for you guys too absolutely and and today i would add like uh just from what i can see just from what i can see uh back here like you don't look particularly like jacked or anything so my first thought is okay when you say you you stop keeping your motivation three or four months in it might be a little earlier or like what he's saying what you're doing is not that effective and that can be the first thing i hear is like i like tennis but weightlifting has kind of given me an issue is okay well tennis is the got this social component there's a competitive component and you need to make the workouts work with your personality like you know for me when i stop now i'm going to talk about boxing my my bad right when i when i stopped fighting the hardest thing for me to do to switch over to training was to find a way to get that that feeling of incremental improvement because like in the gym i can feel okay i worked my warm myself out i feel like i'm a little more coordinated how can i translate that feeling into the gym well i started tracking uh body fat and that's one of the reasons why i started while i started paying i paid to go to a gym that has access to a an in-body scanner so i could see and track what i was doing and then it turned into a competitive game for me and on top of that the other thing was like just going to the weight room was f and boring for me man like being in that place in that fitness environment there were guys to talk to and interact with so the motivation is not i mean the results are a big part of the daily part is you have to play to your personality if you're a social guard your athletic experience has come through competition and team sport you're probably going to hate the weight room when you first get started you're definitely going to hate running and like you know i'm not telling you to do cardio or not but those are solitary improvements in your fitness and that's not what you've gotten used to so you got to find a way to recapture that whether it's you know join and i'm telling you dude i go to this place here i am like like quite literally a professional athlete and they're freaking old ladies in there sometimes working out are guys that have never competed in life but you know what it is it's the social component for me it's like getting back in the boxing gym i'm not i'm not willing to put the investment in like a boxing gym anymore but that was very important to me when i got out of it once i figured that out it it turned into uh you know i'm going there waking up at five in the morning and getting in there and then i'm gonna work out you know again because not just because the trigger for what's enjoyable has changed is now i'm getting into the training so yeah work with your personality and like he said man track your goal whether it be you know okay man i put up my arms a little bigger um three pounds heavier in the morning not at night those kind of things you know you you follow those enough to bring motivation yeah you just got me thinking about this ed since obviously but you were you were our legitimate professional athlete and i've been watching you train you know sort of like your instagram you're hitting like certain strength goals doing certain things yeah and that's something that this actually speaks to the psychology of like you know masculinity what are your standards that you have for yourself across your life like are you even thinking those terms like if you were to go through like different categories of being where you have like your professional life your familial life you know your personal life you know tennis whatever do you have certain standards that you hold yourself to there are defined standards yeah that's something like with strength training that's like very the metaphor is very simple direct if you want to get in the gym and start training and motivate yourself let's set some strength standards yeah and like i've i've talked about many times on the email list where if you can hit certain markers which is with body weight with dumbbells with a barbell with bodyweight strength that gives you something to work towards and it's definable and you can reverse engineer that goal and then now when you're in the gym it's not just an arbitrary i'm here to work out yeah i'm here i'm here to train chest like no i'm actually working towards something if you hit that goal let's say you're you have you find your happy median point well then now you know you need to maintain that and you've also taught yourself how to systemize uh process towards a goal you'll pick something work it backwards and then you can carry over in other areas your life i think that's the thing that's why i harp on the physical side so often for men is that if you are in a place where you're trying to figure out like how you want to develop yourself what what standard are you holding this up to where the standards and that's a big question for a lot of areas for the weight room that's pretty simple yeah what do you squat what do you bench what do you deadlift how many pulses can you do how many push-ups can you do can you do dips these are very basic things and once you train at them and you're able to do them you reveal that capability in yourself you realize okay like on a very basic but very profound level if i set my mind to something and apply myself with action with physical force and i execute i can actually bring that to being i can make it happen so change is possible if i have a standard that i follow well then you know what what else can i apply standard to and then you start improving in other areas yeah exactly you create your own term momentum that way which is drive i do have a great inputs by the way so i'm gonna take a lot of takeaways i'll apply that the suppose social the competitive spirit but i do have a follow-up question so personally my goals are to lose at least you know five to about eight more pounds and become more leaner you know right now probably when i last checked i was at 14 body fat bring it down to about 10 percent and pack some muscles right so i've heard a little bit about intermittent uh you know fasting what's your take on that does it help i mean two meals a day with intermittent fasting you know i mean that's what i heard some of the you know youtubers talk about that so let's go first there's lots of uh roll with that so i mean for all you guys you know to make a general it's entirely possible to gain muscle and lose body fat at the same time that's totally if you're brand new yeah that's so it that's totally doable if you've if you haven't trained in a long time let's say it's been five years since you took the gym seriously if let's say yeah you're just overweight you know you know it and you want to start training again having the more body fat you have on you it actually gives you a metabolic advantage because you can keep gaining muscle for a while because the basically calories towards the muscle gain will come from the excess body fat now if you've been training for five years that like you're not gonna have that happen like it's gonna be more bulk cut comp scenario if you are a relative beginner though yeah you can get bigger and get leaner at the same time now where does intermittent fasting play into that intermittent fasting is not optimal for muscle gain so like for yourself if you're already playing tennis you already have a cardiovascular base i would i personally wouldn't recommend that you could do it and you might get leaner but the likelihood of you being more muscular it's pretty low you're going to be kind of a skinnier version of yourself with you know no real you know substantial muscle um you know what would be you know more advantageous in this basic would be to eat like an additional three meals a day high protein diet lift three or four times a week and eat at maintenance you know that's the other factor for someone that's um you know sort of like that in that in between zone if you eat at maintenance calories but you increase your protein intake to about one gram per pound of body weight or more you're going to gain muscle mass that's been clinically substantially proven many many many many times over um like and that's an issue for most people in general you know for a lot of guys they just undereat protein if you're on a high protein diet and you're lifting weights and you're not gaining any muscle mass either you're lifting terrible or you're lying about your diet like it's kind of like so it's always impossible for that to not work i've never gotta hear your hormones check yeah or you know maybe your testosterone is like in the tank that could that could be it so that was me yeah yeah so i mean that's another factor to that so you know intermittent fasting i would deem it like i airmen fast but i'm pretty happy with like my physique right now relative to what i do which is ballet where i can only be so big for it because otherwise you can't spin because you're too heavy um i use intermittent fasting to maintain my body weight by that percentage and i can drive that down you know but if i decide like hey man i want to get up to 220 i wouldn't be in run fasting i'd be eating three to six small meals a day and training to you know get bigger um and do it that way so you yeah i mean like the metaphor there like you always pick sort of the dietary model that is most effective for your specific goal if the goal is to get like leaner with muscles that's going to be sort of like that traditional like what i call a recomposition diet if the goal is literally just to lose body fat yeah that'd be your man fasting and if the goal is to obviously gain weight do what bro science has proven works a million times over small protein-rich meals and go lift yeah and and i'm going to add to that as a our resident bro science kind of apprentice doing a lot of experimentation on myself lately and one of the big things that i've switched to is intermittent fasting here's what i'll say about intermittent fasting one you absolutely need to get your maintenance calories are slightly below 10 percent is uh you know it's what's popular i guess and that seems to work if i think about my numbers and what i am yeah i'm putting away about 1800 calories in my if window most times here's the thing you're gonna be surprised how relatively difficult it is to get 18 to 2200 calories in in a in a six to eight hour window if you're doing it correctly like not eating garbage i mean eating good lean food it's going to be a challenge can it be done if you have the lifestyle for it i i you know i can eat whenever i want to so it wasn't really an issue once i figured out how much i needed to put away but if you can do it i i found and there's another thing you know from what when i looked at in the science i guess your body goes into a slightly ketogenic state after you haven't been you've haven't consumed anything for you know i think it's 12 hours maybe 14 or whatever and that's what a real benefit comes in so what i would do is i would intermittent fast at the the 14 or 15 hour mark i'd go do after already my weight lifted in the morning i'd go and do an afternoon cardio session and i got more out of the cardio because my body was primarily burning fat or so i'm assuming you know and at least the results show so we can we can go with that so iaf will lower body fat as far as keeping muscle goes it's funny uh because i have two things to show one where i wasn't doing intermittent fasting and eating clean and one where i was and my muscle gain was like nil i didn't lose any i didn't gain any but the body fat dropped on iaf when i was when i was spacing it out and training though today oh man i must have gained in one month i think my body fat percentage dropped almost three percentage points and i gained eight pounds of muscle and that's in and that's from eating about 2400 calories a day all clean mostly protein and and really just you know living in the gym so the tl dr to sum that up yeah if you if you want to lose body fat and you're content with where your muscle mass is right now i you're not going to be disappointed if you don't suddenly you know come out looking like papa or something yeah uh if for sure and on top of that from and this is un related directly to the question but the mental clarity you get not from like some magical chemical change that happens so apparently that happens but because of you not having to worry about meals uh is is really that's worth the wait and and goal to me so there's actually a good point there about you know when you gain more muscle mass eating you know the meals so there's something called positive nitrogen balance in the body and basically means that when you are consuming protein regularly your body has enough amino acids to continuously be building muscle if you're not eating protein regularly you'll be in a negative nitrogen balance um that's the reason why again bodybuilders will eat around the clock where it's like that seems like a lot of work like yeah it actually is a lot of work but your body can basically build muscle continuously 24 7. if you're only eating one meal a day like your your gains will be pretty marginal and there's also the fact that factor of what ed pointed out where trying to eat like 2 000 calories within eight hours is actually like really really hard if it's not if it's not terrible food um like i the only way that i'm able to do it like i have to i'll have to use protein shakes because otherwise it's like it sounds cool like oh i get to eat these great huge meals if you eat like a really big meal you're not hungry again for six hours let's say four six hours like oh i'm at the end of my window but then i need to eat another huge meal and then like try it and to add to that correct me if i'm wrong but like i think you get into a problem because the protein shakes somehow have an effect on your insulin levels uh so it makes it harder to burn fat if you're going to get that get that with protein shake the the thing with protein protein is protein is highly thermogenic so basically it takes about for every household phrases for every 100 calories of protein you ingest your body will absorb about 70 calories of usable energy from that so protein like the thermogenic value protein's like 20 to 30 percent like this the act of digesting it actually burns calories but that's also why if you eat like i mean okay your your your indian supreme steak eat chicken let's just let's just pretend jesus all right let's let's pretend you were sick and eat chicken um i lived india six months so nothing but love let's pretend like you're sticky chicken and you're really full of eating the chicken uh that's gonna take a while to digest so like dairy completely plant-based okay that's actually okay that's actually perfect because if you eat a plant-based diet your fiber intakes can be pretty high you'll stay full really long time so i mean like now that i know all this about you like i wouldn't recommend intermittent fasting for you but you probably end up really under eating and like i said you just end up like skinny fat indian so which you probably want to avoid here sir so i want to come back and add on to his question a little bit and talk about goals and motivation i have one goal and let's lose 100 pounds but i don't think about it like ever and it's i'm almost entirely habit driven did the sunrise i go to the gym did someone say my shirt fits like a tent then i go buy a new shirt and that's literally that's like everything is a habit and i'm wondering if i'm just missing an opportunity to go harder faster better think to to use the cliche that's floating around the internet right now it's just useful but it's turned into a cliche are you going to tell them to tell us on this no but no one's talking about it man now uh you need a system instead of a habit there's just there's no way around that because you know or not even it sounds like even a habit of making sure i hear this right that you you have the goal to lose the weight yeah but you only work on it when someone notices or some situation arises that points out you need to lose the weight that's the problem right let me say it a little differently so i came up with the idea that i needed to lose the weight and i just structured the habit and said okay i'm gonna do lifting three days a week cardio four days a week the other four and boom boom and then gone okay is it working to the point of where i'm blowing up my body we talked about that um and so uh you know it's it's that's really kind of the question is is i'm not revisiting the habit i just structured it and i'm executing the system and i'm not thinking about it at all and so i'm trying to figure out how often should i be thinking about what it is i'm doing intentionally in those sorts of things exactly this is this is a good thing that's a good question this is a good expression because like this is the like the dilemma between like systems versus goals like do you set goals or you create a system this has always been my argument that if you're going to create a system a system has to be oriented towards something you don't create a system arbitrarily that is like by definition if you just do arbitrary actions it's not a system so a system has to produce some kind of specific effect or outcome now taking that into account how often do you want to revisit the goal that you create the system for you in your case because we talked you know the other yesterday where it's like you've had some health ramifications from doing things where you're doing this is where comparing you know the goal versus the system you created versus like the time frame you're doing on that's where it's useful because then if you are overextending yourself or if you're underperforming you now have some sort of set of metrics you can follow um if you're just surface blindly following yourself through the process this is where guys will take themselves off a cliff because they never you know took a step back and considered like okay like where am i actually going this is this actually directed do i have like north star in place or it's taking me towards that goal or is am i going sideways i'm actually you know ending up in a spot where like i've actually now negatively impacted my health now i have to solve that problem you know so a system so every system is going to have those sort of like features and faults built into it where you'll have to course correct it every so often so like obviously it's very effective in the sense you've created these this habitualization that it's working like it is yeah but isn't working too well there is such a thing so yeah from stanford like what do you do with that this is where if whatever goal you set for yourself whatever system you create you always want to revisit it i'd say like i'm gonna say weekly but like monthly every so often have you know some sort of number in place let's say for weight loss like you know your body weight's going down okay like that's going down am i plateauing how's my health feel like this is like where i get into biomarkers to people like there's certain biomarkers you should all pay attention to as men yeah very things going well great if you're losing weight though let's say like your libido's dropping and you're feeling weak in the gym okay maybe we need to take a step back you're like you have your sleep is negatively impacted that's something to examine and then we can compare that with the data we have something from the habits uh yeah like you know there's a little complication to that but that's also how you're able to maintain progress long long term you know you know oreo had been a place where i've seen this happen for people they're very overweight where they try to lose body fat and it works but the way to lose body fat uh you know dramatically and the way to be healthy long term those are two different things you know it's not the same system so okay thank you for translating my question into the system no problem much better way of phrasing it thank you right here how do we get someone out there oh you already got one okay sorry dude sorry dude hey guys we've had some great examples talking about fitness the gym and applying that to become a better version of ourselves the three of you have a lot of skill mastery outside of the gym as well how do you take the discipline that you structure your routines and apply it to your personal branding apply it to your style and do that on a weekly basis you know that where we're essentially lifting weights one day we might be doing cardio the other day how can you help men and fathers have a better routine in that area and basically not skip leg day you want to start with personal branding uh sure so so one of the things that anyone who's followed me over the past two years sometimes even surprises me how much growth has occurred without a change in the uh the input of work the the output is increased and the input stayed the same and one of the things that i think has well too they work in tandem uh one i never forget why i'm in this position at all like why anyone even cares that i'm up here right i never forget that and i'm always grateful and i can always go out of my way to remember that each day i mean if my girlfriend was here she would tell you that on a at least five times a week if not seven days a week i'm talking about how much of a good day it is and for a practical application standpoint to your question this allows you to always be aware and intent and have a sort of intention of whatever you're going to do but not from a negative standpoint like what i what i thought his question was earlier using the link here i thought he was asking like how do i stay uh committed and had to to perform my actions with intention and have it turns out that you know that was the case but here uh thinking about that and using it the idea for me doing that is i want to stay aware of everything that i've done so i do keep the work consistent so i do continue to do what i've i've done and continue to have a positive connection with it and i guess i did you know kind of walk into the next thing which is i act with intention every day and it's easy to do that because i don't i don't feel like what i'm doing is works what i found is a very enjoyable way to exist i get to i tell people all the time now i'm i'm fortunate and that i get to make a living being myself just just straight up me for better or worse you know something good happens something bad happens i'm grateful that people care for whatever reason right and i can go and talk about that and teach from that and use that so i remember the positive impact that i'm having and how it's helped my life and i think if you can do that with any habit then then the habit becomes a system and it becomes really easy for you to just do it but even once when it gets to that point you still got to step back and go man i'm happy that i can do this i'm happy that i'm here i'm happy that i have you know like like you were saying i'm not a father you know tanner so i'll give his his uh perspective on that but if i was a father you know every every day i remember that i'm i'm so grateful to have a healthy kid that i get to rear and deliver my values to and that kind of thing and then at that it just becomes easy it puts everything in a positive way for me i've found that intentionality is not domain dependent unless we make it that way and it's it's a waste if we make it domain dependent where you get really good at something in the gym or you get very good at being intentional in your work and then you don't because you have these actions that you do that are intentional but underlying those actions are the principles and there's the whys and the hows and all these other things and it's a waste if we just keep this in one arena that we're really good at being intentional and then we don't take those same principles and apply them to different actions within different arenas that's one of the reasons why the three of us wanted to talk together is because we found in our own lives that that intentionality is not domain dependent i became a better father when i started going to the gym and i became a better businessman when i became a better father and i all these things if you're good at if you make intentionality a skill set then you get to apply that skill set to every other arena in your life that matters and so one of the reasons why we wanted to work together is because we can work with you guys and even as we're trying to answer these questions now is helping you see that if you are intentional and you develop that skill set in one arena that matters then it's like we were just answering over here you get good at being intentional and if you're good at being intentional then you want to do it more you enjoy it more you don't have to motivate yourself to do it anymore you find yourself doing it in all these different arenas and so that's when you really start to win that's when you get to this level of optimization and so get really good at being being intentional do it in arenas where you get really quick good feedback like fitness or appearance or something else and then the other thing is also recognize when you're able to go from this building mode into maintenance mode like for example with style i don't think about what i'm putting on every day any more than you guys do because i've developed i've gotten myself the level i want to be and i get to be on maintenance mode when i come to an event like this then i have to think about it a little bit further just like if you're getting ready for a fight or if you're getting ready for a performance or a show then you have to tweak your diet a little bit more but maintenance mode is infinitely easier you still get to maintain all those benefits and then take that skill of being intentional and apply it to the next arena so it's this virtuous cycle of getting better and better at more and more things while still maintaining what you're already good at and that's how you start to self-optimize so i'm gonna add to this a bit so my dad he's a he's a doctor and he didn't become a doctor until he was 47. so he's like pretty late in life he backs back we went back to school 40 40 47 graduate 47 so he's but he's in a 60s now he's been positioned for you know something about like 16 years roughly so something i always picked up about my father is that he has always had a very clear division of priority in what he does with his life and i've never seen him half-ass anything ever at all but he also does not do too many things so you know from a parenting standpoint one of the things i've seen working with parents is that i don't know what your situation is with you know your you your spouse your wife your kids whatever you know what that division of labor is but when you have clear let's say gender roles clear roles what the father does clear roles what the mother does you have a division of labor where you know who's taking care of what with kids that allows you to focus your energy better those things that are priorities to your role and what you're trying to take care of yeah what i've the case the situation i've seen working with parents is that people they'll they never have these conversations with their spouse whether they're together divorced and then it becomes a sort of mess where everyone's trying to take care of everything or no one's taking care of anything and then you fall into the state of perpetual you fall to the same perpetual reaction to your own reactions and then at that point trying to focus your energy focus it where you're basically trying to keep up with your own bad habits that were catalyzed you know let's say years ago and you know how do you even create a system out of that and then like that's why i collection of this like it's just pure case like it's like the mess of a life it's like well what should i start working on yeah you sure like mental review i'm like well everything kind of sucks right now so yeah then you hit that point you're like well what's the priority then oh jeez you're like okay let me figure myself out but then you you trying to figure that out for yourself also it's like well you know i need to figure that out with my wife or ex-wife whatever situation is oh damn there's another conversation i have to have you know how can you avoid all that since that's a lot to solve you figure out what's important to you what you need to be doing and then you make sure that you do only those three things each day and yeah obviously there's still going to be things that come up in fatherhood where like you're going to have to solve problems you don't expect to have to solve that's going to happen but now you're working from place to stability and you have a defined role you have to find roles that you're playing and you're not trying to fix your own problems while fixing your kids problems or fixing your wife's problems while fixing your marriage's problems which are affecting your kids problems yeah like what like that's like so he talks about the the virtuous cycle you have the psycho virtue you also have the cycle of this pure chaos yeah and that's all of your mistakes and lack of focus and lack of attention compounded on itself so obviously getting from here to there yes that does take time you know where do i think that starts for a lot of guys start doing push-ups you know like seriously because if you do only one thing consistently each day at least you have that stability with consistency and it's really hard to argue that dropping down the morning and doing three sets to failure well at least you're doing something the same way each day since there's nothing else in your life that you are doing the same except being consistently inconsistent with everything else hopefully that made sense awesome okay we had one over here okay okay i stole the mic sorry um come on i'm curious to know what you gentlemen see as you work with men who are building a brand or improving their appearance or physicality that are common and destructive uh mistakes or mindset errors that they make you know the proverbial one step back that we should all be thinking about wanting to avoid going forward i'll go first man people like forget that they have a valuable perspective i'm always tell people to tell your story because like i i could say something one thousand times and they could have heard it a thousand other times you know combined and it's how you say it and whether it be because of how you look or a specific experience or maybe they just caught on the right their time what you say has an impact and and prompts positive change in behavior and so what i see is people say oh you know no one's going to care what i have to say no one cares about my experiences whatever that side or the other and i'm like dude you you have to get rid of that mindset you become valuable partly because you start believing you are valuable you know impostor syndrome is what happens when people give you value and you don't believe you have it and then you run around thinking like oh who cares you know everyone's like well no we really care we want to hear it but you don't believe us you don't so you can't even deliver a great message i mean like like right now i mean whether you guys are bored as hell or having a great time i know what i'm saying is great right and i'm going to walk away feeling like i shared something positive and something constructed from my life and i see that every person i work with like everyone from from teaching them how to tweet to present themselves better or overcoming something in their individual lives people consistently consistently underestimate and undervalue themselves i see that exact same thing when it comes to style and presence and presentation most of the men that i work with one-on-one they diminish themselves they know that they don't dress or carry themselves or speak in a way that's poor or mousy or bad they just get to this point of being a safe neutral and they have a desire to get into the territory of being something stronger whether that's adding more edge to their look or anything else but there's a fear of the risk of trying and failing and it's the it's the flip side of the coin of this imposter syndrome where maybe people won't expect something of me that i don't expect that i don't expect to myself i'm not capable of it so that's where that imposter syndrome comes in and the other side of it is and at the same time they're also not going to see me try something and fail at it they're just going to see me as being effortless but not masterful and it's like we we desire effortlessness more than we desire mastery because there's not there's not risk that comes with that and so it's this i see those as two sides of the same coin and it's really helping men get enough confidence to be willing to take more risk whether that's with their branding whether that's with their physicality their presentation anything else and recognize that you are capable of handling that risk and even if you make a mistake and you fail the way that you respond to that risk is where your your confidence should come from that's where your power that's where your self-esteem should come from as opposed to the fact that you never fail therefore somehow that makes you a better person yeah it's a weird inverse of where our values should come from this this is a simple thing but the negative self-talk so everyone has a story about themselves that you reinforce in the course of your life you have yourself you have your beliefs you have the things you say to yourself you have that conversation you have with your mind that destructive mind you have that sort of you converse with um you know and it takes many forms it could be sort of like it could be a gremlin it can be a sort of devil it can just be what your father said to you when you're growing up the way you dealt with your mother but this sort of reinforces these conversations we have where you know from the very beginning we sort of set ourselves up to fail because we're framing our language and stuff away that's it's negative um yeah i mean it could be something very basic like i wanna go to the gym yeah i'm just gonna pick on you because i love indian people my girlfriend's indian so whatever um yeah so i've worked a lot i love indian clients and they'll have this belief they have where it's like oh you know i want to get bigger one get stronger but i'm just like i'm a skinny indian like brown boy like kind of bullshit and like like like bro like look at how you're talking to yourself yeah style guys the techie thing like i work a lot of tech guys where it's like you know it's so like the dorky look they wear a backpack they dress like they're still in college and they were they dressed shitty in middle school and they've been dressing crappy for 20 years it's like this doesn't doesn't have to be who you are the rest of your life you have this image that you've created about yourself that you know this is who i am and this is just how it is and you know i can't can i improve this much from this point i'm like let's back up like do you approach every area of your life this way no usually they have something where they've actually accomplished some level of um success okay what was your attitude towards that and usually it's a bit of a different attitude they were determined they want to do this they believe themselves all right is that that way of conversing with yourself is that something that could be carried over somewhere else a different part of your life and usually it is and if you're starting from nothing that's a bit of a different conversation you know maybe that's just let's just start with a physical because you have nothing else you've done if you're an older gym and though your father you've done things that you're good at you had kids you have a son you have a daughter you're probably doing something right you can be proud of so can you take that can you take that positivity and can you reframe how you speak to yourself that way you probably can yeah and that's where i i see the big change in mindset comes from because you're starting to change how you write your story as you live your life daily and that's kind of what ed does daily where every day is a good day it'd be hard for someone to come to his life and make him feel bad because he already has a way he writes his story the way he writes his tweets where it's positive it's uplifting so all right we got time for one more come on there you go yeah these guys are waiting well oh snap through the clock surprise all right so my name is jeremiah i'm from tulsa oklahoma um i'm a chiropractor i got a bunch of kids as well but i would like to uh one things i'd like to do is have a little bit better presence when i'm when i'm at work dealing with patients also be able to get a little more respect from my family members so i was going to ask what uh with the realms of branding style and fitness what things do you would you suggest that i emphasize in my life why would you say your presence lacks uh you know i think that honestly i'll rephrase it because i'm curious about something okay uh how do you see yourself like how do you want to be seen as a better way because saying that lacks it like you may feel like your presence is lacking but maybe it's not so i'm curious how like where the phrase is how do you want to be seen how do you think you should be seeing and why and how you want to be seen will not be how people are seeing you that's what we want to look at how do you want to see i'd like to be seen as an authority like when i got out of school i grew a beard so that i could look five ten years older commend a little bit better respect that type of thing sometimes i feel like like i'd like to have the authority in that interaction and sometimes it's there a lot of times it isn't though do you feel like you've earned the authority like are you an authority within your business yeah okay so it's not a matter of mastery or competence it's a matter of communication of that competence right okay okay um yeah the first thing you know okay so i'll i'll hit this and we'll do this quick just from a style perspective but one of the things that i teach guys from that perspective is you need to understand how an authority within your particular field is perceived by who your niche is by who your audience is because an authority that is a doctor he's going to have a lab coat an authority in the military is going to wear certain clothes and be perceived a certain way an authority who's a teacher over small children there are different ways that we expect authority to look within different fields and that will be different with you as a chiropractor it will be different with you being in oklahoma than if you were in la and it's going to be different even based on how you differentiate yourself from your competition within your field and within your city and so trying to pinpoint what authority looks like and then finding a way that you can communicate that while still being authentic to you because if you do it at the expense of what you feel authoritative in then that's when you feel like you're playing dress up and that's when you feel like you're a poser and it kills all that credibility it kills all that authority so it has to be a balance of both what the tribe what your audience sees and expects authority to look with and what you see so that when you see yourself in the mirror you see a man that's worth that authority you're killing that imposter syndrome yourself so from a style perspective those are the two things that we would need to look at and what i would do if you were a client is we would actually like get down into the nitty gritty of what that actually looks like and come up with the solution together so from a style perspective that's how we would build that yeah we have about one minute left so i'm gonna talk to you afterward since i actually have a lot to say about this question yeah the short version would be yeah this goes from the physical standpoint just myself um when you're training in the gym you have to visualize what you're turning into and there is such a thing as training yeah i mean you're not doing exotic exercises but when you're doing something like a bench press you're doing something like upper body movement you're training shoulders you want to visualize power within yourself where you can express that and that's something that you know combative stuff brings out where it's like you have to just hit this back you have to hit it hard and there's a level of aggression and level of intent with that so if you're if i was training in the gym i'd be asking like you know you want to improve your presence you want people to take you more seriously let's take this seriously right now i want you to apply intense focus to this and have good posture during these farmers walks and walk upright and when you grip this grip it with authority i mean this is what training does for you because it allows you to take these qualities that you want to live out you can actively apply it to what you're literally moving to how you're moving that's why you know that's why when we see someone that's like a warrior when we see someone it's like a navy seal when we see someone that we know has physically gotten their body and mentality into a state we know there's something there that they've done that's mental and physical you know and like with the physicals we usually focus on you know like why do guys like to bench press because men like having big chests why do men's like why is a man like having big chests or shoulders it does because well women like it if you're a guy with shoulders do men take you more seriously yeah they do if you've got huge arms or do you get you know no looks from people yeah you do is that shallow on one level it is by another level it's because we know that perception appearance is powerful power so yeah that's yeah let's talk afterwards after okay guys so we're out of time but one of the things that we want to talk to you guys about unless you wanted to answer something really oh no i was going to give you like a real quick thing and i'll talk after right so [Laughter] yes you're excused so one of the things that comes with uh being respected and having that authority in our presence if you look at every single one of the the speakers here and what i love you know you can tell kind of by definition because we're the ones that put our faces out there and take the attack we're not afraid to be disliked and i find a lot of guys who have problems projecting authority and gaining respect there you probably play nice at the very least play more cooperatively then it sometimes would be beneficial for you to get what you need and where you need to go and so people you know it's unfortunate but we take kindness as weakness and a lot of times that causes everyone like if you feel that way in work and home uh and likely somewhere social even though you didn't talk about that you know what we're working on if you feel that way you you almost certainly give ground too easily about what you what you know from the the respect that you are from the training you got for work and and the bunch of kids and the family put together from what you know and you likely you know probably give a little too much ground i could be completely wrong but my first intuitive i'm gonna shoot out an answer before we gotta go uh analysis is that so don't be afraid to be uh the bad guy so i love that you finished off that way because this ties in perfectly too you guys have noticed that we've had to do quite a bit of back and forth and we've been able to answer some things relatively specifically but we've also had to answer quite a bit in platitudes or kind of general ideas because each one of your situations and scenarios is very different which is why we originally came up with the idea of doing this self-optimization summit because we know from our own experience that just being able to talk about things in general doesn't always it can get trapped in this world of theory as opposed to actually turning into transformation and actually becoming a better version so what we're doing is we're putting on a summit or it's actually more of it's more of a lived-in experience we're doing it the week of november 4th through november 10th we're doing it at a house in hollywood we've got about a dozen spots and you guys are gonna get to come spend six days with us so you'll be working out with the three of us having alexander help you out every morning with workouts you'll be going through very specific stuff related to style and body language we'll be talking about personal branding whether that's online or even how you brand yourself in relationship to who you're working yeah who you who you're with at work or anything else and we may even be able to do a little bit of combat training you may have to spar all three of us so if you guys are interested in learning more about that come up and talk to one of the three of us we'll give you some more details and uh yeah we expect this to fill up relatively quickly that's why we wanted to talk about this with you guys first because we know that you're kind of the man you're the kind of men who have already put skin in the game you've already put your money where your mouths are and you're really interested in not just thinking about this theoretically but actually applying something so if you're interested come talk to us about it especially before we do kind of our own big initial announcement but thank you guys for being here with us we know there were some other great workshop options awesome you made it back so thank you guys for your time yeah all right thank you what he represents is patriarchy we're here to do work as men as patriarchs there's nothing more natural than being a father