We're going to be moving to England. We're going to look a little bit at what counted as renaissance architecture in England, and then we're going to look at the English Baroque. There's a strong connection between these European ways of thinking and developments that go on in England. Before we talk about the English Baroque, I think we need to mention for a moment the strongest figure in the English renaissance, and that's Inigo Jones. Inigo Jones is credited really with being a one-man show when it comes to the renaissance, and a lot of that had to do with the fact that he tried to connect as directly as possible with things that were going on in Europe. He traveled. He went to Italy. He looked at developments that were going on there, like Palladio, like Bramante, like Giuliano. He went to the forum. He measured things. He studied antiquities, but he also looked very closely at the works of Italian architects. He learned Italian. He had a copy of Palladio's four books of architecture, and he took extensive notes in the margins. Inigo Jones is bringing Palladio back to England, and he's doing so with a, I think, incredibly good eye for what's interesting about Palladio. Many people look at Palladio, and they take this supermoderan attitude toward it and rationalize it so that it simply becomes a diagram. And I think the things that Inigo Jones took from Palladio had to do with things like the muscularity of the orders, or the exaggerated proportions of cornices or moldings, so that I think you get a very robust architecture out of Inigo Jones. This is Inigo Jones' queen's house in Greenwich, just outside of London. It was originally commissioned by James I for his queen, Anne of Denmark, in 1616, but when the queen died in 1619, work stopped on the house and wasn't picked up again until around 1635, when the new king, Charles I, decided to build it for his queen, Henrietta Maria. You can see how Palladian this is. The plan is almost a perfect square, 115 by 117 feet, and it's the first classical building, or let's say the first consciously classical building constructed on English soil since Roman times. It really is establishing new terrain and making a strong attempt to connect English architecture to developments that were going on on the continent. Very Palladian square with some kind of tartan grid, although this tartan grid actually is less striated and more centric than the ones we've seen elsewhere. Palladian in its disposition of parts and seemingly Palladian in its isolation. As a single villa occupying a really particular site, there's also a very odd thing about the original design of Jones' house, and that is that a road cuts through the middle of it. So this is a little bridge piece, and I find that to be bizarre. If you're going to be the queen and have a house, can't you just put it on either side of the road? It's not a completely unprecedented situation, of course. There is a house by Giuliano da Sangallo in Poggiacchiano, the Villa Medici, and a similar situation happens. You really have basically a double villa, a bar on one side of the road, a bar on the other side of the road, and a road cutting through it. In his extensive travels through Italy, it could be that Jones encountered this villa and thought it would be a perfect solution for the queen's house, because although the buildings we have here between the house and the river come after the construction of the queen's house, there had been an original palace there, the Palace of Placentia, where important monarchs lived, like, say, Queen Elizabeth I, for example. Allowing the house to straddle the road in this very idiosyncratic manner made it possible for the queen to simultaneously have access to the extensive gardens beyond it and to the palace courtyard in front of it. Very clever, and she could do all of this without crossing the road or being seen by travelers who were traversing the road. The Palace of Placentia was falling into ruin and was ultimately demolished in around 1665. By the way, these buildings that we see here were built a bit later by Sir Christopher Wren and his collaborators, John Van Bra and Nicholas Hawksmore. I looked for images of the Palace of Placentia and could not find a plan, but my suspicion is they were nothing like this. At least they were nothing like this in the way that they inflected toward the location of the queen's house. This is something we've seen a lot in the Baroque, this kind of telescoping of space, this echeloning forward, and what's I think so effective about Wren's plan here is how the queen's house completes the axis. It's like the cork in a champagne bottle that in its projection outward, nonetheless refers to and strengthens the linear source from which it came. It's the same technique we saw with the Greek temple church, the Madeleine church at Posterlocke & Kold. There's an absence center. There's a recontextualization of the queen's house in the new context of the royal college. Let's look at this as an example of Palladian architecture. We see a lot of things that we would say are consistent with how Palladia would make a building. For example, we have a kind of tartan grid. We have a basic nine-square organization with support spaces tucked inside. In terms of the elevation, it's fairly good at being Palladian. For example, here is Palazzo Chiricati by Palladia, one of his houses in Vicenza, just at the edge of the town. I think that these two buildings are almost figure-ground reversals of each other. If this is wall, wall, wall, wall, wall, columns in the middle. This is columns, columns, columns, columns, wall in the middle. But it's just a kind of imaginative representation of the diagram of Chiricati. A way of making a portico without adding a portico, understanding the portico as something subtractive within the volumetric block of the building. He's also looking at other Palladio buildings. For example, this is Palladio's Malcontenta, and this is the stair going into the queen's house over here. He's taking that detail also from a Palladian example. I've got to say it doesn't quite get the interiors to be as Palladian as I would like them. This is just an example of a Palladian room. It's just a room in the Villa Pueana. And this is a Inigo-Jones room. You'd say these rooms have nothing in common, but they sort of have something in common. The proportions are the same. The top of the vault and the length to width ratio are the same, but Inigo-Jones just got rid of the vault. Got rid of the vault? There's a kind of austerity in Inigo-Jones' handling of Palladio. He's always simplifying, and it could be that he's practicing a bit later. We're ready some of this desire to purge away the extraneous things in architecture coming into play. And I think that's really clear in this building by Jones, St. Paul Covent Garden. It is, I think, a bizarre-looking building. And what's bizarre about it is, in a sense, it's almost a primitive hut. Palladio talks about the primitive hut in his treatise, so there would have been something in the air about stripping away history and getting to something essential. And you certainly get that here. Look at this. This is wood. These are little slats of wood coming out to support a cornice. These columns have a really exaggerated emphasis that really make them look like they're bulging. And you see this thing, and it really has certain aspects that seem straight out of Palladio's playbook, like, for example, these walls with the arch that pull out from the side and begin to suggest to you that this is not a Roman thing, but this is a dismantling of a block. I think that the abstract simplicity of it gives it great power. Here it's located on Covent Garden right over here, in its original condition. And this is what the plan looks like. This is that strange portico. And this is the back elevation, which is almost stranger than the front elevation, in the attitude about the wall as being something really planer. And when you punch through the wall, you get these strong geometrical figures. And I think another thing that Inigo Jones is doing here that's pretty clever is that he's playing with scale in an interesting way. It's a little church. What are you going to do if you have a little church? And I think he correctly realizes that if he glops on the ornament, it will, in fact, diminish the scale of the church because every little gesture will become smaller and smaller and smaller the more gestures he makes. But by stripping away the ornament and dealing with massing and a few big punches, the general image of this thing becomes more monumental. Just some odd little details. This is where the arch and the block of the building meet, completely different material condition. And this is that situation in Palladio. When Inigo Jones goes to Italy, he doesn't simply look at Palladio for a rational idea about planning space or organizing proportion, but he's also really interested in the language of architecture that comes up during the Manorist period. He's very interested, for example, in Giulio Romano and this kind of robust gutsy language. This is the Banqueting House by Inigo Jones and this is Giulio Romano's house. So ideas about rustication or ideas about varied rhythms between pediments and rounded pediments happen there. Or even this project for the House of Raphael with this really strong rusticated course is something we see again in Inigo Jones. The next generation of architect after Inigo Jones was highlighted by Christopher Wren. Christopher Wren is, in many ways, one of these renaissance men, the likes of which we've been admiring in figures like Alberti and Guarini. He doesn't come into architecture through the practice of architecture, but rather because he's so smart, because he's so good at math. He is asked to undertake a project for fortifications because he's a professor of mathematics. And they figure, well, who's going to be able to build things better than a professor of mathematics? Through that, he becomes increasingly engaged in the work of architecture. He had various responsibilities. He was a professor at Oxford University, professor of astronomy and mathematics. He founded the Royal Society, which was a scientific society where people would get together and share these new discoveries that they're making. One of his great friends was Hook. And if I remember anything from physics, it is that Hook came up with Hook's modulus that tells you how springy his spring is. So you can just imagine these guys sitting around and saying, I've got this great idea for rebuilding London. Wait, wait, wait. Let me tell you about the spring modulus that I have. No, I have this idea about an apple falling. I mean, there are all kinds of interesting people in England sharing ideas, and the Royal Society really became an instrument for the kind of conversation that they could have. That generation exemplified by Christopher Wren turned away from this strong engagement in plasticity and heaviness and rustication and materiality, and instead began to think about architecture in what we might call a modern way, connecting back to the French debate within the academy between the ancients and the moderns. If the ancients looked at precedent, particularly looked at antiquity, and tried to somehow understand the lessons of antiquity and repeat them, then the modern or the moderns were interested in extrapolating theory from the lessons of antiquity and moving forward. The modern were happy to jettison quite a lot of antiquity on the way. Claude Perot, architect of the east front of the Louvre, for example, would go so far as to say you don't even need the orders. The orders are simply a convention. People like the orders because they're used to the orders. But what really matters is material and craft and things that are true in all times, in all places, in all periods. So in Wren's architecture, we don't have the quirky mannerist language anymore, and rather than having a taste for heaviness and the presence of material, Wren specifically becomes interested in lightness and the absence of material. In 1666, there was a fire in London, and the fire in London was devastating. The area in pink represents parts of London that were burnt. And this is basically London. The stuff that didn't get burnt has really no architectural or historical significance all of the main buildings in London burnt. Quite astonishing. Wren had already begun consulting on the expansion of St. Paul's, and when London burnt, within two weeks Wren had prepared plans, which I think is ghoulish, for the rebuilding of London. Let's take this opportunity of the entire city burning down, not simply to make a few minor adjustments in what's going on, not just to build a few little churches. Let's take this opportunity to rebuild in a wholesale fashion. Wren comes up with his first scheme for rebuilding London, which is this one. Nobody liked it very much. Why do you suppose nobody liked this scheme for rebuilding London? Anything wrong with it? Anybody have a response to it? Yes. Looks a lot like Versailles. It looks a lot like Versailles. French do not have big popularity in England. Also, Versailles is ruled by a despot. Louis XIV, great patron of the arts, was also a strong man. And England considers itself a place ruled by citizens. But to take in the diagram of Versailles and make it the new plan for the city was something that people were not very receptive to. Wren came up with a second plan, which is over here, and in this second plan, he begins to make allowances for things, like where certain churches are located, and important monuments are located. Still looks a lot like Versailles, however. We still have things like these emblems of the Sun King, the Grand Point over here or over here. But the diagonals become more interested in making connections across. Nobody liked that one either, I have to say. None of these plans for London were met with great response. I have to say, my favorite plan for London is this one. Hook's plan for London, Wren's friend. Hook says, grid it. Clearly these Baroque diagrams don't make any sense at all. Let's be super rational. Let's be super rational. Let's grid the thing. And actually, it's more nuanced than that. I don't know if you can see, within the grid, there are these little squares that become city parks. So it becomes a gridded system with an alternating rhythm of green space within it to create sub-communities within the large community. And up above this is the burnt area of London as rebuilt by Hook. None of this got done. None of this got done because people owned land. People had interest in certain pieces of property and nobody wanted big diagonal boulevards or even new gridded streets cutting through their city. London got more or less rebuilt as it had been built, but with a certain change in the building requirements that buildings could not be timber. They had to be brick so that they would be more capable of resisting fire. Further to Andrew's comment that it looks a lot like Versailles, this is the second Ren plan that still looks a lot like Versailles with these diagonal boulevards and so forth. The fact that Ren couldn't rebuild all of London didn't stop him from continuing work that he had already begun on St. Paul's. This is the characteristic form of St. Paul's, the one we're familiar with, the one that graces the skyline of London today. In fact, when Christopher Ren first became familiar with the project, it was a ramshackle 13th century Gothic cathedral in such bad repair that the steeple was falling down and it was perilous to occupy. When the fire of 1666 destroyed it and here's a contemporary sketch showing you St. Paul's in ruins, Ren was already lined up to begin work on a new church. One of the little stories that goes along with this is that Ren was walking through the smoldering debris of the demolished building and he picked up a little piece of a gravestone that had fallen off and this said Re Surgam, which is Latin for I Shall Rise Again. That became his motto for the project of reconstructing out of the ashes of St. Paul's. He had a couple of projects and of course Ren wasn't an architect so he's sort of figuring all this out as he goes along. He was a smart person and he was also a polymath, which means somebody who's interested in everything and in that capacity he had gone to Paris in 1665 right before the fire and poked around and what could one see in Paris in 1665? Well, projects for the Louvre were under foot. Bernini was in Paris at the time and Ren desperately wanted to take a look at the drawings for the new Louvre. He wanted to meet Jules-Hardouin-Minsard. He wanted to meet Bernini and he was really nobody. He was not the great architect of the great St. Paul's at the time. He was simply some mathematician puttering around. When he got back to London and began seriously undertaking projects for the rebuilding his early schemes were a bit naive but by the time he got to his third project called the Great Model Project he had come up with full flowering Baroque. Kind of spectacular. I mean this is not so different one might say, at least in ambition he had for St. Peter's. Centralized plan, a series of smaller scaled chapels surrounding that with a slight extension toward the longitudinal even in the manner of St. Peter's as a giant dome surrounding this. This is Ren's favorite scheme of all the schemes for St. Paul's so much so that he had something called the Great Model made and why is it called the Great Model? It's called the Great Model because it's a great model 15 feet tall and 21 feet long could open this thing up and stand inside it to experience the space. To Ren's great disgust this project was rejected as too Romish which I think probably meant too Roman Catholic-ish and they really wanted him to come up with something that was more more specifically British it was heartbreaking because this thing cost a fortune. So this was Ren's next project called the Warrant Design Ugh! Give me a break. It looks like what Ren is trying to do here is to harness these continental Baroque impulses that are expressed so strongly in the Great Model plan and to make something that uses classical language but still reprises a kind of gothic image. You think back at the image of old St. Paul's cathedral with a tall pokey tower in the middle of a Latin cross plan the Warrant Design more or less gives you that and here's a plan for the old St. Paul's you can see that it is like many English perpendicular style gothic cathedrals comprised of orthogonal lines with a simple tower at the crossing. The Warrant Design was actually accepted and Ren undertook to build the Warrant Design or at least he promised that he would build this project for St. Paul's but no sooner did foundations get laid than he began to change the project into the one that we now know which is a more robust plan instead of the spindly tower a big gutsy dome but it's funny given how the Warrant Design originated in a reconnection to the gothic roots of old St. Paul's that Ren goes out of his way to disguise any trace of that gothic ancestry happy to deploy elements that look like they derive from the Louvre the paired columns and the pediment happy to use things that look like they derive from even the Tempietta over here for the dome but when it comes to the constructional logic of the building when it comes to things like the structure of the dome the fact that there is this conical brick dome that supports the real structure of the vault through its paraboloid geometry these kinds of things he disguises this is what you get in the space between the vaults you have timber tying the brick conical shell to the outer shell and thereby giving you a kind of deep system that allows this thin element to nonetheless span a great deal or here where we see the flying buttresses hidden behind these walls that work to create this solid massing and clear image of the building it ends up looking kind of like this and if we look at this we would say well it's kind of a Latin cross it's kind of a Latin cross the crossing of which has slipped kind of toward the middle so it straddles this territory of being kind of centralized and kind of longitudinal which is pretty clever in fact the whole church is pretty clever and what makes it so clever is that Ren in fact was this mathematician Ren was this guy who enjoyed the problem of figuring out how to make a dome how to move static forces through a building also how to play with the appearance of that dome to give it a sense of lightness look at a couple of things like look at the way the plan works we have these structural elements that become extended almost like thin walls like bits of wall so that when moving through the aisle you would read it as column and it would go away it would seem thin when you get to the actual space of the dome and look in all directions it would seem thin the structure holding up Ren's dome is composite it's all this stuff it's this corner tower stair tower it's these two thin walls and it's the scooped out spacing between there's a lot of robust structure there but it's not robust structure that you can actually see so Ren makes it miraculous you have to say God I wish I liked Christopher Ren more it's just sort of sad that I don't like him more and I think what I don't like about Ren I like him a lot let me say that but the thing that disquietes me about Ren is that he does have this modern sensibility hyper rationalizing and draining out the guttiness of the architectural language if we admire this rawness in the architectural language in Inigo Jones you're certainly not getting it here you get this real delicate language this real hyper refinement to my own sensibility is harder to love so I love the structure I love the virtuosity of it but when I actually look at the surfaces it does not move me we'll come back to Ren's dome but I just want to show you a couple of other domes that I think you probably like a lot Pantheon dome Brunelleschi's dome in the cathedral in Florence and Michelangelo's domes at St. Peter's these are the three domes that everybody making a dome will have to come to terms with we saw that the Pantheon dome had a limited ability to be light and thin because of its ability as a half circle and because of its nature as a compression dome with these stacked rings that required a continuous perimeter wall the kind of dematerialization at the base that Ren succeeds in achieving couldn't happen with that kind of dome we see here that in the Brunelleschi dome there's an increased verticality which is great because that begins to allow the loads to transfer more directly to the earth we also see that Brunelleschi has this double dome system going on so that the two shells work in tandem to create a structure that is stiffer than either one of the two domes would be or stiffer than all that material would provide if it was just together without the air in between and when we get to Michelangelo's dome we get something that seems to borrow principles from both of these domes a good Renaissance guy might look at the Brunelleschi dome and say, wow, where's the circle? how come this is not representing the sphere anymore this is just pointy stuff this is missing the boat Michelangelo has a double dome also and he manages to pump up the top part of the dome and then also slip down the lower part of the dome so that the geometry of the interior dome is more spherical but the structural value of the dome takes advantage of the increased verticality to do the same kind of work that Brunelleschi is doing here in addition, Michelangelo begins to deploy a technique begun in a limited way with Brunelleschi but he really uses it in a wholesale fashion and that is to add chains chains that act intention to resist lateral thrust instead of just relying on massive walls to resist thrust and compression what does our friend Cusferendu here's his dome it's a pretty fabulous dome it's a pretty smart dome and we see anything that's going on? for one thing, if you like your circles he's giving you a pretty spherical appearance of a dome on the inside and a pretty spherical appearance of a dome on the outside but in between them he has this kind of conic section holding them together and this is really smart the shape of this is the shape, the natural shape of the dome there is this term catenary which I will demonstrate to you using this cord see how it works? this cord is too stiff it doesn't work very well but a naturally loaded cable when you hold it like this will droop and the droop is the natural shape of the catenary and if you were to flip it and make it into an arch it would be the most efficient shape for the dome the geometry of the middle shell that Ren gives you is picking up on the geometry of the catenary becoming the most efficient shape Ren is simultaneously doing something incredibly clever in terms of the structure and then hiding it paying no attention to the fabulously shaped middle dome I'm going to just show you these perfect models of the celestial sphere set systematically like over here too this is the nave of Saint Paul look what he's got he uses something that looks very much like a flying buttress that you would have seen in Gothic architecture but instead of expressing it and deriving a language from these things he's happy to conceal it he's happy to give you this sense of lightness he's happy to give you these elevations that reveal order and clarity and strong geometric forms rather than the dematerialized that you would get from some kind of Gothic envelope in the same way that he masks the true geometry of the dome with these inner shells so he's a little bit of a weasel you would have to say or rather he's not interested in expressing the structure that's not what he's interested in the meaning of his building doesn't come from the expression of structure but through things like proportions the correct use of the orders and these very perfect loaded with meaning geometries he puts a magnificent dome, a giant dome on the crossing of the plan and goes out of his way to make structure seem to disappear in one sense he does that by organizing these thin slivers of wall not so that you read the bulk of the wall but that you read the thinness of the wall as you progress through the nave or by conceiving of the structure as this triangular pier much of which has been evacuated and scooped out so you get a sense of lightness at every moment Wren will conceal the true structure in the interest of giving you a perfect geometry or a sense of lightness we see here the dome for example where Wren because he's so smart because he's such a good mathematician because he's figuring things out in the royal society where all the smartest people in England Wren reinvents the dome really and gives us this triple dome which is tensile in many ways that lower dome is hung from this middle dome the geometry of which is derived from the perfect catenary arch if you look at the actual shape of this thing hovering above here you would have to say he's looking at sources not simply for their structural value but also for their their formal appearance this the dome of Wren almost looks like a giant tempietto sitting on top of the church we have this tholos thing with column column column and another volume pulling up in between it it's different from the Michelangelo dome the Michelangelo dome has this lively double rhythm this kind of syncopation going on and this is much much more of a kind of archeological dome it's like same same same same same quite spectacular and really quite disengaged from the body of the church it's just just sitting there let's look at a few more elements in Wren's church this is the main portico looks to me like Wren has been to Paris and in fact Wren has been to Paris Wren went to Paris when Bernini was working for Louis XIV and looked at Bernini's drawings for the Louvre and he came away from Paris having looked at these fabulous curvilinear muscular drawings of concave and convex volumes popping out of each other and concluded there are only two correct positions for lines horizontal and vertical if you cannot have a horizontal or a vertical line then it should be at a 45 degree angle there's hyper-rationality going on in Wren as an aside during the Blitzkrieg when London was attacked by bombs St. Paul's in the centre of London was an obvious target and throughout all those bombings it did not fall and it became a symbol of endurance another thing that happened during the great fire of London was a lot of the parish churches burnt down and in fact there was a commission to build 50 new parish churches and Wren participated in this and built quite a lot of these churches himself this was just one of them St. Mary Lestrand in London and I like his parish churches quite a lot and I think that when you're building on a small scale you have to use some of the tricks that we saw Inigo Jones using at Covent Garden and that is you pump up the scale you decide that you can't do everything so you do a few things in a fairly dramatic way these are just some of the plans that Wren did in his city church and what I really like about these plans and these churches they're small enough so that they're not too hard to solve as structural problems and so Wren becomes fairly virtuoso in what he's doing with the structure in fact you look at a lot of these plans and you see things that look like in different fields of columns like this could be the structure of a parking garage with column, column, column, column what Wren does is within this uniform field of column he will float sectional figures so there will be this kind of double pull between ordinary at the ground plane and extraordinary in terms of the vaulting and again he's using these composite systems where these little columns that apparently have no value collaborate with a perimeter condition to create a support that can actually make these things work this is just a drawing of Wren's London churches with St. Paul's hovering in the background the church of St. Lawrence Jewry is one of the many churches here's its plan and you look at the plan and you think same, same, same, same, same you can see that there is this vault that is situated above this row of columns in a way that begins to give special significance to the central space but the greatest of all of these Wren City churches is St. Stephen Walbrook this is really, really a wonderful church the plan is a hall, a hall church and remember the debate that everybody in Italy is having shall we make it centralized shall we make it longitudinal shall we make it a Latin cross and in a sense Wren does all those things here inside a box and that's kind of great he floats a really big dome over here kind of getting three skinny little columns to work together to support the thing he plays with the Columbiation same, same, same big, same, same same, big, same to give you a cross and of course there's a long access to it and it's also a hall so there's sort of four church typologies superimposed on this one fairly simple organization and the dome is really, really great and you really have this sense of miracle like how can a dome like that be supported on something that apparently has no substance whatsoever no more substance than an ordinary column just here's St. Stephen Wallbrook and many similar domed figures float in other churches next time we'll continue talking about England we'll be looking at two architects who began their careers working with Wren and who branched off into their own directions


People self-sabotaging, they'll start telling you that they don't like what you're doing. The friends will not be supportive. Family issues will arise with like you change your eating habits. Hello, YouTube, and welcome to the first ever art of charm happy hour. Now, as you guys might know, we've been doing our podcast for about 14 years now. And with the frequency that it comes out and everything that we like to do, sometimes the conversations and guests that we'd like to have on that show are a little bit outside of its scope. So here we are opening up a new show for you guys to explore these ideas here on YouTube. And I'd like to welcome our first guest of the show. Good to be here, my brother. Alexander Cortez. Alexander, why don't you say hello to everybody here? What's up everybody? I've been a personal trainer for 10 years. I've been working in the self-development space for about four, yeah, four years, two and five years. And the big focus of my business is getting men upgraded physically, and also upgrading the mindset and presentation as well with the basis being, obviously, your body, your physique, since that's, as I say, the physique, if you can change your body, that's proof that you can change the rest of your life. Well, very direct effect to that, so.  And I don't know why, but it seems to have gotten, well, at least in an hour crowd, even self-development in itself has gotten a bad name for it. It gets stigmatized at times. It does, it's a strange thing where, and this is like sort of like a generational sentiment, I feel like, where we want to, we're culturally raised, we want to believe that everybody can be successful and aspire to have wealth, riches, material abundance, Instagram lifestyle, we want to look good, we want to be good, we want to do good. But then when it comes down to personal struggles, whether that be with your body, your self-confidence or your charm or how you interact with people, or your sense of being a man, the fact that someone has to consciously work on that, that carries a heavy stigma of, what is it? Like, you shouldn't have to work on that, that should come naturally, or is that something like shameful to need help in that area? It's almost like when people go to therapy, it's like, maybe you need therapy to help. Oh, I could never admit to needing that, but you know that you need it. Why are we making people feel bad about wanting to improve themselves? Well, I think it also comes down to this idea that everyone, this inclusion idea, where everyone needs to be accepted. And that's fine, I think that everyone should be accepted. However, you walk into the room and you realize that there are people doing things that you'd like to be doing, so perhaps it's on you to put yourself in a position to be able to do those things, rather than people handing you those things just because you showed up. That's definitely the entitlement culture. I grew up in the 1990s and I saw that with my generation. That's not even millennials per se, it's just the whole state of culture right now, where there's this element of both entitlement and narcissism, where you're perfect just the way you are, but you're so perfect you don't need to change or work on anything, but also you deserve A, B, C, D, alpha, gamma, beta, delta. You deserve all these things as well, just for existing. So I'm like, oh, where in that is your own ownership for yourself and your actions and consequences and maybe you do need to work on things, like somehow that gets vastly overlooked or just gets discarded. And then people will get mad at you for making them feel bad about themselves in a way that you never even tended. Telling someone it would be great if you got fit and felt good about yourself, well, what does that mean? I should feel bad at myself now? No, but that's a very interesting moment of reversal that's how it makes you feel. So one of my big things with fitness philosophy, I never intend to be a personal trainer. Like, so my goal actually is to be a ballet dancer. That's what I want to do.  I think I saw you post something about that on Twitter. But that was my goal when I was in high school. Like I got into dancing late around like 15, 16. And I really loved it and I decided, this is why I want to do as a career professionally. I want to be a ballet dancer. I want to perform. And my aspirations were not to be famous or be known or be a leader of men. It was just, I want to do the thing that I'm passionate about. And that didn't work out. That's for reasons I got a bunch of injuries in college to the point where I couldn't dance anymore.  So I started personal training as a way to just try to make money. It was like a very like a fallback thing. I'm like, well, I have a degree that's not worth anything. Dance performance, choreography degree, that's not a real degree, it's not. But I was like, what can I do that will pay more than them wage? So it was like personal training. So I started doing that. And what no one tells you is that personal training is not an exercise job, it's a talk job. Basically exercises therapy. So you really have to have a really keen understanding of human behavior. And everyone's gonna come to you with their problems. Because like, why wouldn't they? Like you're spending an hour in a person's face talking multiple times a week, you're gonna have to get to know them. Well, and there's, let's face it, there are reasons why they are going to the gym. And that's usually for everybody, it's to get some perspective on the rest of their day with the challenges they have coming up. Very true. So that, but like I was 20 when I started and I realized it right away that the physical part's easy. Like you can write out sets and reps and exercises. It's the mental game that everyone needs to work on. So I realized, okay, like training is a self-improvement job essentially. Like it is, it is. Whether trainers will say that or not, it is. But that got me sort of studying human behavior. And you kind of go through like the realms of different kinds of psychological theory like Adler, Adler, Freud, Jung, cognitive behavioral therapy and everything kind of has it's useful bits and approaches where you're just trying to have a good conversation with somebody and hopefully often some constructive. Probably the biggest thing I learned was what's called the memetic instinct by, it's renaissance, it's like a French, yeah, new philosophy, but big thing with a mimic instinct and the reason why I bring it up is it's underlies everything is that human beings instinctively, inherently biologically, we always want to mimic and copy and replicate any kind of interaction behavior, dialogue we have with somebody. And we can do it two ways. We can copy it and want to be like the thing or we can react adversely to it and want to make the thing go away. So I mean, if we're friendly right now, if you're talking, if I suddenly get angry that's gonna be a very strange thing of like, why would you switch the interaction all of a sudden? You know, but at the same time, if I'm being friendly to you but you don't like me, you want me to know that you don't like me. So you have to reverse it back. But you see this plat with people's reactions to going back to the self-improvement thing where some people identify with it positively. They want to, yes, I want to evolve, but then you also have the negative reaction. No, I don't want that and that makes me feel bad about myself. And not only do I not want that, but you should not be allowed to express that. And you'll get these really weird antagonistic reactions, especially online in the digital world where people will have to handle about things that you would never presume to even be upsetting. Well, one of the things that I, and when it comes to working out and I'm an advocate, I'm at the gym every morning and I try to do a lot of running as well. It helps me clear my mind. And there, to me, and maybe you can elaborate on this a bit, being a trainer and working in it for so long, I see two realms of physical fitness. Number one is the, well, I just don't want to get fat. There's that guy, right, or a person. And number two is I'm going into gain. So that's a, so there's the begrudging person who goes in because they just don't want to be overweight and they're just trying to maintain. And then there's the person who was going in for mind, body, and spirit to gain wisdom and control over their body. And I personally know the exact moment where that shift was for me. And it was the very first David Goggins interview that I saw in Rogan, where I watched that and I was like, oh, I'm going into the gym with a completely wrong way. You know, there was a sense of always accomplishment and going in, but now there is almost this divine reason of something larger than me of why I'm going in there. There's now a purpose. And what I'm gaining from this is a lot more than I can get anywhere else. And so it makes getting up in the morning so much easier knowing what I'm receiving from going in there. Rather than the, I can't believe I got to do this. I'm going to guess I'll make some coffee. I hope it's not so bad today. Now it's let's do this. Let's fire this up. That's a good, that speaks to the fact that what I've seen from this, there's some interesting clients is, pain is always the catalyzer transformation for most people. Like very, it takes a certain level of self-awareness to want to improve just for the sake of like your own aspiration. So most people, most people there reason for training for physical health, it starts with like a pain, motivation. It's fear-based. I don't want to get fat, which is entirely reasonable. That's a good way to get in there. There's nothing so much, there's nothing really aspirational about that. It's, I'm afraid of this happening so I'll try to stop it versus, I'm inspired to something so I'll build towards it. And yet sometimes the ways I phrase it is like you have sort of a ascendant inspiration and then you have like descending motivations. And the descending ones are just all the fear-based ones. I don't want to be this, I don't want to be that. You know women especially, I don't like this about my body. I don't like this, but I don't like that about my body. Yeah, even men can't have that reaction. Like they don't like themselves and like certainly you get a lot of emotional energy from that, but that burns itself out very quickly because like, okay, well, where does that turn into? If you never get into that vision of like, what am I trying to become, you can circle this drain of sort of self-loathing, resentment, some action that's consistent that you're never really happy about, that can go on forever.  And that's what I always try to describe to clients.  The weight coming off, like I can only go, that can only happen so physiologically fast.  If you can move past that, you'll get to a stage where you could say it's like someone actualized, like, all right, I'm actually, I'm evolving now and I'm better than I was before. And this is actually something that I can apply to other areas and then the metaphor makes more sense. Absolutely, well with our classes at The Art of Charm, there is a defeatist idea of people that come in. They're like, I can't believe I have to be here. I'm broken, I need these skills. And much like the fear-reasing or the defensive position of going to gym. I'm getting over way and I guess we gotta go to the gym now. But if you can, as you were mentioning, if you can move past that and realize what you're gaining, because I always tell people for those people who are bummed out that they're here or coming to the show because of a deficiency that they've recognized in themselves that they're upset about. It's like, okay, you can have that idea but what you're about to gain is an inside knowledge of inner workings of human behavior, how rapport works, conversation flow, emotional bids, which makes you that much better. And so rather than thinking that you are here because of a deficiency, know that you are here because of what you're about to gain and who you're about to come through this journey. And it's like, that is such a shift for the guys who, as you were mentioning, who are looking at it from a fear-based thing because if it wasn't for that fear pushing you and you're never gonna learn about all of these things that are out there that make you a better person. No, no you won't. I have seen guys get very far with essentially like a self-destructive motivation. You see it sometimes in competitive sports, mostly strength sports where it's very much like almost like the 97-pound weakling kind of story where the guy was weak, then he got made fun of, he decided to become strong and he was bullied and you can keep that fire going for a while but then in the process of doing that it requires you to stay in that sort of like, you know, like we just talked about that terrorized state of always being angry at yourself, always being angry at somebody else, always needing opponents somehow where things happen to me, you know, because of other people. And I've seen that break guys' lives up even while reaching a fairly high level of success which is always interesting.  And the reason is you, it's not because of all these externalities, it's you. And are you willing to address that? You know, in some cases they are and they have a mental shift and obviously some people, the answer is no. Yeah, I don't know how long you can continue that if you don't have that shift. The other thing that you mentioned there is this idea of competition and maybe this will, we can transition into Twitter a little bit. Which, so there is this concept at AOC which is four behavioral patterns that you should understand about yourself and people around you. So you know who to bring into your life and you know who to keep at a distance and it just gives you an inside baseball track of what's going on. Especially upon reading the room. The first one is supplicative. These are people who beg for approval, acceptance and attention and they shrink in moments of challenge. Then there's the combat of people who look to take attention, approval and acceptance from others in any way they can by putting others down, by inflating, putting other people in fear of them. The third is where I get in trouble on Twitter is the competitive people who see everything as a zero sum game and they're rolling into it in there and now they must compete for attention, approval and acceptance. And lastly, the fourth value is cooperative value which is you're going to give value in order to get value. And as you know on Twitter, the more you put out there to other people, the more you get in return. We could talk about that and certainly how we've become here to have this conversation. But anytime that I put out anything about the competitive nature in people and where that goes awry, I have nothing wrong with healthy competition, iron sharpens iron and makes you a better person. However, you cannot view relationships or business relationships as a zero sum competitive game that will get you in trouble. And anytime that I post this out, I always, and then I have to, I had to learn to not engage in this because it's ridiculous. But I always have people lashing out at me of how competition makes you better, you need to be angry, you need to compete at all times. And I'm like, this is where you have stopped evolving in your development. And because of that, until you start realizing that this idea is going to continue creating the same problem for you over and over and over again, you're not going to evolve above that to the cooperative state. And so, and of course, as I said, anytime I put these things out, I naturally get that flashback or backlash.  Like that brings out, like what does that bring out? It requires you to be strong, it requires you to be self aware. It makes you aware of other people. Oh, that guy's better at being this than that. Maybe I can beat him in this.  What is a game? Like you are playing a competition, but at the same time, like that is a game.  Like you're afraid of, well, I don't want to lose. I can't lose. You have to lose, so I do. In certain contexts that can work, like yeah, of course, like there's a winner and loser, okay. But in the context of relationships, or in the context of let's say like building a business, or trying to, like what we've done on Twitter, like the way my business works, and like there's, yes, there, I could say there's thousands and 10,000s like to fitness personalities. They're all over. They're all over. Are we all competing for the same pool of people? And like I have to win, so someone's going to lose.  You're just going to be looking at things where you can beat a number or beat a metric or I can detract from what you're doing. And then you'll probably start playing the comparison game, which is crippling a lot of athletes.  And a lot of times they'll suffer through that where they start, their performance starts falling off. They just start freaking out. That guy's better at being, that guy's better at being. I don't know what's wrong with me right now.  And you're like, that's, that's a big thing that is in sports psychology, which is, which is not like, I'm not going to profess to be a specialist at it, but just in the context of being a person of training, you've got time to study sports psychology, but that's a big thing, big things with like the best athletes, like, yes, you want to be competitive and your very nature should make people better by you being there, but you also have to recognize if you are playing, you know, not even a team sport, but playing anything where you are required to have the support of other people, you need to bring something to the table that makes those people want to invest than you and vice versa. Otherwise, it's going to become a self-structured process and a lot of people flame out that way. That's an old story. The flame out is something that needs to be brought up because that's, we see that happening a lot, especially with social media, you come up with some ideas, you get them out there and then if any, if you get any traction, then you're, you put this pressure on yourself to continue to create at the level that you came into it with, which should help in inspiring you to really dig deep, to get some good stuff, but it is difficult and I see it with the young kids who do YouTube videos or Instagram where they get in that treadmill where you will burn yourself out if you don't give yourself the break of going through the abs and flows of creativity. I've been writing, I guess you'd say, I've been writing professionally for seven years and I think the big divide between like a good creative artist versus a great one, first and then it's a good creative artist. They'll produce good work, but they also will want to withhold anything they think is not good. So they'll be in that trap of like, I want to create and I'm trying to produce, but at the same time, like I keep comparing this to what I did before, maybe I had some success here and like nothing after that has had the same effect or hasn't gone viral the same way or hasn't gotten the same number of reads or likes, comments or shares. You have all these metrics now that you can use them to your benefit or they can just toy screw with you. So then they start like either withholding or they keep trying to copy the same formula and they just, it becomes this, like you said, this sort of treadmill of like you're not really progressing in where the craft versus I think like with a great artist, they just share everything. You know, I've been writing for seven years, I've had a newsletter for three and now I've got a lot of subscribers. I write almost like every other other day. So I can, in the last few years, I've probably written like a million words. Like it's a lot of writing. Some of it's great. I've had people, I've written things. I didn't even think we're good. People will contact me. This was incredible. Thank you for producing this, making this. This is the best thing I've read.  And I'm like, wow, I, and I, this is me. Like I realize you can't be judgmental about your work that way or about your actions. Like the creative process, the process of personal pollution, you might think like definitely there's an up and down. You don't necessarily have a perspective on where the up and down is. You can think you're at a low point and maybe you're actually progressing, but you don't like what you're doing. It's like, it's, this is a very weird, you know, situation to try to sort of gain oversight on. But I've written things I thought were totally generic. I'm like, I didn't even like this. And look at an amazing response. I've written things I thought were brilliant and I don't get any feedback. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.  Me, you do an episode. Like it was the best episode. Oh, yeah. You hear nothing. Oh, this is going to be a game changer for this drop. Man, I can't believe it. Nothing. I've gotten, it was about a week ago. I got into a place where I was, for whatever reason, the Twitter gods were aligned. I was getting all those engagement things were really fun. And then I had a day where like nothing was happening. And my first paranoid thought is, that's it, I'm being shadow banned. Oh yeah. Yeah. And then the next day everything was back to normal. And I went, maybe just what I wrote yesterday, just suck. Maybe just what I wrote. No, I started tweeting like in 2015. Twitter like, with any social media in general, like again, it's always this paradox relationship. People say like you don't take it too seriously but everybody takes it seriously. Of course. And yet we all somehow know like wow, you can basically change the world, access the global brain, get inspiration, learn new things. You could literally use it. It's a knowledge library and it's an entertainment fee. It's all these things at once. So it's like, no, don't take it too seriously. But be really serious about when you use it. But it's never going to quite align. It's not rational, obviously. But with Twitter, I started tweeting back in like 2015. At that time, I was working at Jim and Florida. And I had always been a very avid reader. I'd always been a writer, obviously. And I used it as sort of like a way to get my thoughts out, fitness thoughts, client conversations and reactions. And I've always been that. I've just had that brain room. I'll have a conversation with somebody, train someone, and then I'll kind of mentally rehearse it afterwards and like, what can I take from that? Could be useful, a lesson, something. So I would use Twitter for that. And I started to grow following them. I thought, oh, this is interesting. And self-improvement Twitter was not a thing then. Yeah, which we get to in a moment.  Like a few years ago, you're like, e-com what? Now you can get on YouTube and there's gurus and people telling you how to learn how to drop ship. Oh yeah, it's huge. Just all these things that just didn't exist. But that didn't exist then. But I had that happen like the first time I had a tweet. They got like a hundred retweets in it. Like all these people called me like, wow, this is so cool. And then, you know, but the next day, that doesn't happen. Or like when you have your first like 1,000 retweets, and you look at like, wow, tens of thousands of people read this, but you can't make that happen again and again and again. No. You know, like insight, I sort of like a greasy an idea. Like a lot of them, I think the creative thoughts we have, those, you know, those formulations, I don't think they necessarily come from us. We're sort of accessing them. Like there's always that artistic process where, yes, you can think and you can try and be creative, but some things will just come to you and like it flashes brilliance or just arrives and it crystallizes. And did you really even think it? No, maybe not. It just somehow came out perfectly worded and a perfectly resonate, but you can't replicate that again. Here's the thing that I find fascinating with it. That you, it makes you strip everything down so you can't overcomplicate things. And I certainly have a tendency to overcomplicate things. I think most people have a tendency to overcomplicate things, especially if you work in an analytical problem-solving field or that's just how your mind works. And I think I've learned more in the last few months that I've been very proactive on Twitter than I've learned in the last year just because of its basic functions where, and I'll get up in the morning and realize, oh, I don't have anything coming out today or till later I better throw something together. And I'll be groggy and I'll tweet out something, I'll get it to Jim. I come back and it went haywire, compared to the hour I sat to come up with some philosophical mindblower that I think is going to change the world. I mean, I've had great tweets that went viral that were like even short story things, I remember tweeting something, what was it? It was a, it was like a few years ago and I was, I mean, this was so off the cuff, I was like driving in my car and I can't even tell you what gave me inspiration. It was a tweet out like if you read one hour a day and write one hour a day and like train one hour a day, like that's kind of a formula to like succeed in anything in five years and that went mega viral. But I was like, wow, that's so cool but you can't copy 5,000 retweets, okay, man, apparently everyone in that day thought that was a great idea. Now I've had things where I've tweeted out that went viral that I didn't want to go viral, like that's higher, 12 steps being beautiful women, which was like that went crazy viral, I remember. And I got doxxed and I got media hanging me up and that was actually just like what was that? Actor person, I don't even know who the guy was, he had a list of things like 12 things women don't need to be, I'm like this is so try hard. So I'm like I'm just going to reverse it and tweet it and then that went mega vial or like, so I had four days of just like people telling me to go kill myself and I'm like, all right, fine. So it was one of those days I woke up and social media upset me within five minutes, I closed the lid and I did this whole mental thing where I went through it, I was like, that's just the internet, it's just people being rude. Who knows what's going on with everybody today but real life is not like that and that's a good thing. And then I ended up going to the supermarket and where I don't know, it was just one of those days where the internet was at the supermarket and I was like, that's it, we are definitely doomed. I just saw so much rudeness and the supermarket of all places is not a typical place where you would see that. In fact, a lot of times you see people being very cordial at the supermarket, it was in your way, but this is just day people are yelling at each other, they might as well have been throwing food at each other but it certainly seems like that that it's just getting a bit out of hand and I don't know if we're gonna be able to stop it but one thing that gives me encouragement and this is the place that we're all in on Twitter which is no matter how much negativity, no matter what's going on and of all the other insanity that has happened, there has been I guess a pushback against pop culture and all the insanity where people are like, hey, let's use this to build businesses, build relationships and build ourselves to the best people we could possibly be and this seems to be relatively new or it has definitely been bubbling. We could definitely credit Joe for carrying that torch. We've been around for 14 years. We're sort of in that mix somewhere but it is now, this has gone to a point of mainstream and I think is why we're seeing so much contention because this other faction had held the internet down for so long that they are, I think maybe in fear that they are losing control to better ideas but this is something that you've been working in and I definitely feel that my idea for this is that all young men, well all young people in general have to lose themselves in order to define themselves so let them go off, let them go crazy, that's what young people do. However, when they are ready to pull themselves out of that, they need voices that say, we're over here, when you're ready, let's go build yourself up, let's build you businesses, let's make you successful but why are we who are trying to do that for young people being silenced? This is the interesting thing that I saw happen. I mean, I'm gonna be 31 this year so when I, and this is being me being retrospective but the maturation process of being a young man is very much reflective like the hero's journey. Yes, absolutely. You have the known world which is probably high school, high school, your parents, you have maybe stepping out into the unknown which for a lot of kids college this is a continuation of the known that once you are, let's say, out of that, you're an adult, you're 19, 20, 21, 22, you have to go through a period of experiences and then with that you're gonna realize, okay, I don't know much, like that breaks that teenage illusion that everybody has where you're thinking everything and you know nothing.  How do you go about becoming the man that you wanna be? The thing that I saw happen over the past decade or so is that whether, I mean there's a lot, you can have tripped a lot of reasons, lack of parental figure, lack of father figures. We've had Warren Farrell on the show and I mean, what an adventure reading the boy crisis was. Okay, there you go. So yeah, see like lack of father figures, men who are just raised by their mom, they didn't have a male role model at all. Then you have guys where the boy crisis in school, they were kind of always marginalized, that's just how it was. So they get to the stage of being, let's say like 18, 19, like that early adult stage and they don't really know how to be a man and that's okay to admit that, like I really don't know what I'm doing. Like that's every adult, like I don't know what to do. Yes, that is every adult. I don't know what I'm doing. So with that said, well then what do you do? Well you probably, it'd be helpful to have a mentor slash father figure, slash big brother figure. Find someone older and reflect on those aspects yourself that you need to develop.   You have your relationship with yourself, which you know for most people that's the most fundamental one. You have your relationship with like your fellow men. And this is speaking to like the male perspective, your relationship with your fellow men, like your brothers, this man in general, how you get along with guys. You have your relationship with women, which for obviously for men that can be a huge area of problems or it could be great, like that goes a lot for women. And then you have your relationship with the one at large, which is are you successful? Do you have status? You know, like how are you seen by people? And like those are the four areas you need to work on. And you know for most guys like well, what's the most important one? The most important one is whatever you feel needs the most work, which when you're young that might be yourself. Yeah, that might be learning to overcome insecurities, developing self-confidence. Yeah, and obviously like women play a big role in that. So confidence for being good with women, but also many get confidence for having no friends and having guys you can rely on, having comrades and brothers in arms and people that support you. And if you have those things happening for yourself, I like who I am, I have a girlfriend or I feel like I'm good with girls. However you want to say it, I've got guys or good guys, you're probably gonna be successful in the world at large. Yeah, but if any of those areas are out of whack, you can have three of them going on and there could be one that just really holds you back. Absolutely. Or it could be all of them. I mean, that's just like the mental model I use, it makes it very, just direct. I'm like, which one is it? Yeah, maybe it's everything, but like which one could you start today? But that's the mental model I use and it's just interesting that I never expected to, yeah it says many times, but like I never expected to be like a leader of men. But I've realized that this a lot of guys, for social reasons, parental reasons, the way they were brought up culturally, they really lack direction and not even just lacking direction, they don't know that they can look in a direction. There's help out there. And that's why the male self-improvement industry, that's a real industry. Mm-hmm, well if there wasn't a need for it, it wouldn't exist. It wouldn't exist, it wouldn't exist. And society is so vast today where I mean we can always romanticize the past and say oh we have simpler times and maybe it was, but the world is large and to function today and to get ahead in life, to be a success or just to be happy yourself, you have competing interests, you have competing narratives, you live in a cultural environment that can be as you said, super contentious. You have all these different influences that are acting upon you at any given time. Yes. So I mean that's a lot to sift through. Like I, during the 1990s when I was growing up, I don't remember it being that way. Like there was a certain level of social stability that just seemed to be there. And if you did the right things and the right steps like you were supposed to get, supposedly what you were deserving of and tiled to, but like that has changed dramatically the last of many years and I mean you could say like, why has it changed, maybe it's globalization, maybe it's economy, maybe it's a great depression. I mean there's just so many things. You know you could go down a laundry list of like it's this and that, but regardless, what do you need to do? What does an individual need to do? You need to be adaptable, you need to be self aware and you need to be ready and willing and wanting to work on yourself and put yourself in the most advantageous position possible. You know and like, and for most guys, it's like the very, and this is super bro and it's basic but it's true, for most guys that starts with, do you like how you look? Do you feel strong? If you can go like this and you're like, I look pretty good, you're in a good place. If you, if looking at yourself in the mirror makes you feel bad about yourself, start there. Start there. It's interesting, for myself growing up, I was on the smaller side of the kids who were in the sports. And when you get to be a teenager, you start to look around and you start to realize, okay, the girls are after those guys. It's obvious that that's not in my future. So I need to either A, I need to either hit the gym and start doing right and do those things or find a different way. Find another outlet that is going to allow me to get attention, approval and acceptance from the opposite sex or what not. For me, it was obvious it's rock and roll, it was playing music. Bad of being an artist. It was to be an artist. I did my, it was funny because it went from, I was already playing music because my dad was in bands and it was, I wanted to be like my dad. That's cool. But the moment that I realized that the girls are not gonna give me any attention unless I signal this new thing. So it went from I play guitar at home to now I carry my guitar to school. Which of course completely worked, right? Cause it's now. We all remember that guy. Every high school, every high school I had that guy and maybe you were that guy. It's like, oh, that's a guy like that guy can play guitar. And like the thing I, I've, you know, attraction and like relationship game. Like it's not my, you know, my area that I see. Like, you know, I coach guys in really. And certain things I just, I've never, yeah, I try to be like very, you know, self-effacing honest. Like there's certain things I haven't started with. Like I've always, I've been always been tall. I've considered to be reasonably attracted by most people being real. Like I've not struggled with girls that way. But relative to like the, you know, the artistic standpoint, I realized that when I got into dancing that oftentimes men think like, when we think of what attracts women, it's like, oh, you know, the big and tall guys. Like, yeah, like it did be, definitely being an athlete that helps people's attention. But you know, with like, if you really get into like the nitty gritty of female psychology, women are really drawn to men that make them feel something. That emotional response. And nothing does that more powerfully than art. Nothing does that. Yeah. Like you can go to a sport, you can go to a stadium or 30,000 people watch football game. You can go to a rock concert and there's a hundred thousand people there and half it's women and they're going crazy. Going crazy. Absolutely insane. Well, also one of the things that I've been trying to promote on Twitter is to start producing and produce more than you are, try to produce more than you are consuming. Now that's a ridiculously difficult task. However, it's not impossible. You can reach there and it's good for you. And it certainly helps with your mental wellbeing and how you feel about yourself and what's going on around you. And it's interesting to see how many people have trouble with just, well, where do I start in creating? Well, what are you into? Just go, just starting grabs. Do you like painting? Go grab a brush and start painting. I think the easiest place to start is just write. Write about yourself. Write about your day. Write about how you're feeling. Write about an event that you're going to and how you feel about it. These are the simple steps that will get you started and we certainly don't see in pop culture of journaling of how masculine or how effective it can be for young men. You've never seen John Wayne come after a day on the range and start journaling. If they showed that, there'd be a line of guys down the CVS looking to get a journal.  It's like, my buddy Sermit always calls it like, it's like boobs and beer masculinity. I like boobs, I drink beer and bacon, like man cave. This is why I've always had a problem with Adam Cruller because as much as I like Adam, he always had a part of the man show which I felt just was the dumbest dumb down thing and which when everyone thinks about it, they're like, oh, man show. That's masculine. That's what guy's like. No, not really. No. In fact, I don't know who that show was for. That's like a media creation.  Like the Waltons? Yeah, the father's like this very competent, stoke figure that had to provide guidance and guidance and security and safety and like he loves everybody. Like he's very laconic in how he speaks. And you're like, wow, that's actually a good role model. And he gets like 1990s, 2000s and it's like the Homer Simpson. Yeah, you know, Homer is kind of a parody of like, you know, perhaps the American man, but you could see how it devolved. And all the guys that I'm friends with now, like my circle friends, they have a lot of depth. Like masculinity has depth and breadth. If we go back and look at things that get very idolized by men, Samurai, Samurai were artists. Like they devoted their life to a very defined code of ethics and honored how they spoke and how they acted and how they developed themselves. It was not just fighting. You know, there was a lot to it. You know, same thing with knighthood. You are the same thing even superheroes. Like if you go Batman, read the comic books, which I like, I'm a huge Batman fan as a kid. They're pretty intellectually heavy. Yeah. They're not simple stories, most of them. Especially for Batman during the 1990s, I don't know about now, since I haven't read them in a while since the tonality changed, but like very intensely, darkly psychological. Oh, of course. This is not a shallow character at all. So like, you know, when I see that today, I'm like, this isn't really representative of what a man is. Well, I think this is represented in all the acclaim that a movie like The Joker had gotten. Now, I saw that a movie when it was originally made. It was called Taxi Driver in the 70s. Now, I'm not taking anything away from The Joker, but it is a descent, it's one man's journey into descent and madness from modern society. That's what Taxi Driver was. And whenever we see this and people, I don't, they start freaking out. Well, it's like, well, if you continue, and I think Warren Farrell put it best, boys who hurt others, men who hurt will hurt others. And once again, if you are ignored and you are made to feel invisible and there is no one there to nurture and help you through your own void, which we all have to contend with and do with, that can go sideways. Especially if there has been any abuse or psychological damage done in your childhood that will not allow you to make that journey through. And people freak out. And when we show it on screen, people start losing their minds. So it's like, well, what do you think's going to happen? This is a warning. This is not fantasy. Even Taxi Driver, like, I don't know if that movie would even get made today. No. That's actually an interesting thing where you probably couldn't make Taxi Driver today, because it would be, I mean, it's just, you know, this is a paradox of modern media. It'd be like, you know, this is a terrible film, a misogyny, something, something like, this film's about a tragic character and their descent into the self-destruction. This is not an idol. This is not a heroic figure. But like, when you apply the Joker sort of archetype on top of it, where it's like, okay, well, it's from a comic book. And it's a fictional character. Now we can make it. But like, trauma never goes away. It just changes forms. And that could go, that could be good or bad. Usually it's bad, unfortunately. But you see that film and like, I viewed that as almost like a cathartic moment for a lot of society of like, yes, this is actually how I'm feeling. And there was no violence from that film. Nobody went crazy afterwards. But like, it reflected the state of like, reflected like a large state of modern society. I'm like, yes, a lot of people, especially men, feel very marginalized. It's just also the modern world at large where people feel invisible and they feel stuck in their position and there's extreme, you know, stratification of, you know, whether it may not, all you can say, well, like elitism, power, your ability to be heard. And like, the films reflect the era they're made in. Like, that was culturally relevant and that made a billion dollars. Like that should say something. They're like, maybe we're living through strange times. Yeah. And to go along with that. So right now we're having, what the media is showing to be this epidemic of gun violence through America and these schools. And yeah, it seems that gun violence has gotten younger, but it's, but you've always had stray monkeys who have, whose bolts weren't all quite that right. And who went nuts. When I was growing up, there was this idea of that guy's going to go postal one day. And that was said because there had been several incidences in the 80s where a postal worker came to work and shot up the place. This is nothing new. Now, perhaps maybe the ages are getting a little bit younger from what I can tell, but this is, it's not new. It's always been there. You're always going to have folks who are not quite like the other monkeys. They're a little bit unhinged. And if they do feel marginalized and isolated and the internet gives a lot of these folks an opportunity to converge and talk to each other. Now that was the thing that wasn't there before. And so now this, those moments when this happened, there's others linked to it. And certainly when we hear about this, we hear, oh, he was on these forums and he was talking with these people and he was encouraged to do this and they all knew this was going to happen. Well, that's a part of it, but it's not what created it. It was always there.  And I say that not to be nihilistic, but like you can very much create a social media feed and even like a real life perspective of feeling victimized and persecuted.  That's it's very easy for that to happen. If you want to create a good life, like this is why do I tell my followers, people, like you have to cultivate beauty. Yes. Like, you know, my girlfriend's beautiful, like I'd be beautiful girlfriend, like create a beautiful life, like have beautiful friends, have beautiful moments in relationships and have things were within your dealing and habitment of your space, you can look to and they are satisfying to you and like it makes you appreciate existence. But a lot of people don't have that and I don't know that modern life really gives that to anybody. Well, it's all based on utility over beauty. And that is something that, when being such a person who comes from an artist's background, it's like, where is that? Why does everything have to be built for utility over beauty? In the past, we saw things that were built because the builders wanted to appeal to something that was above man. It was aspirational. It's something that everyone can look towards and want to be a part of. When you dumb everything down to utility, well, that's not very aspiring. No, I mean, efficiency is a false God.  When you look at society, let's say 1950s, like, you know, gun ownership. Gun ownership was more widespread in 1950 than it was today. You could, in 1950, 1960, probably up to 1980s even, you could be a kid and you could carry around an undead rifle. Absolutely, yep. You could be in your car. I'm like, the accessibility of guns has decreased with time. That's an increased, yet usable. Gun violence on the rise. Okay, is it the instrument or is it the society that we live in?  Okay, male suicides gone up for X over so many years. All right, female suicides gone up. All right, prescription drug abuse has gone up. Okay, opioid addiction has gone up. And Jonathan Haidt put it together and gave you, basically, gave us a timeframe of when it exponentially hoggies their growth and all these terrible things.  Like, that's happening. Is that contributing to people's sensibility that society is something to lash out at? Yeah, it probably is, probably. Like those should all be indicators to you. But yeah, obviously, power is to be like, how's it gonna change? Yeah, I, like I keep saying, like, it always goes back to you. Like, can you, if you can create a life that is, let's just say, a shining example of other people, hopefully that has a powerful effect. Like, you can't control anything outside of that. Yeah, I can't, yeah, I can't, we could talk about all these things, I can't like directly affect any of them. Yeah, but I can have an effect, I can have my life be that effect upon others, hopefully. I can do it for myself and hopefully that's efficient. Well, the other thing to go along with that, though we're seeing these problem areas, the violence overall is going down. Well, that's, you know, on a grand scale, on a grand scale, yeah, so we have these issues but on a grand scale, everything, all the markers are going down and Stephen Pinker laid out great arguments and stats for all that. And once again, this goes back to the media and all that, but I don't wanna roll this conversation in there, I wanted to roll the conversation lastly into something that you have going on, which is you're about to leave the States and one of the reasons why I wanted to get you in here before you head out was that you are planning on living abroad for a while and I would love to tap into that and talk about that because our conversation the other day on the phone certainly brought up some interesting aspects that I'd like to talk about. Yeah, there's traveling abroad, so we talked about these social problems, so this is the sort of experience to continue with traveling abroad, so I spent all of my 20s, I spent all of my 20s working, like I was, you know, personal training in terms of hours, like it's a very long job, you get your first client at six a.m., your last one could be at seven p.m., even eight p.m., it's a long day. I spent all of my 20s working, I built my business to a level where I got freedom and I got freedom in the sense of like, okay, I have financial freedom, I have the freedom to do anything I want whenever I want at any given time. Like, and once you have that, it raises certain questions where, okay, what do I really want to do? And most people, they work to pay bills, they work to, they always have to support people, they work because that's what you do in life. And to be in a position where you can do anything you want at any given day and you are constrained by nothing, well, now what? And so I was like, you know, I want to travel. So I'd gone to Romania last year for like five and a half, six weeks and I was with friends there, you know, Andrew and Tristan Tate, they're very good friends of mine, great guys. But I was with them and I was like really like living it up, partying, just having fun. Yeah. And then being in a place where it was so far away from the United States, it just puts living to perspective. You realize that there are, there's hundreds of countries in the world, well over a hundred. Yeah, there's what, 170 countries.  Each place is unique. Yeah, and every place has its problems, every place has its pros. And every place can have beautiful moments and beautiful things, beautiful experiences, beautiful people. And you're there and this gives you a sense in a good way of the smallness of one's individual life where you're just one person of many. You're one person of many and what you think are problems may not be problems at all, they may just be this passing transient periods of time. So I came back from that trip and was like, all right, I told my girlfriend, like I'm leaving LA, you can stay here, you can go. Like I'm leaving like I want travel not to find myself or like, oh, I get answers. I'm like, I want to see these different parts of the world and see different cultures and maybe take the best from each or find something I identify with.  So that's my plan. I'm actually leaving in nine days. Nine days that I'm going to Egypt first because I always want to see Egypt. Any, it's like the Indiana Jones thing. I thought I wanted to go and have an adventure. That place sounds cool. Pirates, mummies, a lot of history, from when I was a kid, like that has to be cool, right? It's absolutely. So I'm going there first. But that's the plan. I mean, traveling is like an aspiration for many, of course, and some people, I think falsely do it, hoping they'll get the answers. You don't get answers from traveling. It just is more like a, it's like a very sort of like a harsh mirror where when you're by yourself in a new place and you don't speak the language. It's amazing.  You will find out very quickly what you're made out of. 100%. And your reactions to just whatever happens to you and how people react there. I mean, you pick up on nuances in mind language and how people speak to each other.  So it really, I think it really clarifies your identity for you. Hopefully it means should. Yeah, it was a few years ago where I actually had the opportunity of traveling by myself for a long period of time. It was two weeks. And I was in at that time, I was checking out Portugal. And I was very excited because I've traveled a lot, but there's always been influence attached to it. There was always friends around. There was always an agenda of what we were going to do because we were in the company of each other. So I saw this as an opportunity that I would be detached from all influence and the all except for the influence of the beauty and what was around me, the civilization was around me. And so how I was, I planned on going into that started what is a stream of consciousness that I have on my phone on pages that is open. So I would go and I would go to visit these sites and I would just start jotting down what was coming to my mind. What was I thinking? And this is something I mentioned to you on the phone, which is this is amazing to me. You never really truly know just what's going on inside if you have other people around that you're answering towards answering to. And so here I am standing in front of something that was thousands of years old that we don't get to really see manmade thousands of years old here in America. I'm sitting, I'm standing there and I'm looking at it and it's awe inspiring. We don't have very many manmade awe inspiring things. And I'm looking at it and I'm being flooded with so much inspiration and thoughts and I was like I need to capture all this and the only way to do that is to start writing. And I'm writing, I'm just and it's a stream of consciousness. It doesn't matter if it makes sense. It will just be, it'll be what it is but it will be captured. And so I had this started a process that has now a normal thing for me whenever these thoughts pop up I just put them in and which has made for great Twitter fodder. Oh yeah. No doubt. But to be, and so now I want to have these moments more often. So for AJ and myself we're always trying to travel a bit to experience more of those moments. And I'm very excited for you to really have this opportunity as well. I mean obviously it's beneficial but the thing I was, we were mentioning on the phone is we're talking about things that men had decided to do that they weren't even going to see it. They're never going to see it. They're still building it. I mean, I know you live in LA. I lived in LA on off basically the last 10 years. You know, it's, old in LA is something like you'll, you know, maybe you're somewhere and it's like a house or a building. Like that was, you know, when I was built, it was built in 1920. You're like, oh wow. Oh yeah. 30 years ago. Yeah, I remember being in India in 2014. I was there for six months with a client who's a Bollywood actor. His name's very well known Indian actor. So I was there, I was training him for a film role.  I'm just, I'm an outsider, truly an outsider. Don't look like, of course I don't like the people but I'm there and I'm going to temples. I'm going to these historical sites. Then when was this built? This was built in, you know, 180. You know, this was built in, it was built sometime between 300 and 400 BC. And you're looking at, you're like, this is a 2,000 year old building. Yeah. And it took a hundred years to build. And the guys that started building it died probably, let's just say, maybe at the best, a third of the way through the process. So it was built by like their sons and their grandsons and like, and it's still here and people are still coming to it and it's still perfectly maintained. And this makes you realize like their sense of whatever their ethics and values were, that they had the utmost faith and the eternality that they were going to last and endure forever. And they have, and they have.  You're like, this is dust in the wind. This is ashes in a blizzard. It's so ephemeral and so fleeting and so nothingness. And we attach ourselves to it. And we also tend to think that we're smarter than these phones. We think, yeah. Something I want to add to that, not only is all that amazing, then you look at how it was built and you realize that some of the stones were dragged 500 miles away from some weird island.  Go, yeah. This is a great idea. That's great, yeah. We're going to do this. That is something. Talk about aspiring to beauty over utility.  I mean, because no person in the right mind for utility is like, yeah, this will be good.  Like, I mean, yeah, that's why, like Brutalist architecture, even that 20th century aesthetic, it's very inhuman. Yeah, I mean, that's like a whole weird discussion. But like, I have friends that are architects and like, yeah, there's like a subset of architecture there. It's like, we got to be subversive and like make things ugly. Now that stuff is going to endure.  But it's just straight lines. It's just straight lines and it's gray, like not break, like gray concrete.  It makes you angry. And depressed. It makes you get away from it. It gives you an idea of the mental state of people who were living in those conditions, what they had to contend with. How do you get excited? How do you get fired up? How do you get inspired about each day? If everything around you is square, weird, dull colors, I mean, it's only going to add to the depression that your economic state is in. No, no, yeah, I don't know how you could be happy in those conditions. I, this is like a Roger Scruton kind of, like I'm a very badly paraphrasing, but the thing with beauty and aesthetics, like this is like bodybuilding. I've thought about this for a long time because one of like bodybuilding is like a shell, like I want to look a certain way and I want people to look at me. If you get to like the cultural roots of it, like late 1800s sort of like physical culture, the idea was, and you know, someone can agree or disagree and this is not like a political statement, but like the idea was like, okay, like a man is made in the image of God. You know, a man is a being that he has made to be an aspirational being, an ascended being, and you should be able to embody that and you can embody that and that can be accessed through the training and the trials and tribulations of the body that's entirely, it's attainable and that can be created and built, but then also like an artwork and things you create as well. Like what does beauty capture? It captures what is good. So we know that we live in a world where we can experience joyous moments or loving moments or romantic moments or things that just for, even if it's a short two-minute conversation experience, you walk away and like you have a gratitude for that. Like all that is wrapped into what is a beautiful structure or a beautiful body or a beautiful person, a beautiful building. That's all present, it's all there. And we look at that, you're like, wow, that's amazing. It could be a car. You can look at a car and be like, like you can look at a classic 1971 Corvette. You're like, wow, look at this, wow, man. And it's like, it's not rational. Rationality does not underlie existence. Like it's irrational and you can't quantify it. You can qualify it, you can't quantify it. It will never make sense by any metric truly, but it just triggers something in you where you look at and yours, you're held by it, it captures your attention and somebody you want to interact with it and feel it or drive it. Like you want to put yourself within like the space that it inhabits. And that's just always astounding to me. And you see that, like you travel, like we don't have the United States so much.  Like in Poland, like, my God, look at this city. This is beautiful. Look at this city. Like it's been there for, you know, a thousand something years. And people built that so they could live in it, like, literally just live in it and this look, go out of their home and everything, like, I live in a lovely place and feel good. And like, yeah, it could be, I'm sure it was more than that, but you know, that simplicity of that emotional, you know, experience of being able to wake up and you can look outside in a city, you know, no less, not like a natural setting, but a city.  Amazing. You're probably gonna have a good day. Probably, hopefully. I think we'll end it there. Right on. Alexander, thank you very much for being here today and being the first guest for our first new segment, The Art of Charm happy hour. If you guys have any comments, questions, anything you could throw them in the comments below, make sure you hit that subscribe button and we'll be seeing you guys soon. But I feel, oh.