Chat with a Client’s Sister: Different Methods, Same Mission — Building Better Men

You've heard it a thousand times: men and women are fundamentally different. Most guys nod along without thinking twice. But what if that story is mostly wrong, and the one place it isn't wrong is the exact place nobody ever talks about?

This week Dennis sits down with Ryan Western, sister of long-term client Ian Western, for a conversation that goes places nobody planned. Ryan walked in already convinced that most gender differences are socially constructed rather than hard-wired. She wasn't wrong. But she left having discovered one thing she'd never considered: that men carry a deep, constant emotional fear of women that is every bit as real as women's physical fear of men, and it changes everything about how men show up, shut down, and go silent in the relationships that matter most.

She came in not knowing if she was walking into a red-pill situation. She left saying she and Dennis Procopio (The Bro Coach®) were basically saying the same thing all along. How that happened is worth every minute of this one.

This episode gets into the male loneliness epidemic and why the men most at risk don't look like men who are struggling, the real difference between biological sex and the gender construct and why the confusion costs men their sense of self, and what Dennis actually means when he says Man UP is a bait and switch. Also: the Matrix, Krishnamurti, meditation as the only tool that reaches what words can't, and why Dennis says his real mission has nothing to do with masculinity.

TIMESTAMPS 0:00 - Meet Ryan Western, First Female Guest 1:42 - Was She Walking Into an Andrew Tate Situation? 9:15 - Dennis's Backstory and Complex Relationship with Masculinity 11:20 - Gender as a Social Construct: Ryan's Perspective 26:30 - Identity, Ego, and "I Identify More as Energy Than a Body" 35:10 - Men's Hidden Emotional Fear of Women 39:20 - The Male Loneliness Epidemic and Why Men Are Dying 47:00 - The Bait and Switch: What Man UP Life Coaching Is Really About 57:00 - The Matrix, Meditation, and Beyond Identity 1:04:20 - Ryan's Analytical Process Mirrors Every Man Who Walks In 1:13:50 - When the Scaffolding Falls Away: What's Actually Left

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

• Why men carry a hidden emotional fear of women that most women never see and most men never name
• Why the male loneliness epidemic hits hardest in men who look the most put-together
• What Dennis means when he calls Man-UP! "a bait and switch," and where he's actually taking his clients
• Why the real destination of men's coaching has nothing to do with being more masculine

THIS HITS IF YOU'RE

• A man who performs confidence all day and goes quiet the moment real emotion enters the room
• Someone who's wondered what men's coaching actually is beneath all the alpha male noise
• A woman trying to understand what the men in her life are really carrying
• Feeling disconnected from your partner and unable to put your finger on exactly why

TAKE ACTION Free 30-minute strategy session: https://www.manuplifecoaching.com/application

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ABOUT THE SHOW The Bro Coach® Podcast with Dennis Procopio. Not red-pill garbage. Not therapy. Real coaching for guys who achieved success but missed the point. Dennis has 25,000+ hours working with high-earning men ($150K to $3M+) who look successful but feel stuck.

Transcript

SPEAKER_04 0:00

Most men want more, more clarity, more respect, more control over their lives, but few know how to get it. Welcome to the Bro Coach Podcast with Dennis Procopio, the founder of Man Up Life Coaching and the man behind thousands of transformed lives. Not red pill, not therapy, just the evolved man's blueprint for strength, presence, and purpose. All right, welcome to another episode of the Bro Coach Podcast. I am Andrew Bontz. I'm here with Dennis Procopio, and we're blessed to have a guest this week named Ryan Western. She is with us to kind of bring a different perspective, kind of a female perspective, to several different topics that Dennis will kind of dive into. So why don't you kick us off, Dennis?

SPEAKER_05 0:43

Alright, hey, thanks. Um, yeah, so this is uh a season one, episode 17, our first series. So we're still finding our way around. Uh, we've been rolling out the idea of having guests, which is interesting. And so far, we've only heard from male voices. Um, Ryan is here today. She is the uh sister of a long-term client, my dude who has given me permission to drop his name, my guy Ian Western. He's been with me for years. He very much identifies as a bro. He definitely wanted a bro coach. He used a lot of coaching systems and ultimately decided Dennis was his guy. It was inevitable that I was going to meet his family. And Ryan is not only the first person I've gotten to meet, but I convinced her to uh come on to the show to give us a female perspective. So, Ryan, thank you and welcome.

SPEAKER_03 1:42

Yeah, no, it's a it's a real honor to be here. I know we talked about it last time we got together, Dennis, but uh I think this conversation is really important.

SPEAKER_05 1:50

That's awesome. Okay, so I'm gonna dive right in, and I want you guys uh who are listening to understand why Ryan was interesting for me. So one of the things I learned about Ryan from Ian is she's a very entrepreneurial, business-driven, dare I say, boss babe energy uh killer out there in the world. And I find a lot of guys uh who are in relationships with women who have this, who are cut from this same cloth, who have this same skill set. And one of the things that Brian uh excuse me, that Ryan and I got into a conversation about off-screen was hey, so I'm in a relationship with a woman. In fact, I'm married, I have a wife, I live in LA, and I live in a world where we don't use some of the language that you use, which sounds very, I guess you might use the term heteronormative, very binary, potentially regressive. Um, and I wanted to just put myself on the cross here and let her kind of grill me and poke holes in our culture, our language, and what's going on in our bubble to make sure that uh, you know, what we were building here wasn't in any conflict with what other people are building out there in their cultural bubbles in the world. So, Ryan, I'm gonna just sort of hand you that and say, run with it.

SPEAKER_03 3:41

Sure. Let's run with it. Uh uh I learned about Dennis far sooner than I learned about what the name of your coaching company's called Dennis. Um I knew that Ian was interested in this style of mentorship and coaching, and I've like, I I think I've I've always had a hang-up with um what has felt like going down one versus the other road in terms of gender, uh, not for lack of inclusion, um, but more so it feels hard to make progress when we're leaning into one side of what seems like should be a whole, if that makes sense. So um over the years I feel like I've gotten to know you, even though we only met the other week. Um, you're a part of my brother, you're a part of our family. Um and I went in really not having any expectations. Um, I went in in terms of what to get out of it, but I think I went in not knowing, am I about to walk into a conversation with, you know, an Andrew Tate, or am I about to walk into a conversation with, you know, with uh like what, you know, if not that, what is it, right? What what organizations are out there that that are passionate about these lines um being drawn and acknowledging them and in what looks like to me potentially ways of reinforcing things that actually um further barriers of you know the two sides kind of understanding each other. Um and I as not at all what that ended up being our conversation. I think um it was a perspective I hadn't considered, and so it was it was great. I think uh what I'm excited to talk to you about today is um the perspective that you taught me when we last chatted about, and we can loop back to that part of the conversation, but it showed me how actually I walked away from that being like, wow, men and women are actually even more similar than I even thought, and I think there's like barely a thin little string of a line there. So uh that's uh that's kind of summarizing why I'm excited to be here today.

SPEAKER_05 6:03

I love that. Um I'm gonna just shoot. Yeah, that's okay. Um, if you're listening to this, you're not hearing what we're seeing. But Ryan is blessed to live in Los Angeles and be able to work in natural light. The downside of that, of course, is that when it's light, it's light. When it's dark, it's dark. So if you're watching this for visual entertainment value, sorry, suck it. Um I have a male audience. We could say things like that. Um, deal with it, bro. No, no. Um, okay, so Ryan, I love what you said. I want to go directly to the heart of what you said initially, which is I wasn't sure if I was walking into an Andrew Tate situation. It's comical to me that that guy has become the poster child for what that is. So, what is that in your opinion?

SPEAKER_03 7:06

Uh that is alpha male culture. Um, very thin line between that and what a classic modern definition of incel culture is. Um, it's uh male-dominated, female subservience. Um, I'm out here for myself and my own serving serving my own interests, and I'll never care, you know, kind of about um anything that would begin to jeopardize that. So it's it's certainly not a positive one.

SPEAKER_05 7:36

Right. And I I want you to be, don't be political. The more honest you are, the the better we are, and I will just say for the record, I would never want this guy, Andrew Tate, to listen to this and to think, who the fuck is this guy and why is he shitting on me? Like I don't know him, you know, so I don't know the guy. I mean, but I mean, if you put enough content out there, I can make inferences, right? I guess I'd have to sit with you to know who you really are. And maybe not everything you're saying is really who you are. There's an interest for me as a coach to work with people like that and challenge some of their um uh ideologies um because there's a direct connection between ideology and identity. Right. Yeah, and that's what we're here to talk about. So it sounds to me like you were concerned that a you know, big ish bald guy with a goatee and a backstory of, you know, surviving trials and tribulations of the ghetto and Rikers Island or whatever might just be coming in with some of that MiGTOW red pill alpha male energy. And I think you might have been surprised to discover that in our conversation I was saying things like I was very open about having been a um, you know, um a survivor of trauma, which included uh child, you know, child predation by male predators. So that actually made me afraid of men and complicated my relationship with maleness and masculinity. Um, that after living in a household with a father who was very abusive, my mother's next relationship, like yours, was a female relationship. Um and that in the 70s in rural Pennsylvania, I was going to a Catholic school, and instead of talking about my mom and my dad, I was talking about my mom and my Linda. And so these are these are some of the things that were also part of influencing who I am. You wouldn't know that I grew up as a probably autistic, um, artsy little queermo. I was just a little weirdo kid. I was anything but masculine. I was absolutely the guy that everybody picked on, whether it was jocks or nerds, I was just in my own like weird little sort of Napoleon dynamite without the cool factor sort of world. So comically, here I am now flying this flag that seems to be saying, man, man, man, man, man, and you're coming and saying, wait, I don't get it. I've I just had a conversation with a guy who does not in any way seem like I thought what I was walking into. So the thing I want to ask you is, are you do you believe that the gender construct itself is sort of fictitious or arbitrary?

SPEAKER_03 11:11

I actually really do believe it. Um, and I can talk a little bit about where that belief comes from, if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_05 11:21

That's why you're here. Yes, let's hear it.

SPEAKER_03 11:23

Um I think I felt it at a very I felt the friction of of what I eventually realized was the construct of gender at a really early age. Um boys used to be able to go play outside, get dirty, nobody would care. Girls always have to wear a dress on some. Like, I just to me, gender was not like it really wasn't even about like physical parts. It was about the fact that people were telling me I had to do something one way, even though I didn't feel like like that was the way I wanted to do it. Um, or I had to, or I should do something one way, even though that's not how I would have done something. So, you know, being you know, quiet or polite or not, you know, being raucous outside or um, you know, go let the boys play. I'm like, why can't the girl, you know? So um so to me growing up, I it was it wasn't about I really actually had a hard time understanding. I was like, wait, wait, wait, wait. I don't understand just because there's a word boy there and there's a word girl, that if I want to act away, I have to get slotted on one side, like there's a fence and I have to be slotted on one side or the other. Shouldn't it just be about like what we as a person would want to do, you know, human being want to do? So um I didn't, you know, when you're that young, you don't know what the word gender construct means or societal pressures. Um, but as I've gotten older and I've thought more about it, I'm like everything that I know and and have felt about gender, um, especially somebody being married to another woman, the same gender, um it to me is like I know that there's hormonal differences, there's certainly some physiological differences, but the majority of what the definition of gender is is uh constructed by society. And so if we all wiped our brains and switched flip-flop the definition tomorrow, like, you know, I think it would really show how malleable the concept of gender is. The impacts of those societal pressures are enormous. And Dennis, actually, when we were speaking uh the other week, it made me realize I've, you know, because I'm a woman, I've really focused on the impacts of society's definition of woman, you know, be thin, um, be well spoken, but not too loud and not too soft, you know. Um, you always like society puts a lot of pressure on women to be right in the middle of things, you know, right? Always in the optimal um places. And I've thought a lot about what those are, but I haven't really thought too much about the what are the society's versions of pressures for men in that. You know, we talked a lot about that in our last conversation. The protector, the earner, you know, the safety place, um, tall, big, you know, handsome with a nice car, and and how when you look in the mirror and you don't see that, you don't see those pressures that society has defined equals good, right? We all watch Disney movies, the dudes are huge, they have that V cut, the women are, you know, really petite around the waist. Um, when you don't see what society has told you is right for this definition that it's given you, um, it really affects your feeling of self-worth. So that's where our conversation uh ended. But anyways, from a very young age, I've always had an issue with girl versus boy. Like, and and not like uh I'm against these concepts, I've just struggled with it myself and the fact that they even exist.

SPEAKER_05 14:57

I a hundred percent hear you. Are you familiar with um the song When I Was a Boy by Dar Williams? No, I would love for you to immediately go listen to it after we get off the the call. Sure. Careful, it'll make you cry.

SPEAKER_03 15:16

Okay, all right.

SPEAKER_05 15:17

I will prepare myself and then listen to everything Dar Williams because she's one of the artists who was a 90s, 2000s find for me who gave a voice to some of the struggle that I was having accessing um information in the area where boy and girl, man and woman overlap. I think many people struggle with the difference between biological sex and gender identity. Like even you, after saying I don't believe in the gender construct, said I married a woman, we're the same gender. And immediately I thought, well, based on our last conversation, it's probably more accurate that you're the same sex, and as far as gender goes, there's where the construct fucks you up. Because what even is that? What is like what is what is that? My you know what I mean?

SPEAKER_02 16:38

Every day, and I admittedly am not the best at keeping up with them. I try.

SPEAKER_05 16:43

Oh, I and by the way, please don't think I'm like trying to like be like haut you or whatever.

SPEAKER_03 16:49

No, no, no, not at all. There is a difference. Um, and I mean it's important to keep up with like we all should do our best to understand like the the terms and that are eventually gonna make everybody most comfortable in who they are.

SPEAKER_05 17:03

So less than that. I'm gonna challenge that. I don't think it's about being politically correct. I think it's there's a the the word abracadabra. Do you know that it actually comes from the Aramaic and it has worked its way into the Hebrew, and it literally means I create as I speak. I think that people don't understand the important, yeah. And I think that's why it's in all of our, you know, abricadabra hocus poes. It's it's we were conditioned with that pretty early on because the power of speech is literally the power to create, it's the power to manifest. I tend to be very literary. I'm like Hamilton, you know, like why does he write all the time, you know? And um I mention it because I and I live with a lawyer, you know. I that's who my my partner is, she's a lawyer. And so the reason that we sort of haggle or whatever, or sort of argue over terminology, is because language is power and terminology, um, you know, is where the construct comes from. So specificity in language is important, not just so you don't step on somebody's feelings, but also I think there's a critical difference between saying, you know, um I am macho versus I'm masculine. I think there's a difference between what feminine means, how we define that, what is what is femininity, and can I have femininity in me? And if I can't, then who are all these artists who use romance languages to to anthropomorphize their muse as feminine? Like, why is that baked archetypally into our culture? Why do we pull Mary into Christianity so that we have an ISIS archetype? Like, what's going on with this division between God and goddess energy, as it were? I'm not trying to get all woo-woo here, but what what is that? So, not to just belabor this too much, but the reason I mentioned Dar Williams is because Dar Williams has a song called When I Was a Boy. And she talks about being a child and being able to ride topless on her bike and being able to go out and you know, like sprint faster than her brother or whatever, or catch frogs, or do all the things that young boys do, and how she identified with some tomboy part of herself that then got marginalized as she grew over, and society uh pushed certain expectations onto her that were associated with gender roles. Thoughts?

SPEAKER_03 20:19

Oh, yeah. I mean, if um we're all ships out at sea, I think uh so you know the society that we live in is largely the wind, right? It's gonna steer you and push you one way or another, depending on what where the wind's coming from and which way it's blowing. Um but yeah, and Ian will probably be my brother will probably be laughing at this because um I did go around without a shirt quite a lot when I was young. Uh I spent most of my weekends catching frogs and yeah, all the things that you were describing. Um yeah, uh no, I I um I very much agree with that. I think, and that's why I'm really curious, Dennis, about um you know why you have chosen to have a male client base, um why the mission is really helping men find their uh what masculinity and their sense of uh belonging as a man in the world is, um, and I'd be curious uh how you incorporate the female concept, construct, and view into that. Um, and do you feel like it's been more about defining things or trying to almost undefine them, meaning deconstruct these definitions, these wins that society's been you know pushing into all of our sales?

SPEAKER_05 21:50

You're funny you should mention sales. Uh because I run the risk of affecting my sales. When I tell you my secret sauce, which is actually a bait and switch. Okay, so man up life coaching is and always was a double entendre. It plays on the self-judgment that men carry, which is that they're being a little bitch. Here's the language of male speak. You're a bitch, you're a fag, you're a loser, you're a fucktard, you're not doing enough. You suck, you suck, you suck, you suck, you're a piece of shit, you suck. That is the thought bubble that is above most guys' heads all day long. It is similar to the imposter syndrome that I see a lot of women struggle with, um, but it's less about being liked and accepted as a part of the community, and it's more about being pass or fail, respected for your achievements or regarded as quote, beta, which I don't even buy in all that shit. Just right off the top, I don't buy in all that shit. Like a comedian said it once, he's like, Oh, these guys going, I'm alpha, I'm alpha. They're like, no, you're not alpha. Joe Rogan is your alpha. You're all sitting around going like little birds going, feed me, feed me, Joe Rogan, feed me. And he's just throwing up in your mouth, because I'm your fucking alpha. He's like, you don't have a society of alphas, you have one. That's what makes it the alpha. So I don't buy into the literal idea of alphas. I do, however, buy into the idea of healthy, strong masculine um identity because families are where people come from. And I do believe in the family construct. The reason that becomes complicated is because historically there is an argument that the patriarchy has designed the family structure to favor the biological male and to render the biological female as a wingman person, um, as a you prop up your husband behind every powerful man, there's a strong woman, etc. That you're this accessory. Even in the Bible, you're told that the wife's job is to support her husband and his job. You're made from a rib, dude. You're made from a rib, and we'd still be in Eden if you didn't have this insatiable curiosity. Right. I don't subscribe to that mentality. I do not subscribe to that ideology. A direct answer to your question is both. Am I trying to reinforce these constructs or deconstruct them? I'm trying to redefine them. So it's both and neither. We're insane if we say we don't notice gender differences, excuse me, sex differences. We're insane if we don't say that we notice. We're insane if we say that we don't observe. It's like saying I don't see color. Of course you see color. It's not a question of whether you see a color, it's a question of what that means for you. Do you see biological, do you see sex difference? Sex, not gender.

SPEAKER_03 26:00

I'm just yeah, very minimally. I mean, there's there's body parts and there's um hormones and hormonal amounts, um, and hormonal amounts will influence behavior, um, influence you know, the way that you naturally feel when you wake up. So those certainly have their trends, but I'm I'm curious, like, what are the core sex differences between men and women?

SPEAKER_05 26:29

Here's where I want to be careful because I don't want to seem to be planting my flag and saying this is the hill I die on. If you get to know me, like really peel the layers away. On any given day, I have a hard time believing in the myth of all of this. Like, I I'm I'm only one foot in this world in many ways. I really identify more as energy than I do as a body anyway. So it if you're with Dennis of Man Up Life Coaching for long enough, you'll find yourself meditating, you'll find yourself doing a lot of validation that has nothing to do with gender, and you'll find yourself saying things like, you know, you're a good person, you know, you're you're like my validations, for instance, are you know, things like you're good, you're kind, you're gentle, you're patient, you're peaceful, you're humble, you're loving, you're blessed, you're healthy, you're wealthy, you're strong. Immediately somebody would say, Why do those specifically have to be male validations? Couldn't those work for a woman? Of course. Sure, of course. But in my culture, people who, without getting too philosophical, identify as dudes, show up here and demonstrate that that little 11-line uh, you know, affirmation mantra that I just shared with you is not how they see themselves. They see themselves as the opposite of that. So my job is to take people, again, man-up life coaching is in double entendre. It's a bit of a bait and switch. I find somebody who identifies as a man. It starts out as he has a male body, he has a dick, he has, you know, he looks like a dude without getting into the minutiae of, you know, anomalies and exceptions or whatever. The trend tends to be I can pick a dude out of a crowd if there's a bunch of people in a room naked. So if we just say those people sh come up, come here, they say, I need to man up. And they're not always straight, just so you know, they're not always straight.

SPEAKER_01 28:57

Yep.

SPEAKER_05 28:58

Um, they're not always, you know, sometimes they're poly, they're not always, you know, monogamous. They have in common that they identify as male, they usually 99.9% of the time are born to use a vernacular, assigned male at birth, and are coming here because they are working from a construct that says, I'm a dude, I want a girlfriend who eventually becomes a wife, I want to have kids, uh, I want to settle down, I want to make money, I want to retire, I want grandkids, I may or may not be religious Jew, I may or may not be religious Muslim, I may or you know, I may or may not be religious Christian, any flavors I'm of that, I may or may not just be a spiritualist. So that so the answer to your question about whether I'm construct reinforcing it or uh dissembling it. Once you've been here for a while, you'll learn that I'm asking guys to lean into traits that would typically be considered feminine, nurturing, intuition, improvisation, communicating with words, because the average dude uses about 300 words a day, the average female uses 700 or more a day. These are statistics. How do you define what's a chick, what's a dude? I don't know.

SPEAKER_03 30:33

I'm just saying, oh yeah, you've got to organize patterns.

SPEAKER_05 30:37

Right. So what I'm trying to do is get guys to come through the door who were saying I'm not masculine enough, get them to come in here and to love themselves without having a hang-up about gender identity, getting them into a relationship with whoever their partner is or is going to be, recognizing without saying it too much where she might be leaning into her masculine, where he might be leaning into his feminine, sort of balance that out without giving it language as a precursor to making the jump to the next step, which is saying you don't have to dye your hair blue and be woke and non-binary and gender fluid, to begin letting go of this idea of strict traditional binary gender roles. I'm sorry that was long-winded, but that's how I uh operate. What are your thoughts on that?

SPEAKER_03 31:36

I think that makes a ton of sense. I love that um there's a bait and switch element to this uh to man up life coaching. Um I'd be curious. You and I talked about this last time we met. I'm a pretty linear linear thinker. Um I'd be curious uh how on the nose you are with that, with communicating that to your clients. And so um if I if you were like Brian, you gotta take over manup tomorrow, I'm leaving the country and you gotta fulfill this mission uh without me knowing any of your methodologies, your frameworks, and anything, the way that I would approach it would be uh going in and talking about the utter joy and sense of connection you can feel when you throw out these um associations, you know, these gender associations uh out the window, right? And that I think if we really had an in-depth dialogue about, okay, you know, if we categorize everything that made a man a man and a woman a woman woman, um, both in gender expectations and then at sex, like what is there after you've put shoved everything onto the gender society's definition shelves? What is left? What is the definition, like what actually remains super different between men and women after you've taken away the behaviors that you know we have developed as a result of where we're living and and when we're living, right? Um, like to me, I want to know what is left, and that's where I would start with people, uh, their perceptions of you know, you got two naked, hairless monkeys that are next to each other, and um what really is the difference aside from a few parts and some hormones, right? They don't know anything about society's expectations, they don't know, you know, outside of how to like breathe, they don't know any of that. What differences do exist? And and that's a genuine like question I've never taken the time to think about. I've always felt it's extremely minimal.

SPEAKER_05 33:50

I want to admit when we're in an area where it may be out of my expertise because my fear is facing a Jordan Peterson who is someone who is just sitting there waiting for me with, you know, a brain full of freaking Harvard experience to just eviscerate me on facts, you know.

SPEAKER_03 34:20

I think a good response for something like this, because that's like I said, I don't have a answer. Like, I like is just how you feel about it. I don't think there's yeah, I'm I'm more so looking for your per you're like how you feel about it as opposed to because I certainly don't know the um the biological facts, did not study any of that, and I'm uh I would never say I have the latest vocabulary for all of the things.

SPEAKER_05 34:41

Okay, no, no, no, cool, cool, cool. That's that's that makes me feel a little bit better because like I'll tell you a fear that I have. Let's start there.

SPEAKER_01 34:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 34:56

We all know that women are afraid of men. They will choose the bear. That is a social experiment that has demonstrated beyond the shadow of a doubt that that women do not feel safe around men. Um, I don't think it's as well understood how scared men are of women. Um really.

SPEAKER_03 35:21

Um emotionally or physically?

SPEAKER_05 35:23

Oh, dude, emotionally a hundred percent. A hundred percent. A guy would so much rather just be punched in the stomach than be in a moment of emotional vulnerability where she is, you know, calculating when to say the thing that's just gonna crush his soul. Like, you're just like your father. And which was the one thing that he told her in a moment of like emotional vulnerability. The thing that terrifies me most is being like my father, right? So it's like men are, and again, we're still I'm I know I'm tap dancing around defining men or whatever, but but the guy, the people in my culture are afraid of women, and it's not incel energy, they don't hate women, they want to understand women, they want to love women, they they want um female, they they want female affirmation so badly that I've I've created a term for this. It's big titty in the sky syndrome. It's guys who are just from the moment they pop out and crawl up like a slug up their mother's belly and latch onto those that big booby, right there is where the tit fetish starts because it's it's uh associated with like one survival and two, that child does not understand that it's not still a part of this, like we're the same organism. So that symbiosis. I was I was in there, I was connected. Ah, what the hell is this? Bang, okay, there we're back. And so I get guys who are in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, I'm telling you, who have this like they're running around looking for the big titty in the sky, which means they're looking for female validation. And so much of what men do to protect, perform, provide is just looking for those attaboys. So when you get a guy in a relationship, real talk, you know, and let's not let's not love this vernacular, it's awesome. Oh, thank you. Um, yes, welcome to our culture. Um, so happy to share with you. Um so so when so so so what men do is they use things like dating, porn, um, doom scrolling, which you know it's always a whole lot of female energy on the TikToks or whatever. Um there it's uh it's this kind of Freudian sort of like mommy thing where dudes are looking for nurturing.

SPEAKER_00 38:24

Hey man, stop spinning your wheels. If you're serious about leveling up your career, your relationships, and your mindset, it's time to man up. At Man Up Life Coaching, we cut the excuses and build discipline, confidence, and purpose. Book your free strategy session now at manuplifecoaching.com slash application. Don't fill it out if you're not ready to grind, but if you are, this call could change your life. Man up life coaching, elite life coaching for men by men.

SPEAKER_05 38:54

And they're looking for completion. They know that there's something purpose-wise, they're there something's missing. So for men, women complete their raison d'etre. And and when they're denied, they don't think skank bitch. They think I'm bad. They might act that way, but with fox and the sour grapes. But what they think is I'm bad. So Andrew and I have in common that we want to save male lives. I don't know how you define men and women, but the ones who are classically defined as men are the ones who are killing themselves. The loneliness epidemic is real as hell, and if we're just ripping the band-aid off, Anne is a freaking absolute poster child for this phenomenon. So what we do is we, you know, get all of these man boys, and I teach men how to love themselves, which is so cringy for a guy. Again, he'd right, he'd rather just a dude'll tell himself, you suck, a lot more easily than he'll tell himself, you're a very handsome gentleman. So what are we doing here? How do I feel about all of that? The truth is we want the people who identify as male to be a healthy counterpart for the people who identify as female, and we want them to be able to have the liberty to live their lifestyle according to their little rules of gameplay, except other lifestyles that don't structure themselves the same way or play by the same rules. I'm very libertarian, like sort of live and let live, you know. Um and that's that diversity is what makes life interesting. I'm concerned about homogeny because it doesn't feel natural. And so I'm comfortable with diversity. I just want to make sure that when men, dudes, guys, bros, frickin' whatever, are having conversations with themselves about their value, that they start with, I'm a good person, and that they're able to find counterparts who are similarly working on themselves and have that same self-worth so that they can come together. And if they have kids, those kids are raised without self-worth, and they become people who are comfortable living the lifestyle that they choose, but also very open to intelligent um negotiation with other people who have different perceptions based on different perspectives. Sorry, you know I'm a monologueist by now, right? That's what I have to say. What are your thoughts?

SPEAKER_03 42:46

Um, I really appreciate a monologue because I struggle with like incomplete thoughts or feelings, so I really appreciate that style of communication. Um to me, what my reaction to that is the mission is so critical. There's what we have created in modern society is really isolationist. Um the data shows that men are way more frequently and harder hit by that, right? Unfortunately. Um my own experience in life has pointed me that progress to feeling connected, and I think that is really the crux of why this chronic loneliness is plaguing so many people, especially a lot of young men, especially in the United States, um, to tackle that is through connection. Um, like you said, Dennis, connection with yourself, having friends and community, and then ultimately finding the most intimate connection that you can, which is you know, your person. Men, woman, whatever. So to me, um the ethical component of it, I think I definitely think there's a lot of truth to that. Uh media today is all over it. Um, and I think there's something really there. Um, I would argue that you, if connection is the salve to this loneliness, um connection will be achieved. And this is just my experience. Connection is achieved a lot faster by focusing on similarities instead of differences. And instead of taking the time to define differences, lean into them, um the more walls there are, the further you're gonna feel away, right? So even just like defining those walls, I think uh the more you can, the more we can work to break down those and see that there's really not a lot different about us, right? We still haven't in this conversation figured out what is actually different, aside from some parts that dangle in different places. What is actually different about men and women, right? Um and I think that, you know, when you're when we're talking about how men, you know, women being afraid of men, men being um afraid of women, women being afraid of men physically, um, men being afraid of women emotionally. I think again, we can, or at least the way I see it, I scrap that. What I see is fear. We both have fear. One side is experiencing a very animalistic fear. You're bigger, you're stronger, um, maybe a little bit more predatory, and so physically afraid, right? For the flip side of that, men who are fearing that women are gonna cut them deep, um, I would argue that anybody can cut you deep. I I'm not proud, but I if I want to cut deep, I do know how. Um, and I'm not the best at holding back. Uh and I don't think somebody who is in a great place in their life goes to cut anybody. So if a if men are scared that uh a woman's gonna cut them deep, number one, that person, that man, is probably ready to cut himself deep, and like you said, not feeling the self-worth and self-love. But number two, they're with somebody who's clearly in some sort of fear. Hurt people hurt people. Nobody's having the best air of their life and going around insulting, you know, others. Um, so I think it it all is like to me, it just ties back to like connection is by focusing on the commonalities. And what you said, fear is the common thing. And fear for different reasons, yes, but at the end of the day, if we can understand each other's fear, understand what's hurting each other, then why would you know there be a manifest of a physical outburst or an emotional cut, that kind of thing. So that's just my like philosophy of it, instead of focusing on how we're all different, focus on what we all have in common and how to take care of each other as a result of that. Um, and that would just be again, this is like you plop me in the man up life coaching um CEO seat, and you're like, I'm I'm literally going for a year, you've got to take care of all my clients. That would just be my uh process.

SPEAKER_05 47:04

I respect it, and it's interesting, we're not different in our foundational beliefs here, and I want to make it absolutely clear that that's the case. With a caveat, which is that at the end of the day, I do still have a business called Man Off Life Coaching, and you're still sitting here going, Alright, so if you agree with everything I'm saying, why the fuck don't you just call it life coaching? Dennis Life Coaching.

SPEAKER_03 47:43

If it's um a little bit of a bait and switch, like, and and you just said it really well. We're we're both here for the same reason. We want, like my heart, I want nothing more for than my brother and people like my brother to feel seen, connected, loved, to get the most that they can out of life. Um, and we both want that same thing, different methods, you know. No, no uh science experiment only ever had one method. So I don't, you know, if if that's your method, I'm not gonna, you know, I'm not here to break it down. We everybody's got their own ways of doing it.

SPEAKER_05 48:17

Heard and respected. That said, I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna go down the I'm gonna go down the the freaking matrix rabbit hole here. Okay, I wish they hadn't I wish they hadn't co-opted the term red pill because I would have used that. But um, but now it's kind of got some shit on it. So let's just say, hear me, I'm gonna go deep, okay?

SPEAKER_02 48:45

Yep.

SPEAKER_05 48:46

Um I want to point out that I just heard how I said okay and it sounded patronizing. And I realize that the reason I do that is because I'm used to working with dudes. And the moment I get philosophical to the point that we get away from like I I always joke and say, come for the abs, stay for the enlightenment. And the moment we start, and the moment we start to move into the slippery place, um, I have to really kind of use my my art teacher voice a little bit. So apologies for that. Um, it's just force a habit. Uh so here's the thing. If we smoked a bowl together right now and I told you who the fuck I really am, I'm somebody who thinks that this entire experience that we're having is sort of Alice through the looking glass. I think that it's a bizarre abstraction of reality. I think that all of the religions point to a reality which we call the ephemeral and which which is really actually the firmament, as it were. I think that we are living a bastardized version of reality. We're kind of in upside-down world, and that's why everything sucks. And I think that the critical component of the matrix is the focus on the I, the identity, the ego, that which distinguishes. So on this journey, if I were on a t-shirt, I'd pull up my sleeve and you'd see that I have an ohm symbol tattooed on my arm, because at the end of the day, I am of the belief, which I dare to call an understanding, based on having put in the reps and having some near-death experiences and doing a lot of meditation and a bunch of other crap that I think qualifies me to speak to this stuff. Um I believe that if we peel the onion and we just peel it all the way down to what is what is the is-ness of is, it's vibe, it's it's vibration. It's energy. It's all energy. That's what it is. It's energy. How does energy manifest? I am of the opinion that energy manifests as a response to thought. I believe that at the independent level, the local level, the little avatars that we are that walk around this virtual reality, that our self-talk is not in fact thought. I believe that it is just noise. Um I believe that thoughts are things. That's why I said that I I create as I speak. I really wasn't kidding. Um and I believe that if we look at the universe as a quantum situation, that the game is to be wavelength, not particle. But clearly that's not what's happening here. That's not what we're perceiving. Because it's not what we're perceiving, it stands to reason that what we're experiencing is based on an error in perception. If there's an error in perception, if you recognize that perception is actually projection, and that there's this conceptual mobius band where seeing is believing, but believing is seeing. Which is how you break the pattern by saying something outrageous because then you kind of break into some, you know, virgin territory and the everythingness of everything. I believe that the game that we're playing is a return to a state of grace in which a schizophrenic mind of God or whatever you want to call it becomes whole again, but with a caveat, which is that the I want to I'm I'm going way into art guy world with this, but if you imagine an androgynous representation of consciousness, like sitting, looking, reflecting in a pool of water. If you throw pebbles into the pool of water, it's going to create interference patterns, and the interference patterns are going to create differences. And so I kind of feel like the situation that we're in now is that avatar in a fun house where every mirror shows you short, tall, skinny, fat, black, white, male, female to infinitely varying degrees. And the game is to wake that person, it that mind, that experiencer. The universe is experiencing itself. And so to wake that singularity up into the aha moment, which is what all the serpent serpent candelini crap is about, and what all of the I'm sick, Jesus saved me, and all of that, it's all about the same shit. And you get there through meditation. So I ask my guys, my clients, and just so you know, I do work with a couple of women, but we don't talk about it. Um but I just want you to know that's a thing. It's like a hidden in-and-out menu item. Um, I have all I have all of my clients practice meditation because meditation will reveal what we can't say. And when we try to say it here, what are we gonna do? I'm gonna end up in freaking conversations with everybody from Nick Fuentes to Andrew Tate to everybody else. And when I'm talking, I could just be meditating. So what do we do? We meditate, we learn that our commonality is all there is. The rest is a hundred percent horseshit. Not in a bad way, it's just made up, and that's okay. The problem is when you selectively cherry-pick what you believe is sort of an absolute and what you recognize is just metaphor. The moment you accept it as all metaphor, then fine, it's just a bunch of kids with a dress-up box, and you're just doing shit because you're in the middle of infinite time and infinite space doing infinite shit. Because what the fuck else would you do in the middle of an infinite void and infinite time with infinite power? So I believe that what we're currently experiencing is a rebound where we kind of went there, it went all the way out, and now we're moving back toward a place of absolute grace, absolute awareness, and as you said, the removal of these partitions, these walls. We're literally living a cellular existence right now in every metaphorical, biological sense of the word, which is why you said isolation. Yes, we're living a cellular existence. Cell is in body, cell is in prison, cellular. What is the solution? It's not a problem you solve, it's jumping the tracks to a different way of being because this isn't working for you anymore. So, what am I really? If you want to just rip the band-aid off, a freaking bodhisattva. What is my mission? To get everybody spiritually free. Do I believe in the gender construct temporarily because men need scaffolding and need structure? Otherwise, they can't handle understanding their identity, their identity. It breaks them, and they experience existential crisis, then they go and coke binges, and you know, it's hookers and blow, and I lose them. So that's what we're doing here. Now I'm gonna loop it back to you and say that was a big one. Back to you, Ryan. Um, I loved it.

SPEAKER_03 57:59

I did. Um so the ego, the sense of self, the you know, I think therefore I am. Um I agree with that. My wife and I were just talking. What do you think the first real sign of civilization was? We had uh been watching a documentary, I think, on like Neanderthals or something. But I was like, what do you think the real the first, like, when do you think civilization can can we can all point to it and say that was it? To me, it was the first time somebody verbally shared a memory, um, meaning we had the higher thought to actually express something that we held on to from the past. Um and if we're all kind of built on top of that as a as a as a base layer, um I think we're all really similar. And so when we think about our, or at least the way that I think about it, we all were once animals, yes. And then this you know, moment of civilization happened. Um these were uh just very random thoughts, by the way. But moment of civilization happened, um in every day we can either go back toward kind of that base instinct animal self, um, or you move a little further away from it. And in the matrix style of uh philosophy, every choice that you make is gonna inch you in one direction or the other. You're not gonna the way that I see it, and I love the matrix, by the way, so I love that you reference it. Um the way that I've interpreted that over the years is um every action that you take, every decision that you make, every choice that you have, are we moving back towards that animal version, which to me, let's talk about what that animal version is. Um it's an animal focused on survival, right? At its purest form. That's what an animal is. And I don't blame people when they make choices that to me are in that direction, focusing on survival, right? They're clearly experiencing some sort of insecurities. Food, financial, self-esteem, right? There's there's something that's uh, and it takes a lot of patience, and I'm not always the best remembering it, but there's something that's making them go in that direction as opposed to, like what you were saying, a more enlightened kind of utopia. We are instead of these individual beings on this planet, we're all just this energy flowing around and together in harmony, which is obviously future state goals. Um, but how can we use these types of platforms? And through your uh coaching, how can we encourage people despite the insecurities that we're feeling, recognizing that we are, yes, we were from animals, but we are humans, so it's a higher power thought. So despite those insecurities, how can we still try and make some progress towards you know, towards not the animalistic side of ourselves? So I say all of that um to again say I understand um that concept. I don't have direct experience with it because I'm not a guy. I've like not, um, if I can't understand my identity, then I like fall off this metaphorical cliff on the world. I would argue that that probably applies to anybody, um, men and women. Uh I have a lot of my identity wrapped up in work. I love what I do, I've been with the same company for going on 11 years. Um, I know that like I would be my reality would shift if you know tomorrow you said, you know, uh Ryan, you don't have a job. Um so I would I would still argue that we're we we came from the same you know place. And so to get to the same, like we're all marching towards the same goal. Um I I don't want to negate what you said about men and their identity, and if they can't find it, the crisis that that puts them in. Um my experience is the same rings true for women, and so I think what I feel like I've been feeling every or each time we've talked so far, Dennis, is we're actually all saying the same thing. And like you said, we want the same thing, and maybe we just don't have the counterpart perspective real time to because every time you say something, oh my god, I never considered that. And I think, wait, the female equivalent of that is this, and they're really actually closely related. Um, and so again, to me, this is very cyclical, but it's it's we're saying the same thing. Men and women, yes, it might look different, but they're actually going through very similar things. The product's gonna be different. Um, but how can we unify that? And how can that be done when the focus is on the definitions of the differences as opposed to the unity of the experiences? Which is a very, like, I don't know, a very high philosophy sounding question, but yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:03:17

So I'm I'm sitting here realizing, you know, that I want to talk for another hour. And I'm like, God damn it, did we really just do an hour already? I'm gonna try to wrap up. Yeah, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. It doesn't mean what you think it means. Hold on. I'm gonna try to respond to you knowing that I have an obligation to do that, but regretfully, because I could literally have this conversation with you for another hour and have just okay, I wanna, I wanna, I wanna, I'm gonna do a level set here. Here's what I'm gonna do. Number one, really Ryan listen. Like, that's not my dad voice, that's my just friend to friend. Really let me in on this, okay? Hear me. Audience, pay the fuck attention because I'm about to say a thing. Okay, so Ryan. Um you are demonstrating the exact same inquisitiveness using the same tools as the average dude who comes into man up life coaching. A hundred percent. I am very certain that any guy listening to this is going to hear what you said in response to what I said, and if he can subtract out the which team am I on bullshit, and just listen to the process, your analytical process, and you came into this saying I'm very linear. I'm a linear thinker. Your process. I've got this book here. The Book of Life by J. Krishnamurti.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:12

I think my wife has read that.

SPEAKER_05 1:05:14

Okay. Um Krishnamurti's kind of a dick, right? But I like him because he's unapologetically a dick. Like he's just like, look, I come from a culture where everybody proselytizes and it's about meditation and enlightenment and everything. I'm gonna put my monocle in and I'm gonna question everything, and I'm gonna do it unapologetically. And I'm gonna do it like with a like I just smelled cow shit look on my face for the 90 years that I'm alive. Um, and people are gonna like love me for it, which is exactly what it turned out. The more I say I don't want to write a book, the more they're gonna like take my words and turn them into books. So I like about Krishna Murti that he was. He was true to his own way of processing. He was very much in his masculine freaking quote unquote. And your response to what I said reinforced for me, validated your original message. Like, why do I have to feel excluded from this because you've turned it into a boys club? Like, I feel like we're saying the same shit. So you're right, we are. The reason that I chose men, quote unquote, as my demographic is because when I was a young man looking for a mentor, I was trying to heal my father wound. And that is a very important part of your identity as a dude, is your relationship with your dad. So, real talk, I'm kind of a rent a dad. And I am. And I shouldn't be understated that role that that can play, by the way. I'm saying, you know, and my practice is on a 15-year-old kid with profound autism, dwarfism, red hair and freckles, and hopefully a soul. Uh, but I mean he is a ginger kid. So so so we love my son. We love my son. Um, but yeah, nobody goes unscathed. I'm a Gen Xer. Fuck him too. All right. Anyway, so so the deal is I love my son. I just want to reiterate, but boy is he tough work. Um, so here's the part where I want you guys to listen. This is the pay the fuck attention part. Ryan, if I had chosen to call this, you know, deal with it life coaching instead of man up life coaching, and if I had chosen to make my brand assets gender neutral, there's a possibility you and I might have found each other. Maybe not, but maybe. And there's a possibility that you could have come into this culture and I would have used the same methodology with you as I use with my clients. Do you play chess?

SPEAKER_03 1:08:32

Uh, poorly.

SPEAKER_05 1:08:34

On my watch, you would learn to play chess better because you would use the engineering part of your brain a little bit more. Most of my clients overuse that part of their brain. And they try to use that part of their brain to solve emotional problems. So you would play chess with the promise what's the science? Trust me, bro. That's the science. Okay. Um, exercise. I would find out what your what your exercise, um, what your what your goals are, and I would make suggestion fitness suggestions for you based on my experience working in a gym with athletes, men and women, who trained and trained for competition. Very actually conversational in that space. Um, personal organization. Because you're so linear linear, because you're so systematized, uh, I do not think that personal organization would be a huge problem for you. So if I were working with you, I would more likely be suggesting for you to practice taking time off and to build breaks into your schedule rather than making your life a wall of work, which I believe you probably inherited from your dad. Just saying, this is just an outsider's view. In the spiritual department, I just learned about you that I said let's step outside of the time-space continuum, and you looped it back to biology. Biology, chemistry are within a container which we can call the physical realm. In that container is metaphysics. I'm not trying to, sorry, I there was the tone again. I caught myself doing it. In that container is metaphysics. Where I would hope to take you would be outside of the physical, biological, chemical explanations that depend on time and space as this construct, if we're going to deconstruct, and I would take you into the metaphysical. I wouldn't take you, I would guide you to do stuff that would uh force you to deal with uh some stuff that you didn't know that you didn't know, and on that lateral drift, you would be like, what this is, and I would be like, hey, there we go, let's talk about that. So so if we were to work together, I think that you would learn. I don't know if you can see this. Uh uh, there's this little drawing that I did while you were talking. Can you see it? The choice to the left represents sort of an infinity of choices that you can make in the matrix. Do I have the chick with the red dress or not? Do I have the steak or do I not? Do I eat the cookie? Do I not eat the cookie? Etc., etc., etc. What is the entire message of the matrix? The message of the matrix is that the spoon bends when you realize that it's not the spoon but you that bends. What does that mean? It means you have to change your narrative. What does that mean? It means accepting that there is no spoon, which arguably means that there is no you, that there is no objective reality, and that is enough to put you in existential crisis, right? Um the antidote for that is unasking the questions that you're asking analytically because you're trying to make a roadmap of a place that you haven't been yet because you're trying to control it because you're control and structure-oriented. And again, that could be called your masculine brain, but call it whatever the hell you want. That's the process that's happening. Somewhere out there is a dude whose freaking ephemeral, feminine, whatever you want to magical energy is so incredibly high that the moment I started talking about that, he went, oh yeah, well, that's obvious. Yeah, she's not getting it. She's talking about like biology and stuff. And in that situation, I would be like, she's kind of the dude in this conversation. He's kind of the whatever feminine energy in this conversation. Let's remove those constructs by saying finally, let's remove those constructs by saying, and this is where I'm gonna bring it in that the end result of man of life coaching is for you to learn that arguably everything you think you know about yourself and about life is questionable, potentially impermanent. And that the reason I have chosen to be the portal that brings in people who identify with the manup language is only so that I can get them to a place that they no longer need to use that scaffolding for identity or underst uh meta understanding. Andrew, you've been so quiet. What are your thoughts about what we've what have you seen here today? You've been a very patient fly on the wall. What do you what do you think about everything that we've said? I was a lot. I just I didn't think we were gonna just come in here and have a casual conversation. I saw Ryan from a mile away, dude, trucking.

SPEAKER_04 1:14:28

Yeah, I think it was I mean, I'm sitting here listening to the two of you talk, both highly intellectual. Obviously, I see your logical, linear, practical brain, Ryan, and I see Dennis leaning into his spiritual side, uh, and and kind of creating this, you know, Picasso of a conversation between two people that are just genuinely curious, and I think it's a beautiful thing.

SPEAKER_05 1:14:59

So thank you, brother. Um I want to before we go, I want to explain what this was. There is a mantra that I learned pretty early on, and it was this peep this. Love is that it's a three-line mantra. Love is that which enables choice.

SPEAKER_03 1:15:19

Both of us, Andrew and I?

SPEAKER_05 1:15:21

Hear me, hear me on this.

SPEAKER_03 1:15:23

Okay. I don't think you said repeat it or not.

SPEAKER_05 1:15:26

No, no, no, no, no, no. Yeah, it's the way to get into my cult starts with you have to repeat everything I say. Come on, be an obedient woman, men are speaking. No, no, that's not what I'm saying at all. Um, I was saying, hear me. Oh, I said I see, I said peep me on this. Sorry, there we go. I sometimes slip into my hood character. Um to soften my Napoleon dynamite side. Um uh it's a three-line mantra. Love is that which enables choice. Love is always stronger than fear. I always choose on the basis of love. Now, if we want to use the matrix as our reference, my little picture was going left at the fork in the road, where you have a literal infinity of choices within the matrix. That's choice one. Choice one is to go to the left and have an infinity of choices, a seeming infinity of choices. To get lost in the labyrinth of quantum entanglement. Live cat, dead cat, the you know, green shirt, red shirt, bald, not bald, male, woman, trans, you know, goatee, not goatee, like glass eye, whatever. As many things as you can come up with, right? Um the other is love is that which enables choice. I can choose love. What the hell is love? It's the thing that you find in meditation when everything else is removed. And the best I can do is to be a tenant. What's that?

SPEAKER_03 1:17:06

It's a very Buddhist tenant.

SPEAKER_05 1:17:08

Sure it is. Sure it is. Because and another Buddhist tenant tenant is I am that, and I think that's what we're doing here today. We're saying, I am that. I am her, she is me. We are we the God in me and the god in you, the divine light in all of us is the same light. And so trust me when I say, fellow spiritual warrior, I'm bringing people like your brother, but not excluded to your brother, to the light, and asking them to question some of their language and narratives surrounding identity, because you can't define yourself without divining the world as the context that you know defines you, and vice versa. So, what the majority of people who are successful here in this environment learn is completely the opposite of what somebody on the outside would expect. Andrew, do you do you agree with that? Yeah, I agree with that. Cool. All right, Ryan, before we head out, give me a play us off stage and give me leave me with something powerful.

SPEAKER_03 1:18:40

If uh you've shown up to Dennis' door, you're looking for change in your life. Um for change to be there, there has to be change. And so I know I speaking from my own experience, it can be really hard to be open to change when you're really lonely, when you're feeling on an island, um, when things aren't going your way at work, outside of work, you know, in relationships, in your relationship with yourself. Um, as much as we can take steps away from that, you know, animalistic version of ourselves. And like you were saying, like to me, there's actually not a ton of difference, Dennis, between choosing the infinite choices and going back kind of towards that survival mode, that animal mode, and then choosing love and the I believe it was the sunshine on your drawing, right? Like that's to me that represented happiness. Um it's really hard to do, but if you're on Dennis's doorstep, you want that change. So the accountability piece to me is keeping a really open mind to the fact that you might be wrong. I remember the first time my mind was changed, like very seriously changed, and it was one of the best feelings in the world. I was so taken aback by how like powerful that felt that my mind I just started reading an article, it was actually about like self-injection sites, heroin and filling. I was like, how could anybody propagate you know further harm to people? But then by the end of the article, you're like, and the death toll went down to zero. Yes, there's usage, but there's always going to be usage, and that you know, so anyways, my mind was totally changed by the end of the article. Um, and if you're at Dennis' doorstep, you're looking for that change. If he's your article, keep keep an open mind, is I guess the last thing that I can say. And try and walk towards that sun, that that happiness and not the infinite choices.

SPEAKER_05 1:20:36

That's so awesome. And and to be clear, it it's that sun represents radiance.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:43

Beautiful.

unknown 1:20:44

I love that.

SPEAKER_05 1:20:45

Minor, speaking of language, minor language shift. We're not always happy, but if we can be comfortable in the uncomfortable, if we can lean into our self-worth, because our idea of self is grounded in our big self, which is where we experience commonality rather than difference, then we radiate a vibration that brings us all back to a state of peace, love, and sanity. Can I get an amen? Hallelujah. Andrew Bontz, play us off stage, my man.

SPEAKER_04 1:21:25

All right, well, if you're not with us to where we're at right now, you obviously got a chance to see the philosophy side of Man Up Life Coaching. And we've talked about previous episodes about relationships and relationships with yourself and you know, fatherhood. And this is very much a different angle, but it's also a side of man up life coaching. So if you got value out of this, if this was helpful for you, all we ask is that you know add a review on your favorite podcast player, share it with your if you're watching this on YouTube, subscribe, you know, share it with other people, help us spread the message. Because our mission really is that brotherly love mission of showing men love, lifting men up, and because we believe that you know through this mission, we can lift up. If we lift up a man, we can lift up his family, if we can lift up that family, we can lift up that community and kind of have that ripple effect beyond that. So we appreciate all of you for being here. We appreciate you, Ryan, for you know, investing the time today and sharing your perspective. I think it was beautiful and you brought out a side of Dennis that I don't know if our audience has seen before. So uh it's pretty cool to see.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:34

Thank you guys so much for having me. I really, really appreciate this opportunity.

SPEAKER_05 1:22:39

Thank you.