 What he represents is patriarchy. We're here to do work as men, as patriarchs. There's nothing more natural than being a father. Welcome back to the 21 convention, second patriarch edition here in Orlando, Florida, live in 2020. We're about to finish off with our last speaker for the afternoon, and this is the man who's been involved with the 21 convention since its inception. He's been here in a part of the family and a part of the crew from day one. As I've been involved and known him for the last five years, I've really come to appreciate his perspective, his depth and his ability to think things through, his charisma and the way in which he expresses them is a pretty awesome combination. And so I'm really excited for you guys to get to hear from him, especially because what he's going to be covering today as far as intentionally parenting your children, how to be able to take that perspective and combat a lot of the forces in the world that are trying to take our children away from us, whether that's actually or even just from a moral or a mental or an emotional perspective, he's going to give you men the tools to be able to keep them in your court and be able to serve them the best you can as fathers. So please welcome to the stage Socrates. Guys, thank you for coming here. I am always stunned when I sit on the stage or stand on the stage at the patriarch event. Like Tanner was saying, I've been a part of this from the very inception, even though I was not at the first convention, I was very much aware of it. At the time, Anthony was a very, very young punk when he was doing it, and I just knew enough to stay out of his way. And he essentially took at $17,000, $10,000 worth of cash debt from slow sharks to put on an event. I never thought it would happen. I thought there were some severe reservations regarding the event, what he was trying to do. The concept we had proven on a voluntary basis locally, but he decided to blow it up and put it in a hotel and people were going to fly in and hotel stays and it wasn't going to be a weekend event, it was going to be a week. If you know Anthony, he gets it done. And at this point in my life, 10, 12 years later, having watched him grow, develop, mature with these events, he has done just that and I don't think I'll ever put money against him. And he has very personally, because of his gracious nature, asked me to come and talk about some of the ideas I've had, the things I was concerned with and share that with some of the other guys. And that was nice. I thought it was going to stop. And that would be the last time I would talk. It didn't. And I got invited back again and again. And what ended up happening is as you talk to men like yourselves and you're sharing ideas and talking in the hallways and at breakfast, lunch and dinner over a course of a three-day immersion event, you have significant conversations. Your social group expands rapidly. And because of each of the speakers usually tend to stay with the convention the entire time, you can sit next to these guys and talk to them, pick their brains, and you develop relationships with them. Additionally, attendees are coming back multiple times, as well as the speakers, and so that there's this reunion of sorts that takes place within the 21 convention events and now the summits. Throughout that process, I went through a number of transformations as I grew and matured. Initially, I had some real strong reservations regarding the sexual marketplace and concerns about that and how do you navigate that. And that's primarily what I used to talk about is how to help people navigate today's sexual marketplace. Then I started broaching in the subject of me becoming a father and what that was like. And there was no good form for doing that. And we had a couple of guys. Tanner was one. We talk about Hunter and he's now known as Zack, evidently. I'm still getting used to that. And there was this real commonality of saying we're slipping in talks about being responsible, relationships about being responsible, husbands about what does it mean to be fathers and sharing that internally and having that on a couple of talks. And Zack, bless his heart, commenced Anthony to put on an event. And they did. And we've never looked back. At this point, it's given me an opportunity to not only talk about navigating the sexual marketplace as fun as that is, I actually take particular pride in becoming a father advocate of promoting fatherhood, fathers, and child rearing in a very responsible way. And that, to me, is entirely precious because I've seen how much of a better man I have become and how much of a better father I am now compared to where I would have been had I not been peer mentored by the men and the attendees in which I embraced this during these conventions and has had a remarkable transformation in my life. And so for that, I owe Zack, I owe Tanner and ultimately Anthony a tremendous sense of appreciation and thanks. Now, with that being said, I'm going to be talking about your legacy and where it gets manifested. I believe there's no more important project in life than in making good people. And I say that as a licensed architect. Let that sink in for a minute. I don't do residential work. It's all commercial-based. It's all public sector. A lot of these are multimillion-dollar projects that are not insignificant. They're socially-based. They're culturally-based. And they influence, in effect, a tremendous number of people and their end users. There is no architecture I can create that will give me more pride than developing good people. There is no award I could win that will lift my heart up like seeing men return improved the following year. Getting the call saying, hey, I'm now engaged to that girl that we walked through and we talked to her. I'm now having a child with my wife for the first time and sharing the excitement. I also had the ability recently where two of my talks, I had engaged about the nature of a father taking on the role and responsibilities of changing a diaper and how important that is for protecting your family, protecting your child. But in most cases, it was primarily not dealing with the diaper and the hygienic element, but with the notion that you're developing a relationship with your child, that they learn to come to you in their time in need. And I was fostering and developing that pattern of behavior by example, not being word, not saying I love you, but showing you I love you, to a child who can't speak and developing that pattern. And how important that was when she came to me as her primary choice to be cared for. Now, part of that is I told a diaper bag story. It was a pretty big hit for that particular talk. It was so important that everybody convinced me the following year to come back and actually have the dad bag that I had and actually display it. This year, interestingly enough, one of our attendees who I consider now a friend having seen him and spent time with him and just sheer enjoying being around him brings his brother to this event. The brother is an expecting father. And they asked, tell me about the dad bag. And so my partner, Mary Frances, last night brought it and I had it and I had the opportunity to show him how to do it. Walked him through the process, here's this, talked about different things. And it wasn't so much what I said, what little information he got, the technical skills, the little things he would write down and put in his back pocket and use. The most important thing you do is how you made him feel. And very much when you talk to somebody, it's not what you say, it's how you make them feel that becomes important. And you could see it in his eyes a shift from a very young man who's going to have the dawning task of being a father for the first time, suddenly have confidence in going, not only can I do this, it's going to be goddamn cool and I'm going to own it. And I'm going to follow up to make sure he does. Tell me, what piece of plastic award tops that? Now, that's something for me, what I want to tell you is each and every one of you has the ability to be a father and command the same level of discipline for a child to create life and be responsible for that. I want you to think about your legacy, which you're going to leave behind. And we want you to leave it behind. And not only we want you to leave it behind, we want you to be Darwinian successful. And being Darwinian successful is not the fact that you had a child. That's only one tier. To be truly biologically successful, your children need to have children of their own. I want what you do today with your children in developing them to resonate in your grandchildren. I want you to have that legacy. And we don't really talk about that as men. And we need to start. Now, Texas Dom is sitting in the audience and he said something probably three years back that I will never forget. He goes, you will never completely understand how insignificant your children are until you see and hold your grandchildren. That's impressive. And particularly from the man in his background, his story and what he's doing as a patriarch for his family that will be passed through and down to his grandchildren. I'm humbled to be considered his peer in an event like this. In all honesty, I'm humbled when I think of Tanner Guzzi. I think of Hunter Drew. Sorry, Zach. I think of Tex. I think of the guys who you've seen here. And I think I have to fill some very big shoes if I'm going to stand next to them. It's dying. But I want to focus on this because that's a commonality we all share. And what I'm trying to tell you is if any one of us can do this, we all can. Make up your mind to do it. If you think your legacy is important, make it your job to do so. By the way, when we talk about raising children, there's no better system to do that than stoutly committed fathers. Fathers who are present, fathers who are available, fathers who listen, fathers who are willing to teach. We're not here to raise children. We're here to raise our replacements because children are here to replace us in a very literal sense. We should be treating them like understudies. We're here to nurture and develop, train, and to give them the stage experience in life so that they exceed and they excel. But more importantly, like their education, we don't give children an education so they learn. We educate our children so that they will then teach and educate theirs. And we need to start thinking generationally if we're going to change the world today. There's a term for this. This term is called patriarchy. Now this term is verboten. You're not allowed to talk about it. You're not allowed to express patriarchal tendencies. And by discussing and bringing this term up, we are crossing a Rubicon, a social river. Now when you do this, you shouldn't just cross into a territory and wander aimlessly. The point of crossing a Rubicon is not just to cross a social boundary. You cross a social boundary like the Rubicon to seize Rome, to march on Rome. The Rubicon was the outer boundary, the outer limit. You need to march on Rome, and it will not be significant enough just to banner about and show these ideas. So what's Rome? I have a question for you. Who raises your children when you outsource education and development? When you send your children to school, who teaches them? What's the social contract? You send your children to a school that's in your community, should reflect your community, and should reflect your community values. Can we honestly answer the question that that social contract is being adhered to, honored, respected, or is our education system being used and leveraged to corrupt our children, to change their value systems, and to change the future in a way in which their handlers prefer? And it's not just at a university level. You're going to find intersexuality and critical race theory presented in grade school. Why is it okay to have BLM posters in a grade school but you can't have an American flag? So, I think Rome, quite literally, is commanding the power to educate and develop your children. It's subtle, but I think it's terribly influential. So let's go with the basic concept. The children who have the brightest perspectives in the lives are the one most thoroughly parented. Anybody disagree with that? I know we've talked probably at length in the last couple of days about fatherless homes, the disadvantages children have when they don't have fathers, crime, behavioral issues, substance abuse issues, all the things that we talk about, that plays a role. And if that's true, what would it look like if children were over-parented or over-fathered? Would that change a child's life? And how significant would that be? Would it be the same if we were talking mothering? What happens when you over-mother a child? They're over-mothered, right? They're over-nurtured and they essentially become weak. You'll hear that refrain in a number of talks. And there's a reason for that. Women make poor fathers. Likewise, interestingly enough, I believe men make poor mothers. I think we need to have appropriate roles at an appropriate time for children's development. Here's a biological issue. And this is a ground-fact we're going to have to work with. This is a limiting parameter. Before the age of five, 90% of a child's brain is developed. Neuro pathways, conditioning, a lot of behavior elements, personality, characters, all those sort of things. So if we're going to be concerned about our legacy, we need to start with the birth, let's just say the birth of a child at zero point birth for it. Obviously, prenatals are a tremendous issue. But let's say we're the things that we can truly, truly control. From birth to age five, I think we need to make it a priority that we have a primary caregiver and support giver that that child can rely on. It's essential they have that. And this is also during a time period when they're very, very young. They have inability to speak. They communicate. They have needs. They cannot express themselves. They don't know how things... And it's critical that you are providing that or someone's providing that that's consistent. What's the earliest form of abuse? It's going to be neglect when they're not cared for, when they're not provided for, when their security needs are not met. And this can take a lot of forms, really some very, very benign forms. This could be a baby who's left left to cry because it just needs to cry it out. As an adult, what would we do if we seen somebody who cannot speak our language in duress, panicking, crying? And we're just because we couldn't communicate with them. Just let them cry it out. What type of psyche do you think is developed here? The ugly reality is this is a source of codependency and substance abuse issues. Addiction. This is where it starts to develop. The brain doesn't develop appropriately. They have needs that are unresolved. And unresolved needs don't just disappear. They get carried forward. And biological imprinting takes place. And as adults, people who are neglected as children tend to turn to alcohol and drugs, sexual promiscuity, risky adverse behaviors. And that has consequences. If neglect is the early form of abuse and we know it has detrimental effects on the development of a child, what does physical abuse do? And I don't mean criminal physical abuse. I mean generally parental discipline, corporal punishment, smacking a child when they just fucking need to listen, shaking a child because they won't listen. What do you think happens? All the issues we talked about just a second ago are compounded. Ultimately, on a moral issue, why is it okay to hammer a child with a fist or a slap or a belt, but you can't do it to your spouse? Because you know, won't she listen sometimes too? Woman, just fucking listen. How about grandma? Is it cool to slap grandma or what? Because I know she's seen now, dementia's setting in. Can we just slap her and get her in the car, get it over with? Come on, we're in a rush, grandma. Give her a cuff. Morally, it's not acceptable. I'm a supervisor at work. I'm telling you, there are times I'd love to just bitch slap my employees. You said you were going to do something. You promised me we needed to do something. It was deadline goddamn centered. You knew you had to do this and you fuck off. Why can't I hit them? I think it'll improve their efficiency. The danger here is also more than just manifold in brain development. You're teaching your child a language. They learn through imprinting by our experiences, by our leadership, by the things that we do and say and tonality and their depth at it because they don't have the ability to communicate particularly young. And that language you're teaching them is violence. Violent people are not creative. Violent people don't know how to think outside of a box to look at alternative solutions. And that's going to play out in a number of professions. And violent people will pass it on to others. If you were taught this was permissible, you're more than likely to do it yourself. If you want to strengthen your family tree, right now, make it a promise. Slow yourself down. Take a deep breath. Walk away. Don't hit your kid. If you really want to prepare yourself for it, because this is going to happen. A number of events are going to happen. You're going to be stressed. You're going to be tired because that's when it happens. You're going to be overloaded. Kid's not going to be responding. You're going to be having a conflict of interest. Prepare yourself in advance. Have the skill sets involved right now, today to handle that situation before it comes to this. For a lot of people, if you just did this in life with your child, you're improving your family legacy. And the interesting thing about trauma and abuse like this, what doesn't get transmuted, gets transferred. You have the ability to sidestep that completely. If you don't do harm, you don't have to worry about that harm being transferred to your grandchildren. It doesn't exist in the first place. Not only that, they will be brought up with the knowledge of it, and I can guarantee you, they will probably pass it on to their own children because it was an expectation of their life, and it reflected it, and they imprinted it, and they will pass that on. I think you have an awesome ability to change your legacy just by doing that. This is nice. Where's the problem? Dads aren't usually the ones hitting the kid. Who hits infants? Mom does. A single mother in particular. We typically assign early child care and support and nurturing and primary caregiving to the mother. What happens when that woman gets overloaded? Particularly within today's demands, because I'll be honest, the demands today for mothers were not the same for their own mothers. The expectations have risen dramatically. There's a tremendous number of more pressures being involved. Social media is driving a lot of that and awareness of how much better other mothers are doing and this competition anxiety betterment. Am I good enough? Then you get a little kid who acts up, who's crying, a baby that shits himself, and you're tired, your back's hurting, whatever the hell's going on, you're hungry and you just want peace and quiet and you're overwhelmed. What happens? Mom loses control. Mom hits the kid. As a patriarch, as a leader of that family, it is going to be your job to make sure that doesn't happen. The first way you do it is you communicate it. You make it clear, and I mean crystal clear, that this behavior is not acceptable. You back it up. You lead by example, and together, the two of you develop protocols for how to handle a misbehaving child. So this doesn't happen. Third thing, I need you guys to read the subtext on her body language as this is taking place. You need to know the difference between fine and fine. You didn't hear the difference. You need to see the difference. Watch her body language. I know a lot of you guys watch Shark Week. What does that have to do with parenting, particularly a woman's behavior? There's a difference between a shark gracefully moving through the water, a woman moving through your house. Mom moves naturally in a particular way, but mom's agitated. She starts to stiffen up. Sharks that attack will arch. Moms do similar type things. You need to know when a shark is getting territorial and when a shark is getting overwhelmed because just in a minute, you're going to get bit. Someone's going to get hurt. You need to recognize when mom starts to show those sort of behaviors, very much like a pre-attempted shark attack, how to defuse that situation. You need to intercede, to intercept and disrupt that pattern. In a previous talk, he used the example of changing a baby's diaper. He said, now's the time I'm going to do it. I'm going to be diaper daddy. I'm going to take care of this shit and do an amazing job at it. I'm going to make sure that I'm not just changing the diaper because that's not your primary task. Your task is to chair for the child, diaper is a technical element. I talked about that. I talked about setting yourself up to have a go bag, very much like a get out of dodge bag that's already kitted out. It's almost like a medical bag as well. There's an arrangement of tools and equipment. Make sure mom has one too. Make sure you pre-stage things. Cache stuff around the house. I think a great one is in the restroom. Have stuff you can grab immediately in case you need it and be prepared to do it. Now, it's not just changing the diaper. You've taken care of the baby. You need to throw the baby on your shoulders, dance around a little bit, come back to mom and take care of mom because she's overwhelmed. You have a second couch that you need to deal with. And you need to attend that. And the things to do, get mom off her feet, get her to decompress and start picking the low hanging fruit around your life. And there are going to be plenty of them, particularly with a young child. Cleaning the dishes, picking shit up, making sure mommy has a glass of wine and say, babe, I got this for a while. Let me take the kid for a walk. Let me do something. These aren't just gendered sex roles. You need to make sure you can laterally move and take care of your family so your legacy isn't abused. Second one. Daycare is dose dependent. A principal tenant of toxicology is that the dose makes the poison. Why do we believe we can outsource childcare and development cheaper, better, more efficient than the primary caregiver that gave birth to that child? I know we do. I know there's economical reasons because we have to have two parent incomes because we haven't structured our lives to make sure this doesn't happen. I think we need to plan better. I think we need to reshape our lives. I think we need to make sacrifices where we need to do. And I think we need to lead our families to make sure that this doesn't occur. Because of the behavioral issues that come with daycare. It's a law of the jungle there. All right. We want to make sure our child properly socialize. How do you properly socialize a child? Have them engage appropriately with adults, with children and teenagers. They need a mix of behavioral responses. They need to be engaged. This is called FaceTime Parenting when you actually have the parent and the child having more FaceTime. By the way, 25 years ago, almost unheard of. I know in my particular case my mom got a stress. We had breakfast, our teeth were brushed. We were literally open the door, kicked us in the ass and told go and play in the street. Those days are over. And we understand the value of FaceTime Parenting. Children are better behaved. They develop quicker, faster, they retain more knowledge. They're more socialized, less behavioral issues, less substance abuse issues. Again, more thoroughly parented, not outsourced cared. This is your legacy. If your legacy is important to you, if you want your legacy to outlast you, make it your job to be successful. Make it your job to make these things happen. The interesting thing with child development is between 0, birth, and 5 to 7 years evolutionary speaking, a child's now complete. They essentially, previously, were able to join the tribe and be a semi-functional self-carrying and autonomous individual. Now, very likely they had very much kinship bases, they had families they cared for and alliances within that network, but a child's expected to go to work, help support the tribe and the family. That's our generic heritage. Now these happen to be Neanderthals, but they're a stand-in for right now. And I would sit down and say this, that on several talks, I show a brain development graph and it is incredibly steep over millions of years. A lot of anthropologists will sit down and say that's because of tool use, obsidian flakes. There's truth to that. Others will sit down and say it's because we went from scavenging and foraging to consuming large bone structures and bone marrow and extracting tremendously nutrient-rich bone marrow. That's also true. What we don't hear a whole lot about is extended parenting. Extended parenting. Childhood development. And there's a reason for that. The longer a child is parented and more thoroughly, the more likely they're to survive. Now we get into some interesting components here. Why support your child beyond this time period? There's a decisive advantage for doing so. The percentages of your child surviving to adulthood as viable children of their own greatly increases. We talk about men wanting to be seed spreaders. That's technically true. Why monogamy? Why does our species and mammals tend to gravitate towards monogamy? It's a consolidation of resources. Because once you find an appropriate mate, you don't want to kill yourself like a lot of animals will, fucking everything around. They will literally breed themselves into exhaustion and most of them do not survive the mating season. Our species kind of figured something out. Now a lot of times this may be divested. You may have a separation of the parent and the father. And a recoupling with somebody new very much in our matrix. But what we find is those that actually survived the longest as has been a number of studies even amongst indigenous populations is that those that survive adulthood tended to have consistent parenting throughout the course of their life. We also can talk about R and K theory and development. And it's resource based. And it's the notion of how do animals look at their environment, consider the resources available, the degree of predation taking place, and how do they respond in a mating situation? How do they respond in the types of children that they end up having or offspring that they have? The easy way to remember the R is rabbits. Rabbits typically be found in resource rich environments. Predation is incredibly high and their solution for survival is to have as many fucking rabbits as they goddamn can produce. They will literally fuck like rabbits. That their defense mechanism quite literally is breeding. They will outbreed the competition's ability to eat them. K theory or K selected animals tend to really safeguard their children. They come in and resources may be low, predation may be low, parental investment goes up. We like to think humans are primarily K selected. The reality is archaeological evidence, anthropological evidence says we switch depending on the situation. And for the vast majority of our evolutionary history, we were moving into new lands and competing against that lovely couple there, Neanderthals coexisted. In many cases they may have been larger than us, definitely stronger, more stout and fascinating enough I give a talk on this as well they had larger brains than we did and we outperformed them. There's a number of reasons why and in particular smaller brain is economical and particularly in way in which our brain development occurred compared to theirs. But if we are traveling into their territories you can bet your ass we're breeding. And I would propose that we outbred them. I think we fucked and mated like fucking goddamn rabbits and our children were plentiful of plowing the plains. And then we utilized tool resources our differing shape frontal cortex and we weren't just a killer ape. We were a murderous ape. I think it was at that time once we had the numbers we had the resources we're out competing them based on the natural environment that we actually did kill them off physically. So I would propose to you that we would want to be case selected more parental investment but understand depending on where you're at you may have beneficial being able to slide back and forth. Ultimately I think we need to understand our human nature and child development and look at reasons why we would want to consider parenting beyond this age range other than it's a legal obligation. And if we're going to do so why stop at 18? Why is 18 a magic number? Incidentally human brain development still actually solidifying itself at age 22, 23, 24 and 25. Why 18? Maybe as a parent who's concerned about their legacy might want to reconsider that. Might want to think about the honest to God investment you have in your child and what does that mean? So let's talk about this. I think there's a massive difference between the roles and situation that mothers inherently vastly superior for. Those tend to be nurturing and they tend to be primarily important at the very early age of a child developing between infant and childhood. What I'm not showing here but it's implied that fathers here cultivate and that tends to be more important between childhood and adult. And so what happens is that mommy's value in nurturing diminishes as the child gets older. And fathers technically rises. We become really important here. Now, that's very basic but there's the third equation, the child. The child is completely dependent over here and you want an autonomous adult over here. So just because dad's very influential here it tapers off as the child becomes more autonomous. That's natural. So when we start looking at this where is dad really effective? It's going to be right here. We need to consider that. But what do we have? Is this an honest graph? Is that what happens? Nope. That's what happens. Mommy nurtures the child. Daddy may be involved, the more he is the better but typically he's not playing a truly primary role. The status as soon as you send the child to school. And do we think it stops at 18? No. Not particularly if you even go to college. Now you've got another four years tacked on to that. What are the other ways in which the state imposes itself upon development of your child? Remember when we talked about neglect and abandonment issues? Substance abuse issues? What's another form of that? It's insidious one. It's one that's really not talked about. Here's the really ugly part. You're paying for the habit. It's called welfare. Children who are neglected at home at an early age do not develop appropriately, do not be self-supporting adults and therefore require on the dependency of the state government that then comes back and tax you. You're raising other people's children. No. Let's be really honest. You're paying for other people's children. I think we need to seriously as a group look at this. I think we need to change this. I think being a patriarch we should be looking at something completely different. I think we need to make sure dad is involved in the child's life in here a hell of a lot more. What are some of the ways that that could happen? What would that look like? Well quite honestly getting involved in your child's education. Sending him to schools that reflect your values, reflect your community appropriately that you don't have your child indoctrinated with values that are not yours. Really want to take issue with this? It's called home schooling or online schooling. There's a whole series of ways in which that can take place and that by the way, interest in this is dramatically growing and there's reasons for this because the social contract is failing. We can no longer trust that we can send our children to Rome and that they will come back representing us or our families. I'm going to say something else. I'm going to sit down and say COVID has given us a tremendous opportunity. Really a tremendous opportunity. I'm an architect. I have to go to an office to a studio to conduct business. COVID made it possible that I could work from home. In many cases mandated it. Industries that would never have entertained remote employment were now forced for their own survival to make sure it occurred to stay in business to stay alive. And if we don't take advantage of this and go back to the way it was we're going to lose our children because it's going to be too convenient not to. We aren't going to be able to solve the problems of making sure that we're involved because the demands on us are going to be too spread. I think it might be terribly interesting if not only that we talk about doing remote homes, what would have happened if you had a child doing home lessons while you worked and instead of spending time with your work family and having coffee with your child went and had a water break at the water cooler at the fridge with your child was involved in their homework like a team member asking a question. How about instead of take your daughter to work day she sits on your lap while you work or have a conference call. Is that obscene? I know several employers that would have a problem with that. I think employers have no problem I mean you take business phone calls early morning late at night weekends, holidays, vacations whatever the fuck it may be to handle their business because you're essential they need to make that call. Let's reverse that. How many families have really bitched about business interfering in their lives? I'll ask you this question too. How willing do you think your employer will be for you to stop working to answer a call from home? To fill the same questions you would hear but in an office. I don't think too many. Why aren't we having those conversations? Because they are in a degree of power and you're not and COVID has changed that. I think the cat's out of the bag I think the cat's out of the bag and we have short time to seize upon this opportunity. I would love to see men seriously consider how to function, how to create a home business so that the family gets involved. Let me just give an example. I'm an architect. What would it be like for me to set up a small home office and had my daughter on a regular basis with me watching what I do seeing the things I do. What do you think she would learn? The problem with the existing model is while you are providing nobody sees it. You're providing and they don't see it. Do you think you're going to be really truly appreciated? Elliott Hulse was talking about it in his family how his wife does this amazing job while he's working and doing things the kids are writing notes and they're acknowledging how thankful they are for dad for the life that they have the things that they enjoy. That is freaking amazing. But they're having to be cultured for it because they can't see it. And I'm not going to Elliott or his wife, I'm so goddamn grateful that woman exists to do that for him because it regenerizes him to be a stellar father for that family and his legacy will thrive. What would happen if your child on a daily basis instead of seeing you go off to work or worse yet sleeping when you went to work knew you were right around the corner that anything happened dad was there when the child needs dad the most, right? What if, I don't know what if you wake up in the morning you wake up with a kid and the two of you go exercise together what if you sat and did different functions you made a tradition out of doing these things on a daily basis maybe it's certain education here maybe it's a different form of education at STEM classes in the afternoon and so it's a child's program to do that and then maybe it's jujitsu in the evening maybe the child helps make lunch with you you have lunch together so they develop cooking skills these are things we can teach our children and it's essentially we do this I don't want to see us be diminished by the natural gradient of existence of us not being involved here minimized, marginalized how do you hold on to a legacy, create a legacy if you weren't there to create it what would your child truly want more how much more money could you make until it impacts that child's life and the way in which your presence lacks I think we have an opportunity here I think we need to discuss this I think we need to understand the value of fathers I think we need to champion it but I think we need to fundamentally restructure how men think of themselves I think we need to re-fundamentally think about how men integrate themselves into their family and how their family structure works gentlemen there's an ugly reality and that reality is you need to be thinking more than 20 years in advance and all the processes that need to take place for proper parental development for the child over-fathering and abundance of fathering and what it means to parent a child all the way up through that and the reason why we look more than 20 years in advance because that's where you're going to be judged that is when the age in which your child will look back on their lives and judge you this is the area of time that your legacy will be manifested and gentlemen I want to know in 20 years time when your child thinks of you that your child says I love you daddy make this happen thank you fantastic job really enjoyed it you actually brought up something that a lot of people ask us men we are technically trained to think in one way but looking at this graph what are your thoughts of especially in the second half stay at home fathers a modern new thing especially with COVID I know a lot of people who are now transitioning to staying at home because they got for load or dropped from their job but their wife was able to continue their jobs so I just wanted to get your opinion on that actually I think that's a it's very much in debate right now I know that George Bruno I kind of did a thing on Twitter he was trying to say give me a justification for it and I said your legacy and the reality is that maybe mom's value diminishes here nurturing a child but the issue is here mom's value doesn't plummet truly like this I mean obviously with the autonomy of a child both dad and mom become less and less significant but the issue is that mom needs to switch she needs to invert here to maintain value and so she needs to change what she's doing we sit down and say primarily over in this left hand corner which we say is let's say the first three years out of the five or seven is primarily with a child I think there's an inversion takes place that mom then becomes free as the child starts to become a lot more autonomous that mom then resorts to nurturing the family supporting the family particularly dad okay not just the kids and I think then you'll see a massive transformation in that family structure mom's value doesn't diminish the problem is feminism has taught the value of femininity those traditional value traits of virtue are irrelevant or to be scorned now I think that I don't particularly care who earns the brings home the bacon or the money I think it's important that it does so what I'm not advocating for is for daddy to become mommy I don't want men to be substitute mothers if you're going to stay at home and be the primary culture divider cultivate you know cultivator you do that okay and I don't care if your wife goes to work I know there's some arguments about putting women in the workforce everything else but I think it's entirely possible what if you actually structure your life that you had two income earning families that were at home and could alternate between the two back and forth and had a child there well historically we know what that looks like historically that's called the family farm right it just happens to be agriculturally based but we live in a digital environment why can't mom and dad be providing digital services at the home and still be able to care and take care of a child it's not uncommon for a farmer to take their kid along the daily chores and taskings at a farm why would it be impossible for me to have my daughter sitting on my lap while I attended a zoom meeting on our architecture project I've never been you know my folks are from Montana out west you know to roll up on a farm and talk to a farmer that had their kid standing there nobody cross dies at anybody that actually seemed entirely normal it would be odd to run a freaking farm where your child wasn't involved imagine being a farmer with children on the farm that didn't have ability to farm themselves there's something wrong there so what happens if in my my theory of if I run an architectural studio and my wife is doing something else and it has to be outside of the home okay and I diminish as a man if I'm cultivating providing for my family protecting them and taking my legacy serious let me ask you this question too what the fuck do I give a shit what you think about me if I'm taking care of my goddamn child the way in which I believe and I can control fuck you alright I have no shame that way I will actually take pride in that shit I will own that I'm not like you and my child won't turn out like yours that sort of understanding the why can greatly enhance the doing then it's just a matter of what and how ultimately I think that it's terribly important that we actually spend more time with our families and not just sort of playtime not just face time parenting not just being the parent doing the teaching and the school work and the PTA meetings and all that stuff I think we need to reintegrate not only parents with the child's life I think we need to integrate our children I think it's an aberration of nature that we've actually somehow managed and negotiated a separation of the two isn't it weird to have to get up and commute more than an hour away to go to work and we're not talking hunting and gathering we have to pursue the animals we do this on a regular basis I think there are a lot of guys that actually view work as an escape from their families I've also seen very very firsthand up close a man who had a negotiated gender role with his wife as to where the responsibilities would fall she was going to take care of the family he was going to go to work everything was fine here as the kids get older what's happening here mommy is still nurturing because that's what mommy does mommy doesn't know how to cultivate like dad does because it's not in her nature and mommy essentially raised the children and these kids were essentially fatherless for the most part of their lives now they had them they did things on weekends, they did other things he was a good and loving father but the kids didn't quite turn out the way they would have anticipated liked or desired and it was catastrophic in fact he's alienated from his child children and this is somebody I was close to and now to see the vast disappointment the dejection that takes place on having not only failed yourself but your children to know it and not do anything about it from that point forward I think we need to look at these things and I don't have all the answers I think we need to be discussing this I think we need to find examples of this I think it's actually fascinating and I don't want to call anybody out but I think there are men who have been on this stage that are doing just that I think there are men that are looking and working from home that are terribly terribly involved in their children's lives and I think their legacy and their children are absolutely going to benefit from it and I'm envious as shit and so I'm personally looking at this during COVID I actually had was forced to go into work I was considered a central employee and I also realized that because of the nature of my job and what was going to take place it was essential that I went into work because I couldn't do the work at the house because of the age of my child the disruption would have been too great my child's a little bit older boundaries are a little bit better and I need to be here and so you're going to see me in the next couple of years doing just this just like I moved from pick up and game to relationships something I was always positive about that's how I started my first talk relationships when this event was all about pick up I'm going to be transitioning to that to fatherhood to this to very likely a very alternative relationship family structure in which I cultivate my child and I seize control of their education and development and I don't let outside influences and particularly tribal instance that don't have my values raise my children any other questions Thank you Excellent speech Mr. Socrates Jack it's nice to meet you Pleasure meeting you Jack During your speech you were talking about laying hands on children it's not okay to hit a child and I was like that's absolutely not okay and then you talked about what about your spouse I was like that's definitely not okay that's not what men do and then you talked about grandma and it was like man that's just uncomfortable to think about and it made me think there are a lot of fathers who are going to go home and they're going to have this motivation from this speech and they're going to be fired up and when they start to implement change there's going to be some push back and that's going to be just as uncomfortable as thinking about hitting your grandmother what advice do you have to those men to overcome that uncomfortableness which comes with change That is truly going to be the challenge the issues that we talk about your reaction remember striking somebody is going to be trying to avert your will but in many cases it's to reduce tension when you lash out being able to stop and it's going to sound really stupid stop and take a massive breath really inhale because when you're physically lashing out when you're hitting a child and you're responding because you're overwhelmed you are in limbic thinking you're an analyst thinking it's fight or flight and right then it's fight and unfortunately it's your child your spouse your grandmother with dementia alright so the question is how do you get out of limbic thinking you calm down the fastest way to do that is take a full breath let it out take another one let it out relax the muscles get the dopamine serotonin hits know that you're going to feel uncomfortable know that this child is doing this know that you have 3 seconds I'm not going to do anything but breathe for 3 seconds when my kid yells screams and does all sorts of crazy shit because my child and legacy matters I also think something else I think it's also terribly important to not just say I have patience I think you need to verbally say out loud because it's important to say it particularly while you're breathing going from limbic thinking to a more steady state using your cerebral mind I love you think about that can you strike your child and simultaneously say I love you I think that's going to be a challenge and if you have to say it again and again and again do it I love you and just hold on to him you don't have to shake him just hold on to him I love you I love you I love you in pickup we talk about the strongest frame controls ultimately where the energy goes the strongest frame wins that child is negotiating through behavior the strongest frame is going to win the question is are you able to do it peacefully tactfully using sophistication and grace and love or can you dominate that child so I think there's a number of skill sets to do I think also that a lot of these things we ignore the child's behavior the boundary setting it gets broached and we have to re-establish the boundary and when you re-asset any boundary I don't care if it's with adults, with children your employer, anything it's harder to re-assess that boundary and re-set it than it is had you just maintained the boundary to begin with understand that nature understand you're better off to appropriately discipline a child to let them know that they have boundaries and really push the boundaries too far I think there are times I know personally I've been laying on the bed, I'm home, I exhaust I just want to get a load off my feet and just say fuck it, I'm done after 12 hours of work and stress and my kid is just all over me and the kid's demanding attention and it wants attention it misses me and I love her and I just want to be fucking left alone what's more important the 5, 10 minutes of me getting peace solitude or me doing the hard thing rolling out of bed, achy back sore feet, tired picking her up, telling her I love her hug her and playing a game with her understand we make value based behavioral judgments on a regular basis I think that is one in which we need to prepare ourselves for I think we need to cultivate ourselves for it and I think we need to support other men in doing so I know personally there are some other speakers here in the convention that I love we respect each other we have very diametrically opposed views on this I think that's in part culture I think they've done a tremendous job raising their children it's flat out proofs in the pudding right but I want more for them and so when we disagree about these sort of things it's a critique and criticism not out of mean ill for the individual but I want more for him, his family, his children and I mean them well so you may hear myself and some other people kind of in disagreement on some that's totally cool but just understand that I want more for their children them I want more for myself and most definitely my children and when we talk about this I want more for you any other questions thank you he represents his patriarchy we're here to do work as men as patriars there's nothing more natural than being a farmer