 Welcome back to 21 convention 2021 in Orlando, Florida. It is my distinct pleasure to introduce the following man. He's an author, poet, mystic, and without a doubt a warrior. He's incredibly famous and incredibly influential. Writings on men and masculinity are becoming quickly tomes within the Manisphere and appropriately so. It is my pleasure to introduce the man and the action figure named Jack Donovan. All right, today I'm gonna talk to you about three archetypes of masculinity. The father, the striker, and the Lord of the Earth. Three eternal forms that I believe we see repeated over and over again throughout philosophy and myth and religion and history. And I believe that these three forms are eternally relevant for men. Because they relate directly to three different kinds of challenges that men have always faced in our ongoing struggle to create champion and perpetuate order in the midst of chaos. Now, when you write and speak about masculinity and the nature of men in a universal sense, there's a bit of a paradox because it is in the nature of men to break up into separate groups and create their own orders. And they're competing groups and so they create their own cultures and their own religions and their own ideas. And so on the surface, when you look at all of these different groups of men, their cultures, their ideas are very different. But that's who we are. We are a tribal animal. The way of men is the way of the gang. So, in order to really understand the nature of men, what you have to do is zoom out. Go up to that thousand foot view. And then in the Germanic tradition, it was called Leitzkauf, it was Odin's high seat. And from there you can see everything. Everything that ever was. And we kind of have that now with our handheld high seats that we can see the entire world on them and everything that's ever happened. And so, you know, we look at the world and you look at everything that's ever happened and you say, what have we been doing for the past few hundred years, for the past few hundred thousand years? What have we been doing? What have we been up to? What challenges that we have to face? What jobs that we have to do? You know, what were our solutions to all these problems that we had to face? And I believe that when you look at all of that, you see we've been facing a lot of the same problems and doing the same things over and over and over again. And I believe that our problems are the same and our solutions are the same. And in many cases, our ideals have a lot in common. Our gods, our heroes, we create the same ideals in many ways over and over again. Because in many ways, these gods and heroes and ideals are perfected versions of ourselves. They're ideal versions of ourselves that face the same kinds of challenges that we face. But they just do everything better. And they do it on a far grander scale. I believe that it's always been the job of men. Whether you're talking about Australian Aborigines or people in Africa or people in Europe, people in Asia, it's always been the job of men to venture out into darkness and disorder and create a perimeter of safety and order in which human life can flourish. To venture out into confusion and try to make sense of it. To go out into the unknown and make it known. To wander into nature's wild anarchy and impose our own hierarchy. I believe there's always been the job of men to create light in the middle of darkness. It's always been our job to build a fire in the dark. Now I'm going to talk about chaos and order a lot because I think that's the big struggle. The struggle beyond struggles is a struggle between chaos and order. But we should define our terms a little bit. What is chaos and what is order? Well, when people think of chaos what they think of, you know, it's just something, it's crazy. It's crazy, what's going on? And that's not too far from the truth, I think. But I like to be a little bit more precise in my definitions. So I think chaos is a state of non-differentiation. A state in which you can't really tell what is what and a state of disorientation. Like what is up and what is down and where am I going, what's happening? And I realized this morning while I was writing this and after I made this slide that I should add an element of time as well. Because what happens in chaos is that our ability to predict the future, our reliable patterns break down. So, you know, when you're in chaos what's going on? I don't know what's going to happen. And that's, what is more terrifying than being in a state of chaos and disorder? Like, I don't know what is what. I don't know where I'm going. I don't know up and down. I don't know what's going to happen. And that's, I think that's the most terrifying thing to men in the world. We need, we want to order our world. And that gets close to the ancient Greek definition of chaos. It's closer to the abyss. And the dramatic could be a primordial gap, a yawning gap. A space in which, you know, all matter is present. But, undifferentiated, everything is there, but it doesn't have a name. And almost all mythologies start out this way. Almost all creation stories start out in this place. They start out in darkness and everything is there, but there's no direction. Nothing means anything. And really that's, that's kind of a state of pre-life and post-life as well, at least for our bodies. You know, that's what we're afraid of going back to the place where our matter is the same as dirt. And the struggle of life is really a struggle of differentiation. Like, we're differentiated as long as we're here. And you know, it's very popular for a whole bunch of people to take, you know, mushrooms and ayahuasca and ayahuasca and then they, invariably, their experience is the same. It's like, man, we're all made of stars. Everything's connected. Everything's the same. And that's a red flag for me in a weird way. I mean, it's true. It's not wrong. Everything is connected. We are all made of stars. Sure, but while we're alive, we are differentiated. And there's a real, there's a bad logical problem that follows from, you know, everything is the same because the next thing that follows is, then nothing matters. So it's a collapse of all meaning. So everything starts in this state of the abyss in most creation stories. And then someone comes in and differentiates. It says, this is this and that is that. And the Bible, in the beginning there was the word. And I believe that translates to logos and logos really means logic and reason. So you're differentiating between things. And that's what gods do and that's what men have to do. And that's what the sun does. That's why I always like the solar thing. You know, there's all these things floating around the universe and then all of a sudden they become predictable. It's gravitational pull makes them predictable and pulls them into a predictable orbit. And he orders, you know, the sun orders the universe. And to think about how important words are and how important definitions are. I came up with this the other day. If you're gonna play rock, paper, scissors, everybody knows that game. Rock, paper, scissors. In order to play that game, we all have to agree on what a rock is and what paper is and what scissors are. And not only that, but they also have certain properties. You know, the rock can crush the scissors. The scissors can cut the paper. And, you know, the paper can cover the rock. And those are all rules because all definitions are fundamentally rules. That's what words are. You know, to say that that's a glass of water means that it is not a tripod. And that, you know, that's, if we don't have that, everything falls apart because if you're trying to play rock, paper, scissors in a world where you can't agree on what rocks are and what scissors are, throw the table up. There's no, it doesn't matter. It's total nihilism. Why play the game? Nothing matters at all. And so I think, you know, people lose it. Well, it's just changing a word a little bit. But changing words means changing meaning. That means changing everything. So I'm gonna tell you a little story that I've told before. It's in the book, Fire in the Dark. And I call the story the first man. And they're not the story, they're not the first men who ever lived, but they're the first men in our story. And most stories start out in this same way. And what happens in the story of the first man is that, they leave a place. You know, first, you have to imagine that you don't have Google Maps. In fact, you don't have maps. And so that's most of human history. You're just in the wilderness. And you really don't know, you don't even have a sense of the globe, or continents, or even much farther than you can see. That's very chaotic. So, if you wander through this space, let's say that you left a place and you can't go back. And this happens all the time for various reasons. Maybe a tribe came in and burned all your village down. Maybe you had a fight with somebody and they don't want you there anymore. But a group of men, for whatever reason, leave a place and go to another place. They are entering a state of chaos. They don't have a home. They have nowhere to go to. So they're disoriented. They're going into the unknown territory. And so I had a little animation created for this that I've been thinking about for a long time to visualize moving through this open territory of the unknown. Where you don't know where you're going. And when the sun goes down at night, its light goes away and your ability to see the difference between things, the differentiation goes away. So you build a fire. That's what man had been doing all over the world, over and over and over again. You build a fire. What does the fire do? The fire allows you to see everything around you within a specific perimeter that it creates itself. A perimeter of light. And so you can see everything and so you can put everything in that circle. You can put it in order. You can say this is this and that is that and that is my friend and that is my other friend. And this kind of circle of order expands until the light of the fire collapses. And the light of the fire becomes home. And if you wander beyond that circle of order into the unknown chaotic world, as long as you can see that fire, you know where home is. And that becomes the essence of really what is sacred? What is most important to us? That's the light that wherever we are, we can still see it. And if we don't have that, we are in a perpetual state of chaos and that's of course very terrifying. So there are jobs that you have to do. And these are the jobs that man have always had to do and that's where I think these archetypes come from is that you have the fire, you have to create order and make definitions and draw lines and make words and determine what is gonna happen, what the rules are. And that's the job of the archetype I call the father. And his job is to deal with the decision-making and order and so forth. And then the guy who has to go to the outside of that circle, if you've read The Way of Man, you'll recognize his job. I mean, that's the striker. He has to go to the outside of the circle to protect everything that is outside the circle, I mean inside the circle from everything that is outside the circle. And what is inside the circle is really everything that he cares about. It's all his friends, it's all his resources. And it is also ideas, the ideas that he cares about, his sacred order. All that is what he's protecting when he walks the edge of that perimeter. And then finally, if you're gonna keep that camp going, if you want human life to flourish, you're like, well, this is a good enough camp. We're gonna settle here. All the work that has to happen to keep that going. Like, well, we're gonna build some things and then we're gonna do all the things that we need to do to make life happen. We'll maybe do some farming. See if we can domesticate some of these orcs. You adapt the environment. We change it. Humans, when they walk into an environment, we change it and adapt it to our needs. And that's really what I call the Lord of the Earth because he interacts with the earth and shapes it in a way that makes human life flourish as well. So we talked about the sacred, what is holy? What is sacred? Your understanding of the world. And I wanna talk a little bit about the idea of hierarchy. And hierarchy is a really cool word because we talk about hierarchy all the time and you probably don't know what it actually the roots of it mean. I mean hierarchy, not all hierarchies of value, hierarchies of like military hierarchies, all those kinds of things. But the root, the higher part of hierarchy actually means holy. So it is what is sacred and what is holy. And so it really, and then the, our key from which we get anarchy and all the other arcs that becomes, that's our rule. So you rule by what is holy. What is sacred and inviolable. And that's a really powerful concept to think about what is sacred? What are our core values that we rule everything else by? And I kinda like the idea because we have a perimeter already, raises up like what is the highest point? And then of course that's upward and towards the sun and God and all that kind of thing. And the highest point of our values is always gonna be our most excellent thing. Like the most excellent version of our virtue, the highest form of our virtue. And the ancient Greeks called the arete. And that's what you're reaching for. And then everything below that and further out from that becomes less excellent, not as good. And men need this. Men need the idea that like, this is what good is and this is what not good is. And there are all kinds of variations in between. There's A, B, C, D and E. And that is order. That's how we like to see our world ordered. And men don't care so much if they're at level C or level B, but they wanna know where A is. And A, well, A stands for arete. And that's the highest form. And there's a book that I really recommend if you wanna talk about what is sacred and what is profane. It's actually called The Sacred and the Profane by Murcia Eliata. And he talks a lot about this. And if you're a Christian, because I'm talking to obviously all kinds of different men from all kinds of different groups and all kinds of different religions, and he talks about the idea of a church. Well, a church would be the most sacred place. It's actually a building. And everything that in that church to like say a Catholic would be, everything that's in that church and in Shrine that hurts and symbolized by that church is the most holy thing. And then you go towards the lobby and the bathroom and the door and as you get further and further away from that church, it becomes more profane. And that's a great way to think about hierarchies of values. So we talked about these three jobs, creating order, perpetuating order, and championing order. And I think they relate to a system that we've seen over and over again in comparative mythology. And I call it a tripartite system and I got that from somebody and I'll explain that in a second. When I started writing The Fire in the Dark, when I started writing this book, I was performing a lot of Germanic rituals and I was dealing a lot with the gods Odin, Thor and Frey. And I performed some rituals and I was thinking about that for a while and I was like, well, what did they do? What is their purpose? What is their function? And well, Odin creates order, he murders giants, starts the world, creates the order, the king of the gods, all that kind of thing. And you know, you have Thor who is clearly the protector of order, he's the striker for him. And then you have Frey, who's a fertility god. You know, kind of governs all kinds of crops and fertility and fruitfulness. And so, you know, as I did more research, I was gonna write the book and the Book Fire in the Dark was originally gonna be titled Odin, Thor, Frey. But as I looked into it more and more and more, like there was just so much more there because you see this tripartite system over and over and over again. And someone who picked that up a long time ago in the Indo-European system was George Dumazil and he wrote, he called it the sovereign, the military and the productive. And he's a pretty famous, I think he was a philologist, you know, a cool guy is a philologist. But that's basically what he came up with in comparative religion and he talked about the same ideas I'm talking about with Odin, Thor and Frey. Plato talked about it in the Republic. He called them, you know, his philosopher kings were the guardians and then the warriors who worked under them were the auxiliaries and, you know, everybody else was merchants and farmers and all the people that they ruled over but also fed them, you know, and gave them everything that they needed. And many of you have probably read, you know, Robert Moore's King Magician Warrior Lover. It's a very popular book in men's circles from the 80s, 90s. And, you know, there's some problems with that book because it has a little bit of a feminine influence but he talks about the same basic three forms. His king and his magician match up with some things that Dumazil said about the differentiated roles of the king. And obviously warrior, same, lover, matches up pretty well with the appetites and productive function. And then my friend, Robert, Brian Micler, he, you know, you may know him from The Order of Man, a very popular podcast and he has a group and he wrote in his book about sovereignty that he used to protect, provide, preside. And again, those are the same exact functions. You know, it is just, you know, like in a different order, you know. Preside would be the father role. You know, protect would obviously be the warrior role and provide would obviously be the productive function. And I'll talk about this with each of them but each of these, you know, there's a nice Greek word for at least two of those. The, you know, productive, the ordering function is obviously governed by logos and animated by logos and then the champion of war. And I like to say champion because when we just talk about protecting, it's all defensive. And that's really not all that warriors ever were and that's got a little bit of a cop out in terms of just what warriors just didn't just defend. Sometimes the purpose of warriors to go is to expand your community. And maybe in order to survive, you need to go and take this stuff from that other community. And that's what warriors have done for most of history. So I think, you know, we can whitewash that and pretend that they only respond to threats but that's not how it's usually worked. You know, heroes actually go out and fight battles before they come to the perimeter in many cases. So the champion of order, he would be animated by Thumos and we'll talk about that more later. And then the God who perpetuates order would be animated by appetite because we are humans and we have natural appetites. So we'll begin with the father. The creator of order. Obviously we see this again and again. You might know him as God. You might recognize him as God. But I mean, there is a father in the sky in almost every system. And I think the reason why is it's specifically a sky father is that when you're a boy, you look upward to your father. You literally look up to your father. It's not just a figure of speech. You look up to your father because he's taller than you. And he represents, in some sense, for a girl, he represents a model of what a man is but for a young man, he represents a model of what he will become or what he could become. But of course the truth of that is, is that you never actually become your father. That's impossible. He's himself. So there's something beyond a father, something higher than a father. The father of fathers. He's the ideal father. One father to rule them all. Odin is called the all father. And I think that's why. You know, it's so normal. I mean, so much of the stuff I like to talk about is so simple and repetitive because we've been doing it over and over and over and over again. And it's just everyone has that experience that your father is higher than you. And why would he not be in the sky where light and the sun is provides order and light? There's no real system in which darkness is symbolizes good and the light symbolizes evil that almost never happens. We've been doing the same thing, creating the same ideas over and over again. So he's motivated by logos which is of course logic and reason. And each of these figures has a kind of excellence to them. Like what is their excellence? What is their, it was their rete. And of course he's gonna be involved in problem solving, leadership, decision making. And the other thing about the father and the symbolism of the father and the striker are often very similar because the father and the striker, the striker usually becomes a father. We don't have to become a father. Basically like you can't become a father without usually being an ascended striker. You know, most of the, whether you're George Washington or Zeus, you had to kill a monster of chaos before you could take over your kingdom. And throughout this book, I like to frame it in two different senses. What is the role of the father? And he has two different roles. The father in darkness, which would be the stuff that you aren't supposed to see. Like you're not, if you're being, if you're the kid or the people being ruled, you're not supposed to see the father in darkness because if you're a good leader in any way, man, that's hard. That's hard work. And you have to sit and think of like, oh, what are the consequences? All the things that I could do and there's so many possible outcomes and this could hurt this person and this could hurt that person. And I'm setting a precedent here and maybe that's a bad precedent. And that's a lot to think about. And it's confusing and it's stressful. So, you know, I think that there's a job of the father that doesn't get seen a lot and you're not supposed to see it. Because, you know, if dad freaks out then everybody freaks out. But, you know, any leader or father who's worth his salt and actually cares about his kids or his people is gonna be a little stressed out sometimes and confused about what he should do. So, I think it's symbolized really well by Ra in his solar barge. He's an Egyptian god of the sun and he symbolizes, you know, in the ancient world, obviously, the sun goes down and where did it go? It disappeared for the whole night. Well, Ra in the stories goes and fights chaos monsters all night long. And in the morning, you know, he defeats them and therefore the sun rises again. And it's just a really beautiful image. And it's also really symbolized really well. The father in darkness is symbolized really well by Odin because there's a story about Odin that he was on the tree of life, the big Dresel for, you know, a whole nine nights. It was windy, no one gave him any, you know, horn or a loaf. And he did this not for, you know, it wasn't a sacrifice. It sounds Christ-like, but it's not quite the same thing. He did this for knowledge. In this case, the symbolism and magic of writing in the rooms. And so he sacrificed himself at night and went through this ordeal to understand the world. And then the father in light, as I said, he makes an overseas laws because he's already made his decision. This is the part that you see. This is the confident father who tells you, okay, this is what we're gonna do and this is why this is the course of action and we're gonna stick to it. And I love the idea, this is a great image. And I think I just heard that somebody else used it, but we love this image because it shows what the father does. He draws lines. And that's present in the language as well. In the Rex, which is the Roman version of King, but it's also in the royal styles of like the British royal family versions of Rex. I mean, it's a queen right now, so it's like Regina or something like that, but it's in part of their titles. It corresponds to Rajan in the Vedic, kind of an ancient Indian culture. And it goes back to a Proto-Indian root, which I talk about that a lot and it's really a theoretical language that a lot of languages come from. And that's Kheg, or however they don't even know how to pronounce it, it's all theoretical. But all these things mean to write or straighten oneself. They come from, you know, write, draw his lines. That's what kings do, they draw lines. They make boundaries, they make rules. And what's cool that we also had another word for that, which is ruler. That's what a ruler does. So where a ruler is a king and also someone who's drawn his lines. All these things just come together in this really elegant way. Second archetype that I wanna talk about is the striker. As I said, he's a champion of order. And his job is to contend with physical chaos. You know, the father deals with conceptual chaos and ideas. And his job is to contend with physical chaos. And he's motivated by Thumos. And Thumos is an ancient Greek thing that means spiritedness is usually how it's translated. But, you know, it's also very close to indignation. And my best example of Thumos, I think for anyone living in modern times, no matter what you think of what happened on 9-11 or whatever, all the guys who joined the military right after that, that's what Thumos is. They're the guys who are like, no, this is not happening. We will go fight for this. I think in Christian circles, there's a popular phrase that a lot of warriors like that it's something like, I'm here, send me. And that's what the striker does. And his excellence, of course, would be the tactical virtues, strength, courage, and mastery and honor. I mean, that's what the book The Way of Men is really all about. And what's cool about the striker is that, you know, you have the sky and the sun and that's the calm sky, the father in light who is, you know, the overseas order when all is good and right. And what the striker does is he's the storm. He's the sky, he's a storm in the sky that comes out, he's the vengeance of heaven. We see this over and over again. And it's symbolized usually by a Vajra. And this is a Vajra, this one is from Indonesia. So it's been filtered through some kind of Buddhism. But what's cool about it is the tines are open. These little points are open. Buddha apparently closed the tines and I guess put the safety on the lightning weapon. Because this is what this is. This is a lightning weapon. And you can find it repeated over and over again throughout all these mythologies. You know, Indra, the Vedic god who became kind of a different figure in the Hindu stuff later. But Indra originally is kind of awesome. He has a posse of Maruts and he calls them Mahbules. And he wheels this lightning weapon. He kills a serpent named Fritra. And he kills it with this lightning weapon. And if you look at the old pictures of Zeus. Surprise, you got a lightning weapon that looks almost exactly like this. In ancient Greek it's called the Koranos. But it translates later, it becomes a hammer in the hand of Thor. And I would say that thunder weapons also come in spears and guns and other things. Cause that's what, it's a great, it's a beautiful metaphor. And you can see how like our ancient ancestors would have, you know, you're out in the wilderness and all of a sudden lightning comes down from heaven. Lightning comes down from heaven and whatever you're trying to do, whether you're hunting or fighting, I want to do it like that. That is the ultimate ideal of boom. You know, like that's what you want to do. So it's such an illustrative form but it's repeated over and over again and you can see why it's so primal. Now to talk about the striker in darkness. The striker in darkness I would say is, you know, the striker that has to go out and face monsters. Cause heroes are really defined by their monsters. That's how we know them. You know, we have all these examples of famous heroes. Like I said, you know, Zeus had to fight Typhon and that's how he got his kingdom. And his son Apollo, Python. Thesias, you have the Minotaur. You know, Perseus, Medusa, Heracles, you know, killed a whole bunch of things including kind of, you know. And Thor fought Jormungand, Indra, Fritra, you know, Sigurd is known for a dragrid slaying. It's a common theme over and over again that the heroes have to fight monsters and the monsters represent chaos because the monsters, what? They threaten all the predictability. They threaten all the order. They threaten to tear everything apart. So they're these dark forces that represent chaos. And the challenge of the striker I think is to, you have to become a monster to fight monsters. You have to become terrible. And all the stories I think from the Rig Veda, you know, you'll see the, you know, all these striker type figures, they'll become, their faces are beautiful and handsome and then they become hideous and terrible because you have to become hideous and terrible to go fight monsters. So the challenge is to become a monster for a short period of time and not just become a monster. And I think we see that challenge, you know, and a lot of the, you know, veterans and so forth that I talked to, you know, the challenge is to like come back from that. And you know, one of the police guys who comes here who are pretty good friends with, we've talked about this before, like you're dealing with people on their worst day all the time, like how do you not become really nihilistic and like, and just, you know, horrible yourself? So there's this repeated phrase because you know, heroes kill monsters and usually they're serpents. And you know, the people who have gone through all the academics who have gone through all the myths and so forth, there's this repeated phrase over and over again that is even linguistically connected. And it's, he went, ogwim, it means he killed the serpent. And they've been saying he killed the serpent about the hero again and again and again and again all throughout history. He killed the chaos monster. And it's really interesting symbolism if you think about it. The snake, eagles actually kill snakes. You know, heroes are generally represented by eagles. The eagles also represent the king in sovereignty and all these things. And eagles kill snakes. And you can see this, it's on the Mexican flag. It's a great theme in ancient Rome. I think this is a Byzantine mosaic. And think about that, the eagles are in the sky. They are high above us. They come down like lightning to stop this chaos monster who slithers around in the darkness, which is obviously symbolizes some cunning and maybe duplicity. And comes from the shadows. It's hard to see, it's poisonous. So it's a really beautiful symbol that again is repeated over and over again. So the striker in light, as I said, if you're doing it right, the ideal is for the striker to come back and be honored and reintegrated in society and celebrated. And in some way become, they would say it is better to be a warrior in a garden than a gardener in a war. But a lot of those guys need to come back and become warriors in a garden. And that's how they fix themselves. They focus on life and perpetuating life. And that leads us to the Lord of the earth. He perpetuates the word. This guy gets skipped a lot because he's very focused on higher ideals. And I want to be a warrior and I have high ideals and all that kind of stuff. But man, so much of the stuff we have to do in life is just to keep it going. I have to call my accountant and do my books and farmers have to go out and keep farming. They have to go do all this grunt work to get it done. You aren't gonna have shelter unless you build a building. All these things, everybody has to go to work every day just so they can feed their family. That's what has to happen. That's most of life is actually the Lord of the earth stuff. He contends with material chaos, which I mean the world is chaotic world. I mean you take, as I said, you go out into a perimeter of nature but you bend the branches. You do things to make the environment suit you so that life can flourish. And that's, whether he's growing fruit, using animals, all that kind of thing. And he's motivated by appetite. And that took that specific from Plato. But he's motivated by appetite, meaning that we are animals, we're human animals. We have human needs that need to be met. We are creatures of the earth. And so he serves those needs. And there's a difference between perpetuation, which is just surviving and prosperity. And prosperity is a sweet spot. That's where life happens. It doesn't matter if you just have enough food to survive, great. That's kind of, we can eat gruel but I'd much rather have a nice dinner. And that's where the joy of life comes in in the fruitfulness of enjoying things. Is he working to make sure that we have more than we need? But of course, you know, the Lord, you know, and he's represented of course by Frey. You find him in Dionysus. In the Celtic stuff, you know, there's Canunos. Hephaestus in the Greek, which is, you know, the Vulcan in the Roman, I believe it, it's, you know, the Smith God who makes things. And, you know, represent pan, all kinds of satyrs and pastoral fertility gods. But, you know, this God of the festival is gonna, you know, there are problems with that. If you just serve appetite, the darkness part of that is vice. You know, you get addicted to that feedback. You know, all that prosperity can be a little bit addicting. And it can take you to a dark place. And, you know, it leads you to abandon your reason and your tactical thinking. You know, there's a story that I like to call Frey's error. It's not presented as an error, but I feel like it's an error. And I think it's familiar to everyone here, not in the sense of the story, but in what happens. Which he actually, he has a magical sword that fights for itself, which is pretty awesome. He doesn't have to do work just like go fight sword. And, but he falls in love with this giant, he sees her and he's like, I gotta have her and she's everything to me and whatever. So he ends up trading away his magical sword for this pretty girl that he doesn't even know. And I think a lot of us can relate to the idea of a dude who gives away everything that he is important and makes a lot of sense for to chase some girl. And so it's, I think that's the Lord of Darkness. You know, obviously, you know, he's not making a lot of sense. And the Lord in light, I think his excellence is pursuing whatever he does. You know, it's in the service of order, in the service of goodness. It's not just about vice and like, oh, we're gonna get drunk and do whatever, but you know, providing healthy and delicious food and drink. Creating beautiful and functional structures. You know, creating strong, healthy, righteous, you know, art and music that contributes to and promotes order and beauty and excellence. And a huge part of the work of the Lord of the Earth is building relationships. And actually Tanner's whole presentation and the patriarchy thing was really about Lord of the Earth stuff. Like, he was called Leading with Love and it was all about like, how do I build relationships that are healthy all around me? And that's the big challenge of the Lord of the Earth. That's what he does. That's the Lord's work. Because that's so much what we need, we're social animals. We need to build these strong relationships all around us. So we have this system. The Father, the Striker and the Lord of the Earth. You know, archetypes, symbols, gods, whatever you would call them. And when I wrote this book, we were living in a very different world. And I was thinking, yeah, hey, we can use these symbols to talk about how men can balance parts of their lives. Like I said, the warriors a lot of times need a little bit more Lord of the Earth. They need to balance things out. Everybody needs a little more Lord of the Earth usually. But the Lord of the Earth usually needs a little bit more of the Father. If you're partying too much, you need a little bit more order. And you need to rein things in and make some rules. So I thought it would be a good system to talk about the important parts of men's psyche that are all the same, the things that we all have in common. Because that's what's been really important to me. A lot of you are part of a group or a part of a particular religion and that's what you do and that's good and that's how men are supposed to work. My job is to look at, to try and sit in the high seat for a little bit and see how everybody works. Like what's always the same and what's always meaningful. And we're living in a world right now where they're trying to destroy the idea of excellence. The idea that there is something better than anything else in any way. Ideal forms are anathema to so much of the culture that we're facing. And so me trying to do my job, I wanna look and see, man we have so many groups of men from all around the world. What can we agree on? Yeah we all have different religions, there are doctrines and all those different points and whatever. But what would everyone at this conference agree on? What do we have in common? What's the same? What is a truth that is self-evident? That seems almost as if it's holy and comes from somewhere higher. Because it seems obvious to us but it's being challenged everywhere. I think we can all agree that it is better to be strong and athletic than it is to be weak. Seems like common sense, definitely in question. Can we all agree that it is better to be courageous than it is to be fearful? Can we all agree that it is better to be robust and healthy than it is to be sick? Doesn't matter what religion you're in, it's all the same. I think we can all agree that men and women are different and that they should be. It's better to be beautiful than it is to be ugly. It's better to be intelligent than it is to be ignorant. It's better to be competent than it is to be incompetent. It's better to be industrious than it is to be lazy. It's better to be independent than it is to be dependent and it is better to be a free man than it is to be a slave. That's a pretty good order. I think we can all agree on that. But they're tearing down statues, tearing down ideals, saying this is the new beauty that we made up yesterday. This is the new version of health that happens to be obesity. Saying we should all be chemically altered in the same way. Gender doesn't matter. Men and women are the same. They're really trying to destroy everything that means anything to us. Our sense of order. Our sense of differentiation and orientation. I get emails from people all the time asking me, how can I find my purpose in life? What should I do? Especially in the past two years, if you don't see a mythic struggle, you're not paying attention. I don't even know what to tell you anymore. There are dragons to slay. Order is under attack by forces of chaos, forces of the void. And they sound nice and they're like, oh, we should just be nice and everything should be okay. We have a choice to try and protect those or not. And it's always been the job of men. To try and make order out of chaos. To try and hold that back. Though it's always been the job of men. To create order, to champion order, and to perpetuate order. And all these mythic struggles and mythic heroes, they're just idealized versions of what we have to do and what our job is. And they represent men who lived in other times, but our time is now. These are our fights. These are our serpents to slay. So, if you need a motivational speech at this point, because everybody loves a motivational speech, I've been doing this for a long time. It's my job to research what men look at, what motivates them and what they see. And I can tell you that the speech, it's always the same. It's the same speech that's been written a thousand times over and over again. Every motivational speech is fundamentally the same. They just change the details. So go with something like this. Band of brothers, will you tolerate this injustice? Will you suffer this indignity? Will you rise up and fight to protect everyone and everything that you've ever cared about? Do not let this world, this beautiful world, collapse into darkness and chaos. If not you, then who? And if not now, then when? I see in your eyes the same fear that would take the heart of me. And there may come a day when the courage of men fails. But it is my sincerest hope that it is not this day. Stay solar. I guess I can take questions. I think I have 10 minutes. I'm not sure how I was gonna work out. Yeah, hit it. Great speech, Jack. Thank you. So your four tactical virtues, strength, honor, courage, mastery, what would you say is the best action plan to cultivate all four of those in your life, let's say today? Today? All right, go surround yourself with men who represent those values to you and put yourself in situations so that it challenged each of those virtues. I mean, that's the strategy really. So, you know, I always say, you know, go do some martial arts. That's the best way, really. But anything else? I'm gonna go.