 We're live at the Under 21 Convention in Orlando, Florida, and with the main man, Sok. Sok, first of all, my name's Mike. Mike, we met last night. We met last night. Crazy. Good to meet you. Thank you. So yeah, you've just given your talk here at the convention. Unfortunately for myself, I didn't get to see a lot of it because I'm doing all the live streaming and stuff. So I'm curious to learn a bit more about what it is that you spoke about. Okay. Talked about relationships, and I wanted to ground several concepts into the idea. And the most important, I think to me, was the fact that relationships and long-term, stogic relationships, loving, faithful, committed relationships, are the actual normal for mammals. And it's abnormal when we don't have those. And so I want to kind of put a lot of that in context. And so I wanted to initially talk about the, just the incredible odds of existence that we have when we're alive, you know, that what it took to actually get there and put that in context with the length and span of humanity over, you know, 14 million years of just hominid development, you know, and it's a remarkable thing. And when you look in comparison to the lives that that occurred to have that take place, you know, you're talking about more than a half million generations of continuous operation of continuous transfer of existence and creation of life and raising and developing to get to a world we're at today. And I think that's terribly significant. And then I talked about at length human evolution and how we've been adapted for social relationships, specifically because of social relationships. And kind of showed the biomechanical elements of some of those things and kind of the philosophical elements of why those are important. And, you know, for example, I talked that a lot of people talk about tool development and technology, but the reality, the biggest invention or the greatest invention that impacted humanity is social constructs of relationships and those sort of large scale complex elements. And the most basic of which is the human family and going from there. Obviously, then I talked about the things that would put that in jeopardy. What limits our ability to have these naturally current relationships? And some of them were natural things that were built in the cake because we've evolved differently because of binary sex, men and women evolved differently. The human brain responding to both environmental and cultural elements developed separately, you know, and then there's impacts there. And that's natural. And so those are some biological natural elements. And then they're a cultural and kind of took a big whack at some of those. One of the most important, I think, that we can handle as an individual is a lack of social skills. You know, we're just not taught culturally those sort of skills. The other is far more imposing and far more threatening. And that is the rise in acceptance of feminism and mainstream of it. And I wanted to be very, very critical. I wanted to kind of give a fair history of some of the stuff and then actually put a marker up and say how successful was it in comparison to the things they call out that they wanted to destroy the family structure, these loving nature nurturing relationships that have existed successfully for 14 million years, you know, and in particular, the human evolution, you know, when we talk about, you know, the real divergence and human evolution, you know, occurring in the last 7 million years has been dramatic. And I thoroughly believe that that's because of the rise of social skills, you know, of relationship skills, long term parenting and raising of children that have made us tremendously successful. And we have a cultural construct, putting that in jeopardy. And I, you know, raised whether it's poverty, whether it's violence to women and children, you know, any number of the social disorders we talk about, you know, and what are the ramifications and in all fairness is very, very lightly about some of these things, you know, just incursory, but to sit down and say, is it fair to evaluate this? If you want to destroy something, what are you destroying? You know, and especially destroying something that we know that works. And while I understand the rise and the human nature to change real needs, you know, the sheer vulnerability of women and resources and those sorts of things, I understand that, but we don't measure it objectively and say, Hey, we try this, but it hasn't worked. Let's take a step back and rework this. We don't have that introspection culturally to do that. And in many instances, we're forbidden to even do it. And I showed examples, particularly with third wave feminism, censoring that, not allowing that sort of discussion to even take place and obscuring language to the point that we can't call things by the proper name and note that, you know, the beginning of wisdom originates with calling things by the proper names. And if you can't call things by proper names, you can't have the truth. And if you can't have the truth, you're sure as hell not going to have justice. And if you can't have justice, you're not going to have equality. These are all things feminism spouses say they do, but in reality, they don't. They're currently very much opposed to that. I would be very, very interested in seeing what a fourth wave of feminism looks like that would be reconstituting and relooking at some of this stuff, you know, whether it's the factual feminists, whether it's the honey badgers defending men and culture and, and, you know, loving families and those sort of things. I'm really kind of interested in some of that stuff, you know, objective, you know, rational analysis on very real world situations. And one of the things that I was rather proud about was that I say proud I brought up in the talk was that I evaluated the these needs going back to and I typecast Neanderthals and had images of reconstructed Neanderthals. Those same needs are still yet unaddressed and unresolved today. And we literally had an election, you know, this year, there's currently going on, that still having that up as part of the discussion. And yet we're not still objectively measuring the results of that. What I want to ask is, like, why is it that no one seems to be talking about this? Like, you seem to be almost at the forefront of this. There's there's an in within this group I am. I am by far and away the leading. I'm very much, I don't want to say Johnny come lately. It's something I've been interested in. There's better speakers about some of the stuff. People are absolutely more versed in it that this is their kind of bread and butter and a lot of what they do. This is, I don't say hobby. It's a passion of mine. Something I wanted to work on to improve my own life. And I started sharing with men and that's how I got involved. But there's several other speakers talking about it. But to answer your question is why we're not we're threatened. And I don't mean that facetiously. I'm currently on an FBI watch list because of things I've spoke about. And not because I've made threats, not because I'm threatening, but I've spoke about men's rights. I can't do that in the society in a feminist society. And quite literally, the Southern Poverty Law Center actually puts anybody who talks about the manager, men's rights, men's issues under hate speech. And they take that they used to have a relationship with the FBI. And they would follow and track all these, you know, individuals that would, you know, talk about hate speech or domestic terrorism or anything and pass that information in the FBI. Well, the problem is the FBI was taking that unfettered. And they took this and my name was attached to it because I spoke openly about feminism. I spoke about, hey, look, you can't have justice, these sort of things, and calling attention to it, not in violence. I wasn't promoting violence. I have no intentions of violence, but we're not allowed to even talk about it. And so I got settled with that. And it came to my attention as I'm an architect. And one of my specializations in building types are airports. You know, I design airports, and particularly for a period of time security systems, I'm going for a security review at an airport. And all of a sudden, I'm being questioned on stuff. And they wanted to know things I hadn't divulged. And you sit down and say, okay, we've crossed the threshold. You know, we're now officially having a conversation that I'm concerned about my civil rights. Can you please identify yourself in writing? I'd be like your business card and would like to exchange information. And at this point in time, I want to acknowledge that we're having this conversation in this vein. And I have some very real concerns regarding it. The problem is, is that you can't sue or go after it until damage is done. And so this happened probably a better part of five or six years ago. And so, you know, at that time, you kind of get your ducks in order start contacting different groups and legal groups to get prepared to because this is affecting my potential to provide for my family, myself, everything else for nothing more than using my first amendment rights in a manner which is appropriate and civil, you know, and in particularly civil manner, you know, I'm not being outrageous. I'm not calling for violence. I'm not trying to be descriptive or, you know, just, you know, doing some, you know, just unorthodox, ungodly, uncivilized behaviors. I'm trying to be rational and trying to understand what's going on and be willing to talk about it. And I was censored for doing so. I've dealt with, for example, a local university here, we had worked on some transgender issues associated with privacy concerns with restaurants. And I don't have a problem with providing essential basic services, you know, that people, everybody has a civil right to be able to use restaurants and everything else. And the issue was privacy. How do you make a single occupancy use private appropriate, in particular at a university in which we're dealing with recreation centers? So you're dealing with locker room situations. The notion of public disrobing and nudity and sexuality, you know, whereas the convergence of all these things, how do you handle it appropriately? So I was highly involved in some of this. And these things got resolved amicably, very, you know, very efficiently. And, you know, I'm particularly proud of that. In conjunction, I thought was really interesting was this is during early parts of the current war on terrorism. There are a number, a large number of GIs coming back that were maimed with IEDs. And so they're coming back on the university campus to get an education user or GI Bill and they're still going to these rec centers. And they didn't want to shock and disrobe in front of people because they were, even though they themselves were comfortable with their injuries, they weren't comfortable with putting that upon other people. They didn't want to impose that visual shock and make people feel bad. So they were looking for heightened privacy. Interestingly enough, so were the individuals who are transgendered. And, you know, in relatively it's a small number. So they're very small percentage of people. But when your client group is in the tens of thousands, you're talking a lot of number of people. But even if it was still one, what were we doing to accommodate one individual? And that's kind of a Western civilization value that we really do value the individual. And how do we accommodate these needs? And then what they're finding is that they didn't have essential services of just access to restaurants and how that was affecting campus life and that. So you actually had transgendered students and military veterans coming together working together resolve this issue. I found that fascinating. We also had different cultural groups. We had, interestingly enough, a number of sororities that had concerns about body image issues. We had faculty members that had concerns about disrobing in front of students. We had security concerns about people cell phones being able to record and immediately upload to the internet. And these are real world concerns about standard functions that have evolved. And how are we responding that as a profession architectural? And so I was involved in some of that. And so it was interesting being involved in that. I was invited to a gender studies program, interestingly enough, not just a gender studies. The school actually had a masculine studies class. And I thought, holy shit, are you kidding me? And not knowing a whole lot about it, they had kind of a public meeting and it happened to be at a local Panera spread. They had that kind of conference room and they wanted a discussion. It was invite, but it was open to the public. And so I was invited, one by the director because of my involvement architecturally. And he generally very lightly knew I was involved with young men and developing better men. And he thought that was not really kind of knowing the extent what a lot of it was pickup or some of these other things. And kind of keep some of that on the QT and having to do that underground, that's still when that was taking place. And I'm reading the syllabus and you start looking at it. And there wasn't a single male issue involved. It was the entire course was gender studies of how do you take people, females going to male and what is the cultural implications of being gay, lesbian, transgender, not a single male issue. And I made the mistake in an open public form of just calling attention to this. How can you say this is a masculine studies program when you have absolutely nothing involved in genetic male interest? Not one. And they immediately started yelling, screaming, they reacted horribly. The one comment was name one issue. And my response was take any feminist issue and what's the male counterpart, female circumcision. If it's okay for male, why not for for women? Biomatically, there are more reasons. You know, if you're going to sit down and say for sanitation, hygiene, cleanliness, disease, women are vastly better served by being circumcised. I think it's kind of an abhorrent position, both male and female, but it wasn't even room for discussion. We talk about rape. You know, and the reality is men are raped more often than women. But we're not even allowed to discuss it. We talk about suicides. Men kill themselves disproportionately to women. And remarkably, I mean, it goes up to a factor of 20 to 25 depending on when you look at it. Can I ask you a question about the male suicide rates? Yeah. For me personally, like I've suffered with thoughts of depression in my life. Okay. Not as severe as, you know, maybe, you know, other people, but I've definitely, definitely felt it. And it's definitely caused a lot of misery, pain and happiness in my life. And the root of that for me personally, I honestly believe was not being able to pursue the thing I wanted to do, because the advice I got as a young man was, follow your passion, and you'll never have to work another day in your life. Like, I think that's the way out. That's a feminist response, by the way. Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Well, because a male response is self-sacrifice. Do what's required. Overproduce. And that's your role as a man, is to overproduce. You can't provide for others if you're underproduced. So I think that is my almost, I'm sorry, word, inability to find my passion. It's difficult. I lost my train of thought there. I wanted to do work I loved. I knew that, and that was lacking in my life. And that's what I was searching and seeking for. And, you know, finally, I'm at a point, luckily, where I've kind of started to figure it out and I'm on a much better path than I was, thanks to the 21 convention. And the past month has been the happiest of my life. And I think it's because I've truly found maybe my one purpose in life. And from my selfish perspective, I've got in my head that one of the leading causes of male depression is that a lack of purpose. What I wanted to ask you, is that leading? Or is it something to do with what you've been talking about today? To be honest, I don't know what the true leading cause is because I haven't studied the nature of society. You know, I see the stats and just absolutely alarm. And you sit down and say, as a men's issue, as a men's health issue, why aren't we paying attention to it? Why don't we have the research? If this was about breast cancer, do you know how much attention that would get? You know, and so I don't have the answer. I, you know, I know, for example, you talk about pursuing your passions and you're going to be happy. There's absolutely no doubt about it. You know, and that's called human thriving and we're meant to thrive. We're supposed to thrive. Unfortunately, thriving and profitability aren't always linked. Yeah. And that's where I was a little bit of disagreement saying, hey, look, just because you follow your passions and a family seat, you're going to find happiness and riches. You'll probably find happiness. Okay. But you're, and you're probably just going to be better for you than the riches. You know, I know some really wealthy people that are just miserable thoughts. But yeah, if you have your purpose and you're pursuing it, I think a lot of cases your fear drops away. Your anxiety drops away. Depression. And I've always been kind of fascinated. I've always looked at depression being retroactively. You're looking at the past as anxiety is always future projection. Yeah. And you know, and I'm leaning heavily on others here. But the key is to kind of live in the moment in the now, you know, and that's human thriving. It doesn't mean that we're not looking forward and planning accordingly, but we're not anxious about it. You know, we're willing to accept changes and evolution and know that we're going to be prepared. On that point, getting into the now, what is the fastest, best, easiest way to get into the now in your opinion? Stop resisting. When you resist either the past or the future, you're not in the now you're struggling. And this is Eckhart Tolle. I'm absolutely from him. And that's something I got to, you know, because how do you get into that moment and stay there? And you stop resisting. You stop projecting, you stop resisting, and you just let be, you know, to sit down and take a breath, open yourself up. And you know, I hate to say it, learn rocks. And this is one area where, you know, literally my body is because I can't relax. I don't allow myself to relax. And it's stress induced apps. You know, it's not, I talk about sugar and carbon calorie intake, but it's, it's stress induced. But yet to be able to sit in and to find that moment of existing right now and being on stage, you know, so for example, stage writer fearing that I was going to forget shit. And I get focused in on and develop tremendous anxiety, you know, about that, you know, did hardly slept at all. But you prepare, you do the things you have to do. You don't beat yourself up on the past. And so for example, that room, there were some issues with me in that room, my first speech, I did a horrible job with it. I developed fears, I started focusing in, you know, I got into limbic thinking or no longer creative, that hind mind mentality. And I started using one word as a crutch. And that word was aspect. And I use that word, I think somebody counted it 53 times in an hour and 20 minutes. Horde, I mean, absolutely, it's, it's absolutely embarrassing. So to come back up on stage at the scene of this crime, I had anxiety is about, you know, about, you know, kind of, you know, I don't say depression, but I had anxiety is going forward with it. And you sit down and say, when you get on the stage, you have to take a breath, just deep breath and stop resisting and say, just be in the moment, feel it. And if you're feeling the anxiety, you're feeling the fear kind of kind of, it's normal. I embrace it. And I hate to say it, kind of enjoy it. And you sit down and say, okay, take them out. And so I kind of had my speech prepared where I was going to come out with a personal confession. And I really wasn't ready for it. I really was having to say, how do I mouth the word feminism and get that shit out and not get hung up on it? And I said, Joe, you're in a moment, you're having a little bit of anxiety. It's affecting your performance. Relax. Enjoy this moment. Okay. You know, you're absolutely alive right now. You know, and that's kind of what got me going. One thing I just wanted to say about you, sock, you're like the one guy I really wanted to meet. I was at the Melbourne event a few years back, and I really wanted to meet you. And one of the things like you, I've read your blog and not going to lie, I don't understand everything. No, that's okay. I just know as I'm getting older and going into relationships, you're going to be my go-to guy in terms of blog. And it's manning up smart. Manning up smart.com. Yeah. And one thing I want to say now that I've met you last night, we'll show it briefly. You were stressed and excited. And I could feel that from you. And what was behind that was, you really fucking care? Yeah. I give a shit. I give a shit. And that was something else. If I didn't give a shit, I wouldn't be feeling that. Yeah. And so you sit down and say, okay, don't resist that. Work with it. Because I can't resist it. I resist it. I'm going to check. And that's a natural reaction. If I worked with it, if I allowed it, and I had legitimate fears, you'll appreciate of going up insane aspect or some other fucking literally at the scene of the crime. And I was talking to Mike last night, you know, and I'm like, I don't, you know, there was this helmet. Yeah, cool. It's a really nice environment. I like the hotel. You know, it had a really good time. And it wasn't until I walked in that goddamn room, it was a scene of a crime. I'm like, oh my God, you know, and I didn't realize how much that bothered me. I still cringe. I mean, we can probably pull it up later at the house if you want to play the damn thing. Just to give me shit. But that's part of it. And what I find particularly proud about is that if you watch the videos in sequence, I've gotten better over time. And even though I'm an architect, I present, I don't present like this. I don't have to give stories and that sort of things. You know, it's fairly small segmented, very controlled, fairly simple. You know, this is a whole different realm. And this isn't something I do professionally. You know, so that makes an added challenge. And it does matter to me. It really matters to everyone else. You know, the curve on the human evolution, we have an ability to tremendously impact them. You talk the improvements in awareness just in psychology and child development. In the last 100 years, that's nothing over the course of evolution of what we could actually achieve as a species or people to improve the quality of our lives, the quality of our environments and our society, and how to project that going forward. I think I think there's a tremendous amount of resource available. And this is kind of ground center for being able to talk and discuss and have a platform with the guys to have that conversation. Awesome. Thanks so much. Pleasure. Awesome stuff.