 introduce our next speaker, our first speaker kicking off the event, which is Socrates. I had the pleasure of meeting Socrates last year in Orlando. Got to hang out at his awesome place, spend some time with him. So I'm really excited to hear his speech. I heard it in Orlando. This speech is brand new and the title is Relationship Building in the Earthquake Landscape of Post-Feminine Culture. So what that means is the relationship talk your father never gave you. It's going to be awesome. A little bit about Socrates. He's a returning keynote speaker to the 21 convention. He's featured in the 21 convention documentary. He's a prolific blogger at ManningupSmart.com and he's been at this for over five years. So expert. Let's welcome Socrates. Hi guys. My name is Socrates. I'm a previous 21 convention speaker. Like Robbie stated, I do run a small blog for men regarding relationships at the ManningupSmart.com. And specifically, it was geared towards my experiences last year from the 21 convention. A lot of it had to deal with my personal experiences, my personal journey, collecting the information as I assembled, failed, collected friends and awareness and moved on. But also what happens is when you get together and are able to share ideas and are able to share, relate, project, make observances, get feedback from each other and pick up ideas and try them out yourselves, you learn a tremendous amount. And this is what one of these organizations actually do. It takes people of like minds and brings them together. And what I found during the 21 convention in particular was that there are a number of very common questions men are asking throughout all their age ranges that are not simply being answered by society today. And they're fairly simple questions. And in probably many ways they're going to be the questions of our age. Who do I want to be? What do I want to become? And what is the character and nature of the life I want to live? And they're terribly profound. And I'm going to later in my talk be talking about and addressing some of those. But my blog was specifically geared towards relationship because it plays a critical aspect in men's lives, how we're cultured to believe ourselves, our cultural identity as men, and it propagates throughout our lives. And to get a handle on that aspect, or and I promise I won't try to use that word again, that focus of attention is one of those elements in which it concerns men because we don't do it well. We're not taught, we're not trained, but we're expected to know these things by osmosis. So my blog was a direct response to realizing I just didn't want to put out a thousand page document rant. I wanted to make it a little more concise, make it more organized and provide a resource available to the guys that I was talking to. My mistake was believing that it was going to be fairly localized. I put it out on the World Wide Web. And one of the first people to contact me, interestingly enough via email, was somebody from Australia. And the blog is specifically for men in the North American framework, and this was a woman in Australia contacting me about a relationship, took something to heart about what I wrote, applied it to her live and saw an immediate payback and in return. I find that tremendous. I find it a fascinating concept that what we do today is now live worldwide, that we have an ability to communicate, relate, and share with people we've never met, never crossed. But we can convey ideas and manner though we were speaking face to face. So this, I think, is one of the best things about the 21 Convention. It's not about sitting out here and me speak or the other speakers are going to follow. But the fact is that we're all together in one room and we can share ideas on a number of different levels, on a number of different issues about men's relationships and men's relationships with themselves and their lives. So based on that, I'm going to be specifically talking about relationships. I'm an architect by trade and by profession and to make it fairly simple, I'm going to actually frame my speech around what it's like to build in the built environment, to really take the idea of a parallel analogy of building a relationship in the sexual marketplace of today, the environmental context. And you have to understand the context in which you're going to be living, the forces that are going to be pressed upon it, what are your objectives, how to build appropriately, and then actually how to make actually architecture, making it really sing, making it tailored to you. And because if you don't do that, it's not going to be unique, it's not going to be individualized. And one size fits all doesn't work. And we know that. We want it to be specific for you. And there are a number of things we're going to be able to talk about that are going to be negative. I'm not anti-woman, I'm not anti-relationship. But I think there's some things you need to go into these things with your eyes wide open. And I mean wide open. Based on that, I've been very fortunate. I've had real world examples of a number of friends, family, long-term people that I've known for probably better over 20 years that have really healthy dynamic, lasting, monogamous relationships. It's kind of an anomaly. It's unfortunate, but we don't celebrate it. I don't think that has to be the case. And by their example, I can look at a number of different factors of what they were able to do. And it kind of boils down to three things. In each case, no matter what age grain, what generation they came from, where they're at, they did three things that were synonymous to each of the relationships. They themselves were took finding their relationship and their partner terribly, terribly serious. They were not lack of days ill about their approach on developing a relationship, nor their intent for a relationship. They went into the relationship knowing that was what they were looking for. They screened their partner to make sure that they fit their objectives. They screened their partner and make sure that their objectives match their own. So you have two people going to the same goal. Most guys don't do that. All we're attracted to is a cute girl is paying attention to us. If your life objectives are not matching, you're not going to have a long term relationship. And it's foolish to get into a seriously committed relationship. I'm not saying not to enjoy that time period, but don't delude yourself, don't delude her into thinking that this is going to be more than something it's not. The third thing is that in each case, both parties were willing to invest heavily in sustaining that relationship. And that is a critical part of actually a healthy relationship. It's not that you're perfect the way you are, she was perfect the way she is. It's that fact that you're both willing to work together to manage and maintain and to sustain that relationship over a course of a period of time. And it's not just a period of time that's a factor. I know a lot of people misidentify longevity with a successful healthy relationship. That's not always true. If it's healthy and long, that would be successful. But the quality of that relationship is very much important. Okay, the stability of that relationship is very much important. Trust and respect in that relationship is absolutely fundamental. Alright, I don't care if you have a long term relationship. If you don't have those things, you don't have a healthy relationship. The key is to create a healthy, sustainable relationship. And what we're going to use is a framework of architecture. And when we talk about that, one of the most important things to realize is the environmental context in which we're going to find ourselves. And as I step back and I was writing my blog, my involvement in the men's community in a variety of ways, talking to men in and out of my life, I was seeing a number of things. I was seeing more than a generation of men that were literally lost to the forces of nature that they neither identify properly identify or properly recognize. They're subtly kind of aware of some of the influences, but they don't recognize it. The cultural framework in which they're existing is marginalizing the masculinity. It is telling their irrelevant and actually replaceable.