 to the 21 convention 2019 of Orlando, Florida. Our next speaker is an alumni speaker at the 21 convention, returning for his fourth time to our stage. He's also the best selling and legendary author of The Way of Men, becoming a barbarian and a more complete beast. Without further ado, please let me welcome Jack Donovan to the stage. Welcome back. All right, man. Cool. Thank you. Thank you. Mainly idealism. Why are most of you here today? You're here because you want to be better men, a better version of yourselves. You have an idea of yourself, a platonic form of man that you want to be more like. You want to improve. You want to create yourself. But how do you do that? You know, who creates me? You know, when I announced that I was going to speak at this conference, now I got a comment from a guy and it was something along the lines of, you know, all these guys should just save their money. They don't need to go to listen to see all these so-called men. If you want to know what being a man is, you should just get a woman pregnant and then you'll figure it out. And so, you know, I went back and I looked at his profile and I looked at his woman and I wasn't impressed. But it's worth addressing. It's a statement that I think if you write about masculinity and you talk about it and, you know, whether you talk about it to your friends or whether you're me up here on the stage talking about it, it's something that maybe you'll hear a lot and I've certainly heard it a lot over the years. You know, it's an idea that you need a woman to make you a man. Now, it is true on a technical level that you do need a woman to make you a father. Yeah, I can't really deny that. But fatherhood and masculinity are not exactly the same thing. There's a lot of overlap and I think a good father is being a good father is an expression of being a strong man. But I was a delivery guy in Portland for years and I can tell you I've delivered ellipticals and treadmills to a lot of really effeminate men who happen to have children. And on the same, you know, the other side of spectrum, you know, the trailer parks and ghettos are full of slobs, terrible excuses for human beings, let alone men, who have at some point managed to get a woman pregnant. So logically speaking, it doesn't carry that making, you know, a woman makes you a man by becoming pregnant. And you know, at the top of the spectrum I have, you know, I've met a lot of guys who've seen combat and tier one operators and men who have fought in the UFC. And a lot of them don't have children and you can call them, you can say, hey, you're not a man to those guys, but I'm just gonna stand back and watch. You know, I don't think that's gonna fly. So something's not the same there. And when I say this, people think that maybe a man tied fatherhood or something like that and actually that's not the case at all. In fact, I love to see it done right. You know, at my jiu-jitsu gym that I work out at, there's this guy, he brings his son along with him. His son's maybe 10, 12 years old and he brings him to jiu-jitsu class and the guy works with some of the smaller adults and then at the end of class he rolls with his son. And I've told him, I'm like, man, you're doing something right. That's a good thing. You know, that kid is gonna remember the rest of his life that, A, his dad gave a shit and his dad wanted to try and make him see what, some component, whatever was in his power to help him become a better man. And that's great. So I'm definitely pro-fatherhood but a woman can't make you a man. And that's one of the themes I'm gonna talk about today. And who creates men? Well, men create men. In the way of men, I talked about the perimeter. And basically it's a really simple concept that comes from evolutionary psychology. That is, you know, if you're out in a forest, I love a campfire as a symbol of it because you can really see where the perimeter ends. You know, where this fades into darkness. So men are walking through nature. And nature by itself, to us, is chaotic. It has its own order, but it doesn't care about us. And so there's this chaos and darkness. There's bears out there. There's other men hiding there to kill you. And your job as a man is to control that space, to make that space safe. Because everything around that fire is everyone that you care about, your friends, your kids, your women. Everything that matters is right there. So your job as a man is to work with other men to help keep that perimeter safe. To help order that space. Because there's chaos out there. But you're creating order inside here so that human life can survive. And, you know, women may help with that, they may not, but women have a different value to men. You know, a woman doesn't have to really do anything if she's hot. Because she has a value to men that has nothing to do with her ability to hunt, fight, or do anything else. But men, you know, I think that this is why we care about being men so much is because we've always had to function in that group of men on that perimeter. I mean, that's been our job. And if you can't do that, well, what good are you? So, and briefly, in that book, I talk about something called tactical virtues. And those are the qualities that I think that men needed from each other. And they're still how we judge men today. If you say that guy is more masculine than that guy, you're judging him according to these tactical virtues. You know, is he strength, courage, mastery, and honor? You know, is he strong? That's pretty self-evident. That's one of the basic characteristics of masculinity. Is he courage? Is he gonna be able to take risks when you need him to take risks? You know, if he's fighting, you know, boars are scary, let alone an orrox. If you have to take that down to bring food back into the protected space. You know, he's gonna fight other men to save your women from being raped from the other tribe. Mastery, obviously he has to be competent in doing the job, all the skills that are necessary to do that job. And honor, the most basic definition of honor is that you care about what your honor group, your group of men thinks of you. That's your reputation of, and you need honor in that group because that's how men trust each other. Like, you know, is he gonna go off and do something, you know, cowardly and make us all look bad, maybe get one of us killed? And, you know, so, you know, honor oftentimes makes you do something that you don't wanna do, but you know, the other guys are depending on you. So, and it's been really big, it's been great for me over the years. I wrote this all, it was all theory to me, but I've done some firearms training and so forth with different guys who have actually seen combat and worked in units and been under stress and they're like, I've seen them teach you the class, they're not even trying to do this, but they're telling, they're saying these exact things in different words. You know, if you're with this guy and everybody here isn't depending on you, you have to have your shit together, you have to have the skills necessary because you can't fuck up because if you fuck up one of us dies. And they all say this. And so it's been really cool to hear that said back to me over the years. But I'm gonna go back to this kind of primal space, this chaotic space. And you know, we go into nature and as I said, we create order. That's one of the funnable things that men do is nature, you take down these trees, you make some shelters, cut some wood for fire. See what plants you can use, harvest some of the animals. Take that space and make it useful for you. And if you fly over the world as you, many of you have today or within the past week, over 30,000 feet, you see how man has ordered his world. All these little geometric shapes of like, this is where we're gonna have corn and this is where we're gonna have wheat and this is where we're gonna have an airport and this is where we're gonna have a public park. I mean, men create order in their world and we do that as well with language. I mean, imagine giving someone directions. You know, you're going on a hunt with your primal buddies and you have to give them directions but well, without language, your directions are. And so we have to create mountain, tree, river, concepts that help us make our space more useful and then it becomes a question of bigger concepts and when we apply this skill of creating order, we also do it to our own minds because that's chaos too. You know, we have all these hormones that give us thoughts and feelings and emotions and we use words to describe them, to make sense of them, to put our consciousness in order and that's really what myth and philosophy and religion and psychology, that's really what they all are is stories, a way to make sense of this chaos in here to describe the world around us in a way that makes sense and a way that's useful. So, you know, and I think throughout time, you see the stories change, right? One religion comes, the other one goes, sometimes it's because the king converts, sometimes it's because a variety of reasons. Maybe that story was no longer useful. It wasn't the best story of the time and you can see obviously, there are certain stories, I'm not gonna get into it, but there are certain stories in the world that you hear in the media and so forth and there's an agenda behind them. We want this to be the story that you use to order your consciousness. We want you to perceive the world in this particular way. So, this is my favorite car, young meme. As I said, psychology, it's all stories and I've always been really into the arts and really into symbolism and the depth of meaning of things. And so, I always thought, young was my guy. And he has been, if you're talking about archetypes, thanks young, he definitely has influenced things in a really positive way and certainly me in my thinking over my lifetime. But, there was a more scientific, rational approach to psychology and young's like, how about magic though? And how about magic? And he looked all through myth, the myths of societies and was pulling all these symbols that have always been important to people and making connections between them. And again, that's what I like to do. So, I thought he was gonna be my guy. So, this summer, I bought the Red Book and the Red Book is a book that young wrote. I think it was before World War I. It was while he was going through a difficult time in his life, but it's a fantastic piece of art, really. It's all written in calligraphy and there's a bunch of artwork in it and he did it all by hand and himself over a period of many years. But he wrote this first book kind of in a very stressful period and he thought he was going crazy. And so he forced himself to imagine all these different visions and then he's like trying to examine why am I envisioning that? And then I see a lot of these visions getting applied to his psychology later and you can see it in his notes and so forth. But, so I bought this book and it's an expensive book. It's like $170. I bought a stand for it and I bought the Kindle Virgin and I'm like, I'm gonna take a month and I'm just gonna read this book and this is gonna be a really powerful spiritual experience for me and I'm gonna read it out loud every day and I'm gonna really get into it and get something huge out of it and I did because I hated it. I mean, and not to say that it's bad. You can look through the red book and I could quote thoughtful and true statements from the red book on Instagram for the next six months. It's great stuff, but there are two concepts in it that bugged me. And Young's been so influential and I'm like, how much of these concepts? A, is he understanding something that's been going through Western society for a long time? And B, in presenting them and filtering them out through his work, how much influence has he had in that's maybe negative? And so those two concepts are the feminine soul and the murder of the hero. So the feminine soul, that was the first thing that triggered me. I'm reading through this and Young talks about, he's talking to the spirit of the depths, which is, you know, the eternal voice and eternal sense of truth. And then, you know, he said, and then my soul reaches out to me and she said, am I, she? You know, am I really? I'm like, why do you think your soul is a woman?