 Welcome back to the 17th, 21 convention event here in Warsaw, Poland. Today I have the pleasure of introducing a friend of mine who I encourage Anthony to invite to this event. So without further ado, please welcome to the stage Mr. Noah Ravoy. Thank you Richard. Gentlemen, we live in a world that is designed to erode our agency. You have a problem? With your health you take a pill, you get hungry. There's no need to think about what the future brings. You just go down and drop a couple of dollars out of McDonald's and you got food. If you're bored, we got TV shows for you to watch. If you need a sense of purpose in your life, a video game with 100 challenges awaits you. If you're lonely, there's no need to go out and work hard to make friends and improve yourself so that you can get good quality friends. You can just go on social media and get likes. There's no need for you to work. This is the kind of men this produces. Men who don't have agency, men who are weak because we live in a world that encourages the culture of weakness. What's the same about all of these things? The same about each of these industries is that they are selling passivity. They are selling men passivity in their lives, in their careers and in their relationships. But passivity will not make you a successful man. They do this because they fear your agency. They fear that you can't be easily manipulated. They do this because men with agency are dangerous men. They can't be manipulated by politicians, by religious leaders, by women. They can't be coerced and controlled by strong personalities who create their cults around them. These are men that society fears. Fears because they are not sheep that can be herded. And I want to help you men become men of high agency. I want you to become the men that they fear. I want you to be the man they fear. But first we're going to talk a little bit about what agency is. Agency, and we're going to have a little agenda today. I'm going to talk about what agency is, talk about its limits, and we're going to talk about some of the benefits as well as why agency is vital, and especially male agency is vital to saving the West. And lastly, what specific steps you can take to develop your agency. Marcus Aurelius said that it is time that you realized that you have something in you more powerful and miraculous than all the things that affect you and make you dance like a puppet. We've all probably been at some point in our life dancing like a puppet while someone else manipulated or pulled the strings. This often happens when we're younger. If you're a child, you're five years old, you don't have a lot of agency, you have to do what you're told. Ideally, your father will teach you agency. He will help you graduate from that puppet-like state into the state of being a man. Unfortunately, most men, even if they have fathers, don't have fathers that understand how to teach them agency. But what is agency? It's the red pill in action. So we all know what the red pill is. It's looking at the world the way it really is, accepting truth at any cost. But that's intellectual. What does that mean in your life? Where is that going to take you? If you have agency, you're going to take the information you learn with the red pill, the information you learn at something like the 21 convention, and you're going to implement that in your life in a way that will make actual changes. Every year, millions and millions of self-help books are sold. Men read them. Women read them. In fact, women buy and read more self-help books than men. But there's very little implementation of the advice they get. I want you to think a little bit about the advice you've gotten in the last couple of days and think about some of your favorite examples of things that were practically applicable in your life. What is the chance that when you go home, you're going to apply it? It's probably pretty low. It will change your attitude being here. It will change the way you think about things. But the chance of specific advice being applied is fairly low unless you tap into your agency. If you tap into your agency, you can apply 100% of what you've learned here. Your ability to develop agency will take every attempt you make at self-improvement and amplify the results. So then let's take a look at what agency is, and we're going to go from a simple to a complex. Agency is a sense of self-ownership. That is the understanding that you have at least some level of power and control over your thoughts, your feelings, and your emotions, and your actions. If you don't recognize that you can control yourself, you're not going to do it. The second is the actual ability to do that. These are some skills, knowledge, power over your life, and willpower that is going to help you to implement what you know you want to do in your life. If you had a choice between the two of these, you always have to start with a sense of self-ownership first. There are millions of people, perhaps billions, that actually have the ability to control themselves if only they knew that they had that ability. They simply don't know how to unlock it. Kurt Doolittle gave a more systematic definition of it. He talks about it as our ability to identify opportunities. Very often people who will not accept self-responsibility, responsibility for themselves, will talk about, well, I couldn't do this because there was no opportunity. I don't have a girl because none of them like me. I have no opportunities with women. Where I live, there's no good women. Around me, there's no good jobs. I just don't have a skill that seems to be needed and I can't get a job. It's always about a lack of opportunities because they don't know how to identify the opportunities that exist. The other is to be able to make choices that are consistent with reality, that correspond with reality, and that are possible. You can want something. You can want it a lot and it doesn't matter how much agency you have, how much intelligence you have. If the thing you want is actually impossible, you can't achieve it. And so aligning your goals with reality is going to help you to develop agency. And of course the ability to act upon them, unimpeded by limitations. We'll talk about the limitations later. So you see agency is very important. It's very powerful. Agency is a thing that makes this event possible. It's a thing that makes civilization possible. It's what separates us from the animals. Animals do most of the things we do. They're born, they eat, they have sex, they reproduce, they fight for territory, but they don't have agency. We could be just like an animal if those are all the things we limit our actions to. Or if we do those things purely out of instinct. But men of agency, they have something else. They have the ability to consistently make good decisions and then act upon them to execute their will in the universe. Now agency has limits. You know man's got to know his limits. You have limits, physical limits, intellectual limits, limits in time and space. And to understand the limits to agency actually gives you more agency. Part of living in the world that seeks passivity is the idea that everything is possible or anything is possible. Of course that's only true within the realm of reality. But the part of the passivity is to keep us focused on the unreality. But limits to agency, these are very important to understand. Does anyone know who this is? This is a famous figure. Yeah, this is Atlas. He was a Titan. So kind of a god, not quite what came before the gods. And he's here holding up the world. This is what men do. Men hold up the world. It's our labor. It's our hard intellectual work that keeps the machine of society working. We're the ones that build the sewer systems, that fight the wars, that protect and provide for civilization. And it takes a lot of agency to hold up that weight for men. We have to do that within our limitations though. The limitations here are knowledge limitation, ignorance. If your knowledge is limited, your agency will be limited. Intellectual limitation. There's a limit to how smart everyone is. And if we learn to work within our limits, we have more agency. Mindfulness limitation, that's something you can do something about. You can meditate, you can learn to get your impulses under control. Physical limitations, such as our body. You can want to be something you're not. You can say, I wish I was taller. It's not going to happen no matter how much agency you have because you have a limitation. We have instrumental limitations. Our ancestors didn't have the technology we have today. And so they died of diseases which today are easily preventable. If your child dies because you didn't give it a vaccination, today you'd be considered irresponsible. 300 years ago, that's just what happened. And so improvements in technology enable us to be more to demonstrate higher levels of agency. Paradoxically, they also have been encouraging us not to display our agency. We have resource limitations. If you're poor, you're not going to be able to have the same agency as if you're rich. The reason being is your options, your possibilities are more limited. This doesn't mean that you can't show agency, but it means you're going to have to do it within your limitations. Lastly are the impediments placed upon you by others. And this is perhaps the most insidious one. And those limitations perhaps, for example, a slave does not have the same level, the ability to demonstrate agency that a free man would have. A person living in a dictatorial government, especially through several generations where society itself has adapted to that is going to have a hard time showing agency. And we will see this in countries where there was a lot of repressive governments for generations. It's more difficult for people to demonstrate agency. Their ability at a cultural level to be agents of their own desire or their own will are greatly reduced. And of course you have your personality. This goes back to some extent to the physical limitations since genetics probably are responsible for about 80% of our personality. The reality is, if you're a highly conscientious person, you probably already have developed agency because you will feel impelled to do it and you'll be incredibly uncomfortable until you achieve a fairly high level of agency. On the other hand, if you're a low conscientiousness person, it's going to be very difficult for you to do the work necessary to develop agency. Think of it like this. There are different body types. We have mesomorphs. We have ectomorphs. And these different people, mesomorphs, they find it very easy to gain muscle. Ectomorphs, easy to gain fat. If you know your personality, if you know your body type, you can train according to what you have gifted naturally, to what your natural genetics are. So it's important for us to understand our personality. Some people might recognize this from Jordan Peterson's work. And it is important, one of the great contributions he gave is making people more aware of differences in personality and how they affect the strategies that you need for your life. Again, one of the other ones I'd like to mention is neuroticism. If you're high in neuroticism, it will be difficult for you to exercise control over your negative emotions. If you're low in neuroticism, you might end up taking on tasks that are too big for you that are impossible to finish because you don't have that little warning in your brain that says, no, not that, it's too dangerous. So understanding your personality and where you are on the personality scale is going to help you to overcome the limitations of personality. Measuring agency. How do you measure something like agency? We have a pretty good measurement for IQ, but we have no way to measure agency outside of direct competition. This is why agency is so much connected with the male realm since we are competitors. All men are competitors. We compete with each other fiercely.