 Boom! Welcome back to the 21 convention 2022 of Orlando, Florida. The 16-year anniversary of 21 convention events and 21 studios being held at the much larger Super 21 Summit in Orlando, Florida. Our next speaker is a returning speaker to the 21 convention. First speaking at our event back in 2019 in Warsaw, Poland, our special event we had there back in July of that year. Excellent speech, excellent event. This speaker is a personal friend of mine who's helped me a lot in my life recover from kind of childhood trauma, relationship trauma, what he calls CPTSD, complex PTSD. He's an expert at it and I think he's one of the best coaches in the world for these kinds of issues for men and even for women on his channel. He's a big YouTuber as well by the way. I call him YouTube's number one psychology guru. He's also the author of a brand new book. He's going to be a best seller any minute. It just came out a couple days ago. We have a couple copies out in the lobby. It's called A Cult of One. It's even endorsed on the back by Dr. Shanti Smith, which is pretty badass. I was like, whoa, Shanti Smith endorsed this guy? Anyway, without further ado, please let me welcome back to the 21 convention stage, Richard Granin. Welcome back, sir. Thank you, sir. Hello gentlemen. Firstly, I must apologize. I have a bit of a head cold. And to combat that, I have taken large amounts of pseudo effigy. And I'm very, very high. So this could go one or two ways. It could be brilliant or it could be absolute drivel. I watched as many of you did Jack Donovan deliver just before this and watched him wrestle with the topic of what masculinity is. And in preparation for this, I wanted to know what Jack would say because I don't want to cover what other people do. And I don't want to cover what other people do better than I could. I'm very, very heavily influenced by Jack. I have a Donovanian worldview of masculinity because I read a lot of his material and it's had a heavy influence on me. So I thought in order to do this in a way that is not going to cover all ground and that could possibly present you with something useful, practical and interesting with actionable steps. I thought, how do I give myself a restriction? What would be the affectation with which to do this? And I thought, well, I could imagine I was trying to explain to a young man how to be a man now in 2022. How to be what you already are but it is sort of illegal to be. Very, very strange situation to find yourself in. And in doing that, I thought, okay, we'll start from a premise. What is masculinity? And I struggled to define it as you saw Jack struggle a little bit to define it as well. It's more of a kind of like a you know it when you say it sort of a thing. So I thought, okay, how do I reduce this to first principles in a way that really draws it down and makes it very, very simple. And I went back to Taoism and Taoism at the sort of the quantum physics level, like the quantum of reality. What is masculine versus that which is feminine? Because you can only define masculinity through its opposition which would be femininity. The Taoists called it yang, yang. It's that which is versus yin, which is that which is not. When movements are done in martial arts, yang is that which is, yin is that which draws in. It's that which pulls forward. If you have too much yang or too much yin in your internal organs, you have health problems and you can potentially die. You have to have balance. So if you have something that is yang and it is a thing, what does that mean? If masculinity is beingness and what is under attack is masculinity, then what is under attack is beingness itself. You are not allowed to be a man. And really now I think I will claim as we move forward everybody is being told that they're not allowed to be a human at all. So first of all, masculinity is attacked. It's stupid. It's pointless. It's contemptible. You remember the TV shows, the adverts, not the first person to say it. The classic in the American sitcom was the father is a goofball. He's an idiot. He's a clown. He's the bot of the jokes, even as everybody is sat in the house that he has provided inside that house. Here's the bot of all jokes. In adverts you see that being played out again and again. Masculinity, the father, stupid, dumb, greedy, selfish, home assumption, a big fat beer drinking moron. Then it got nasty. We moved from masculinity is stupid and pointless to masculinity is evil. Masculinity is dangerous. Men are evil. Men are dangerous. And the idea of toxic masculinity was born, which is being upheld even by the American Psychological Association, as I'm sure most of you in the room will know. They had this thing, this piece that they released about how psychologists across America must unify in training young men that being a man is bad for their mental health, that masculine traits are bad for your mental health. We live in very, very strange times, folks. Anybody watching this on YouTube afterwards who thinks that this is just a room full of men concerned with men's issues? What I would say is the defense of masculinity is the defense of humanity itself. The end goal is not to put women in charge. Women are tricked, women are tricked, who think that? Feminism, the ambition, the agenda of feminism, the cancer on culture that is feminism is to trick women into thinking that they will get their moment in the sun, that they will be in charge. But that's not true. Women will not be in charge. Men will not be in charge. We will all be enslaved and subjugated. There will be no men. There will be no women. There will be what Jack Donovan has referred to as androgynous, genderless, worm people who consume. We are being trained by an extremely evil agenda to be the best voters and the best consumers we can be, and there is no other concern. Social justice has fuck all to do with this. Never did. It was never about social justice. It's only about subjugation, enslavement and entrainment. Attacking men was necessary. Why? I said, yang. Men are yang. Men were the boundary. Men were the boundary. Men were the wall. Men were the last line of defense. And that's gone. There was a little trick that was used developed by the communists. This isn't me being a paranoid right-wing conspiracy theorist. It is verifiable. Objectively, it's called demoralization. Train the women into an ideology of conformity, vanity and victimhood that causes them to hate men and to show men contempt. And what happens when men lose their women? They become depressed. Are we not depressed? They become listless. Life has no meaning. Life has no passion. Life has no juice. Men clearly live for women. Hang on a second though. I thought men hated women. I thought men live just to subjugate women and enslave them. But apparently that's not true because we're depressed as fuck without women. Because women don't want us anymore. Because they've been trained in this toxic cancerous ideology to think of us as pointless, stupid, unnecessary and or evil. True or false? I'm afraid it's true. So here we are now. And what would I say to a young man in this society, in this culture right now? And he said to me, how do I be a man and how do I be masculine? I would say you need to recognize all of this. You have to absorb all of this. You were raised, you were born unfortunately in a very, very strange time where the essence of who you are, you are not allowed to be that. And the people who tell you that you're not allowed to be a man are the same fuckers who are going to tell you that you have to accept what everybody else wants to be because that's what they identify as. You have to accept what other people want to do if it's a fucking freak show. But if you want to be a man, that's a problem. That's a problem. I'm sweating now. I told you the effigy would kick in. So in this version of events and this timeline and this reality that we're up to now, masculinity is a decision to be as opposed to not being. This that we face is not feminism. Feminism is a mask for what this is. This is a death cult. This is a death cult. The purpose of this cult, as I say, and as Jack has said, is to turn as all men, women, children, trans, everybody, nobody say from this into genderless, identityless, worm people who will literally be put into pods. Literally. I swear. You will see this in the next five years. Pods. Pods are coming. They won't be called pods. They'll be like virtual reality machines or whatever. But we will be facing heavy pressure to get into pods because it's pleasurable. So the pleasure button is going to get pushed, as it always is, with these people and for the good of other people. So if you want to be virtuous, if you want to do the right thing, you should go and jerk off inside of a pod and just consume infinite virtual reality sex or infinite virtual reality torture or genocide or all of human depravity. Consumer capitalism as it is today is evil. I'm a capitalist, but we need to recognize the difference between free market capitalism and consumerism. It behooves consumer capitalism to provoke and invoke evil in people. The seven deadly sins. Lost, sloth, greed, envy, rage, because people are in that state they buy and they submit and they do as they're told. Recognize that. Yang is the choice to be. There is going to be conflict in this choice. There is going to be conflict in this choice. If you think about at the very raw level of reality, the structure of human genitalia, that which is the yang is an audacious thing. That's a daring thing, but it is standing out and it is visible and it is punishable therefore. Safer to be horizontal, safer to be flat. We're talking ones and zeros. We're talking being and not being. I'm not trying to say yang is good and yin is bad. They need each other. They absolutely need each other. But this is the choice between I would claim a life, one of passion, one of red bloodedness, one of individuality, one of being able to be who you are, whatever that is, I'm all for it. I'm all for people spontaneously being whoever and whatever they want to be. The forces that we face are not. They demand submission and as I say, it's a death cult. I'm reminded frequently of around 2012, Will Smith, the poor cock, came out with a couple of movies. One was called I am legend and the other one was I robot. In I am legend, he is literally the last human being alive. He's the last man alive and everybody around him has been infected by a virus. Everybody of every ethnicity turns bald and milk white and become these screaming vampire zombies. In I robot, at the end of the movie, it's Will Smith alone facing an army of robots and facing artificial intelligence and they are also white. Why so much whiteness? It's anti-white racism. No, it isn't. Whiteness in this context represents sterility. Death. That which is white is death. White. Like, white people aren't white, right? They're sort of yellowy pink. Every ethnicity when they die, they go pale as the blood goes away from the skin. This is death. In one representation, he was the last man on earth facing a viral infection and in the other, artificial intelligence. Interesting. I find it interesting. I find it interesting that that's what came out of the collective unconscious around 2012 because that is the situation that we face now. It's desperate. It's tragic. These are the forces of death. These are the forces of conformity. This is a hive mind. You'll notice when you argue with people who are invested in this world view, this ideological infection, they all say the same shit. They all virtue signal in the same way. Virtue signaling, by the way, just as a side note, as I referenced artificial intelligence and the death cult, there is just a concept called signaling in biology when animals want to speak to each other, they signal. There is a type of South African deer that jumps up in the air to show to potential mates that it is very virile. This action is called spronking. That's a signal. Signals can be deceptive. Signals frequently are deceptive. The animals will communicate that they're more virile than they actually are in order to win mates. This virtue signaling that we're seeing is actually a symptom of the ideological infection of the virus that is sweeping through society now. It's a pandemic. Does that mean that nobody has any moral responsibility? No, people should resist going with the flow. But when I say there is conflict in being, and when I say we will need to resist and that there may be violence, what I would also say is the people who are your enemy are also victimized by this ideological infection. Does that make sense? I don't want to breathe a bunch of not cases. We have to keep our compassion. This will be hard, but we are men, and it is masculine to be compassionate even with your enemy. Even with your enemy. It is honorable to be compassionate even with your enemy. I believe that this ideological infection can be reversed as well. So that's something to bear in mind. What we're looking at at the initial level when you think about this ideological infection is a kind of broad-scale anima infection, which is a Jungian concept, which means that there's a part of the human spirit that has been denied and then has come back to possess the individual, but we're seeing it at a collective level. What this means is that the spirit that has collectively infected our culture is that of an angry, stroppy, bullbusting woman. Sound familiar? That's anima possession. If it were anima's possession, you would have a very, very bullying, aggressive man infecting people. This archetype, sometimes I'll refer to it as the smother-mother archetype. If you have bad parents, like a danger daddy would be a father who encourages too much risk in his children, the smother-mother doesn't allow for any risk whatsoever. She's obsessed with safety, conformity, and people doing as they're told. She's also very keen on policing words and thoughts. You may find that something you recognize. The end goal is, as I say, a kind of sexless consumer, a perfect voter. Now, under these circumstances, if we're looking for action steps, and I hope that we are, whether you're male or female or however you identify, presumably you identify as being a human being. If you identify as a human being that values individual freedom, then you must resist, and you must develop your will. This is one of the biggest tests that humanity is going to face. Everybody around you is going to throw their will to one side, and they're going to give you every single kind of pressure and every single kind of reason to do the same thing as them. We are tribal creatures, we need each other, and you will feel the impulse to do whatever else is doing and to throw your will away. Being willful is it's stupid. Just do as you're told. Stop asking all these hard questions. Just go with the flow, just do what everybody else is doing. So what I'm going to advocate for is training the will, even as everybody else is throwing theirs away. Make your will strong. Cultivate your intent. This is going to be tough, very tough, but nobody's coming to save us. It's just us. Literally. Don't fantasize that there's anybody else, there's no one else. This is it. It's these conferences, it's these groups, it's these forums, it's these people, and no one else. And you'll look around and you'll think, fucking hell, I'm not that competent. I'm not that great. I'm not that perfect. Doesn't matter. There is no one else. If we don't stop it, nobody's going to stop it, and this is where it's going to go. You start here. You train your will. You train your intention. You train yourself to be determined. That means making certain choices again and again that are going to be uncomfortable choices. Literally uncomfortable choices. You're going to have to choose conflict. Conflict's not nice. The smother mother wants you to be nice. The smother mother wants you to be agreeable. Be agreeable. Our culture values agreeableness practically over everything else. What kind of fucking progress can you make being agreeable? What kind of progress can any culture make being obedient? How does obedience and agreeableness become a key principle of a culture that is expanding? It is not. It is a key principle of a culture that is now in decline. So you must choose conflict. You must choose rebellion. Over conformity and obedience you will have to rebel and this will challenge your will because you won't want to. This is going to be painful. Your own tribe is going to turn against you and that's guaranteed at this point. You must choose risk over safety. Keep choosing risk over safety. It is hard and it is fucking dangerous. I don't say this to you and be like don't worry guys everything's going to be okay if you take risks. It isn't. It could fuck you up. That's life. That's the way we always lived. That's the way we've always lived up until about 120 years ago. We said right we're not taking any more risks because you know bad things might happen. Choose discipline over self-indulgence. I think we're already seeing this spontaneously happening. I used to laugh at all the guys online who would brag about nofap. I'm like are you seriously talking about wanking with each other in a public space? But I see value in it now that I never did before. I was like this is some weird cult shit. You know people who take cold showers and they stop wanking. I think what are you doing that for? Or they don't do porn. And now I'm looking at I'm going no that makes sense. That is a spontaneous intuitive unconscious drive to rekindle the masculine urge. Discipline. Control. Do the uncomfortable thing. Do the hard thing. Do the difficult thing against indulgence. Everything in your environment. Everything inside of the ideological soup that you swim in every day is saying don't be disciplined. Indulge. Indulge. Indulge. Because that's what makes you a good consumer. Consumer capitalism needs that shit. So you have to be disciplined. You've got to change the way you eat. You've got to change the way you drink. You've got to change the way you sleep. All of it. Clean your fucking act up now. Now. Now. There's no more time. It's got to be now. You want to be healthy. You want to be strong. You're going to need it. Choose hardship. Choose hardship over ease. Choose action over introspection. I'm a psychologist. You won't often hear psychologists say that. But actually I think our culture is infected with something that's called psychologization and safetyism. If you're interested in that you can read Jonathan Haidt's book, The Coddling of the American Mind. It's an excellent book. Introspection is not that useful. Knowing why somebody did something is not that relevant. But we're obsessed with it. We're obsessed with knowing like, why when that military general did this, why was he doing that? Was it because his mother told him no? It doesn't fucking matter. Take action. Get out of that. That's a more feminine mindset. So as a psychologist I generally am a more of a feminine type of a guy. I'm more interested in people than I'm interested in things. But I can see that this is poison. It paralyzes people. Stop introspecting that so much. Get on with it. Take action. You want to do something. Fucking do it. It becomes a form of procrastination. Mental masturbation leads to paralysis. Focus on the results and worry less about motivations. But why am I doing this? Sit down and fucking matemate. Just get on with it. Just fucking do it. And if you want to see something happen in your life, make it happen. Stop fucking whinging. Stop whinging. Loads of lads now. Fucking hell they whinge. You know what whinging is? Does that make a complaining? What do you call it in American? Whining. Whining. Stop whining. Don't fucking do it. It's an indulgence. That's ease. That's safety. That's conformity. Stop whining. Take action. Do something. Stop whining. You want to see something happen in your life and it hasn't happened yet? What did you do today to make it happen? What five things did you do today to make that thing happen? Nothing. But you whanked five times in a row. Well done. Well done. That takes discipline. Get sore at the end. This is the kind of thing you want to be focusing on if you want to break out of this. It's going to be hard. It's going to take a lot of courage and it's going to be very, very uncomfortable. I also recommend as you do this, try and have open-minded conversations with people even if they're on the other side of this argument. Have faith that a strong philosophy will beat a weak ideology. Have faith. So if you're calm and you're patient and you can have the conversation, you follow the Socratic method. You don't get defensive. You don't get cranky. You just sit there and say like, why do you believe that? Oh, that's interesting. What causes you to think that that is true? What evidence is there for that? And then you present a superior philosophy. You don't have to take people apart. You don't have to be like, I'm going to smash this communist's ideas into smithereens. You don't need to do that. Just show people a better way. Just show them a different way of thinking about something. The human brain has this weakness. It has this fallibility and I've been using it for 25 years now in the therapeutic context. Because if it has two choices, if you show it a better choice to get done, whatever its objectives are, it automatically takes that. It automatically takes that. Find out what your opponent's motivations are. I just want my children to be safe. So do I, mate. So do I. Have you considered that one way of doing it would be this? Oh, OK. I thought that handing over all of my power and agency to the state would do it. Well, you know, historically, there isn't too much fucking evidence that that is a good way of keeping people safe. What I wanted to do in this session, guys, is to give you a chance to ask questions so we can go back and forth on this. So I'm going to stop yelling at you in my effigynd out state. My jet-lagged, caffeinated effigynd state. And we'll do some questions and we'll have a little bit of a chat. So thank you very much and feel free to go up and ask a question. Hello, sir. Hi. So on that whiteboard there, you have a bunch of words. And like it can be, it can, like practically, it can be very easy when you're the only one to just avoid the conflict and be agreeable and to make the choice that the majority wants you to make. Like if they say, OK, like where I'm asked when you work, take the COVID shot, do what the government tells you to do, and then they broadcast it on media. So you think you're the only person that is making, and it makes you feel like you're making the wrong choice by not doing what they say. And at my particular job, I eventually found about like five to 10 people who were in agreement with me and did not want to take like the shot or really do what the government says. Like how can you, can you give some advice on how to make the more difficult choice when you're choosing like the conflict, or rebellion, and all that other stuff, like the action over just like really going with what the, doing what the TV tells you to do and just going with the majority. Less TV, less porn, more Nietzsche, more Kierkegaard. You got to read. You got to read, and you got to read, you got to read the harder stuff. These are weird guys, strange dudes with big ideas, challenging ideas, dangerous ideas. You got to live in their world. If you watch Netflix, or you're consuming porn, you're on social media all day, you're not going to develop a will like that because everything I do, I'm scrolling TikTok, I'm ideologically infected as well. I got enough Nietzsche in me to defend it, just about, but I'm aware of it, and it's all, it's all lowering impulse control. It's all lowering discipline, slowly, slowly, slowly, and like the coordinates of what you're watching, you go, that's funny. And then I'm sat there, I'm going, why is that funny? What do I need to believe to be true in order for that to be funny? You know like meme culture online so that we can all enjoy the same weird videos? That's ideological. That's conformist. It's incredibly conformist. There aren't multiple standards of sense as a fumer online. There's one. There's one tone of like this ironic, post-modern, hipsterish sort of tone to everything. I enjoy it, I like it, but I recognize it's actually a sort of conformity. So you've got to break it. It's really, really uncomfortable. Read. Stop watching TV or watch way less TV and be very, very careful. The adverts come on on the radio, turn it off. Don't look at posters when you drive around. I'm serious. I'm deadly serious. Don't look at big hanging titties when you're in the traffic. It's hard. That's not me milking them. When you're in traffic, try not to look. Try not. There's so much bombarding your mind and it's weakening you because these unconscious messages that have been put in there by smart people who understand psychology at the deepest levels, they want you weak. They want you soft. You've got to be a weirdo. Like you're going to be weird. Okay, so fuck it. I'm a weirdo then. You're not watching the same TV as everybody else. You're not consuming social media like everybody else. You're the weirdo who, I won't go in the cinema and watch trailers. I won't watch any, I won't watch any fucking adverts. And if I fuck up my timing and I end up watching them, I sit there with my thumbs and my ears. I'm weird. I don't give a fuck. It's my mind. It's mine. I have to protect it or what little I have left after all this effort. I have to protect it. Does that answer your question? Sort of. I mean, you're right. I mean, Nazi Germany, I mean, they got that way because they propagandize a nation. But it's also difficult when it's like your own family that believes and is doing the will of what the TV says. I mean, like you were saying, I don't really watch much TV. But when it's your own family and they're really pressuring you, it can be tough to resist. Would you say that it's like an isolating and depressing experience? I would say it's more like... I'd say it is more like isolating. I mean, because it would be just me and then against my two parents and then my brother and my sister. So it's definitely isolating with that. Does that ever lead to feelings of despair? More like the conflict of just knowing that I'm making a bad decision by following what they say. You would enjoy Kierkegaard. Okay, I have not read Kierkegaard. Yeah, you would enjoy it. It helps. It's an Nietzsche. It will offer a lot of solace. It's the nature of the beast. It's the time we're born into. This is the test. Your mother is going to pressure you to do something out of kindness and love and the best of intentions to do something that you know you shouldn't do. And you're not going to do it. And it's going to suck. That's what being a man is. Embrace the suck. Okay. All right. Yeah. Thank you. That really helped. I'll definitely give Kierkegaard a read. Cool. Cool. Hello. How are you today other than high? Sick as fuck, mate, but go on. So of the words that you have up on the left side of the board, I think a lot of men can relate to those from physical aspects, you know, combat. We understand that physically. But how would you paint a picture of what those look like within the current sociopolitical experiences we have? How do we take that kind of action? Well, they mirror perfectly into the psychological, emotional, and political world. You take exactly these same principles. You could look at these as, these aren't tactics and they're not strategies. They're upstream of tactics and strategies. These are principles of action. So take those principles of action. So if you're dealing with, say, something that's difficult politically, you could look at a list like that and go, okay, where am I not taking action on this issue? And where could I? Or where could I inspire other people to take action? Or where should we stop looking at fucking motivations? Because a lot of politics stays in a loop of what are you trying to do? What are you trying to do? That's the virtue signaling thing. Show me the fucking results. Your results stink. I mean, it's perfect right now. I love what they're doing here. The results stink. They suck. And it's open and it's obvious. I'm like, yes, it's fucking brilliant. So that's why I would, I say it overlays perfectly. Is there an example you're thinking of? No, not in particular. If you could think of one, I'll try and work through it for you. I'll let you know. Okay, all right. Thank you. Hello. Hello there. I was first of all wondering if you could tell me which roadways to drive on that I could see those big hanging titties you were talking about. So it really resonated with me when you were talking about being weird, consciously being weird, embracing the weirdness. Because I think a lot of the guys in this room, including myself, have done that in some form. But I was wondering, let me just give a quick anecdote. I was walking the other night, nice October night, you could smell the leaves, you could get a nice cool breeze. And I was walking through a neighborhood and you could see the stars, beautiful night. But you could also see the flickering blue light in every house. I mean every house. And I was just thinking, some of those are normal people, good people, just having their nightly Netflix. But I want to be able to drag some guys, some people out, and just get them to experience something else. And I was wondering if you had any ways that you've run into in your life, successfully getting people out of the matrix and into some fun stuff. I think like the answer I gave before is pertinent to this, which is if you have a superior philosophy and you give people the choice to go for it without badgering them for what they're already doing, it's pretty cool. So exactly that example of watching TV versus looking at the stars at night, I'll say to people, how many shooting stars have you seen in your life? Like most people go two, three. I've seen over 40. Over 40, how you do that? Because I'm constantly outside, lying on my back, looking at the stars. I'm like, why'd you do that? I'm like, dude, you've got to try it. It's like taking psychedelics or something. Half an hour, 35 minutes, your mind just goes into another place, you start zoning out. And it's like a sales pitch for a unique experience that then people go, oh, that sounds really weird, but I kind of want to try that. I live sometimes in Ibiza, which is an island off Spain. It's a beautiful place. And if you go inland, there's no light pollution. And you can just lay there and just watch the stars. America's great for it, like your national parks. I've done it in Joshua Tree. It freaked me out. I was nearly crying. Yeah, I've done it in Great Sand Dunes National Park, Colorado. Just lying in the sand in a sleeping bag. Yeah. Unbelievable. And it's a psychedelic experience, right? You're not thinking your normal thoughts. You can't. Because from there to there, your entire reality is the sea of stars. While some of the people are sat at home watching, I don't fucking know, whatever shit they're watching on TV, that's weird and is full of ideological infection and is full of these subliminal messages that aggravate you and make you feel like shit. Whereas if you just sit there and look at the stars, your mind opens up. You become free. You cease to be in a certain sense. Your ego disintegrates. So you said, how do you convince people? That's how I convince people. I talk like that. I talk like a weirdo. I'm like, your ego disintegrates. They're like, shit. I want to try that. It kind of sounds like ayahuasca. Yeah, but you don't throw up and you don't shit yourself. That's great. And I would say as far as being weird goes, it's okay for us to be weird and it's okay for us to swim against the flow. But we also have a responsibility to learn to be socially intelligent. We're going to have to convince people. There may be violence, but I don't think the violence will lead to anything. This is more of a situation where the thing that's going to create the next revolution to something better is convincing people with a superior philosophy. So we have to become philosophers. We have to become good at speaking, good at conveying with passion that which we believe to be true and bringing people on side naturally without bullying them because that all creates resistance otherwise. So yeah, it's a good example. I like that. Convincing people not to watch TV but to go out and look at the stars. And I guess while I'm here and we have time, one more thing about that. Are there any specific activities you can recommend for men to get together and do? I know nature is awesome, but are there any other things that are alternatives to dragging people away from the television? Usually what I've noticed with men is that I'm a fairly feminine guy, so I have female friends who I'll hang around with. Women seem more comfortable just meeting up and talking. And men, they need like a third thing. So it's got to be poker or they're going to show up and do Brazilian jiu-jitsu or there's like another thing that you do. So as long as you put that in there, it makes it appealing. But it's just an excuse. As far as I'm concerned, the most important thing now for men and for women for humanity would be at the end of the day would be to collect around a campfire and talk and look at each other with no fucking phones, no TV, no nothing and just interact. I actually think a lot of mental health problems would dissipate after a few weeks. A lot of insomnia issues, a lot of anxiety issues, a lot of depression. We've lost each other. We've lost our connection with each other. You just sit there by firelight. You don't even need to say anything particularly deep. You could make like fart jokes or something or whatever. But you're there together. You're there together. You feel the presence of other people. You have that interaction. Last night there was a speaker's dinner and around the table it was sort of found out that everybody at the table had either done Brazilian jiu-jitsu or judo. And then we were chatting about like throws and everybody's getting like fucking really animated and passionate. And I'm thinking none of us work in security. Nobody's law enforcement. Nobody's gonna use this in real life but as men we like that. We like that shit. We want to talk about the technical aspect of the thing when you do this and that's what we are. And when I talk about masculinity I don't want people to think that they have to conform to my deal of what like being a man is. Like you have to kill elk with a bow and then eat shag it and eat it while it's still out. You know like do whatever if you're an artist or you're a little bit of feminine or you're a poet or whatever then be that naturally, spontaneously. I warned you I was on drugs that night. Does that help? Thank you, that was great. Thanks. We were shagging elks there for a second. Fucking hell. Hello. Hey, I really appreciated your talk. It spoke a lot to me. Thanks. I think especially in America I think it's intentional that they don't really bring philosophy as much into the schools. And you're a perfect example of that. You're very dangerous because you're open to a lot of different ideas. For me personally philosophy found me in a very low time in my life. I was very lost. So my question to you is how did you run into philosophy and what part of your life were you at? What's your story in a way? Well, I was... How long we got? When I was a kid I was in a... There's an ethnic group in the UK that you don't have here that my father is from that brings a certain sort of trouble that is renowned and I was raised in a household like that. So I have multiple late half brothers and sisters that I don't even know. It was a chaotic environment. It was violent and it was actually abusive as well. So whilst I was in that space as a kid that couldn't escape I was always looking for something, some way out. So when I was looking at like magic, religion, psychology, philosophy, all that kind of thing as a way of sort of trying to escape the chaos and the pain of what I was in. And what I could see as a kid was I saw children, other children and they seemed okay. But then I looked at adults and I was like these motherfuckers are infected with something. Everybody's really grumpy and angry and ugly and like burdened with something. And so over the years I would always come back to philosophy, spirituality and religion and be like what do we need? Like why as we age do we age like this? Like you're fucking angry. Is that necessary? I just when I flew in to America I had this thought, I was like oh what if people did more like fasting and what if people did more like dancing? You know dancing to change your consciousness. You dance till you're exhausted and then you keep going. So I was thinking fasting, dancing and then chanting. And I was like which religion has that? Native American religion. I was like what does America need? America needs native and I was drunk on the flight. I was like American needs native American religion back and everything will be okay. There's an unburdening in doing that. Oh also they took psychedelics. That's part of the Native American church. You can take psychedelics and it's actually legal. We need that. We need as humans, we need our tribe, we need our people and you have to escape your ego because this flesh suit it sucks, it's tough. So if you can alter your consciousness regularly I think you unburden something and we desperately need that. We desperately need that. Now does philosophy give you that? No, but I think philosophy gives you the tools to ask the question. So say okay what am I looking at? I'm looking at people weighed down, burdened. Why do we even age was one of my things when I was a kid. And then when I was like I think 13 I took acid for the first time and I did that right the way up until I was 20. And I would take acid even if it was a bad trip. Like most of my trips were really really bad trying to find the answer to these kinds of questions and it left me, because you asked where did this come from it left me with the curiosity for these things. Like why have we always lived this way? Human beings don't live like this. We never live like this. This is like one day old. We are weird. We speak to spirits. We like I say we do the sweat lodges. We do we escape this reality. We have a magical view of reality, a spiritual view of reality and that's the creature that we are. The post enlightenment western mechanistic view. It's good and it's given us dentistry and anesthetics and airplanes fantastic. But I think we've gone too far that way and it's probably time to sort of explore back into psychedelics and other practices that alter consciousness. Taking loads of pseudo-epigen is not a recommended one. I'm like coming in and out of reality here. Does that answer your question? Yeah, I guess in a way it found you at a certain time in life. Do you feel as if you need to experience that other level of consciousness do you need to take psychedelics? Or can philosophy just give you that own stimulation? For me in a way I feel like I haven't taken psychedelics so I can't tell you why I'm asking you. But me personally I find that same mental stimulation an openness of my mind, that depth through philosophy not necessarily through drugs. I don't do psychedelics anymore. I regularly get asked to speak to psychedelics groups. I'm not an advocate for it. I don't like the way it's become trendy because it is actually quite dangerous. It can induce psychosis. As I said my trips were frightening because I wasn't guided and I was traumatised. So of course I thought demons were fucking trying to eat me and Satan was eating my leg and stuff. So no philosophy might do it. Really seriously looking at the stars might do it. If you need a push, dancing, chanting is a great heavy heavy exercise like a savage kettlebell workout. These things are ego-dissolving because you're not, if you're blowing out your arse you're trying to fight the urge to throw up. You reduce yourself back to that primal state and you're engaged in all that conflict and hardship. You survive it and you sort of take a shower and afterwards you feel okay. All that shit that was bothering you before it got burnt away by the horror of the kettlebell workout. That's another part of the Native American culture, right? Was self, what do you call that? Well there were degrees of self-harm. Ritualised self-harm. Cutting off fingers, drilling holes in the head. It's a tribe that would hang themselves by pectoral muscles and these initiatory rights that are savagely fucking painful, that's also part of who we are. And I don't think we should lose that. But to answer the question about drugs, no, I don't think drugs are essential. Fucking love that. Do you have any other books or philosophers other than Soren Kierkegaard and Frederick Nietzsche that you'd recommend to young men? Yes, I think all young men should, especially now should read Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov. I think that's the central reading for this moment of history that we're going through. Thus Spake Zarathustra is also another one probably. And then explore the philosophy of Sufism, Buddhism, the Vedic philosophies, these are interesting, Gnosticism. And then just compare and contrast and be like, wow, why would wider human beings think that we're trapped inside of a world that was created by an evil god that we can only transcend through Gnosis? That's an interesting idea. And what were the different sects of that? Why did they believe that? Why were the bogamills only having anal and oral sex? That sounds fun. I'm going to join them. So yeah, these are the things that... That's true, you know. Some bogamills really did that. It's not my fault, man. Yeah, to explore all of these different things and to see from the point of view of trying to understand how our human beings are experiencing themselves. How are we experiencing the human experience? What does this mean for us to be alive now with all of the conflict, with everything that's going on? And what's the right way to live? You're right, there is no philosophy taught in schools and it's insane. It's insanity inducing. There are questions that we all have to answer as human beings that should be gone being asked by the age of eight. What is good? What is bad? What is the purpose of life? What is the nature of reality? How should a person live? Not that an eight-year-old is going to be able to answer that question but an 80-year-old can't answer that question. We should wrestle with these questions for life and, you know, we should hang around the campfire and argue with each other about it and engage in the Socratic method. I think it is good to do this. Imagine that. Three months, every night. That's what we did, everybody in this room right now and everybody has to go up by the campfire and you answer that same question again. What is good? And you say it. Why do you believe that? And then we all badger you and you have to think. You have to endure that psychological pressure to defend the point of view. How strong? It's like three months. How much stronger would you be in terms of thinking, presenting an argument, not getting emotionally dysregulated when somebody challenges you? It could be a good thing. It's the beginning of my new cult. That's why I'm here. Yeah. And I think that's something that we definitely need in the civil discourse. I see a lot of people are just talking but they're not addressing the deeper seated philosophical issues at hand, which is why people like Andrew Tate or Jordan Peterson catch our attention because they get to the real fucking issue. They don't talk about surface level bullshit. A lot of what you'll hear in modern discourse or modern debate, it's just morons who are ideologically infacted going bleep bleep bleep bleep bleep. And then there's no thought there. So, ideology is not philosophy. Philosophy teaches you how to think. Ideology can only give you what to think. It's a parasite. It's a psychological parasite. Have you heard of the Kruger Effect? Yeah. Donning Kruger Effect. Yeah. So there's plenty of that. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I appreciate it. Thank you, sir. Thank you very much. Any other questions? Hey, Rich. It's great meeting you, man. Breaking bread with you last night. It was a great conversation about doodon and stuff. But absolutely fascinated by your talk today. I think the head sickness just loosened you up a bit enough to be a little bit more authentic. I guess my question would be if you could quantify a little bit because I've always thought introspection was a good thing. But how do you quantify having a slightly better value over action, I guess? Or how do you manage or reconcile the difference between spending being on one dimension or over the other? Do you know where the idea, the modern idea that introspection is a good thing came from? I have no idea. It's probably largely popularized by Freud, by one guy. Like the daddy of psychoanalysis and the way we view human psychology today. If I said to you, if we kept this philosophical if I asked you why is introspection good, how would you answer that? So you could probably review and analyze and make better choices. That's how I would define it, I guess. So I think and this is after I did a degree in psychology and I actually got a job in psychology straight away. I was really, really lucky. They stuck me in the probation service working with criminals who are criminals because they're drug addicts. I was 21. They would fill a room with drug addicts and they'd be like, now tell them not to take drugs and give them and I'd be doing cognitive behavioral therapy. Next time you think of taking heroin do something else. It didn't work very well. So some of the assumptions of psychology are somewhat naive and I think this is a beautiful example of one of them. Introspection must be good. Why? Because I go inside and I think and it revealed to me what my true motivations are. How do you know you're telling the truth? So in psychology if I say to you we're doing a therapy session, why did you do that? And you go, I'm introspecting now and you know you come up with some reason. It has to be acceptable to me. You're not going to say because I want to fuck bitches with bigger teeth. But that really might be the reason but how you would say it to me because I'm a deviant as well. But to someone else you would lie. But it's not really a lie because in that moment where you're looking at your female psychologist you don't want to offend. You would say I wanted to improve my social circle. Instead of bitches with bigger titties. But that's really what the motivation was. But in that moment you would believe that. So it's a confabulation. You trick yourself. So introspection like the repressed memory I don't think much of it. There is another school of psychoanalysis that was developed by Adler that was much more focused on what people did. And he just believes we were all full of shit. Alfred Adler. He's another one if you're looking at somebody to review. Alfred Adler far superior way of looking at psychoanalysis. We are all living a story and the story is bullshit to protect our ego. We all have the will to power. They were all influenced by Nietzsche and Jung and Adler. The three of them. But Adler is truly Nietzschean. He was like I don't care what you say you want to do. What are you doing? What are you doing? It's the will to power. The will to power is I want what I want. You're a man. You're a biological entity. You feel lost for beautiful women. Why can't we have a conversation which we say you did that because you want to have sex with better looking women. Why can't... How is that a taboo? It's really true. People are building corporations for that reason. The world runs on this but we're not allowed to say it because it's not politically correct. That's fucking crazy, man. That's completely crazy. And so that's where I come at it with introspection. I'm not convinced it's as useful as we've been led to believe. Was that even your question? No, I mean it's... It's led to it. Well, I guess how do you with your call to action over there? Oh, yeah. It would be how would you... You kind of answered it a little bit. So I guess if I could surmise that you're saying that being in integrity is being in action versus over-indulging in introspection. Yeah, that's good. I should have said it like that. I will say it like that from now on and never credit you. It's all good, man. I think the brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky, was for the importance of spirituality and the importance for the love of something greater than ourselves to break beyond the human ego and integrity. Freud read that and he had a rule which was above all else be honest with yourself. So one of the things that I meant to say in this talk and I didn't until you just reminded me is about authenticity. We have to tell ourselves the truth. So trying to reclaim masculinity, reclaim life we have to tell ourselves the truth. Whatever your motivations are, your motivations, whatever you want is what you want. And it's all good. As far as I'm concerned that is what it is. The ideological infection is like, no, not titties, no, titties bay, titties bay. Why? Why are we all here? Because heterosexual people got together and fucked each other a lot. And now there's 8 billion of us and then yesterday we decided that's the worst thing on earth. All right, tell me this isn't a fucking death cult. Tell me, I mean, come on. What was your question? No, that's it. You got it, mate. We're getting titties on everything now. Titties, titties, titties. Sorry, Anthony. This will be unreleasable on YouTube. This is useless. Thanks for being a candidate, you know, saying that you have like a feminine side in front of a bunch of men, which is pretty cool. My question is that earlier when you're talking about introspection and you're saying, you know, that there's less value in that than taking action per se. But then when we question people, for instance, what's your motive and then they say, well, I want my kids to be safe. And then that's kind of asking them to be introspective. Is it more valuable then to maybe just talk to people about the consequences of what they're trying to impose versus having them introspective? This is a wave. This is to fight a wave. So the wave is pushing you towards agreeableness, introspection, self-indulgence, ease and so on. So we have to fight against the wave. We have to push back. But then when you're talking to somebody and you want to build rapport and you want to lead them to a good conclusion, you do whatever you need to do. And finding out what people's motivations are makes them feel heard. Even in therapy. So sometimes I'm doing therapy with people and sometimes I'm writing sales copy because these are the two jobs that I have largely speaking, the sound make money. I don't really care. I actually don't really care because the answer, it's not that I don't care about you, but the answer you give me is going to be a lie because you're performing. We all do. I'm performing, you're performing. So I say to you, what is your reason for wanting to vote this way? You're not going to tell me the truth. You don't know the fucking truth. But I will sit there while you give me your answer and I will listen. And I'll go, okay, I don't have to buy it. Do you know what I mean? But I'm listening to you. I'm here. I'm present and I'm taking an interest. And the answer you give me does tell me useful data about you but it's not answering the real question. Not really. Do you see where I'm going? It's more about the connection with another person actually saying, like, this is the real reason why they do it. Because people just do it. I ask people all the time, I'll say, are you left or right? And then they'll give me their answer. And I'm like, do you know what left and right means? Nobody fucking knows. You take anybody out of a bar, they have really strong political views. And I'm like, where does left wing come from? Where does right wing come from? It's the French Revolution. What does it mean? They don't know. I'm totally convinced I'm left wing. But I don't know what those words mean. You know, I take people, humans, seriously in terms of their value. Like, I want everyone to be happy and healthy. But I don't take what they say seriously. It's gibberish. People just go, I hope they just practice saying sounds. Yeah, I mean, it just seems like honestly when people give you that answer, why are you doing this? It's just talking points that they've heard somewhere else. Most of the time. We were all around the campfire. Really, we would learn so much about human psychology if we did that. So I'm going to ask you, for the next three months every night, the same question. And you're going to give me a different fucking answer. Because you show up the next day as a different you. Like in some quantum physics sense, you fell asleep and the old you died and then a new you was reborn. I'll go, why did you do that? And you'll give me like the same answer but with a little nuance. And then a little nuance and it's, you evolve as we're having the conversation. I mean, I think there's a lot of value in what you just said in talking with people with opposing viewpoints as well is they have the ability to change their viewpoint daily. And we shouldn't castigate. We shouldn't punish people for that. So like what you were telling the gentleman earlier about being intellectual, like reading more and just focusing on just kind of like factual conversations. Yeah, because again, I come back to we think of ourselves as rational but we're emotional. We're still animals we're the smartest animals on this planet but we're still fucking animals and we are tribal. We must connect. So like we have a conversation about why you're depressed and you go into your childhood a bit and you walk away feeling better. Is that obvious that I'm depressed? Yes it is. But actually why you walked away feeling better is because someone listened to you. You made a connection and you saw humanity in their eyes and it's not so we give ourselves these bullshit reasons like oh it's because I expressed the moment where my father denied my desire to... Dude you just had a conversation because you don't have that conversation. Who's listening to you? You're a man. Fuck you. Nobody's listening to you. I'm in pain. Are you? Get back to work bitch. Nobody fucking cares but if I sit and listen to you and nobody did in three years like imagine you're fucking like hyped there's endorphin being released that motherfucker really listened to me. God damn. We should be doing that for each other. Thanks for answering. How are we for time? Good. Hello sir. How's it going? First I just want to say thank you for what you put out right in the content. I just came into the room I didn't know who you were or what you would speak of and just putting all those words into like everyday practice like the conflict take action like me coming right now I'm saying I got to take action to reflect that and also this is a point of us around the campfire where I wanted to speak to this gentleman with the hobbies and I do agree as far as I'm a jiu-jitsu guy I don't train actively but I was going to express to him saying that's a form where male bonding happens and you take action by showing up the conflict is the one on one training and it humbles you very much and this is where you bring into like hey let's try this let's do the campfire thing let's go to look at the stars and everything else so I just wanted to say thank you for that those little I don't know how many words you can't really see can you actually fucking read this I can't see it I saw the conflict but again thank you for it's very powerful you're welcome thank you it's interesting I haven't done Brazilian jiu-jitsu for about 10 years but this idea that men are hyper competitive and that all we need to do is dominate we're not interested in it that thing where you get humbled every man likes that so how does that fit into the toxic masculinity we have to dominate thing it's the same in boxing people walk out and have a bruise on my head right now we walk away from boxing I got punched in the head by a 24 year old I was delighted it was a beautiful thing he did it was like I watched him do it and I was so full of admiration I didn't realize it was my fucking head he was hitting and I'm happy for him he's a big long goofy fucker so his hooks are shit and I taught him how to hook and then we go sparring and he fucking hooks me the cheeky cunt when I was happy you know and we are like that's most men are there are a few men who are like psychopaths, narcissists maybe they're like one in a hundred or three in a hundred who are not happy but most of us are happy it's a so people who have a bad faith view of men and masculinity they see it as sparring they see it as fighting they're like or they're just practicing for genocide no we're not we're having fun this is how we connect this is how we play this is how we we build bonds you fight a little bit and you know he's good at this range and that one's good at his hooks and you have your thing and you have your reputation and you have your nickname you have your place in the hierarchy in the men and then you stop as you just said then you go and eat some food you look at the stars you sit around the fire it's all good it's all it's not there's this bad faith view of of men and violence that is absolutely poisoning fucking culture it's a poisoning culture yeah any any other questions wow yes one more I feel like I took ayahuasca today we've got 12 minutes so you mentioned earlier that above all else to tell yourself the truth sometimes so I mean it can be difficult to see the truth of situations and things like that and I mean we live in a world too where just like people don't even know what a woman is how do you they do they're just being cowards how do you find that truth sometimes because it can be rather difficult to know when you're not telling yourself the truth oh that's where your will comes in I always if it's me to me I'll be like why are you doing that and the first three answers I give I'm like no no bullshit one of them could be right actually but these philosophical experiment I wrote with myself is I'm like no I want you to pretend that that's bullshit what would you say if you thought that was bullshit and then I'll come up with five and I'll be like which one of these feels intuitively like is really what's going on which one do I not want to look at makes me feel like a bit of a twat do you have you know a bit of a dick like I don't want to believe that I'm that petty I don't want to believe that I did that just to be like you know to somebody who I don't like or I don't I'm greed if that's true I'm kind of greedy you know don't I mean so you have this is a game you have to play with yourself it's rigorous it's tough it's frightening but that's where young would call that shadow integration like we're not perfect angelic saint like creatures we have barbarous evil drives inside of us we're not born good that's the perverted idea of radical leftists it's I can't remember who came up with it first but the idea of a blank slate that was pure and good it's nonsense you speak to in most the Native American religion they'll say no people are evil they'll say absolutely we're fucking evil we need religion to stop us from doing evil that's how evil we are so humanity is not in this good state so why is it hard because you're gonna look at some shitty things that you want to do those aren't so nice they conflict with your hyper idealized self-image so you go wow I really want to do this shitty thing really I thought I was this guy but it turns out I'm this guy well maybe you're both and maybe you're neither and maybe it's bullshit or maybe it's true like that's that's where you I have a point here it relates to martial arts okay so I used to teach self-defense and it was incredibly fucking frustrating because guys would want to learn from me how do I stop someone doing a right hook like that and I'd be like well I can I can give you options but you don't fucking train you're just sat on the computer thinking about it you have to learn how to fight and then their brains would be like no I want to know what to do it doesn't matter when you see I think John Jones said this like he made up a submission that nobody had ever seen before and he said well I just his answer they said how the fuck did you do that and he said I just know how to fight because he's training all the time so there's a fluid ability versus a static knowledge and in our culture we value static knowledge over fluid ability we have to get back to skills and strengths and spontaneity so the answer is it's hard and requires practice on your first day you will suck on your second day you will suck by day 300 you'll be better just go through the suckiness you because you stink you do you suck you're incompetent at the thing that you've never learned how to do before if you never box before and I take you sparring it's super unlikely you're a natural there are some natural but it's super unlikely you probably will suck but we keep training and you keep going and you develop that physical and mental strength to do it in time you will be good that's how it works okay so like so you mentioned that so the fluid ability is more just like learning how to like in your case how to fight or how to swim or how to do all that stuff do anything how to do philosophy how to do this anything and then the static skills would be more like just like your university degree or whatever your which is almost useless I mean like you know my university degree in psychology taught me literally zero about how to bring somebody down out of an anxiety attack or raise them up out of depression and academics don't want to talk about that they're like I don't know just study the history of I don't know a fucking skinner or putting rats in mazes or something like that it's inhuman there's no touch there's no touch to it so that the style of education is to me it's shit it's a total fucking waste of time if you have the if you have the skills and you have the strengths and then you want to know the theory behind it I would say it should be 90% and then 10% like that something like that what was your question so my original question was about truth oh yeah you do the answer very well thank you good I'm glad I did thank you gents thank you for your time for your attention let us go and eat food I think that would be wise and if you want to ask me anything else then just see me out there thank you guys