 Welcome back 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. Hi, man. Thank you. Manly 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? Who creates men? When I announced that I was going to speak at this conference, I got a comment from a guy, and it was something along the lines of, 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. 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 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. 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. 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 as 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 other side of the spectrum, 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 a woman makes you a man by becoming pregnant. And at the top of the spectrum, I've met a lot of guys who have seen combat and Tier 1 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 going to stand back and watch. I don't think that's going to fly. So something's not the same there. And when I say this, people think that maybe I'm anti-fatherhood or something like that, and actually that's not the case at all. In fact, I'd 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. That kid is going to remember for the rest of his life that, A, his dad gave a shit, and his dad wanted to try and make him see 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 going to 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 that guy is more masculine and that guy, you're judging him according to these tactical virtues. You know, his 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 going to 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 going to 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. And you need honor in that group because that's how men trust each other. Like, you know, is he going to 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 want to 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 like 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 going to 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 you know, 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. You know, 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 going to have corn and this is where we're going to have wheat and this is where we're going to have an airport and this is where we're going to 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, you know, 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, you know, hormones that give us thoughts and feelings and emotions and we use words to describe them, to make sense of them, of our consciousness and order. And that's really what myth and philosophy and religion and psychology, that's really what they all are. You know, stories, a way to make sense of this chaos in here, to describe the world around us in a way that makes sense, in 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 going to 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. You know, 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, you know, I always thought Young was my guy, you know, and he has been. I mean, if you're talking about archetypes, thanks, Young. He definitely has influenced things in a really positive way and certainly me and my thinking over my lifetime. But, you know, there was a more scientific, you know, rational approach to psychology and Young's like, how about magic, though? You know, how about magic? And he looked all through myth, the myth of society 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. He's my guy. So, you know, 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 art working it and he did it all by hand in itself over a period of many years. But he wrote this first book kind of stressful period and he thought he was going crazy. And so he forced himself to imagine, you know, 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, you know, I bought this book and it's an expensive book, it's like $170 and I bought a stand for it and I bought the Kindle Virgin and I'm like I'm going to take a month and I'm just going to read this book and this is going to be a really powerful spiritual experience for me and I'm going to read it out loud every day and I'm going to really get into it and get something huge out of it and I did because I hated it. 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. 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 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 this eternal voice and eternal sense of truth and then my soul reaches out to me and she said am I really why do you think your soul is a woman? And so I bugged me and I kind of put a bookmark in it and I looked it up and I listened to some speeches about the red book and so forth and then one of his major scholars pointed out where he found it and one of the things that in his collective works Young noted he connected it to Dante and the medieval mind and he thinks that's where it switched and so here are some quotes from his collective works the medieval background of Faust has a quite special significance because there actually was a medieval element that presided over the birth of modern individualism. It began it seems to me with the worship of women which strengthened the man's soul very considerably as a psychological factor since the worship of women meant the worship of the soul this is nowhere more beautifully and perfectly expressed than in Dante's Divine Comedy Dante is the spiritual night of his lady and for her sake he embarks on the adventure of the lower and upper worlds in this heroic endeavor her image is exalted into the heavenly mystical figure of the mother of God a figure that has detached itself from the object and become the personification of a purely psychological factor or rather of those unconscious contents whose personification I've termed the anima so I did a little bit of research on this looked into the background of this and I read Divine Comedy or parts of it many years ago and Dante is kind of an interesting figure and what he did was this girl named Beatrice he only met her a few times in his life and the way he writes about her because he wrote a whole book of poetry about her Levita Nuova and he writes about she is the queen of virtue and just seeing her has made me be cleansed of all vice and just seeing this woman has made me good and this was not even a woman that he had a romantic relationship with this is just some chick that he met on the street a few times I had to look it up because the way he wrote about her and so and it turns out he's not he was betrothed that he got married and he had a few kids but he never wrote about his wife he just wrote about this chick that he saw a few times and listen to Sean Smith's speech about letting the wrong women into your life and he talked about idealization somewhere in this and this is the perfect of insane idealization he's taken this woman who's probably an average girl and made her into basically the mother of God who's going to lead him into a better world and make him really a better man and you see this played out all through western culture you see it becomes part of medieval culture and knights doing great deeds for the lady and so forth and then it becomes Victorianized into their version of chivalry which is kind of ridiculous and this idea that a woman is going to make you better and you know I see it in my friends I see it in men around me there's a lot of guys out there who idealize that this virgin this hot mommy is going to come into their lives and fix it they're going to find this woman and then they're going to have a reason to stop drinking or then they're going to have a reason to work harder and they're depending on her as this guide into the manly perfection and obviously that isn't a woman's job to guide you she's not your mom she's not there to tell you hey you're not allowed to go out tonight but men let women do that and I think it's because of this idea that's been part of western culture for a long time but you know we've always had you know gods and goddesses and muses and women who inspired men at this point maybe this entry of Catholicism and the virgin mother and the idealization of the perfect woman changed men in a certain way and I think that it makes a lot of sense there's a balance there because if you're living in a cutthroat world of men and you're out slaying mother fuckers all god damn day I've had a hard day I've cut off three guys' heads this nice little Beatrice at home she's all purity and innocence she doesn't know of this horrible world that I'm in where I have to do horrible things all the time you can see how men would idealize women in that way but really she's just a woman and women are not angels and they're not devils they're just women they have their own agenda and their own state of being and they have their own wants and needs and sometimes they are devilish and sometimes they're angelic and they go to a better man by themselves you have to want to be that better man and I think this is especially a terrible idea today because we're not slaying mother fuckers I mean most of us we're not out having a hard day with the men all day long having a rough time in this cutthroat world we're living in a world where you are often raised by a single mother where you're taught in schools by women their entire point of view you get filtered through them and you know you go out in the workplace and you work with women and often they're your managers I don't think that a woman is going to lead men to become better than they are we already have a huge amount of feminine influences in our lives so what I'm saying is that maybe that's not a story that works anymore maybe that's not the way that we need to order our consciousness that some woman is going to be the reason for me to be good or me to be who I want to be you know and Young talks about I'm not going to go too far into it but he talks about the idea of the anima and the animus and this idea that there's a male and female part of us and it's an interesting way to explain certain phenomena you know it's not wrong you can make it right it's an interesting concept to talk about but he was also really interested in the occult and gnosticism and you know someone asked me about the baphomet and I'm like well that's as male and female combined in one we're all the same everything is one it's kind of a part of occult lore and again I think that's great for wizards and that's if you're trying to create the philosophy for stone and if you're going to be an alchemist and so forth but I don't think it's a good story every day guys I don't think it's this idea that you have a feminine side and masculine side competing so I'm going to give you a better story you have no feminine side you are a hundred percent man congratulations you know when you were born when you were conceived you were x y you were always going to be a man and I think that this is important to think about and I think it's more helpful because our idea of what a woman is is a caricature it's a fantasy and I think that especially when people talk about sex and gender today and men who want to be women and so forth I have been saying for years probably 12 years that sex and gender that's a total life experience that's not like something I decided to put on a different outfit today and now I'm in a different sex this is a total life experience you were born a boy you interacted with the world in a male body you interacted with boys and girls and your parents and adult the rest of the world as a male you've had to process information through that filter your entire life that has shaped your consciousness and you know the same thing with girls you know we don't know what it's like to an average girl walk through a room and kind of most of the men want to fuck her you know like to deal with that process of like having to process that information and be like a prey object really I mean they have a different a whole different filter for reality so we don't understand really what women are and we so create a caricature of them and they create a caricature of us and young probably would have agreed with that but the way that his ideas get taken out you know you can't law of unintended consequences you can't always control the way your ideas make it out into general public and when I was in Poland I was at a mall in Poland we had just gone shooting and I'm with this guy who's a reader of mine and we're going through a store and he's like I mean this guy was in the French Foreign Legion and he's like well you know I kind of like shopping I guess it's part of my feminine side and I'm like man you're just buying pants like you're not being a woman you're just buying pants we talk about this kind of stuff all the time you're just buying pants, you're doing something that you need to do you need good pants you don't want to look like you need it okay buy pants you enjoy not looking like you need it great doesn't mean you're a woman you know I think it's more useful to talk about things as being more or less masculine for you and maybe you know do I need to turn up the masculine you know a lot of things that you can be explained as this is my more feminine side could actually just as easily and probably better be explained as I wasn't masculine enough you know I wasn't good enough at being a man that day I need to be a better man and just take that feminine side out of it because you're never actually going to be a woman or really understand what that is you can either be good at being a man or you can be a shitty man and I think that's a better scale a better way to look at everything and I think it's more important also to look at the different aspects of masculinity and I'm going to probably write about this more in the future balance I mean people wrote like a magician lover there's a balance there different aspects of masculinity and you know I I'd like to see it as you know a lot of guys come to me and they have their head in books they're really smart and they're really good at certain aspects of very masculine pursuits in a certain way but maybe they need it's not a little something from the physical side and they need to balance that out I think what a lot of us do when we talk to guys and try and help them out and I was talking to an MMA fighter recently and we were talking about Jordan Peterson and I'm not calling him out or anything but I think that he's a guy who's been a book guy his entire life and he talks a lot about masculinity and strong masculinity but we were basically like you know what Jordan Peterson needs he'd be really cool if he did jiu-jitsu you know it'd be good for him not I don't care if he does it for me not for me but for him I think he needs to feel that expressed you know he needs to feel the concepts he's talking about as they exist in that part of being a man and so I think that's really interesting more than masculine and feminine balancing these two concepts talk about different aspects of the masculine different ways to be a man and what's that balance in your life so in terms of this feminine soul idea you know what I'm saying is that you don't need a woman to follow you need a man to show you how to do it you know not just to like I'll follow her and she'll make me better no I need a dude who's going to show me how to be better and in many cases that's why you guys are here right you're coming to see other men who maybe are better at something than you are and see what they do how does he do it because I believe in myself and I can be better and the second concept I want to talk about from Young's red book that I think you see it played out all through society is the murder of the hero you know and this is a great little scene you can actually see it in the drawing here that this is Young's painting of where he murders the hero and so he's in this mountain pass and he's friends and it's daybreak and around the corner comes Siegfried the great Germanic hero and his name actually goes back to the word for victory which is peace and sanctuary so it's a very old concept older than the name Siegfried he's the Germanic concept of the hero and this guy comes around the corner this great hero and he's glorious and he's putting on a chariot of bones and so what does Young do he and his friends shoot him and I read that I'm like what that's shitty that's like shitty behavior like I need to kill the hero so I can feel better about myself that just bugs me immediately and he asked himself about it why should I kill the hero why did I want to do that why did I dream this and he said that what he figured out is he wanted to kill his own idea of force and efficiency and he also said again I think this is problematic that he wanted to kill the hero because the hero means imitation kind of monkey see monkey do as long as you're imitating a hero you're not really individuated you're not really becoming yourself and I think that's bullshit I think we need heroes and I don't know yeah a lot of really cool guys here but I don't know any of them who doesn't need to model their behavior after someone who didn't get where they are by saying hey I need to be a little bit more like that guy in this aspect you know we need that leadership and we've always done that and everyone's going to use that picture I know through the conference I was talking to Tanner last night and I'm like everyone's going to use this but the because it's this week they've been doing this for years but this is the thing this week and you know you look at what men have been doing a culture of men throughout history and we've been raising men up we've been saying this is the guy this is a great man this is what a great man looks like this is what a great man does and that's the culture that you get if you have a heroic culture if you have an idealized masculinity like this is the goal and if you don't have that you have this that's where that leads I started a revolution and became a president of a great nation well this guy wore a silly outfit great you know it's just and the thing about as I said you never can become a woman you can only become a shitty man and that's that's what that leads to so it's not the imitation of women so much it's like the dissension of manhood and killing the hero has been a huge thing in feminism and that's why they love stuff like that because it's part of their goal because they realize that men need heroes and we need to tear that down so feminism they want to kill the hero they want to say you know you don't have to have this standard you know that's most of their message really it's okay to cry you know that's so confining this archetype that you're trying to be because you'll never be as perfect as this guy and then they try and take the guy and say why he was really a bad person he isn't worth looking at anyway but that's really saying most of their message is that masculinity is fake and you're crying so hard and it's not making you you should just relax and be whatever you are it's like fat acceptance just be what you are look how this hurts you it's making you sad that you're not something better and they say that so they take down the hero but what do they have to offer in return just the freedom and they call it freedom but it's the freedom to be weak it's the freedom to be dependent it's the freedom to cry men don't want that and it doesn't make them better and the idea that because you have this north star that you look up to this ideal of masculinity then that makes you have a sad life because you'll never reach that no one reaches that it's an ideal that's not the point the point I mean I have guys who I think are better than me in certain aspects and you know I'm not going to ever be them but they help by looking at them and showing what they have done it helps me be a better version of myself you know every powerlifter doesn't have to be the top powerlifter but maybe he gets a lot stronger and that's better and the same thing you can apply it to anything I don't care if you apply it to I look at guys who read more books or learn faster than I do it's like I need to be better at that I need to be more like that guy I'm never going to be that guy but I'm going to be better for trying and be better version of myself so one of the most positive qualities of women is empathy and this is where this comes from like oh you're hurting because you're not a good enough man and that's kind of the funny thing about feminism empathy is good but it's only good in the context of motherhood and building tribal relationships it's always the woman who's sending out the thank you cards and the Christmas cards and making sure everybody in the circle feels included and feels tight and that's what they want and that's what's really kind of ironic or comical about feminism is that you have all these women despite the fact that they say that there is almost no difference between the sexes despite the fact that they say that they're so feminine in that way you know what they want is they want everyone to feel included they want everyone to feel the same they're very equalizing everyone's the same, no hierarchy horizontal culture everyone feels loved and included and special and again that's good if it's your mom you're little and you're crying you're scared you're inside the circle, you're in a protected area but that's what feminism is doing and despite themselves, despite how vile they can be sometimes there's a part of them and it's a driving part of their philosophy that wants to take the whole world and put it right here it's gonna be okay everything's gonna be okay really that's part of this driving thing this person who's been excluded so we shouldn't exclude them you're saying that this quality is good and they don't have that quality so they feel bad and so we have to include them make them feel included and make them feel special and that's really an element of feminism that I think gets overlooked is how female it is and so being in that spot that's a good spot to be right you're comforting and safe, it's like an opiate you're all curled up and you feel warm and nothing's gonna hurt you everybody wants a little bit of that in their life but that's not where growth happens and that's not where manhood happens at some point you need a father to step in you need a different figure to step in and challenge you challenge you to be better than that because you can't stay curled up in that ball forever you need someone to step in and challenge you and say your mom's gonna tell you that everything's gonna be okay and your dad's job is to tell you that it's your job to make everything okay someday this is gonna be your job and that's the role of the father is to create order and to take you outside into that perimeter outside into that space between order and chaos it's called a threshold space a limital space that is an anthropology where initiation has already always happened that's where transformation into manhood always happens by in that space where you're challenged and a little afraid and you have to overcome that that's what the role of the father and the hero and the mentor and the leader that's what the role is he creates order and then shows you how someday you can create it to he's an example to follow so back to manly idealism that's why you're here the culture of women has always been a horizontal culture it's of the earth it levels everything makes it equal and the culture of men is a vertical culture we wanna look upward we wanna see something higher than ourselves we wanna look up and say there's the example there's how I become better the fact that we need to create is a a culture that includes our own pantheons of heroes and is unapologetic about it because that's the problem this tearing down of idols that has become so popular in culture the tearing down of ideals I mean that's where you really have to stand your ground and you're like no actually that's fine because you can't control the world you really can't it's gonna be what it's gonna be lots of people everyone wants to be in that space everyone wants to be protected and dependent so many people do and the people who don't wanna be here are gonna be a minority so you have to be unapologetic about it well you can live in your safe space and that's fine but I'm gonna seek out a vertical culture I'm gonna seek out a culture where there is a good better and the best create my own pantheon of heroes and that pantheon becomes an ideal self a model for you so I would say let that be your sin it's a sin against the ideal version of yourself that exists in this pantheon it ever changes because you get new heroes and if you've gotten really good at something maybe you did a different hero so to do that in order to have a culture of heroes we need to raise men up and I think that women are so good at this I hate the way they do it but they're so good at this because there are times women will get support from not only women but all the men obviously but women will support each other and they will raise each other up even if they've done nothing they will raise women up just because they're women and we don't wanna do that because we're in a vertical culture not a horizontal culture but you see online and so forth in real life men, because they're different handle this differently they handle the idea of heroes differently and I think that they get kinda jealous and there's you see it online all the time some guy who's pretty advanced at whatever he's doing you don't care what it is and there's a bunch of little haters who wanna tear him down they watch three YouTube videos about whatever he's doing and now they're experts and they wanna jump in to show you why he's wrong and when I see those guys I just see insecurity and they haven't done anything it's not impressive I just see a bunch of guys who are excited about criticizing someone who they really don't deserve to criticize they haven't really earned that criticism is great from peers but in a vertical culture all criticism is not equal so you see guys who constantly tear each other down whereas women have the ridiculous culture of I went to the gym today 10 girls, you're amazing okay, you're not amazing you went to the gym and they say they do anything, it's amazing I said something mean to someone you're a badass no you're not any of those things and it's ridiculous and so I think in many ways men react to that culture and we're like well we're not gonna be that we're not gonna do that and so a reaction to that is that a lot of men will just do the opposite and refuse to acknowledge other men at all like if another man is doing well they'll be like that's good but they won't say anything and that's not really helpful and again it seems a little insecure, it seems a little jealous but I think what they want to avoid is becoming the third guy and that's prostration and I'm not gonna use the word worship because worship actually means to honor the etymology of it but prostration means to get down oh god, you're amazing and the upturned hand of the monkey wow that is embarrassing to watch and you see that online all the time too and I've had it happen to me and I don't want that you see guys who are like again do the amazing thing they blow you up into some version that you could never be it's beyond idealization you do one little thing and they're like you could beat up anybody I'm pretty sure I couldn't or they do really anything a good lift like you're so strong I can never be that strong they put themselves down and as you get to be you can kind of see that I've worked out a little bit I've had dudes walk up to me and produce department of a store in the morning I'm asleep and I'm not trying to look scary and after the produce guy walked by me and be like I wouldn't mess with you and I'm like that's not necessary you don't need to do that you don't need to make yourself look bad man to acknowledge somebody you don't have to do that it's embarrassing man you don't have to do that you are who you are and I'm comfortable with who I am so no one wants to be that guy so don't be that guy that's not helpful because it makes other men not want to give each other compliments and so I think the focus of what you have to do to build a culture that is more focused on manly idealism and vertical culture is that you have to be able to honor men with dignity and I've found as I get more confident with myself over life and what my contribution has been and what I've done man it is so easy to give a simple, honest compliment you know I can say good lift that was inspiring that was good, good job that doesn't hurt me, that doesn't make me see blower that's not submissive but it is inspiring other men it is encouraging to continue without being ridiculous and I think that's the culture that we need other men but keep your dignity while you're doing it so I'm going to wrap up a little bit, we talked about all these ideas of order and creating order and so I'm going to focus a little bit on a symbol that has been helpful to me in that area and because I'm the guy who likes symbols and magic and so forth and if you take all the Indo-European languages probably languages that anyone in this room is speaking has ever spoken from Indian to German, French, all that if you trace all that back and trace all their mythology and all their culture back you come to this they've theorized what their god was the Proto-Indo-Europeans that lived like 500,000 years ago and you know created the languages that all of our languages come from and a lot of the culture and the ideas they've kind of theorized their own mythology here's what we think they believed based on all these ideas because Diaz Fathar is the name of the guy and it means Father of the Daylight Sky and you can see it, I mean Skyfather is pretty much almost a universal concept for God it's kind of the original patriarch and you see the name reflected and you can see these words they become other words later Diaz becomes Dios it becomes another word for God it becomes also Tiwash and all these other gods who have meant order and daylight and all the things that I've been talking about and Father obviously that becomes Fathar and all the different versions of Father and so Diaz Fathar Father of the Daylight Sky you can imagine how if you wanted to look up to something what's better to look up to than the sun what would the ultimate image of a Father be it would be light what does the sun do what does light do it illuminates the world it illuminates the world so that you can order the world because at night there's darkness and mystery and chaos it lights up the world it makes truth possible it's a giver of life obviously the life giving sun we need the sun to survive it's warm and inspiring it's constant and dependable and you can stare at the sun but it's going to do what it's going to do and it'll burn your eyes long enough the idea of the mother who kind of does whatever you want to versus the stern father who's just going to keep going and a lot of people have related what I'm talking to you with this concept to stoicism because it's going to do what it's going to do and it's sure of itself and it knows what it is and as you get older or maybe even as you're younger and you talk about who you want to be in the lives of the people around you you know who do I want to be in my circle well the warm inspiring center of gravity not the person who's always complaining not the person who always has a problem I want to be this person who lights up the room and makes order possible there's order around me if nowhere else I mean that's a goal that's an ideal and I think it's a one that crosses culture and crosses boundaries you know the sun all the mythology of the sun is that it goes through the sky all day long and then it disappears into darkness and it's usually portrayed as a harrowing you know it goes through darkness and it has to endure darkness but you can depend on it coming up the next day and that's you know again a father figure dependable and always a source of order and light and so you know this has become an important symbol for me and I think it's an inspiring thing that you can take with you so this idealized father this son so when you leave this place and you go out into the world and you're surrounded by darkness and chaos and disorder you can choose to get angry and stay angry you can choose to feed into it you can choose to disappear into it and become part of it or you can choose to be a source of light and life a source of warmth a center of gravity a source of order an unmoved mover you can choose to be the kind of man that's worth looking up to you can choose to be the son so I'm gonna leave you with a model that's become important to me and maybe it'll become important to you when you're moving through darkness remember who you are remember what you are you're the man be the man stay solar thank you we got time for a few quick questions go to the mic in the center of the room if now we can wrap up oh come on you pussies I know you guys got questions that's it, Dylan alright great speech thank you so much love your books what was the term you just used prostrate yeah you don't have to do that man thank you what was your talk challenge to me awesome one of my greatest mentors told me to be fully man you have to become woman to be integrated to be full he was wrong I took his advice I looked up to him that turned into chaos so I just wanted to acknowledge that what you said there was something that challenged me because I had a completely different thought about it until I experienced it understood the sense of it and realized that we don't want to step into that darkness we don't want to step into that chaos she may be in there but don't talk to her I know you love mythology in The Fisher King as it's recounted by Robert Johnson in the book he talks about how Parsifold the young boy he leaves his mother he leaves home he follows the warriors and one of the warrior mentors that he comes across says to him never allow yourself to be seduced by the fair maiden and in essence that means don't allow your emotional side that feminine side the soft side the baby boy, beta blue pill boy side on the inside with her or him on the inside there, so thank you for verbalizing that alright guys, oh we got another question, there you go and we got this one here too cool, after that we'll wrap up I just want to say thanks for your comments and your speech on this it's getting me to think about my own relationship with my father which was kind of contentious and long dead actually so it's helping me to sort of organize my thoughts and I just wanted to share that so you spoke a lot about heroes is there any type of particular heroes that you have in mind like to kind of look up to because you talked about and just kind of like as like models like you mentioned Carl Young and Jordan Peterson and how to like decorate your I think you said Parthenon or something with like these heroes like who would you who do you have in mind for that I think that is somewhat individual I'm not going to make everybody's hero the same because you need a good friend of mine at one point said he used to say like your friends around you pool things from them when you need them and you carry all the people around you all the men that have inspired you around you, you carry them with you in some way because it doesn't have to be someone famous I've met a lot of personal heroes and they let you down sometimes they aren't who you want them to be but who can be the idea that you have of them who can be that guy but you try if you're doing a good job you try but you can't be that guy so it doesn't have to be someone famous and I think that's important and that's where a father figure in your life isn't necessarily famous it can be someone who's close to you that guy is really good at this one thing that I want to get better at so I'm going to start what does he do and why is he better at that and get better at that thing because we all need different things some of us are really good at one thing but we need to get good at a different thing so like I said maybe your pantheon changes over time I mean there are some ideals certainly that are all the same but I think that you have to find the people around you that you want to model like who do you want to be more like that's what's important thank you that's all the time we have give it up one more time for Jack Donovan