 This is Will Spencer from the Renaissance of Men here with the new 21 report and Alexander Juan Antonio Cortez. Good to see you, sir. What's up Will? What number 21 convention is this for you? I believe this is, let's see, 18, I think this is number four. What did you think about this year's convention compared to years past? It's definitely evolved, it's matured. The male spear from when it started, let's say a decade and a half ago, I mean, if we're being honest, it started out as like guys that want to get girls. They really start with that. Okay, that's a real problem for a lot of men. But those guys are older now. That generation has, they've aged, the quality of the content has evolved. It's moved beyond obviously just being about getting sex. And this year was, it's gotten more mature. This year was probably the most mature by far. I started attending this where the quality and depth of conversation, it was political, it was philosophical. It was much more holistic. Religious as well. Yeah, religious. It really covered sort of the breadth of like the human experience, the masculine experience. So that was really cool. I guess it was really cool to see like the conversations I had this year with the attendees and the other speakers were tremendous. And you spoke at the 21 convention and the 22 convention, right? Yeah, I did both. What did you speak about at the 22 convention? 22 convention was very tame. I kept it very tame. Any time you're a man and like you're addressing a group of women, it's a different dynamic. Right. Yeah, obviously it is. And I wasn't really sure what to expect. I didn't go in this, you know, pretending like, oh, I know exactly what I'm going to say. Like I wasn't sure if it was going to be younger crowd of women. Was it going to be older women? Was it going to be, you know, was it going to be groupies? Was it going to be women that just really want to hear what men have to say? Was this going to be research in their part? So, yeah, it was like a mixed crowd. And, you know, like the content of that speech was, like I said, very simple. It was like roughly 20, 25, like journal life lessons for women from like paternal perspective, as I called it. A paternal perspective. Yeah, paternal perspective. Since my audience is obviously predominantly males. No kidding. It's about 80% men, 20% women. But my overall audience is over 100,000 people. So it's, you know, it's around 20, 25,000 women that they listen to what I have to say. And the questions I've gotten in the last few years from women aren't really not that dissimilar from men. It's just from a, you know, a womanly lived experience of being a girl. So I had created like a, like an AMA sort of slideshow on Instagram actually once a month ago where I'd done an AMA just for my female followers and I asked them like, what would you, like, you know, girls only like ask questions. And a lot of the questions were just, it was like the guy questions but just like I said, the girl version. This is like they want life advice. I'm 18, I'm 19, I'm 20, I'm 25. I'm 30, whatever the age. And they're trying to navigate career or finding a husband or, you know, their personal struggles with their own maturation development. And there's very little, I think, quality content for women that caters to that sort of, you know, like actual personal development. A lot of them just feel good rah-rah. There's a lot of good stuff on Instagram, but like it's a very limited platform. There's not a whole lot on YouTube. There's not a whole lot on Twitter. You know, it's mostly on Instagram, but not the content that's produced by 21. No. And a lot of it, I've explored it a little bit, but a lot of it's just like what I call like Chick Crack. It's like you're amazing, you're goddess, you're special, you're queen. Chick Crack. You know, just because you exist, you deserve to be loved. There's nothing very constructive about it. It makes you feel good, but there's no actual direction as to how to improve yourself, change, do anything. Well, a lot of it. The messaging is that women are perfect as they are. So why should they need to possibly improve anything, right? Yeah. Just live and, you know, magic happens for you. Right. So I created sort of like this series of questions and answers about, you know, those kinds of topics. And I just put that into the presentation I gave. And it was about like a 20-ish, 25 lessons. It went over well. Like I could probably refine that speech a few times. And I would do it differently if I did it again next time. But the fact that there were women here that actually were receptive to this listening to man and like wanting to get a male perspective, that was very encouraging. Yeah. I mean, man, in fact. Mm-hmm. Did you have interactions with women outside of your talk? Did they ask you questions? Did they come up and talk to you? I did. I did. Yeah. And they're, you know, what I told them, like, the journey is not just similar for men. Mm-hmm. Yeah. That's one of the things, like, when we talk about masculinity. Yeah. Obviously, there's obvious differences in the nature of energy, the nature of masculinity, the nature of being feminine. There are biological differences. Like, no kidding. Like, that's all, you know, that's not... Radical. Yeah, that's all very scientific, honestly. I mean, there's nothing novel about that if you're an objective person. But there's a lot of shared experiences and, you know, one of the things I was telling one of the young ladies that I was talking to was, like, your process of becoming, like, a woman. Like, you're already a woman. Mm-hmm. And I tell this to the men, like, you're already a man. Like, there's not such thing as, like, oh, I want to become a real man. I'm like, there's such thing as being a better man. Mm-hmm. There's such thing as being a more effective man. Mm-hmm. There's such thing as being better at being a man. But you're already born a man. Mm-hmm. So, you see, that oven itself, that biological identity, like, you don't have to earn that related title. Sure, sure. Like, you're a man, you have XY chromosome. Sure. You're a woman, XX. Okay, like, you're a woman. Mm-hmm. Now, are you the type of woman that you'd like to be living the life that you want? Yeah, maybe not. Mm-hmm. But the process of getting there is going to be very individual. Mm-hmm. And, yeah, you can certainly pull from tradition. Mm-hmm. You can pull from maternal qualities. You can, you know, find that type of content. You can, you know, model yourself on that. But there's also going to be mixed as well, among the world, and guess what? Like, life costs money. Like, you're not in a position probably in your 20s where it's like, well, I don't want to work. Like, I just want to have a magical husband that makes six figures a year and live on a farm. Like, that's really nice if that happens. Mm-hmm. But the likelihood is you're going to probably have to date, vet, be discerning, get some experience interacting with men that way. And also, you have to support yourself financially. So, like, yeah, you do actually need to get a job. Mm-hmm. Like, no kidding. Mm-hmm. Do you, does that mean you devote your life to your career for the next 35 years? Maybe not. Maybe it's more temporal. Mm-hmm. But you do need to work. Right. That has to happen. You can't be lazy. Yeah. That's the odds that you're going to have to work. Yeah. Everyone has to work in the society. There's no such thing as disavowing that and thinking you're going to get away with not doing it. Yeah. And that's what I was telling her. Like, you know, so, you know, pull from what appeals to you, develop your own individual character. You know, don't try to imitate something just for the sake of imitation. Mm-hmm. It was a good conversation. You felt like the message landed. Oh, yeah. 100%. What did you speak about at the 21 convention? That was a lot more broad. Talking about this past year, coronavirus, pandemic, supply chain breakdown. Like, it's vaguely familiar. Yeah, this is all very familiar to us. Like, okay, the world's in crisis. Yeah, no kidding. Okay, it is. How do we make sense of that and how do we effectively navigate the changing environment? What, you know, what thinking paradigms do we need to have? What tools do we need to adopt? How do we position ourselves? And I tried to give a very holistic overview of sort of the reality of living in a liminal time period where there's not going to be a war tomorrow and everything fixes itself. There's not going to be a savior that appears and, oh, this person's going to write the shim and everything's back to normal. Like, you have to prepare, when society's going through a period of decay and it's going through a transformative period, you have to prepare for the long haul, the long night, whatever you want to call it. This is going to be a multi-decade experience. Yeah, I used some examples from history, let's say like the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Empire lasted for, you know, 700, 600 years. So the Ottoman Empire never went away to date to the modern state of Turkey. So if you, there are people who have lived in Turkey, you know, generationally for probably hundreds, hundreds, hundreds of years. So they live through, their family needs to live through the rise of the Empire, the static period, the decline, the fall of it. Turkey still exists as a country. Yeah, countries don't go away. You know, I tried to spell, like, these very low-resolution fallacies that people have. It's like, oh, the United States going to collapse. I'm like, no, it's not going to collapse. Countries very rarely ever collapse and completely disappear. And not something of this scale. No, not that scale. Russia was a communist country, USSR, right? Did that collapse? Economically, yeah, it collapsed. Is Russia still a country? Of course it is. Because the people, they're still Russian people. And it still functions enough that people want to keep it going and remaking it to something else. So the United States, 50 years from now, will no doubt not look like the United States today. What will it look like specifically? I don't know, I can't answer that. Do you need to be prepared for rapid change? Yes. Okay, so what does that look like? That looks like having control of your income. I have this running joke, you know, on Twitter and different platforms, like, quit your job, work for yourself. You have the power and you have more flexibility running your own business, working, especially in the digital online space, living where you want to live, not allowing yourself to be subjugated to bad governance, like why you're going to put up that situation. You're not fighting it, you're basically a refugee in your own land. Go to the United States, 50 countries, go to where you're treated best, or go overseas if you want to do that. There's something wrong in doing that. People immigrate for very same reasons historically. Know what your relationships are. Have a network, have friends, have family, have an information network where you can use that to actually navigate the world. It's like networked intelligence. That's almost what Twitter is now. I mean, seriously, people don't take social media seriously, but you should. You can connect with people all over the world, all over the country, all over different cities, towns, and you can get information, get intelligence, and know what's happening, have the curve. You can find people that have very good predictive powers, you know, by way of intelligence, in the field of study. It's like, okay, I kind of have some sense of what's going to happen. I can adequately prepare myself. I can change where I live. I know to stock up. I know not to be in this place and to be in that place. All that's possible for anybody. So I kind of covered that. I threw out the idea of creating cooperative networks of using cryptocurrency, like you can create your own cooperative networks of basic economies. So you can create your own mini-economy amongst yourselves. Whatever different coins. Yeah, that's not directly, directly traceable, but it's not even about being traceable. It's the fact that you're doing business with people that you know, on a transparent network. You can sort of bypass traditional banking. If you in the future get debanked, or let's say in the future, your interest rates go negative, and now your dollars are actually losing dollars storing in the bank, well now you have an alternative. And you have to think about all this. Obviously I'm throwing a lot out here, but you can't afford to be naive. It's not going to fix itself. No one's going to take care of you. Your governor in a lot of states, governor's fucked people over basically. Oh my god, I can't believe this is happening. Well it is. So you have to dispel with this shock, and like I can't believe it. It's everything that can get worse will get worse. Every right that can be taken from you will be taken from you. What are you going to do? It has to be something. It has to be sitting in your ass and just hoping it stops. Because it's not. Just to play devil's advocate for a second, do you think that's kind of black pill thinking? I don't think so. Nihilistic thinking, let's say. This is being realistic. It's being realistic. The United States is not in a rising ascending period. That's pretty much a mutual agreement on that. That's fair. Does that mean it's going to fall apart and it's going to be a civil war tomorrow, and the electricity is going to disappear and go away? No. It just means that you're going to live in a society where it's going through social decay. It's no longer cohesive. Are parts of the country still very high functioning? Absolutely. You can go to Idaho, Oklahoma, you can go to Florida. Life is normal. Life is great. You would never know anything is wrong here unless maybe you go to the grocery store and it's like food's expensive. Inflation is happening. There are some people still, but life is going well. So even in the midst of this sort of mega-reaching narrative chaos, things still tend to operate. The U.S. is not at the point of the Balkan Wars or that level of conflict where things literally fall apart and you're dealing with a social breakdown of this war and rape and absolutely hell on earth. We're not there. And I don't know if people will even ever get there. Not widespread at all. No, but you will have to deal with government tyranny. You will have to deal with federal incompetence. Okay. Does that mean everything's shit? No. I consider this time period in history because things are falling apart. Opportunity is infinite. It's absolutely explosive. So Ivan Throne says as well. You have all the tools that every major media company has to do anything you want with. You have, like I just said, you have the ability to form networks, you have the ability to broadcast a message, you have the ability to create an email list, you have the ability to reach people, you have the ability to do business. You can do anything you want and the barriers to education for anything are, like, they're not existent. Zero. You want to learn something? You want to get in touch with somebody? You can do that. I'm astounded from people using Twitter and LinkedIn, especially, you can get in touch with the world's experts on so many different subjects and actually have a conversation with them through messages and learn from them directly. You know, the flow of information, the control of our information, our ability to leverage our existence against the vast social order, like, it's never been like that in human history ever. For most human history, 100 years ago, even 20 years ago, to be a known person, the idea of being a known person, creating a network, building your own kind of world, how would you have done that? Calling people on the phone? Sending emails? That was not an idea in the social consciousness at all. That was even possible. Today, anyone can do that. People are doing it by the thousands every day because they have the tools. And some of them realize how powerful this is. So, I mean, that, like, I'm very optimistic about. Like, if this is finding extraordinary. The social decay break down the solution. You do have to accept at a certain point that not every epoch in human history is wonderful and good. As I said, ascending. Sometimes things are rough. You can compare maybe to living through the United States in the 1930s. It's like, wow, this is really shitty right now. It did get better, obviously. But yeah, it was a rough decade. It was. So it is. So deal. So speaking of forming networks, you have your inner circle. And a lot of those guys came together and formed and some of those guys were here. What was it like meeting the guys from Palestine? That was really fucking cool. I actually did not know they were going to show up. I was talking the last night. We thought we'd just kind of surprise you. Were the guys that were here? Robert was here. KG was here. Kilo was here. Sean was here. Quite a few actually. That was just really cool. I had very personal conversations with all of them. Thank you for changing my life. I mean, you did that. But, it was very gratifying. When I started that group over a year ago, it started as sort of like a fitness group. Some guys signed up. They liked me. It really demonstrated me the power of creating a network of friends. And men, it's a very appreciate thing to say. But like, Iron does sharpen iron. If you get men together and you give them a common cause and orientation and better themselves and develop themselves, you do extraordinary things. The most powerful force in the world is a group of men working together. Having those kinds of relationships. It's only been like a year. So I imagine a few years from now, they're going to do cool stuff. Did it hit a little different? I mean, obviously you've heard men say to you before, thank you for changing my life. As the figure of speech. As the figure of speech. Thank you for having a positive impact on my existence. It's a great time to meet the men in person that I spent over a year with. Chatting daily. Sometimes hundreds of messages a day did hit a little different. It did. I get messages all the time from guys where they got a program or multiple programs and follow me a while. It's in the DMs, right? Thanks so much, dude. I'm proud of you. That's cool. When you see a guy in person, you're like, wow, this really changed their soul. Did you just come from the gym? Yeah. I don't normally dress like this, go out like this, I'm not that vain. I came from training. I was with Tanner and Jack and Arthur and we trained shoulders. What role does fitness play in the life of a man? Fitness can be everything. I mean, it's almost like a writing joke at this point. You probably say this, if I have to tell you that you need to be strong as a man, you're not going to make it. Yeah. It's a fundamental aspect of male reality. It is the most distinct characteristic of masculinity, masculine energy, yang energy, that strength is what defines you. Hardness, power, kinetic force, that's masculine. Everybody knows that's masculine. Both men and women intuitively, when we see that, that is what a man is. So, you have to train that, you have to embody it. You have to embody it. Lift weights, you do combat sports, you do something that requires you to physically apply yourself and apply your will to reality. Like one of the ways I frame the fundamental difference between feminine and masculine existence, men move the world by force, by direct action, man of action. Women will the world to move. They do it by soft power, by persuasion, by enticement. It would be very disparate for a woman to try to very connect, force things to happen. That's masculine energy. Same thing vice versa, for a man to try to be persuasive and use soft power that way. You can, but it's very Machiavellian. Within both masculine and feminine, you can do both. A lot of what soft power is beyond the pretense of what is seen is it's manipulation. It's Machiavellian manipulation. It's building relationships. It's knowing how to phrase things and use people's emotions and form alliances. And men obviously do that. But there's a sort of feminine dynamic to it. And vice versa, a lot of times for women to be effective in the world today, they have to be more masculine. But speaking about the characteristics on a very pure, unmixed homogenous level, strength is masculinity. Masculinity is strength. Those things operate on a feedback loop, but it's virtuous cycle. You've got to work out. You've got to lift weights. I always say that jokingly, but seriously, what do I do? What's my business model? I tell guys to lift weights. That changes the whole world. It does. It's been very successful. Fight club physique. Let's just talk a bit about that because I think we've spoken about it before. That was a huge thing during COVID for a lot of men. It was very derivative, obviously. Fight club physique. A lot of guys have seen that movie. But I realized as lockdowns happen, I was thinking about, okay, my business, people are going to work at training at home. All right, well, this is an opportunity for yourself this year to establish the habit of fitness and health. The train to get physically in shape. And as I kind of talk about in the book, you have to dispense of all the fuckery. There's going to be a lot of things in the news that will anger you and upset you and you're going to argue about it. This is going to feel so important. None of it means shit if you're a fat piece of shit. No one cares what you think. You're slothly and you got 20% body fat. BMI is 35. Look at yourself. What is there about you to respect? Nothing. So do the push-ups. Do the workouts. Start training. Maybe you're from now. Like now you're a man of action. You're a man of intention. You have the means now to actually change your life the way you want. You're not so reactive to everything. If you could put anything on the billboard what would you put on the billboard? That's a stupid question. That's a stupid, terrible question. I'll tell you why. I'll tell you why it's a stupid question. We set that up beforehand. We set that up. We set that up. This is not me being an asshole on purpose. It's not me being an idiot on purpose. We live in this modern discourse. This modern social discourse. We call it global homo-culture. Which to clarify for a lot of people, what does that mean? Global homo-culture is not about homosexuality. It refers to global homogeneity. Everything is the same. Everything has to be the same everywhere. Everybody has to think the same and agree the same. It's shared by each other. There's no differentiation. There's no intellectual diversity at all. That's what global homo-culture is. So there's this question I've seen arise. I haven't even been asked this on podcasts the last so many years. If you could put anything on a billboard, what would it be? There's this universal message that you're going to deliver to people because you are so of God that truly you must have profound thoughts in your head and mind and soul. Share with me what you would say to people. The word of Jesus. I think it's this contribe bullshit. Human beings are diverse. The world is diverse. There's many civilizations. There's infinite kinds of people. There are messages that are divine and that they are universal while respecting others. People want to love. Absolutely. Is there a message that you could put on a billboard? A commercial billboard? That would inspire great change? Not really. Lift weights. Lift weights, yeah. Unfuck yourself. It's supposed to be pithy and quotable and you're going to put that in your bio, your LinkedIn bio. I hate all that fuckery. I wouldn't put anything on a billboard. Where can people go to learn more about you? What do you do? I have a newsletter that I've operated on for five years and the newsletter is where I actually hopefully give the impression that I'm an intelligent person. The newsletter is e-mailed obviously but that's where I actually do long-form discourses, missives on a variety of subjects, both fitness and philosophical and intellectual. On so forth, obviously I have my Twitter account for Cortez. Instagram, I use Instagram a lot now for photo essays, which is really cool. Instagram is an incredible art medium that I don't think a lot of people really appreciate for that, but it is. Yeah, so newsletter, Instagram, Twitter, and then my DMs honestly are always open as well. I've never actually closed them, so they wouldn't send me a message. You'll probably hear back. Yeah, one of the speakers, I think it was Socrates, spoke very highly of your newsletter. Yeah, it's a pretty diverse subject matter. I mean, if I was to recreate newsletter today, it'd probably be on Substack. I charge for it, but it's free. It's the best place to reach me as well since I always check those e-mails and correspond with people. Can people sign up for that through your Twitter account? Yeah, through Twitter account, through the website, Cortez.site, very simple. Thank you, Alexander. This is Will Spencer with the Renaissance of Men and Alexander Juan Antonio Cortez. Thanks so much.