 And I actually forgot to say this, but this is a speech that I'm giving, but for the past five years I've run these groups that are like, man, it's insane. I mean, we talk on the phone at the minimum level, three times a week, or over Skype, or one of those things. The higher level of things when guys are more involved in it, ten times. I mean, there's like 20 hours where we are interacting and talking. I started that, but man, all the ideas here come from those guys. I mean, it's amazing. You know, it's basically what we do. I love teaching in that way. There's no hierarchy. I mean, they are always busting my balls at like, man, take on the leader role, take on the authoritative role. And I'm like, man, but I don't believe in that. You know, I believe that we're all equals. I believe that everyone here has the same potential for your happiness in your social life, your sexual life, your health, you know, all that sort of stuff. I'm never going to be Skyler Tanner or Socrates. I'm never going to be Nick. I'm never going to be James and James. But I'm going to be an expression of myself, you know. And we can't be other people. We just have to be who we are. And anyway, that's kind of what we teach, but we teach in this template of like, look, start out with some basics. We're born to be social. We're born to be sexual. We are born to live life. All right? So pretty basic stuff. So how can we get into some really basic modes of that? How can we get to how we are born to be in that? All right? Now check this out. What we're made to do, what were we made to do, and how did we evolve to be social? Okay? So, like, think about that. Really. I mean, we didn't have this dense population. You know, and whenever you're walking around in an airport or, you know, on my way over here, or you're on a plane in its pack, who do you talk to? At most you talk superficially to the person next to you. And superficial conversations suck, right? They're shitty. They're not fulfilling in any way. We all kind of hate them, and, you know, we all try and get good with them because, you know, that's what we, you know, have is our culture. But how we actually evolved was with very few people. And actually what was so interesting about James's speech, which made me rethink a lot of stuff, but, man, we talked like once a day. We had a meaningful interaction. We didn't have to do 100 sets. We didn't have to do, like, some super crazy escalation model. I love all that stuff, okay? I've done it. And I may still do it again. I may... I'm gonna unnaturally talk to all of you guys after this. But I have to realize what I was made to have, what was so fundamentally important and my fulfillment is dependent upon it, is that I have to bring it back to what I was made to do. And everybody is different. Everybody has a different, like, evolutionary path, but, hey, we're talking about some consistencies here. So we want to normalize being social. Guess what? You got social anxiety. And let me tell you, the people that I work with, so, you know, I've been doing this job for almost 10 years now. About six years, I've been working with people who have, like, mad, mad addiction problems. Saturday, yesterday was a funeral for somebody that I knew. Ed and I, it's actually totally fucked up, you know, this guy that we trained with. And I worked with very directly on this. You know, he had passed away about a year ago. I see this happen all the time. But with those guys, guess what? When you have trauma, when you have, like, a really screwed up mentality, when you have had something which made you in shock and in fear and anxiety that on a completely different level, you know, on ways that might be hard to comprehend. In fact, I remember after a speech that I gave, I contacted a mutual friend of ours and I said, man, these guys are talking about, like, how they, like, traveled and didn't know what to do and then found what to do and it was this big thing and, like, God, you know, you've made decisions where you were just trying to keep, like, a fucking needle out of your arm and cut withdrawals and all that sort of shit. He's like, dude, you can't bring that up. People aren't going to understand that. But all those people, guess what they do. Guess what they do to learn to be social and learn what I would actually say a higher functioning social skill set that is more consistent that I see of people that come out of the seduction industry, including myself in that, is they normalize being social. Guess what they do? They have one meaningful interaction today. They say hello to people, not to fucking get a result, not to be something, not to get any expectation but to be an expression because you've got to be an expression, you've got to be okay with your identity, who you are and put it out there with the world in order to get an exchange. And that isn't a superficial exchange. That is an exchange of that real person back towards you. And if you get that, you become a little bit fulfilled. You still may want to do all these other things that culture may say like, hey, I want to get laid. Hey, I haven't had these experiences where I'm the shit, where I walk to a club and everybody high fives me. You know, when I watch so and so walking to the strip club, all the strippers leave from their dances and run to them, I want that. And that is still imprinted in my mind. But never achieve that one, motherfucker. But anyway, so it's like I want that definition. But you know what? If I start having one meaningful interaction a day and I do that for like, let's say six months a year, guess what, man, I get to start to understand myself. I get to start to relax. And we just stop making it about all this shit and stop doing all this ridiculous, I don't know, crap, in order to be social. But look, we were born to be sexual. You know, we were born to be sexual. So how do we be sexual at the simplest level, you know, based on our design, our evolutionary design, let me make that clear. What about sex comes from nature? What is it? And this is a little bit different because I love sex, man, I love talking about sex. I can talk about sex forever. If you want to have 20 minutes left after this presentation and one question, ask about sex, and I will fill that time like in a very selfish, horrible way. But we need to see sex is a lot of things, right? And again, it's simple, but it's our urge. It's our emotions. It's our desire for love. It's our urge to fuck. It's our urge that we will have to dominate. It's our urge that we will have to feel the feeling of ownership, to feel the feeling of exchange and sexuality. And it's all these things which are interpreting in our head. You know, we're trying to find definitions. In fact, Doug McGuff touched on it, but I forget the terminology used, but when the amygdala fires, our logical brain can't keep up with it and we try and source together different things to match that thought. But when we have a sexual urge, especially when our needs aren't being met, we're going fuck. All I can think about is how I will like use, interact, dominate, make love, like all at once to that body and like our brain goes poof and we just move or freeze or don't know what to do, right? Because it's overwhelming, right? But our urge for sex is massive and it has a full range of things, right? I don't need to explain this with being social because, you know, we are social. You know, maybe with a little bit of dysfunction, but we're social daily. There's a lot of people who aren't sexual daily. So guess what? How do you be sexual daily? Man, you show your intent. You show what you want. You show your expression. You may not get an exchange, but you show your intent. So how do you do that? Man, why make it a big deal? Why not normalize it? Why not make it something that is a little bit easier to stomach than this like complex huge thing that your masculinity is dependent upon and start using the nature of your masculinity to express it? Start with giving a compliment. Start, if you can't do that, start with eye contact. Start with leaning in a little bit closer. People may be afraid they may lean away and we're not trying to hurt somebody. We're not trying to use society as an experiment. But we're trying to have an interaction. We're trying to figure it out. And our sex drive comes a lot later than when we're trying to figure out stuff as babies. 12, 15, 16, whatever it is. We start to get this urge, but we already have these social definitions, but we are not allowed to speak that language. We are not allowed to learn that language. And so we restrict ourselves. We feel bad about it. We make sex a whole bunch of fucked up shit. We make it porn. We make it about an orgasm. We make it about a racking up of lays, all that sort of stuff. But man, when you can be sexual, let me tell you and speak from experience, there have been times where I've had sex every day and I was not sexual. That may not make sense, but I was detached from the experience. I wasn't having the natural feelings of that sexual experience. I wasn't emoting. I wasn't exchanging. I was doing something else. Actually, I will tell you this, man. When it gets into levels of addiction on that level, man, it gets to such a point where, again, you get to that point of confusion and inability to find solution. I mean, geez, there were times in 2008, 2009 where I thought that I never enjoyed sex in my life. I was convinced because I'd have 40, 50 interactions of just, you know, what the fuck am I doing? I'm having sex with somebody else's expression and not mine, all right? So, we are born to live. Look, man, your life is a force of nature. Think about how important that is, man. There's so much happening. There's so much cool shit happening within you, every single one of you. Like, right now, if we got up and interrupted this whole fucking speech and just talked to somebody about what we were really thinking, even if it sucked, if it was hate, if it was anger, man, you want to know how we get rid of those things? I mean, it's kind of an intense and somewhat unnatural reaction to the degree of what we're having towards today. But when you have hate, when you have hate to the point where, like, I don't know, some crazy shit has happened. Somebody's murdered somebody else. Somebody's, you know, may hate women. Somebody went through a whole ton of abuse. You know, somebody was raped or somebody was a rapist. You know how that person actually neutralizes and normalizes? They express it. But what if actually we did with our life? We're able to express who we were to the person next to us. You know, if we just had that, one piece of the equation, there wasn't necessarily an exchange yet, but we could do that, okay? It might feel a little bit lost. You know, you might get some judgment. You might get some, you know, resistance back. And actually, one thing I know from, like, sex and socializing, when I'm truly social, I'm truly expressing an exchange. There isn't any judgment. There's no judgment. There's choice. People may not like something, but there's not that fear of, like, oh my God, what are they going to say? Shit, fuck, oh. I better stop. So what if we were able to do that? You know, and guess what? When we can actually live how we were born to be, how we were made to express. And this takes time, right? I've had crazy shit in my life, man. Crazy stuff that is all my responsibility. I did them. I built it up, right? You know, and that's one thing we got to understand big time here. We explain this a little bit more when we talk about different philosophies of what is the sexual life, what is VA Evolve, is there's nature that's the absolute, there's society and culture which builds a little template of that, and then there's you, the identity. In order to even have any inclination of nature, we need to explore ourselves deeply. Not like some checklist or something like that, but really look at it and start feeding that into what society and culture is. Start putting that into, start interacting and exchanging. When you have that, over time you will start to get what you are of nature. But in that, the war within us slowly calms. We stop getting mad about things. We stop being confused about things. It could be as dramatic as self-hates or it could be as minuscule as just like frustrated and not happy. That chills out. We stop needing a checklist of like, all right, I'm going to go do yoga and meditate, then I'm going to do a gratitude list and then I'm going to call some people and I'm going to do the Tim Ferriss life hack of 101 Happinesses and not just not Tim Ferriss, good awesome guy, but hey, you're top, man. I can't see anybody else. That war within us calms. We stop needing all this shit, right? And the other thing that's so cool is the war around us. What it is that is our interactions, stop being about how I can control things, how I'm mad about them, how I'm pissed off, you know, how I'm angry. I love talking shit just like anybody else. I love like if I have like, you know, some good sexual experience or I pull off some bad, I totally brag about it, man. I talk about it and you know, high five everybody. But the thing is, is that that true meaning of me needs to be fulfilled and expressed in order to come that, in order for that to become, you know, some sort of normalized behavior. So check this out, value. So you can't really read this, but let me fill in the blanks. So we've been teaching in this old like seduction system with value, right? And a lot of people that have been speaking at this convention, don't teach in this template. Absolutely. But we haven't really moved beyond it. Like how the fuck do we, do we make a connection, right? Because and I'll say this, from my viewing of this and how I see it, is because we're stuck in this filtration that it's not within me. It's separate from me. Happiness. Skills of dating, skills of relationships, skills of sex, skills of being social are outside of me. They're not already within me. And if I look through that filter, then I have to use society as some sort of like, oh, well people like this more. Man, social value, that's what's gonna fucking get me, get me all the fucking cool shit. Guess what, man? I think pickup has proven that if you buy into pickup, if you buy into it and make it your life, you will get worse. This is actually a true statistic of mine. And actually, well hey, I can't state the specifics, but hey, 2006, 2007, 2008, I probably approached like a thousand people a year. I got laid a lot. I got laid a lot. I did lay competitions. I beat all these dudes. I got like kind of popular and they're like, man, Steve, El Topo, geez, you beat all these, whatever, you know. And it was cool. But like I said, in those years, I didn't really enjoy sex. You know, I thought that for my whole life I didn't like it, right? And man, check this out. Then we get to like 2009, 2010, I stopped, I fucking didn't like it, man. I was like, this is not sexual. Actually, this is crazy. This is a true story. I made friends with all these guys in the porn industry. They would talk to me about sex addiction. I was dealing with other addictions at the time and I couldn't talk to anybody in the seduction industry about this stuff because nobody would really, I didn't have friends that were willing to be honest about it yet, right? And so I talked to these guys in porn. They're like, man, you got to learn to love women like sex is natural. You got like, look, you have to find your sexual definition and do that. You know, I came from that hating, I came from that thing where I couldn't come or I couldn't get off or it was just like, you know, it was just, it wasn't happening for me, right? And that's why it's like I always, I'm very critical when people speak bad about porn because porn is definitely not fucking sex. But let me tell you, man, the people in that industry like shaped my mind in a way that none of those other TED Talk people who don't, aren't familiar with that kind of sexual activity, aren't familiar with that sort of like desensitization that comes from it, you know, they brought me back to a normalization of sex. One at this point, all around the world. I believe he was actually one of two or maybe even the only speaker in 2012 who spoke at all three events held in that year in London, Texas and Australia. So please give you a warm welcome to Steve Mayeta, founder of the Sexual Life. Hey, thank you. Thanks, man. Man, what an honor to be brought on stage by Anthony Johnson. I mean, we all know he's done so much to shape and influence men, but look, I want to start this off with something a little bit different and standing on this stage who gave a presentation is one of the best in the world. I mean, hands down. Higher level of things when guys are more involved in it 10 times. I mean, there's like 20 hours where we are interacting and talking. I started that, but man, all the ideas here come from those guys. I mean, it's amazing. You know, it's basically what we do. I love teaching that way. There's no hierarchy. I mean, they are always busting my balls at like, man, take on the leader role. Take on the authoritative role. I'm like, man, but I don't believe in that. I believe that we're all equals. I believe that everyone here has the same potential for your happiness in your social life, your sexual life, your health, and all that sort of stuff. I'm never going to be Skylar Tanner or Socrates. I'm never going to be Nick. I'm never going to be James and James. But I'm going to be an expression of myself, you know? And we can't be other people. We just have to be who we are. And anyway, that's kind of what we teach, but we teach in this template of like, look. Let's start with some basics.