 I found the perfect architect, the project manager, for the series of buildings that we're going to build. And we're going to have him on stage right now to tell you about what he's going to do. Socrates, come on stage. I always kind of hate introductions like that. I'm far from perfect, I can guarantee you that. Architecture is a profession that, in all seriousness, if you're considerate, empathetic, and sincere about what you're doing, it makes you feel stupid every day of your life. There's always something to learn, it's terribly complex, and you're designing for a particular place and time that then changes and shifts over its evolution. So it's typically a snapshot in time, and so it becomes a very difficult and challenging thing to plan for an immediate need that transcends into a future one. But that's essentially what architecture does, and we need to actually design buildings that actually look at the life cycle of how they're going to be potentially be utilized. Anthony and I have had a conversation over the last three, three and a half years regarding culture, politics, and the environment in which 21 studios and 21 universities are finding itself. And it's driven a lot of thought and process as far as the business goes. At first I would like to discuss a little bit about the context in which we're talking, just a little bit of frame for you to guys that understand the general realm in which we're dealing with. We live in a tremendous age of opportunity. At no other time in the history of mankind have we been able to, at an individual level, communicate, connect, and share information. It is literally the digital age, okay? 21 studios, 21 universities, and 21 conventions is a ramification of this as an organization and as individuals. We would never have met had it not been for this capability. It is also the challenge of our time. The digital frontier is over. The social justice warriors have ridden into town and they intend to bring along leftist civilization and control with it. It is exemplified by a degree of intolerance and repression and the policies of self-destruction or a personal destruction, sorry. It is literally a new digital age inquisition. We are finding resistance to ideas and concepts and rationality based on doxing, literally an intelligence process to identify, name, shame, and destroy individuals. This is no longer about providing an alternative reason, alternative argument. It is literally violence over reason. Violence over civility, civility, sorry, excuse me. We're also seeing deep platforming. Anthony gave a great example of that where we talk about taking digital content and putting it into a ghetto, a digital ghetto. We look at a number of other things where we're looking at removing opinions from the stage of discourse. These are neither healthy or appropriate. We're also seeing demonetization, removing the means in which people can fund further exploits of ideas, concepts, and awareness. We're also seeing a degree of libeling, slandering. Years past it was easy to just name you as a hate group, to sit down and say you're a misogynist, you're a supremist. Now we don't, those days are past. It's not even enough to do just that. We're relabeling you as a hate group, and then we're required to treat you as such. When you tell somebody it's okay to punch a Nazi, you're advocating and moralizing violence. You're pushing it. You're a peddler of violence. These are pimps. We also see and have seen historically, and it's becoming more and more apparent, the physical disruption of venues and lawful assembly. If they can't de-platform you, this venue can be interrupted with a fire alarm, bomb threat, shaming you before you come to hear someone speak. All these things are not only just being utilized, they're being celebrated in pop literature, absolutely discussed as how to stop thought movements. The last one is intimidation. Starts to boil down to this is the idea to deter individuals by compulsion of threats either directly or indirectly. Ultimately, it's not the external threats of removing my voice from this platform from that video. That's the aim. The aim is to remove it from you, attending, from you from having the thoughts, from you even thinking about raising a voice. And this is necessary. It is absolutely a requirement for your exploitation. You are being groomed to be exploited. You are being groomed to have your rights and abilities taken. They are treating you like cattle, and you are going to get milked and processed accordingly. And essentially, it is a form of being a tax cattle. As men, you're expected to provide, and you will, and will tax you, and you'll be cuffed into servitude. The chains will not be literal, but you will still fill them. This is the environment in which 21 studios and 21 universities find itself. We are going to have to develop a range of applications and strategies business-wise to meet our needs, to continue to provide the content we have and to give to you. I'm going to give you an example. Approximately a year and a half ago, there was very real consideration about actually hosting this event today, the 10-year anniversary in the LA studios of YouTube, a facility explicitly designed to do this, to create content, to share that content, right? And we're not, for a reason, we're not welcome. We're not welcome because we stand opposed to the orthodoxy. We stand opposed to some of their central tents. And it is not to learn, share, or create content, because to be honest, there has been a tremendous union between YouTube and 21 studios and 21 universities, all right? There's a cost involved here, there's a physical cost, this room, this hotel, this ballroom costs money, okay? That's going to be overhead costs for organizations such as this that could have been shared in a facility designed to provide and host all this, all right? We have to create alternatives. Now luckily enough, we're already prepared to do that. Other organizations actually have to learn how to host and provide venues, assemble people, host them, and actually conduct the process of actually having a convention such as this. Luckily, Anthony started with this. The second one is going to be the higher individual costs. And it's not necessarily the ticket price for us to pay for this to cover the overhead. The real cost is, you'll never hear me talk again. You won't hear a Varela. You won't hear of the individual we're not even aware of. Because his voice will be silenced. His ability to reach you, you to find him or her will not be exist, and that is the intention. The good news is, we've been here before. We've absolutely been here before historically. This is not the first time we've seen this. I'm a massive fan of the Gutenberg press. The age of print revolutionized the world as we know it. Previously, it would take a single scribe, a year or greater, to create one document that was called the Bible. With this invention of the printing press, you're able to produce thousands in the same period of time under superior quality of conditions. It removed the ability to have an interpreter between you and the Word of God. Imagine the ramifications of that. A common man could read in his own language the word of God directly. You did not need a priestly class to do it for you. That concept would play out, moving forward, after the revelation of this technology. And this is where we come across the nice German monk. He was a decent fellow, and he had some issues with the church's practices of indulgences. So he wrote a letter and sent it off. It's kind of a litany of complaints and some rationalities. And it was meant as discourse, an objection to what was taking place. The pushback from the orthodoxy was rather extreme. And because of the pushback, his resolve and purpose was hardened. And he was further convinced. And it drove the direction of his thought process and created a movement. That movement was the Protestant Reformation, Torah Park the Church, Torah Park Europe. In the course of two years, that technology printed out over 300,000 copies of his theses and distributed them across Europe. And the cat was out of the bag. Mass communication, connectivity to people, to ideas unrestricted from a governing class. Ultimately, the Protestant Reformation led to a number of things. You're going to recognize them. Ultimately, it was a renaissance for Europe, the beginning of the European Renaissance. It also led to, quite literally, the age of enlightenment. It also led to the modern sciences as we know it. My personal pride and joy is that the age of enlightenment, the pinnacle of that was the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution, removing tyranny and destroying human rights, individual. When we talk about our form of government, it is a unique study in this evolution. And it took several hundred years of tremendous amount of bloodshed to get to that point. When you can't argue through words, inappropriate means will take hold, usually resolving violence. We want to prevent that. We're not in support of that. We mean to discuss, and we mean to argue, we mean to proper ideas. 21 Studios is a platform for those ideas. 21 Studios is absolutely in a similar cultural situation. We're facing an orthodoxy. That's restrictive and oppressive. And the responses is to censor and to mean. We also live in a transformational age. Unlike the printing press, the ability to digitize information and spread it globally is vastly superior. It is unbelievable. And this is something that's relatively new. It actually, I transcend this period. I was shocked by my first email after I wrote my first couple of blog posts. I was contacted in the middle of the night. Email comes through. Somebody read something. They found it profound, implemented in their life. And they said, we wanted to say thank you. It was somebody in New Zealand. I had no idea somebody in New Zealand would read anything I would ever write. Not only that, she was a female. I was distinctly writing for men, and women were reading. Not only reading it, found it beneficial and helpful. I had no idea. It escaped my concepts. It escaped my sense of reality, or potential, or penchantiality. I didn't think it was possible. This is the world that 21 studios exist in. I don't think any of us had an idea that this was possible. The results, though, of what Anthony's been able to achieve is right now today. There's over 125,000 subscribers. 125,000 people that will receive a message at a push of a button. There's over 20 million views and counting daily of video content. And he has a library of over 2,000 different videos of people providing content information that you have access to. This is an entire library, and it is growing. And he has absolutely every intention to increase this. Likewise, 21 studios in Anthony was initially it was the objections to the orthodoxy of the day. Feminism and feminism and franchisement was literally a discussion of objections of the removal from central tenants of human nature. It was supposed to be men as a discussion amongst people, men, women, about families, about their health, about their fitness, about their relationships, and how we relate to each other. But because of the pushback, this man has gotten greatly hardened by it. It has also solidified his resolve. It has also given him purpose. It also affects a lot of the alumni speakers. I know personally I have been transformed by a lot of this. I'm not the only speaker that has. It is also very much reflected in the current list of speakers we have for this convention. It is also reflective in the direction in which Anthony intends to take the organization. Ultimately, I think what you're going to end up seeing is a masculine reformation. You're going to see not only a rise of men, but a return to men. I hold a unique place in the 21 studios and 21 convention. It's something that a lot of people don't know about. I think even people who are close to the organization may not quite understand. And so I think it's fair to actually kind of discuss my involvement with that and with Anthony. And there are three primary areas in which I want to go through. I have a historical presence. I was with Anthony prior to actually the conception of it. I was involved in a self-help group at the time that he was a member of. We had started individually prior to Anthony, kind of a mastermind group kind of started doing it. We started changing and sharing information back and forth. We're holding each other accountable. And there was a tremendous growth in not only myself but the individuals involved. Anthony was part of that. Part of that, though, is that we actually expanded the number of individuals in the group and started to become fairly large. At one point, I would have five or six people. I'd have them in my house. We would discuss it over an evening and kind of move on very much like a book reading club. It ultimately evolved into about 30 or 40 people showing up at my house at one time. It wasn't just mine. There were several other individuals doing it. And we'd move from house to house every month, every year, every month. The problem is that it just became too encumbering. You just couldn't hold host that many people. So we actually started using a local library. We'd actually check out their local conference room, actually have a Fairleigh Science. And it was very similar to what you're seeing here, just absolutely not nearly as commercially-based. It was just picnic tables, your community library. And it was nice. It continued. And then, unfortunately, they decided to change the policy and they were going to charge us $35 for the room for two hours. I didn't think it would go anywhere. The guys actually did it. They paid for it. And it was successful. And it started to grow. We started getting more and more people. I thought it was interesting when we actually had guys from Tampa coming over specifically for the event. And I'm like, wow, that's kind of cool. After one of these meetings, we're coming out of the hallway, we're heading out. We're going to grab a bite to eat, probably a beer. And a 17-year-old punk comes up. It was in that room. And he goes, I'm going to blow this up. We got to make this thing huge. It's got to be epic. I kept using that term, epic. I'll never forget. I had not known the individual very well at the time. We had known each other socially, online. I was more aware of his reputation within the group. Young, determined, tremendous amount of energy. And bullheaded as hell. There was going to be no stopping. His idea, this young punk, was, let's run a conference room. Let's run a ballroom. Let's get a hotel and just blow this damn thing up. Make it enormous. I'm in my mid-30s at the time. I'm like, yeah, okay. How are we going to do that? Orlando's not that big. We're not going to get that many people. Don't worry about it. We're going to fly people in. We're going to fly people in. Yeah, we're going to make it over a series of days. Not just a couple of hours. Not a couple of days, but we're going to have it three, four days. We're going to even make it a week, possibly. They'll get hotel rooms. They'll fly. They'll cover the cost and the ticket price. I'm like, good luck with that. Have at it. I knew enough to back away. Let this 17-year-old punk go. That 17-year-old punk just spoke. That is that man right there. 17-year-old kid saw the vision of something, saw the value of the technology and the information and the ability to actually deliver it to people, executed on those deals and made it happen. For 10 solid years, 14 or 15 events globally. Each passing year, I was just amazed. I was absolutely dumbfounded, celebrated, and in no little way ashamed that at that time I took a step back. That's bothered me. It's bothered me for years. I had a chance of redemption. Several years ago, he actually asked me to speak, continue some of the thoughts I had and had me in as a speaker. I threw myself at him. So I had an involvement with him personally through a self-help group, how it evolved, and the personal accountability bit. I saw things happening. I had personal fears within culture, within society, about my relationship with women, my potentiality of being a husband, being married, my rights as a father, my ability to father, to be a decent father, to be a decent man, and I saw a culture that was very much at war with this. And the more you learn the anger you get and it's very tough to see an immorality, to see an injustice being in take place and not be angered by it, not to be disturbed by it, particularly when it's personalized. It's not an abstract immorality to someone else or somewhere else. No, it's one directed to you. So it was not an issue that I sat down and looked at lightly. And I had a decision to make. I could remain angry or I could be happy. And I had a choice and there were consequences of this choice. I also recognized that decent men don't stand around and watch history pass them by when they see an injustice. I take personal risks sitting here and talking. I felt those effects in all honesty to a minor degree, but it's a real and never-ending threat to my personal welfare and to this point to my family. And I'm gonna tell you I'm gonna lean into it. All right? The other, the secondary one is I have a very close personal relationship with Anthony. And it's not just because we're involved in the same self-health group and we're dealing with the community issues and we had kind of the same journey together, which is very, very true. It did occur. But we also shared ideas. And it was odd having that disparity of age to have a friendship. But what I saw is he had some tremendous things to give an older man. Energy, just can do attitude. He may not have had the knowledge or the wisdom at that time period, but he had energy. Not only that, he executed. In that group, there was never a harder working individual. That man had work ethic. And based on that, that was a token of my focus and intention. It was kind of the cost of it. If you don't try, if you don't put your effort out, I really don't have a whole lot of time for you. I don't have a whole lot of respect. So consequently, when I talk and see you guys, you guys are putting yourself out there to come here to be here. I have time for you. And so he did offer quite a bit and a friendship did form based on shared values. Also, I learned a lot. He's a better version of myself in those areas of taking risks, of putting himself out there, doing things and saying I have faith I can achieve that. I was ready to be conservative, very, very conservative. As an architect, you don't want your buildings falling down. Okay, so a lot of that I was taught. He didn't have that training. He wasn't, he didn't get that fear development. The other one is, and a lot of people note it, it's been discussed that after the failure of his relationship, his marriage, where he was just brutally, brutally betrayed, just the depth of injury that was inflicted and the poisonous nature of that relationship, which was truly singular. I had an opportunity to grab him. Saw a friend that was gonna be hurting. Saw a friend that was going through trauma. He needed to get out. And I said, you got his place. When I said I have your back, I meant it. At that time, I told him you need to get out. You have a place. My house is open. At that time, I just had a two month old baby boy, you know, delivered two months early. So you can imagine I now have a whole household. I have a family of five, a newborn and a friend who's going through a failed relationship, failed marriage. Yeah, I say this, not in light of my actions. I say this because I had an opportunity to repay an immense debt. I wouldn't have my daughter today if it wasn't for that 17 year old punk, to that man there. He allowed me an opportunity to continue my evaluation of society, culture, sex, politics, my place in it to evaluate my fears and insecurities to develop myself and a platform to share what I had with others with you, which ultimately drove my game, okay, which ultimately made what I do more focused, made me think about things and spend time on these thought processes in ways in which I would have utilized another means. And because of that, I developed the confidence to be able to have the relationships I wanted, to remove the people out of my life that were toxic that were gonna take me places I didn't wanna be, to secure the relationship I have today and give me the confidence to know there isn't a better man or father for my daughter. When I look in her eyes, I can thank him. So he's an alumni of the Big White Box, which is my house and home. There have been a number of friends who have stayed with me, been roommates. It's always kind of an experience. And I was immensely gratified to have him in my house and home for the short period of time that I did. The last one, which is the point of the introduction, is that I'm actually a professional architect by trade and practice. The nature of my work professionally is all commercially and municipally based. Primarily I've dealt with airport and transportation facilities, I've designed billion dollar terminals, billion dollar concourses, and to the extent of revitalizing an Eastern Bloc country's air infrastructure system to bring them into the World Trade Organization to bring them part of the EU. I was terribly proud of that. The other half of my career has been dealt with very large-scale civic and university-type projects. And we kind of have a joke that there are two types of architects. Architects that know type five, light gauge timber wood construction, and all the other building types. Building material types. I've definitely fallen in the latter. These buildings are fairly complex. They're bureaucratic in nature. You're responsible for organizing and orchestrating and orchestrating an entire team of professionals, as well as responding to a multi-tiered level of clients and having to manage that communication and project management associated with all that work. Design's easy. I mean, it's not easy, but it is very, very significant. So it puts me in a unique position when we talk about having a need for physical facility to advise Anthony on the built environment. What is the construction industry like? What is the process for it? How do you phase this? How do you actually gear towards financing this? How are these things done? What are the zoning and building codes? What are the implications of ownership? Hard, soft costs? All these sort of things. And this is the direction Anthony and I have been talking about for about three years that he's asked me to be fairly quiet about because he wanted to make sure that he was sensitive about going forward, but didn't want to reveal it too early. But ultimately I want to talk about the response to the 21 University is this, is that he's providing a first world solution to a first world problem that quite honestly has global and cross-generational implications. It's not just about improving your life. It's about improving your life surrounded with everybody else you know, particularly where it matters most. Your families, your loved ones, the people you deal with. And ultimately with your family and your children going deeper into it. It also relates to multi-generational. I'm an older guy. We talk about the guys my age compared to the much younger guys and being able to relate and share those ideas that sense of presence, that the masculine culture that so much is lost, that so many people are striving for, that you just sit down when you're in with a group of great guys. You just feel at ease. Ultimately, 21 Studios is literally about self-improvement. Men improving the quality of their own lives, improving the lives of the relationships they have, healthier families and sounder children. The business model, unfortunately, is relying on other third-party institutions and platforms, the servers, the databases. We also have an issue with the platforms in which they're being viewed from. The fact that we have to rent space in a hotel, who very well in the future may decide business model-wise, that hosting an event like this is probably not in their best interest, okay? It also means we can't control the security of this environment. We can't control the crowd that's outside. We can't control the people pulling fire alarms. And we know these things are being done. How do we resolve this as far as a business model goes? To allow you to have continued content in facilities and to have the conventions we have, the discussions in the hallways, which are so important. Not so much what we say here on this stage, but the fact that everybody is talking in the hallways after the speeches. The actions today, we've taken several steps. Obviously, we've been discussing this with thought leaders and peers across the board. We are researching comparable businesses and businesses models. How are they doing it? So we're not reinventing the wheel. We've actually visited and toured several facilities. Last year, Anthony actually went out to LA and actually saw YouTube cities. He's got a personal tour, he was able to see it firsthand. Actually, it was more than a year ago. That's when we were actually seriously considering hosting the event there. But because of their terms of services, their contracts related, and the fact that at any time they can delete the content, we opted not to do it. We also talk about having a pro forma of the actual concept, it's a program. What would a facility mean and be? What would that look like? We also talked about the discussion of sequencing. How do you do this? How do you enact that? In most cases, most large projects don't happen all at once. They're typically phased. So we discussed that. The other is the evaluation and reorganization of the business plan, the business model. How are we gonna do it? And Anthony was talking a lot about that. Ultimately, what he wants me to show you today, when we're getting right to it now, is a three-tiered vision for the future for us. The first one is the smallest, most easily, and readily available. It's kind of the intuitive one. It's a LiveWork digital studio production facility. Obviously, we'd be having recording production and server hosting. We would want to look at corporate offices for this facility. We also want to make it a LiveWork facility. Anthony thrives when he just immerses himself in everything he does. He's not a guy that commutes to and from different ideas. He throws himself into it. Consequently, you want him swimming in his work, his home life, everything else, all in one. And I think there's some utility to this. He's not the only one that thinks this way. A lot of people who do digital media arts, there's a lot of this, there's a viable market for it. Not only that, you can affiliate lease. It has a, what they refer to as an NOI, a net operating income associated with it, so that the costs are actually load-shared with income stream. Not only as a business model, but additionally for these facilities that allows other people to come and use these facilities. Other speakers who don't have the capabilities themselves would naturally find a home here. The second is everything we just talked about in addition to having a stage large enough to hold a conference. That's terribly important to us. It was now we can actually host and secure our own events. So we talk about having a number of things. They also live work component of this. May include more than just a small executive suite for personal living. It may include guest housing to be able to have people come in, stay, host speakers, host individuals, and then have that stay. Now it's something about a think tank, about having people come in and discuss in a round table. Ideas, events, concepts, and be able to hold that internally and be able to host that effectively. The last one, which is Anthony's personal favorite because the man doesn't ever think small, is replicating something very similar to YouTube studios which is what you see here. A very large central stage. Other secondary tertiary stages as well, but obviously one in which you actually host events and an entire suite for post and production facilities. So we're looking at any number of things, but we're also looking at funding. And so it's terribly important for us to understand that we want to continue to provide great content, to continue to control the channels and distribution of that content, to produce more content and ultimately have the facilities on hand so we can actually meet and discuss and have that personal interconnectivity, that human element be central to what we do. Ultimately, men are gonna need to speak up. We're gonna need to act. You're gonna need to stand up. Decent men will not be idle to witness to the events and culture before us. You don't have to stand here, but you do have to enact through your values. That's virtuous behavior. Men are gonna have to be respond not only in a self-centered manner, they're gonna have to think about their ruthless interests are at stake. We're gonna need that support. Anthony has decided personally to take that mission on and he means for 21 studios to be a bulwark against this cultural shift, okay? Against the orthodoxy, against repression, against intimidation. We also seek to refine the services we provide. He's always been stellar with an emphasis on phenomenal video production. That's gonna continue. We need the ability ultimately to use language and reason for human discourse. The alternative is unacceptable. The alternative is uncivilized. It is uncivilized for people, it is uncivilized for culture, and it is uncivilized for people. I'd like to thank you for your time. I hope you enjoyed the presentation and the vision in which we are heading and I'd like to have Anthony take over at this time.