 Welcome back to the 21 convention 2021. I have a special guest for you today. I am particularly pleased to introduce our following speaker. He'll be kicking things off. He's a multiple return speaker. He typically speaks about fitness, life, philosophy. And if you really want to get into it, he's got a beautiful head of hair in which I'm incredibly jealous of. He is an outstanding example of what it is to be a man living in today's society. An exemplar of not only philosophy but fitness and enacting that through integrity with intent. May I introduce you to Alexander Cortez. Is that working? Yes. What's up, gentlemen? Nope. Okay. Oh, geez. That's unnecessary. All right. Thank you. All right. We find ourselves at a liminal stage. I want to thank Anthony for putting this on. I've said this before, but the foresight required to create something where you bring men together and to do it over a decade, knowing whether he fully rise at the time they create it, but knowing the future, there'd be a real need for it. That's the level of perception that I serve in it that's very rare. So, props, brother. That's you. So, we're here now, and the world's changed the past two years, the past year, and you've all seen it change, and everything that is talked about with self-improvement and evolution of the man, it's that much more relevant. It's now real. We're not in a time of comfort. You can afford to be lactasical about what you're going to do. So, I call this, we have sovereignty and we have crisis. We have the world that is in crisis, and it's going to be in a state of crisis, a state of change for a very long time. That's not going away. And fuck yourself. I said this about four or five years ago, and it kind of took off as a meme, and this idea that if you want to become a man, you're going to have to remake yourself into that man, and it will be on you. You know, you have guides, you have ghost mentors, you might have someone like myself, or I look up to you. That's very admirable. But the work is always going to be on you, and I've reiterated this point over and over again the past five years. You have to find those qualities in yourself and bring them out. They are not given to you. The work is always yours. The stage rat right now, and I would say all of you qualify as this kind of person, is that if you are auto-didactic, you're a self-educated man, you take it upon yourself to do that work, to learn, to become more, you're going to make it. There's this meme online now that I really like. We are going to make it, or you're not going to make it. And there's this growing perception, I think, in the world at large. There's going to be two groups of people. You're going to get dragged, and you're going to get surprised by everything that happens. I can't believe it. Or you're saying that, okay, I need to stay ahead situation. I need to have my finances in order, my health, my social networks, the people I know, the place I live. I might need to relocate. I might need to move. I might need to change jobs. You cannot wait to see what's going to happen. You have to act ahead of it. If you are going to be actionable, that means acting in the moment. That means being decisive. I've seen so many people now, even within my own group, my own inner circle, where they have been spent, fucked by the political social changes. They live in Australia. They live in Canada. They live in certain US states. They lost their job. They lost their mobility. They lost their friends. They lost their social network. They've now been shunned because of certain decisions they've not made. They should have acted faster. Hesitation is going to kill you, and time is going to keep moving quicker the more we move into the future. If you are still asking how, then you're not going to make it. With the not going to make it meme, why is the idea so powerful, specifically on a lovely individual, is that people are now being able to see the consequences of waiting. Like I said, the consequences of hesitation. I'm always emphasizing all this stuff. A lot of you guys follow me. Some of you are in the inner circle and you listen to me all the time. You have to get this in order. This in order. You have to pay attention. You have to pay attention. Discernment. Perception. Who do you know? I'll do that eventually. You can't. You can't. You cannot wait. You cannot. Because it will cost you. So where are we going? What's the future going to look like? One of the points I make a lot is that nothing's going to be reversed. Because we live in the social media age where, how many social feeds do you all have? You probably have, let's say Twitter, Facebook, maybe Instagram, Telegram, Twitch, Discord, YouTube, Slack channels. Maybe you have, God forbid, you have Zoom meetings where you have to talk to people and pretend you're being productive in a meeting. Then you have the search engines. You have your email inboxes. You probably have three or four different email addresses. You have all these different attention economies pulling on you all the time. You see these social trends happening 24-7, and they're very rapid. Not all of them are meaningful. A lot of them mean nothing. You see arguments about pronouns. You see these cultural battles. It seems like we're always on the precipice of something like, oh, there's going to be a breakthrough moment. There's going to be war. There's going to be a civil war. There's going to be what? Nothing's going to reverse itself. A lot of what we see in this sort of hyper-reality, it's illusionary. It took, let's say, arguably, let's say it took 120 years to get to this point from industrialization, modernization, feminism, communism, the rise of capitalism, the rise of this global economy, and now it's 2021. Oh, there's problems. This system isn't working. Yeah, it's not working. It's not working in a lot of ways. Well, what if we do this, and we what? You revert it back to an earlier error. That's not happening. You change it so next year all the problems are gone. That's not happening. If it took a century to get here, it's going to take, let's say, another 50 years to get somewhere else. Are you prepared for a long night? Are you committed to that? Because you're going to have to be. This isn't a hypothetical. It's not going to be five years from now, and the United States solved all its problems, and the world's better, and globalization's gone, and we're all free. Yeah, there's no more bullshit. That's not happening. It's not. The role of civil war, I get asked this question all the time. We think about civil war. There's not going to be a civil war. Why not? Because there's nothing to fight about specifically. There's no, we might have ideological differences 100%. I think this, I think that. Why don't I agree with you? Oh, yeah, that's an intendable gap to chasm. Are we going to create armies, and then we're going to fight, and then what? It's this romanticized idea that if we just have that final apocalyptic battle, and the right people win, well, now the future's solved. It's all great. It's not happening. The civil war, even in the United States, that took the ramifications of that last decades. You look at countries that have had civil wars have broken up. Those countries are still broken 10, 20, 30 years later. That's not a situation you really want to have happen. It doesn't make life better. It makes life worse. It makes it more violent. So now you're in a broken nation, and now you're having to fight out for yourselves. Maybe 30, 40 years later, your country's finally prosperous. But you have what? Half a lifetime of trying to make that work? So there won't be a war. There will be a decline. There's going to be a decay. And I say this not to be pessimistic. I know this is starting off like this sounds really negative. You have to take a long game in a turnless perspective. You have civilizations. They go through life cycles. They rise. They have a period of decadence. And they go through some sort of disintegration. Energy is always going to transform itself. Everything's always evolving. Just because something falls apart doesn't mean that it falls apart forever. And it's terrible forever. There's always going to be opportunity and tragedy. There's always going to be opportunity and chaos. If you are a man of action, you can recreate the world that you want. If you are. If. That's a big if. This is what everybody wishes for. We just get fucking violent and we start just fucking cutting heads. And we all fantasize about this. You fantasize about it. You fantasize about it. I fantasize about this all the time. Like if I could just, this is going to be demonetized on YouTube so fast. If I could just kill all the right people and just stack fucking skulls. Like that would just, like that would warm my heart. Like I fixed it. It's all fixed. Like this pile of fucking bodies, the river blood. That's not going to happen, unfortunately. I wish, right? I wish, I wish, but it's not going to happen. But you can take that same sort of ethos and spear and apply it to the world you want to create. This is very symbolic. I now know what specifically this is from. This is probably off Tumblr. Whatever. But it's very symbolic. It's this idea that you're going to take a stand for something. This is a moment, though. This is a moment in time. This kind of pictures this kind of image. That'd be very cool if you could actually create that. In reality, it's not going to be a moment in time. It's going to be many moments. It's going to be many years. The most extensive boundaries of the Ottoman Empire. Why did I include this? So people talk about, we're all Americans. People talk about the United States. We think the future United States is. The United States is not going away anytime soon. It is the world's biggest economy. It is the economy. The American dollar, USD, is the reserve currency. If you go anywhere in the world, I go to Thailand. I go to Turkey. I go to Dubai. I can go to Egypt. I can go many places. And I pull out cash dollars, $5, $20 bills, a stack of cash. Everybody wants that. Exchange, the hustle, you rip you off. They all want US dollars. US dollars not going away anytime soon. I don't worry about that. Is inflation going up 100%? Money's not even real. Those print morbid, whatever. But is the US dollar going away? No. It's going to be around for a long time. The United States is the best economy in the world to make money. That's not really changing. The Ottoman Empire, you can't leave. I'm not going to go through the text by text, but it started around 1300 in this area. Then it grew. The Ottoman Empire lasted up until the 20th century. About 700 years it lasted. Is it completely gone today? No, it's not. There's a country called Turkey, which you've probably all heard of, the country of Turkey. The country of Turkey is the sort of last final piece of the Ottoman Empire. And it's still a very prominent powerful country in the region. It never fully disappeared. Countries don't disappear overnight. The United States, to make a point, it's not going to go away overnight. It's not going to be 2050. There's no more United States. Now it's, what, the United, the United Chastain Barbarianism Federalist Republic. That would be amazing, but I don't know how likely that truly is. Probably not very probable. But it's not going away. And I think that's, I feel like that's an optimistic mindset that, okay, we have this world that we live in that's going to change, it's going to certainly transform, but it's not dissipating. It takes a very, very long time for social systems to fall apart. And despite all of the cultural warfare and the dilution of American values, there's still a very strong American ethos and spirit that we are American or independent. We fucking live how we want. And I know all of you feel that way. That's why you're here. That's not being crushed. That lives forever. The Soviet Union. This is a bit of reframing. How long did the Soviet Union last? Let's say from the Russian Revolution in 1917. So it took, what, 1920 to 1980, took a little over, no, sorry, 1990, took a little over 70 years for the Soviet Union to fall apart. So Russian Empire lasted about 300 years. Russia's been a country for over a thousand years. Russia's never going away. It went through a 70-year period of socialism communism that wrecked the country, made life miserable for everybody. But it eventually, what happened? It fell apart. There was a revolution. Russia's not necessarily the best, highest-ary in the living country in the world, but is it a Communist country now? No, it's definitely not. They were able to see through the bullshit eventually. There was a collective realization that life sucks. We've turned our country into hell. All right, now we need change. However painful it might be. I think the United States is probably in for its own version of this. In parts, you might have free states like Florida, which basically are their own countries at this point. Florida does what Florida wants. It's amazing. You go to California, you go to a blue state. Yeah, they're going to impose their version of communism, socialism, and they're going to make it shitty. And if you live there, you are going to supper through it. You're just going to have to deal. 20 years from now, 30 years from now, maybe that will change. Are you prepared to fight and make a stand for yourself? Flag burning. The flag is a symbol. There's this common reaction on the right. Conservatives, whatever you want to call it. You see something that's upsetting. This is upsetting. This is something that you want it like this, not that. You see that and you get angry about it. Of course you do. It's violating some sense of value. How are you representing your values in your actual concrete life, though? Again, I make this point all the time. You have things that you believe in. You believe in them fervently. They're passions. They're ideals of yours. They're close to your heart. Are you making a world with those actual values? Or are you just getting pissed off when you see these things in hyper-reality? The internet where it's like, how dare someone say that? How dare they do that? So fucking what? So what? I can get online right now and find 10,000 things that upset me. I could spend all day doing that. Or I could come here. I could speak to a room of men. I could get online. I could get into my various communities. I could try to build men up. I can try to create the world that I want. You don't counter destruction with emotional reaction. That's not the appropriate response. You see people doing things you don't like. You see people destroying things you don't like. Then you have to build your own. Whether that be yourself or that be your network, whether that be your community, you have to build your own. It can't be this continuous cycle of anger and rage and how dare they know, I'm going to make this company or this person the savior. They're going to take a stand. Make your own fucking stand. Your life is your stand. Your whole existence is your stand. It's not going to come from the media. It's not going to come from the politicians. It's going to be you. So then we find ourselves in the sort of heaven and hell, polarized space. We're pulling back. We're pulling forward. What do we follow? The better or worse are angels of our nature. One of the foremost qualities of the United States that's declined the last 50 years, actually, is this quality of cooperation. Historically, if you go back in time, you go back in history, your allegiance, I'm going to generalize, but it's directionally true. Your allegiance was with God. It was with the church. It was with this idea that what you do now will have a place in eternity, will echo into eternity. You are living for something beyond your own lifespan. And that lasts, that still exists today in some parts of the world. But that formed the sort of bedrock of Western civilization of, all right, I need to be a good person now because what I do will affect my generation to the future. And we see that with art. We see it with architecture. We see that when you go to old European cities and they're a thousand years old and you see this was built for people and everyone that built that, and they never even saw it completed. They're all dead, but they built it for their progeny, for their offspring, for their families, for their culture. They did it to honor God. They did it to honor themselves. They built all that and it's a spirit of cooperation. It's getting along with your fellow man. It's wanting to help them. It's wanting to build them up. It's wanting to make the world a better place. And then you get to, let's say America, sort of like the beginning of the modern era, post-enlightenment. And your allegiance is no longer with God, because God, for better or worse, God's been killed. God's dead. We live in a material world now. We have the separation of theology from science. We live in this material world and now your allegiance is to what? It's to the state. It's to your nation states, to a country. And countries rise and countries fall, but now you have an identity of a label and you should trust your institution. You should trust your king. You should trust not God, but you should trust things that are man-made. And what happens from that over 200 years? Well, we get this point where we don't cooperate anymore, where people are slaves to ideology. There's no interest in getting along. There's no interest in building anything pretty. There's not. Look at the modern world. Look at regular American cities. Or any of them attractive? Look at mega-churches. 30,000 people in a stadium listening to a pastor, probably a heretic. Is that really honoring God? You're in Lakeland, whatever, Texas, and I'm gonna go to the mega-church? Maybe, maybe not, who am I to say? But we don't build anything that way anymore. What do we think of being our savers? Who do we honor? Well, we want to obey the government. We want to think that the government's gonna be efficient and solve our problems. We want to believe that the institutions, this is a joke now, but 10 years ago, if you had said institutions are the worst fucking thing in the world, what do you mean? America's built institutions, isn't it? Well, now they're all corrupted. What were we obedient to? We were obedient to things that are man-made. These are not divine creations. They are things made by man. They are flawed. They are the bottom of this picture. And they tell us to join them. They tell us that if you just followed us and you did what we say and you got along and you conformed and you thought the right thoughts and said the right words, well, now you're a good person. Now you can be part of our blue church world that we made, this heretical world. You can't agree to that. It's your duty as a man to defy that. The Taliban. This is really cool to watch. This is really cool to watch, actually. When I was watching this, I got into contact with a bunch of guys who were in Afghanistan the past so many months, some of whom were in the Taliban, and then I lost all their numbers and actually dropped my phone in the ocean, and I don't know where that went, and that's my story. But I was able to talk to a lot of people in the country. And the reality of hearing how this occupied nation had the United States in it for 20 years, was able to basically buck off the global homo paradigm and then take over itself again of these people cooperating with each other. This is a cooperative structure. All these guys, they live in that place. They are of that place. They believe in God. Obviously, they're Muslim. Their family has been there 2,000 years. They're not fucking leaving. America had watches. They have time. They're not fucking leaving. You're going to leave first, and then we're going to fix what you did. How are we going to do that? We're going to get along with each other. We're going to start networks. We're going to start cells. We're going to make WhatsApp groups. So this is literally what they did, and we're just going to talk, and we're going to figure out plans, and we're just going to wait. And when the time comes, when we see opportunities arise, then we'll take them, we'll capitalize on them. And they did. It took them 20 years, and they did. So now they have their country back. Whether you agree or not, maybe you don't like Muslims, maybe you don't like Islam, maybe you're in the military, and this is a very painful thing to watch, but that's their land. That's their place. That's their home. It was never ours. If you cooperate, you can do great things. You can defy nations. You can defy supposed to the great superpower in the world if you cooperate. Economy versus country. So what does that mean? Because there's always this question about the United States and ways to think about it. I'm trying to give you guys as many thinking tools as possible. In a country, in a cohesive country, the country is built on this paradigm in which you favor the people in it. This is not a controversial idea. A lot of countries like in Eastern Europe today, Hungary for example, Viktor Orban. Viktor Orban wants Hungary to be for Hungarians, basically. The journal policies and the direction of governance is for the people that live there. It's not for people that are not from there. It favors its people. It generally will have some sort of legal system, whether it's codified or not. It's for people and it's by people. If you go back in time to like ancient Babylonia, Code of Hammurabi, like the first recognized legal code, it was written by one man. He was a ruler of that region. But legal code, the way it's written, it's to handle disputes between the people that live there. It's to keep the country operating. It's to favor, it's to favor truth. It's to dish out punishment when necessary. It's to be fair. It's an operating system designed to serve. To serve the body, to serve the consistency. You have a shared heritage. You have shared values. This can obviously skew ethnic. You can always make that point. If you go to Thailand, Thailand is for Thai people. Why? Because they're Thai. It's been that way since 5000 B.C. But you can also be unified by a shared history. You have shared beliefs. United States originally, who was it for? It was for people that wanted religious freedom. They wanted extreme independence. If you come here, that's what we value. If you are of that mind, you'll get along. We don't necessarily particularly care where you're from as long as you share the beliefs, share the values, and you buy into the historical mythology that we've created for ourselves. That's a country. You could create your own country if you wanted to. Maybe not internationally recognized, but I've made this point many times, and this is kind of slowly in the works within my particular circles. If you get enough people together and you create a community, you take over a county school board, or maybe you just all live in the same neighborhood, you create a culture within yourselves. And that spreads outward. That has a very, very powerful effect. You're seeing that already take place across the United States. I came from California. California is fucked, and I love California, but California is like a bad girlfriend. Bad, crazy, hot girlfriend that just ruins your life. California is going full communist. I know it's going to get worse. It's beautiful. It's a beautiful state, the most beautiful place in the world, I think. But I can't live there. It's not for people. The government is not for the people. It's for a very particular elite group. So you go somewhere else. Florida, a free state. Half of you in here right now are open caring. Or concealed carry. Why? Because you can. It's great. Taxes. There's no state income tax. The journal atmosphere. Does it feel like there's a pandemic happening? There's fear? No. You can create the world you want. You can always create. And then you have the shitty economic zones, which is a lot of Western countries at this point, like Canada's great example. I love Canada, but Canada's a terrible country. What does it do? It favors production. It's for money to make money. It has global homo culture. So long as you buy it, it flies. What does that mean? There is no culture. The culture is consumerism. Which is really, that's the global order right now. What's the great reset? The great reset is to make everything hyper-consumerist. Every part of your life from even your vaccines at this point. Your vaccines, your medicines, your entertainment, your healthcare, your car insurance, all of it. It's all going to be subscription. Every part of your life will be subscription-based service. And you will pay for that subscription to one massive company that's owned by another massive company that's owned by a mega conglomerate. And that's a future of the world, supposedly. You'll own nothing. You'll be happy. You'll just rent everything. That's really what we're up against. You can certainly dive into the occult and say, this is evil. This is satanic. You absolutely can. I could ram about that for a long time. But on the surface, what's it about? It's about greed. It's about money. It's about people profiting off of your every second of your existence. You're alive right now? Okay, well, if you're alive, you probably need some kind of insurance for that. So if you pay whatever, $99 a month, you sign up. Okay, well, cool. And we'll make it super cheap and very easy in this very comfortable world where there's no real problems in regards to the hardship. Those that might be coming, but as of right now, like, you're not quite there. And we'll just profit off you for your whole life. Peter Turchin, Cleo Dynamics. So what the fuck's that? Might be a new word for some of you. If you want to get into the nitty gritty, and I'm not going to get into the nitty gritty of like actual economic statistics because it gets boring. If you ever want to get into the nitty gritty of like, why does history go into these cyclical patterns, there's this field called Cleo Dynamics. And it looks at this different economic realities, elite overproduction, power competitions, looking at basic income and equality. And if you combine all these different data points, you can actually make fairly accurate predictions. Peter Turchin 15 years ago predicted violence in 2020. He's been very dead on with his predictions. A lot of the work I've done, a lot of the personal decisions I've made the last five years in regards to trying to create income for myself online, creating an online business, creating a network, trying to stay ahead of the curve with where I live, with what laws I have to follow. It's because of his work. He's written a number of books, Ages of Discourse is a really good book, but it gives you foresight into the future. I keep emphasizing this again, but you don't want to be that guy where it's like, why is this happening? It's happening for a lot of reasons. Nothing in history is random. Events are actually easy to predict if you pay attention to the right data points. There is no grand you finding reason. There are many reasons. There's this very human inclination where we want to simplify things. We want to make life singular, very binary. Why is this happening? It's because of this. What's happening? Well, it's because there's a conspiracy. Everything is complex. We're dealing with complex systems all the time. One of the precepts of being a man of action is that you make lots of decisions constantly. Why? Because you're living an interdisciplinary life. There's many, many risks and many different possibilities. Which ones are you actually taking? Which ones are you acting on? If you want to follow a pet theory that this is going to be the story and that doesn't happen, now you're in a situation where you have to recalculate, recalibrate your entire reality. Oh, shit. I guess I was wrong. This didn't happen on the time scale I wanted or it didn't happen at all. I had this idea about the world. It didn't come to pass. What do I do now? I guess I need to rearrange everything I think. I see this online all the time where people get into these rabbit holes where they want to subscribe to some sort of conspiratial, whatever, theory, conspiratial story. And then they're waiting for it to occur. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's like, okay, well, this is going to happen. It's going to happen. Oh wait, it didn't happen. Shit. You always have to be calibrating reality. And you have to do that multiple ways, not one way, not one story. There are two kinds of power. So this is where, if anyone wants power, you can get power. Power is available to everybody. There are two ways to think about it where you have hard power. This is military. This is being able to kill whoever you want and get away with it. This is force. This is kinetic. We're not at a stage where we have hard power so much. Maybe on a personal level within the space that you live in. But obviously, there's not a chat of stand of barbarian army. I wish there was. Guys, go sign up. Go fight. It doesn't exist right now. So we don't have hard power. But hard power is the way we usually think about power. We think about loss. We think about being oppressed. And we've seen this abuse. We've seen people, we've seen countries like China where they're building their hard power. They want to have that military. They want that might. They will do what they want with that kind of force. The irony to this, actually, if I go back, this is actually in a way hyper-patriarchal. It's a strong oppressive father where you're going to do what I say, when I say it, however, whatever I tell you to do. And you don't have a choice of the matter. In a weird irony, the United States is actually much more masculine nation. China is much more masculine nation than the US is at this point. I don't know why it's skipping ahead. There we go. This is Australia. You can see Australia. This is hard power. Pandemic. People are, this person didn't wear a mask, right? So now they're going to get handcuffed and beaten and this is going to protect people and keep them safe. They're exercising hard power. They can do that because the population there, well, they don't have any guns because they got rid of them. And apparently they like to follow rules. So nobody really makes a fuss about it. Yeah. And like, what does that get you? It gets you a literal fucking boot on your neck. That's what that gets you if you follow rules. Most men are weak and beta. How do you get past this? How do you be a real man? How do you be a husband and a father? That has been where we dropped the ball as men is because we're too accepting. We're too tolerant. I'm calling for intolerance for evil. We need to be able to properly identify with the definition what is masculinity? We need men to stand up and do heroic things. Building a tribe of people who are of like mind, who you can depend on, who hold you accountable, who will call you on your V.S. I call the official tagline for now with 21 convention is America's last stand for masculinity. I think it is. The event and it's as a reflection of the hemisphere really. You come out and you consciously attend and start talking with these people because people who are coming here are coming here to discuss big ideas, important ideas. Not just talking about being masculine, but okay, you've done all the self development. What are you going to do with it? So China is building up to hard power. China has the manufacturing capabilities. China has that, you know, China lack resources, but they're basically replacing the United States. Is this a bad thing? I don't really care so much about China, honestly. What are you doing right now in the United States? What are you doing here in America? You're not going to go beat a country of 1.6 billion people. If they're going to be the dominant empire in this century, then they are. Okay. You have things like Bitcoin. You have hard money. So I said money is not real. Money is not real. Money is just a mutually agreed upon idea that we engage with. But we can almost make it real. We can have something that's not inflationary, finite supply. It can increase in value. Bitcoin is a great way where you can actually assert power yourself, because you can completely separate yourself from financial system almost. You can do business with people whose values you agree with, because if you're using Bitcoin, we all can't believe the same thing, and we don't have to conform to the narrative. These idea that there's rules, and this idea that, well, this is what the banking law is. This is what legal, I think, no. No, we can actually do this ourselves. And this has opened anybody. So the ability to create your own systems always exists. If you're intelligent, enough to create enough, and if you're willing to take a risk. A lot of people think of cryptos as big, you know, it's like, what is it? I don't know anything about crypto. Well, you can research it. You can educate yourself. It's not a complex idea to think that what if you got a hundred people together, and we use our own kind of currency just amongst ourselves. Okay, I can see that happening. Multiply that by a thousand people, a million, ten million, a hundred million. Trains of dollars of value. There's nothing stopping you from embarking from one hard power system into another one that's more to your advantage. You can't make the switch. And then we have soft power. Soft power, you have things, Netflix, they just, I guess now they're canceling Dave Chappelle, after saying they wouldn't cancel Dave Chappelle, that that's really important. It's not that important, but it's an example of soft power. Soft power is culture. Soft power is persuasionary. Soft power is the social boundaries and the social conventions that you're supposed to conform with. Soft power has a lot of pull, obviously, but you can always defy it. You all defied it coming here. You all did. Everyone in this room is probably defying it in some way, where you've made separations between people that you agree with and people that you don't, maybe upon very harsh ideological lines. So you can always make a stand for yourself this way. And most of the power that the United States has at this point is soft power. Yeah, the president we currently have, toothless. Not really. In reality, like, is Biden the powerful president? No. Maybe in Washington, D.C., you know, within certain spears, yeah, no doubt about it. But the state of Florida, is anyone following mandates here, really? Is anyone doing what the president says? Florida, West Virginia, Texas? No. We're doing stuff the way we want ourselves. Our leaders are making our own decisions. The United States no longer has the ability to project hard power abroad or internally. So now it's relying upon soft power and social convention. And certainly some people are going to get dragged, and some people might get targeted, but the system is breaking to your advantage. Our lives are shaped by symbols. One of the interesting things about, not just Netflix, I could have thrown up 20 examples of global homo companies. Facebook, Instagram, Disney Plus, whatever other bullshit. Pfizer. You see the logo. What's a logo? A logo is a symbol. Something that the general right spear has lacked for a long time. Our symbols. We have the American flag. That's one symbol. But we don't have much else. When I was talking with my friend Arthur Kwan about art, about the ability to create art, to create beautiful things, to pull out of your soul something that people look at and they feel, and it inspires and unites something of them. The general left, the general narrative, they've got a lot of that. And these symbols are aligned with companies, obviously. It's just logos that you go engage with. They have a lot of that, and that's very persuasive because it seems very omniscient in your mind. So when you see something like Netflix or anything else, it's not just that word. It's not just that company. It represents this whole spear of soft power, semiotics. Symbols always stand for something else. You have to create your own symbols. A lot of what I've tried, okay, these are out of order. There we go. A lot of what I've tried to do with my own inner circle is create symbols, give them something to follow. I got this tattooed in my fucking arm right now. I got it from Jack Donovan, Strength, Courage, Mastery, Honor. Do I expect everybody to get tattooed? No, but I expect it to mean something when you see it. For the guys in their group, it means something. Even if I go back, where is it? There we go. Chastron Barbarianism. That's ridiculous. No, it's not. I have the means to create an entire digital country. I can do that. I can create a DAO. I can create an LLC if I want to. I can create an online community. I can create social conventions. I can create a culture. I can create an idea. I can create a set of ideas, entire schema, operating system. Here's how we're going to live and change the world. And I can pack that into a symbol. I've got 10,000 variations on this fucking thing. You know how many Chastron Barbarians I have? So goddamn many. Most of them are probably made by Devin. And we laugh at this and we're like, oh, that's ridiculous. No, that means something because that got a lot of you fit. That got a lot of you in shape. That got a lot of you living your life differently. And now you're going to create a community amongst yourselves. That group of an itself was from a larger group. Create the world you want to live and create the networks. Also, this is great. How could you not see this and fucking look at this? Like Jesus Christ. This guy's having the fucking time of his life. Let me go. There we go. Back. Back. There we go. So as much as I want this to happen. And I don't vote. I don't really believe in democracy as it exists right now anymore. I'd love this to have an introduction. We'd all love that. I said this before. Just show up. Just stab, stab, stab. Behead. Roll the body off. I run shit now. We can fight in a pit with sticks if you want to argue. Okay, we're not going to get that. We're not going to get that. We can dream about it. That's fine. That's fine. But what we do have is you have all the tools to shape the world. What does the United States have? What does the federal government have that you don't have? Do you have social media? Of course you do. Do you have the means to create your own banking system? You do. Can you create your own networks? Absolutely. Can you arm yourselves? Of course you can. Do you have tools to reach people? To broadcast? Well, let's see. Instagram live. You too? Oh yeah, I do. You have all the power that a media conglomerate has. You have all the power that an individual country has. You can do this yourself. You can create the world yourself. If you want to talk about being a man of action, what can you create? What can you create? You have all of it. So why aren't you using it? What I've tried to do the past five years, especially this past few years, I've tried to create. I've created groups. I've created network tribes, cultures. I've connected with other people. There are so many groups now that exist online. They're all valid. They're all useful. What appeals to you? One of my good friends, Jack Murphy, Liminal Order. He has a group. I've got my own Aaron Tribble group. Jess, I'm Barbarianism. It's own group. War Room, Tate Brothers. They're their own group. Fraternity of Excellence. They're their own group. Every group serves somebody, but what are they all creating? What are they really doing? They're creating the substrate for a new world. They're doing it themselves. It's men doing it themselves the way that men have always done. They're not relying upon the external order. They're pulling it out of them and their brethren. You can do that. That in my mind is what being a man of action is. Mishima from Japan talks about this in a lot of his books, Sun and Steel. The dividing moment in his life was when he realized that he had for the first half of his life, he'd been a writer, he'd written books, he'd written novels, he'd been a very intellectual man, he'd been a scholar. He'd been a man of the mind, but then he got to this point, this sort of life crisis, and he writes, he's not a man of action. He's very good at thinking. A lot of people are very good at thinking. A lot of the political sphere, the political right, very good at thinking think pieces, national review. Let's talk about how we got here. Let's talk about moving forward. This is going to be terrible. This isn't constitutional. This is a violation of social rights. Yes, we can comment all fucking day. We can deliver commentaries and missives. It doesn't mean anything unless you're creating something. You're not acting. You're just talking. We have things like Tradicon Movement. They want to have this very idolized world, this idolized image, valor, the golden man, this man of virtue, fair maiden. We're going to make a return to the past. This is nice to think about. This isn't a bad mental model necessarily, but this is not complete either. That movement, those kinds of movements, that kind of thinking where we're just going to simplify down to this romantic little fairy tale box. That's what we'll say to the world. No, that's not going to say the world. The world is bloody and violent, and it's beautiful, and it's complicated all at once. Getting a hypothetical virgin wife and then living on a farm, good for you. That's a nice idea. That's great. That's a beautiful life. I won't say that it's not, but that alone is not going to change the direction of history. So you reclaim your values and you live them, and you recognize everything I just talked about, everything that you are going to have happen to you going forward. It's going to be a process. It's not an event. It's not any one thing. It's not a war. It's not one final battle. It's your whole life until the day you die. Are you man enough to create that? I can ask that question, but you are going to be the one that has to answer it. And I will end there. Does anyone have any questions? Take the mic, man. Yeah, we got a mic. First of all, great speech. Thank you. I hear you're not living in the US. Yes. So how was that process for you as far as travel, getting through customs? I don't know if it's obvious, but are you not vaccinated in order to get through these places with no issues? Did you take the vaccine to make that process easier? And are you anticipating the difficulty in getting back into the United States and considering never coming back or staying away for many, many years? Those are good questions. So I was living in Thailand last year. When I returned at the end of last year in December, there were no vaccine requirements at all because the vaccine was just being rolled out. So at that stage, it wasn't an issue with traveling. Obviously, as that's progressed into this year, some countries flat out require you, like if you need the vaccine or we're not supposedly not going to let you in, or we're going to give you trouble coming back in. Part of the reason I moved to Florida was because I realized that the United States is 50 states. Each state has its own laws about what it allows to happen. And a federal mandate is not a law. It's a mandate. Do this. There's no actual legality attached to it if you really want to dig into that. Ian Smith has explained that many times himself. So my long-term plan was, okay, I need to move to a red state where they're not going to obey the mandates at all, or they're going to resist them as much as possible, resisting any kind of legal onus that way, legal oppression. So if I fly out of Florida and go to foreign country and come back in, Florida's going to let me in. They might give me trouble, but they're going to let me in, being unvaccinated. If I was flying into, let's say, a state hypothetically like California, New York, where they want to follow the mandate, okay, now it's going to be more difficult. So you're going to see this sort of fractious division of people moving to places like I did where why did I come to Florida? Well, it's zero state income tax, the politics, but also the restrictions around vaccine law, they're probably not going to follow them. Then you have countries, let's say, like Mexico, Mexico doesn't give a shit if you come to Mexico, vaccinated or not, they'll let anybody in. They're not actually following anything. So then for the future, if you're going to travel, then you need to create like basically a network in your logistically like, okay, what countries can I go through where I'm not going to have a problem flying in and out of? And there's still loopholes for people, let's say, like flying from the UK into the United States, like I think there's still restrictions on some like EU countries. But if you're coming from Mexico and Latin American countries, there's no restrictions. So I think a lot of times we assign this mastermind like galaxy-brained IQ to supposedly the powers that be that, you know, the whole world, it's hyperorganized. There's like, there's must be this secret group that just runs this, they make everything run so smooth. It's not the world, the earth, it's 200 countries. Every single country has its own laws, every single country has its own systems, operations. Some of them cooperate with each other, definitely. A lot of them don't, and no one actually really knows what the fuck they're doing. So like, you'll have countries that they'll follow the United States, they'll do what the US does or try to, you'll have countries like some of the Nordic countries now where it's like, you know, we just got revolt restrictions. Yeah, not everywhere is taken over by this, you know, this dominant culture that we think exists. Some places are actually independent. So, you know, if you're going to like map out like, I'm going to travel, I'm going to live here, I'm going to live there, just start going like through the map, map by map, like, okay, this is where I can travel to, this is where I can travel not, this is where I'm going to live, this is where I'm not going to live. I've told so many people to move this past year, it's just like, it's like a tired thing now, like, oh my, I'm in New York and I'm going to lose my job. You know, when I told you last year to fucking move? Yeah, I know I did. I said that probably about 9,000 times on Twitter and in the group and in the other group and the DM sent. Did you move? No. Are you surprised? By what? You've watched it get worse and worse for a year straight and now you're surprised by that New York's run by a fucking bunch of lackeys like that, that's surprising to you that they're going to make your life shitty. So, be proactive. Yeah. So, thank you for your talk. You specifically mentioned Peter Tillich. Yeah. Who else do you follow and who has influenced you? What are the great thinkers that you think have influenced your line of thought and philosophies? Relevant to, you know, so the paradigm we just talked about. Peter Churchen, really excellent for just sort of like future casting, future prediction making. You know, Cleo Dynamics is like I said, this big field where you just pull data from everywhere else and you know, try to create this reality picture. Really excellent. There's a guy recently, he's on Twitter. My girlfriend actually knows him too. I'm on a butcher's last name. First name is Valogy. He works in the tech space. Very good futuristic thinker. You know, one of those guys sort of like, you know, you could say sort of like, you know, tech philosophy. Make this very good accurate prediction making or just, you know, theorizing about, you know, future of power, soft power, hard power, future of money, future technology. You know, tech tends to get like a bad rap and like the right spear overall, like fucking techies. But a lot of techies are actually like pretty kind of conservative or they're just, they're not, they're not liberal necessarily, to use that label. And because they literally work, you know, within these power structures and they've seen the, they've seen the abilities that they have, they've seen the reach that they have, they actually have a lot of good insights into how we can use technology to free yourself from the current system. So Valogy is a really good person. Nassim Telib, I read a lot of his work a few years back. It influenced a lot of my, a lot of my paradigms on this decision making in general. You know, like things that are considered like, you know, five years ago, 10 years ago, it would have been considered risky to start your own business, work online. You know, is online business even a thing? Like, now it sounds stupid. It's like, of course, you know, there's $20 that are all exchanged, you know, through the internet. You know, but 10 years ago, that wasn't even a thing. You know, being an influencer, what the fuck's that? Stupid. But look at the world that we live in now. If you are an influencer, if you are someone that is known, look how much power you have. It's insane. I find it insane. I can reach millions of people a day that's unheard of throughout human history, you know, 100 years ago, 5, 10 years ago, you know, for the entire, for the entire, all the epochs that record history to be a known person to have power, you had to be a king. You had to literally be like the ruler of the country for people to actually know your name. Now, you can be an individual online. You can speak, you can share your ideas, and your reach is literally infinite. There's no upper boundary to it. Talking about hyper-reality, René Girard, Mimetic Theory. I know I'm jumping around here a whole bunch, but Mimetic Theory, that was, I read the book Things Hidden Since the Beginning of the World a few years ago. Some of you, maybe one or a few of you, read my book review of that. But Mimetic Theory is sort of like, this is going off with the weeds, Mimetic Theory is essentially the scientific recognition that human behavior is always imitation. So like, I could go back through this whole speech I just gave and talk about imitation games. Why are we competing with each other? Well, because you're doing something and I want to do the same thing, so we have to keep copying each other. And that can spiral off, and there's many different versions of that. But René Girard, once you understand Mimetic Theory and you really start analyzing the world, you see like why certain things happen as they happen. Why do you react this way? Why does the left and right react that way? Why do you political ideologies arise where they're all sort of part of the same horseshoe, going to become very reflective of each other? Mimetic Theory, that was a big one. A guy who's not well known now, but was at one time, René Gwinnon. He's a French philosopher from the mid to late 1800s. He was actually sort of the predecessor to Nietzsche. And he's not known at all anymore. But he wrote a number of very good books, sort of predicting like the modern world and the loss of values. This was in like the 1850s, 1860s, 1870s. The separation of theology and divinity from materialism of science and the consequences. He was influential. Who else? That's philosophical. I would say Isaac Asimov. So Foundation Series, Psycho History. That was at the time that I read it when I was like preparing my early teens. That made a big impact on me. This idea that you can, again, viewing history in these very long term stages, having this very long game mindset and being able to take this sort of collective interdisciplinary account of all of it very holistically and then let's create, let's plan out 500 years into the future. That's actually do that. It's a really good thought experiment. I think Isaac Asimov, he detailed that whole process and created this very compelling narrative around it, as best as anyone ever has. So that's everybody that comes to mind. I'm sure there's more if I keep going. Abram, your question? Yeah. All right. So obviously we live in an age of information overload and you talked about multidisciplinary analysis and stuff. And I was just wondering if you had any thoughts on dealing with kind of filtering information these days? Because I feel like a lot of people, especially those prone to neurosis, can kind of get into these rabbit holes. And I'm sure almost everyone in here has been down a rabbit hole where you're just bogged down by information. And I think if you're going to be an influencer, you kind of have to have like systems in place to rapidly filter and not get overwhelmed. So I just wanted to hear your thoughts on kind of filtering these days. That's a good question. The popular framing for that is like how do you distinguish signal from noise? So a signal being something that carries relevant information, noise being just meaningless information, literal noise, cacophony. The information filter that I use or series of filters, actually some of the guys here will know this very specifically, it's just a series of questions. And there's about I think like five or six questions that I ask. So I'm assessing information. First thing I look at is does this information, does this affect my ability to make decisions in my day-to-day life? Like is this something I need to know where it's going to make me more situational aware? Or is this just bullshit? So like a lot of like online stories outrage like, oh that's stupid, fuck those people. That has no impact on my day-to-day life. Maybe it's useful to know if it's going to impact laws, if it's going to impact social policy, is it going to impact something specific to like the sphere of where I live or my ability to travel? Like okay, so if it affects my daily life, if it affects my mobility, if it affects my ability to, let's say, earn income, if it affects how I need to conduct myself online, it's censorship and serial related, if it affects maybe my family or my well-being, like yeah, I probably should pay attention to this. So like when the COVID situation was happening, like oh there's all these stories happening, there was a shitloads of stories. What was I trying to figure out through all the mess? I'm like okay, how are countries actually responding? Is it laws? Is it mandates? What are specific counties doing like where I live? Like that's why I was really paying attention to. Yeah the cases in the count number like yeah that goes up and down. Those statistics are going to be skewed and they're going to lie with statistics all the fucking time. But what's the actual policy that's going to be made off of that? Because that's what's going to affect you. Yeah that's what surprised a lot of people who are living in certain places and it's like oh my god this is cases and you know they're watching these guys talk about you know this is really bad, this is the most, this is the Delta Alpha mega omega fucking version that's 18, 90,000 percent more infectious than the other version. All right whatever, like what's you know what's the governor actually doing in regards to you know movement, mobility restrictions, what's the general trend that's going in? Because that's going to affect you if you live there. So it's really just floating down like what actually affects you and your ability to act. If it's something that just gets people angry for thinking people angry and you can't really distinguish anything other than just like emotional fury over it, it's probably pointless. And then this is when you rise a lot to the daily pop culture like Milu that goes on. It might be directionally useful to kind of know about it because you can kind of see where culture is going certainly. But most of the actual stories themselves it's just bullshit. It's just it's pointless stuff. It's people in comfortable situations finding things to complain about. So like what actually affects you taking action? Because that's important. You know if it doesn't affect that then hey this is something to know. Good question. Back from romance for questions it looks like guys. How you doing now Xander? You're good. My name's Xander and I'm a part of your group. Oh John, holy shit dude. Yeah how you doing? Fuck I've never seen you. Cool. Great, great talk. Thank you. So I recently saw your email about incline bench and how you have had to recalibrate. Maybe it's not quite the pinnacle it was before. And this led me to another kind of way of thinking that I've been kind of mulling through with the election, with all the craziness that's been going on. How do you handle or what is your thinking when your mind changes? When maybe you've made a mistake or maybe you know something that was you know a foundational belief changes. You know where where would I just wanted to hear your thinking on that you know where you would go with with you know going from here going to there. So my thinking process for for truth I mean this is actually like a question of like truth and what is good. I try to have as few beliefs as possible. I don't want to have things I like believe in like this is my opinion is why I think I'm like I want to follow what is true and accurate and what proves itself out in reality. So for something like incline bench I'm when I was promoting it when I'm you know I'm creating this meme even around it I'm operating under this paradigm of like I believe this is a good lift and I think it's true that it it does this for your body it builds the shoulders this way the chest you know so on and so forth. When I presented with contradictory information that shows actually not the case like all right like I thought it was I thought it was good I thought it was like the true lift let's say it was truthful what I was doing but can I create an argument for that can I logically explain my point can I can I objectively create some sort of logical proof you know to demonstrate the truth why I believe if I can't really do that that well okay then maybe this other thing's true so maybe I need to engage with the truth that way so I'm always trying to update this what I think about anything yeah but there are there are objective truths truths in life I mean this this is this becomes like a god knows this is a philosophical argument about truth Jesus you could argue about that for a long time maybe there's no such thing as objective truth maybe there's just only increasingly updated pictures of reality yeah maybe maybe there is objective truth and that truth is divine and it's with God okay like you can argue for that as well but when you're trying to change your mind you just you're always trying to orient yourself towards what is most true so having like an emotional attachment to like well I really believe this like it it hurts me bothers me to have to let it go why should it hurt you if it if it is if it is true the truth sets you free that you should now have more power into before it should be something you embrace you know so it doesn't like bother me to change my mind that way like there's like there's lots and lots and lots of things but of course my life I've changed my mind on I thought this at one time it seemed true I watched it work itself out in reality oh it wasn't you know this is like something for like politics like personal beliefs yeah I was raised like you know very like democrat you know it's very generically you know bluestate democrat I went to San Francisco lived in SF for a number of years lived in LA I saw certain beliefs that I have not work in theory so I guess they weren't as true as I thought they were okay so what actually does work you know what creates a good world now into the future you know those things that have worked since those things are axiomatic that work and they continue to work and they work today and they work tomorrow they were 20 years from now that's probably more true you know for something like incline bench like I think this is a great upper chest exercise I thought that so I did it and you know I got some muscle growth from it okay and then I was confronted with this argument well that's not actually true this works better oh shit okay yeah let me let me try that let me engage with the truth let me actually practice and apply it oh you know what decline dumbbell chest press and cable front delt press actually does work way better it definitely does okay so let's go with that that's more true now that doesn't negate something that still might be effective and true to a point but you know is it the highest form of truth no there's always you know there's always something more ascendant that way so I mean hopefully that answered the question but I mean the best thing I can tell you is like don't get don't get too attached to any one thing that you think you believe in is at some point you will be either you'll be proven wrong or it will be tested at such a level that you break from your resistance to letting go of it no problem that the question was about incline bench and that went off in so many directions wow uh kind of back I have a question um how do you overcome shadow banning okay that's that's a good question um so I'll go a little bit meta with this one it's a very common complaint I mean I see this and I got out of season so many accounts person ABC I'm shadow banned you know this is bullshit you know we're fucking being controlled this is our well-being it it is it definitely is like shadow banning sucks you know censorship censorship sucks like nobody's denying that there are social controls in place but if I have to go back 20 slides you honestly have to approach this like you're living in soviet Russia I'm dead serious then that's like an ugly thing to have to accept you have to approach that way when Russia was a communist country USSR did they still create art yeah Tarkovsky still created great cinema there were still incredible music that was created there are still great literature that was written there was still political and social talk that was contradictory to the social narrative but you have to you have to carefully navigate it I don't see any point when people start complaining about being shadow banned and it's like oh my content is being fucking whether locked or its reaches being minimized then find a way to be more creative and work around the censors there's lots of things that I don't directly talk about but if people are smart enough and they read through the lines you're like oh I know what this guy thinks I know what he's about I yeah I would love to say shit outright of like what I really think about you know let's say it's something controversial I'm not actually going to say what I think LGBTQ ICT plus plus whatever the hell it is now I would love to say what I really think but you know what that will get me kicked off the fucking air in it so goddamn fast and I'll never even look back on and what would be the point I'm gonna make myself what it's a digital martyr yeah they couldn't handle the fucking truth no the reality is that my viewpoint is not welcome so fuck off we don't need to have you on the platform okay so how do I navigate that well let me find ways to say what I think and feel without saying them directly let me hint at them yeah let me learn how to speak in code yeah for people that grew up in the USSR like they got very used to this where it's like you develop this very sort of dark sense of humor where you joke about things you can refer to it you can critique it indirectly but you never say it outright in its most plain form you have to find a way to be creative so for shadowbanning get creative you know fucking poking a fucking hornet's nest and then being surprised when you get stung by it that's not that's a stupid you knew that was going to happen find a way to slowly you know create some kindling around the hornet's nest and then gradually over time you're managing me hopefully to set on fire but you did it without the hornet's noticing you hopefully that analogy makes fucking sense probably not anyway so yeah 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 18 I think this is number four number four what did you think about this year's convention compared to years past it's definitely involved it's matured um like the male spear from when it started let's say like a decade and a half ago yeah I mean if we're being honest it started out this like guys that want to get girls didn't really start with that okay and that's you know that's a real problem for a lot of men but those guys older now you know that generation has they've aged like the quality the content has evolved it's moved beyond obviously just being about getting sex and you know this year was like it's gotten more mature this year is probably the most mature by far you know since I started attending this where the quality of the conversation it was it was political it was philosophical it was much more holistic religious as well it was yeah religious it really covered sort of the breadth of like the human experience the masculine experience so that was really cool like it was really cool to see like the conversation 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 since you know anytime you're a man and like you're addressing a group of women it's a different dynamic right you know 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 I'm gonna say like I wasn't sure if it was gonna be younger crowd of women was gonna be older women was it gonna be you know wasn't gonna be groupies was it gonna be women that just really want to hear what men have to say was this gonna be research in their part so yeah it was like a 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 uh since my audience is obviously predominantly males no kidding it's about 80 percent men 20 percent women but my overall audience is over a hundred thousand people so it's you know it's around 20 25 or 2000 women that they hear they listen to what I have to say and the questions I've gotten the last two years from from women aren't really not that dissimilar from men it's just from a you know feminine womanly you know lived experience of being a girl uh so I had created like a like an AMA sort of slideshow on instagram actually months months ago where I done an AMA just for my female followers and I asked them like yeah 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 then there's very little I think quality content for women yeah that caters to that sort of you know like actual personal development yeah a lot of it's just feel good rara 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 of the content that's produced by 21 no and a lot of it like I've 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 girl goddess you're special you're queen um yeah you you know just because you exist you deserve to be loved uh there's nothing very constructive about it it just 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 just live and you know magic happens for you right so yeah I created sort of like this series you know questions and answers about you know those kinds of topics and I just put that into the presentation I gave and uh it was about like a 20ish 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 uh but the fact that there were women here they actually were receptive to receptive to this listening to a man like wanting to get a male perspective that was very encouraging yeah many men in fact did you have interactions with women outside of outside of your talk do they ask you questions they come up and talk to you I did I did um yeah and they're yeah what I told them like the journey is not just somewhere for men yeah that's one of the things like when we talk about masculinity yeah obviously there's obvious differences in ones in the nature of energy the nature of masculinity and nature of being feminine their biological differences like no kidding like that's all you know that's that's radical yeah that's all very scientific honestly 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 ready you're already a woman and I tell this to the man 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 there's such thing as being a more effective man there's such thing as being better at being a man but you already born a man yeah it's not actually that of an itself a biological identity like you don't have to earn that related to title like you're a man you've x y chromosome sure your woman x x okay like you're a woman now are you the type of women that you'd like to be you know living your life that you want maybe not but the process of getting there is going to be very individual and yeah you can certainly pull from tradition 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 because we live in modern world and guess what like life costs money like what you're not in a position probably in your 20s where it's like wow 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 but the likelihood is you're gonna probably have to date vet be discerning get some experience this interacting with them that way and also you have to support yourself financially so like yeah you do actually need to get a job like no kidding do you it does that mean you devote your life to your career for the next 35 years maybe not maybe it's more temporal but you do need to work right that has to happen you can't blaze that's the odds are that you're gonna have to yeah everyone has to work in the society there's no such thing as you know disavowing that and thinking you're gonna get with not doing it um that's what I was telling you're 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 um 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 you know some life change 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 um 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 when what tools do we need to adopt uh 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 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 uh like you have to prepare when society is going through a period of decay and it's going through a transformative period transformative period you have to prepare for the long haul you know the long night whatever you want to call it this is going to be a multi decade experience yeah I use some examples from from history let's say like the ottoman empire ottoman empire lasted for 700 600 years yeah so the ottoman empire never went away today it's the modern state of turkey so if you if you there are people who have lived in turkey you know generationally for probably 100 times 100 years so they live through their family lineage live through the rise of the empire the static period decline the fall of it turkey still exists as a country yeah yeah countries don't go away um you know I tried to spell like these this very low resolution fallacies that people have it's like oh the unites it's going to collapse i'm like no it's not going to collapse country country is very rarely ever collapsed and completely disappear and not something of this scale no not that scale yeah russia was a communist country usasar right did that did that collapse economically yeah it claps does 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 to something else so the united states 50 years 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 yeah i have this running joke you know on twitter and there's platforms like quit your job look for yourself and i mean that because you need to have control over your earning power and you have more flexibility growing your own business working especially 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 as a refugee in your own land go united states 50 countries go to where you're treated best you know or you know go overseas if you if you want to do that there's something wrong and doing that people emigrate for you know very same reasons historically know what your relationships are yeah create a network have friends have family have an information network where you can use that to actively navigate the world um that it's like networked intelligence that's almost what twitter is now like i mean this seriously people don't take social media seriously but you should you can connect with people all over the world 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 to have very good predictive powers you know by way of intelligence by way of 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 that not to be in this place and to be in that place all that's possible for anybody um so i you know kind of covered that i threw out the idea of creating cooperative networks of using using uh cryptocurrency like you can create your own cooperative networks of basic economies so you can create your own mini economy amongst yourselves you can transact and bitcoin or whatever you know whatever different coins um you know 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 transparent network you can sort of bypass traditional banking if you in the future get debanked or let's see in the future your you know the interest rates go go negative and now your your dollars are actually losing dollars you know story 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 like you can't afford to be naive you know there's the government is not going to fix itself you're not no one's going to take care of you now your governor in a lot of states you know governor's fucked people over basically don't you afraid oh my god i can't believe this is happening well it's so you have to dispel with this 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 you can't just be sitting your ass and just in hope it stops because it's not do you think that's just to 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 okay no i mean this is this is being realistic it's being realistic um the united states is not in a rising ascending period that we that's pretty much immediately on that so okay does that mean it's like i said does that mean it's going to fall apart and it's going to be a civil war tomorrow and you know the electricity is going to disappear and go away no great down man it just means that you're going to you're going to live in a society where it's going through social decay it's no longer cohesive or parts of the country still very high functioning absolutely you can go to idaho oklahoma you go to florida life's life's normal like life is good life's great life's great yeah you would never know anything is wrong here unless maybe you go to the grocery store it's like well food's expensive inflation is happening okay people wearing masks yeah yeah there are some people still but life is going well you know so even the midst of like this sort of mega reaching you know narrative chaos like things still tend to operate um the us is not at some the us is not at the point of like let's say like the balkan wars um yeah yeah yeah you know or you know like that level of conflict where like it just you know things literally fall apart and you're dealing with a social breakdown of like this war and rape and like absolutely you know hell on earth we're not there and i don't know if people will even ever get there not widespread no but you will have to deal with government tyranny you will have to deal with federal incompetence okay so does that mean everything no i would consider this time period in history because things are falling apart opportunity is infinite it's actually explosive yeah i've been thrown says as well yeah you have all the tools 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 curate your intelligent intelligence and information sources you have the ability to reach people you have the ability to do business you can do anything you want yeah and the barriers to education for anything are like they're not they're not existent zero you want to learn something you want to get in touch with somebody you can do that yeah i'm astounded you know from people using you know like twitter and linkedin especially like you can get in touch with the world's experts and so many different subjects and actually have a conversation with them you know through messages and you know learn from them directly i mean that that's just unprecedented you know the flow of information and the control of our information our ability to you know leverage our existence you know against the you know the vast social order like it's never been like that in human history ever you know hundred for most human history hundred years ago even 20 years ago to be a known person to the idea of like being a known person creating network you're building your own kind of world how would you have done that calling people on the phone you know sending sending emails right like that's just that was not an idea and the social consciousness at all that was even possible today anyone can do that people are doing the people are doing by the thousands every day because they have the tools you know and some of them rise how powerful this is so i mean that like i'm very optimistic about like i just find that extraordinary you know the social decay breakdown to solution like you do have to accept a certain point that not every epoch in human history is wonderful and good and you know as i said ascending like yeah sometimes things are rough i you can compare maybe to living through the united states in like 1930s it's like wow this is really shitty right now like like we perhaps will get better it does it did get better obviously but yeah it was a rough decade it was fair okay 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 chastin yeah and some of those guys were here what was it like meeting the guys from chastin that was really fucking cool i'd actually did not know they were gonna show up and in the way they basically i was talking the last night they're like yeah we we thought we just kind of surprised you who are the guys that were here um robert was here devin was here kj was here kj was here kilo was here like shon shon was here yeah quite a few actually yeah um and that was just really cool um and yeah like i had very personal conversations with all of them and thanking me like yeah thank you for changing my life about that like i mean you did that like to thank you um but yeah it was very gratifying like yeah when i started that group you know over a year ago it started sort of like a fitness group and some guys signed up that i just you know they liked me they liked me it's like oh it's a cool guy okay um it really demonstrated me like the power of creating like a network of friends and you know men you know it's a very appreciate things save like iron does sharpen iron if you get men together and you give them a common cause and orientation to improve themselves and better themselves and develop themselves like you do extraordinary things you know the most powerful force in the world is a group of men working together you know having those kinds of relationships so and this is it's only been like a year so i mentioned a few years from now like they're gonna do we're gonna 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 i mean as the figure of speech you know yes you did that but as the figure of speech like thank you for having a positive impact on my existence yeah but did it hit different to meet the men in person that spent over a year with like chatting daily hunt sometimes hundreds of messages a day did it hit a little different it did it did yeah like i mean i i get messages all the time from guys for the they got a program or multiple programs and follow me a while like just it's it's in the dms right like oh that thanks so much dude like i'm proud of you that's cool but when you see a guy in person you're like wow like this really like change their soul change their whole trajectory their life okay so you've just come from the gym yeah obviously very i'm 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 our friend we trained shoulders yeah yeah what role does fitness play in the life of a man fitness can be everything i'm like i mean like i it's almost like a running joke at this point like i you've probably say this like if i have to tell you that like you need to be strong as a man like you're not gonna make it like you're not like yeah no it's just it's a fundamental aspect of male reality it's it's it is the most distinct characteristic of masculinity masculine energy yang energy that strength is what defines you you know hardness power you know kinetic force like that's a masculine everybody knows that's a mask like we you know men both men and women intuitively when we see that we witnesses when we witness it that's powerful like that that is what a man is is so you have to train that you have to embody it how do you embody it lift weights you do combat sports you do something that requires you to physically apply yourself and apply your will to reality you know like one of the ways i frame the fundamental difference between feminine and masculine existence men move the world by force you know by by really by direct action man of action women will the world to move they do it by soft power by persuasion you know by enticement it's very it'd be very disparate for a woman to try to very you know connectly force things to happen like that's masculine energy you know same thing vice versa you know for a man to you know try to be persuasive and use soft power that way you can but like it's very Machiavellian yeah and within obviously like within both masculine feminine like you can do both sure of course you know a lot of what soft power is in like the world of you know like the sort of the shadow world that exists between the surface you know beyond like the pretense of what is seen is it's manipulation you know it's a Machiavellian manipulation it's building relationships it's knowing how to phrase things and use people's emotions and you know formal alliances and it's it's men and men obviously do that you know but there's there's a sort of feminine dynamic to it and vice versa like a lot of times for women to be effective in the world today they have to be more masculine that'd be more direct but speaking about the characteristics on a very just like pure you know unmixed you know homogenous level like yeah strength is masculinity masculine use strength those things are operate on a feedback loop it's virtuous cycle yeah so you gotta work out you gotta lift weights you know like I always say that jokingly but seriously like what do I do like what's my business model like well I tell you guys lift weights and that that changes the whole world it does yeah I mean it's been very successful I mean Fight Club physique you know yeah just talk a bit about that because you know I think we spoken about it before like that was a huge thing during COVID for a lot of men yeah like I mean it was very derivative obviously you know Fight Club physique a lot of guys have seen that movie but yeah I realized as lockdowns happen I was like thinking about like okay my business like people are gonna work training at home like all right well this is an opportunity for yourself this year to establish the habit of fitness and health to train to get physically in shape and as I kind of talk about in the book like you have to this dispense of all the fuckery it's like you're gonna see you're gonna there's gonna be a lot of things in the news they're gonna anger you and upset you and you're gonna argue about it and this is gonna feel so important none of it means shit if you're a fat piece of shit no one no one cares what you think you're slothinly and you got 20 body fat BMI 35 like look at yourself like what is there value to respect nothing so do the push-ups do do the workouts start training and you know maybe you're from now like now you're a man with your man of action your man of intention like okay you have you know and you have the means now to actually you know 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 as 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 and we set that up we set it out this is not me being an asshole on purpose it's not me being an idiot on purpose yeah so so we live in this this modern discourse this modern social discourse yeah what we call like you know global homo culture which to clarify for a lot of people like what does that mean it's it's not global homo culture is not about homosexuality yes it refers to global homogene so everything is the same everything has to be the same everywhere everybody has to think the same and agree the same and it's shared by us the thoughts 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 some podcasts the last so many years of like have you put anything on a billboard who would it be like there's some this universal message that you're going to deliver to people and because you are just so of god that truly you must have profound thoughts you know head and mind your soul chat you know share with me like what you would say to people the word of chat Jesus yeah and I think it's this contrite bullshit you know human beings are diverse the world is diverse there's many civilizations there's infinite kinds of people there are messages that are you know divine and that they are universal you know in regards to treating people well respecting others you know people want to love yeah absolutely is there a message that you could put on a a billboard you know a commercial billboard and then like that would inspire great change not really lift weights lift weights yeah yeah unfuck yourself oh that's right it's very very pithy it's mostly pithy and quotable and like you're going to put that in your bio your linkedin bio it's like I hate all that fuckery so no I wouldn't I wouldn't put anything on a billboard where can people go to learn more about you what you do um so I have a newsletter that I've operated on for five years and the newsletters were actually hopefully give the impression that I'm an intelligent person so it's newsletter it's e-mail obviously but that's where I actually do like long form discourses missives on you know a variety of subjects both you know fitness and philosophical and intellectual political so and so forth obviously I have my twitter account you know AJA, I'm school Cortez, Instagram I use Instagram a lot now for sort of like photo essays which is really cool I think Instagram Instagram's an incredible art medium they don't think a lot of people really appreciate it for that but it is uh yeah so newsletter you know Instagram you know Twitter and then my DMs honestly are always open as well like I've never actually closed them so maybe once in a message you'll probably hear back yeah one of the speakers I think was Socrates spoke very highly of your newsletter it's a great newsletter yeah yeah no it's a pretty diverse subject matter um I mean if I was to recreate newsletters today it'd probably be on the substack yeah I charge for it but it's free yeah and that's it's the best place to reach me as well since I always check those emails corresponding people working people sign up for that through your twitter account or for yeah through twitter account uh through this website Cortez Cortez dot site okay very simple perfect thank you Alexander awesome thanks well good talking to you good talking to you this is Will Spencer with the Renaissance of Men here with the new 21 Report and Alexander Juan Antonio Cortez thanks so much thank you