And howdy fam, Anthony Johnston here today, founder of 21 convention, 22 convention, 21 university and co-founder and CEO of the Redman Group. Here with episode 144 of the Redman Group with special in-house episode live, right, with Mr. Will Spencer from the Renaissance of Men. He's been doing a, working on a big project around the United States and Florida, especially recently, past week or so. He's an interesting guy. I met him first time last year at 21 convention, 21 summit, 2020, during the peak, Cuffid hysteria. I got to know him a little bit at the event, got to know a lot of our speakers and we've become kind of distant friends since then through the internet and the wonder of technology and watching him on Twitter and his podcast, all kinds of things. Anyway, I appreciate you coming out, Will, big time. Thanks, Anthony, this is great. Yeah, man. So first things first, for the guys who don't know you, like I've been telling them here, I got to know you a little bit. Yeah. The story last year at 21, we had maybe a long conversation in the hallway, one point, like an hour. But for the guys who don't know you, like, who are you, what are you about and what's up with the Renaissance of Men podcast that you got going months ago at this point? Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. I'll sort of, I'll just start by telling my story about how I discovered you in the Manisphere. And so that'll feed into the Renaissance of Men. So in 2006, I lost my mother. She ended her own life, unfortunately. And so I was in a place where I had to sort of, my parents were divorced at the time. My grandmother died of grief, essentially six months later. And yeah, it was really intense. I was in the room when she passed as well. And as I said, my parents were divorced and my family kind of broke apart. My aunts were busy taking care of my grandma's affairs. So it was basically on me to pick up the pieces from my mom's life. And so, which I did successfully, but I was carrying a lot of grief. And there was something missing inside myself. And over time, I came to realize that I didn't really know what it meant to be a man. My dad was and still is a successful lawyer. He was a pilot in the Air Force. But I never really got those lessons passed down to me. Which is true for many men in my generation as well. You were raised predominantly by your mother, like a single mother? No, my parents were together. They were married all during the time I was home. And they got divorced when I went off to college. But yes, my dad was working very hard to provide a very nice life for me and my family. And my mother did primarily raise me. And she was a lovely woman, I'm very grateful. But she had some, I'll say, mental challenges, let's say. And she essentially made me her son-husband. And so my dad wasn't necessarily aware that he needed to step in and kind of intercept that. And I think that there are many men who just aren't. They don't know how to recognize those signs when they're happening. So I was essentially raised by my mother for the most part. And so in that circumstance, I feel like there were some lessons that just weren't passed to me about manhood and masculinity, which is not uncommon these days. So my mom had passed and I'm carrying all this grief and a number of years after that, I discovered this organization called the Mankind Project and what they call the New Warrior Training Adventure. It was a 40-hour men's initiation. And I remember hearing about it from some distant acquaintance on Facebook. Like he just posted one afternoon, today I begin my new warrior training adventure. That's all he said. This is early 2000s, early 2010s? This is early 2010s, yeah, 2013. It might have been actually 2012 around there. And I said, that's exactly the sort of thing that I would do.  And so I signed up for it and I went and it's a weekend men's initiation. It was a very powerful experience for me growing up as sort of a softer kind of boy. Didn't really have much edge, didn't really have much fire. And that initiation helped me discover that in myself. And after that, I got into men's groups, I went into therapy, and I'm really good with talk therapy. I know talk therapy is a challenging subject for many men. There's a lot of questions around it. And there are a lot of really like garbage therapists around there, around as well. To keep it PC. Yeah, look, I know guys who have been in therapy for years, seeing multiple times a week. And I think that's criminal. Like you should be making progress every week. And many therapists don't really care for men very much either. They don't know much about men. They treat men like they're broken women. And I was very fortunate to have found my therapist through a men's group related to the mankind project. So you tell me the guys like Sean Smith and Ken Curry are not normal in therapy? These are the outliers? They are the outliers, which is really sad. Which is, it's really sad because. The rebels really. They are very much so. I mean, standing up to the establishment of the American Psychological Association is a big thing to do. As we all know, as men these days, speaking out for the things that we believe in comes with costs, especially professionally. And these men are blazing a trail. Because I think that there's wonderful possibility for many men in the profession of therapy and psychotherapy and psychology. It just betrays men in many cases. I got very lucky. I got very lucky to find a therapist who was on my side and helped me do what I needed to do. And between that and men's groups, within a couple of years, I had completely turned myself around as a man. And I've seen a, maybe I'll show it in the video, there's a photo of you, like a before and after basically. It's pretty startling. You're stunning.  I'm really proud of that photo. That was me, the photo on the left. And I'll send it to you. But photo on left was me in 2012. And the photo of me on the right was me eight years later, almost to the day in 2020. And so that's a result of the journey of transformation that I went on specifically, exclusively through working this world of men. Reading the books, following the instructions, working with male therapists, going to various healing modalities and essentially turning myself out inside out to empty out all the junk and find out who was left. And this is the man who was left. And that's where the renaissance of men came from. Yeah, it's pretty impressive the journey of being on men. Even again, that photo, it's like, it's so obvious that you're a different man. Not just like, you didn't just lose some weight or something, like you're just, in every little detail of the photo, you're just fundamentally different is what it looks like to me. Just at a glance. Nevermind, talking to you, getting to know you and stuff. I didn't know you back then, obviously, but I haven't gotten to know you since then. Yeah, that's impressive, man. So how do you exactly, so the manuscripts I've viewed, and we've talked about this, it's kind of like these rings, these outer rings, and then inner rings, and more inner rings, take it to like a core. And I do view the mankind project maybe distantly as part of the manuscript on the periphery somehow. Sure, yeah. We've talked about some issues with that too, because I have some, in my view, there are some limitations as to who could be like man-sphere and who could not. Right. If they're genuinely four men, or are they four men for something else? Right. For society, or for women, or whatever excuse people want to make of it. What is the vision of men that some of these organizations are trying to make men into? Yeah, so there's like a little bit of a litmus test to be a man-sphere or not. But what eventually led you though to the man-sphere where we both agree like it is man-sphere and not something distantly related? Like what was the connection there to finding 21 in the man-sphere? So I, as I said, I went through the mankind project started with men's groups and a therapist and I liberated myself to fulfill my lifelong dream of traveling the world, which I'd saved for many years to be able to do. So I was traveling through 2016 and 2017 and I got into the 2018. And I think what happened first is I was looking for books about masculinity and I came across and introduced 31 Days to Masculinity and I did part of that program when I was living in New Zealand at the time very briefly. And I'm not sure the magic that happened from that but I liked that program. And you know how Amazon sometimes talks to YouTube, sometimes talks to Twitter and we can't say how it all gets around, but it does. I remember seeing Richard Cooper's 21 talk Be Better and I watched that talk and I'll never forget I watched that talk and I wrote in my journal at the time that today feels really important because I knew that I had discovered something that was gonna change my life. I could feel it, I could really feel it. And thank you by the way for hosting the 21 convention and I'm just one of the many men whose lives you've affected and thank you. And that talk, because he was speaking the language of inner work that I was familiar with but that he was holding and caring himself like the kind of man I'd never seen in the world of inner work, I had discovered the whole other half of the equation which rich in body at the time. And so that was my deep dive into the manosphere properly. It's almost like you put your toes in this giant lake of masculinity or a manosphere. Yes, exactly, exactly. And I allowed myself to go into that world and be challenged by it. I discovered Jack Donovan and Elliot Hulls and all the speakers at 2010 or Guzzi. And I think I must have, I sorted by most popular videos on the 21 Studios channel and I just watched all the top 10 of them and I discovered, well, I discovered this whole new world that was so interesting to me and that was when I discovered the manosphere properly. Yeah, I really appreciate that, man. It's interesting to hear that. This isn't the first time I've heard that but it's one of the first times I've heard it in person this detailed and intricate and it makes me proud to have done, because there must be, and I know there's thousands if not millions of other men who've done something inagulous or similar to inagulous for the start word. Analogous. Yeah, I would say it, to what you did. And it's pretty cool. I mean, you found a channel, you found a speech, you know, a specific speaker, but it opened your eyes to a whole world that exists. It's not even just 21 Convention and Tony Studios, obviously. It's like this whole interconnected series of podcasts and events and speakers and books and like it's a million different things. It's hard to even keep track of sometimes. It's massive, it's massive. And I think the thing that affected me the most was to see and hear and feel the presence of men who were so deeply congruent.  It's like this is a man who is who he says he is. And so few, there are no models for good fathers in popular culture, like put on the TV, watch a movie. You're not gonna find anyone who comes close. And this was in the days really before Jordan Peterson. He held that for a lot of men, you know. Neil deGrasse Tyson kind of was that a little bit years ago. I felt that Steph Curry, the basketball player was- A bit of a tangent, something I think it'll really shock you, maybe. You'll see, but I've discovered recently, in the positive sense that the original Adam's Family show, like the 60s or whatever, Black and White, it's actually really positive like family values in it. It's totally like you would never, I never watched any of it. I saw the movies in the 90s. But those are remakes of different actors. The actual original variation of the shows, it's really impressive. And it's the exact opposite of what you see today. All these, the Homer Simpsons, the modern family, all these fat losers, and they had dad buys, and Vader schlubs. So it just comes to mind, but if you ever get a chance to check that out on the Amazon Hazard or something, it just absolutely impresses you.  The Adam's Family have all things. That actually makes a lot of sense because back then family values were things that just weren't really questioned. And I don't think I ever really watched the show. I don't remember the names of the characters, but I remember the husband was very debonair and dashing and had sort of a Latin kind of flavor and his wife was very, very feminine and very mysterious and spooky. And the core of that show was the romance between the two of them. They were both very different and both equally, I guess you might say powerful, but very complimentary in raising the sort of outsider family. And now that I think about it, yeah, that would be super family values. All the, basically the dark humor or the satirical elements or just the quirky weird horror show stuff, that's all kind of a backdrop to family values and stuff that are basically really empowered or ingrained into it. I don't know, reading about this too. And I wasn't learning when to figure this out. People are like, yeah, it's like really super positive compared to the crap we see today. Oh, it's crazy. And the Cosby show as well was like that and Silver Spoons, you know? And now you can't watch a movie or put on a TV show without some very overt attack on the family. There's one that might be worthwhile. I did see a couple of episodes with Tim Allen, last man standing. Oh yeah, for sure. Yeah. And that's some sort of, it even got canceled temporarily. Oh, really? Yeah, like a year or two ago. Yeah. I got put back on eventually another channel. Yeah, is it because he was outspoken politically? Yeah, I think it was some politically, or some kind of like that. You don't get to have wrong opinions. Yeah. And it was funny because the ratings on it were so high and they still canceled it. So you know, there's some fuckery going on. Like why would you cancel a high rated show that they didn't want to cancel the actors and stuff? Yeah, exactly. It was like, well, go broke. It's like, there's a gravity to that. It's like, no, we can't help ourselves kaboom. There goes your property. Yeah. It's incredible. Garbage, garbage. So that's how you found the Manisfree and you found 21 Convention and 21 Studios. Before we move on, it sounds to me, well, I do want to get in the hair thing a little bit. Yeah, sure. We'll see if we can get into that. The lack thereof. Yeah. Well, talking about the hair.  Yeah. That's brutal, man.  Neither one of them killed themselves. But talking about the hair thing and then if you can segue it into how you've utilized from the mankind project to the hemisphere to heal your masculinity. Sure. Which seems to be the undercurrent of what you've been doing for a long time now. Yeah, happy to. So my hair started falling out between when I was 17 years old between my junior and senior year in college. And I didn't realize it until a year later really, but that year, my senior year, one of the school bullies walked up to me and said, you were ceding hairline motherfucker. Like he said that to me and it didn't land. I was like, what kind of insult is that? Okay. And then it wasn't until the summer between my senior year and my freshman year in college where my bathroom had a skylight in it and there was light reflecting off the top of my head and I could see it in the mirror. I was like, that's unusual. I've never been able to see my scalp before. So I went to my hairdresser barber or whatever and I said, I think I'm losing my hair. And I remember him making eye contact with me in the mirror. So I'm looking in the mirror, he's looking at me. He's like, yeah. At 17. I was 18 at that point. Yeah. Well, it's brutal. It was brutal. Well, the thing was, I had worked really hard to get into Stanford University, which I'm very proud of. I had spent all grade school, my high school, just working my whole senior year. I was the yearbook editor. I was down in the yearbook office working and on the weekends I'd go there on Saturday morning and I'd come out and it'd be Saturday evening. I'd go down before the sun came up because it was in the basement and I'd come out after the sun had set. So it was like a full day of darkness for me. I loved it.   It hit me like a bomb. It hit me like a bomb. And one of the things I don't think is really well talked about in this sphere is what baldness does to men. And in a perverse way, I'm actually kind of glad it happened to me when I was 17 because at least I got some time to work with it. I can imagine that you're a guy in your late 20s or early 30s and you're just kind of coming into some sort of economic and social power, you know, and it's like, boom. And it's just how devastating. Kind of in the knees, basically. Exactly, exactly. Cause there's a real feeling. I mean, I even felt that there was a real loss of feeling of a loss of reality. I didn't have a great, my dad and I have a great relationship now, but I didn't have a good relationship with him then. And I didn't want to look like my dad. It's like, I didn't, I really didn't handle it all. This was my freshman year in college. This was supposed to be my big victory. It was like cutting me off on the knees. It was brutal. It was super brutal.  That's right. You hit basically legal adult age, dead, gone. Yeah, exactly. So you had a jumpstart on, I see what you're saying. Yeah, I mean, there's like, you can make a case for either one, right? But I never got to grow my hair out. I never got to, you know, dye my hair blue. Beer game strong, doing well. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, this was, this was what, this was 2016 when I started growing this. So yeah, so I just decided to give it a shot.  And it's like, oh, this is kind of awesome. So I'm enjoying it. Dennis, yeah. So we were talking a minute ago about healing your masculinity. Is that a way you've interpreted your journey from the mankind project into the atmosphere? You feel it's happened to you over time and like, how's that been looking for you? Oh, it's, I mean, through the mankind project and really the myth of poetic man's movement, which was, which started in the 1980s. It's the movement that the mankind project grew out of. So the myth of poetic man's movement is where the book Iron John by Robert Bly came from. Of course, everyone knows the king, warrior, magician, lover archetypes, those were part of the myth of poetic man's movement. And the myth of poetic movement, what it was really good at was introducing men to their inner emotional lives. And Robert Bly talks about this, that men access their inner emotional life through grief, through the experience of grief. It's a really interesting point because when you look at those two photos of me, side by side, the 2012 and 2020 photos that we mentioned earlier, the guy on the left was absolutely full of grief. But you understand, I lost my mom my grandmother and my childhood. I needed to grieve all of that. And it was very necessary for me to go through that process for me that manifested in talk therapy because I'm good at talking. So it's easy for me to get at my emotional self through talking. That's not necessarily true for other men, it works for me. But by through talking and going into that process, I was able to empty myself out of all the grief and finally live and stand within my own emotional self in the way that I had always wanted to, stably, very stably. Where the mythopoetic men's movement stops though, is it doesn't know what to do once a man has emptied himself out from grief. And so there are many groups out there like sacred sons and every man and many therapists as well I think and men's groups and stuff like that that are very good at getting men to encounter their inner emotional realities which can be very challenging for men. But then because they exist within kind of a feminist mindset, they get men only so far to where they can't necessarily be a threat to women. Truly powerful men come across as a threat to women. And that's not a bad thing. And just in general, this reminds me of Jordan Peterson talks about this, right? Yes. If you're not a threat to anyone or if you're not, there's a weakness to it if you don't have that edge to you. That's right, yeah. Like if a harmless man is not a good man, only a dangerous man who has it under control is a good man. Yeah, that's how Jordan puts it, yeah. Yeah, that's classic Jordan Peterson. There's another thing that he says that a woman can't necessarily tell the difference between a competent man and a tyrant. They look kind of the same. I love that quote because as a man rises in his competency to a woman who maybe isn't herself integrated, she could feel potentially very threatened by that. And so the myth of poetic men's movement and many of the men's groups that I was talking about, they get men up to a point of, we'll say personal empowerment, but not to a point where any woman would potentially feel threatened by him. So they kind of, so that's great for what it is, but then it can't take men the rest of the way. And that's where the things that you do and the things that many men in the Manisphere do is it takes them the rest of the way into powerful, confident, competent men. You know, in the Manisphere we talk about, sometimes some people will talk about killing the beta and killing the beta. Yeah. And these guys sounds like they're making, whether or not, kill the beta and then build the alpha. And I think in the Manisphere, number one, there's not enough build the alpha, build the alpha talk and discussion and thrust. But it also sounds like, yeah, these guys are just kind of making betas better at being beta, which is not rising past that threshold point that I hear you talking about, which makes healthy relationships a little bit, I think, impossible. Because you're never going to inspire any kind of desire or lust from them, which is, I think, part of being men, part of being a natural, healthy, masculine alpha male. I agree. A red poo alpha male. No, you're absolutely right. And one of the things in my experience that these groups don't do is they don't talk about women. You're actually not allowed to talk about women. You can, yeah, it's sort of like, well, we don't really talk about that. We focus on men's issues. And I get why they do it, because it can be controversial, but really the net effect and the problem that I have with it is that it comes off as not wanting to upset mommy. We'll build the better beta. Wait, isn't this what Iron John is?   Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. But it doesn't really, it doesn't really, where the mythopoetic men's movement stopped, because they didn't know. Like we have the benefit of additional 30 years of hindsight to see the excesses of feminism and the family, men, women, children. I'm on the same page. I don't mean to make fun of these guys. Yeah, I know. These days, sure. Looking back on them now, this is like proto-menispheres, I see. Proto-men. Yeah, exactly. It's the beginning of the Renaissance. That's where it came from. I don't think the guys of those days were really prepared for the widespread societal shaming campaign that was gonna be waged against them. There's that image of drumming naked in the woods, which came out of the mythopoetic men's movement. And that was used to so effectively shame men, the second they started gathering and started trying to figure out like, who are we as men? Bam, just came right after them.  I only know some folks like that. Yeah, exactly. Mocking them essentially. And I don't know that the guys of those days were really prepared for it. They thought, and they thought what they were doing was good and innocent and not harmless in that way, but harmless. Like, what are we doing? We're men gathering. And the hammer came down on them and they had to sort of go underground. All that reminds me of Warren Farrell getting booted out of feminist groups were actually for promoting real equality. Yeah. And like, oh, that's too much quality. Yeah, exactly.  Yeah, exactly. Well, he tells that story so beautifully and as part of the project that you referenced, I spoke to him a couple of months ago. And he was saying that he was on the board of the National Organization of Women. Warren's a lovely man, by the way.  It's just a real blessing. He was saying that he was supporting the feminist causes and at the time in the 60s, I think, that was the edge. That was like the leading edge of culture. And so naturally, he was attracted to that, which is great because he's an incredibly sharp, very wise, very hardworking man, very incredibly insensitive mind. But then he started seeing the effects that divorce was having on kids from broken homes, essentially. And so he went to the board of the National Organization of Women and said, hey, this divorce thing, women being freed, divorced their husbands is great and all, but it's kind of having these really terrible effects on the next generation of kids. Maybe we should pull back a little bit on that for the good of the kids. And then the board came back to him and said, no, our base won't tolerate that. Unrestricted divorce.  Yeah, essentially. Essentially, that's what happened. Yeah, so this is the thing is that I can understand at the time, you could be like, yeah, women's liberation from men, women's independence, fine. We have the benefit of hindsight, but at the time it was really obvious. These are the negative effects that this is having. We need to pull back for the good of kids. And the women of the National Organization of Women, the board were like, no, we will not pull back on women's divorce even for the benefit of kids. That was the hard line at the time. And Warren was a man of exceptional courage because he said, okay.  Absolutely is. Like that's just beyond that brutal, brutal. It's shocking. It's shocking because you would think that a woman's core instinct would be to naturally protect her children from herself, but to somehow propagate the idea that you should prioritize yourself over your own children. And that's unthinkable. This is genetically irrational is what it sounds like. It is. It's species suicide. Yes, for sure. And it's all driven by this feeling of resentment. Resentment, as Jack Donovan speaks about. Resentment. Resentment. Yeah, exactly. He has all these 10,000 words that are actually useful. Absolutely. And artistic. Yes. He's got his own way of doing things which is so incredibly inspiring. The way of Jack Donovan. Exactly. That'll be his biography, the way of men and the way of Jack Donovan. Well, let's talk about Jack Donovan. So when did you find his work? You mentioned maybe around the time of 21 convention you found it. Something like that. I think I would have read his book. I think I encountered his work before I read his book. And so I probably read his book sometime in maybe 2019, 2018, something like that. And I was just so blown away by the way of men to read him lay it out. He just laid it out like, yes, didn't have to be a big, thick, hardcover thing. It's just like a slim, well-designed, well-written volume that just hits you right in the chest. And that book is legendary for a reason. Yeah. So what are the ways that his work is influenced to tactical virtues, tribal thing, anything else? I really like, I like a number of different things from his work. I like obviously the tactical virtues because that's a really good barometer to explain to men who don't necessarily get masculinity that there is something fundamentally different between men and women. It's that men throughout all of history have been required if they want to succeed as being men to display strength, courage, mastery, and honor in those four. There are lots of ways to be a good man that change based on the society, right? But to be good at being a man, you have to body those four characteristics and that's universal. And men select from the best of each other based on who most embodies those virtues. Now you just mentioned these are universal too. And I think it's really important for the audience to understand like, you mean that, and so does Jack. And I think the right, whether you're black, white, Italian, Cuban, Asian, like these are for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. These are accepted as masculine and vitally important to the survival of your family, your tribe, your culture, your nation, blah, blah, blah. That's right. There's never been a culture, and I think Jack says this, there's never been a culture in history that has not required men to be strong, courageous, skillful, masterful, and honorable. Until now. Until now. Well, I mean, but even now, well, even that I think it's a charade because this culture very much requires men to be all those four things. Like, where does our oil come from? You know, like there aren't beta males on the oil rig. You know. It's women. It's women doing it. Women work on the garden sanitation line and the sewers, yeah. Yeah, for sure. Well, man, it's men on the front lines. You know, one of the things I try to, I try to explain to people is that our civilization is built on the broken bodies, blood and bones of men, billions of men, nameless men. We just can't see it. And so it's one of the things that we all kind of take for granted as being men that we're essentially disposable. We know that on a genetic level because generations have been disposed of before us. It's a very powerful thing to sit with and that Warren Farrell gets into in his book, The Myth of Male Power. But there's no culture in history, even this one that doesn't require that of men, it just pretends those men don't exist. And it shames them and tries to push them out of the spotlight so they don't speak up for themselves. And the result is this kind of delusional clon world. That's right. Where masculinity is supposed to not matter. You're not even a man. There's no such thing as men anyway. There's no such thing as gender. There's 500 genders. Yeah. Well, Roman McClay's book, Sanction, which you have down there, lays out very clearly like these are the demands of a true labor alpha male and the struggles that the character deals with in that book that are written about so beautifully depicts that in a way that me growing up, college boy, educated, could never experience, but I could viscerally connect with it. It's like, okay, I get it.  And meanwhile, you have the men who are divided from their masculinity. Some men, they have it and they don't really know how to use it productively. And other men like me growing up don't even know they have it. And so I hope that these two men start talking to each other, which is one of the powers of YouTube as a platform, as it gives men the opportunity to learn from each other in a way they never have before. Pitch into the Red Man Group. Donate now. Help us keep talking. I don't want to. Thanks guys for watching, hit the like button. Let's shift into women a little bit. You mentioned earlier that these groups didn't even want to talk about women, which is so bizarre to me. As if almost every man on the planet is heterosexual, not literally all, but most by far, it's how the species continues, heterosexuality.  Like from relationship with your mother to women, siblings, to a wife, girlfriend, children, daughters, like women are, it's the other half of the star species. Duh. But even from your perspective of having worked, seeing the manosphere and the proto-manosphere and not having your own podcasts and doing all the projects you work on and stuff, what do you see, trying to figure out a word of the question, we don't see that happening for women is where my head goes to, right? We don't really see, now I think we're beginning to see that of make women great again, right? I've even seen a model that came out in 2018 where they were saying that the manosphere is leading to a masculine rebirth, which will lead to a feminine rebirth as an offshoot and then a civilizational rebirth if it doesn't fucking collapse, or maybe collapse is included, who knows? But do you see, what do you see there? Like why aren't women having a rebirth, right? Until maybe now with the manosphere kickstarting it? I mean, it's frustrating to see that. I think they are, I think they are very much. This is how I describe the situation of modern men. You have sort of the alpha and the beta. You have the strong man with an edge who maybe emotionally say brittle, right? There's something to the mask of masculinity argument. They go, the feminists go way too far with that, but there is something to that. We can all think of a man who's very, very tough outwardly and you can tell that there's something unintegrated inside him that's really eating at him. He's emotionally constipated. Yeah, exactly, exactly right. Yeah, and so then. I've had some amount of emotional healing to do. Yeah, of course, yeah, and it shows because we can have this conversation. And so I think that there's a lot to that. The best benefit of inner work is to be able to engage fully with the moment as it is and not constantly be churning in your head, you know what I mean? And so men who have done that work, they have whatever happens to their life in terms of their story or their fulfillment or purpose, there's just such a better enjoyment of the moment. Can always tell when a man has done that as you have.  Connoisseur of speakers in the moment. Exactly. So you have these men that are emotionally constipated, right? That's one side of a man. An emotionally illiterate is how Richard Grennan, a buddy of mine, would put it. They just don't even know how they feel at all, even if they try. That's right, yeah, some men they just can't get there. And some of those men can be very strong and very capable and maybe even be adaptive for them to be like that, but they are emotionally illiterate. On the other hand, you have men who have some amount of emotional diarrhea.    It's like there's more to being emotional on a man than crying indefinitely. Yes, absolutely. That's a necessary skill to learn, but with like the mankind project, that's not the end of the road. So if we look at those two kinds of men, the emotionally over expressive man, overly literate and the emotionally illiterate man, those are not two different kinds of two different species of men. That's one man who's been broken in half. The man who has emotional literacy needs to learn from the man who is emotionally literate and the man with physical illiteracy might say in terms of fitness and his body and his presence can learn a lot from the man who's physically literate. They have, men have so much to teach each other and they're so divided right now. So men have been broken in half by 104 years of industrialization and war. It's like a constant drumbeat of industrialization. World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, Korea, the 60s. Well then you stack feminism on top of that.  It's like when is it gonna be smashed? And is that really a good idea in the first place? Like I don't know about this anymore. Yeah, well I mean if you ask a feminist to like paint a picture from, or you can do this with any liberal. Now I used to be liberal. I was part of Occupy, Wall Street in San Francisco. I was very active. I was really mad about what the big banks had done and which I think was a really legitimate protest. So I went into that movement. And after doing a year's worth of really hard work, I started to wonder like, well, help paint a picture for me of the world that we're trying to build.  Save the Spot of the Owl because it's this giant hodgepodge of different political ideas that we're all trying to move their way forward to something productive. And I wanted to get someone to paint a picture for me of the world they wanted to build. And they would not do it. I could not get anyone to paint a picture. Like, well, how much taxes do you want to pay? 60%, 70%, like let's operation, as Sean Smith would say, let's operationalize this. No one ever would. And so, you know, so it's like, we need to smash the patriarchy. Well, how will we know when the patriarchy is smashed?  Does that mean killing fatherhood completely? Like the nuclear family?  Yeah, well, there was an article in the Washington Post I think that said, when can we start killing men? What, yeah. Well, another one was why can't we hate men? Yeah, exactly. That was on the Atlantic maybe or something.  Well, the truth is that was the academic side of feminism that was there during the 1960s. Janice Fiammango talks a lot about this. And now it's just surfacing.  The mask is coming off. The mask is coming off.   That's right. Smack, yeah. So anyway, so men have been broken in half by that 104 years of industrialization, war and propaganda, et cetera, et cetera. And in that space, if men are broken in half, women will look at, they look at the, you know, it's the alpha fucks beta bucks thing, right? You know, which is a really good observation.  It's like that coded language.   And so that women feel like they have to be the man. So as the manosphere and many of the men doing the work begin to step up and be the man, women don't have to be the man anymore. They can be the woman. And there are so many women more all the time who are enjoying that role and are discovering that this is who I've always wanted to be but never felt I could. And so I believe very much that we're living through a renaissance of men, the manosphere and what you're doing at 21 is the leading edge of a 40 year cultural wave that will absolutely and that will lead to a renaissance of women that is leading to a renaissance of women because men and women interact, they exchange energies. As men step into their masculinity, it frees up space for women to step into the feminine. If only because a masculine man and a feminine woman, if a masculine man and a masculine woman collide, if you really hold your frame strong enough, you can potentially, you will be the, what happens when the unstoppable force meets the immovable object, right?   And then along with the civilizational rebirth, I call that when men can be men and women can be women and come back together, I call that the great reconciliation. And I think that is the civilizational rebirth that's coming, I know it's coming. Yeah, I agree, man, yeah. There's always, there's no guarantees in life, so I keep that in mind. Sure, sure, of course.  I mean, a thousand different ways, but I do think this is basically not only on the table, but where things are heading.  I do think that the Mansphere is gonna change the course of American history. Absolutely. That's what I wanna do with it, and that's what I think the community itself more or less is doing in these different ways. Maple McGray again, you know, is the first time the Mansphere has reached out to women in a positive and productive way, and we took a lot of heat for that last year. Sure.  Like, you can't make a McGray again, that's logical thinking.  What does that even mean? To humanize this woman to the point where they can't even think at all, which is just dumb. I'm a big Iron Renn fan, I mean, she was a genius.  Absolutely. And women are sometimes useful for things beyond cooking, cleaning and breeding and stuff occasionally. Occasionally, no. But I love it, and I think it is, what I'm getting from you, and I think the same, everyone's name page is that it's very natural for men and women to connect and to communicate. And in particular for men, like we talked about earlier, to set boundaries, say no, and these things.   Generations, generations of men, yeah. That goes on, that doesn't get discussed enough, I think, either in the man-sphere and even with regard to feminism, like why has this all happened? It's multifactorial, like maybe you have communists, maybe you have wars killing off a lot of masculine men, industrialization changing things. It's amazing how complicated those situations sometimes it is, how altitude they are. Yeah, I mean, to look at all the different threads that got us here and to understand the flows of history, lend a sense of perspective to say like, okay, this moment probably wasn't avoidable if only because the industrial revolution was going to happen and it happened so fast that the separation of fathers from the home would just alone transform everything. And everything that has followed since then, of course, some of it has been accidental, some of it has been, I think by design in many ways, but we're living through a historical moment where we're waking up as men to the realities of the past 140 years of masculinity, if not more, and we're getting the chance to create something new. We learned about masculinity from our fathers. Our fathers learned from their grandfathers or the men around them. Some of us didn't even learn from our fathers. But the amazing thing about this moment is we have the opportunity to learn not just from our fathers, but for the best fathers from all of history. Look at all these books, the stories that are in here, right? The speculations, no one's ever written about masculinity and femininity to the volume that we have today and YouTube channels and Twitter and books and conventions. And we have the opportunity to learn from the best men of the moment and the best men of all time. I think there's no excuse for men not drawing from that, just drinking from it as much as they can, because that was my story. That was how I transformed myself. I was like, this is the most interesting stuff I've ever read, give me more. That's been my experience of the mannisphere for 15 years now, man. I remember that feeling emotionally and distinctly when I found the PUA community in the mannisphere, it was like finding an ocean or a lake, dipping your toes in and you're like, whoa, this is dope as fuck. And I knew that it would not all be perfect.  I could apply it, test it, and tinker with it and stuff. It's such an amazing community. I love it, and that's been my whole life. If that's one of the communities I've learned the most about from you, because that's the one community of men I've never really participated much in. I didn't really have much need to, but I've been super curious, and I know that there are probably ways that I've been sexually successful in my life, let's put it that way, but I've never had to learn pickup artist techniques. And I sometimes wonder like, well, I'd like to try some of these things out. Maybe there's room there. Yeah, now they've had a good influence. They took a lot of heat over the years and stuff. Make sure it owes and some of that's true.  Just from a social skills perspective, that's really what it is.  These days not tender and all this bullshit, which is a lot different, but it is what it is. Well, to listen to Socrates talk about it the other day, him explaining that the pickup artist community though, it's portrayed very much as like mystery and like you said, the Thetaboa as the whole like showmanship kind of aspect to it. But what he said was that it's really just a lot of men discovering the notion of personal development for the first time. It's really grounding perspective and that really grounded the whole thing of what the men were really doing. It made sense. It's not a whole bunch of guys wanting to be the not circus clown, but wanting to be those I guess comic book versions of themselves. There's just guys trying to figure out basic things that men used to just know. You can watch movies with World War II, Fighter Pilots or whatever going off to war and they're at the dance with all the girls. You know what I mean? It's like the guys are all talking amongst the guys. The girls are talking amongst the girls. The guy and the girl make eye contact. Like that just used to be life. And so now men are having to learn those skills from each other on the internet. It's really incredible that we've gotten to this point. Yeah, some of the two is even adaptive to feminism, I think just the ways that women, female behavior has changed so dramatically in a dating sense and it's like hookup culture and it's like, how do you operate in that? Should you operate in that? If you do, if you're going to, what are you gonna do exactly? And the POAs teach you how to do that, better and for worse. Well, that's the interesting thing to me about where the red pill community came from is that all the PUA guys started comparing notes around the world and they sort of realized like, wait a minute, kind of crack the code here and the whole thing unfolds. Like this world is not what we thought it was. You know, I love women a lot, but it's been my view for a while and I maintained this in the atmosphere for years and I've been saying this on Twitter every like, I don't know, six to 12 months I'll just tweet it. And I think women for a long time, they basically, not maliciously, it's very inadvertently. Like there's also the theory that women destroy civilizations given excess political power in these things, especially when detached from responsibility. And that's been the case in America in the day one.  You can vote for a president who will take you to war and you will not be drawn into that and watch your friends burn alive or watch yourself melt under a grenade or something. You don't have to pay the consequences of it. Your choices. Yeah, that's a really good point. Yeah, where was it going with this though? We were talking about the PUA community and the red pill stuff. Yeah, I had somewhere I really wanted to take it though. I just lost train of thought with it. We'll have to get back to it in a minute. It's going to be killer too. Okay. But let me ask you this. So what are some of the ways you want to see, make them great again?  Sure, yeah. What are some of the ways that you think that women should be great again today? What do you see there? Permissuous behavior, virginity stuff, motherhood, wifehood, these things. What are your thoughts on that? Well, I think one of the topics that is really up in the monastery in general is around women and careers in particular. Like, should women work? Should women vote? That seems to be an argument that's really happening right now. And I take the position of, well, what feminism has said for the past, say, 50 or 60 years is that women are not good women unless they're working. I've had some friends out in San Francisco for a while and they have a couple of young sons. And the woman went back to work, the wife mother went back to work within weeks after giving birth to her son. And I don't know that it was that she was so committed to her job, maybe, but I think she had inside some sort of feminist ideas that if I stop working I'm being disloyal to women somehow. Oh my God. Right, well, you know, one of the concepts that I've learned from Rallo is sisterhood, uberales, the sisterhood above all, that women have been taught to feel this loyalty to women above all.  And so that's what feminism has said. And I take what feminism says, feminism says women should have choice. I turn it back and I say, you're absolutely right. Women should have the choice to be mothers if they would like to choose to do that. And that's a legitimate job. It absolutely is.  There's an author I read, his name is David Shackleton. And I listened to a talk that he gave. That's right, Janice Fiamengo recommended his work to me. And there's a talk that he gave where he basically explained that the way that our society has conceptualized of progress is purely in economic and material terms. So men have created the most economic progress over history and we've excluded women from that. It's essentially like a Marxist argument that he's revealing as Marx revealed, looks at everything in terms of the argument. But what David said, and I'm very grateful for this, is what that ignores is the progress made in the home and the emotional realm. And so what he said is there have been women that were raised poorly by their families for over generations, right? Abuse of mothers, fathers, whatever, impoverished, whatever, and there are women that could have chosen to raise their children to be like them and given the kids the same life that they had. But there are women who instead say, I will give my children a more loving childhood than I received. And so women in that sense created emotional progress, which is invisible from a market-based perspective. You can't see it, you can't measure it on a balance sheet. But the women who took the big risk to say, I'm going to raise my children with more love in the home than I receive, it's a remarkable contribution to humanity. And it's breaking the cycle of trauma. That's right. And that's why we're here. That's why we can start asking these questions. In fact, that's a whole unmeasurable aspect if human progress, the growth, and emotional, and in some sense, spiritual awareness. And if all you see is money, you're going to completely ignore that. But the reality is it's really sick and we take it for granted. And so it reminds me, I've thought a lot about the founding fathers, obviously like they're very inspiring to me. I think they're an excellent example of masculinity. What would George Washington do is Jack Donovan's new thing. That's right. He's got me into George Washington even more so. Much more of a Thomas Jefferson guy traditionally. Sure. That is what it is. But I always think like, we see the founding fathers, we see the paintings, we see them on the dollar bills sometimes and whatnot. Our money and all around, we should see more of them. We still see them around a lot even today. That's right.    Maybe sisters, so each, but no one talks about this, right? They're always just these founding fathers. We look at them when they're- Down from on high. Yeah, no, they were little kids once. And they had, in some cases anyway, loving parents and fathers and mothers. It's like, do you think, we're told that women by feminism have been oppressed forever, infinite oppression, right?   Like it's so delusional and nonfactual. And in particular though with the founding fathers, yeah, they were little kids once. And if they had a shitty mother, that would have turned out different in some cases. Absolutely. Yeah, I think the most of the argument completely ignores the contributions of women to history. And also just how loved, treasured, protected, died for, fought for women have been. The greatest love poetry in all of history has been written for women. I've been romance stories. Wars have been launched for women.  And yeah, you can look at history if you are predisposed to view history through the lens of oppression. That's the gift that critical theory has given us is that it looks at everything in terms of a lens of oppression. But when you take off those glasses and you see reality for what it is, the picture is so much more complicated and you can find not just hope, but truth if you do that.  And that's the quote, unquote, red pill moment, the awakening to reality that it's not where you're told it is. And you can find out what it is for yourself, but there'll be a cost for that. I like my pills, extra red. That's right. I take the whole bottle too, not just one. I like my pills, like I like my hats.  I did, by the way, think of the thing I lost train of thought with earlier. And it's my little personal theory that for a long time, and I don't think it's out of malice, kind of like if women destroy civilizations, kind of like we're seeing now with feminism running out of control, women have not put that in check. I think this is an example of men putting it in check at the beginning too. A woman, though, basically inadvertently run low-key beta propaganda. And that, I think, is what they say. Low-key, but yeah. Sometimes it's not low-key, sometimes it is, though. And that's, I think, that's, you know, with the red pill and the PUA community, both, they both have that notes-sharing idea. And this is what the internet enabled for the first time in history, separate from the proto-manusphere before the internet. This is men that are on the world, particularly in American Canada, but really on the world sharing notes about their own state of masculinity being a man, but also their interactions with women. And it really has spawned so much. It's so special. That's never happened before in history, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever. It doesn't mean things like the Bible and these different religious texts didn't have useful, very real, practical, reality-based information about the sexes they do. They call it biblical masculinity and biblical femininity in a Christian sense, which is fine. I just call it common sense, masculinity, common sense, femininity, or return to common sense. It's fine if others have put it. But yeah, I really do think the role in the kind of low-key beta propaganda in the internet for the first time ever is actually enabling men to push back on that. And I do think it will lead, like you're saying, to a civilizational rebirth and a much healthier balance between the sexes. Actually, two weeks last night, I had this idea, it was really late at night, you can see it on my Instagram and my Twitter. I was like, I don't mean this. I mean, it's dramatic and I probably, in a sense, but also it's real. I was like, a billion beta males cannot bring a woman one ounce of happiness. It doesn't work that way. That's true. It's absolutely to be really, deeply, genuinely happy and in love, they need an alpha male. They need that alpha, not even alpha male, because people don't argue that a genetic alpha male, a born alpha male, raised an alpha male, they become an alpha male, they have nature versus nurture thing, but they need the alpha energy that I think is in every man. That's right.  That's literally how our species works.   And there have been, I think, mechanisms over time that try to curtail this and moderate it. Sexuality is a powerful thing. I think every religion has rules and regulations for it for a reason, but it's still dysfunctional basically in the long term. And I do think, yeah, we need to change things around a little bit. And maybe the manosphere is how that's all gonna have to pan out now. I think for sure. I think one of the things about the renaissance and about the manosphere is, the manosphere is a space. It's what a sphere is. It's a three-dimensional space. Men come in, men go out. Men get ushered out when they're exiled. Exiled, fakes and frauds. They get convicted guilty and everything like that. They get the pitchfork. Exactly. But the renaissance is a process. And so the renaissance has been going on for 40 years since the mythopoetic days or even before. And it's this process of rebirth that we're living through, which is it's not a revolution because a revolution goes around and around, right? And it's not a reformation because a reformation is led from the top down. And the cool thing about the men's movement collectively is that we're just kind of all figuring it out for ourselves. No one looks to a guy and says, that is the guy in a way that someone leads a political party. Well, someone, people do that. And that is rightfully looked down on, more so these days than ever, which is good. And yes, that's cult-ish behavior and it's not healthy. It's codependency at large. It's weird. Yeah, I mean, you have to, you have to, the field of philosophy, there's not just one guy. When you study the history of philosophy, there's a great book, Sophie's World by Jocelyn Gardner, for anyone who's into philosophy and they want a big overview of the history of philosophy. It's a great fictional work that goes through everything. But you can't just say, like, there's one guy. Like, well, there was Plato, but he was pretty dope. But then there's Nietzsche, he was pretty cool. And then you have to see them all in different, as having a big conversation with each other. And the men's movement has been that. It's a big 40 year long conversation, but it's going somewhere. It's going to a rebirth of masculinity. And it's a renaissance. It has a beginning and an end point when masculinity is reborn. It's like, oh, we've arrived. And I don't... Would you say, would you see it also as an awakening or a reawakening somehow? Is that a word you would use as well? I think it's an awakening for the first time. Because I think there's never really been that opportunity to question masculinity.  We have this sort of cultural amnesia about what it was like to fight for survival. Now, and we've forgotten after a couple of generations, but that's kind of a good thing. I would never want us to go back to a widespread struggle for survival. I don't think we all really, truly want to be the Mad Max warlords. And some dudes do want that. And you know, it's like, if you could come and fight for civilization, we could use you and we'll reward you on the back end. You know what I mean? Like come and fight for civilization and we'll gift you with land and you can do your own thing, but fight for us, please. Fight with us is a better way of putting it. So I think as a result of that, we have the opportunity to really say, well, there were all these really great things about masculinity in centuries prior. Millennia prior. Going back to Gilgamesh and Homer and all of that. And there are actually some really good things about masculinity now. I think it's probably a net benefit that men have the opportunity to become more emotionally integrated if only because they can better connect with their children. I think that's a beautiful thing. So if we can take the best of the past and the best of the present and put them together, we can make a cool new thing, new third thing that's never existed before. So that's why I think it's not a reawakening. I think it's an awakening for the first time. It's hugely exciting to be on the leading edge of it. It's just, what a time to be alive and to be a man. Yeah, I love a man.  Like I have some awareness of that. I'm in the middle of a hurricane in some ways, trying to leave these different ways physically with conventions online, as there's a public figure in this and that, make them great again, battling with the media and feminists and stuff. And it's a lot and I do my best. And I think I do pretty good. You do a great job. I also recognize I'm still really young and that I'll do much better when I'm older. I'm a 32 now, so 42, 52, whatever. But yeah, it's exciting, man. It's so, there's so much that happens so fast. Sometimes it feels like years is burned by, you're in your 40s now, right? Yeah, I'm 43. Yeah, I'm 32.  It really does. And you're told this when you're young, but you don't understand it. You don't have enough experience to really appreciate it. Now, what do you get?  Well, one of the things that I find that slows time down is novelty. So I've traveled a fair bit and traveling, it's like a week you can feel like a year. And I think I thought about that.   And I think that time is moving really quickly, but it's also moving really slowly in a way because I would imagine for you, there's so much novelty you have to deal with on a daily basis with new situations, things you're working on. And I just want to say, I'll never forget. I'll never forget when you announced the title of the president of the man's sphere. And I loved it. And I remember I DMed you on Instagram, I called you Mr. President. And I just thought it was so fantastic. And I love what you're doing and I get it. And I get it because the man's sphere, this whole movement will rise to public prominence naturally over time. And it's really important that once it gets there that the space be full of congruent men. There can be no fakes. There can be no fakes anywhere in here because anyone with a skeleton in their closet, who isn't who they say they are, who's done bad things and not admitted it and surfaced it publicly and repented for it, they, we will be held to their standard.  Right.  I think people should, yeah.  Sure, yeah, of course. But I mean, there's a way of saying, look, I did this thing and not trying to hide it. Like men who do criminal things. You know what I mean? Like particularly around families and stuff like that.  Yeah, that sort of stuff. If that's in a man's past, that's every possible slander that feminism will throw at the man's sphere that they can just point at and say, look, it's all ultimately, like we said, it's all toxic masculinity books. And so it's like, and so suddenly the work that thousands of men have been doing is all undermined. And so it's like, men have to come clean about that stuff. And look, I don't make the rules. I just work here. The redemption is a real thing. It is possible. This is one of the beautiful things about Christianity is that if you, I guess, confess your sins and you atone for them. You take ownership. You take ownership. You have your accountability. You take ownership, right? You make it right to the best way that you can. And there's a lot of pain and grief associated with that and may go back to like, why were you doing X to your wife or kids? Well, go back to your childhood. And this is where the inner healing part comes in. You have to go into that groove of your childhood, the way your dad treated you or the way your mom treated you and confront that dragon. So you can be free of it and never have to do it again. And then you're free. And then you're free. And then you can play the game with the rest of us. But if you got something in your closet, you got to go through that process. The conflict is feminine. And why are you confronting things? That's for women, bro. That's feminine energy. Feminine energy in the man is fear of conflict. Really? Yeah, I just hate these crappy people. I just agree. I called the data mail police, the BMP. We all make nice, nice together. Yeah, they always say any kind of conflict or confrontation, even internally like that, will be viewed in some way as feminine, which is beyond stupid. It doesn't make any sense at all. Yes, no. They're delegitimizing all conflict, basically. Oh, OK, well, that's a tangent. OK, yeah, they're wrong. But I appreciate the presidency thing. And it did start out kind of tongue-in-cheek. Right, yeah. But a little bit of seriousness. And that's because it had certain purposes, too, at the time. And it's just gotten more serious over time, while still being really funny. So I have a blast with it, yeah. Interesting, too. The Black Manisphere pointed out recently a documentary I released in March recently. Yeah, I think March was in March. Yeah, it was March. And they actually pointed out that the presidency of the Manisphere brings a lot of structure and order to it, which was not explicitly in my intention. I would not have been able to articulate it at that time over some drinks with Jack Donovan. Maybe we would have come to that conclusion. But that wasn't really the point. And they're right. And they were the first ones to spot that and identify that and compliment me on that. And they wanted the ministry in general. And they want that in the Black Ministry, and they don't have it. And so I don't have much connection with them. But it's kind of interesting that they have a lot of respect for that. And it's been a big benefit, I think, to the manager bringing that to the table.  We're not there yet. A cabinet. A cabinet. I called Jack the Secretary of Masculinity. Jack Donovan. Secretary of Defense. Yeah, exactly. Secretary of the Memes. Secretary of Mememorefare. Covertate, maybe it'll be that. Exactly. Yeah, I think the Black Manisphere is one of the most exciting developments of the Manisphere overall that I found. And I want to see, not just a Black Manisphere, I want to see a Japanosphere making this up. I heard you say there's a Latino sphere. Yeah, loosely. South, I want an Africanosphere. I want there to be a men's movement for authentic masculinity all over the world. I want all the warrior cultures of the world, of every race, ethnicity, et cetera, to stand up and to recognize each other and be like, I recognize you. You're like me. And I think an awakening of men on that scale would be absolutely unstoppable. Yeah. Yeah, I just kind of, I try to play neutral with it towards Switzerland. I try to treat 21 Convention that way too, which is people don't even believe because there's so much lately these days. As you rise, there's a lot of conflict. People try to tear you down this and that. But I've always seen it as like a real Switzerland of the Manisphere. And I can bring people together from different tribes and movements and fields. PUA, Red Pill, McTail, MRA is all the same convention. And they have different ideas. Sometimes a few of the speakers even hate each other. But they get along and they're respectful to each other because I not only ask them that, there's kind of a demand for it. Like, you have to be cool. Because this is like a Switzerland. Yeah, of course. Unless and until there's like a serious problem that demands my attention in some way. And until then, I'm gonna stay out of it. I'm gonna do my best. People don't, they're very skeptical of this, but these are the facts of reality. Now I conduct myself. And I think it's important for the 21 Convention and the Manisphere to do that. I agree. And even the Black Manisphere, that happened organically on its own. I have nothing to do with that. Yeah, for sure. If there's more from the pop-up, that's fun. And if there's not, it is what it is. I'm not that worried about it. Whatever's gonna happen there, I think, should just kind of be kind of laissez-faire. Like, let it happen or not happen. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that's a world that's coming into itself and being recognized itself as a thing. And I've listened to Kevin Samuels and Obsidian Ali, Moomya Obsidian Ali. I listened to his talk. I listened to O'Shea, Duke Jackson as well. And a little bit of Derek Jackson also. And to listen to these conversations, they're incredibly important conversations. And they're not necessarily relevant to me and my upbringing and my community, but there are lots of things that are universally relevant to masculinity. And so I learn a lot from listening to them and I also respect listening to men working out shit on their own. And that's the best thing to see. That's everything that I want is for men to come together to work this out on their own and to find out what it means to be a man, what it means to be masculine and lift up their communities. It's the most beautiful thing. Even in a Jack Donovanian sense, to make up a new word today, it's probably not surprising that we see the mannosphere build additional tribes as it grows. Like that's just what men do. We build tribes and clans and groups. And like that's, I hadn't thought about that way before because there's a lot of controversial issues to the black men's screen stuff. I don't even, I could barely name them, but there's definitely a lot of tension. Sure, of course. I think it's awesome. I think it's cool as fuck. I joke that I want a black card on me. I want to join their group because they're more masculine in some ways than the general mannosphere. They really are. And I didn't know this still a few months ago.  Oh, listen to Kevin. Listen to one of Kevin Samuel's two hour talks. I mean, this, I mean the smaller channels. I don't see Kevin. I don't see Kevin.      He's brutal. But there's a lot of smaller channels, 1000, 2000, 10,000 that the mannosphere in general has these and the black mannosphere has their own too. And that to me is the grassroots, the guys that really matter. Cause that's like on the ground for you can really feel what's going on. And most of them don't even have any kind of business with it. They don't make money off it. It's just kind of something they do. And that's in these where the real gems are. Interesting. Yeah, they're really, but you have to find them. But you know what to search on YouTube. You'll eventually kind of find these. And there's always like a few dozen or whatever per group. And yeah, it's very raw data in terms of intelligence. It's pretty cool stuff. One of my friends, a man named Jonathan West, he runs the being husband podcast. And he's black from Nashville. And we observed that there's not a lot of, one of the conversations that really needs to be happening in America right now is around race. That the three things, every culture around the world, and I've traveled a bit. Every culture around the world has different taboos. So for example, in China is the three T's. Tibet, Taiwan, Tiananmen. Those are the three things that you can't bring up in polite conversation in China. I don't speak Mandarin, so I didn't get to test it, but that's pretty no. In America, the three things that we're not allowed to talk about the height of taboo is money, weight, and race. And these are the three things that aren't not coincidentally are tearing America apart. The inability of us to have an intelligent conversation about money where it comes from, where it included weight, obviously it's like when you even hint to someone like, hey, you put on some weight, in the whole world.  Oh, you're evil.  Yeah, and the comments that you get from something like that. And even if you try to provide like some constructive criticism to it, people are very sensitive around it. Fat is beautiful. Fat is the new beautiful. It's like, no, you're just obese and sick. I mean, I used to be fat. Me too.   It's like, look, get down to a low BMI. You know what I mean?  Try living the other way. Get yourself there and then you can make a reasonable comparison. If you don't do that, then you have no right to have an opinion because if you say you're healthy, well, try to see what the alternative is and then you get to decide.  At the end of 24 hours, they'd be begging. They would be begging because I used to be fat. I was miserable. During 2020, when the lockdowns happened, I was living in New Zealand. I just moved back to the US. I moved into my apartment the day the lockdowns hit. I was in Phoenix. All I could do was literally like it was looming. I could just buy a mattress and a box spring and I had a little wood table that I had used for an altar that I had in storage. That was my bed table and that was all my furniture. And so it's like, okay, I'm locked down in this new city. I don't really know anybody. What am I gonna do? Well, okay, I have total control over my time. I have total control over my diet. I don't have anyone to go and hang out and eat dinner with or drink with or anything like that. I have total control over what I eat. Now is the time that I'm gonna get in shape. And six months, 40 pounds came off. Wow, damn. And it's like it was the best gift that I ever could have given myself. I give myself the gift of life. And I'm the only person who could give me that.  It's at the stage for everything that could come. But just to get back to the issue of Jonathan West that I brought up, I do an episode of my podcast with him called Race and the Renaissance. And it's a one to two hour conversation where we talk about racial issues. What's going on within the black community and masculinity, the manosphere and the renaissance and how that feeds in, how the black community is different and my perceptions of those things checking out with him. It's just a very open conversation. I'm very proud of that conversation. And I think more of those need to happen. So we have one race in the Renaissance episode that's out now and we've got another one that I'm finishing up, it'll be coming out soon. And it's so great to listen to conversations that black people are having within the black community about the need to be better men and be better at being men because their community has its own struggles with that. Just like men in general in America do. And I think it's vital that men of any race and ethnicity figure this out for their own happiness in their home and for the men who look like them, let's say.  Next question. You got to attend 21 convention last year for your first time. Yeah. What were your expectations going in and then how did that compare to the actual experience on the way out? I don't know that I quite knew what to expect. To be honest, I just knew that I had to go. In fact, there was a time when I was thinking of living in New Zealand and this is true, one of the big reasons that I was internally opposed to that was that there's 21 convention. How am I gonna get from New Zealand to the 21 convention? Long journey. We did it actually in Australia one year. I know. That was a long time ago. What year was that? 2012. Was that where the Nick Sparks talk was? Okay. Now, there was a big speech there from there. It got two million views almost. James and Colleen. Okay, yeah. A lot of speeches came out of that event, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I wanted to do it in Auckland, New Zealand one day. Oh, really? But because of all the free speech craft and the culture wars now I've decided to can that for a while. Yeah, New Zealand, it's tough down there. Australia's not much better. Yeah, they're not very friendly to free speech these days. Back then it was whatever, you could just do something. Yeah. I think many Americans don't really understand just how important the Bill of Rights is. Yes. And once you travel the world and you understand that the notion of free speech is just what an incredible technology. Never before in human history had the leaders of a society decided, you know what, we should just give the people the ability to say whatever they want. It's completely, they're completely incentivized to do the exact opposite. And that the founding fathers of America, that as you mentioned, said, no, we're gonna give people the ability to speak freely. It's like, we're gonna make it very explicitly clear in the founding documents because that's the Bill of Rights, is that, you know, the constitution was written that said any rights not given to the states of the government are given to the people. The states of the people, respectively. Yeah, and so, but then they're like, well, we wanna make really explicitly clear the 10 that are really important. You know, and so it's just an incredible thing. And so to have that in America, I think a lot of Americans take it for granted. They do. Well, they have. I've traveled not as extensively as you about 26, 27 countries, something like that, but it's enough to realize like people that live in America, then maybe they'll have America sometimes they don't, but they don't have the experience, they need experience beyond the country. Absolutely. To see what the world's like and for better and for worse. I've seen, you know, Poland, I think is in some ways a lot better than America. The gender relations as I called them are a lot healthier there, but other parts I've seen too much worse. Like there's a lot of feminism in Sweden and the UK and crap. I've seen a lot of poverty down in Central and South America and stuff. And people in America with some exceptions like the ghettos, like you don't really see that.  It's pretty hardcore. That's right. Yeah, I mean. It ain't on a TV, it's like right in your face. Yeah, well, many people, many people who even talk about travel, they just go to Europe and they got traveled. Like, well, no, like Europe has the tourist trail that you can follow and stay relatively safe.  You know what I mean? I spent a couple of months in China. I spent six months in India. Radically different. Radically different. There's no bubble that you're just confronted with the reality of the country. And you get a perspective real quick about just how fortunate we are to live in America. But many people aren't courageous enough, you know, who talk about travel, on the travel. It's like, well, have you been, have you been where it's really difficult to travel? They go on a cruise to like Cancun. Right. They travel and like, oh, you've definitely done it.  Like, okay, I'm going to go to the place where I'm terrified to go safely. You know, for sure. I really want to go to Japan. I almost went last year. That's awesome.  Yeah, I know, man. They've, the culture is not perfect. I know there's a lot of issues that I gave her else, but a lot of it is very interesting to me. The homogeneous nature of it, they really have this kind of nationalism to them. They love being Japanese. They're not Japanese. They're gonna be Japanese. Shintub and studying stuff lately. Yeah, it's interesting. Japan is one of those countries where good enough is not good enough. Like, they take everything they do. This is what I loved about being there is they take everything they do so seriously. And so many people there strive for excellence just for the sake of excellence. And that's something that's part of American culture in many places as well. And that's what really makes particularly the food. You have to fight to have a bad meal in Japan is my experience. You have to try, you know what I mean? So it's a really special country in that way. But as far as 21, yeah, what was your expectations or experience? You didn't know what to expect going in. How was it in the end? It was incredible. I mean, I think I arrived on Wednesday and left on, I think I left on Tuesday. Yeah. That's right. And so Thursday night, Friday night, Saturday night, Sunday night, Monday night, five nights, I might have slept for 18 hours the whole weekend because it was so many high energy, high integrity guys, and the vibe was so high, even though it was kind of raining, even though the whole coof weirdness was going on and all that stuff. Just to be around men like Jack or Ivan Throne or Tanner or Pat Steadman, to be around them and to really see this is what it means to be an aligned, congruent man for me to experience that was, I mean, it was so, I don't even know the word. I wanna say intoxicating, but that's the right word. It's just like, why could I wanna sleep? I didn't feel the need to, I was so excited. And I think on Saturday night, Jack Donovan and I were sitting by the pool in the circle of guys and he and I just kept talking and we literally talked like all night until like eight o'clock in the morning, hey, do you wanna get breakfast? Like, let's go to Denny's. And so it's like going to get breakfast. And you know, with Jack Donovan, the Denny's was like, it's incredible. And earlier that night, Pat Seven and I had had ridden in the trunk of a car with the trunk open. Oh my God.  And it's like, well, we didn't wanna walk back to the hotel. So we just sat in the back of the- This is some of the stuff that goes on at Twin Island Convention that people on the internet just have no idea. They just see the speeches and it's like, no, the speakers, I don't even know, there's no demand to do this, obviously. They just do this kind of stuff.  Like they just do stuff with the attendees and like this would normally cost like a lot of money to have one on one time with some people like this. Oh, for sure, yeah. And they just do those things and it's funny, you know, I rode in the back of a trunk with another speaker where we were drinking late at night. Like, where else do you see that? But there's a good man too. These aren't goofballs. These are really serious guys. They're real guys. They're real men. And they love their work and they love that the men that they help and some men show up needing a lot of help and they're there to take in. And then we all help each other. That's the point. And that's the best part is to see men genuinely wanting to help each other. Just even one-on-one, not even with a speaker, just guys sitting around and having conversations about masculinity. I mean, who would have thought that such thing was possible? This is the grassroots thing I was talking about. You see it on YouTube, but at 21 convention, which has always been in my view, grassroots thing. It's so old at this point that some people won't see it that way, but I do because I know where it's roots really are, which is grassroots content and contact like that. You know, these are kind of relationships. Attending to attendees, speakers and attendees, speaker to speaker even, obviously. There's a lot of camaraderie and positivity to it and always has been. That's important to me. Very much, very much. That's one of the reasons I don't want the event getting too big. Like I've seen bigger events than the last 500 people, 1,000 people. And at some point, you lose that personal intimate connection with people. It's just too big. There's just too much going on. There's too much energy. And so I like keeping them, couple hundred people tops and like that. Our peak was like 230. I think that's the right size. I mean, you want men to have the sense that they can get to know each other if they want to. And not to feel so lost in a crowd and to have the access to speakers to be able to talk to them. Just one-on-one talking to Jesse Peterson, for example, or Elliott Hulse, or all the guys just walking around. They're just there. They're not in some sort of VIP area that they're on. Yeah, because most events do that. The speakers are like corraled off in some little section or they just leave. They just, they're in and they're out. We have guys like Elliott Hulse come out who has millions of followers, right? He could do anything that he wants. They've spent like four or five days at the event, which is incredible. I don't pay him to do this. He does it. Yeah, I just want to go and be there. They want to be there. Almost like an attendant. Even Jack Donovan was not a speaker last year. That's right. He just wanted to be there. I'm like, yeah, go ahead. Sounds good. Yeah, the energy is so great. And I was so interested to see when you announced 22 convention, I was so interested to see how that would go. It was really exciting to me. And it was because it was such a bold step. But to do it again, I think tonight, we should everything done tonight, if not tomorrow, the latest. That's great. Round two. Round two. I mean, I think that conversation needs to be had, but I think what isn't obvious is that the whole notion of make women great again is happening in the context of make men great again. It's really easy to lose the sense of like, no, you've been doing this convention to make men great again for the past 15 years. So there's no lack of balance there. Which there was a big, that's also what set up making women great again. Like you're right. I mean, we've been making men great against for since day one, 2007 or 2006, depending on how you do it. And it's not controversial to say make men great again because men are hit on today so much, or not to put it. Beat down. Beat down be a way to put it by culture. But yeah, that's what we do. And I think that was basically the skeleton or the foundation to build make women great again off of.  This is like a long, let's do this for every decade, for men and fathers. Now he's doing it for women. So it has this whole framework that I could fit it into very easily. I knew exactly what it would look like, where I wanted to do it. You know, the city, the location, the venues, this and that, the speakers, the film team, the video team, the security team. Like there's like so much that goes on that seems people don't understand. I have to lead like half a dozen teams. Yeah, for sure. But I was able to do all that in a heartbeat for 22. And that's also, I think it's also made a threat.  That's right.  I don't know any of those for lately. They don't exist. But no, for real, I'm the best at what I do, I think in the industry, in the market. Absolutely. And I was able to like compress that into, let's do it for women.  Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think men in general, they're used to a low standard just for themselves. Like one of the things that Tanner Guzzi talks about very openly is like that satirizing real men don't care what they look like, right? Yeah, he's gonna. And well, I love, and I love what he talks about for that because he's pointing out that men often set really low standards for themselves. And so they have really low standards for everyone around them as a result. They don't expect a lot from themselves. And so I think men who might be thinking about a men's convention might naturally have very low standards for it just because they wouldn't, they would never think that way. Like, oh, we should do it properly.  And you know what I mean? I've been there for sure. We all have, right? But at a certain point, men have to learn if only for themselves to up their game. And what I love about 21 Convention, what really did impress me was, and many of the speakers say this, is that it's a really high standard, high quality event. And you put a lot into it to make it achieve that level. Like, look at the branding. Look at the backgrounds and the audio video, the audio visual production. And the whole thing is like, you really make it, you know, a national tier quality event. And I think the expectations of men would naturally be lower that they'd be like, okay, it's enough to get together in a conference room with a podium or whatever, right? And that would be enough, but it's not enough. For me, it's never enough too. It's never enough. More, more, more, more, more. 4K, 4K, 4K, 6K, 8K, let's scale more cameras.  Absolutely right. I drive the video guys nuts. I'm like, more, more, more. Why do you need in 6K? I want it in 6K. It's gonna be useful for another 20 years that way instead of 18. Exactly. Gonna be ready for that stuff. Yeah. Yeah, and I think that that really shows. And that shows up in the presentation and really in everything you do about it. And I think it forces men to raise their own standards for themselves. It's leading by example too. Like I do think about that to some extent. It's not just for me and my own personal motivation to work and produce the best work that I can. Allow the fountain head. Which is where it inspires me to do that. But it's also like, this is masculine to improve over a lifetime. Yes. And to always be pushing your limits to new levels and new challenges. And the company and the events are how I do that. 21 Convention literally I'm looking at the logo. Okay. But that's my like, that's my challenge to do that. It's my opportunity to do that in life as a man. And then I get to lead by example to do that. So it's pretty awesome stuff. It's really exciting. And men need to do that. You know, it's like the event is always getting better and men need to always get better too until you die. That's right. Like that's just part of it. I think it's the best way to live. Anything else is just dumb. Right. And you have an incredible opportunity to do, you know, you personally and you being generally to do amazing things with your life and to accomplish real things of value with a sense of purpose, whatever that purpose is. And once you discover what that is, how can you not want to get better every day? Whether it's painting or writing or throwing events or, you know, lifting weights or whatever, the feeling of incremental progress, of being in that journey, the rewards of effort of climbing the mountain are immense. And I feel so sad for men who don't have a sense of purpose and don't have the opportunity to experience that because I think it's one of the core aspects of being a man is to experience that incremental improvement over time with a sense of purpose. And it's so fulfilling to men. And that's what I reflect to men that I hope that they find for themselves as you found it for yourself and I have for myself. Okay. I appreciate you being an episode 144 of the Red Men Group. Thanks for having me. It's been a lot of fun. It's been a lot of fun. Last thing is where can people find you? Renofmen.com. The podcast. You can go to my website, Renofmen.com. You can find me and that's Renofmen, R-E-N-O-F-M-E-N, like Renaissance of Men, but shorter, Renofmen. You can find me on Instagram at Renofmen and on Twitter at will underscore Renofmen. And from all of those locations, you can find my podcast, The Renaissance of Men. Hope to have Anthony on real soon for the conversation. And there'll be links in description guys to all that stuff on YouTube and whatnot. So I appreciate a big time, man. We'll talk soon, I'm sure. Thanks for having me. Thanks everybody. See you guys. Like, subscribe, leave a comment. Most of all, I appreciate it. And I'll see you next time on the Red Men Group. Peace.