This is Jack Donald, author of The Way of Men. All right, I'm here today with Anthony Dream Johnson, president of the Manisphere and founder of 21 Studios. Every year he puts on the 21 convention and he's been doing it for a really long time. Anthony, thanks for coming on the show. Yeah, man, glad to be here. Appreciate you bringing me on. Yeah, so every time I post about the 21 convention, I get questions like, what is this and what is the Manisphere and all this kind of stuff because I have readers across the board who have never heard of that kind of stuff. I mean, obviously I've been involved in the Manisphere for, I guess, a decade, but... Yeah, you're the high priest of masculinity in the Manisphere. Something like that. I'll take it. Yeah, Professor Donovan, Professor Donovan. Something like that. But first I wanted to say just to get it started, obviously as you run up into the 21 convention this year and you got a lot of press for the 21, for the 22 convention when it first launched and then I've had it be moved because of the pandemic or whatever. But... Like he's slipped that in? The plan's in it. Yeah, yeah, I'm bitter. But so you're getting a lot of press for that and you're gonna get a lot more. I'm sure people will actually come across you and see you. I actually had talked about the 20 convention earlier with a female at my Jiu-Jitsu place and she thought it was funny and then she heard it coming up in a female Jiu-Jitsu forum that a whole bunch of girls were mad about it. Nice. So it's making waves out there. And so, for people who... Did she know that you know the founder of and stuff? What? Oh, the group? No, the chick, the Jiu-Jitsu chick, did she know that you were like, you weren't speaking out of it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. In my group and over, I told her the whole story and she's like, oh, that's funny. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, like, but... Damn.  And so it's out there. And people know about it and people are talking about it and so forth.  And that's cool and you provoke response and that's awesome. But one thing I really wanted to say is, obviously I've known you for several years now. And I've had the opportunity to watch you evolve and watch you do things and watch you react to things and so forth. And my impression, excluding all these other things that all these other people say, my impression is that you're a good dude who actually has devoted his life to helping men, which I think is really, really admirable. And so that's my impression of Anthony going into this discussion. I think he's doing, you know, it's a lot of work. And whenever you put yourself out there talking positive about masculinity, you're putting yourself in a firing squad, do a certain degree. And I mean, I've done it. You're doing it all the time. You're going big with it. And, you know, it's a lot of work and it's a hard game, you know? But it's worth it because you care about it. So that's good. Absolutely. But I appreciate that too, man. I think your opinion of me is pretty assured among people who know me. And it's different from the internet, just the percent of the people see, which is why I think people ask you that, like, why do you speak there? Like, how do you know that guy? Right. I guess in real life, you know, when you get to know me, it's different than just the internet, the super flaming, provoke everyone, response type thing. Right. But there's more to it than that, obviously. It's primarily, it's just positive, educational. But then it makes in my personality with it and just triggers everybody.  Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. People always have this weird impression of, you know, people who are in the public eye.  They think they know you. People come taller. And they think I'm taller and angrier. They want me to be really angry all the time, you know? You know? Yeah, me too. You know, I'm laughing all the time. And so, like, it's not quite the same thing. But so to start out, what, because people don't always know, and as the president, who is better qualified to talk about it, what is the manuscript? Like, how would you define that? Sure. So I think the manuscript is the world's first emerging movement of men, boys, and fathers. Primarily, obviously, there's no boys in it. They're, you know, really not enough for it. But there's plenty of teenagers in it and stuff like that. But primarily, it's men and the fathers as well. And I think it's the world's first emerging movement for men, boys, and fathers that we've seen in the world through the internet and stuff. And it's specifically for the purpose, though, of masculinity and men and boys and fathers. And then related topics do that. Relationships, games, so to speak, health and fitness, even politics and stuff. So advocating for the interests of men. And you saw my speech in Poland, actually, called the Manusphere itself. The Manusphere, talking about this, yeah. So I think it's the world's first movement for that, that we've never seen that. Movements, women have their own feminist movement, right? There's sucker jets and the feminists, you know, that they have their own thing. But men have never really had that. I think the Manusphere is actually the first iteration of that we've ever seen. And it's still very young. I'd say it dates back to the 1990s with early men's rights activists and pick-up artists. Ross Jeffries, you know, Mystery, Alan Archer Curry, some guys we know personally from the event. And so it's pretty young. It's barely 20-something years old now. Maybe 25 or something like that, if you'd penny high count it. So it's still very young. But I've never seen anything like that before or men are coming together for that purpose.  It's not a religious thing. There's all kinds of races and religions involved. That's what makes it really special. Like when I do our event at the hotel, I tell them that we do a men's event, and we're doing a women's event, and a fatherhood event.  I'm like, no, it's for all men and fathers. And they're like, the hotel people are stunned. They've never seen that before. They immediately assume it's like, I would just fine, you know, them to think that. I get it. But they immediately assume it's some sort of religious thing. I'm like, no. And we have Jews show up, Muslims, Christians, Baptists, Catholics, Mormons. I'm an atheist, objective as myself. I ran into all the kind of legacy of that. So it's very, very diverse. The guys that show up, I think we're a role model of what America is supposed to be. But we actually do it in a really healthy, positive, useful, rational way.  For our stuff, it's like a lot more positive and healthy and super legitimate inclusive, not in some Orwellian Newspeak way. And you've seen that yourself at the events. All the guys that show up, it's like, it's incredible. From all over the world too. Good guys show up from Australia, India, Canada, Europe, Germany, Austria. I mean, it's wild. You guys just show up at the event. Yeah, I mean. I don't know if that answers your question in the atmosphere. That's a huge community. Yeah. Well, I mean, that whole community is not necessarily positive. But I mean, people have to go through different stages in their interface with reality. Obviously, because they're trying to be very... A lot of them don't have fathers. And a lot of them have to experience them for the first time. And so there's some anger and different levels. Yeah, yeah. And to be more specific about your question, so the Manisphere is not just this, they describe it on Wikipedia and the news people of the news articles who hate it, they try to attack it and undermine it. They want to break it up, basically, to stop it. And they're not, they're so far losing that it's good. The Atlantic has done a couple of articles on it in the New York Times and try to beat it up and stuff. Wikipedia has a shitty article on it. But basically it's not just a wildly dispersed community of men and fathers and stuff, looking at interests for men and fathers from different angles. It's specifically for main communities that make it up. And there's a few guys in the auxiliary. So on the outer ring, if you look at like a circle, the outer ring you'd have kind of guys who are loosely associated with men's issues. That'd be like Stifan Malini maybe, he's gotten more involved in the Manisphere. Jordan Peterson is a good example. He would not consider himself Manisphere, but I think he is on the distant fringe of it. And Sargon of Akkad's another example who focuses on criticizing feminism, advocating for men and fathers. But it's not his primary thing, Jordan Peterson same way. But as you get into the inside of the Manisphere, the core components it's for, that the men's rights activists who've been around for a long time, decades, had to focus on men's rights issues, father rights issues, all kinds of stuff like that. But it's usually specific to politics and family law and stuff like that. Then if you go into the Pickapartist community, that's famous from Ross Jeffery's Mystery and those guys, that focuses on picking up women.  It's not necessarily anything to do with health and fitness or the red pill or men's rights or anything like that. And then beyond that, you have the Miqtah community who's been growing as well. I think in the late 90s, early 2000s, it's men going their own way. Guys kind of checking out. There's different layers to it, levels to it. I'm not like a super duper expert on Miqtah stuff. We have speakers who are, that are much more involved in that community. That's picked up a lot of steam in recent years. So Miqtah, and then the final one is the red pill community which is huge on Reddit until they get killed off pretty soon. They're quarantined right now. They're gonna get the axe any day, they think. And that's got about 300,000 guys and a lot of speakers know the convention from that. And the red pill is kind of like the Pickapartist community but a lot more hardcore. The Pickapartist community in the late 2000s, I was involved with it. It started kind of softening up, getting more effeminized, effeminate basically. More apologetic, more warm to feminism and stuff. And you saw this in the news even with guys like Neil Strauss who wrote the game, Mystery and These Guys.  You saw them sort of apologizing basically for masculinity and the red pill guys were much more alarmed than what you think and what you write about in the way of men.  So it was a divergent. The manisphere basically, that elements the manisphere, the pickup guys, they split off into red pill and they are still community today. So it's the four groups and then some larger figures in the outside like Jordan Peterson, Sargon Avacado. And that basically is the manisphere and it's millions of men and fathers around the world. I don't know how many millions, but it's each one is like 304,000 guys on a single subreddit. The Pickapartist helped like 300,000, red pill 300,000, McTow about the same, men's rights about the same.  So that's millions of guys. No, absolutely. And you said there's never been anything like that before. And obviously it's because there didn't need to be, before we didn't have a men's movement. And feminist would say it's because, well, you've always run everything. So you didn't have, and that's true. That is the way it is. But obviously there are a lot of issues. I actually, my entry point years ago was, I started writing my masculinity from a different angle and then I started writing for this blog, The Spearhead. And that really had some talking to some of those guys about some of the stories about things that they'd gone through in divorce court and things, you know, having a slot team, show it through her house and put him on the floor or whatever, because their wife was mad.  And so they're not going to just like become this big media figure all of a sudden because they're still trying to fight for their kids. And I actually had a dude who follows me on Instagram, put something out the other day where he was like, you know, he had changed his own profile and he was raising money to basically fight the courts to keep his kids. And I said in 25 bucks, I was like, ah, I hate those stories. Whenever I hear it, it bugs me. And then like, I got like, I would say eight more DMs from other followers who was like, oh, I've been through that. Oh, I pay a mortgage in childcare, you know. And oh, it's terrible school, you know. And, you know, and I think it's easy for a lot of those guys to focus on in a very negative place. And that's why it's really good to have some, a positive, you know, a positive direction for them, which is what I think you're trying to do with the 21 convention, so. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. I think the Manisphere, as much as it has some negative elements to it, so to speak, there's a, first of all, there's a reason for that stuff.   I wouldn't be on top of that if I went through half of that. I mean, I haven't had to go through a lot of it. I just see it, it makes me mad. Yeah. Yeah, I can't imagine how angry it would be, you know. Yeah. But the one thing that makes the Manisphere, people like to say they want to view it strictly as a response to feminism. And that's part of it, I think, for sure. You know, the feminism, especially the radical stuff we've seen in the past 30, 40 years and stuff, post-second wave and all that, that has inspired, I think, a lot of what we're seeing with the Manisphere. And you see these different, I think some of it's even just risk-tolerant stuff. The MiG-Town guys, the Manisphere generally, I don't know if they get along, but they share fundamental beliefs and values. And sometimes they get along, sometimes they fight the different communities.  And then guys on top of that have different risk tolerances. So the MiG-Town guys, they view the same, for example, the MiG-Town and the Ripo community, they get along, in terms of beliefs, they get along really tight. They believe a lot of the same things. They have divergent ways of dealing with it. The MiG-Town guys are like getting away from it. The Ripo guys are more assertive and aggressive, still staying in the game, so to speak, still approaching women, still trying to do things, right? Right. So there's basically different ways of dealing with it. But some of these guys, well, here's what I'm gonna say, that here's the important part, for our least friend of thought. So feminists are strictly, I think, negative. They haven't done anything positive in a long, long time. Even in their whole history, I don't think it's very positive at all. It's been very negative with a good PR campaign. Whereas the manusphere, most of it's actually very positive, and it's been very, and so in that sense, it is the response to feminism, but it's a legitimate, genuine mirror, and that it's self-improvement focused. And you don't see that in feminism at all. And the manusphere, very widely, you see a focus on health and fitness. You see a focus on getting your career, and your finances in order, and being self-reliant, self-responsibility, mastery, a lot of guys are fans of your work, you know, the four tactical virtues. So that's a lot different from feminism. So anyone's saying it's like just a mirror, opposite of feminism, it's as bitchy guys, whining about the way of the world or whatever. First of all, some of that's, a lot of it's justified.  But second, there's a big focus on self-improvement, and all the communities, all of it. And that's the thing very healthy and very positive. And you don't see that that women and feminism, they have nothing that's positive until make women great again. Yeah, I love that.  Yeah. Whatever the situation is, is to find a way to path forward and to take action. Cause if men don't feel like they're taking action, they don't feel like they're doing anything. They feel very impotent. And it's definitely, I think, a big struggle between chaos and order. And that's kind of, that's a lot of what I'm writing about and working on now in my book. It's, men have to impose order on the world. They want things to be ordered. They want things to have definitions that have definitions and things that are separate. And that makes the world makes sense to them. And if they don't have that, it's really unsettling for them. And I think unsettling for society because like what feminism does, it's been all about taking down order about, you know, creating chaos really by Smash the patriarchy. Smash, smash, smash, break, break, break. What are you replacing it with? And they don't really have a good answer to that. And they never have.   I mean, we destroyed our relationship with England and created a new country. You destroy something to create something. Whereas I think that feminism has been very much about just destruction of the old order without really replacing a new order. It's just a complete leveling. And men are about men like hierarchy. You know, like it doesn't matter if you're on the bottom or the top. I want a hierarchy to be there.  What is better? What is best? Men like that. And, you know, like you can talk about whether it's like kind of like body acceptance movement or any of these things, like feminism has been very much about everything is okay. Everything is pretty good. And men don't see it that way. And I think that's one of the key things that maybe all the guys in the menosphere really understand is that, A, they think that men and women are different, which, you know, is really have to live in a bubble to not believe that. And that's been common sense for pretty much all of civilization and probably even before that. But I'm probably absolutely before that.  Yeah, it's basic division of labor and the thing of pregnancy. Yeah, it's believing what your eyes tell you. Like, yeah, men and women are different.  Yeah, it's very obvious and very basic. And you really have to do a lot of gymnastics to get around that. And they spent many years developing those gymnastics, but at the end of the day, the truth is still there. And, you know, you can't really get away from it. And so I think you're, I think your point here with the order and chaos is huge. And I think the manosphere is actually like on a, maybe on a, you know, gene level, genes, RK selection, gene thing, evolutionary, whatever it is, cultural society, but the manosphere is the first like, basically gender-based pushback against feminism that's healthy and positive in ordering. It's men wanting to bring order into their own lives personally, whereas that's a guy who got burnt in divorce court, or a mixtape guy who got burnt on a relationship.    Because they're sick of it.  They're sick of me too. They're sick of divorce court.     Where does that leave the average guy who's an assistant manager at Best Buy? Yeah. To mean you're acting with women.  Which is a lot harder when you don't have a millions of dollars of buffer. Yeah. I mean, guys who are just making an average living because, you know, there's this idea of privilege and whatever and like, the average guy really isn't that privileged. The average guy is just trying to make ends meet and get it together and, you know, hold his life together. And yeah, when you throw, you know, whether it's huge fines at a business or whether it's huge, these huge payments that these guys can't afford, whatever you, that it's crippling to them. I mean, look at Johnny Depp. Johnny Depp's a victim of domestic violence.   But I think he, I mean, this guy is powerful. He has connections. He has relationships. He has status. He has money. He can hire the best attorneys in the world.   And that's the guy with, he's worth like $200 million or something. Where does that leave the guy? Even like your local doctor has money.   Yeah, yeah. No, it's really, and I don't think people realize, and I was talking to someone who I would say is more progressive, I think the other week. And they just don't realize how loaded the system is in that direction. Yeah, even when we talk about psychologists and therapists and that whole industry is very excited in the way it sees the world. And it's very, it's married to a particular agenda. And so it's like, well, just have the psychiatrists evaluate them. Well, they're gonna evaluate them in a very specific lens. According to the new, the API guidelines are like, masculinity itself is bad. So, if he's doing it, if he's being a man the right way, he's like toxic to them. So, but yeah. I think the day is coming. I think the day is coming when masculinity itself, anything to do with traditional masculinity is considered a dismantled disorder. Like they came pretty close to that last time. And I think in the next five, 10 years, that's what's gonna happen. Yeah. No, I mean, I think that that's coming out of the pike. And I've said often that I think that it's almost, masculinity is almost gonna become like a cult. You know, like it's a religion in itself. And that's kind of their direction that I'm going with some things is, because it's gonna be a choice that you have to do underground. Now, actually the whole- When does church start? When do I sign up? I'm working on it. I'm like six. But yeah, I mean, it really is. It's something that men are going to have to choose and follow and they're gonna be demonized for it. And I've always said that that's how you become the best version of yourself. I mean, if I wouldn't have ever forced myself to go take boxing or do something that puts me at risk and deal with that interaction with other men and all the things that you get out of that, I would not be anything like what I'm like today. You know, it definitely transforms you. And I think that men need that. And unfortunately, a lot of people don't see it. I mean, I made a comment on Parley actually their day. It's like, there's this kind of doctor mentality that people have that if you hurt yourself, you should never do that thing that hurt yourself again.  You should never deadlift again. And there's a lot of doctors that will just tell you that. And that's kind of a mentality that's very motherly, protective, but the reality is that if you're gonna do cool things, you're gonna get hurt. Well, it's the same thing in the manuscript. You see that, yeah. You see that in your like relationships sometimes. Some guys get really burnt on a relationship.   But in terms of like a one-on-one relationship, that's a bad idea to use an equal one experience, a personal experience like that and way too heavily an anecdote like that. Like, oh, I had a bad experience in this relationship.  I'm never gonna date them ever again. You see, you guys do this like all the time. There's even YouTubers.  And it's just like, dude, not good, dude. Yeah, yeah, you can't. I mean, I actually even had a friend say that to me and it kind of put me in my place on that one in terms of tribalism. It's like I did a thing with a tribe and it didn't work out. And he's like, oh, so you date one girl and you never date girls again. Is that how it works? I'm like, oh, all right, you're right.  And so yeah, you can't let one experience and you have to have a group selection of data to pull from because it, and that's the other thing that people say is, they think if you're anti-feminist that you hate all women and that's a very common thing. And really not all women are radical feminists. In fact, very, very few are. Correct. Very few of them even identify as feminists at all. Yeah. Like 75% in England a couple of years ago do not identify as a feminist when they're asked. They don't want anything to do with it. That doesn't mean they don't believe feminist ideas but in terms of like how they identify, they know to stay away from it. It's a toxic. Yeah, so it doesn't mean that you hate all women and it's the same kind of thing with Black Lives Matter.  And of course that's not true at all. And it's just, but that's the frame, is they're gonna push that frame because it makes everyone feel like they have to get on board. Yeah. It's a logical fallacy being used as effective marketing and it's effective.  I'm an abolitionist actually. I want to abolish feminism. So, Piers Morgan called me an abolitionist and I was like, yes, I'm an abolitionist. Because that's good marketing. I was like, yeah, I'm an abolitionist. Yeah, yeah, yeah. My mission to abolish this. Righteous. Yeah, yeah, there you go. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The slavery of feminism. Absolutely. Yeah, I want them back in the kitchen and out of the workplace. That's where they belong. That's where they're happy. Out of the chain. Out of the chains. Yeah. I always say that people like, for every one of these popular feminist bloggers or writers or some woman who's actually at the head of top of industry and that's certainly prevalent all around the world. For every one of those, there's some chick who just would like to hang out with her kids but she has to go to work at Walmart every day because that's the only way she can make a living and that's the way society's been designed now. And so she has actually, the reality of work is that most people don't like their jobs. I mean, all through history. Like that's, most people, dudes didn't want to go work in coal mines. That's just how they could make a living. And not all work is about fulfillment. Some jobs just need to be done. Like that, the micro dirty jobs. There's somebody out there cleaning a sewage plant and it's not because he's being fulfilled by it. It's because he needs a job and it pays well. And men have always done that kind of stuff and there's no romance or excitement to it. Feminism really romanticized these careers as if like careers for most people.  For now, I may have to go down to get a job someday. Whatever, but hopefully not. But most people, that's it. I never had to. I just do what I want. I just do what I want every day all day. Well, who knows what the world has in store for us. It's been a weird year. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We need about five more. Who knows what it looks like. And that's another thing I've also talked about a lot is that there used to be a thing like you're gonna be in masculinity someday. And I was always like, well, what if you didn't though? Like would you still want to be a man? Or because you can't rely on that. But it turns out we're in a situation where we may, people may need to figure out how to be men, be good at being men pretty soon. Depending on what happens. So in that... There's a saying that's been going around on Twitter and it's that nature is healing.  There was a pent up energy lock on people up. But it's also shown us who the tyrants are.  So that's good.  It's taken the mask off ironically. Also the feminism.  Like it's out of the blue. And a lot of guys are importing this.  And I guess in a long enough time span, it's always bound to happen. And that next time, it's as bad as it is. Yeah, well, I mean, that's if it does correct itself. I hate to rely on that. Like, cause people are always like, well, we have to get to the end of the next cycle. Well, that could be in 200 years. I want to live my life right now. So I don't want to rely on that. But some corrections may be happening right now. But I just wanted to clear that up.  I heard that you were an in-cell. Oh, me? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I get, I get all kinds of, I mean, I get called every name on the internet. Yeah. My life is, I've been single for a long time. So I'm a relationship vol-cell, I guess you call it. Okay. Yeah, this is that. You know, I was the nicest question on Piers Morgan.  And I really should have been like, I did them banging like four different women at a time, like not in my room at the same time, but like concurrently throughout the week and the month. Right. And that's pretty common. You know, three, four, five women at a time that I have on like a rotation. So this kind of in-cell stuff, it's so delusional. Like I've been in hot chicks too, I love it. My goal, I don't actually want to, I don't like, want to be like, like the highest quality, not that they're like, not that they have inner beauty, so to speak, but on the outside.  Right. If she's granted the insight too, that's great. Cause I'm not, you know, I'm not dating this in the long-term. I'm not, I'm not building a family with them and stuff, but I want to have fun and I want to bang super hot chicks cause that's what feels good. It's a hedonism, but it's hedonism. It's hedonism with a long-term purpose cause I'm building skill and experience. I know that it's going to be useful in like longer term in my life. Just keep learning about the opposite sex. See, if most people saw the woman I banged, they would be like really angry. They'd want to choke me. They're that hot. I mean, I make it habitable but they're a point of having the hottest ones. Nice, nice, nice. Nobody believes me, but on the internet I guess, but it occurs. Well, yeah, I mean like, you know, internet is kind of, you know, Pixar didn't happen, you know, but what's, as far as you talked about family, and you've been promoting family a little bit more through the 21 convention and so forth. I mean that's been part of it. How does that fit into your picture? Well, partly we're just rebuilding the patriarchy. We're building a new one. And that's kind of tongue-in-cheek, but it's also like very literal. You know, the feminists obviously, they smashed the patriarchy as they told us millions of times now. And I think one of the ways I work as an entrepreneur and then think as a man and as a young American, I look at things that I hate, movements. And then I flip everything. I think my basic theory is that when you see a toxic movement like feminism or BLM, everything that they value is inverted. So everything that they hate is actually really good. Everything they like, basically, pretty much is that really bad.   Right. But also feminists hate patriarchy. So what does that mean? I mean, basically, in a common sense fashion, patriarchy is really good. Men leading families, men leading civilization, not necessarily by law and stuff. I think people should be treated equally before the law. But in terms of like culturally and socially, what we're gonna encourage and what we're gonna push, especially in a family, who's gonna lead a family? Who's gonna drive the bus or drive the car if a family has a car, the man? I think that's the way it's always been more or less and it's the way it should be. I think that's a woman respond to really well and some men excel at. So what makes them, that's being in alignment with your nature as a man is to be a leader, especially the family where you're even a pregnant woman and you have little half-users running around. So yeah, the family thing is big. It's been, since 2019, we started getting that kind of patriarch edition of the event and that's pretty much our main event, like, you know, 21 convention, but with this much stronger focus on fathers, fatherhood and family and patriarchy, literally. Some of the speakers will talk on it explicitly. And to me, there's no, people see a conflict in that because I'm like myself, I'm not a father. I don't speak out of those. So there's, I draw lines. Like I don't, all the speakers of the patriarch event have to be biological fathers. If you're not a biological father, you can't speak, period. So I actually value these things a lot. I really want to build a family. I look forward to it. I have another nephew on the way in like five, six weeks now, really excited. I think babies are, babies are underrated. Babies are awesome and all that, but I'm not a father yet. So the patriarch edition, I don't speak. I speak at the other events because it fits the narrative of what we're doing. But at the fatherhood event, only fathers can speak and I'm very strict about that. And you know, I run my own company and I don't respond to shareholders or anything like that. I'm not under anybody's thumb. So I could change it at any point, but I don't. I had a respect for the kind of content we're building and the kind of mission. And the father speaking there who has biological skin in the game. Even I had one guy who wanted to speak who was only a stepfather and it was, it was no. You have to be a biological father. You have to have biological skin in the game, period. And yeah, again for me though, there's no dissonance, there's no conflict with it. You know, if I found a great mother for my child tomorrow, I might pull the trigger on it. I can't say that I would without, you know, being in that situation, but definitely something I want to do, start my 30s and look forward to it. In the meantime, I'm not responsible for what women do that I don't know.  That's not the first time she's done that.  Right. I'm not responsible for, I'm responsible for being number 28, sure. I'm not responsible for previous 27 dudes. Right. I'm not taking responsibility for your life. I don't know you. You're not my best friend's sister. I don't work with you. I'm not related to you obviously.  You're responsible for you. Your parents responsible for you. And I'm responsible for you in that night. And that's it. If it descends there, which you probably will. Yeah.  I mean, because they're taking responsibility. That's a strong independent woman who made her own choices. Yes, right. But the track cons come after me on Twitter, these track guys, I like these guys. They have traditional conservative values and stuff, whatever I have criticisms of what they do. Cause obviously they're not, they're not winning the culture war. It's been a downward fight or downhill fight. But they come after me for stuff. Like, why do you do this?  I'm like, what else am I going to do in the meantime? Like I'm not going to be in a celibate, whatever. These girls are out doing this anyway. If I don't partake in it, I do have lines I draw. Like I don't help women commit adultery or cheat, but find out she has a boyfriend or husband and I vacate immediately. And I've lost some haucos with that because they want to use me to cheat and I'm like, I'm not doing it. I'm out. Now are they going to cheat anyway? Absolutely. 99% chance. If they're going to cheat with me, we'll find some other dude to do it that night or the next night or whatever. So I know that I'm not changing the world doing that, but I know that I'm also going to not enable what I view as a relationship abuse or the downfall of marriage. It's going to happen anyway, but I'm not going to part of it. Right.  I mean, that's great. Let's do it. Like you're going to have a good time. I'm looking forward to it and not responsible for your past or your future because the chance of me dating that girl is super low anyway. Right. That's why I look at it. People get upset at me that I'm enabling it.   Well, yeah, yeah. I mean, a similar position to you in that sense is I'm very, yeah, I want to support fatherhood and patriarchy, obviously. Patriarchy is kind of the foundation of everything. And it's everything good and a lot of problems in society come from men not having good father figures and not having that kind of representation. Father knows best. Yeah, yeah.  I mean, when the nurture fathers create structure and together those two things go very well.  I'm lucky enough to come from a background like that. But actually my sisters are both still married. They're about my age. So, you know, I actually come up from pretty stable background like that, but you know, I'm not married. And so I do the same thing that you do. I don't tell fathers how to father. Yeah, because that's that's that's not my business. You know, like that's not my job. Yeah, I don't have there. I don't have the credibility to talk about that. I don't tell how I don't tell warriors how to make war. And I don't tell father who's at a father. That's the exact position. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But at the same time, you could talk about what the big picture of what father is. Yes. And I think that that's like, I'm writing a little bit about that now. And you can talk about what that is without actually giving like, I'm not going to tell you how to change diaper. You know, I have no idea. I'm doing what you're doing, except more indirectly.  So Tanner, Guzzi, Hunter, Drew, Socrates, you know, it's to find them all and all these guys. So I find guys who I do have opinions on fatherhood masculinity and how they work together in patriarchy. But since I'm not a father, I don't speak on it directly, but I find guys to voice what I believe to be true to the best of my ability to judge it. And I don't tell them what to say.  I don't dictate, you know that firsthand, I don't tell the guys what to say.  Just use your best, that's hard to do anyway, obviously at this point. But just use your best judgment. Other than that, you have free reign to say whatever you believe. In fact, what you believe is most important to you is what you should say on the stage at the conference. And then as do that with fathers.  You have guys getting together that are declaring like a new direction for fatherhood that's different from what the feminist establishment, the feminist order has been dictating for a hundred years now. And the patriarchy smashed it for the patriarchy.   The wife's is super intelligent, knows everything, right?  And it's unapologetic too, like, you know, you've been to these events. Yeah. And that to me is a really beautiful, very positive thing coming together like that. And to be able to direct that and put that together is like really fun for me. I love doing it. Oh yeah, I mean, I love watching the same thing. I love having dudes like Tanner or Ryan Mikler or somebody say the things that I would want to say about fatherhood. They're verifying, okay, they're actually doing it and they agree with me. So we're, that's exciting, you know. Hey, it's validating, but it's also, you know, I'm glad that they're putting that message out there for the guys who need that particular advice because they're building families right now and they need to hear the right things because there's a lot of bad advice out there.  But I think it's important too though that they speak firsthand as a father and that's why guys instinctively like me and you don't do it. It's like, I'm not, I haven't put a baby in a chick and then watch my own genetic legacy walk around. It's a big deal. Like having a nephew, even then I'm related to him, like, wow, this is huge. Yeah, but these guys do. Ryan Mitchell and Hunter and Tanner, these guys have kids and they have skin in the game.  So that it's not only validating it, but it's important, I think it's important for the audience, it's the fathers who need the help, need the advice, the motivation, whatever, right, the knowledge. I look to do that and I think the world is a father. They need to see guys doing it successfully as fathers, not guys like me and you were like, well, I think this is true. I'm pretty sure based on what I've read and what I understand but you haven't tested it yourself firsthand, so. Right, right, right. So it's, I mean, to circle back on the thing about the criticisms you get from like Tridcons and so forth. The reality is, I mean, you have guys like Ryan Mickler and you have Tanner and so forth and they also have a community framework that supports this positive thing. I mean, they have like a religious background that supports that and there are a lot of different religions that do that.  And so you have, it's much more cohesive than mainstream modern culture, which is just kind of, you know, no fault divorce or fault doors or just like, just take, you know, we're doing this for a few years then we're gonna do something else and whatever Most people are, a lot of people are in that situation and one of the things that I've said to people is that you can't assume that all guys are gonna get married and have kids because, hey, that's really never happened in history. That's not, I mean, there are a lot of guys who are expendable in some way or another.  I mean, not every dude has a wife and kids or is entitled to one. But, you know, for the guys who really want it, I think it's a really good thing. But there are also a lot of men and women who are just never gonna get there. You know, they aren't looking for that or whatever. So yeah, by you going out and enjoying the people who are probably never gonna get there, you know? I mean, like, you're not getting them there, you know?   That's a zone of fucking, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, a lot of them, dude, people don't get it, man. Modern single mothers and millennial single mothers, a lot of them are really hot. That's actually the reason that they're single mothers is some dude, eventually, they're promiscuous. There's no social religious pressures to push back against being promiscuous to keep their legs closed. So they just kind of bang guys indiscriminately. They've been trained and encouraged to do this behavior by feminism their whole lives, you know, from age 10 up or even before that. At the end of the day though, you know, eventually they just find a guy who doesn't pull out. That's what happens. It's a ticking time bomb. My pull out game is undefeated.    And the dudes didn't pull out and they have kid. Yeah. And then five years later, they bang me.  You have another man's child. Like, sorry, sorry, not sorry. Yeah, yeah. Maybe some guy will, but I mean, you gotta get realist. These are another thing too, the single moms, there's too much of a tangent, but they have like really bad expectations. They're super unrealistic. Cause they still think like they don't have a kid in a way. Even if they're not like horrible mother, they like, it hasn't connected. They know, but they refuse to connect the dots that having a kid is gonna massively lower your attractive level for a guy who doesn't have kids and doesn't want to take care of another man's kid because it's not a kid. I don't take care of my own kids who don't exist yet. So. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean that, total thing, I mean, I've went on like three dates with strippers last year that were very much like that. We're like, they don't even realize that they're strippers. Like that, that changes the value of whatever. Like they, they wouldn't treat you like you're dating them.  That's, that's your, and they're also single mothers. I think, oh, of course, yeah, feminism. You were talking about feminism saying everything's equal. Yeah.  It's the same thing.  Everything's equal. It's this very, you know, communist kind of mindset. Everything's equal, equal, equal, equal to the point of insanity and absurdity.  That's because their body and that maybe is still in good shape and it's still might be physically attractive. It's like, there's more to you than that. And you're not acknowledging that. And that's a problem. It's going to make, it's not only awkward to be on the receiving end of that.  It makes it, it makes relationships impossible for them because they're always trying to like, to straight, to, you know, to hypergamy. So date up.  I don't have, you know, any problems like that I don't have some ex-baby mama. I don't have another, you know, other children from other women running around and stuff, which would be an issue too. I don't have any of that.  I'm not an ex, I'm not an ex-criminal. I haven't been a pros or anything. And they try to date guys like that. It's like, you're, you're out of your mind. Like you're, you're three leagues out of your, out of your own domain where you belong. They don't want to, they don't want to hear it.  And they end up during, I mean, there's actually, it's kind of a tragic note, but alcoholism is skyrocketing for women today in their fifties. Oh yeah.  You're completely entitled to the point of delusion. Yeah, well, I mean, we'll see where that goes too.  I mean, and that's, that's a problem with men too, frankly. I mean, when you have men, that's a challenge. I've talked to Richard Granon a little bit about that podcast is that, you know, men without structure or responsibilities also tend to self-destruct as they get older. And because you do have kids, their lives are planned. They have busy things to do, like baseball practice and all this stuff has to go on.   I mean, I can, I could get away with it.  They don't have any like other pressures on their time. Whereas if you have kids running around like, hopefully you're like, I really shouldn't be drunk all of a sudden. You know, like, hopefully you're making good decisions based because you have kids there. You know? Yeah, there's a motivator, there's a motivating factor. And so a lot of guys are looking for that motivating factor to change their lives. Whereas, you know, I think one of the positive things that you get from some of the Manisphere guys is, you know, the idea, well, you have to change it yourself. You can't wait for some woman or family or whatever to come along to fix you. You know, because you need to take responsibility for your own life. And although taking self-reliance and taking responsibility for your own life apparently is bad now. But I saw one of those privilege things the other day, I guess that's part of it. It's not a fashion to take responsibility. It's part of a privilege or whatever the, you know, self-reliance. But anyway, so what did you get? Oh, go ahead. I wanted to add on that note, you know, the structure. I've had that from entrepreneurship. So I guess I'm blessed or I've been fortunate to have that kind of life. From the 17 years old, the 14 year anniversary of my company is in like two days. It's coming out a couple of days here. And I know that it's unusual. Like I get, most guys don't have that. I do forget sometimes though, because that's been my whole experience. Like it's my bubble. It's having massive responsibility through business that I've self-inflicted, so to speak. I've, you know, I run three businesses now legally. So it's increasingly complex and professional and big and all that stuff. But that's given me structure. So I could do, yeah, I could do, you're saying get drunk three days in a row or whatever, right? But I don't. And I focus, what I do is I do entrepreneurship. And I do, it's pretty high risk. It's pretty intense. You know, last year as an example of that, you had events in Poland, we did three events. Each event is in a huge risk. Events are complex, logistical stuff.   Right. You know, we moved ours, thankfully.  It was like, great.  Everything's fucked.  In the meantime, let me move these two events in the spring and combine it with the third event rather than trying to finagle, you know, three separate events. I'll just do one event, combine the three. And that's working really well now.  Over the tickets, it just came out and stuff. And plus obviously 22Con blew up and it's all working, but it's all high risk. And that keeps me focused. And that's keeps on my edge, you know, that masculine edge. I think that maybe you would talk about in your books. Staying on your path. Yeah. Yeah. We both have a mission. I always say, I'll never run out of projects. I mean, that's what we keep me from going down.  And, you know, so yeah, cause I have things I want to do. I'll never run out of projects.   Or an art project or whatever. I always have a million things that I'm working on. So I don't have a problem, but a lot of guys don't have that direction. And so that's, I think why they flounder. And so they're looking for direction. So I think that, I mean, you and I both are examples of dudes who have saved by a mission to a certain extent. Like we have a mission. We have something we're doing.  Yeah. And I have no doubt that if I didn't have that pressure and that structure and that business multiple in place, I probably would be very destructive.    They've been, I'm having the guys in history have drunk, you know, gotten drunk to death, killed themselves, because they didn't have an art form to express through positively. I mean, that's saving some of these guys, you know, as artists. Oh, absolutely.  I've heard a lot of people say, Jiu-Jitsu saved me. You're like, there's all kinds of things that people do just need something to focus on and some kind of purpose and way to put together. So, I mean, what made you want to do the 21 convention originally? Yeah, originally. So it was actually called the under 21 convention, the original name. The first two years, I was called that. And later we did one in 2016. I brought it back briefly. I was for young men. So I was 17 years old and I had found the, I just got out of high school, like a few weeks. I was in college, UCF, summer classes. And basically I was in the pickup community at that point.  And I was familiar with Mystery Method at that point and the book, the game that was famous at the time, New York Times bestseller and all that. So I was in that community. And on top of that, I was involved with a local pickup community in Orlando in Florida actually called Toplayer. It's lived for the Tampa Orlando Lair.  It was famous because it was super helpful together. The guy running it, which I think in a sense kind of rubbed off on me. I met him a few times. I don't know the guy too well, but the actual way it ran online and then we had meetups in person.  Oh, whatever the fuck, right? Who lives more?  Right. But anyway, good practice, whatever. But I was involved in that community. So the larger pickup community, which is part of the larger Manusphere and then a smaller local community of Florida meetup group for men, basically. I was very positive actually, very good stuff. I met Socrates there, a lot of guys you see today at the events. And that kind of gave me the idea to do a meetup myself for young men.  There was a section for young men. It was under 21. And they knew me from posting there because I was the only guy that showed my face.  I post pictures. And back then this was like super taboo. Nobody did that. I mean, this wasn't like the Instagram age. This was 2006.  Right. That was like I had cares in 17.  Right. I just didn't, not thinking the future at all, but you know, whatever worked out. And I put this out there that I'm like, hey, we should do an under 21 meetup in Orlando. You know, it's great. There's a lot of places to go. We can all meet up. Everybody could fly in for a couple of days and we'll just go pick up chicks and try to figure out how to get better at picking up chicks. How to get better as young men, basically.  Cause no one had ever tried this before. So I basically had accidentally found a niche from my own age, you know, speaking to guys my age.  How many 17 year olds have, you know, back then it was all ebooks I would sell in the pick up community right at the man's sphere. You know, I was trying to get together when I was in high school, my friend, we were trying to get together and split an ebook cause it was like 90 bucks. I mean, this is how this is a desk. Right.  I'm picking up chicks. It sounds bad idea, right? Right. Even 18, 19 year old, 20 year old college kids. Anyway, I put this idea out there and under 21 meetup and everyone loved it.  We'll do it next summer or something. I'm like, yeah, let's do it.  And I was like, yeah, that's a great idea. And I was like, yeah, we'll have like under 21 convention. And everyone's like, yeah, that sounds like a great idea.  So before I knew it, I was putting together a conference, a convention for the next summer, which was July. So this was July 2006 at this point. And then I was planning now, I was like, all right, we'll do it, let's just say next July. Like this one year, I was like, yeah, that's probably enough time. Just a guest, basically. I'd never done a conference before. I had no experience organizing professional events like that. And so basically I put it together. And it was very motivating the community. They were very excited for it. The moderators got involved from the forum because they were concerned they were going to shut it down. They actually locked the thread. It was like thousands of comments guys were posting and they were worried because it was a bunch of young dudes meeting up and they were like, this is a real company they were doing. I mean, Mystery Method was like a multi-millionaire company at this point.  But I talked to them and I'm like, hey man, we're going to charge 20 bucks at the door if you're from Florida, 40 bucks if you're from out of the state. So it's going to be, so they were very concerned too about a competitor basically. I'm like, I like what you guys do. I'm not a competitor.  And obviously you don't care about this because we don't have any money. But we like what you're doing. And so there was a genuine positivity. I think they had all the guys running the forum and the business. And so they unlocked it. And before I knew it, I made a picked up a lot of steam, a buddy in mine in college was taking web development at UCF and he was able to put together a little website back in 2006 for me.  And that was the founding of the company. And then we had about 80 guys show up from around the world. So mostly it was from a guys from out of state. There's about 20, 30 guys from Florida that showed up. The rest of them were flying in. And that's something that was special. We had speakers show up from these different companies a little bit back in the day, pick up companies, some of the local guys, Socrates didn't speak at it but he knew a lot of guys who did like the top layer thing. So it was a cool little event. And on top of that too, there was a guy really lucky through, I worked at Sears at the time selling TVs part-time, like selling those TVs and shit like that at Sears.  So he gave me a deal for a couple hundred bucks. He did audio for the event, recorded all of it. And then a guy from the forum was taking in film school in California. He was like, Hey, if you get my flight and put me up at your house or something for a couple of days, I'll film it for free.  But it was nice, it was nice enough, right? Holiday Inn, three-star hotel, living a big life. And we had 80 guys show up and had basically a film team and an audio team. And we got lights from Sears that we like rented, I returned them when we were done. Nice. And those halogen, these cheap leather garage lights. But it lit the stage, speaking area. We had speakers, we had, it was a two-day conference to this Saturday, Sunday. So two-day, we got the film, we got the videos. And then as a young guy too, I was very frustrated. I didn't know about TedEvent yet. Well, they did stuff, they're publishing for free. But I did see the man in the industry, the pickup community. Everything was a, YouTube was still taken off then. There wasn't like any much content for learning how to get better with women at that point on YouTube. And everything for videos and the manager at that point was super expensive. It was all DVD sets and all in CD sets. They were like 300, 400, 500 or $600.   You're lucky you can torrent it. You can find a torrent back then.  It was way out of your price league.  I hated that.  I was like, our convention was dope. And everyone's like, well, you can do the videos. I'm like, they're gonna be free. Everyone was like, yeah. This was a huge deal back then. I can't even tell you.  And I've taken a stand to keep publishing the videos for free for so long, which a lot of people have encouraged me not to do.  But I believe in the message. I believe in the mission. And I believe long-term too in the profit that actually there's more money than doing it for free anyway, long-term. In the short term, you sacrifice some profit, but in the meantime, you reach millions of more people. Men. So that's how the company got started. With the videos out, maybe two months after the event happened and it blew up, man. People loved it. And it's kind of just kept snowballing from there. I could get more into it, but that was the first year and how it all went down. I got very fortunate, man. We made, I made profit on the first event, like a hundred bucks. Yeah. And it was a nail biter, dude. The hotel was collecting cash from me after it. I was collecting cash from the attendees. The hotel managers were watching me collect the cash to pay them for the room. And I had no idea if we'd have, and I had no idea if we'd have enough attendees because all they did was RSVP on three email.  They just paid cash at the door. And I had no money. I had like 80 bucks in my bank account.   Yeah. So I mean, what advice would you have for someone trying to get something started somewhere? I mean, because a lot of people want, wait for it to be perfect. And that's never to happen. What advice would you have for a young guy trying to start out? He who hesitates masturbates. That's an old pickup community saying seriously, old school late 90s, early 2000s, guys would say that for approaching women. But in business, it's kind of the same way. And what you just said reminds me of that. So you're waiting for it to be perfect.  You have to take action. You got to execute. You're gonna make mistakes.  But you also will have, I think, some beginner's luck, so to speak. Whatever reason the universe deems that. Things work out. I think what it is is a lot of starting energy when you get something going. The excitement back comes crazy. And part of that is just the novelty of it. So execution, especially off the bat, is important and taking action, having balls in them. If you're gonna be an entrepreneur, it's gonna be risky no matter what. I was an old, young, whatever. So it's gonna be risky and you gotta execute. And not let fear dictate your actions. Have courage and actually follow through on that. And you'll be scared, you know, should've happened. But you don't let that dictate your actions. You don't let it dictate your choices. You don't let it dictate what your body does physically. Like what are you gonna do? Well, what I'm gonna do is not what fear tells me necessarily. I'll listen to it maybe as risk management kind of stuff. Now that I'm older, I understand that.  I try not to be anyway too much, even if they come off like that. But I don't want fear to be the primary way that I make decisions. We'll put it that way. I want courage and I want mission. I want creativity and my own thoughts. What's important, my own values to be the primary driver, what I do. Not negativity and fear and toxic garbage. Awesome, awesome. That's what I'm saying. Well, I like that a lot. To wrap up, why don't we... What's going on at the full-on convention this year? Yeah, my dream's coming true, man.  So I've been dreaming for a while. I've been doing a 21 summit, kind of a mega kind of thing. I didn't have the more specific details of it early on. We're about two, three years now, I'm thinking about this though. Not just a 21 convention, but like a multi-conference event. And now we're doing that. Now we're doing that probably out of necessity because of COVID. I kind of forced my hand to do it earlier than I maybe would have thought of, 2021, 2022 or whatever. But we're doing three events this year and the first time ever. Well, three conferences is part of a larger summit, 21 summit. And I think that actually be the new model going forward that we end up doing. So you'll see 21 summit probably get next year in the fall. And then after that, and then after that, there's a couple reasons for that business-wise and kind of mission-wise and personal sanity-wise.     Last year doing three was an example of that.  I was like, oh my God. I won, but at what expense? I'm like a zombie. I'm like, ugh. So basically this year though, we have going on right now is super important. I love it. And so it's gonna be three events. It's the 21 convention main event, the flagship event guys have come to know and love for 14 years now, basically. I would evolve the course from the young men's event, the under 21 convention. It aged with me and so did the name and the mission and the focus. On top of that, we have the 21 convention, second Patriarch edition. That's basically the second time we've done the Patriarch edition, which is the main 21 convention, but it's got a much stronger focus on fatherhood, fathers and family and patriarchy. You see some of that obviously in 21 convention, but I think it's a growing niche. It's a growing market and there's a growing need for it. And fathers want that. And they don't quite get that. They get some of that at main 21, but it's not primary, where it's much broader as much more bigger focus on masculinity overall. Even things like self-defense and stuff like that. So it's very diverse. So you got the main event for all men, the second event going on at the same time for fathers, separate conference, same time, same venue, same weekend. And then finally we have the event for women that has a long time come in the 22 convention, make women great again. That's the first time ever we're doing that. And that has made me kind of a zealous celebrity, I guess, like internet famous legit. On top of what we've done with 20 convention it's already pretty big, millions of views are on the world. 22 convention has gotten, has been sent to over 150 million people through news outlets, New York Times, New York Post, Paris de Morgan, Good Morning Britain, The Blaze, The Real, like all kinds of shit.  So we're doing a combat to women and we're gonna make women great again. And the mission is to make women great again and abolish feminism. And people see that as a joke and that's good. I want them to think it's like kind of like Saturday Night Live and Matt TV kind of skit.  But it's also a way it's kind of like the fake pump. It's real. And where this is the beginning, this is like anti-synical falls in a sense. It's women who don't like feminism. I think it's gone way too far. And they want to hear from men and they want to get mansplained too. And we're going to do some great 100% mansplaining. All men speaking, you know, major guys, they've seen the event, A.J. Cortez, I'll be there, Coach Gregata, Mr. Femme, all the new guys like that. So big deal. And we're filming all of it and we're going to publish it free to the world. And I think through that and pissing off all these feminists, they're just going to drive a lot of attention to it. And inadvertently, they're going to educate millions of women to ditch feminism, to abandon it. And that's my goal, to get them to ditch feminism, ditch feminist beliefs on top of that. You know how women identify? That's it's important, I guess it's useful, but it's not the core foundation of what they believe. And I believe feminism for women in particular, nevermind its effects on men, that should have been very negative in family and patriarchy and fatherhood. But for women, it's super toxic too. And I think it ruins your lives at this point. Well, yeah, I mean, I would say it's responsible for executives, it's also responsible for Tinder. I mean, you wouldn't have that without feminism. It's also the responsible for the epidemic of single motherhood. Single motherhood in America went from like- Which are related. Totally, totally, totally. Yeah. So it's a huge, it's the first real pushback for women to push back against feminism, to learn about femininity from men. Like what do men want? What are men gonna say if we actually ask them and they talk to us in public? Not like some dude on his, that's doing a video blog in his room. It's like on a public stage, professional lighting, camera work and all that. That's a big deal, I'm excited. So there's three events that are going on at the same time and that's for once for women, once for men, once for fathers. And all three are going on at the same time. They'll be separate, but they'll be limited. A little bit interaction between the events, dinners, things like that. I wanna keep things pretty separate for male spaces and like women's spaces. Right. There will be at least one co-ed event, the farewell party on Sunday night when we all leave and we're all done.  Nice, nice, nice. That's what's going on, man. It's the world's all, it's the manospheres, it's a woodstock of a manosphere and the world's ultimate event for men, the ultimate event for fathers, the ultimate event for women. And I can all apologize for that. They are really, really good as you know. And I love it and I'm really excited to be able to do it. It's a good opportunity. A opportunity of a lifetime. Absolutely. And as I've always said, I mean, they're extremely professional. You know, it's a... Yeah, I'm a fan. I close out a lot. I saw it the other day.  I mean, when I first walked in, I was like, oh, they're serious. Like they've got this figured out rather than like here's like, you know, whatever, filming this with an iPhone and you know, like one light on the stage.  Yeah.  And it's important to me. I view what we're doing. I look good like, you know, Martin Luther King and stuff like that. And I view what we're doing as absolutely righteous for men, for fathers, for women now too. And we're hated for it.   They want his poor, dead or whatever. Like it's, it's that bad at this point. Oh yeah. And sometimes it's quite explicit. I mean, they're very, they're very literal and open at this point with it. Absolutely. I view, you know, the mission is extremely important. And because of that, I'm going to dress my Sunday best so to speak. And that includes not only what I'm physically wearing, but the conference itself. It's going to be super professional because it has to be. It's going to win cameras. We're going to use the best cameras, the best guys, the best audio team, the best lighting, all that shit. Best hotels. And if we're going to win this war on feminism, as I call it sometimes, that's what has to happen. And for men, for everybody involved, no matter who the audience is. So professionals start to finish. Boom. Yeah. Yeah. It's, I mean, that's what you have to do. I've said to a lot of people that, you know, if you have an alternative message, you're competing with Hollywood. Yeah. So, I mean, that you have to, you know, you're not ever going to match that production level because that's at the $100 million dollar level. Yeah. But fortunately, if the technology is there, it is much more affordable. I mean, I can talk to you with a nice camera on 4K and it's not, we couldn't do this five years ago, be like a totally different situation. So we have the ability to produce content at a high level, relatively excessively. And I think that that professionalism helps the message. Yeah. I think it actually protects it too. It helps it and it protects it. I think it's one of the reasons why now, you know, fingers crossed, but we haven't had any problems at YouTube yet. And people are, they get surprised by that because they've got a controversial content. Excuse me. But I think one of the reasons for that is the actual camera work and the professionalism of it. We use real venue.  Yeah.  Four and five. We used a five star hotel in Poland. That was the nicest hotel in the country. Yeah. No, that was nice. Yeah. Yeah. So these are real hotels and they like what we do. You'd be surprised, man. A lot of hotel managers and professionals, men and women, they love what we do. A lot of them are very traditional. They tell me to fly it out. Like, yeah, men should be men. Women should be women. I'm like, yeah, you're radical. I'm coming here. This is great.  Yeah. And really it is there are so many people just because they're not online screaming. And the people online screaming are all that you hear. And that's how the media gauges what's real in the world is their circle. It's the people who are online shouting, the people who are loud. But yeah, most average people, to some degree or another, they're like, well, yeah, men and women are different. That's obvious, you know. And a solid family is probably better than not. You know, I think most people actually believe that.  Yeah.  My face is not channel face. Yeah. So it's more, there's kind of a corporate company feel to it. That's good. I think it makes it harder for them to attack it. They can't character assassinate a company. It's harder to anyway. You can attack it and criticize it, but it's not, you know, it's not a human being. It's a thing, it's a company. And then on top of that, the video is being professional and the actual, the way we set it up, the lighting, the audio, the video, it makes people think they don't know how much money and like attorneys we have. And, you know, one time YouTube about a year ago, they contacted me to take down a video, one I gave actually, incidentally, but it was just a controversial video I'd given my biggest speech ever, marrying Medusa. Right.  And if they want to talk any further, they can talk to my attorney. And I gave them, I forwarded them to my attorney and actually, you know, forwarded them on it, gave them his bar number in California, bar number in Florida, his personal cellphone number, his email, his website. I was like, there you go. I never heard from him again. And this is how you need to deal with these people. The minute they get serious with you, hey, here's my attorney, we're going to war.   And I think it's necessary to do that for the movement and the mission. And it protects it. It's actually very protective. It's a guarding kind of thing. Absolutely. Cool. And rent. All right, man. Well, I think this has been good. And obviously I'll put the links to the 21 convention and everyone so they can find it and find you and all that. I appreciate that. And I wish y'all.  You're going to be there? I bought the ticket. So I'm, who knows what the world's going to do? But like I'm planning on coming. So I just want to come and hang out with guys and I support what you do. So I'm glad to be there. And thanks. I like that. Absolutely, man. I appreciate your time. I just find it very amusing that our event is so good. Speakers come to just hang out. You're not even speaking at it. Yeah. And I like come hang out across the country because it's like that good. Yeah, that's real good. The kids are.  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. Nice. And I appreciate being on, man. Appreciate your time. Cool, man. Thank you.


My name is Frida and I come from Solomon Islands. I'm here and I'm studying a Masters of Public Health at the University of New South Wales. The best thing about studying at the University of New South Wales is that it gives me a really good experience to work with research academics, especially doing a Masters by Research program. I came to engage with some of the world-class public health researchers and not only that but there's a lot of overwhelming support that I receive both from my colleagues and also from the school and from the university family as well. I'm happy to study in Australia and I'm proud to be an Australian award recipient and to study in a prestigious Australian university because Australian university are some of the world-class universities around the globe and having achieved a degree from such prestigious university will not only boost my academic and professional development but also will help me personally when I go back and contribute to my country's socio-economic development.


Welcome to video number 5, in a series of videos that I have entitled configuring Emacs. This series, what I did is I started with a vanilla GNU Emacs, and I've slowly worked on a configuration file, and I've kind of turned it into something akin to Doom Emacs. So we've already installed Evil Mode, and we've got a lot of extra functionality and plugins. I've added a ton of key bindings to this thing already, being that this will be the fifth video in the series. For those of you that have not been following along with the series, if you want to, what you can do, go back to the very first video and follow along, and if you want the configuration files as they existed in those previous videos, I have this over on my GitLab, this repo called configuring Emacs, and you can see I have these directories. One, two, three, four. So these are the first four videos. So for example, if you start with video one and go into the one directory here, you will find the configuration files from that very first video as they existed at the end of that video, and of course, after I finish today's video, there will be a fifth directory here on this repo, and it will contain the configuration files as they exist at the end of this video. I'm going to do something a little different for this particular video. I'm actually going to show you the finished configuration file rather than slowly adding things on camera, typing things out, copying, pasting things. All of that kind of takes a little bit of time, so I've already added some extra functionality to my configuration file, and I'm just going to talk you through what I added rather than having to type it out on camera, because these videos, they typically run kind of long, and I hope that saves a little time today. So I'm going to close the browser here, and let me show you my latest configuration. And you can see I've added true transparency to Emacs, and this is something that was not possible until just a couple of days ago, and the reason I'm just now adding true transparency to this is Emacs version 29 just came out. That's a major release of Emacs. It just hit the Arch Linux repos just a couple of days ago. For those of you on a rolling release distribution, you may already have Emacs 29 in your Linux distributions repos. If you're on a static release, then you're probably stuck on Emacs 28, and if that's the case, there's not much you can do other than wait for the next major release of your distribution and then get the latest Emacs 29, hopefully in the new version of your Linux distribution. Other than that, you could compile Emacs yourself. You could build it yourself. I'm not going to go over how to do that, because to be honest, that's kind of a hacky kind of solution, and it's tough because you have to compile Emacs with the proper flags depending on what desktop environment or window manager you happen to be using. Are you using a pure Wayland environment, for example, GNOME on Wayland, or are you using Strictly Exord, because that will depend on exactly how you compile Emacs. Again, that's a deep topic. I'm not going to go over that, but if you have Emacs 29 available for you, go ahead and take that update, and if I go into our config file here, I'm going to zoom way in. I've got our table of contents here. I'm actually going to zoom out just a little bit. I zoomed way in. I've added this new section called transparency, and this is pretty simple. You can see with Emacs version 29, true transparency has been added. So true transparency means that you get a background that is transparent, but the text and the bullet points and all of that is still completely opaque. Before what you would have to do is there were hacky ways to make Emacs transparent. You could actually make the entire Emacs window transparent. You could do that with your compositor, for example, Pycom on Linux. You could just make the entire Emacs window like 90% opaque or whatever it happens to be, but the problem with that is it also made the text transparent. And that was very bad as far as readability, but now that we have this true transparency, all you need to do is add this line of text here. Add the list, default frame, a list, alpha background, dot, and then 90. 90 is 90% opacity. Obviously, if I set that to 100, that would be fully opaque, meaning no transparency at all. If I set it to zero, then the background would be completely transparent, right? Some 50 would be 50% transparency. You see how that works. So you just add that line and then you need to reload your Emacs. In this configuration, remember, I have the key binding, space HRR, to do a hot reload of our configuration after we make changes. You can see it's loading Emacs config, LPACA, the package manager would install packages if it was needed, but I haven't added any new packages to the config, so LPACA is not doing anything. Now I could do space VP for buffer previous to get back to the config. So I really love the transparency. I think it's a nice look. It makes Emacs so much more beautiful. One thing I wanted to do, though, I wanted to go back to the themes. So this is the theme section. Now remember before we added this custom path to a theme file that I created, and I created my own theme called DTMax, and basically we had these two lines here. Add to list, custom theme, load path, and then the location to this themes directory where I stored dtmax.el, which is my own custom Emacs color scheme, right? It's basically what we're looking at here. It's kind of bluish, greenish, pinkish, purplish colors. Got kind of a bluish background, but I wanted more themes than just the one theme that I created, and there is a very, very nice collection of themes available from the DOOM Emacs guys. So actually what I'm going to do is I'm going to install the DOOM-Themes package. So all you need to do with this is, again, use a use package block. We've done this many times in past videos when you want to install an Emacs program, right? Use package, name a program. Use package, DOOM-Themes, and then I do colon config. So this is setting some configuration options. So what we're going to do, set queue, set queue, we're going to assign a variable, right? We're going to assign a value to a variable. The variables I'm going to assign a value to, DOOM-Themes-enabled-bold is set to true, and DOOM-Themes-enabled-italic is set to true. So what this is is some of these DOOM-Theme configuration files have options for bold text for certain fonts, and italic text for certain fonts, and I want those bold and italic fonts to be turned on. If I set T to nil for false, that would turn the bold fonts off. And the same thing would happen with the italic fonts. If I set enable-italic to nil, then the italics would be disabled. And after adding that use package block for DOOM-Themes, I would do a space HRR to reload my config. And then after that, I could actually do a meta-x, and I could do load-theme. If I hit Enter, I'm going to get this huge list of all the various DOOM-Themes. And there's a lot of them, and it's going to be all the standard themes you know and love, such as DOOM-1, which is my personal favorite, GrubBox, Solarized, all of that stuff. Dracula's in there. And of course, somewhere in here, it will also list DT-Max, right? Because it's also going to find my custom theme that's also in here. So the load-theme command will find all the DOOM-Themes. It's also going to find our local themes that we have sourced here from this line here, from the custom theme load path. Now, I actually set a keybinding because I might change themes often enough that I wanted a keybinding. So if I gg to go back to the top of this document, and I'm just going to click on General Keybindings here, what I did is if I go to the keybindings here, this section here, Space H for Help. Of course, you remember Space HV for Describe Variable, Space HF for Describe Function. These are helper kind of functions, Space HRR for Reloading or Emacs Config. I also did Space HT for Load-Theme. I just thought loading a theme, it kind of fit in this H category. I probably could have put it somewhere else, but it made sense. I had the keybinding available. I wasn't using Space HT for anything else. So Space HT, this is the Load-Theme command. That way, I don't have to do metaX and then type Load-Theme. And then I could do DOOM-1, for example. Let's do DOOM-1. That's the DOOM-1 color theme, right? Now, this is not saved permanently. As long as the Emacs server in this session that I'm currently in is running, so basically until I either kill the Emacs server or I reboot my computer, this theme will be enabled. But the next time the Emacs server starts, I'm gonna get my custom DTMacs theme back. And the reason is, because I have it hard-coded right here, Load-Theme DTMacs-T for True. So whatever theme you want, if you wanted the DOOM-1 theme, right, just make sure you load DOOM-1 in your config, right? And that way, every time you start Emacs, it knows to load that particular theme. Now for me, I'm gonna go back to the DTMacs theme and let's go ahead and do Space HT. And I'm gonna type DTMacs and let's switch back to that theme. So now we've got some really cool transparency. We've got a gigantic list of really nice color schemes. You really can't complain about the way this Emacs configuration has turned out as far as the looks, as far as the aesthetics. Let's talk about functionality though. There are some things that I wanted to do with DeerEd. So I'm gonna gg to get back to the top of this document and go to the table of contents and I have added this new section for DeerEd. And it looks like a lot of code, but it really is pretty simple. I'll tuck you through exactly the functionality that I've added here. So DeerEd is the built-in file manager inside Emacs and I'm gonna do these two different use package blocks. I'm gonna use package DeerEd dash open and use package peep dash DeerEd. Now DeerEd dash open I think is a part of DeerEd. Like you don't have to install it. And one reason I'm using this use package block here is because there were some configuration options that I wanted to add. And I figured I would actually add these using set queue inside a config section of a use package block. That's the only reason I needed this. DeerEd though is a third-party package that Elpaka will need to install. But let's go back to DeerEd dash open. So use package DeerEd dash open config and then set queue and what we're gonna do is we're going to assign some values to this variable here DeerEd dash open dash extensions. So when you're doing something in the DeerEd file manager, let me open the DeerEd file manager. So, you know, I could navigate around and eventually I'm gonna find some kind of file that I wanna click on for some reason. I don't know, let's find a file, you know this particular shell script. You know, what's it going to do with that shell script? Well, Emacs knows that's a text file. Emacs is just going to open that text file in Emacs. But what if I clicked on an image file such as a GIF, a JPEG, a PING. Well, you can see what I'm doing in my configuration. I'm telling DeerEd open those image formats in my image viewer, which I'm using SXIV. If you were doing a different image viewer, you would specify a different program to open these image formats. I also specified some video formats. Typically I make all of my videos, for example, for the YouTube channel and everything I typically render all those as MP4. Occasionally I'll use MKV for things and I wanted to make sure that if I was in my videos directory, for example, and I wanted to actually watch one of my videos that I'm recording, maybe this clip that I'm recording now, that if I'm in Emacs, if I'm in DeerEd and I click on that MP4, I want it to open that in MPV. So that's pretty self-explanatory, right? So that's what we're doing with this very first section here for DeerEd open. Now this next use package block here for PEEP DeerEd. PEEP DeerEd is a third-party package that allows you to preview the contents of what you're scrolling through in your file manager. Most file managers have a preview kind of feature. DeerEd has this ability with this PEEP DeerEd program. Now let's talk about the use package configuration here. So I have colon after. What this is, it's basically deferring, loading PEEP DeerEd until after DeerEd itself loads, right? There's no reason for DeerEd to load with all the configuration options until of course DeerEd loads first. Then colon hook, and so this is adding a hook. Now for those of you not used to use package, you could do this outside of a use package block. So this is typically how you would add a hook. You would use the add-hook command and then you would do quote, a single quote, and then the name of the hook space and then a single quote, and then the name of the mode or in this case, the name of the key map that I'm adding to the hook. But notice it's a little differently here in the colon hook section of use package. Everything is backwards, right? So instead of the hook being first, the hook is at the end and instead of the mode or in this case, the key map being last, it's first. So they're in reverse order here. So just something to be aware of.  So evil mode will be loaded when we're viewing dear ed and when we're in the normal state and we're using the dear ed mode map because we're in a dear ed buffer. I want h on the keyboard to run the command dear ed up directory. I want l on the keyboard to do dear ed open file. And then I want j on the keyboard to run the command peep dear ed next file and then k on the keyboard peep dear ed previous file. Now you probably didn't understand exactly what all of I just said meant, but you can see HJKL are the key bindings. Basically, if you've ever used a terminal file manager, any kind of keyboard driven file manager that used them like key bindings, they all have a similar kind of feel. And I wanted that similar kind of function and feel in dear ed. I wanted to be able to navigate through dear ed entirely with HJKL. And I also wanted the ability to get a preview of the file, especially with the J and K keys as I'm moving up and down dear ed. Let me show you this in action. So let me go back to the dear ed buffer I had opened before. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna search for my wallpapers directory here in my home directory to do a search in Vim or with the evil key bindings in Emacs, right? You could do the slash, right? Slash and then search for a string for wallpapers, right? Let me hit enter. And now I'm in this wallpapers directory. And you can see J, as I go down, gives me a preview. K, as I go up, gives me a preview and I'm going up. But every time I go up or down, I get a preview. Now I have this turned on because I had already enabled this earlier. I have this key binding set up, space DP. Space DP turns on or turns off peep, dear ed. I just turned it off if I wanna turn it back on. Space DP would turn that back on. Now sometimes you will get some weird effects. Sometimes you'll think you're in peep, dear ed and you should be getting previews and you J and K up and down and it seems like it's not working. Sometimes it's like dear ed doesn't really know what state or what mode it's in. So typically what you wanna do is for some reason you know you've already enabled peep, dear ed, but you're not getting the previews. Escape a couple of times, two or three times to make sure dear ed knows you're in a normal state inside evil mode because if you're not in normal state in evil mode, you cannot get this preview because we specified that in the configuration file. Remember, evil defined key normal. And just to show you the key bindings as far as how we added that, remember general key bindings, I added a new section of D keys. So space D is going to be dear ed. So that's gonna give us a hint that anything that is space D on the keyboard right is a dear ed related key binding. If I just hit space without hitting another key, you can see D we get a hint is dear ed related key binding. So I hit D and then I get D again for open dear ed, J, dear ed, jump to current. So this would be if I'm in a file, for example, this file here, maybe I wanna open the directory that this file lives in. I wanna open that in dear ed. I could do space DJ and I'm in this directory. Space BP for buffer previous, of course would get me back to this file.  But if you did, you could do that, but I have a key binding here where you could quickly turn peep dear ed on and off as well. I've also added this interesting key binding here, space DN for neotree dash dear. What this does, it opens the current directory that this file is in inside neotree. Let's see that in action, space DN. Well, it's first gonna ask me what directory. So it's not necessarily the current directory, but you could specify a directory. If you are in the current directory that you wanna see in neotree, just hit enter. I do space TN for toggle neotree. I could turn neotree back off. Now, how did I do all of that? Well, I just added this section here for neotree right above the org mode section. So neotree, neotree is a file tree viewer. Those of you that are familiar with Vim, you've probably used nerdtree in Vim. Neotree very similar to nerdtree in Vim. Very similar functionality. So under the neotree section here, let me create some spacing. I've added a little description just to describe exactly what the neotree program is. And then I added a table, this table, just to give you what the key bindings are. Remember the key bindings I added in the general key binding space TN, toggle neotree. Space DN is open this directory in neotree. And then if I scroll down is the actual block of code that will actually install and configure neotree. Now this looks like a large block of code, but if you've been following along with these videos you're probably starting to figure this out, right? Use package neotree, it installs neotree if it's not already installed, right? And then colon config inside the use package statement. This is where you add your configuration options and then set queue assigns values to variables. What variables do we want to assign values to? Well, these five or six variables here, right? We're assigning some values to these. For example, neo show hidden files T for true, right? So neotree basically by default. It does not, I believe show hidden files but if you have that turned on I could click this with the mouse or I could navigate it with the HJKL keys. It doesn't matter, but you can see you can actually see my hidden directories, my hidden files there. So let me do a space TN to toggle neotree back off. The variable neowindow width set to 55. 55 is the width of that particular window. You could adjust that of course. And then this block here, it's quite lengthy. It was just a copy and paste job that I found somewhere on the internet several years back for truncating the file names in neotree. That's all this does is some file and directory names are very lengthy and you want neotree to just cut them off after a certain point. So that is neotree. It looks like I had a comment there from something from the past that is no longer there. So now we've started to get our Emax configuration really looking good now, right? Because now we've got the really cool dashboard. We've got all of our key bindings. We have our configuration file looking pretty good here. Obviously now we can toggle on neotree when we want it, right?  And I can do space TV for toggle vterm to get my vterm terminal emulator here inside a horizontal split inside Emax. If I need a quick terminal emulator, let me hit I on the keyboard to get into insert mode. So I can actually type LS, for example, here in the terminal. Let me escape to get back into normal mode. That way I can do a space vk to kill the buffer.  So space TV toggles vterm, space TV to toggle vterm back off. Now I've got a deer id working the way I want. Let me do a space DD for deer id. Let's open up my home directory. Once again, I'll go to the wallpapers directory because I have those images there. If I can type correctly, can't spell today. And peep deer id is still turned on. So we still get the fancy image previews. If I do H on the keyboard to go back into this directory, obviously we will not get any image previews in this directory. Unless I happen to have an image file in my home directory, I do not. Well let me escape and quit out of Emacs. So that was video number five in configuring Emacs. Mainly the big thing I wanted to cover today, I know this was a little quicker video, was the transparency. I wanted to cover that because it was a big deal being that Emacs 29 was just released and it's a big release. Those of you that are interested in Emacs 29 as far as the new features that were added, I strongly recommend going and reading the release notes for Emacs 29. As always, for those of you wanting the configuration files for this particular configuring Emacs episode, I'm gonna push all of that to my GitLab. Look for the configuring Emacs repo over on my GitLab at gitlab.com slash dwt1. Now before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. Gabe James Matt, Paul Royal, Wes Armored Dragon, Commander Ingrid George, Lee Methos, Nate Erion, Paul Peace, Archon Vador, Realities for the Last Red Prophet, Roland, Soul-Ashtring Tools, Devler, Ward Jintu, Anabutu, and Willie. These guys, they're my house-tiered patrons over on Patreon. Without these guys, this configuring Emacs episode would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now, these are all my supporters over on Patreon. I don't have any corporate sponsors. I'm sponsored by you guys, the community. If you like my work and wanna see more videos about free and open source software like Emacs, subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. All right, guys, peace. Eventually, we have to add some games to Emacs.