All right, everyone, welcome. It's the end of day two at the 21st Convention London, the conference of the century. You guys know it by now. I'm bringing to the stage two men that are going to speak. They're going to have a good time. Frederick is a returning speaker from Sweden last year, and Yoram is joining us on the convention stage for the first time. So believe in your undivided attention, please welcome Frederick and Yoram. Thank you. Thank you. Good night. It's a mercy. What's up, guys? You guys had a long day or a good day? A good day. Awesome. That's what we want to hear. We're here to have four good days. And what we want to do right now, is we just want to top that second day off a little bit. So the title of our speech is Surviving the Game. Surviving the Game. Does anybody know that movie maybe from the 90s? Yeah, he knows, he knows, he knows. He's actually too young for knowing it, but he likes to watch old school movies. It's kind of like me. I was too young for watching that, too. I had to pretend to my parents to go to bed like when I was watching it at the time. So anyways, my name is Frederick. Yeah, my name is Yoram. And Surviving the Game. What could this be? Has anybody of you read that book called The Game?  I read it, yeah. 500 years ago, don't want to talk about it. It's a bit embarrassing. No. So what this book does, it gets people to realize that they want to get better with women. And we realize that at some point, too, with or without having read the game, actually. Both cases are on stage. And what we want to give you guys is a bit of an overview from the beginning throughout the middle towards the end of that development process, getting better with women. What do you encounter in the beginning, in the middle, and in the end? And that's sort of the common stuff to everybody. It doesn't matter whether you want to learn speed seduction, natural game, method game, or, I don't know, stripper, hired, gun, ice cream, saleswoman game. I have no idea. These are the issues that you are most likely to come across in any situation you are. What am I forgetting? Well, nothing really. Well, I've got to add, though, that for me personally, this is actually going to be my last speech. It's going to be the last speech to really, yeah. For me, it really signifies my, well, clinical retirement from, well, from pickup. Well, I think I've sort of divorced myself from pickup for a while now. But this is really, to me, I think the 21th convention, really, to me, seems sort of the pinnacle of the bang on the fireworks. It really seems just a really good place for me to end it. And therefore, I've really, you know, we're thinking of what we're going to do the speech about. And I really wanted to have it contain the things that I wish I would have known since the beginning, since the beginning, the middle, and the end.  So it has to do with community stuff. It has to do with personal stuff. And well, I can't really say that I'm the ultimate oracle of the truth or whatever. But to me, this stuff is really the truth to me. And yeah, got to get it out there. You'll see what I mean, I hope. And yeah. It's both of our truths. That's why you can see we're using two different computers because we can't even agree on one PowerPoint. You see? Like, the truth is individual for everybody. There is no unified truth, even though you're sometimes being sold a unified truth, there is no such thing. And that's probably the first thing to realize, that there is no such thing as a unified truth. So, right, what's the beginning kind of like? What is it when you get into this thing? How are you usually? Like, how were you five years ago? Well, when I got into this, I got into this really because, yeah, I was actually really bored with my life. I was not living the life I wanted to live. And to me, this stuff is really my ticket out of there. And not doing, you know, not approaching or whatever was not an option. It was going back to hell, or it was just really enjoying life in a better way really. But I think for me, yeah, the beginning was really, yeah, it's kind of that place. I think for me, it signifies most. It's best described, actually, as the biggest wall between you and women. So, I think near the end, of course, you're going to feel like you're on the side of women.   And yeah, I guess in the beginning, you sort of just stumble across the stuff. And they're like, all right, fuck, where do I start? And you feel like you're entering a war. And sometimes you project the women as the enemy in there, even though clearly you deep down know they're not. But, of course, how am I going to win that girl over? See? That might be the situation you're in, but in any case, you're in a situation where you're not happy with the relationship life you're having at this point. And that's why you're looking to the pickup community or the pickup industry for help. Can we agree on that? Is that clear? Yeah. So what we want to do right now is, again, beginning, middle, and end. And what we do is we'll give you some entertaining stuff that can happen, that can set you back, and we're going to phrase it a bit entertainingly, hopefully, that it doesn't get also deep and dark and that we're all going to start crying. Share maybe a few personal stories, how we all fell on our nose before. And then we're also going to tell you, like Joram said, the truth, right? Like what we really think is the truth condensed down to a minimal point that everybody can agree on, both in the beginning, the middle, and the end.  Like personally, I have not released a single e-book, you haven't either, but we're among the few speakers on this stage, you haven't. And the speakers on this stage are only a small part of the coaches in this pickup community, because Anthony only picks the ones that he personally wants on this stage, he doesn't let everybody. So there's, no I'm not millions, millions is over exaggerated, but there's hundreds more. So, and it's really easy to actually put out an e-book, right, and maybe it's not good, maybe it doesn't have a good sales page, but guess what, one thing happens for sure, it's going to get torrented. Do you understand what I mean torrented? It's going to be put into a downloadable format. So there's going to be hundreds and thousands of e-books on how to get better with women in such a downloadable format. And what are you going to do? You're going to hunt for that missing piece of information in the beginning. You've maybe read five, 10, or downloaded 15, who's downloaded more than 10 e-books in their life on picking up women? Come on guys, be honest. Who's downloaded more than 10 e-books? There's no camera on you. You're not going to get sued for this. See, there's somebody who is honest at least, awesome. So I mean, I can tell you I've downloaded, I don't even know. I know that I haven't read most of them in the end, but I did spend a lot of time on searching for them. So this information overload basically screwed me over in two different ways. I waste the time searching for this stuff and I didn't really read all of it. And the stuff I read was mostly repetitive after the third book, right? At some point it's like, yeah, I've read this before, yeah, oh, this is a new nuance. But what you end up doing is you end up searching for that last bit of wisdom, that last bit you're missing. You feel like you're missing the sort of magic piece of theory that will worldwide make all panties drop in an instant. Well, I tell you right now, it's not there. It's really not there. This is a development process where you yourself have to put energy in. So stop hunting and focus on the information you have, really. Good one, yeah. All right, the two topics I really wanna get into or actually wanna sketch before I get into them are the fear of approaching, which is also really, I mean the fear of approaching is probably the number one, actually just without a doubt the number one problem guys have in the beginning when they get into this stuff. Number two is actually over idealizing attraction as a sort of a game tactic or whatever you wanna call it really. Medicine for everything. Yeah, and I'll get into this. So first of all, fear of approaching, right?  And I think at the beginning as well, as we've all, well maybe not all of us, but in the beginning, right? A lot of us, we have lives that aren't necessarily very, very scary, right? Let's say a guy X sits in his mom's basement, plays computers, maybe is only a couple of contacts or his fellow gamers or whatever, computer gamers in this case.  And he maybe goes out to his local gas station for cigarettes or something, I don't even know. But the point is, right, this guy is living his life in a little cocoon and yeah, severely sort of, yeah, has a larger version of the risk. And I think when you get into this stuff, especially you know you have a problem, right? You know you have a problem, you wanna go, cool, I have to approach women, that's what you find out.  And yeah, not only does this, you know, this information overload actually give you a lot more approach, does everybody, has everybody heard of approach anxiety, by the way? Are you ready, right? Okay, so that's basically the fear of women.  Why? Well, I don't have time to go into that, but it's built up in such a way that you feel like, okay, approach anxiety feels like shit, what do I need to fix it? Attraction, I need to attract, yeah, that'll be good, right? If I'm attractive, my approach anxiety will go down and won't be, you know, it'll be all right. Vanishing. Well, I guess, you know, that's, it's not even like it will be vanishing, but you can just, it allows you to move through it really, right? So, the thing is this though, right? I think really like seeing attraction per se as a way to, you know, as a tactic, instead of seeing it as a result, you're just, I don't know, I think you're sort of beating around the bush as I'm actually doing right now a little bit. So, point is though, right? A favorite approaching, it's really there because we're not used to projecting our sexuality onto women.  You know, so if you see a hot woman, usually I think when you look at like a pubescent teenager, right? You might get this funny little feeling. We've been taught, we've been teaching ourselves to block this feeling because it's inappropriate, right? And this sort of feeling of we're being inappropriate, yeah, we're wrong for feeling arousal is really what makes us scared of the approach all the way in the beginning, right? All the way when we've been, you know, I think when we were like 12, 13 getting into puberty. I mean, this is really the place where it comes down to. So, yeah. I just wanna share a quick personal story about the approach anxiety thing. Like I got into this pickup community twice. Once in 2004, and at the end of 2004, I got into a relationship that lasted until, it lasted roughly three years. And then I got back into it. The first time I got into it, the game wasn't written. It was probably being written at the moment. And the only theory I had at my disposal was David DeAngelo's double year dating and Robert Green's The Art of Seduction. Now these books do not mention the word approach anxiety very much. I didn't know what approach anxiety was in 2004. Therefore, I didn't have much of it. You know, it was like, I didn't, I hadn't talked to women for three years besides during my study or on the tennis practice or whatever, you know, but not flirting with women for three years, I was 22 at the time. But I had not read the word approach anxiety with my first bits of theory and I went out and I started talking to girls again.  So I get back, I get into my relationship. I'm living the happy couple life for three years and all of a sudden it breaks down. The happy couple life, the couple life isn't there anymore, I get, I'm thinking like, yeah, let's get back into the community. Let's really start being good with women. So this is 2007 when all the theory is out. Everything's there. So I start reading stuff. And on every page, the word approach anxiety is probably the most used. So actually the first time I got, oh yeah, let's talk to some girls again, like I did three years ago. I'm there, I'm like, felt the approach anxiety hardcore. Like at some point, like I was crippled. It took me a while to get over this, to blink this out again, because what approach anxiety really is, it's a wrong interpretation of high adrenaline.  Now think of guys at a bungee tower, they all feel adrenaline and the one guy will be there, hell yeah, adrenaline, let's go.  Right, this is something I really had to learn. So, shall we talk about how to do the beginning, right? Yeah, I think so, yeah, I think it's a good time. Yeah. Yeah, cool. You wanna kick it off or? Yeah, see the first thing is, do not fight through something. Enjoy yourself. You're not going into war here. War is much worse than talking to women and stalking women. I almost said, I'm not too sure. But war is definitely much worse than talking to women.  I'm gonna learn something today. Well, you're not gonna get shot. Like, you're actually on the same team with the women. It's just that neither one of you knows this yet. This is what game has actually been made for if you interpreted healthy, to just understand that you're actually both on the same team and to actually start wearing the same jersey. So enjoy yourselves, do not start a fight. And furthermore, every conversation you strike up, every single conversation is valuable. I don't know, has Marcus Oki already spoken? I think he will. And he'll teach you how to strike up conversations in a public bathroom if needed. You know, you can ask him about that. He knows how to do this. He can strike up a conversation anywhere, no matter how awkward the place is. So you should really listen to him when he speaks because every single conversation is valuable. It doesn't matter if you talk to the toilet lady, if you talk to the hottest girl in the club, or anything in between. Why does this not matter? Does anybody have an idea? Yes. You're practicing conversation. Exactly, you're practicing conversation. Why is that useful? What do you think? Exactly. A, you're building up momentum in your conversational stream every single night. The more you talk during the day, the better your night's gonna go. The more you interact with people, the better your interactions will go. But also, the chances are that you haven't talked to people for a long time, at least not as much as you should have. So this is a skill you need to rediscover and start practicing. That's why every single conversation is valuable. And what should you not do while having conversations? Analyze yourself while doing it. When you have a conversation, you're gonna be in that moment with the conversation. You're not gonna grab out your cheat sheet to find out what your next routine's like, or anything like this, no.  Not during, afterwards. You will remember this, don't worry. If you don't get absolutely plasteredly drunk, you will remember the next morning what's been going on in your conversations. There's no need to think, talk, or do whatever game, I don't know, but there's definitely no place for thinking or talking game. Questions at the end, if you don't mind. Is that good? Okay, cool. So basically, learn focused, take in a limited amount of material that you see fit. Don't just download everything, take in the stuff that you see fit, and practice with it. And while you practice, forget about it. And after practicing, come back to that material. And see what you've done, see what you've done well, pride yourself on that. See what you've not done so well, and fix that. Yeah. Okay, so really, I think the biggest lesson that ties everything I've said together, and it's the same lesson that I really want you guys to take home, actually, when it comes to the beginning, right, because in the beginning, I guess it's kind of hard to, you know, to already be thinking about, perhaps, you know, your sexuality about projecting it and this and that.  So I think the real nugget is this, right? Okay, the community teaches you, I think in general, it doesn't matter whether it's natural game or whatever routine game, right? It all goes pretty much like this, right?   I mean, it seems quite logical. First, you attract the girl, this is nice attraction.  But if you actually go down this road, right, of thinking like this, then you will continuously, right, go through this weird cycle where you will only, well, you never feel like you've actually attracted enough. Why is this? It pretty much goes like this, right? If the community actually says, okay, do this and that routine, you say this, say, let's say, whatever, the women, what is it, the women lie, who lies more, men are women, open it, right? And then you do this routine and then this, right?  I remember my first approach.  With all this AA built up.  I'm scared, you know, and I'm like, all right, boom.  And it actually worked, it was amazing. She actually didn't slap me and she didn't run away. She actually had quite of a cool talk and she was very entertained, she played with her hair just like we've all read, right?    All right, no worries, I know what I did. My attraction worked, it was perfect. I just need more attraction, right? That way, she'll just play with her hair longer and then we'll get to the connection, I guess, right? So, you know, this is actually the road you're going down towards, right?   I mean, I don't know, hasn't we ever read this already? Like, this shouldn't be a linear process?  All right, so, what up? One sec, guys, all right. What does it come down to, right? If you shouldn't idealize attraction, what should you idealize? You should idealize leading.  What this means is this, you know, after you open a woman, after you just start a conversation, right? Could be like five seconds in, two seconds in, like, hey, cool, let's go, let's grab a drink, you know? She might say no, like, all right, cool.  After like, whatever, 10 seconds of that stuff, right?  All right, let's say you do that, cool. She's attracted, boom, again, you lead, you know? Now let's go to the bar, right?  It's gonna get you that number close, whatever, the first night you start approaching, really, you know? It's gonna get you the kiss close, what, the second night, maybe? Because you're just gonna go for it. Idealize leading, don't idealize attraction, don't idealize comfort, you know, or connection, whatever it is, you know? Cool, I think that's pretty cool. And you'll see this in every man who's good with women. He is going to lead, and this process applies to so much more like Steve even talked about it, even applies to selling. Leading is an important skill. It might be scary, but it's worth learning it, seriously. So in the beginning, make sure to start with focused information that you see applies to you, where you see the fit with yourself. For that, you need to know who you are and where you really wanna go. That's actually the most important thing to determine in the beginning. Make sure to only work with that information where you see fit. Make sure to enjoy yourself, enjoy every single conversation because it's valuable. And make sure to learn how to lead. That's gonna be your most important skill to learn in the beginning. So that's the beginning. What's the middle looking like? All right, the middle, right?  You know, maybe it could be, what is it? Like three to six months in or something. Could actually be six months to three years, four years in. You can actually never get out of the middle. Right. What do I mean by the middle? I mean that you actually, you still, yeah, I put it this way. Like you still have this feeling as if women have this slight aversion to cock.  You're really, you know, fighting an uphill battle and they're just gaps, you know. Could be frustration as well. All right, what do you think? Yeah, you're like the kind of guy that sometimes goes into a bar and leaves five minutes afterwards with the girl he wants. And the next night you're going like, yeah, wow, I did this all yesterday, it was fantastic. And then you're gonna do 10 approaches and you're gonna get blown out 10 times. So the middle is really, in the middle you have some skills and you have some good experiences, but there's almost no consistency in it. And why? Like what he just said, you think women have a slight aversion to cock. But you also have value issues. You also have value issues.  But that's why you do all of this because you fundamentally see yourself at lower value. You see yourself here and you see the woman there.  Seriously, I mean, this is where frustration is built out of. Why can't you not see people at the same level and approach each other at that same level? There's absolutely no need to bring somebody's value down in order to match yours. Why not work on your own perception of your own value? Why not think about what really makes you valuable? The whole value thing is a whole matrix thing, right?  We luckily only have that one in Amsterdam.  That's what gives you this value perception because you feel that women in short dresses with an open back always get ahead of you. Well, that's the club matrix. That's not real life. They dive into this matrix as a sort of holiday every weekend to enjoy that attention. However, you can get them out of that matrix really quick and you don't need to insult, neg, or do whatever to lower their value. Because if you don't have an issue with your value, if you're all right with your own value, then this is what's actually gonna shine through, not the value itself. It's how comfortable you are with yourself. So do not have an issue with that. Rather work on yourself and be like always 80% comfortable and 20% working. Never be 100% comfortable cause you'll get stuck. Never be 100% uncomfortable cause you'll get depressed. Find the right balance there. I think the following is something that's actually funny because I realized this, I guess sort of towards the end more. And I really realized I did this in the middle so I had to bring this up, right?   Doesn't matter, you're so focused on yourself but you're not focused on the women at all. In the middle, you hardly pay attention to how turned on the woman actually is or actually isn't, or how she might be then get turned off.  That's why it gets frustrating because you're not actually paying attention to the woman in front of you. And yeah, this is like a really weird thing cause I think as guys, I think I heard this thing once where guys when we're like in the, what is it, the womb, right? We get this surge of testosterone that makes us just like these sort of rigid, you know, like these non-sensitive, yeah, you know, this sexual, whatever, testosterone-driven competitive dudes, right? These animals that actually pay no attention to what other people are really feeling.  However, everybody does this wrong. Yeah, and all the community literature is phrased about paying attention to yourself and only looking at superficial indicators of something on the other side. Again, I'm saying the other side because at this middle point, you still feel that women are on the other side of that river or on a different team or a glass wall in between, which in the end you realize isn't true. But you know, there's some really bad practical stuff that people do as well in the middle. It's like all of a sudden, they start ditching their friends because they need to hang out with their pickup buddies. They need to run some game because they need to go out three nights a week and do at least 10 approaches every night.  Like maybe it's the culture, maybe it's because, I don't know, German-Dutch people, they're pretty blunt, honest, straightforward. So this was both a Dutch friend and a German friend calling me up almost in a week.  Wow, fantastic. To my knowledge, pickup artists are not women. So you're not really progressing towards the goal you had originally set for yourself. So do not only hang out with PUA's. Keep your real friends. Yeah, okay, and the following, right? This is something you already mentioned in the beginning or in the introduction of the middle. In the middle, you still feel as if there is this huge battle between you and women, right? Let's say the battle of the sexes. And it's kind of funny, because I want to spend at least a minute or so going into this of how this got started, right? So I remember when I got to, actually I was about 13 years old and I moved from Amsterdam, or actually from Holland, but you guys don't know anything about it, right? So let's say from Amsterdam. I moved to San Francisco. And I was 13 and at the time in Holland, it's all very much, I think it's all pretty much protected and you're very much protected until I think quite an old age, actually. But I got flown over, dropped in like total, let's say valley girl, valley, right? Like, oh my God, look at you. And all the guys were all like buffed and playing football and all the girls were all cheerleading. At 13, everyone dressed all nice and stuff.  And I didn't speak English.  I had no idea. In Holland, I was kind of cool. Like I was, I got friends and I was like, everybody liked me. But there I was like, whoa, boom. Superficial wall. And yeah, this place already had this battle of the sex stuff going on way before, right? And actually already started at an even younger age than they do in Holland. So what is this, right? Okay. And I heard this actually through a seminar. Should we name it? Yeah, I guess. You can always name a good guy. Yeah, right, all right. This guy's a really good guy. I actually followed a seminar of him, I think about six months ago. And yeah, basically, I was walking around with this feeling ever since I was that age, 13. And I lost along the way. But what was that feeling? What was that shitty feeling? That huge sort of distance between me and women. And this guy, he sketched it amazingly. He wore it, he phrased it perfectly. He said, at that age, right? When you're about 13, 14, you know, puberty starts, the battle of the sexes starts. The distance between you and women, right?  Look at Betty, she's so hot, what do I do? Women get sort of like more important, right? What is this? What was this vibe that women were projecting? It was the following. It was, I know you want me, and I despise you for it, right?  And you know it's kind of true, right?     And what was this, right? And then it comes down to the fact that women are very, very good at social cues.  And women are much more, they're way, way, way more susceptible to social cues, right? So what happens is when they are around that age, they're around that age, right?  When they open Vogue magazine on the cover, it says, you know, it has this sort of bitchy look of a woman, and it's that exact same bitchy look, right?  And women start copying this, right?  So fast forward, whatever it is, like 10 years later, let's say you're around 23, whatever, and you're going to the club, right?   But there's this huge wall, and it's fake, right? And how to solve it, I'll get into this later. But I had to mention this. Yeah, it's important, the solution will come. So now comes actually one of my favorite points in this presentation, I'm just going to connect to. So, like, in my opinion, one of the worst things you can really do while you're in the middle, in the beginning, in the end, or anywhere, is trying to press your reality onto other people.  That's fine. Now, okay, we're not pressing reality, right? Oh, oh, oh. I guess they, should we go?  We're talking about the guy who will write his post on the forum about this new thing that has worked for him last night, and he'll write it down just when he gets home because it was a small thing. He's not getting late that night. He has time at three o'clock in the morning to write a post on a forum. So, he writes this down, and it's super important to him because it has just given him one breakthrough, this one like line he said, and then the next person will come on the next morning and be like, well, I've said this before and I bombed. No, this could not have happened. You must have used a different word or a different facial expression or whatever. This works guaranteed, you trust me, take it from me. That's what one of our, you know, one person we know always says, just take it from me, it works. Whenever you're here, just take it from me, it works, you should ask more questions. Really, that's like the point, that's the ideal point to ask questions. So basically, pressing your reality onto other people on forums or with your pickup buddies who you've hopefully not only started to hang out with but who you just meet every now and then. But again, what can you imagine is the result of a guy who is pressing their reality onto another person or trying at least?  And he thinks, he thinks. At that moment, he genuinely thinks or could think, not everybody luckily does, is God, if I only got to the level, if I only got to instructor level, if I only was instructor level good, I'd get all the women. So I want to become a pickup instructor. Seriously, at that point, you're confusing means and ends because like we can tell you we've met a lot. Like not all pickup instructors are good with women. That's number one. And B is basically, it's not really the glorious job that it seems. I mean, you might be staring in a video camera every now and then and talking about nice stuff which you definitely enjoy but this is an industry where the demand is much lower than the supply. Do you guys understand what that means? There's more people wanting to sell things than people wanting to buy things. Just to give you a simple example, just to condense it down in numbers, basically people want to sell for $100 million every year. However, the market only wants to buy for $20 million. So what are you gonna get then? You're gonna get these yard, meter, whatever you wanna call it, long sales pages that repeat themselves over and over again because people are desperate for your business. Like I've personally heard of people like from trusted sources that grabbed somebody in the neck and said, no, you should really take this program now. I'm like, so what does your rent depend on it? I mean, sorry, that's your rent, not mine. So this is one of the biggest mistakes you can do in the beginning. Set yourself the goal of becoming a pickup instructor because being a pickup instructor does not only mean having a low pay job in an industry that's oversupplied and under demanded, it also means that you probably can't live of this right away. So you need to keep your normal job Monday to Friday. So your only three days are gonna be Friday night, Saturday and Sunday.   And working as a pickup instructor means eight out of 10 times, spending time with guys who you would not spend your free time necessarily with. I'm not saying like everybody who is a client is terrible. I mean, I enjoy working with eight out of 10 clients, but if this was my free time, I probably wouldn't, I would rather hang out with my friends because I already have that little free time. So this basically means making a huge sacrifice and it does not necessarily mean becoming good with women. What else? Well, I think, I mean, it seems like a really, a really sort of cool goal, right? Like whatever pickup instructor, whatever it is. The reason is this, right? I mean, they seem to get all the women or whatever. I'm sure some of them really do. And it's not a debate about that. The point is though, right, is that pickup in general is really actually focusing right on what I described before, battling the sexes. Actually, it's sort of like, note that thing I described, that sort of bitchy wall, is described to sort of like hammer away at that or actually sort of like, you know, wizard away at that, rather than just ignoring it and just like whatever, wiping it out the way and going straight through into people, right?  But it can really, really limit you to actually getting down into people, literally, sexually as well, you know? And yeah, the last point I really wanted to make then is that, you know, pickup, right, teaches you how to play hard to get, right? It's like you're the ultimately hard to get guy. You're the guy that all the other girls want, right?  Jealousy plotlines, all this good stuff that works, right?  The Battle of the Sexes game. But it's not actually set up to make you win at the end, right?  It's really making it fucking, actually the only way to get through this, to get so much experience in it, that you go, holy shit, they're all right.  Still use the experience you've gotten because it is a valuable experience, not denying that, but you know, after a while you really do have to like move on. So how do you, how do we start progressing well in the middle, right? How do we end frustration and put it into smooth? Yeah, like when you are at that inconsistent position of knowing success but also knowing failure and sometimes having it even in one night, combining, there's a few things that you can do well. There's a few things that you can really do well. First of all, realizing simply that emotionally connecting to people, actually being more open beyond that surface level of, yeah, she's playing with her hair, but no, she's actually, we are two human beings connecting right now, not refusing that connection. That's actually one part of not seeing that wall anymore. And trust me, like emotionally connecting with girls is rewarding, it's super rewarding. For me, it's one of the most rewarding things in life. And I don't mean when I say emotionally connecting, necessarily having a monogamous relationship with that girl. It's like I sometimes had relationships with three girls because more I can't handle by time, but any time one of the three girls was with me, I would emotionally fully embrace her and connect with her. Because if I don't do something, like this is something my dad told me when I was really small. He's like, okay, in German he said like it's either Zekt or Zeltas, which basically means like you do something 100% or you don't. So being with a woman, being with a woman longer than just a one night stand, what would the 100% doing something 100% be and what would doing something not 100% be? Clear? Refusing the connection is being half ass, embracing the connection, enjoying it, building on it, that's the 100%. And if that's not the connection you want, that's probably what you're asking yourself right now, that you don't need to take it. But why spend time with people where you don't have anything connectable with?  That's fine, that's a form of physical connection. But if you spend more than that time with a woman, do not refuse the emotional connection, rather enjoy it. And again, like about coming back to our points of wanting to become a pickup instructor or only spending time with your pickup buddies, you have to fit this into your life and not the other way around. Like your life should not become pickup all of a sudden. You should make room in your life for learning flirt skills or for learning pickup. It shouldn't become that shit, I'm living pickup, now I have to make some room for my life because last week I received my last warning at work and my friends won't talk to me anymore and all of a sudden I don't get invited to the birthday parties I used to get invited anymore.  But don't let pickup become your new life. That's not the way, pickup is not a life. Like pickup is part of a life, can be, doesn't have to be. But it's never only the life.  Imagine if you only live pickup, you only have one pole left, if that breaks down, boof, there goes your identity. There goes everything you have. So fit that into your life and not the other way around. Yeah, cool. All right, so the middle, right, how to start progressing well. Well, how I started sort of progressing well. How I started getting rid of the frustration that sometimes I get comes with wanting perfection, right?  Right, all your goals, right, and how to start actually getting what you want, right? What did it for me is when I no longer actually wanted to waste my time battling the battle of the sexes, right?  It's when I decided, you know what, actually there's more out there. And through some sources, right, I really learned that projecting your sexuality, right, was something that you could actually improve and you could actually really, really, yeah. It's something that's already within you, but it's something you actually gotta stop blocking yourself from, right? And after a while I just said, you know what, I gave myself permission to project this, right? And I found out very, very quickly, I think pretty much like a couple hours later, when I consciously started looking at this stuff, that women really, really love it when you project your sexuality onto them freely. Not like creepily, you know, they're trying to like, well, you know, but that's not section, you know. But it's about, you know, it's not about battling fire with fire.   And then going, boom, you know, get sexual. Okay, so. Can I just ask you a question because you're like the one dude that I know that projects most sexuality. Like this guy, we go out a lot, like he rarely ever talks to girls, but they still like him somehow. Like where I will lose 50 words, he'll lose five. So can you maybe give these guys one tip, like one thing really, I know I'm catching you on, we didn't talk about this, but one thing really practical of when they're looking at a girl, how they can learn to project their sexuality, like something they can think of or something they do. Right, right, okay. There's a couple of things that you can do that I sort of figured out like, throw an air, I'm like, oh my God, I wrote this down when I realized this. Two things, right? And sort of build upon each other. First is, and I hinted at it before, is just looking at her and seeing how does she feel?   Does this, right?  And they're constantly like pinging, like how does she feel, right? So that's the number one tip, right? How does she feel? And actually when you want to go sexual, right? All you gotta do is just how horny is she? Right, how sexually aroused is she actually? There's a, if there be one right here and I just look at her she'd probably not be very sexually aroused. But by actually looking for this, she, I don't know how they do it, right? But she knows I'm sort of looking at this, right? She knows I'm looking for her arousal and she starts to see, yeah, I guess, you know?  Whoa, she starts to let go and, you know, sort of accept mine, you know, right? And the thing is this, like I said, I'm not busy at all with me, right? I'm not focused on me trying to feel sexual per se, right? If I do, then great, you know? But it's really about her and how sexual she is. And when you look at this, right? When you look for this, like magical doors start opening. And that really is, like put that chick to practice tonight. Walk down the street from now on for the rest of your life.  How do they feel? And actually really start looking for how aroused they are. You'd be surprised how many arousal women that are on the streets.  Yeah, you might also be aroused how, like, good eye contact actually feels because that's what you need to ping that, right? Yeah, I guess. But it all becomes automatic. All those little things, like eye contact, you know, voice or whatever, all that stuff. It all comes together when you just start focusing on the chick and how horny she is. I don't, weird, but, you know? Good for the middle? Yeah, let's see. Yeah, I guess so. Awesome. So the end. The end. The end. The end that everybody, like, you know, tries to find at some rainbow or pot of gold or whatever. And this is one of the huge issues we're gonna get into.  So you know what?  We've just hinted at this before at not being able to emotionally connecting. But this goes much, much deeper, actually. You equate emotionally connecting or getting into a relationship with being a chode, an AFC, or somebody who's not good with women because you can only be with one woman. Well, what the hell? If you find the woman you genuinely wanna be with in one way or the other, you know, the definition is still up to you.  If you're not, then you're not, you know?  Just because you think, oh my God, I'm such a great pickup artist. I don't wanna be a chode and be in a relationship. This is like one of the most destructive thoughts you can have because remember, remember the beginning when you couldn't talk to girls? Like, I take a bet. More than 50% of my old clients always said, yeah, I just wanna have a nice girlfriend. And then you meet some of them again a year later. They got into the community and everything. They're like, no man, I don't wanna have a girlfriend anymore. Just wanna go for a bunch of S and Ls and strip of three sums and maybe four sums. Hopefully they'll be twin sisters or whatever. So, you know, it's like you're scared to actually leave the pickup community due to the abundance that you've experienced, that you are experiencing because right now at the end, you're at the point where you have consistent results. It's not like it works 10 out of 10 times. Like, if you ever had that dream, take it away. Doesn't. Never gonna be 100%. Nothing ever gives you 100%. However, it gets closer and closer and closer.  You know, that's kind of abundance, right? But realize that this abundance also keeps you from actually getting into the relationships we just talked about, from the real reward you were reaping. It can. It depends on how you define your relationships, really. Like I said, you're free. You don't need to actually take over what cosmopolitan or men's health or whatever these magazines are called tell you a relationship is. One-on-one monogamous emotionally, monogamous sexually. You can make your own decisions on every single level. But the deep enjoyment of a monogamous emotional connection is something that's really, really worth experiencing.   I don't know, you know?  They're not just like, they're not just the object of your sexual dreams really. And you need to meet them on that people level. And yeah, there are some strippers. Yeah, and there are some women who are into three sums. It exists. However, you know, don't make unrealistic dreams hold you back from actually getting what you initially wanted, if it's there. Right, that's a good point, good point. I think another like end issue, so to speak. Yeah, I mean, the issue of actually, like to me when you brought this up, right? The, you know, how the whole relationship issue.    Whatever the story is, right?      So I think that's also one of the things that could get you into the community.  By the end, you're just, well, you could be and you maybe even should be near the end, this sort of sexually charged but quite non-emotional, emotionally connecting guy, right? Yeah, you get the results. You get the pickup results.   Oh man, I guess she wasn't really the chick I thought she was. I thought she had, you know, she was high self esteem but now she's needy for me. I'm just a guy, you know?  Next, right, that perfect woman ideal you sort of, you know, project. You don't even recognize like her willingness to emotionally invest in you, you just say it's neediness, right?  And I think that's really, yeah. Just giving, like in your life, certain things, for example, approaching anxiety adrenaline are given the wrong meaning by social conditioning but community conditioning can also give you the wrong meaning. So this is basically of how are you gonna handle this well? How are you gonna handle the end well? So you need to realize that even though we've been rambling a little bit, that the community can teach you and also the pickup industry can teach you some really valuable stuff. It taught us some really valuable stuff. However, as I've said in the beginning, there are only individual solutions. There are no general ones. So you need to figure yourself out while you're listening to all of this, while you're listening to us tonight, you know? Spend some time going out tomorrow before you listen to the next people. Spend some time with yourself. Have some me time. You know, realize that it can teach you a lot of great things. What really matters is your grain of salt. What really matters is how you take this and what you take. Don't take everything.  Like if something, you know, if you try something new and it doesn't work once, that's not an indicator that it doesn't fit you. But if that happens 20 times, yeah, then it probably really doesn't fit you. And by spending a little bit more me time, trying to figure out yourself a little bit better, you will avoid going down a bunch of different paths that will end up in a hole, where you have to go through these 20 times to realize that it's not you. So what this really is, what women really like, is a guy who knows himself, who's confident, and who can lead her. Remember the first thing, know yourself. So that means community says social conditioning a lot. But like I said, the community also has community conditioning. It tries to condition you onto its level, recondition you. And the truth is actually somewhere in the middle. And you have the power to not go with the stream, but to only go into that part of the stream that you wanna be in for the time you wanna be in it. And this can be anything from two weeks till forever.  Everything is individual. So yeah, you can actually, you know, you can actually connect a woman on an emotional level in a healthy way. Like there is a possibility, right? So if you're trying to look for that way to sort of wiggle through, you know, not be needy, yet still actually end up connecting to people, you know? Would you wanna do that, right? You have to realize a couple of things, and there's a pretty cool way to actually go about this and make it happen in a healthy way. So first of all is, right? Realizing that you will never ever be needy, right? As long as you will not project a woman to be higher than you. Like you won't be needy.  An AFC or whatever, POA, whatever, right? Player. The difference is that the player, the winner, right? The champ does not let women walk all over him. That's the only difference, right?   Women or a woman, you know? Or a woman, right? One single woman, multiple women. So this means also, right? That when you think about it, a real man does not let himself, sort of pulled out of his career, out of his study, whatever, do the pickup, right? So when it comes down to emotionally connecting healthily with a woman, right? Not only is it about realizing that you will never be needy if you don't think she's higher than you. So by the time you've actually gotten to the end, right?  There's a pretty high chance you won't see she's like the ultimate, oh my God, she's the only woman I'll ever love and she's my only chance at, you know, ever finding that connection, right?      Because it's the primary thing in your life.  Well, actually, if you just wouldn't have known the community and just knew about not being too needy, right? You would have just done a lot better. So, number two, right? What's the real way to, what's the actual practical way, right? To go from, you know, the middle, right? The consistent sexual but anti-sexual interactions towards more meaningful and diverse interactions. Well, it's very simple.   Keep doing it, you know? After a while, you're gonna go fuck, man. Like, this is really it. Is this really the strip or threesome I wanted?   And at that point, hopefully, you're gonna make a pretty good decision. And you're gonna say, you know what, I'm gonna actually, you know, me, I'm not saying I'm gonna marry the next chick I meet or whatever, but you're gonna start letting your feelings go wherever they may, and you start connecting to women, right, in field and during the sex as well. And what's it gonna look like, right? What's it gonna look like really simply before you make your point, is that in field practically, all it's gonna look like is, you walk up, how's she doing, right?  Hmm, wait, how horny is she?  Don't wanna grow needy, right, whatever. Just look at her, cool. You have this connection, right? An emotional connection. And at this point, right, you start leading her through the club. Boom, boom, boom, you know? Start doing all the right things automatically as long as you keep your sexuality sort of as your leading compass, right? You will end up in the bedroom and if it's a woman you really like and connect with, right?  Very simple. You'll never be needy. It'll be a choice, you know? Exactly. And basically, what we're hinting at is clear, right? At some point, you either need to find a new purpose within the pickup community for yourself. So if you truly have passion to coach other people, to help other people, you know, try. Have fun. It's a great job. We've enjoyed it. You know, however, for us, it is definitely time to move on right now. The thing is basically that you've spent so much time and energy on developing yourself those last few years. You can't just go cold turkey. You can't just not spend that energy anymore. However, think a little bit creatively. You can spend that energy on a lot of other destinations. For example, your finances, your health.  You've basically slept through half of the next day and maybe you haven't been all that good and focused at work because secretly you've been browsing pickup forums. So basically, you don't need to quit spending that energy and go cold turkey. However, when you feel that you are where you want it to be in the beginning and where you still want to be right now, it's definitely time to redirect some of that energy because you are not needy anymore. You are able to connect with women.  This is the one thing like we've hinted at. The community is designed to not make you want to get out. It paints the next unrealistic picture after the three sum comes to four sum comes to five sum. So basically, realize for yourself what did you really want and what do you want now. And if you've got it, why do you need to pump countless amounts of more energy into that hole? You can still put a little bit in there. However, your energy at this point is probably much better spent at other places. So remember what are you doing? What are you doing? What did you do before? Well, I think honestly, like in the end, right? What do you do it for? What did I do it for?    Or whatever you want.  It really makes you feel alive. Like I said, at first approach, I was like, this is awesome.  I just remember the feeling. It was like a rush. It was amazing, right? So I mean, I think David Dyer put it best. It's like when you take race car driving, right? That race car driving, whatever, motorcycle racing, if you would take all the danger out of that and you take all the possibility of crashing and dying out of that, nobody would ever do it. Nobody ever watch it, nobody ever drive it, right? Same with this. If you couldn't get the blow out or couldn't go wrong, you would never do it.  And when it's time to move on, follow that, you know? That feeling, that rush, this is just one of the, you know, hundreds, thousands of ways to get this, you know? And as long as you follow that, I really thought like I was on different sides with women in the beginning, right? Or rather towards the middle of my second entry. But then during that, progressing and progressing and progressing, I realized that I actually really love women. Like I think they're fantastic human beings. They are actually human beings. They're not on the other side. They're not the warriors to be fought against. They're fantastic.  I enjoy being with women. And yeah, I still have guy friends, don't worry. Not that unhealthy, but I enjoy being with women. I love it. I deeply, deeply love women. And for that, I don't need any more pickup knowledge. And I enjoy coaching people, but I don't really have the time for it anymore. So for us, this was our last speech on pickup at any pickup convention. You know, we love this convention. So maybe we'll learn something new and we'll speak here again. Maybe we've learned something amazingly new and you'll see us again or one of us in two years talking about something completely different. But pickup, that's it. So screw you guys, we're going home.


Good morning. First, let me send a warm welcome to our distinguished ministers and chiefs of events. Thank you for convening for today's 20th meeting of the Ukrainian Defense Contact Group. And to us all here at the Assistant Secretary of Defense now serve as facilitator for today's contact group. I'd like to welcome Mr. Bergara and the Ukrainian delegation to today's meeting. As always, we are grateful for your attendance and are looking forward to hearing from you shortly. As a first shorter of business, I would like to introduce Secretary of Defense, Oya. I'll now provide introductory remarks. Mr. Secretary, over to you. Well, thanks, Solis. And good morning, everyone. And thanks for joining the 20th meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group. It's great to see everyone in person. And it's great to be back at Rammstein. Let me start by thanking Minister Pristorius, our host, for his wonderful hospitality, and also Minister Umarov and his delegation for joining us. For more than two years, Ukraine's forces have fought Putin's aggression with defiance and skill. Russia has paid a staggering cost for Putin's imperial dreams. At least 315,000 Russian troops have been killed or wounded since Putin's all-out invasion in February of 2022. Russia has squandered up to $211 billion to equip, deploy, maintain, and sustain its imperial aggression against Ukraine. Putin's War of Choice will cost Russia $1.3 trillion in previously anticipated economic growth through 2026. And Ukraine's defenders continue to degrade the Kremlin's capabilities. Ukraine has sunk, destroyed, or damaged some 20 medium to large Russian Navy vessels. And Ukraine continues to down Russian warplanes. Now, Ukraine's troops face harsh conditions and hard fighting. And Ukraine's civilians endure a constant barrage of Russian missiles and Iranian drones. But Ukraine won't back down, and neither will United States. So our message today is clear. United States will not let Ukraine fail. This coalition will not let Ukraine fail. And the free world will not let Ukraine fail. Just last week, the United States announced additional security assistance for Ukraine, valued at $300 million. This is an extraordinary measure to support Ukraine's most pressing needs for air defense, artillery, and anti-tank capabilities. We were only able to support this much-needed package by identifying some unanticipated contract savings. But we remain determined to provide Ukraine with the resources that it needs to resist the Kremlin's aggression. And so do the countries of conscience that have gathered here today. Together, this contact group continues to dig deeper to get vital security assistance to Ukraine. The Czech Republic recently procured 800,000 urgently needed artillery shells. Germany, France, Denmark, and Sweden have each recently announced important new military aid packages. And these are investments in Ukraine's just battle against Russian aggression. But these are investments, also investments, in our shared security, in European security, and in global security. We will all be less secure if Putin gets his way. And we will all be less secure in a lawless, violent world where dictators can redraw borders by force, wipe countries off the map, and rebuild their old empires. So Ukraine's battle remains one of the great causes of our time. And Ukrainian people do not have a day to waste, and neither do we. So we continue to build creative, adaptable, and sustainable ways to support Ukraine's defenders. And this contact group continues to move full speed ahead to get Ukraine the capabilities that it urgently needs to help Ukraine build a future force that will provide its long-term security. Earlier this morning, I convened the first meeting of the Capability Coalition Leadership Group. And I'm grateful to Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, and the UK for steering the Capability Coalitions. We're coordinating on cross-cutting issues, such as drones, and sustainment, command and control, and training, and galvanizing our defense industrial basis. The eight Capability Coalitions have made significant progress in recent weeks. We'll keep working together with all of the Capability Coalitions to identify gaps, to maintain cross-cutting needs, and to help Ukraine build a formidable force for the future.  The Capability Coalitions underscore our shared commitment to Ukraine's long-term security. And we stand united and firm. Ukraine's struggle for freedom matters to us all. And ladies and gentlemen, let's not kid ourselves. Putin will not stop at Ukraine. But as President Biden has said, Ukraine can stop Putin if we stand with Ukraine and provide the weapons that it needs to defend itself. Ukraine's survival is on the line. And all of our security is on the line. So we will continue to stand together to resist Putin's campaign of conquests. And we will continue to keep the faith with the people of Ukraine. And with that, we'll pause as our friends in the media depart.


Let's go to y'all Chris from jassescasebreaks.com doing a fun one here 2022 Gold Rush Quad Zilla autograph memorabilia box random hit number one So four spots four pieces of autograph memorabilia per case Open the box first randomize the hits afterwards and the customer names It's a big one. It's right here. It doesn't fit on the table So we'll rip from here and then we'll go our fresh dice our fresh list when we need it Nancy Hans chatted Scott grab the four spots. We'll put in the hits after this and plug and play it, but uh, we're going to go Let's switch screens real quick We'll rip here show off there in front. So Thanks again y'all good luck Multisport there's awesome football some baseball basketball some soccer on the cell sheet thumb up. So let's see I Start off here Got a football mini-helmet Atlanta Falcons Let's hear here on the top Gonna be Maddie ice Matt Ryan autographed mini-helmet Atlanta Falcons edition That's our first tip move that right there next up so the jersey Oh nice New York Mets edition On the road Jersey for Jacob de Gron signature on the four right there got the JSA certification number on In the bag as well Jacob de Gron our second hit Unless there's two things in here, I think we might be missing a hit Yeah We'll rip right here Cross There we go, we got two cards there we go. Thank goodness. So two cards Let me grab some spacers real quick. So we can hide Let's do like this so Ronald Cunha and Vladimir Guerrero junior from the tops now card and will be homerun leaders accomplished feet only done three times in last three decades authenticated from PSA That'll be one hit and the next one Mason mounts autographed to PSA authenticated from looks like a tops attacks. I think not Panini And you need football 2020 There we go. So some football some baseball and some soccer Represented Matt Ryan All right So in this order one more time Matt Ryan on the Falcons auto mini-helmet Jacob de Gron Sign Jersey Mets edition the Ronald Cunha Vladimir Guerrero dual auto And the Mason mounts auto as well. All right, we're gonna pause the video real quick We're gonna put the hits in when we come back will randomize For Scott Chad Hans and Nancy. You're back y'all All right, we're back So in the order that they were hit Matt Ryan autograph Falcons mini-helmet Jacob de Gron autograph Mets jersey The Acunha Vladdy dual auto and the Mason mount auto So our list with our hits and we will roll our dice and randomize them this five and one six times for both. Good luck Thanks again y'all one two three four five and Six six that final time Scott with the last about Mojo up top down to Hans and Six times for the hits. Good luck one more time one two three four five and Six, let's copy and see the way it rolls out so Scott's Getting the Jacob de Gron autograph Mets jersey Nancy gets the Acunha and Vladdy dual auto Chad with the Mason mount auto card and Hans with the Matt Ryan autograph Falcons mini-helmet There we go We'll print those out and we'll ship them off together. Thanks again y'all. Congrats. Thanks for getting in Jaspies case breaks calm for more breaks soon Bye-bye


I want to get right to it. I'm just thrilled that you're hanging in there. I know this is a long day, but you're in for a great treat tonight, a birthday party for Theodore Roosevelt. He's 150 years old this month. And also, it's the 50th anniversary of old four eyes, and you'll see vignettes of that and other surprises. So the evening will become a little more light-hearted, beginning with the reception tonight, and we appreciate that. And we will keep you posted on tomorrow. Dan Flores teaches at the University of Montana in Missoula. He's the A.B. Hammond Professor of Western History there. I'm meeting him for the first time, but I've read his work, and we have mutual friends, including Stephanie Ambrose Tubbs. When we were conceiving this event, we wanted to have, in addition to talking about Roosevelt and conservation, we wanted to talk about the conservation of this place. And what does that mean? And the theme of this next hour and 40 minutes is what will the badlands of North Dakota, Roosevelt's beloved Little Missouri River Valley, look like 100 years from now? And what sorts of things should we be thinking about as these pressures, these events unfold in this extraordinary part of North Dakota? I couldn't think of anybody that I would rather have take the lead than Dan Flores. This book, The Natural West, Environmental History in the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains, if you don't have it, I urge you to buy it today and get Professor Flores to sign it. The chapter called Chapter 9, A Long Love Affair with an Uncommon Country, Environmental History in the Future of the Great Plains, is arguably the most thought-provoking thing written about our place in the last 20 or 30 years. So I hope you will get this book. It is extraordinarily interesting about where the Great Plains were, where we are, and where we're headed. So without any further ado, I want to introduce Dan Flores. He's going to give a short lecture, basically, helping us understand how we should have the discussion that will follow his lecture. Dan Flores. Thank you for sticking it out today. It's been a fascinating conference to me, and I'm really delighted to be here. I appreciate Clay thinking of me last spring when he was planning this. And I have to say, I have never been to Dickinson, and I have not been to the Badlands before. I'm a Badlands aficionado from way back, but I have long wanted to be here and come here, and I'm finally going to get to see the place tomorrow. I'm not going to be a sissy. I don't care if it's snowing. I'm going out there. But what I'd like to do as a sort of a preface to the panel that we've assembled here is to talk to you a little bit about thinking about the future of the Great Plains. And I mean, I'm a historian. Historians commonly take a point in time and look backward, not forward. So I don't have any crystal balls to read. I think we discovered today in listening to some of the talks this morning, particularly Donald Worcester's talk, that it was difficult for Teddy Roosevelt to see into the future. However hard he tried to do so. It's just difficult, I think, in terms of translating history into the future. Hardly anyone has been successful in doing that. And I can't claim that I'm going to be able to do it today, but I think I can. I think I probably can use history a little bit, as the saying goes, that the things that are interesting about history is that it basically produces the causes of what we're interested in and what affects us in the present. So I think maybe by looking back at history a little bit, I can kind of give you a sense of what we might expect. And I've got a particular point of view here I want to share with you as well about your little Missouri and Badlands country, because, well, you'll see. I've spent a lot of time on the Southern Plains and have mostly written about the Southern Plains. And you'll see how I relate to your part of the world. I don't know how many of you know the name W.H. Auden. He was a very famous writer and literary critic from Great Written in the early 20th century. I know almost nothing useful about him, except for one thing, which is that he wrote a passage that once came across and basically just kind of committed to memory. It goes like this. I cannot see a plane without a shutter. Oh, God, please, please do not make me live there. There's an exclamation point at the end of that sentence, by the way. And I would have to say that Auden's sentiment there in a lot of ways is sort of how the rest of the world, especially the rest of America, tends to think of the Great Plains today. The Great Plains just isn't loved in the same way that the Rockies or the Sierra Nevada's or the Colorado Plateau country or the Southwestern deserts get love, at least not in a sort of a general way. Now, certainly in a regional and local way, the Plains are very much adored. But I think the general sort of take on the Great Plains is that it's flyover country. It's a place that you drive through and hope that you get through fast and maybe at night. I mean, that's the way most people. I've had people tell me that they didn't think that Montana existed because they had never met anyone from Montana. They'd spent their whole lives on the East Coast and had never come across somebody from Montana, so maybe Montana doesn't really actually exist, I've heard people say. Now, for us, of course, the fact that Teddy Roosevelt and so many other people, especially from the 19th century, had exactly the opposite reaction to the Great Plains, I think is cause for some celebration and some excitement. And what I wanna do just for a couple of minutes is to read you a few examples of people who reacted very differently to the Great Plains than W.H. Auden did.  One of the people who's quote about the Great Plains I've always loved because it so upends this common sort of scorn about the plains from the coast was a little known mountain man named Albert Pike who in 1831 made a journey out onto the plains after having he and his party of trappers had mostly stripped beaver out of the Southern Rocky Mountains and they went out on the Great Plains looking for beaver to trap. And after a few months of roaming around in what is now Colorado and Kansas and Oklahoma, Pike, who turned out to be a remarkably good writer for a mountain man wrote this, listen to this line. The sea, the woods, the mountains all suffer in comparison with the prairie. The prairie has a stronger hold up on the census. Its sublimity arises from its unbounded extent, its barren monotony and desolation, its still unmoved, calm, stern, almost self-confident grandeur, its strange power of deception, its want of an echo and in fine its power of throwing a man back up on himself. I mean, every time someone from another part of the country visited me when I was living in West Texas and talked about how flat it was and how bare it was, I trotted out this quote. I would usually ply them with a little tequila first and get them in the proper frame of mind and then trot out this particular quote. Here's a, and this image that I have on the screen, I think sort of captures that. This is an Alfred Jacob Miller painting from the 1830s of a mountain man who's reacting, obviously, to the open spaces of the plains with something like adoration. I mean, true love for the landscape. Closer to where we are now, in fact, near present day Williston and only a dozen years after Albert Pike wrote those lines, the precise date of this particular description is June the 10th, 1843. The, let me change my slide here. The painter John James Ottoman offered up a really potent word picture. I think for one of the Great Plains was in the 19th century, the West's most admired landscape and this is what he said. We passed some beautiful scenery today and almost opposite of where we camp had the pleasure of seeing five mountain rams or big horns on the summit of a hill. We saw what we supposed to be three grizzly bears but we could not be sure. We saw a wolf attempting to climb a very steep bank of clay. On the opposite shore, another wolf was lying down on a sandbar like a dog. If there ever was a country where wolves are surprisingly abundant, surpassingly abundant, it is the one we are now in. I forgot to say that last evening we saw a large herd of buffaloes with many calves among them that were grazing quietly on a fine bit of prairie. They stared and then started at a handsome canner producing a beautiful picturesque view. We have seen many elks swimming the river. These animals are abundant beyond belief hereabouts. To me what Audubon is giving us a sense of and what so many people in the 19th century had a sense of on the Great Plains is that it was literally the Serengeti of North America. It drew people, the plains drew people from all over the world, primarily because of this tremendous abundance of wildlife. And I might add too that even in the early 20th century after much of this plains' wildlife had been exterminated, but before modern agriculture had ripped the grass off a good part of the plains, the region continued to entrance people with a kind of a peculiar magic that, I mean, I'll sometimes even wonder if maybe the reason we react to the plains the way we do, the way I do, doesn't have something to do with our evolutionary hard wiring in Savannah terrain in Africa. I mean, we just seem to have this kind of visceral reaction to the plains. So young Georgia O'Keeffe, for instance, who seemingly was sentenced to people her friends back east thought this was the case, to a career as an art teacher in Outback, Texas, during the time of World War I, found herself out in the Texas Panhandle and writing her friends back east and saying, this is the most entrancing place I've ever been in my life. She said, you can literally just drive out or walk off into space, as she put it. And even as late as 1949, she wrote a friend of hers, Daniel Catten Rich, and said this to him. This is after she'd been living in New Mexico for many years. Crossing the Panhandle of Texas is always a very special event for me. Driving in the early morning towards the dawn and the rising sun, the plains are not like anything else. And I always wonder why I bother to go to other places. So those of us, and obviously they're in the 21st century, there still are a few of us who experience a rush of excitement on finding ourselves on the Great Plains, as opposed to the, what seems to be the coastal reaction is sort of escape the Great Plains. No, this landscape is kind of a tremendous enigma. And I'm gonna read for you a little passage here. This is from an essay of mine. And I think it probably says it better than I can summarize it just spontaneous to you, spontaneously. Seemingly the simplest and umblest of topographies. In fact, the plains was long the biological Eden of North America. Today, America's poster child region of dwindling towns and an aging population, more than once in the past, it's drawn the human imagination as if it were the Elysian Fields. Find a piece of native prairie on the Great Plains, even today, preferably out of hearing distance of interstate traffic. And a few minutes of imagining brings the plains enigma home with a jolt. 10 centuries ago, elephants and camels and lions could have been in view. For thousands of years after that, herds of buffalo, likely trailed by wolf packs and bands of native hunters, would have grunted and grazed past your spot like wildebeest on the Masai Mara. Not quite 150 years ago, cattle drives tacked across the grass ocean towards the pole star. Then the homesteaders came, fences arrived, tractors appeared, followed by center pivot irrigation, libraries, churches, universities. Yet now, except for a handful of cities, the Lincolns and the Amarillos and the Bismarcks, in many places on the plains, modern America seems to be receding. What on earth? What I want to try to convey to you here is that there are a couple of points, really, to make. One is that we happen to be on the plains inhabitants of probably the most anxiously lived in spot in North America. Now there might be a case to be made for Beringia, I suppose, but the first great migrations came into the plains country, perhaps along the coastlines, but certainly our first major cultures that we associate with 10 centuries and 12 centuries in the past are great plains cultures. But one of the patterns that you find in the history of the great plains is this kind of going back 10 centuries or more, this pattern of embrace and farewell. Time and time again in the historical record, human beings have come to the great plains, stayed here while the weather was good and often retreated either eastward or westward when the weather turned bad. This has been one of the parts of North America where the climatic history has really regulated the ebb and flow of the human population. I mean, and that makes, for historians, the great plains into a really kind of fascinating place because it makes it so unlike the steady, relentless growth of so many other American regions. I mean, on the great plains, you have this sort of embrace and farewell that's characterized by the Clovis culture, the Folsom culture, the unregulated market hunts that devastated keystone animals like bison, cattle die-ups and sell-offs, homesteader failures, dustbowl out migrations, declining water tables and this slow bleeding away of the 20th century population on the great plains. I mean, all of this has made the great plains a kind of a set piece in the environmental history that Teddy Roosevelt had instructed us in that we've been talking about for the last couple of days. I mean, I would say that with his ranches, the Maltese Cross and the Elkhorn, Teddy certainly felt the undeniable power of life on the great plains. And I think we can also say that coming here and settling and remaining here generation after generation, I mean, it's not, hasn't been anybody's mistake by any means, we've all loved being on the plains when we've been able to stay. And clearly we're not going to go away, we're going to be here, so we're going to inhabit the place a century from now. But I think the question is not so much abandonment anymore, at least I hope it's not, as how, as Wallace Stegner put it, we create a society to match the scenery here. And in order to think about that, I want to pose to you a couple of points about this long-term history and our much briefer experience.  And in that short amount of time, folks, I mean, I really liked the fact that we've been speaking truths here about Teddy Roosevelt and trying to grapple with what his legacy really is, not just whitewashing the story or turning it into a celebration. So I feel an obligation to do that about occupation on the Great Plains too. In the short amount of time we've been here, we have really produced an extraordinary transformation of this place, especially in ecological terms. We managed, in a very brief period of time, to debuffalo and de-wolf and sometimes de-grass an ecology that was 10,000 years and more in the making. And across a lot of the Great Plains, that process has left the landscape a kind of a, if you look at this 1850s lithograph, it's left what we're occupying a kind of an empty stage. I mean, it almost has turned the Great Plains into an eerie sort of ghost place, a kind of spectral of what it once was. We read all these marvelous descriptions of Lewis and Clark and John James Audubon, and then we look out across the landscape that seems strangely empty of all of this excitement and all of this life. And it's not just a highly visible and charismatic species, the bison that are now just a shadow of themselves, Plains, Grizzlies, Lobo Wolves, Eskimo Curlews, Miriams, Audubon, Bighorn Sheep, all of those have been virtually rubbed out of the landscape. Let me go back here, let's see. Oh, I'm missing one. Sorry, if it comes up, I'll show it to you. There was one other one here I wanted to show you. It was Charlie Russell painting of wolves being roped. What I want to say before I conclude that thought, though, is that, I mean, we've been talking a lot about how Teddy Roosevelt was in love with birds and so forth. Today, the Great Plains is the landscape in North America that has suffered the sharpest population decline in birds and bird life of any other region in the United States over the last three decades, depending on which part of the plains from 25% to 65% of birds and bird species have disappeared on the Great Plains over just the last three decades. There are currently 55 Great Plains species that are threatened or endangered and a whopping 728 Great Plains candidates for listing as threatened or endangered. I mean, that is an extraordinary dismantling of an ancient ecology. The piece you see, the image that you see on the screen right now, I want to tell you what this is. It sort of stands to me kind of as an emblem of some of this dismantling that took place with, stunningly enough, a very small population of people out on the Great Plains. I mean, just a few tens of thousands of people in the 1870s, 1880s, 1890s. Dismantled a huge amount of the ecology in a very short time. And here's just one example of it. This was done by an artist named William de La Montaigne Kerry who was on a steamer heading up the Missouri River crossing into Montana Territory in 1874 and he saw this from the deck of his ship through good sharp field glasses. What he saw was this drama that absolutely transfixed him and he described it this way. He said, about a mile off an immense grizzly bear was making for a cottonwood miles away and behind the bear came two men superbly mounted, armed to the teeth. We could see distinctly the horses straining every muscle to overtake the bear who was equally anxious and making every effort to escape his pursuers. Kerry went back east and painted what he titled cattle men tracing grizzly bear to a den to capture the finale of that scene that he witnessed. They stopped, he later interviewed some of the people who were involved in the chase and this is what he was told about how it ended.  I mean, it's kind of a reiteration of the conquest of the continent and it happened in a really rapid fashion on the Great Plains. I mean, even Teddy Roosevelt himself put it this way. There's the Shirley Russell one. Teddy Roosevelt put it this way about hunting grizzly bears. He said, no other triumph of American hunting can compare with the victory of killing your grizzly. That's the photographer L.A. Huffman with the first grizzly he killed on the Northern Plains. Settlement of this region that we're talking about, the little Missouri drainage in Badlands country though, was really a 20th century phenomenon.  But I mean, Stockman had been here since the 1870s basically running cattle and sheep and horses across an open range. But, and I'll show you the growth of stock on the Great Plains in the decades from 1880 through 1900. You can see that the little Missouri country has really no stock in the census of 1880 and only is beginning to get something like 10 to 50 cattle per square mile. And even some of the Western parts, not that much by 1900. So it's a fairly open, classic open range, low stocking situation. But starting in 1904 and up to about 1920 during a really good and wet period, entities like the Golden Valley Land and Cattle Company began marketing real estate to farmers and the breakout began in Western North Dakota. Land prices at the beginning were about $5 an acre. By 1915, they were up to $15 and even $30 an acre. There was a pioneer photographer, quite a number of them obviously who were engaged in capturing the breakout in Eastern Montana and Western North Dakota and Evelyn Cameron, a really wonderful story about this woman, I don't have time to tell you. But she sort of captured the process of sod busting on the Montana North Dakota border. During this real estate boom between about 1904 and 1920, actually only about a quarter of the region that we're concerned with, the little Missouri drainage ever got plowed though. I mean, one reason, of course, was because the badlands and the badlands to some people seemed already to be plowed. But only about a quarter of the grasslands get broken out during that period. That's a very different situation, by the way, from other parts of the Great Plains. I lived down on the Southern Plains, which I'm gonna use as a comparison here in a second. And I can tell you the county I lived in, Lubbock County, back in the 1980s, had 3% of its native grass left. 97% of the grass cover had been removed by that time. In this part of the world, the historical low of remaining grasslands came in 1978 and there was still 78% of the prairie intact at that time. So only something like 32% had gotten broken out even by 1978. Despite the, let's see if there's, yeah, there's one more shot, I wanted you to see this one, how homesteaders were making it in the area in the first part of the 20th century. One other thing I wanna quickly tell you about is the fact that we have not, even in the short period that we've been here, we've not been impervious to the vicitudes of climate change either. And the classic example of climate change and its impact on the Great Plains, of course, is the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. We generally tend to think of the Dust Bowl as having affected the Central Plains, and especially the Southern Plains the most. But I mean, despite the latitude of North Dakota, it didn't get a reprieve from this most vivid modern historical experience. In 1934, in fact, the little Missouri drainage, which normally gets about 15 inches of precipitation a year, was getting for several years in a row only about seven or eight inches of rainfall a year. And during the 1930s, a quarter million acres of broken out cropland in this region failed, and area ranchers ended up, of course, liquidating huge numbers of cattle to New Deal programs, which ended up killing most of those animals. That's a very famous Alexander Hogue painting called Mother Earth Laid Bare, famous Dust Bowl painting. I wanna say something else about the Big Picture story. One other thing, and this is sort of where I'm carrying this towards the end here, because it's really important to the present and the future of the area, and also because it helps to make this comparison that I wanna draw between this region and the country farther south. In our national landscape tradition, the American national landscape tradition, we've always confused the vertical with the monumental. In other words, another way to put it, altitude equals beatitude. The plains is not very vertical. It's not very high elevation. And it got perceived as an aesthetically deficient place, especially with all these animals gone for much of the early 20th century, during the time when Teddy Roosevelt was helping to create this great national forest system that we've been talking about for the last couple of days. Hardly anything was going on in terms of preservation of Great Plains landscapes. I mean, I think we all know that in 1934, the first, or 1834, I'm sorry, the first great call for a great, for a national park by George Catlin was for a park on the Great Plains. I mean, this was the first person in American culture who really argued that the government should create something like a national park and Catlin wanted it to be on the plains along the Missouri River. But the Great Plains right now at the beginning of the 21st century is the most underrepresented region of the American West in the entire national park system. I mean, through the end of homesteading in the 1930s, the National Park Service found proposed parks in the Great Plains in places like South Dakota in the little Missouri country and Palo Duro Canyon down in West Texas, not sufficiently monumental as they put it compared to the parks of the far West. There were three existing Great Plains parks. I think someone has mentioned those in the last day or two. Sully's Hill, Platt down in Oklahoma, Wind Cave in South Dakota, they totaled altogether fewer than 30,000 acres. I mean, there are a lot of state parks that are bigger than 30,000 acres. And the National Park Service did everything it could to lose those three that it had. In fact, I found a document one time where one National Park Service investigator reported that he said Sully's Hill lacks even comic value. I mean, this was the attitude that even the Park Service had about parks on the Great Plains. In the 1920s though, the ecologists started getting interested in parks for ecological purposes and I won't go into all the details, but Victor Shelford, who was a very prominent early landscape ecologist in the United States, studied 11 Great Plains sites and the best one that he could come up with was one that I've written about a lot really regretting this decision. But in 1931, Shelford and many other people said the place the Park Service really needs to look at on the Great Plains is Palo Duro Canyon, the Red River country down on the Texas Panhandle. It's really dramatic landscape. It's just perfect for creating what Shelford and other folks thought should be a million acre park of the Great Plains. That would be about half the size of Yellowstone where you could turn Buffalo loose again on a large Great Plains landscape. The problem was though that Palo Duro didn't measure up in terms of verticality to these other parks in the far west. And so here's a map showing the outlines of what the Park Service was considering as a million acre national park of the Plains didn't happen. Park Service was not really interested and this land on the Plains, one of the problems with the Great Plains of course is much of it was homesteaded, therefore privatized and the Park Service doesn't have an acquisition budget. It can't really acquire private lands. It has to call on state folks, entrepreneurs, wealthy CEOs to come up with money to acquire private lands for parks. And I have to tell you, one of the problems with Texas is that none of these Texas CEOs ever stepped up to the plate. They simply were uninterested in a place where the politics are really conservative, they just didn't want a federal Great Plains park. Up in this part of the Great Plains, Roger Toll who was kind of the one man band of evaluating all these places came to the Badlands of South Dakota in 1928, took a look around and said this, it's not a supreme scenic feature of national importance. The Badlands Toll said, are surpassed in grander beauty and interest by Grand Canyon and Bryce. But since 60% of the Badlands in South Dakota was still public domain and South Dakota promised to acquire the rest of it and turn it over to the National Park Service, Toll recommended that under the Antiquities Act, that great Teddy Roosevelt creation of 1906, that we get a national monument out of the South Dakota Badlands. And so Congress approved Badlands National Monument in 1929 and President Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed it such in 1939. Something similar happened with the Little Missouri Badlands which, and this is by the way, Palo Duro. Let's see. Okay, let me stick with that one. The Little Missouri Badlands, I'll go ahead and tell you this story and I think I've got an image here that will show you what I'm talking about. The Little Missouri Badlands Toll said, it's just too barren for a national park. He took a look at the Little Missouri country at the same time that he was looking at the South Dakota Badlands and he said it's just too barren. It shouldn't be a national park. We might make it a national monument, he said, but it looks like the idea is really vehemently opposed by local landowners, especially ranchers in the area. But then a few years later, this is in 1928, 1929, a few years later came the droughts of the 1930s and at that point rancher opposition sort of swirled away in the droughts of the middle 1930s and the National Park Service finally acquired the area in 1947 and Theodore Roosevelt National Park then became a reality of our part of the world. Both, it became a park of course with the Omnibus Parks Bill of 1978 along with Badlands down in South Dakota. I wanna stay with this area on the Southern Plains for just one more second though because I wanna make a point again as I said by comparison. The Park Service tried again on the Southern Plains in 1938. They decided that this time they would go for a more modest 140,000 acre national monument on the Southern Plains in this region, the canyons of the Red River around Palo Duro Canyon. And so Park Service did a study, recommended national monument status but again, absolutely no interest in the state of Texas. Park Service didn't have the money to acquire these lands. They were private lands and no one in Texas was willing to step up. Although people from Oklahoma and Colorado and New Mexico and Kansas were all excited about it but in Texas they didn't seem to be very excited. So what I wanna tell you is that in this part of the world today, what we've got are a pair of state parks that's all we have in this region that was considered by the Park Service twice in the 1930s for a park or a monument. We've got two state parks there. They total 40,000 acres altogether about 30 miles apart, one from the other. And what's happening in this part of the world today is that you see the area that's designated, these are the counties by the census of 1990 that were losing more than 10% of their population per census, per 10 year decade on the Great Plains. And the area I'm talking about is where that cluster of counties is in the Texas Panhandle. I mean, dramatic loss of population in that region. Today, I mean, not only do they lose population but they lose young people, of course. There's no predator larger than a coyote remaining in that part of the world. And the region seems to be becoming a national sacrifice area to hog farms and miles and miles of wind turbines along the Camp Rock escarpment. I mean, it's probably not a candidate for collapse the way Jared Diamond describes it in his book but it's not an economically healthy place. And I wanna say also it's not a particularly enjoyable place to live anymore. I mean, I lived there for 15 years and some, what I wanna convey to you it's not the little Missouri country. You got what from the perspective of the Southern Plains I always wanted the Southern Plains to have acquired. The little Missouri country ended up getting it. One last theme I'll tell you about and then I'll yield the floor to the rest of the panel is as I think, there we go. Famous painting of the country that we're interested in here. A theme that Don Worcester mentioned this morning and I've written a good bit about which is that in the 21st century the theme of conservation has now gone to basically restoration. Restoration of the wild. I mean, the 19th century and the 20th centuries we were preserving and conserving places. Now we're restoring them. Restoration goes all the way back to a famous writer named George Perkins Marsh who wrote a book called Man in Nature in 1864. And he described how we needed to, humans needed to reconstruct the fabric of the world that we had been dismantling. And I just want to read a brief thing for you that I think you will like because I mean, you all know Henry David Thoreau and Thoreau captured the whole premise behind restoration beautifully. He described himself, he said, is I am that citizen whom I pity. He wrote this in 1856 in his journal. And the reason he said I'm that citizen whom I pity is because, and I'm quoting from Thoreau, I take infinite pains to know all the phenomena of the spring, for instance, thinking that I have here the entire poem. And then to my chagrin, I hear that it is but an imperfect copy that I possess and have read. And that my ancestors have torn out many of the first leaves and grandest passages and mutilated it in many places. I should not like to think that some demigod had come before me and picked out some of the best of the stars. I wish to know an entire heaven and an entire earth. That's basically the premise, I think, that lies behind the idea of restoration. Restoration is going to be controversial. It's going to basically force us to confront that maybe the most sustainable landscape in places like the Great Plains is the one that geology and evolution and ecology fashioned. We're gonna have to grapple with things like whether or not we want to introduce, reintroduce to the Great Plains species that are a little more difficult and controversial, say, than black-footed ferrets or swift foxes. I mean, we're getting both of those back on the Great Plains. But the question is going to be, of course, one of them is going to be, are we going to do on the Great Plains, ultimately? What we are doing in the Rockies right now, which is to reintroduce the Keystone Predator in the form of wolves. And heaven forbid, what about this one? Here was one of our native species. I mean, it seems unthinkable to us, but I gotta tell you, I live in a part of the West where we got grizzly bears around all the time and we somehow seem to do it without any great problems. It seems like once the bears are gone, people really develop a kind of an aberrance for having them back again. But when you live around them, you don't think too much about it. And here's, you know, Charlie Russell even is an advocate for restoration.  I wish I could clothe your frame with meat and hide and wake you up today, he said.   I know you have them in the little Missouri country, but that's the kind of question that restoration begs for us to address in the Great Plains country, especially. I mean, we've got the whole, I don't wanna go into the Buffalo Commons or the Big Open or anything. I know you all know about it. Those are very controversial, depending on your politics, of course, that's either Shangri-La and Eden in the future or it's the worst disaster one could possibly imagine. But it is the kind of thing that sort of in a piecemeal fashion is happening. And we're also confronting the whole issue of global climate change. Global climate change, as indicated by the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, is likely to hit the Great Plains especially hard. Some people are arguing that the Chihuahuan Desert may advance hundreds of miles northward into the Great Plains. And these particular maps demonstrate that the Dust Bowls seem to converge around places where the temperature was especially warm during particular seasons. So a warming temperature is going to make the likelihood of Dust Bowls and Dust Storms in the future much more common for us to confront. I kind of think, really, there are some other things I can say and I'll save them for the panel, but I really think, basically, what we're likely to confront on the Great Plains is a future that looks a little more like what the Rocky Mountain present is today. In other words, with more public lands, maybe regionally or locally managed, not necessarily owned by the federal government or managed by the federal government, but maybe in the John Wesley Powell fashion owned by and managed by local commonwealths. But I think it's going to be, in the future, a more restored nature. We're still gonna have plenty of ranching and plenty of farming, but more of this kind of restoration like the little Missouri Badlands and Theodore Roosevelt National Park already have. In fact, I kind of think that heritage tourism and eco-tourism of the kind that you're getting with the park is really the future for the whole Great Plains. And I'll leave you with this. We're talking about Teddy Roosevelt, and I wanna close this with Teddy Roosevelt simply by quoting something from his The Strenuous Life. What Roosevelt seemed to believe was that the kind of future I'm describing would have made for a more authentic life of the kind he wanted to live, this sort of wilderness life. And Roosevelt seems to have had this kind of thing in mind when he wrote in The Strenuous Life that for he who seeks out the wide waste spaces of the earth, the grandest scenery of the world is his to look at if he chooses. The beauty and charm of the wilderness are his for the taking. The joy of living is his who has the heart to demand it. That's the kind of future I think Teddy Roosevelt would have wanted for this era. Thanks very much for listening.