So, a really short regression before I get to the rest of my talk. The very first time I stood up in front of a conference full of people and gave a talk was 1997 and that was at a vendor tool conference, a test automation tool conference. I was presenting a technique on some deep magic I had done with a little fascinating sort of undocumented aspect of the language. So I had 25 slides that were incredibly code dense and when I speak and I'm nervous, I speak faster. So I went through those slides really fast because I was really nervous. So 25 code packed slides and I went through the whole thing. And at the end, I had had no sense of time when I gave the talk and I look at my watch and I realize, wow, I used 25 minutes of a 45 minute speaking slot. I have time left. And then I looked out at the audience and they're all looking at me like this.  And they're still all looking at me like this, except for one guy. The one guy was in the front row like sitting right where you guys are. And he looks at me and he says, no, that wasn't too fast. That was perfect. I got it. And I'm sure he did. He probably had invented it two years before I even thought of it. He was wicked smart.  I think you're all smarter than I am by a lot. So I'm not worried about whether or not I'm going to run over time. I'm more worried about whether or not you're going to get anything useful out of this. We're going to find out. OK, now yesterday what I learned was that we've got a whole bunch of people who program Ruby and who do testing and better yet, who drive their development with tests. And I know that somebody asked for a show of hands on who uses cucumber, but I completely forgot who uses cucumber. So how many use cucumber? Wow, that's a lot. That's fabulous. This is actually not a talk about cucumber, although all of the examples are in cucumber, but this isn't about cucumber. The other thing I don't know about you guys is how many of you take the time to do proper care and feeding of your code. So you do refactoring. You take care to make sure that your method names and your class names are evocative and intention revealing your move duplication. Let's see a show of hands. Woohoo, that's fabulous. Now how many of you do the same thing for your acceptance tests? Any fewer. That makes me sad. But that's OK because I'm not here to talk about how to treat your tests like code and refactor them and so forth. This isn't a talk about that either. This is also not a talk about Ruby or about anything that's actually particularly technical, although technical details snuck in here. Instead, this is an entire talk about being nice to humans. Well, you're humans too. Boo. Ah! Misanthropes in the audience. All right.  So this is a talk about being nice to people. And by being nice, I mean speaking in human language, whatever language your team speaks to each other in, well, OK, some teams speak to each other in Ruby. But that's besides the point. I mean, the human speaking part, that's probably English if you're working around here. And we're better to look for advice on how to communicate effectively in English than in the classic work on how to write English effectively. And incidentally, as Henrik surrounded us yesterday, tests are for communication. This is how we communicate, so our tests are going to follow some rules from here. All right. So let's take a look at one of the rules out of this book. As a rule, begin each paragraph with a topic sentence and end it in conformity with the beginning. Who knew that Strunk and White were talking about acceptance tests? It's amazing. Don't you see the connection immediately? Well, OK, let's change some words, like scenario, paragraph scenario, same thing. And an evocative name and, OK, this is looking a little bit messy. Keep the expectations and, oh, let's rephrase it. Make the statement and the expectations all align. The statement, the name, the expectations. So let's take an example. This is something I see a whole lot of. When I look at suites of cucumber-like tests, especially on Rails projects, they'll look kind of like this. Does this look sort of familiar? So we've got a system here. This is a trading system. The magical commodity exchange, known as Magix. And in Magix, we have players who have commodities in their inventory, and they want to trade them. So if I am logged in, it's the fairy godmother, and I am on the make offer page, and I go fill in this field with this and this field with this. Does this look kind of familiar? Your test might look a little like this. OK. Do you have any idea what this test is about? Yeah, me either, and I didn't write it, and I wrote it. So clearly, this is violating the strunken white rule. But let's take a look at some of the stuff that's in there, and maybe we can pull out some of the essence of the meaning. Given I am logged in as fairy godmother, and I'm on the make offer page, and blah, blah, blah, that whole thing that's surrounded in red, all of that is about making an offer. And all of the details that are in there are extraneous. In fact, I'll say they're almost gratuitous UI details. The only time the UI details belong in our tests is when we're testing the UI. If we're not testing the UI, and we're just testing the logic of the system from an externally facing perspective, and I know you got your unit test, because whoo, you test, that's great. But the customers want to express their intent about the system, and the intent here isn't to fill in fields. The intent here is to make an offer. And similarly down here, the intent is to see that when I make an offer, I can see it on the market. So let's do a little bit of refactoring. And now our test becomes this. Is that a little more clear? I hope. So we've now made this so much more clear, but wait, there's still another rule that we could apply here about omit needless words. Strunk and white rule number 13. And well, okay, words, details, eh, same thing. There's a principle here that's drunk and white so wonderfully captured that has to do with expressing the essence of the test and nothing extraneous. We're going to omit all of those irrelevant expectations. So when we look here, we've got four statements in this test, but one of them has nothing to do with making an offer and everything to do with the UI. There's one UI thing left over, and that's that line. So we can shorten it even further. This test in the steps may go through the exact same steps, but the important piece is that it is now conveying so clearly the intent behind it. So there's the principle of play here is that we're going to hide all of those incidental details. Cucumber gives us some fabulous place to hide details every framework does. So Cucumber, we can put stuff in the background. We can put stuff in the steps. We can put stuff in helper methods. We've got a lot of places where we can hide the extraneous but necessary details. Y'all do this? Okay, I heard like two yeses.   Excellent. All right, let's keep going. I only have half an hour, 20 minutes. All right, there's another rule that we could apply, and that doesn't come from drunk and white directly, although I'm pretty sure they would agree with it, and that is to use the most clear representation even if it's longer. So let's take a look at a test. This test is pretty straightforward. This is a simple trade. So Fairy Godmother is going to put some wands on the market, and Jack's going to bid on them, and Fairy Godmother's going to accept Jack's bid, and then we've got some expectations about what should be true in terms of the money and the magic wands, because if you do financial transactions, then you should know that it is an absolute requirement, and the government gets kind of cranky if you violate it.  Right? That's kind of a good thing to follow, and similarly, although this is the magical exchange, we probably shouldn't be creating or destroying magic wands. So we want to make sure that everything is all balanced. Well, this test, I would say, is pretty readable. Do you agree with me? But now, see, these kinds of tests, oftentimes, the stuff that's being verified here is really being verified very well by the unit level test. So I'm not going to write a whole bunch of simplistic acceptance tests, although I am going to write some so that they express the expectations of the system, they provide documentation, that documentation is executable, all kinds of good things happen, but still, there aren't that many, it's just not that interesting. This is much more interesting. So now we've got a much more complex situation where fairy godmothers put up something and Alibaba has put up something else open for bids, and then we've got Jack and T-Bell, because I figured that Tinkerbell and Disney might get cranky at me if we use Tinkerbell to the name. So we've got T-Bell, she's going to bid on some stuff, and then we've got some expectations around what happens, who wins the bid, what happens to their accounts, right? This is way more complex. Can you rock that one at a glance? I'm embarrassed to tell you how long it took me to write that test, because I kept getting lost in who bid what, who won, what their account value should be. It took me a good 45 minutes to work through this. Then I refactored it. So Cucumbert allows you to do tables, so you can express what's going on in sections like this. So we can see that we've got some offers, we've got some bids, which bids were accepted, and then what final state of the accounts should be. Does that have a little bit better? Who knew that we were following Strunk and White's Rule 9? One topic per paragraph. Could be just amazing, they would be so great at acceptance testing on software projects. So paragraph section and whatever. And furthermore, following Rule 15, having to do with putting coordinate ideas in similar form, or if it's the same basic idea, then express it in the same basic way. Cucumbert lets you use scenario outlines for this, which is really, really great, and tables, which you just saw. Okay, so that's about organizing long tests, but let's go back to some simpler ways of being nice to the humans. Because remember, this is a whole talk about be nice to the people, be nice to humans. One of the ways that we can be nice to humans is to allow them to speak grammatically, giving Jack offers one magic bean bag, and T-Bell offers five magic bean bags. If we are too literal in our steps, then it won't allow for stuff like this, and that means we're gonna have to say things or tell our product owners or customers. Yes, we want you to express stuff like, given Jack offers one magic bean bag. And then they're kinda looking at us like, really, oh come on, really? But fortunately, this is relatively easy to do thanks to the fact that cucumber works with regular expressions. Woo-hoo, regular expressions. They bend my mind almost as much as closures, but they're incredibly useful. So we can pull out the salient fit just by expressing that regular expression better. Similarly, let's avoid enforcing unnecessary stuff. Like, does it really matter if we capitalize gold? Well, through the magic of regular expressions, we can make it so that it doesn't enforce that constraint. Unless it's important in which case we're gonna make it so that it does. But if it's not important, let's not enforce it, because then we've got these people who are running these tests and wondering why they can't manage to express their ideas without getting lots of bread all over the screen. It will accept it either way. Now, let's go back to why is this important? We've just walked through a handful of techniques for making your tests more readable, and you're on a short, you've got very little time on any given project, and you're thinking, maybe you're thinking, why should I bother being so particular about expressing expectations in acceptance tests? Y'all do write acceptance tests, right? Let's start there. Acceptance tests in any framework don't care which one? Ooh. Maybe we need to spend longer on this section than I thought. So let's talk about the universe from the perspective of the customer, and I've heard a lot of controversy over the last few weeks to months about frameworks like Cucumber and more about fitness. Anybody seen used fitness? Woo, okay, great. Wait, no, that's another language. So, people think this doesn't work because we can't get the customers to write the tests anyway, so let's just express the tests in code. I think that the people who, I don't have scientific data for this. I have not done a comprehensive study. I am speaking purely out of my hat and from my opinion, so this is my opinion. But I think that the organizations that have found it doesn't work are places where people are not willing to invest in the communication. These tests, the ones like that, they're not just tests. They're executable documentation.   They go off into some repository somewhere and nobody looks at them again and we have to waste time making them because somebody in the project management office said that we did. These serve that same purpose, but they do so in a much more powerful way. And they do what Gwegoadzik calls bridging the communication gap. That's his book. Gwegoadzik, bridge the communication gap. Fabulous book. I highly recommend it. They're communication mechanisms. So when we say this doesn't work, we can't get them to write the test. Is it possible that we have tried to get them to write the test in another language? We have tried to get them to write in something that looks like code. We have tried to get them to write in terms that are unfamiliar to them. We're not working with them, pairing with them, helping them to bridge that communication gap and forge a language that we both can speak that represents the expectations of our application from a domain perspective. So it's critical to me to have acceptance tests that we can all share, read, understand and that my business stakeholders could, if they were so motivated, contribute to. There would be no technical impediments and no language impediments to them contributing to them. Because that's the point of how to forge that bond. How many of you have ever been on a software project where you did fabulous work and then the customer or a product owner, business stakeholder came back and said, that's fine but it's not what I asked for. How many of you have not? I mean, come on, if you've been in the software industry for more than six months you've had a discussion that was like that. This is what acceptance tests are for. They're not to see if the system is tested. They're to talk about what's acceptable. The emphasis goes on the first part, not the second part. I would argue that from a tester's perspective these actually aren't tests at all because they just check that stuff that we know should be true, should be true. Testers have a tendency to break stuff. I'm pretty darn good at breaking stuff actually. Wow. But I don't express those kinds of things in this kind of format. This is a communication tool and it happens to be executable, amazingly powerful. So, if you can accept, all right, well let me do this quick poll because I could just get down off the stage and be done if we don't have sufficient belief in this. It's kind of like Tinkerbell and Clap if you believe. Okay, acceptance tests are important. Oh, that's weak, come on. Acceptance tests are important. If we buy into that then why isn't it more readable, making them more friendly to the humans, making them in accordance with the guidelines by people like Strunk and White. Well, they're important because, as George Orwell pointed out, language can also corrupt thoughts. So to the extent that we are not careful in how we express our acceptance tests, we are allowing sloppy thinking about the thing that we are building, which is what's ultimately going to lead to those really uncomfortable conversations. Six days after you were supposed to ship and something hasn't shipped yet and the customer is ticked off and wondering why and trying to figure out where all of their money went that they spent on this thing that doesn't do anything that they wanted it to do and it's because we didn't have that shared alignment. So acceptance tests or alignment tools keeping very carefully and clearly in those acceptance tests helps to ensure that what we ultimately deliver is ultimately serving the business's need. And that's why we do this, right, to deliver value. I mean, lambdas and props and stuff, they're all cool and fun, but at the end of the day when we're on a software project that somebody else is paying for, we're there to deliver value and this is part of what helps us ensure that our efforts are in alignment with what our customer is expecting. Incidentally, major, major thanks to Steve Conover, you here, because he's the one who reminded me of this essay by George Orwell, so I went and looked it up and realized, that's the perfect quote to end my talk with. So, back at the end of the talk, there are some references that I want to point you to. One of them is Dale Emery's two essays on acceptance tests and expressing the essence and leaving out the incidental stuff. He's got some really great stuff around that and he has inspired me. Elements of style, of course, politics in the English language, thank you, Steve Conover. And then one more groveling apology and that is that my materials are not online yet. They will be later today. So I will tweet as soon as they are up on GitHub. I think I'm done. I've ever seen so enthusiastic with your question. You didn't see him leave. Those of you who were facing forward, looking at your laptops, that was amazingly agile. What I wanted to ask is about these acceptance as we write them in natural language and human language. But then again, if you express the same thing in various forms, which can be expressed in a single, regular expression, then we need to cover the same thing multiple times, right? And we don't want to do that. We have all this dry philosophy or anything. So when do you make, when do you put the line on this constraint that we should discipline ourselves to use the same terminology, use the same sentences over and over again and not try to be poetic and be very literate and be very human in our acceptance test? So if I understand correctly, where do I draw the line? Because if you do what I just described, you're not being completely dry. You're gonna have repeated regular expressions and stuff. Yeah, what I'm saying is that people, when they write, they avoid using the same thing over and over. That gets boring. The same sentence, the same word, right? So they tend to change it. So if you avoid writing the acceptance test, that would mean a lot of sporting ruby code to make it run. Okay, so let me go back to George Orwell because this is where I draw the line. If my product owner is being wishy-washy about terms like let's take user and account, for example. Those are two that sometimes people will, in conversation, use interchangeably.  And it turns out that in our system and in our code, we have 17 different flavors of user and 17 different flavors of account and nobody has any idea what they're talking about. That is not acceptable. Now, I don't think that's what you were actually asking about, but it is important because when we talk about humans want to be poetic and want to make sure that when they speak, it's interesting they're not saying the same thing over and over again. That's how that kind of sloppiness creeps in to anything, whether it's like dead specifications or a lot of executable ones. The sloppiness creeps in when people get a little bit too creative in their expressions. So then, we pull out the George Orwell statement and we remind them that we have to be very precise in how we use domain-specific terms so that user always means user, account always means account and we don't ever confuse the two. However, that said, when we've got something where sometimes it makes more sense to say when fairy godmother accepts the offer and we know that in this task there's only been, sorry, when she accepts the bid, there's only been one bid made so there is no possible confusion over bid, then I don't want to make half to say when fairy godmother accepts T-bell's bid of 15 gold and I had just said T-bell bids 15 gold, that's where I accept a little bit more duplication in my acceptance test steps than I would have accepted in my code. So I do, my tests don't tend to be quite as dry as my code but that's how I draw the line. If it's about the domain-specific language then we have to be very, very precise. If it's about making it easier to express the concept related to the domain-specific language then I allow for a little bit more duplication in the code. Yeah, thank you. Great talk, I've got a question about the first couple slides you've been over about the very long acceptance test versus paring it down. Yep. It seems to me that when you talk about yes, that'll make it easier. Yeah, an example would be handy right about now. You could quote Brian Merrick. Okay, so this slide very clearly gives the customer's expectations on a very specific level about what they want to see in the page, what they want to fill in, et cetera, et cetera. Right. The second test seems to me to just sort of put a lot of trust in the developer that I want to do these two things. However this happens, I don't care, but I want it to happen. I just want these two things to happen. I just sort of balance the difference between some customers want very specific things to happen and they want to specify without the acceptance test getting to be like the first example, which is 15 or 29, which is kind of hard to read and understand, but at least is very precise about what they want to say. Well, what we're really talking about is two separate things. So I'm going to have two separate tests. And that's where we pull in Strunk and White's rule about the paragraph, all coordinate, whatever, I can't remember it off the top of my head. My English teacher would be mortified, but that I can't. But here, look at the scenario name, make an offer. It's not expectations about the offer page. And especially when we're talking about AJAXY, Web <IP_ADDRESS>, whatever we're talking about, the expectations about the UI, they are going to have very specific expectations about the UI. But I'm going to express those in a UI test that talks about when I have not filled in this field, then this button is not available or grayed out or whatever. That's all about the UI elements. When we're talking about doing an end-to-end test about the logic of the system, then I'm just going to express it that way. This would be a long bloated test about the UI because it's going through an entire flow. And it's not really expressing the expectations about the UI well. If this was about the UI, I would change the scenario name and I would probably break it into multiple scenarios to express expectations about the make an offer page versus the market page versus other pages. And that would be a whole separate set of features. Okay, thank you very much. Talking about the issue of how much effort it's worth putting into acceptance tests to make them clear. And I guess what I'd like to say is that acceptance tests are a very high leverage document. A very short acceptance test can correspond to thousands of lines of code. And therefore that leverage makes it worth getting it right. And the other thing I guess I would say is that some of the same rules of writing good English in terms of short sentences and short paragraphs and putting in a few helper words here and there to help the reader along apply here as well because not everybody's a native English speaker and even some native English speakers don't have a good lot of English. Totally agree with you. So when you were talking about separating out this into the multiple tests, which makes a lot of sense, do you have any recommendations for cases where you wind up with a lot of setup? And so turning a test like this into re-reporting tests for UI elements, you know the math would wind up with a lot of duplication basically. Are you concerned about duplication or speed of writing? Duplication, I don't care as much about speed of writing. Well I think both are totally valid because I mean especially if you're going end to end through the GUI and every single test goes all the way back out to logged out and then all the way through to logged in to this page to that page to set this up, then you can have a test that should only take like two minutes to run, suddenly takes two hours to run. Absolutely, it's a valid concern, it just wasn't like our own. Okay, well if your current one is just duplication then I would say the power of Ruby is with you because you can stick a lot of that stuff in helper methods so that you're not actually duplicating large chunks of code, you're just calling a helper method or you're just calling another step. So you can chain steps the same way you would. So essentially you wind up with a rule of? Sure, there's the background. So you can stick some of the potential duplication up in the background so it will execute with every scenario. Or you can hide it in steps so that when it says something like as grandmother or as fairy godmother I offer then the step can check, is fairy godmother logged in, da-da-da-da-da-da. Instantly do that. Power, for the runtime problem, well I'm now prepared to be booed off the stage although some of what I'm about to say was implied by the code that I showed. I understand that sharing state between steps is somewhat controversial and it is entirely possible that there are technical reasons not to do it that I'm not aware of but when I researched and when I'm running my own stuff I haven't found issues yet. The answer is that I would have some shared state so that we get to a state that is farther along the path and then we're just sharing that state between steps and also potentially even maybe between scenarios. Be really careful with that. Don't boo me off the stage but if you've got serious performance concerns then you have to start taking shortcuts like that. I think that's it. Can we take this question? Given that I named him. Okay, okay, okay. Just for you. I have a brief follow up to the runtime question. One of the tenets of restful rap is that actions are stateless and it's often possible to log in in a stateless fashion like by an HTTP offer. What he said. So you can get rid of all of the intervening steps and make a stateless call to the staff. Right, so what he said is a better answer. Okay, that wraps it up for questions. Thank you very much.


We know that it's hard to stay up to date on USIP's latest publications, so we've challenged our teams to summarize their latest research in less than a minute. This is briefly. Conflicts don't just end with a peace agreement, and while nearly all agreements establish an institution to monitor the deal's implementation, we know very little about what makes these institutions successful. That was until USIP research identified five factors that make the difference. First, leadership matters. A successful institution requires a credible, competent, senior leader who is present full-time. Part-time oversight is ineffective. Second, preparations need to begin before the agreement is signed so that oversight institutions are effective on day one. Third, there should be continuity between oversight institutions and the mediators who oversaw the negotiations. Fourth, mandates need to be realistic. These institutions can't solve everything, but they can help keep peace agreements on track. Finally, there need to be clear lines of accountability so that it is clear where the buck stops.


Y'all want the real T?  What is up everybody? This is Chris from the Rewired Soul where we talk about the problem but focus on the solution. And if you're new to my channel, my channel is all about mental health. Typically what I do is I try to provide tips and tools from my personal experience to try to help you improve your emotional and mental well-being. But I also advocate for mental health. So if you're into that stuff make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell. So yeah in this video we are going to be talking about Donald Trump's actions versus his words when it comes to mental health in the United States. So recently after the Mueller investigation Donald Trump has just been on this thing where he's just like going after all these different things but he's talking about repealing Obamacare again. And Obamacare is more formally known as the Affordable Care Act. And that's something that we really need to talk about.  So the first thing that I will just get out of the way is this. Obamacare or the Affordable Care Act is not perfect. It is not perfect. It needs to be adjusted, rearranged, some things need to change. That is my personal opinion on that matter. But the issue that I find is that a lot of people are forgetting what the Affordable Care Act did for mental health care. All right. And I put up a poll the other day about how many of you have political anxiety. A lot of you said you do. And I was actually surprised. And a lot of you just are afraid to talk about anything political because it turns into a fight. I will be doing a video on that. All right. So do me a favor down in the comments below. Please try to be respectful of each other. But the main thing I just want to talk about is I've seen a problem over the last few years where people can no longer have a debate or conversation with opposing views without it escalating into something purely ridiculous and childish. So just try to have an adult conversation, share points of views and all that. All right. So yeah, let's get into this. So again, Donald Trump is going after the Affordable Care Act again and he wants to repeal it. All right. So let's talk about this. So when the Affordable Care Act went into play, there was a part of it that is for people with mental health issues. So this first article I want to read a clip for you from is from mentalhealth.gov. Okay. And it's a Q&A and it says, does the Affordable Care Act require insurance plans to cover mental health benefits? Answer. As of 2014, most individual and small group health insurance plans including plans sold on the marketplace are required to cover mental health and substance use disorder services. Medicaid alternative benefit plans also must cover mental health and substance abuse disorder services. These plans must have coverages of essential health benefits, which include 10 categories of benefits as defined under the healthcare law. One of those categories is mental health and substance use disorder services. Another is rehabilitative and habilitative services. Additionally, these plans must comply with mental health and substance use parity requirements as set forth in MHPAEA, meaning coverage for mental health and substance use services generally cannot be more restrictive than coverage for medical and surgical services. So what does that mean? What does that mean? What that means is the Affordable Care Act by law, by law insurance companies have to cover mental health care, which includes substance abuse treatment. All right. Like think about that. Like I don't think people necessarily understand. So there is this huge debate going on, which a lot of people aren't even aware of, when it comes to mental health issues and substance abuse issues, where there are people out there who don't think that they don't think that science exists. They don't think that mental health care is necessary. There are people who don't think substance abuse should be covered under treatment because a lot of the blame goes towards the addict. That's a whole stigma with drug and alcohol addiction. So with the Affordable Care Act, when that got implemented, they said, yo, health insurance companies, you have to cover it. You have to cover mental health care. So if the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, gets fully repealed by Donald Trump, insurance companies are no longer held by the law to provide you with mental health care. All right. So like right now, it's not even that great. A lot of you know, I was working in a drug and alcohol treatment center for a little over three years. That place was expensive. People who had the best of health insurance to go there, some of them were still paying thousands of dollars for their copay or deductible. All right. Think about that. So it's not even that great. So although they have to cover it, some people were still paying like $5,000 out of pocket. All right. But it was better than nothing. Okay. If this thing gets repealed, then health insurance companies don't even have to cover therapy. They don't have to cover psychology. They don't have to cover psychiatrists. They don't have to cover those things.  Like me personally, I am on an antidepressant anti anxiety medication called Lexapro. Okay. Will it affect that? So you guys, we need to keep this stuff in mind. All right. So this next piece is from the American Psychiatric Association. So when the Affordable Care Act went into place, let's talk about, did it actually help people? What were the benefits of it? So a quote from this article says, researchers led by Kathleen C. Thomas, PhD, with the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, examine the impact of mental health reform for people with mental illness. They use the health reform monitoring survey to exam health insurance, access to care, and employment for more than 1500 people with mental health conditions, pre and post implementation of the Affordable Care Act. They compared survey results from 2013 before the Affordable Care Act implementation. Health insurance marketplaces in 2013 and federal support for state Medicaid expansion in 2014 to a similar sample in 2016 after the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. After implementation, people with mental health conditions were more likely to be insured, 5% uninsured versus 13%. They were also less likely to report the cost of mental health care as a reason for not getting needed care, 17% versus 21%. They were also more likely to report a having usual source of care, 82% versus 76%. These effects were experienced in states with Medicaid expansion and those without. The increased accesses to care in non-expansion states may have resulted from improved coverage of mental health services and services to help with daily living skills such as occupational and physical therapy under the Affordable Care Act, the authors suggest. The authors conclude that the findings highlight the important improvements in health insurance coverage and access to care achieved through Affordable Care Act reforms for people with mental health conditions. The gains in both non-expansion and expansion states underscores the importance of improvements in the quality of health insurance coverage such as mental health parity. So, what that's saying in a nutshell is when the Affordable Care Act went into place and health insurance companies were mandated by the law to cover mental health care as well as substance abuse treatment, more people were getting help and it even says in there that even though that there were some costs associated with it, it was less than what it was before. So, there were still more likely to get mental health care. All right? So, we need to care about this. So, how does Donald Trump, how does Donald Trump come into play with this? Again, aside from just trying to remove this, here's what really grinds my gears about this. All right? The United States has a major issue with mass shootings. All right? And listen to me. I am pro common sense gun laws. That's me. Okay? But anyways, anytime a mass shooting happens in the United States, which is happening all the freaking time, Donald Trump comes out and says, this is not a gun problem. This is a mental health problem. All right? So, not only, not only is he trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act, but he's saying he cares about mental health and how this stuff works, right? Because, you know, they need mental health care. We don't need to get rid of guns. We just need to get mental health care. Well, check this out. This is from an NPR article, not long after one of the mass shootings. Okay? It talks about the massive budget cuts that Donald Trump was trying to implement to decrease funding for mental health care. It says, but the budget blueprint also slashes spending for the substance abuse and mental health administration at SAMHSA by $665 million. Additionally, Bloomberg reported the National Institute of Mental Health would see a 30% reduction in funding, a half a billion dollar decrease in 2019. Do you guys understand? Are you guys following me here? He's saying, oh, it's not a gun problem. It's a mental health problem. But hey, let's take away over half a billion dollars in funding for mental health. And the National Institute of Mental Health, that is the government agency that does studies to try to help people like you and me and everybody else with our mental health conditions by putting money towards research to understand depression more, to understand anxiety more, to understand schizophrenia more, to understand bipolar disorder more, to understand borderline personality disorder more. They're trying to find more solutions for all of us to make our lives better. And he got Donald Trump over here trying to cut funding for it. So when it comes to the mass shootings in America, even if he says it's not a gun problem, it's a mental health problem, he is not adequately funding mental health programs to help people before they get to that point. Or even more importantly, the victims, the survivors, the family members of the people who involved in those shootings, those people have been traumatized and need mental health care as well. All right. So nobody likes talking about politics. But I really want you guys to think about this because politics are coming into the conversation.   So you need to think about this, whether Donald Trump, you know, is getting reelected or any other candidates from either side of the party, you need to pay attention to what they are talking about when it comes to mental health care. And why does this matter? I've got a lot of flack lately for being an unlicensed, unqualified person on the platform talking about mental health. Well, guess what? If we keep putting funding towards mental health care with professionals, you don't need jack holes like me on YouTube, trying to put out free videos to help people, but you need to go and vote. All right. So in the 2020 election, make sure you're paying attention up until then and see who does and does not care about mental health and look at their track records too, because I will be doing videos about how Donald Trump on the campaign trail talked a lot about the opioid crisis and he hasn't done jack squat for it. All right. Anyways, I hope you enjoyed this video. Let me know your thoughts down below. If you liked this video, please give it a thumbs up if you're new, make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell and a huge, thank you to everybody supporting the channel over on Patreon. You're all amazing. And if you would like to become a patron, help support the channel, get involved in our monthly Q and A and all that stuff. Click the top right there. All right. Thanks so much for watching. I'll see you next time.


introduce our next speaker, our first speaker, kicking off the event, which is Socrates. I had the pleasure of meeting Socrates last year in Orlando, got to hang out at his awesome place, spent some time with him, so I'm really excited to hear his speech. I heard it in Orlando, this speech is brand new, and the title is Relationship Building in the Earthquake Landscape of Post-Feminine Culture. So what that means is the relationship talk your father never gave you. It's going to be awesome. A little bit about Socrates, he's a returning keynote speaker to the 21 convention. He's featured in the 21 convention documentary. He's a prolific blogger at ManningUpSmart.com, and he's been at this for over five years. So expert. Let's welcome Socrates. Hi guys, my name is Socrates. I'm a previous 21 convention speaker. Like Robbie stated, I do run a small blog for men regarding relationships at the ManningUpSmart.com, and specifically it was geared towards my experiences last year from the 21 convention.  But also what happens is when you get together and are able to share ideas, and are able to share, relate, project, make observances, get feedback from each other, and pick up ideas and try them out yourselves, you learn a tremendous amount. And this is what one of these organizations actually do. It takes people of like minds and brings them together. And what I found during the 21 convention in particular was that there are a number of very common questions men are asking throughout all their age ranges that are not simply being answered by society today. And they're fairly simple questions. And probably in many ways they're going to be the questions of our age. Who do I want to be? What do I want to become? And what is the character and nature of the life I want to live? And they're terribly profound. I'm going to later in my talk be talking about and addressing some of those. But my blog was specifically geared towards relationship because it plays a critical aspect in men's lives, how we're cultured to believe ourselves, our cultural identity as men. And it propagates throughout our lives. And to get a handle on that aspect, and I promise I won't try to use that word again, that focus of attention is one of those elements in which it concerns men because we don't do it well. We're not taught. We're not trained. But we're expected to know these things by osmosis. So my blog was a direct response to realizing I just didn't want to put out a thousand page document rant. I wanted to make it a little more concise, make it more organized, and provide a resource available to the guys that I was talking to. My mistake was believing that it was going to be fairly localized. I put it out on the worldwide web. And one of the first people to contact me, interestingly enough via email, was somebody from Australia. And the blog is specifically for men in the North American framework. And this was a woman in Australia contacting me about a relationship, took something to heart about what I wrote, applied it to her live, and saw an immediate payback in a return. I find that tremendous. I find it a fascinating concept that what we do today is now live worldwide. That we have an ability to communicate, relate, and share with people we've never met, never crossed. But we can convey ideas in a manner that we were speaking face to face. So this, I think, is one of the best things about the 21 Convention. It's not about sitting out here in me speak or the other speakers are going to follow, but the fact is that we're all together in one room and we can share ideas on a number of different levels, on a number of different issues about men's relationships and men's relationships with themselves and their lives. So based on that, I'm going to be specifically talking about relationships. I'm an architect by trade and by profession. And to make it fairly simple, I'm going to actually frame my speech around what it's like to build in the built environment. To really take the idea of a parallel analogy of building a relationship in the sexual marketplace of today, the environmental context. And you have to understand the context in which you're going to be living, the forces that are going to be pressed upon it, what are your objectives, how to build appropriately, and then actually how to make actually architecture. Of making it really sing, making it tailored to you. And because if you don't do that, it's not going to be unique, it's not going to be individualized. And one size fits all doesn't work, and we know that. We want it to be specific for you. And there are a number of things we're going to be able to talk about that are going to be negative. I'm not anti-woman, I'm not anti-relationship. But I think there's some things you need to go into these things with your eyes wide open, and I mean wide open. Based on that, I've been very fortunate. I've had real world examples of a number of friends, family, long term people that I've known for probably better over 20 years that have really healthy, dynamic, lasting, monogamous relationships. It's kind of an anomaly. It's unfortunate, but we don't celebrate it. I don't think that has to be the case. And by their example, I can look at a number of different factors of what they were able to do, and it kind of boils down to three things. In each case, no matter what age grain, what generation they came from, where they're at, they did three things that were synonymous to each of the relationships. They themselves were, took finding their relationship and their partner terribly, terribly seriously. They were not lackadaisal about their approach on developing a relationship, nor their intent for a relationship. They went into the relationship knowing that was what they were looking for. They screened their partner to make sure that they fit their objectives. They screened their partner and make sure that their objectives matched their own. So you have two people going to the same goal. Most guys don't do that. All we're attracted to is a cute girl that's paying attention to us. If your life objectives are not matching, you're not going to have a long-term relationship. And it's foolish to get into a seriously committed relationship. I'm not saying not to enjoy that time period, but don't delude yourself. Don't delude her into thinking that this is going to be more than something that's not. The third thing is that each in each case, both parties were willing to invest heavily in sustaining that relationship. And that is a critical part of actually a healthy relationship. It's not that you're perfect the way you are, or she was perfect the way she is. It's that fact that you're both willing to work together to manage and maintain and to sustain that relationship over a course of a period of time. And it's not just a period of time that's a factor. I know a lot of people misidentify longevity with a successful healthy relationship. That's not always true. If it's healthy and long, that would be successful. But the quality of that relationship is very much important, okay? The stability of that relationship is very much important. Trust and respect in that relationship is absolutely fundamental, all right? I don't care if you have a long-term relationship. If you don't have those things, you don't have a healthy relationship. The key is to create a healthy, sustainable relationship. And what we're going to use is a framework of architecture. And when we talk about that, one of the most important things to realize is the environmental context in which we're going to find ourselves. And as I step back and I was writing my blog, my involvement in the men's community in a variety of ways, talking to men in and out of my life, I was seeing a number of things. I was seeing more than a generation of men that were literally lost to the forces of nature that they need to properly identify or properly recognize. They're subtly kind of aware of some of the influences, but they don't recognize it. The cultural framework in which they're existing is marginalizing the masculinity. It is telling their irrelevant and actually replaceable. And I mean utterly replaceable, okay? The political and legal realms that follow that, the bastions that follow the culture, cultural context, are developing laws, regulations, and procedures that are isolating men from their families, from their properties, from their marriages, that are actually removing a number of sexual health issues. For example, men typically have almost zero sexual reproductive rights. You actually have more rights to your intellectual property rights than your own physical DNA, and not only that. Society is controlling our ability to communicate. Society does not want men speaking up. Feminism, in essence, is a single form of single gender politics with only one seat at the table, and women like it that way.  I don't mean just in a physical and a material way, but in an emotional and psychological way as well.  We throw all that on top of a very, very unchanging biological context. You know, we have not changed biologically for millennia. Our base nature hasn't changed. And so you're throwing all this sort of together in a way in which most men are unprepared for. We don't recognize what we're facing. So based on that, I'm going to start breaking some of that down as far as the context, in an environmental context. One of the most important and the fundamental is identifying the age in which we live. If we're going to be looking at architecture, it's important to understand the time frame in which it was created to understand why they were doing what they were doing, what solutions they were trying to meet, what were the programmatic objectives. And in that regard, we live in a fascinating time frame. We live in the age in which men can ask themselves probably the question of our era, who do I want to be? Who do I want to become? What type of life do I want to live? And the nature of it. And no other time in human history have men of any social standing any social status, but it will honestly ask those questions. Typically those questions have been reserved for a very, very small minority of individuals on this planet. Today, everybody who's here and some of the people that are looking at this video now, can ask themselves that question. And I find that revolutionary. The second thing is to recognize not only do you have that privilege, but there's an expectation that comes with it. And it's a tough one. And this is where you're gonna come face to face with the age. And that is physically it is almost impossible to leave your parents home, become a new quote, an aged adult, and have the knowledge and awareness associated with the information age. We live in a knowledge-based economy, a service-based economy. That requires a high degree of education. A high degree of education coupled with practical experience. That takes time. That takes effort.  What they're finding is it's more dynamic than just going and getting a degree. It's not just a four-year program anymore. It's closer to a decade. You need that practical experience. Not only that, practical education is now coming into question. It is completely possible to get a higher educated degree, a STEM degree, a science, technology, engineering, math type based degree, and still be completely unemployed in this age. Our context with our employer, our context within the business realm in which we're operating can pretty much guarantee you will have 10 to 12 jobs in a 20 year period. If you're lucky, it will be shorter, you'll have a longer stint in that. You'll have a little more stability. But we no longer have this expectation that you will work at a same job for 20 years and retire with a company you got your first job with. You are no longer brought up through the company. It is easier to outsource. It is easier to hire without and transfer, knowledge based. Basically stair stepping. You got to start thinking that way. If you don't, you're going to run into direct conflicts. You're going to have self-crisis. You're not going to be prepared. And it will play out not only in your own personal lives, but the relationships you have in very profound ways. Add on to that complexity, there's no single route in which to achieve this. It's now new. It's a wild west. You now have any number of ways to do it. College is not the only route. And it may not be the best route. It may be the worst route. Not only do you not get necessarily a healthy education, depending on which school you go to the quality of the education, but you will leave indebted to a degree that will be hobbling. You will become basically financially indebted to the point that you become as a way of essence to your own freedom of choice. That's called slavery. Whether it's a physical shackle, whether it's a financial shackle, the results ends up binding you. Ways you down. You ultimately are going to be responsible for your own education, your own self-development. That's true in relationships, it's going to be true in anything in life. Keep that in mind. But as we look at the information age in general, I want to take a bigger step back and look at in the transition of mankind with social relationships, because that's what I'm going to be primarily speaking about. As we've gone through it in a historical evolution, primarily three times. And this is not the first time we've had major social evolution or changes. The first time is when we went from hunting and gathering to agriculture. And what you have is a degree of specialization taking place. And it's a dramatic specialization. Unfortunately, most of those time periods are undocumented. We can look back at areas where they transcended a bench to see some friction, some conflict, but on the whole we can only kind of empathize and imagine what that conflict was like. But we do know that there's a degree of specialization taking place. The second would have been when we went from the agricultural age to the Industrial Revolution. There we do have documentation. But the issue here is that it wasn't just that we have the documentation. The documentation tells us very clearly it was single gender specialization. Men got more specialized. Men's roles have been able to provide, became further specialized. Women on a whole, their dynamic role did not change. And as we go into the information age, we now have a significant change in the fact that we now have dual sex specialization. We talk about in a very kind of overt way about society becoming more feminized, and that is very true. And that is a direct outlay of the information age. But part of that feminization is realizing we have specialized roles where women are taking, fulfilling, and actually co-sharing in, okay? And men have not adapted very well. Our psyche of belief has not actually kept up with the times. And Darwin has taught us anything. It is the species that evolves appropriately for its time and the challenges its face that survives. And where men are failing, where men are feeling lost, they have not kept up with the times. We have not recognized that we have an increased in EQ or emotional quotient as far as what we expect in relationships and jobs and everything else. We have old school models of what it means to be a leader, to lead and to manage. It's fairly direct. They're typically referring to as hard skills. Women have brought in a whole series of other skills that are highly valuable to increase effectiveness, team building, networking, socialization, consensus building, collaboration, and overall a measure of diplomacy. When you take this in an appropriate context, and these skills are highly utilized in business today, all right? But we don't teach them in men in relationships, okay? Men who don't understand that, who don't learn that, who are not taught that are exposed to it, go into life at a deficit. And we need to realize we're at a disadvantage when we don't know something. And ignorance is no shelter from reality. It's a hard fact of life. These sort of skills, and while we utilize them in business, really are perfect for relationships. This is where you start developing them. If you don't not understand how to set a boundary, if you don't not understand collaboration building in a relationship, or consensus building in a relationship, proper to lead and managing and maintaining a relationship, your share is hell not gonna do it in business. Interestingly enough, there are men that actually do it well in business and have horrible personal lives because they don't utilize it. There's a direct correlation between them. So we need to understand and recognize that the information age has brought a total transformation in our social structure, it's opening new things. And we're not gonna put this genie back in the bottle. And to be honest, I wouldn't want the genie to be back in the bottle. I love the hell out of June Cleaver, leave it to Beaver, but I wouldn't want to be married to her. I think there's some amazing dynamics involved. There's some things I miss, and feminism has gone from one swing of the pendulum to June Cleaver to Kim Kardashian. The pendulum has gone too far to the one side. We need to take the value, women don't have to give up everything. They don't need to be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. They don't have to get rid of the domicile and the domestic aspects of being feminine and the things that naturally draw men to them. But we need to be aware of some of the issues that we're facing today as the age. The second element will be the cultural element of what we're gonna be looking at, and culture today is about storytelling. It always has been, and it's been with us for eternity. We can see it in K paintings, and it's an element that codifies our culture of beliefs and values, and it gives us an indication of what we can expect and how to behave. And what is society teaching us today, and I'm gonna go through them really quick because we just don't have time to cover them all. The first and primary is that you're not the favorite sex. We have a favorite child, it's not men, okay? We guys it in a number of ways, but we make allowances for women. The biggest and the most blatant is the fact that we openly value the dramatic disparities between men and women. We saw a prime example in this in Aurora, Colorado, the shooting. Your life is not worth as much as a woman's.  To the extent that it costs you your life. By the way, there's no reciprocation. The social contract, by the way, interestingly enough, was not that she gives her life up to provide for you and to protect for you. It's to nurture you. It's to nurture your children.  By the way, how's that social contract going? Are women today nurtures? Do you have any belief based on divorce statistics that you're gonna actually have a relationship and a family still together after 15 years? When the divorce ratio is over 50%, 70% of the time women are filing. These are harsh realities. Second one is that society today is terribly misandric. And that is a phrase probably most of you don't know. If you understand what misogyny is, it's a hatred towards women. Misundry is the direct correlation opposite of it. It's the antithesis. It's when women hate men or men who hate men, okay? We are openly misandric. So for example, classic example, another recent occurrence, would have been an episode of The View.   A man who had the audacity to file for divorce because he wasn't happy, did so openly. No, no overt signs of abuse, no story along those lines.   Can you imagine a panel of men openly laughing about a sexual mutilation of a woman because she had the audacity to divorce a man and give herself the eat, pray, love to her around the world? Not that he had any attention of doing that. This is the world we live in. I don't think it's right. I don't think it's fair. It's not just, and men are starting to talk up about it. The comments on culture is gonna be primarily about men's rights. So the following ones that I'm talking about, if you have an interest in it, look up men's rights. The men that are gonna be talking about have been damaged and hurt. They're angry, and they have a right to be angry. They've been terribly damaged. Another element that we'll look at culturally is the fact that we suspend accountability for women and we give them special privileges. The clearest example would be the single mother syndrome and is an immense syndrome today. Is the fact that we have a thing called deadbeat dad.  These men just don't pop out of nowhere.  And it wasn't just that there were deadbeats. These women were attracted to deadbeats. What's that telling you about our character? What's that telling you about our makeup?  Okay, honestly, we're not allowed to do that.  And by the way, there's a response to it. An entire community of men who've gone underground cuz they weren't allowed to be above ground on it, developed skills and reactions to get women they wanted to be with based on what women were choosing. This is a pickup community. Answering demand, not answering the fantasy that women were portraying. I want a decent guy, I want a loving husband, I want a family.  Now, the reality is these guys are giving back the men that they're actually choosing. They're getting smart about it. I don't think it's healthy for society. I don't think it's healthy for the relationships. I know it's not healthy for the children they end up having. We can continue on. We have a notion of the outlay of information age on society when women are getting more and more educated that women tend to marry up as a cultural model. Part of that is recognizing men provide, which is another way of saying men marry down. Look at it that way. Men don't marry up, they marry down. Based on that in women marrying up, what happens when a woman becomes more educated, she earns more, she has more independence, she's more secure, she's more independent. The pool of available men diminishes dramatically. Throw on that the notion of female entitlement. This notion of special privilege with entitlement and princessdom syndrome. You have women that are saying never settle and they have a right to never settle, but there are consequences. And for over three generations of women, women have been told you can do anything, you can be anything, but there's that unspoken element. There are consequences. And up until fairly recently, the numbers have been small and there's always been some other man willing to step in to provide. And we can look at the train wreck on those. But the reality is they're starting to become acutely aware that good men have left the building like Elvis. By the time you hit your late 30s, early 40s, good men are no longer available. And what we have is not just a woman who's exercised that notion of education and developing herself in an appropriate way, but there's this delusion of entitlement that good men will be available when she's ready. The consequences is that they're not. And what we have developed is an element of new age spinsterdom. When you have smart, educated, good-looking women who are single, middle-aged and they're not able to find relationships because they have not prepared themselves for it. They have not geared themselves for it. And they themselves have priced themselves out of the sexual marketplace. Women, rather than working on their own development, their own skills, their own relationship abilities, start making bullet point lists of what the next man is going to provide her. All she's doing is rotating cast of characters. And the list keeps growing as her market value plummets. This is going to play out in a social level. This is going to affect our society.   A woman who's young, beautiful, and sexual can actually hit above her weight class, and by that I mean to be able to be sexually involved with a man who will exchange a relationship for commitment for sex on a temporary basis to get sex, to have access to her at a later time in which she won't be able to get because men won't put up with her behavior. And by the way, the same guy is now moving on to younger women. She's been replaced. And again, you have her slipping into this new age spincerdome syndrome. Ultimately, the last one I want to bring up very briefly is the fact that women have privileges because of the youth vibrance and the value of sexuality in our society. Men have it a different way. We age differently. Our status rises later. Do not think just because women have sexual privilege and act on it on marrying up and society values it and they can throw that out in the mainstream and be okay with it that you can do the same when you exercise male privilege. Your male privilege is to get the highest quality woman you can at the best possible time in your life and it's typically it's going to be when you're older. Do not think you won't be shamed when you act on it. Older men being sexually active with, marrying and taking up sexual time with younger, vibrant women who are younger, fitter, hotter, and free of the social baggage of women of his age. Do not think that's socially acceptable. If you doubt me, ask your mother. All right, moving on from culture, we also fall into politics and this is where we get into the law of the land and this is when politics lives downstream of culture. Culture will guide our laws. And if our culture was feminine based, awarded women special privileges and removed accountability from it, what do you think our laws are doing? By the way, this is where men truly get hurt. It's not just that you're going to take a financial hit. It's that that your sense of a man as being able to provide is actually under attack. You've been found to be unsuitable. All right. And because the marriage is truly only valuable in an economic sense, men are particularly hard hit by it, both on a psychological, emotional level and a financial level. And because that we can see the astronomical increase in depression rates, we also see the astronomical rise in suicides. You don't see that correlating with women as emotionally distraught as they may be. All right. And so one of the things that we can look at as far as culture and what our politics and laws are telling us is not just that marriages are disposable and they are, they're readily disposable. You know, the running joke with lawyers is, you know, the divorce divorce is worth it because it's so valuable. You know, it's worth paying for is that it's not just that it's disposable, but men taking one step back, looking at the legal context in which they're living are really utilizing that marriage isn't necessary. It is completely not required to be loved, appreciated, to have, have a relationship, lifelong relationship. It's not necessary to actually have children and raise healthy a productive adults. It's advisable for a number of reasons in their studies, but you're actually better off not getting married because you're better protected outside of the law than you actually are as men. And that's a scary thing. You know, we can look at the divorce statistics. The secondary case would be child custody. 80% of the time women get custody, even though as men with higher EQ requirements, with a greater demand of your involvement in your child's life as a father, emotional development, you're expected to be there. Our courts in the last 20 years have not changed in the percentage of awardees of child custody nor visitation. Gender rights have not kept up with the times. We can also talk about alimony. If, if marriages are disposable at will and merit, lead and marable marriage spousal supports obligation and at marriage, what is the point of actually supplying additional financial incentives and also reserves as far as funding their lifestyles after marriage? What is the point of actually doing it? In some cases, there are actually some genuine ones, but overall, this is not about keeping women afloat. It's not about, you know, the social contract and the construction, which the laws were actually forming. They have not kept up with the time in which women are actually higher educated than men when women are actually making more money wanting on per basis of job. They may have choose other careers that afforded them other lifestyle choices of, of comfort, of socialization, of a number of things, you know, but that's a choice. Men typically sacrifice. So you have a, have a causal effect that alimony is really wealth management, it's wealth redistribution. You know, and we're not the only society that does this. In our sense, skin and navy doesn't have that in many cases, you know, which is actually kind of a unique way of looking at things. The last one, we'll actually, there will be two more. Another one is going to be looking at your sexual rights as far as reproduction goes.  Once you lose control of your DNA, it's over. A woman's body, a woman's choice, but a woman's choice can actually incur after it's no longer her body post delivery of the child. She has the right to be able to sign away parental, parental rights and financial support arrangements at will be able to give the child up for adoption. A man has no right to that. You are tied to her decision at no point anywhere in the process are you allowed to sign off on your rights and obligations to that child. Now I'm not saying it's right, but we don't have gender parity on this. Beyond that, a man who actually claims, lays claim to child custody for a woman who's given rights up to a child cannot sue for child support payments in a way in which a woman can. Again, non gender parity. And again, we're not even allowed to discuss these things, let alone come to conclusions. We're not simply allowed to discuss them. That's that there's no justice in that. There's no equity in that. And we can move on. But the basics is that we have that the cultural context and political context are fueling the incentives for men to stay out of relationships. And then we come into a doozy and that is going to be the biological context has very much has been unchanged. And there's going to be an elephant in the room. There's been an elephant in the room that we don't talk about that society literally drapes a sheet over. And that is going to be a term called hypergamy. And what we face with is a very real notion biologically is that men and women are actually the same creature. Men have a libido. We have a limbic system that drives a sexual error, choice selection or desire of mates, so forth. Interestingly enough, behind that curtain, so do women. And it acts out. And there are three primary ways in which it acts out. By the way, ignore that. Ignore that elephant in the room and it will ruin your life. It will ruin the house you live in. It will ruin your relationship. All right. And the three elements of hypergamy are going to be the sexual dive morphisms of desire and selection, the physical traits that trigger women's desires. This is going to be the elements of size, muscularity. You know, when you look at agility, your general fitness level, you know, the prime species of a man. The second is going to be actually a social behavior. These are going to be social traits of dominance, of aggressiveness.  The last one is going to be your social standing. And that is going to be based on your status, your ambition, what you've done with your life, where you aren't. The old hullbacks of power, wealth, fame, and money have doubled up on one. But those are the old hallmarks. They get mixed up into a variety of degrees. These get played out. Remove those from the issue, and you're in trouble.  She doesn't care. She may not care, but on a base biological level, she will actually act out, and people act on base biological needs before they will social conventions. And hypergamy is her baseline value and need as a human species. Individually, there'll be some other things, and it'll be important to address those as well. So as we move into, for example, that's the contextual environment in which we're going to be building, and it is a hazardous one. This is no land of milk and honey. This is why you need to be serious. You need to go in with your eyes open. If you're going to build in this environment, we need to be able to have a foundation that's going to be able to support it. That's going to be starting with you.   The second part on all this is actually moving on to a bit to it. Let me grab a little bit of the drink, pardon me. It's looking at yourself, if your self needs, your developmental needs, and a lot of cases these are going to be dependency needs. These are things based on your developmental tasks as a child, as you grew up, as you transitioned an adult, anytime there's a void, and because we know there are going to be voids, because no parent is perfect enough to raise a child, complete and whole, that you're going to actually have some of these, and you're going to need to work through them, is that when you don't have some of these developmental tasks resolved, they become dependency needs, they become these elements where you have separation and anxiety. Anytime when you feel you have a need for a relationship, when you have a need that she completes me, that's a dependency need. Notice those, be aware of those. The second one, and it's going to be a real critical, it's subtle, is that we tell ourselves a number of myths growing up, whether they're childhood, young adult, of what our sense of reality is of our world. What does it mean to be a man? What does it mean to be love? What does it mean to be in a long-term relationship? And a lot of times we develop these frameworks and we never revisit them as adults. We never revisit these ideas back as grown adults to check it. In many cases we've outgrown them and don't realize it, or they're no longer a function in the manner in which we do, but we desperately cling to them. You know, personally I've spoken before about having heroes in your life, some are personal failures of an individual or a hero as a real man failed. A lot of times they can be imaginary. They could be, you know, fictional characters or these ideas of a, you know, I had a close friend that just idealized John Wayne, not John Wayne as a man, but what he represented as a man by God he was going to go through the information age as John Wayne that never really existed, you know, from all the cowboy shows. It's affected his life, it's affected his employment opportunities, it's affected his education, the relationships he's in. All right, realize that when your childhood myths no longer meet to today's needs or your values today and if you don't look at them, you're going into life at a deficit. You're going in with the dex, dectagastia and this is by the way something you control. This is absolutely something you control. The second is going to be a fairly simple one. We need to actively screen our partners. We need to look at our partners. We need to identify what their objectives are. We need to look and evaluate these women to find out what their dependency needs are, what their developmental tasks are that they need to be actually on because one of the things about a developmental task is a relationship can help resolve it. You can learn by develop, learn by to learn a particular developmental task within a relationship and grow from it. But once that developmental task is over, typically so is the relationship. Unfortunately, we cling to it and we cling on to it too long. So understanding that if there's a reason to be in a particular relationship is the developmental task and we're brought together because we're mutually trying to resolve these and that's over. It's time to start looking to let go in an honest, respectful way. All right, ultimately your developmental tasks are your responsibility, but we need to screen our partners to make sure that we can handle what their developmental tasks are. Dating crazy is awesome. All right, you know, if for the excitement, but if you cannot handle it emotionally, if you cannot hold that woman as an individual and care for her in a manner which she needs, it is going to play havoc with you.  Don't own it, don't try to shelter, don't try to corral it. All right, I know I wasn't prepared for it when I tried. And that's my fault. All right, the next, the next element we need to look at, and this, this is key, this is going back to hypergamy. Desire and attraction are absolutely non-negotiable in relationships. You must meet base biological needs of attraction and desire.  Ultimately, what we're going to be looking at is the elements that wreck a marriage when we ignore it in, in relationships with hypergamy, whether it's your physical standing, like for example, I could drop 40 pounds and increase my sexual worth rather dramatically. Okay, I could sit down and learn, you know, dominant skills of setting boundaries, setting attitudes, learning to lead in developing consensus and development, socialization skills. These are going to be social standings.  Okay, take my career seriously. Look to provide, be accountable. One of the most important, this is not sexy news guys, having six months to 12 months in savings as an emergency fund will prevent you from hypergamy. How? Lose a job and see how your anxiety goes through the roof. Your ability to quote provide for not only for yourself, but for the relationship. It's hard to be a man if you're not providing. And I'll even argue you don't actually physically have to provide later on. All right, but having that as a backstop, it's conservative, but it answers the base biological need of security. And these Trump's social conventions, these Trump's social needs. It's terribly important. And of all the force, social dynamics in the context in which we describe, whether it's the information age, the cultural response, the political response or the biological response of the four. I was prepared to today to say as men, we can only affect one. OK, and that's going to be biology, you know, either by learning game, getting in fit, learning social standings or so forth. But the reality is there are others. We can affect culture when we make each other aware of the non gender parity in our culture. When we look at non gender parity in our laws and we become aware when you reach out and touch a thousand men and make them aware, we can affect culture and culture, as we know, leads politics. And that's one of the things that I really, really value about the 21 convention. You have men who are coming together to to actualize themselves, their lives and the world in which we live in. So when we look at hyper many, these are some of the things we can look at. But make no doubt about it. If you ignore that, it isn't going to last. No amount of wealth, fame or power is going to be able to do. Robert Pattison is actually a running example. Here you have a rich, wealthy, successful, famous man, loses a woman because she acted on sexual impulse. He wasn't providing it. Doesn't make it right, doesn't make it fair, but this is what happens. People get bored, their sentation, they're just not happy. And she acted out, ruined a relationship. All right. As we move on from the base core elements of those three of working on yourself, developing yourself, screening and filtering your partner and then working on the the role of biology as being a critical component of relationship, we actually need to develop the vertical structure of our relationships. And these are going to have to be strung with to stand the cultural loads that we place on them and the dynamic loads placed within them, the relationship itself. And the primary of these are going to be three. There will be three. The relationship skills that we develop, the management skills that we develop within a relationship and ultimately the maintenance skills that we develop within a relationship. Most men are not taught any of them, but they're all going to be familiar. None of these are going to be original. All right. When we talk relationship skills, you're going to want to take a self assessment, you're going to want to look at what you're going to be able to look at and where you're at. You kind of know where you're at already. Look at your aptitudes. What are your studying and behavioral patterns like correcting those? All right. Then actually doing assessment of how is your interacting with other people? What is your sociabilitic? Are you consciously of where I would like to do one thing but I'm not actually implementing? The third is actually going to be self educating yourself, physically educating yourself based on what you know is available. If you want to actually be more empathetic and you want to learn to you know, imply active listening, actually looking and researching and documenting active listening skills, finding those particular skills you want to learn about, document them, having a separate directory in your computer, noting and journaling, taking a daily approach to utilizing those skills and recording your experiences of it. What you did well, what you didn't do well, self regulate. All right. The last one on that is going to be taking a relationship autopsy.  Where you had problems, where you failed underscored your lack of ability, actively looking back at and reflecting upon those what decisions were made because they were laced with value, tells you a tremendous amount not only about yourself, but your skills and where you're at and what you could be working on. Analyzing those is self educating is what you're going to have to do. We don't typically have coursework on this. Men are not taught that. So you have to self educate. You have to relate with other men. All right. When we move on to management. And again, management is nothing more than an organized approach of people, resources, relationships, any number of things to have a desired objective. Going into a relationship, it is fundamental to know what is your objective. Ultimately, if you don't have a relationship objective, do not commit to one. Why are you committing to one if you don't have an objective? Most likely it's going to be because of dependency need.  And you're not strong enough willed as an individual to stand on your own and live on your own in an autonomous way. And that is underlined a weak psychological structure.  We need to be far apart ourselves. We need be willing to really differentiate. We really need to look and say no. We're not willing to exchange it. Women are the gatekeepers of sex. Men are the gatekeepers of commitment. Start controlling that gate. Another part of relationships management is opening the lines of communication early. It's not just communication. It's going to be communication in the critical realms of what does it mean to be in a committed relationship?  All the common relationship elements are going to be there. And we're going to need to be looking at those as well. And there are a tremendous number of other drivers we need to evaluate and discuss openly. And we need to take a healthy approach to this. Unfortunately, I've run a little bit long on it. The last thing I want to talk about is we need to be able to protect ourselves as men. I'm going to jump way ahead of my talk. And part of this is if we're looking at marriage, we need to look and realize that marriage as an institution is primarily an economic one. And based on that, we need to have an economic response to it, not a moral, not a cultural one. Part of that is preparing yourself for it. Absolutely without a doubt. The critics and pundits will sit down and say, marriage is for the poor. Marriage is for men who can't afford the rent. Marriage is for men who can't afford the mortgage. Marriage is for men who need to share the financial burden of housekeeping. Marriage is for people who can't afford retirement benefits or insurance benefits or child rent capabilities. Men that can't afford either through costs or by intellectual decree the ability to outsource the wealthy due for cause. Based on all that, and I don't necessarily agree with it, but there's a strong argument for it. We need to protect ourselves. The first is going to be a prenup, your old agreement is going to be a must. Absolute must if you're going to protect yourself. And it's not just a security thing. It's framing a discussion of relationship. The problem with prenups is the fact that it only directs towards assets and property division and spousal support. Under no circumstances does it involve children or child custody because it's up to, at the time, the child's best interest. You cannot have a legal element in family law governing them. Not only that, lawyers and primarily judges are actually playing loose with some of the standards and actually waving some of that off based on outlandish lifestyle agreements. The second thing I would entertain would be something that we're not seeing today, is that we actually formulate a partnership agreement, a legal structural element that you would see in case civil law, of why you're being in the relationship. What's the point of this merit? If it's child-rearing family development, state so. What are your obligations? What are the things you're going to be able to do? What are the things that you're providing and why? Treat it as such. For example, when we look at Alamone, does it make sense that it's a two for one relationship as far as payment goes? For every two days you're with her, she gets a paid Alamone. So you can imagine going to an employer working five years with for an employer and getting two and a half year severance pay. That doesn't happen out in the economy, but it happens in family law. All right? Setting the tone against a economic standard would dramatically transform that. All right? The third one is I would look at putting incentives back into the marriage. All right? And these are going to be kind of subtle ones. I would sit down and say self-perform marriage insurance where you both mutually add into the marriage based on a certain amount to actually augment the insurance on the damages are included. The second one is under civil law have civil penalties assigned to breaches of failure. We do it in business models. We should do it there. That would up serve the family law elements. And this goes for either sex. It needs to be mutual, mutual compatible. I'm not just talking from a man's side. The third one, which I find entertaining as hell, is actually put out of a co-signing parental performance bond. Is her friends and family, particularly family, willing to co-sign the marriage agreement? Willing to put good money, not as a dowry but as a risk. People are willing to put up co-sign car loans for the child, co-sign mortgages for a loan but we don't co-sign marriages. Why? Yet the first time the marriage is in trouble when there's conflict, what happens? The social support network is saying get out of that marriage, take the kids to get the money and get out. Rather than having a vested interest in making that marriage work and having people work through the issue, not destructing the bonds. The bottom line is when we look at things, and I'm sorry to cut it short, is we need to actually look at a number of issues. We need to to understand the age in which we live in, the cultural, political, social economic situations. We need to actually protect ourselves in a number of ways. And that is going by looking at relationship management, relationship maintenance. All right. And I know I skip maintenance, we'll talk about it later. And we need to actually actually take solid, concrete steps in actually protecting ourselves in the relationships we want. Ultimately, we need to put the incentives back in. And the best way to put the incentives back in is only to commit to women who are prepared, willing, able, and are able to actually foster the relationships we want. And that is by being very, very, very selective, by being discriminating, by taking it seriously and making sure she does as well. As men, we're gatekeepers to that commitment. I really want you to be a guardian at that gate and will recognize that not only the choices that we make for ourselves, but the quality of the relationships determines our lives. So with that in mind, over the next three days, I want you to listen to the speakers that are going to come and speak. I'm going to want you to take notes, talk with each other, engage in the speakers, you know, and ask yourself the question, who do I want to be? What do I want to become? What, what is the quality in nature and make up the life that I want to live? And no matter where that takes you, contemplate that and choose and apply yourself. All right. Thank you. One two questions. And by the way, I cut the speech short. And so if any of you guys want to take notes, we'll talk. I can talk about maintenance and management and some of the other things I know I ran long. There's a lot more to talk about. And this is going to be one of the things I'm going to be around for the next three days. Please come see me. Love to talk to you, but that's why I'm here. questions. First off, thank you. Thank you for having the balls to say something that no one else is able to say, especially on the web. But my question is you stated how dependency is bad. And I think there is a level of dependency that's needed in a relationship. Ask the question. So can you just repeat it? Okay, yeah, sure. Are you good? Can you just go deeper into really what level of dependency is bad? Because I feel like you need a level of dependency. But you stated, you know, that it's completely bad. Well, I'll differentiate probably what you're not saying is that with dependency and desire, there's a difference between desire and dependency. Dependency is when you actually need somebody. You're not functioning as a human being that you're not able to make good choices for yourself or that are unhealthy in nature. All right. That's a dependency, you know, um, you know, when you have that sort of driven need, I don't think it's healthy, you know, and because it ends up, it plays out in a number of ways. If you have a desire for somebody that you want, okay, is completely different. And if we look at it, there's a difference between, for example, joy and pleasure.  Okay. Somebody that's not autonomous, that that's pleasure seeking. Okay. That's looking that's an external influence because dependency needs are external driven rather than internal driven is that they have a need for it. Okay. That they'll be alone and they'll be needing. Okay. And they have not learned to differentiate the difference between an internalized sensation and state of being and something that's driving external. Anything that's external is not associated with you. And pleasure is very much an external thing. I love pleasure, but it's external. All right. I find joy within. Okay. And when I'm whole and I'm self and I'm secure, I'm not dependent because I'm self-sustaining. My joy and sense of being is all internalized and I'm able to go through life. I can want and desire things. Okay. And that's but that's completely different than not being adequate. You know, and actually when you're not adequate, you will reach out and we'll and we'll actually, honestly enough, we'll develop relationships based on our own sense of development. We'll actually seek out people that you can help us along or people that will replicate that that experience. And if it's a negative experience, and it's a dependency experience, there'll be negative and unhealthy relationships. That's quite talking about women marrying up. Yeah, I was wondering, do you think that in cases that women make more money than the man in a marriage? Do you think that gives them the right to, you know, be more dominant and have that more masculine role? Whereas, for example, like my neighbors, I know the wife is always yelling at her husband. She's like, like blah, blah. And it just it's kind of sad to see that. Do you think that maybe just because women make more money they have the right to control the man in a relationship? That was a point that I actually cut out of the speech. Interestingly enough, making more doesn't give anybody the right. Okay, what you're hearing in that example is somebody that's lacking social skills. Okay, and in this particular case, it's coming from a woman. She's lacking social skills to appropriately do it. I will actually entertain this notion. I hope you guys do it. And if it's not in your reality, it should be. And keep in mind, if it's not in your reality, don't expect it to happen. We live in an age in which for the first time in our lives, we actually have a choice of marrying up. Okay, and it doesn't mean you just become a say at home dad and you're a slag or anything else. But we can actually meet women's needs who are able to actually out earn us or out capable of ours and provide us a measure of wealth, life and enjoyment that we couldn't necessarily earn our own. Okay, and we can exchange that for a number of ways. Flip it on its head. When you're with a woman, what is she providing you as a man outside of sex? By the way, sex is a major driver. Okay, well off healthy women love sex. Are you able to meet those needs? Okay, it doesn't just mean to be the boy toy. Okay, ultimately, a woman is going to be a little more judgmental and she's going to look for other based biological needs that need to be met, sense of security, providing. And when we look at relationships in which men are utterly failing at any measure, what we had measured as masculinity, women in those relationships still define the man when they're out performing out providing doing all the roles as the man as the head of household. Why? Ultimately because back to your biological progative is to actually protect the woman to protect the family. They're relying on that based biological need. If you can address more than that, find out what her specific psychological needs are. Okay, what's her life stories? What what are those untold expectations and family history? Answer those questions and you will have something that nobody else will provide her. And that is has a tremendous value. It's no longer about just one provider. It's about nature of two people going through their lives together and what's the make up of that life. But for the first time in history, men on a whole are able to look at that and evaluate it and say I have an opportunity to marry up as well as marry down. You know, or for that matter, grab a partner that's equal to put that concept because it's very it's very much going to be a reality very much so. Okay, we got to end it. Thanks guys.


do so because after that, it's going to go into a filler. Just want to get everyone to know. All right. So there's two different number blocks here that'll knock out that one box break. So these two things will knock out that thing right there. I think I kind of organize this a little bit here. So that filler helps that. No filler yet. That filler will help that. Well, there's a, isn't there a filler for that filler? That pristine. All right. So that helps that. That helps that, which helps that. These two things will help that. And that pack helps sell that out. So there are your world cup breaks right there. How far are we away from that? I'm not going to go over, are we? We need 14 of those breaks. There's one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine and 10. So we'll have four mortar account for it at some point, but we'll figure out those other four. All right. So these are all of your world cup promo breaks. All the fillers are kind of collected right next to each thing as well. So they're not kind of scattered around. Now remember, I'm not randomizing these for world cup promo spots. But if you win an R&B spot, if you're part of that and the randomizer lands on the R&B country, then we'll randomize the 10 names and name on top will get it. All right. So John just picked up a full spot in that luminaries random number block. Nice. Thanks, John. So like I mentioned, we're selling we were selling four spots outright and there'll be a couple fillers. Or if those three spots move, then we might not have to do fillers. But John kicking that off. Thank very much, John. Here's the link if you want to follow him into action. Now, if you don't feel like paying that price point, you can try to win your way into that for 16 bucks, 16 bucks to win $128 spot. I'm still holding out hope for this. That seven pack spot giveaway is tonight only. So we're only selling 23 spots outright, we randomize the 23 names top seven get spots, get extra spots within the pack break, which gives you slightly better odds to get into stitches and slabs. And we got to do one more of these fillers.  And that gets us into break fill. We got we got about 25 20 25 minutes left in the show. So we'll give it pretty close to the top of the hour. See if anybody's interested. I'll be honest with you, I've only seen two hours two orders in the last hour. So it seems like the writing is on the wall. But listen, as a forever optimist, I will I will believe that we can still get this break done by the end of the night. Thanks everybody.  Yeah, don't do that. I stopped like, I had never grabbed it before. That's the thing. I didn't realize how far I didn't realize how far I would go. Yeah, you're like, poor kid, getting abused in Jaston. Okay, he has a dolphin stand. I feel like, I feel like for a guy who has speed, that's the part of the meeting. It's not like he's following, they're like, Oh, you've got a long way to go. 101.  We got it. Yeah. Yeah, which was a train spot. Yeah. But I don't think a lot of train, the train spotting was done by like atomic kitten. No. Someone did it. It was a cover of the time. Yeah. You walk into a club and the song is playing, right? You're like, just like walking wherever you want to walk. That's how you do it. This is first. That song should be in your head every time walking club, no matter what the song is.  If you have a song, if you have a song like that. I might be that. I don't know. Not right now. So you're here in your head when you're walking the ball. So like if you're, if I was just, if I'm recording, if I'm shooting Teddy right here, I'm filming Teddy. This is the music that I'm playing. There's like a little intro. It's, uh, did you hear that? Yeah. All right. Well, we're a couple of minutes past the hour. I don't see any other orders. Unfortunately, this promo goes away. It's all right. Try it. It's fine. Listen, we break every night of the week, excluding some holidays, which are coming up actually, but, but listen, I'll be back tomorrow at three o'clock Pacific, six o'clock Eastern. Everyone have a great night. Whoever's lurking around still listening in the background. Have a great night. Thanks for hanging out. Sleep tight. I think Teddy might be live for just a little bit longer if you want to squeeze in a quick one box, uh, personal break or something like that at Jasper's breaks on Instagram, check in with him or a hit pack. That's even faster. Um, check in with him before you call it a night. Um, thanks very much, everybody. I'll be back three o'clock Pacific, six o'clock Eastern sleep tight. See you tomorrow.