Latest / The Sovereign Man Podcast / EP247: Joseph Riggio - Can You Take A Punch

Transcript

EP247: Joseph Riggio - Can You Take A Punch · The Sovereign Man Podcast

0:00
Joseph Riggio: What's interesting, you meet these men, they come in, they are very soft.
0:03
Joseph Riggio: Their movement, their presentation of themselves, the way they interact with the world is soft.
0:08
Joseph Riggio: Their bodies don't know what to do.
0:10
Joseph Riggio: And then they get hit a couple of times.
0:12
Joseph Riggio: Enough that he knows he's gotten hit.
0:13
Joseph Riggio: The first time, it's shocking.
0:15
Joseph Riggio: By the third time, it's interesting.
0:17
Joseph Riggio: By the tenth time, they're looking forward to it.
0:19
Speaker 2: You're a man living in the modern world in a time when men and manhood are not what they once were.
0:27
Speaker 2: You live life on your own terms.
0:29
Speaker 2: you're self-sufficient. You think for yourself and you march to the beat of your own drum.
0:35
Speaker 2: When life knocks you down, you get back up because in your gut, you know that's what men do.
0:41
Speaker 2: You're a badass and a warrior. And on the days when you forget, we are here to remind you
0:47
Speaker 2: who you really are. Welcome to Solid Man Podcast, where we aim to make men masculine again.
0:53
Nicky Billou: I'm your man, Nicky Ballou, and we have a very special guest for you today, Joseph Riggio.
0:59
Nicky Billou: Welcome, Joseph.
1:01
Nicky Billou: Thank you much, Nicky.
1:01
Nicky Billou: Appreciate being here.
1:03
Nicky Billou: Good to have you.
1:04
Nicky Billou: So I interviewed you on my business podcast, and we had such a good time that I wanted
1:08
Nicky Billou: to have you back on my men's podcast.
1:11
Nicky Billou: And this is going to be a different conversation, but I think we ought to start it in a similar
1:16
Nicky Billou: fashion.
1:17
Nicky Billou: Why don't you just tell the folks your backstory, how you got to be in the work that you do?
1:22
Joseph Riggio: Backstory goes back a few different chapters, so to speak.
1:26
Joseph Riggio: Early, early on, you know, kind of growing up in the city of Newark, New Jersey, a little
1:31
Joseph Riggio: bit, I won't quite call it hard scrabble, but really an urban environment during the
1:37
Joseph Riggio: 67 to 69 riots that were occurring back then.
1:40
Joseph Riggio: Wow.
1:41
Joseph Riggio: So the neighborhood was tough.
1:43
Joseph Riggio: You know, I remember going to sleep some nights with mattresses up against the windows because
1:47
Joseph Riggio: there were some bullets flying through the neighborhood.
1:49
Joseph Riggio: So it was kind of an interesting experience, you know.
1:51
Joseph Riggio: Wow.
1:52
Joseph Riggio: That's crazy, bro.
1:54
Joseph Riggio: Yeah, I was a young boy.
1:55
Joseph Riggio: I was in my early, early, early teens.
1:58
Joseph Riggio: You know, actually 10 years old at the time.
2:00
Joseph Riggio: I wanted to start it.
2:03
Joseph Riggio: And then growing up, my father was a contractor, so I decided to become an architect.
2:08
Joseph Riggio: And the reason that's important is because I love the concept of design, how things are structured, how things go together and are built.
2:14
Joseph Riggio: And, you know, the physicality of putting things together with one's hands and building stuff.
2:19
Joseph Riggio: And that's kind of deeply imprinted.
2:22
Joseph Riggio: Real quick story going forward, left that business because it became computerized and I didn't want
2:29
Joseph Riggio: to live at a desk in front of a computer all day long and output through digital means. I wanted to
2:36
Joseph Riggio: do something that felt like it was connected to being alive and being human. So crazy as I was at
2:42
Joseph Riggio: the time, I left that business, sold my partnership off to the guys who were joining me as founders,
2:49
Joseph Riggio: And I began training dogs, which I had done as a teenager.
2:53
Joseph Riggio: No kidding.
2:55
Joseph Riggio: Trained dogs for a living, real high-end protection stuff,
2:58
Joseph Riggio: working with super aggressive animals, which was just a blast, Nicky.
3:01
Joseph Riggio: I mean, you're just standing there, and you've got this 80-pound pit bull
3:05
Joseph Riggio: on the end of a leash that somebody's holding,
3:08
Joseph Riggio: and they let it go, and it hits you on a sleeve,
3:10
Joseph Riggio: and your world is rocked for a few seconds.
3:13
Joseph Riggio: It was actually a blast.
3:17
Joseph Riggio: And I had been a martial artist since I was 11 years old, and I was a relatively high-level martial artist at that time, competitive boxer.
3:25
Joseph Riggio: And I began training some folks in the military, some of the special operative guys, in hand-to-hand combat, which was a blast.
3:34
Joseph Riggio: So I had a bunch of different backgrounds, and I didn't know what I wanted to do.
3:38
Joseph Riggio: I eventually began studying this thing called neurolinguistic programming and opened up a consulting practice around it.
3:46
Joseph Riggio: Went back, did some more graduate work, wound up getting a PhD in neuroscience around decision
3:52
Joseph Riggio: making in a business school, and realized that that was the key. For me, everything that happens
4:00
Joseph Riggio: or doesn't happen is predicated on the ability to make a decision that makes sense in the moment.
4:05
Joseph Riggio: And whether that's a critical in-time decision, like the guys I was working with in Special Forces
4:10
Joseph Riggio: and had a chance to work with around this model, or whether it's somebody who's making a decision
4:16
Joseph Riggio: about what they're going to have for dinner and whether they'll feel well afterwards or not,
4:19
Joseph Riggio: you know, that kind of thing. So I built a model and I've been working with people around the world
4:26
Joseph Riggio: ever since on how to make decisions that are predicated on the internal stance that you hold,
4:32
Joseph Riggio: you know, what goes on that shapes the perception field that you have, how you make sense of the
4:37
Joseph Riggio: world and what is reality. And a lot of my clients now are in a position we could call wobble,
4:43
Joseph Riggio: where they at one point made decisions easily and confidently and stacked up over years and years.
4:50
Joseph Riggio: And now at their high end of decision making, they're making critical decisions in some cases.
4:55
Joseph Riggio: Some cases literally spending billions of dollars on projects that are planned out over 10 years as senior executives in international corporations.
5:05
Joseph Riggio: They're not as confident as they once were.
5:06
Joseph Riggio: And that's not a function of not having the information or not knowing how to make decisions.
5:11
Joseph Riggio: It's almost as though something distorted internally for them.
5:14
Joseph Riggio: So we recalibrate that and put it back on track and the world changes.
5:18
Nicky Billou: You know, what you do is fascinating.
5:22
Nicky Billou: I think it's very unique.
5:25
Nicky Billou: Not a lot of people in the world understand how critical it is to be able to make decisions quickly and effectively.
5:36
Nicky Billou: I think from the point of view of the theme of this podcast, being of service to men, I'd love to have you share your thoughts on what you think has happened culturally and societally in North America.
5:54
Nicky Billou: because we've gone from a period where for hundreds of years in Western society,
6:00
Nicky Billou: the roles of men and women were very clearly understood.
6:03
Nicky Billou: And then seemingly out of the blue, in the early to mid-1960s,
6:10
Nicky Billou: the so-called feminist movement came out and upended all of that.
6:15
Nicky Billou: Now, that didn't happen all over the world.
6:17
Nicky Billou: It's happened specifically in the Western world,
6:20
Nicky Billou: and in particular in the United States, Western Europe, et cetera.
6:24
Nicky Billou: but it has had an impact. Some people think the impact's been good, but a lot of other people,
6:30
Nicky Billou: myself included, feel the impact has been mixed to negative. And I'm wondering what you think
6:35
Nicky Billou: happened and how you think men today can become more powerful, more confident decision makers.
6:44
Joseph Riggio: It's a great question. And just as an aside real quickly, my wife agrees with you. Feminism was not
6:50
Joseph Riggio: necessarily all it was cracked up to be. And she always says, when she gets to heaven,
6:55
Joseph Riggio: she's going to find the woman who started it and have it out with her. So I live with a woman who's
7:01
Joseph Riggio: living inside that space. The thing is, Nikki, we both know 1960s was a volatile time. And it wasn't,
7:09
Joseph Riggio: as you said, just the United States, but there was a transition in culture that was happening.
7:14
Joseph Riggio: And in the United States, it was reinforced and nurtured because of, to some extent,
7:19
Joseph Riggio: our involvement in Vietnam, and the lack of moral certainty that had existed prior to that about the
7:25
Joseph Riggio: United States and our exceptionalism and what we stood for and our moral justification for being in
7:31
Joseph Riggio: a war. And now all of those things were being mixed up. Simultaneously, you're right, there was
7:37
Joseph Riggio: a cultural revolution where people began to question what it meant to have an identity.
7:43
Joseph Riggio: because before that, the identity was both internal and externally presented and reinforced, right?
7:50
Joseph Riggio: So you knew what it meant to be a man.
7:52
Joseph Riggio: And therefore, you acted in a particular way, which kept those markers in place,
7:56
Joseph Riggio: almost ritualistically, so that you could identify yourself comfortably within your own skin.
8:02
Joseph Riggio: As those markers began to devolve and people didn't have the external support
8:09
Joseph Riggio: that they could identify with, if my hair is cut a certain way,
8:12
Joseph Riggio: if I wear a certain kind of clothing, if I use certain kind of language, if I have a certain
8:16
Joseph Riggio: kind of job, I'm clearly a man, I have a masculine quality to me, then it began to become obscured
8:24
Joseph Riggio: and our identities weakened. They softened. And this led to, again, we could spend hours on this,
8:30
Joseph Riggio: and I know we don't have hours, so I'm not going to go there, but a distortion in the fundamental
8:36
Joseph Riggio: stance of the individual that is very directly related to the work I do. That in order for a
8:42
Joseph Riggio: to know who they are, how they feel that's outside of consciousness, and how they represent
8:48
Joseph Riggio: themselves publicly and how that gets fed back to them and feedback from others have to all match.
8:55
Joseph Riggio: If that's incongruent, the person feels unstable. And the problem is when a man today presents
9:02
Joseph Riggio: himself with what we can call traditional masculine qualities, they're being challenged by society.
9:07
Joseph Riggio: And he has to question, is there something wrong with me?
9:11
Joseph Riggio: You know, and one of the things I would point to is in a lot of species, including the human
9:17
Joseph Riggio: species, and I have a bit of a scientific background, so I apologize for a little of
9:21
Joseph Riggio: my nerdiness up front.
9:23
Joseph Riggio: In the human species, it's not uncommon for men to be somewhat more aggressive than women.
9:29
Joseph Riggio: We have evolved to protect and to provide for our families.
9:35
Joseph Riggio: And sometimes that means taking on the world and making sure those who are closest to us are safe.
9:41
Joseph Riggio: So we can be a little bit more volatile.
9:43
Joseph Riggio: And I can even, again, talk about brain structure and how our brains are wired, that men arrive at decisions more quickly than women.
9:51
Joseph Riggio: And some of those decisions are triggered by a part of the brain called the amygdala, which presents a violent front.
9:58
Joseph Riggio: And if a man today is violent in an appropriate way, I'm not talking about committing a crime.
10:04
Joseph Riggio: I'm not talking about harming someone, but even standing up forcefully to someone, that's toxic
10:09
Joseph Riggio: masculinity. But it feels right to me. Somebody just insulted my wife. Somebody just threatened
10:14
Joseph Riggio: my child. Somebody crossed me in a way that was physically violent and almost led to an altercation.
10:21
Joseph Riggio: And now I'm confronting them physically and forcefully. And people are telling me my behavior
10:25
Joseph Riggio: is toxic. It doesn't make sense to me. So who am I? We have to be able to resolve this internally
10:31
Joseph Riggio: and go, it's okay to do what you just did. And it's okay that you understood there was a boundary
10:36
Joseph Riggio: to it as well. And you didn't cross that boundary and do something inappropriate or criminal. And
10:42
Joseph Riggio: to be treated as though you had is inappropriate from society. And yet this is the message that
10:48
Joseph Riggio: keeps getting reinforced for any man who acts in what had traditionally been for not thousands,
10:55
Joseph Riggio: tens or hundreds of thousands of years in what we can call a masculine way.
11:00
Nicky Billou: So we don't tolerate that phrase, toxic masculinity, on this show.
11:07
Nicky Billou: I think that's a misandrist statement.
11:11
Nicky Billou: It is.
11:12
Nicky Billou: Absolutely.
11:13
Nicky Billou: And so we don't tolerate that here.
11:16
Nicky Billou: And I don't tolerate it in real life.
11:19
Nicky Billou: Anybody uses it, I hammer them.
11:20
Nicky Billou: I hammer them really hard.
11:22
Nicky Billou: I'm an Iranian man from a very traditional culture.
11:25
Nicky Billou: But if a woman uses that phrase in front of me, she is going to feel my wrath very quickly.
11:30
Nicky Billou: right um verbally of course you know appropriately appropriately as i said feel my damn wrath uh and i
11:38
Nicky Billou: i ran into a woke feminist woman who started to use that phrase in front of me and i cut her off
11:44
Nicky Billou: she tried to talk over me and i wouldn't let her um and i said that is sexist you need to stop
11:49
Nicky Billou: right now or we're done we're done our relationship is done right here right now and she backed off
11:56
Nicky Billou: But it's nothing we tolerate here.
11:59
Nicky Billou: So I want to just be very clear about that.
12:02
Nicky Billou: But I want to go back to the original question I had, because you described what happened very well.
12:07
Nicky Billou: Well, why do you think it happened?
12:08
Nicky Billou: Why do you think, seemingly out of the blue, and only in Western society, these changes took place?
12:16
Nicky Billou: Do you think it was organic?
12:17
Nicky Billou: Do you think it was not organic?
12:19
Nicky Billou: And why?
12:20
Joseph Riggio: I think it was a combination of organic and agitated, or an agenda that was being propagated.
12:29
Joseph Riggio: I think if you want to make a society submissive, you have to dismantle parts of it.
12:36
Joseph Riggio: And one of the parts of it that you have to dismantle is the nuclear family, that unit
12:41
Joseph Riggio: that is in the Western culture, organized in both patriarchal and matriarchal ways,
12:48
Joseph Riggio: different distinctions, as you said, men and women's roles were clearly defined.
12:54
Joseph Riggio: And that identification allowed the nuclear family to exist the way it did.
12:59
Joseph Riggio: I do this, you do that.
13:00
Joseph Riggio: I represent this, you represent that.
13:03
Joseph Riggio: You know, one of my favorite characters out there, you could call him, is a guy named Joseph Campbell, who you probably heard.
13:08
Nicky Billou: Sure, he rolled a thousand faces.
13:10
Joseph Riggio: Absolutely.
13:11
Joseph Riggio: And Joseph Campbell talks about the idea of this differentiation between men and women and what identified men and women as being different in their roles and the maternal and paternal character.
13:26
Joseph Riggio: And he makes it very clear that there was a breakdown, an intentional breakdown as early as the 1930s or 40s to allow women to infiltrate men's spaces.
13:38
Joseph Riggio: But the corollary was never supported.
13:41
Joseph Riggio: So you can have a women's club legally that is unique to women, but it's very difficult, if not illegal, to hold the club to purely men today as a social environment.
13:52
Joseph Riggio: And so you can't say that there was no government or larger scope agenda that was in place.
13:59
Joseph Riggio: And a lot of it had to do with the country was becoming very comfortable, very successful.
14:05
Joseph Riggio: People were moving up economically.
14:07
Joseph Riggio: The gap between the wealthiest and the poorest was closing aggressively.
14:12
Joseph Riggio: The middle class was doing better than it had in virtually all of history.
14:16
Joseph Riggio: And that meant, to some extent, the wealthiest and most elite were threatened.
14:22
Joseph Riggio: And we began to see a pushback against that. We began to see a challenge. And one of the other
14:28
Joseph Riggio: things that was happening is that especially in minority cultures, whether that was the Black
14:35
Joseph Riggio: American culture, or that was some of the American ethnic cultures, or that was the minority of women
14:40
Joseph Riggio: in terms of some of the authority or power or access they had, was being pushed to the surface.
14:47
Joseph Riggio: and there was a demand for equality at a level, again, that had never existed
14:51
Joseph Riggio: in any society almost on the planet.
14:54
Joseph Riggio: So we live fundamentally, Nikki, in a caste system.
14:58
Joseph Riggio: And the caste system is not defined as it was once by birth.
15:02
Joseph Riggio: It's defined to some extent by external circumstances.
15:06
Joseph Riggio: And now that includes if you're a man or a woman.
15:09
Joseph Riggio: And I know you don't like the term that I used, and so I won't say it again.
15:12
Joseph Riggio: I don't want to have to be there.
15:14
Joseph Riggio: But what I will say is there's another term which you probably don't like as much, which
15:19
Joseph Riggio: is the idea of white privilege.
15:20
Joseph Riggio: And this is a redefining of the caste system, where once that was in fact a privilege and
15:26
Joseph Riggio: put you in a privileged position, it had to be degraded so that these other positions could
15:32
Joseph Riggio: be risen up and there could be inequality.
15:34
Joseph Riggio: And that equality actually degraded everyone.
15:37
Joseph Riggio: So now we see a big gap again between the wealthiest and the poorest and the upper caste.
15:44
Joseph Riggio: I'm not calling it class.
15:45
Joseph Riggio: I'm using the word caste, C-A-S-T-E.
15:49
Joseph Riggio: Yeah, I know which one you mean.
15:50
Joseph Riggio: It is now repositioned in a way to have more control, more concentration of wealth, and it in part demands a control of the population.
16:00
Joseph Riggio: You don't want strong men.
16:01
Joseph Riggio: If you want a controlled population, you sure as heck don't want strong men.
16:10
Nicky Billou: After World War II, there was a group of folks that fought in the war that came back in America and they found their town to be under the control of a corrupt political establishment and police force.
16:22
Nicky Billou: And the men got together, banded together, overthrew these guys and took back their town.
16:27
Nicky Billou: I can't imagine that happening today.
16:28
Joseph Riggio: You can't have that. You can't have that.
16:31
Joseph Riggio: You know, I mean, I'm going to give you an example, if you don't mind.
16:35
Nicky Billou: Yeah.
16:35
Joseph Riggio: There's a movie I've never seen, and I made a choice never to see it.
16:39
Joseph Riggio: I never will see this movie, and it was Brokeback Mountain.
16:42
Joseph Riggio: Yeah, same with me.
16:44
Joseph Riggio: And the reason I chose not to see it, I have many friends, and I have no issue with homosexuality.
16:49
Joseph Riggio: I really, truly could care less what people do in the privacy of their life.
16:53
Joseph Riggio: I have no issue with the decisions that people make about who they want to love or how they want to respond to people at a sexual level.
17:00
Joseph Riggio: Not my issue.
17:02
Joseph Riggio: No, mine neither.
17:02
Joseph Riggio: What I had an issue with is you took a standard, strongly held American convention and an icon of America, which was the American cowboy.
17:12
Joseph Riggio: And you had to make sure that you distorted the image and the idea of what that represented for years and years, decades, centuries, into something that was now a piece of social engineering.
17:26
Joseph Riggio: Yeah, I had a real problem with it for a similar reason.
17:29
Joseph Riggio: You know, but it's there.
17:30
Joseph Riggio: And it was a wild success.
17:32
Joseph Riggio: Think about that.
17:33
Joseph Riggio: How many people did like it and how much praise it got and critical acclaim and all this other
17:38
Joseph Riggio: stuff.
17:39
Joseph Riggio: And never once was it brought to the surface that basically was done in order for it to
17:43
Joseph Riggio: have all that stuff go on was the degradation of an American critical icon.
17:48
Nicky Billou: Great.
17:49
Nicky Billou: Yeah, no, it's what it was.
17:52
Nicky Billou: I agree with what you're saying 100%.
17:55
Nicky Billou: I don't think it was organic at all, to be quite frank with you.
17:58
Nicky Billou: I think the rise of the feminist movement was entirely engineered.
18:03
Nicky Billou: And I think without this engineering, it would have never happened.
18:06
Nicky Billou: So back in 2020, I was introduced to the work of a former CIA case officer named Kent Clisby.
18:17
Nicky Billou: And he wrote a book in 2011 called Willing Accomplices.
18:24
Nicky Billou: And Kent is not a natural born communicator.
18:28
Nicky Billou: He's not a writer.
18:30
Nicky Billou: So if you ever decide to buy the book, and I highly encourage you do when you read it,
18:35
Nicky Billou: the first 30 or 40 pages are a tough slog because he's not a good writer.
18:40
Nicky Billou: But once you get past that, you won't be able to put it down because he makes a very compelling
18:45
Nicky Billou: case that what's going on in the West vis-a-vis the degradation of traditional masculinity
18:53
Nicky Billou: and men and manhood was a deliberately engineered project by Vladimir Lenin beginning in 1917.
19:03
Nicky Billou: 1917, Russia became the world's first communist state. And Vladimir Lenin, unlike Marx,
19:12
Nicky Billou: had a vision of the entire world becoming communist. See, he's the Leninism part of
19:17
Nicky Billou: Marxism, Leninism, right? But he realized that Russia was too weak to militarily make that happen.
19:25
Nicky Billou: And the biggest obstacle to his dream, his vision, was the United States. So he came up with a plan,
19:34
Nicky Billou: a multi-decade plan to weaken the United States from within. He wanted to use the United States's
19:39
Nicky Billou: very openness as a society against it. So he had a German communist who was one of his acolytes,
19:47
Nicky Billou: a gentleman named Vili Munsenberg, and he charged him with moving to the United States
19:54
Nicky Billou: and told him, your mission is to infiltrate American institutions and the following three
20:02
Nicky Billou: institutions in particular, education, media, Hollywood. And you're to start putting in our
20:09
Nicky Billou: narrative into these institutions and find willing accomplices, progressives in the United States
20:16
Nicky Billou: to help you with this project. Mr. Munzenberg did this. Mr. Munzenberg fell out of favor when
20:21
Nicky Billou: Stalin came to power and I think he was executed, but the project he started in the United States
20:26
Nicky Billou: and the rest of the Western world continued.
20:28
Nicky Billou: The Cold War that began in 1945 and ended with the defeat of godless communism did not
20:37
Nicky Billou: stop the movement within American and Western society to weaken them from within.
20:43
Nicky Billou: The rot had set in, as it were.
20:45
Nicky Billou: And so 1989 through 91, the communist regimes in Russia and Eastern Europe all fell.
20:54
Nicky Billou: but Marxism and cultural Marxism had taken root in the United States and in most Western countries.
21:00
Nicky Billou: And a big part of what they did was they wanted, as you say, to weaken the nuclear family,
21:05
Nicky Billou: to weaken men, because how do you conquer a society? You make sure that their men aren't
21:10
Nicky Billou: strong enough to fight back against you. And that was the entire plan. And unfortunately,
21:17
Nicky Billou: they had some brilliant manipulators come and work with women and women are magnificent. I love women.
21:24
Nicky Billou: I think they have certain qualities and strengths and skills that we as men don't have.
21:29
Nicky Billou: Unfortunately, they also have certain weaknesses we don't have.
21:33
Nicky Billou: And we have certain weaknesses they don't have.
21:35
Nicky Billou: Let's just be honest.
21:35
Nicky Billou: We can be manipulated in ways that are just, a woman would shake her head at that and go,
21:41
Nicky Billou: oh my God, the man he's thinking with his, you know what?
21:44
Nicky Billou: And they do.
21:46
Nicky Billou: And really dumb decisions have been made of major import because of that by men.
21:51
Nicky Billou: But really dumb decisions have been made by women of major import.
21:55
Nicky Billou: And one of them was to buy the feminist lie that, hey, you are being oppressed.
22:01
Nicky Billou: You deserve better.
22:03
Nicky Billou: All of her complaints were validated.
22:08
Nicky Billou: And in the work that I've done with some sociologists who work with women,
22:11
Nicky Billou: they say one of the key ways that women get status in the world is when they complain.
22:19
Nicky Billou: They don't actually want their complaints solved.
22:21
Nicky Billou: You ever had your wife tell you about all the things that went wrong in a day, and as soon as you start trying to solve her problem, she jumps down your throat?
22:28
Nicky Billou: You ever had that happen?
22:28
Nicky Billou: Because I know I have, right?
22:30
Nicky Billou: She's actually named it.
22:31
Nicky Billou: It's when she needs to vent.
22:33
Nicky Billou: That's it.
22:34
Nicky Billou: But most women don't know that's what they need to do.
22:37
Nicky Billou: What are you doing?
22:37
Nicky Billou: You're not listening to me.
22:39
Nicky Billou: I'm solving your problem.
22:42
Nicky Billou: They had their complaints not just named, but extolled.
22:46
Nicky Billou: And as a result, this spread like wildfire.
22:50
Nicky Billou: and women in the West started to buy the lie that they've been oppressed. They'd never been
22:54
Nicky Billou: oppressed. They just had a different series of roles than men did. Now you can make the point
22:59
Nicky Billou: and, and, and, and, and I would say it's a, it's a valid point that many opportunities were denied
23:04
Nicky Billou: to women in the past. And that's a valid point. And if there's women who wanted those opportunities,
23:08
Nicky Billou: they ought to have been given a chance to have them. I agree with all that. What I don't agree
23:12
Nicky Billou: with is the lie that they were being oppressed. Okay. And that lie, unfortunately, from the early
23:18
Nicky Billou: 60s to 2026 has led to, as you say, the degradation of the masculine ideal and the degradation
23:28
Nicky Billou: of manhood, the concept of manhood.
23:31
Nicky Billou: And there's men out there today that would hide behind their girlfriend's skirts if a
23:36
Nicky Billou: guy came and attacked them rather than standing in front of her and beating the crap out of
23:40
Nicky Billou: the guy or die trying.
23:43
Nicky Billou: Do you know what I'm trying to say here?
23:44
Nicky Billou: Oh, yeah.
23:44
Joseph Riggio: I understand completely.
23:46
Nicky Billou: Yeah.
23:46
Joseph Riggio: So let me, you know, there's two things, Nikki, that jump out at me really quickly is number one, my comment that it was both organic and engineered is that the organic piece was that there was a certain willingness or readiness in culture and society for that message to take root.
24:06
Joseph Riggio: That's fair.
24:06
Joseph Riggio: There were certain societies, certain cultures, even in America, subcultures, we can call them, where that message never took root and still isn't taking root.
24:16
Joseph Riggio: Yeah.
24:16
Joseph Riggio: You know, one of the ones that a guy named John Taylor Gatto, who was a big influence of mine and educator, talks about is in the Amish society, that doesn't exist.
24:26
Joseph Riggio: No.
24:27
Joseph Riggio: Right?
24:28
Joseph Riggio: So he points out the distinctions to some extent of the Amish society and why they have this difference of opinion.
24:36
Joseph Riggio: And part of it is, as you said, the difference between godliness and godlessness is part of it.
24:42
Joseph Riggio: So there was an organic organization.
24:44
Joseph Riggio: The second thing is it didn't start in the 1960s.
24:47
Joseph Riggio: We had suffragettes in the early part of the century.
24:50
Joseph Riggio: We did.
24:50
Joseph Riggio: So there was something going on there.
24:51
Joseph Riggio: And you have to remember it was in the 1920s that prohibition occurred.
24:56
Joseph Riggio: Yep.
24:56
Joseph Riggio: And prohibition was a forerunner to beginning to test the limits of how far you could push
25:02
Joseph Riggio: the population to limit and take away their rights and present them with forms of control
25:08
Joseph Riggio: that had not been in place before that they were now being forced to accept.
25:12
Joseph Riggio: And so we've been tested consistently, and I'm going to argue and have argued publicly
25:19
Joseph Riggio: that the whole COVID pandemic was another red flag test.
25:23
Joseph Riggio: It totally was.
25:24
Joseph Riggio: It was.
25:25
Joseph Riggio: And it was not that it didn't happen.
25:26
Joseph Riggio: We know there was a real thing.
25:27
Joseph Riggio: There were people getting sick.
25:29
Joseph Riggio: But the way it was handled, the exaggeration of it, the quote unquote issue that the average
25:35
Joseph Riggio: healthy person was confronted with just never existed.
25:39
Joseph Riggio: It was very dangerous for compromised people who had compromised immune systems.
25:43
Joseph Riggio: Over the age of 80.
25:45
Joseph Riggio: Yeah, we saw it.
25:46
Joseph Riggio: And so we're not going to argue with the reality of it.
25:48
Joseph Riggio: But then it was played out to test, can we get people to hunker down in their homes, wear masks, stand three feet apart?
25:55
Joseph Riggio: For years.
25:55
Joseph Riggio: Whatever the heck the rules were.
25:57
Joseph Riggio: For years.
25:58
Joseph Riggio: Give up the ability to meet with their loved ones.
26:01
Joseph Riggio: Give up their ability to have their children in a social environment, in a school environment where they socialize and engage.
26:09
Joseph Riggio: These things were not random.
26:10
Joseph Riggio: No, they were not.
26:11
Joseph Riggio: It's hard to argue they were random.
26:12
Joseph Riggio: And the reality is, if we had a society of those men you referred to who had come back
26:17
Joseph Riggio: from World War II, who took back their town, it probably wouldn't have happened.
26:22
Joseph Riggio: So I know men who didn't accept those rules.
26:25
Joseph Riggio: I know men who pushed back.
26:27
Joseph Riggio: I know men who said, no way.
26:29
Joseph Riggio: I know military men who said, I'm not getting vaxxed.
26:32
Joseph Riggio: I don't care if you exclude me from the military as a result.
26:35
Joseph Riggio: Despite the fact that I've given the military 10, 20 years of my life, and I have a massive
26:40
Joseph Riggio: commitment to what it means to be a soldier, a sailor.
26:44
Joseph Riggio: For sure.
26:44
Joseph Riggio: No, 100%, man.
26:46
Joseph Riggio: 100%.
26:46
Joseph Riggio: And so I agree with you.
26:48
Joseph Riggio: Totally engineered.
26:49
Joseph Riggio: And by the way, I know some of that story you shared about the infiltration of American
26:55
Joseph Riggio: society.
26:56
Joseph Riggio: And when you think about it, I don't have the facts as validated as I would love.
27:02
Joseph Riggio: But when I look at the correlations between what did happen in education and Hollywood, I sure as heck can see the pattern unfolding there.
27:12
Joseph Riggio: And so I think we could also make an argument that the same pattern, to some extent, was played out in a different way in religion as well.
27:22
Joseph Riggio: And removal of religion from the home.
27:26
Nicky Billou: Yeah.
27:27
Nicky Billou: Yeah, 100%.
27:28
Nicky Billou: I agree.
27:30
Joseph Riggio: I don't think it's a fatal disease.
27:34
Joseph Riggio: I think men can recapture their masculinity.
27:37
Joseph Riggio: I think men can very quickly reestablish themselves to an identity that is very strongly masculine in a very positive way.
27:47
Joseph Riggio: Yeah.
27:47
Joseph Riggio: And they can retake that position that I would argue is, I would call it, Nikki, because of my own beliefs, a God-given right.
27:56
Joseph Riggio: but let's call it a natural born right.
27:58
Joseph Riggio: That as a function of what we're born as men
28:02
Joseph Riggio: is our right to exhibit and express ourselves through.
28:05
Joseph Riggio: And that's that close.
28:07
Nicky Billou: Yeah, 100%.
28:07
Nicky Billou: It's very easy to come back.
28:09
Nicky Billou: I agree.
28:10
Nicky Billou: I mean, that's the whole reason I have this podcast.
28:12
Nicky Billou: I have a community of men called the Sovereign Men.
28:15
Nicky Billou: We run something called the Sovereign Circle.
28:17
Nicky Billou: And the whole reason we exist is to do that.
28:20
Nicky Billou: We have men in our community that are experienced men
28:24
Nicky Billou: like me, like you, at our level.
28:27
Nicky Billou: And we got men that are, you know,
28:29
Nicky Billou: less experienced in life
28:30
Nicky Billou: and less certain of their masculinity,
28:32
Nicky Billou: but we're helping them get in touch
28:34
Nicky Billou: with that warrior within
28:36
Nicky Billou: and bring out their badass.
28:38
Nicky Billou: I say every man is a warrior
28:39
Nicky Billou: and every man is a badass.
28:41
Nicky Billou: He's just forgotten it for a while.
28:43
Nicky Billou: And my job and what I do
28:45
Nicky Billou: is to remind him who he really is.
28:47
Nicky Billou: Yep.
28:48
Joseph Riggio: I'm going to tell you an interesting thing.
28:49
Joseph Riggio: It's, excuse me for interrupting you there.
28:51
Joseph Riggio: There's a, there's, I teach martial arts.
28:54
Joseph Riggio: I'm a martial arts instructor. And the martial art that I teach is called Warrior Flow. And it's a
28:59
Joseph Riggio: very physical art. We are engaging literally in a physical way. And what's interesting, you meet
29:07
Joseph Riggio: these men and they come in and Nikki, they are very soft. And I don't mean just physically,
29:12
Joseph Riggio: they're physically soft, their bodies are soft, but their movement, their presentation of themselves,
29:17
Joseph Riggio: the way they interact with the world is soft. And so when you're working with them and you
29:22
Joseph Riggio: begin to do sparring, it's their bodies don't know what to do. And then they get hit a couple of
29:28
Joseph Riggio: times. And we actually, you know, I'll hit a man in the chest, I'll hit him in his shoulder,
29:33
Joseph Riggio: and I'm hitting him in a way that's not going to do damage. I'm not looking to hurt him or bruise
29:37
Joseph Riggio: him or break something. But enough that he knows he's gotten hit. The first time, it's shocking.
29:42
Joseph Riggio: By the third time, it's interesting. By the 10th time, they're looking forward to it because they
29:46
Joseph Riggio: feel like they're now engaging and they're ready to hit back. Where they go through the threshold
29:55
Joseph Riggio: of the excitement of being able to know they can be hit and it didn't kill them. And they can hit
30:00
Joseph Riggio: back as a result or response to that. They start becoming very interesting to work with. I actually
30:05
Joseph Riggio: have to make sure that my skills are in place and I'm getting out of the way because they're throwing
30:10
Joseph Riggio: and it's exciting. It's exciting for them. It's exciting for me, frankly. And they change who
30:16
Joseph Riggio: they are. And all of a sudden, they'll come back a week, three weeks, a month, six months, a year
30:22
Joseph Riggio: later, whatever it is. And they go, I was in a parking lot. And some guy made a comment to my
30:26
Joseph Riggio: wife. It was really interesting, Joseph. I turned to this guy. And as soon as I turned to him, he
30:30
Joseph Riggio: went, ah, get the hell, you're just nothing. He walked away. He said there was something he picked
30:34
Joseph Riggio: up from the way I was behaving that he knew he had crossed the line and I was ready to stand my
30:39
Joseph Riggio: ground. I didn't even have to do anything. And people think that you have to elevate this to
30:44
Joseph Riggio: level of violence when you're capable of violence the world knows yeah and it doesn't go there as
30:50
Joseph Riggio: easily it can go there but it doesn't go there as easily no question no question um you know
30:57
Nicky Billou: there's a lot a lot we can talk about and honestly i joseph i'd love to have you back on both shows
31:03
Nicky Billou: to get into some of the uh topics that you brought up um i i enjoy speaking to you man i really
31:11
Nicky Billou: really enjoy speaking to you and i think you you you make me think which not every guest does
31:17
Nicky Billou: um and that's really good for me as a human being it's good for me as a man because it forces me to
31:25
Nicky Billou: question some of my assumptions it forces me to validate other ones and and and and frankly even
31:31
Nicky Billou: discard some but let's go back to this conversation so there is a russian uh defector from the
31:41
Nicky Billou: 1980s, who was the KGB's country destabilization expert. His name was Yuri Bezmanov.
31:48
Nicky Billou: I know Yuri.
31:49
Nicky Billou: Yeah. So he did an interview. It's available on YouTube. It's almost two hours long. And he
31:54
Nicky Billou: explains in exquisite detail how the Soviet Union went about destabilizing a country and taking it
32:01
Nicky Billou: from a stable country to one that was susceptible to revolution. And being an Iranian, I can see some
32:08
Nicky Billou: of their work in Iran during the 1970s before the Islamic Revolution overthrew His Majesty
32:18
Nicky Billou: Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah and Shah of Iran.
32:21
Nicky Billou: And I think it's important for Western men to be aware that these destabilizing forces,
32:26
Nicky Billou: these agitated forces exist today in the West, in the United States.
32:31
Nicky Billou: and from the point of view of a observer,
32:37
Nicky Billou: I think the United States is the country in the world right now
32:40
Nicky Billou: that is best positioned to reverse this tie
32:44
Nicky Billou: because they elected a very strong masculine man as their leader.
32:48
Nicky Billou: Donald Trump is a man you don't mess with.
32:52
Nicky Billou: You know that phrase that's out there these days?
32:54
Nicky Billou: Yes.
32:55
Nicky Billou: Fafo, nap around and find out.
32:58
Nicky Billou: Like with Donald Trump, the world has found out.
33:02
Nicky Billou: It's like when he comes out and he says, I don't like this, you better shift or else.
33:07
Nicky Billou: That or else is a real thing.
33:10
Nicky Billou: That or else is not a paper or else, right?
33:13
Nicky Billou: And people are saying, you know, oh my God, Trump got elected.
33:16
Nicky Billou: But look, China, they're going to probably invade Taiwan.
33:19
Nicky Billou: Yeah, China ain't invading Taiwan.
33:20
Nicky Billou: I'm sure you China ain't invading Taiwan.
33:22
Nicky Billou: Well, enough for the next two years.
33:25
Nicky Billou: Three and a bit.
33:27
Nicky Billou: You know what I'm talking about.
33:28
Nicky Billou: Yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about.
33:29
Nicky Billou: We don't know what's going to happen next.
33:30
Nicky Billou: No, we don't.
33:31
Nicky Billou: But listen, I'm an Iranian.
33:34
Nicky Billou: I'm from a humanitarian point of view, from an Iranian patriot point of view.
33:40
Nicky Billou: I'm thrilled that Donald Trump has taken the steps he's taken against the Islamic regime.
33:44
Nicky Billou: I believe that regime is going to be overthrown.
33:46
Nicky Billou: And I believe there'll be a pro-Western Iranian regime in place sometime this year.
33:50
Nicky Billou: Okay.
33:51
Nicky Billou: I thought it would have happened by now, but I'll give him a credit for having had more
33:55
Nicky Billou: staying power than I thought they had.
33:56
Nicky Billou: but it was the most boss of moves that he pulled against China because China's source of oil supply
34:04
Nicky Billou: had been Iran and Venezuela. What did Donald Trump do? He took both of those off the board.
34:11
Nicky Billou: You think China's going to mess with Trump right now? China right now is like trying not to piss
34:16
Nicky Billou: him off too much. You know what I mean? Because they know this is a dude that's got their number.
34:21
Nicky Billou: They've been smarter than every other American president that's been around since the year 2000
34:25
Nicky Billou: by a country mile, but not this guy.
34:28
Nicky Billou: And right now they are scared shitless of him,
34:32
Nicky Billou: quite frankly.
34:33
Nicky Billou: And I believe that what's going to happen in 2028
34:40
Nicky Billou: is J.D. Vance will probably be the nominee.
34:43
Nicky Billou: Now, is he going to be Donald Trump?
34:44
Nicky Billou: No, but I also don't think he's going to be a wuss.
34:47
Nicky Billou: I think he's going to be a guy
34:48
Nicky Billou: who's going to follow through
34:49
Nicky Billou: on a lot of Trump's policies,
34:50
Nicky Billou: on foreign policy and with China.
34:52
Nicky Billou: He's not going to cave into those guys.
34:54
Nicky Billou: And I think his running mate's going to be Marco Rubio.
34:57
Nicky Billou: And I don't know how closely you've been following politics in your life.
35:02
Nicky Billou: You sound like you have and you understand and you've seen people come and go throughout
35:06
Nicky Billou: your life.
35:07
Nicky Billou: But I studied international politics and American politics in particular in university.
35:11
Nicky Billou: And I have as a very dedicated and ardent amateur ever since.
35:16
Nicky Billou: Okay.
35:16
Nicky Billou: So for the last 35, 40 years, ever since the Islamic revolution in Iran, I've been interested
35:20
Nicky Billou: in this stuff.
35:21
Nicky Billou: Marco Rubio is the toughest, smartest, best secretary of state America has had since Henry Kissinger.
35:28
Nicky Billou: By a country mile, Marco Rubio being the vice president and J.D. Vance being the president, which I believe is going to happen in 2028.
35:35
Nicky Billou: I believe you're going to see a 20 year period of America having good, strong, masculine leaders.
35:42
Nicky Billou: And that's good for the world.
35:44
Nicky Billou: That's my take on it.
35:46
Nicky Billou: Could I be wrong?
35:47
Nicky Billou: Absolutely.
35:47
Nicky Billou: Everyone could be wrong in their predictions.
35:49
Nicky Billou: But that's what I think is going to happen.
35:51
Nicky Billou: I think the modern Democratic Party is so feminized, so weak, so unable to do anything other than scream and yell that they hate Donald Trump as their response to everything,
36:06
Nicky Billou: that they're going to stop being taken seriously by a big part of the American electorate.
36:13
Nicky Billou: And in my opinion, as long as Trump's president, their ability to play shenanigans in elections is going to be limited.
36:21
Nicky Billou: So this is why I think it's going to happen.
36:22
Nicky Billou: It's my take.
36:23
Joseph Riggio: Listen, I tend to lean strongly in your direction across the board on those comments.
36:29
Joseph Riggio: I'm not quite as sure or confident as you are about the Vance-Rubio mix of being elected.
36:36
Joseph Riggio: I think America is still confused, and I really do.
36:40
Joseph Riggio: I think that there's a very strong pull, not just in America, but if you look what's happening,
36:47
Joseph Riggio: even in terms of the most recent speech that King Charles made.
36:51
Joseph Riggio: Yes.
36:52
Joseph Riggio: He's a very eloquent guy, speaks beautifully.
36:55
Joseph Riggio: Yes.
36:55
Joseph Riggio: But when you listen to what he says, there's not a lot of substance behind it.
36:59
Joseph Riggio: There's a lot of hopeful wishing and inspirational phrasing and not,
37:07
Joseph Riggio: here's what we need to do, here's what we're going to do,
37:09
Joseph Riggio: here's where the line is drawn in the sand.
37:11
Joseph Riggio: And again, from a masculine point of view, a men's point of view,
37:14
Joseph Riggio: a man's point of view, one of the things that men do, and again, we can identify this however you
37:20
Joseph Riggio: want, evolutionarily, psychologically, physiologically, men draw lines in the sand. They go this far and
37:27
Joseph Riggio: no farther. And when you begin to take that away from the identified men in the world, the men who
37:34
Joseph Riggio: are speaking, and a lot of them are, frankly, today, looked up to are entertainers, whether they come
37:41
Joseph Riggio: in the world of music or they come from the world of Hollywood or theater.
37:45
Joseph Riggio: And they've been, to some extent, what I'm going to use the phrase, demasculinized in
37:49
Joseph Riggio: the sense of unwilling to draw a line in the sand, to have an unbearable level of tolerance
37:56
Joseph Riggio: and acceptance.
37:57
Nicky Billou: Yeah.
37:58
Joseph Riggio: And this is, I go back to your comment about when you said, you know, women were sold the
38:05
Joseph Riggio: idea of oppression.
38:06
Joseph Riggio: And the conflation between truth and fabrication was brilliant because it was true that women,
38:14
Joseph Riggio: certain women, particular women, ran into issues where they were living with inappropriately
38:19
Joseph Riggio: dominant men who wanted to control them and run their lives in a way where they had no
38:24
Joseph Riggio: freedom whatsoever.
38:25
Joseph Riggio: And because of the way the society was set up, the women had no choice.
38:28
Joseph Riggio: They literally could not support themselves independently.
38:32
Joseph Riggio: And now, again, I'm going back 1920s, early 1900s, not 1960, 1920s.
38:39
Joseph Riggio: And that was one of the things that was used to leverage the idea that the suffragette
38:44
Joseph Riggio: movement had to move forward to give women rights, in many cases, simply to become independent
38:50
Joseph Riggio: financially, as simple as things like being able to inherit wealth.
38:54
Joseph Riggio: That was a limitation.
38:56
Joseph Riggio: And now that was taken to an extreme level where it was presented as though every woman was a sufferer, was a victim and being oppressed by that.
39:06
Joseph Riggio: Which is outrageous, which is absolutely outrageous.
39:09
Joseph Riggio: Absolutely.
39:09
Joseph Riggio: So you had, let's pick a number, 0.1% of the female population in the Western world was actually under that kind of oppressive behavior.
39:19
Joseph Riggio: But it became 99% as a mental presentation and was sold very effectively.
39:27
Joseph Riggio: And it's still being done.
39:30
Joseph Riggio: Listen, I watch movies and I watch television shows.
39:34
Joseph Riggio: And Nikki these days, about 50% of them, I don't make it through.
39:38
Joseph Riggio: There's an event that they present to me where I go, that's too much.
39:42
Nicky Billou: Yeah.
39:42
Nicky Billou: That's why I watch older TV shows and older movies all the time.
39:46
Nicky Billou: Yeah.
39:46
Joseph Riggio: Yeah.
39:46
Joseph Riggio: My wife's a Pluto addict with me.
39:49
Joseph Riggio: So we're watching all of those old movies that are on Pluto and all the old TV shows.
39:53
Joseph Riggio: Nice.
39:53
Joseph Riggio: You know, I love Lucy.
39:55
Nicky Billou: I love Lucy's great.
39:57
Nicky Billou: Rockford Files, you know, Magnum P.I., Miami Vice from back in the day.
40:03
Nicky Billou: They're tremendous.
40:04
Nicky Billou: The Rocky movies, the Godfather movies.
40:08
Nicky Billou: Those were movies that portray anything with John Wayne, Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant.
40:13
Nicky Billou: Those are fantastic movies.
40:14
Nicky Billou: I agree with what you're saying.
40:16
Nicky Billou: I'll tell you why I feel very confident.
40:19
Nicky Billou: I feel very confident for a couple of reasons. First of all, I'm naturally an optimist.
40:23
Nicky Billou: So, you know, one of my mentors once said, uh, optimists and pessimists are both equally
40:28
Nicky Billou: deluded, but optimists live longer. So I'm going to err on the side of optimism for that reason.
40:33
Nicky Billou: But secondly, I think there is a sense in people today that they've been lied to,
40:41
Nicky Billou: that they've been hoodwinked. And one thing that nobody can say about Donald Trump is that he's
40:48
Nicky Billou: lying to them and he's hoodwinking them. They may not like him. They may not like his presentation.
40:52
Nicky Billou: They may not like how mean he is, but they know he's telling the truth. And I think there's a
40:57
Nicky Billou: hunger out there in the world for truth tellers, a hunger that the folks that have been pulling the
41:06
Nicky Billou: wool over our collective eyes for so long don't fully comprehend. They don't understand what level
41:13
Nicky Billou: of skepticism people have and how more and more people are listening to everything they're being
41:21
Nicky Billou: told and questioning it. I'm an Iranian. When the Islamic Republic took over, we knew they were
41:27
Nicky Billou: lying to us 24-7, 365. So I came into this milieu believing I was being lied to. And then I said,
41:33
Nicky Billou: oh, the Western media doesn't do that. Now I'm going, oh, they're absolutely doing it. They're
41:36
Nicky Billou: propagandists just like the Iranian media was under the Ayatollahs. And more and more people
41:41
Nicky Billou: are starting to think like me.
41:43
Nicky Billou: And I believe that the 28 election
41:47
Nicky Billou: will be an election
41:48
Nicky Billou: where Donald Trump will be used
41:50
Nicky Billou: by the Republican campaign of J.D. Vance
41:53
Nicky Billou: to go out there and do the rallies
41:55
Nicky Billou: and pull out the troops.
41:56
Nicky Billou: And I think he's going to be extremely effective.
41:59
Nicky Billou: Extremely effective.
42:00
Nicky Billou: If they pull the SAVE Act,
42:03
Nicky Billou: if they pull the SAVE Act into legislation,
42:06
Nicky Billou: or if Trump somehow makes it an executive order,
42:09
Nicky Billou: if they don't,
42:11
Nicky Billou: And they can't pull the shenanigans they've been pulling when it comes to elections.
42:16
Nicky Billou: In my opinion, in fair elections right now, the Democrats are lucky to pull 42%.
42:21
Nicky Billou: Lucky.
42:22
Nicky Billou: I think the country is going to vote Republican at a 58% level in a fair election, right?
42:29
Nicky Billou: Where you don't have shenanigans being pulled.
42:33
Nicky Billou: You don't have people that are not citizens voting and that sort of thing.
42:36
Nicky Billou: And I think that's going to be that way for a while.
42:39
Nicky Billou: What's going to have to happen to the Democratic Party is what happened to the Republican Party in the 50s and 60s, you know, when the Democrats had won five elections in a row with FDR and Truman, right?
42:51
Nicky Billou: They're going to have to be beaten so badly that they go, crap, we're going to have to change our ways if we ever want to get back into power.
42:57
Nicky Billou: And that's what's got to happen.
42:58
Nicky Billou: So that's my thought about this.
43:01
Nicky Billou: But let's wrap this up with just some of your thoughts on what do you think modern men need
43:08
Nicky Billou: to do to make better decisions than they're currently making?
43:11
Joseph Riggio: Listen, I would love an opportunity to sell my work.
43:15
Joseph Riggio: And you just opened the door for me.
43:16
Joseph Riggio: I want to do something else that I think answers the question more radically and more importantly,
43:22
Joseph Riggio: and I'd rather help the audience.
43:24
Joseph Riggio: And that is, immerse yourself in the narratives of real men.
43:30
Joseph Riggio: You mentioned a few things.
43:31
Joseph Riggio: The reality is some of what John Wayne did, not just on screen, but who he was as a human
43:38
Joseph Riggio: being.
43:39
Joseph Riggio: Yeah.
43:40
Joseph Riggio: Begin to look at men who represent the ideals that you'd like to live to, whether those
43:45
Joseph Riggio: are in fiction or whether they are in biography, doesn't really matter.
43:50
Joseph Riggio: But you want to saturate your own brain with the kind of identity that is representational
43:58
Joseph Riggio: of what you're aspiring to. So that's the first thing. And if you can reset that internal position,
44:04
Joseph Riggio: which is what my work is all about, then something shifts for you. The challenge with
44:11
Joseph Riggio: what men can do in the model of work that I do is the model of work that I do is really an
44:16
Joseph Riggio: intervention from the outside, noticing what the individual can't notice about themselves.
44:21
Joseph Riggio: So the subtle somatic tics, the ill-formed structure of language they're using,
44:26
Joseph Riggio: The distortions in what we call paralinguistics, the tone, the volume, the pace, the rhythm
44:31
Joseph Riggio: of their speaking as it changes and as they're moving through topics or talking about a decision.
44:37
Joseph Riggio: Those things have to shift, but you don't notice it from the inside.
44:40
Joseph Riggio: So what you need is an external model that you can identify with and go, how would that
44:46
Joseph Riggio: person do this?
44:48
Joseph Riggio: Am I deciding like this person I admire or am I defaulting to a decision structure that
44:55
Joseph Riggio: is in fact a collapse of my own identity and my own being, right?
44:59
Joseph Riggio: So men have to come back to knowing themselves.
45:02
Joseph Riggio: If you're not inside yourself, and frankly, to use a very overused phrase, that's totally
45:07
Joseph Riggio: appropriate.
45:08
Joseph Riggio: If you're not in love with yourself first, it's hard to make any of this other stuff
45:13
Joseph Riggio: work, Nikki.
45:14
Joseph Riggio: You've got to know who you are and accept yourself, warts and all.
45:17
Joseph Riggio: So it's not, I'm in love with myself because I'm perfect.
45:20
Joseph Riggio: It's I'm in love with myself and I know the stuff that's a limitation.
45:24
Joseph Riggio: I know where my weaknesses are.
45:25
Joseph Riggio: And that's okay, because I also know where my strengths are.
45:29
Joseph Riggio: And I can play to my strengths.
45:30
Joseph Riggio: And you made a comment, you're an optimist.
45:33
Joseph Riggio: I've built my life and my practice and my work and my relationships on building positive
45:39
Joseph Riggio: orientation to the world.
45:41
Joseph Riggio: I view the world to a rosy lens to some extent.
45:44
Joseph Riggio: Good man.
45:45
Joseph Riggio: And what happened was, you know, if I use the most personal example I can, the choice
45:50
Joseph Riggio: to be with the woman that I married, I chose her because she didn't need to be with me.
45:55
Joseph Riggio: And I don't need to be with her. So therefore, we were both free to choose one another without the
46:01
Joseph Riggio: oppressive sense that we needed to be in each other's lives for us to be happy or complete.
46:07
Joseph Riggio: Now, we have something more since we've joined and since we are a couple than we had when we
46:11
Joseph Riggio: were separate and independent. But she knows if something happened tomorrow and I get hit by a
46:16
Joseph Riggio: truck, she's going to survive. She's going to be okay. She knows how to make herself in the world.
46:20
Joseph Riggio: and God forbid something happened to her, I would mourn her and it would be a tragic event in my
46:25
Joseph Riggio: life, but my life will go on and I'll still have a chance to see my kids and my grandkids.
46:30
Joseph Riggio: And she's okay with that. She doesn't, she doesn't, you know, tell me, oh my God, you know,
46:34
Joseph Riggio: I wish she would, you know, mourn me and grieve for me and pull, you know, hair off your chests
46:39
Joseph Riggio: every day. That's crazy. So I think that's what men have to do is just get back to being okay with
46:46
Joseph Riggio: who they are and what they are first, step one. And if you don't yet know what that is,
46:51
Joseph Riggio: find some really good models. And ideally, if you're a young man, if you're 30, 40, even 50
46:58
Joseph Riggio: years old, find some old men who figured it out and hang out with them. Buy them a drink,
47:04
Joseph Riggio: go smoke a cigar, sit on the stoop, whatever you need to do to absorb some of that old masculinity
47:11
Joseph Riggio: that they possess and they've grounded completely.
47:14
Joseph Riggio: That's what I would say.
47:15
Joseph Riggio: I would give advice to the audience,
47:17
Joseph Riggio: to anybody who might be listening to me
47:19
Joseph Riggio: and give a damn it what I said.
47:22
Nicky Billou: Joseph, we're going to make sure
47:23
Nicky Billou: we put your information in the show notes.
47:26
Nicky Billou: I got a few guys to introduce you to
47:27
Nicky Billou: that you should go on those shows.
47:28
Nicky Billou: I think they'll love you.
47:30
Nicky Billou: I really appreciate you coming down.
47:31
Nicky Billou: I'm just taking some notes on what you said.
47:33
Nicky Billou: Sure.
47:35
Nicky Billou: This has been fun.
47:36
Nicky Billou: We'll do this again.
47:37
Nicky Billou: God bless you later.
47:39
Nicky Billou: You too, man.
47:40
Joseph Riggio: Thanks so much for having me, Mickey.
47:41
Joseph Riggio: Oh, thanks for coming.
47:41
Joseph Riggio: Hope everybody well.
47:42
Joseph Riggio: Cheers, man.
47:45
Speaker 2: Thank you for listening to the Sovereign Man podcast.
47:48
Speaker 2: If you're ready to take charge of your life and become the man you've always wanted to be,
47:52
Speaker 2: we invite you to join the movement at SovereignMan.ca.