“How did you figure all this out?” On women and dating

A guy at reddit asks that rarest of things, an interesting question, which got started from this post. The guy says, “I was the outsider for a long time (I box professionally) so I had this idea that it doesn’t matter what the average person says or think, I can do whatever I want. I was super disagreeable and would keep grudges (and of course I lost friends like that). This was my most recent realisation, after finishing my study abroad year in Madrid. Having (the right) friends give you an unwavering amount of confidence and motivation, whether it’s picking up a girl or starting a business.”

Furthermore, “the contrast thing is also very true. A lot of my friends think I get girls mostly because of boxing plus I study at a top university in the UK, but the reality is because I paint and post it on Instagram.” Yet he says grew up in poverty. He asks, though: “how did you figure all this out?” It took me a while to figure out how to answer him, because to answer it with any level of honesty demands detail. So I took a shot:

Getting hit in the face (figuratively, mostly, took boxing lessons but never fought), failing, flailing, struggling, reading Peter Thiel (one of the great geniuses of our age, even when he’s wrong), reading broadly + deeply (the people who tell you fiction is a waste of time are dumb), observing, practicing, feeling humiliated by rejection from chicks, realizing some chick is saying “ljbf” before she goes off to get railed half an hour later, trying to figure things out, reading pickup / game / red pill blogs (for too long now, though I’ve learned much from these guys, even some of the crazy ones), studying Bayesian statistics, studying statistical thinking more generally, talking to guys. Some of the “how did you figure all this out?” is just an interest in puzzles, of which human social life presents many. A lot of guys are stuck in an overly simplistic mindset, where they think “iff a, then success” when in reality “a” may be helpful, but success is rarely, if ever, monocausal. That overly simplistic mindset is evident in many comments online, many of which are so incomplete as to be effectively wrong. Many aspects of success in social life are not only not monocausal, but they’re a matter of balancing opposites: an idea many Internet users reject.

Why you can’t trust drug claims, and what that says about the ability to trust in general

This is an even nerdier piece than usual, and it’s fundamentally about trust, verification, and science… try reading the Peaches saga for something fun, sexy, and actionable…

Game is an open field: it has few definite answers and doing it poorly has few short-term consequences. Drug development is different: it has more definite answers, although the answers happen amid a lot of noise, and has many important short and long-term consequences. Politics is closer to game than to drug development, but it’s not a perfect overlap, since failing or succeeding at game has a strong impact on a given individual… while most political opinions are meant to signal tribal allegiance, and being wrong has little impact on the individual. In the last three+ months there have been lots of dumb claims about how hydroxychloroquine “obviously” works.. and yet we’re still looking for that evidence, which seems less and less likely to exist. The more interesting preliminary commentary was out there, best summed by Derek Lowe… April 6, March 31, April 16… no bullshit and written by someone who knows a lot about drug development… his comments about preliminary studies with small sample sizes are accurate… the early studies showed that hydroxychloroquine didn’t seem to badly hurt anyone (good), but we have law of small numbers problems. The smaller the sample size, the easier it is to find a significant effect through chance. An early and bogus French study was done by a guy who is, to put it uncharitably, frequently full of shit. Yet a lot of guys writing in the game / red pill / right wing worlds went for him. Why?

Those guys often don’t know anything about the field and, in addition, they don’t know what they don’t know. Lots of drugs look promising in vitro or in murine/ferret/etc. models, then fail in humans. Evaluating data from coronavirus is tricky, because most people do recover. It’s possible to give 20 patients the drug and then see most of them recover, because they were at the stage in the disease where they were poised for recovery anyway. These kinds of problems are how and why double-blind trials showed up in the first place, to distinguish cause from effect. These are also the kinds of problems that lead many people to falsely believe in all kinds of cures for colds and flus that were on the verge of clearing up anyway. By now, we know that a large and real trial from the UK with 11,000 patients found no benefit to hydroxychloroquine. France has also suspended trials like this one. A trial of 821 patients didn’t show hydroxychloroquine acts as a prophylactic. Yes, there was a study published in Lancet that was withdrawn due to phony data: but other data is consistent with the “no benefit” hypothesis. In other words, the guys you read on Twitter proclaiming that hydroxychloroquine is an easy win were all wrong, and they were wrong in predictable ways.

A little knowledge is dangerous and most of the people on Twitter know zero about statistics or the history of drug development… they make the same mistakes homeopathy people do. Their conspiratorial mindset flares up. They have no skin in the game: they’ve heard of Nassim Taleb but failed to internalize his lessons. If their recommendations turn out to be correct, they announce how right they were. If their recommendations turn out to be false, they say nothing, or cite the one “maybe” weasel word they used, somewhere. If you can’t trust them on something that has known correct answers, how can you trust them on things that don’t?

Meanwhile, people with skin in the game know that most drugs fail. Twitter has its uses but taking drug recommendations from it is nuts. Then there are Twitter exchanges like this one:

Stedman may know something about men and women (a field with limited opportunities for falsification… he’s also posted some goofy shit like this), but he doesn’t know shit about complex systems or about drugs, and he too doesn’t know it. He doesn’t want to learn, either. People have been trying to get Vitamin C to do something for decades (seriously, Linus Pauling initially made up the idea that vitamin C helps the immune system). Chaga is fine but it’s also been relentlessly studied. He’s a sort of Gweneth Paltrow and Goop for the red pill set: mostly harmless but also overconfident and making unbacked medical claims, relying on the ignorance of his followers. But if he’s wrong about something that can be falsified… what else is he wrong about? He’s also a conspiracy theory guy. And he has a large enough platform that he should try harder not to mislead his readers.

On Twitter, the ignorant are often loud and the most knowledgable often quiet. The ignorant have nothing at stake. Sometimes they are right, too, which is gratifying, when it happens. But what general lessons should we draw?

People are susceptible to showmen. Arguably the game is about becoming a better showman (Mystery was literally a showman: a magician). But the natural world doesn’t care about the show, like the human world does. It’s very reality-based. When dealing with women, some men fail to realize that the show can be more important than the reality, under current social and cultural conditions. When dealing with the human body as a system, the show doesn’t matter… the reality does.

There is a problem, I forget the formal name of it, in which people who have expertise or intelligence in one field, think they know all fields. Their knowledge or expertise doesn’t transfer, though. It’s limited. That’s one way people who are otherwise smart, make stupid mistakes. Stedman doesn’t even realize that what he’s pitching has a long history… he’s making a common mistake but doesn’t know it, and, when I pointed out that he’s wrong, he ignored and muted me. Fine. In terms of the drug world, politics makes people stupid and, oddly, people who know that then accuse others of it, not realizing that they themselves are subject to the challenge.

Meanwhile, here is yet one more piece, an older one, about HCQ not working in late-stage patients, which matches doctors’s anecdotal evidence. That HCQ wasn’t working well in moderate and severe cases became apparent by late March/early April, yet we still saw many on Twitter touting its efficacy… how many docs are writing to game, red pill, or far-right twitter… probably not a lot.

There is an interesting question in why otherwise smart people fall for myths, conspiracy theories, etc. I don’t think the whole answer is there, at the link, and I don’t have a full answer, but self-deception seems to be super common. Stedman falls for it. So do many others.

A gear switch. In game: it’s very tempting to lie to yourself first, but guys do well if they do one of two things: lie to themselves to the point of incredible, delusional confidence (“frame” if you prefer that term), OR be relentlessly honest with themselves about their strengths and especially weaknesses. The human propensity to lie to ourselves seems strong, and in medicine this seems like a particularly powerful tendency. We like to see patterns in randomness. Small parts of humanity have spent the last few centuries trying to learn how not to lie to ourselves. The internet does lots of good things, but it also allows the ignorant to be amplify their ignorance, without realizing their own ignorance.

One logical counter is to say, “Experts have their own problems,” and that’s completely true: but experts being wrong is notable and intersting, while non-experts being wrong is the norm, and many of them don’t even know what they don’t know.

It’s possible that the thousands of people wrongly amplifying their messages will learn something from this… but more likely they won’t. We have centuries of knowledge about how to test drugs already, and one more example of being wrong probably won’t convince anyone, anymore than the homeopathic holdouts can be convinced. Ignorance is the human condition, knowledge the exception. Game is one kind of knowledge, but it’s an imprecise kind. You can be great at game, or a great showman, and know nothing about scientific or technical fields.

There are problems with how to test drugs and other health treatments in the United States… but the noisiest people haven’t been repeating them, mostly. Their knowledge level doesn’t extend that far, and something closer to the truth, doesn’t make it to tweets.

We probably won’t learn much from the hydroxychloroquine debacle, since the people falling for it mostly aren’t or weren’t doctors prescribing medications. Everything I wrote above about statistics and drug development is well-known to people who work in drug development or have learned about drug development and how it works. Everything I wrote above about those topics will probably never be known to people with no skin in the game, no knowledge of statistics, and no downside to being wrong. They were wrong yesterday and will be confidently wrong about something else tomorrow.

Knowing what is really true is hard, which is why it took humans so long to build the civilization we have today. Most of our existence has been spent in superstitious blather. That tradition continues in homeopathy, anti-vaxers, and Twitter.

Most people who think they have secret knowledge are deluding themselves.

In some fields, there is a definitively right answer and a definitively wrong answer. When guys wander into these fields and say things that are likely wrong, or at least unwise, there is a tendency, maybe unfair, to denigrate their knowledge in all other fields.

It’s good to know when you’re part of a show and when you’re part of the study of reality… and a lot of guys online don’t distinguish between the two. Trusting noisy Twitter has its dangers.

Update, January 2021, see The most stridently asserted opinions will disappear down the memory hole. 

How I started learning the game and seduction

If there is one thing I have learned about chicks, it’s that most guys lack masculinity and chicks are hungry for masculine guys. So much of “the game” is about how to be a masculine guy. That’s 90% of the game, the rest being logistics, approaching, etc. Chicks yearn to express their essential femininity, but they need a guy w/ masculine polarity to achieve that, and most guys can’t or won’t do that any more.

There are two main ways I can write my early story… one way is to make a “Journey of the mythic hero” story following Joseph Campbell’s schema, which is compelling to readers but, in my case, less honest than the real answer, which is that I’ve learned game/seduction by muddling through, learning bits and pieces of things here and there, and not having real confrontations with demons or the underworld… my story has also been pretty bereft of benevolent helpers (think of the Obi-wan/Yoda role in Star Wars, or Gandalf/Strider in The Lord of the Rings), probably to my detriment. When I was younger, I of course had lots of talks with guys (and some girls) about how to get chicks, date, have sex, etc., but those talks were typical haphazard ignorant bluster, with more myth than reality guiding us. Even the termination of my longest-term relationship was not a very low point, because I had become mentally, logistically, financially, and psychologically ready for it before it happened… I think it was a much lower point for my ex than for me. I also try to keep my material needs restrained, which is a useful way of buying freedom. Every time you spend money, you are also buying your way a bit closer to bankruptcy… I internalized that notion early on, and it has rewarded me. When other guys are spending stupid money to impress chicks… I’m trying NOT to do that.

My origin story doesn’t start with consciously learning seduction and the game, because when I “started” in high school and college The Game didn’t exist and guys like me tried our best more or less on our own, or listening to our friends’s bad seduction advice. I had to try and understand chicks by looking at their (inconsistent) actions and by listening to their (self-justifying, inaccurate) talk. Naturally, I noticed that what chicks said and what they did differed (one example), but I also had bad game with hot chicks and inadvertently good game with so-so chicks. With hot chicks, I’d put myself in the friend zone, orbit for weeks or months at a time, be scared to make a move, be scared to make her mad, agree with everything she said. This worked about as well as you’d imagine.

With so-so girls, though, I’d run hot-cold, be indifferent, be a cocky asshole, etc., and in this way I had more sex and sexual experiences than the average high school guy, although still not a lot (like 6 – 7 total). Big exception to this was one very hot girl toward the end of my senior year of high school who I did my usual orbiting thing with, but she was ready to make sexual debut before college (get some experience under her belt) and, in hindsight, I believe she selected me because I was a pretty safe, pretty okay choice to get some sexual experience with. That was a good read on her part, and we “dated” until we left for separate schools. Often, a guy’s first hot chick relaxes him psychologically, because he realizes that hot chicks are still humans and that, realistically, ten seconds before he blasts in her, how much better is she than a somewhat less hot chick who is still acceptably pretty? Right. Many guys spouting opinions online have only spent significant time with zero or one chick, and it shows. Spend a lot of time with a wide array of chicks and you won’t dislike chicks, who have their own problems, problems a lot of inexperienced guys don’t understand or appreciate.

Hot chicks have insecurities, weaknesses, dreams, desires, etc., just like everyone else, and when you’ve been f**king one for a while, her beauty, while still powerful, is not so overwhelmingly intoxicating. Guys also realize if they can get one hot chick, they can get another. Hot chicks also know, usually subconsciously, that when they date a guy, they are communicating to all other hot chicks, “this one is good.” F**king one hot chick will often lead to f**king the next one.

Today, I’m actually not sure I’m “good” at game… certainly wasn’t in high school. But by the time I was in early college, I knew I needed to make a stronger effort to be more social, and I’ve kind of been doing that ever since, though it’s a fight against some of my natural introvert tendencies. Like any logical guy, I realized that I am not going to get laid by hanging out in my room reading. Beyond that, it’s just been reading, observing, and trying to apply what I read and observe. Starting with The Game, around the time it came out. And The Red Queen. I also paid attention to the world around me… often, the hotter the guy, the better he did, and that kept me into intense physical activity. I read many of the pickup and seduction blogs that appeared after THE GAME… lurking only… I thought about writing one myself but worried, correctly, that it would suck up too much time and affect my work and work habits.

I’m getting out of order. Jumping back in time, before THE GAME, when I started college, I managed to get with a fairly attractive chick pretty quickly, and that introduced me to the idea of network effects, although I didn’t know the term. Today, some of my game is still about networks and network effects… this is why sex clubs and non-monogamy work for me: I can bring in new chicks, which most guys can’t, which gives me status/reputation, so that I can bang more of the high-libido chicks who have already been filtered. In school, the guy who gets the reputation for getting chicks, tends to get more chicks. The more you try, the better you get. Chicks can tell a guy who is good with women from a guy who isn’t. Competence is attractive to chicks, and in some ways I’ve been working on competence my whole life. Competence alone isn’t enough, as nerdy engineer and programmer guys know… it needs to be competence, but also social competence, and chicks today value social competence more than they value being a top engineer.

“Focus on competence” underlies You only see the tip of the spear. And it underlies how it often takes ten years to succeed overnight. The game is not that hard for most guys, but I bring this up because guys who succeed young are usually a) good looking, b) athletic (or musical, or some other talent/skill), c) naturally outgoing, or d) don’t take rejection hard, so they persisted in the face of rejection. When younger, I would spend weeks or sometimes months moping because some hot chick rejected me… I was too dumb to know that I should really thank a chick who firmly rejects me, because I can move on to other chicks. I also thought that if I just showed a chick how much I like and care for her, she would like me back (in fact, the opposite is almost always true). So I had some pathologies and some strengths. The pathologies were sufficient to help me understand many of the problems guys have, and The Red Quest helps address those pathologies.

I was sensitive to rejection when I was younger… I had to get over that. Most guys are rejected by most chicks most of the time. I won’t say I am now absolutely totally immune from the sting of rejection… but I recognize it as part of the process, like the good pain from lifting heavy objects. I also figured out that chicks, particularly young hot chicks, like hot guys, so that kept me involved with various forms of athletics, which are both personally satisfying on a visceral, physical level, and satisfying because the results help attract and retain chicks. It seems like most guys in the game, writing about the game, are cerebral bookworms who don’t get the physical, tangible world. Or those guys aren’t even bookworms and are instead damaged, ignorant men with neither good bodies nor good minds. Chicks are physical, tangible creatures, and they like hot guys both for aesthetics and because they know how guys are better in bed, have good stamina, can throw the chick around, etc. There is the book by Geoffrey Miller, What Women Want, that chicks want a “tender defender:” a guy who is strong and competent, maybe potentially scary to other guys, but who is tender to the individual chick and who uses his strength to gratify her sexually without hurting her physically. Being into sports helps a guy develop into that physically, while also growing him psychologically by putting him into adverse conditions and making him perform.

Over time in college I got a system together for getting with chicks, involving chitchat, social circle questions, and inviting them over for a beer and a movie. Pretty simple, but I racked up a decent number of chicks/lays that way from my late sophomore year on, as I figured out that rejection is okay. I was also working in chick-friendly jobs, so that was a good source of chicks and caused me to write, “Don’t be too eager to get a corporate job and wear a suit [Career][lifestyle].” Most conventional jobs yield very little access to hot chicks and are filled with guys and fat/old women, so, when you’re young, and if you can afford it, you’re not going to be bad off taking jobs in bars/restaurants, tutoring centers, pools, etc. that are likely to yield easy access to lots of hot chicks. Like all college students and 20-something guys I didn’t appreciate that my peers and everyday life brought me into natural contact with tons of young hot chicks, something that stops happening after age 30, when access to young hot chicks has to happen online or with a lot more engineering.

I took a hiatus from game for a long stretch in my 20s, but even during that hiatus I didn’t stop doing sports, I didn’t stop reading, and I was actively working to build my career. Over time I was working to just understand the female mind and understanding how to appeal to chicks. In school I was taught that men and women are the same. To seduction guys, to Red Pill guys reading this now… I’m sure you’re laughing. But I think the same things are taught today. A lot of guys get confused when they find chicks aren’t attracted to the exact same things guys are attracted to, and that chicks have evolved to have somewhat different preferences.

I’ve also had to learn to tame some nerd tendencies, because chicks really do just want to have fun, and if you can be the fun guy, chicks will want to f**k you. I would love to discuss philosophy, books, public policy, theory of the firm, things like that, with chicks, but 98% of chicks don’t want that… chicks just want stories about your life, about her life, interpersonal gossip, personality discussion, flirting. 90% of celebrity gossip is consumed by chicks… look at chick websites and magazines… they’re all about looking cute, gossip, getting a man, etc. So I’ve learned to re-frame my conversational topics… chicks will do some idea talk, but only after a lot of sex and after they’re well into my frame. Brain topics are good once a chick has already decided she likes you sexually. They don’t substitute for visceral attraction. Ideally, I have a couple stories from within the last month or two that will appeal to a chick’s sensibility. About a party, a drama between friends, those kinds of things. What kinds of things I’ve learned. I have “just learned” about massage in a bunch of different months… it’s a handy thing to have “just learned about.” There are others.

Chicks are so heavily into “feelings” and “interpersonal relationships.” Even intelligent/intellectual chicks want to be made to feel feminine by a high-status guy. The number of chicks who are really into abstract/cerebral topics is very small. Smart chicks will want to go there, but after a guy has shown himself to be fun and masculine.

Most chicks LOVE sex but are also kind of afraid of it and guys. It is hard to underestimate the underlying psychological fear inside most chicks’s heads. I try to alleviate it… most chicks are amazed by that effort, because I don’t think most guys “get” how fearful chicks are. Chicks get slut-shamed by society, they are justifiably worried about sexual assault, they are worried about what their friends will think… most chicks love a guy who is sex positive, who doesn’t shame them, who can alleviate their own anxieties. Today that means a guy who can be present and who isn’t on his smartphone 24/7 and who thinks social media is for girls and that what happens online doesn’t matter. I try to get chicks to focus on the here and now and to be as honest with me as they can about what they want sexually. Chicks seem confusing to guys because chicks are also confusing to themselves. Weird, right?

Chicks want to come… they want good sex… they want guys… they just have a biologically wired urge to try and make guys prove themselves, and to put barriers up to sex. I focus on the “chicks want good sex” thing and de-emphasizes the barriers and the nature of female psychosis. Guys who seem to have trouble with chicks reverse those two things… they focus on barriers and competitions, rather than the innate drive to sex.

So I guess “practice” and “trial and error” is a lot of where my “game” came from. And building underlying value, where possible. I’m still building it, in the body and mind. Probably will keep doing it, until I die.

To be me, part of the game is just extending a lot of leads and seeing who’s into it. Being a little bit flirty in a deniable way. Like I said, chicks really do want to be with hot guys who aren’t going to sexually shame the chick… that seems to be pretty rare. I had some problems with internalized feelings of sexual shame around female sexuality when I was younger, but those are absent now.

I have also learned to try and work with my own personality, not against it… that means making my nerdy personality more flirty. Or, and I have used this example before, I’m not musically inclined, so I don’t use playing an instrument and going to concerts/music events in the game, even though those kinds of things seem to work really well for some other guys. I do try to tap into a chick’s dream-state and to get her out of her everyday, logical and stressed-out state.

Along the way I picked up The Game (the book)… I discovered some online writers, many of whom are in the sidebar right now… that gave me a lot more theory, which fed into my practice, and helped me with some sticking points and taught me about ideas like “shit tests” and that sort of thing. I also got more into the idea that it is possible to meet chicks randomly, in a “cold” environment. I built up some “warm” environments for meeting chicks, which helped, but I got a bit better at just chatting up chicks at coffee shops, places like that.

Today, I actually do quite a bit of somewhat “indirect” openers, like with Bike Girl, and am not a big “direct” opener most of the time. This girl was a more direct opener, because of the environment.

Today, I’m also trying to practice the things that I know lead to high value and good outcomes. It seems I am also in a better environment than many guys. Being in a rural or suburban area is poison to game. Being in an urban area with one and ideally two decent bars within walking distance is amazing. Today, some urban areas have hot chicks in them, and universities do, and that’s it. Most chicks don’t take care of themselves and they default to getting fat early. Hot chicks over age 30 are just too rare. The older the guy, the more he has to think about his pipeline for chicks age 20 – 30, who are in prime territory, as he is not likely to default into them. The average chick is also fat and thus invisible to me.

Most guys just don’t go all the way. They can’t or won’t. So they don’t succeed. I am weird because I have gone further and farther than most guys bother. I think I am fairly actualized, as a person… now I am thinking about how to help the next generation become actualized.

I actually think I like the sex-club world because there’s a kind of algorithmic approach to it… you find another couple you like, you chat with them, excuse yourself to get more drinks, and later on you can ask if they want company, then proceed from there.

I write many long posts on many subjects because it’s not possible to answer completely and honestly in shorter spaces. So many guys seem to be giving and taking game advice from Twitter, which has its place, but it’s way too hard to reach the necessary depth in a small number of characters.

I’m not convinced I’m really up there in daygame terms with the advanced guys; I have just figured some stuff out and set up some systems that work for me. The various things I do (online, cold approach, some ecosystem, non-monogamy) work together and complement each other well. I didn’t exactly set out to these things, but they began coming together as I tried out various routes and realized that no single route works best for me. Guys like Krauser and Tom Torero, who seem to only do cold approach… I admire them, but I also lack their tenacity, in some ways. Doing hundreds of truly cold approaches… it seems super time consuming, and I don’t see that many attractive chicks wandering around on a given day. I’m not a great daygamer and would rate my skills as advanced beginner / low intermediate. I just don’t have the practice. I do have expert-level skills in one or two areas (outside of game and women), so I know what expertise feels like. I also know I don’t have that expertise in daygame. I still stumble over words, can’t quite decide what to say/do next, don’t speak fluently, etc. Not all the time; with this chick I was on, granted that she also made it easy and was out to meet guys.

And I’ve definitely hit some pitfalls, especially around 1. One-itis, 2. Expecting chicks to be logical instead of random, and 3. Thinking in my mid-20s that I should somehow find a “good” girl and get settled w/ her. I’ve definitely missed some common pitfalls organically / through luck, most notably marriage, getting fat/complacent, thinking women are angels, and probably one or two others. Even my one-itis problems were less extreme than some guys’s one-itis. Some guys make themselves a random hot chicks bitch for years and years… I didn’t do that, though I have some embarrassing stories from my teens.

People also tend to get out what they put in. People who put in extreme effort, tend to get out extreme results. Those who don’t, don’t. Many hot young chicks don’t put in extreme effort and suffer for their lack of effort as they move through life. Hot chicks who ghost, act bitchy, etc…. that’s an external manifestation of their internal problems. Yes, I would still like to f**k those chicks, but they are the ones who suffer. Trick is to allocate attention correctly.

Like most normal men, I admire guys with deep skills I lack, and that is why I link to many daygamers in the sidebar. The main domain where I have skills/experience most guys seem not to have, or to have developed, is in leveraging the non-monogamy scene in game, so my aim has been to discuss more of that and less of the things I lack expertise in. If I didn’t have some other things going for me, I would probably do a lot more daygame because I would have to.

There is no “moment of clarity” for me. For a lot of guys, that happens because of divorce, because of their one-itis getting banged by some hot guy, because they look in the mirror one day and see a fatass who has been playing video games for the last three years solid, because their “one and only” girlfriend leaves them. I’ve missed most of the very deep bottoms. I like the game because I am curious about how the world works, and because it has taught me things I likely wouldn’t have learned on my own. A couple thousand guys have found this site via search engines, and in that batch I hope there are a couple who have learned how to improve their own lives. We exist on this planet for a very short time, too short to suffer so many bad relationships. But, by historical standards, the world is changing very quickly. From 1900 to 2019 the world has changed in almost unbelievable ways. The things our parents or grandparents did, may not be the right things for us to do.

Most of the “bad” things women do to or with men… are only possible because guys enable them. If a guy withdraws attention and stays away from a woman who is not going where he wants, a lot of the “problems” one reads about will go away. Women thrive on attention.

If I write a book about how to be a man and achieve greater dating success, this post will probably be the introduction. It might be my only other major Red Pill work.

The best books for learning game

Guys should start with Neil Strauss, The Game and Rules of the Game: they’re slightly dated and anything about “negging” should be ignored, at least at first… know that “Negging” is really push-pull or what Torero and Krauser call “fractionation.” The rest of the book is still more right than not, and Neil Strauss is a very good writer… both books are also “mainstream” enough to give to your friends, even as a joke. Neil Strauss describes how he read evolutionary biology books that reinforced and supported the game he was learning. Another early writer is Mystery and his book The Mystery Method also has a lot of present-day applicability. If you are an intermediate or advanced guy, my own free book about sex clubs and non-monogamy is useful and, to my knowledge, original: no one else has covered this subject. But it assumes the guy already has solid game skills.

For clueless guys and even some intermediate guys, it’s helpful to understand biological programming. Whether you want it to or not, biology drives us more than culture. Women don’t have that much choice in who they are attracted to, just like guys don’t. Guys can try to force themselves to be attracted to older or fatter women, but it just doesn’t work, right? The number of 45 or 50 year old women a guy will be attracted to is very close to zero, unless the guy himself is aged 60+. A 22-year-old hottie will make any guy look twice, especially over his 45-year-old wife. Maybe he’ll overcome his primal urge through conscious effort but it will remain. Girls are the same way but their criteria is not exactly the same for reasons that make sense from an evolutionary biology perspective.

I actually don’t think it matters very much where you start with game books, as long as you read a lot and more importantly immediately try to apply what you read. Too much reading in the absence of practice is masturbatory.

What else a guy should read depends on where he starts and what sticking points he has. Guys in high school and college will have different needs and ecosystems than guys who are 30 or 40 or 40+. If guys in high school and college try London daygame cold approach or Strauss-Mystery Method they are going to become weird outcasts quickly. They need more friendship, social circle, and connection techniques. Some techniques and mindsets described by London daygame and Strauss-Mystery are still applicable, but “cold approach” is for big, anonymous cities.

“Sticking points” will occur at different levels. For example the Reddit user MattyAnon suggests The Sex God Method, and that is a good book but will be of less use to very inexperienced guys. For guys who are getting laid but are not skilled or confident enough in bed it will be extremely useful, maybe even essential. The book She Comes First is also useful and extremely recommended. Teenage guys should all be gifted a copy of this book, and even sexual veterans can probably learn a thing or two.

One of the best game posts I’ve read is by Krauser, “Reveal vs Restructure,”

I think it comes down to which side of this divide you fall on. Is your Journey a process of:

* Uncovering a pre-existing SMV and personality that is attractive to women, or;

* Ridding yourself of a Pussy Repellent virus and then building an attractive man from scratch.

A guy who is uncovering preexisting value will be different from a guy who has to build a lot of value. The latter guy may be a fat, psychologically messed up guy who needs to learn how to cook, how to quit eating sugar, how to use the gym, how to move his body, how to dress himself properly and get his clothes tailored, and why he needs to physically move to a city and get out of suburbs or rural areas. He must start now, though results may not come for a very long time. But he has no choice. He must struggle, or pay for it, or be alone. Chicks are savage in their evaluation of men.

Although this isn’t a book, I like the website Good Looking Loser because it’s about an attractive guy overcoming his own psychological barriers, and more attractive guys than you’d think need help with that. Some attractive guys have limiting beliefs and other issues that prevent them from achieving up to their level. The guy who wrote GLL has some problems and limits of his own, which I leave it as an exercise to the reader to spot. Also he advertises a bunch of garbage (“Kratom”) that needs to be ignored.

For books, I wrote about the Torero book Daygame, and that is a good read. Krauser has good books too. There is a purple pill book, Mate, by evolutionary biologist Geoffrey Miller and writer Tucker Max, and I think it’s worth reading as well.

For guys who need help with fitness, Starting Strength is good and so is the 5×5 method or any number of others. The important thing is to start and make some progress, and track progress.

Many people like the Mark Manson book Models. It isn’t my favorite but so many guys like it that I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention it.

Over time it is very important to understand how women think and how women evaluate men. There isn’t a single book that is best for this subject but all of the books recommended will help build this mental map.

My Secret Garden, by Nancy Friday, is all about women’s depraved sex fantasies, so if you have trouble realizing that chicks want to be totally dominated and used hard by the right guy, read it. Women prefer written porn and guys prefer visual porn, so to understand what gets women off you need to read, while also realizing that erotic material has its place but also often differs from real life.

Personally, I used to read a lot more novels than I do now. Great fiction is still wonderful but so much fiction is about people who are psychologically damaged or who are just dumb. For game-aware guys, watching fictional guys step on their dicks is painful. Usually the answer to their dilemmas is “escalate,” “lift,” or “find a new girl.” In most novels the answer is to keep pouring attention into a single hot girl, who by the end of the story comes around, exactly like most girls don’t in real life.

There is still great fiction but it is usually not about relationships… fiction teaches you about how people think and interact, and not reading it is a mistake.

If you haven’t already, on your journey you will learn that there is life beyond game and,  without personality and outside interests, you will never break into the highest girl tier for longer-term relationships, whether open or closed. Sex is like oxygen or water, because when you’re getting enough it recedes in importance, and when you’re not getting enough it becomes the focal point of your entire life (not my original metaphor but it’s a good one). When you’re confident that you can get acceptable sex in a tolerable timeframe your whole outlook changes and that’s what people mean by “abundance mentality.” It’s not just a mentality, it’s a fact of existence. Abundance mentality ensures that no chick can occupy your entire mental space without your consent. There are also “threshold effects” for many chicks, in terms not only of hotness but also, for many, in terms of  interests, psychology, life functioning, etc. If you are an attractive guy with decent game but no other interests, for example, a lot of hot girls who have an IQ threshold or “energy” threshold will not be that into you.

The more you read and learn, the more you will realize how most people, including most girls, are dumb… or if not “dumb,” then they don’t connect their behaviors to their lives. You also learn that almost no one has a complete and total handle on the game and sex. There is always another nuance.