“The Uncensored Truth About Alpha Males” | (#048) The Masculine Psychology Podcast with David Tian

Welcome to the Masculine Psychology Podcast, where we answer key questions in dating, relationships, success, and fulfillment, and explore the psychology of masculinity. Now here’s your host, world-renowned therapist and life coach, David Tian.

David: Welcome to the Masculine Psychology Podcast. I’m David Tian, your host.

This episode and the coming two episodes are all about the one thing that unlocks everything else, and I’m not just talking about your dating success or your relationships success, but more importantly, your happiness, fulfillment, the love in your life, the joy in your life. One thing that would unlock everything else and it will take care of your dating life. It’ll ensure that you have the conditions for a successful relationship. [00:54.3]

In getting this one thing, it will ensure that you access your higher self, your true self, not the parts of you that are anxious or nervous around attractive women or that are lacking confidence, or full of fear and uncertainty—and those are parts of you, if you have experienced those emotions or parts experiencing those emotions, but you also have within you a higher self that is your true self, and you are going to be able to access this true self within you by focusing on this one thing.

This one thing will not just fix your dating life, give you a flourishing social life and bring you happiness, but also enable you to access your higher self, which unlocks the love, joy and connection that can be your daily reality. This, of course, is not to say that life will not throw you challenges and surprises, but you will have the calm and the confidence, and the courage and the creativity, to face them full on, and that’s what this one thing does. [02:02.5]

Okay, hopefully, we will not give away the one thing in the title of this, maybe we will. But, hopefully, that gets you intrigued enough to keep listening. The one thing, the kind of Rosetta Stone of your happiness and success in life, especially with women—because I know many of you have found me by searching on the internet for help with women—but much more than just success in your dating life and in your relationship, which is already huge. Your relationship is a huge factor in your life, and in addition to that, happiness, meaning, love, joy, fulfillment comes from this one thing.

Conversely, if you don’t have it, then you will in the pursuit of all of these things—if you don’t have this one thing, if you haven’t focused on this one thing, then you’re focusing on the wrong thing—and if you don’t focus on this one thing that I’m going to reveal, if you don’t focus on this one thing, in the pursuit of all of these other areas of your life, of dating success, relationships, just success, I guess, worldly success, money, status, power, in the pursuit of anything else important in your life, if you’re not focused on this one thing, if you don’t take care of this one thing, if you don’t have this one thing, then you will end up losing your mental health. [03:16.0]

You will end up sabotaging your long-term enjoyment of any success that you attain. You will also lose any sense of calm and a deep abiding inner confidence in facing the challenges of life. If you don’t focus on this one thing, you’ll end up losing your soul, so to speak. You’re going to lose your happiness. You’re going to self-sabotage, and you’ll feel exhausted and tired if you don’t have this one thing taken care of in the pursuit of any success in any other area, this one thing.

Okay, have I got your interest? Have I piqued your interest? For the first several years and maybe the first decade of my work as a coach, I was focusing on helping men with their dating lives, and as I’m trying to pivot into more of a mental health angle or helping you with therapeutic issues, I know that a big part of my audience is still responding to the dating content. [04:13.8]

Now, I could take any area of life and use that as the entryway to introducing the one thing, but I’m going to take dating specifically addressing men, and, hopefully, this will resonate with you. There is a big myth when it comes to men trying to figure out what to do to succeed with women in a casual dating or even in a dating contact leading to a committed relationship, and this myth is all about the alpha versus the beta male, and I’ll call it the “alpha myth.”

It’s a myth not because there isn’t a concept of alpha that could make sense. The myth is that thinking about whether your alpha or not is going to help you. It doesn’t help you. The very fact that you are wondering whether you are alpha or beta, or being concerned about whether you’re alpha or being afraid of not being alpha, shows, proves that you’re not alpha on any reasonable definition of that term. [05:19.6]

Worrying about whether you’re alpha and not beta, and trying to obviously be alpha and not beta in order to attract women, feeds into the core insecurities that will ensure that you’re not attractive. That will guarantee that you’re not alpha.

There is a way in which applying the concept of the alpha male to the dating context, to the dating world, the modern dating world that you are living in right now, there’s a way in which that could make sense and it might even be helpful. But worrying about it, using that as a guiding question is self-sabotage that will guarantee that you don’t become it. [06:05.7]

It’s sort of like when you’re driving. Worrying about not hitting that barrier will maybe not guarantee, but will make it a lot more likely that you’re going to hit that barrier. Hopefully, you’ve taken some driving classes so you know what I’m talking about. I know that in some expensive cities now with the prevalence of Uber, maybe you don’t drive if you’re younger, but hopefully, you know what I’m talking about. When you’re driving, you want to look where you want to go, not what you want to avoid, and that barrier, that construction obstacle that you want to avoid in the middle of the road, that is, in this analogy, worrying about that category, whether you’re alpha or beta.

So, there is a way in which it could make sense, this concept or category of alpha versus the category of beta when applied to modern dating, and like I said, I’m going to be using this worrying about whether you’re alpha or beta as an entryway into revealing the one thing that unlocks all the other good stuff, not just dating success, but happiness, fulfillment, joy, love, and meaning in life. [07:14.3]

So, what is this thing, the alpha male? Obviously, this category is taken from evolutionary biology. One of the earliest uses of the term in a scientific context suggesting it could be applied to human interactions is in Frans de Waal’s work. He’s famous for the work on chimpanzees in the ’80s. In fact, there’s a book that he published in 1982 called Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex among Apes. I highly recommend Frans de Waal’s work, especially The Age of Empathy and his work on ethics and how this connects to ethics. In a way, it’s ironic that he introduced this usage and applied it to human interactions and having it warped in such a major way. [07:59.2]

This category of the alpha male fits very comfortably in studies of animals like chimpanzees, gorillas, lions. You name it, right? This is about mating opportunities and the alpha male is the one who has the most mating opportunities. If you cash it out any other way, it would be preposterous.

Imagine a so-called alpha male who doesn’t mate with any of the women. He’s just, I don’t know, the biggest guy, pounding his chest, and meanwhile, none of the women pay him any attention and there’s some other dude who is having all the sex and all the babies. You wouldn’t call that dude who is just posturing, just because he’s the biggest guy, the alpha male. That’s not how that term would be used in the study of animals or in evolutionary biology. In terms of evolution, what our genes care most about is replication, reproduction, and survival insofar as it keeps us around so that we can reproduce. [08:59.6]

From an evolutionary standpoint, our genes would prefer that we mate, where I’m going to have five children and die at 30 than to live to 100 and have no children, from our genes perspective, from the evolutionary perspective, because no matter how long we live, if we don’t reproduce, then our genes die. This is kind of the whole point of The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins’s work there.

Then the debate like Frans de Waal—if you don’t know his name, Frans, F-R-A-N-S, de Waal, D-E W-A-A-L—argues against Dawkins about the mechanism that’s used, whether, for instance, empathy and alliances are more important than full-on conflict or domination. But the outcome is still the same. The desired outcome is more reproductive success. In terms of evolution, the alpha male is the one who has the most reproductive success. [09:55.5]

Okay, so far so good, I hope. If you’re following along, this is just, I don’t know, biology or evolution 101. The alpha male is the one with the greatest mating opportunities and let’s just run through some of these. One of the things that I’m going to point out right from the beginning is, especially in our human modern context, it’s not even so much mating opportunities, but that the females choose him, choose to meet with him willingly.

If it was unwilling, and this is something that might seem preposterous, but I think we have to pause on this because it might deter some incels or it might deter some people who could potentially become incels by recognizing the importance of female choice. It’s the females who dictate, decide, through a kind of unconscious voting, which male is the alpha, which male would have the most mating opportunities.

Maybe there’s an equal number of them at the top, alpha males at the top, but commonly there is a peak to the hierarchy and it’s the females who choose, who determine that through their choice, because if it was purely mating opportunities, then you could be an alpha male by just raping women. Simply, if you were just the alpha male, that would just mean that you’re the biggest rapist, right? [11:15.0]

Because if all it meant was that you were popping out babies, then, first of all, there are some guys who have hundreds of kids through donating their sperm at sperm banks. In that sense, they are the alpha males of humankind, just purely based on that. But there it wasn’t that the women chose him specifically, though maybe he did have a nice profile or something in the book, so they chose him. That’s an outlying content. I mean, that is only because of modern technology that we’d have that kind of outlier case.

But notice it is females choosing not just rapists, the biggest serial rapist. It wouldn’t be, in any kind of sense, that that would be worth emulating or aspiring to, I hope, in that sense of alpha male or worrying if your alpha versus beta could not really be, worrying whether you’re a rapist or a guy who doesn’t get to have sex. [12:06.0]

So, clearly, you want to have female choice, right? Right off the bat, you notice that it’s females choosing, and that’s an important element to just recognize that it is subjective and relative. Who is or qualifies to be an alpha male, at any given time, is contingent on the women, the females choosing, and that means that it tracks female choice and that means that you have to understand female choice.

I’ve done a ton of videos and episodes, and a lot of my bigger dating courses begin by just breaking down what women want. It’s really important to be tracking that, so you know that. If you care about things like alpha versus beta, I will be pointing out the one thing that you should really be focusing on, not this, but I’m going to be using this super-common debate and worry that it seems like a lot of young men have to steer them into understanding why that one thing is far more important, in fact, is necessary to focus on if you want long-term lasting success with women and in your relationship. [13:17.8]

When I’m saying mating opportunities, the assumption is that opportunities given by or granted by or allowed by those females themselves. The females are the ones that are choosing. It’s not just that you’re taking the mating opportunities that aren’t given to you through rape or some form, something like that. It can’t be that the alpha is just the biggest rapist. I hope you understand that and I’m just going to move on.

The real alpha isn’t the one who has just lorded it over by physically dominating the females, though you might decide that that’s the way you’re going to go. Then, I don’t know, maybe you still listen to the episode and this podcast, and maybe I can help you, but I hope that society constrains you and prevents you from doing harm. [14:08.3]

But, hopefully, you’re a lot more attracted to the concept of the alpha male, who is the alpha male because of who is given mating opportunities by the females because they choose to do so. Then now, with that as the basis, what does make a male, an alpha male? In other words, what does make a male, the one that the majority or the most females choose out of all the other males?

I’m going to be going one by one through the most common factors that are cited, especially on the internet, especially by guys who are obsessed with whether they’re alpha or beta, and then the ones who are obsessed with alpha or beta you know are not alpha, but then also the ones who then theorize about all these other bullshit categories like gamma. What are these? Omega. I can’t remember. They’re filling in all these other things that are just unscientific, just to kind of nerd out on something that is not going to help them, because of their own frustrations of not being what they consider to be alpha. [15:09.4]

Just with that as an aside, going back to just alpha versus beta and having that make sense or making sense of that category of alpha, as the one with the or given the most mating opportunities, what are some of the common conditions? One is money. A lot of guys think the richest guy is the alpha male and that couldn’t be the case because of—I’ll just throw a counterexample out at you—the pool boy.

Maybe you can already know where I’m going to go with this, but you can imagine a beautiful woman marries a rich guy and this rich guy is so busy at work making riches that he leaves her at home bored, bored housewife, the bored hot housewife. Then, of course, they have a pool and this strapping young pool boy comes over to clean the pool in his swimsuit, and she’s eyeing him and thirsting after him, and there you go. He gets the mating opportunities while this guy who works so hard, day in, day out, doing 80 hour weeks to afford her this lifestyle, makes all this money, and yet the pool boy swoops in and gets the mating opportunities, chosen. The female chooses him. [16:19.4]

But, of course, that’s just the mating. That’s the sex. There’s totally the other question of the person who’s going to support her lifestyle financially. I mean, literally he’d be the cuckolded one. The cuckold couldn’t be the alpha, right? In this case, this scenario, the pool boy has won the mating opportunities and his genes will be passed down.

I mean, you could even just work this out. Maybe he has sex with her once a month or something because he is so busy and she keeps making excuses. In the meantime, pool boy comes over every day and they go at it and they have a long affair, and so you just see that the likelihood of him actually being the one who passes down his genes. [17:02.4]

In terms of mating opportunities freely given, can’t be money. How about status? A lot of people say status is all and, actually, there is a lot of scientific evidence for status being maybe one of the biggest predictors for male attractiveness, and, certainly, it is an important factor. Actually, all of the ones that are brought up are factors in explaining male attractiveness, and short-term mating and long-term mating opportunities. But could this be used to define alpha male, status?

My friend, Mark Manson, in his book Models for men and helping them with dating, in his first chapter, he cashes this out as status being the most important factor, but that we’ve evolved to have another factor, that women have evolved to, since they can’t immediately ascertain status, they instead look to his behavior to determine his status. But, in any case, it ends up being status. So, what about status, the alpha male as the one with the highest status? [18:10.5]

Setting aside the fact that status is incredibly subjective and there are many different hierarchies and so on of status, a high-status person in a country club will be a low-status person in an inner-city gangster land or something like that. You can see how subjective it all is, but let’s go with that. Let’s say we can imagine a king. This is unequivocal high status, a king in imperial times. He has the greatest status in his kingdom. He’s literally the king of his kingdom.

Now imagine this king has a hero. I don’t know, let’s fill it like King Solomon with 300 wives, 700 concubines. If he had sex with one woman every day, it would take him over three years to get to every single woman in his harem. That’s literally what the Bible says that King Solomon had. [19:01.0]

Now imagine, because he can only get to them once a year, this king, unless incredibly like he had did nothing else during the day in his ruling and just had sex, maybe he could fit in two or three or more women in one day, but let’s just assume he’s got 1,000 women in his harem, and imagine a Don Juan.

In fact, there’s a famous movie, starring Johnny Depp and Marlon Brando, and Johnny Depp is very much in the news these days, Don Juan DeMarco. If you’re a guy who wants to get better with women, I highly recommend this movie. It’s highly entertaining, but it is also a brilliant depiction of a certain type of an archetype of a seducer that Johnny Depp does very well and very naturally.

Anyway, there’s a scene in it, in that movie, where Johnny Depp is in the harem. He has snuck in as Don Juan into the emperor or the king’s harem and there are 100 naked women in that scene. The interviewers asked him what it was like to shoot that scene and he was saying that eventually they all just blurred after a few takes to just masses of flesh, but he was focused on his acting, I suppose. [20:05.8]

Anyway, returning to the counter example, Don Juan in the harem of this king, who has the highest status, but he can’t get to them. Meanwhile, Don Juan all day long is just screwing because these are bored women. This is the stereotype that I’m setting up and I wonder if somebody should do a King Solomon in the harem. I don’t know if anyone has done that, fiction or a movie, life from the perspective of the women in King Solomon’s harem, what that must have been like.

Anyway, there’s this Don Juan and he’s sneaking around, and the women love him because he’s fun, and, besides, they’re locked in this harem, so they have eunuchs patrolling them and whatever guards. They can’t leave and they can only play with themselves, and it’s just all girls, all women. So, here’s Don Juan and he fits in with them. Actually, this is the rake character, the rake who sneaks in through the bedroom windows of the maidens and all that. He’s on the rooftops at night and they open or they leave their windows open for him, hoping that he’ll come by and that kind of thing, and here’s Don Juan. [21:11.7]

Now, Don Juan’s status is low because he is like Aladdin, right? He’s like a street thug kind of thing. Now I’m moving away from the classic Don Juan, but you can imagine this street kid, but who’s just really comfortable around femininity and sexuality, and is randy, and is young and horny and can keep it up.

As they depict in the movie, Don Juan Demarco having sex with three or more women a day and eventually is exhausted after a year or something like that of that activity, and gets into that bedroom and collapses on the bed. The concubine is so disappointed, like, Oh no, what’s wrong with you. It’s my turn. And here’s Don Juan. In terms of an evolution, if we cash it out as mating opportunities given to him by females, Don Juan wins over the king. [22:04.5]

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Now, the king could, if he chose to, do the same thing, but the very nature of his status prevents it. In order for him to keep his status, he’s busy. Now, the one who ends up with the most reproductive success could easily be Don Juan and that messes up status, right? Because he has no status or he has low status. Status, defined in any reasonable way, status in terms of a hierarchy in society, you’d have to really warp the meaning of status in order to give this little Aladdin street thug kid who snuck into the harem, high status over the king or equal status to the king. In any case, status alone can’t be it because of this Don Juan in the harem counter example.

Okay, if it’s not money and it’s not status, then maybe it’s physical prowess. Physical prowess, I use this, kind of this odd term, “prowess”, to refer to anything like strength, speed, whatever physicality or physical abilities, or skills or capacities, or features. You want to pick out the physical part of it, and so physical prowess. [23:55.7]

Maybe it’s that, and I, in my research on this just before I pressed record, I came across a clip of a Joe Rogan podcast where Joe Rogan was focusing on the big strong guy and that would be what an alpha refers to. I guess in the background, the assumption is that that would be what would give or bring the most mating opportunities. So, physical prowess, sure.

If you’re just thinking about animals, then maybe you think it’s just physical prowess, and probably in many cases, it is. In the animal kingdom, it tracks who ends up becoming alpha because the males fight each other physically for access to the females and for mating.

What about it now applied to much more intelligent animals, us, human beings? You can imagine this one is going to be pretty easy if you think about it, the male bimbo. Of course, here’s the guy who’s got tons of physical prowess, the biggest, strongest, fastest, athlete, whatever, and for all of these, money, status, physical prowess, intelligence, all that, there are always going to be women who have a fetish for it for whatever reasons from their upbringing or whatnot. [25:07.1]

But, normally, if you think about just a guy who has got all this physical prowess, but he’s a bimbo or he’s flat in his personality, it’s got no sense of humor or he’s just cruel—he likes to kick puppies in the face, for instance—that wouldn’t be attractive, would it, to women?

Now, you might not know about women,, because I realize there are young men who might be now veering toward incel land or isolated from women that they can talk to that they may think, Yeah, that’s what women want, but they don’t. Obviously, it’s like you get the male bimbo, and, I suppose, if all she wanted to do was get off, and instead of using a vibrator or dildo or something, she’d just use a guy with six-pack abs or something, okay. But, ordinarily, she doesn’t want just a dummy, like in many senses of the term, a dummy. So, is that all that women want, a male bimbo? [26:04.8]

Now, you could test this out in the nightclub, and if you’ve been to enough of these mating ritual type of venues, maybe now post-pandemic, nightclubs will open up again, but you can go to the bar and you can see that, in every case, the tough, just the guy with the best body, if he just stands there, women might come over and start talking to him. But unless he has a personality to match, they’re going to be turned off pretty quickly.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed this yet and maybe you’re one of those guys who spends 90 percent of your time in terms of improving yourself and to improve your dating opportunities, you spend 90 percent of your time on the fitness aspect of it, and then you just get into the bar club and you just stand there with your tight T-shirt, just expecting now that all of that hard work will pay off just because you look hot now—and then, guaranteed, you are disappointed to find out that you will need to open your mouth because she asks you questions or she begins to talk to you. [27:03.2]

If your personality doesn’t match, she might be just so drunk and horny and it’s the end of the night that she’ll just be like, Okay, you’ll do, but that’s because she’s bringing her standards down and compromising her standards in that moment, and just wanting you to shut up so she can get off, right? That is actually not going to be attractive.

Now, all of these things, in and of themselves, can make you more attractive or more appealing as a mate, money, status, physical prowess—no doubt, especially physical prowess. I mean, all things considered, it’d be better to have a hotter body than not, but that can’t be the only thing the alpha male is referring to because you’ve got the male bimbo and, hopefully, that’s easy to understand.

If it’s not money, if it’s not status, it’s not physical prowess, what about intelligence? Okay, this should be easy to dispose of, but I know some people who maybe are stuck in like Silicon Valley where that’s like the alpha nerd or something. But, hopefully, you know that until very recently, until the Mark Zuckerberg type of phenomena happened, the smart guy was just the nerd. Famous movies, Revenge of the Nerds 1, 2, 3, 4, whatever, right? [28:12.7]

The nerd in that context became attractive only because it tracked money or the potential to make money, and there might be female nerds who are thirsting after the power and the money for themselves, and so they’re using him, this nerd, as a proxy to get that for herself. But, clearly, intelligence on its own can’t be what would determine whether he’s alpha.

Okay, now this is the easiest thing. Just put them all together, right? The guy who has the most of all of these different qualities I’ve just mentioned, money, status, physical prowess, and intelligence, put it all together and he would be the one who is the alpha.

Now, finally, we get to the one thing because the one thing will point out to the counterexample to that, this combination of money, status, physical prowess, intelligence, and pretty much anything else you can come up with that’s not the one thing. [29:05.1]

I can just think of a counterexample for you. I don’t know, maybe you can write it in the comments or something, or maybe you can exercise your own creativity, and just notice once you understand the one thing, how you can find a counterexample to anything else that would be a factor in determining whether somebody’s alpha, given, again, it’s subjective and relative, so given what we know about the history of female choices for mating opportunities.

There’s one more factor that is cited. Before I just tell you what the one thing is, this is an important factor, because it was, in fact, originally how the term “alpha” was being applied to humans. In 1999, in a Time magazine article, a journalist was using the term “alpha” to refer to then presidential candidate, Al gore. I’ll quote this. I found this on the internet. “Wolf has argued internally that Gore is a ‘Beta male’ who needs to take on the ‘Alpha male’ in the Oval Office before the public will see him as the top dog.” [30:03.3]

Okay, very resonant references there, and, of course, what’s beta and alpha here are not defined and there are a ton of connotations that this person is just assuming will get triggered in our heads, and then uses the term “top dog” to just kind of end it off and make sure that we’re looking at it in that way. But in what ways are the terms “alpha” and “beta” meant here in saying that Gore is about beta male who needs to take on the alpha male in the oval office before he’s seen as the top dog.

Whatever this is, kind of like a political influence or maybe, broadly speaking, a kind of power here, what would make [an alpha male]? Maybe that. That would be the alpha male, the one with the most political clout or influence. Okay, so I’ll just put that out there and then I’ll also put out there the combination of these other factors, overall, on average, the one with the most money, status, physical prowess, intelligence, throw in anything else that you like, funny, good-looking, fashion sense. I don’t know, whatever else you think. He’s a hardworking, ambitious and industrious person, whatever. [31:11.8]

Throw all those things in there that evolutionary psychology puts out there as things that women are looking for, but that, commonly, men are focused on the easy ones, the visible ones, money, status, physicality, intelligence, and we’ll throw in political influence, political power. Maybe you can dominate other men. You can bully other men like a top dog would, ruff-ruff and make the other men go and hide in the corner so that you can have the mating opportunities. Maybe you don’t understand, maybe you think very lowly of women like an incel or Red Pill would and think women are just animals and they only go after mean bullies, right? Maybe that’s the case. Is that what an alpha is? [31:56.5]

Again, alpha is determined by female choice, right? Again, the alpha male is the one with the most mating opportunities given to him by females. Then the question is what are the features that females are looking for consciously or unconsciously to give mating opportunities?

Just before I reveal the one thing, let’s recap here. The alpha male is not the one with the most money. The alpha male is not the one with the most status. The alpha male is not the one with the most physical prowess. The alpha male is not the most intelligent one, and I’m about to argue and show you, the alpha male is also not the one with the most political power or dominance over other males.

So, what is the thing that females choose in a man to give him a mating opportunity? Hopefully, now I’ve said this enough times to explain to you what an alpha is. The alpha male is the one that is given the most mating opportunities by the females, and, hopefully, now if you’ve been following the podcast, you would know where that factor is. [33:01.0]

Now, let’s take, you can take any one of these or all the combination of them, or let’s focus on the political power. Let’s just start with that, political power. Imagine a guy. He’s the president. Now imagine the president and you can see, okay, president, he’s sexy, I don’t know. He’s the president because he is the alpha of America. All the American women would want to have sex with him because he’s the king of the kingdom of America, and so immediately that would be ridiculous because he’s 80-something years old right now and all of these other things, once you think of the specific person.

But, okay, let’s say he’s the king. He’s the mythical king of America, right? So, he has the most political power. Imagine this king. Okay, let’s put it all together. Immediately, let’s say, he’s the richest person in the kingdom. There’s no Elon Musk. Let’s go back to imperial times. The king is the richest. He’s also the highest status. He also has, of course, the greatest political power. Let’s say there’s no Iago whispering into his ear and undermining him. Let’s just say that he has the political power to banish anyone from the kingdom. [34:01.8]

Let’s make it, he’s the most physically powerful dude in the kingdom as well. Maybe he’s like Genghis Khan, a warrior, like an early or young Genghis Khan, I don’t know. So, he has got physical prowess as well and he’s the most intelligent. Okay, now he’s really stretching it. He’s a combination of, I don’t know, the Hulk, Captain America and Iron Man. Plus, he’s the king of the kingdom in imperial times. 

Wouldn’t that guy be the alpha male? Okay, great, that guy sounds awesome, whoever that superhero is. Let’s imagine this Ultraman. Let’s call him Ultraman. This Ultraman, imagine him needy. The Ultraman has a date with the hottest woman in the kingdom and he’s texting her. “Hey, when are we meeting? We meet at 7:00, right? I said 7:00,” and she doesn’t reply.

I don’t know, 6:45 rolls around and he’s getting nervous. Let’s say, he’s pulling out his phone. “Hey, are we meeting up or what?” He starts sending his minions over to her home or something to fetch her and she’s not at home, and now he’s sweating it. He’s like, Oh, damn, oh, no, this is the one woman. This is the Cleopatra. This is the siren. This is the, I don’t know, the Marilyn Monroe. I’m just making up the ideal, whatever female archetypes of powerful women who lorded it over powerful men. [35:13.4]

He’s like, Oh, I have a harem, but I want this woman, and he’s needy. Finally, she shows up at 7:30 and he’s like, Oh … He’s really angry, but he hides it because he doesn’t want to look unattractive, doesn’t want her to see his anger or his annoyance or frustration, because he likes her so much. He plans out this whole evening. All she’s got to do is show up late, but he’s done all this work of planning it and everything, and she’s mildly pleased by it and so on.

The date ends and he tries to make a move, so to speak, and she pushes him away and says, “I don’t kiss on the first date,” or whatever. It makes him sweat, and here’s the president, the king, the emperor, the whatever, and he’s needy, the needy alpha male. [36:01.0]

Now, hopefully, you’ve studied attraction long enough that you understand this example that no matter how you dress him up, the needy guy is still unattractive, and the needier you are, the more unattractive you are. It doesn’t matter how much money you have. There are tons of needy rich guys with women who have them wrapped [around their finger], these rich guys wrapped around their finger.

Same with guys who think that their status matters. They come in there thinking, I’m the highest status here, get out of my way, and she doesn’t budge. She doesn’t give a damn about his status, and if he becomes needy, right? If he’s non-needy with status, then we’re good. Not because of his status, but because of his non-neediness.

If you add in neediness to any other factor, any other ingredient, it destroys. It undermines. It ruins it, pollutes it. The needy tough guy, right? Tough physically, right? Not tough emotionally, clearly, here, or he could be tough emotionally in, I don’t know, the military context, but then when it comes to women, he’s a needy guy. His neediness is what tracks his attractiveness, right? [37:09.0]

That’s why the Don Juan can be attractive with no status. That’s why the pool boy can be attractive with no money, right? Because he doesn’t give a fuck, and then you can add in anything else that might help him with that, looks or something. But you could have a good-looking pool boy who is incredibly needy and she would not do it with him, or at least, she would not be attracted. She’d have to be really desperate to do it with him.

But if there’s a pool boy who is not needy, and when you’re not needy, then what you are naturally, the natural parts of you, the way you naturally are, comes out. A lot of guys think, I’m naturally shy, beaten down, introverted, depressed. You’re not. You can see that in little children when they’re playing.

I have an infant son and watching him, and we have families that we met in our birthing class and all of our kids are roughly the same age because we went through the same birthing class, and you’re seeing all these other kids who are just effervescent. They just do whatever. They’re shouting. They’re screaming. They have no social barriers yet until they’re told to behave, your inside voice and all that stuff. [38:12.4]

But they’re just playing and no sense of these other boundaries and they’re just immersed in flow in their play, or in their discomfort or something, just immersed in the whole thing of life, experience of life. It’s only when life gets to you or trauma happens to you, or repeated many traumas condition you, that you end up becoming the shy, awkward, depressed, anxious little boy, and that little boy then grows up with those same mechanisms. Then that boy, that man thinks that he is that way naturally. He’s not. You’re not. [38:48.8]

The way that you are naturally is spontaneous and playful, and adventurous and creative, and open to new experiences and exploring. It would’ve had to be life in some painful ways to have forced you into that beaten-down state, and Ernest Becker in his The Denial of Death puts it really well that the unconflicted man is the leader of the primal horde.

What that means is that the one who doesn’t have these restrictions on the inside of how he needs to be is unconflicted. He doesn’t have any parts warring with each other. He’s just integrated. He’s just unconflicted, and as a result, he’s able to lead. The one who is the most unconflicted would’ve been the leader of the first horde. The unconflicted man is the non-needy man. Hence, he is the alpha, the original alpha, the alpha alpha.

So, this one thing turns out to be neediness, and non-neediness will determine your attractiveness to women, and women unconsciously choose, sometimes consciously, if they’re self-aware, choose men who are non-needy, and the more non-needy you are, the more attractive you are as a man, and the needier, you are the less attractive you are as a man. [40:11.0]

Okay, David, then how do I become non needy? That is the subject of the next episode. Just to recap, understanding the proper use of the term “alpha male” from evolutionary biology, from zoology, we see that the alpha male is the one who is given by females the most mating opportunities. The alpha male is not necessarily the one with the most money, not the one with the most status or physical prowess or intelligence, or political power or social dominance. 

It turns out that the alpha male, because the alpha male is the one that females choose to give the mating opportunities, in other words, they’re attracted to him, the alpha male is the one who’s the most non-needy and is himself, expressing himself, because he is not altering how he is in order to please others. He’s not looking to others to meet his own needs. He’s able to meet his own needs himself. [41:14.2]

If instead of focusing on whether you’re needy and going through the therapeutic work to become non-needy by being able to meet your own needs yourself, instead of focusing on that, the one thing, neediness, instead of focusing on that, you focus on being whether you’re alpha or beta, you’re going to be guaranteeing that you sabotage yourself in the long run.

You will lose your mental health, even if you were to succeed getting that short-term goal of the money or the success, or the women or whatever it is. You will lose your mental health. You will sabotage your ability to enjoy, in the long term, the success that you have. You will also prevent yourself from experiencing lasting love, happiness, fulfillment, or deeper meaning in life, if you don’t have that one thing handled. [42:08.0]

Now, if you have the one thing handled, in other words, you’re able to meet your own needs in yourself, then along the way, first of all, by definition, you’ll have met your own needs, your own needs for love, connection. Your needs for love, connection, worthiness, fun, play, fulfillment, happiness, joy, and meaning in life. If you’re able to meet those needs, then in other words, you’ll have those needs met.

In addition, you’ll be optimally attractive to women and that’s all from just tracking one thing, because I know guys who are trying to become more attractive, have all of these areas of a long checklist of things that they have to do in order to be worthy of their ideal woman and this is like a multi-year plan that they have to implement. [43:00.0]

Some of them or many of them might be good things, healthy things like meditation, working out. Some of them might be learning conversation and humor. They might be going through multiple video courses all the time, all in an effort to make themselves better, to improve themselves, develop themselves, without realizing that if they don’t learn how to meet their own needs, if they don’t do the therapeutic work, which is really just a shift in perspective to seeing themselves as not okay to be able to see themselves and fully accept how they are right now and that it’s okay. From there, the growth is natural and effortless, but if it’s coming from a place of not accepting yourself, you’ve already polluted it. You’ve already begun to sabotage it. This project of finding happiness and love and meaning. 

If you just focus on this one thing instead, your needs and neediness, guaranteed, if you just focus on the one thing, you will have to unlock your true self. You’ll have to get to know the parts of you that are needy and learn how to meet their needs. [44:06.6]

First of all, you have to find what their needs are and build a relationship with them, because that will be a prerequisite for meeting those needs, and that whole journey, that beautiful, enjoyable, deep, meaningful journey, is what will not only make you attractive and as alpha as you’ll get. But in addition, it will give you all the good stuff on top of that that you’ll discover is far more important and rewarding.

You might be wondering, How do you do this, David? Come back to the next episode because that’s what it’s all about. We’ll see you in the next episode. If you like this, please share it with anyone that you think would benefit from it. I’d love to get your feedback on it. Put a comment in wherever you’re hearing this, and thank you so much for listening. I look forward to interacting with you and welcoming you to the next episode. David Tian, signing out. [44:54.4]

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