White Knight Narcissism

• The main points of Rollo Tomassi’s book, “The Rational Male” are analyzed by David Tian Ph.D. and Steve Mayeda.
• David Tian Ph.D. and Steve Mayeda explore the characteristics of White Knights and compensatory narcissists.
• Some men become Red Pills, David Tian Ph.D. and Steve Mayeda explain why they fall into this path.
• There are problematic issues regarding the Iron Rules of Tomassi, David Tian Ph.D. and Steve Mayeda point them out.
• In this Man Up episode, David Tian Ph.D. and Steve Mayeda states out what you can do to achieve real and lasting happiness.

David Tian: Hypergamy and codependence, because he makes a list of what hypergamy doesn’t care about. This is on my version page 135. Hypergamy doesn’t care about boom, right? So, a lot of these lists of things hypergamy doesn’t care about is actually a list of things codependent narcissists use to bargain and earn affection. Their list of what white knights do to — you know, their sacrifices to earn affection.

So, in case you’re not clear on what a white knight actually is, this Rational Male is a great depiction and demonstration of what a white knight actually is. This is what like an advanced white knight who’s been white knighting for decades would say. So, on page 135, he says, “Hypergamy doesn’t care how you rearrange your college majors and career choice in life to better accommodate her.” Oh my god. “Hypergamy doesn’t care how inspired or fulfilled you feel as a stay-at-home dad.”

Steve Mayeda: I mean, he did all that and he feels ashamed about it.

David Tian: Right. “Hypergamy doesn’t care that you moved across four states to accommodate your long-distance relationship. Hypergamy doesn’t care how supportive you’ve always been of her decisions or if you identify as a male feminist.” I’m going to throw one in there because it’s so funny. I’ve worked with so many nice guys over the years.

So, hypergamy doesn’t care that you drove 40 minutes to give her chicken soup but she wouldn’t open the door, so you left it on the porch and rang the doorbell. Like, hypergamy doesn’t care about your nice guy bullshit where you’re trying to earn her affection and love by doing shit and guilt tripping her into being good to you and giving you a blowjob, right?

Hypergamy doesn’t care how you funded her going back to college to find a more rewarding career. Hypergamy doesn’t care how great a guy you are for adopting the children she had with other men. Hypergamy doesn’t care about your divine and forgiving nature and excusing her youthful indiscretion. So like, this is like saying, “I’m a good person. Why aren’t you good to me? I’m damn good.”

So, all of more of moral philosophy would say, “If that’s your view and that’s your motivation for being good, you’re not actually good. You’re just fake good.” And there’s a whole spinning plates thing by the way, which you haven’t got to yet. The fear and insecurity of the spinning plates strategy of, “I can’t put all my chips in one woman because, oh my gosh, she could just totally kill me emotionally. So, I’ve got to spread my neediness around to multiple women.” Right? “So, I’m going to be an emotional vampire of multiple women and protect my own feelings.”

Yeah, that’s coming out of the fear and insecurity. Hypergamy is about the fact that this is a biological imperative in women that they cannot resist. So, this is departing from all of the philosophy that I had mentioned earlier, because all the philosophy, which is moral philosophy from the very beginning, for over 2,500 years, has already come to terms with this. Where is the morality? Where’s goodness?

The answer is you need to resist. We human beings have a need for self-restraint, just as children do. They need to learn limits. And when you can say, “No, I’m not going to have that extra Ben and Jerry’s ice cream even though I really want it,” and that’s you resisting a biological impulse, now you’ve graduated to a healthier adult from your child state.

But what they’re saying is with hypergamy, it seems, with what they’re saying, is that women don’t — they’re unable to resist that. When he says that — well, he says they’re capable, but it will eventually drag them under. So, it’s sort of like they’re saying, “All women, on the analogy, have an eating disorder.” Like, they can’t resist the Ben and Jerry’s even though there’s a part of them that says, “This isn’t good for me.” And they just eat it.

And that’s not true. And it’s really — I can understand where it’s coming from because it’s coming out of the fear and insecurity of a closeted white knight.

Masculinity for the Intelligent Man. I’m David Tian, PhD and this is Man Up!

Welcome to the Man Up show. I am David Tian, PhD, your host, and I’m happy to be joined by Steve Mayeda, my guest. Hey, Steve.

Steve Mayeda: Yeah. Yeah. What’s up man? How are you?

David Tian: Hey, doing great. Alright guys. So, this is the sequel to our original — I think it was a week or so ago, a couple weeks, red pill analysis. And the first show was more about sharing our personal background and experiences with the red pill. And this one is much more of a dissection of the arguments. And it will be kind of critical at first, but this is the more thinking part of the two-part sequence. And Steve Mayeda is joining us from the US. I’m in Taiwan right now. How you doing, Steve?

Steve Mayeda: Fabulous, man. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. You know, if you guys are watching this via my feed or something like that, David’s an awesome dude. And I was so excited when he asked me — he asked me like a couple months ago about doing this research on the red pill and I like went crazy with it. And it’s something that I’ve really avoided because I generally disliked the people involved in it.

But in all of that, it was really refreshing to read a lot of it because, for lack of a better term — and man, hear me out, don’t shut this off right away because hopefully will go into it pretty deep, but it’s actually less thought out than I thought. Man, I think a lot of guys could waste a lot of time with it.

I get the whole reasoning behind it, and men are in pain, and our culture has a lot of problems. There’s problems with feminism, and women, and all this sort of stuff, but the red pill solution is just — there’s no experience in it. And I think we’ll get to it.

David Tian: Yeah, awesome. So, Steve is one of the guys in the world who has a lot of experience with the red pill or just working with these issues. So, it’s really important for me to do this with him on here. In Asia, it less seems like less of an issue. So, I was able to avoid it for a while. Though, I personally went down that rabbit hole right around the same time Rollo Tomassi’s book Rational Male was published. So, that’s interesting. And we’re going to be looking mostly at Rollo Tomassi.

I forgot. I got to do my spiel. Over the past 13 years, I’ve been helping hundreds of thousands of people from over 87 countries find success in dating, relationships, and lifestyle, and life and love. So, that’s my background, and let’s just dive into what we’ll be covering. So, I want to first point out that I don’t know Rollo Tomassi personally. I’m not personally attacking him. This book that we’re breaking down, primarily this book, but we might just refer to other books in the — or resources in the red pill. It was published in 2013.

So, I don’t want to attack him personally because I don’t know who he is personally. But I will be mostly focused on the arguments in this particular book because it’s the one that I do get asked for my thoughts on. So, that’s where our focus will be. Alright, so I’ve got five or six main points. We’ll see how far we can get. And we’ll — I guess we can start with that first one we discussed just before we hit record.

And this is the issue about how in the book Rollo Tomassi’s Rational Male pillories or attacks white knights. And they go — there are different terms for this. like white knights, nice guys, AFCs, the beta male, all these different labels for roughly the same kind of category of guys.

And the surprising part for guys who are following red pill is that the arguments being made for the red pill are largely basically coming out of being bitter white knights. So, they think they’ve escaped it but they’re actually right in line with it.

Steve Mayeda: I just wanted to make a point because I remember back in the day in pick up. All these problems repeat themselves over and over again, but there was something called PUA Hates. And in PUA Hate, there was a lot of hate. It was basically everybody who pick up didn’t work for, got scammed, a huge population of guys, but they also generally… So, some people just got scammed and ripped off or really angry, but most of those guys had something else going on there.

There’s a social problem that wasn’t addressed, perhaps mental illness that wasn’t addressed, but there was something other than just getting scammed that made things impossible for them. And one of the things that they would always do is talk about how much this didn’t work and how much that it was their job and duty to control women, and you know, do all this sort of stuff like hate them, and be disgusted by them, and then compartmentalize the why of stats.

This became the red pill, although perhaps the red pill may have existed before then. But I remember talking to one of the guys, and I said, “Man, you’re the bitch of women. You are the slave to what you hate.” Like, all of this hate is more energy than what you put into what didn’t work, pick up. And you are playing to them more than you ever have before, because you’re now hating me, you’re hating everybody, you’re hating the system all because you wanted something and you couldn’t get it because you didn’t know how to, probably in combination with also you couldn’t get it because you had something else going on that perhaps might be a psychological thing.

There’s no shame in that. There’s no shame in any of that, or a behavioral thing, or something that you were unaware with of why it didn’t work. Because what I know is that you can get success from women and it’s pretty easy. I mean, you’ll have to work it and stuff, but it’s pretty easy if you’re a normal functioning member of society.

But if you’re not, man, you’re going to have a lot of trouble. And so, we see the same kind of thing of the red pill, this hatred that is all born out of you being wanting women, wanting what you can’t have, and essentially being the white knight, not a leader. You are the one who followed. You are the one that listened. You were the one who believed in Santa Claus and refuses to not be mad at your parents who told you about Santa Claus.

And maybe you need to become a parent to realize why you tell your kids there’s a Santa Claus. It’s such an infantile or adolescent way of looking at your problems as well as dating, sex, and relationships.

David Tian: I like to pathologize it just a little bit just to get them to take it seriously. So, the term white knight, and what I’m using to refer to this issue, this problem, you could say, is — it sounds quite colloquial, but it’s a colloquial term for a clinical label we could just say it’s basically kind of narcissism but it is what I call compensatory narcissism.

I and other theorists call it compensatory narcissism, or we find this in the clinical psychology literature of covert narcissism or codependent narcissism. So, these are the emotional vampires who are not the aggressive extroverted version of the narcissist, who is more obvious, more obviously sociopathic. But it’s the victim who’s actually in that role with the vampire.

So, I’ve done a four-part video series exactly on this. And when I’m describing the victim and the codependent narcissist, I’m actually talking exactly about — I didn’t even know this. I’m describing Rollo Tomassi in this book, and those who follow this, right? So, I have no qualms in saying that, also, I want you to be taken seriously. So yeah, I mean…

Steve Mayeda: What are some of the characteristics of a covert narcissist?

David Tian: That’s great. If you Google narcissistic personality disorder and look at the laundry list of symptoms, they also exist in the covert narcissist. It’s just not obvious. So, I’ve done that in the four-part series about four hours. If you want to learn about it in more detail, hopefully, after this video you will, I’ll have a link to that series and you can go deeper into that series. So, that’s a four-part series just explaining the problem, right? That’s how long it takes to be very careful with it.

And then I have a four-part series to explain the solution which I call Practical Psychology for Extraordinary Living where I chart out the solution in again four videos. So, it’s another four hours or so. Let’s use Rollo Tomassi’s book and I’ll just draw out passages from there as evidence for — and hopefully, I’ll be able to explain this as we go along, and hopefully, it’ll be quite obvious by then to those who are on the border.

Again, I’m speaking to people who are not in the hot center of red pill because it’s kind of like a lost cause. It’s sort of like an alcoholic kind of bender at that point. Again, we’re speaking to people who are sort of on the borderline of, “Should I go deeper into this?” And let me just point out where this is actually coming from psychologically, the psychological roots of it.

So, on page 26, on Alpha is a Mindset, I’m working off of a PDF version of the book so the pagination might be different in whatever version you’re looking at, but on the e-book, page 26, Alpha is a Mindset, you can see that there’s a bitter resentment of the alpha. While at the same time, they’re advocating adopting alpha energy. And as an example of this guy, Corey Worthington… And on page 33, he says, “I’m not condoning it. In fact, I find it deplorable.”

So if you don’t know who Corey Worthington is, and again, we’re talking to people who probably have read [INAUDIBLE 00:13:58] attractive. So hopefully, you know what it is, because I don’t want to read out the whole thing about Corey Worthington. But Corey Worthington is kind of a bop. He’s a jerk. He’s actually quite self-centered, and he’s an obvious narcissist. So, he’s not a codependent or compensatory narcissist. He’s not compensating as a compensatory. Compensatory means you’re compensating with your narcissism because you’re in the downside, you’re on the losing end, right?

So, he’s on the winning end so he doesn’t give a fuck. He doesn’t give a fuck so bad that women are attracted to that not-give-a-fuck attitude. And the thing is, he’s not an upright citizen, or upstanding citizen. He doesn’t contribute to society, doesn’t give any values, not a leader of men.

And Tomassi is like, “How is this so? A real alpha should be a leader of man. He should be the Navy SEAL on the frontlines.” And all this — like you’re saying, in terms of Santa Claus doesn’t exist, “There should be a Santa Claus. Why the fuck isn’t there a Santa Claus?” That’s the kind of immature energy that flips around and becomes this attacking energy instead of, “Now I’m sad.” Now I’m angry. So, that’s the compensatory narcissist who now realizes he’s in the down. He’s losing. He’s lost.

So he’s got to now compensate with extra energy that of the perpetrator. I’m going to take the energy of the perpetrator and now become a perpetrator to make myself feel better because it’s too scary for me to confront the toxic shame that has led me into this position. Right?

So, they’re attacking alpha at the same time as championing or advocating that you have energy. So, I’m not condoning it. In fact, I find it deplorable. Why the raw irresponsible, irrepressible, obviously unself-aware alpha energy, of Alpha Buddha Corey Worthingtons of the world offend our sensibilities so well. They’re offended that this guy bags chicks, yet he doesn’t have a job, doesn’t give a fuck.

It’s sort of like a guy who hasn’t really explored the edges of PUA, because good PUA already knew that from the beginning. If you just wanted to bang a lot of chicks, you could just become a drug dealer. Like, we talked about this is the last episode, right? You do not have to have a good job. You don’t have to have money. You don’t have to be fun and not give a fuck. [INAUDIBLE 00:16:19] and really just not give a fuck.

Instead of saying, “Oh, let’s understand the psychological principles for that and why that would be attractive.” They’re instead saying, “Fuck this. We’re going to take this energy.” They’re coming at it with a very bitter anger.” And I’m going to adopt it, but they’re doing it as — and they’re hitting themselves why they do it, right? Like, I find this deplorable, but I’ll adopt it. I find this guy irresponsible, but I’ll take some of that energy to use on women. Fuck them.

Steve Mayeda: This is interesting. I don’t use the same terms in terms of narcissism and so on because I think there’s — I haven’t studied it, to be honest with you, but I do have enough experience with working with psychologically — people who have problems and stuff. And even with like — so, every drug addict would be considered a narcissist. But then, if they recover, it changes, get their certain traits, which can be really messed up. When we see this trade over and over again with guys who work with me or if it’s in the addiction realm or whatever, women realm, of when you are not something, you hate the fantasy because that’s what belittled you, that’s what hurt you, strong men.

But then your idea of what the fantasy is is based off of that thing that hurt you. You see this all the time in pick up, like what the alpha is. I trained with a guy Tim Kennedy every once in awhile. I don’t turn train with him often, but I was talking about him when we were on the mats. And whenever he’s there, it’s like there’s nobody more alpha than that guy. That’s just the best term to use. Like, nobody could beat him and like it’s just ridiculous man. It’s a joke.

And he’s very cool, you know. He has whatever political beliefs that he spouts out. If you don’t believe in them, he’s still training with you and all this sort of thing. But the thing is is that you — in that idea of it, I’m not him. I don’t want to be him. I have a very different life than him. I’ve always had a very different life than him. But if I wanted to be him and I was angry and resentful at being him, I would not actually be him.

I would be the fear and the pain that worked coming from my own hurt to try and be that. And if you put a side-by-side, if I got to the up, I got to that level of where I thought I fulfilled that fantasy, it would be very off from what that man is. And it’s really a very terrible thing, and we see that over and over again, and we see guys with pain. We see guys living their pain. We see guys running from their pain. I have a slogan in my coaching that says pain shows where the problem is but it doesn’t show you the solution.

So, pain will show you, “I’m angry that my wife, or my girlfriend, or whoever said this to me. But now I want to do the opposite of that pain.” That’s not the solution. The solution comes when you’re actually — you’ve dealt with that traumatic pain or — he used the word trauma because I think it gets overused, but from that pressure that the pain caused, when you can alleviate that, that’s literally the only time when you can find the solution of the actual actionable steps that will help you. And until then, you have to mimic, in my opinion, you have to mimic and fake actionable steps based off of someone you trust like yourself or some other mentor.

So, I think it’s interesting how it goes in there, you know, this obsession with the alpha. And none of these guys are it. And then there’s obsession with how it’s justified in evolutionary psychology, when that’s an argued point in evolutionary psychology, and any evolutionary psychologist who’s worth his salt probably would disagree with — say you really heard what — you know, with Rollo Tomassi on the surface it’s like, “Oh, well, women are hypergamous.” Which I can disagree with his argument on that.

They might agree. But if they heard his definition of it, they’d be like, “You’re fucking insane, man.” And anybody in the red pill, like, what the fuck is wrong with you? Like, you are an angry, pissed off dude, and you’re not going to get… And then the denial of anybody who’s had experience that goes against their belief.

David Tian: That’s a great point with the Tim Kennedy example too. They’re trying to be like this Corey Worthington guy who just doesn’t give a fuck, but they’re actually — it’s so obvious that they’re not actually alpha because they give too much of a fuck. And they’re doing it with this like gritting their teeth. Whereas this guy does it effortlessly because he actually doesn’t give a fuck, I’m assuming, based on the description. And if you pretend to be him because you care so much, and you’re going to do it, so you [INAUDIBLE 00:20:55].

He’s like, “Don’t give up your identity for a woman.” That’s exactly what they’re doing. These guys are trying to become an alpha energy despite their own conscience. And instead of working out their conscience and evolving that, they just say, “Okay, this is what I have to do to bang these girls because fuck evolution and fuck this world. But that’s — I want to have sex and I want to get my revenge, so this is what we have to do, okay.” But that’s just an example of how much fuck they give. They give too many fucks.

On page 71, he gets into love, and he explains, “Love is when she takes you for granted.” And they hope that women will appreciate — they say men hope that women will appreciate the sacrifices you make for them. What the fuck is that? The sacrifices you make for them? What kind of relationships are you getting into? So I guess these are the type of guys who are like, “Look, I’m going to do all kinds of things I don’t want to do just to keep this woman. I’m going to move halfway across the country.”

Because he’s got all this weird stuff on long-distance relationships. Why is it such a major part of this ebook? And I realize, “Oh, because these guys are white knights. They’re consistently sacrificing as ways of getting a woman to like him.” That’s their MO, and they haven’t changed that MO, they just become really bitter and now they’re attacking women because the women don’t give them the shit that they wanted because of the sacrifices.

So don’t ever have a relationship where you’re sacrificing. But sacrifices are actually different from compromises, and sacrifices are different from meeting each other’s needs. And a lot of this has to do with the fact that you picked the wrong mate. You have poor mate selection. Throughout, there’s this theme of men sacrificing and women not appreciating it. So, that’s actually classic white knight, and I hope it’s quite obvious.

Steve Mayeda: I’m going to find this quote, but look, let me just tell you, in terms of my relationship. And I’ll even say this, you know, because you know this David, that very few guys who were in the seduction field and remained in it are still able to have relationships. I I think we talked about this last time, but there’s like five guys I know who… So, there’s a lot of guys who are good coaches. And if you give them money, they’ll help you out.

But I know very few guys, and I haven’t really calculated it, but it’s probably five, less than 10, of guys who are very good coaches and walk the walk. And there’s very few guys that can have a relationship, and it’s really, really terrible and sad. Because so much of that is difficult. Like, I had a long-distance relationship for five years in pick up. The only difference is — and there’s big problems in that with me, but the only difference is, is that I had sex with like 150 women during that whole time other than her. There were all sorts of different relationship variations that we had.

The thing with me that was a problem was I needed an emotional blanket. And of course, it’s way more complex than just that, but that’s what I was in it for. But in all of that, you — so I have answered a lot of questions of guys on long-distance relationships, and it’s true. You get just this guy that doesn’t have faith in himself on a huge level that builds his life within a fantasy, and it’s just so crazy. And not to say that I was void of that, it was a big problem. But in my relationship now, this sacrifice is every goddamn day. Why? Because it’s important to me. Why? Because it is the most important thing to me, and it’s mine. It is mine.

There’s no more just me in it. It is us, and we work at this, and we have to. I do not hear that from any of the red pill guys about how they make their relationships work, let alone any of these motherfuckers show any of their wives. Not that my wife should be broadcasted to the world, but we’re accessible people, man. We’re extremely accessible people. You know about what’s going on with me. Who knows about… I would love to hear about real stories about Rollo Tomassi’s relationship or any other dudes. The only guy that kind of does is Hunter Drew, and he actually seems like a normal dude.

He’s one of the few red pill main pillars that seems sane, in my opinion. But there’s this quote that I have. Somebody shared this on, it’s a Twitter thing of Rollo Tomassi, and I just saw it. I thought it was so retarded. There’s so many levels to it. It says, “Gentlemen, it’s incumbent upon you to never be the facilitator of anyone’s sexual advertising on social media. If your girlfriend insists on you being her personal photographer, know that you — not only — that you only aid her in broadcasting her sexual availability to men she believes more alpha than you.”

When I posted that, you see how weak that is, how pussy that is. When I posted that, I have these haters going like, “He’s been married for 24…” or whatever the hell it is. Like, he’s more alpha than you’ll ever be, and you’re just jealous. And I’m like, “No, man. Here’s the thing: I’m a fucking photographer and my wife is a model, and I’ll totally take pictures of her. And if she fucks somebody else based on my pictures, like, what? I’m supposed to fear that or get mad at it? Like, no, man. That’s so ridiculous.

David Tian: Oh, yes. So, fear-based. That’s just so…

Steve Mayeda: I have to take away freedom?

David Tian: There’s so much insecurity. It’s just reeking of insecurity. And these guys want to have that alpha energy of this Corey Worthington guy, he doesn’t give a fuck. Corey Worthington doesn’t give a fuck. He’ll take a fucking photo and not give a fuck. Like, that’s one way to do it. But kind of on the sacrifice line, if it’s a lot of work for you to take that photo, then maybe — but if it’s no big deal, she likes to show off because she got a new dress or whatever. Yeah, I mean, why would I deny her that — I mean, how much fear and insecurity must there be for me to go, “I can’t do this.”

Steve Mayeda: The other thing too is that I’m writing a book now. I have all these weird life experiences, and part of that is infidelity on both ends. I was non-monogamous for 13 years in all the wrong ways and some right ways. And I get it. There’s benefits to it, absolute benefits to not being with one person. And now I am with one person. And in all that, just looking back at… So, I had a girlfriend for five years that I had all these affairs, some she didn’t know about, others we did together. There’s all sorts of weird shit, right?

But in that time, she could have done whatever she wanted. She slept with I think four people in five years other than me. And there were a couple times where the situation and so on made me go crazy. And here’s what happened, and this is what I really got from my book, and I even took notes way back when it was happening, and just weird journaling psycho stuff. But my brain went to, at that point, control. It went to — and there’s something where I couldn’t control about myself where it was like I got brought up that way, it’s cultural, or some people [INAUDIBLE 00:27:56] or whatever.

But we see it all the time with cheating. One of the biggest things that upset me, and she wasn’t cheating, was that I was being made ashamed or humiliated as a man. That if a woman were to have sex with someone else, I felt like I was being fooled, or made fun of, or less than. Now, when I had sex with other people and my girlfriend found out whether she was okay with it or not — and this is the weird thing about what people don’t get about open relationships, is you can communicate all you want. It takes a long time for people to become okay with them if they’ve not really experienced them. So, she felt the same way.

She felt, “Man, you’re screwing me. I’m just a fool. I can’t believe this.” And I’m like, “No, look. This chick borrowed my dick and we fucked. It was good but it was not that great, and it made me want you.” And you try to explain all this. But to her, it was like just so hard. And for me, it was the same. And this is what I see with these guys, this repetition. And I was sane enough. I mean, I was a pickup artist, man. I could’ve gone down the rabbit hole of just being like, “This is why I need to control and humiliate women in order for them to date me” or something.

I knew that was off and I was just fucked up, and hurt, and sad, and all of those other stuff, but that’s the example. Pain shows you the problem. It doesn’t show you the solution. I have to let that pain subside and then go to the real thing. Which for us, it was like, we just wanted to be together but we — neither of us were ready to commit. And so, we did all this stupid shit. Like, it like it was just once you stepped away from it, it was obvious.

It wasn’t that she was so good at lying, because she would lie to me about it — so, if it was a certain situation where we weren’t supposed to talk about it, because there are other ones, points in our relationship where we were talking about it, she would lie to me about it. Like, that deceptive bitch. Like, this is like she was bred to do it, she was made to do this, all that red pill stuff but she thought the same thing about me when I did it.

The thing is, is she was just withholding information because she didn’t want to fuck me up. And she knew it would fuck me up. It’s really amazing that this doesn’t get seen by people. It gets categorized that women must be psychologically, you know, predisposed to manipulate, and trick, and all this sort of stuff. But that’s one of the things, you know?

David Tian: Yeah, it’s crazy. So, pretty much everything that they say that is a biological imperative for women can equally apply to men, but I want to get to that further down. The point about the sacrificing… I just realized as you were mentioning that, I was in a long distance relationship with my wife for the first two years, two plus years, we were dating. I didn’t even realize it was long distance until I thought about it because I didn’t live in Singapore where she was, but I would fly in every six weeks for like one or two weeks, and then she would fly out sometimes to meet me where I’m at.

So, you know, we were only spending 30% of our time together during that period, which is normal if it’s just like dating, right? And I didn’t see it as a long-distance relationship because there was no sacrifice. There’s no sacrifice on her part or my part. It’s when I wanted to be there, I came. When she wanted to visit me, she did. So, there’s no sacrifice.

And then the other thing is, in a relationship, I wouldn’t even use the word compromise because what sacrifice and compromise imply is that it’s something you don’t want to do. But if you’re in a loving relationship you want to do it for her. And one of the refrains you hear from white knights who get dumped in a bad way, because they always get dumped in a bad way because they will attract emotional vampires because they’re the weak victim side of the emotional vampire pairing, of the parasitic vampire.

So, they’ll get burned, and they say over and over, like I did many years ago when I first came onto this material. Back when I was in a very low point in my life and suicidal, I would hear myself saying, “I gave her everything. I sacrificed so much for her.” That’s a refrain. That’s a sign that you’re in that compensatory narcissist energy. And it’s the same thing. I say it almost like jokingly now because it seems like so obviously — to my audience in my group, it seems like the people who write to me in our paid groups and so on, it seems just obviously weak. It was just reeking through the book. It was just this really weak energy where he’s still suffering from the pain and bitterness of discovering that women are like men.

So, there’s the whole idea of like, “Here’s another one…” Like, they have this really weird view of what makes a good woman. So, this is another related theme, like the good woman. And I was like, “What does that mean to him?” So, a good woman is basically a virgin. This is the really immature view. It’s sort of like — there are actually teenagers, psychologically, with big vocabularies.

As a teenager you think, “Okay. I want a woman who’s never had sex because I’ve never had sex, so that’d be nice because I’m intimidated by a woman with sexual experience. That would mean if she had a sexual experience, she was a slut, and I can’t deal with that.” So, the right thing, here’s some examples, page 73. The right thing is to marry a woman your age. The right thing is to marry a single mother.

Like, these are examples of what they call sacrifices. Like, you want to marry a woman who’s younger, but you want to do the right thing and marry a woman your age because that’s the right thing to do. No, this is what a codependent narcissist white knight would think is the right thing to do because he’s got sexual shame and he’s very judgmental sexually.

So, he’s judging these women for having lots of sexual partners. And this is like — that’s just an example of white knight and the bitter taste of the red pill starting on page 79. And the only reason it’s bitter — it’s only bitter to you when you’re still a child. You have this immature view, this idealized view of what women are supposed to be like, virgins who are there to love you, and they haven’t even worked in that sexual component of like… You can tell that they have really vanilla sex, if any good sex at all, because they have this morally judgmental view of sex.

And there’s so much sexual shame involved. So, that colors their view of what a woman should be like. A good woman should be a woman who basically is like a paragon of virtue, I suppose, like a nurse / priestess, a nun, a young nun is what he’s saying. And then they find out, “Wow, there are all these hot chicks in clubs who aren’t young nuns.” Like yeah, it’s important to come to that realization.

And so, when we get to hypergamy, so maybe this might be a good time to dive into that, because there’s a lot of covert narcissism here. Page 130, appreciating the sacrifice. Women have an inborn ability to switch off her emotions for you in favor of higher SMV. This is unethical, insincere, duplicitous. Consider the emotional investment a women needs to put into mothering a child who could be taken away or killed at a moment’s notice.

So, if you’re finding women who that support this hypothesis, that they have an inborn ability to switch off her emotions for you in favor of higher SMV, higher sexual market value, basically guys who are more alpha…

Steve Mayeda: Like Corey or whatever the guy’s name is. He’s got a massive sexual market value.

David Tian: Right. So, evolutionary psychologists are pointing this out, is just in terms of short-term mating strategies and long-term mating strategies. The cads and the dads. This is pretty basic evopsych. And by the way, evopsych wouldn’t agree with this characterization of alpha, because he’s defining it in a weak way, like a bitter way, like alpha is a mindset.

Steve Mayeda: Yeah, it defines it in a bizarre…

David Tian: Yeah, scientifically speaking, alpha is just the male that gets the most sexual mating opportunities, and that’s it. And then the mating opportunities, whatever that requires is what it requires, but that’s separate from the designation of alpha scientifically. But anyway, that’s a side point. So, women have an inborn ability to switch off their emotions for you in favor of a hotter guy. Let’s just use the word hotter as more colloquial understanding of it.

And so, this is clear covert narcissism and white knight again because it’s poor mate selection. Like attracts like, broken guys attract broken women, and it’s so easy if you were to just switch this because — and this is something that white knights will understand if you just think about it like the way I’m going to point it out now. There are plenty of men, not all men, not you, I’m not talking about you as a man, whoever is watching this, but men, you know, have an inborn ability to also switch off their emotions when there’s a hotter girl that walks by.

Like yeah, you know it, and you know that women, some bitter women as Steve has pointed out, there are women who have the red pill, like red pill women. And they’ve been red pilling much longer than men have in this sense, also say all men are… all men are like this, all men, you can’t trust men. All men they just want sex. It’s the same thing.

Steve Mayeda: It’s funny because you see the same thing with the MGTOW groups because women will just be like, “No, I don’t need men, ever. I’m just going to use them for sex when I need it, and I am independent.” And then they come around. It’s a phase. Or if it lasts long, then they get too many cads and sit around. That’s the problem.

David Tian: Yeah, there are some Women Go Their Own Way, yes, for sure. And the women red pill are just — you’ve probably met them. If you’re a red pill, you’ve definitely — if you’ve been out there interacting with people, so you’re one of the minority of red pills, you probably have met women who have these generalizations about men. And it doesn’t take many drinks for that to come out.

And what’s scary is not just that hypothesis, but then the further moral ethical judgment, that this is unethical, this is insincere, this is duplicitous. And this is, again, like a sign that you’re not cool. Like, you’re just a fake, you’re totally faking this alpha thing that you want to have because you’re attacking this. So, I get it. This is just a bad person. If somebody is like this, they just switch off their emotions. They have no empathy. This is just sociopathic, and there are people like that.

And then you know trying to base it in this historical argument of consider the emotional investment a woman needs to put into mothering a child who could be taken away at any moment. A hundred thousand years ago, anybody you loved could have been taken away at any moment. A million years ago, it was just as tenuous of a life. So, these just-so stories of Stephen Jay Gould with no scientific evidence are the sort of things that white knights are looking for to back up their wounded emotions.

Steve Mayeda: Well, let me talk about hypergamy first — let’s do sexual market value for a second. So, sexual market value makes more of a difference the less somebody sees of you, or the less you’re affluent in society, or the less that society allows time for people to naturally communicate, then sexual market value is huge is defined by how the red pill defines it.

Meaning, you have to be bigger, stronger, faster. You have to be cooler. You have to have more attention. You have to have more of what society says is good. But the more a society one is smaller or can integrate network on a very face-to-face level. So for instance, like Austin, Texas is a big place. If I want to broadcast myself over just the means of broadcasting to all of Austin, Texas, I need to look at TV, radio. I need to look at what’s popular to be seen as a natural person.

But if I go into, let’s say, a community where there’s a lot of people that do talk, like a tremendous amount of people that do talk, so there’s big martial arts gyms, there’s big rock climbing gyms here. And in that, then I’m more — my face-to-face time has much more value. Now, some of those people might go, “I’m going to talk to the taller guy.” Like, if The Rock were next to me, everybody’s going to talk to him. But there’s enough people, because he’s only one person, there’s enough people that will talk to me to satisfy me emotionally, mentally, sexually, all these different things.

And what I found is, and especially being in… I grew up in California and Hawaii, and I think people are just a little bit shorter there. I didn’t realize I was short, I’m 5’8″ or 5’7 3/4″. I’m on the shorter side. I didn’t realize I was short until people told me that. And when I moved to Texas, they would tell me that. So, this didn’t matter to me, didn’t make a difference, any of those different things. But the thing is, is that if I’m talking to people, that becomes less and less important.

Now, sure, people have different tastes and those types of things, but sexual market value is such a flawed thing. Here’s why it’s flawed. Everybody who’s big, and strong, and shit like that gets women. Or women’s sexual market value is at a certain peak. This is all because we don’t communicate in the society. This also means that everybody’s sexually frustrated in the society. This also means that everybody is emotionally frustrated in the society. This means that everybody is dying to just have their real selves be heard.

So, if you have a technique or a way to listen to somebody for real, they will listen to you and love you. This is amazing. And this is like the whole print. Like, everybody had a different way of doing this in pickup, but if somebody were to actually be taken seriously, because we’re dying for it, so much to the point where we just go to Instagram and go, “This is how we get popular” or all this stupid stuff, that when somebody sees you for you, it’s very special.

And if you took all the examples of how people have relationships and not just cherry picking the ones that you want, which is what they do with their stats and stuff, you would see that there are a lot of poor men who get women who carry their weight for them. I mean, this is a phenomenon that happens. It’s not the only thing that happens.

There are a lot of people, women, who could find better men very easily. There are a lot of women who know that they can but they don’t because they’re happy. I’m sure they’re frustrated in some ways, but they’re happy with who they have. And one more thing too, and this kind of transitions into the hypergamy thing, and I have a whole series on sexual market value and how fucking dumb and — and how you will never be happy if you have that mindset, there’s a bunch of YouTube videos on it.

But in terms of hypergamy, one of the best relationship pieces of advice I got was that, what women really need in a relationship is to feel special and to feel secure. And so, there’s all sorts of narratives to that, but to feel special is that they’re important, they’re only them, that you see them in a specific way. And if you don’t do that, then one of the things that will happen is that you will… She’ll be unsatisfied, right?

The other thing is is that she needs to feel that she can be taken care of, especially if there’s a family and especially if there’s kids. And every single guy I know in a marriage, and we have these men’s groups in Austin, we all meet up. And one of those things is, is that they all say, and this happens to me too, is their wife is like, “Man, why can’t you earn more money?” And if they are in a tremendous amount of, “Why can’t you be there more for me? Why can’t you do this and that?” There’s all this sort of stuff that you hear over and over again.

And when we all tell each other, it’s like, oh my god, it’s like they have a script, that as soon as they have kids, they just start saying it or whatever. And these are guys who are men, but you get guys who have zero experience, or who are bitter, or who wish they live a different life, who wished they weren’t whatever Rollo Tomassi’s real name is, but he’s got this fake name, or wished that they weren’t — all the guys that I knew know of the red pill.

And some of, I know personally, but they wished they could be something. There’s so much coming from that resentment where it’s like, we just sit there and we say like, man, Jesus Christ. And we’ll say things like man, they just want your money” or “God damn it, they just don’t shut up” or something like that. But we all love our lives, our relationships, or we’re trying to work towards that. In all of this, if your woman is unhappy, what are some of the things that she’s going to look for first?

And this is what you should really be asking yourself as a red pill guy? How did you let your wife get unhappy? I get it. You did everything. You showed up for work. But how did you learn what she is thinking to know why she’s unhappy? Because when she is unhappy, yes, she will go, “Man, he doesn’t provide and that hurts me” even though you think you’re providing. It’s a miscommunication here, you know. Or like, “Man, he let himself go with who he is. He’s not attractive to me anymore.”

Or another thing when couples are fighting, it’s like, “You’ve never been attracted to me. I don’t know how I’ve ever been attracted to you.” They take all this shit seriously, or even affairs. That shit pisses me off too. I mean, it’s up to your own moral code, but a lot of the times when an affair happens, it isn’t that somebody’s disgracing you or whatever, it’s that they were bored. It’s that they didn’t know what to do. It’s that they were frustrated. It’s all this stuff. And then if you don’t listen to them with that, then the woman having the affair is going to blame you and say, “Man, you made me do this.”

And then nobody’s communicating. We’re not figuring out the problem or getting anywhere near the solution for how men and women can be happy with this philosophy. We take the pain, the anger, the frustration. We just build justification on top of it. There’s no solution. I’ve listened to, at this point, hundreds and hundreds of hours of red pill podcasts. I do not hear a solution. I hear, “Be tough, be strong, be determined. These are red flags.” But never has anybody shared any good story. Never is Rollo Tomassi or [INAUDIBLE 00:46:23] Campbell saying how good — how they make their wife feel this.

David Tian: Yeah, we get to the how-to in this e-book at the end. It’s kill the beta and adopt the alpha energy. It’s sort of like their how-to for moving forward. Special and secure, it’s a great way of putting it. I adopt a three-part from Tony Robbins’ coaching, which I did, and it’s attention, presence, and reassurance so that they feel special and secure.

Steve Mayeda: Because you know the application of that is much harder than just…

David Tian: Absolutely. And the reason why these guys, it wouldn’t resonate with them, they can’t do it is because there’s too much fear. If you are held back by the fear that she’s going to hurt you and you’re so afraid of that that you can’t open up, you’re not going to be able to be present with her fully. Because in the back of your mind, you’re always going to be holding back. She’s going to miss that. And maybe at the beginning, you had nothing to lose. So, you’re just picking up a chick.

So, you just go all in there and then she likes that. But then over time, you had more and more to lose in your mind, and you were too afraid of the loss. So then, you hold back too much and now she doesn’t feel secure anymore because she feels that you’re holding back, that you can’t fully be there. Yeah, but that’s a great way to put it, the two S’s there. That’s nice.

Steve Mayeda: It’s also funny with relationships, because I tell my wife this, and she tells me this, too. Is I say, “Hey, if I am not the absolute best for you, you have to leave me.” And I’ll try and win you back. And if you’re not the best for me… And there’s leeway within that, but man, dude, I’ll tell you right now, man. I still talk to a lot of women. I see women all over. I still travel. I fucking work out and on it, there’s like fitness models, and I teach jiu jitsu classes.

There’s a lot of beautiful women around me who are great people, who are good people and beautiful. And they don’t come close to my wife, to me. So, there’s no doubt that in that situation, I’m with the best. And so — but if I don’t think that, then we need to work towards that.

David Tian: She’s the best for you. So, the sexual market value thing is like an objective devaluation it seems, that you just rate people, and it takes away the personal connection, and the personal compatibility, history, and all that.

Steve Mayeda: One thing. Brian Black, he’s another coach. He said he was going to do this in his 21 Convention speech, which is like really into the red pill now. And they asked him to talk. He told me he was going to do this [INAUDIBLE 00:49:13] I didn’t see the speech, but he told me before and he said, “I’m going to have everybody write down what my sexual market value is or what a good sexual market value is. And then afterwards, we’ll rate it, and everybody’s will be different.”

David Tian: Yeah. A better scientific way of putting it is, there’s actual research done on mating value, objective mating value. So, there are a few things that science has shown to be attractive across the board for men. So one is like, you know… So, it’s just obvious things. These are obvious things. So, physical attractiveness that are health markers, you know.

So for men, there are obvious ones; you have resources, you have intelligence to get more resources. You’re good with people, so you’re good at making alliances. These will all help you with survival and reproduction. So, these are more obvious. And that’s one component of being attractive. Like all things being considered, wouldn’t it be great if you were healthy and fit? Yeah, right? Same with the woman. Even if you were in love with her, if she gained a lot of weight, you can still love her. But all things being considered, wouldn’t it be better if she were fitter or healthier? Yeah, obviously. These are obvious, right.

Steve Mayeda: But that’s not what people just have sex with. People have sex with a lot across the board?

David Tian: Right. So, red pill, when they’re talking about sexual market value, they mean a lot more. They’re going over. They’re going far above what scientists would consider just to be mating value. And there’s this deep insecurity that pervades all of us. So basically, they take the scientific term and then they add in huge doses of insecurity and they spit out.

Steve Mayeda: The least scientific thing, man.

David Tian: Right. It’s sort of like on top of this veneer of science. So, on page 132, they’re afraid of female trade-offs. So, this is actually — I just wrote it as a scientist would write it, female trade-offs in choosing genetic benefits versus long-term investment benefits.

In the next page, Tomassi writes nature, make sure she never abandons either strategy. And this is the — females have the capacity to resist going slut, but this goes against their base biological impulses.

You know who’s afraid of the fact that females have to do trade-offs, just as men have trade-offs too, right? So, the slut versus the — easy sex versus the one that you want to spend more time with over years and years of your life. Guess who doesn’t like this fact that women have to do this trade off? White knights, closet white knights.

He calls them uncomfortable truths. The uncomfortable truth that women actually have to resist their natural impulses. So, what a lot of this shows is also they’re very unfamiliar with moral philosophy from the earliest time of philosophy.

So like, Plato and Aristotle already talked about the natural impulses and how the morality and the good life, eudaimonia, happiness, can only result from resisting, having some level of restraint, self-restraint on all of the pleasure and hedonism that you could have. And you find this even earlier in Asian philosophy.

So, these uncomfortable truths. I mean, if they had just paid more attention to the wisdom, collective wisdom of our elders, they would have been able to do a lot better.

Steve Mayeda: You know, you’re a very well-read guy and I don’t know any of that stuff, but I just know from talking to people, that this is not healthy. I think anybody who has good experience with women and is relaxed about it, it’s not like a tense thing, they get like how, “What the fuck is wrong with these people?”

I mean, I don’t understand how it’s so popular. But obviously, it is for a reason, and there’s a lot of people that are in pain out there that see it as the truth. But it’s disturbing.

David Tian: I just want to point out, too. It’s popular in… So, if you think it’s popular, whoever is watching this, you probably have a lot of friends who subscribe to this. But it’s not popular in Asia. I think there’s a big part of Asian culture that’s still quite steeped in tradition, and the traditions of Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism have already dealt with all of these truths about resisting the natural impulses for thousands of years.

So, this isn’t new. I just want to end off on hypergamy… My contribution to hypergamy and co-dependence. He makes a list of what hypergamy doesn’t care about. This is on my version, page 135. Hypergamy doesn’t care about boom.

So, a lot of these lists of things hypergamy doesn’t care about is actually a list of things codependent narcissists use to bargain and earn affection; their list of what white knights do, their sacrifices, to earn affection. So, in case you’re not clear on what a white knight actually is, this Rational Male is a great depiction and demonstration of what a white knight actually is.

This is what like an advanced white knight who’s been white knighting for decades would say. So, on page 135, he says, “Hypergamy doesn’t care how you rearrange your college majors and career choice in life to better accommodate her.” Oh my god. “Hypergamy doesn’t care how inspired or fulfilled you feel as a stay-at-home dad.”

Steve Mayeda: I mean, he did all that and feels ashamed about it.

David Tian: Right. Hypergamy doesn’t care that you moved across four states to accommodate your long-distance relationship. Hypergamy doesn’t care how supportive you’ve always been of her decisions or if you identify as a male feminist.

I’m going to throw one in there because it’s so funny. I’ve worked with so many nice guys over the years. And in Asia, they do the funniest things. They’re like cute because… Anyway, so it’s a little bit more of an immature type of relationship situation out here. So, hypergamy doesn’t care that you drove 40 minutes to give her chicken soup, but she wouldn’t open the door so you left it on the porch and rang the doorbell.

Like, hypergamy doesn’t care about your nice guy bullshit where you’re trying to earn her affection and love by doing shit and guilt tripping her into being good to you and giving you a blow job, right?

Hypergamy doesn’t care how you funded her going back to college to find a more rewarding career. Hypergamy doesn’t care how great a guy you are for adopting the children she had with other men. Hypergamy doesn’t care about your divine and forgiving nature in excusing her youthful indiscretion.

So, like, this is like saying, “I’m a good person. Why aren’t you? Why aren’t you good to me? I’m like damn good.” So, all of moral philosophy would say, if that’s your view and that’s why your motivation for being good, you’re not actually good. You’re just fake good.

Steve Mayeda: So, what do you think about hypergamy in general? Because like Jordan Peterson says women are hypergamous. And I think he’s kind of stupid when it comes to sex and relationships. People get really mad at me when I say that.

David Tian: That’s like getting dating advice from a powerlifter.

Steve Mayeda: Yeah.

David Tian: I think people mean different things by hypergamy. So, I didn’t know what they meant by it until I read this damn ebook. I thought it just meant women would trade up if given the opportunity.

Yeah, I think most people would just be looking for the most attractive — like they would — all things being considered, would they prefer a more attractive person? Yes. But there are things that men are looking to trade up too, especially the type of men who would be attracted to red pill, who are probably actually quite immature. So, they’d get this analogy.

It’s sort of like if you’re dating a girl for a few months and you have the option. So, you have to imagine that you have the option of dating an even hotter girl and you click with her. There’s chemistry, and it’s fresh, and new, and then this other girl is sort of stale, boring now.

Obviously, you don’t know how to have sex, so the sex is getting really boring as well. So, it’s really easy. It’s very tempting for you to trade up. And the moment that the girl that you’re not that into anymore fucks you over, you’re there, you’re like, “Okay, done with you. Moving on.”

And this is the whole spinning plates thing, by the way, which you haven’t gotten to yet, the fear and insecurity of the spinning plates strategy of, “I can’t put all my chips in one woman because, oh my gosh, she could just totally kill me emotionally. So, I’ve got to spread my neediness around to multiple women. So, I’m going to be an emotional vampire to multiple women and protect my own feelings.”

That’s coming out of the fear and insecurity. So, is it true that, generally speaking, you’d want to get a girl who’s hotter? If all things are equal, the answer is obviously yes. Unless you have some fetish that makes it just one of the minorities in science. This is just straight up mating value.

But hypergamy doesn’t mean that for them. Hypergamy is about the fact that this is a biological imperative in women that they cannot resist. So, this is departing from all of the philosophy that I had mentioned earlier because all the philosophy, which was moral philosophy from the very beginning, for over 2,500 years, has already come to terms with this.

Like, they’re red in tooth and claw, this whole getting ahead in life. And where is the morality? Where’s goodness? When’s goodness? And the answer is, you need to resist. We human beings have a need for self-restraint, just as children do. They need to learn limits, and when you can say, “No, I’m not going to have that extra Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, even though I really want it,” and that’s you resisting a biological impulse, now you’ve graduated to a healthier adult from your child state.

But what they’re saying is with hypergamy, it seems what they’re saying, is that women are unable to resist that. He says they’re capable but it will eventually drag them under. So, it’s sort of like they’re saying all women on the analogy have an eating disorder. Like, they can’t resist the Ben and Jerry’s even though there’s a part of them says, “This isn’t good for me.” They just eat it.

And that’s not true, and it’s really — I can understand where it’s coming from because it’s coming out of the fear and insecurity of a closeted white knight.

Steve Mayeda: Yeah. You know, it’s funny because there’s this article that Robert Glover wrote about hypergamy that I’ve been trying to find and search for, but it’s so good because he talks about — this is such an odd… First off, he’s like, “Hey, look, if you’re looking at this, you have a problem.” Like, if you’re looking at the internet and trying to figure out women in this way, this is not going to help you. This will never help you.

Before all this, we were having a water balloon fight and it was like totally badass. It was fucking great. Anyway, Robert Glover wrote, and I forget what it is… And I’m not like a huge fan — I’m not like a ‘no more Mr. Nice Guy’ follower or anything like that. But basically, he wrote about like, “Man, this is so weird. If you’re looking at this, you have a problem.”

But even more so, we didn’t work in this way. It wasn’t about take, take, take. It wasn’t about weighing a scale. And nowhere in our evolution do I think that this exists, so much to the point… He pointed this out, which is interesting, because there’s all this argument about origin, and how tribal culture works.

And the thing is, we don’t really know. But there’s this… In our culture, we can see what the red pill calls hypergamy to some degree. We can find examples of it. In our culture, we can definitely see people… [INTERRUPTED]

The thing is, in tribal cultures, in American tribal cultures, which were very diverse — in California alone, there were 400 different tribes — when people say like, “Oh, well, the Native Americans thought this.” You’re getting kind of dumb.

But one of the things that was punishable by death was not like lying or whatever. One of the things that was consistent was that when you hoarded and didn’t share. And I forget how specifically he brings this up in his article, but when you don’t share and you take, that is one of the worst crimes that we see in humanity within a group.

And hypergamy, and the way red pill puts it out, is so that it’s so about this hoarding, scarcity mindset, that it’s a tragedy when we get into interpersonal relationships. And it’s not about who could get over on you or whatever. And if you are having interpersonal relationships where people are making it about a scale, and stairs, and steps…

And I get it that in corporate America, that’s the case, but if you are, then there’s a problem. Like, it needs more connection. It needs more empathy. It needs more exchange. It needs more of you sacrificing yourself, willing to be hurt, so that you could put your real self out there and not some fake facade.

Because when people you know and depend on, that care about you, whether they love you or their friends, when you put out a fake facade out of scarcity, what are you? You’re fake. You’re the guy trying to be Tim Kennedy. You’re the dude that is based off of your fears. You are your fear. You’ve empowered your fear, and you are not you.

And you being you, and being able to be heard, is all those things that Rollo Tomassi’s listing off about, you know, hypergamy doesn’t care about. Those are all the things that will make you a badass. And when you’re in love with somebody, you’re going to do stupid stuff, and you’re going to fail, and that’s how you’re going to learn.

And some of those things like, you don’t drive across four states to somebody that you don’t care about. But to somebody that you do care about, god damn right you do. You know, that’s one of the best things about man. And the reason why you know, god damn right you do, is because you’ve probably done it and failed and had it blow up in your face. You’ve probably done it and had it work, or things of lesser degree.

See, the thing is, is we’re all afraid to be psychopaths, sociopaths. We’re all afraid to be hurt and damaged people. But if you hold onto your pain, you become a psychopath. You become somebody who is a narcissist. You become all of those things, and that’s what we should be talking about.

Like, how do we have a good life out of all this? How do we fulfill our sexual urge and have a good life? It’s crazy.

David Tian: Yeah. Narcissism arises from the split between the original self and creation of a false self. That’s how the literature describes it. So basically, there’s this toxic shame. There’s a shame about who they are at their original level, their original self. And they don’t like that. That’s not working for them in the real world. They’re trying to get this from certain types of women, it’s not working, so they split off.

They say, “I have to be a different way. I have to be this, what psychologists call false self, in order to get this love.” And it’s very dangerous. The reason, there’s a difference between a false self, and persona, and parts. So, in IFS therapy, a therapy style that I’m learning a lot now is, look at the false self as a new protector part.

So, you can heal the false self and the persona… The Jungian way of approaching it is, this is a useful part of you that you have as a front-facing representative to the world. But when it becomes narcissistic is when you think that that Persona or that part is your real self, your true self.

And because of that confusion, you’re still underneath it, hiding all of this toxic shame of your original self. So, they’re trying to, “Here’s my false self. I’m this alpha dude. I’m alpha Buddha.” And underneath is this little wounded boy who just wants love. And you can see it all through the book. He just wants to be loved.

But he has a very entitled view of what love is. And so, this child would also, or probably a teenager, like a preteen, would also be very judgmental towards sex. Like, ooh, it’s dirty. It’s wrong. So, a good girl wouldn’t like sex that much, and women don’t actually like sex. That became another thesis in their book.

And so, this is white knight narcissism, and it is the splitting into a false self. So, at the end of the day, they can’t experience love because they’re just interacting as a false self to another female emotional vampire’s false self, and it’s just false selves interacting with each other.

I break this down in a lot more detail in that four video series. Part of this is, what do we do about this? So, in order to heal that split, you need to recover the inner child that the false self is hiding and heal and grow the inner child parts. There are going to be multiple inner child in you.

And I found that the most straightforward way to do that and most effective and quickest is psychotherapeutic processes. So, over the past more than four years now, that’s been the focus of my work, using psychotherapeutic processes to bring guys into this growth and healing.

And the reason it’s so hard for them to even see the value of that is because they’re still driven very much by their fear, because their needs aren’t being met, their needs for… They’re not able to meet their own needs for security, for love, for connection, for significance, and they’re trying to neurotically get women to meet those needs for them.

And it’s so hard because they’re trying to manipulate women into doing it. And they’re picking the wrong women. So, the wrong women over and over and over, and these women keep screwing them over in certain ways, and they formed these neurotic patterns of interacting with women.

And as soon as they engage those patterns through their false self, they’re turning off actual good women, like developed women, developed, and mature, and emotionally intelligent, and so forth. You can see this encapsulated really well in the iron rules. At the end of his book, he’s got the iron rules of Tomassi or whatever.

And most of these are so fear-driven. I think if I just read them out, it should be quite obvious, but I don’t know if we need to say anything more than that. But rule number one is, always control the frame.

Another point is, all the good advice in this book, is already said in good PUA advice over the past two decades. You’re not going to start teaching us about frame now, are you, Tomassi? Because we can do books on frame.

Anyway, so always control the frame, but that comes out of this deep insecurity. I used to teach frame for years, and I think it’s useful to know especially in a business context. But if you’re in a relationship, like going back to that sacrifice issue. I’ve traveled a lot to meet my wife.

When you’re in love, will you think it’s a sacrifice to hop on a plane to meet your lover? You’re so excited to go, and it’s exciting because it’s a trip for you too. And you get to see a new place, and you’re really excited. Would you say, “I fucking sacrificed to get on that.” No. If you’re in love and you’re doing this out of love, it doesn’t feel like it.

Now, there are times where I’m like, “Fuck, I’m getting on this plane.” But there’s a part of you that, if it’s really out of love, it doesn’t feel like a sacrifice. And it’s sort of the same here. Like, when you’re in love, you’re not counting this stuff. You’re not keeping score. On the frame, you’re going to sabotage your relationship.

Steve Mayeda: Boundaries and frames are really important, and they’re great, but they’re useful when you can’t trust yourself having that border be open. It’s like, “Man, I don’t want to date somebody that a red flag shows up.” I’m not that afraid of it right now. I just say no.

But when I am afraid of it, I need a boundary because I need to stop myself before I get carried away. And so, control is a weird thing. Part of the things, like the solutions that come out of pain are going to be control. They’re going to be power. They’re going to be all the things that the red pill literally says and somehow people think is good.

But the things that come out when you’re at peace with that pain, they come out of choice. And choice always has to be affected by all things in order for it to truly be choice, which is human value. What gives us our worth is the ability to choose and decide and not be bound to something.

And it’s funny, because things like the red pill make this rigid system that we must follow in order to have the human experience.

David Tian: Yeah. I just want to point out, again, because Steve and I are old-school PUA as well; way older school than what you’ll find on the internet right now. I’m just looking at some of these other iron rules. So, the next one is, “Never reveal the number of women you slept with.” So, you can see there’s so much fear around that.

This is just beginner level PUA. It probably [INAUDIBLE 01:10:10] run into stuff you don’t know how to handle. But what’s great is, he’ll do this iron rules, and then he’ll do this explanation for it. And the explanation is where you see all the fear and insecurity coming out.

Because if you’re just teaching a beginner PUA with the training wheels, “Here are some things you want to avoid because it’s going to get a little tricky.” But these are ironclad rules. You can see the fear, right?

Number three is, any woman who makes you wait for sex is never worth the wait. Again, like if you’re a beginner PUA, this is good starting advice. You want to not get stuck in the friend zone or whatever. But the fact, the way he describes it, it’s just pure insecurity. And the same with the next one.

Never live with a woman you aren’t married to. Again, actually, I think this is pretty good advice because it gets trickier once you do move in together. But he’s like, this is never until marriage. Okay, but the reasoning for it is, as he describes, is basically insecurity and fear, the fear of loss, the fear of getting hurt.

Number five, never allow the woman to be in control of the birth. Like, this weird — one of those weird excursus about birth control.

Steve Mayeda: I don’t get that argument. Anyway, if you’ve heard this, like they — by the way, I found that Dr. Glover thing and I posted in the chat. You can read it. I hear from both ends. I hear from really sane people that I really like what they have to say is that birth control destroyed western civilization, and it wrecked the family unit, and all this sort of stuff.

But it’s just so weird how he writes it because it’s written in a way that could be taken wrong [INAUDIBLE 01:11:59].

David Tian: It’s like those half-truths. Yeah, birth control has been very disruptive for evolutionary patterns and so on. But the reasoning the rationale for why this there’s this ironclad rule, it’s all fear.

The next one: Women are incapable of loving a man in a way that he expects to be loved. Women love opportunistically. Women cannot appreciate sacrifices that men make. This is in explanation rule 6. So again, just fear, covert white knights.

This is actually — their view of love is what I’ve been describing as need love. It’s the most basic love. And maybe it’s a second level up, the second type of love which is a transactional love. I’ll love you as long as you love me back. And neither of those are actually real love. They’re not mature love. They’re not developed, or evolved, or integrated love.

Love, like at the higher level, the type of love that’s required to have a successful relationship is one where you love just because that’s who you are and that’s what you’re feeling at that moment. It just comes out of you. So, you’re not looking for it to come back before you give it.

And I think when you become a parent, it’s a lot easier to see that. Like, a little baby, you’re not expecting anything from it. They could pee on you, shit on you. And you’re just full of love and just loving it. You’re not expecting it. It doesn’t have to come back to you in order for you to love this thing.

And hopefully, that’s an easy example for guys who are still single to understand. And you want to get eventually to that point, because if you’re at the point where you’re just like, “Wah, fulfill my needs. I’m a little baby.” Meet my needs for significance. Make me feel important. Make my sacrifices — appreciate it or else I’ll feel like shit.

That’s actually where you’re expecting others to meet your needs for you, and you’re incapable of meeting your own needs. So, a big part of getting them through that growth process is actually teaching them what their needs are and starting with universal human needs, and then showing them how they can meet their own needs and satisfy their own needs in themselves. I don’t think we do need to go through all these other…

Steve Mayeda: I want to kind of talk trash on all of them, but it’s just so weird because this guy didn’t come from experience. A lot of the guys didn’t come from experience. I mean, there’s so many of the dudes that talk about the red pill. How many of them have actually achieved it?

Because one of the things with me is that, I can control a woman. I get that. I can — you were talking about it — somebody wrote on my forum today. It said, “Steve, what is breakthrough comfort?” And I said, “Oh, it’s this thing that was taught in Mystery Method that this guy future came up with, and [INAUDIBLE 01:14:34] I taught a couple of classes.

But one of the advertisements was something like a woman would be willing to kill herself if you dumped her. It’s like the old-school pick up ads, clickbaity and stuff. And I just told him, I I said, “But if you really did want to know how to make a woman kill herself” which I’ve never done that.

But it’s just like — there’s probably better ways than breakthrough comfort. I get all of that and I’ve lived all of that. All these guys, what they say their dream is, and it was fun. Like, I remember there were internet marketing parties in Austin, and one of the dudes, they’re all these like fake PUA dickheads and they’re like, “Steve, I bet you can’t get two girls over here and fuck them.”

And I did. And then I said, “Man, you’re not going to fuck me. You’re going to fuck all my friends.” And then they all sat there watching — playing Street Fighter going like, “It’s okay, Steve. You can…” [INAUDIBLE 01:15:28] suck your dicks. It’s like you know.

And they were just like, “Oh, it’s cool.” I mean, I have power sexually over — whatever the fuck that means man. Those things were fun. And in all that, like, I didn’t do that because I controlled them. And here’s the other thing, right? Like, all these guys who have lots of women naturally in their lives didn’t do it out of control or power.

They may have had to be powerful at certain times. They may have had that whatever control, but they didn’t do it by belittling or degrading a woman before they even met her, right? And now, don’t get me wrong. There’s like pimps that are psychologically — then part of that is psychologically like, you know, torturous to females and so on.

And that may happen in those situations, but I just don’t see the red pill guys actually looking at people who have been successful with women in the ways that they think is successful. And when we talk about this, this would be like people who are tyrannical, people who are, you know, pimps.

On a street level, that might be cool, but in the reality of that, it’s not. Real life pimps aren’t like these badass dudes. They’re often times losers or people who are polygamists and so on. There might be some people that are really good with that or live a good life with that. There might be some people that aren’t, but we want this, yet we go about it in a way that clearly comes from our pain and clearly comes from damaged guys.

And they don’t get it. They don’t get it, and they look up like, who do they look up to? A guy that talks shit online about women? You know, a guy that talks… You know, so my wife and I had a problem with one of the dudes who was really into the red pill that we know.

He was in Austin and it was right after we resolved our problem. I said, “Yeah, man. Me and my wife had this problem.” He started laughing and then he said, “What you should have done is you should have tied her up and left her there for a couple of days, and then brought women over and just like fucked them in front of her and then raped her while you did it. This works.”

And I was just like, “Hey, man. It’s cool.” And he’s like laughing, I’m like, “Dude, it’s cool. The reason why we didn’t talk about the solution to this…” And he’s like, “No. People write about this. It’s on the female red pill board.” And I’m just like, “Dude. I’ve not done that, but the desired goal that he thought of humiliating somebody to the point where they would follow you is shit that I’ve been involved with.

And not done exactly that, but like to play that type of thing, and I don’t do that anymore. But he’s never done that. And for that to be delicious for somebody has to come from pain. And I know because I was in pain, that’s why I did it. That’s beautiful.

David Tian: The pain might be so long ago that they’re not conscious of it, and then it becomes just power tripping. I studied that type of control for too many years, and there’s a part of me that’s like, “Yeah, now, I’m the man. If I can make this happen, then I’m basically like Thanos. I’m the man. I can do whatever I want. Yeah. No one can touch me. I’m the shit.”

And I’m very lucky that a few years later, I finally got taken down pretty bad by a woman. That actually led me into exploring the red pill. But yeah, in psychotherapy, control is a bad word. Like, if you’re looking for control rather than — because there’s so many things in life you can’t control. Look for ways of being adaptable, flexible, enjoying the moment, letting go of these neurotic things that you have to control in order to feel secure.

Steve Mayeda: Look, so here’s the other thing too that I think the red pill should be responsible for, because I always hear Rollo Tomassi talk about this. He says that, “So many people come up to me and say that I was about to kill myself, and then I read your book.” That’s great. I think if a lot of guys read your book and did not kill themselves, that’s a good thing, but I work with people who kill themselves.

So, this is what I fucking hate about the red pill, again, is they cite drug addiction and male suicide. And I work with men who killed — I know a guy that got murdered a couple of weeks ago who was 20 years old, who was a drug addict. I know many people have killed themselves, committed suicide, both men and women.

In addiction, there are more men in America that I see, and I don’t know the stats, leaning way more towards men that have it, but nobody gives a fuck. Addiction doesn’t care what religion you are or whatever, if you’re junkie, your life is fucked.

In all of that, I know — and people that I’ve worked with have killed themselves. That’s the reality of mental illness, is a book does not solve that problem. I think that that is such a perhaps narcissistic way to put it.

I work with people who want to die and and have a very tough time with that on a daily basis who get themselves in really bad spots. And the solution is not just something that they read online or a small-knit community. There is a lot of psychotherapy. There’s a lot of fellowship and interacting. There’s a huge component to this, and to put it that lightly, that the problem with suicide politicized into a male problem is terrible.

So then, the other thing too is that when you bring up… First off, the red pill has a lot of mentally ill people in it and they do not address that. That needs to be addressed. You need to get outside. If somebody comes to my groups, I say I’m not against therapy. I’m not against psychotherapy. Please see a therapist. If I think you have a problem, do yourself a favor and talk to somebody. Let’s look at resources of how this can be discovered.

That’s very important when people work with me, because I’m just a coach, and all that sort of stuff. The thing is that in all of that, you do not recognize — and this what the red pill does great, is it speaks to guys in pain so well. And those guys who are in pain, the anger, the judgment, all those things are really great. But somebody who’s in that anger and pain now as an adult cannot see, it’s impossible to see, will laugh at you, even me.

Like, I’m in pain, I’m really sad about something. “Well, Steve, what about with your mom and how you grew up?” And I’m like, that has nothing to do with it. Nothing to do with it. But if you start working at it in a legitimate way in a legitimate setting, you will see that it does lead there, and that healing does have to happen.

So, when you say it’s like a hurt little boy, nobody sees that. But when you start to go like, “Man, I’m really angry. Why am I angry?” This is an exercise I have people do. It’s like, okay, well, you’re angry about your wife leaving you. What does that mean? Well, I’m not respected, I’m belittled, this and that, like, all the stuff about me, not about her.

Okay, so what happens if you are that guy that’s belittled? What does that mean? It means that I’m a tragedy, my life’s a lie. You keep walking down this more and more, and then we go, “When’s the first time you felt that? When were times when you felt that?”

Really have them think. Like, during adolescence, really have them think with the first time you had fallen in love in a high-pressure situation, and when you were a kid. And it tends to mimic a pattern of how we cope.

I mean, you know this. But it’s just, why isn’t that happening? We’re talking about men’s development. You’re talking about being the best man, and all you’ve got is power, and rage, and control. That’s weakness. Because no greatness, no great act doesn’t come from a massive amount of inventory, whether that’s a martial art, a skill, writing, anything you’re going to master which should be yourself needs to come from the depth of that.

David Tian: Yeah. Absolutely, that’s great. I wanted to acknowledge that. Actually, I wanted to start off by saying there are parts of this ebook too that are inspiring and motivational. So, I can see why a guy in a lot of pain would really resonate with them. It’s also why the first part of this two-parter was mostly focused on trying to resonate, relate to that, how this can feel very soothing when you’re in a lot of pain, to know that you’re not alone, that there is a way to think about it.

It’s really important to see that you’ve got to grow out of this stage if you’re in it though and get out of it, because you’re eventually just going to stay in that kind of white knighting. And here’s an example of what will happen down the road if you stay with this. On page 72, he does talk about his marriage, and he says in the section, Kill the Beta, “This is what marriage is, normal, common, or become so. Not boring per se, though it is more often than not.”

And there’s so many other parts where he just describes his marriage. It’s actually quite sad. I don’t mean that in a condescending way. I really feel that this is tragic for him and that he doesn’t know how to create passion in the long term. He doesn’t actually understand what love is. Because of that, he’s not able to inject love and connection.

In order to have love and connection, you need to be able to drop your guard, and be vulnerable, and be able to deal with the fear and insecurity along with that and handle that, manage that. And then to go further, beyond connection and to love and to unconditional love, that’s another thing you talked about, the myth of female, the feminine mystique.

The feminine unknowability comes along with the idealizations of unconditional love. And this is just because he’s just confused on what love is. He’s in that need love, the transactional love, and this is a great sign, this is a symptom of the fact that the red pill lacks emotional intelligence. Women’s emotions have a logic, it’s just that you don’t know what that logic is.

Steve Mayeda: Oh, yeah. [INAUDIBLE 01:25:53]. It’s kill the beta. Kill the boy. Kill the person. Deny yourself and that’s how you get to the fantasy of what that beta that wanted to be an alpha saw as a solution. It’s so weird.

David Tian: Here’s an example of how they basically just, out of their pain, and fear, and insecurity, they make up stories to explain what happened to them and ways that make them into the victim role because it makes you feel better. Victimization, right? We talked about that in the first part.

And here’s a great contradiction in the whole argument. Women are both the most feeling and the most unfeeling of creatures. On the one hand, they want to say, “Women, they’re all emotions and they’re driven by these needs. They’re just emotions, emotions.” That’s the feminine and the unknowability of it.

On the other hand, they’re like, “Women will turn off these emotions like that.” So, they’re the most feeling but they’re also the most unfeeling. And the way that they try to resolve that paradox is just because, well, when it’s convenient for them. When it’s convenient for the bitter man to claim she’s unfeeling now because he doesn’t understand the logic of what happened.

He’s not making her feel special and secure. He’s not giving her his presence. He’s not giving her the right type of attention or reassurance and he’s let himself go. He’s not growing. He’s not growing and probably she’s not growing. There’s so many reasons why your relationship might fall apart, but it’s like, is this a new fact for you guys that you’re not going to find happiness in life if you don’t keep growing?

Is this a brand new awakening to these guys? Like, yeah, if you stop going to the gym, you’re going to start getting fat and not be so attractive. Is that the new idea? You let yourself go? It’s like, “I want a woman that I can let myself go.” There’s this whole quotation in there about some guy he posts on the forum about how he just wants to rest. It’s a super long thing basically saying, “I just want to rest. I want to find a woman to love me so that I can rest. I can stop working so hard. I can stop…”

This is basically David… A lot of the good stuff in here has already been said decades ago by David Deida and the more cutting-edge pickup artists. It’s the same thing, like the masculine temptation. I think that was chapter one of David Deida’s book, Way of the Superior Man, the temptation to want an end.

Like, you want to get to the end of it and to finally be done. This is an immature masculine. So, almost everything, this whole book is just reeking with the fear and insecurity, and the pain, unfortunately, of the immature masculine who is actually a little boy who is hiding behind — actually, probably a preteen, and then he’s hiding another little boy who just wants love and connection and is hiding behind a shouting, railing, flailing older boy.

Until you break past each of those barriers, and heal and grow each of those layers, you’re never going to actually find peace, and contentment, of happiness and fulfillment. And more importantly, what you’re really looking for guys, which is unconditional love. And you have to give that love to yourself first and discover how to do that. And if you continue with this narrative of you’re the victim, you have to be a certain way, take on a new identity as an alpha energy in order to get women to like you, because you’re still giving too much of a fuck, right? Until you drop that whole agenda, you’re never going to find that love.

Steve Mayeda: Yeah. It’s such a weird thing that guys take this seriously and find peace in it. But I guess that’s kind of the state we’re in of how men can be sad. And I get it. When you’re going through divorce, it’s real easy to look at the red pill stuff. A lot of it makes sense and speaks to you.

But man, I’ll tell you this. Like, it’s much easier when you don’t worry about this stuff and you just get that women are women and men are men. And you don’t need to figure out why. You need to figure out how you can build that bond to communicate, to be a complete man. I always say you need to be completed by the opposite of you, and that is part of the feminine man.

If you deny that and you’re solely a man, a life only as a man becomes a life against women. And man, I’ve always thought this, always thought this, and then it becomes a reality more and more just as time goes on. We just have so many people refracted and alone. To be a divorced man is a great thing in the world. It’s beautiful. It sucks for about a year and a half, all that pain, but god, it’s so great.

When we live in a man’s world, and I’m sure if I was a woman, I’d say we live in a great world for women too, but like, to be a man whether you’re single, there’s so much to do and it’s so great. Don’t waste your time looking at the why. And these guys who’ve never prove — who’s proved themselves? I mean, it’s so weird.

David Tian: He attacks solipsism in women, but he commits a solipsistic fallacy, which is that: just because he hasn’t seen it, it doesn’t exist. So, I want to say that’s solipsism right there. That’s the belief that the world is just you, it’s just ultimate self-centeredness. Just because you haven’t found love doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Just because you haven’t found a successful relationship doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

Steve Mayeda: The thing that I hate about this whole red pill thing is that it’s kind of ironic. It comes from The Matrix, now those two guys who made it are women, but it’s like you’ve taken the red pill. You wake up, you go back to the life you always lived if you take the blue pill. And then if you take the red pill, you’re awoke in this way.

It is such a lie. The biggest lie is to think that you are awakened to a truth. And here’s another thing. If I were to break down what is wrong with the red pill, it’s like evolutionary psychology. They get that wrong and it’s not a hard science and it’s not meant to be a hard science. And I’m not asking for it for to be a hard science, but don’t assume it’s a hard science.

The alpha-beta thing is a huge thing in the red pill, which I think they interpret completely wrong and fucked up, and I just think it’s a fucked up idea in general. The other thing is sexual market value and we kind of talked about that a little bit.

I think I said objective instead of subjective, but sexual market value or one’s worth is a subjective thing, not a hard-line objective thing, which you then [INAUDIBLE 01:32:36].

David Tian: Mating value?

Steve Mayeda: Yeah, that is a little bit different. The other thing too is going to be hypergamy. Also, when it comes to the red pill, there’s this idea of an absolutism or a truth that cannot be broken and is better than anything else, which mirrors any extremist group you’re a part of, you’re the same thing with.

Islam is a great religion, but when it comes down to extreme Muslim beliefs, you get the same thing like, “Oh, if I just know this, I’m now wise. I’ve looked at Reddit on the red pill and now I’ve been enlightened in this way, which makes me smarter than the average fucking chad out there that just thinks he’s got it better than me. I’m better than them and I’m superior because I have this information.”

It’s the same thing with extreme Christianity or whatever political system. This idea of the truth is not based on your experiences, not based on how you’ve been challenged in life and made decisions as yourself making it your own truth, but it’s a truth that can protect you, and make you better than, and make you more powerful.

And once again, you know, you said in psychotherapy, it’s like control is a bad word, but we get into these zones of what I call scarcity and where — you know, there’s a reason for anger, there’s a reason for fear, there’s a reason for control, there’s a reason for boundaries. But when we start making those our main form of communication to people that we don’t know, like we fear them, we judge them, we try and make control or have control over them and so on, this is tremendously unhealthy. And I think that’s the biggest red flag to say that you’re not developing as a man, to saying that you think that that love is a lie and it can’t be true because you gave it your all.

And you’re probably not even willing to look at it if you didn’t give it your all. Men and women are so different. We have to learn that language, and it’s a beautiful thing. And the more you learn that language, the better off you are as a man or a woman exploring those things.

David Tian: That’s great. I guess we should really be wrapping up here as well. Let me summarize on one of the points, which is the the fear and insecurity. And the insecurity that’s driving the red pill agenda, especially in the Rational Male book, comes out of the the fear that you’re not enough, that you’re not good enough. You’re not worthy of love, not good enough for love, not enough for love.

And it’s just, the entire thing is just coming to terms with feeling that way that I’m not good enough. So, I have to be this guy, this Corey Worthington type of alpha or whatever it is, that they have to be different from who they are, and the toxic shame that they have towards who they are. And there is a theme running through it of like, you can’t just be yourself and be loved; that’s just a myth.

And it’s sad because what they’re referring to is just standard AFC. PUA has been saying that for two decades, and there are much better ways of actually coping with that. So, if you’re going to take that tack, just learn some real game. But even deeper is actually tackling the belief that you’re not enough, challenging that, and then how to actually feel in your core, like it’s a real belief, that you are enough and you are worthy of love.

And the way to do that is to start with meeting your own needs that you’re not driven by this fear anymore [INAUDIBLE 01:36:10] security for love and connection, for feeling important. And then the way to go further from that is integration. So, the term that I like to use is integrating your inner child parts into yourself, and growing and healing those parts, and integrating even the feminine energy, learning how to balance that out, being able to relate to the feminine and even grow some of the management of your own feminine energy within you.

Because that’s what’s required for a successful life, it’s not just 100% toxic masculinity, because it becomes toxic at that point… But to get in there 80-20, 70-30 of having that balance, and integrating that into yourself, and ultimately discovering your true self, and leading with that, and being able to interact with others. What that will do is draw out, call out the true self in others, and those women who are integrated themselves, who are developed on the path, on the pathway there who are growing themselves will be drawn to that.

It’ll be almost at an unconscious level. Whereas if you put the false self out and you’re leading with the false self, all you’ll get will be other false selves, because the true selves will be turned off by that and it won’t be something that they can relate to. So, if you continue to go down this road, you’re going to end up with how Tomassi described his wedding…

Steve Mayeda: “I was married to a cuck.”

David Tian: Normal… Yeah. Even if you do get married, it’ll be normal, common, becomes — or becomes so, not boring per se, though it is more often than not, that fear that there will be no more sex once you move in together, and then you can’t spin plates anymore, all of that fear and insecurity. It’s such a horrible life. And I think red pill guys know it, if you’re just starting down that road.

It just feels like yuck. It feels like, “Okay, I got awoken to…” Matrix is a good example. You look at how shitty the world is. It’s sort of like, and I’ll tell you, the answer is, actually, you have to take another red pill. It’s the red pill for self-discovery, self-awareness, and grow it. This isn’t the reality. This isn’t true reality. There’s something much more beyond this, a lot more color in the rainbow. You’re just looking at one or two colors.

Steve Mayeda: You know, it’s funny because this idea you’re not enough, the red pill blames society, and all of your power comes from evolution. But the definition of alpha isn’t based on evolution, it’s based off of society. And then the sexual market value… And let me just rewind because I know people are going to question. If Rollo Tomassi or any of these guys get challenged on what alpha means, they’re like, “Oh well, it doesn’t mean the pack of wolves guys.” What are we, stupid?”

It’s like, “No, we’re not stupid. We’re asking you the question because you’re using the term because you’re saying, “All of my power comes from my evolution as a man, what it means to be a man.” You’re using terms which don’t define what’s going to help you. So now, alpha is this cool term because everybody knows it, it’s because it’s an evolutionary term, because we’re talking about evolutionary psychology, but really, it means confidence based on society which damaged you.

When you look at Tomassi, he would never survive in an alpha world of what he’s saying men came from. He’s the ultimate bitch. Maybe he’s even the penultimate bitch because he’s second to everybody. But the thing is, is that then we look at sexual market value. It isn’t based on evolution. It’s based on, “Oh, muscles.” And the shape of the body. But then how to get there is societal based things. How can we hack society in this sort of way?

Hypergamy… I mean look, how we evolved if hypergamy is existing would have been represented completely different. There’s problems in our culture, no doubt, but to make yourself think that it is an evolutionary thing so that you could buy into truth, so that you could have power, so that you could represent yourself in a way that can’t be argued and that you could believe in and not look at yourself as part of the problem, that is a circle and a cycle of shit that you’re going to eat for the rest of your life.

If you want to know the David Tian version of that, there’s probably some psychological term of denial and delusion. And that’s so terrible. Nothing is true in this. Like, the red pill, the truth that you’re supposed to take, unveiling the reality of the world keeps you deeper in a world that is a greater lie. And to see the truth isn’t taking a fucking pill or reading a book. It’s living in such a dynamic way to show yourself as you to people and to learn to deal with the pain of that.

And people aren’t going to like you, and you’re going to get screwed over, and you’re going to get fucked worse than you could ever protect yourself. But then you’re going to learn to live through things that you never thought you could live through, and that’s the beauty of it, man.

When you hear a lot of these guys talk about PTSD and trauma, which is a real, real thing and a terrible thing, and it has unique characteristics, they don’t even look [INAUDIBLE 01:41:29]. They just use it as an excuse to diagnose themselves or give reason to why they’re angry. But trauma is accentuated in a culture — or trauma has a different result psychologically in a culture that can’t allow somebody to be a part of something, and that’s what I think we’re dealing with here.

We need more connection and more openness. And the less that we have that, the more we’re just going to see this crazy stuff and see it justified to be angry all the way up to we get school shooters or all the way up to just hating a woman, to thinking that that’s how you’d be a man.

David Tian: That’s great, man. That’s so inspiring. So, to end off, I guess on the community thing, Steve’s got a great community. Don’t go in there trying to push your red pill shit, but he’s got a great community. So, we’ll link that up below. I also have a Facebook group, please join that. Again, we’re probably not going to let you do a whole bunch of red pill bullshit.

Steve Mayeda: You guys are good with that. You’re good at answering questions and you’re good at moderating. It’s pretty impressive, man.

David Tian: Yeah. It’s like a full-time job almost now, moderating that. But yeah, please join either of our groups. There’s a lot of free resources as part of those groups. I’m also going to link up a four-part video series that I’ve mentioned before called Modern Mating Explained that will speak directly to the red pill condition, that’s a good phrase, the red pill condition, and how to heal and grow from it. So, I’ll link that down below.

Steve, it was such a great pleasure. I wish we had a longer period of time so we can really dive deep and it was great hearing your stories and your perspectives. So thankful for having you on here.

Steve Mayeda: Yeah. You got it, man. Thanks for having me. You guys have a good one.

David Tian: All right. Peace out.