“Modern Mating Explained” is a special seminar series that explores the deeper psychological bases for mating in the modern world.

For over a decade, David Tian, Ph.D., has helped hundreds of thousands of people from over 87 countries find happiness, success, and fulfillment in their social, professional, and love lives. His presentations – whether keynotes, seminars, or workshops – leave clients with insights into their behavior, psychology, and keys to their empowerment. His training methodologies are the result of over a decade of coaching and education of thousands of students around the world. Join him in this special seminar series as he explores deep questions of the psychological bases for mating in the modern world. Subscribe now.

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Growth & Maturity for Reformed Players & PUAs (Pick Up Artists)

• David Tian Ph.D. shares the two types of psychology the pick-up artists use.

• Dr.Tian explains why the pick-up artist’s false self is especially dangerous.

• Nice guys aren’t always “nice”, David Tian Ph.D. points out the characteristics of a nice guy that we should be wary of.

• In this talk, David Tian Ph.D. explains how PUAs can get into the road to recovery, strength, integration, and maturity.

Welcome! I’m David Tian, PhD. And for over the past 10 years, I’ve been helping hundreds of thousands of people in over 87 countries attain success, happiness, and fulfillment in life and love. Welcome to a special class. I think I will make this presentation a prologue to what I was going to get into. I’m glad we spent a few hours getting to know each other here in the room, and then figuring out where you’re at. It’s really important for me to figure out where you’re at. One of the things I figured out where you’re at, is that if you’re still coming from – or you know me as helping you learn how to pick up girls or attract women, or however you want to call that, and then you’re wondering how the more recent material on clinical psychology, developmental personality psychology, rather than…

The pick-up artists use two types of psychology, social psych and evolutionary psych and that’s pretty much it. I’ve been drawing mostly in the past few years from other areas of psychology. If you know psychology, you’d know the difference. One of the questions that comes up is, “How will this help me meet women?”. So, I just want to put that to rest that how I came to it as a way of answering of getting better at answering that question. That learning the clinical psychology is actually coming out of the journey of making myself more sexually attractive and ultimately finding out that that journey where that desire was in itself part of the problem.

There is some good advice in pick up. Things like you should stand in a certain way. I’ve taught that before. I used to have a formula for it, back brought up and breathe. It was how you stand; shoulders back, chest up broad, have your chin up, stomach in. Right now, I’m a little bloated from all of the protein and caffeine. And breathe. That’s good musculature. It’s good posture to have. The voice, make it slow and smooth when you’re talking to women, otherwise – in all cases – project well with resonance and strength in your voice. These are all good things to learn.

Of course, on top of that, there are the more obvious things I’ve been attacking previously, which are things like routines, openers, and that sort of thing; having pre-scripted things to say. Also, just detaching emotionally from the whole relationship or interaction so that you don’t get ‘hurt’ and all this other stuff. There are some pick-up tactics that are more obviously manipulative and bad psychologically, and you might think that that’s what I’m attacking. I’m attacking the entire enterprise of it, because even things like giving you advice on how to stand in a certain way, there’s a minority of people, for men and women, who could benefit from body language advice, vocal tonality advice, and all of this. I actually picked it up pretty quick. I was in the overlap group where it was bad for me, but I picked it up quickly.

The people who could benefit from this in a healthy way are those who generally pick it up quickly. Quickly, as in you just get exposed to it once and you learn the technique or the teaching in 15 minutes or an hour. And right away after that, you can apply it. In other words, just standing up straight, that’s a good piece of advice for people in general. If you’re like, “Oh yeah, stand up straight. Okay. Done.” Standing up straight, great.

But then, most of the guys I work with have trouble implementing that. I get them to wall stand, in other words, stand up against the wall, and they set their backs straight and all of this. The next day, I see them slouching again, or they feel like, “Oh, this is very stiff. This isn’t me.” And they’re not comfortable. They’re not able to talk that way. They’re not able to operate that way. This is a sign of a deeper problem. One way to do it is – and what pick-up coaches do – is to just bash them over the head with this.

“You just need to do it more.” There’s another example that’s more common, is cold approaching. The guys who get good at cold approaching. There are ways of teaching cold approaching. Say this, do this, and don’t do this, and go ahead. Go. Do it. There are some people who implement it quickly. I’ve had the joy of working with several individuals. They’re that few who pick it up that quickly as quick as I’m talking about it. Several individuals, and generally they’re the ones who paid $15,000 or more to work with me.

Ironically, they’re the ones that require the least amount of work for me. They were just really smart. Basically, what they had was that everything else in life figured out, and they thought there was a big issue.

This is how really successful people approach things. They think it’s a big issue and they’re willing to spend a lot of time to fix this issue. Those people get shit done. They’re usually in the right frame of mind. So if I say, “Well, use a pink elephant here and that’ll really help.” He’s like, “Okay.” Now, he tries it and gets results. He gets laid or whatever it is that he was looking for. That guy just needed a little tactic. I had lots and lots of these little tactics.

But the vast majority, well over 90% of the people I work with, need a lot more work to do this. Even little tips like speaking it down tone. Instead of saying to somebody, “Are there any seats available?” You say, “Are there any seats available?” That’s an up tone, right? And then I say, “Don’t ask questions like that if you want them to take you seriously, and to obey you, and to follow what you’re saying.” Say it with a down tone. “Are there any seats available?”

Another one that comes up is like, “Let’s go!” Instead of “Let’s go.” Right? Just a little subtle difference. And then the guy goes, “Okay, speaking it down tone.” You go out, or you bring him up on the stage, and you drill it, and he can’t even do it in a drill. There’s that disconnect. What’s happening there is there’s actually a deeper psychological problem that’s not just a little tip that they can implement. If all you’re looking for are little tips, the internet is replete with them. The wonderful thing about the information age is that every two days – this is something from Eric Schimdt, the ex-CEO of Google, I think he said this in the early-2000’s.

He says something like, “Every two days, there is more information uploaded on the internet than there was in all of human history up to the year 2000.” Now, it’s even more. If you google how many hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every day, it’ll astound you. Most of it is never seen by anybody except the creators. If you just need little tips and tricks, there are enough tips and tricks in an airport book by Leil Lowndes, “How to talk to anyone about anything”, or whatever, that will occupy you for years.

There’s some people who literally just need to learn to stand up straight. “Okay. Oh, stand up straight. Okay.” And then they do it. There are people who I say, “Speak slowly and smoothly, get in the right emotional state when you speak to somebody like that and you come off sexier.” And he’s like, “Okay, slow and smooth. Boom. That day. Done. Never have to talk about it again. Boom.” Right? And I was one of those people. I was comorbid where I was learning it and I was getting it quick, but I was still just papering over the underlying problem. The pickup artist problem is that he ends up putting a false self over another false self that he’s already got.

Whereas the person who is just looking for tips and tricks just is literally looking for, “Oh, stand up straight. I didn’t know that. Now I know it. I don’t have to deal with it anymore.” He literally just needs to hear it once. If that’s you, you probably aren’t watching this. Like I said, I’ve had the joy of working with people like this, but they are very few and far between.

Here’s another statistic for you. Out of all of the guys who start learning pick-up, less than 5% of them will actually finish the journey and actually get really good at cold approach pick-up. There’s another reason for that, is because they don’t actually fix the underlying problem. They just address the symptoms. The reason why, when you try to stand up straight and you feel stiff, and unnatural, and this puts you in a new personality that you don’t like, and that’s very hard for you to think creatively in, it’s because you’re actually dealing with deep-rooted issues of shame and low self-esteem. Now, we’re just adding a whole other layer of fakery on top of the fakeness that you have been living in, the fake self that you’ve been having. I’ve made a whole other video addressing a related issue, and that is called “Why Game Is Fucking Us All Up”. There are many variations on this.

This video will touch on some of those issues, so that’s a good one to watch, but it’s going to cover quite a bit more. I wanted to point out, to start off, that the whole enterprise of teaching a guy pick-up tricks, or even good tips like standing in a certain way, and to walk and move in a certain way, and to speak with a certain type of voice. They are generally good, but only if you can implement them easily. If you have to exert a lot of effort to learn those things, to switch your voice, to stand in a new way, to move in a new way… In order for you to do that, it will require the exertion or learn cold approach pick-up. If doing this, learning this, requires a lot of time and effort on your side, it’s a sign that there are deeper psychological issues that you’re not addressing.

If you actually get these deep psychological issues addressed. What will happen? You might have heard of ‘natural game’ before. The way that I used to use this many years ago was to just say, “What’s in this way?” I was always a natural game proponent, which was that you internalize what you’re learning. You want to get to the point where speaking slowly, smoothly, and standing straight, and moving deliberately and slowly, and smoothly, and generally as your default, and having witty things to say, and having things off the top of your head, just spontaneously creative things, and flirty things, and being able to drop pink elephants and things like this – to actually get to that stage, if you were to go about it the old way of imposing it from the outside, most people fail at that.

Whereas, if you were to become psychologically integrated and mature, then you wouldn’t need to attend to any of those things. You would speak how you want to speak. You would walk, and talk, and move, in how you just naturally want to walk, talk, and move. You would be yourself. I’m just saying this for emphasis. I don’t know how many of you guys are actually paying attention. Whereas the other way of being ‘natural’ was internalizing an outside, external set of rules that you’re trying to now stuff into your brain so that you do it naturally.

The idea is, if you do it enough times, you will do it naturally. That’s called ‘internalizing’. That’s actually basically the process, for pick-up artists who internalize it that way, the process of becoming a new false self. A good example of a false self that later became an adaptive self is my old blog, which you will not find on the internet anymore. I still get requests, “David, where is the challenge screening article?” “David, where is the believability article?” And so many of these other articles. We obviously have saved those data, but I made the decision relatively recently to remove the site because it was sending guys down the wrong path, and I didn’t want to be responsible for that.

If you’re one of the 3% or maybe even 1% of people who are just looking for tips that they can implement immediately, you don’t actually need the website. With enough resourcefulness, you’d find everything, all the information you want, somewhere for free on the internet. That’s how powerful the internet is. It’s going to become even more difficult to have an information product business as we go forward, but that’s one of the things, and so I don’t feel bad about withdrawing that information for the 1% of people that would actually use it in a healthy way.

Instead, most people use it as a way of putting on a new false self. My false self was called – I gave it a name. In fact, if you can identify the various parts in you, and we all have various parts in ourselves, and you can give it a name – this is something Tony Robbins likes to do in his sessions, in his trainings. You give it a name. After you’ve called it out, you’ve anchored it, you give it a name. You denote it with a term that you can call it out and it becomes an easier way of bringing that part out. I gave it a name not even knowing any of the psychology because it was a handle, because everybody is fake in the PUA world. Back in those days, nowadays, when you want to make money, you come out with your real name because it’s too easy to search people on the internet. And so, they know they’re going to get outed anyway.

But back in the old days, you always had a handle. You’re on some creepy forum, no one is their real selves, you all have an avatar that’s got knowing to do with the real you, and then you have a cool name like ‘forumhandle’ or something like that, or ‘tokyoPUA’ or something. I came up with a cool name because back then my identity was really caught up in being Asian and all that so I called it, “The Asian Rake”. Of course, I learned the word ‘rake’ from Robert Greene’s book Art of Seduction, which is a great book for learning how to be a fake self. So you know, Asian Rake. Who was I? I was the Asian Rake.

When I was with women, I wasn’t David Tian, I was Asian Rake. It became easy to think of myself that way so I can learn things faster. Who was rejected? I wasn’t rejected, Asian Rake got rejected. Asian Rake doesn’t give a shit about rejection, so he laughs it off. It’s very easy to do this, and then you get better, and you get better really quickly. If you can create an alter ego and put that out there like Batman, and Bruce Wayne, or whatever, then Bruce Wayne doesn’t get the hit, Batman did. It’s a great way of distancing yourself from your true self even further. Already, the David Tian that I was back then was already another adaptive self.

It becomes an adaptive self, a false self becomes an adaptive self when you see it as a false self, and you now are able to control it, you’re able to call it out when it’s necessary or when it’s needed, and you’re able to put it to rest when it’s no longer needed. Most people have no clue about false selves, and true selves, and depth of selves, and all of these other parts in them, so they just become that person by taking on acting – by taking on the body language, the eye contact, the tonality, of that character that they are, given their environment. They are one way with their parents. They are one way at work. They are one way when they’re at the clubs, bars, and want to look cool and pick up chicks. They are maybe another way on the date, and then they are another way with their buddies at beer. There are all of these different instances, it’s a new self, but they’re doing it unreflectively, and they’re doing it without being in control.

A part of them doesn’t see them as different selves. They see it as one unitary self, but that unitary self is changing all of the time. I’ll get into why the pick-up artist’s false self is especially dangerous, and that many guys who are in that world, many as in the vast majority, over 90% of the guys I know, who got into that world and got good at it are still very much caught up in their false selves. I know because I knew from the other side, and I’m still in the process at 41 years old of becoming my true self and inhabiting that more often, and being able to bring out other parts of me depending on the circumstances and when it’s needed. Sometimes, The Asian Rake will make his appearance when I want to seduce my wife again and make it a sexy night or whatever, or just for fun because it’s fun, but it’s not a part that I wish was me.

Back then, I did. Back then, when you’re pre-PUA, you don’t like the self that you are. There are parts of you that you don’t like, like the nerdy part, the geeky part, the part that is insecure, the part that can’t speak, the part that doesn’t look cool, whatever that part that’s been shamed and that you’re ashamed of, that you want to change in order to be more attractive to women. You’re willing to do all of this changing at the essential level of the self to get the women, to get the validation, to feel good about yourself. In fact, the self that you were before, you weren’t too proud of. What happens is, what you replace one false self with another. And then you really hope to god, because you don’t know that you’re actually replacing false selves, you just think you’re becoming a better version of yourself.

Every time I hear that phrase, literally speaking, there’s nothing wrong with it, but every time it’s being used, it’s usually being used to manipulate you. “Become a better version of yourself.” One way that pick-up artists love that phrase now, because you’re becoming a ‘better version’ of yourself by dressing differently, changing your body language, changing the way you talk and walk, and the words you use. What’s the most dangerous about that is if you want that new self to actually be you. I’ll get into the details of that. I’m not sure if I can get to it fully today, I’ll begin it and then we’ll continue it in the next session.

But what’s dangerous is when the pick-up artist or when the guy hopes that – he really wishes and desires – that the seductive self is his real self. How does he know whether the seductive self has reached the ‘better version’ of him yet? How does he know? Well, if he’s a ‘seductive self’, but all the girls he talks to turn him down and he’s not getting laid and no girls like him, that’s evidence, it’s a metric he’s using to say, “I have not yet succeeded in becoming my better, seductive self yet.” What is the metric? Well, when this hot girl – who’s got to be HB10 or something like that – returns his affection. That shows that he is indeed the seductive self that he’s been hoping he will become this entire time, this whole process.

When that’s the case, then he now thinks he can rest because “I got the girl.” This is a common myth. “Now, I got the girl. I don’t need to learn anything more. I don’t need to better myself.” And he hopes to god that he’s become ‘natural’ at the game, which means that he hopes all of the body language, tonality, eye contact, the lines, the witty comebacks, that’s all internalized in his brain. He doesn’t have to think about it. It’s just there. Sometimes, it is. It was for me. I didn’t have to try anymore, but all that meant was I didn’t have to try to be the false self that I was already, because I was a false self. All of these guys are false selves.

They hope to god that that false self is their true self, that that seductive, charismatic, attractive guy, that girl, which is proof that he is, infact, attractive, that that is his real self. His metric for determining this is whether that girl likes him or whether enough hot girls like him. Now, he’s made it. He’s the hot guy or whatever, right? The sexually attractive, naturally attractive man. But he forgot that it was actually the result of him actually putting on a whole other facade, a new personality. It’s one thing to say stand differently, talk this way, and you just do it. That’s not an essential part of who you are. But when it’s an essential part of who you are and you change that, that’s why guys find it so difficult, because it’s not very difficult.

It’s funny, because you see these guys who are really intelligent. General intelligence is very high. You get a lot of guys whose IQs are pretty high, and they’re in high-powered jobs that pay a lot, right? They’re smart guys. Yet, you tell them to say the dramatic direct opener, which is the best opener ever. It is literally three sentences. Three fucking sentences, right? And they’ve done nuclear science, okay? They’ve past high school, okay? You can do three Singlish sentences, right? Yeah, and just throw in a few pauses. Can you do that? Yeah, great. Okay, go! And then it’s just horrible, it just bombs. It’s like, is this an English as a second language issue? No.

And then sometimes even just reading it, they can’t even say the line. Like a script reading, they can’t even do it. What’s going on here? Well, they see that their essential self, their false self, actually sees these changes as affecting the essential elements of their self. So for him to actually successfully be the player guy, the sexually attractive, naturally attractive guy, he’d actually have to change the self. That’s the successful journey, is to change the false self into another false self. Why do I say this? That’s period, line, next section.

Why do I say that you’re originally a false self? That’s the really deep stuff. For most of the people, especially in Singapore that I interact with, or actually interacting with me, has a false self. If you had met me three or four years ago, you also would’ve been interacting very likely with one of my false selves. I now consider them adaptive selves because I use them for particular purposes or instances. For instance, when I would like to get a free upgrade at the airport or a hotel, I become a different self and see if it works. These are selves you bring out and use.

They have their own needs, and I’ll get into this way later for you guys a couple of days, but further down that series. I don’t want to give away too much of that yet. Let’s first look at why I would say that before – while you’re a nice guy. While you were the guy who went blank when you talk to a beautiful woman. The guy who had crippling approach anxiety, or even just a lot of approach anxiety when you wanted to talk to a hot girl. That guy. That guy who didn’t find it very easy to just change just like that after learning that he should change. That guy. That guy is actually also a false self. In fact, you have been inhabiting one of more false selves for most of your life. That is the reason why you are having trouble attracting people.

Sexual attraction can actually work for pick-up artist because their false self triggers her false self, and those false selves fall in love, but not really love. It’s a neurotic kind of love. It’s a vampiric kind of love. That’s another real danger to this whole process where you take on a false persona, complete with lines, thoughts, a belief structure, affirmations that you say every day to install beliefs like “She wants me” every fucking day into your brain so that you think, “Oh, naturally, yeah, she wants me.” But this is not done in the way that is actually emotionally healthy; it’s done in a way that imposes a new false self onto you. Of course, the way you look, move, and all of that good stuff. That will attract the female version of that.

This is what I call the perfect pairing, or the perfect victim-predator couple. One way to think about them is – and to connect them with earlier material I’ve made is the fixer. I made a video that’s helped a lot of guys called – the white knight syndrome is, I forget the exact title, but it had the terms white knight syndrome in it. This is describing that person, the fixer, the guy who has got a hero complex, the rescuer, what most women see as ‘the nice guy’. When they say that, they mean that in a derogatory way. The co-dependent in a certain way. Co-dependent is a big concept here. It has overlaps. This is a guy who basically – he takes responsibility for the emotions of other people. That’s the clinical definition of it. I’ll get into why this is the case, but these are bascially boundary violations.

A guy like that will attract a predator female. You can think about this in that way, the fixer male, a predator female, but it works in the opposite as well, different genders. The predator female is a great way of thinking about predator personality disorders. These include narcissists, egotists, borderline personality disorders, and also include histrionic sociopaths, psychopaths. They do the opposite. They make others responsible for their emotions without taking responsibility for themselves. If you want to read the clinical description of them, just google DSM-5 or DSM-V cluster B personality disorders. That’s in the DSM manual.

What’s really important to understand is they’re both feeding on ego supply. The co-dependent fixer or the white knight, the guy who wants to get better with women and finds it difficult to do that, versus the 3% or 1% of guys who just learn it, learn that they should stand a certain way and they just do it. No need to train it or whatever, right? Everybody else I’m talking about who has to exert a lot of extra effort. That nice guy, the guy who takes responsibility for the emotions of other people, who is used to having his boundaries violated. That guy is actually the flipside of a narcissist. He’s actually a co-dependent, who then in the process of becoming a pick-up artist, or a player, or a naturally attractive, seductive man, actually becomes a narcissist himself. In the clinical literature, this is called the compensatory narcissist. He’s a second-nature narcissist. He’s a later in life narcissist. That’s what The Asian Rake was: a later in life narcissist.

That would only attract bigger and bigger predators. At the beginning, when you’re not very good at game, you’re going to attract some psycho girls, but they’re going to be just this much psycho. The better you get at game, the more psycho the girls get. If you don’t believe me, just look through YouTube. All these pick-up guys, the more they are in the field, the longer they are on this, the crazier the girls get. And then they start posting how to do drama on her to get her hooked and all of this really unhealthy stuff. This is all because they actually were narcissists to begin with, but they weren’t very smart narcissists.

In other words, when you’re a nice guy, you’re still trying to manipulate people, but you’re just not very good at it so you’re not really getting what you want. Whereas if you’re a good psychopath, you get everything you want because you know how to read people and you’re smart enough. You know how to get things by manipulating people. Both parties really want ego supply or narcissistic supply. That’s whatever feeds the ego. You might think, “Oh, now David’s on the ego thing.” But stay with me for a second here because it gets deeper than this.

The preferred source of ego supply for predatory disordered individuals like the cluster B type of women, sociopaths and so on, they feed off flattering attention. They feed off the admiration of others. They feed off applause and adoration. They see the ego supply as an end in itself, not for something else that they’re going to use it for. They actually feel better about themselves when they get the attention, the admiration, the approval of other people. You’ll see why the nice guy, the aspiring pick-up artist, or the guy who is trying to learn how to be a player is actually the same thing, he just sucks at it. He’s learning how to be a good predator, because he too – what he really wants isn’t sex. To the women who are watching this, it’s about 10% – 20% of women who watch my videos, the guys are not just horny dudes. They’re not just after pussy. If they were smart, they’d realize there are ways of getting that sex without going through all of this hassle of learning all of this pick-up stuff. You can just pay for it.

But they refuse to do that for whatever moral reasons, but mostly because they don’t feel like they earned it. They want to earn it, because somehow if they earn it, it’s pure. The sex is pure in some way. So what’s going on there? They want the flattering attention. They want her to give him the admiration. Because if she likes him, that means he’s better as a human being, he’s a better man, he’s a better seductive guy, and that’s what he thinks he needs to be in order to be loved, in order to finally feel worthy and have self-esteem.

That’s a big misunderstanding about aspiring pick-up artists, that people think they’re just sexual predators. They’re actually not after sex. A lot of pick-up artists, when they get to the deed before they go through the intercourse, actually lose their erection. The whole point of it was to get her to the point where she says yes to the sex and to plow through the LMR, last minute resistance, and then to get in there. And once he’s in there, yes, now he can write a lay report. That means he got another one, yeah! That means he’s leveled up, right? He’s like a video game, you level up from level 1 to 2 now because he got another victim. He would always deny this. But now just ask them and find out if you google far enough, how many of these guys have erectile dysfunction when they actually do the deed when they’re going after it as a pick-up artist – because they’re really just looking for the ego supply.

It’s almost misunderstanding predatory women. You think all these girls who are wearing revealing dresses and all of this are there because they’re horny. That’s the misunderstanding of very conservative people thinking they had to rein in the rampant sexual desires of these club girls. Actually, no. If they just wanted to have sex, they don’t have to do anything. They don’t even have to dress up. You’d fuck them. They’d just show up in their regular dresses. They’d have to compete with the other girls. What they need is ego supply. They got to get the guys fawning over them. Even when they reject you, they feel good doing it because it’s like fishing, sport fishing. They got one, threw it back in.

What is all of this? Where am I going with this? Just to remind you: The unconflicted person, the person who is integrated, who is mature, who is not dealing with issues around approval, attention, who is not frozen in the face of somebody who he wants to impress; who doesn’t have to think extra hard or really focus on what he’s saying. That guy will be his most attractive and more importantly, most fulfilled self when he actually goes through the therapeutic process. If he doesn’t do it that way, all he’s doing is delaying the process of finding happiness and fulfillment. In other words, all the pick-up stuff is really just a way to save him money. Because if he’s really just there for the sex, the ego won’t ever get supplied.

The ego won’t ever be satisfied in the pick-up process, only the penis will. But he spent all this time, and effort, and emotional turmoil learning how to stand straight, and speak in a certain way, and to use your face in a certain way. Come on, let’s be fucking honest, how is it possible that 95% of these guys who started out on it fail if it’s supposed to be so easy the way I’m talking about it, the way these VSLs autoplay, VSLs say it’s so easy, effortless, just say three words, ask her these three questions and she’s yours. Why isn’t everybody doing it, then? You listening? Right, it’s because it wasn’t ever for that. It was for, “How can I be somebody different from who I am now because I don’t like who I am right now.” And it wasn’t really about sex. It was about the fact that they weren’t getting the approval, attention, and admiration. Why do you think they get frozen with fear when they’re talking to a girl? Because they’re worried what she’ll think. That’s their problem. That’s why they need therapy. That’s why we all need therapy, because we worry about what she thinks.

Once you don’t need therapy anymore, in the sense that you’ve gone through enough maturation, you say whatever you’re thinking because whatever you’re thinking is okay, even if it’s a horny thought. It’s a thought you’re having, and if you’re having it, the most honest thing is – if you’re going to say anything at all – is to say that. Now, of course, all of these guys who are very immature are going to say, “What? So I just go around saying, “Fuck you, bitch” because that’s what I’m thinking?” Yeah, actually. That would be better for society, then we can identify the really creepy guys fast. But also, you know you’re creepy. Right now, you’re walking around pretending you’re okay, like you’re a nice guy, but you’re a fucked up guy. The faster you discover that you’re a fucked up guy, because everyone runs from you, the faster you could seek therapy. It’ll be a signal to everybody else to stay the fuck away from you.

The only person who would not want to reveal what he’s really thinking is the person who is having evil thoughts. And if you’re having evil thoughts and you don’t want to have evil thoughts, the faster you go see a therapist and figure out why you have so many evil thoughts, the better, rather than holding it in and pretending to be a good person when you’re not. The more you distance yourself from your true self, the more dissatisfaction and lack of fulfillment you’ll find in your life. No amount of fucking or girls liking you will solve any of that. It’ll just distract you. I was distracted for years with that. And at the end of it, because I’m a pretty existential thinker, I was a professional philosopher, I did it for a fucking living as a professor. Eventually, I kept encountering this.

I guess if you were not too smart, you’d just go around like another dog and just keep eating the next meal, and eventually you die. I imagine there are some people who like that, they’re just not too smart. And so, they never ask the deeper questions. But if you’re intelligent, and I really only speak to intelligent people, “Masculinity for the Intelligent Man”, right? You’re going to be asking these questions. You’re going to be wondering, “Why is my life so empty? Why is it that no matter how much pussy I get, no matter how much adulation I get, it’s never really enough to rest? I have to keep going back for it.”

Here’s the biggest mistake that will waste a couple years of his life: He thinks that the girl who likes him back, that they get into a relationship and then he can rest and go back and become himself. But actually, he’s either going to rest and become his false player self. If I could reside as The Asian Rake all the time then, and live as that false self, hoping that’s just my true self because I plan to live in that self for the rest of my life, right? That is a recipe for disaster in terms of mental health and wellness.

Or he hasn’t internalized those lessons. He’s just a fake pick-up artist superficially and then he reverts back to – when he relaxes and just wants to kick back and play some video games, and watch Game of Thrones, he goes back to his nerdy self which he wasn’t really proud of. What happens is, the girl loses respect for him and starts picking on him. And then he calls that drama and all this shit happens. He’s like, “Oh, fucking bitches.” Either way, you’re fucked. Either way, you’re going to have to get some therapeutic help. This is the reason why I’m focusing on these sorts of concepts, the deeper psychology.

These predatory women are also at it for ego supply. They’re not just after it for sex. Because if a woman just wanted sex, she wouldn’t have to try at all. In fact, she wouldn’t even have to go into a night club because the guys in the night club are whatever. But she can just go to the gym or whatever her fetish is and say, “Hey, you want to get some nookie in the back?” And the guy would be like, “Okay.” There’s actually studies on this where they actually had girls walk up to guys and proposition them. It’s like 100% guys are like, “Okay, let’s do it. No one’s going to find out. Yeah, let’s go.” It was the opposite when the men did it.

Anyway, women don’t dress up and get all slutty in the club to get sex. That might be the cherry on the top at the end for her, but often she’s not even going to be into the sex. It’s just to get the ego, the narcissistic supply, the admiration of others, the attention, the applause, the desire of others. Why this is very dangerous for the pick-up artist, or the nice guy trying to be a pick-up artist, is because he will always lose. A lot of them have lost, and then there are different reaction to this. The two main reactions to losing that battle with the predator is to become – well, there are two.

One is you take my route, which is you really soul search, you turn your brain on and you go really open minded. You go deep into the literature, the research, that by the way is hundreds of years old but that we just think – we’re not taught it in schools, so we just don’t think to go there. But the more common it seems – well, after much research now, I believe it is a very small segment of the market. I’m not going to really pay any attention to them, really. I used to address them, but I realized this is a small segment. They become bitter and they hate all women. This is mostly in middle America with the rise of Trump and all of that, the hate on women.

I understand, and I’m very sympathetic to it. I was close. I was on the brink of making those choices. For a while, I was going down the bitter route. It’s really important that you stay open-minded and you don’t let the anger and hatred consume you, because then you’ve really closed yourself off to any kind of fulfillment. Then it’s just dog eat dog world, and the best you can do is to emerge victorious over all of this bloodshed and then die having had no rest, and no real fulfillment in life, and no love most importantly. You’d just close yourself off to the most rewarding emotion of all homo sapien life.

The reason he will always lose is because the white knight, or the fixer – we’re not all white knights, but everybody who doesn’t like their previous self and wants to become a new self. Okay, I guess I can think of a better term for that, let’s just call that the compensator. The compensator, for him, the attention is the means to an end. He’s not just getting off just on the attention. He wants attention from her. What happens is the fixer, the white knight, the compensator, becomes more invested in her over time. If you know my work, and if you know social psychology, you know that the more you get invested in something, the more you value it. This is cost-worth connection. This is also sunk cost. You get pot committed, is that the right term? Pot committed. And then you want it more and more, and you get more and more attached to it.

The predator, for her, the attention is the end in itself. She doesn’t want his love, or his dick, or any of that stuff. She just wants primarily attention and approval, and most of all his admiration. And then she over time becomes less invested. She cares less because it’s like a victim of a vampire that just keeps sucking the blood out, and eventually there’s no more blood left. She’s basically bled this victim dry. The victim, the whole time, still wants to be made into a vampire, but the fucking vampire won’t let it, so she’s just keeps torturing it. Eventually, there’s no blood left. Maybe by that point, it’ll turn the damn human into a vampire. Now, we have a fucking vampire.

What happens? Basically, if you stay with the pick-up artist route, your best solution is to get the hottest girl you could find. That’s what they’re always trying to do. Hottest girl, whatever that means to you, your HB10. When you get her, you think you’re done. It’s sort of like the Neil Strauss’ The Game. What was the climax of it? He found an HB10 that he couldn’t get before, who played with his emotions, played push-pull and now he’s like – before, the other girls he banged, he just dropped because he could get them. But the ones he couldn’t get with all the skills, that’s the one who triggered his fixer. Now, he’s back on that treadmill. He’s stuck on that. Well, eventually, she sucks you dry in a bad way. She becomes less invested.

What are some examples of flattering attention? Girls who have orbiters, like guys that they friendzoned and then they keep around. You know that guy wants to have more with her but she gets him to orbit. Orbit is like you go around and round the planet but you never land. Girls who have a lot of those. Another one is girls who make men compete over them, creating any kind of jealousy. Girls like this really get off when guys fight over them physically. A lot of guys will do that. They’re like, “I will defend the honor of this lady”, some girl he just met, and then get into a fight to defend her. Dude, you’re just a compensatory narcissist now. You’re becoming that.

And girls who indulge in seemingly platonic conversation or companionship with other males, knowing that he likes her, and she’s an attractive female, there are going to be a lot of guys like that. She has a choice whether to continue stringing him along, while knowing that it’s torturing him. But the predator will do that, because what she’s after is his approval, his admiration. What’ll usually turn a guy is when he gets friendzoned. He’ll search on the internet, “How do I get out of the friendzone?” That’s how they sometimes find me. And they look through the free course on how to get out of the friendzone.

One of the things I say is to go away and then work on yourself. One of the reasons I give them that advice is rather than, “Hey, here, read this e-book on how to get game and say, dress this way, work out”, all this other stuff. Sometimes, they interpret working on yourself as that. Hopefully, what the working on yourself will really mean is get some fucking therapy. Basically, you need to just put yourself out there more as a vulnerable person where you’re saying your truth. You will never get friendzoned if you’re putting your truth out there. In other words, if she knows your intentions from the beginning, the guy who gets friendzoned is the guy who hides his intentions. He’s like, “Oh yeah, we’re just friends. Yeah, no problem. Yeah.”

And then after much inner turmoil, he works up the courage to ask her out or to ‘confess’, that’s the word I get a lot in the Man Up group. “Should I confess to my crush?” What is this confessing this crush thing? Oh, I see it all the time. Because he’s been fucking friendzoned for years and it’s just weird to suddenly, out of the blue say, “I see you as more than friends and I’ve been pining after you and jerking off to your photo for fucking three years.” That’s weird, so you can’t say that. So now he has to go like, “How do I put it to her that she’s my crush? How do I put it to her? How do I confess?” It’s like, where would this come from? Well, you’re hiding your intentions and you’re hiding your true self. If you could get to it, but you’re hiding the truer self this whole time.

Whereas if you met her and you’re like, “You are gorgeous” right from the get, whatever you’re fucking thinking. And it might be – there are other reasons why you can’t get together. Maybe she’s got a boyfriend, she’s loyal, and that’s cool, and you respect that, and you say it out loud. There’s no wondering about your intentions, and now it’s whether she’s a predator that keeps you around. But if you know that that’s the case, only if you’re psychologically unhealthy would you hang around knowing that you want her, in fact, but you’re just waiting for your opportunity to pounce.

But you’re a weak narcissist. She’s always going to win this game. Like a second nature, you learn the game late in life. She’s been doing this since she was a kid very likely. Like, the natural narcissist, been doing it since they were young that way. And maybe she figured it out when she was 16. There are many ways that you could turn a woman into a narcissist or into a cluster B personality disorder, all kinds of things, sexual abuse, incest, all of these things would turn them into that.

There’s controversial research on how you could create a psychopath, but all the other stuff is like a lot of really traumatic things could happen to you and your reaction to those traumatic events could turn you that way. Notice this: The nice guy actually has a traumatic event. Whatever traumatic event led him to search on the fucking internet to find me or some other guy who is going to teach him this, that’s a mini-traumatic event. It might even be a huge traumatic event. He might’ve found out that the girl friend, his first girl friend from his college cheated on him and that was the big traumatic event. Or it could’ve been he finally got fed up of being stuck in the friend zone for years and having unrequited love for ever, and he just got fed up, and that was the thing that turned him, where he made the decision, “I’m going to learn how to be that other guy.”

Whatever that was that triggered that, in both cases, that would cause you to end up taking the narcissistic route. We got to wrap up on this particular one, and then I’ll continue when we come back. But just to preview. What’ll happen is, if the nice guy does learn game, he will encounter – if he’s getting better – bigger and bigger predators like if he’s learning it as a false self, and he’s learning the body language, eye contact, tonality, and then he’s actually acting as a false self. It’s now using the lines, the routines, the stories, the DHVs, the pink elephants, all these little devices that he’s throwing in there as mechanisms to create attraction. Shit testing her, and then seeing push-pull, hot and cold, all these various manipulative techniques. He’s using them all, and then he’ll run into one that will actually destroy him in some way. That’s how they go.

Usually, what they’ll try to do is they’ll either go bitter, oh there’s a third route – they either go bitter or they go down the therapeutic route, and the third is they just keep doing the same thing. They rise up again, they put on their pick-up artist mantle, get back out there in the field and get their mojo back. And then eventually they’ll hit the wall again, they’ll get fucked over again, and then they’ll have to redo that whole cycle. There are some very well-known professional pick-up artists who’ve gone through this quite publicly. All of that is because they’re actually really just going for ego supply, not for sex. If you’re really smart and all you wanted was sex with hot women, you make enough money that you just go to certain places and get it, assuming willing parties in both sides.

But that’s not what they’re after. They’re not after sex. They’re after ego supply on both sides, the woman and the man. The man ends up becoming, if he gets good, he becomes a compensatory narcissist; not just a compensating nice guy. If he succeeds, all he succeeds in is becoming a narcissist. In other words, he becomes the hot chick in the club. The hot chick in the club looks great, she always has the right thing to say, she’s always manipulating people. And she gets up on the stage, and she gets all this adoration. She can pick whichever guy she wants to toy with and maybe take home and give him a little ego boost.

Now, the guy is the hot girl. The guy who was the nerdy, geeky guy, he goes through his makeover, spend months or years learning how to pick-up chicks and all that. Now, he shows up in the club as the man, right? It was to call girls over with the look, maybe a little smirk, maybe a little comment as he walks by, opens at, and then he walks over here and opens that. And then he sits back, and they start coming to him, and then he starts playing with them. All of this is the same fucking thing. It’s like the Neil Strauss – Lisa Leveridge ending in the book The Game.

What is the great apex of that book, of getting The Game? It’s the two of them sitting in a party or something, and they were holding court. The king and queen, and everybody paid obeisance. That’s just pure narcissistic supply, and that’s like, yes. It wasn’t like, “Finally, I had sex with this beautiful woman that I’m completely in love with.” No, man. It’s sitting there in the fucking party with a hot girl next to you, and now everyone thinks you’re the fucking king. How do I know this? Because over and over, I asked guys in all of our programs, “What are your goals?” And none of them ever say ‘sex with hot girls’. It’s always how to get the skills to attract women. And if they’re really honest, also the respect of alpha males, to dominate others. That’s what they really want. How do we know this? We fucking tested it, split tested it on the fucking internet. You’re fucking clicking on that shit. I know that’s what you want.
It’s not just me that’s test it. All of these other copywriters in the industry have tested this. The two things that will always appeal to this market that will, which is 1% of cold traffic, you have to keep that in mind, is that people who are looking for this and will pay for it off of an autoplay VSL not knowing anything else, one of those ones that doesn’t have a stop button and all that shit, right? Those guys, what they’re looking for is: “How do I get the skills to get any girl that I want, or a lot of hot girls?” The second is, “How do I become the envy of all the other guys?” Both of these goals are narcissistic supply goals. If you go down that route, because maybe you don’t understand or don’t agree, I would not have agreed with myself now. My previous self would’ve just been like, “Yeah, yeah. This is all airy fairy.” I wouldn’t listen to heart. I would just be like, “Yeah, that’s somebody else’s problem, not mine.”

Here’s a great example of my old ignorance. I read “No More Mr. Nice Guy”, a really great book by Glover. This is way back in 2009. I got that book and read it as a coach. In other words, I read it as a description of these guys I was helping. Because I thought, “I got no nice guy problems. I can go in there and just tell a girl to fuck off. There’s no big deal. I’m the man.” But I read the book as describing someone else I could help. Because of that, it wasn’t that great of a book for me. It was like, “Yeah, there’s some stuff I can use here that I can use for exercising for these other guys”, and I did. But then I reread it years later, a few years ago, and it was, “Oh! Now I get it.” I didn’t understand 70% of that book back then, and it was just because I didn’t think that it was describing me, but in fact it did.

It’s sort of like an alcoholic on a bender. You’re telling the guy, “You’re a fucking alcoholic. Don’t you see?” And he’s like, “Nah, man. Life is good. I’m just having another drink. No big deal.” And life is good for him in that moment, it’s subjectively experiencing that moment. You got to wait for that alcoholic to get off his bender, hit rock bottom, and then you say, “Dude, look around. Look what you’ve done. Look at what happened.” At that point, hopefully, you will have a frame of mind to look around and, “Holy shit. What did I do to my life?” And then you can get some help.

But when he’s on that – maybe you’re one of those guys, and maybe you’d think, “David Tian? What a fucking dick.” Or whatever. Okay? So cool. I mean, I might’ve said that. If you keep down this path, I will see you in a couple of years and I won’t blame you because I did that, in fact, with the Glover book. So luckily, I don’t think we’ll ever delete this video, so we’ll always be here for you. But reach out and let me know, but we’re going to end it here.

Just to recap, I went over why the pick-up artist route, while it can be helpful to a small percentage, maybe 3 – 5% of guys. You can tell if you’re one of those if you can implement it quickly without much resistance; you just find out what the body language is and then you just do it, no problem, because it hasn’t affected your essential self. But if you’re having trouble speaking the lines, moving that way, using your eyes that way, having the beliefs that are congruent with that behavior, then what’s happening is you’re going to have to put on a very different self, and that’s a false self.

I went over why the false self is so dangerous, because the narcissist hopes that the false self that they’re projecting is their true self. They would know this only when they get ego supply, when they get narcissistic supply, because that tells them that false self is working and is them, so they don’t want to come out of that. Once they start getting the opposite of ego supply, people start rejecting them or whatever it is, they’re like, “Oh shit, I’m just that weak loser that I hope I had left behind back there, the geeky nerd that can’t talk to girls.” And they don’t want to be that. They want to come out as the super hero pick-up guy. If they keep getting that response, then they are that way. And they’re like, “Yes! Now I am that guy! I don’t have to go back to that guy anymore! Yes!”

In fact, all they’ve done is, this is a false self that’s defeated and weak, self-hating, shamed person here, and this is a false self as well. If you know they’re false selves, then you’re on the road to recovery, and strength, and integration, and maturity. But many people aren’t. They have no idea about any of these concepts, unfortunately, so they get trapped. I talked about the female side of that; the predator who would be attractive to the victim who would give her ego supply. That guy is ready to give it. He’s ready to give. In fact, he can’t even stop himself from giving ego supply. He sees the hot girl and he starts salivating. He’d like, “I’ll do anything. I’ll even kill other dudes for her. I’ll fucking fight demons and dragons to rescue this maiden. That’s what I’ll do.”

She knows. She’s sees in his eyes. The good pick-up artist is actually emitting that from his eyes. He’s firing those mirror neurons of desire. He’ll go through the ends of the earth for her. And then she’s like, “Yes, this is my victim. Come now.” And then she just keeps him alive, sucking his blood until he’s like, “Oh, please love me! Please! Tell me that I am the one! Tell me” And she’s like, “Yeah, you are the one, hah, for now.” Until she sucks all the ego supply she can out of him after maybe months or years, and then she’s like, “Uh, you’re done.” Because like, “Yeah, I know you adore me. I know you worship me. I know you’ll sacrifice for me. Yeah, I got that. But I knew that way back then. Now, onto that guy. That’s a hot guy over there. Let’s get that guy to like me and then I’ll feel good about myself.”

“Or maybe I’ll get thousands to like me, maybe on social media. I want 100,000 likes then I’ll feel good about myself.” This goes on endlessly. This is somebody who has a personality disorder that is much stronger than the compensatory guy. He came on that malicious side or bad side later in life. What’ll happen, the nice guy turns into the narcissist, but he’s actually a compensatory narcissist. He will eventually lose. The thing is, just before we go, the compensatory narcissist won’t always run into the big predator females. He will often, in order to earn the big, predator females, he’s going to pick the small game. For those guys, I know some of you guys can relate to this part because you’re still developing so you haven’t met the big game yet. Most of you are still developing, like 95% of the guys who start this journey don’t actually succeed.

Very likely what you’re doing is while you’re trying to become the narcissist, the predator yourself, you are able to be a predator on smaller game. Like the girl who is a cute girl at the bar who is only there because it’s her sister’s birthday or something and she’s an easy victim. You go up there and you say manipulative things. You push-pull. You go cocky funny on her. Maybe you go direct and then you slap her ass a little bit, and she responds because she hardly ever gets that or something, or maybe she’s sheltered or whatever. And then you bang that one, but then you’re never going to stay with her. She doesn’t fulfill you. She’s not hot enough. She’s not an HB10. She’s only a 6, so you’re not going to wife up a 6, right? You’ll maybe see her for 10 dates or whatever and then you drop her. You get another 6, and another 6. You might know that 10 HB1’s does not add up to a 10, okay?

It’s all you guys. You’re like, “Oh, if I can get enough 6’s, that’ll fulfill me.” You find out, nope, none of this fulfills me. I’m just fucking girls I don’t think are attractive. Eventually, you keep looking for that 10. You keep looking for the big fish, or you’re just never satisfied; you just keep dating them one foot in, one foot out. “I don’t know.” And the weak you is going to settle because it’s too hard to get through that. 95% of guys give up before they even get to the point where they could seduce that big predator, or they think they’re seducing the big predator. Actually, the predator is the one who is turning him into a victim. So, he hasn’t even earned the right to be her victim yet. He’s still feeding on the small game.

And you know you’re feeding on small game when you keep dating around and hooking up with girls, and quite possibly hurting them, their feelings. You don’t like them enough to go all in and commit or be exclusive with any of them, or to actually give them what they really want. That’s an example of somebody who is trying to become a narcissist, trying to become the predatory narcissist. Pay attention to that.

All of this is to say: pay attention to the next video. See you in the next video where I go further into this and I’m going to continue for you guys tomorrow. I’m going to get everybody out of here. Alright, so thanks so much for listening, watching, wherever you’re at, if you’re on the podcast listening, if you’re watching the video, thank you so much. Please leave a comment. Join the private Facebook group. I’ll see you inside there. Until then, David Tian, signing out. Man Up! Thank you.