Fear & Pain in the Red Pill (with guest Steve Mayeda)

• David Tian Ph.D. and Steve Mayeda discuss the pains of Red Pills go through.
• The #MeToo movement have its downside, David Tian Ph.D. and Steve Mayeda discuss the negative effects of it to men.
• Red Pills are constantly angry, David Tian Ph.D. and Steve Mayeda reveal the reason behind this attitude.
• David Tian Ph.D. and Steve Mayeda deliberates the role of morality in the Red Pills’ situation.
• In this Man Up episode, David Tian Ph.D. and Steve Mayeda share a solution for the fear and the pains of Red Pills.

David Tian: I was still in that immature level of thinking that I find a lot of this red — well, all of the red pill material that I’ve read so far, which is basically fear-based. “If women don’t want the sex that I have, then I have to exert power in order to keep them.” What I’m seeing in the red pill is a lot of pain, and the problem is, they’re not dealing with it in a productive way or a constructive way. They’re just taking a victim story. “Woe is me. Everybody’s against me.” And they like that.

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

David Tian: Welcome to the Man Up podcast. I’m David Tian, PhD. and for over the past 13 years, I’ve been helping hundreds of thousands of people in over 87 countries attain success, happiness, and fulfillment in life and love. And I’m joined by a very special guest, a good friend of mine that we’ve actually known each other for almost a decade, it seems I think. Steve Mayeda. Steve Mayeda is in the virtual house here, and it’s my great honor to be interviewing them on a subject that we’ve been getting a lot of requests on, and I’m really looking forward to this one.

So, you can find more about Steve Mayeda at The Sexual Life, TSL, or on Facebook at the Austin Men’s Development group, a great group, and we’ll get the links to you in the show notes or at the end of the podcast. And Steve’s been a pioneer in the field beginning with… Well, I got to know you, Steve, through pick up way back. It’s almost a decade ago. I actually sought you out for some help with this — stacks [INAUDIBLE]?

Steve Mayeda: Dude, I still get requests for those, man. It’s crazy.

David Tian: Well, it really helped out with my pickup success back in the day. But we’ve both been evolving continually since then, and it’s been great to follow your personal evolution. Now, you’ve got a beautiful family, and they’re super cute, following them out on Instagram, and just the way that you’ve been evolving in your views and just experience with helping men all around the world with their issues. So, Steve, welcome.

Steve Mayeda: I’m super pumped. Obviously, you guys know David. But if you’re watching this and just know me, David’s awesome. You should go to his channel. It’s like really, really good stuff. I remember one time, I was watching a video of yours and you were talking about like the manosphere stuff, you were talking about MGTOW, and you were like, “M-G…? I think it’s MGTOW? I heard Steve Mayeda called it.” And I was like, “Yeah!” I was like in this room going, “Ýeah, I’m on David Tian’s podcast.” So, you should definitely check out his stuff. He’s awesome. But yeah, man, I’m stoked to be here.

You asked me to do this maybe a month and a half ago. And man, I have been really excited. I took it very seriously. I hope it shows in this. Like, I hope I just don’t come off like a total doofus. It’s funny too because you’re such a studied and well-read man. I just kind of like go about things on an experiential path. And so, it’ll be interesting, the different kind of rabbit holes I’ve gone down with some stuff we were talking about.

David Tian: Yeah, looking forward to it. So, let’s just dive into it at. I thought it would be good for us to share some of our personal experiences with the red pill subculture, and part of the problem with addressing the red pill for me in the past was that there wasn’t a clearly defined red pill. So, we’ve gotten requests. I’ve been asked about Rollo Tomasi’s book or books, the one that’s most well-known is The Rational Male.

Once you give me a book to analyze, I’m in my space. I could do this very easily. And the problem was, the people that I know personally who are very wedded to the red pill ethos, I guess you could call it, disassociated themselves from Tomasi. I just discovered yesterday after doing more research. And now I’m like, okay. If we analyze Tomasi and show these logical leaps and so on, will that make any difference? They’re now saying, “Oh, this is not…”

So, this is something that’s important that we don’t just attack one author or like address just one person’s views, but the overall approach of the subculture of red pill, even the ideas about red pill, black pill, purple pill, and that’s sort of weird stuff, and how it’s very understandable within certain contexts. So, coming out of PUA and in response to the PUA subculture. So I thought we’d just attack it that way.

Steve Mayeda: Yeah, let me let me just start off too with: the red pill isn’t all bad. What makes it bad is what we want to talk about. I think that’s important. A lot of guys might just hear what we’re saying like, “Oh, these guys are just going to talk trash on the red pill.” This is something that I just want to make clear: David has lived and lives what a lot of you guys in the red pill may want to achieve. And so have I, yet I find — we have a different narrative and a different story that is completely different of how we got there.

And I think it’s important if you’re literally lifting the veil up on your eyes on society, or women, or life, or what culture shoves down your throat, like this is our life, man. And in so, how we got there, that was very different than I see a lot of the subculture of the manosphere, the red pill, even MGTOW per se which I don’t live that.

You know, it’s a different thing. So, I don’t want to just be like, “Man, this sucks.” I really want to break down, and with David, like what the truth is. I mean, I hate to use that word because usually people who use that word are crazy. But what the actual reality of my life is in all this. Anyway, go ahead.

David Tian: Absolutely. So there was a period in my life when — way before I was asked about red pill. I was just in the phase actually between pick up and that purpose or that part of my life becoming basically empty, meaningless, and nothing really fresh or new, and just lost in the pleasure, and then getting burned real bad by the women that I had attached myself to. And then spending more time for this period about — it was like half a year of just being bitter and angry about the power that women held in the mating world, and especially in the modern mating world, especially now, in the contemporary mating world.

Luckily, I kept going. The way I see it, I just kept going through, thinking about the questions, and not staying with the easy answers. But I understand why they — why the red pill would be enticing. I discovered the manosphere pre red pill. There was a blog called Solomon II, and he’s a really fun writer. The writing itself was a lot of fun to read. I think somebody saved his blog because he took it down for personal reasons, but somebody saved it into a PDF. I think that is a great segue or a halfway point to what a reasonable male in the modern Western world would be feeling after getting burned in dating or mating relationships.

That’s probably the way that 99% of guys enter the red pill, having been burned. Because otherwise, you’d go along thinking, “There are some bad people, there are some good people.” You’re going to learn how to find the good people versus the bad people. Maybe more people than 50% are bad. Okay, so there’s a minority of good people. But you still think, there are good people out there man and women and dogs and cats, there are good ones and there are bad ones. After going through an experience where you just question the whole of — and usually, it’s something like the clubbing scene or, you know, where there’s a predominance, a disproportionate number of cluster B personality disorders happen to be concentrated there, or sociopaths or something, and you start to think every woman in the whole world, all 3.5 billion females are like that and not realizing your sample size really sucks, and spoiled, and so on.

But I understand that bitterness because I actually thought that too, and I got really angry about that. And I do want to talk about that. So, the red pill — it wasn’t called red pill back then, but the manosphere material helped me with that because it was it was a group of guys who understood the pain I was feeling and the bitterness I was feeling. And there were some things that I had to discover at that point in the science that I’ve been ignoring.

I’ve since put out a video called The Reality of Women where I canvass a lot of the science, some of which I see now that the red pill — which their science that would help the red pill in their conclusions, and Tomasi prefers to go the other way, like things like women actually like sex and he’s like, “No. They have this power agenda.” But I think it actually helped your cause, red pill guys, if you thought that women actually did like sex a lot.

Steve Mayeda: If you want to truly… I mean, we’ll probably get to this, and I don’t know how much time you have David, but I got a lot, is that if you wanted to truly sexually control a woman, it has nothing to do with the power that the red pill says, which has been my life, man. And I choose not to live that way, but I have no problem with people living that way. I’m not judgmental towards the behavior. The only thing I’d be judgmental about is the motive behind it. But if you really want to control a woman and enslave her sexually, it has nothing to do… Well, you could do it with powers. He’s talking about money and social status, but that’s really hard, and he’s not at that level, and none of the guys that are speaking at the red pill thing are at that level.

My friends that work with professional athletes that are very famous, they’re at that level. That is a very different story. But if you wanted to be an average Joe that is borderline homeless but passable in society and be able to do that, you could if you learned how to do it the right way, which is the most… One of the weirdest things about the red pill — because I would even say that guys in the red pill don’t really want to get laid. They want power, just like in pick up. They wanted attention, not sex from women. So, guys in the red pill don’t want to have powerful relationships with women. They want to have powerful relationships that represent that they’re powerful. So, that represent that finally they’ve achieved something, which is a parallel to what we saw in pick up. But man, keep going with your story if you want.

David Tian: A quick side note on that. For instance, I discovered at that point that a lot of the sex I’ve been having was pretty immature. It was the kind of sex that I think the Tomasi and red pill describes. Because one of the things that they describe is, as you get into a relationship, the sex gets worse. And he’s like, “If you ever move in together, then that’s the end of your sex life.” I’m like, wow. You must have really vanilla sex.

Steve Mayeda: Yeah, you guys must suck. That tells me a lot about them.

David Tian: I discovered that because I just I took the premises, that okay, women value these other things that I was overlooking. And one of the SMV, sexual market value, should be the knowledge that that guy could give me great pleasure, and that’s part of the appeal of the alpha male. So, I discovered that, and luckily, I took the science and made the better conclusion that women like sex, maybe not as much as — as the whole male gender or whatever, but they do like sex a lot more than we thought, we as human beings thought in the 1950s, before the pre-Kinsey Report, they actually do have orgasms. They have all of these different pleasure points, and they can go on for a long time.

And I learned that, the different ways to develop in my sexual life. And that’s something where — the reason I didn’t think much about that was because I was still in that immature level of thinking that I find all of the red pill material that I’ve read so far, which is basically fear-based. If women don’t want the sex that I have, then I have to exert power in order to keep them. The way that they do that is through this pretty basic, standard evolutionary theory of social status and other types of mundane traditional types of powers.

Steve Mayeda: To be honest, I don’t know if all evolutionary psychologists or biologists would agree with a lot of the conclusions that the red pill guys have made. I know that there’s some, because like the guy that wrote Mate with Tucker Max, he’s said some bizarre stuff when it comes to mate theory type stuff. But for the most part, yeah, I don’t think David Buss would be signing on to a lot of the conclusions that these guys come to with it all.

David Tian: Actually, Geoffrey Miller I think is the guy who co-wrote with Tucker, that book. I have to look that up, but he’s an evolutionary psychologist basically like young middle-aged one. And he just recently — I saw him. He posted, and then Joe Rogan reposted it. It was from Nature is Metal, which is a really great — I follow them on Instagram, but probably they’re all over, and it’s just a series of shots or videos of how nature is ruthless. And one of them was this crab, mother crab – eating little baby crabs. And the caption was it was her babies. But anyway, there’s controversy about whether they were actually her babies. But the fact is, she was eating baby crabs.

The thing is that you put under there Geoffrey Miller’s, or whoever Geoffrey Miller or Joe Rogan’s initial thing was, pretty sure it was Geoffrey Miller, that — do we still believe in the nature equals ethics conclusion? Which is to say: if it’s natural then it’s good? There are a shit ton of things that happen in the natural world that are pretty cruel, and part of the reason why there’s morality at all, if morality was natural then we wouldn’t need it. We just act. So, morality is a limit on the natural impulses. So, to say women have these natural impulses. I’ll say dudes have these natural impulses too that they’re not confronting. And part of morality, and ethics, and growing the fuck up in maturation and evolution personally is being able to say no to your natural impulses.

Steve Mayeda: It has that feeling that we discount so much from human nature. Human nature is this amazing grace amongst the natural world which can be chaotic, and freaking evil, and does not care about your pain. And within that human nature comes a whole bunch of different things, like man-made concepts, and ways of thinking about the world which the rest of the world or the natural world doesn’t really care about. We throw a lot of that away when we accept certain man-made thoughts.

The very thing which gave us our ability to think on our own, we discredit. And what I specifically mean here is that nature or whatever it is, evolution, whatever you want to call it, gave us this ability to think, and make choice, and have unique decisions, and be individuals, and have expressions that can change, and adapt, and all sorts of different things. Yet, when we study certain things about society, especially looking through the filter of being angry, we can make poor choices. I know right now from how I’m talking, I’m probably going to shut some people off who are into the red pill so either back to your story, or we can get to the specifics of it.

David Tian: That was great. The thing is, if I’ve discovered that if you’re a hardcore adherent to any philosophy, when you click on the video that is purporting to attack it or criticize it, your mind is already going to be shut. So, hopefully we’re talking to people who are on the edge, and not sure, and they’ve just picked up the book, and one or two of their friends said it was all right, and they want to go deeper, and some of the things really resonated with them. So, one of the things I want to say is, that they resonated with me to at one point in my life.

And let me refer to the Solomon II because I would recommend everyone read that because he leaves everything with no conclusions. He basically just shares his anger, his own vulnerability in a way of, “This sucks. I hate the fact that all these girls I’m dating are cheating on their boyfriends, and they’re telling me about it. And I’ll bang them, but I feel like shit.” And then he’s like, “It makes me sad when I stop to think about it.” And then I meet these old dudes in their 60s at this work convention, and they’re like, “Women these days aren’t the same. Back in the day.” You know, they talked about his wife who is like 60-something-year-old, like 77 year old wife, and like, “They don’t make women like they used to you know.” And all this.

He’s like, “Oh, you’re right. They don’t make women like they used to. Sadness, right? ” And like, he’ll end his blog post there and like, “Damn, that’s beautiful. Right?” I get it. I get the sadness. We’re now coming out of this idealized view of how mating would be, and we’re now seeing people, men and women, kind of suck, especially when they’re given too much freedom and power in their twenties. He does rightly point out that with feminism in the past several decades, has given women more and more freedom, or actually, it’s removed the restrictions for them to pursue short-term male style mating strategies. So, they’re hooking up and all this.

And then he said rightly pointing out, this is like the freaking 90s. I can’t remember. It’s a pretty long time ago he wrote this blog, early 2000s, where he’s pointing out: This is not fulfilling any of the women when they do talk to him. Saying, you know… And actually, there’s a Black Mirror episode from Netflix that actually walks through that conclusion. So in the future, you have this app that just tells you who you’re going to mate, and almost everybody just says yes to the sex because that’s pretty much the only way you can have sex in this future.

And this woman who’s just like opens the app, it says, “You have one day with this guy.” She goes home to sleep with him one day and then they split up. And another one says, “You have one month with this guy.” And she still sleeps with him but has one month. And then the thing was taking her on all these short-term relationships. One hour, one day, one week, and she’s feeling — you can see as the episode goes on, and she likes the sex at the beginning, but then after a while she was like, “This is all meaningless.” And whatever, right?

So in a way, the short-term mating doesn’t fulfill the female, or the woman’s actual underlying desires for love and for connection, that actually, just like for the men, it won’t either when they grow up and are looking for more than just sexual pleasure. It’s not going to fulfill their needs for love and connection either. But I didn’t know any of that at the time. I was just like, “Yeah, these bitches, they’re all cheating, lying whores. And screw them.” You know, and here’s, “How can I screw them over?” But it’s hard. You go into a club. You’re a 30 year old dude, and a hot 23 year old walks in there. She can just [INAUDIBLE] in the VIP, you know. Jamie Foxx would just be like yeah, “Yeah, come on in.” And he’d be like to you, who are you? How much are you going to buy for this table? You know, you got to lay down money.

It’s like, shit, if I have to compete at that level in in a nightclub, which is like where there’s — They don’t play any games around. This is sexual mating value, right? Sexual market value, right? If you’re a hot girl, you’re up here just by the fact that you’re hot. And then I took pleasure or I took gratification in this chart that Solomon II had made. It’s a very simple chart where the peak value for a woman is like going to be in her twenties in terms of her market value because she’s hot and that’s physically is what — the physical thing is what immature men most want.

And I understood that, because I was an immature man back then still. Like yeah, I get it. And then as men increase or get older and they get better, they increase their social status normally if you just climb up the corporate ladder or whatever, and you can keep your health in check, your SMV, or I think am I using it the right way? Mating value, the psychologist would call it mating value. They call it market value but your mating value would increase over time. So that even though she’s up here, when you’re teenagers, men have no mating value but women do, and then it peaks like this, and men go down, and then it meets somewhere where they call it the wall, right? The red pill calls it the time when women start to freak out because their biological clocks are ticking real loud now, and then they switch around their mating strategies.

And I saw all of that, like that makes sense. Look at what’s happening. So, this was several years ago. I’m like, “Yeah.” So then the conclusion was, “Well, Solomon II didn’t really have a conclusion. He’s just hooking up, having sex.” But it’s sort of like in that TV show, Californication. Yeah, it’s just sort of meaningless, and empty, and he’s like drinking a lot or whatever, a sad old man. Right? Like I get it. “I’m going to turn into this sad old man, but fuck it, there’s no way out of this.” So, I remember writing emails to my old mentors, and I’d CC all of these. Christian Hudson was one of them. Mark Manson was one of them. I’d go on these long rants. Looking back, it was kind of embarrassing, but they all took it with such grace, responding to my rants about how the way the world is…

And Nick Sparks was in on those, and I was like, “Damn, man. I’m figuring out for myself. Like, yeah, fuck these bitches.” And then I finally realized. I calmed down and all the anger wore itself out. I’m like, “Okay. But I do know one or two women who are actually loving. They say no to those opportunities that come up when they could hook up with a rich guy, or hook up with a celebrity dude.” And I was lucky that my game was good enough that I was able to hang with these dudes or laying down 50,000 bucks for a table at night, and see what happens when the women flock to that table, and how their behavior changes and all that.

And I was like, bitches, right? But then there’s like one or two women every weekend who are in that environment but not getting affected, and I was thinking, “Let me talk to you guys.” Like, hey, let’s go have tea on a Tuesday or something. I was like, “What game are you playing here? I was trying to figure that out.” It was like, some people actually have decided not to give in to those natural instincts, if I’ll take the term from red pill, like it’s “natural” for them to do that. And they say, “No, I’m not going to…”

Just like some men, as I was getting there, could say no to sexual pleasure. Because if that’s an immature thing, like when a hot girl says, “I want to suck your dick and I want to fuck you.” You’re like, “Well, why would I give that up? That’s just stupid.” And if you know three hot girls say, “Hey, let’s have a foursome.” You’d be like, “Why would I get — Let’s do it. I pay money for that.” And then after you get enough experience, you’re like, “Yeah, I don’t know you peep…” And there’s a part where you say, a point in your life when you can say that you’re not going to do that because you can see the long-term repercussions.

And this is something I’ve been seeing in newer material and a few of the other guys that we know have grown up from that time back when we were just picking up girls left, right and center, was that it’s not necessarily from abundance. It’s more from just seeing the long-term consequences that you don’t see right away. So, in pick up circles, there’s this thing called tacit approval where you could date multiple women and just don’t tell them until they ask you. Well, I call it tacit approval. So, it’s just like they say yes until they say, “No, I don’t like this.” And then they’ll be like, “Hey, what are we now?” And then they’ll say, “Are you dating other women?” That whole conversation. And it would just be so much easier if you just put it out right out front.

This is what you’re about right now. This is what you’re enjoying in life. This is what you’re not about. And just putting it out, having the courage to put that out there instead of playing games. Because you’ve learned what it’s like 6 months or 12 months down the road to have to deal with that later. I wouldn’t say that you lead with it — it’s not an opener or anything. But if you get the hint that she’s looking for something deeper and you lead her on… So, that was one of those things, that as an immature… Well, I was a pretty advanced pickup artist, but I was immature cycle — like, emotionally, was that I can say no, and I should say no. And women can say women will say no, they’re a minority of them, but they too. There are some who will not give into what Rollo Tomasi calls the feminine imperative or something, the imperative of being. I want to get to the hypergamy in this, that they must be with the man with the highest market value. It’s not about sex or sexual pleasure. It’s just this unconscious thing that’s driving their whole operating system.

Steve Mayeda: If that were true, I never would have gotten laid.

David Tian: Right. He does bring up what is considered alpha is not what most people think is alpha. I also want to get to that.

Steve Mayeda: Alpha is an evolutionary psychological term except when it doesn’t fit their narrative.

David Tian: Yeah, exactly. We’ve so much to get into, that gives my background but I didn’t have any personal experience with what’s called the red pill because that was like half way, that was like manosphere stuff, Solomon II.

Steve Mayeda: Dude, I saw The Matrix, man. I saw The Matrix the day it came out. I was [INAUDIBLE] before any of those people.

David Tian: Well, yeah. Until the last 21 convention thing I was at, and it suddenly took a dark turn because the guy who is in charge, like, organizing the event had just found out that his wife was a psychopath or something. And he went down that dark road.

Steve Mayeda: Let’s get into this. First off, one thing I want to say is that if there’s — I have a problem with people self-diagnosing things because we get it so wrong. It’s just not the right thing. You get diagnosed by a psychiatrist, or psychologist, or somebody who’s trained in that. Now, I might have senses about things, and they might be right some of the times, but there’s a reason why people go to a proper person for that sort of diagnosis. So, even at looking at sociopaths or whatever, if all those women in a club when they were 23 were sociopaths, then they would have specific problems later on in life, and we just don’t have the population to prove…

Like, that doesn’t happen. And so, that’s one of the things that I think is immediately wrong about a lot of the red pill stuff, saying that these women have these psychological problems, and it’s so obvious and apparent. It’s a phase and people pop in and out of phases just like yourself, myself, and those types of things. But also what I would say with the 21 Convention which is weird about this is — and look, man. I’ve always supported Anthony. The guy still flames me online all the time. I do not talk to him. I mean I’m talking about him right now, but none of those things were proven, so nobody diagnosed her as a psychopath. I mean, she — I’m at the house that she stayed in with Anthony. Both of them are pretty crazy people, which is what makes Anthony successful.

I mean that in a good way, but he’s different, right? He’s a different person. She is, too. I’m not a psychiatrist. I’m not a psychologist. In fact, the one doctor I know who he talked to was a medical doctor who was an investor in the convention who retracted that to me of the diagnosis, because it was said in passing. It’s not a legit diagnosis. So, that’s weird too. Also stating, that she was a prostitute. Not proven, or all the other stuff that he was going on and on. But that being said, how many times have you and I broken up from an ex, and man, we were like, “That fucking psychopathic bitch.”

David Tian: Yeah, absolutely. The one where he reached out to me is because I did think that the ex you cheated on me back right at that crucial point where I was switching, that forced me to grow up and I’m so thankful for that now. But the time of course, I wasn’t. And I thought, “Man, she’s bipolar.” As I read books on bipolar disorder. And then I was reading books on psychopathy. So it’s like, “Wait, no, she’s a psychopath.” Basically, whatever book I was reading, I thought she was that. And now, looking back, I was like, “She’s just really super immature at the time, and there were things that I did that caused her to go there.

And maybe she was suffering from some kind of cluster B symptoms and things like that.” But you’d have to go through the battery of tests and go through these various assessments to have a decent idea. And people change. It’s a part of the argument about psychopathy, is that it’s genetic, or that it’s not in their control, and they’re lacking these various mechanisms that normal people have. And so, you just lock them up in an asylum like The Joker or something. There certainly are probably people like that.

Steve Mayeda: Or you make them a CEO.

David Tian: Right. It takes two to tango. So, that was one of the big lessons I learned. Why would you attract somebody like that? Why would you stay with her for so long? What was creating that chemistry? And oh, you look in the mirror like, “Oh, these are the things I was doing.” And so, I’ve created multiple video series just on that realization and that depth of study that it’s more important that I look at what part I played in that, if that’s something I can control, I can learn and grow from that. And yeah, and to give people the freedom to develop themselves.

And I think that’s part of the problem with the whole MeToo excesses, is that you can take some shit that some guy tweeted 20 years ago, and throw it in his face and not think he’s changed. But you have to allow for people to develop too, and it’s just what I call immaturity. So, a lot of what they’re attacking in the feminine nature is just the immature feminine. And a lot of what they’re displaying is the immature masculine, and it’s just like two very immature types of people coming up against each other and playing games with each other all the time and creating these problems, and bitterness, and resentment, and rage.

We could dive into the actual philosophy we want to address.

Steve Mayeda: Look, man. A lot of people have heard my story. I just want to mention it really quick. I’ll try and be quick. I’m not quick with that. But I want to talk about the other stuff much more… But the thing is that for me, I mean, my goal in life was to be like David Duchovny from Californication before there was ever a pickup scene or anything like that, man. I wanted to smoke cigarettes, drink, get fucked up, and fuck chicks. And that is something that I did, although nine months into my PUA career, I stopped drinking.

A lot of that I did sober, I did without any sort of drugs or alcohol influence. But man, the fire was in me. And one of the things with that is before my pickup career, I had a child. And that’s right when my pickup career started. I didn’t know what to do, man. It was crazy. There were a lot of things that went into that. Being a dad, and just not feeling right with it, not feeling good with it, being totally stupid. It takes two to tango, man. And that is the most important thing. The thing is, is during that relationship and previous relationships, the reason why I don’t buy into the whole like, “My chick was a narcissist, psychopath, sociopath.” Is because all those things were said about me many times over.

And I did a lot of fucked-up shit. Like, there’s no doubt. I’m not saying that I didn’t. But to immediately jump to that as some sort of a grace to win over a conversation or an argument, to give yourself power, to make yourself feel better, to take the responsibility after yourself, that’s very obvious. That was obvious in the time when that was happening, or women that I had dated. Very angry, like making like, “This man’s a rapist.” And putting my photo all over the place, or my friends, or damaging cars.

So, I dated crazy motherfucking people, but note, I wanted to be like David Duchovny, and drink, and smoke, and fuck chicks. That was my life. When you do that, you get people in your life like that. Now, some of those people I’ve had relationships with are not crazy, and that’s interesting. So, at the time, they were crazy. Human beings can become crazy, which I think a part of this whole phenomenon of searching for an identity, red pill, feminism, these extremes of culture, we’re looking for that. But in all of that, I had two kids with this woman.

She put me in jail. She put me in jail — she tried multiple times. I didn’t get the message, as a lot of the cases got thrown out of court. And then one stuck, went to jail, went to a child abuse total like fucked up criminal case here, didn’t see my kids for five years, spent mountains and mountains of money in that. And I remember that time going like, “Man. I’m going to dedicate myself to men’s rights. And this is what’s going to happen.” And that lasted about six months because I noticed all those guys were super weak. I already had my programs at the time. I was already teaching. I already had people that were good in my corner, and they were like, “Man. This men’s right stuff is weird.”

Because they got into it with me and they were like… I remember. I mean this was like in 2011-2012 with one of the guys going like, “Whatever is the opposite of feminism, that’s what I am.” So I’m like, “Yeah, let’s look into this.” You just saw these men that were weak, that didn’t have life experience. They were not David Duchovny. They were not dudes who were badasses and lived too hot, too hard, too fucking God damn whatever alpha they want to say, and we’re paying the price for that and learning a different way to live. They were weak men who always wanted to be that guy who got fucked over by somebody because they bought into whatever validation she was serving him.

And I realized like, “Man where the fuck are these men that were badasses that lived too hot, too hard, or whatever it is, but that I could relate with that fix themselves?” And there are those men, and they would never join pick up, they would never join the red pill, and they would never join the manosphere. And that is what’s so starkly obvious about what’s in the manosphere. And when I talked to the guys in the manosphere, they’re like, “No, you don’t understand how I’ve suffered.” Or one thing that Anthony said to me, which I thought was amazing… This is this another little interesting perk that I love to hear which just… And man, I’d rather talk to somebody face-to-face. But like sometimes, I just don’t want to. But I remember Anthony said he’s like — because I said, “Man, I actually suffered harder than you and I’m not angry.”

And he said, “But that’s because I’m smarter.” And I was like, “Man, you fucking dumb idiot.” Like, I didn’t marry my first girlfriend. I fucked like, I don’t know, a hundred chicks, and had like multiple relations with multiple women before the burn started to happen to me. But the thing with that is that, it’s such a thing that we see in all extremist cultures, is that with this information, “I have now superseded the scientists, I have superseded culture. I, as a man who don’t have an identity in this culture, now have, you know, I’m on the level.”

And you’ll hear people say this, and this goes into what I would go into mental illness with a lot of these. So, whether it’s extreme feminism, whether it’s extreme Islam, whether it’s extreme manosphere stuff, or Christianity, or whatever, it’s like because I have this information… You know, Isaac Newton was onto something. I am on that level. Julius Caesar, Oprah, Tony Robbins, I am on that level of helping people. And it moves into this kind of weird delusionary thing which comes from pain, not having a culture, and maybe some other psychological riffraff that goes into it.

But in that, when I have information, I need to apply it to my life. And that is the only thing that matters. The only thing. And I know a lot of information in my life. But if I cannot talk to my wife when she’s mad at me and realize that we need to work this out, if I cannot balance our budget with her or figure out whatever needs to happen, if my kid is hurt and sad, and he might be doing a beta whatever thing, it is my job to listen to him; not to categorize him into some sort of certain way of them gaslighting me, or they’re shit testing me or whatever. It is to be there and to experience what is happening.

And the only things that ever helped me in this journey of whatever it is, getting screwed over, or having somebody fuck you, because if you live life, you’re going to get fucked, man. You better get fucked. If you’re not getting fucked, you are not living life. The best thing that was with that is to get over it, which is hard. That’s not simple, but get over it, to put one foot in front of the other, and to listen to people who I respect, listen to people that have my best interest. And if I switch those people every month, two months, or every time I go through a big change in my life, then I’m the one fucking up. Like, I have consistent people in my life that I’ve turned to for over a decade, man.

That if I don’t know, I call and I do. And that to me is the most important thing. And so, what ended up happening in my six-month stint in the whole men’s rights stuff is like, “Man, this is stupid. This is so dumb. I’m not even going to listen to any of this, and I’m just going to focus on myself and make my life better.” I met my wife, and things opened up. And then the day comes when I do get to see my kids again, which is awkward. And I have a story about this. In fact, I’ll share it now. It was really awkward.

You know, you haven’t seen them for five years. They’re told that you’re this abusive guy the whole time, and to build that relationship now… There’s no red pill manosphere people helping me out with that. There’s no training that can help you out with that. You have to put — and here’s what I did, man. I called the guys in my group before I picked them up. I went and hung out, tried to follow a protocol of that was best thought out, which just, you know, went all over the place, which it wasn’t bad at all. And then after I was done, I called them up. And then I repeated that over and over again for years until I built a relationship and felt comfortable with it.

It’s a weird thing. There’s all this fear that goes into it. But the most important thing in that is: How can I be a dad? This screwed up thing happened, but man, I know from my life the screwed up, the really bad tragedies that happened in my life, I love them. And I’ve had bad things happen. And I know people that have had much worse, but maybe they had to access something bad to me, and that was the only way I would learn a lesson, but that’s kind of how I learned things. I just don’t see people having that value. I see a lot of people standing on the outside, you know, trying to outsmart things. And information is great, man. It is great. But if you’re not living life, you’re a bitch.

And then the thing that I will say is, there’s this guy that I knew in December. I met him in November and December. Same story. He got out of prison. He had a domestic violence thing. And I said, “Man, I don’t care what happened between you and your wife, but let me help you out with your son because you can do Skype calls with your son now.” And he’s like, “But he’s a stranger to me. And he looks at me like this, and his mom…” I’m just like, “Shut up, dude. Just shut up.” To be a father means you are a father even when you can’t be a father. And so, you need to start thinking about that. I know it’s hard. You can talk shit to me all you want, but be a dad. We’re talking about all this stuff, [INAUDIBLE] the groups. “Come to the groups.” And he pulls all this ego stuff and he just says, “Man, it’s not for me.”

And he’d say like, “Oh, I’m the shit.” He gets in all these fights with people in his personal life, and he moves. He moves. I don’t talk to him. So, that’s November, then December. He moves in January, February, March, April, May, June, and he’s dead in the beginning of June. Why is he dead? And the first thing he said when — and I work in the drug world, so I know a lot of people who pass away from either suicide or overdoses, which is predominantly male. And the red pill is not the solution to them. And that whole time, I’m communicating with him all on his Facebook. It’s all like, you know, the liberals, or Trump, or whatever, and then women do this. I’m like, “Man, but your job is to be a dad. Your job is to be able to connect with people. Your job is there so that you can fucking like show up and not be politically fueled and emotional when things are coming around.”

There’s a lot of stuff on him passing and the different information on that. But yeah, man, it’s just like — it’s all this crap man. I guess July 3rd was the last post that he had, but it’s like be wary of any belief or ideology that promotes division between you and your fellow human beings. Yeah, totally. And then there’s something about hating women about, you know, like — man, just all this like ‘screw the liberals, they ruin the world.’ Like, man, that is the biggest waste of time. And I don’t want to say that any of that stuff killed him. What killed him was depression, irresponsibility, bad situations, maybe mental illness, all these different things. But that stuff did not help him. And the idea is is that what you see so much in the manosphere is this insane anger and this insane rage.

David Tian: I can see it comes from pain. That’s part of why when I read it, I try to tap into where I was several years ago. I had the pain. Now, we could go around comparing my stuff as more painful, but all pain is subjective, right? Like, what’s painful for a two year old is still felt to be as intense as whatever painful thing — that was much more objectively harsh on your body when you’re 20. But it feels the same. And that’s part of the problem of the more developed, we get the more comfortable we get, we still have the same amount of pain because the human brain is looking for that sort of thing. It helped to have that. It was adaptive evolutionarily way back when. So, it makes sense when we’re looking for pain. But it’s a story about that you tell yourself about what the pain means.

Like one story is, like you were telling, is empowering. “I love the pain” because it’s like the way is the obstacle, right? If it doesn’t kill me and I learn from it, that was the only way through. It was this bridge across to the other side and the bridge was on fire. It had to go through it, because otherwise I would have died starving on the other side.

Steve Mayeda: You can even say that life tries to kill you. Look at nature. Life tries to kill you. What saves you?

David Tian: That’s what actually defines life, to surviving being eaten or so on. That’s just how evolution works, survival of the fittest. And what I’m seeing in the red pill is a lot of pain. And the problem is, they’re not dealing with it in a productive way or a constructive way. They’re just taking a victim story. “Woe is me. Everybody’s against me.” And they like that. Just even reading that one report where Tomasi is complaining or reporting that the 21 Conventions kicked them out. All these comments are like, “Good because red pill was never meant to go mainstream anyway, they all hate us and they have to hate us.” It’s like they’re wedded to the…

Like, even if they ended up on the New York Times or whatever like mainstream exposure, that would actually undermine their victim narrative. They have to hate us. They have to be against us because that’s what gives my life significance. That’s what makes us important, because all those women don’t want us, they’re not treating us with respect. So, we’re going to take this victim narrative. And so, same thing as what’s eating away at the immature feminine in the modern world, I believe. Like hewing to the victim narrative is so strong, they don’t even bother with due process or actually looking objectively at things.

Steve Mayeda: When it comes to the specifics of the red pill, what did you want to start? Like, do you have a definition, because I have somewhat of a definition of it now.

David Tian: Yeah, I’m thinking like we were talking about if someone is in that logical rational frame of mind, and they want us to just go one at a time through all the different arguments, we could do more of a dry logical philosophical [INAUDIBLE].

Steve Mayeda: How did you want to go?

David Tian: I’m thinking I might just do that in a separate one just because it’ll be less interesting than these stories, because this is what resonates at the emotional level, like hearing your experience, my experience. I didn’t want to get into the pain and the victim narrative because that’s actually what’s happening. Let me share how I dealt with this instead as a way of contrast. So instead of holding onto the victim narrative, I felt the pain of being betrayed and all of this, and having my eyes open, taking the red pill and seeing how women are sluts and how they’re empowered to do so, how they’re rewarded for doing so, how there’s no limits, as it were, in the past on their promiscuous behavior, and how this undermines our desire as men to be able to get ahead of them, and be able to control them, and things like that.

And I was like, “Okay. Well, I still am going to pursue sexual pleasure, but I’m going to keep my emotions at bay.” So, for years, I engaged with women, I dated them. I engaged in dating relationships with them but I didn’t have any real emotional ties. It was like at any moment, she could lie to me. At any moment, she could cheat on me. At any moment, for all I know, everything she’s saying is a lie, but this is still fun. Hey, cheers, right? And I was just like in the moment with that. And I start to see the underside, underbelly of it all, that I was ignoring before because I thought, “Well, my game isn’t good enough. As I move up in game, this’ll disappear.” And it actually just got worse. In fact, I saw more and more and more.

And for years, I’m just flying around Southeast Asia, and seeing that all of these places I was going, in America, in Canada, was like that. And I just kind of gave up. But I thought it’s also rare that there are men upstanding men. Like, one of the problems with the red pill was what is that they make men out to be perfect. Like, men have integrity. The masculine is straightforward, it says what it means, and does what it says… And like, yeah, like 1%, like 5% of dudes. Like, we all want to, I suppose, if we’re good people. But behind the scenes, dudes lie and cheat all the time. You see them do all kind of despicable things.

One woman that I was involved with in her early 30s or something, she’s telling me on the second time we hung out how, while she was engaged, she went to some business conference, and every night, she decided she will say yes to any guy who says, “Come to my room.” So, seven nights in a row, she slept with seven different guys, and she was engaged, and she laughs at it. Of course, now she’s going through a divorce or something, or back when I met her.

And I was like, “Oh my god. You are evil.” You know, so that guy — and she didn’t feel anything about it, like no conscience. And then that guy’s doing the same exact thing, actually worse. So, everybody’s fucked up. And I’m like, “Okay, in this world, I got to just take care of myself. There’s people that I love.”

Steve Mayeda: But also in the red pill, there’s this idea that men have a different sex drive, and they do than women, and they see sex differently. But they… This is the problem. If you’re a dude and you’ve fucked chicks, and hung out, live life, and you’re not really insecure about your sexuality, you’re going to say women think about sex one way and men think about it another way. You’re going to clearly see that. But if you’re a nerd, or if you’re somebody who hasn’t, or you’re really angry, or you are a badass, but then you were married for 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 20 years, and you’re really bitter about it, you’re going to see it in a completely different way. And so, like, they’ll be like, “Yeah, man, the beta fucks and the alpha fucks…” And all this sort of shit.

And they get all like, “That’s exactly what happens.” And then if they get really weird, they get into this like vox dei ranking of beta, sigma, gamma, and dadada. Dude, it’s awesome, man. It’s so great, man. They’re just like, “And the sigma is like the alpha, but nobody knows that he’s the alpha except the alpha can tell that he’s the sigma.” And it’s just like, dude, just shut the fuck up. But it’s so interesting because, yeah, there’s a difference, but you need to experience — and this is the thing. It’s like you have to do the things that you’re afraid of in order to understand life.

And if you haven’t done them, you’re pulling from information, and that’s really what I want to see. You know this about pick up. How many pick up guys have kids, who have a functional relationship? And we may not know. You don’t see my household. I don’t see your household and stuff like that. But like, how many guys actually made something of their lives? How many guys achieved something outside of pick up? Like, did something? It’s crazy, man. And you had accomplishments before pick up. But like, how many guys have? They haven’t. It’s so weird.

What is so odd about the men’s development coaching industry where we see this over and over again? We don’t know anything about Rollo Tomasi’s life. He says he does all this alpha stuff with his wife. Show me. Show me. He says he does all this alpha stuff with his daughter. Show me. Those are not the stories that I’ve heard. And I do not know the guy. I’ve not experienced anything, but I know a lot of people who know them, and they talk about stuff, and it’s just like, “Dude, that sounds like…” And you know, I’ve watched hours and hours of his stuff at this point. And just like that, it sounds so weak. And the other thing too is like, you know, with the 21 Convention and Anthony, great guy. Like, he’s doing something great, but how much life experience has he had? When he came on with a lot of the theories and insights of what we see, there wasn’t a lot of experience. And maybe now he has more, that’s great.

You know, when I hear like Richard Cooper who also got kicked out of the convention, nobody talks about that because it’s got to be secret, right? The dude knows what he’s talking about with business, I guess. I mean, I know about business and I like what he says. But when he talks about women, this dude was married to a chick, and he dated a fucking crazy chick, and that’s like all I hear. He said something the other day, “It’s great. I love this. Actually. I love this. It’s so badass.” And I can see all the fanboy, pussy ass motherfuckers would latch onto this. And I think it’s great that he says this. It said something like, “Women don’t fuck the guys working at their life. They wait at the finish line and fuck the person who comes in first.” And I’m like man, no, they don’t.

Women fuck who they want to fuck. And if you think that you’re wasting a lot of time, the hot chick that’s in that finish line, she’s already had like 20 dudes run through that pussy. Why don’t you be one of them? I guarantee that one of those dudes wasn’t the dude who finished first. And if he knew what he was doing in bed, she would have stayed with him. You see this over and over again in society. Where are the examples of the female psychopath? Like, I get the examples that you’ve experienced.

But okay, ten years later, where is she at now? Show me. Show me these people. Also, when it gets to women who are these gold digger… I’ll tell you a story about a gold digger. I know a guy. I’m friends with a dude and he was dating some girl. She’s an Instagram model. [INAUDIBLE] I know a ton of Instagram models. And you know what? Some are gold diggers and a lot of them are very, very cool. Like in fact, I would say more are very cool. I know their relationship — they’re good people, man. They’re fucking awesome. They’re great. And this girl is not [INAUDIBLE] chick, and I don’t know her, but she’s an Instagram model. She’s dating my friend and she won’t commit to him.

Well, he called her straight out. He said, “Man, what’s going on? Do you have another boyfriend?” She’s like, “Oh, I do. I do.” This is what I love, man. This is why I love about these red pill guys, is that… And some guy like — I did some video years ago on MGTOW, and he’s like, “Who’s this motherfucker?” Dude, this is like the funniest shit. The guys who believe in gold diggers, you don’t have any game, man. And don’t get me wrong, you put money in front of a woman and give her an opportunity to take it, you put her in divorce court, then she’ll take it. But it takes her a long time to get what’s going on in terms of like the power dynamic and whatever. Dude, this girl, the Instagram model, hot as fuck.

So, she breaks it to my buddy. “Hey, yeah, I have a boyfriend and he’s a sugar daddy. He’s this old man, and he gives me $1,500 a month. He pays for my rent and he helps out my mom.” So, because of that, let’s just say it’s $4,000 a month, the dude’s mega-wealthy, like people would know who he is and stuff like that. He’s got $4,000 a month. No problem man, it’s not a big deal. And this girl, you know, basically goes to him. But for $1,500 a month, $1,500 a month and rent, and maybe your mom’s rent or something, she stays with him and then she fucks my buddy on the side.

But if he comes into town, she’s got to go to him. Okay? So, the other day, she met Dan Bilzerian. She’s total gold digger person or whatever you want. It’s cool. Yeah, you meet Dan Bilzerian, you get to have a great, crazy experience. You know, whatever it is. So, she goes and parties with him, you know, hangs out whatever, he’s done with her. In all of this, when I think about this — and she’s trying to get a job. She’s trying to separate from the dude and whatever, she has zero power. Like, anybody who’s afraid of a gold digger, you don’t know shit about women. Because if a girl wants to come after my money for stuff, I don’t have any money, but it’s like, man, I’ll tell you this. A stripper knows how to make $20, $60, maybe $500, but she doesn’t know how to make $5,000. I know how to make $5,000.

It might take me a while, but I know how to do that. But anybody who’s good at asking for low-level stuff stays asking at low-level stuff. And that might sound like misogynistic, or chauvinistic, or whatever, but that is what happens in those dynamics. I’m not saying you need to live them. But why are the red pill people talking about that? That is so obvious. Like, Jesus Christ, man. It’s like pimps have been around for a long time. You want to know guys who — In the pimping community, there’s a lot of pussies, but you want to know guys who really run stuff, who actually get women to have sex with other men and pay them for it? Because that’s a dynamic that you can learn and do if you want. You don’t have to.

But in that… Like, those guys might have some experience and some knowledge. I don’t see the red pill guys looking at that at all or try. I didn’t see pick up guys doing it. I was infatuated with it, man. I went straight to those motherfuckers, man. I was like, “Yes, man.” I’m not putting drugs in my body anymore. I want to find out what those guys are doing. So, that was part of my immaturity. And I wouldn’t even call that behavior bad. It’s illegal, so it’s not good, or at least where I live, but it’s the motive behind it which is bad. Some of the people that lived in those circles were happy. There were a lot that weren’t. But some were. In all of this, when I think about that, it’s like, “Oh man, the gold digger, the gold digger.” Dude, my buddy that’s fucking this chick, he’s not worried about any of that stuff. He’s not worried about any of it because it’s obvious. That girl’s value is $1,500 a month cash, as well as rent, and her mom’s stuff, and all of that keeps her from progressing anywhere in life, and that is weak.

I respect a woman — like if I walk into a strip club or I talk to a hooker, I don’t get off on any of that shit. It doesn’t mean anything to me. But if that girl’s good enough to take my money, man, fuck yeah, come on, bring it. Like, I want that to happen. But these guys are so goddamn afraid of it that they don’t let women do one of the most beautiful things that women can do, and that isn’t necessarily prostitution, but to work the feminine to make a man go wild and crazy. Because the problem is, is when your first girlfriend, or wife, or Mary Jane from high school gave you the slightest bits of attention, you went wild and crazy. And now, you can’t control it, and you’re all upset, and butthurt. It’s just so crazy, man. How we look at women in this culture comes from sexual repression and lack of experience. And nobody wants to have that experience.

Like, I wish the pickup dudes, the red pill guys, whatever it is. You know, I didn’t want to be David Duchovny from Californication because it hadn’t come out when I was on that tier in my life. I wanted to be like Henry Miller, man. I wanted to quit my job, and go to Paris, and beg, and play fucking — like, talk about philosophy, and fuck, and fuck, and fuck. And this is what I wanted to do. And that’s what I did, man. It was fucking beautiful. It was amazing. It’s the most amazing thing of my life. And in all of that, there’s just so much of a big picture with it. If guys did that, they would get it instead of judging from the feminine on how it won’t hurt them.

It’s just so terrible, right? Anyway, when we talk about hypergamy, like dude, “Please, woman, try and take my money.” And I get it. We can talk about the court systems 10 minutes from now or whatever. But like, try. Try and take my money. We’re not married. We’re not legally bound. Try. Yeah. Really? Man, because if you want to put that on the line, then suck my dick. Like, come on. Like, really? You want to objectify yourself so much? Then be an object. But like, I would think that’s what you want, red pill guys.

David Tian: Well, if you’re afraid of the gold digger who would be, you know, pegging her value at a certain dollar amount, and you’re afraid of that, then you’re beneath that. That’s where you’re valuing yourself. Part of what I decided to do was just hold — like, be in a holding pattern, just like wait it out, and in the meantime pursue these other goals that I had going. I got my fitness down real good, much better than I am right now existential energy right? I had all this extra space in my brain.

I wasn’t focused on letting the bitterness eat me up from inside, but I was just being productive. And I didn’t have an agenda. It’s just like, “Oh, let’s just see.” Sort of like in meditation when you just watched thoughts go by, and you’re not like trying to control or force anything, because I didn’t need it. I wasn’t pursuing that kind of neurotic neediness where I’m trying to get other people to fulfill my needs for significance, or love, or something like that.

So, that set me up to be in a great place where, for years, I didn’t find any woman, even like female friends. It’s really great if you can become friends with lots of women who tell you all the dirt, you know. They just open up about all the kind of things that go against their conscience and they regret. Okay, I get it. We’re friends. It’s cool. You’re a good person, but you still do dumbass shit that hurts people and you’re not changing. So, I’m just — it just warns me off women even more. And so, I totally understand the red pill feeling of like, “There are no women who are trustworthy.” Because that’s part of the feminine.

And I would say that’s part of the immature feminine just as men doing really stupid ass shit might be part of the immature — that would be part of the immature masculine. But when you rise up above it, you know, I just held out hope that because I know that there are upstanding men who say no to the things that their natural impulses would lead them to, in their self-centered aggrandizement. I think there are women who are that way.

Steve Mayeda: I think what made those men say no or women say no was also life experience. If you just say no without the life experience, it may not have the same meaning. Maybe those people did go a little bit down the dark side.

David Tian: You have to be tested in a way. I ended up meeting my wife right around that end of two or three years of that kind of bitterness. I’m in the holding pattern after a couple of years. So, about five years into learning about manosphere and that sort of thing. And I met her in a place, in a nightclub, and she was working in the VIP. And I was like, you know, she’s not — but then the more I got to know her, the more I realized she was not like all of the other girls who were there.

I just kept waiting to see, “When am I going to see the cracks here?” And you know, there’s plenty of this feminine kind of like when she gets — when she’s not able to regulate her emotions, just boom, like that kind of thing that would trigger me too, like, “Oh, god. This chaos is happening again.” As Jordan Peterson would call it. And the feminine can’t control it, and it’s just like — but it’s not enjoyable that — it’s not that enjoyable for her at that time because she’s unregulated. And then I become unregulated.

Because I was able to get the training to be able to bring that back in, and her as well, I was seeing growth and progression. I saw that she was trying to actually follow her conscience, and to say no to these various temptations, and had a track record of it. And all this other stuff just waiting to see, waiting to see, holding out the possibility that there is somebody like that. But you know, it took me two or three years of searching, dating around before it happened. And it’s a minority people. The same with dudes, man. I don’t have many guy friends that I trust, that I open up to, I’d be vulnerable to, that when I fly in and my schedule is crazy in that city. I’ll still make some time for them.

There are very few even guys like that, because a lot of guys will backstab you, too. Like, a lot of guys say one thing to you and your face, and then, you know, if it helps them their cause, they’ll throw you under the bus. And I learned that the hard way, too. So, it goes both ways. It’s not like a sexual energy thing. It’s just an immaturity thing, or it could just be an immorality thing. And I also believe that there is no natural moralism. I did a whole other video series on this, about an hour and a half, I put it into one video, about — well, I actually haven’t released the…

Steve Mayeda: It may be released by the time this is out there.

David Tian: Thanks for that Steve. So, look out for that where I tried out my own views of morality and that it comes down to a decision that you make, to be a certain way because it makes your life better, and you enjoy life more. And it’s — It may not be like there’s — because there’s no God, per se, who gives you a book of things to follow. There’s no divine command ethics or anything, but it could just be something you choose. And I prefer to be around people who make that choice. And I’m not going to judge them if they don’t make that choice. I just don’t want to — I just want to stay away from them because that’s not the life that I want for myself.

And there are few people. There’s a minority of people, I’d say easily less than 20% of the people who would be in the sexual market, like, available to me to date and stuff. And guy friends, less than 20% of people.

Steve Mayeda: Yeah, I would say less than that for me.

David Tian: Yeah. Probably less than 20%, maybe. And for women, you throw in all of the other things you’re looking for, physical attractiveness and all this other stuff. Maybe one out of a hundred, one out of a thousand. And I tell guys, one out of a million. Just go for one out of a million and just go to a place where there’s a lot of women.

Steve Mayeda: When I think about my wife, man, people don’t compare to her. I mean, that’s why I’m with her, you know. I mean, she’s so rare, at least to me. That’s what matters here.

David Tian: That’s what it is for me. Guys ask me, “How’d you know it was her?” I never sat down with a pro and con list or anything like that. I did that for other girls and it never worked. And it was like, if I even have to ask that question, it’s the wrong woman. I was just going to — or is this the wrong time? I didn’t know or write or something. So, I just wait. And it worked out, but it was just because I didn’t give in to that victimization story, that I am a victim, that the world is against me, that all of evolution is against me because of the way women have evolved, this whole thing about how it’s part of their unconscious brain chemistry, that they’re going to be hypergamous and they can’t say no to that.

They always just leave you for a better guy no matter what. And you know, it’s like, well, but you’re telling me a lot about your damn self. Now, I know your ethics. I know your morality. That when you fuck me over, because you got a better business deal over there, and you had no ethics around it, well, that’s nature, you know, kill or be killed, eat or be eaten. So, hey David, too bad. Fuck you. Throwing you under the bus. I’m like, “I can’t trust you man.” If you are into that red pill thing deep, that’s a good sign. It’s a great symptom for me to like, okay, see, this guy I can’t trust because that’s how he thinks the universe is and it’s going to let him off the hook when he fucks me over.

Steve Mayeda: In some ways, I just think lazy because you got to — any philosophy is not going to be there when I need it in my life. And I mean, shit dude. Fuck, man. I mean, there’s people that I’m really good friends with. But just looking at who the people I know in the red pill, they’re just so like, “Do you believe in my ideology or not? Have you bought into this?” It’s so dogmatic. It’s ridiculous. That’s not friendship. And so, if something that is important to me is going to be a part of my life, it needs to be there when it counts. And the things that count are like those doubting times. The greatest parts of myself were shaped from moments where I was confused and didn’t know what to do, when I was afraid. Either I had to just step forward blindly and make mistakes, or I had to get advice from people.

But the people that gave me advice weren’t people that were like, “Well, wait a minute, do you believe in this or not?” They weren’t people the people that I still know 10-15 years later. They’re not people that I know that — just for six months, you know. And that might be the case, because that’s all I got at the time, but they’re not short-lived people in my life. And I think that’s what’s so interesting about the whole internet phenomenon of it, is that it doesn’t build solid relationships with people, and it should, man. If it did, that would actually be a step. I think it would change if people really did build those relationships that were really solid. It’s like, man, it would tell so much. It would shape you with who you are and it would change your values of those things.

I don’t see examples of that. I don’t see examples of a lot of things within the red pill community. I mean, nobody talks about their personal lives much, or they show boat in these different ways. I mean, fuck, dude. Like, women fuck you up, man. That’s what they’re supposed to do. Society does, too. The things that I hate about the red pill is they tell you everything that’s wrong and give you a reason to be angry. And I think that we may have been doing too much of that this time just because we haven’t really talked about it, you know. And it would be great if we could talk about it more. And that was actually something I was thinking about talking to you about.

I know I had messaged you but we never really talked about it. So I just throw it at you live on a podcast. No, but I think it would be good to continue the discussion. But the solution is what’s important. For men, you can live a great life, and it doesn’t matter what has happened to you. You know, one of the things with me is that I work with people that have a lot of problems. And it just kind of worked out that way, and I’m good at it. If that’s one thing I’m good at, you know, you brought up the stacks. I was good at customizing. I’m good at working with guys who have a lot of unique problems.

I’m not a therapist. I don’t replace that. I’m not a psychologist or psychiatrist. Like, I want you to continue those things if you need them. But the solution is that you can live a great life and you don’t need the things that might be coming from your pain which say you need to have the opposite of your pain. What you need is yourself to be seen, felt, and heard. You need yourself to be experienced. You need to be welcomed in a certain area. And man, if that means fucking the whole goddamn world, I’m down with it.

But if you want to do that, do it. Because if you do that with anger, you’re going to soon realize that there’s another thing to it. In my experience, it’s very sexual. Everything in my story has a lot to do with drugs, sex, and then working with men. And what’s interesting is the sex part was mainly without the drug part. It’s kind of crazy. So, the drug part was first, it was like 20 to 30. Sex, 30 to 40. And then, you know, working with men was also 30 to 40. And it’s just an interesting kind of dynamic of what I bring to the table to people. I have a guy who I work with. He’s got an IQ of 100. Motherfucker makes more money than me now. And 100 is average, but he has a lot of problems. He grew up a lot of abuse. He’s a heroin addict for 20 years. He was homeless when I started working with him.

It’s kind of like a rock star story. It doesn’t happen to everybody, but you know, he worked. And to work with a guy who had so many problems, and teachers, and different rehab techniques working with him, which were all great to do that. To see somebody change with that is a good thing, and to work with a guy who’s been married for, you know, 26 years, and he gets divorced, and doesn’t know how to date, and he is really angry at his wife. Who doesn’t? There’s probably like a hundred guys that I’ve worked with going like, “Steve’s talking about me.” Who doesn’t when they break up with their wife go like, “Man. I want to kill her. Like, I have a plan.” Because we all think those things. Like, we need to process those emotions. And if we go down the wrong route, you know, and we get into the — as you put it once, you know… I watch and listen to as much of your stuff as I can, but you know, I’m always busy too.

And you put out really good stuff. As you said, if you buy into the subculture of hate, blame, and whatever despair, and I was like, “Man, that was so good how David put it.” If you do that, you’re just not going to get better. And I’ve always had a lot of reasons to bitch or be a victim in my life. And that mentality, whether I was or wasn’t, and there’s a lot of times where I can argue it might be worse societally than other people’s. But to me, they actually weren’t, you know, worse, but I could be like, “Oh, I was beaten. I was sexually assaulted.” That stuff wasn’t the bad stuff. That was not the bad stuff of my life. The bad stuff was being alone.

The bad stuff was getting the results that I thought would work, like women, like money, like power in certain areas, which women, money, and power are good things. But because I didn’t know them, those tortured me in my life because it proved that I was still nothing. I was still unhappy. I still hated myself. In some ways, that’s why I’m so grateful that I had the amount of self-fate that I developed in my 20s for myself because it forced me to see reality. To be honest, I see a lot of guys not in enough pain, they have this dull pain, pain of a thousand cuts. So they, you know, get upset and have whatever issues that come around that. But man, there’s an answer to live well, and it’s dependent upon hard work, consistent action, and looking at yourself, taking responsibility absolutely a hundred percent for yourself.

That’s what I’m all about. That’s what David’s all about. If you’re on his boards or in his programs, you’re going to learn that, and that’s my message too. That’s what I want to put out.

David Tian: You got a great story, too, every time we talk. It’s so different from mine, but it’s really inspiring. I’m really glad we can share it with my channel and tell other guys about it. I’m going to put how to find Steve in the show notes. Again, just want to throw that out there, and I’ll throw in my two cents on the solution. And for me, one great way to think about it is, the meaning you attach to the pain, or to the thing that drove you to even look at the red pill in the first place. And maybe it’s just frustration because the girls you’re dating, they never gave you the time of day, or it could be you got really attached and got really close to one and then she betrayed you or something.

Whatever that pain is, you could give into the pain and create a victim narrative around it. That’s the story you tell yourself about what that means. But you could tell a different story, and I wish I learned this story quicker because it would have saved me some of that pain that was perhaps a little bit longer than needed to be, which was the story of the chrysalis. It’s basically the idea that you don’t know what’s coming up next. And I actually became suicidal as a result of that. Looking back on it now, I’m like, “That would’ve been a really stupid reason in my life, that some girl cheated on me or whatever.”

But at the time, I was just so into that whole thing. It’s because I didn’t know that there was a whole other existence, a whole other plane of existence, like the caterpillar doesn’t know that those beautiful things flying around them, butterflies, used to be caterpillars. And you go into this cocoon, and it’s this dark, horrible place, and you just have to wait it out. And it would be a lot easier for the caterpillar to just wait it out if you knew what was coming. I wonder if caterpillar brains can understand that those butterflies used to be them, that would be interesting. But I didn’t know what was coming next. And because of this experience, I got to get to this other phase, this breakthrough without being broken, without being humbled, I wouldn’t have gone from what I call in my legendary coach, a group which I just launched what I call the night energy or phase two, which is the ‘go get it.’

Like, what you were talking about. Like, “If I could just get the women, or the money, or the car, or whatever, then I’ll feel complete, then I’ll have made it, then I am somebody or something like that, then I’m significant, then I’m important.” This is the actual desire that they all have in common: “Then I’m worthy, then I’m good enough to be loved.” And I didn’t know that was what’s driving them. I just thought everybody does that, so I’m going to do it because I used to do it with grades, and I used to do it with other professional stuff, and obviously then with women. And now, what this betrayal meant was that I wasn’t good enough to keep her. I wasn’t good enough to attract better or whatever. I wasn’t good enough. I wasn’t good enough.

I wasn’t enough and I had to confront that fear. And without this experience, I would have continued to live in that lower level phase. But this broke me. And because of that, I finally was able to see that I had these tender emotions, that you don’t think about. I mean, the beginning of Tomasi’s book was something like, “Psychotherapy teaches us to feel. Fuck these feelings. Let’s talk about the truth.” And I was like, you’re still feeling shit. It’s just not the tender stuff.

Steve Mayeda: At the beginning of Tomasi’s book is, “I’m smarter than everybody and I’ve proved it.” [INAUDIBLE].

David Tian: The anger is there because you feel like you’re not getting the love that you feel like — that you really need and crave desperately, the connection with others, the acceptance, the significance for you to feel like you’re enough. And now, it’s being denied you, the way that you’re trying to do it, and you’re not turning inwards. You’re not actually getting in touch with your inner child, or those tender feeling of the need for love. You begin to learn over time, if you follow the right narrative, that it’s not a victim narrative, but that you can do something about it. If you continue with it, that you can actually meet your own needs for love, that you can get in tune with your needs for connection, and for care and compassion for yourself first, and learn to love yourself.

And you can start with, if it’s too weird to love yourself, you can love your inner child, the one that you can think of when you do some of our meditations in our courses that I have. And then that leads you slowly but surely to your true self. But all of what’s happening in the red pill is the kind of persona, a kind of angry false self that’s trying to lash out at other women’s false selves. It’s just false self against false self and just leads into this toxic thing.

Steve Mayeda: Ain’t that the truth, man?

David Tian: Yeah. So, there is a solution, but it’s not in the direction that they think it’s in. It’s not in the direction of striving for more, or trying to one-up each other, or just battling in a zero-sum game. That led to this problem in the first place. It got you — maybe if it gets you out of bed, to work hard and make some money, but now we’re growing out of that, right? You got to move away from the significance-driven, what I call the night phase, and move up into what I call the sage phase where it’s more — now, we’re in tune with actual presence. We can actually be present and vulnerable with people because we can meet our own needs for love and connection, and we can feel like we’re now going to meet them with all of — the kind of thing that red pill guys are so afraid of. They might get hurt. She might betray him, all of this stuff. Fears, right?

But when you pop up to the next level, you know that they can do whatever they do, but you can meet all your own needs, and you can be sad, and be okay. And actually, sadness is very cathartic, and being okay with the sadness, and being sad for them if they choose that way. But you are who you are. And if they want to come up to where you’re at, that’d be wonderful. And this openness to these experiences is what will take you into the butterfly level from where you were at, at the caterpillar level.

It is hard to explain to a caterpillar what it’s like to be a butterfly, or it’s hard to explain to someone living a two-dimensional life what three dimensions is like. That’s what it feels like. I keep having to use analogies to try to spur those breakthroughs. But yeah, it’s like it’s been really refreshing talking to you, Steve. You always have so many great stories and great background. I hope to do this again soon. We’re almost an hour and a half in here. I was planning to do like 30, 40 minutes, but this is great. Absolutely fantastic. Thanks so much, Steve. How can guys get a hold of you and learn more about you?

Steve Mayeda: You can email me, Steve@TheSexualLife, or you can go to the Austin Men’s Development Board, which is on Facebook. You can also go to TheSexualLife.com or AustinMensDevelopment.com. But whatever, man. Just find me on Facebook. If you want to get a hold of me and contact me, that’s probably the best way, and we’ll talk man. I’m open to it all.

David Tian: Awesome. We’ll get all the links from you and stick them into the show notes. I highly recommend it. We do have quite a lot of overlap between our groups, which is great, and it’s always great to have your guys chime in and contribute because they always got good stuff. Thanks so much, Steve, for [INAUDIBLE] David Tian. That’s me. You can check out the show notes. We got the website, DavidTianPHD.com/podcast/man-up. You can see all the links in the show notes. Thanks so much for watching, and thank you Steve.

Steve Mayeda: Later, thank you so much yourself.