The Truth About Dating Gurus | (#059) The Masculine Psychology Podcast with David Tian

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

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

In this episode, we’re going to confront the truth about dating gurus. In the last episode, I went over how most dating advice made for men on the internet is actually dangerous, and in this episode, I’m going to be getting into the specifics about dating gurus to save you time and energy because I know how much information is out there on the internet, and now the challenge is in getting information. The challenge now is sifting through it all because you have limited time and energy and attention, and willpower and concentration, so you want to get the key to figuring out which information to listen to or to follow, so this episode is going to be exposing the truth about the dating gurus that are dominant online right now. [01:05.0]

If you follow most of the dating gurus that are dominant online right now, and I use the word “guru” as a kind of tongue in cheek term, if you follow the dominant dating gurus right now, you will be amplifying the fear, insecurity and anxiety in your life without realizing it, and you will be pushing away the possibility of experiencing real love in your life.

Almost all the dating gurus online right now, the dominant ones with big followings, are teaching or preaching, or sharing or teaching, from a place of fear and insecurity, and neediness. Their strategies and tactics and advice will only amplify whatever fear and insecurity and neediness already exists in you.

All right, so let’s get into it. I’ve got six points here and the first three points are to give a kind of historical background. I think it’s very important to understand for making sense of the deep insecurities, the sort of underlying neediness that afflicts most of the dating gurus currently dominant online. [02:09.6]

The first point in the first phase of dating gurus is what I’d call the PUA phase, pick-up artist, and it’s sad that this phase has passed. In a way, it’s sad, because this was the phase of the lovable losers, in a way. We were first introduced where the world was first introduced to the PUAs from the award-winning New York Times bestselling book by Neil Strauss, one of the most prolific and award-winning authors alive right now, who wrote the book, The Game. I’m saying all this as background because I’ve recently come across guys who have been coming to me for advice who don’t know and have never even heard of this book.

The day before I read Neil Strauss’ The Game, I had met my first in-person dating mentor, mentor in this area of dating and attraction, and then the next day devoured Neil Strauss’s book, The Game, in a day and a half, and that set my life on a whole new trajectory, as you can imagine, if you know my background, so this is a big deal. This book is sort of like a milestone. [03:15.3]

It’s set off or popularized the underground community of guys trying to understand dating and attraction and getting it out into the mainstream, and that first group of pick-up artist teachers and instructors that were the subject of deal Strauss’s book is depicted so beautifully in the book, The Game, as these lovable losers, in a way, who compensated for their insecurities in all the wrong ways or at least ways that were psychologically unhealthy. You can see this in the book itself in the story of the book where all of these high-level dating instructors and dating gurus end up fighting against each other and splitting apart into these little factions. [04:01.4]

Neil Strauss himself, along with his closest teacher, and Style and Mystery were their usernames back then, their monikers, and Neil Strauss as Style, showed how this journey into figuring out the dating and attraction dynamics was born out of their own insecurities and lack of self-worth. The book ends, the story ends with finding what he believed at the time to be love, and the sad thing is the whole book wasn’t, in fact, about love. It was about the wrong ways of trying to get love, love for yourself and love from women.

Of course, the book itself doesn’t teach you how to get love, but it teaches you the wrong ways to do it and it does it in an incredibly entertaining way. Almost every guy who read the book missed the underlying message, but of course, Neil Strauss didn’t do much to discourage this misinterpretation of it, the misreading of it, and continued to sell pick-up courses for years afterwards, until he published a book called The Truth, which is about him actually confronting his childhood trauma. [05:11.2]

It’s actually pretty deep psychologically, presents lots of psychotherapeutic concepts and gets into addiction, a lot of addiction treatment and therapy and so forth. I highly recommend that book, especially for the guys who are confused about why any man who can have it all when it comes to women would be tempted by monogamy.

That’s the first wave of dating gurus of pick-up artists, and the first generation of pick-up artists were depicted in Neil Strauss’ book. This includes Erik von Markovik and Neil Strauss himself as Style. I actually don’t recommend you following their particular approach, which is a routines-based approach with lots of memorization required, and if you actually are good at it, and it’s difficult to do, but if you actually do master it, it can lead to a kind of robotic responses with women and especially with an opening when you’re just blurting out long paragraphs’ worth of canned routines. I don’t see anybody doing that anymore or recommending it or teaching it, so that’s an improvement. [06:15.5]

However, this period, and that first generation and the second and third generations, I would put myself somewhere in the second and third generation of pick-up artist teachers improving on what came before. That period from about 2004, 2005—I think it was 2005 when the book came out—until about 2012, I don’t know of any or I’ve not seen any good dating advice or material that I’ve ever come across that has been any good that I would recommend to any guy that has been published after or put out after 2012, besides my own material, of course, because I’ve synthesized hours and hours.

I mean, my prime dating skills course “Invisible” is over 35 hours of material, partly because it interweaves, it weaves into it, a lot of therapeutic processes. That’s about half therapy, half more of the high-level methods and tactics and techniques for dating, and best practices for body language and conversation, and so on. [07:15.8]

If what you’re after is the highest-quality, most-effective dating advice, this is the period to go to, in my opinion, and I’d recommend not only reading The Game because it’s just highly entertaining, but also gives you a background for it and for what’s going on in that period, but the old Swinggcat “Real World Seduction” on framing, Brad P. who has got some innovative openers and just fun ways to approach and see things, and maybe the most sophisticated was this guy named Mehow who was a friend of Neil and Erik, way too complex to be workable.

But what was interesting to see was these guys were doing it and approaching it like R&D, like research and development, like they have this theory and they’re going to try it out, and they’re going to try it out on 20 different, 30 different approaches, with basically 30 different groups of women that they try out this material on and see how it works. This real life laboratory. [08:08.8]

That period is mostly gone now and the dating advice that you find on YouTube and on the internet, in general, is incredibly dumbed down the most. It’s as if I’m looking back at the golden age of Brazilian jiu-jitsu where you had black belts constantly grappling with each other, rolling with each other, and get that footage, and now let’s say, the analogy, guys studying BJJ are just freaking out about the fancy moves and they’re all really still white belts. That’s what it looks like, to me.

I have not seen or heard any good dating advice that was made after 2012 that is not just rehashing what came before, except, of course, my own, but I haven’t actually put out any new dating advice in terms of tactics or strategies or techniques since about 2016, 2017, because up to that point, it was about synthesizing the hundreds of hours of material that I had and bringing it down to 35 hours in “Invincible”. [09:07.8]

I know now the guys who go into the bigger courses like “Invincible” that is 25 to 35 hours of material say it’s way too much and that this is encyclopedic. I know it seems encyclopedic to you, but this is an abridged version of what I used to teach in my in-person yearlong courses. This is just a fraction of what we used to cover. There’s so much because interpersonal dynamics, when you’re talking about not just interacting with women, but people, in groups of people, and then in terms of breaking down the status stuff, the high-status lifestyle stuff, obviously, this is life. This is interpersonal, “you with another human being” dynamics.

This can apply at your workplace and it can apply at school with the other parents of your kids at school, and so on. I mean, it applies everywhere. Anytime you’re dealing with another human being, including getting free upgrades and all that, getting better treatment at the top restaurants or bars or whatever, it applies anytime you’re dealing with another human being. [10:04.5]

In “Invincible”, I’m bringing it down to the most efficient way of getting it to you, that essential knowledge of the best practices, the practices in terms of dating that I’ve worked the best for myself and my students over the many years.

That’s the golden age, I would call it. There’s a lot of harmful material in there only if you approach it at the wrong time. If you’re not needy and it’s fun for you to use these conversational techniques and tell stories in these ways and so on, if this is bantering, it’s just fun and it feels natural, and you just didn’t know how to do it and then you learned about it and you quickly employed it, and it came easily to you and you made it your own—just like any kind of improv comedy or any kind of method acting you. You’re having fun with it. You’re making it your own. It’s coming out of a unique expression of you because you’re just applying the principles—then there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it. [11:00.3]

If, however, you focus on this before you get into the therapeutic process, then the harm comes from creating a false self and that’s how almost all guys do it. Most guys these days don’t even bother with the therapeutic process. They don’t even know what it is.

By the way, if you’re wondering what it is, that is the subject of almost all the episodes in my podcast series. It’s on the therapeutic process. If you want to go deeper and have me guide you through it, there’s the Platinum Partnership, which gives you access to all the courses in which I lead students through the therapeutic process in different permutations, in different ways in applying it to different subject areas.

This period, this first period, the PUAs, they were lovable losers for the most part who just wanted to feel like they’re enough and they’re gauging whether they’re enough by whether women like them, and many of them just wanted love, as you can see in Neil Strauss’s book, The Game, and it opens with the top, quote-unquote, “pick-up artist”, “Mystery” Eric von Markovic being suicidal because a girl basically wasn’t giving him validation. [12:02.5]

As a result, these lovable losers tried to compensate for their insecurities, their neediness. They compensated for it by taking on narcissistic personality traits, thinking, “I’m the 10. I’m the prize. I’m better than you. You, girl, can’t hurt me with your rejection because I’m just going to approach it as a video game and you’re just an NPC, a non-playing character in the game, and I’m going to gauge my results with women, which is a marker or a metric of how I should feel about myself. I’m going to gauge it based on your response, but you are not really human. You’re just a non-playing character in the game that gives me the feedback on whether I’m doing well in the game.” This is a way of protecting their insecurity and all of this is a way of compensating for their core neediness that they don’t actually address, instead of just covering it up and compensating, overcompensating for it, with pick-up artist methods and tactics and techniques. [12:59.0]

Now, what has happened to all these dating gurus from that pick-up artist time? I happen to know a lot of them or most of them personally or maybe one or two steps removed from my own circle, and I can tell you that, by and large, they are single still, 10 years later, 15 years later, or divorced, and now it’s kind of sad because they’re all in their fifties, some in their sixties, and they probably have children from women that they knocked up.

There are a few who are in what seem like stable marriages, if you were to look at it from the outside or from their personal Instagram accounts, but they’ve confided in me and I’m not going to share any of the names, but I’ve heard many times that they’re not having sex. The wife is not giving them any sex. “What should I do, David?”

There’s a natural lack of passion that happens at a certain point in a marriage, and if you don’t have the skills to be able to reignite the passion when you need to or when you want to, it will have its natural course. Pick-up, the danger about learning pick-up, is that you think it will actually apply to the relationship and almost everything that you learn in the pick-up world is actually based on a more toxic framework. [14:11.0]

Not all of it. Plenty of techniques, like just fun, conversational techniques that are maybe borrowed from improv comedy or something, those are fun. Just being aware of the social dynamics of power dynamics and status, that helps, too, especially in a business setting. But when it comes to a relationship, it actually requires vulnerability. Love requires vulnerability. Love also requires a lot of courage, the courage to be hurt and to withstand it, and not run from it or not shield up from it or not put up your guard against it. It also attracts into your life a certain type of woman.

Actually, this is supposed to be Point 4, but I think it falls very neatly here, so I’m going to make this point, too. The women who fall for these men, and just to preview the next two points because I want to refer to them, because they also apply here, the second phase after the pick-up artist are what I like to call the Red Pill and largely rednecks—Red Pill Rednecks, it’s got a ring to it—and then, after that are these sort of insecure alphas that you see online dominating the new platforms like TikTok. [15:11.8]

I’ll get to those two in a minute, but just a note about the women who fall for these men, because they wouldn’t be able to get a following among other men unless they were able to have women fall for them, or, at least, have the semblance of women falling for them. That leads to the question of “What women would fall for such immature men?” so I’m going to point out the immaturities in the Red Pill rednecks and in the insecure alphas on TikTok.

But just before I do that, which you can just assume that there’s this immaturity, then what women are actually falling for them? It’s interesting because, if you’re mature, you can already make conclusions or have hypotheses, working hypotheses that you can develop based off who they’re attracted to or who they have in their circles, who they like and are drawn to naturally. [15:59.3]

In this case, sticking with the PUAs, but it applies across the board for all of these dating gurus, the women who fall for them would have to be equally immature, equally or about, or even more immature. These are, in the old PUA parlance, LSE women, low self-esteem better. A term for it would actually be low self-worth women. They might look like they have self-esteem on the outside. They’re quite arrogant or proud of themselves, and if you take that as a superficial understanding of the term self-esteem, then you might think they have high self-esteem, but actually it’s born out of a toxic insecurity. It’s actually low self-worth.

Then they also would share similar values, narcissistic values, wherein they’re judging or measuring themselves as toxic achievers would, based on external markers, like how hot or physically attractive they are or how much money they have, or how high-status they are. This leads to a ruthless world, a world in which there is no accord, no compassion, and no true goodness, because it takes no merit, no virtue whatsoever to admire the admirable, to esteem the esteemed. [17:10.7]

A low-functioning teenaged boy with Down’s syndrome, who has got a big heart and is open to kindness and compassion, and loves his puppy and wants to be kind to strangers, on this narcissistic value system, he would be a zero. He’d be a beta. He’d be a loser and he would not be worthy of love.

Hopefully, you are as repulsed as I am by a worldview like that. But, hopefully, you can see that people who have a worldview like that would naturally attract into their lives other people who have similar worldviews and have similar values. Similarly, those who don’t, those who prioritize love and compassion, and kindness and goodness, moral goodness in the world, would also attract naturally into their lives people with similar values and would repel those who have diametrically-opposed values. [18:05.8]

In a way, these two groups of people wouldn’t really be aware of each other, especially the way the internet and social media silos us through their algorithm, and so it’s becomes easy for those who are in their world of hate or their world of ultra-competition, and a world without love and without compassion and without moral merit, and it’s just red in tooth and claw that they start to see that everyone else also believes the same or they’re only losers.

Those are the women who fall for such men, and, of course, their relationships fall apart, and the vast majority of dating gurus in the PUA vein have had horrible relationships that blow up in very dramatic fashion and it’s a kind of marriage where there is a kind of rapprochement of an agreement that will stick together for whatever reasons, maybe their children, for practical reasons. The passion is gone, the kind of life of quiet desperation. [19:04.8]

But for the most part, because these guys have made a career out of saying, “Screw you, I’m going to do it my way,” right? That’s the PUA approach. Most of them have just divorced, and this is the result, right? They’ve set up their lives with this compensating compensatory narcissism and they carry that into their relationship, and since compensatory narcissism is based out of a toxic shame, and this fear and insecurity and neediness, it will necessarily sabotage a relationship that is supposed to be about love, because love requires vulnerability and it is, in fact, based on that. It’s required and it requires courage, the courage to be vulnerable. [19:49.7]

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Okay, now we get into the third point, which is the second phase, which is what I call the “Red Pill rednecks”. These are Red Pill guys who are largely coming from more country folk, more of the gun-toting, the stereotypical gun-toting Republicans, and this is a very misogynistic approach to dating. There wasn’t any innovation, as far as I could see in terms of dating dynamics and just improving your results in dating. They were more concerned about getting revenge on women who cheat and lie. [21:03.2]

They were hypersensitive to any kind of loyalty or disloyalty cues of her cheating or lying, and they almost all came from the pain of being cheated on or lied to, and then instead of growing from that, they armored up and they tried to tell other guys to armor up so that they could stick it to the women, women, in general. This actually evolved into or maybe fed into or assimilated a much stronger misogynistic bent.

The first time I encountered the Red Pill rednecks type of approach was at the 21 Convention. The last time I was there in person, I was shocked that half the speakers at least were of this approach, and then it wasn’t a surprise when, a few months later, the entire channel and the entire company or whatever account went in that direction and tried to paint me in a bad light. But that’s to be expected. [21:53.3]

I have made some content in the old Man Up Show series, and I might come back to the Man Up Show series, if I do video podcasts again, just saying. Just look out for that. But I have done content on Red Pill with Steve Mayeda who has had even more experience with it, with grappling with these types of dating gurus than I have, and especially in person. I recommend that you check out those videos on Red Pill from the Man Up Show.

I haven’t done much more on Red Pill rednecks because most of my audience are like me, a coastal liberal. In fact, I’m Taiwanese Canadian, so I’m very international, and as a result, when I polled the audiences and new contacts coming into our list and so on, most of them had not heard about the Red Pill, so I wasn’t going to tell them about it as I’d dismantle it, so I just sort of left that alone.

But that’s Phase 2 and I was getting a lot of comments on YouTube at the time, up until about last year, telling me, “PUA is dead. It’s now replaced with Red Pill,” and that was sad because of the misogyny in it, but I thought, culturally speaking, this wouldn’t resonate as much with my audience because of the cultural gap or disconnect. [23:07.6]

Now, this third phase is the one that I’ve been getting a lot of requests to do content on for the past year or so, especially in the last several months, and there are channels like Fit & Fresh and a guy named Andrew Tate that I’ve been getting requests over email and comments and through Messenger and all that to do content on. I haven’t been able to stomach watching a whole lot of it, though I do find some of it highly entertaining, which I’ll get to in a bit.

But what I have noticed is the way that especially guys like Andrew Tate sell it. It’s now dovetailing with a lifestyle emphasis and they’re getting a lot of leads and getting attention from, it seems like, showing off the trappings of the young entrepreneur, or, basically, the young businessman. They’re showing off fancy cars, watches, that sort of jet-setting lifestyle. [24:02.3]

That was always there as an undercurrent in the PUA world, though it wasn’t being exploited until several years into the PUA industry. For the most part, the PUA industry was selling how to improving your dating skills, and then towards the end, say, the third generation or so, it sort of morphed into transitioning into teaching you how to become location-independent and have your own sort of digital-nomad lifestyle.

This is also dovetailing with another book that was published around the same time called The 4-Hour Workweek that was published a few years after The Game, and that was one way that many PUAs, and power to them, many of the PUAs in the first, second and third generations, after they’d had a few years as PUA coaches, transitioned into entrepreneurs in digital nomads who were making millions of dollars a year. Some of them have actually created very successful and legitimate companies that have exited for some millions, and there were a lot of commonalities between the old PUA world and this type of entrepreneurism. [25:05.8]

This whole way of showing off, not just that you can get women, but mostly that you’re getting most of the attention through showing off your lifestyle. One well-known example is Dan Bilzerian who has gone quiet I think on Instagram. I haven’t seen much from him, though he has published a book. Dan was, as opposed to what I’m seeing from Andrew Tate, doing it in a much more authentic way, in the sense of he wasn’t trying to sell you a course on it and he was just literally just showing his lifestyle.

He did mention, I think it’s in some interview that I saw, that there are tons of guys doing this, that there are a lot of guys doing this, but he’s the only one who’s showing it off on Instagram, because most of the guys who are doing it don’t want the heat and that’s true. In your clubbing and dating world, especially at the high levels of the pick-up artist where you’re clubbing professionally three or four nights a week, you are going to meet the high rollers and they absolutely do this and there are plenty of women, like I was saying, the women who fall for them. There are plenty of immature women who just want to live it up and party it up, and they want the perks that come from partying with a rich guy who is going to take care of all the financial part of it, so this is actually nothing new. [26:11.2]

In fact, the godfather of all of this type of lifestyle is Hugh Hefner, who is far smarter, especially in his voluminous writings on his philosophy of it, especially as the kind of first, the forerunner of this sort of combination of lifestyle and dating success or women, success with women, Hugh Hefner. There’s, of course, lots of toxicity in there. Dan Bilzerian I don’t think made any bones about being a role model or having guys follow him. He was just doing it for kicks.

It’s all kind of sad to see that guys who are looking for dating advice went from really high-level, sophisticated approaches, though they were way too impractical and that was in the pick-up world. Most of them were impractical. Plus, they paid no attention to the therapeutic process. If you adopted even the healthy parts of it, which might be just conversational skills and conversational techniques and that sort of thing, and attitudes around socializing that will help relax yourself and help you to be more laid back, if you do all that before the therapeutic approach, then that can become toxic, but there’s plenty of good advice there if you’re coming from the right place. [27:17.8]

Then the Red Pill rednecks with the misogyny really threw things off and didn’t add anything helpful or useful. Then now you have these insecure [alphas]. Obviously, it should be obviously insecure alphas. If you know anything about narcissism and anything about psychotherapy or psychology, it should just be obvious. But I get it if you have a worldview that is the sort of red and tooth in claw; there is no place for love, compassion or goodness; you don’t give a damn about moral goodness; it’s just get whatever you can for yourself; you’re out for yourself and for your bros who are also really just only bros, as long as they can help you and all this self-centered narcissism. [27:54.4]

If you’re coming from that worldview, the lovable Down’s syndrome kid who is low-functioning but has a big heart, he’s got no place in your life or in the world in which you operate, and that’s sad because that means also your inner child you, and now we’re getting to—and, hopefully, if you’ve been following the podcast long enough, you can sense already—that deep level of status anxiety among all of these insecure alphas who are trying to overcompensate for their toxic shame and neediness by showing off their cars and their watches and that lifestyle, and showing off about the women that they say that they get and all that. These are all ways of overcompensating for their insecurities.

There’s nothing wrong, of course, with admiring the engineering of a well-made watch or of a well-made car, but showing it off, this extra level, is either they’re just doing it purely for marketing, in which case that’s sleazy in a different way, or they’re actually overcompensating for their deep neediness, or both, which is what I think is the case for this new era of insecure alphas that are on TikTok and so forth. [29:01.0]

It turns out as a further point, this is Point 5 now out of six that Andrew Tate was on Big Brother or some reality TV show, and this is great because it really shows how much this is just based off getting attention. There’s a big divide now in the world in terms of attention between substance and the superficiality of it. Sort of like virality, if you can hack virality, then you can have something that has very little substance, but you package it in just the right way that it gets attention. This is the era of reality TV stars, because that’s really what social media is doing for everyone. It gives you the opportunity to turn the camera on yourself and make a show.

Going all the way back to that first generation of pick-up artists, they would’ve made for a great reality TV show, and, in fact, there were two seasons of reality TV show on The Game that was sort of patterned after that. But it’s all drama. It’s all drama. All of this insecurity, fear, and neediness, it doesn’t actually create a life of love, happiness and fulfillment. [30:06.5]

It creates a life of anxiety, partly because there’s so much drama that comes from it, but mostly because you’re trying to push away, repress and suppress the toxic shame that is underlying all of it, and those who are mature can see it from a mile away. On the one hand, it’s fun to see, “Oh, this guy is entertaining.” I mean, there’s no question that watching these guys or reading about them is entertaining because this is like reality TV. There’s drama in it.

If you had a reality TV show about a mature couple, it would actually not have much drama in it, and as a result, it probably wouldn’t make for very entertaining viewing, and that’s the catch 22. I actually think that’s part of why some of my content, in the way that I’ve been doing content as a trained academic and a professor, has not translated very well in the social media world of ADHD and all that. [30:58.0]

I’m getting help with that. I’m working on that, trying to make it punchier and put more stories in it, and we’ll see if that works out in the years ahead. But I was more focused on the substance. I was a philosopher who read Aristotle for fun, and I had to learn that most people don’t do that and I had a hard time relating to them.

Now, imagine the opposite where there was almost no substance, but the person was awesome at the entertainment part, and that’s what you’re seeing now and I don’t know if that’s ever really going to change. The onus is on me and any other type of artist or who see our work as a kind of art and the substance in it, and the content is the most important thing, to make it more entertaining in order to relate to the masses. But these are the type of guys who relate to the masses, just normally, but we have no content there. There’s nothing really there underneath it and they’re just showing off this lifestyle. [31:55.2]

Just pay attention to that. You can see the drama. The drama will give you a clue as to the mental health of the people involved, and the more drama there is, most of the time, the more are these issues that are unresolved that are being worked out or not worked out, that are just being turned over and over in this cycle of more toxicity, and that’s what you see, sort of reality TV drama that’s being played out, and the suckers are the guys buying into it.

I’ve got to get better at this reality TV drama stuff, man. I think my life is too good, that’s the problem. I’ve got to create some drama in it. My wife and I were joking. It was her idea. We were joking around like, we should just get a divorce for fun and then it’ll drive up all these clicks and stuff, and then we’ll just bank off that. This is totally a joke. We’re not going to do that. But just because our life is too stable, there’s no drama—and that’s what happens when you work on your own stuff, when you take responsibility for your own stuff and you don’t live a life out of fear and neediness and insecurity, and armoring up and approaching life with your high guard, completely blocking your vision, as you just robotically go forward, using a fight analogy, and having this armor up, this guard up; and as a result, not being able to see all the goodness that is out there because you got hurt in the past; and as a result, getting hurt, you got hit in the past. [33:14.3]

As a result, your guard is just covering everything and you are just living out of fear, but you’re not realizing it. Instead, you’re bragging about how good your guard is, when, actually, you should really just go hands down into the world and face it with more courage. What’s needed is more courage and what’s needed is more love for yourself and for others.

You can’t do that when you are armored up, and that’s what these dating gurus keep teaching guys on the internet, and it’s all flash and superficiality and no substance. I know because I went through all those phases. I went through the PUA phase. Obviously, I’ve written about it, talked about it so much. Then I also went through about six months of a Red Pill phase. That’s why I know that material, old-school Red Pill, like the Solomon Blog and that sort of thing that, that kind of return of kings kind of Red Pill, not this more misogynistic Red Pill, though that’s already pretty misogynistic. [34:08.7]

Then I also went through that whole lifestyle thing, the status insecurity and status anxiety of the insecure alphas on TikTok these days, and I also learned about the women who fell for me that were attracted to me back then. I realized that that is not a good measure for my own growth and that is not a good way—it’s not a way at all—to actually experience unconditional love or happiness, or fulfillment or joy in life. It was just a way for two narcissistic vampires, one compensating, which is me in this pairing, and the other who is more of a natural narcissist, feeding off each other and saying to each other, “Aren’t we the coolest? Aren’t we the best?” This is actually just feeding, building and feeding into our own narcissism and creating a bigger crash later on and more drama, as a result. [34:59.4]

Lots and lots of drama that is a result of narcissists getting together and creating their own narcissistic bubble, and not realizing that outside this bubble, if you drop this guard and you grow this courage to face your shadow, and face it with love—not with further repression or hating on it, or telling it to go away, but with arms wide open with an open heart and a chin up, and a big smile, coming to it with love and understanding, and compassion and appreciation—then your whole lived experience of life changes. In the same universe, the same planet, the same reality, two different worldviews, two completely different results. Which do you want? 

I’m going to leave it here. I’m recovering from a head cold and I just realized, as I was listening to this, that there’s quite a bit of an echo, I’m sorry. I hope to God that our editors can fix that and I hope it doesn’t bother you too much. I also had to stop the recording a bunch of times so I could blow my nose or cough. Hopefully, I’ll be back to normal. [36:02.6]

When I have a cough or in the morning, I have a much lower voice, so this is more my natural voice, and then I have to try to keep it up here. But right now I can’t, so this is where it’s at, speaking to you while I’m on the road, which makes it challenging, which is why the audio conditions are not ideal.

I look forward to welcoming you to the next episode because the natural question will be “If I’m not supposed to be listening to all these dating gurus who are toxic and just are speaking from their insecurity and neediness, and so forth, then what should I follow?” Come back to the next episode. I’ll be revealing that there.

Thank you so much for listening. If this was helpful in any way, please share it with anyone that you think would benefit, and let me know what you think. I’d love to hear your feedback. I look forward to welcoming you in the next episode. Until then, David Tian, signing out. [36:48.6]

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