Copyright © 2022 Rian Stone
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Book Cover by Rian Stone
Illustrations by Rian Stone
1st edition 2022
There are too many people who put too much work into what has become this
work. I will give sincere appreciation to the following short and incomplete list of people
who made this happen, starting with:
Nick for the editing
BogeyD6, who will always be my brother in this space
Rollo Tomassi, the only man I can talk to about these concepts without wanting to
punch myself in the dick
Rich Cooper, who I can sum up as a great friend who refuses to coddle you. Points
you in the direction of success and leaves you to do the work, or not.
Carl, the anonymous man who always made me wear hideous shirts and bring my Agame when talking about anything of substance.
Whisper, HumanSockPuppet and Archwinger. I’ve never met any of them, but learned
more from them than people I’ve known my whole life
The entirety of the Evopsych profession, the research is invaluable, the conclusions
practical, and the only complaint is I wish you would follow through your research and
acknowledge your conclusions
Delicious Tacos. I watched a first time author become a third time author and he
helped me get to where I am now. Two down, one to go; and
And finally,
Cat, she knows why.
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Foreword
Introduction
The Tetrahedron of Frame
The Physical Pillar
The Intellectual Pillar
The Emotional Pillar
The Final Pillar Vision
Books By This Author
Foreword
The Red Pill, in terms of intersexual dynamics, is, and will always be
a praxeology. Ideally, it is unconcerned with value judgments,
conscientiousness, or morality. This approach is a hard sell in the age
of 45-second TikTok buzz-clips that make the study of “human action,
based on the notion that humans engage in purposeful behavior”
another cartoon to watch. Sex sells, and intersexual dynamics really
sell, but you have to be a student of a lot of interrelated sub-fields to
understand how the red pill Hustler you just watched came to “his”
opinion of men and women.
I started referring to the Red Pill as a Praxeology around 2014. A
commenter on The Rational Male explained how the study of
intersexual dynamics neatly fits the definition. Around this time, the
Red Pill study/theory of intersexual dynamics became distinct from
the practice of pickup artistry and Game. Red Pill was the theory, and
Game was the practice. Each is incomplete without the other.
However, both are dependent upon accurate and actionable
information. The Red Pill as a praxeology doesn’t concern itself with
best practices; nonetheless, developing prescriptions from that data
is inevitably where men want to go. Issues of how one interprets the
data presented by Red Pill praxeology as right or wrong is an
exercise in subjectivity and personal belief.
The Red Pill praxeology should always be about what is – not what
should be, not what seems moral, immoral, amoral, or personally
expedient.
Adding ideology to the Red Pill distorts the intent of staying as
objective as possible. Praxeology is the study of those aspects of
human action that can be grasped a priori; in other words, it is
concerned with the conceptual analysis and logical implications of
preference, choice, means-end schemes, and so forth. In a
praxeological context, the Red Pill is a ‘loose science’ concerned with
understanding the underlying motivators of why we do what we do as
men and women. It doesn’t get everything right but asks the right
questions. It’s these questions that make believers uncomfortable.
The beauty of The Red Pill as a praxeology is that we get to write
those questions and conclusions down in pencil, not ink, to be erased
and edited as new information changes them. The Red Pill is not an
ideology itself. Despite what many moralist critics would like to
redefine, a Red Pill awareness is an obligation to understand the truth
about men’s and women’s natures.
What does one do with the data the Red Pill praxeology aggregates? How one
interprets that information is up to the individual. The prescriptions we create with this
knowledge are always a value call. The real question for men new to the Red Pill is
whether they are beginning from a position of value judgment and then seeking to find
the Red Pill data that best aligns with that preconception. Or are they starting from a
neutral, objective position of interpreting Red Pill data and then forming well-thought,
rational prescriptions for themselves based on that objectivity? Factual truth isn’t
always defined by what benefits humanity. It’s often not.
How we make this information useful is just as important as how
we conclude that it should be useful to us. After having written in this
sphere for over 20 years, I’ve seen how men use Red Pill awareness
to better serve their lives by implementing it or using that awareness
to validate their preconceived belief sets. Usually, they do this by
cherry picking the parts that align with those beliefs and discarding or
disqualifying the data that conflicts with them.
Rian Stone and I have jokingly referred to ourselves and the research
and development department of the Manosphere for over a decade.
When the latest red pill pretender makes a loud noise on social
media, Rian and I are the ones who have to clean up their mess. It’s
been said that the amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an
order of magnitude greater than to produce it. To date, Rian and I
have been the only praxeologists with the consistent energy to refute
the bullshit.
Rian Stone once called the Red Pill praxeology the Chilton Manual
for intersexual dynamics. Chilton Manuals were model and makespecific handbooks that auto mechanics used to identify parts and
processes to repair cars. We’ve forgotten about them in the digital
age, but everything about that car, from the smallest lug nut to the
biggest engine block, would be detailed in that manual.
The Chilton Manual doesn’t care what you think about the car’s
design, nor does it bother debating how best to repair or drive the
vehicle. It only details what that car is. The Chilton Manual is a
perfect praxeology. It’s up to the mechanic to use this manual to the
best effect. The problem with the praxeology that is the Red Pill is
that the manual is still incomplete. It gets better and more accurate
every year, but portions of the manual are still fuzzy. Some systems
could be better defined, but the manual is still complete enough to
form predictive frameworks.
Perhaps there are better ways to repair the car, but the mechanic can
reliably improve it and drive it, far better than trying to guess what the
parts are and where they go without the Chilton Manual.
— Rollo Tomassi
Introduction
The Internet is disappearing. For the last decade, there have been
groups of men who were not happy. Their lives were lives of quiet
desperation. Wives were entitled to everything while giving as little as
possible, and men were told that they weren’t doing enough in order
to deserve more.
You used to go to Sunday school, have sports after class, do the
Boy Scouts on weekends, have summer camp, confess your
problems to your priest, talk to your dad when things were bothering
you, even the bartender used to let you vent while he poured you a
few wets. Hundreds of institutions, small and large were around to
help men. In the modern world they have all failed in that task.
Feminism took over the Western world and women spent three
generations raising men in this new paradigm.
They failed, miserably, and their sons paid the price. A small
handful of men then took to the Internet to solve this problem and told
women and popular culture, “We got it from here. Step aside.”
It turns out men are pretty good with collaboration as long as they
share common goals. The shared goals in these groups were to
enjoy enthusiastic sex, a positive male identity, and fulfilling lives.
Men don’t need total agreement on abstract principles as a collective
in order to collaborate. We only require a shared destination. That
isn’t the first rule; it’s the only rule. It’s Rule Zero: Male-centric sexual
strategy and a positive male identity. Anyone involving himself in this
space for any other reason was shown the door.
The Internet used to be the wild west, a virtual place where few limits
on content existed. Those of us who were motivated and concerned
about improving men’s lives posted blogs and documented our
experiences with dating and casual sex, marriage and divorce. We
did it with a raw honesty that only a male audience could appreciate.
We stood on the shoulders of giants, building on the work of our
predecessors, men with pen names: Rollo Tomassi, Roissy, Roosh V,
Dalrock, Keoni Galt, Athol Kay, and Ian Ironwood. We were a new
group of men took the blending of Evolutionary Psychology and Pick
Up “artistry” that was synthesized in their writings and applied them in
our lives. In doing so we synthesized our own collections of Mental
Models, or methods of processing the information according to Rule
Zero. Our predecessors walked so we could now run.
Since I’ve started research for this book I’ve come to discover that
much of what was there is gone. Blogs have been removed, deleted
or lost in the memory hole. Essays in content aggregators sit at the
bottom of an information ocean, fossilized like the creatures we will
never know existed. The old works are slowly eroding, luckily there
are some long memories still around to remember what used to be.
What used to be? In order to answer the questions,
“What is frame? Why is it more important than any self
improvement one can do? How do I gain it?”, we first have to figure
out how to become our own team of specialists:
♦ Psychiatrist
♦ Pastor
♦ Fitness coach
♦ Style coordinator
♦ Teacher
♦ Altogether renaissance man
And we have to develop our own Mental Point of Origin.
This book will categorized with self help books like The Secret,
Models, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus etc. This is a
shame as this book will not offer a step by step guide to promise men
some vague concept of a better life (as defined by whatever
marketing emotions let you to fill in the details). Self-help doesn’t
work as a how-to guide. It’s not Dad 2.0 telling you what to do. It’s a
toolbox. If someone tells you what to do, or offers prescriptive advice,
it fuels an unhealthy sort of narcissism. When I describe a concept
and use ™ in it, this is meant to describe the unhealthy narcissists
version.
There are concepts in here that you will find useful depending on your
situation, your goals, and your personal qualities. Some you may
already know. Others you know but never articulated. Some will
sound completely foreign, but fit nicely with how you already see the
world.
If they are useful, use them; if they are not, shed them. You’re the one
doing the work and this book cannot define what you want. There is
no “why” here, only “how.” It’s up to you to find your “why.” Anyone
telling you otherwise is trying to sell you something.
I will not hold your hand. Nothing in this book is to be taken literally
except those things that are, in fact, literal. Which ones are which?
That’s your job to discover as this book is not meant to end a thought
process but to start one. This is not a book on truth, but a book on
utility. If you know me from my online presence, you know this: If I
were to tell you the moon is made out of cheese and you work out
diligently because of it, then as far as I am concerned the moon is
made of cheese.
After reading, you’ll understand what frame is, how it improves your
life outcomes, and how you can get it. Frame starts with
understanding the physical, intellectual, and emotional aspects of
your life that you can take control of and use to understand your
vision. You can’t be told what to think, only shown how to act. By the
end, you should have built your own roadmap and have the tools to
travel it to whatever destination you have chosen.
So my question for you is, What do you want?
The Tetrahedron of Frame
For every section in this book, always start with a question: What do I
want, and whats in this for me? Self interest is a strong element of
frame. Whether what you want is “good” or “bad,” alpha™ or beta™,
doesn’t matter for the same reason that mechanics aren’t freaking out
because some people like diesel trucks while others prefer hybrid
cars. That’s because they are too busy figuring out how much torque
on the wrench is too much when replacing spark plugs. Stop listening
to car enthusiasts talk about why your car won’t start and ask the
mechanic.
Frame is a difficult concept to explain, an even more difficult concept
to master, but becomes remarkably simple in hindsight. Thousands of
men were swapping notes for almost a decade, but almost no one
ever wrote a good, clear description of it. The answer was there, but I
had to follow the breadcrumbs to see it and articulate it here.
A house’s appearance is fundamentally determined by its framing. In
the same way, a person’s decisions and actions can only be as good
as how they are framed. Frame is not stoicism; it’s not dominance; it’s
not being victorious; it’s not godliness. Frame is not good, neither is it
not bad. It’s not strong or weak or noble or ignoble. Frame as a
concept has more in common with gravity than masculinity.
Frame. Just. Is.
It originated from pick up artists as a concept they call frame control.
They understood that in every interaction between a man and a
woman, someone will frame the interaction. Are you the creepy guy
at the bar making women uncomfortable, or are you the cocky and
funny dude who she would love to sleep with? Well, that’s a matter of
frame. It’s partially the agreed upon perception of your environment,
partially the narratives that make up everyones decision making
process, and partially how you perceive yourself and how they
perceive themselves.
It was a good concept, but as we grow up we throw away childish
things. Frame control was too much like wearing frame as a skin suit.
Like many concepts in pick up, we first learn by mimic, then we learn
how it works and so internalize it. So frame is similar to frame control
with one very important difference: It’s not something you do. It’s who
you are.
Frame is literally how you conceptualize, how you process, and how
you react to the world around you. Frame is your deep narrative.
Frame isn’t strong or weak, frame is frame. Frame isn’t what you do;
it’s who you are. When you read the words weak frame or has no
frame, they should be understood more accurately as non-useful
frame. A codependent man who buckles every time his wife gets mad
has frame, it’s just that he’s submitted to his wife’s stronger one.
A decision or an action can be good or bad depending on how it’s
framed. Is cheating on your wife good or bad? If your frame is based
on a female-centric view of the world, it’s seen as categorically bad. If
your frame is based on your own best outcomes, then it depends. If
you are in a sexless marriage, and your frame is based on the idea
that your wife gets first crack at your libido and not sole custody then
it’s good.
It’s easy to mistake frame as self-delusional, unhealthy narcissism or
post hoc rationalization. It’s easy to steal then think, If I didn’t,
someone else would have. That’s not frame. That’s self-delusion.
From your work comes self-respect. From your self-respect comes
options. From your options come authority. From your authority
comes expectations. From your expectations comes investment.
Making decisions isn’t about making good decisions or bad decisions.
That’s how a child reacts towards the authority in his life. Adults ask
questions like, Good for whom? Bad for whom? What outcome were
you aiming for? How will you know when you have it? What were the
consequences? Are you OK with that?
Frame is understanding all of these things and making the
decision that’s right, but right for whom? Right for you. Frame is the
serenity prayer for the modern man: Gain the strength to do what you
must; gain the serenity to accept the things you cannot; and gain the
wisdom to know the difference. Of those three options, you can
change only one.
Frame is built from collections of mental models. In this book I
conceptualize Frame as a series of of mental models organized
around the form of a tetrahedron, a three-sided triangular pyramid; or,
for our purpose here, three base qualities holding up a higher ideal.
Frame is the pillars you build of your value psychically, intellectually,
and emotionally.
By owning his actions and consequences, observations and
experience, rejections and successes, a man builds a vision of what
he is capable of and what he wants. Doing so Keeps him from
becoming delusional about his capabilities and expectations because
he knows if his expectations don’t align with his value, he won’t
achieve what he wants, so you either increase your value or temper
your expectations. You frame it without self-deception, validationseeking behavior, codependency, mental instability or addiction.
Frame isn’t something you do. Frame isn’t a thing you have. Frame is
who you are. Frame is a base formed by your physical, intellectual,
and emotional selves which provides a stable foundation for you to
structure your vision, your goals.
Physical
This is the most obvious and conventional of the pillars because it
lives in a vacuum. You can have a bitchy wife or a sex kitten. You can
be single or married. The only thing you need is a gym, a kitchen,
some discipline, and a modest investment of time. Your physical and
hormonal responses to fitness build your physical pillar and increase
your motivation to develop the other two pillars. You are becoming
your own coach and chef.
Intellectual
This pillar is about internal growth, solving problems, developing
mental models, and situational awareness. You need skills in order to
succeed at your job, to grow a business, to handle the logistics of a
family, and to fuck more women. This takes knowledge, skill, practice
and discipline. How can you expect to build a business if you don’t
know how to build a marketing funnel? How can you expect to have
more sex without understanding the nature of male and female
dynamics? You have to become your own mentor.
Emotional
This pillar is about the human condition. It’s about tempering your
instincts and emotions in the same way you temper your appetite for
sugar. You can call it your spiritual self, your emotional self, mental
health, or whatever you like, but those animalistic parts of man are
the emotional pillar and make themselves known, for example, when
life is going well, but you’re in a malaise because you’re lost. You feel
depressed and don’t know why or what to do. You have to become
your own shrink, or your own priest.
◆◆◆
Men once had organizations they could join, or were forced to attend,
to build these pillars. You’d go to church to hear your priest offer
guidance. You’d go to a shrink to address your mental health. You’d
ask your dad or your brothers or your best friend to help you through
a rough patch in your relationship. You would have a beer with
coworkers to get your work gripes out of your system. Shriners.
Freemasons. The Legion. The Boy Scouts. All of those traditionally
male organizations turned co-ed or disappeared entirely. They
disappeared partially because men in previous generations believed
in blank slate equalism between the genders, that men and women
are essentially the same mentally, emotionally, and even physically.
Those male spaces began as places that benefit men but became
places where men seek the validation of women.
The church shifted from a place of emotional solace for all to a place
where on Mother’s Day men are told to venerate women and on
Father’s Day chastised for having insufficiently venerated them. It
likewise shifted from a place where men could meet women of similar
faith to a place where women seeking forgiveness are officially
presented as though it is your duty as a man to forgive them.
Fathers have gone from being the man with experience who was
always there and who you could always talk to to learn about a man’s
life to the guy you see every other weekend who mom brainwashed
you into hating. The institutions and fathers of yesteryear no longer
guide boys into effective manhood. There are many reasons for this
which fall outside the scope of this book. Look around. See for
yourself. Since feminism has taken over the soul of our societies, it’s
had three generations to prove it could guide men into a positive
masculine identity that serves men’s best interests, but they have
failed miserably at this job, so to that we now say, “Thanks but no
thanks,” and take it from here. After all, you are the only person on
Earth who feeds you every day, who tucks you in at night, and who
wipes your ass without complaint every day. It’s time to treat that man
as well as he treats you.
A final point: Frame means you no longer react to people in the world
and their childish problems. Your wife’s crying doesn’t bother you
anymore, neither does her nagging. It’s not because you no longer
love her or desire her. It’s because you have frame, and
Anything outside your frame is amusing, intriguing or funny.
—TheUltmateCAD
The Physical Pillar
The Physical Pillar is the first aspect of frame where you become
your own coach, where you lift right, eat right, and dress with purpose
and style. How you look, what you eat, and what you communicate
through your clothing all tell the world who you are. You may think
you can’t judge a book by its cover, but everyone does. Better to take
control and make an impression that helps rather than hinders you.
Avoiding sending a message with your physique, physical health and
hygiene, and clothing because you don’t want to signal anything still
signals something and not in a good way. If you’re asking why
hygiene, workouts, nutrition, and style are in a book on frame, it’s
because frame means, among other things, having expectations and
achieving goals, and you only get there through hard work and self
care. From your work comes self-respect. From your self-respect
comes options. From your options come authority. From your
authority comes expectations. From your expectations comes
investment.
Whose investment? Investment in what? Yours, and in yourself. This
is rational egoism. You invest in the people who bring value to your
life, and you’re the only person on this earth who feeds you, clothes
you, and wipes your ass every day. If you can’t treat that guy well,
then no one else will either.
Your physical manifestation of frame starts with something simple,
hygeine. You are learning to care for yourself first in life. If others
cannot see you treating that man in the mirror like you care … well
they have no reason to either.
Then comes physical fitness. You want to appear healthy and strong
because you are healthy, you are strong. You next move on to
nutrition. Health and nutrition work in synergy. Once you have heal
and strength you can better focus on building a sense of style. Style
is how we communicate, physically.
It’s a lot of work, takes time, and realizing the benefits are part of your
long term goals. You’ll be working out consistently while you’re
working on the other pillars. From your work comes self respect.
From that self respect comes options. From those options comes
authority. From your authority comes expectations. From your
expectations comes investment.
Hygiene
You can’t put makeup on a pig, so don’t be a pig.
Carl, a good friend of mine who went by the pen name
BlackLabelLogic, would tell a story about how this pickup artist he
used to follow in the 2000s would amend his seminars with a section
on how to shower, how to wash your balls, and how to practice a
basic adults hygienic lifestyle. I originally thought it was too basic a
topic to include here. After talking with a few hundred struggling men I
have seen the error in my assumptions. You, the reader, may be
competent. Many men are not. You may know ninety percent of what
I write. Every man has a different ninety percent. I include onehundred percent of what we have to make sure you get that last ten
percent.
It was a a joke in the 2000s when pick up artists were showing
sexless young men how to talk to women. The joke was a two-panel
comic on how to draw an owl. The first panel told the reader to draw
some circles and displayed two overlapping ovals. The second panel
told the reader to finish the fucking owl, and had a photo realistic
pencil drawing.
This will not be a paint by numbers guide on how to have good
hygiene but a starting point to understand how a man takes care of
himself so that you can be that man.
If you’re asking yourself what this has to do with building frame or
handling the worst that the world throws at you, the answer is simple.
If you cannot handle the details, the big picture will be a chaotic
mess. If you can’t do the bare minimum, then there’s no point wasting
everyones time with the harder work.
Fig 2: a meme representing one learning from the naturally talented
The Red Pilled Grooming Guide
The red pilled grooming guide is a collection of essays and reports
from men who have taken hygiene seriously. In an annual event
labeled days of dread guys would go over the previous years self
reports on hygiene and improve upon them. After a few years they
were refined into what you see here. This isn’t a codified example of
hygiene as a dead language, it’s a living document. It’s not meant to
stop a thought process but to start one. Come back and re read the
section after you’ve completed the book and see which elements
align with your vision and which you can shed.
Teeth
Teeth are a window to your hygiene. Crooked, yellow teeth are bad.
Straight, white teeth are good. Now there's genetics at play here, and
some things you can't change. Over the years a man’s teeth will take
a beating. A couple of crowns and a good teeth whitening can be the
difference between a complimentary smile and the creepy old guy
with coffee breath. It costs money, so start saving.
As far as whitening, the whitener is pricey from the dentist, so online
retailers like Amazon could offer it at a substantially-reduced rate.
Brush your teeth a few times a day. If you spend the time and money
to work on your teeth, you'll floss them at least daily. Why spend time
and money if you're not going to do everything necessary to maintain
it? Plus, your breath will be fresher.
Nails
Your fingernails need to be clipped and cleaned. People notice. If
you're getting frisky with a woman she's not turned on by your claws.
If you wear flip flops in the warmer weather, clip those talons. You
won't be able to climb trees like a spider monkey anymore, but your
socks will appreciate it.
Beards? When growing your beard out, it’s going to itch at the twoweek mark. If you have clippers, trim the ends (a 1/8" guard will likely
be perfect here). Clipping the ends will likely improve the itch
because the ends are blunt from constant shaving, coarse, and tend
to poke. Once past the two-week mark, the itching should subside.
Skin
Keep skin care fairly simple. Use aloe and lotion. Nothing bad will
come out of using lotion every few days when you get out of the
shower. Take care of your skin. Its your body's largest organ.
Shower
Shower daily if you work in an office. Shower twice a day if you work
out or work outside. You never know when m’lady is in the mood.
Follow the old dating rule: Wash yourself 3 times so you'll know you
smell clean. For the love of god, wash your jungle rot alligator feet.
There’s a story in Neil Strauss book The Game. Remember Stinky
Feet Girl from The Game? Don't be Stinky Feet Girl.
Grooming
If you expect your woman to keep her nether regions groomed, set an
example. If you use a cream, wait the recommended time and wipe
down with a wet cloth in the shower. If you use clippers, use a guard
or be fucking careful. That skin is tender. You can cause serious
damage if you're not careful. Good judgment comes from experience
while experience comes from bad judgment. Use good judgment.
If you have chest hairs peaking out around your neckline, shave that
shit or pluck it.
Ear hair, nose hair. Pluck or clip that shit, too. Trim those Andy
Rooney eyebrows while you're at it. Groom yourself, bro. Groom
yourself.
Cologne
You're a high value man. You're taking care of your body, your
hygiene, your wardrobe. So smell better; wear cologne. I'm not going
into the best colognes. You'll have to experiment and see what smells
good on you. But pick it out yourself.
While women pass down this knowledge from mother to daughter.
No one teaches men about fragrances. Mothers often take their
daughters perfume shopping. It is rare for a father to do the same.
The lack of knowledge and openness about fragrances pushes many
men to choose between two bad options.
1 Play it safe and wear nothing.
2 Wear something light and clean so that you don't offend
anyone.
Smell is the greatest memory trigger we humans have. Sniff the
shirt you wore last night and memories of a great evening out floods
your brain. Roll over to the other side of the bed and smell the pillow
where your partner slept and you may catch yourself smiling. In short,
fragrances capture memories. They do more than that, however. The
cologne you wear communicates to those around you who you are.
Even if you don’t, that woman you’re with does. There’s a reason they
steal boyfriends’ clothes.
I'm sure you've already heard tons of advice about cologne, that men
should wear what girls like. Sales associates often tell me to get this
or that juice because it's a best seller or popular with the girls. There
is however, a problem: it doesn't work.
First, no guy has ever gotten a girl just because he smells good. A
good scent might improve your chances, but it won’t bring home the
win.
Second, reeking of cologne that every other guy is wearing smells of
desperation. Trying too hard repels woman. Anyone who was dating
in the 2000s remembers the typical dude at the bar wearing way too
much Polo Sport by Ralph Lauren.
Never buy a fragrance just because someone else likes it. The only
person you wear perfume for is you. Your scent should say something
about you. This is why you wear something you like, for you. It’s a
signature, a finger print, or a calling card. You may be thinking, “But
what if no one else likes it on me?"
When someone tells you they don't like your fragrance, they
usually mean any of these three things:
♦ They may not like a certain note in it. If someone doesn't like
the smell of vanilla, they won't like any vanilla perfume, not just
yours. It's not that it is a bad scent; it’s just that they don't like
that note.
♦ They may not like you. Women don’t know what attracts them
until they are already attracted. Even then, they have to post hoc
rationalize it. So if a woman already isn’t into you, she’s
searching for a reason that isn’t just her lizard brain attracted to
your caveman evolution. Don’t take it personal. “It’s not you, it’s
me.”
♦ You put on too much. This is probably the main reason why
people tell you they don't like your juice. Putting on a fragrance is
like putting spices in your food. You want to put just enough to
give it a nice flavor but not too much to overpower the dish. You
want to put just enough to enhance your image, not to overtake
it. You want people to notice you, not your cologne.
There are some technical concepts to a scent which help you
understand the difference between scents and better detect what you
like.
A note is an ingredient. Notes are divided into three categories or
levels: top (or opening), middle (or heart), and base (or bottom)
notes. The combination of all these notes together is known as the
accord.
Opening notes are the first notes you smell when trying a fragrance,
so they are the ones that shape your first impressions of a scent.
These often fresh, fruity scents are light and burst on your skin as you
spray then fade 10-15 minutes after applying. Fragrances have
alcohol in them which carries these notes, then evaporates, which
explains why they fade. How many times have you tested a fragrance
only to be turned off right away? Why? Because the top notes didn't
make a positive impression on you. Just like a catchy song, if you
don’t like the hook, you won’t keep listening. Popular top notes
include orange, grapefruit, lemon, and basil.
Heart notes make an appearance once the top notes evaporate. The
middle notes are considered the heart of the fragrance and form its
core. They last longer than the top notes and influence the base
notes. A perfume's heart is pleasant and well-rounded. It is often a
smooth combination of floral or fruit tones sometimes infused with
spices like cinnamon, nutmeg or cardamom. Popular heart notes
include lavender, rosemary, black pepper, geranium, and juniper.
When you’re wearing a scent you may not always notice this since
you become nose deaf to your own scents. When you’re looking for a
scent, place it on something and leave it for a while before sniffing.
Base or bottom notes are the final notes that appear once the top
notes are completely evaporated. Instead of being carried by alcohol,
they are usually from oils and respond to your body heat to finally
release their scent. It is these notes that you remember most and that
help create a memory in your mind, the lasting impression. The base
notes mingle with the heart notes to create the full body of the
fragrance.
These linger on the skin for hours after the top notes have dissipated.
The time it takes to detect them is unique to every individual and
depends upon your body heat, air temperature, etc. Popular base
notes include vanilla, sandalwood, cedar wood, jasmine, and
patchouli.
Fragrances come in various price points with fancy names. The
only difference among them is the concentration of the scent relative
to the liquid. The options range from thirty percent concentration
down to two percent with a corresponding time until you need to
reapply:
1 Perfume
2 Eau de Parfum
3 Eau de Toilette
4 Eau de Cologne
5 Eau Fraiche
One of the biggest mistakes you can make when it comes to
cologne is overspraying. You know a guy, or worse, you are the guy
whose cologne announces his entrance. Some workplaces are scentfree, so overspraying can get you a meeting with HR. Reeking of
cologne is the olfactory equivalent of going autistic in a conversation.
Remember, you will be nose deaf to your own scent after a while, so
you don’t need to smell it on you in order for others to smell it on you.
A small spritz on your collarbone or a dab on your neck is usually
enough. It’s still there, have some faith.
Applying cologne is simple but people have made it complicated.
Don’t mist it and walk through; don’t apply it like aftershave; and don’t
rub your wrists together.
Misting, where you spray your perfume in the air and you walk
through the mist, results in the fragrance distributed evenly on your
body, clothes, and hair. The problem with this method of applying
fragrance is that you end up wasting it.
Applying cologne is not like applying aftershave where you pour a
small amount in your palm then slap it on your cheeks and neck. For
reasons lost to masculine history, someone decided that the most
manly way to apply perfume is by slapping yourself in the face with it.
Doing so has consequences. Perfume is a lot stronger than any
aftershave, so your palm ends up reeking. This doesn’t sound bad
until you have to shake someone's hand. Having your hands smell of
another guy's cologne, no matter how good it is, makes you wonder:
“Did he wash his hands when he went to the bathroom?”
“How many times has he washed his hands since he applied this
cologne that his palm still smells?”
The rub and dab is another less-than-ideal approach where you spray
some on one of your wrists, rub them together, and then rub your
wrists on your neck. The problem is that rubbing a fragrance changes
its distribution and its evaporation rate, so the scent doesn't develop
as it should. You end up heating it up and making it smell off.
The good news is that the proper way to apply fragrance is really
simple. Spray directly on your skin and you are done. The trick is not
how you put it on but where you put it on. If there is any one spot
where you want to apply cologne, it’s your chest. When you spray
there, some of the perfume rubs off on your undershirt and the smell
ends up lasting longer. The chest area is also warm, which helps your
cologne bloom more than if you were to spray it on, say, your
forearm.
◆◆◆
Hair and Shaving
Get it cut regularly and stylishly. If you're graying and you don't like
that look? Color it. If you're balding, shave it. Male pattern baldness
can be a killer to your self-esteem, but pretending that it isn’t there
shows your insecurity to the world. Shave your head with conditioner
instead of shaving cream. While I don’t personally have balding
issues, the men who did report that conditioner was more cost
effective, better lubricated the scalp for the shave, and caused less
issues with drying skin and small cuts.
Choosing Your Style
Style is not fashion. Fashion is cyclical and fleeting. Style is your
overall look. Your style may incorporate elements of current fashion
trends, but the overall effect of how you dress and look is dictated by
your personal style.
Your hair style, believe it or not, can make or break everything else
you have going on and accentuate what you have to offer. A huge,
jacked, and ripped dude does very well with a shaved head. The
same shave on a man 40 lbs lighter makes him look like a cancer
patient. A well muscled athletic guy with a nice fade style evokes
paramilitary qualities. The same cut on a fat man can actually give
him pedophile vibes.
Choose your hairstyle based on how much hair you have, your hair
texture, your hair line, and your face shape. Without knowing
anything about any of this, you can start with a hairstyle that looks
good on a person that resembles you. As Mad Men, a show about
1960s America has shown us in the year 2022, what was old is new
and classic haircuts never go out of style, so check out some
characters from television and movies who resemble you, note their
styles, and experiment from there.
Caring for your Style | Your Stylist
Your hairstyle will dictate how you get it cut. Some styles are better
cut by barbers and some are better cut by stylists. As a general rule,
stylists are better with longer hair and barbers are better with shorter
hair. A barber will have cut thousands of taper trims and fades while a
stylist will have layered thousands of heads of hair.
If you want a stylish cut from the latest look a stylist will have learned
about it already. If you desire a classic cut to signal a more
professional demeanor, that 60 year old Italian man in the 30 year
barber shop will work.
Always consider what you want to communicate and then work your
way backwards.
Avoid places where hair stylists cut their teeth on the public. A ten
dollar cut looks just like a ten dollar cut, which makes you look like a
ten-dollar man. While many of these people are good at what they do,
they tend to be employed no longer than 6 months at those locations
because they are always looking for actual salons and barber shops.
You're going to want a professional who is in it for the long haul;
someone who understands your hair and how to deal with it. Also
note that many higher end, or boutique-style, stylists are usually
trained on a higher level than a fresh-out-of-beauty-school stylist.
There are also those who specialize in men’s hair, black hair, and
women’s hair, so find your specialist.
A shitty stylist will give a shitty haircut, and two shitty stylists will give
two shitty haircuts. Don't pick a stylist based on what your dick says
about her. She may be hot, but her attractiveness has nothing to do
with her ability. That eighty-year-old Italian man may not get you hard,
but he won’t make you look like an idiot, either. Don't cut corners
when it comes to your hair.
Maintenance Schedule
Depending on how fast your hair grows, you should get it cut every
three to four weeks. If your haircut is short, then that works out well.
Going longer will make your very clean cut look more like a shaggy
man who just got back from vacation. If you have a mane, you might
sometimes go six months between cuts. If you’re going to the same
person every time, they can easily maintain the look you like, or make
suggestions for changes that complement/enhance your appearance.
Get your haircut while it’s styled the way you wear it. This will give
your stylist a better template to work from. If you don’t have that,
photos on your phone are extremely helpful as is knowing haircutting
terminology too better describe what you want.
If you have gray hair but don’t like it, you can always color it. Don’t
fret about being a guy who gets his hair colored; nobody cares. You
will be surrounded by women who are doing the same thing.
Home Maintenance
There are tools to this trade: hair dryer, brushes, combs, and styling
products. Treat your hair as you would any project. Don't half-ass
your hair, and you won't look half-assed. A good haircut can make the
most down-dressed guy look substantially better, but a shitty hair cut
can make the best dressed guy look like an asshole.
Get a Hair Dryer
Every picture of an actor is taken after he has had his hair styled
using a blow dryer. The heat of a blow dryer relaxes the hair and
allows you to dry-style it and train it in a particular direction. It also
removes the water making the condition of your hair better for styling
with product. Too much hot air makes it dry and frizzy, so think of it
like a wool sweater in the dryer: slightly damp is better than dry. Use
your brush or comb to point your hair where you want it, and it will
stay there as it dries.
Products
Less is more. You can always add more, but you have to rewash to
remove it. Be conservative in its application and take your time. There
are several types of products to choose from:
Gels. These are the most common type. The purpose of a gel is
to harden and stiffen the hair. Be careful because they range from
really cheap and shitty to very high quality across a great many
brands. Using gels won’t give you a style anyone will run their fingers
through, so it’s more for looks than for intimacy. They have a high
level of hold and shine to them.
As a general rule, the brighter the packaging the worse the product.
Creams. Creams have more thickness to the product than gels
and require smaller amounts. Luckily you do need less to do the
same amount of holding. They will range from firm hold to light hold
and the thickness of the product dictates that. There are many types
but they’ll generally have a light to medium amount of hold and a low
to medium shine to them. Creams are the vanilla pudding of hair
care. If you don’t know where to start, start here.
Pomades. Pomades are like creams but heavier, and wetter
(shinier.) They are designed to hold with flexibility and add shine.
Think of the 1950's greaser look. It adds weight to the hair, so use
sparingly or your hair will look like it’s painted on your head. This is a
high hold and high shine product, similar to a gel but with the ability to
readjust throughout the day.
Clays. These are very thick products designed to spike the hair or
add serious texture to hair that otherwise is heavy and very straight.
The best way to apply this is directly and only to the roots of your hair.
Their strong hold and weight will guide your hair in the direction you
want. They are high hold with low shine.
Cleaning
Hair is an extension of your dead skin. It is composed of keratin and
has a nice coating of sebum on it to keep it moisturized and healthy.
Shampoo strips sebum away and makes your hair drier and more
separated. Conditioner can re-balance the pH of your hair and add
some surfactants to protect it in lieu of the sebum. As a general rule,
watch for how long it takes your hair to become oily enough that you
look like a Florida carnival worker, and wash it with that frequency.
Longer hair needs to be washed less, and when you do wash it, focus
on the roots and not the ends. This keeps hair healthier longer.
If your hair schedule and your shower schedule don’t match, just
rinse your hair for a minute to get hair products or daily dirt out. Scrub
your scalp and hair as you would normally were you using shampoo
and skip the conditioner that day.
Dry your hair vigorously with a towel and blow dry and style as
necessary. If you have naturally wavy hair, blow drying can add a
straightening effect so if you want to keep the wave, stick to the towel
and let it air dry.
◆◆◆
There are thousands of words on everything from nails to hair,
polish to pomade, tooth brushes to hair dryers. It may look like
excessive metro-sexuality, but there is purpose. From your work
comes self respect. From that self respect comes options. From
those options comes authority. From your authority comes
expectations. From your expectations comes investment. While
making sure you are deliberate with your hair doesn’t seem like work
now, it’s one of the most important things you can do.
Sprezzatura, or the concept of artful dishevelment means even
being a slob requires work. You may not want to communicate with
your hygiene, but by avoiding it, you’re still communicating, and it’s
not good.
Fitness
The number one thing you should be doing is lifting heavy weights
regularly. There are thousands of men who built this road map.
Thousands of men with hundreds of different opinions and beliefs on
everything a man should want in life. The only, and I mean only, thing
that everyone agreed on was this:
“Do you even lift bro?”
It’s not solely about aesthetics though looking good is one benefit.
Lifting accomplishes so much all at once in an activity with no
downside:
♦ You gain muscle and lose fat, which makes you look more
attractive
♦ For codependent men, this is often the first time in their lives
they put their own interests first
♦ Hormones are impacted in a beneficial way by strength training
and play a greater role in your emotional pillar than you might
think
♦ Lifting increases testosterone, reduces neuroticism, and makes
everything else easier to feel
♦ Your first attempts at boundary enforcement require something
valuable to weigh your time against
♦ You cannot over think when you have to focus on keeping that
bar off your skull
Some of the men who finished their road maps provided a few
basic lifting programs that you can choose from to start with. I
personally suggest Stronglifts 5x5. It’s the simplest, oldest, easiest,
and most replicated one of the bunch. You can type the term into
Google to find the whole program, paint by numbers style.
Stronglifts 5x5
Pro:
♦ Time efficient workouts that require no special equipment
♦ Compound lifts have the best hormonal response
♦ 12 weeks until you see your first real gains
♦ A baseline of strength allows you to pick any goal after your
first 6 months
♦ It’s simple
Con:
♦ It’s a linear program, you will have to move onto something
else eventually
♦ Strength only, don’t expect to get a six pack
♦ No advanced or specialized components
♦ Serious injuries prevent you from deadlifts or squats which can
reduce effectiveness.
Madcow
Pro:
♦ If you’re not new to lifting, this advanced program may be more
appealing
♦ You will get stronger
♦ Recovery means you won’t be lifting heavy all week
Con:
♦ Not for beginners
♦ Low volume, strength only, not for bulking or cutting
Untamed Strength
Pro:
♦ A focus on volume means it’s great for building muscle
♦ Assistance exercises ensure you can change exercises based
on your strengths
♦ Reported by the guys to be the best beginner program if you
have the time
Con:
♦ Requires a larger time investment
♦ You can temporarily lose strength due to muscle failure
♦ You’re spending more time at the gym
◆◆◆
I won’t go over each of them in here. The list has been refined over
the years by the men who have made this road map and swapped
fitness notes with each other. In the end (especially if you’re a
beginning lifter) anything and everything will work, and you don’t have
to commit strongly until you hit your first plateau.
I will stress that fitness is about lifting, not sports, not cardio, not
cycling and not rock climbing. Lifting. Team sports have a
camaraderie aspect that is good, but it doesn’t solve your relationship
problems. Cardio typically increases cortisol but doesn’t increase
your sexual desirability. The hormonal response is important. Solo
activities like rock climbing don’t achieve the same thing. You are
practicing a technical skill, not building frame. Your goal isn’t to be a
good climber. Your goal is to be more fuckable.
Do you even lift, bro?
As you learn about boundaries, the gym will become your
enforcement mechanism. Your phone is off; your time is yours. As
you learn about your mental health, your gym becomes your clinic.
If you have anxiety attacks, the gym can stress your central nervous
system. You become too fatigued to panic. As you get more muscle,
your body produces more testosterone. As you increase testosterone,
it tends to mute your neurotic response. Atlas didn’t ask for a lighter
load, but stronger shoulders.
As you write field reports about your love life and career, you should
also journal your lifting. Looking back periodically gives you a positive
feedback loop. You have the numbers to prove you are getting better
which is how male self-confidence works. Men and women are not
the same. Women are granted an intrinsic worth, the benefits of
owning the baby maker and having less testosterone and less sexual
desire. For a woman to gain self-confidence she only has to believe
in her intrinsic worth. She does have the plumbing to make babies
after all. As a man, you gain self-confidence the way you gain identity,
by doing.
You are what you do. As you do things and succeed, you gain a small
bit of confidence. You use that confidence to inspire you to do further
things. It’s a feedback loop.
The pain from working out sucks at first. You hate how the soreness
and stiffness slows you dow and affects your ability to move. But you
convince yourself that the pain is a good feeling. You learn to use the
same self-deception that women use to fall in love. You learn to use a
woman’s tool, but with male sensibilities and purpose.
Finally, you learn to break down your goals into discrete elements
because fungible goals are worthless. I want to get jacked means
nothing, and no matter what happens, you will convince yourself you
met that goal. Instead, lifting adds a binary effect to your goals:
I want to gain 24 pounds of muscle turns into 2 pounds a month,
which is 2800 kcal of protein per pound, which means 600 kcal extra
per day. Did you meet your calories? You did or you didn’t. Did you
make weight? You did or you didn’t. Are your goals achievable? They
are or they aren’t. You can change your goals to reflect reality, or you
can change your behavior to better meet them. Lifting becomes your
first experience with self-actualization.
That process will come into play for all the other pillars of frame.
What do I Know About Lifting?
Author and friend, pen name BogeyD6, tells a wonderful story about
lifting called, What do I know about Lifting? Read and see one man’s
notes on his fitness future. He’s the strongest man I know that I’ve
learned with and from.
The First Week
This fat fuck decided to do something because being single got real
old very quickly. The gym has become a second home to me over
these last 2 years.
Day 1 (Sunday) I was at a public gym. I felt weak and stupid that I
was doing my first lift, struggling with the empty 45 pound bar.
My first squat was on a Smith machine because the squat racks were
full. The bench press was equally unimpressive, but easy. I was doing
bent over rows and had an employee come and ask me if I needed
help because they’d never seen that lift before and thought maybe I
didn’t know how. The truth was, I didn’t.
The next day was incredible. Monday was a day of reckoning for me
and I wanted to quit. I was telling my legs to walk but they wouldn’t. I
could not believe how sore I was. The chickens had come home to
roost.
Tuesday I was back with my legs barely moving and was completely
sore. I barely made the trip up the stairs and cursed myself for not
using the elevator. I took two Aleve (as aging men are known to do)
and hit the bar.
This time I was squatting 50 pounds and the soreness started to
lessen as I completed my sets. My legs were fine afterwards and I did
not fear walking down the stairs. I completed my first deadlift without
hurting my back.
Overhead press was easy. My upper body never really gets that sore
because of all the years I spent working in the oil fields. I left the gym
feeling great and thinking the worst was behind me. I could not have
been more wrong. I considered going to the hospital the next day
because I felt like I had broken my entire lower body.
Thursday I went back to the same gym, but the soreness was nearly
gone, and I was working up to the 55 pound squat. The session was
normal and I can not express how happy I was to have the next two
days off from the gym. I met two guys at the gym that day. We still
meet up for beers and wings monthly.
I played on a poker tour with them and they have replaced the people
who were using me in my life. I called in that Friday for work and
spent the whole day in bed sleeping or sending emails.
The next month was OK. I was still sore every single day and figured
I just needed to keep moving. I don’t quit.
My Breakthrough
The 85 pound squat was a turning point. This was the first time I felt
like I couldn’t complete five reps. Those last five reps took everything
I had and I almost threw the bar down on the safety catches. Even
when you think you are at the bottom there is always something more
you can give. That day proved to me that I could do this and that I am
going to keep doing this. Maybe the next gym day I fail. That would
have been a blow I couldn’t recover from.
Problems
I do not consider myself an expert on weight lifting. What I do
consider myself an expert on is all the problems and mistakes the
new lifter is going to make. I made every mistake there is, every injury
in turn. I figured out why and knocked that shit off.
♦ Neck Injury? Look up when squatting.
♦ Shoulder Injury? Grip was too narrow on bench press.
♦ Elbow Injury? T-rexing the bent row.
♦ Knee Injury? Wrong foot placement in the squat.
♦ Lower back is sore? Bad deadlift technique.
You Don't Know What You Don't Know
Over the months I was developing a problem in my upper middle
back. I suspected something was wrong in my overhead press
because it hurt when I would straighten up from a slouch. I setup a
video to record my squat at 300 pounds back in Jan 2016, one full
year ago.
The first issue is the bar is not going straight up and down. There is a
curve from front to back right near the top. I am squatting and then
using my posture to inch it the rest of the way up. I knew right away
when I saw my video that it the cause.
The second issue was my choice of footwear causing a balance
issue. New Balance are not proper lifting shoes. Cross-fit shoes are
excellent. This lead me into another direction. If my squat was bad,
what else was bad?
A lot.
In all those gains I was doing a small part wrong in all those lifts. This
was leading me up to bigger and bigger issues and also meant I was
training the wrong muscles.
If you have a question, you better ask somebody
Don’t even think about the trainers in your local box gyms. Don’t
bother researching on the Internet. The trainers are not trained in
lifting very heavy and doing it safely. You can squat 65 pounds with
bad form, deadlift it with worse form and be OK. You don’t want to
carry bad habits much further.
You can find a local powerlifting coach and search for gyms near you.
Call and ask for a few sessions or to come and hang out during a
practice. Typically they will either do it for free or you can pay to go
once or twice for form checks. Most of them are quite reasonable and
the two I went to were super friendly. These guys are professionals
and have been training new people for years. If you decide to make it
your gym, then that is even better.
My First Competition
Fast Forward Dec 2016. I decide to lift in two power lifting meets
in the NGPF and USPA. Leading up to the second competition my
tested numbers were:
♦ Bench Press: 355 pounds
♦ Deadlift: 385 pounds
♦ Squat: 455 pounds
With my weight and age I was in the sub master 242 lbs weight
class at 269 lbs.
I hit 355
then 365
I missed my third at 370 for my bench presses at both competitions.
They were close. It was during these two competitions I learned that
my squat and bench press are not up to competition forms. Most of
these guys are benching 400 and squatting 500.
Fuck it. I wanted to make my numbers official.
Crossfit/Cardio
The last thing I have to say about Lifting: Crossfit is not going to help
much. You are going to miss all the things you get from lifting heavy
that you will not get in Crossfit. Being tired at the end of a workout
doesn’t mean it helped. After I complete my routine I am tired for
about 15 minutes and then I have endless energy the rest of the
night. Nine months of Crossfit wouldn't have gotten my squat to 300
pounds.
Closing
♦ Lift heavy.
♦ Ask for help.
♦ Don't give up.
♦ Get your diet in check.
♦ Pick a routine and stick with it.
Nutrition
This is about dietary options. Food has served many purposes in
human history:
It’s been a social bonding experience; a flex of wealth; an addiction;
and now?
It’s fuel for your road map.
Men struggle with weight. Even after significant muscle gains it is
easy to still have too high a percentage of body fat. You can be
athletic and look like a fat weightlifter rather than a hot guy who
makes the ladies swoon. Like the fitness topic, this topic always
brings out the evangelists.
I use the word diet in this section very specifically. When I write the
word diet, it’s shorthand for dietary plan. Remove any preconceptions
of sitting around eating lettuce and hating life and going off the wagon
because you just can’t do it again.
There are many diets out there, some of which you may have
heard of, others you may have tried, and some which may have
worked for you to one degree or another.
♦ Ketogenic diet. Cut carbohydrates out of your diet. The theory
is that in absence of carbs encourage the body to produce
ketones in the liver. These switch you to metabolizing fat for
energy instead of glycogen.
♦ Paleo diet. This is similar to Ketogenic diets. The idea is to eat
like a predator, not like prey. This translates to a meat-centric
diet, no sugars, and no cereal grains. Limited carbs come from
plants rather than seeds. The thinking here is that we used to be
strong and fit, so we should stick to eating like we did then. Don’t
fix what ain’t broken.
♦ Lean gains. A program designed by Martin Berkhan, a selfproclaimed nutritional consultant, magazine writer and personal
trainer. Intermittent fasting with 16 hours of not eating followed by
an 8 hour eating window.
♦ Avatar Nutrition. Layne Norton, a bodybuilder, nutritional coach,
and PhD in Nutritional Sciences developed a web application
that takes in information about your goals and your current
anthropometrics, and uses them to set macro targets for you. As
you use the system you provide weekly weigh-ins, and the macro
targets are redrawn depending on your progress and adherence
to the system. The central idea is that macro balance is what
counts, and one must eat to the macro targets, not under them.
♦ Vegan or Vegetarian diet. Some people don’t eat meat. They
have that parasite that makes them sick, or a belief system
against it. Since vegetables have incomplete proteins, it requires
a mixing of the right combination of different foods to get a
complete protein.
All of these programs work, and don’t work. It turns out they all
work with an underlying premise, one of oxidative priority.
◆◆◆
What is oxidative priority?
This section is a summary of research from Raymond J. Cronise,
David A. Sinclair (PhD) and Andrew A. Bremer (MD PhD) about the
concept of oxidative priority. I’ve written previously about how every
diet works even though they are sometimes contradictory, and this is
the missing piece of that puzzle.
This will be an extremely oversimplified explanation. I encourage
you to read the study. In short, the research reveals that our bodies
have different mechanisms which it uses to process each macro
nutritional type: carbohydrates, fats, proteins, and alcohol. Our bodies
take them in as we consume them, and process them in the following
order:
♦ Alcohol | body heat
♦ Carbohydrates | blood glucose and through activity
♦ Fats | the respiratory quotient (RQ) as a percentage of the
above
♦ Protein (which can be ignored for the purpose of fat loss)
Calories are expended to maintain your body’s metabolic
functions and provide glucose to the muscles and liver and converted
to glycogen which is transformed into Adenosine 5-triphosphate
(ATP) through physical exertion leaving lactic acid as a byproduct
(which is why you feel sore at the end of a set).
The RQ when your body is in a fasted state, defined as at least 4
hours since your last meal, is .78 or ~74% of your energy needs
being met by fat and the rest met by carbohydrates. As you eat, the
RQ becomes .85 or ~50% fat and carbohydrates. When consuming
alcohol, your body synthesizes it before processing your RQ.
Simply put, during fasted states your body utilizes fat for your daily
caloric requirements more than carbohydrates. During fed states your
body is more balanced. During states of inebriation you pause your
diet until you have synthesized the alcohol. This is why:
♦ Women gain more weight during periods of binge drinking than
men do (women don’t have the stomach to synthesize alcohol
and must use their small intestine)
♦ Eating and drinking together make it easier to get fat.
The second element to this research is that your body burns
marginally more calories when exercising. It turns out you will burn
more calories outside the gym than inside. You truly cannot outrun
your fork.
While exercising your body switches to a primarily carbohydratebased energy system. You will burn 4.5x as much carbohydrates in
an hour by running than by being sedentary. Your fat utilization will be
only 1.5x as efficient. However, in a fasted state the fat utilization
changes your sedentary fat utilization to be 1.3x more than in a fed
state.
Sedentary
Carbs
Fed State
75 kcal/hr
Fasted
State
75 kcal/hr
Fat
37
kcal/hr
55
kcal/hr
Exercise
Carbs
500
kcal/hr
500
kcal/hr
Fat
64
kcal/hr
64
kcal/hr
Fig 1: comparison of calories burned in various states of feeding and exercise
The takeaway is that periods of fasting increase your ability to
synthesize fat. Combined with caloric restriction through periods of
fasting to retain your metabolic rate can burn more calories from fat
during your day.
This is why all the diets you see above work to some extent. So give
the paper a read, walk through the concepts, and tailor a diet to your
lifestyle. In the same way you created a binary process to gage your
fitness goals, you are now creating a similar process towards your
weight loss/gain goals.
A pounds of fat is 3,800 kcal. You can safely lose 1-2% of your body
weight in fat per week. Say, for example, you’re 50 pounds
overweight. Your preferred diet is to eat a proper balance of protein,
carbs and fats, avoiding alcohol during your cut.
Here’s how that looks over a twelve-month period:
♦ 3,800 x 50 pounds = 190,000 kcal
♦ 190,000 kcal / 52 weeks = 3,653 kcal per week
♦ 3,653 kcal / 7 days = 521 kcal per week restriction
♦ Your daily caloric requirements (TDEE, look this up to
calculate)
♦ 2,500 kcal per day
♦ 2,500 kcal per day - 521 kcal restriction = ~2,000 kcal
♦ 3 meals a day = ~650kcal
Now you have a number. You buy food based on your caloric
requirements. You can buy enough for the week, prepare your meals
and split them up into 21 discrete meals. Split it up in whatever way
works for you. Eat more for one meal and less on another. Use one or
two fasts a week and don’t restrict calories in meals at all. It can be
as complicated or as easy as you want to make it.
Another issue men had was in measuring progress. Some used the
scale, others used fat calipers. Both groups would get frustrated
when their weight or fat looked to be going in the wrong direction. It
turns out the classic measurements for fitness are only telling half the
story. This method worked better and had additional benefits for your
style, which is in the next section.
Once a week, check your weight on the scale and take your body
measurements with tailors tape. Are you losing the amount of weight
you have set and reducing your waistline? If the answer is Yes, you’re
succeeding, so keep going. Are you losing weight but your waist size
isn’t smaller? It is worth checking your protein intake because you’re
likely losing muscle. Are you gaining weight but losing waist size?
Then you’re gaining muscle. Are you gaining weight and gaining
waist size? Then your TDEE is off and you need to restrict calories
further.
As you continue, you calibrate your diet to meet your goals. No
bullshitting yourself. No self-deception. Stop looking for motivation, as
it’s a feeling that changes as frequently as the wind. You’re looking for
discipline.
Fig 2 - Basic body measurements
Sabotage
Women are solipsistic. This means their decisions are filtered through
their perception as if the world revolves around them. It’s not that they
are selfish; it’s that they are self-interested. The distinction is
important.
The reason I mention this is because almost every man who is dialing
in his diet and fitness eventually experiences some attempts to
sabotage his effort by his wife or girlfriend. Sometimes it’s malicious;
sometimes it’s not, but it does happen, and you need to be aware of
it.
The following is from Archwinger. It describes his experience of
marital sabotage:
What to do when a girl cries?
I wake up every morning at 05:00 and drive to the gym, missing traffic
and getting in a few sets before work. I’m tough to get along with if I
don't get my workout in. Last night the weather was bad, and it’s still
raining this morning. My wife is next to me, asking me to please not
leave because she’s worried about me.
“It’s so dark outside, you're going to drive into high water and die;
there was a story about someone who did that on the news last
night.”
A normal guy would give into that. My early morning waking up and
working out has been her longstanding issue. She’s been trying to get
me to spend less time at the gym since the day we met. Partially
because she’s kind of heavy and has confidence issues herself,
partially because I make her feel guilty, and partially because it’s a
power and control thing.
“I’ll be fine,” I say, packing my stuff to leave. That’s when the tears
start. Shaming and guilting me aren’t working so she moves on to
manipulation.
“You don’t care about me anymore! You don’t care about my feelings!
You’re being selfish. What you can’t skip one workout for me?”
I mention that I can think of one really great way she could keep me
around for another hour, and that just makes her cry more because
I’m joking about her feelings.
I was serious, but OK.
Screw it. I get my stuff and tell her there’s nothing to worry about and
head out, leaving her crying. Then, fuck. It’s cold and rainy out. I can’t
get that nagging picture of her crying into the pillow out of my head. I
go back inside.
Amateur mistake, letting crying work.
I could see it visibly. All of the attraction and all of the respect she had
for me just draining out of her face as soon as she saw me back. It
was too late. There was no fixing this.
She’s not happy to see me. She’s still crying. She’s not grateful
because her precious feelings are so terribly hurt and I’m still so
terribly selfish and she never should have even had to ask me to stay.
If I were a better man, she wouldn’t have had to ask.
She keeps accusing me of being mad at her. I’m fine. I’m eating
breakfast. It’s her that’s mad but she can’t put her finger on why. She
got exactly what she wanted but she’s so filled with contempt and
disrespect. She doesn’t understand what she’s feeling or why, so she
assumes that she’s picking up on me being angry and accuses me.
It’s pretty clear where I screwed this one up, but maybe someone out
there can learn from the above.
In a solipsistic way, she felt guilty about being fat, and that was all
she saw and felt. Therefore, seeing him going to the gym was
reflecting that demon back at her. Instead of powering through those
feelings and joining in the workout, it’s easier for her to convince him
not to go. Women just work different. Of course, this shit test is like
any other shit test. Desire comes at the tail end of that anxiety. By
failing the test with compliance, he aborted the cycle thereby reducing
her desire. Since she was mad at the false signal of sexual attraction,
she then had to project that feeling onto him. Again, solipsism in
action.
This kind of test isn’t limited to manipulative tears nd guilt trips. Some
women cope by cooking more, bringing more unhealthy food home,
or offering to pick up some wine or beer for the night before you
makes it out the door for the gym. She isn’t necessarily trying to
consciously sabotage you, but she’s giving you a shit test that she
wants you to fail. She’ll play other manipulative games, too, and I’ll go
over them later in the book.
I will offer one piece of advice in closing: Do not let her weaponize
your guilt or your protective instinct. Hate her, just a little bit. That
hate will get your ass out the door.
Style Speaks Clearer than Words
Clothing is communication. What you wear, how you accessorize,
and how it works together says more about you than your words do,
and says it first. In real life, you definitely can judge a book by its
cover. Everyone does. You may say that you prefer to dress for
yourself and that you don’t care about impressing others, but you
can't escape the introduction your style makes to those around you.
You are always communicating something, and by “not
communicating”, you are nevertheless still communicating. This isn’t
a good thing.
The critical question is, What do I want my style to say about me? In
the case of dread, frame, relationships and the praxeology in this
book, you want to avoid narcissistic fantasy (a made up identity,
ruthlessly enforced on those around you) and lean towards an
attractive demeanor (be attractive, don't be unattractive).
Men hate the idea of runway fashions, but that’s not what I’m talking
about. Style and fashion are not the same. Fashion is a current trend
sold by marketers and appealing to susceptible people’s fear of
missing out and desire for luxury branding. Style is coherent
communication.
I lean heavily on two approaches to style: an historical perspective,
and the three archetypes of style coined by author Tanner Guzy.
Historical style is based on the evolving function of clothing. If you
want to know how to properly dress, it's good to know what clothing is
or was for and adapt that to your lifestyle. For example, people tend
to think of polo shirts as semi-formal, but they are actually workout
gear. Tee shirts, historically, are the equivalent of wearing underwear
in public. Khaki isn't a style of pant; that’s a chino. Khaki is a color.
Chinos were adopted from the Chinese cotton pants that were
brought back to Italy. They were simply casual working pants.
Some looks have been built by “turning swords to plowshares” by
adopting or recycling military issue clothing. World War II veterans
came home wearing bomber jackets, khaki colored chinos, aviator
glasses, peacoats, etc. After the war, they got together in motorcycle
clubs to continue riding like they did in the military, and wore the
same apparel. Their punk grandchildren wore disheveled versions of
the same clothing to piss off their parents.
European styles of clothing were based on aristocratic social
signaling. Dressing in white signaled status. It meant you didn't have
to work in the fields, and the clothing required more effort to keep
clean. There is an entire book on the differences historically among
different types of clothing, so this won’t be the one stop guide to
dressing yourself in the morning. The purpose isn’t to tell you what to
wear to get women wet. It’s to begin a process where you discover for
yourself how you can create your style.
The point is, you need some introspection and insight into your life
and how you want to present yourself, and base your clothing choices
on that. Are you in a blue collar or a white collar job? Do you live in a
rural area or downtown in a major city? How formal or casual do you
want to dress for a specific occasion? Wearing a suit to a casual meet
up at the bar would tell people that you’re socially inept. Wearing a
Tee shirt and jeans to a corporate board meeting would be similarly
inept ... unless you are signaling you have enough status to ignore
the social norms which, again, is communication.
Knowing why a certain piece of clothing exists and learning how to
communicate with it is the key to a sense of style. People pick up on
it, mostly subconsciously, and it resonates with how they see you. A
forty-five year old man who dresses like a teenager looks like he is
having a mid life crisis while his dressing in Kirkland Signature tells
you his wife dresses him.
There's a story of a British Aristocrat drinking in a common pub. One
of his friends sees him dressed in ratty clothes and walks up:
"What are you doing in here, and dressed like a slob?"
"It's OK, no one knows who I am in here."
The next day they see each other at a social engagement. Again, the
man sees his friend sitting there, dressed raggedly:
"What are you doing here dressed like a slob?"
"It's OK, everyone knows who I am here."
Dress to communicate. Dress based on history. I won't give you a
shopping list of items to buy, but start the process of taking a serious
interest in what you wear.
Your Kirkland Signature sweater and oversized jeans communicate
that your wife shops for you and that you have a bland mushy
personality. Your hoodie and jeans or sweatpants with ratty sneakers
signal you're socially insecure and want to conform in a way that
cannot be criticized or commended. It also signals that you’re a full
grown man who thinks himself a teenager. A great point I learned
from fellow author Aaron Clarey when we both showed up for a
podcast regularly wearing Hawaiian shirts:
"I wear this because you aren't allowed to. Not in the office, not in
church, and not in my cold ass State. I wear this because I am free."
Everything you wear is commentary. Take control of your life.
◆◆◆
Tanner Guzy advocates a different method. He breaks down style into
particular archetypes. These are the rakish, the refined, and the
rugged. The rake is a man who bucks social norms, what you would
think of as a rebel. The refined man is one who is dapper, more
delicate, creative, professional and precise. The rugged is a man who
works with his hands, a salt of the earth who isn't afraid to get dirty or
defend what’s his, exhibiting a gruff, scruffy masculine demeanor.
Clothing loosely fits into one category, or a combination of multiple
archetypes. Work boots are rugged, unless they are the DIY punk
look, in which case they are rakish. Military jackets like pea coats are
rugged, but also refined as military kit is always well maintained. A
windowpane or plaid suit is refined, but also more rakish than your
standard navy blue or gray because wearing the former is dressing to
stand out.
So look at your life, your personality, and your aspirations to find an
archetype that appeals to you. For example, when I left the military
and started working in a corporate setting in downtown Toronto, I had
a look that was mostly refined, but slightly rugged: Oxford blue suits,
military parade shoes, and an unfinished leather messenger bag.
When I left corporate life to become an author I wore more rakish
outfits and kept some ruggedness with Hawaiian shirts, Henley’s,
chino shorts, seersucker oxford button downs, and boat shoes.
Tanner would call it Waspy chic. I created a personalized combination
of rugged, refined, and rakish that changed as I changed.
The way to learn to dress for your archetype is simple. People who
you find in magazines, social media, and television are wearing
clothing, and you only have to follow the creative process when you
see something that strikes a chord with you: copy, adapt, create.
When you see a man dressing in an archetype you like, buy versions
of what he has. As you understand the nuances of the style, adapt it
to what is available in stores in your area. Eventually you learn to
create your own style and can throw away the archetype.
Internalizing your own personality through clothing will then be a
process you have finally mastered.
◆◆◆
Let’s consider some tools and methods men have found useful in
building their own wardrobes.
Never buy everything at once. If you spend a thousand dollars on
clothing you will end up throwing 80% of it away because it doesn't
work for you. Instead? In one trip buy one thing. This allows you to
avoid jumping onto current trends and thinking more long term about
your stylistic choices.
When you first fill your closet, get the absolute basics: an Oxford
button down, Levi 501 jeans, a basic leather shoe, a white and a
black tee shirt along with white, light blue, and light gray dress shirts.
If you need suits for work, buy navy blue and charcoal gray suits
along with brown oxford shoes. These staples work with everything
and anything, and have been in style for centuries.
As you buy new clothes, keep a mental tally of the clothing you have
in your closet already. Picture how that shirt will look with each pair of
pants and each jacket you own. Picture those shoes with every pair
of pants in the closet. The more items you have that are
interchangeable with the other items in your closet, the more versatile
your wardrobe. Women have giant closets because they have
collections of single use items which they only pair with other single
use items. This is why they have an entire closet of nothing to wear.
The cost of an outfit is irrelevant. It’s the fit that’s important. A $1,000
suit won’t look nearly as good as a $200 suit with $100 in tailoring. If
your shirts are too big get darts sewn in. If your pants are too big get
them taken in at the waist (if you get muscular legs from working out
this is required.) Find a seamstress or tailor. Any good dry cleaner
should have one, or know one. Hem in your pants to an appropriate
size, your shirts to an appropriate girth, and watch how those simple
moves make basic outfits look stellar.
Logos, branding, and graphics? They are a naive look. They appeal
to people who have never had money before and hope that borrowing
the luxury of the brand will improve their status. But you cannot buy
status. Spending ten times what the clothing is worth just to have a
logo on it is money better spent on higher caliber clothing. Think
about it: How many billionaires put spinners onto the rims of their
cars? Now ask yourself how many rappers who finally get some
money because of their first hit album do?
60 Days of Style
The 60 days of style is a collection of essays and reports from men in
the same vein as the previous hygiene guide. Years of tweaking has
refined what we learned and practiced into what you see here.
◆◆◆
Your clothes need to have purpose. This is a fact lost on many men.
Every article of clothing, jewelry, accessory, etc. needs to be there for
a purpose. I remember reading about author Rollo Tomassi owning a
yin/yang ring. At first I thought, that’s gay. Why wear a yin/yang? He
went on to talk about how so many women identify as spiritual
mystics and that chicks would approach him saying they felt a
connection. Not only did I see the logic of wearing something like this
if you were trying to get these types of chicks, I also recognized that
my bias was putting blinders up preventing me from seeing the the
big picture.
Why do I care what some other guy wears? Why was my first
reaction to the yin/yang so negative? As long as he owned it, as long
as he made it work for him, that’s all that matters. I was just being a
womanly judgmental ass. I recognized that behavior and killed that
response from my mind. I found a weakness and destroyed it. So,
before I break the rest down, you, too, need to remove that bias
because it doesn’t matter what you choose to wear or someone else
chooses to wear as long as they own it and it serves a purpose.
Hair & Headwear
I wear Under Armour beanies in the snow, an American flag hat, New
England Patriots hat, or no hat at all when I’m out. Ninety percent of
the time, I don’t wear anything on my head. I’ve seen guys wear
cowboy hats and look like fucking clowns. I’ve seen fedoras and
Nightmare Before Christmas hats worn by hipsters and emo dudes,
and I have even seen the endangered sweat band while out and
about.
Here’s the important part. Maybe one out of twenty guys look good
with their hat. The other nineteen look foolish as their hat doesn’t
match their facial hair, their clothes, or the rest of the look they’ve got.
It is fine to wear a hat, but ensure that the hat is complementing your
look. Ask yourself, What purpose does this hat serve?
I only have one piece of jewelry I wear on my entire body. It is an
authentic replica of the chain Frodo wore to carry The One Ring
around his neck. I wear my wedding ring on this chain. Have your
ears pierced or gauged if you want to signal a more rebellious nature
and don’t work in an office. Understand that each of those are an
extension of who you are to women who observe you. As mentioned,
books are judged by their covers, so ensure that your style and
wardrobe are sending the signal you want.
Torso and Legs
My style is that of a fashionable outdoorsman. I rock an awesome,
well-maintained beard, and in order for that beard to look like it
belongs on my face, I base my fashion style off of it. I work at a place
where business casual is what is expected. Since it has been winter I
have been wearing a lot of V-Neck sweaters over button-down shirts.
On Fridays, while everyone dresses down, I grab one of my buttondown shirts and a nice tie and wear that to raise the standard and do
my thing. My work bitches love me, and even though I go against the
grain, the guys have made comments as to how they want to improve
their styles as well.
When I am home I am usually in a sweatshirt or a thermal. The
thermal is my staple lounging shirt. Mine are from American Express
and they hug the muscles I’ve worked hard to grow. My wife loves
them as well and says that she catches people looking at my hips a
lot because the thermal, at the right angle, shows off my “V taper.”
This may not work for you, so consider what body type you have.
If you’re overweight and working towards slimming down, then get
something that has some give. V-Neck shirts are classy tee shirts.
Hoodies can work if they are made of nice material and are plain. My
hoodies are from Columbia or North Face. If you want to hide the
body until it is showroom ready, wear something that covers the gut
yet still looks age and gender appropriate.
Remember, you are gaming your woman every day. You cannot dress
up for work and then come home and relax. If she only sees you in
tee shirts, sweatpants, and over sized clothes, is she really going to
view you as a masculine man whose life is on-point? Will she view
you as someone that other women want to fuck? Possibly, but
chances are it’s a hard negative.
Make sure your damn pants actually fit. If they are too small and your
gut is spilling over, get them tailored or donate them. If you’re walking
around with a muffin top, I am making fun of you and your wife is
embarrassed. If you look like a slob spilling out of your pants, then
who are you to tell your wife to get in shape. If you’ve got a muffin top
you can’t get mad when she does too. Style goes beyond the clothes.
Ensure that you are matching your pants to the occasion. I wear light,
faded jeans when I’m working in the yard. I wear dark jeans when I’m
out with my wife. I wear black, gray, and khaki dress pants at work.
Nowhere in there do you see me discussing anything with holes, nor
do you see me talking about wearing light jeans to a restaurant.
Why? Because I don’t want to look like a tool.
The standard is so fucking low that if you were to adopt these simple
pieces of advice, you would look better than 85% of guys. My wife’s
work had a family dance the other night. I wore a nice striped shirt
with a pink tie to match my daughter’s dress, gray dress pants and
some nice shoes. I spiked my hair and wore a nice watch. I was the
only one among fifteen other fathers wearing a tie. My wife’s work
friends were all over me. A few shit-tested me about wearing a pink
tie. I am fully comfortable with myself, so I joked about it and poked a
little back. Some of the women would blush and giggle like little girls.
A few would not stop talking about how they are glad that some men
still have the decency to dress up when they leave the house.
Needless to say my wife was drowning in the external validation she
was receiving and days later they are still telling her that she had the
best dressed family.
Shoes
You know how women hate when it rains because they don’t want to
get their shoes dirty? Well, if you don’t give a shit if you step in a
puddle of mud, you’re not wearing good shoes. Go out and buy a pair
of shoes that will make you think twice before kicking a rock or
running in the mud. Women notice this shit, and if you are kicking ass
on the rest of your attire, and you are wearing a pair of Pedors
Stretch Walker White 801 Touch Closure Orthopedic Shoes - You
lose. Sir.
You have to find a style that fits who you are as a man. If that means
scouring men’s fashion sites, stalking photos of your celebrity
doppelganger, or looking at who gets your wife wet and replicating
their attire, just do it.
Again, prior to joining this space, I did not care about fashion. Then I
realized it was another aspect of my masculinity that I needed to own.
I’m glad I did because if you look good you feel good, and I have
turned my style around one hundred-eighty degrees. My improved
looks may not be totally responsible for my success, but they didn’t
hurt.
Acta, Non Verba.
Take a hard look at your wardrobe and make the decision to get rid of
old crap that doesn’t fit or has nothing but sentimental value. Throw
away the shirt from your first concert; it’s past due. Replace it with
some high-quality threads. I don’t care if you’re more comfortable
wearing graphic tee shirts and worn-out jeans. Since when has the
right path been the comfortable one?
As a masculine man, I expect you to know a lot about a lot. This now
includes fashion and having at least a foundation of understanding of
what makes a good outfit and how to forge your own style from the
various resources available to you.
The Intellectual Pillar
The Intellectual Pillar of frame is where you become your own
mentor. You build up a collection of useful mental models in your life.
The goal here is not to tell you what to think, but to demonstrate how
to think.
The Intellectual Pillar is a summary of the things you (should) know
that get you what you want out of life. You will learn about yourself,
about sexuality, women, leadership and how to not get drawn into
bullshit arguments. It’s not a list of items for rote memorization. It’s
learning to internalize concepts and adapt them to whatever
circumstances you find yourself in. Everything in this area is a
hypothetical imperative prodding you to do a lot of thinking, reframing, and adapting.
These lessons can’t be taught; they can only be learned. Even if I
were to write down a one hundred percent factual and accurate set of
principles you could follow to create a perfect life, it still wouldn’t help
you for the same reason that sticking feathers up your ass won’t
make you a chicken. The goal for you, the reader, is to understand
why each mental model is important, what part each model plays in
achieving specific results, and whether you want those results badly
enough to own the consequences of your actions.
Single guys often ask me about frame, but it’s become more and
more obvious to me that you need to have a relationship to truly
develop one. A single guy dating a girl who makes him lose frame
can simply leave. This is why a lot of guys go through a cycle of "date
a girl, get gradually more annoyed by her antics, break up." You ask
them what happened, and they say "Eh, she was just crazy man.
She'd lose her shit over the dumbest things. And she nagged me to
death about basically everything. Eventually, I just got sick of it."
In other words, if there's pressure on the pillar, they can just move the
pillar. But in a relationship, the pillar is fixed. The pressure will be
constant. If you don’t strengthen and maintain your frame, the pillars
will buckle, bend, and ultimately break. The consequences of having
a weak frame are severe enough that our options to mitigate said
weak frame are basically nil.
Just having a woman around is no guarantee guys will do it right,
either. Those guys who take this path get excited because they have
finally grown a spine for the first time ever. A month later they claim to
have reached alpha male™ status to change their wives but it
becomes obvious that they didn’t take the time to understand how
any of this works. They didn’t understand the importance of taking
their time to grow their frame, start leading, and internalize outcome
independence. In the end, rushing into alpha male™ status without
having developed and internalized the intellectual know-how to lead
effectively doesn’t make their girls trust, respect or desire them more.
What it does is makes things worse.
If you do this, in her eyes you will change from the dependent who
was mostly likable and stayed out of her way into someone with
erratic behavior who now compensates with arbitrary, inconsistent
demands and temper tantrums. This is why it’s so important to take
your time, to observe, orient, decide, act, and reflect. If you don't, you
will only make things more difficult on yourself.
As you read, you do need to practice this stuff. This is part of faking it
til you make it. Don’t go in all guns blazing, Be clear that you are
testing this out and getting used to working outside your comfort
zone. Focus less on her and more on understanding how you fail so
you can learn. The more you focus on yourself, the more you learn
what works and what doesn't.
Many people came to our little space thinking that by just being here
consuming content or interacting with others that they are turning
things around, as though they’re rolling around in magic dirt. But
these models only help by giving you the tools. You still have to
rebuild that engine of your life with them. Take pride in studying and
learning. Work hard to act in accordance with what you learn. This is
the smart way to act efficiently towards achieving your vision for
yourself, for your life.
The topics you will read about here include the importance of field
reports, OODA loops, dark triad personality types, the purpose of
mental models, and why this praxeology will work where so many
ideologies, philosophies, and therapies haven’t. You will learn about
the dark triad personality types and why they are effective, then on to
the mental models that are useful but don’t fit nicely into any other
category.
In the end, you will have learned to become your own teacher in the
sexual marketplace and how to get what you want out of life. You will
also learn to stop sabotaging your potential success with behaviors
that we all default to without even realizing it. Once this pillar is in
place along with the physical and emotional pillars, you can move
onto forming your vision and developing that elusive concept I call
frame.
It’s a lot of reading, a lot of reflecting, a lot of action. It’s a lot of work,
but from this work comes self-respect. From self-respect comes
options. From your options comes authority. From your authority
comes expectations. From your expectations comes investment.
What is a Mental Model?
This is a synthesis of two concepts, narratives and Praxeology.
praxeology is the practical study of human behavior. Not abstract
understanding of human behavior but its practical application.
Narratives are a shortcut we use to anchor our decisions in the real
world. This is because our brains consume a lot of energy, and this
shortcut allowed us to expend less energy, thus providing an
evolutionary advantage. Once we have our deep narrative (a
collection of narratives that you can think of as a coherent world view)
we lock them in place, or, in biological terms, we reduce our
neuroplasticity. From that point forward, we do not accept new mental
models until we experience trauma.
From an evolutionary perspective, being seventy percent good
enough in our decisions is preferable to us expending more energy to
be one hundred percent. This is why the concept of being zeroed out
is perceived as so traumatic. If you’re unfamiliar with the term “zeroed
out”, it refers to a life trauma that affects us in the same way a life or
death situation does. It could be an acrimonious divorce, losing a
child, etc. When a traumatic life event elicits a fight or flight response,
the brain increases its neuroplasticity in order for us to renew our
deep narrative so that we can adopt more useful narratives to make
decisions and adapt to change in our environment.
If you’ve ever wondered why the largest demographic of suicide is
divorced men between the ages of forty and sixty, this is why. If there
is no way to adapt to the new environment, we take the trauma of not
just divorce, but the complete disillusionment of our deep narrative
the same way as one would take a lethal wounding.
Purposeful, useful created narratives are called mental models. This
book is a collection of more useful mental models in the modern age.
You may already have some. Christianity has its own deep narrative.
When you are indoctrinated into the religion you are provided mental
models which anchor your decisions to that identity. The heuristic,
“What would Jesus do?” is an example.
When you are making a decision, you don’t have to expend a lot of
energy reinventing the wheel, as it were. You simply think of the
stories of Jesus and act in the way he would have. A good mental
model will have more positive outcomes than negative ones. Jesus
does not have to win every battle for your soul, so long as he wins the
war. Of course the world we live in seems to find the Christian deep
narrative less and less useful. If it were, we wouldn’t see Christian
men increasingly without wives and families, taking instruction from
thought leaders who would rather berate them for not sufficiently
revering females than guide them into productive lives.
Mental models are meant to be taken seriously, not literally. Those
who take them literally are attempting to bolster their own narratives
by discrediting your models in favor of their ideology. This is why
people who argue against your political opinions always seem
uninformed or evil. This is why atheists are annoying and overly
reductive, why women argue that they aren’t like those other girls
(even when you know they are), and why men in marriages of quiet
desperation would rather argue with you than fix their situation.
I don’t tell you which models are which. This book is about starting a
thought process, not finishing one. If your believing the moon is made
out of cheese gets you to the gym three days a week, then the moon
is Brie. This emphasis on what simply works for you is also why you
don’t need dogmatic zealotry to defend these mental models. This
isn’t ideology; it’s praxeology. No one else has to believe or endorse
your models, and others people having different mental models
doesn’t invalidate them for you. They are all simply tools in a box.
An author who goes by the pen name Whisper has a great example
of a mental model in his essay, You Must Put This Bucket on Your
Head, Right Now! It is a useful mental model that helps you decide
whether or not to take people’s advice when you don’t have enough
information to verify its outcome:
You Must Put This Bucket on Your Head, Right
Now!
Sooner or later, someone is going to walk up to you with a bucket,
and somewhat breathlessly explain how you urgently need to stick
your head in it. The bucket will have any number of labels on it:
Jesus, philosophy, psychotherapy, socialism, functional programming,
steroids, veganism, nofap, The Red Pill, drugs, mysticism.
They’ll explain how inside the bucket is a wonderful, enlightening
experience that will change your view of the universe. Having already
stuck their own heads in there they certainly seem to believe it.
Before you stick your head in the bucket, you don’t know what’s
inside. And afterwards, if indeed you do stick your head in there, you
don’t know if you have truly gained meaningful enlightenment, or
simply been conned by someone who needed you to follow in their
footsteps in order to validate their life choices.
All you have to do is pay attention to what happened to the other
people who stuck their heads in that particular bucket. Did they
prosper afterwards? Did they thrive? Were they suddenly wittier,
richer, healthier, stronger, prettier, more insightful? Were their lives
suddenly filled with joy and meaning?
Or did they mostly do the same things everyone else typically does
but with a new bucket and a need to proselytize? Every bucket is
going to have its own advocates who want you to stick your head in it.
They’ll promise you all sorts of things. Stop listening to them, and
start looking at them.
If it’s nine o’clock on a Saturday morning, and they are walking up
and down your street knocking on doors, where do you think you will
be in five years if you decide to wear that bucket? If that guy has the
secrets of getting rich by flipping real estate, why is he writing it up in
a book and selling that instead of using the secret himself? Will that
kung-fu master selling his bulletproof martial arts program climb in the
ring with a decently-ranked amateur boxer?
There’s always someone willing to test the waters for you. If
something amazing happens for them, you should be able to see it. If
not, you’re just being proselytized by someone with a bucket on his
head.
This book itself is one bucket amongst many, so whats the
difference? In a word, unhealthy narcissism. Narcissism is the male
condition. Everyone has it. Men have it more than women, and it
forms a bell curve amongst the population. Some people have less,
which could be described as Borderline, as in the personality
disorder. Most have similar amounts within a standard deviation or
two. Pathological people have unhealthy amounts. But what exactly is
it?
The definition in the DSM (the official psychiatrist’s book of mental
disorders)
defines it poorly. If being human were in the book it would read like
this:
We have something that we call human. It has an eye, a foot and a liver.
Unfortunately, so do dinosaurs. So we will define humans as creatures with eye, foot,
and liver, and missing dinosaur.
This may be accurate, but it’s not useful. Instead, I use the definition
by a very insightful author, TheLastPsychiatrist, who defines it
through a lens of mental models. Narcissism, according to
TheLastPsychiatrist, is the belief that you are the director and star of
your own personal one-man stage production. You create an identity
for yourself and require reinforcement of that identity from everyone
around you. But narcissists don’t see those around them as people.
They see them as archetypes, reducing them to set pieces in service
of the play.
This differs from a healthier narcissism where you defin yourself by
what you do. You put in the work to improve your life, and the result
becomes your identity. A good way to tell if you have a healthy or an
unhealthy form of narcissism is to see how easily you define it. If you
can give it a brand name, you’re unhealthy. Are you a Rebel™, a
Playboy™, an Intellectual™, a Gamer™, a Patriarch™, a Good
Father™, a Digital Nomad™ or a Real Man™? You may as well take
the Pepsi taste challenge because you’re just a curated brands
manufactured marketing demographic.
If other people who don’t acknowledge your identity make you rage,
then it’s unhealthy. Good narcissism doesn’t need others to
acknowledge it in order to be effective.
The purpose of frame is to build a useful selection of mental models
into your own personal deep narrative. You do this while removing
any identity from your inner life that doesn’t map to the things you do,
and by rebuilding your identity into one with a strong foundation. This
is the fundamental concept behind the tetrahedron of frame.
Why You’re Lost
Most men spend their days struggling to evade three questions, the answers to
which underlie man's every thought, feeling and action whether he is consciously
aware of it or not: Where am I? How do I know it? What should I do?
By the time they are old enough to understand these questions, men believe that
they know the answers. Where am I? New York City. How do I know it? It's selfevident. What should I do? Here, they are not too sure — but the usual answer is:
whatever everybody does. The only trouble seems to be that they are not very active,
not very confident, not very happy — and they experience, at times, a causeless fear
and an undefined guilt, which they cannot explain or get rid of.
They have never discovered the fact that the trouble comes from the three
unanswered questions — and that there is only one science that can answer them:
philosophy.
Ayn Rand, Address To The Graduating Class of The United States Military
Academy at West Point New York -- March 6, 1974
Lost boys seeking direction are everywhere. They are the guys
asking the third question. Some of them are just getting started:
“I know I need to live for me, but someone needs to tell me how to do
that.”
Others are further along:
"I’ve transformed. I'm charming, good looking and in shape, but
bored. I need something to do next, another challenge to conquer.
Please give it to me."
You see the former latching onto platitudes, lists, and arbitrary tasks
for self-improvement: Avoid soy. Eat meat. Don’t drink. Vote for X.
Run a side hustle. Do what I did. Be like me. It worked for me!
Random categorical imperatives. Categorical imperatives are
statements of value deemed too be “good” because someone said
they are good, without exception or nuance. Follow the rules and
you’ll become the Ubermensch. This is men acting like the orphan
child latching onto whatever father figure is trending. The king is
dead, long live the king. We men love to think of ourselves as
individualists while desperately conforming to someone else’s
program.
See how silly that is? Fulfilling someones checklist doesn’t make you
any better, any more than doing more chores makes your wife more
comfortable and willing to sleep with you. Pick goals and accomplish
them. They don’t have to be perfect goals. They don’t have to be the
right goals. They only have to be the right goals for you at the time.
When you’re done with them, move onto something else. If they
aren’t helpful anymore, drop them. No one can tell you what matters.
Nietzsche was right, meaning is dead.
So, the good news. When nothing matters, the only thing that will
matter is what you decide on. There is almost nothing all men agree
on as being universally good. Financial freedom, sexual abundance,
and physical fitness are the three we usually do agree on. Once
those are achieved, once men get past all the anger from bitchy
wives, overbearing bosses, bullying peers, and social stigma, they
get bored. They don’t have any more villains to overcome, and they
remain just as lost. Like the Ronin, they serve no Lord.
Stoicism is kicking the can down the road. At some point you have to
choose. Choose what? Rational egoism. Nietzsche called it master
morality. François duc de La Rochefoucauld called it virtue. Marcus
Aurelius called it self-love. How best do we put that into practice? Ask
yourself what you would do with your life if everyone who depended
on you died tomorrow? Now go do that. Aspire to be that. You were
not put on this earth to light yourself on fire to keep others warm, nor
will anyone reward you for your sacrifice. They won’t even
acknowledge it was a sacrifice at all. It was simply what they
expected of you. And If you think being the best plow horse for a
lifetime will get you that nice, warm stable as a reward in the end,
you’re in for a rude awakening. Horses that no longer plow are sent to
the glue factory.
There are a surprisingly large amount of guys out there who word at
reconciling frame with their religion. So if you think you can sneak
your prior beliefs in the back door by desperately searching the Bible,
Koran, or your academic textbooks for some verses to force fit into
this new frame you are doomed to either outright contradict their
teachings or slink back into your previous misery by adhering to
them. I have no stake in your beliefs. You can be as rational or as
irrational as you want. Accept that your life will be unnecessarily
volatile.
Peace one day. Chaos the next.
Everything that goes right is just what is expected of you. Everything
that goes wrong is your fault. If that’s the deal, if everything is on you
anyway, then you may as well deliberately and energetically live your
life instead of letting life happen to you. Men tend to prefer reading
and rereading the same life story of quiet misery because even
though it’s depressing as hell with a bad ending, it’s familiar. It seems
to be every man’s story, and many men comfort themselves in that
shared, common misery. But there’s a better way: Instead, learn to
write your own life story with an unknown ending, and enjoy every
single page.
Embracing rational egoism will not be easy. The altruism we were all
raised on is deeply ingrained and tough to undo. But you must
consciously do it. No exceptions. Otherwise, you’re going right back
to the matrix. If you try to do it subconsciously, or half-assed, you will
soon experience a life of volatility. Smooth sailing one day, maelstrom
the next. The worst part is you’ll find it pleasurable. After all, you
know how to run dread on your wife, and extinguishing each garbage
fire feels like a victory…until the next one. Sisyphus would be proud if
he didn’t have other things to do. Of course, you think these are your
herculean tasks, so you don’t notice it’s the same boulder each time.
No one has any stake in your religious beliefs. You can be as rational
or irrational as you want. No one has any stake in your success or
happiness, either; but the Truth is the Truth: you ditch the altruism or
you get eaten by it, fast or slow. So if you want an answer to the
question, ”What do I want next?” you first have to ask yourself,
“What do I want?”
What is Praxeology?
Praxeology is the study of human action and conduct. People act,
that action produces outcomes, and the connection between the
actions and the outcome is self-evident to the observer. However,
most books on relationships are not praxeological, but ideological.
Authors preach (a word I purposefully use) their messages of what
“good relationships” are, and they use catchy wordsmithing and
talented marketing to compensate for a lack of substantive, pragmatic
content. Anything practical that is included ends up serving the
marketing instead of the reader.
Ideology is about achieving an ideal. When discussing relationships,
the author, using an ideological approach, conjures an image of a
perfect husband and wife interacting within a perfect system
conceived or adopted by the author himself. It usually involves some
version of the white picket fence, 2.2 children, one dog not more than
30 pounds, and barbecues during the superbowl. In realty, the kids
are on Ritalin, the wife is a drunk, and the husband is sleeping with
his secretary, but the model fits the checklist. All for just $29.99 at all
on-line retailers!
Any time people’s real world situations differ from the above ideal, the
author typically, and subtly, finds the individuals at fault, assigning
root causes to personal failure rather than a consequence of pursuing
impractical, unrealistic models of domestic life. So if your white picket
fence is destroyed, they’ll never tell you it’s because you’re pursuing
a highly-flawed mental model. They’ll tell you it’s because you weren’t
white-picket-fencing enough. It’s not that the wife is fat and the
husband is lonely. It’s not that the kids are borderline diabetic and
sedentary. It’s that everyone needs to try to fit the model more.
This is why marriage counselors don’t lose their job if you get divorce:
According to them, you didn’t fail because the therapist sent you in
fruitless directions but because you didn’t truly commit to their advice
or plan, or because you just happened to be one of those people who
can’t be saved. The therapist’s actual goal here is to strengthen the
system, not to solve a problem. How many wives “tried everything!”
(including the counselor) just before pursuing alimony? That’s what
an ideological or philosophical approach typically gets you.
This book is different, and better. It’s better because it outlines a
method, a praxeology rather than abstractions and universal ideals.
Mainstream relationship therapy has failed men, telling them they
aren’t sufficiently X and that there’s nothing they could have done to
improve their situation, but they still should have tried harder. So, thus
abandoned, men began meeting in their own spaces, swapping notes
on managing their relationships much like mechanics might swap
notes on building engines.In this case, however, what we’ve built is a
praxeology for navigating relationships with women in a culture
hostile to evolved masculinity.
This specific praxeology, known as the Red Pill, involves hypothetical
imperatives. An imperative can be defined as a directive or an order.
There are two types, categorical and hypothetical. Ideologies involve
categorical imperatives. Praxeologies such as the purposeful
behavior described in this book, involve hypotheticals.
Categorical imperatives require adherence to the model. In the white
picket fence example above, the goal is to act in accordance with the
ideal. Buy a house so that you can build the fence. Get a wife. Have
2.2 children. Get a dog. No one ever seems to ask themselves if they
want these things, and more importantly, what problem are they
solving by having them? A wife isn’t an accessory, like spinners on
your car’s rims. A wife is a person. So the question you should be
asking yourself is, What advantages do I get from legal marriage that
I don’t already get from a long-term relationship or common-law
marriage?
Hypothetical imperatives shine a fresh light on these kinds of
questions, but they also reveal a flaw of their own: Since there is no
ultimate good to defer to, you have to know what you want so that
can ask yourself the right questions. For example, if you want
children, you need a woman but not necessarily a wife. What kind of
woman would be best? One who is loyal, sexually available, and
pleasant would be a great start. The benefit of this approach is that
now, instead of following some relationship guru telling you about the
importance of adopting someone else’s criteria like getting married in
a church to the nicest girl you can, you learn to make decisions and
start building better goals aligned with what you want.
A loyal woman is faithful because she sees you as the best she can
do. Work on getting that. A sexually available woman is one who
feels aroused by your behaviors. Work on getting that. She may not
be a wife. My relationship has lasted thirteen years at the time of
writing, and we are not married. It’s lasted longer than many friends
relationships, but that’s because I focus on the hypotheticals, the
praxeology.
The mental models in this book always come with this caveat: if you
want more of this particular thing, here is a model to help you make
decisions that get you more of that thing. If you don’t want it, then
don’t do it. We leave the value judgments to you, sir. We ignore the
“why” and the “should” and focuses on the “how.” Categorical
imperatives function like religions. Hypothetical imperatives function
like building and fixing cars.
Praxeology is a system of practice, not a system of belief. The
elegance of Red Pill as a praxis comes from its self-defined goals. If
you’re in a struggling relationship and you want to take back control
of your life, the mental models in this book provide a road map to
solve specific problems in that scenario. If your relationship is
satisfactory, then dread isn’t needed. If you are physically fit or follow
an effective plan that differs from the models in this book, then
disregard them. When was the last time anyone tried to sell you
something they claimed to be solely for your benefit without insisting
on some kind of total fidelity on your part?
Replication Matters
The beauty of Praxeology is that whatever you use, it’s either
replicated, or it’s removed from the tool box. For every mental model
in this book, I have read the work of dozens of men who either had
encountered something similar in their own personal pasts, in that of
their friends or co-workers, or from newer acquaintances who had
just learned it, tried it, and got results with it. The reason this stuff
works isn’t because I’m particularly talented, have done more
research, have a high intellect, or any other such nonsense. It’s
because other men have tried it, had success with it, and let the rest
of us know.
UEMcgill, on Praxeology
What’s interesting to me is that I have two examples in my life that
resonate every time I think about Praxeology. Early in my career, I
worked in a plant in the Deep South. In the area I worked, it was a
unique blend of STEM people and blue collar support staff. One
woman in particular was happy, outspoken, and an AME minister on
weekends. Once, two female chemists there—one married, one
unmarried—were discussing their problems with men. The married
one mentioned that she was fighting with her husband. The woman
who was the minister looked at her and said, "Girl! Ain’t no use
fighten wif your man. You suck his dick? Cause if you don’t, some
other woman will. You take care of yo man in the bedroom and he will
take care of you foe-vah. You takin care of bidness?"
The married one sheepishly answered, “No.”
The minister looked her straight in the eye and say, "Mmmm hmmm.
Thought so. White women."
It was enthralling to watch. Even then I understood what she was
saying. Men will put up with all manner of crap if you just cater to their
most basic needs. And judging by her dishes from the occasional pot
luck, she was also a fantastic cook who had all the bases covered.
The second example involves my own cousin, a card carrying,
Obama-loving, self-pro-claimed feminist of the highest order who has
one of the best marriages I've seen in my family. She once told me
that my mother had taught me how to be part of the male patriarchy
that keeps women below the glass ceiling—cue Monty Python: Help,
help I'm being repressed! Yet, despite her boilerplate feminist-speak,
the moment she comes home from work she behaves as her man’s
ideal woman. She supports him and his hobbies. She cooks like
nobody's business. And lord knows I've heard stories about how she
takes care of him in the bedroom.
As an engineer, this Praxeology resonates particularly well with me
because, in my technical career in a very pragmatic field, the most
common response too success is, Who cares why it works but it
does! I can cite countless examples where the scientific people were
involved in seemingly endless discussions about abstractions while I
made progress by doing what simply worked.
In one example there is a feminine, married woman who couldn’t
even be bothered to keep her man happy. In the other, a blue haired
feminist who looked like a walking red flag, but understood how to
keep a man. On the surface you’d swear the wife was great and the
feminist was a frigid bitch. In reality, their actions were all that
mattered, not the identities they presented.
When you have frame, you don’t care how nice the packaging looks,
you only want to play with the box.
◆◆◆
Red Invictus, on Praxeology:
I just had one of those heavy conversations with my fouryear
girlfriend yesterday. The subject? She is uncomfortable with our
arrangement and with me being Captain. This is coming from a
twenty-two-year old woman who is very, very new to everything. I've
vaguely shared some snippets of what I learned here and there over
the last year.
She's hostile to it, having been exposed to lots of feminist
indoctrination.
I remained stoic and just listened to her for the better part of half an
hour as she listed her grievances and talked in circles. After nodding
sincerely and looking interested, I kept my mouth shut while she
finally admitted, out loud, that she's not even sure why she disagrees
with this model of our relationship.
She is the type of woman who analyzes her own thoughts by
verbalizing them, by thinking out loud. She doesn't even know what
the hell she's saying until she's said it or is in the process of saying it:
"Why do you make all the big decisions? I feel like I'm following your
script in this relationship.”
"Yeah sure, you don't realize how much influence you hold then,” I
said.
Men are told to be more mindful of what we're saying. We remind
each other all the freaking time here to be careful with our words.
At the end of this serious discussion on leadership in our relationship
she finally admitted to me, "I'm not sure why I'm so against the idea of
you getting to make all the decisions. I guess it's because from the
start I was against it just because you’re a man.”
"I assume positions of leadership because I'm 5 years older than
you,” I told her. “I have more life experience. I'm far more rational, a
hundred times over, so, because of that ,it naturally falls on me to be
the Captain in this relationship, not just because I'm a man."
She fell silent for a minute and then found herself completely
agreeing with me.
Field Reports, a Guide
It’s great to read these mental models and stories from men who
have suffered, fixed, and thrived in their lives, but if all one does is
read and retain other people’s stories, nothing will ever change. Selfhelp brands and talking heads love to shout platitudes like “do the
work”, or “just man up.” They never actually describe what that work
is, leaving it as an emotional exercise for the listener. Container
words, it turns out, are a viable marketing strategy.
Field reports are what separate the thinking and reading from the
doing. They are a key component of OODA loops. Field reports are
not quite a journal, but closer to what we call in the military an after
action report. They allow for you to document what you’re doing, why
you’re doing it, how it went, and where things went wrong or right.
The reasons it’s important to write things down are because our
brains are lazy and our ego’s are fuzzy, our focus is misplaced and
our memories are short, our nostalgia is selective and our stories are
exaggerated.
When we get a stimulus, our brain processes it first through instinct,
then our limbic brain, then our frontal lobe. As we remember things,
we process it in the same way. We do this because we don’t have a
hard drive of brain matter, we actually re enact the situation in our
heads each time we remember it. Not only do we suffer from the
same issues we had when we played the telephone game as children
(kids would sit in a circle and whisper a statement into each others
ears. By the time the last kid got it, the message was entirely different
than the one the first kid used) but we also reinforce the specific parts
that make us feel most strongly.
Writing things down is important to prevent us from doing that. When
the actions are still fresh in our mind and we haven’t had a chance to
process it through out egos, we write it down. Our brain may be able
to use creative flair when remembering, but we can’t change whats
on the page. Whether one part of our memory is strong than another
is irrelevant, it’s all there in front of us and we are forced to remember
it as written.
As time passes, we forget the bad parts of our lives and remember
the good parts. This is not a bug, it’s a feature. If we constantly held
onto all the bad memories and traumas over a lifetime, we would all
be suicidal and humanity would have died off. I won’t say men
haven’t figured out their own relationship strategies and mental
models out prior to my writing, but the one advantage this road map
has is that It doesn’t kick the ladder out from under you.
Too many men go through hardship and come out the other side
better for it, only to turn around and tell the men struggling behind
them the bland platitudes that solve nothing. Just be yourself is great
when yourself has been through hell and back, it doesn’t work so
great when yourself is objectively bad. Men are what we do, so be
yourself is useless.
By writing things down, you can go back and see the hard times for
what they were, not what nostalgia paints them to be. You’ll never
forget that loving wife in front of you was at one time a frigid harpy
that made your life one of quiet desperation. This cold dose of realism
helps you moving forward, and I have a story about one of my
inspirations, a man called Athol Kay, and how he suffered greatly
because he didn’t remember the bad times.
Finally, by writing things down you get to see more about you than
the words on the paper. You practice reading your subtext. What is
the focus of your field report? What details did you add? What details
did you omit? Is there something important thats glossed over, or
something insignificant that is written in detail? What we don’t write
can tell us more about our problems.
Who is the protagonist in this narrative? A validation seeking
codependent writes his life story from his wifes perspective. An
absent minded man may completely gloss over his wifes words. Men
bury the lede by neglecting to mention their wife is newly pregnant
until an off hand statement 3/4th s of the way in (this is a big deal as
hormones are all over the map and her need for comfort skyrockets
which explains a lot of fights) or don’t mention that their wife has had
an affair for the past year. Sometimes it takes an outside reader to
ask questions and cajole the answer out of them. On a side note, it’s
always better to find an anonymous place to share your notes with
other men. You avoid the social niceties that little white lies live in,
and have a place where no one has any reason to be dishonest with
you.
Now that you know why field reports are important, how do you write
one?
◆◆◆
Keep the OODA loop in your head as you read this. A field report
doesn’t follow a specific structure but has some guidelines:
♦ A field report is best written in the past tense. Saying you need
to do something in the future gives you a dopamine hit, like you
actually did something. This makes it less likely you will actually
do it. A past tense allows for you to reflect on what you’ve done
and where you need to change
♦ You must be the protagonist. Nothing screams codependent
like an essay of she statements. Everything is filtered through
what he believes his wife wants or what her incentives are. Not
only is this showing who has the frame in these interactions, but
they are also wrong. What your ego assumes is not whats going
on. Just rewriting a field report, changing the protagonist can
help men see the answer to their problems become obvious
♦ It’s good to take time away, then come back and read it after
cooling off. When the memories are fresh you aren’t reading with
your eyes, you’re reading with your heart. You see what you want
to see in the page. After some time passes, the memories get
fuzzy and it’s almost as if you’re a dispassionate third party
reading this field report. There’s a reason you see dysfunction
clearly when other people are experiencing it and never seem to
notice it in your own life
♦ You don’t have unlimited time and effort. Pay attention to the
details you add, and the details you omit. That shows you the
importance you put into various parts. Important things you’re
ignoring show you your weaknesses, your ego cannot hide them.
If your problem is your sex life and your field reports talk about
your career then you know avoidance is and overcompensation
are your problems
♦ As a corollary, pay attention for the Batman origin story. I
coined this phrase based on the various Batman films I grew up
watching. In each new one, there is always a scene where you
have to see Batman's parents murdered, reliving the exact same
story we’ve seen before. It’s not needed. What this means is a
man has no idea whats important in his story so he treats it like
he needs a full disclosure of his life. Every mans story feels
unique, but reads exactly like everyone else's story. If you find
your reports are more back story and less recent actions then
you’re ignoring the point
♦ Finally, when writing batman origin stories that other men are
supposed to read and offer feedback on, men expect some sort
of absolution, like it was a Catholic confession. If only you were
in the situation I was in, you would have made the same choices
as I did, therefore I am not a bad person! How you feel is
irrelevant. Whose at fault is irrelevant. Being understood is
irrelevant. Leave your morality and need to social cohesion at the
door. Accept you will be the bad guy in your story and focus on
your problems
So with field reports you are better able to implement OODA loops
and internalize the applicable mental models into your life. I cannot
overstate how important this is. The biggest mistake men make is
ignoring this step with confidence, only to come back in 2 years
finding they had massive covert contracts in that time and having to
start from the beginning. You’ve been warned.
Observe, Orient, Decide, Act
So far I’ve covered how men come together around relationship
issues. I’ve covered the three types of dysfunctional relationships and
the differences between the sexes. I’ve explained mental models,
praxeology, and a utilitarian approach to fixing lives and relationships.
Now we look at the process that puts them all together to make better
decisions, the OODA loop.
This is important, as human beings are lazy. When I first started
showing this to men they would give unintentional lip service. They
would describe their sub par sex-life and problems in great detail. It
was very obvious what kind of man they were before marriage, what
kind of relationship they were in, and how they treated their women
like men, and in which ways it was sabotaging their goals. I could
articulate this all and always received the same response:
“Yes, exactly this! This is just what I need to hear, thanks for saving
my life!” which was always followed up with the same thing.
Nothing.
Men are so predictable in their troubles that you could see a man in a
struggling relationship, tell him why it was struggling, what he could
do to change it, the consequences of not doing it, and show (with
examples) men making the same mistakes and having the
aforementioned consequences. Again, they would respond with:
“You know that thing you told me not to do? I did it anyways, and the
thing you said would happen, happened. Now that I’m here, what do I
do?”
There is only one answer. Accept the consequences of your actions.
All the choices have been made, all the consequences were
accepted, and now it’s just about letting things happen. What is the
point of being able to predict someones future if they don’t change
anything because of it? OODA loops are the process for men to
actually apply what they learn.
OODA stands for observe, orient, decide, act and was developed by
US Air Force strategist John Boyd. The idea is how one can
overcome obstacles with agility by constantly re assessing their
actions and consequences. The process results men having what is
called calibration. The faster you can iterate an OODA loop, the faster
you can learn and fix the problems in your life.
First is orientation. You can’t fix a problem that you can’t articulate.
Our ego gets in our way more often than we care to admit. We think
that we can overcome a wife who has fallen out of love with us, or
overcome a wife who has been cheating in hopes of finding her new
husband before shedding the current one. We think we have to lose
ten pounds to become fit and it’s really closer for 40. Orientation is
about seeing things for what they are, and not what they want them to
be.
Your wife says she loves you but you haven’t had sex in 5 months?
Then she’s not in love with you. Is it a case of not being attractive, or
being too unattractive? In what way? For a simple example let’s say
it’s because you’ve gained a lot of weight and look unattractive to the
point she’s not sexually interested anymore.
Orient is how you take these observations and apply proper mental
models to guide your future decisions. In the past you may have held
onto models about in sickness and in health. This is clearly not
useful. Instead you decide to adopt the model of being attractive to
have more desire. This is a simple and straightforward example, so I
suggest you start looking a the rest of the models in this book with the
same process.
Decide is where you make a decision based on your orientation. You
decide to join a gym, eat healthier and stop drinking. You decide on
the gym, you decide on a program, you decide on your meals, you
decide to throw out your alcohol. You make these decisions silently,
because (as I will outline later) a common reason these things fail is
because of validation. Like any new years resolution, we get the
same dopamine high by telling people about our goals that we get
from actually achieving them.
Act is the final part. You’ve observed the dynamic, oriented yourself to
the adequate mental model, decided on a course of action, now it’s
about following through. When you hear a lot of self help types tell
you to fake it until you make it, this is where that belongs. You knew
what you were doing when you got here, so trust that. The only thing
going through your mind is hesitation. Why? Because you’re worried
about making a mistake, experiencing rejection, or both. Accept that,
it’s built into the system.
And after you conduct an action, you reiterate your loop. Observe the
effect it had. Are you closer to your goal? Are you further from your
goal? Are you tangential to your goal? Observe the results and orient
yourself accordingly. Sometimes it’s obvious. You did something, your
wife responded sexually, and you were happier when acting on it.
Continue to do that, or escalate. Reward good behavior, don’t reward
bad behavior. It sounds easy, but it really isn’t.
Men run through an OODA loop and start seeing results. They stop
treating their girl as a man and start treating her like the most
responsible teenager in the house. The wife becomes more feminine,
submissive, and the sexlife improves. You’d think this means men are
happy with things and continue to reinforce this situation. They don’t.
What actually happens is men feel bad that they are acting like such
a jerk to their wife when she is acting so well. They revert back to
their old behavior as some sort of reward.
Then the wife gets frustrated, loses sexual interest again (along with
a little more trust that it’s ever going to be real) and the husband gets
resentful. This is because he isn’t using his OODA. If you feel like you
are acting like a misogynist, a jerk, a selfish prick, and your wife is
responding well then know that this is the reward.
“She loves the new me, so I will act like the old me to show her how
much I appreciate it!” See how silly that sounds? Yet men always
default to this. It’s because they don’t observe, they see with their
heart and not their eyes. In reality, they have a self ideology of how a
man should act. Their deep narrative has a categorical imperative.
The models in this book act like tips and tricks to convince a girl to act
right. Then when she’s acting right he assumes he has to go back to
the previous model to continue to submit to his ideology.
The Dark Triad Personality Types
Understanding dark triad personality traits is key to fully
acknowledging and taking control of our own self-interest and taking
responsibility for getting what we want. Three personality types make
up the so-called Dark Triad: narcissism, psychopathy, and
Machiavellianism. They get a bad rap for a couple of reasons. People
often question the morality of the triad’s associated actions or
decisions used by those pursuing life goals. Also, assessing others
for their utility, for what value they can provide in terms of behavior,
assets, or other value, contradicts the popular mantra that “we are all
equal.” Could it be that the typical individual resists demanding
practical value from another person out of fear that he himself
actually brings little to no value, and will be deemed “unworthy” by
others? Could it be that those who insist upon this “intrinsic value is
the only value” mindset crave a world with a twisted empathy, where
no one can succeed at the expense of anyone else, and anyone who
does is just evil? Both questions deserve strong responses based on
validated learning, and it is in the rational understanding and
controlled practice of dark triad traits that the answers lie (pun
intended).
To fully understand the dark triad means accepting that we all
embody and employ it to some extent. Properly understood, the main
question stops being, “Are we good people or evil people?” and
becomes, “Why are we selfish, self interested, and amoral about the
wrong things, and for the wrong reasons?” Remember, this is a book
about frame. Accepting our fallible nature and making deliberate
decisions that harness and guide that nature helps us (and our
associates) in a sustainable model is a critical step towards
developing a strong frame. In other words, No man comes to strong
frame except by dark triad.
Having said that, I really dislike the term dark triad. It’s not an
accurate term. These aren’t evil behaviors that are only internalized
by the modern despot and creatures of the night. I am convinced it’s
referred to with evil, shadowy terminology because those behaviors
are, historically, strong, masculine behaviors, and we have been
villainizing masculinity for years as though our society is suffering
from a gigantic case of daddy issues. I’ll go ahead and pin that for
later when we get to the emotional section. So, regardless of whether
you’re the sensible female ally who thinks dark triad is a codex of evil,
or a lost boy who loves to do what pissed off the feminists, leave your
luggage at the door.
Dark triad is masculine behavior. As such, it is also a tool. Like a
hammer, you can use it to build a house or to cave your neighbor’s
head in. Pro tip: Using it to frame your house is by far the better use
case.
It turns out that Machiavellianism is really just your ability to plan for
good outcomes and cater your morality to your own self-interest.
Psychopathy powers your ability to mute your empathic response if
it’s being weaponized against you, and narcissism is the male
condition. You can’t run from it without losing what makes you who
you are. Let’s take a closer look.
Type 1: Machiavellian
Otherwise described as cunning, the Machiavellian trait enables
deliberate, amoral action in order to achieve a result. When and how
do we lie? How does a man with frame lie? How do we become more
Machiavellian in our careers and sex lives? Do we need to become
more selfish, or are we already selfish and need to guide our
selfishness better? Is our morality a system that helps us, or does it
just help us cope with failure?
Why do you ever need to tell the truth outside of the legal system?
Everyone lies every single day. It is institutionalized manipulation. We
make judgment calls (or are told to) that lying is not harmful in cases
where everyone agrees with the end result. We value the social
cohesion cemented by shared lies to a greater degree than whatever
outcomes those lies produce.
For example: Your wife or girlfriend asks you if she is fat. You could
be honest and upfront with her, tell her that she is fat and
unattractive. After all, she deserves to be told by the person she loves
most in the world that her health is at risk, does she not? While you’re
at it, why not tell her you find rolls desirable, but only when they are
on the dinner table? Consider this a thought experiment. Just by
reading those questions, you already know that conversation, and
quite possibly the relationship, is going to end if you go with total
honesty.
The other way to get a result is by a more Machiavellian lie, or never
telling her she is obese. You instead start going to the gym yourself,
changing your diet at home, and achieving results with your own
body. You rub her hips, ass, and she will start notice all on her own
that she is on the losing end of the attraction game. Casually mention
events at the gym and new classes and see if there is any interest in
going. Never pushing the issue. If she starts mirroring your diet and
gym habits and becoming more attractive you wouldn't say you
manipulated her?
You did, and you lied to yourself, saying that you are not a
manipulator.
Why is it then that one way worked and was considered immoral,
when the other way destroyed the relationship? I’ll come back to that.
You approach a woman in the bar who you find attractive. You’re
confident, attractive and start talking. Imagine telling her your entire
life story, warts and all. You probably should mention up front that you
have an ex girlfriend you’re still hooked on, poor credit, and a love for
Japanese porn. Her panties are going to moisten right up and she will
decide that your personality is so much more important than your
health status?
You are probably not going to mention any of those things to her. You
will lie about them if she asks. Instead you keep things light and fun.
You leave yourself a mystery for her to fill in the gaps with her own
wants and desires. Not only do you do that, but she is doing the
same. She doesn’t bring up her crippling daddy issues, her kid who
lives with grandma because of a court order, or that she just banged
her drug dealer before coming out with you. Women use sex as a
manipulative tool better and more often than men. Women have fun
and party at 23 then hit 30, have baby rabies and are ready to settle
down and they aren’t like that anymore. That birthday blow job is to
convince you to buy that new washing machine with the steam option
was not manipulation.
So why is it that your way was manipulative and wrong, while her’s
isn’t? I’ll come back to that.
Most people in the work force have a pretty decent resume. They
write down qualities, skills, employment history. They embellish a little
bit. Not outright lying, just gussying it up. You kind of have to, as the
keyword software HR uses will skip over a good employee that
doesn’t use their specific wording. People get the interview and
answer the questions truthfully. They don’t mention their bad
qualities, instead using them as a springboard to talk about more
good qualities.
Why not lie about your resume completely? Put down jobs you never
worked at with skills you know how to do but no one would hire you
for lack of experience? For each job have a friend pretend to the be
the HR person and provide the employer that phone number to
check. Many people work for small companies who may not be in
business anymore. You can't check a job that is closed down but you
can still provide your old supervisor's phone number. Show up the
interview prepared for the job duty questions and just tell them what
they want to hear. As long as you show up to work and actually know
how to do what the job requires who cares what your GPA was in
school?
There will never be an issue if you are just out of practice or green as
long as you can complete the work. There’s stories in the news of
corporate senior officers who have made up entire swaths of their
resume.
So why is it your resume needs to reflect your life at all?
With all these things, the answer is something no one wants to
acknowledge: life is manipulation. Women manipulate, children
manipulate, animals manipulate. Men manipulate, but we do it
differently. We get angry, which is the only social emotion. Anger
requires a combination of pain and grievance, thats why no one yells
when they are alone. In our caveman past, anger was our way of
telling people to do what we want (or stop doing what we don’t want)
otherwise we will get violent.
As we become civilized, we lose more and more violence in our lives.
I think this is a good thing, but it does hamper mens ability to
compete in the manipulation Olympics. I’m not being hyperbolic, this
is true on a biological level. Babies crying is manipulation, women
screaming is manipulation, dogs yelping is manipulation. It turns out
men have an adrenal response to all these of these things. We are
hardwired to empathize with pain from others and respond as if it
were our own fight or flight response.
In modern times, this is the process by which feminism has made so
many victories for women. It’s the tactic of weaponize the male drive
to protect women in order to receive more from us. The manipulation
is a tool, in the case of your wife being attacked by someone, this
manipulation is a good thing. You can protect her. In the case of a
feminist calling you a misogynist if you don’t support her and give her
money it’s bad, a grift.
So in a world of manipulation, you need to shed your morality and
look at it from the perspective of rational egoism. Who is manipulating
you, what are they trying to get, and what’s in it for you? Even if you
refuse to lie, manipulate, or otherwise be more Machiavellian in your
life to get what you want or need from people, it’s extremely useful for
the defense against others attempting to manipulate you without
providing adequate value for you in return.
◆◆◆
Cynicism is the belief that people are motivated purely by selfinterest. They look out for themselves. Even altruism is selfishness in
the long term. Therefore, there’s no reason not to use the selfishness
of others to get what you want in life. People with a healthy dose of
cynicism already look at social interactions and life events for what
they are and not as they want them to be. The world realpolitik exists
for a good reason.
Did you think marriage actually was a good thing to benefit you
personally? Is that job actually hiring you because you fit the role and
were a good fit? Does the 32 year old single mom sleep with your fat
ass because you are great in bed?
Marriage is a to benefit the woman. Your job needs you to make them
money. That single mom needs a provider since the drug dealer she
got knocked up with ain’t around anymore. Most of the masculine
problems men whine about are opt-in problems. They refuse to
become cynical towards things and take people at their word when
they are told it’s for your own good. Machiavellian thinking removes
the childlike fantasy of what you want the world to be, and strips it
down to what it is: advanced primates manipulating other advanced
primates to follow in their own selfish desires and wants.
Even logic is manipulation. Mankind did not evolve to understand
objective truth, it was evolved to understand fitness.
To the non-cynic, marriage makes strong families. Your job likes your
work and personality. The single mom likes your sense of humor and
agrees you aren’t the step father, but the father that stepped up. One
of the best manipulative tools are ego.
If you can accept that everyone lies and convinces themselves they
do it for the right reasons, that everything is manipulation and the only
question is what do people offer in return, and that cynicism is the
transition from naivety to adulthood, then what purpose is morality to
the man with frame?
Morals are standards of behavior and belief by society. Society is
playing a game and the agreed upon rules are morality. Who gets to
decide what is moral? You do. You get to decide if your actions are
moral or not. Why? Because everyone else who has been doing it for
as long as you’ve known has been doing it. Your priest told you it was
godly to marry the single moms in the pews, venerate the women on
mothers day and feel guilty for not being good enough on fathers day.
Your government told you that women deserve more and you deserve
less. Your wife told you that most couples lose sexual attraction after
a time and that focusing 100% on your children is the best thing for
your marriage.
If their morals are what brought you to a life of quiet desperation,
then who could possibly give you morals that won’t? The morals of
your actions should be dictated by your results. As long as there is
not a law against it, it’s moral. There it is in black and white.
♦ Tell the truth when it benefits you.
♦ Don't Gossip, use it to spread discontent against an enemy.
♦ Respect others who have something to offer you.
♦ Seek justice, especially when it will get you that promotion over
the guy who was caught breaking the rules.
♦ Serve others, but only when they are giving something back.
♦ Be charitable, because people need to see your good side.
Everyone manipulates everyone and pretends they don’t. You can
either play to win, or accept defeat.
We Aren’t Designed For Truth
Humans are not evolved to understand an objective truth, only
environmental fitness. While we have evolved a brain that likes to
know the truth (in this case, I define truth as predictability with the
outside world). Our brains are just not built for it. We can create
abstractions to better understand it, but thats not our strong suit.
Donald Hoffman, professor of cognitive science at the University of
California, has some great research on this. Here’s a summary in his
words:
Suppose in reality there’s a resource, like water, and you can quantify how much
of it there is in an objective order — very little water, medium amount of water, a lot of
water. Now suppose your fitness function is linear, so a little water gives you a little
fitness, medium water gives you medium fitness, and lots of water gives you lots of
fitness — in that case, the organism that sees the truth about the water in the world
can win, but only because the fitness function happens to align with the true structure
in reality. Generically, in the real world, that will never be the case. Something much
more natural is a bell curve — say, too little water and you die of thirst, but too much
water and you drown, and only somewhere in between is good for survival.
Now the fitness function doesn’t match the structure in the real world. And that’s
enough to send truth to extinction. For example, an organism tuned to fitness might
see small and large quantities of some resource as, say, red, to indicate low fitness,
whereas they might see intermediate quantities as green, to indicate high fitness. Its
perceptions will be tuned to fitness, but not to truth. It won’t see any distinction
between small and large — it only sees red — even though such a distinction exists in
reality.
While I know that men (myself included) love to learn about the
mysteries of the universe, love to break the world and women and
careers apart like a swiss watch and study the pieces in hopes that
understanding the variables will help us understand the system in
question, it just doesn’t work that way. Our ego shows us what we
want to see too much for us to be objective.
A great example occurred during our experiments involving men who
suspected their wives were cheating. You’d think you could run a test,
observe the truth it reveals, and act accordingly. Instead, we
observed men drifting towards one of two extremes: they either
shifted the goalposts to hide the facts they didn’t like, or they became
extremely paranoid. In one case, the man involved wound up creating
his own self-fulfilling prophecy.
One guy put a GPS tracker in his wife’s car and monitored it
throughout the day. Another man hired a PI to tail his wife for a month
while a third man took his girl’s phone while she was out, and logged
into her computer and email accounts. None of these men have
frame, but for different reasons than you probably think.
The first man spiraled into paranoia. The places his wife went were
legitimate and not suspicious: shopping, grocery store, parents
house, etc. But regardless of how innocent a destination turned out to
be, he always assumed she was just good at covering her tracks:
“She probably parked the car at the grocery store, met some guy, and
then drove off with him!”
After a month or two of this, his paranoia began producing very
erratic behavior. He started fights, became overprotective and
controlling, and drove what was already a lackluster marriage into
one involving hysterics. At the end, he confronted her about this
imagined affair, and his wife left and went to her parent’s house. He
disappeared from my community shortly after that, so I don’t know
whether her time at her parent’s place was a prelude to a divorce or
whether it was a short fight that sorted itself out. Regardless, his
responses weren’t good. He was completely reactive, living in his
wife’s frame instead of building his own. He had no emotional pillar of
frame and lacked the intellectual basis to know what was going on.
He had no frame.
The second man received regular emails from the PI he’d hired and
ended up finding out something much worse than an affair. All those
situations where she was sneaking out of the house? It turned out
she was just so smothered and annoyed by his clingy, unattractive
behavior that she would just go to the library or alone to the movies.
She wasn’t cheating. She simply had no desire to be around him.
He could have been using that time to make himself attractive and
shed his unattractive behaviors. Instead, he assumed the problem
was her. He had no physical pillar or emotional pillar. He had no
frame.
The third and final man looked at his wife’s phone while she was in
the shower. He got forensic software to download her text messages
and looked through them. He got the passwords to her emails and
checked there, too. He ended up finding what he was looking for, but
kept moving the goalposts so he didn’t have to acknowledge it.
The man she was emailing turned out to be a coworker. Even though
she was using her personal account to contact him, the husband
reasoned, it was possible that it still could have been professional
communication. Even though they exchanged some texts, he
thought, there was still plausible deniability on their part. The
coworker did come across as though he was flirting with her, but she
never sent anything sexual or explicit back, the husband thought.
Anything suspicious that the husband found, he dismissed it because
he always needed more evidence. In the end, the only thing that
would have convinced him would’ve been a video of them having sex
while he was holding the day’s newspaper in his hand along with a
signed affidavit confessing to it.
This third man was, indeed, being cheated on, but instead of
spending his time making himself attractive, making plans to move on
with his life, to build sexual abundance, and to develop outcome
independence and the skills to find women after he left this one, he
was always reactive. He operated in her frame and, worst of all,
deluded himself. The last time he checked in, we learned that he had
confronted her about it, she admitted to some of it, and they were
attempting to work past it. Whatever ultimately happened, I don’t
know, but it didn’t sound like it was going well.
The point of these examples is to demonstrate that no matter how
smart you are, or think you are, that no matter how much you
convince yourself that you’re searching for truth, how your ego
frames it will be driven by your emotional state. You can’t trust your
stupid monkey brain, so you end up focusing on what you can’t hide
from: yourself.
Your wife might be cheating on you. Your boss might be lying to you.
Your life may be a product of manipulation by everyone around you.
However, once you have frame, once you’ve built your base,
developed your pillars, and topped it with your vision, you’re in a far
better position to handle these kinds of serious issues in your life than
with whatever your high IQ tells you is the truth. And the beauty of
frame is, the stronger it is, the less people test it. When you’re
reading and internalizing the models in here, remember they are
about selecting what you need for your own benefit, not about finally
discovering some objective, definitive understanding of reality.
What’s in it for you?
Type 2: Psychopathy
Psychopathy is first and foremost a mental disorder that manifests in
a very manipulative and charismatic person who lacks any capacity
for empathy. You can’t learn empathy any more than you can learn to
have brain damage. It’s caused by trauma, genetics, or both.
Hardened convicts with multiple murders under their belts, titans of
commerce who conquer the corporate world, and politicians sneaking
off to your billionaire island du-jour for the full Gauguin treatment all
have it, but what exactly is it? The psychopath has zero empathy for
other people and no guilt over their destructive actions. Remember
that time you pushed your sister down and she started to cry, and you
felt bad that you hurt her? The psychopath would feel nothing, for he
is completely unable to feel guilt for his actions or empathize with the
actions of others.
While you cannot learn psychopathy—which is probably a very good
thing that you can’t—you can learn to use or emulate certain traits
that can help you manage relationships and interactions. These traits
include the psychopath’s excessive charisma and charm; the ability to
provoke strong emotions in those around them; muting empathy and
reaping the benefits of doing so; and projecting and maintaining the
illusion of free will: that others’ decisions and actions are wholly and
organically their idea or choice without any subtle guidance or
influence by you.
Charisma is a great tool for connecting with people. Women want him
and men want to associate with the charismatic and charming man.
Psychopaths excel in creating and capitalizing on this dynamic. One
of the defining features of psychopathy in the DSM is surface level
charm which functions as both bait and bonding agent for the person
wielding it.
Provoking and managing the emotions of others is a powerful skill.
When on a date, have you ever sat across from a woman droning on
about herself and her problems? It's easy and almost natural to
check-out and stop paying attention to her, isn’t it? Conversely, it’s a
much more difficult (and, therefore, valuable!) skill to learn how to
feed those emotions and get her to associate those same strong
feelings with you. You have to become confident and competent
enough to take her on an emotional journey while also being a good
listener (or pretending to be).
Moving a woman’s emotional state up and down from highs to lows is
like feeding her chocolate. Pushing her buttons gives you the ability
to push and pull her feelings in a cyclical sort of tension and release.
The readiness and ability to identify and push them is where the
psychopath succeeds. Therapists and trauma specialists see this all
the time in battered women. They talk incessantly to professionals
and friends about their abusive boyfriends and husbands. They
describe their experiences in such great detail that you have to
assume they are re-living those strong emotions. Friends and
professionals all tell her that it’s abuse, that she deserves better, that
she needs to get away. She agrees with all of it just before going
back to the trough for another helping.
I’m not saying you need to be an abusive boyfriend, or even to play
one on TV. I am saying that the ability of the psychopath to stoke
strong emotions is attractive enough that you benefit from using it in
whatever manner you deem ethical. Remember, you and you alone
define and determine your morality, following legal lines or limits).
Women need approval from others, especially from men who they are
attracted to. It’s a component of a concept called hypergamy where a
woman is fiercely loyal to one man at a time, that man being whoever
she deems as her hypergamous best option. As that man, you need
to be able to provide your approval and also be willing to take it away
as her behavior or your purpose deems it necessary. She needs your
approval, and when you take it away, it generates strong feelings on
her part. It’s called push and pull for a reason. Don't be afraid to tell
her no or to stop doing something she likes for good reasons or for no
reason at all. Consider these real-life examples:
Recently, I had planned a date night with the wife. She came
downstairs wearing jeans and a blouse. She got very angry and
pissed when I told her she wasn't wearing that. She was even more
infuriated when I informed her to wear one of her black skirts with
heels. When she came back down she was stunning and giggly as I
carried her to the truck.
Another time, I was out buying groceries and decided to get her some
flowers, just because. When I got home and went inside, groceries in
hand, I gave a blast of shit to my then girlfriend. I called her lazy, told
her to get her ass out there and help me carry this stuff in. She was
almost in tears. When she got out to the car the trunk was open and
the only thing remaining was the bouquet of flowers. So she called
me an asshole and hugged me like I was headed off to war tomorrow.
Women love drama. Try starting a fight with your woman over a
perceived slight. Break up with her and ignore her then come back
and take her back into your bed. Each time you do this, it becomes a
little less more common, more normalized and, therefore, a little less
effective which is why you have to switch it up and move her back
and forth from experiencing good emotions to bad emotions. We
develop a tolerance for one or the other. Unpredictability is what
keeps it fresh.
Women will pat attention to their own levels of anxiety in a
relationship as a cue to the quality of the relationship. Give her
reasons to feel anxiety or be upset because you are an asshole. If
you are creating drama, then make sure the drama is centered on
yourself and not external sources. One way to do this is to start an
argument by accusing her of doing something ridiculous. That is
negative drama. You can also create positive drama by doing fun
activities together so that she has stories to take back to her friends.
Men love drama, too. One of the first bits of guidance I received when
I joined the Royal Canadian Navy was that I should deliberately get
into trouble. Trouble serious enough that I would get dragged in front
of the commanding officer, but not serious enough that I could end up
in a jail cell. Make it a story that gets you a stern talking to, but once
you leave the room the CO and his staff can have a good laugh about
it. When the time comes to talk about early promotions, the only thing
anyone remembers is your name. It’s because of source amnesia,
everyone remembers seeing your name all year, but no one
remember why.
Sure enough, every one of my friends who did this were promoted
ahead of us. One friend, Jason, was put in the San Diego county jail
because he was drunk and mooned a cop. I was reporting to him a
year later.
Finally, one trait of the psychopathic personality that it is particularly
advantageous to have in your toolbox is lack of empathy. It’s perfect
for those times you need to choose to not give a fuck. It’s also your
best defense against codependency. If you have any experience al all
in the dating world, you should already know that women are never
sexually attracted to men who are too invested in receiving their
approval. If you treat a woman like a celebrity, she’ll treat you like a
fan. A few paragraphs back I pointed out that a woman needs
approval from her man. How can she get approval from someone
who is all wrapped up in seeking hers?
Your ability to switch off (or ignore) your emotional responses to her
also creates anxiety in her. During fights, especially if she is in the
wrong, she will tend to prod and poke to get a reaction from you.
Sometimes it’s because she feels better when she messes up and it
makes you mad because then she can mentally and emotionally try
to switch the focus away from her bad behavior and onto your
response. It’s like a Catholic going to confession. Sometimes it’s
about avoiding guilt or shame. By making you mad, she now has
something to work with besides her own behavior and subsequent
guilt. Now it’s not about what she did but about your anger. Playing
your cards close to your chest by giving a steady, oak-like response
avoids all that, gives her nothing to work with, no way to shift focus,
and allows you to act, unimpeded, in your own best interest.
Most of us are not psychopaths. We feel emotions and have a
conscience. This is why it’s important to learn how to
compartmentalize emotions, important to be seen as strong and
confident men who are the oak in our relationships with others.
Women experience constant ups and downs. Neurotic coworkers and
supervisors do, too. They all want someone to crash against to
anchor their inner selves. Neurotic men are not attractive to anyone.
No one wants to see you complain about their complaining. No one
cares about your problems. By playing to their fantasies, you play to
your strengths.
The psychopath is an expert at controlling people. Free will is not as
free as you think, nor as honorable as you hope. The psychopath can
exploit your free will by being the only person who offers you choices.
This is why people often see journalists and politicians as
psychopathic: they frame people’s choices inside a specific overton
window, a collection of ideas a particular group of people is willing to
consider or accept. It turns out you don’t have to tell people what to
do. You only have to limit their options and make your option look
better.
We often characterize people who do this as control freaks, and there
is a reason why it works so well. It forces us to choose only from
those choices presented to us such that we are then incapable of
choosing any options not in that set. Look back to my previous
example of a battered wife. She could easily find another man, but
she doesn’t. Due to the sunk-cost fallacy where people are unwilling
to abandon their course of action because of their ongoing
investment in it, her addiction to strong emotions is one that she is
not willing to walk away.
In summary, these emulated psychopathic traits constitute behaviors
that people tend to criticize and look down upon. Yet, they work, and
work well as tools to help you get what you want, and are only
“harmful” if they are used to harm.
Knowing this, as well as the stigma and shame often heaped by
society on people who deliberately and assertively use these
techniques, there is only one question you have to ask yourself when
realizing that your choice is between doing everything you can to get
what you want, or leaving it to chance: How badly do I want what I
want?
How Can you Go Against your Instincts?
Psychopathy is a dark triad trait. Research has come out
demonstrating that women find it attractive, and that people who have
it are either born with it or develop it through psychophysical or
physical trauma. It cannot be learned. Psychopaths can be functional
psychopaths and become elite performers as corporate titans, special
forces operators, or surgeons. They can also be non-functional and
become serial killers. So the question for us and our purpose ends up
being, if it’s not something one can learn, what use is it for us to even
talk about?
The answer is killology. Samuel Lyman Atwood Marshall, a World
War I veteran turned military affairs journalist and researcher, did a
study on soldiers during the second world war and found that the ratio
of rounds fired versus hits was extremely low. Very few soldiers were
shooting with the intention of hitting their targets. It turns out human
beings have a natural revulsion against killing other human beings
without an immediate “life or death” decision forced upon them. Some
soldiers, however, did not have the same aversion, and we began
studying the differences between these groups, which led to a greater
understanding of psychopathy.
From the military’s perspective they had a problem. How could they
more effectively project force when they didn’t have enough
psychopaths to recruit? They discovered that while you cannot teach
people to be psychopaths, you can train them to circumvent the nonaggressive, civilian part of their brains. Soldiers once practiced
shooting against targets with circular bullseyes. Then, the military
began using targets with dark silhouettes, and rifles were developed
to have an effective maximum range where people would resemble
those featureless targets. The intended result was that in a time of
war, soldiers wouldn’t connect that silhouette at one hundred yards
with a human being, but instead with the visual and muscle memory
of shooting at faceless silhouettes on a rifle range. While I am
oversimplifying the actual process used by the military, it did work.
Military effectiveness through force projection increased substantially.
During the Iraq war, the UK conducted a study to find out why there
was such a high prevalence of PTSD among returning soldiers. It
turned out that due a weird manifestation of Münchhausen
Syndrome, returning soldiers were psychologically meeting
expectations that they manifested symptoms of PTSD based on the
assumptions of those monitoring them. While I am again simplifying it
here, what they found was that by assuming those soldiers would
exhibit symptoms of PTSD, and treating those soldiers as though
they were suffering from PTSD, the soldiers were subtly and
unintentionally convinced that they had PTSD. They were given
professional help and easy access to drugs to manage the presumed
condition.
So why are these two examples, one of men learning to kill better,
and one of men being manipulated into developing PTSD in a book
about frame? Because both examples demonstrate how malleable
and impressionable human beings are under the right circumstances.
How manipulable. While psychopathy itself can’t be taught, some of
the same techniques and behaviors can be, with similar results.
Think about it. In our personal lives, when under stress we tend to
default to our instincts, trained and untrained, rather than conform to
ideals and abstractions. If you have anxiety approaching women out
of a subconscious fear of rejection, you can desensitize yourself by
practicing canned routines, or by just asking her for the time while
you adjust to the situation. Eventually, you can learn to systematize
how you walk up to a girl, say hello, develop rapport, escalate
sexually, and, eventually, to go back to your place and sleep together.
What you have actually done is taught yourself how to bypass your
fear of rejection (your dominant overview of the situation) by breaking
down the interaction as a process to be learned, a series of steps. By
focusing on executing each step, the fear becomes less relevant It
becomes manageable to the point that you don’t really see yourself
being rejected. All you see is the silhouette.
You also learn to recognize that when your peers apply pressure, it
can make you buy into their narratives. Understanding that just
because everyone around you is calling you a “misogynist”, for
example, that doesn’t mean you are one, but your brain is hardwired
to meet those expectations, and will if you’re not cognizant of what’s
happening. These principles are not relevant only in regards to sexual
dynamics, either. The same processes occur in politics, in feminism,
and in any social construct large enough to contain competing
individuals or factions. Just as those soldiers in the aforementioned
UK study were convinced they had PTSD by those who expected
them to have it, men today are constantly bombarded with messaging
by factions insisting that toxic masculinity is a problem they must
address. Of course, those men who rebel against these
manipulations and false characterizations end up being labeled and
criticized as the very embodiment of “toxic masculinity”.
It’s not that you’re actually toxic, gents. It’s that so many of you allow
others to define and contextualize you as their villains, their
boogeymen. But if you develop your own frame, you can avoid
operating within theirs. In a crisis, whether a crisis of masculinity or
identity, you must teach yourself to not rise to the ideals and
standards of others, but to default to your own training, your own
frame.
Your Virtue is a Lie
I was, at one time, an instructor at the Naval Fleet School when an
incident occurred. A group of young trainees went out camping,
smoked weed, and got caught. Over the next year, everyone received
a good lesson in How virtue without options is worthless. In other
words, your virtue is a lie.
There were five guys in this group. Four were worthless. That they
gave the organization a reason to kick them out was a gift to their
future shipmates. It was also something of a statistical miracle
because it is virtually impossible to get fired from the military. Gross
incompetence? Massive screw ups? No worries. All that anyone has
to do is show up on time. There will always be another plow horse
there to pick up the slack.
Drugs and sexual assault are the only things that fast track military
personnel to civilian life. I remember this young French kid.
“Frenchie” had a lot of potential. He grabbed onto the ideas of
honesty, integrity, and fidelity. Those values were drilled into
everyone’s head from the moment they signed allegiance to the
queen. The narrative they feed you from day one is the lie that all
men want to believe:
Mistakes will be made, just fess up, do your time, and walk with your
head held high.
Frenchie did just this when he and the other four were caught. He
was honest and open. He kept his head held high. He was the only
one of them who never cried during his interrogation. This is actually
impressive. Most of the disciplinary process in the military is
psychological and highly adversarial. We call it military theater. Grown
men are systematically broken down. It rattles you to see a man cry
in front of you, though you still play your part. When I was taught
about this from my senior instructor, it was crazy how casually he
delivered it: Have him wait outside your office for five minutes at
attention before you bring him in. Don’t ask him if he’s OK. Push the
Kleenex box towards him but don’t take one out. Pause until he gets
his composure together. Do not let him leave the room.
Some men have trouble unwinding after doing this and need time
before going home to their loved ones. Even being a part of the
queen’s force of good takes a toll. Some of us had secondary duties
at cells (think of it as “prison lite” for people who only committed
summary offenses), and we needed that transition time to switch back
into a more normal and social mindset.
Frenchie got the respect of his peers for handling himself well. He got
it all the way up to the commanding officer. I was his escort to cells. I
call it prison lite, but it’s still twice as bad as anything you can think of.
I felt for Frenchie, got him a Redbull and a few cigarettes to calm his
nerves. I took our time getting there and we just talked. He got all the
little comforts because he followed the script, he did the right thing,
and he was virtuous, so he got every consideration to help him keep
his dignity and humanity.
Frenchie did his time like a good virtuous sailor. As I said earlier, this
is one of the things that will get you the boot. However, military law
has a loophole. The Commanding Officer has a great deal of leeway
in enforcement. This is called “operational requirements.” I had to
quickly learn to become a paralegal to help prepare Frenchie's case.
My boss secured Frenchie a lawyer for the court martial. The
commanding officer gave a formal intention to retain member, or to
keep him in the forces and make an operational defense policy
exception. He vouched for Frenchie who had done everything by the
book: French had been forthright, honest, took his punishment, never
once did anything that wasn't the paragon of military virtue.
None of that mattered.
Frenchie was released nine months later. That discharge prevented
him from ever entering a government job for the rest of his life, from
ever getting a security clearance or even working in a bank. I kept
Frenchie's file in my office. I used to bring it out during the first day of
a new class. I told the students that if they gave me one hundred
percent, I would go to bat for them one hundred percent.
Everyone bought the lie, me included. In reality, if you screwed up, it
would have all be used against you. After all, what did Frenchie get
for his virtue? A small folder and economic hamstringing, and a
lesson for me: Be the better plow horse for your better plow horses.
Play your part in the theater. Frenchie had the respect of a group that
he will never be allowed to capitalize on. How is that for a reward?
For his year of living virtuously, he received a gift that he can never
open. No good deed goes unpunished.
Years later, when my unit attempted to weaponize the military legal
system against me, the first six months I never knew why. It was
Kafkaesque in that my office was taped with police tape and I was
shipped off to a work camp to shovel gravel. The only thing people
would do is look at me like I had raped their family. It was like that
moment where I was taught how to make someone cry in my office,
taken to the extreme.
I had finally gotten in front of the MP’s for an interview. I never forgot
about Frenchie. While he was honorable and proud, I instead said
nothing. I recorded my interview with the MP’s, and listened back to it
later. They asked me if I wanted to admit anything I had done. It turns
out they didn’t have anything, and expected my sense of duty and
honor to take over. My response:
“I’m not here to do your fucking job for you.”
They tried everything to appeal to my sense of honor, empathy, and
fair play. They tried to convince me by promising to reduce the
severity of the accusations against me to warrant a summary trial. I
would get time served and go back to work. Instead, I escalated to a
full court martial in the capital. Instead of being the good virtuous
soldier, I forced them to either put me into military prison for two years
or to admit this was all for nothing.
I received two letters fourteen months into my personal hell. The first
one was from the head JAG dropping everything. The second was
from my commanding officer, admitting he hated me, but that he
needed me at work because the unit was falling apart. I was still fresh
in my anger phase and I framed them both and had them in my office
for the next year while I planned my release from the military on my
terms, not theirs.
A year later I was working in Toronto in a nice corporate job earning a
six figure salary wearing my suit in the financial district of Canada.
Type 3: Narcissism
Narcissism isn’t a a mental disorder that is exceedingly rare in the
population. It’s a trait that exists in every person, but predominantly in
men. In fact, narcissism is the male condition. The female condition is
borderline personality. Classically, a narcissist is a person with a need
to be the main actor in his one-man play. He does this by creating an
identity (in other words, he makes one up) and requires everyone
around him to reinforce it. This is called narcissistic fuel. If someone
rejects the identity (not dislike, but disregard), it provokes a response
called narcissistic rage. This isn’t anger. This is more limbic and lacks
the social aspects of anger. Because this disorder exists as a trait we
all possess, it is something we can deliberately tap into for our own
benefit. In other words, narcissism provides some very desirable
traits that we can identify, understand, take control of, and use for our
own purposes.
What you’ll find is that narcissism gets a bad rap in the same way
masculinity does in today’s world. But look at it this way: If narcissism
is masculinity, narcissistic personality disorder is masculinity dialed up
to 12. In the section on mental models, I wrote about the eye, liver,
and the lack of a dinosaur. In this case, narcissism is medically
defined as:
♦ Superiority Complex
♦ Need to associate with gifted and unique people
♦ Obsessed with success, beauty and power
♦ Use others to fulfill own goals
♦ Arrogance
♦ High projection of self-esteem and confidence
♦ Demands special treatment
While excessive amounts of these traits are counter-productive to
a man who is developing his frame, healthy levels of them are
identical to the characteristics of a high value man. The superiority
complex in particular is a useful tool for men.
As a man, it’s normal for you to have an inner need or desire to be
better than the next person, to compete. These days, a common
response to someone admitting such a drive would be to shame it, to
call it a defense mechanism like little man syndrome or small dick
energy, but this competitive drive is much more than that. The
attractive part of the trait is that it drives you to achieve something, to
become the best in a specific area in which you’ve been working.
This ties into your frame because it builds both competence and
confidence.
Men and women aren’t the same, and the way in which each gender
approaches confidence based on their own value clearly illustrates
this difference. Women are just assumed by society to possess
intrinsic value. They literally make new humans. As such, a woman’s
self-confidence is realized simply from believing in her innate value
and accepting reinforcement by her social circle in particular and
society in general. For men the situation is much different. We are
what we do, have done, and are capable of. We derive confidence by
creating and proving our value when we set our minds and actions to
a task and succeed, thereby proving our capability, which increases
our desire to go achieve more, and greater, things. This feedback
loop is how men gain confidence, and is a good thing, necessary for
a man’s positive self-image. The current negative associations with
men conquering and achieving through direct, sometimes aggressive
action tend to be pushed by the mental health industry which views
such behavior from a feminine perspective. This perspective
necessarily drives them to pay therapeutic lip service to men’s egos
by praising them for demonstrating feminine characteristics while
overtly or covertly shaming men who work toward gaining
competence using masculine traits.
Lifting weights, for example, leads men to naturally develop a
superiority complex. Men who have never lifted weights and who
don’t possess a muscular physique naturally compare themselves to
others at the gym when getting started and typically develop a bit of
an inferiority complex at first. The guy in the mirror getting the pump
from twenty-five pound barbells on his eighth set knows what
narcissism is. He embodies it! As we lift regularly and increase our
squat weight from forty-five pounds to three hundred, to we begin to
feel much better and stronger than others. As we walk around the
workplace, we start noticing that other men are weaker and in far
worse shape than ourselves.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with your noting your superior
attributes and skills, but it can be taken too far if you lose perspective.
An unhealthy version of this sort of confidence is what’s known as
invisible lat syndrome. If you’ve ever seen a man walking around like
he’s carrying two invisible paint cans, you know the type. This is what
marks the line between unhealthy narcissism and healthy narcissism:
whether the identity was invented or earned and whether narcissistic
fuel is required or irrelevant to the identity.
Most people don’t try to accomplish much of anything. That general,
widespread lack of ambition is what allows motivated men who do the
work to quickly rise into the top twenty percent of their field or
endeavors. This “twenty percent rule” is called the Pareto Principle,
and it reveals where people often miss the mark regarding selfimprovement. Self-improvement is not about some arbitrary set of
tasks that offer confidence to men. It’s about men attempting things
outside of their comfort zones, achieving a high level of competency
in them, and leveraging the confidence gained from that into other
things. These are the beneficial and natural results of our narcissism,
but unlike those who actually have narcissistic personality disorder,
the competencies and growth are real and demonstrable, not
imagined.
Confidence is your self-assured expectation of success and the
behaviors that accompany it. This makes men attractive. It’s common
for people to believe that you either have it or you don’t, that you’re
born with it or you’re not, but this is simply not true. Confidence is a
learned trait, and the earlier you learn it, the sooner your confidence
develops. Naturals aren’t natural; they were just early.
This is why men need to “fake it until they make it.” If you are
spinning plates (casually dating multiple women at the same time)
you already understand how confidence is important in drawing
people to you. If you don’t, then you may recall your female friends
being extra affectionate towards you the minute you got a girlfriend.
Success begets success.
There is a book that I suggest about assertiveness by author
Manuel Smith called When I Say No I Feel Guilty, and it has a nice
quote on how people only have so many No’s:
One step towards building confidence is to start training on overcoming rejection.
By doing so, you’ll realize that someone will say “no” to you only so many times. You
can then begin to use your confidence to manipulate others into accomplishing things
that you want.
Most people lack confidence, women especially, so anyone
outwardly displaying unflappable confidence will tend to cause those
lacking confidence to follow their lead. This is because it puts the
onus of success or failure onto someone other than themselves, onto
the confident person. Both men and women find this attractive.
Everything is judged by its appearance; what is unseen counts for nothing.
Use the wisdom, knowledge, and legwork of other people to further your own
cause.
Robert Greene, Laws of power #6 and #7
Men came to our space on the internet not just to learn about women,
but also about many pragmatic topics such as career guidance and
help getting promotions or pay raises. Our answer is always the
same. You have to be seen working on the big important projects so
that you can manage the narrative.
Managers do not care about their work horses. That might not be a
good thing, but all managers tend to view work horses the same way.
The person who does the “eight and skate” and completes all of the
boring work everyday is the most secure employee in that office, but it
comes at a price. They will be overlooked for everything of
importance to their career.
If they get frustrated and turn in their notice, only then might they be
offered something better, something out of the ordinary. The great
employees are rewarded more often because they can and will leave
if not compensated at a higher level than the average employee. The
work horse, however, is tied to his plow.
This is one very important benefit of being obsessed with attaining
power. The narcissist wants people to see him, wants special
treatment. You need to possess that same desire (or fake it) along
with the will to go out into the world and take what you want. Be
willing to earn it, and earn it smartly:
♦ Ask people for favors with no intention of returning the favor.
♦ Return the favor if it is advantageous to you.
♦ Share credit when you can. If it goes sideways, others can take
the hit for you.
♦ Play people against one another to suit your interests.
♦ Look out only for yourself, and your direct superior.
♦ Some colleagues are disposable. They are your base of power.
♦ Use others as scapegoats to keep your hands clean.
♦ When you do something important, make sure it is seen by
your superiors.
♦ When you fuck up, make sure your superiors don't know it.
♦ Only closely associate with other high powered colleagues.
When it comes to applying these principles to women, some
things hold true more than others. This reminds me of you the adage,
"Be mean, it keeps her keen." For contrast, here is what an unhealthy
narcissist in a relationship is going to do:
1 Idealize
2 Devalue
3 Repeat
4 Discard
Narcissists are masters at creating a sense of instant connection
with people. They make people feel unique and wonderful, put them
on pedestals, and shower them with attention. Whether professional,
personal, romantic, those connections are always fast and deep. The
narcissist is deliberately creating that experience, and so captivates
the woman that she would never even think about leaving him.
The unhealthy narcissist then shifts from his pathological pulling
behavior to devaluation: passive aggressiveness, backhanded
compliments, excuses, criticism, stonewalling, mental games, nowin
situations, ridicule, etc. The funny thing is, later in this book, we talk
about nice guy behaviors and how to overcome them: they read
almost identically to women in narcissistic relationships during the
devaluation stage.
This cycle repeats. The old adage, Beat her one day then buy flowers
the next, while crude, is apt. This cycle of intermittent rewards causes
the woman to develop a sort of addiction to the narcissist. Finally,
when the narcissist stops getting anything back of value from her, no
more narcissistic fuel, he ends things swiftly and brutally.
The men in those relationships take this way too far. We all hear the
stories of the psychological damage of women who fall for men like
this. They can’t help it, they say. “The heart want what it wants.” A
man with frame can dial these behaviors to a more reasonable level.
It’s called, Being attractive, not pathologically attractive.
When was the last time you had a woman come out of her dressing
room to hear you ask, "Is that what you’re wearing tonight?" Probably
never, right? Are you afraid she will get mad at you and hurt your
feelings? When you do this and she asks what's wrong with the outfit,
simply tell her it looks plain. No one wants to be a basic bitch. Then,
when she goes back and comes out looking stunning, reward her in
your own way. Notice how her face lights up and she becomes happy.
You just manipulated her, and she is happier for it. Funny how it
works like that.
That’s a basic and simple example of how to use narcissistic
techniques. The narcissist’s ability to push and pull is pathological,
but the basic behavioral principle at work is sound. Narcissistic
tendencies are self-centered without regard for others. The
implication is for you to put yourself first in your life, even to the
detriment of others. There is no such thing as brotherhood in this life.
You do you.
You Don’t Want to be Don Draper
So why is narcissism attractive at all?
It's because of Jon Hamm. If you have been living under a rock or are
less than forty years old, there's a television series out there called
Mad Men which starred Mr. Hamm. The protagonist is a narcissist
named Don Draper (it’s not my opinion, he was written this way). He
is confident, attractive, and charming. The girls want him and the
guys want to be him.
The only problem is, he isn't Don Draper. He’s Dick Whitman. Dick is
an insecure bastard child raised in a whorehouse and his crippling
insecurity seeks love to soothe his ego. He doesn't know how to get it
himself, so he adopts a narcissistic fantasy by assuming the identity
of his former commanding officer who was killed in Korea, Don
Draper.
Don was a WASP and a suave, charismatic man of mystery. Men
swoon over him as with many fictional characters. James Bond, for
example. Most men by default tend to think good game mirrors the
behavior of idealized fictional characters like Don Draper, but they are
missing the point by emulating his unhealthy narcissism. Don isn't the
seducer in this story. He’s the cautionary tale. He invented his identity
and requires everyone around him to fuel it. What happens when the
girls on the show cease to buy into it? He breaks down into a
blubbering mess. Dick Whitman comes out and he cries. Now, this is
a television show, so this example is merely illustrative of the
difference between the actual person and the image. In real life, Dick
would have likely started throwing punches the moment anyone
rejected his persona. If you’re older, the Talented Mr. Ripley is
another great example from fiction.
A current example you might witness in real life are the young
traditional conservatives who aspire to become the middle class
suburban man of the 1950s as painted by Norman Rockwell in a
cigarette ad. These men believe they can live as though women are
still limited by the options open to them in the fifties. So if one of their
wives decides she is a person in her own life story as opposed to an
accessory in his, the husband will tend to either lash out or turn his
rage inward. There are many stories of good, handsome, Christian,
married men turning into the worst degenerates as part of a weird
narcissistic rage of self-loathing. We call them hypocrites, but what
they actually are is psychologically damaged.
The reason I bring up Don Draper is because there is a real lesson
here. The man with game is Jon Hamm. He's an actor, playing a
character. He knows he's playing a character, and the audience
knows he is playing a character, but everyone plays along anyway.
It’s called Kayfabe, theater being presented as if it were real and the
audience suspending disbelief. Acting isn’t a fantasy. It’s a job. You
can be a good actor, and being a good actor builds your confidence.
The question then isn’t, “Why are women attracted to narcissism?”
but, “How can narcissism be sustainable?”
The answer is authenticity.
Women read romance novels in the same way men watch Rambo III.
Womens’ need to live inside of a seduction story is real. Yes, they
know Fifty Shades of Grey is madeup by a sexually frustrated soccer
mom and they don't care. You know Rambo didn't free Afghanistan
from the Russians, but you don't care, either. They know Mad Men
isn't real, but they still want to fuck Jon Hamm (who is real).
The difference is, and this is the crux, when someone disregards
Jon’s narrative in real life and calls out Don Draper as a fraud, he
doesn't experience rage in the same way Dick Whitman does. Jon
looks confused at the situation:
"You do know this is a character I play on a TV show, right?"
What did I mean when I said authenticity is what makes narcissism
attractive? Authentic people are honest about their dishonesty. They
think of others as human beings and not archetypes or set pieces in
their one-man play. They recognize that other humans have their own
desires, their own wishes, and their own stories. Authentic men, men
with game, make the woman a co-writer in the narrative, not a set
piece. They don’t need her to fuel their identity. They’ve already built
it, and it’s on a solid foundation. This pillar in an authentic man’s
frame is stable.
Why would you want to be honest with a woman? Narcissists are
attractive even as they love bomb and ultimately devalue with lies, yet
women seem to love it anyway. So why not just go with it? The case
for honesty is not because Jesus wants you to, and it’s not because
soccer moms watching Dr. Phil will nod their head and approve of
your being a nice man. It’s because you have nothing to hide from
her and you don’t require her judgment. If you don’t want her to know
something, then it’s none of her business and you don’t tell her. A lie
implies that her judgment is important. That lie, therefore, indicates
lack of frame on your part.
For a healthy narcissist, no one’s judgment is important because
there is no fantasy to reinforce. The manipulative narcissistic fantasy
is not only damaging, but it’s failure reinforced. If a woman loves a
man for his fantasy, he attributes it to her being too stupid to know the
real him and takes it as rejection. This is how the cycle repeats: Love
bomb her; receive love in return; reject her love for its dishonesty;
and repeat.
For the unhealthy narcissist, everything is about them except blame.
Unhealthy narcissism is the antithesis of frame.
Men and Women Aren’t Equal
Men and women aren’t the same, but they are complementary.
Originally, this was going to be a single book about men in struggling
marriages, but it has since become two books. They are
interconnected topics since our relationships can both help us be at
our best and reveal the worst we have to offer. It’s much more difficult
for a man to develop a strong frame while he is single because he
never truly has his frame tested. It’s very easy to hold an unflappable
worldview when you don’t have a mate with her own worldview
butting-in and challenging yours.
Interactions are always about a test of frame. In every interaction,
you’re in someone’s frame, either yours or someone else’s. If you
don’t think this is the case, then you’re in their frame. When you listen
to the responses of people who are first exposed to the idea of frame,
they treat it like some video game life bar. They say things like this:
“I tried to hold frame but she whittled it down and then I lost it!”
Frame isn’t something you have. It’s who you are. There’s something
about having a walking, talking shit test coming at you with emotions
and blather that tests a man’s frame like nothing else. Partially, it’s
because men don’t embrace conflict anymore, so this is as close as
most men will get to seeing a war. It’s partially because we are egoinvested in women whether we admit it or not. We are hardwired to
desire, to protect, to value women. If we weren’t, we wouldn’t be here
today. Which is why you have to be the oak.
What is the oak? The oak is a concept that teaches you that the way
you develop frame is in response to the world testing your frame. I
can explain it better with an analogy:
The Oak
The University of Arizona built a biosphere to learn about how living systems work.
The plan was to study ecosystems in isolation and learn how to modify them to suit our
needs. What we actually learned was far better.
We learned that trees need wind.
Trees would grow in the biosphere faster than they grew in the wild. It sounded
like a great thing, we could learn how to grow wood faster and prevent deforestation
and fix the planet. Those same trees had one issue though, the wood was horrible.
They fell down more frequently than wild trees, the lumber wasn’t as useful for
carpentry, they were just large, fragile trees.
It turns out that trees growing in the wild are constantly exposed to wind. The wind
constantly tries to push the trees over. The trees respond by growing something called
“reaction wood.” The cellulose and lignin content in the wood is different, stronger, and
more resilient in trees exposed to wind. Developing reaction wood takes energy away
from the tree that it would have used to grow faster and taller.
That resilience had additional benefits. The trees were able to contort their shape
to better take advantage of rough terrain, or odd angles to achieve maximum sunlight.
The biosphere trees couldn’t do that. Likewise, when dealing with women, think of
them as the wind, and think of yourself as the oak. They are emotional, flippant, shortsighted, fickle creatures. They love you and only want whats best for you. They can’t
imagine hurting you, and would never do that, until they would, and when they do, it’s
your fault.
But you are the oak.
Every fight, every emotional outburst, every time she cried, you grew resilient.
Every new girl you brought home and every new girl who rejected you was like that
storm trying to push you over. Each time you grew slightly more resilient. Eventually
you became the mighty oak.
Now, you’re in a relationship, and when that wind decides to blow, it might ruffle
your leaves a bit. You might even sway, but you don’t fall over, you don’t buckle, and
you aren’t bothered. The wind can’t be anything but the wind. You can take it, and you
never budge from where you laid roots.
Be the oak.
Do I think that it’s possible to have a strong frame without female
influence? No. I don’t think you have to get married and have a wife
and a family and a white picket fence with 2.2 kids and 1.8 dogs with
a two car garage to have frame, but you do need a substantial string
of successful responses to having your frame tested by women over
a length of time to build that resiliency.
So while you may be able to develop useful mental models and a
strong world view or deep narrative, and maybe you can be
completely unflappable in your frame, without the resistance training
that is a result of successfully responding to repeated challenges by
women, you’re still not an oak, you’re granite. Unlike the oak, granite
doesn’t move when it’s tested. Without successfully dealing with
women, you become stubborn, not strong, and nothing affects you.
Unlike the oak, everything bounces off of you because you’re not
living life. You’re trying to remain outside of it.
And over time, things will slowly wear you down. It might take a while,
but guys who tried to hold frame only to have it “whittled down” before
losing it altogether never built proper frame to begin with. Simply put,
if no one wants to sleep with you, you’ll always think of your frame as
a life bar to be protected instead of as who you actually are.
The "Dancing Monkey" Attraction Programme
Men today have neither frame nor an independent concept of self.
They are afraid of asserting themselves or challenging their wives.
Out of shear desperation they find our self-help community, develop
new hope, and search frantically for things they can do right. Lifting,
STFU, and reading about our mental models are essential. Most get
the message and do all three. Beyond these basics, though, comes a
large and bewildering array of sometimes contradictory
recommendations for becoming attractive, owning your shit, building
frame, and learning to lead.
Having no clue as to what frame is certainly doesn’t help men with no
goals or missions in life beyond pleasing someone (boss, wife, etc.).
In effect, they have nothing but a goal of making their wives happy in
order to fulfill covert contracts hoping it will get them laid. These guys
latch onto any Kisby ring to try and stay afloat long enough to make a
new and improved covert contract:
"All I have to do is become attractive, and my wife will want to fuck
me again!"
"All I have to do is hold these women accountable, and I will find a
woman who will love me forever!"
So they make a road map that includes the following:
♦ Lose the fat and get abs
♦ Lift weights and become ripped
♦ Dress better
♦ Flirt with women
♦ Initiate sex more frequently
♦ Have outcome independence and don’t be butthurt
♦ Act more sexually dominant
♦ Become more fun
♦ STFU about my emotions
These new men gaslight themselves by looking at this laundry list
of mental models and tools like it’s an Alpha Male™ checklist, like
commandments in some new secular bible. What usually happens is
after working on their dancing monkey attraction improvement
program for around two years (I don’t know why, but it’s always two
years), they run into a wall.
They did the work and their wives still won’t sleep with them, or they
did the work and they are not swimming in poon behind the wheel of
their new Bugatti. Over the last decade, I’ve seen dozens of men
flaming out, blaming everyone else for not fulfilling their covert
contracts, their fantasies of a dog doing tricks for treats.
What went wrong? In a word, pandering. They weren’t men
developing their own mental points of origin, building a strong frame,
and going after what they want in life. They were dancing monkies
trying to entertain the princess while hoping for some sex for their
performance. Attraction is necessary, but so is respect. Respect
comes from frame, leadership, a personal mission, and a willingness
to challenge and stand up to anyone attempting to manipulate you
without providing value in return.
One of my favorite authors in the space, a man who went by the pen
name “Roissy”, put it this way:
You got the short end of the stick. Your job is to sharpen that
sombitch to a fine point and stab the heart of anyone who gets in your
way.
Don't waste your time sprinkling Alpha™ on your paint by number
dancing monkey attraction improvement program that avoids the
challenging parts of frame. It will fail and you will waste years
pretending it didn’t.
The Hamster
The Hamster is a mental model describing a woman’s thought
process. Their emotions drive their processing of the world, and, like
a hamster spinning in a wheel, it can sometimes create a feedback
loop of anxiety and nonsense. This is the Hamster Wheel.
You know what it means to reduce your woman’s relationship anxiety.
She doesn’t. You have to be covert. You can’t just tell her to calm
down, and if you don’t believe me, try it. Not in the History of Ever has
it achieved calm.
Wives who are on the wheel ask all sorts of probing questions when
they notice you changing your behavior and building value and
developing a strong frame:
“Are you having an affair?”
“You feel distant”
“Are you mad at me?”
And guys usually respond with DEER (Defend, Excuse, Explain,
Rationalize). DEER is a psychological concept describing people
responding to overt challenges by being submissive and cooperative.
Don’t do this. What you’re doing by responding this way is failing
someone who wants you to demonstrate higher status by providing
them comfort with your strength. So you fail to provide them comfort
thereby demonstrating that you do not have higher value and are just
as weak as they are. This builds resentment and pushes them into an
adversarial response in return.
Women feel, then process verbally. They do this because they
evolved to be cooperative. They base their feelings on what’s
acceptable to the group. That’s why modern psychiatry seems to
cater to women more than men. Talking through your feelings is how
women process emotional responses. The hamster is a condition
where a woman doesn’t have social groups available to listen as she
processes something (yet, or at all), so she babbles instead.
The reason men with strong frame are so attractive to women is that
they provide a narrative that leads women off the hamster wheel.
Your mental models are not just beneficial for you, but beneficial for
the people you value in your life. When she has a conflict with a
friend and is freaking out over it, some calm words or quiet strength
that reassures her can give her hamster a way to escape.
You don’t have to do this, however. Part of having frame is realizing
that you don’t need to hang onto dead weight. There are men in
abysmal relationships who learn to develop their own mental points of
origin and develop frame only to discover they were only in that
relationship because they had enabled shitty behavior by a horrible
person. They practice leading their women out of the hamster wheel
because it’s a skill set that must be learned with a sparring partner in
their house. Eventually, though, they come to the conclusion that they
are trying to resurrect something that’s already dead, so they move
on.
The takeaway from this mental model is in understanding how
women communicate differently from men. A woman’s words aren’t
meant to convey information, and by responding as if they were,
you’re missing the point. The words are a processing mechanism,
and once you understand that, you can look at these situations
without becoming angry, frustrated, or otherwise lose frame. Crazy is
many things, but it’s always committed to projecting its frame onto
others.
So for men who are developing frame, understanding that the
emotions of women are like the wind buffeting the oak tree is key. It
can make the leaves shake and the branches sway, but the roots
don’t move. Stoicism is popular these days, and it’s one aspect of
frame, but it’s not frame. Frame isn’t about being able to take a punch
from a crazy person and not flinch. Sometimes controlled anger is the
proper response. Since anger is a social emotion, you can use it to
signal when someone is crossing a boundary. However, women in
particular love to call bluffs, so it only works when you’re not bluffing.
Thats frame.
So is it better to use calm reassurance or controlled anger? Thats
where your own experience comes in. I can’t offer a list of situations
where one or the other work, no If X, Then Y. People have a lot of
variability because of how they were raised, their innate
characteristics, and their habits, so universal responses don’t work
when it comes too this.
A woman with an abused past responds better to anger than
assurances. This sounds horrible, and it is, but it’s not wrong.
Psychiatrists studied the effects of abuse on validation, and I can sum
it up with a single quote:
“When he yells at me at least I know he cares.”
That is an extreme example. A 10/10 psychologically damaged
person may find comfort in abuse, but a 5/10 level of this is closer to
normal than we might like to think. A father with a stern glare or a
husband slamming a door can be just as effective to someone with
healthier relationships in their past. The trick is not to be abusive but
to harness its latent, functional power by referencing it in a controlled
manner. Maybe your nature makes it too difficult for you to be that
guy, which is OK. Then your frame must be such that you refuse to
remain in those situations. You leave.
Frame isn’t about what you do. Frame is who you are.
Police and military use controlled anger as well, so the value goes far
beyond relationships. It’s called continuum of force, a strategy
involving several steps that escalate from no violence to deadly
violence. The methodology is to demonstrate one level above that of
the person you’re interacting with. As they go up, you go up. When
they go down, you go down. In a normal everyday social context,
you’re signaling to the person you’re with that it’s useless to fight with
you. Every time they escalate, you provide negative feedback, and
every time they de-escalate, you provide positive feedback.
Sometimes responding with anger at all means you’ve entered the
other person’s frame. A wife might behave hysterically because she’s
insecure about her relationship, but she might also just be bored and
looking for a fight. It surprises men to learn this, but women love
strong emotions regardless of whether they are negative or positive.
If every time a man’s wife gets on that hamster wheel and starts
cranking up the neuroticism he responds with controlled anger, then
he’s actually encouraging more of that behavior. He thinks he has
frame, but in reality he’s in her frame the whole time. What should
you do in these cases?
Nothing. Laugh off the neuroticism. Leave the room. Take the kids for
ice cream and leave her to her emotions. Pick fights over nothing
then let it go so she gets it out of her system. There is no one answer
that covers dealing with the hamster. Just remember to use these
tools and the mental models to anchor your decisions. Then you can
experiment, play around, have fun. Sometimes respond with
controlled anger and see how it plays out. Sometimes respond with
amused mastery or manufactured outrage and see how it plays out.
This is good for two reasons. First, you get an idea what kind of
person you have in front of you and how she responds. Sure, women
as a group are too different for you to be able to understand them all
using a simple set of techniques, but an individual woman is
predictable in her actions so long as you ignore her words.
Actions are always honest. Words are always dishonest.
Second, you’re becoming more fun and engaging on an emotional
level. Everyone likes to think they are purely rational and logical, but
no one truly is. The only differences are the things they are rational
and logical about. Similar to the other dark triad behaviors, emotional
variety is what makes the difference between a relationship of five
months that has already lost that spark and a marriage of twentythree years in which the wife still has tingles for her man.
If you’re thinking this sounds like too much work and this particular
juice isn’t worth the squeeze, I can only offer this: People are fickle,
emotional, and driven by their base emotions. You can either learn to
play this game, or deal with the psychological damage that comes
from being isolated. The juice may not be worth the squeeze, but no
juice at all makes Jack a dull boy.
The Medium is the Message
Very little of our communication is about the words we use and their
objective meanings. Most of it is nonverbal. It’s in our body language,
our tone, and the context of what we say. Men aren’t very good at
understanding the subtext, or the underlying meanings of nonverbal
communication. One mental model, The Medium is the Message,
helps to both understand the hypothetical imperatives in this book as
well as understand how women use language, or womanese.
Every conversation contains two channels of communication: the
content and the process. The content is the information in the words,
the objective meaning. It’s simple, direct, and easy to understand.
The process is the message conveyed by the medium of language,
the outcomes conveyed via both words and subtext.
Process communication plays a much larger than content
communication. While this book must convey information in the form
of content, the goal is to make you understand process
communication by using content communication.
Men have a difficult time generalizing or grasping abstractions. They
don’t tend to easily understand nuance or subtlety, and they lack a
sense of proportion or context. They receive content as literal
statements and either accept it as literal truth or reject it wholesale.
They are more interested in interjecting statements designed to
impress you with their intelligence than anything else. This does not
work in social settings.
In social settings there are words. Then there is the intent behind the
words. I cannot help you with the latter. I can only use the former to
show you how to get there yourself. Words manipulate, words jockey
for status, words lie.
To be masculine in a world that has neglected to guide you as you
develop means you must learn The Medium is the Message. If you
treat every conversation as if it’s a power struggle because you just
learned about the dark triad personality types, then you’re being
overly literal. If you read them and think they are tools of the devil,
then you have been listening to too many fire and brimstone
sermons. Either way, you’re not going to make it. Tools are amoral,
you bring your own morality.
If I told you the moon was made out of cheese, and you somehow
used that belief to consistently work out three days a week and
become the most attractive man ever, the message is clear:
conceptually, the moon is made out of cheese. Arguing with me about
whether the moon is actually made of Brie for not misses the point.
If you do not learn to use and understand process communication,
not only will women forever find you unattractive, but you won’t even
be able to understand how the medium of this book and the message
therein can address that. Think about the presentation. Think about
the process channel. Use your own brain.
You will never be free from the responsibility to think.
The next mental models give two conceptual frameworks for men to
internalize. First is the reason you can’t argue with the women in your
life while second is a framework you can use to practice process
communication by focusing on the open and closed types of
conversations.
Don’t Argue with Women
You argue with friends. You argue with your date, your girlfriend,
and your wife. But nothing ever changes, and you’ve argued yourself
out of sex at least once. The two most annoying statements I
encountered when dealing with men who absolutely could not keep
their stupid mouths shut were these:
1 I was on this date and arguing with this girl over how women
nowadays don’t know how to cook, and it went downhill from
there. Thank god, I dodged a bullet.
2 I came home after work and my wife was just livid. Every time
she started to yell I calmly asked her to calm down and it just
made things worse. Now I’m sleeping on the sofa and she’s
crying in the bedroom. What happened?
Most guys think about the content of the conversation: “If only I
could just explain things better, then she could come around to my
way of thinking, calm down and we can have a wonderful time.” You
may be expecting me to say that no one will ever change anyone’s
mind, that women are stupid, but you are smart, and that they are
emotional creatures so why waste your time? But the issue isn’t that
women are emotional, fickle, or whatever. The issue is more
fundamental than that.
Men and women talk past each other, not because they are having a
heated argument, but because they cannot even agree on what we
are arguing about. There is a clear disconnect, and it’s not that men
and women don’t want to argue. It’s that we fundamentally approach
the discussion with different assumptions and expect different
outcomes.
Men bring specific assumptions to their arguments. We think that
there is a single universal reality, and truth is what describes that
reality. The better a statement does this, the more true it is. It’s factual
objectivity.
We also believe that morality, or what is good and bad, is a matter of
opinion. Something can be good for me and bad for you, and vice
versa. All those moral systems we have and believe are what people
invented in order to convince a different group of people to join them.
It doesn’t matter whether something is good or evil. What matters is
what effect it has on others. It’s moral subjectivity.
If you’re having an argument, as a man you are trying to establish the
facts and correct information. You are trying to find out what’s true so
you can make decisions that make the outcomes beneficial for you
(both). You’re arguing over what is true and the argument is a
cooperative, yet adversarial, process between people with the shared
goal of sorting out a conflict and coming out of it with a better
absolute reality.
You may have strong opinions, but if you’re given better evidence
about truth, you turn on a dime and go with it. The only real
attachment here is to the truth. The argument isn’t about the people,
but about the ideas. So attacking someone, their character, or calling
them names isn’t important, or even relevant.
Women, on the other hand, bring much different assumptions to
arguments. They think that truth is subjective. What is true or not is
the culmination of someone’s personal experiences. This is why you
hear women talk about “my truth.” It’s pointless to argue about what is
true or not because she already knows what she feels. They are
factually subjective.
Women also believe that morality, or what is good and bad, is not up
for debate. There is exactly one set of moral laws which humans
have agreed upon over time on a pathway to perfection. People
aren’t good or evil based on what they do, but what they believe. This
is why you’re constantly being berated, not for being wrong, but for
your tone. Sure, people can believe in different moralities, but in her
mind all of those moralities ultimately place you on a scale from 1 to
100. They have moral objectivity.
When women argue with you, they are trying to establish who is
morally better, and what everyone else needs to do in order to keep
the peace and avoid conflict. They don’t argue about what is true, but
what is right. They treat the argument like a zero sum game where
two people are establishing status over the other person. They do this
so that the higher status person can establish the morality for
everyone else to follow. So unlike arguments among men, your
character is not only part of the discussion, it’s the entire point.
This is why all of those arguments end with you getting accused of
being a misogynist or an asshole. Women are hyper aware of their
self image. This is why they cannot imagine anything you can say
that doesn’t exist to judge her and potentially reduce her social
status. Not sure what this means. This is subconscious. We don’t
even know we are doing it, but we are. This is why women think the
men they argue with are mean assholes, and we consider the women
we argue with emotional and crazy.
So take this mental model and understand that arguing with a woman
is pointless. You think right and wrong are a matter of opinion but she
doesn’t care what the facts are. This not only applies to arguing with
women, but with a new breed of men as well: men who were raised to
be defective women. As far as argument goes, they are functionally
identical to women.
Playing Power Games: Status and Harmony
All economic models are wrong, some are useful
— George E. P. Box
Men don’t immediately understand what subtext is and why women
use it. Why does everything have to involve reading between the
lines and looking into what the other person meant? Can’t women just
say what they mean, and mean what they say?
They do. They just have different aims, is all. Language is a more
sophisticated tool than people give it credit for. Communication
involves the signal and the process, and part of understanding other
people means understanding which pathway they are using at any
given time. It sounds more confusing than it is because it takes longer
to explain than it does to use.
An easy way to start speaking subtext is to break down
communication into two paths and two axes: open and closed
communication with status and harmony. Open communication is
what you’re thinking of when you think of communication. Your words
have meaning, they are aiming to explain, articulate, or express
ideas. The words have no ulterior motive, no reading between the
lines. It’s clean and simple.
You use open communication when you’re at work, or when you’re
pulled over by the police, or when you’re in court. Formal social
situations don’t require you to suss out a hierarchy, so the only
purpose of communication then is to share information.
Closed communication is about many other things. Closed
communication establishes hierarchy, it displays social aptitude, and
separates friend from enemy. Women speak almost completely in
closed communication. From an evolutionary standpoint it makes
sense. They were never required an objective explanation of the
world because they didn’t go on on hunts or participate in other
dangerous activities where coordination was critically important. They
were in tight knit social groups instead. So where men required
language to coordinate hunts and fights, women required language to
ensure safety in the herd.
What does this have to do with frame? Frame tests tend to involve
communication. Every man has been in a situation where he knew
something was being said but didn’t know what it was, yet knew it
was at his expense. Maybe you’ve known someone who got lost in a
conversation and lashed out. Maybe you were the one who lashed
out. There is no greater loss of frame than having to resort to
violence. It means you’ve used up all your other tools and still failed.
Closed communication can be sorted along two axes. One axis is
status, or who the speaker considers above or below himself in
status. The other axis is harmony, or whether the speaker thinks the
listener is cooperative or adversarial. This creates four quadrants that
you can place any closed conversation. Examples:
Higher status, cooperative
Magnanimous, charming, playfully condescending, facetious or cocky
and funny. Signaling higher status involves a casual ease when
speaking to those you consider lower status. Since it’s also
cooperative, there’s no ill will towards them. An extreme example is
how you talk to a 4 year old trying to be serious. It’s more adorable
than anything.
Through a sexual dynamics lens, this is the best quadrant for a man
to be in. You have no problem with the woman you’re talking to and
find any attempts to commandeer the situation funny. The standard
quote on frame:
Anything outside your frame is either amusing, intriguing, or funny.
Dealing with women should resemble the way a mother talks to her
teenage kids. If she acts condescendingly towards you, and it doesn’t
appear she is doing it to show off to the friends around her, then
you’re probably in the friend zone. Don’t be offended. She just
doesn’t want you. Alternatively, it could be a fitness test where she
wants to see if you’ll accept her frame or impose your own. It’s
common for women to test frame when they are unsure of their
attraction to you. It’s a contest she wants to lose.
Lower status, cooperative
Submissive, accommodating, neurotic and pandering are all
cooperative lower status behaviors. Signaling an acceptance of one’s
lower status is driven by a need to impress or pander to those they
consider above them. For the fathers of daughters who read this, you
probably become aware of this when your little girl treats you like
you’re the greatest person in the world. For switched on men who are
good with women, this supplicating and admiring behavior is probably
what you’re used to getting from women, so you assume it’s the
norm.
Through a sexual dynamics lens, this is the ideal place for a woman
to be for you as a man if you want her as anything between a onenight stand and a wife. Talking about passing fitness tests and getting
lower status cooperative responses is a clinical and sterile way to
explain flirtation. She wants you, she likes you, she respects and
looks up to you, and wants to make you happy. Alternatively, loss
aversion often occurs in this quadrant. Loss aversion provokes
women who are worried about their man cheating on or leaving them
to make neurotic statements meant to test the man’s commitment.
She’s looking for assurances in his response.
Higher status, adversarial
Contempt, irritation, belittlement and cruelty are all signs that a
woman in an adversarial conversation considers herself higher status
than her man. Her signaling higher status while seeing her man as an
adversary or challenge is not a good sign.
From a sexual dynamics lens you’re most likely to see this when a
divorce is looming or when a spouse is cheating. In this example, the
wife thinks she can do better, and, in her eyes, she is. Therefore,
again, in her eyes, the man is not only worse, but also in the way.
This is as close as women get to a full on fist fight. She doesn’t love
you. She may not even like you, and she thinks it would be better for
her if you just went away.
The problem with mistaking closed conversations for open
conversations matters most in this quadrant. She may be looking for
attack points while posing as someone just asking questions. Many
fights start with, “Why would you say that?”
And the other person, oblivious to the dynamic, starts explaining
themselves only to eat a punch. I was raised in a small rural town,
and watched it happen too often to count.
Lower status, adversarial
Trolling, insolence, bratty behavior, lashing out, and sabotage are all
signs of a lower status person who is not on your side. The
adversarial tone in this case it usually means the woman perceives
herself stuck in a situation against her will. In a professional context, it
may be someone who hates his boss but can’t afford to leave the job.
Sometimes, it’s a wife who feels trapped in a loveless marriage with
children she doesn’t want but who can’t leave because she believes
everyone would disown her.
A very common scenario involves men who have no success in the
dating market and lack social skills to such a degree that they can’t
even position themselves to learn how to succeed. Instead of hitting
the gym, becoming charming, and dressing better, they spend time
vilifying women instead. The trope of the stay-at-home mom who lost
interest in her husband is the gender-opposite example. The only
anecdotes this woman tells at dinner parties are about how much she
hates her husband so that she and the other housewives can
commiserate about it.
◆◆◆
Some quadrants that interact are unsustainable, while others can be
sustained over the long term. It benefits you to understand that and
work on shifting it to position yourself where you want to be. Two
people cannot sustain a relationship where they each consider
themselves higher status than the other. Neither can it work if one
person is adversarial and the other is cooperative. These frictions can
make human interaction fun, but their long-term benefits are limited.
If you’re flirting with a girl she gives an adversarial response, then you
give a co-operative response and signal lower status, you’re just
setting yourself up for abuse because this is the dynamic between
abusive wives and their enabler husbands. A better response would
be to communicate as higher status and cooperative, effectively
putting the ball in her court so that you can gauge her choice by her
response. She will either continue being insolent or become more
submissive. If the insolence continues or she becomes apathetic,
there is no salvaging this interaction and the best move then is to
walk away.
Two high status people can have an adversarial dynamic and butt
heads when they get close to each other. Eventually, however, they
have to sort out the “pecking order.” Someone has to acquiesce, or
they will end up maintaining emotional distance from each other. Two
high status people can be cooperative, like two people in cars
stopped at an intersection, each signaling for the other to go first.
Eventually someone has to go. Human interactions either end or
move towards stability. A big part of frame is understanding this and
ensuring that the only quadrant you’re in is the one where your status
and harmony meets your goals; lower status with a boss, higher
status with a girlfriend. Adversarial with a rival, cooperative with a
friend. Neutral grounds exist when people are comfortable with each
other, but they are only sustainable when people aren’t concerned
about status, which is rare. I’d call a situation like that one between
best friends.
A suggestion for guys new to the idea of subtext is to look back at
their previous conversations. Look for ones which were emotionally
charged, like a breakup. Alternatively it’s easy to sit in public spaces
and people watch. Take note of each speakers tone and intent. Which
quadrant would each statement be in? How strongly are they
communicating it? How is the other person reacting? Who shifts
quadrants during the conversation and where did they shift to? What
was the result (if any) and who benefited?
To summarize: when you’re working on frame, your take a look at the
conversations you’re having. Take in the information people are
giving you, and if it looks like it has more feelings than information,
push it through a closed conversation filter. Chances are you’re
missing a subtext that can help you understand what they are actually
communicating to you, outside of the words they use.
This is especially important among status-conscious people and
women, but I’m repeating myself. Womanese is what they are
evolved for, and if you learn to recognize and process what is meant
instead of what is said, you will be able to respond more effectively
and get better outcomes for yourself.
Gratitude
I don’t know how else to say it: men have a harder time accepting
gratitude than they do accepting criticism, except for the raging
narcissists. For the man with frame, there is going to be a lot more
gratitude coming, so it’s best to learn how to anchor your actions
around a model of gratitude. Gratitude is useless.
Men hear compliments like:
“You look good!”
“What are you, some kind of player?”
“I’ll bet you say that to all the girls.”
And their first response is to minimize the compliment. They make
excuses. They backpedal. They defend, excuse, explain or rationalize
it away. They don’t understand. Gratitude isn’t about them. It’s about
the person giving it. Girls don’t say you look good because you
actually look good. They process their feelings by communication.
What they are actually saying is that they feel good being around you.
What they are actually doing is checking your frame. When a guy
dismisses or otherwise argues the compliment he is telling her that
those emotions aren’t valid. He’s failed the test.
One of the reasons women are evolved to communicate their feelings
is because the responses they get van verify whether their attraction
was real or a false alarm. Invalidating those feelings vetoes her
interest. Talk about self sabotage!
Don’t worry about your self-image. Don’t worry about humility. Don’t
worry about looking like a cocky asshole. Just say thanks, validate
her emotions. She confirms her feelings, and you win in the end. She
has used a lower status and high harmony statement. Anything but
responding in a higher status with high harmony only drives the
conversation two ways. She either believes she is actually a higher
status than you, or that she’s not on your side. Neither are good.
Don’t step on your own dick.
Sometimes, the complimenter is trying to manipulate you. One of the
best ways to manipulate a man is through his ego:
“You’re such a big strong man. Would you mind holding this for me?”
The assertiveness and nice guy behavior that is susceptible to this is
in the emotional section later in the book. Even then, the gratitude is
useless. The compliment is insincere, and you’re only getting it
because someone wants something from you. Ask yourself if you’re
getting something in return for the manipulative compliment. If so?
Say thanks and go along with it. If no? Say thanks and don’t.
So am I saying manipulation isn’t automatically bad? I am. If your
girlfriend wants to give you a blowjob then ask you to come to the
pottery barn with her for an hour, is it really that big a sacrifice? You
may want to avoid thinking of your relationship as transactional, but it
is. Every relationship between people is transactional. The only
difference is in the currencies. Providing value to each other in a way
that you both like isn’t the worst transaction in the world, particularly
in long-term relationships. This isn’t to say tit-for-tat is a good social
strategy, keeping tabs on favors easily builds resentment. But, a
general idea of whether someone is in the red or the black is useful.
People instinctively know this, but they prefer a degree of emotional
separation between the transaction and the intimacy. Women like to
know you value them for something other than just sex while men like
to know they’re valued for who they are and not just what they do. We
ask each other to lie so that women can feel loved like a man, and so
a man can feel loved like a woman. It’s silly, but that’s people for you.
So a better mental model for you to adopt is to understand that
gratitude is bullshit and love and sex and validation is transactional.
You already know if you lost your job, your ambition, got fat and
stopped showering, then your wife or girlfriend would leave. Maybe
not right away. She might give you the benefit of the doubt, give you a
chance to get it together soon, but eventually she would leave. Just
like you would leave if you watched your wife gain a hundred pounds
in a year, or start cheating on you.
So offer the narrative for her hamster. Let her feel what she wants. If
you’re getting what you want, who cares, right?
“You only want me for sex!”
“Not true, I love how you make sandwiches.”
“Would you love me if I gained weight?”
“I’d love if you hit the treadmill when you did.”
“You only come with me to church after we’ve had sex.”
“I only go to confession when you do that thing that I need to get
forgiveness for!”
Sex, love, gratitude, compliments, and frame; all of it is a game. Have
fun with it. Stop taking it literally and remember that most of the time
it’s not about you anyway, so it really doesn’t matter how you
respond. When you’re miserable and people are taking you for
granted, you won’t be in the mood to give them any thing extra. But
so long as you are getting what you want out of life, you’ll be in a
great mood and have no problem passing that great mood along to
others.
Guys first hear this and think it’s tit for tat: you rub my back and I’ll rub
yours. Sometimes it starts that way. But it’s really just men learning to
get in touch with their feelings. Remember that thing every woman
tells us they want us to do? If you’re feeling good because others are
treating you right, be generous and do it. When you’re not feeling
good because others aren’t treating you generously you won’t be in
the mood to reward that, so you won’t reward it.
Cuddles aren’t free, and you have no obligation to be taken for
granted. Your gratitude is useless.
The Emotional Pillar
Guys laugh when you tell them to be more vulnerable or show more
emotion. It’s understandable. Most men have had at least one woman
in their life tell them to be more vulnerable, more emotional, only to
regret it when she uses it against him. Your boss gets weird when you
get emotional in front of him. Your wife or girlfriend loses sexual
interest when you share. Your friends don’t know what to say in
response to experiencing your raw emotions so they offer some bland
platitude like, “keep on keeping on.” What could possibly be useful
about indulging in something that always produces negative results?
And since men have a habit of missing the point, they assume that
avoiding emotional confessions means they have to bottle everything
up, eventually exploding in a fit of random anger. It’s not some toxic
byproduct of masculinity we’re talking about here. It’s everyone
completely missing the point of men’s emotions. They assume men’s
emotions function like woman’s emotions. But men and women are
not the same.
Women talk as a way of processing their emotional states. Since
women evolved to build consensus and cooperate, their perception of
reality is closer to consensus than it is to objective reality. Any man
who has ever had a fight with their woman describe the same
experience: they have a good cry, then a bitch fest in groups, and
afterward come up with a consensus on how the events took place.
They collaborate to find “my truth.” A minute later it’s like nothing ever
happened.
I had the same experience once when my girl and I had an argument
over money. I was about to retire from the Royal Canadian Navy. I
was at a turning point and I had made some rather big changes to my
life. One of those changes was that I had decided to no longer
subsidize my girl’s consumerism, and we would downsize our life so
that our expenses would be an even financial split. I said my piece
and she reacted as if I had said we were going to murder puppies for
the rest of the evening. She sat on the kitchen floor and cried (with
snot bubbles) and accused me of being overly controlling. A minute
later shes was sitting on my lap giggling while we set up a
spreadsheet on the household finances. Emotions came,
communication processed, emotions went. A man without frame can’t
even process what just happened.
Our instinctive answer to this behavior is an adrenaline surge. A
woman crying provokes something like a fight or flight response in
our caveman DNA. A benefit of frame is the ability to understand and
control our emotions as well as understanding a woman’s emotions.
Men and women aren’t the same, and these kinds of emotional
responses are a perfect example of that.
Men experience emotions as a reaction to the world around them. We
don’t have the same emotions that women have. Anger is an emotion
as is lust. Depression is an emotion as is solitude. Boredom is an
emotion as is obsession. Ignoring your emotions is worse than
expressing them without control. Expressing them without control is a
form of validation-seeking behavior. Men have been raised as
defective women for so long we think this is normal, and we blame
women for not reacting properly.
Bottling them up makes you miserable. Anger is a great example. It is
a social emotion driven by pain and grievance. If you drop a hammer
on your toe, you may be hurt, but you’re not angry. If your wife hits
you on the foot with a hammer because you came home late, you’re
going to be angry, and rightly so. No one yells when they are alone.
Expressing the emotion is how men communicate. The subtext is:
“This isn’t working for me. Change it or I will escalate to violence.”
Anger is not violence. It’s the underlying threat that violence exists
and may be coming soon. It’s been effective in the past because life
was dangerous. We made the decision long ago to put away violence
in order to build skyscrapers and have Chinese takeout. Welcome to
civilization where your wife cheats on you, so you become violent,
and then you go to prison while she gets away with it. This is the
reason mattering the emotional pillar is so important: the world has
removed your evolved masculine tools while empowering a woman’s
evolved tools. Either adapt or suffer.
◆◆◆
The emotional pillar is where you become your own priest, your own
psychiatrist, your own mental point of origin. You’ve built your
physical pillar which makes this easier. Your hormones keep you
level. You’ve built your intellectual pillar so now you can process
whats happening in the world and act accordingly. Now you develop
your emotional pillar, the most difficult pillar. You are learning to
unlearn what you’ve always done by instinct.
You are evolved to consume simple carbs, but you can learn to go on
a diet. You are evolved to crack open the skull of anyone who
threatens you, but you can learn to have a more controlled (and
legal!) response.
The key mental models you will learn in this section revolve around
nice guy behaviors, assertiveness, covert contracts, and other
instincts that sabotage your frame. By understanding how the failed
parenting strategies of your parents’ generation caused you to
process the world, you are able to stop making bad decisions driven
by emotion and start making them as deliberate choices. You’re able
to both understand why you’re having the emotions you’re having,
and what you can do about them for better outcomes in your life.
The emotional pillar is the final pillar for a reason. Most men believe
that they can somehow change how they think which will enable them
to change how they act. It works in reverse. We change how we act
and it changes how we think. Asking a neurotic and sexually insecure
man to approach women with confidence, or to stand up to his wife, is
too ask of him the impossible as he can’t imagine a world where he
doesn’t feel anxiety when standing up for himself. He needs
testosterone to turn his 10/10 panic into a 2/10 panic. He needs an
intellectual base to comprehend why all of his panic is misplaced.
And he needs his emotional base to understand why the panic exists
and what he can do about it.
The first example is the emasculation paradox.
The Emasculation Paradox
The first mental model that was ever written in our little men’s help
niche was the emasculation paradox. Here I quote author Keoni Galt,
who coined the term:
Whenever your woman asks which of two paint colors you prefer, you
have to say you don't care. The alternative is surely picking the wrong
color and paying dearly for it.
My ex-wife used to love to put me into impossible verbal situations by asking such
questions as, “Do you think that supermodel is prettier then me?"
Wrong answer #1: Yes. Response: "You don't think I'm pretty!"
Wrong answer #2: No. Response: "Liar!"
So I found myself avoiding talking to her at all.
I do think that women manipulate more than men do. They cry, they feign anger or
hurt, they tell you stupid things like, “A man doing the dishes is sexy,” or, "I'll be happy
if you do X,” and if you refuse, to her that means you don't want her to be happy. Of
course women lie! Unless you really believe she's had a headache for six solid months
or is somehow turned on by a man pushing a vacuum.
I'm a good guy. I don't cheat or go places I shouldn't or do things I shouldn't or
drink too much or any of that stuff. I have nothing to hide from my wife, but I have
learned the hard way that if I tell my wife the truth about certain things, especially my
feelings if they're at all negative, then I'd better be prepared for two or three weeks of
significant pain.
I want to be a truthful person with my wife, but it just isn't worth the hassle,
especially since she's made it so clear that she really doesn't want to hear the truth. No
offense, but sometimes women are just plain scary.
The emasculation paradox is this: men who are worried about their
woman’s emotions and the consequences of making her angry will
submit to her in hopes of avoiding those consequences. The paradox
is that this supplicating behavior makes it more likely she will become
angry, and end up doing exactly what he was hoping to avoid. By
letting the wife wear the pants in his marriage so that she doesn’t
divorce him, he ends up losing her respect and she divorces him
anyway.
In this next case, we’ll be talking about divorce, but it applies in all
such circumstances. The modern husband who thought he married a
woman to communicate with and form a partnership of equals with
might notice her attitude growing hostile over time. Squishy and
supplicative men in the workplace receive similar hostile treatment.
Overlooked for promotions and taken advantage of, these men are
more likely to lose their jobsduring a round of layoffs than if he was
more assertive which, no surprise, is itself a display of higher value.
This supplicative attitude is counter-intuitive. Men falsely believe that
they have much to lose and little to gain by standing their ground.
Women, on the other hand, actually have much to gain and little to
lose by villainizing and divorcing their husbands. When a married
man stands up for himself in today's climate, he often does so fearing
that could easily find himself put out of his own house, paying his exwife for the privilege, and seeing his kids only when (and if!) she
decides. In reality, however, the social signals a man sends by being
assertive makes it less likely people would try to mess with his life.
Here’s why…
I’ve already written about dark triad traits, and this is one element of
them. Psychologist Kevin Dutton writes in his book, The Wisdom of
Psychopaths, how he and his colleagues were able to tell, just by
observing the body language of people walking on the street, who
would be a good or a bad target to rob. It turns out women mess with
you because they know they can. Everyone messes with you
because they know they can.
A man who understands this also understands that standing up for
his boundaries is the only way a wife, girlfriend, a date, or a coworker
can admire, love, or respect him. Men with frame don’t worry about
upsetting their woman. After all, she's a woman who gets upset as
often as her heart beats. Kids test boundaries because they are kids.
Coworkers take advantage of coworkers if they can. Marriage is a
better example, though.
Losing a job sucks but there’s always another job. Replacing your
wife, your house, and your children isn’t nearly comparable. The real
danger is the paradox of a man who is afraid of his wife’s emotional
state. It’s a situation containing everything needed to ensure that
worst case scenario. Seventy percent of divorces are initiated by
women. There's more to it than common tropes like, All women being
greedy whores. Sure, greedy whores exist, but they are the third
standard deviation or a few percentage points out of the whole
whereas most women cluster around the mean. This isn’t as much
about failure by women as it is a response to technology and the
environment in which men are raised to be defective women and
women are raised to be defective men.
This is why a majority of modern women are bitchy, nagging, fat, and
absolutely contemptuous of their husbands. This is also why men
who used to be bold, assertive, and confident while dating become
absolutely crushed under a domineering, harpy wife.
Attraction is not an intellectual decision which is why marriage
counseling doesn't work. No matter how many logical reasons there
might be for a woman to be happy in her marriage, if she has
contempt for her husband, she can’t control how she feels about him.
It's a women's nature to seek dominant men, and too many men
supplicate when married and submit to their wives as their final
authority. Even if she thinks it’s fine for her to be the dominant one,
her basic instinct feels utter contempt for her submissive husband. In
this kind of society, if we are equal, women are always more equal
than men.
This is why a man becomes dumbfounded that the sweet loving
girlfriend he dated turned into the uncaring psychopath he married,
lacking a shred of mercy or decency while dragging him through the
divorce court system and all of its indignities.
Threatpoint and the Media
Emotionally, men resonate with that submissive response. Lacking
assertiveness, support, or, seemingly, the ability to imagine any other
reasonable options, most men settle into their role as second-class
citizen in their own homes. This isn’t my opinion, you only have to
look around you. How long is it before you hear this from yet another
friend, relative, or acquaintance:
Happy wife; happy life!
But your emotions aren’t just some simple case of lower testosterone
or your grandfather or mom not hugging you enough. Rather, it is a
result of media manipulation playing on the limits of the human
condition that make it seem almost rational for men to be trapped in
the emasculation paradox. Another well-respected author in this
space with the pen name Dalrock talked about it in his essay called
Threatpoint which explains the phenomenon of how a small number
of particularity heinous cases paraded around produce a cooling
effect on man’s behavior.
Modern media isn’t out to get men any more than the tail wags the
dog. Professionals are keenly aware that the primary consumer
demographic is women. MasterCard releases annual reports on
spending habits that reveal how women make up our largest
consumer demographic by orders of magnitude. This gap started in
the seventies and has only gotten wider since then. In 2020, women
were a fourteen trillion dollar annual market. Men were closer to four
trillion, and trending downwards.
Since marketing is a cutthroat and competitive industry. The most
successful marketing campaigns grab the attention of women in the
most visceral and emotional ways they can. They do this because
spending decisions aren’t a logical, frontal lobe decision, but an
emotional, limbic one. By successfully engaging emotions, marketers
are able to bypass people’s ability to reason their way through
purchases. One of the more important emotions triggered for this
purpose is indignation. Women with subpar husbands love to see
other husbands getting the shaft. Single women who can’t get a man
want to know that men have it worse. It’s the same entertainment that
Maury Povich or Jerry Springer used to provide, only with Reality TV
sprinkled in.
So, in cases of particularly damaging divorces, the media will
oversaturate us with the very few cases of these kinds of divorces
happening. If it bleeds, it leads. A tiny minority of examples of men
behaving horribly oversaturate the public thereby warping common
perceptions of marriage, and of married men. Sufficiently demonized
and hoping to avoid finding themselves in a situation where they are
the “bad guy” in a divorce they don’t want, men police themselves
and voluntarily make the entirely reasonable assumption that being
more supplicative is a good strategy to succeed in life.
Arguing with men that they are being irrational in this context will
always fail because they aren’t being irrational. They are being
perfectly rational as a response to a threat that has been blown out of
proportion in order to move more merch. Fortunately for men, there is
a mental model to help them make better decisions with their lives.
There is the Emasculation Paradox Model which guides men to
understand why they have to stand up for themselves if they want to
stop presenting as a target. There is a threatpoint in this model which
shows you why those rational conclusions about becoming more
supplicative are actually based on false premises. Finally, the
Assertive Bill of Rights explains how men can adapt and overcome
these hurdles.
Assertiveness
The two biggest and most beneficial mental models in this book for
the average man are about building assertiveness and shedding nice
guy behaviors. The Nice Guy Behaviors Model explores the ways in
which men supplicate and seek validation, and ultimately judgment,
from the women in their lives, and how they do so to the detriment of
happy and healthy relationships, resulting in lives of quiet
desperation. The Assertive Behaviors Model demonstrates how to get
what you want out of life and how to enforce boundaries without
relying on the instinctive behaviors that men instinctively use to get
them, namely violence. There is no greater loss of frame than having
to resort to violence, so having a toolbox full of alternative, nonviolent
models to use is a good thing.
I am providing a simple, broad overview of these tools and models for
the purposes of this book. If you want a more indepth analysis of your
behaviors, I suggest you read author Manuel Smith’s book, When I
Say No I Feel Guilty, and Dr. Robert Glover’s book, No More Mr. Nice
Guy.
The forthcoming tools include the assertive bill of right, broken record,
negative inquiry, negative assertion and fogging. These skills handle
the majority of interactions you are likely to deal with in closed
communications. They are practical, simple enough to use, but do
require calibration as every situation requires a different tool for a
different outcome.
The assertive bill of rights
The Assertive Bill of Rights was developed by author Manuel Smith.
Being assertive means building strong boundaries by hardening
against your vulnerability to be manipulated by emotions such as
shame. This is important for frame for two reasons. First, you have to
develop a personal worldview in order to even have boundaries as
you can’t know what you will or won’t put up with if you don’t know
what you want. Secondly, a man can want anything in life, but if all it
takes is a little pressure to make him surrender, then he doesn’t have
frame, only wishful thinking.
The bill contains ten items:
1 You have the right to judge your own behavior, thoughts, and
emotions, and to take the responsibility for their initiation and
consequences upon yourself.
2 You have the right to offer no reasons or excuses for justifying
your behavior.
3 You have the right to judge if you are responsible for finding
solutions to other people’s problems.
4 You have the right to change your mind.
5 You have the right to make mistakes—and be responsible for
them.
6 You have the right to say, “I don’t know.”
7 You have the right to be independent of the goodwill of others
before coping with them.
8 You have the right to be illogical in making decisions.
9 You have the right to say, “I don’t understand.”
10 You have the right to say, “I don’t care.”
I
The difference between guilt and shame is that guilt is our internal
feeling of discomfort after doing things we don’t condone while shame
is the external manipulations of others who are attempting to control
our behavior. Neither guilty nor shame are good or bad; they are
tools. Shame can work great no people who don’t have an internal
gauge. If someone is unable to live with other people without taking
advantage of them, shame is the only way to keep him in check. The
entire criminal law system is based on a sort of shame. Women work
well with shame, as they are communal by nature and shame is
ultimately derived from a group imposing or asserting its values.
Social exile itself as well as the threat of social exile is a powerful
negative influence.
Men and women are not the same.
Men don’t have the same instinctive need to be loved by the herd that
women have. It’s an instinct that’s been nurtured with failing parental
strategies and other environmental factors. The problem with shame
is that today it’s used disproportionately to vilify masculine behaviors
over feminine behaviors. It makes sense that shame exists to keep
men from becoming unnecessarily violent over minor disagreements.
However, in the same way that our instinct to eat carbohydrates has
led us to over consume them and dramatically increase the rates at
which modern humans develop diabetes, this shame response has
significantly affected men’s ability to develop frame and thrive in the
modern world.
Guilt is a far better tool for men. If we do something we think is
wrong, or sometimes even considering doing it, guilt calls attention to
it so that we can acknowledge it, learn from it, and move on. Guilt is
harder though, as it requires an internal locus of control. Is cheating
good or bad? Is it good to take advantage of a system that was poorly
designed? Everyone has an opinion, but none of those opinions are
in your best interest or the best interest of those who you choose to
share your life with.
You cannot rely on others to shape your sense of right and wrong.
Men once allowed the church do this. Unfortunately, the modern
church seems more interested in deifying women and their struggles
than in providing useful guidance for men. Most of us are far more
secular than previous generations, so even if the church was once
relevant in this area, it no longer applies to most of us. Marketing,
movies, television, the Internet, news, and everything we read and
watch today caters primarily to female sensibilities. What’s the point
of letting a Disney fantasy shape your world when it’s chief lessons
are that masculinity is toxic and women deserve the world?
Adopting the ideas of master morality and rational egoism, and
accepting that you and you alone can define right and wrong for
yourself is how you become responsible for your own actions. The
buck stops with you, and when others attempt to shame and
manipulate you, you should remember that while truth is objective,
your morality is yours. No one defines it for you but you.
II
The actions that make up the acronym DEER— defending,
explaining, excusing, and rationalizing—are submissive actions.
When you make a decision, you are your own judge. When a wife,
girlfriend, or parent demands that you justify your decision, they aren’t
asking for an explanation. They want you to submit to them as an
authority.
Not letting others manipulate your sense of right and wrong is only
the start. Not letting others make you run your choices by them is
another. Keep in mind that this isn’t the same in open communication
or more formal hierarchies. When your client or boss wants you to
explain your reasoning, it’s a simple exchange of information. When
your wife is mad you decided to do what you wanted and not what
she wanted, she wants you to get her permission before continuing.
When men think of their relationships as wife-led, or as a partnership
of equals, they completely miss the power dynamic in play. The wife
isn’t asking you to explain yourself even if she thinks that’s what she’s
doing. She’s actually shit testing your decisions to see if you’re
confident about them. This subtle power play is instinctive, so there’s
no reason to call her out for doing it. The only good solution is to opt
out of this power struggle altogether:
“The door is that way if you don’t like it. Don’t hit your ass on the door
on your way out!”
A powerful statement. It demonstrates that you don’t fear the
consequences of your actions. After all, you are your own judge. It
also lets you know where people stand in your life. A casual fling will
jump ship, as will a wife who doesn’t love you anyways. But when you
have a track record of good judgment and sound decisions, you have
earned trust.
Counter-intuitively, people actually prefer to lose these contests to the
man who doesn’t defend himself. It means he has taken responsibility
for the consequences of his actions, which means they don’t have
any. Women who get their men to defend themselves in decisions
that don’t pan out just argue against it being their fault anyways. So if
everything you do is already on you, you may as well do what you
think is best.
III
Some people are unlucky or unhappy. Some people do it on purpose.
Some of the worst care taking behaviors that are used to manipulate
men involve their becoming the captain of the USS Save-A-Ho. Men
have an instinctive need to protect women and children. Some
women learn this consciously or unconsciously and leverage it for
their benefit.
It’s called topping from the bottom.
Asinine statements like, I am not the step father, I’m the father that
stepped up! Is one of the worst best examples of men who fully
commit to the woman’s frame. I remember a supply technician who I
sailed with during my naval days named Monahan. Monahan married
a woman who had three kids with three different men. He had a great
job with stability and wanted to save her. It gave him a sense of
purpose. Over the years she even managed to leverage his
protective instinct and his paycheck to move her three baby daddies
into his house, and he hated it. However, he couldn’t quit thinking that
all of their lives would all fall apart if he weren’t there to save them.
His coworkers often told me that he would write mock suicide notes
on supply boxes before throwing them in the garbage disposal. He
lived in a self-inflicted prison.
While it feels good to be needed, you have to understand that your
protective instinct is a gift. No one deserves it unless they provide
adequate value to your life.
IV
We all make mistakes. Some of us pick bad wives, like Monahan.
Some of us pick bad jobs, or simply grow out of the spaces we’ve
made for ourselves. Instead of making changes when we recognize
we’ve made mistakes, men are often shamed into just sticking it out
for the convenience of others. The 2008 housing crisis in America
was a situation that serves as great example of the consequences of
allowing yourself to be shamed into making choices for the sole
benefit of someone else.
For years, people had been accepting the banks’ recommendations
to take on mortgages they couldn’t possibly afford in the long term.
When the housing market collapsed, most of these mortgages were
underwater, meaning the amount of outstanding debt was higher than
the market value of their homes. News reports were blasted 24/7
telling men that they made a promise to pay and that they should
stick it out, so many did. Smarter homeowners with frame decided to
walk away. They stopped paying their mortgages and simply left.
Some declared bankruptcy. Some got lucky and the banks couldn’t
prove they owned the mortgage while others simply never heard from
their banks again. Some of the people who walked away from their
mortgage had better outcomes than those who stayed. Had those
holders of underwater mortgages allowed themselves to change their
mind without letting themselves be shamed to do the right thing, they
would have better lives for it. There’s no guarantees, but tell that to
the guys who won.
You may be thinking that these people had the moral obligation to
continue. Who was that good for, and who was it bad for? The
morality play is nice, but ultimately it’s a subjective concept. There is
no singular good and bad, there are things that are good for some
and bad for others. Go back to the section Why You’re Lost and read
it again, specifically:
No one has any stake in your success or happiness, either; but the
Truth is the Truth: you ditch the altruism or you get eaten by it, fast or
slow.
V
One of the most important lessons on assertiveness a man can learn
is to give himself permission to make mistakes and learn from them.
Women are risk averse, highly neurotic, and love to nag. Making a
mistake isn’t a reason to cede authority to someone else.
I have been absolutely baffled by the amount of men I’ve spoken to
over the years who were terrified of making a decision because there
was a chance they would make the wrong one, or have a problem
that comes up half way through their solution.
We don’t live in a world of immediate and life altering consequence
anymore (Within reason. Don’t get arrested and charged with a
felony.) The decisions you make today will never be right or wrong.
Those concepts are childlike and inaccurate. Instead there will be
decisions with benefits and trade offs. You will never have perfect
information before you make a decision. Accept all this and know that
you can both trust in your abilities to weather or handle any issues
that come up in the future, and feel solace that whatever happens will
not be the end of the world or your marriage (Within reason. Don’t
sleep with your wifes sister this Christmas.)
VI
You aren’t a god. You don’t have to know everything. Sometimes you
have to make a decision or be assertive when you don’t have all
relevant information, so you do the best you can. It will either end well
or it won’t. Men can’t allow themselves to be shamed into
compounding poor decisions simply because they can be accused of
not having all the answers. You do the best you can with what you
know. You have the confidence in your abilities to deal with the things
you don’t know, if they become a problem.
Besides, plans change. Previous assumptions get tested and people
are forced to adapt to shifting circumstances. Part of having a strong
frame is having the confidence to know that you can improvise and
adapt to a constantly changing environment. Women love to have
control. It’s how they derive comfort, especially in a land where men
refuse to (see the paradox?). They need to micromanage and plan
and waste time covering all the angles, then panic when everything
doesn’t go completely according to plan.
VII
No matter what happens in life, you will be a villain somewhere. You
have to learn to be OK with that. So many men have been put into a
manipulated box because of weaponized goodwill. You have
boundaries that you want to hold, that is OK. Others may adhere to
them or not, and that is OK. Some people will not like them, and that
is OK. Some people will demand you change them, they can ask.
I’ve been showing you, the reader, strategies throughout this book on
how to build better boundaries and a frame that cannot be
manipulated. The takeaway here is that if you require someones
good will before you assert yourself, then the exact kind of people
you want to protect yourself from will weaponize their good will to
manipulate you into exactly what you were trying to avoid.
You can accept that people will react positively or negatively to your
boundaries. That’s OK, they are allowed to feel whatever they like.
However, people will respect them in action, or you will enforce them.
It doesn’t matter if it’s a lifelong friend, wife of a decade, or a family
member: if your boundaries are important, then they are more
important than any appeal to goodwill.
VIII
Men are human beings, just like women. We have emotions and act
on them. One of the more effective manipulative techniques,
especially among married men, are what I call frame traps. Men are
so worried about appearing logical, consistent and even handed
(read: not like a woman) that clever people blitz them with logical
fallacies and contradictions to force them into manipulation.
You aren’t required to be perfectly consistent and logical in your
decisions. You don’t require a perfect articulation for a boundary.
Sometimes your boundary is illogical, doesn’t make any sense, and is
irrational. That is OK.
How many wives have convinced their sexless husbands that having
a kid together is a great way to rekindle the relationship? How many
wives have convinced their husbands that if he did more dishes, she
would feel more comfortable and want to have sex more? The issue
isn’t the logic or the dishes. The issue is that men aren’t computers
and logic is a persuasive tool, not a decision making heretic.
Sometimes, the answer to ‘why?’ is ‘because I said so.’
IX
“As a mother …”
There are an infinite amount of discrete categories that exist which
you will never have, couldn’t possibly understand, and require a leap
of faith for you to let yourself be manipulated into ignoring your
boundaries. You will be expected to understand these needs without
having to be told what they are, or you aren’t capable of being a ‘real
man’ or whatever identity cudgel exists to manipulate you.
It’s not an embarrassment not to know why someone wants to
manipulate you into something. You may be OK with that, the benefit
may be worth it. Then again it may not. If someone demands you
accept manipulations on a leap of faith then you’re well within your
assertive rights to demand they have you understand it to your
satisfaction. Only then can you decide what you will do.
They may get mad, and thats OK. You still don’t move without a
damned good reason.
X
Everyone expects you to be perfect. You’re told that you’re defective,
that you’re lazy, that you’re not a real man unless you do what they
want you to do. A good employee would stay late and get this done.
A good business would give someone a discount because of how
angry they are. A good husband would rub his wifes back even if they
haven’t been intimate in years. Sometimes, you just have to admit to
yourself:
“I just don’t care.”
Everyone wears their problems on their sleeves. Everyone is a victim.
Everyone loves to assume you want to fix the world for them.
Everyone assumes you would never want to hurt anyones feelings,
even if it means more happiness in the long term. This is the best
assertive concept I have ever learned — and I cannot stress this
enough — you don’t have to care about anything unless you want to.
Guys are being called racist, misogynist, evil, greedy, and anti
whatever, because they had the audacity to have a boundary, belief,
or action that someone else didn’t like. You get one of these words
thrown at you, and the expectation that you’ll change. After all, you’re
not a bad guy, surely not like all the racist misogynists? If someone
wants to manipulate you into something, they had best offer you
value in return. Taking away the pain of insulting you isn’t value.
“You’re a misogynist if you do that!”
“I don’t care.”
Assertiveness Tools | Broken Record
You lose because you give up too easily.
Broken Record is an Assertive Mental Model you can adapt to
situations when you want to say no but tend to buckle under pressure
and allow yourself to be manipulated. People attempt manipulation by
appealing to many of the issues that are listed in the assertive bill of
rights. They change the subject, the offer a logical explanation, they
appeal to your goodwill etc. The purpose of repeating yourself is to
keep things on topic. A boundary has been crossed, and you will not
allow yourself to be distracted until that is dealt with.
One of the most important aspects of being verbally assertive is to be
persistent and to keep repeating what you want without getting angry,
irritated, or loud. Keep the boundary you want to enforced strictly on
that point alone. Women often use something called frame shifting to
manipulate men. By dancing around a topic, using a lot of words, and
moving the conversation, women are able to get men to agree with
things they otherwise wouldn’t. Using Broken Record is a way for you
to keep yourself focused on what you are trying to achieve,
enforcement of your boundary:
When telling a woman no turns a conversation into a confrontation,
your natural instinct will be to get irritated. Children do this well, as
many parents lose their cool after a five-year old asks “why” for the
seventeenth time. One of the easiest and most effective manipulation
techniques women use on men is to demand they logically clarify and
explain themselves, looking for the smallest inconsistency so they
can rationalize manipulating you into what you don’t want.
You don’t really need the other person to believe what you believe,
agree with what you agree with, or think what you think. You need her
to comply with your boundary, and you enforce it if she doesn’t.
Remember the emasculation paradox. The paradox is in submitting to
a girls whims is the best way to avoid her worst behavior, which
creates her emotional disdain that makes her worst behavior more
likely. If this is going to work, your way is the only way it can work.
When your wife or your children throw guilt-inducing statements at
you, you must remain unflappable. Manipulation is coercion for the
nice guy. Here’s an example I had from a client in the recent past:
“Honey, we have to put our son in the Montessori School,” a wife tells
her husband. “I need twenty thousand dollars next week to pay for it.”
“We aren’t going to do that,” says the husband. “It’s way too
expensive, and it’s not going to make him any smarter.”
“I don't want to be a bad mother. Are you the kind of father who
doesn’t want whats best for his kids?”
“We aren’t going to do that.”
“Well why not? Walk me through why you think it’s so important he
doesn’t go?”
“We aren’t signing him up for the Montessori school.”
This is what enforcing a boundary looks like. No DEERing, just
stating your decision and repeating it as much as needed, just like a
broken record. You’re likely a good father and you are looking out for
your kids. If not, fix that first. You don’t have unlimited resources, so
you have to make decisions about what’s best for them. You’ve done
your research into these sorts of things, and you’ve made the
decision thats best for everyone involved. Broken Record is the only
skill to master in order to successfully address this scenario. Your
statement is like the law of gravity. There is no argument to be had,
no shame to be felt, no guilt to be given.
It just is.
I have trained men to use this whenever they need to enforce
boundaries. A great example can be found in the situation of one of
the men I’ve worked with who was raising his children and didn’t like
how his wife would get stressed-out and yell at the kids. So he made
a rule that they would not yell at the kids or at each other when they
are in front of the kids.
It wasn’t easy. At the beginning he succumbed to temptation and
explained why he made this boundary, why it’s good for the kids, and
how it made them better parents. Before he met me he was frustrated
that his wife could only keep it together enough to be stable in front of
the kids. After learning Broken Record and using it to enforce this
boundary, he got far more success. Every time she was about to yell
at the kids he repeated it, like a mantra:
“We don’t yell in front of the kids. We aren’t that couple.”
He ignored all of the accusations, justifications, and pleading by his
wife, and he just repeated it over and over and over. It took weeks of
him standing his ground before she finally got on board and
enshrined this as law. Eventually, she started to believe it. Now this
isn’t to say she never yelled at the kids again, but every time she did
she was aware that she shouldn’t, caught herself, and tried to make
up for it. For his part, he paid attention, and when he saw that she
was about to lose her temper, he told her to go upstairs and cool off
while he took the children for a few minutes.
At the time of writing, it has been about a half a year and his house is
far better off than when he attempted to solve the problem with
negotiation. Broken Record isn’t stylish or fancy. It’s boring and
repetitive, but it works well.
The point is to avoid DEERing (defend, explain, excuse, rationalize).
Remember, DEERing is a tool that nice guys use to avoid conflict and
seek approval from their women. It creates a dialog, and that dialog
gives her room to create a weaponized form of manipulation. If he’s
conflict averse, she uses conflict as a wedge to get her way. If he’s
validation-seeking, she withholds validation until she gets what she
wants. It’s not necessarily conscious and malicious. It’s just how
women shit test their men. It’s a test she’d prefer to lose. Every time
she wins, she loses a little more respect for her man. It’s the
Emasculation Paradox in action.
Assertiveness Tools | Negative Inquiry
On the topic of manipulation, a common female tactic is to accuse the
man of something regardless of whether she truly believes he’s done
anything wrong. The idea is to shame him in hopes of weaponizing
his guilt to get him to act the way she wants him to act. Negative
Inquiry is a tool to separate legitimate concerns from these
manipulations.
Girls complain. Sometimes the complaints are an unstructured word
vomit of emotions pouring out. Guys take these at face value all too
often. The purpose of Negative Inquiry is to put the onus on her to
express her problem and desired solution. This will either make it
clear to your that she was simply venting, or that it’s an actual
situation you can choose to address:
Complaint: “You never do anything around the house!”
Response: “What else in particular do you think I should be doing?”
Complaint: “You dress like a slob.”
Response: “What is it about the way that I dress that you think could
be improved?”
Complaint: “You never talk to me anymore!”
Response: “OK, what would you like to talk about?”
The answers you get make it very clear whether she is sharing a real
concern or not. If it’s a real concern, she can articulate it. If it’s a
vague emotional feeling that she can’t really put into any meaningful
response, you’ll get random babble back. You must train yourself to
be able to distinguish subtext from overt communication.
Assertiveness Tools | Negative Assertion
Learning to cope with criticism is an assertive skill. For some people,
they are completely incapable of learning to handle criticism of their
behavior. A lot of people who have this problem have a reduced
ability to handle life in general. If you’re the kind of person who makes
a mistake and receives manipulation, thinly veiled as criticism, then
negative assertion is the strategy of admitting the criticism is correct
without allowing yourself to be manipulated because of it.
You will make mistakes. That you can own them and fix them, own
them and accept the consequences, isn’t the purpose of Negative
Assertions. The purpose is that you’ll find in those small moments of
failure that wives and girlfriends subconsciously test you. They can
see it as a wedge to drive through your ego to see if you have frame.
It’s a shit test like any other, and while men instinctively want to
apologize and supplicate, that’s the worst possible response to a
Negative Assertion. This is why the Emasculation Paradox is so
prevalent. It’s not that it’s irrational. It’s a perfectly reasonable
response to a situation where you make a mistake and are called out
on it.
So to be more assertive, you have to learn to stop apologizing. In
these situations, you’ll think that what you’re doing is expressing
regret and asking for forgiveness while promising to never do it again.
But men and women aren’t the same, and this isn’t how she sees it.
In a woman’s eyes, what you’re doing is supplicating and asking her
to judge your current and future behaviors. This is submissive
behavior. Don’t tie a pork chop around your neck then get mad when
your dog tries to take a bite out of it:
Her: “You were out till three last night! I tried to call and you didn’t
answer your phone!”
You (assertive answer): “Damn, I didn’t realize how late it was.”
You (non assertive answer): “It wasn’t that late. What were you
watching the clock? I wanted to be home sooner but there was an
accident. You’ve late all the time, so whats the big deal?”
It’s not just negative criticism that this works with. Sometimes
compliments can also make men lack assertiveness. Using the tool in
a positive situation can also keep a man from supplicating with fake
humility after a compliment. When a girl wants to look up to you, don’t
make her feel stupid. Instead, validate yourself (and thus her) by
displaying confidence:
Her: “You look sexy in that shirt! You look hot!”
You (assertive answer): “I know, you always did have good taste
in men.”
You (non assertive answer): “Not really. I was thinking about
taking it back. You’re only saying that because you want something.”
The idea is you can make mistakes, or succeed, without
supplicating. Your woman is allowed to point out your flaws without
you having to defend yourself. The work to achieve this state is done
privately. If you make a mistake, you either didn’t foresee the
consequences, or you did and decided that you were better off. In the
latter example, you have nothing to apologize for, and in the former,
you don’t need forgiveness. You need to fix your behavior and learn
from your mistakes. Neither thing requires an apology.
Assertiveness Tools | Fogging
The final tool in your assertiveness toolbox is called fogging. When it
comes to emotions, women don’t experience or respond to them the
same as men. Women experience truth subjectively, emotionally. For
her, truth is a codification of personal experiences. That’s why you
often hear women use terms like my truth. As such, a woman
expressing her feelings is doing so because she processes them
through conversation. You are reading about mental models in here
because thats how guys learn, by understanding, internalizing, and
applying concepts. Women learn by consensus.
Fogging prevents you from making the mistake most stupid men do.
Most men invalidate their woman’s emotions, so she reacts
negatively. It’s no different than a girl trying to tell you that gravity
doesn’t exists. Fogging is a way to speak assertively to women
without allowing their neurotic emotions to successfully challenge and
negate your frame.
Women define their reality by expressing feelings and either verifying
or denying them based on the communication goes. For example, if a
woman accuses you of cheating on her, she probably doesn’t actually
suspect it. She probably feels jealous and doesn’t have enough
information to validate the feeling, so she expresses it. By denying it,
you actually solidify it in her head. After all, she thinks, why would you
argue with her about something that isn’t true? What are you hiding?
It makes no sense, but thats because you’re a man and she’s not.
Instead, fogging acknowledges her feelings, but without validating her
accusations. Fogging sets the narrative. Here are a couple of
examples of successfully fogging her accusations:
Her: “Are you cheating on me?”
You (assertive answer): “If I were, you’d be the first one to know.”
You (non assertive answer): “I would never cheat on you. What you’re
feeling is stupid. She’s just a friend and I swear there’s nothing going
on!”
Her: “You’re such an asshole!”
You: (assertive answer)“It’s your own fault, you know that right?
You’re the one who decided to marry an asshole”
You (non assertive answer) “Baby, I am not! Here what if I bought you
some flowers?”
Knowing which tool to use in which situation can be difficult at first. If
you don’t know what to say, the best thing you can do is shut up. You
may not win an engagement, but you won’t lose either. Reflect on it
afterwards, see which tool would work to achieve your assertive aims,
and remember it for next time.
Over time, you will handle this instinctively. It will become like riding a
bike. You don’t have to think about the pedals and the brakes and
your balance. You just aim and go!
Nice Guys Aren’t Nice
I have presented this section very late in the book for how valuable it
is. For all the behaviors men can change, all the mental models men
can adapt, all the improvements men can do for themselves, there’s
two that matter the most: shedding nice guy behaviors and acting
with assertiveness. They are the easiest to identify and the easiest to
fix, and all men exhibit them to some degree.
“Nice guy” is a specialized usage of the common term coined by
psychiatrist and author Dr. Robert Glover in his book, No More Mr.
Nice Guy. The book is the culmination of his counseling practice
spanning over twenty years, and I cannot overstate it’s importance for
men’s lives. In fact, you could ignore every other section in this book
but this one, and if you learn from just this section you will still get
better results and more happiness and contentment than ninety
percent of people on earth. It’s that good. I strongly suggest as a
supplement to this book you get a copy of Glover’s work and go
through it multiple times. Many men read it every year for a few years
to internalize and reinforce its teachings.
The first thing to learn is that a nice guy isn’t actually nice. He’s
actually a validation seeking, risk averse, conflict avoidant,
codependent narcissist who cloaks himself in niceties. He does this
because of his parents’ fairly common failed parenting strategies in
order to cope with environmental changes in the modern world. No
one is really to blame for his condition, there is no fault, but it is
solvable by any man who wants to solve it.
After understanding how failed parenting strategies and the loss of
fathers can result in your following a perfectly rational but failing set of
practices, you can then learn about the covert contracts, as Glover
calls them, that have been dictating your behavior for so long. Once
you do so, you can begin adapting them to deal with the evolutionary
selfishness women are hardwired to have. You can learn how to
change how you frame women in your life for better outcomes and
stop being the squishy, directionless man-child that is on the slow
road to that proverbial but very real life of quiet desperation.
Then when you understand the work you must do to stop being
unattractive, you can learn to be more assertive and ultimately more
attractive.
Being a nice guy is being everything a man should not be. Men today
have been raised to be defective women, and as a result of a
combination of failed parenting strategies and modern feminized
institutions, the odds are against being raised any other way. Maybe
you’re angry with a woman, or all women. So much of your emotional
fragility stems from nice guy behavior: codependency, validation
seeking, hiding what makes you a man out of shame. All of it can be
traced back to this collection of nice guy behaviors.
They are called nice guy behaviors because thats the shield or
figurative costume men usually wear when exhibiting them. On the
surface, they are deliberately presented as virtues: Agreeableness,
problem solving, calmness. In reality, they are covertly manipulative,
angry, and unattractive as explained in Dr. Glover’s book. These
behaviors encompass the Covert Contract, summed up as follows:
“No matter how hard I try I can’t do anything right. She always finds
something wrong. I once thought that dating was tough, but once I
got married and did all the right things, I thought that life would get
better and I’d have a problem free life.”
But when you make the women in your life the ultimate judge of your
behavior, you give them power over you while often parroting the
tropes, “women have never started wars,” “they possess better
emotional intelligence,” and similar statements that deify women and
cement the Venus of Willendorf as god in your mind. Not good.
But women are as human and as fallible and petty as anyone else.
They also react very negatively to the responsibility that comes with
being your judge (at least, the ones without psychopathic
tendencies). If you give a girl that responsibility and authority over
you, she will ruin it purposefully in such a way that it still isn’t her fault.
By making her your judge you put her in a position to resent and
punish you for enabling, and you build up resentment for her not
being your god.
The behaviors that drive you to make any woman in your life your
judge are a result of bad parenting strategies. Most dads work
outside the home or are divorced and unable to see their kids as
much as they could if they lived together. Few men teach school
these days, and women have taken over the developmental phase of
boys’ lives. As such, they use feminine strategies when working with
boys and girls alike. A very significant one is that of managing
character and identity without establishing explicit guidelines. If
you’ve ever heard the phrase “don’t do that, you’re a bad boy!”, then
you know what I’m talking about. This approach shapes children’s
core identity by aligning “good” behavior with making ‘her’ happy
since there are no rules and the feedback is sporadic.
◆◆◆
The nice guy aspect inside the emotional pillar of frame is about
shedding those behaviors which gives us worse outcomes and
replacing them with behaviors that provide better outcomes:
♦ DEERing. Never defend, excuse, explain, or rationalize
ourselves or our behavior.
♦ Lying. You have no need to lie. Either it’s none of their
business, or you quit fearing the response. Lying implies you
want to hide things from your judge.
♦ Boundaries. We learn through trial and error what we expect
from those around us, and what we refuse to accept. We enforce
these boundaries with the tools that we have.
The result of practicing those principles is a strong, honest, selfaware emotional center. We feel what we feel, we understand why,
and we take steps to address it and learn to let go when we cannot.
When you first start your road map you’ll be angry when your wife
criticizes you. You’ll feel hurt when she attacks a flaw.
You’ll feel embarrassed when she mocks something you hold dear.
You’ll feel the need to explain yourself because, according to your
male brain, “If she only had more information, she would treat you
better.”
By the time you complete the process, however, none of those
negative feelings matter. You’ll know clearly what you want. You’ll
know what you will accept and what you won’t. You’ll have healthy
expectations. The people who choose to not accept your boundaries
and requirements will leave your life, and you won’t feel anxious for
the loss because you’ve developed some abundance in your life. If
your surrogate “mom” abandons you, you can replace her with
someone better.
Failed Parenting Strategies and the Outcomes
Whenever a child experiences any kind of abandonment, he will always believe
that he is the cause of what is happening to him.
—Robert Glover
While I get that it’s been done to death, a shrink talking to you about
your childhood does have some merit. Modern society has changed
the family unit in some pretty extreme ways. Due to these changes,
the way men grow and develop has also changed. Some of these
ways are useful. Others are not. Understanding the failed parenting
strategies that make you believe in bad mental models is the first step
in understanding how to adopt new ones that have better utility.
From farmer to soy boy…
Humans used to be agrarian with a well-defined division of labor. Men
worked outside while women worked inside. Children were exposed
to both parents more or less equally, and their respective strategies
allowed children to develop into functional adults. Once the industrial
revolution took over, fathers went from working at home to working in
factories and offices out of the home. Women took over as primary
sole caregivers of children which is the primary reason men are being
raised today as if they are defective women. They lack longterm
guidance according to mens’ universal, rule-based parenting
instincts.
Children instinctively fear abandonment. Infants who are left alone
quickly die. Anything a child can do to lessen the chance of
abandonment increases his survivability, and this is/was a selectedfor trait among humans.
Fathers use a more rule-based parenting strategy than mothers:
Don’t do this. Don’t do that. So long as a child followed the rules, he
could be comfortable and avoid feelings of abandonment. An extreme
example can be seen in understanding the difference between
spanking versus child abuse. If dad spanks his kids every time the kid
fails a test, it’s a known rule. The kid can structure his life around the
knowledge that so long as he does well in school, he can avoid
spankings. If he is spanked in this manner, it isn’t traumatic. It turns
out that where corporal punishment is concerned, it’s not the pain or
the violence that messes kids up, but the lack of predictability of why
it happens.
This doesn’t mean that fathers’ methods and strategies are perfect.
There are a mix of positive and negative aspects of a traditionally
male parenting strategy. However, when fathers are mostly out of the
home and uninvolved in their children’s lives, it can’t be the dads’
parenting strategies directly causing problems for their sons or
messing men up in their relationships. If men share any blame for
their children’s relationship problems later in life, it is more indirect,
more due to their lack of involvement which could provide a much
needed counter or balance to the female’s approach to parenting
which dominates today.
This is why mothers’ parenting strategies can mess kids up. Women
are more emotional and character-based in their parenting. She might
be kind and loving one day, and mean the next, regardless of the
kid’s behavior.
Had a bad day at work? “Go watch TV and leave me alone!”
Had a good day at work “Turn off that TV before it rots your brain.
Let’s have dinner!”
The lesson the kid learns from that isn’t, TV is sometimes good and
sometimes bad. It’s that whoever has the power in the relationship
makes the rules. Since mom being angry is processed by the child as
potential abandonment, the kid makes it a survival strategy to always
attempt to make mom happy and carefully accommodate her
dynamic emotional states. In his limbic brain this is seen as important
as food water and shelter.
As he gets older and goes to school, he runs into the same thing. For
various reasons, men are no longer teaching, so most of his teachers
will be women. The reasons for this lie outside the scope of this book,
but if you look to yours, your father’s, and your children's education
system, count the difference in the number of male vs. female
teachers.
When teaching, women and men will default to the same strategies
they use when parenting. Women want the class to be good little
boys and girls or else they get sent to the principal’s office. A child’s
instinctual need to get validation from mom ends up getting refined
over time with mental models about being good, not just to his
mother, but to all women in authority. The frontal lobe takes over and
makes mental models that anchor his decisions to seek the approval
of these “surrogate moms.”
Some men even get all the way to college graduation without ever
having been exposed to a male authority. This model is, Stay
Monogamous to your Mother, and creates the core of nice guy
behaviors:
♦ Conflict avoidance
♦ Avoiding change
♦ Lack of boundaries
♦ Social isolation
♦ Attracted to women who require fixing
♦ Covert contracts
A covert contract is just that. A man who creates a narrative
structure in his head where he does things out of an unspoken,
assumed, hopeful expectation that he’ll receive validation in return
without having to face rejection by verbalizing it. To quote Glover:
If I can hide my flaws and become what I think others want me to be, then I will be
loved, get my needs met, and have a problem-free life. If this doesn’t work, the only
solution is to try harder.
This is why men in failing relationships, instead of addressing their
own failings, try to work longer hours at their job, or perform the same
behaviors they did as a kid to keep mom happy. All this time the man
with the covert contract refuses to acknowledge that his wife can’t
love him the way he wants her to.
As a result, men have a hard time accepting the potentially harsh
nature of women. It’s not just an argument that needs to be won, a
proposition he can be convinced of with logic and reason. What
you’re telling a man in this mental state is that his entire survival
strategy is wrong. But his brain is hardwired to ignore this reality until
it’s absolutely necessary too do so. This is why it’s almost a required
road map for men to ignore warning signs like those of infidelity in
their marriages until they are thrown in their faces and get zeroed out.
Then, as a result of that trauma, they become more likely change
how they look at the world.
The only piece missing is the change. This is why you’re reading this
book.
Evolutionary Selfishness
“I can never do it right,” Jason began, looking over his list. “No matter how hard I
try, Heather always finds something wrong. I don’t deserve to be treated this way. I try
to be a good husband and father, but it’s never good enough.”
“I thought once you got married, everything was supposed to be great. After all I
do for Heather, you’d think she would be willing to give me the one thing I really want.”
Chapter 1 No More Mr. Nice Guy
David Claire writes about the Betatization process in his book,
Practical Female Psychology. Nice guy behaviors actively play into
the process, specifically in the second to last stage, called
evolutionary selfishness. If we all ran on instinct alone, women would
be spending their lives attempting to secure children from multiple
men over a lifetime as it guarantees a better chance of survival.
Hypergamy means that a woman is fiercely loyal to one man at a
time, not to one man forever.
Evolutionary selfishness is the process where a woman instinctively
distances emotionally from her husband so that she can secure a
new man without the cognitive dissonance and pain that comes with
a separation. They will constantly put their men in what Dr. Glover
calls no-win situations. If you’ve ever had a fight with your wife or
girlfriend where any answers you give to her questions are wrong,
you’re familiar with it.
Nice guys are adamant in avoiding conflict, seeking approval from
their women, and hiding their perceived flaws. They think they are
creating a perfect, conflict free life. They are only encouraging their
relationships devolve into an evolutionary selfishness. It starts with a
woman finding him attractive, getting him to emotionally open up,
putting him to work, detaching from him emotionally and then going to
a marriage counselor so she can tell her friends she ‘tried everything’
before leaving him to be with someone else.
A lot of conflict seems to happen with a conflict free life.Imagine living
with a fat person trying to lose weight and thinking you’re helping
them by stocking the fridge with chocolate cake. This is what nice
guys are doing to the women they purport to love. They may say they
want submissive, loving, sexually available wives, but deep-seated
nice guy behaviors reveal that they want to be the sacrificial plow
horse.
The only way a relationship can work is for the husband to take on
the role of benevolent dictator. The dominant personality with
strongly-enforced boundaries and such high value that the woman
he’s with works hard to meet his expectations and standards is the
one who keeps the girl, and keeps her happy.
I have had many moments of blunt honesty with my wife including
all of the questions every husband receives:
♦ Do these jeans make my ass look fat?
♦ Do you find that other girl pretty?
♦ Which do you like better?
♦ If I gained weight would you leave me?
♦ Do you like my new haircut?
I answer them all one hundred percent honestly. Because of that
honesty, I’ve also been at the receiving end of her crying or anger
more times than I can count. My only response:
“I may make you cry, but I won’t lie to you.”
She has never left, and I never have to deal with issues surrounding
evolutionary selfishness, or a dead bedroom, or utter contempt. This
is how you don’t fall into the emasculation paradox: by maintaining
your own mental point of origin and never buckling out of fear that
you’ll be abandoned by mom.
It’s Not your Job to Keep the Peace
I love this piece. The space most of this books research was from
was called the married red pill, or MRP for short. The guy had gotten
his act together, and was continually frustrated at people who would
not get their act together, and were driven to write constantly about
how other men can become better. The Dunning Kruger effect mixed
with too much free time. So he gave himself the pseudonym
FuckMRP. He had some of the greatest wisdom, the name was the
cherry on top.
Too many guys read about boundaries and assertiveness and still think they have
keep the peace. They are using these assertive tools as wrapping paper with the same
shitty box they came with:
Wife gets mad? Better use some tools and keep the peace!
Do something selfish? I better use these tools and keep the peace first!
She says I screwed up? I didn’t but I can handle this. I’ll manipulate her emotions
so I can keep the peace!
It's not your job to keep the peace. Nothing changes while you avoid confrontation.
Choose your battles but know, when you change your behavior to avoid her emotions,
she's controlling you. Never argue with her, she's not interested in solutions. Make your
statement about the issue and then broken record if need be. Do not explain yourself,
your logic. You're only offering her ammunition.
Be happy even when she's mad. Ignore her silent treatment, talk to her as if you
don't notice. Tease her and see how childish that shit is so you never behavior that way
again.
Be assertive when boundaries are crossed. The best time to address shitty
behavior is while it's happening. Bringing up old shit makes you look weak.
You don't have to answer every question. Not everything needs a response. Take
time to choose your words, let her wait or wonder. Never deny your emotions, she
knows when you're mad. Own it, just don't direct it at her. You are allowed to be angry!
Be comfortable making her uncomfortable. Do not rush to fix things. Do not initiate
apologies she should be making. Your time is what she wants most from you. This is
the best thing you can take away in response to bad behavior.
Her only weapon is your fear of what she will do.
Covert Contracts
Understanding covert contracts is the biggest, best, and most longterm mental model a man can use to make his life better, and it will
pay the biggest dividends.
Nice guys always have strings attached when they give. They give
their wives back rubs then expect sex afterwards. They take their
wives out on dates with the expectation of sex afterwards. If you ask
those guys, they will swear they don’t, but women aren’t stupid and
have been through this before. Men, having been raised to be
defective women, have acquired the female self-deception instinct in
their covert contracts.
Luckily, women have been having sex or dealing with sexual
advances and expectations since they were as young as thirteen.
They may not be as smart as men, but they make up for it with much
more experience. Nice guys take them out to dinner then get a little
resentful when she doesn’t just know that they should have sex, fall in
love, etc. Nice guys marry girls then get resentful when she doesn’t
give him blow jobs three times a week in perpetuity. Nice guys do
things as toddlers hoping to make their moms happy, then use the
same model on their wives in hopes it makes them happy and sexual,
and without attempting to get his needs met directly through
seduction.
Thats how and why covert contracts hide a man’s unattractiveness.
They ultimately boil down to a man being ashamed about the things
that make him a man and being clueless about how two get what he
wants. We love to have sex with women, often and enthusiastically.
But nice guys can’t just say that. They hide it behind romantic
delusions, gifts, and such. They don’t want to risk rejection (read:
abandonment by mom), so they leave it to hoping the girl will fulfill his
needs after reading his mind.
And since women are so used to this kind of behavior, they tend to
blow these covert contracts up. It may be subconscious, or
completely conscious, but they do blow them up. Covert contracts
produce an uncomfortable feeling that girls can never quite identify or
articulate. They have to use a very broad, vague word like creepy to
describe it. But what it boils down to is having a man in front of them
they may be attracted to but who is exhibiting his worst worse
qualities through his actions.
The way to shed these covert contracts is first to become aware of
them. One of the easiest ways to do this is to examine how you
approach giving. If you buy your girl a gift, do something nice for her,
or give in some other way, then do a simple test. Ask yourself, If your
girl were to throw that gift away, or not be appreciative of it, would you
still give it to her? If you lit yourself on fire to keep her warm, and
instead of thanking you, she just came to expect it, would you still
give?
If the answer is no, then you’re not in a position to give. I have a
saying for single guys who are starting their dating careers: dinner
dates are a reward for good behavior, not an interview for sex, and
that attitude distills the killing of covert contracts to its core.
When a woman desires a man, she feels it. When she is happy being
around a higher value man, she feels higher value herself. When
she’s in this good mood, she loves to do things for him. Making him
feel good is how she continues to feel good. This dopamine feedback
is sometimes called pair-bonding. It’s not, but it’s a good enough way
to conceptualize it. In this case, when someone is adding value to
your life, you are more likely to give without needing anything in
return. You do this because you are already getting your needs met.
Men do this by instinct, so they don’t need to practice or hone it. They
only need to temper it to get real, immediate value instead of
speculative, future value.
Another aspect of covert contracts is about approval seeking. In the
same way children want moms approval, men without frame expect
their women to define their worth as a man. But having frame, having
a mental point of origin, is about building your self-identity through
what you accomplish in life, by building actual value, actual worth, as
opposed to creating a narcissistic, made-up fantasy in your head. If
you know your worth because you’ve actually built it, you’ll avoid
putting the woman in your life in that role. Not only will you have no
need for that, you will have learned that she will do as poor a job as
the mother who raised her son to hate his dad.
Women compartmentalize men into two categories, lover and
provider. By forcing yourself into the role of dependent (and thats
what elevating a woman to the position of identity judge is), you step
out of the role of the desirable man she wants to sleep with as well as
the loving, comfortable father of her children. Fights get worse
because every time she pushes a button, you as nice guy will defend
his identity by hiding his mistakes, lying, and groveling for
forgiveness. The more you do this, the more frustrated she gets, and
the harder she pushes back. This is how relationships with one
hundred percent emasculated men and ball busting battle-ax wives
are formed. When men shirk their responsibility to themselves, they
also let their women down, and women will act as shitty as their men
let them.
The behaviors a man can use to replace these abhorrent mental
models are simple. Create boundaries and enforce them:
♦ Give without expectations. If you can’t give that way, don’t give.
♦ The easiest way to avoid your wife pouncing on your weakness
is not to be vigilant against exposing weakness, but to not have
any weakness to expose. Lying, relationship equity, fixing others,
DEERing, and losing ourselves in addictions are all weak
behaviors we use to hide from our flaws.
♦ Where do you try to be perfect and what abandonment are you
trying to protect yourself from?
♦ How would you live your life if your wife died tomorrow? Do this
along with thinking about what would you do if you knew with one
hundred percent certainty that your wife wouldn’t leave you over
it? Live this life unapologetically.
The goal is to be honest and comfortable with yourself, warts and
all, to make no apologies for being a man and for wanting what men
want. At the same time, you have no expectations that anyone will
fulfill your desires without receiving value in return. That value is the
byproduct of you living a life unapologetically for yourself that
maximizes your strengths and minimizes your weakness.
From your work comes self-respect. From your self-respect comes
options. From your options come authority. From your authority
comes expectations. From your expectations come investment. If the
people around you are unable or unwilling to recognize your value
and treat you accordingly, then they don’t deserve value from you and
you don’t give it. You now no longer fear abandonment like a child
because you’ve grown up and realize that by being attractive and not
being unattractive, you provide a lot of value to anyone who deserves
it. If your current wife or girlfriend won’t recognize it, that means she
doesn’t deserve it, so you wish her well and head out to find her
younger, tighter replacement.
After all, she wasn’t yours, it was just your turn.
The Sexual Marketplace; or Where Frame is
Tested
I first learned about the concept of the sexual marketplace from
author Rollo Tomassi. At first, it seemed very crass and
dehumanizing: reducing sex and relationships to the transactional
level of candy bars or XBOX games. Once I got past that childlike
understanding of economics, however, it made much more sense.
Economics isn’t about the study of money. It’s about the study of
human decisions and managing limited resources. A sexual
marketplace isn’t the trading of money for sex, comfort for love, or
marriage for half your house. It’s an understanding that human,
sexual relationships are all about decisions, incentives, and
opportunity. To deny this as an important part of frame is to deny what
makes us human.
Everything we do is about sex except sex itself, which is about power.
You may not treat it like this, or be aware that you do, but this is our
default behavior when it comes to sex and life. You can either learn to
play the game as it is played, or you will be run over.
What does this have to do with frame? Everything. In the final chapter
of my first book, Fuccfiles: 15 Lessons From a Decade of Women, I
explain why thirst is the worst state for any man to be in with regards
to his relationships with women. It’s impossible for a man to have
frame when he’s failing himself in the sexual marketplace. A man
without sexual success is a liability to himself and others. He will
allow himself to be manipulated for even the faintest whiff of sexual
attention.
Marketing research firms like Gartner love to research topics like how
women prefer married men and gay men to single men (or other
women) in the workplace. The reason why boils down to thirst.
Women in the workplace view other women as competition for men,
so they sabotage female coworkers. Single men can only think of the
women around them as objects of conquest (not you, I’m talking
about the other guys). Secure, married men aren’t thirsty. They have
families at home and aren’t worried about where their next partners
are coming from. Gay men have zero desire to attract women.
I have an entrepreneur friend, Richard Cooper, who talks about this in
his book, The Unplugged Alpha. A business partner of his for
decades once tried to away their multi-million dollar empire all
because he got a whiff of some strange, but had no frame that
allowed him to manage his desire or keep it in perspective. It’s not
just business, either. During the cold war, one of the most common
points of failure in the standoff between the US and USSR was thirsty
men falling for honey pots, attractive women who feign interest in
men order to leverage them for state secrets. Activist journalists like
Project Veritas have found all kinds of nefarious dirt on companies.
How? By sending attractive reporters on Tinder dates with tech
employees, then asking their targets right questions.
This isn’t the be-all guide to avoiding thirst in your life. This is more of
an introduction to game and inter gender relations based on an
important fact: Men and women aren’t the same. We think and act
differently. We have different motivations and different insecurities. By
understanding them, however, by understanding how we sabotage
our own frame with ineffective behaviors driven by incorrect thinking
and mental models, we can learn to avoid making obvious mistakes
and build stronger frame.
Thirst is the worst, and if your world view crumbles the first time a
pretty girl offers your a whiff, then you don’t have a world view, you
have a flimsy and flaccid coping strategy.
In this section, I’m exposing aspects of frame you’ve never
considered. I start with how men dehumanize women and lose sight
of their own self-interest by doing so. I give examples of how men’s
innate narcissism, when deliberately harnessed to produce an
attractive dark triad trait, complements a similar, healthy borderline
trait in women, and how men who ignore this reality end up creating
misery in their own lives. I demonstrate how our mental hangups and
lack of frame can destroy our sex lives when we get married and start
families. I explain how the transactional nature of relationships can
result in, and be a result of, a significant loss of frame for men as a
consequence of our relationships with our parents sabotaging us in
the long term. Finally, I end by revealing how women offering us
advice is really just a test of our frame, and how to better hold frame
when being manipulated in this way, regardless of women’s intentions
are good or bad. Understanding intersexual dynamics teaches us
about frame so that we can then move on to creating a vision, the
pinnacle of a man’s frame.
The Madonna Whore Complex
There’s religious undertones to this mental model which aren’t
important. The important thing to remember is that men dehumanize
people in order to keep their world views and that this
dehumanization prevents us from a state of frame. Women have a
version of it called the lover and provider, or as author Rollo Tomassi
puts it, Alpha Fucks and Beta Bucks. While there may have been
utility in this sort of broad categorization in our pasts, it’s completely
irrelevant to the modern sexual marketplace.
Women are attracted to two separate groups of qualities, behaviors,
and actions. These are categorized as alpha and beta. Alpha are the
behaviors that create sexual desire. Beta are the behaviors that build
relationship security. The terms have been bastardized in marketing
campaigns in the 2000s by replacing goodness and godliness as
buzzwords for a more secular crowd. The bastardized sales pitch was
that anything alpha™ is good and anything beta™ is bad, full stop.
And in the realm of men being raised to act like defective women, we
have the Madonna and whore complex.
The term has deep roots, but in this space was popularized by David
Claire and Franco in the book Practical Female Psychology. Men,
either through their religious upbringing, or from repeated sexual
failure, would categorize women into virginal Madonna or the whore
of Babylon. It caused two major failures in mens sex lives, which then
created two major failures in men learning to have frame.
The first came in men sabotaging their own happiness by declaring
the complex openly. The second came in men sabotaging their own
relationship happiness by adhering to their complex. It all comes back
to frame. How you frame women changes how you act around, and
act towards women.
When women meet a man for the first time, they instinctively see him
as either husband material, or fuccboi material. For the man that’s
just there for fun they will submit quickly, enjoy themselves, then
convince everyone nothing happened and it didn’t count. For the
husband material, she sees him as a long term investment. She
doesn’t submit quickly, making him earn affection. She submits after
expensive signs of commitment (monogamy, co habitation, a ring etc)
enjoys herself, then convinces him she’s always been like this.
When these men as defective women meet a girl for the first time,
they have been trained to see them as Madonna or whore. For the
whore there’s just fun and they act hyper masculine, aloof with an
abundance of dark triad traits. They don’t care because she’s a
disposable plaything. Then they meet the Madonna and they turn into
prudes. If they sleep with her on the first date then she’s damaged.
It’s not that sex ruins people (it doesn’t) it’s that she was stupid
enough to fall for their tricks, so she clearly doesn’t love them for who
they are.
Early on in a relationship men sabotage any future happiness
because they just can’t believe that they can be attractive, she can be
attracted to him, and it’s because sex is fun and there’s no
consequences. Instead it becomes an existential crisis because she
treated him as the lover and not the provider. Men actively sabotaging
their sex lives because the women they meet don’t categorize them
properly. Must be her fault, nothing to change here.
Later in a relationship a man moves past his whores and settles down
with his Madonna. Sometimes it’s right when he becomes
monogamous with her, other times it’s after he puts a ring on her, or
when that first baby is born. In a guys mind his woman is not the
virginal Madonna, the mother of his children. He pedistalizes her, puts
her into a category of the divine. She is no longer the messy, ugly
sexual object, she is the 4th wheel in the holy trinity.
And when she probes for his opinion on sex ‘do you think that girl is
attractive?’ he slut shames other women. A man thinks he is saying
he loves her and not the other women, but what he’s really doing is
showing her that sex is wrong, and he will shame her for enjoying it.
That same guy then gets confused when his wife stops giving blow
jobs, and eventually stops having sex. The only thing a woman loves
more than hot sex with a cool man is not being shamed for it. He
never had the foggiest notion when he was shaming all those whore
for not being as good as his wife he was establishing his own life of
quiet misery.
This is a lot of sex talk in a book about frame. Next to eating and
sleeping, sex is the only other non negotiable biological drive we
have, so yeah, it’s important. Understanding why the mental model of
Madonna and whore is so damaging you can learn to avoid it and
build something healthier. In this case:
Women aren’t Madonnas and whores, they are just women.
It’s a running joke, that the guys in this space were the biggest
misogynists because they had the audacity to treat women as
individual human beings, and it’s kind of true. Learn to stop
categorizing women as sexual or non sexual, and categorize them as
individuals. The nice girl next door you met that is making you wait 12
dates for sex was likely doing the most depraved stuff to a dude she
just met at the Cancun foam party. The girl you married and had a
child with is the exact same girl you knew who followed you into the
bathroom at the bar for a quickie. She is a woman and fills the role of
the strongest frame around her. It’s borderline personality to your
narcissistic personality.
If the analogy for narcissism is "being the main character in their own movie," then
the analogy for borderline is being an actress.
—TheLastPsychiatrist
A great line from the aforementioned author is that borderline is only
borderline in relationship to other people. If you put a BPD woman
onto a deserted island, she will cease to become borderline. That’s
not the interesting part. The interesting part is she will become a
narcissist. This is why Madonna and whore aren’t accurate categories
of women, only accurate ways men condition the women they are
with into acting a certain way. I wouldn’t call it gaslighting, more
incentivized collectivism.
So when you’re thinking about the Madonna and whore complex, and
the useful mental model to replace it (women are human) it’s not just
a useful statement, it’s a self fulfilling prophecy. When you hear
narcissism and borderline in the public lexicon, replace it with
masculinity and femininity in your mind. This is how you reconcile the
dark triad personality types with successful frame in your sex life.
You’re not an evil narcissist, you’re a man with strong frame. She’s
not a whore (borderline) she’s reacting to the biggest identity in her
life. When you meet a woman who has cool hobbies, thank the man
she used to date because that’s where she got them from. If you are
a fan of something, when she is dating you (or interested in doing so)
she is a fan of the same thing. If you break up and she dates a man
with a different interest, then she’s a fan of that instead. It’s not that
she’s doing it to make you like her, she really believes it. She’s not
lying, she actively convinced herself each time.
Frame is important, not just in business, work and your social life, but
in your relationships with women as well. Being the strong frame in
life means you attract people who are attracted to strong frame. They
enjoy the value you bring so much they act better around you,
because they want to. I jokingly call it the Laci Greene effect.
Laci Greene was a Youtube personality and feminist. She was always
making videos about the patriarchy and men being evil and women
being just as powerful as men. One day she started talking about the
Red Pill and how men were treated badly in divorce; it was like she
turned a 180. The only change she made was she had a boyfriend,
and she was in love. All of a sudden those feminist ideals were just
gone, instead replaced with her love for a good man and hot sex with
a cool man.
The original descriptions of frame were from pick up artists, and they
would talk about the frame of an interaction. Two people were
asserting their perceptions of reality onto each other, and the strong
personality would usually win out (or two equally strong personalities
would butt heads then separate.) The takeaway from all this is the
understanding that frame isn’t something you pick up and put down in
each interaction, it’s who you are. So the next time you find that
everyone is treating you like shit, remember:
Women Act as Shitty as you Let Them
Most self help gurus pick the low hanging fruit. They tell you to
workout, make money, dress nice, buy nice things and be pleasant.
They do this as the half truth, since nothing in there is bad, offensive,
or wrong. Most of it is tangential to how you’re treated. The only
things that matter, especially with women and men, is status and
value.
Talking to women, treating them well, having common interests,
having compatible personalities, getting along as friends for awhile,
then maybe moving things toward sex later is the feminine framing. In
the last section I wrote about making relationship material wait until
they give expensive signals of commitment and this is how it
manifests.
The only purpose behind the way you interact with a woman is that it
signifies your status and value. A healthy level of narcissism,
preselection and and aloof personality doesn’t equate to value
directly, these things send signals that the underlying person who has
this personality and these behaviors is good looking, successful,
social, skilled, and valuable. Even your looks; women won’t know if
you have a six pack until you’re about to sleep together, but they can
see your forearms. Forearms for a man are cleavage for a woman.
Where men who don’t have these valuable skills go wrong is by
looking at successful men and leaping to the wrong conclusion. They
think that women only love assholes (which is a container word, they
only define it by the things they hate about another guys success)
and act abrasive, then assume they can be as successful as high
status men. Worse yet, guys go in the opposite direction and figure if
they are in touch with their feelings, or act nice, treat them well, have
common interests, a pleasing personality, and get along as friends for
that this is what is attractive to women.
Guys who lack value but interact with women in a pleasing manner
either become friends only, or get blown off entirely as creepy. Guys
who lack value but interact with women like an asshole are blown off
as angry creepy incels. They take the wrong lessons here. It’s not
that being nice or being an asshole works, it’s that the strongest
frame dictates the preferred behavior. Women who are attracted to
your value adapt to your personality. Women who are not attracted to
your value will detest it.
Women mirror valuable men. Valuable men are the containers and
women are the water that fills the space they are given. Women who
interact with valuable guys take an interest in the valuable guy’s
skills, hobbies and pastimes. They suddenly notice how cool those
things are and want to learn more. Likewise, when an awesome guy
expresses displeasure or distances himself from something she does,
she changes her behavior. She conforms to please him. She isn’t
doing this on purpose, it’s how women are wired.
So when you see men working hard to please women, by being
submissive, nice, accommodating etc. Is it any surprise women aren’t
attracted to it? When you see a woman acting like a frat boy do you
prefer it to a woman acting like a woman? It turns out the behaviors
you’re noticing are the secondary behaviors, and you’re completely
missing the core of it. Value is valuable, everything else is negotiable.
When a man is low-value, women laugh at the things he does and
distance themselves from his interests. Low-value men adapt by
conforming to please women. This signifies low value. When a man is
high-value women love the things he does and get close to him and
his interest. High-value men don’t adapt unless it’s in their own
interest do so. This abundance signals high value.
Modern women don’t have much going on in the way of personality,
hobbies, skills or interests. You’d be hard pressed to pry a 20something without a TikTok or Instagram account with 0 posts and 8
hours of daily activity. The lives of most modern women consist of
social media, eating out, buying clothes, and dating. They spend their
time shallowly reflecting the guys they want to be with, latching on to
the lives of their men.
It’s easy to hate them. To look down on them. Why? Because when
you see women as non-unique, non-special beings, each one defined
primarily by how hot they are you can approach them with confidence
and outcome independence.
When you hate her, just a little bit, you’re able to stop seeing her as a
fantasy and to see her as a human being, just as boring as the rest.
You see stories of women acting up, cheating, dumping, divorcing,
and being shitty towards men who love them. You see men shouting
from the rooftops how they just aren’t worth it. But remember: Women
mirror their men. If you’re a high-status, valuable man, everything you
do looks awesome. Even the asshole things. Especially the asshole
thing. If your frame is weak and your value low, everything you do
looks awkward and creepy. Even the nice things, especially the nice
things. Your interests and goals look like loser stuff.
If a woman is being shitty to you, it’s because you’re letting her. She’s
reflecting your own shittiness back at you. Women are only as shitty
as you let them be.
Men Have Been Raised to be Defective Women
Men and women aren’t the same. Of course, men and women are
different! Then I go through many examples of how blank-slate
equalism has led men astray and you’ll sit there baffled that you
never connected the dots.
We were all raised to believe it. Women can do anything men can do
which is a true but not helpful statement, much like saying, “All birds
have wings.” Both statements lack context, significance, relatedness.
Right now things are so easy anyone can do them. During basic
training, we were told the story of a bunch of soldiers who were
ordered to move a hundred gas cans. They formed a line, passing
down the fifty pound cans, one to another, stacking them perfectly.
Then a female platoon was tasked with the same thing. As the story
goes, they started up a forklift and moved them all with ease while
everyone laughed. It’s a funny story but it explains everything. We
have automated the world, and now there is a lever for everything,
and everyone has access to it. Of course, this doesn’t change our
innate drives or instincts.
Men and women aren’t the same.
For the sake of your own benefit, this matters in how we approach
conflict, how we handle jealousy and infidelity, how we cope with loss,
how we approach relationships, and how we organize socially. Men
and women aren’t the same, and understanding these differences
means the difference between success and failure in a relationship.
The functional difference between men and women (including men
raised to be defective women) is in how we perceive and express
truth, morality, and the purpose of conflict. Men see truth as objective.
There are singular, definable truths, and statements are factual
insofar as they are closer to truth. Furthermore, because truth is
objective, there can be no universal goods or evils. Every interaction
produces winners and losers. Men see morality as subjective, so
what is “good” is whatever benefits you and your group, and what is
“bad” is whatever harms your group.
The purpose of conflict (read: argument, debate, confrontation,
conversation) is to share information and test it all against each other
in order to discover which facts are closer to truth. The closer things
are to the truth, the more predictable life becomes and the better the
decisions men can make. The character of the people involved
doesn’t matter as factual statements or results don’t have a moral
component. If two men fight for control of a group of people, for
instance, the winner of the fight will become the leader of the group.
When two men argue over a theory, the one whose facts are
definitive is the one most likely to persuade us to accept his position
or premise, etc..
Women, on the other hand, see truth as subjective. There is no
universal truth in their minds. Truth is simply the codified set of
experiences of the individual woman. This is why you hear women
say things like my truth. For a woman, statements are true because
she feels they are true to her. Women believe in a universal morality.
Behaviors, ideas, and events are either good or bad based on a strict
hierarchy regardless of how they affect individuals. Thus, they are
either good or bad. So while women perceive truth as subjective, they
perceive morality as objective.
The purpose of conflict among women, then, is to establish a
hierarchy, decide who is the highest status person so that they can
use their truth to dictate morality to the in-group. The character of the
people is not only important, but it’s the entire reason for the
conversation. The actual words and ideas are merely a pretext to
establish a pecking order.
When dealing with loss, men are the true romantics, posing as
pragmatists. Women are the pragmatics, posing as romantics. There
are plenty of evolutionary reasons why this is the case. David Claire
writes about womens’ relationship cycles in his book Practical Female
Psychology, and it’s worth a read. A woman’s ability to have multiple
children from multiple fathers was a genetic advantage that ensured
reproducing if her mate was killed or stopped providing, and the
women who were best able to secure a top tier man, secure his
provision, and repeat this cycle survived and thrived, while extremely
loyal women did not.
Promise Keepers
One common theme I’ve encountered amongst the more zealous beta White
Knights I’ve counseled over the years has been this determination, bordering on
fanaticism, with out-doing the life-performance of their asshole fathers.
—Rollo Tomassi, “Promise Keepers”
Men today are raised to be defective women. Is anyone surprised,
then, when having daddy issues is one of the traits we pick up? When
men aren’t around much during a boy’s childhood, the boy leans
more on his mom, and half of the moms out there left their children’s
dads, and half of those who remained couldn’t stand dad but refused
to leave for various reasons. Thats three-quarters of women out there
harboring some sort of resentment to the most important man in their
children's lives. And those children prioritized mom since she almost
always got custody.
Why did she get custody? Because dad was working, and she
stopped working and stayed at home, sacrificing her future earning
potential for him and the children. Naturally, the courts saw all of
those “selfless acts” as evidence of her being the better parent. The
law may be blind and fair to all on paper, but decisions are made with
a thumb on one side of the scale.
Mom complained (or complains) about dad. Her kids don’t perceive
that venting because have yet to learn what venting even is. Instead,
they think she actually hates the man and has good reason to, that he
is everything wrong with the world. Mom’s boys then grow up thinking
that they will right such wrongs:
“I will grow up to make sure that I never treat a woman the way dad
treated mom. Then I’ll have a problem free life and my woman will
love me forever!”
This mental model is a covert contract called Promise Keepers, and it
sets so many men up for failure. They treat all the comfort they gave
to mom over her glass of wine as proof of how good of a boy he is,
how bad of a boy dad was, and how she will never look at him and
see his father. Sounds good. Maybe dad was even abusive, right?
Except, dad turned mom on. He was charming, attractive, and
sexually-desired enough to give her at least one kid. He likely had his
faults, but Promise Keepers throw away dad’s entire identity. Say
what you will about the infamous Austrian painter of the 1940s, but
the trains did run on time, and Hugo Boss is a very stylish clothing
line.
Jokes aside, the mental model of Promise Keepers creates bad
outcomes for men. Instead of developing their own frame, instead of
taking the best qualities of both parents and shedding the worst, they
instead choose mom over dad. The problem arises when dating as
women don’t like dating women, and they sure don’t like becoming
someone’s mom, yet that is how Promise Keepers present
themselves: as feminized men seeking approval and guidance from
mom.
All these promises go unfulfilled as these men build resentment
towards the women they date for not living up to their part of the
bargain which they were never told existed. Remember the previous
sections on narcissism and borderline? Well, women who have a
healthy level of borderline shed this nonsense when they meet and
connect with a high-value man. Men turn it into a narcissistic fantasy.
The women they date become the mother archetype, and the men
eventually develop rage when the women they are with don’t act the
part or read the script they didn’t know existed.
Men originally wanted to learn frame so that they could deal with
harpy, ball busting wive. It was never the aim of men to get past
issues with their parents and how they were raised, but it was a nice
side effect. Many of us, myself included, ended up coming to terms
with the Promise Keeper in us. We repaired our relationships with our
fathers and stepfathers. We understood that they weren’t perfect and
did they best they could. Remember that no one taught them how to
do this either. Is it any wonder that men default to their instincts when
they are under the stress of a wife about to leave? Our instincts are
for anger and violence, the two qualities least able to address the
problem or to get any sympathy or help from the community.
So the mental model in this situation for a man developing his frame
is that your mom is no different than any other woman. It’s similar to
Madonna-Whore, but different enough that it warrants its own model.
Your dad may have been a cad.
Mine was. If anything, your mom was no different from his
perspective than the throwaway women you dated in your youth but
didn’t end up with. She’s not a mother goddess. She’s just a human
being like the rest of them.
If you can let go of your childhood resentment of your dad, not build
any for your mom’s lying to you as a child, and build an adult
relationship with them both as much as possible, you’re well on your
way to having frame. I joked in my first book how I came to blows with
my step father when I turned eighteen, how afterwards nothing ever
scared me, and how his only fatherly advice was:
“You’re not a man until you put your old man into the hospital.”
The point is solid, even if the wisdom was horrific: Learn to let go.
Realize they made mistakes but did the best they could. Your mom
isn’t the protagonist or the divine mother goddess, and your father
isn’t the antagonist or the evil villain. She was just a woman, he was
just a man, and you are too. Once you kill the Promise Keeper, you’re
that much closer to a solid Emotional Pillar as well as the end of your
journey to build frame.
Alternatively, you can just fight the guy and get it over with, but it
saves a lot of hassle to stand up for yourself, realign your perceptions
without having to take a few shots to the face first.
‘What do you bring to the Table?’ is an Autistic
Question
Incentives matter.
The Mental Model to take from this is that women cannot love you the
way you want them to, they can only love you in the ways they are
capable. When you’re doing well, they are supportive cheerleaders.
When you’re doing poorly or on hard times, they look to their own
survival and needs. You have a buffer if you’re a valuable man but it’s
not unlimited. Once you understand what women are, how they think,
and what they can offer, you are better able to temper your
expectations to the reality of her nature.
And since most men get mad because women cannot be everything
to him, I’ll only add this: don’t blame her because you can’t find a
strong male friend to share your vulnerabilities with.
Women are the weaker gender. They have a heightened sense of
neuroticism and it only gets worse when they are in a relationship,
pregnant, or with a kid. They have an innate borderline personality
and latch onto the strongest frame in the room. In what world is this
the resume of someone to lean on in troubled times? As a guy you
may have this as an expectation for the women you date. If a woman
doesn’t want to do this she can hit the bricks, right? What does she
bring to the table? She brings the mans role apparently.
A woman isn’t there to complete you. You are there to complete
yourself. The woman is a lagging indicator for when you’re complete.
This is why you see a lot of advice in my niche about waiting until
your 30s to settle down. It’s not because you’re peaking in what you
bring to the table (though you are in a way) it’s that you need to find
those emotional pillars before you add a woman to your life.
You don’t need a woman to be mature and complete. You already
have those things. There’s a reason guys in this space tell everyone
to look at woman a decade younger or more. It’s not because you,
the 36 year old man can only find common ground with a 36 year old
woman, it’s that what you want, what she brings to the table is a
bubbly attitude, a nice smile, great looks, and whatever logistics you
need for a good lifestyle can be sorted out after the desire is there.
When a single woman gets older it’s like she is on a deserted island.
She hasn’t had a strong personality to attach her borderline to, she’s
emotionally on a desert island. Author TheLastPsychiatrist puts it
best:
Here's the ironic part: if a borderline was shipwrecked on a desert
island with no one around, she'd develop a real identity, of her own,
not a reaction to other people. Sorry, that's not the ironic part, this is:
she'd become a narcissist.
When you think about what women bring to the table, you don’t
generally consider a healthy level of borderline and a lower level of
narcissism. She wouldn’t know how to articulate it because she never
considered it. But, when you have it, it’s immediately clear that those
are the things she brings to the table that you value. Things just work,
they feel great, and everyone is happy.
You have the frame, she adapts to it, her happiness is your
happiness. Your happiness is a hard won choice. The list of what
people bring to the table is irrelevant. The psychological,
psychosocial and emotional ability of you and the woman you choose
to be with having polarity is the only thing that matters.
♦ If you want an emotional safety net, hire a shrink or go to
church.
♦ If you want an intellectual equal, join MENSA
♦ If you want a place to be comfortable in your vulnerability, get a
male friend
♦ And stop worrying what women bring to the table and worry
about your container because that is the shape they will take in
your life.
Women Can’t Tell you What they Want. They
Don’t Know Either
When you ask a woman for dating advice, although god knows why
you would, you’ll find her incapable of empathizing with your point of
view. She can only tell you what she wants it to look like from hers.
A woman who says you should buy flowers and “be yourself ” isn't
delusional or trying to sabotage you. It’s self-centered solipsism and
projection. She can’t help it anymore than she can help being a
woman. She's giving you good information, only if you insert:
“I want it to feel like”, or "I want people to think" in front of every
statement. I call this Whisper’s Rule
♦ Just be yourself becomes, I want to feel like you're just being
yourself.
♦ Act natural, don't force it becomes, I want it to feel natural, not
forced.
♦ Just be patient, the right person will come along becomes, I
want it to feel like it just happened because he was the right
person.
When you listen to their advice on the surface it sounds like feelgood gobbledygook. When you translate it, it becomes a description
of the outcome you want to create. When you hear them talk about
themselves the same rule applies:
♦ I’m a strong independent woman becomes, I want to feel like a
strong independent woman
♦ I am not like the other girls becomes, I want people to think I’m
not like the other girls
When you filter things through Whisper’s Rule, everything makes
sense. Solipsism isn’t selfishness; it’s self-centerness. Everything you
hear is filtered as if her perspective is the only perspective. It’s factual
subjectiveness, which is much different from the way men perceive
and process the world. It’s not a bug; it’s a feature.
Women are evolved for navigating and managing relationships in
community whereas men are evolved to interact with the logistical
and life-or-death demands of the outside world. In the world of stuff,
men must understand objective truths. If they don’t, they can’t build
things, hunt things, and we starve and die off. In the world of people,
consensus is everything. What you can get people to believe is the
only thing that matters. This is why women say “my truth” while men
roll their eyes.
So when a woman tells you she isn't bullshitting you, in her mind,
she’s not. To her, communication is solely about coercion and
cohesion. That's why when your girl asks you if you’re mad at her,
and you insist that you’re not, she continuously prods, trying to find
out “why you are hiding your anger from her.”
So when she suggests you buy this shirt, wear that cologne, or go to
the Crossfit gym she uses, she’s not trying to help. She’s expressing
what outcome she wants and how she wants to feel. This means you
have to decide these things for yourself. When you have frame, she
will force fit your decisions into her desires as she encounters it,
anyway.
Thank god you won’t be like every other man whose wife buys their
clothing from Kirkland Signature to signal to other women that you no
longer want to have sex.
The Final Pillar Vision
Once you’ve developed your pillars of frame—your physical self is on
point, your intellect is fully developed, and your emotional self is in
check—you now have the capability to start doing what high value
people do.
You’re allowed to develop a Vision.
When people talk about frame in the self-improvement spaces, what
they really mean is Vision. They neglect developing those pillars that
provide the stability that’s required to have it. Sure, any man can
have a vision in his life, but if he’s physically weak, emotionally
unstable, and intellectually dull, who will care enough to want to be a
part of it? You may say you don’t care, and no one needs to be part of
your vision, but that only makes you delusional. Human beings are a
social species. We evolved for socialization in communities and
families and friendships. While frame does not involve pandering or
manipulating people to get them into your world, having a frame so
weak that no one sees value in it is also not the answer.
What you want out of life won’t impress every woman, but it can
impress more women. It won’t make all people your friends, but you
will have more friends. It’s luxury branding where you signal high
value but are selective about who gets to purchase it. In the same
way you aren’t able to buy a new Ferrari unless you can show you’ve
owned multiple used ones over the years, the only people allowed to
join you in your vision are those who can likewise show value to and
for you.
I can’t tell you what your vision should be. The whole point of this
book is to show you an alternate and better way to think, not what to
think. There is no bucket on my head. The beauty of building frame is
this question usually answers itself by the time you’re ready to ask it.
Men developing frame have gone their entire lives without asking the
three questions posed in the beginning of this book:
♦ Where am I?
♦ How do I know it?
♦ What should I do?
You know where you are. It’s self evident. You know it because
you’ve put in the work. You’ve built your physical, emotional, and
intellectual pillars. You know your worth, your boundaries, and your
likes and dislikes. You know when you’re being treated well, when
you're being treated poorly, and when people deserve more or less
from you. The only remaining question: Now that you have this value,
what do you do with it?
If you want a family, have a family. You should be able to attract
enough women into your life that you can pick among the ones who
best bring value to you and align with your vision. Men with no frame
who meet women in their thirties with baby rabies think they have
this, but they don’t. Those women want a baby, not a father for the
baby. They mistake aligned interests with shared interests. Men with
frame meet women who are twenty-three who love him so much that
they hear his interest in family and toss their pills in the garbage.
If you want to entertain a career that you love, then do that. I did that.
I moved across the country for a posting to Montreal. I left the military
at thirty-five to join the corporate world. I left that years later in order
to become an author and speaker. Every single change I’ve made,
my girl has followed, no questions asked. I have zero doubt that she’s
invested in me and that I offer the value that encourages her to follow
my vision. If I can get that, anyone can get that as there’s nothing
fundamentally unique about me. On paper, everything about me is
average.
I’m not being humble. I’m showing you this is attainable.
While I call the Red Pill a Praxeology, there’s a bit of Taoism in there.
You’re allowed to be passionate about your vision for as long as you
want it. When it no longer interests you, you’re allowed to let it go
without regrets and pursue another vision. It’s not a singular choice
you make over a lifetime. Relationships are always temporary. Your
woman may be there for a night, a decade, or until one of you dies,
but we all die alone. If you’ve lived a life of any consequence, you are
able to know that the you from five years ago would never believe
what he would become five years later. I know this because I’ve lived
this myself, and seen it in many of the men I’ve consulted over the
years.
Sometimes things affect your vision that are out of your control. A
recession can decimate your industry and livelihood. A wife can
decide she doesn’t want to be with you anymore. Children can be
weaponized to hate you. You can’t do anything about any of this
except own your frame. You earned the skills to earn a living once.
You can do it again. You can lose your money in divorce, but you
either still have the skills you used to earn that money the first time
that you will be able to earn it again, or you didn’t have any money
anyway, so you didn’t lose much. You can lose a wife but now you
have the skills to replace her with a younger model. Your kids may
hate you when they are thirteen, but most of your relationship with
your children will be with them as adults. Don’t be surprised if they
grow up and come to realize mom lied to them about you.
My favorite examples are those men who raised families, were dutiful
plow horses, and had ungrateful wives who cheated or just up and
left. Then they dust themselves off, learn frame, and live the
degenerate lifestyle that their younger selves could only dream of.
Their vision used to be the white picket fence and raising healthy and
functional adults, and they accomplished that. Now they live like
degenerate pieces of shit and enjoy every moment of it. That’s not my
favorite part of that story, though. My favorite part is that everyone
loves them even more when they do.
So I end with this: Now that you know what you want, go after it,
unapologetically and without shame.
Vision is a Display of Higher Value
One rarely talked about element of Married Game is a subtle attribute
known as Vision. Most husbands don’t appreciate what a strong
display of higher value (DHV) possessing a vision can be, and they
proceed unaware of the power it can add to their relationship. Most
husbands do this because they don’t understand Vision, what it is,
and how it is manifested, much less the subtle but important role it
plays. Let me explain: once upon a time I was working for a
personnel agency, and one of my jobs was coaching our people on
interviewing techniques. I learned a lot about the process as a result,
from both the interviewer and the interviewee side. When it came to
my clients who wanted high-quality employees with good technical
skills – real talent – I learned the sorts of things that such highdemand technical people were looking for in a company. Money is a
constant, of course, along with security and benefits. But beyond that,
gifted employees want to work for a company with a history, a good
culture, and (most importantly) a Vision.
What is Vision? In this context Vision is a manifested idea of future
growth and success. Everyone wants to work for a company that’s
changing the world and is doing so in a positive, proactive way. No
one wants to work for the company that’s floundering, that’s
desperate just to meet its next quarter’s goals.
Vision is a generally-stated plan-of-action toward a distant but
achievable goal, presented in an enticing enough manner to inspire.
It’s short on details and long on generalizations. It’s reflective of inner
beliefs, values, and judgments. It indicates character, foresight, and
initiative. It should be bold, meaningful, and challenging. Steve Jobs
and Bill Gates excelled at the Vision thing, and their companies
attracted outstanding talent as a result:
Google lives and breathes Vision. Without adequate Vision, innovation is
impossible and inspiration is difficult to come by. But what about you and your
marriage? Have you presented your wife with an inspiring enough Vision to give her
tingles and gain her support? Mrs. Ironwood knows exactly when I first outlined my
vision.
I received a rejection notice for a novel in the mail way back in the 1990s, and I
shrugged it off. She was concerned, and when she pressed I hauled out a dozen other
rejection letters I’d racked up just that year . . . and then explained how each one was
a tangible sign of success.
I sketched my vision of what kind of writer I wanted to be, what kind of life I
wanted to make for myself, and said it with such passion, conviction and confidence
that it gave her tingles and inspired her to want to be part of that vision.
—Ian Ironwood
As the captain of your boat, you might be so focused on bailing water
or keeping the engine running that you have sacrificed developing a
proper Vision for your marriage. But unless your wife understands
that there is an intended destination somewhere on the horizon, a
lush inviting port toward which you are heading, she is going to have
a hard time investing herself emotionally in the marriage. Sure, she
might proclaim her devotion to you, but unless you give her some
idea of who you are planning to be in the future, she’s going to be
reluctant to buy in.
A properly-relayed Vision gives her hamster something to chew on.
What constitutes a decent Vision? It isn’t merely financial – though
that’s certainly an important element. She wants to hear about your
professional goals and plans, your personal ideas of success, where
you see yourself ultimately, and she wants to know what values and
aspirations have shaped those goals.
Your Vision may not include career aspirations, but could involve
something deeply personally meaningful to you (and, if you’re adept,
to her). And they should involve the marriage without being focused
exclusively on the marriage. Building a dream house, having horses
someday, buying a boat and hitting the ICW for six months with her,
restoring a classic car, writing a hit musical, taking her to Rome,
investigating Bigfoot sightings in the Pacific Northwest – what matters
most is your passion and your ambition, and a demonstration of how
that passion will propel you both to a better and happier place.
Vision is hard. You should give it some thought, and then present it in
a dramatic enough way to make an impact. It should be designed to
engage her emotions, incite her own passions, and literally give her a
positive context in which to envision her future. But every woman
wants to know where you’re planning on heading the boat. She’ll
want to make “constructive” additions, and that’s OK.
As long as you have given her a story to inspire her, and inspire her
devotion to you, the details are unimportant. It isn’t even important if
your Vision changes over time. What is important is that you have
and can communicate that Vision to her in a compelling way.
How to Lead a Woman who Won’t Let you?
I’ve seen a lot of men saying they can’t lead their relationships
because their women are too strong, smart, of bossy. She doesn’t like
it, she’s a feminist and fights them every step of the way and it’s just
not worth it. They usually look for some outside authority to
manipulate their women into acting right:
“What books I can give my wife to read so she can follow my lead?”
They are all part of the men without frame and the things they do.
Some version of:
“I want wife to authorize me to lead.”
What they don’t understand is that their mental models frame it in a
way that makes it impossible. Leaders don’t need permission. They
lead, period. Those who want to follow, follow. Those that don’t, don’t.
Leadership only works with good followership, and followership is a
choice. The focus and charisma of someone with frame, and the
vision that comes with it inspires others to follow. Thinking that people
have to follow so you can lead is ass backwards. That backwards
thinking is one of the reasons they aren’t trusted to lead.
Married guys act like they can’t be a man in the relationship until
they are given permission, like their balls are in a jar and they are
asking for the jar back. Your balls are between your legs and always
were. Stop looking for permission and just lead. Leading doesn’t
require followers since the first person you lead is always yourself.
Mark Twain wrote the Adventured of Tom Sawyer and that one fence
painting scene.
“Why, ain’t _that_ work?” Tom resumed his whitewashing, and answered
carelessly:
“Well, maybe it is, and maybe it ain’t. All I know, is, it suits Tom Sawyer.”
“Oh come, now, you don’t mean to let on that you _like_ it?” The brush continued
to move.
“Like it? Well, I don’t see why I oughtn’t to like it. Does a boy get a chance to
whitewash a fence every day?”
… Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He had
discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it—namely, that in order to
make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to
attain … work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of
whatever a body is not obliged to do.
It’s similar to the concept of luxury branding. You’re leading the
same way Tom painted his fence. Others can critique you and it
doesn’t matter, because you’re a man with frame and having the time
of his life; how could you not? For the first time in your life you’re
living life and not letting life happen to you. Even the worst chore is a
manifestation of your autonomy. And eventually, others want to paint
with you, or they move on.
When we are not leading our life, you can’t lead anyone, not wife not
girlfriend, not a Tinder date and not your kids. When you’re not
leading, you’re just a drunk captain, with a begrudging crew leading
from the helm (but this topic is for a whole other book.)
Most men find our space, hear about frame and want to lead with
vision right away. They think they can declare themselves an alpha
male™ and the rest of us will fall in line. It’s not leadership, it’s
narcissistic fantasy. It doesn’t help that theres a continuous line of
salesmen encouraging it so they can move more merch. Think of any
boss you have had that is bitching that employees don’t follow his
orders. Did you respect and trust him more?
If the women in your life aren’t following you, it’s not their fault. Words
don’t change that, only action does. Even then, life doesn’t come with
guarantees. Tom was OK with that, and so can you.
Leading is the hardest job. Everyone in the ship can bitch, except the
leader. If you are bitching you aren’t acting with vision, you’re
submitting to, no one. The captain is responsible for everything in the
ship. A saying I heard during my leadership training was:
Their fault, your responsibility.
Blaming is irrelevant. Fault is irrelevant. Blame and fault are concepts
for women and children. Would you rather complain and be right, or
navigate life and be happy? The leader takes responsibility for his
vision, not from the vision of others.
If you are in a situation where you are used to your wife telling you
which chores you need to do, and you snap back
“I’m not in the mood, I’m playing X-Box” you are not leading because
you are acting like a child, so you have forced her to lead like a mom.
No wonder she isn’t attracted to you sexually, it is your own fault. Man
up.
Transitioning from the frame where she is the mother and you are the
child is disruptive because the only way to do is without her approval.
If she has to approve it she is still leading. The way you start to lead
is to follow your vision.
Nobody can stop you but you.
The way to start is by doing things that you know need to be done,
even if it’s stuff she usually nags for you to do anyways. You need to
do things on your timeline, to your standard. When you do stuff that
needs to be done, never proudly show it to her. That is validation
seeking behavior. The job itself is its own reward because it
contributes to your vision. Whether she notices or not is irrelevant.
This has the added benefit of quashing all the fights you have over
these things. You’ve put in the work, and any emotional statements
otherwise just roll off you. You’ve can’t be gaslit.
If wife tells you to do something, think about it, and if it makes sense,
decide you are responsible for it. Don't register her nagging, because
leaders don't have time for that, they solve problems. Listen to her
request and prioritize it according to your vision, not to her emotions.
Just saying “Babe, I got it.” and ending the discussion is enough. This
changes the dynamics from her bossing you around to you listening
to her suggestions, and all that you had to do it was to take
responsibility, or choose not to. By doing this consistently she will
learn that nagging only wastes her energy, and when you say you will
do something, you do it. When you don’t do something it’s not
because you aren’t aware of it, it’s a conscious choice.
Women can handle things being put on the back burner, they can’t
handle not being considered. Stop fighting with her and focus on
problem solving. If something doesn’t affect concretely the problem,
change the topic to the concrete problem. If she is bitching about you
not cleaning the garage because you chose to build the new shelves,
instead of pointing that out and trying to convince her to let you lead
say
“I’m responsible for the garage. Don’t worry about it.” and ignore the
rest. You prioritize your way, and you show it with actions, not your
words.
It gets harder before it gets easier. People are slaves to patterns. If
you change, other peoples brains would rather fight you so you return
to normal behavior than to accept the new you, even if it’s in their
best interests. It’s no ones fault, our brans are hardwired for laziness
and familiarity. The only way around it is consistency and patience.
It’s more work, but that is what makes vision rare and valuable. Stop
bitching and just do it.
This works independent of how strong, how bossy, how smart or how
feminist a woman is. The stronger a woman is, the more she wants to
submit to a stronger man. It is your job to be that strong man or to
replace her with someone more willing. The more likely and able you
are to do the latter, the more likely you get the former.
If you think the problem is she doesn't let you lead, then you aren’t in
a place to lead yet.
End of the Road
Don’t think of this as the end of a process, think of this as the start
of one. It’s time to begin using the collection of tools, mental models,
and field reports from the men who’ve gone before trying to answer
the same three questions:
♦ Where am I?
♦ How do I know it?
♦ What should I do?
The chaos in our lives is a result of a lack of a coherent vision and
insufficiently defined and enforced boundaries. The best way we’ve
come up with (so far) for responding to that chaos involves using the
tools you’ve read about here and ignoring what you’ve been taught by
people who don’t have your best interests at heart because only you
can decide what your best interests are. This is praxeology: living life
with your eyes open using a pragmatic approach to defining and
getting what you want.
Using OODA loops help you adapt to the world as is by providing
you with a method for focusing on facts and objective truths about
yourself and your life:
Observe what goes on around you.
Orient yourself to a specific outcome.
Decide on a course of action.
Act on what you know.
Examine and analyze the results and repeat.
Field reports allow you to bypass your ego’s tendency to gloss
over uncomfortable truths by focusing on the details that matter.
Put together, Praxeology, OODA Loops, and Field Reports give you
the ability to overcome instincts that are partially genetic and partially
learned from the failed parenting strategies of women and of men
raised to act like defective women.
It all comes together with a loose philosophy of rational egoism, or as
we call it, Rule Zero. You belong to you. You exist for you. Anyone
who wants something from you had better offer you something of
similar value in return for what they’re asking instead of trying to
convince you it’s your duty to provide, or threatening you for noncompliance. Every moral system is ultimately just a set of rules
someone or some group madeup and adopted over time to suit their
purposes. If you buy into someone else’s moral framework when it
provides no benefit to you or, even worse, hurts you, then you’re an
idiot. Once you begin practicing the things you’ve learned in this
book, you’ll never again let people subvert your primary objective with
their BS.
Building on those basic tools and fundamentals, you have learned
what is so useful about the dark triad personality types:
Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy, and how identifying
and keeping the attractive traits while ignoring the unattractive ones
will help you accomplish your goals and achieve your mission.
Narcissism, but healthy. Psychopathy, but healthy. Machiavellian, but
only to a point.
And since deciding on the women you let in your life is both the most
common and most important decision you will make, you now adapt
these traits to benefit you in the sexual marketplace. They will help
you make better decisions. You’ll no longer overcomplicate your life
by making bad decisions ir hopes of being loved. You’ll learn to put in
the work, and from your work will come self-respect. From that selfrespect comes options. From those options come authority. From
your authority comes expectations. From your expectations come
investment.
What started as a journey of self-improvement has turned out to be a
study and practice of the human condition. You have read about and
understood the idea of subtext, closed communication, power games,
and how to handle with them in conversations with others. You should
now be prepared and able to recognize any attempt to manipulate
you into doing or accepting things you don’t want, without
overreacting.
By learning how to defend and protect yourself against manipulation,
you can build your own, better mental models of the world, shedding
those codependent and validation-seeking nice guy™ behaviors. This
assertiveness is critical so that you can enforce your new boundaries.
Also, and perhaps most importantly, this book has shown you
examples of all the ways men have screwed-up and sabotaged their
road maps along the way, so you don’t have to make the same
mistakes and waste years of your life only pretending to be selfactualized.
Finally, the tetrahedron provides an organizational framework for all
of these tools: Physical, Emotional, and Intellectual mental models
form a base for you to build a coherent vision, a coherent world view.
By the time you’ve observed all the issues arising from problems men
can create for themselves, understood all the concepts that provide
the best strategies for dealing with those issues, made the hard
decisions, and acted in your own best interest, you finally understand
what it’s all about:
Holding frame.
For Further Reading
If you’re the kind of person who loves to do a deep dive I included a
list of supplementary readings in order of importance.
◆◆◆
Dr. Robert Glover: No More Mr. Nice Guy
Manuel Smith: When I Say No I Feel Guilty
Rollo Tomassi: The Rational Male
Joseph South: Practical Female Psychology For the Practical
Man
Dalrock: https://dalrock.wordpress.com/
Roissy, Château Heartiste: https://heartiste.org/
The Married Red Pill: https://old.reddit.com/r/Marriedredpill/
Venkatesh Rao: Tempo
Geoffry Miller: The Mating Mind. How Sexual Choice Shaped the
Evolution of Human Nature
Hector A. Garcia: Alpha God: The Psychology of Religious
Violence and Oppression
Joe Navarro: What Every Body is Saying
Matt Ridley: The Red Queen. Sex and the Evolution of Human
Nature
Robert Greene: The 48 Laws of Power
Tanner Guzy: The Appearance of Power. How Masculinity is
Expressed Through Aesthetics
Fin
It’s never been about telling you what to think. It’s about showing you how to think
— Rian
Books By This Author
Fuccfiles
One part Bukowski, one part Jordan Peterson, one part Neil Strauss.
Lessons from 15 sexual encounters for a sailor who learned pickup in
order to date, and ended up finding so much more! This is a self help
book like you've never seen. Rian doesn't hold back, and talks about
subjects you'd never see discussed in polite society, yet they are
things everyone deals with in their own lives.
It's Bukowski without the self destruction.
It's Jordan Peterson without the naivety.
It's Neil Strauss without being a big nerd about it.
It's everything you wish your father taught you about women, but
couldn't because of the divorce.
It's everything women have been curious about when it comes to men
and sex. It's raw, it's crude, it's unfiltered.
And it worked.