I was working out with my buddy yesterday and another guy's name come up for our friend group. My buddy said something like, I would bet any amount of money he spends numerous hours on YouTube watching Pickup Artist videos. Conversation ended.

2AM rolls around last night and I got curious, so I started YouTubing generic pickup artist videos. I don't want to drive traffic directly to their videos, but they were from the RSD guys. (Mod Request Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEltf4UuFss)

But holy shit I was cringing hard, and felt bad that people in the comments were talking about how Godly these men were. So if you're one of those guys who envies how confident these pickup dudes are, please read:

  • Confidence and absurdity are not the same thing - Pickup artists go out for hours at a time and halt women walking, forcefully touch them in public, and speak insanely loud so it's impossible to ignore them. If you are forcefully drawing attention to yourself from women, you are not confident.

  • Accepting rejection and being indifferent to rejection are two different things- I have absolutely no problem being rejected by females and understand it is necessary to approach, and for the most part it's a numbers game. But I still recognize that there is a difference internally in value between rejection and succeeding with women. Pickup artists will get rejected by 150 girls and be completely indifferent to it, making success with women seem like luck of draw. Success is correlated with effort, so if you are indifferent to its opposite, you are discounting what is necessary for success. Even 10/10 Rich Chad gets rejected. There are an arbitrary number of rejections that will always occur. But if you are 15 pounds overweight and are getting rejected 9 out of 10 times, don't chalk it up to simply I didn't try with enough of girls. Yes, that may be part of it. But also try hitting the gym.

  • People are obligated to talk to you in society - Pickup dudes love showing how comfortable they are with talking to women, and how smooth they are to the point that these women actually answer them. I'm sorry, but social norms suggest that if someone makes a significant effort to talk to you, you talk to them back. Women aren't talking to pickup guys because they are interested - they are talking to them because you look like a total asshole if you ignore someone in the middle of the day who is desperately trying to get your attention.

All these points are interconnected in that they link to a similar underlying theme: guys who buy into pickup live in a manufactured world. TRP is about leveraging sexual strategy in real life. Real life does not entail going out to crowded areas for hours at a time and forcefully stopping women in their path. Alpha men have...you know....things to do with their lives. Alpha men are comfortable with rejection, but always want to improve themselves, and don't chalk up failure to a lack of sample size. Alpha men don't reach their desired results by fabricating a world where failure essentially doesn't exist, and they don't buy into the ideologies of absurdity and "look at me, look at me".