Hey dudes –

So here's what I took away from Blueprint Decoded hours 2 and 3. (First post here: 01)

Humans are social animals, more than perhaps any other species, and that allows us to learn things socially, not just firsthand. None of us learned not to jump out of tall buildings firsthand; we learned that socially, either by watching people try and get hurt, or being told it's a bad idea. Social learning is the foundation of socialization and social conditioning – society shaping the behaviors and beliefs of individuals into to socially-sanctioned patterns.

Usually this is a good thing – it keeps us from jumping off tall buildings. But it's a disaster when it comes to men trying to get laid, because the socially-sanctioned patterns are mostly rubbish.

One pattern society feeds us is the concept of being "romantic," i.e. winning girls over with flowers, candlelit dinners, earnest professions of love, and so on. Hopefully everyone here has learned that this a terrible way to get a girl to play hide-the-salami with you. (Some of us figured this out this socially, others of us had to learn this through painful, firsthand experience, lol.)

And it's not even a great way to get into an LTR! Not only will it generally take longer to get laid, you might even repel her entirely, because "romance" frequently comes across as chodey or needy. Better to use a strategy that gets her in the sack first, and if you want an LTR later, it's usually easy to get one at that point.

Another, less cinematic pattern society encourages is the whole "school > work > financial success > get married" path. Nothing against it, but if a guy does that so he can run on autopilot and assume everything will take care of itself, he might be in for a surprise.

Problem one, if you're a chode (the preferred RSD term for "AFC") during your college years, and continue as a chode in the working world, you're still going to be a chode when you decide to go out and meet women. Problem two, once you do meet a nice girl to marry, you might have trouble keeping her attracted and satisfied, and the next thing you know she's Delightful_White's girlfriend for 12 hours.

TL;DR so far – AFCs suck at attracting women, and social conditioning is to blame.

Hopefully this isn't news to many of us, but he takes it further, in a way that hits closer to home: any strategy based on increasing your value by society's standards first and picking up women later is problematic. Because you'll have a hard time winning that game. The most high-value man – imagine you're a rich, Nobel-laureate doctor with the body of a Greek god – is still, in many contexts, lower in status than a garden-variety HB9.

I'm reeaaaallly not sure I agree with that last statement, by the way – it depends on who and what contexts we're talking about. A bouncer is going to let the HB9 into a dance club before the doctor, but at a classier spot people might give the doctor more respect. But still, I agree with the idea that trying to raise your value as a man by society's standards (looks/money/prestige) so that you can become "worthy" of HB9+ women is generally going be difficult to impossible.

I say this hits close to home because I've been doing this – part of my motivation for starting a gym habit lately is to pull higher quality girls. I'm still going to go, because I'm even more motivated by wanting to be healthy, but I do need banish this "I'm not buff enough to attract really hot girls" idea from my brain.

So all that to say, everyone is socially conditioned, and guys in particular are socially conditioned to pursue girls in ineffective ways. And even PUAs suffer from this, because even though we're avoiding the most obvious mistakes guys make, many of us are still buying into society's frame that guys with average looks/money/respect are unworthy of hot girls, and need special tricks or techniques to pull it off.

So what DOES attract girls? You guessed it, confidence et cetera – and he breaks it down more helpfully into a list of subtle social cues that women pick up on:

  • Eye contact

  • Vocal tonality

  • Body language

  • Sense of individuality

  • Humor and playfulness

  • Comfort in your environment

  • Indifference to what people think of you

  • Personal boundaries of what you will and will not accept

  • Control over your own emotions and your own sense of reality

  • Confidence to say what's on your mind and stand out

  • Self-directedness, conviction, and grasp of your own standards

  • Sense of entitlement and willingness to go for what you want

That's what attracts women, more than your looks, or what you're actually talking about. You could actually speak gibberish if the subcommunication is good, he says.

Which I think would be an AWESOME experiment. (The hardest part would be figuring out how to actually talk gibberish and avoid real words. Anyway, I digress.)

Later sessions go into those bullets in more detail, which I'm looking forward to.