There are two schools of thought on this, both of which are incomplete.

The first school of thought is the blue pill view. Yes, be “vulnerable!” Open up! Now, the reason why this is even a debate to begin with is that you had guys who did open up, and then the girl they were dating used things brought up against them later, or they started to resent their boyfriend/husband because they perceived weakness. You can pretend that these things didn’t happen, but they did happen, men now have the internet so can discuss and share stories like this, and men found common patterns. We would not be having this debate in the first place if this wasn’t happening.

The other school of thought is the dogmatic red pill view, which is never open up to your woman.

I find that school of thought incomplete. Nothing bad will happen if you go that route. But, nothing good is going to happen either. You are limiting the amount of emotional intimacy that you can receive when you go that route. It’s a play not to lose strategy, not a play to win strategy.

You can open up about painful things from your past…once you have done the work, so that those events no longer have an effect on you, and if anything, it makes you look more badass that you overcame adversity. At this point, it isn’t “vulnerability.” It’s transparency. You’re fine opening up, because you don’t need the other person’s approval. You’re not talking about some painful event in the past while you’re crying in the fetal position. You’re talking about some hardcore real life stuff that not only did you get through, but you kicked its ass.

If anything, it becomes a way that you can test her. Much has been written about “tests” that girls give guys. You should be giving her some tests also as part of your screening for compatibility. See if she is supportive. See if she listens. If not, there’s your answer about compatibility.

One thing I sometimes do with girls that I’m seriously interested in is I might make a statement like “you know, it’s been a bit of a rough work week if I’m being honest.” Then I just pause and see how she responds. Ignore it? Make a supportive statement? Offer a backrub? Say let’s go to the strip club together to do some tequila shots and blow off steam? We’ll see.

Remember, the whole point of dating is to figure out compatibility, and that’s a two-way street. This isn’t just you impressing her the whole time. She needs to be putting in work also. It’s a two-way street.

The issue I have with blanket statements like “never” open up is that they are absolute. What’s the point of a relationship if you don’t have a companion that you can talk to? If you don’t want a relationship and just want to smash, I don’t judge it, but in that case, none of this article is relevant anyway. Just go to Encore Beach Club during pool party season.

If you’ve made it to this corner of the internet, chances are you want something more out of life, and as such, work is almost certainly going to be more than a regular 9 to 5. Whether you’re in the military, investment banking, or building your own business as an entrepreneur, any of those things are going to be inherently more stressful than just a regular 9 to 5 job, and as such, you need to find a girl who is on your same wavelength. When times get stressful, you want someone who is going to be there for you, and not someone who views your goals as an obstacle.

I’m curious to hear from readers what your experiences have been. How do you handle this in your relationships?

You don’t need to explain yourself to anyone. They’re not listening much anyway. People are too worried about their own problems, and the ones who have nothing better to do than involve themselves in business that don’t concern them aren’t people that you really want to listen to in the first place.

There is a line from Reality Transurfing (great book) that stuck with me: “If you want something, don’t plead for it, don’t demand it, just go out and get it.”

Look, if you want a hot sexy party girl, just talk to her next time you’re at the club. If you want the more traditional church girl, just talk to her next time you run into her whenever. On that note, if it is a priority for you to date a girl who is Christian, if you’re in the United States, then you have statistically about 66% odds just randomly approaching since the majority religion in the US is Christianity. There is no rule that says you must meet them at church. Navigating the church dating scene is entirely out of my area of expertise, but if you are looking for a girl who is a Christian, you can just meet those girls anywhere.

Now, on the flip side, if some random internet person that you’ve never met doesn’t like that you want a fun party girl, or whatever other type of girl, you can just click the block button. It doesn’t merit a long, well-written essay in response. If it’s someone you went to high school with +10 years ago who is now DM’ing you with some stupid opinion, again, you can just click the block button.

The point I’m making is that you don’t need to explain yourself to randoms. If someone who doesn’t know me like that is just giving some unsolicited opinion, as if they are acting like they’re some kind of close trusted confidant of mine, I’d take that disrespectfully.

It doesn’t merit a response. Treat them like a homeless guy on the subway who is ranting about Elvis and aliens from outer space. You don’t stop and explain to them, “no you’re actually not fighting alongside Elvis to defeat the aliens.” You just think to yourself, well this guy is a trainwreck, and you move on.

Lastly, I’m trying to bring some more levity and fun to the mess that is dating discourse on X. Yes I’m all for making fun of feminists and the more eccentric trads, but girls are fun. They have boobs. Boobs are awesome. It’s not like we’re fighting World War 1 in the trenches and getting chemical gassed or something.

And, this is exactly why you should be paying attention.

This article isn’t going to be just a cliché recap of sayings like “buy when there is blood in the streets” or “buy low and sell high”, since you already know that, and it’s also famous last words by people to justify buying bad investments. What I am going to do with this article is:

• Discuss real developments in the crypto and blockchain space that have been overlooked, but have material implications going into the next Bitcoin halving cycle

• Lastly, what I have personally been buying; this section will be paywalled.

As always, this is not investment advice, and you need to consider your own risk tolerance and suitability. Do your own research.

Analysis of last crypto bull run

Bitcoin is down roughly 50% from its October 2025 peak of ~$126K, and most alts are down 60-80%+. No one’s tweeting about Lambos right now. We also straight up didn’t have an alt season. Some of the reasons for that:

· The economy was on different footing then. We had just come off of the SPAC bubble a few years ago and the Fed was tightening monetary policy. We hadn’t previously had central banks tightening money during a crypto run before.

· The market is simply bigger now. In the 2017 bull run, the market was smaller, so less capital was needed to push things to heights. Think of it of ocean waves crashing against a small boat versus crashing against a US Navy aircraft carrier.

· The smaller coins that could move were, frankly, garbage. All the Solana memecoin crap was not constructive at all. These memecoins ended up destroying a tremendous amount of retail capital, which in turn prevented investment into quality projects.

What I see to come:

• Continued institutional adoption, which is going to lead to smarter allocation of capital and less of the Solana garbage

• Continued development of a favorable regulatory environment

• The Fed is unlikely to tighten to the degree that they did going into the 2024 halving

Crypto used to be seen as a curiosity. The same disdain that we look at some of those silly memecoins is how professional investors used to look at Bitcoin, which we now consider to be a blue chip. We take for granted now that Bitcoin has multiple ETFs and sovereign wealth funds and high net worth investment managers buying positions. This was absolutely not the case 10 years ago, which in finance terms is not necessarily a long time.

Smart money is still moving in

Sovereign wealth funds have been buying crypto:

• In October 2025, Luxembourg became the first eurozone sovereign fund to buy bitcoin: its Intergenerational Sovereign Wealth Fund allocated 1% of its portfolio to bitcoin via ETFs, part of a broader shift that cut bond weighting from 57% to 32% and added a 15% alternatives sleeve. Source: https://www.globalgovernmentfinance.com/luxembourg-sovereign-wealth-fund-invests-bitcoin/

• Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala, which manages $302 billion, disclosed a $462 million position in BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust. Source: https://www.openpr.com/news/4405192/abu-dhabi-s-sovereign-wealth-fund-just-disclosed-462-million

This is purely speculation on my part, but I could see an argument for GIC/Temasek out of Singapore taking a position in crypto. The intent for GIC/Temasek is to hedge Singapore’s foreign exchange risk, and this literally was the original intent of Bitcoin in the first place, to decouple currency from central banks.

High net worth wealth management has shifted their posture from dismissing crypto entirely to now taking positions. According to Long Angle: “42% of high-net-worth investors hold crypto…Among investors under 40, crypto represents 15% of the private and alternative portfolio.” Source: High-Net-Worth Asset Allocation Study - Long Angle

Favorable regulatory environment

It is my opinion that the CLARITY Act eventually passes, probably after the November midterm elections. Right now we are in political silly season where not much gets done, and crypto is seen as pro-Trump, so don’t expect much in the way of common sense bipartisan compromise going into the elections, even though a streamlined regulatory framework for crypto is a popular issue.

That said, the real big change is that Operation: Chokepoint is no longer a thing. The government has flipped from being openly hostile toward crypto to now accommodating.

Technologies to watch: Real-world assets (RWAs) and DeFi

Forget all the memecoin BS or NFT BS. What got me excited about blockchain around 2017 was the technology application to financial services. Blockchain has the potential to streamline a lot of mid-office/back-office functions, and in the process, create protocols with good monetization prospects.

In 2017, “DeFi” was a whitepaper and a promise: the idea that someday you could trade, lend, and borrow using a blockchain instead of a bank, with a smart contract playing the role of teller, broker, and clearinghouse all at once. At the time, it was mostly ICO hype and very theoretical. Real-world asset tokenization was even more theoretical, meaning the idea that a Treasury bond or a share of Apple stock could exist as a token you could move, trade, or post as collateral 24/7, with no back-office settlement delay.

Now, that theory has moved to actual execution. The Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation will begin production testing of tokenized securities in July 2026, bringing Russell 1000 equities and major ETFs onto blockchain rails, and JPMorgan now settles cross-border Treasury-token transactions through its own tokenization platform. This is no longer just Silicon Valley developers, but BlackRock, JPMorgan, and Franklin Templeton building these systems.

Further reading: RWA Tokenization 2026: How Ondo Finance and BlackRock Are Disrupting Finance

What this all means

Price action in Bitcoin and crypto has been anemic since the market peak last year. That said, the actual technology continues to evolve in a constructive fashion. Institutional capital has been stepping in, and this capital thinks in terms of years instead of just short-term trades.

I view this boring time in crypto as a time to step in.

And now, here is what I am personally invested in. Again, not investment advice. Do your own research and consider what is suitable for you or not based on your risk tolerance and circumstances.

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I’ve been taking this time to review what I set out to do at the start of the year versus where I’m actually at now. I suggest you do the same. I’ve had some wins this year, and I’ve taken a few L’s. I’ve used those L’s as learning experiences.

Here’s what I’ve learned from when you’re feeling stuck, like when feel like you’re doing as much as you can, but the results are just not clicking. And, this one is going to need to be paywalled.

Review the goals

I started by mentioning my goals at the start, because if you don’t know where you want to go, then you’re not going to get there. When you have vague goals like “get in shape” or “get a girlfriend”, that isn’t specific. What kind of in shape? Triathlon? Muay Thai fighter? Powerlifter? Simply not being overweight? And what kind of girlfriend?

If you don’t know with specificity what you’re trying to accomplish, then every action is equally valid and equally pointless. This is how you end up with guys who watch all the self-improvement videos, they read all the books, but they don’t get anywhere.

Here’s where it gets frustrating though. Let’s say you have defined the goals clearly. Let’s say you’ve been working towards them, but it’s just not hitting. You’ve “tried everything.”

Well, really?

The guy who says “I’ve tried everything” is almost always lying to himself, either consciously or subconsciously. What he usually means is he tried everything that felt safe and everything other stuck guys recommended.

He watched all the YouTube videos and read all the books. He maybe went out a few times in his own city with the same three friends who also aren’t pulling.

The uncomfortable, high-leverage moves are still sitting untouched. This is how you stay stuck while telling yourself you’re working on it.

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While guys don’t want to end up being on the receiving end, not much is really said about how to avoid this in the first place. That is what I will do with this article: 1) describe the problem, and then more importantly 2) go through how I recommend avoiding this. It is very easily avoidable.

I post a mix of content, some on dating, some on news/current events, some on other topics. Among my followers who watch my takes on current events, what I have noticed is that some guys on the political right, particularly more traditional guys who are devout in their faith, are just not that culturally aware. This is a problem that I’ve been trying to solve. In the meantime, what it means is that these guys just don’t have a lot of experience with dating, so when they do run into problems, they often turn to the internet and end up hearing from the loudest sources, not necessarily the best sources.

This leads to bitterness instead of actually solving anything.

I have been critical of the Manosphere in recent years, but the Manosphere also got a lot right. We owe the Manosphere a debt of gratitude for a lot of information that we now take for granted.

The Manosphere is dead. Long live the Manosphere

For example, this. We know that there are girls who struck out with the hot guys that they wanted so decided “it’s time to settle down”, with a less attractive, “safe”, boring guy. The reason why this is unappealing is that no guy wants to feel like a backup option. Men want to feel supported and respected. A girl viewing a guy as a dork and just a DNA provider to check the box on having kids or a mortgage payment provider to check the box on having a house in the suburbs is the complete opposite of that.

I am not approaching this from a standpoint of morality on what she “should” have done at an earlier age. I’m not big on telling adults what they should and shouldn’t do. I am approaching this from a standpoint of practicality. If, as a guy, you want a healthy relationship, then you need a girl who is actually into you. Most mainstream relationship advice can be ignored since it is trying to patch fundamental incompatibilities. I’d wager that “relationship therapists” know this already, but their business model would be underwater if they just told people, correctly, that they have a fundamental mismatch on values and need to just separate. For more on this, check out Med Gold’s recent article:

No, Fighting Isn’t Normal. - ᴍᴇᴅ ɢᴏʟᴅ

The reason why all of this is problematic is that settling for the girl who just wants to check the box on a relationship means you’re not living up to your potential. I’d wager that what you really want is the girl who is genuinely excited by who you are and what you’re building. She celebrates your wins, shares in your losses, and she actually gets you. You two are aligned on lifestyle and goals. She’s with you because she wants to ride with you, not because she decided it was time to get off the carousel. That’s the difference between being chosen and being settled for.

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You’re not going to get that with the “I’m past my party phase and now just want to marry the first guy who will propose” girl.

How to deal with this

The short answer is you avoid dating these girls by simply not dating them. It’s the same answer I have with girls who are hardcore feminists. You avoid dating them by simply not dating them. Look, nobody has a gun to your head. If you find out she’s incompatible, you simply just move on.

For me, if a girl said “I used to have a party phase but I’m past that now”, I would lose interest, but for different reasons than the Trad Cons. I’d lose interest because I want a girl who likes to have fun. My response if I heard that would be, “Hey, I totally understand. Sometimes I get burnt out with the whole nightlife scene myself. If you’re ever looking for a night out on the town again, we usually get a table first Friday of the month at [whatever club], feel free to come by.”

This response is deliberate. It does a few things. The first one is that it disqualifies me as the “settle down” guy. That is intentional. This is the single most important thing that you need to do to avoid getting into that kind of situation. Look, if she wants to go find some dorky guy to settle down with, let her. You’re not going to change her mind. All you can do is state that you’re not that guy.

What is also good about this response is that it is not bitter or reactive.

I’m also showing empathy that, yes, there is a lot of crap in the nightlife and party scene. I personally don’t use any drugs and I find people who use drugs generally annoying. You run into people who don’t really have anything going on outside of nightlife. I just viewed the scene as just a fun thing to do outside of work and a way to just unwind and meet people or catch up with friends. That’s it. I never viewed it as anything that deep, but you’ll run into people who don’t really have any life outside of the party scene, and I just find that off-putting. So, that statement in my response is saying that I get it.

That also reinforces that, again, I’m not the dorky guy. She’s going to need to find someone else if she wants that.

At a higher level, you want to disqualify yourself from consideration of being that bland, boring guy before the conversation even comes up. This is why I say that getting your bench press to 225x10 is going to do more for your game than reading yet another PDF on “text game”, which was probably plagiarized from 2000s Mystery Method anyways, or nowadays is probably just AI slop. I harp on physical fitness because it works. If you want to avoid girls who say they are into dad bods, then simply don’t have a dad bod.

If you were in a spot where you got that “I used to have a party phase but now I want to settle down” type of reaction, just use that as motivation when you’re doing HIIT cardio. Use that as motivation on the air bike or on the track doing sprints. She can go find the dad bods while you have visible abs and are relaxing at a table at Liv Beach with John Summit playing.

Many guys never get clear on what they actually want in a woman beyond “hot” or “nice.” And, even more guys are in such a scarcity mindset that their view toward dating is to just take what they can get, and the idea of walking away from a bad relationship is outside of their reality. You can’t be like that. You need to get specific on what you are looking for. What kind of hot? New York runway model hot? Austin fit girl hot? And then, what kind of guy do you have to naturally attract that kind of girl?

I want to close by saying that too much time on the dating section of X is going to leave you jaded. It’s like Yelp reviews. Who even writes Yelp reviews? The worst people who just want to complain. Dating X is a mess of AI slop, overseas engagement farm accounts, and genuinely ridiculous people with idiotic takes. Go out and actually talk to some girls in real life. Ignore the “all western women are bad” nonsense, written by some guy who crashed out and moved to Thailand where the girls might not actually be girls. Whatever makes you happy I guess.

Since this was such a big discussion over the last couple of weeks, I’d like to get some audience feedback here. Have you run into these girls while dating? I want to get my female friends to chime in also from your perspective.

It’s not going to be digital immersion or the metaverse. The metaverse ended up just being a bunch of teenagers playing Roblox. I could see how someone in 2021 would say digital immersion Ready Player One is the future. I actually greatly respect a number of people who made that call including but now we have new information. I don’t change my stance just based on random noise. I change it on signal.

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The new information is AI. I don’t think we still fully understand the impact of it, but point being, mass social media is inevitably going to end up devolving into AI agents making slop content for AI agents, who will then respond with slop content for other AI agents. The writing is on the wall with this. There are already AI-generated e-girls who I have some club promoters friends who ended up sending them invites to events by mistake. They thought they were talkin to a real girl.

We assumed, wrongly, that it would be people who we would be talking to online. We did not assume it would be a computer program on the other end of the line.

More to the point, people want connection

Look, put the blackpill crap aside that “girls just go out for validation.” No, girls are desperate for boyfriends and husbands. The issue is that she doesn’t to meet the wrong guy. And honestly, I get it. As a guy, I don’t want to meet the wrong girl. If I’m looking for something long term, then I want someone with similar values and good attraction.

The only real commonality when you go to a public access bar is that you’re in a public access bar. Nightclubs would get a better crowd, since when you charge even a small minor cover, a lot of riff raff simply doesn’t even show up. Nightclubs then upped the ante with bottle service tables, but in the process, they also killed the golden goose. They provided exclusivity, but it was so exclusive that nobody ended up socializing with each other, so it defeats the purpose.

The trick is providing a place that is exclusive, curated, but actually social.

This is where members only clubs come in

I’d highly encourage you to listen to episode 81 of the New Founding Podcast discussing Club Reign in NYC, a private social club:

When people think members clubs, they think some kind of Skull & Bones super elite group that nobody can get into. Those will be a thing, but there are also clubs at every level. You could think of a run club in a city as a members club. The membership is that you simply just show up. There’s one in Houston that does a morning run on Saturdays and then does a brunch party afterwards. It’s a fun way to meet people who are into fitness and also like to party.

You can think of Equinox or Life Time Fitness as a members club. It’s a gym, but the price tag curates the attendees. That said, the price tag isn’t unreasonable for someone in a big city working in investment banking, law, tech, or similar.

Back in the day, all American big cities and even medium sized cities had places called Gentlemen’s Clubs, and no I don’t mean strip clubs. The term had a different meaning back then. This would be on the lines of the New York Athletic Club, the Yale Club, the Army and Navy Club in Washington DC, the Petroleum Club in Dallas or Houston, and similar.

Some of those clubs though are going out of business though since they relied on a mystique and prestige that the newer generation doesn’t care about, because they don’t know they exist. They became unc. They became culturally irrelevant.

Soho House stepped onto the scene by providing something similar in intent, but more hip. I’m not here to debate Soho House’s recent business moves, there are plenty of other people talking about that, but point being, they did make a big splash on the scene. The new hot one is Zero Bond, which just opened up a Las Vegas location at the Wynn.

We’re going to see more of this. People want connection.

We are social animals. That’s why we’re at the top of the food chain. A lion comes at me with claws, and I come at the lion with a rifle. I win. I don’t know how to melt the steel into the components that make a rifle, but somebody does, and I pay that whole value chain with money. We win because we are social. It’s how we’re wired.

The future will belong to the people who can make IRL connections and use those to wield influence. The “influencer” era of social media I wager is going to diminish when AI continues to improve and people have a hard time telling what is a genuine person or not.

Are we living in a computer simulation? If you’re talking about The Matrix or how Elon and others say we’re living in a simulation, I have no idea. If you’re talking about social media and internet immersion, without question.

The 2010s were an artificial time. That wasn’t necessarily bad. It just is what it is. EDM is artificial and computer generated. It’s not natural or organic like a guitar. I like both. It’s not bad. It just is what it is.

Influencers are able to bypass the old Hollywood/NYC gatekeeping system and get their content out to the world. On the flip side. We know more about Ilhan Omar’s marriage to her brother for immigration fraud than our own local city councilor or mayor.

We amplified the concept of the familiar stranger at mass scale. You see the same guy at the coffee shop over and over. That’s normal. You see the same influencer’s posts over and over. Except he or she isn’t really a stranger. You know all about this person’s life story, yet you have never met face to face. That’s the metaverse. We’ve already been living in it.

My prediction is the coming years will be a return to the real world. That isn’t necessarily good or bad. It just is. Nature is beautiful. Nature also can be deadly. I don’t say artificial versus real world judgmentally. I say it objectively

More focus will be on physical building. Software worked itself out of a job with AI and vibe coding. More focus will be on physical industry, base chemicals and materials, energy, and infrastructure.

The late 2020s and beyond will belong to the builders. Don’t like what Trump is doing? Okay, build something better then. And please don’t have it be yet another bro vet coffee brand.

Seriously though.

We’re past the Fourth Turning and transitioning to the First Turning. What this means is we all have a narrow window to make a massively disproportionate impact.

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Instagram peaked out. It’s all reels from professional content makers, or third world comment spam about Israel/Palestine on posts that have nothing to do with any kind of politics. Look, when everyone now shoots the same Corey Chaloff/Sam Kolder style Instagram shots with a pro grade camera, the value has been arbitraged away. The big names on social media now are streamers. It’s harder to fake. Maybe it will be faked eventually as more people move into the space, but people want authenticity.

To be clear, when I describe the metaverse that we live in as fake, I don’t mean that judgmentally. I say it observationally. I mean fake in the sense of not natural, but not in a sense of good/bad. Here’s the good: information is more transparent now. If someone claimed decades ago that he was Special Forces or a black belt on jiu jitsu, he might fool people. Now you can look it up.

Nothing will replace an in person relationship and connection. A lot of high end parties now have a no cell phones rule. They want people to actually connect. Everyone lining up in front of the white backdrop with a bunch of logos is played out. When everyone posts the bottle service story with the girls bringing out the LED signs, it’s played out.

This is why society is unplugging. I don’t say this as far as good or bad. Social media did a lot of good. I just say it objectively.

History has cycles. Read The Fourth Turning. At the start of a cycle, an establishment is built to serve its citizens. The establishment gets challenged when cracks in it get exposed. The establishment then reforms itself to address that. But later, the establishment is now old, not response to its citizens, and it becomes a rent seeking extraction mechanism instead of a public service. Our last cycle: post WW2 order, 1960s turmoil, 1980s-1990s American resurgence and end of the Cold War, and where we are now.

I push back on influencer who say things like “we need to burn it all down” when they have some minor frustration in politics. We don’t need to burn it all down since it fell apart anyway at the end of the cycle. Now, we build. We don’t burn it all down. It’s already burnt. President Biden’s brain melted on live TV during the 2024 debates. It’s burnt, thoroughly. Now, we build what comes next.

Even the term “influencer” implies using persuasion or influence upon a source of power. It’s time for us to move upstream from influencing the power to actually becoming the source of power.

Social media was useful to organize against the establishment. Trump likely would not have won in 2016 if it wasn’t for social media. We would not be discussing topics that the establishment considered forbidden if it wasn’t for social media, like immigration or the failures of COVID policy. We would not be discussing biological realities about men and women if it wasn’t for social media, as this information was essentially deemed forbidden after the 1960s (2010s woke isn’t new), perhaps even earlier. Maybe centuries earlier. Read Assemblywomen by Aristophanes, written in Ancient Greece.

From Wikipedia, below. Does this sound familiar at all to today’s circumstances? Bear in mind, this was written in 391 BC, over 2 millennia ago:

Look, this is why I cringe when influencers reminisce on past morals like as if all of a sudden everything just fell apart in society. Humanity has always had a dark side to it. That dark side has been documented for multiple millennia. This didn’t just start with 1960s feminism. The Ancient Greeks were documenting it in 391 BC.

There was a burger place in Houston called Trump Burger that I am told “made the libs heads explode.” That’s cute, and I wish them success in their small business, but what we really need is the kind of energy that builds Trump Tower, not Trump Burger.

Empire versus influencer. Trump Burger is for clickbait on social media. Trump Tower is part of a multi-billion dollar business empire that actually won the Presidency. Real world versus the virtual world. Trump Burger is virtual.

We can post schizo memes about an American Golden Age, or we can simply go out and build it. Society is unplugging from the virtual reality that we have been living in for 10-15 years. We have a narrow window in which we can build that Golden Age. Those institutions are going to get built one way or another, either by us or anyone else, so it might as well be us.

I do find it funny that a documentary was made about the “Manosphere” when nobody has called it that for almost a decade. Interpret that how you will as far as the factual accuracy of the movie.

I should give an introduction on what the Manosphere was: it was a loose collection of blogs, YouTube channels, and way back in the day, it was forums. Old school vBulletin style forums. The core premise of these groups and discussions was self-improvement for men. A lot of the content was dating focused. Some was fitness focused. Some was political. People often disagreed and debated with each other, but there was a common theme around men’s self-improvement.

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That has dissipated. The OGs from that era have gone their separate ways. It isn’t really a thing anymore, and hasn’t been for some time. This is why I find it funny that such a documentary was made, since this hasn’t been a thing for about 10 years...

And, that’s okay. I argue that the Manosphere fulfilled its purpose. It was a response to the cultural problems of its time, and it worked. The core tenets of the Manosphere are now just mainstream beliefs. The Manosphere served as an incubator to test these ideas, often by experimentation and trial and error, and it worked. A lot of people, myself included, are nostalgic for the 2010s Manosphere, like lamenting about how r/TheRedPill used to be high quality back in the day, before it got weird (complaining all the time instead of practical action, etc.). Or, people who were into the political side of things reminisce on the “Great Meme War”, which was a grassroots campaign within the Manosphere that boosted the original Trump 2016 campaign.

The ideas that were once confined to niche forums are now common knowledge. You don’t need a Manosphere blog to tell you to get in shape, build a side hustle that can eventually become a main hustle, and screen who you date. That’s just common sense advice now. The forbidden knowledge became common knowledge, and the container it lived in was no longer necessary. Others may still claim the name “Manosphere” to sell a product, but the original movement achieved what it set out to do and dissolved. That’s not a failure. That’s a win.

If you want proof, look no further than the virgin husband story that just went viral.

In case you missed it, a man posted publicly that his wife was formerly promiscuous, that he was a virgin when they married, and that she had a born-again religious conversion before they got together. He framed this as a testimony. The internet dragged him for it.

Here you go on the virgin husband story:

And here’s why he got dragged: everyone already knows the playbook. The idea that some women strike out with the guys they actually wanted, write off the party life, rebrand as “trad” or “enlightened” or my personal favorite “I didn’t have a prefrontal cortex back then”. Then, just settle for the good enough guy with a “dad bod” who can at least pay the bills, and he’s too much of a goofball to wander off elsewhere, and he’s overjoyed that a girl is just merely talking to him. Knowing about this arc used to be forbidden knowledge, to the point that the old Manosphere discussion had to be relegated to obscure forums or demonetized YouTube channels during the censorship wave. Now? It’s common knowledge. Everybody sees it. In the age of the internet, good luck keeping a lid on that.

10 or 20 years ago, that man’s post would have gotten sympathetic replies and maybe a few skeptics. Today, the comment section knew exactly what it was looking at. That shift didn’t happen by accident. It was the Manosphere.

So yes, the Manosphere is dead. The subreddits are gone or unrecognizable. The blogs are inactive. The YouTubers moved on to other content. And that’s okay. It was a reaction to the social problems of its time, and the ideas eventually became mainstream. The need for it dissipated. That’s how successful movements end, not with a bang, but with a shrug, because everyone already agrees with you.

There’s an old quote from Schopenhauer:

“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”

The Manosphere is dead. Long live the Manosphere.

This wasn’t exactly intended to be a super thought-provoking piece. It’s not really the most profound statement. This was me bored and shitposting.

What I didn’t expect was the reaction to it.

If you navigate to the post now, you won’t see the reactions that I did, since I hid some that were just stupid and others deleted their replies later after they beclowned themselves. The short story is that this caused people to spazz out at the idea of having a hot girlfriend/wife. I got told that I have “obviously no experience with girls” because I like the company of pretty girls.

Saying you dislike pretty girls is an…interesting hill to die on. I also know that some of these guys are married. I’m not sure how their wife feels about being called unattractive, but I guess that’s not my problem.

At a higher level, this post made me think: what the hell kind of energy am I putting out there such that I’m getting an audience where these weirdos find me in the first place? Granted, on the internet, you’ll get some engagements from total randoms. But some were followers. And I don’t like that.

Look, if you’ve given up on life, we’re not going to see eye to eye on things. I feel like I’m still growing, still making progress, and I still want to make progress and a larger impact. If that’s not you, we can part ways.

I can see how people aren’t into the party scene. I can see how people aren’t into social media. I’ve always been pretty up front and honest that I’m active in both. If this is a surprise to you, then I’m not sure what to tell you. I never at any point pretended that I was some kind of trad. That’s not me and I have never claimed as such. But if you’re not into the idea of having an attractive wife or girlfriend…what the hell is wrong with you? I suggest a doctor checkup and getting your testosterone level tested.

The only conclusion that I really have is that some people have fried their brain on politics and don’t really have a life outside of that. I find politics interesting, and I’ve built a bit of a following by posting my irreverent takes on current events in the news, but there is in fact more to life than this. And on that, the reality is that I don’t want to have the lives of some of the other influencers in this space.

I would love it if there was some kind of niche for people who are: urban, into culture, social, right wing/right leaning, not into weird trad stuff, not into weird Israel/Palestine stuff, and not socially awkward. I want to hang out with people who aren’t scared of girls. I want to hang out with people who don’t think that a girl wearing a swimsuit at a pool party or on the beach is “immodest,” or people who think that having one drink at a bar when you’re out with friends is “alcoholism.” Basically I find current events interesting, but I don’t want to hang out with a bunch of dorks.

There was a lot of creative, fun, avant garde energy on the right in the mid-late 2010s, and now some of that has gotten just strange. We’ve got:

• Socially awkward trad Caths; I have utmost respect to genuine people of faith, but this isn’t it

• People spazzing out about the JOOOOS and Israel. Look, if you want to debate Israel and Palestine, fine. Whatever. They’ve been fighting for like 2000 years. Probably in another 2000 years, they’ll still be fighting. Your problems in life aren’t because of Israel. Your problems in life are because you’re poor and nobody likes you. Where on the doll did Israel touch you.

• Larpers posting “get out of the cities” when they live in Manhattan penthouses, or worse, people who actually DO get out of the cities and honestly think that after “the collapse”, which never happens, that society will turn to a bunch of schizo autists for leadership

I get it that some who were in that space in the 2010s are now married with kids and hence obviously have a different type of lifestyle. This does not mean you pull the ladder up from a younger generation still on the come up. I argue it also does not mean that you socially isolate yourself to the point of insanity either.

Whatever the case may be, I’m out.

The reaction to that original shitpost at the top showed me that whatever I was doing, it’s not working. These are not people I want to connect with. These are not people who are going to move the needle. These are people who are just going to make ragebait for other middle-aged crashouts. When it comes time for my midlife crisis, I’m just going to do something normal, like buy a sports car and date a stripper. Something normal. If I’m yelling at people about raw milk and how music is possessed by demons, or whatever the hell these people are on—this is my way of saying I’m being held hostage and you need to send a rescue team. And side note, I’ve been using long dashes way before AI became a thing.

The takeaway lesson from all of this is that you’re building a brand no matter what, but it might not be the brand that you actually want to build. What I was doing wasn’t working. This wasn’t connecting me with the people that I want to connect with, and it wasn’t getting me closer to my goals. Noted. Time to move on and switch directions.

There really is no reason to not have a good Instagram. It will only help you, and it’s not even that hard to set up.

The reason why I’m writing this post is:

• A lot of guys still, even today, don’t understand the importance of a good social media

• A lot of advice given on Instagram is outdated and optimized for 2010s social media, and not how things are now. For example, there was more organic reach in the 2010s where a guy posting cool pictures could get a following. That is not a thing now, since you’re going to get drowned out with TikTok style reels and slop accounts

I’ll start with that second point. A bunch of the “how to get girls off of Instagram” guides that you may have seen straight up just plagiarized their content from one of three sources: Sam Kolder, Corey Chaloff, or Michael Sartain. You can tell because all of the people who follow those guides post more or less the same 2018-2019 era style Adobe Lightroom presets with that orange-blue vibe that Corey Chaloff came up with.

Let me go through some myths about Instagram and then address them one by one.

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Myth 1: You don’t need an Instagram

Reality: I mean, you also don’t need to go to the gym or eat healthy either. You will live. But if you want something more out of life, then you probably should go to the gym and not eat crap. A good Instagram is only going to help you.

The thing with social media is that it gives girls more honest signals. If you meet a girl at a bar and get her number, she might not text back because the answer is no, but the answer might be “I don’t know.” Maybe she doesn’t quite remember, or maybe she kind of thought you were cool but especially in a big city like NYC or Miami, she has a lot of options. Instagram gives her more information. You exchange Instagrams, now she can see that you’re doing cool and fun things, you’ve got fun people in your life, and this all gives her more information that you’re someone that she should spend time with.

Instagram also lets you get information of your own. You can use Instagram to find cool places in your city. What I suggest is 1) identify some of the best nightclubs in your city, 2) find out who the bottle service girls are and then add them on Instagram, 3) follow their story posts and see what other places they go out to. Then, make a list of those places. You now have an 80% solution on where the hot in-crowd in your city goes. This is information that in decades past was gatekept, and people now just post it out in the open on social media. To be clear, those places may have barriers to entry, but at least you know what those places are.

Myth 2: You need to be posting 10 stories a day (or some other large number)

Reality: This might have been true when IG stories first came out, but now, it’s just going to get ignored as spam. The only way to post that many stories is to just recycle through memes and other slop posts. You should be posting things that are salient and relevant, or things that are just funny. I often find that I get the most engagement when I post 1-2 stories after a period where I don’t post anything. This goes against what all the “how to get girls on IG” guides say, but it’s what worked. There is an old Army saying: if it’s stupid but it works, then it’s not stupid.

Myth 3: You should/should not be posting pictures of hot girls on your grid

Reality: This one is nuanced. Some are militant against posting pictures of other girls, saying that it makes you look try-hard or can turn off other girls. Others are militant for it, saying that it shows pre-selection. What has empirically worked for me: I post some video reels of me doing ballroom dance with some of my female friends, and this has gotten nothing but positive reception. This shows pre-selection, but it’s not weird.

Look, if I go up to a bunch of random girls in a nightclub and ask them to take a picture, 50/50 they’ll say yes. They might think I’m a total weirdo, but 50/50 they’ll take the picture. A bunch of guys have done this, and then word gets out, and then it becomes played out. It’s like how posting an IG story of bottle service girls bringing out the champagne with the sparklers and LED signs doesn’t really hit like it used to, just since people have seen this so many damn times.

If you’re showing in a socially-calibrated manner that you have cool female friends, that can only help you. As far as “what if other girls get jealous”, well then you probably wouldn’t want to hang around them in the first place, so consider that to be a filter of your own. It’s like how the best deterrent against lunatic girls who say things like “I prefer dad bods” is to simply get in better shape and not have a dad bod. Plain and simple.

How you can use Instagram effectively

What you need to do first of all is get a good enough IG grid. What makes a good grid for guys is you being in cool locations or you with cool people. For girls, a good grid is just photos that make her look pretty. For guys, the status comes with being in the cool place. I would suggest just connect with some of the cool guys in your city and see what they do on their Instagram. I say this because, as I mentioned at the start of this article, some of the guides you have seen were optimized for the 2010s when there was more organic reach and growth on Instagram, i.e., before it just got spammed to death with TikTok style reels.

Put another way, it’s no longer necessarily avant garde to have, for example, the photo with all the lights at the Brickell City Centre mall in Miami, since now everyone has that shot. You should still do it, but it’s also not 2018-2019 anymore when shooting with a proper DSLR/mirrorless camera would make you stand out versus some guy shooting with an older fuzzy smartphone camera. Nowadays, modern smartphones actually take very high quality photos, so there is less incremental ROI on shooting with a more studio-grade camera, although you should still do that if possible.

This article is meant more for beginners-intermediate to Instagram, or as a refresher, so I’m not going to get into sending cold DMs on here. What you can do, and should do, is when you meet girls out and about, get their Instagram even more than you should get their number. This allows them to see cool things on your grid and story, which all gives here more evidence that you actually are that guy.

Frankly, I do this to screen guys also (no homo). If I connect with someone on X, I ask for the Instagram just to make sure this is a normal person and not some lunatic.

Instagram also lets you discover fun things in your city. Pick some of the top bars or clubs in your city. Follow their IG, and from who they follow, you should be able to go down a rabbit hole to map out the cool bars, restaurants, parties, and so forth. You should be able to at least get a tentative list of some of the hot girls in your city, from which you can see where they go out to and then add those places to your list of places to check out.

The goal with Instagram is to use it to either 1) find cool places to go to in real life, or 2) fortify real life connections, whether it is someone you met in passing that you want to bring into your group, or someone who you already are friend with and can use it as another convenient way to stay in touch. Any time you post something, that is one to many communication that pings your entire network.

Social media is a very valuable tool when used properly, to the point that anyone who says they got rid of Instagram because they got “addicted” to it makes me question what other addictive or destructive habits they may have, or if they’re just antisocial by nature. I probably wouldn’t want to hang out with them either way.

How much time is wasted knowing the right thing to do, but not acting on it because you’re worried about what people think?

Approach the hot girl, but she’s “out of your league.” Put aside bad habits and hit the gym and eat right, but “that’s not you.” Other people’s expectations. Other people’s limiting beliefs.

So much of one’s identity is arbitrary. We can debate all day how much is nature and how much is nurture, but it’s probably some combination of the two. On the nurture side, suppose that you grew up in a very supportive, healthy environment where by magic you ended up with a perfect peer group who all had hot girlfriends, made tons of money, all were in shape, and this rubbed off on you by osmosis.

You can imagine the kind of lifestyle you’d have if you grew up in that environment.

So here’s my question: Why not just do that now anyway?

If it’s all arbitrary, meaning that if you’d act a certain way/not act another way if XYZ happened to you in the past, you can just simply do it anyway.

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Social media becomes another trap for this. Date this girl because Andrew Tate said so. Date that girl because trad schizos say so. Is thinking for yourself allowed?

Elon Musk has a quote, and I’m paraphrasing: the only real rules are the rules of physics. Everything else is just a recommendation.

If it is physically possible, then it is possible. Just because you didn’t get a certain type of girl in the past does not mean that you are just eternally doomed to never do so in the future.

There is a saying that when you’re young, you worry about what people think. In middle age, you stop caring about what people think. And then in old age, you realize that they were never thinking about you in the first place.

Most people are too caught up in their own problems anyway to be worried about what you are doing, so if it has really gotten to a point that someone feels like he or she has nothing better to do than hate on what you’re doing, then this is a relationship that is well past its expiration date.

The best thing that you can do is to cut off any kind of negativity, whether it is people in real life that are holding you back, or even just slop on social media. Having the right kind of environment is critical to your success, and to get the right people into your group, you first need to get the wrong people out.

On a positive side, but nonetheless a reinvention side, I have had to reinvent myself a number of times. This wasn’t always some dramatic overcoming adversity type of move. It’s just a reality that I’ve grown. Who I am now is different than who I was when I pinned Captain in the Army. And, that version of me is different than when I was in OCS and getting smoked at Fort Benning. And, that version of me is different than who I was in college and trying to figure out which way is up socially.

The version of me who thought it would be fun to date a stripper is different than me now after actually having done that. Fun to check the box, but that’s not one I care to repeat.

The advantage that I had for reinventing myself is that whether it was the military or going to college out of state, I had situations that physically moved me out of locations where I had psychological anchors. Worrying about what old peers think wasn’t even an issue since they weren’t physically anywhere nearby. If you feel stuck, doing a relocation might help shake things up.

Something some close friends and I do is every year towards the end of the year, we do an annual recap of what happened over the past year, what did we originally set out to do, what actually happened, what lessons were learned, and then what do we plan to do this coming year. You can do this now. Is the person that you are right now the kind of person who actually hits the goals that you set out for yourself? Meaning, if you want a size 1 runway model but you’re a fat slob, then either you don’t really want a size 1 runway model and you simply just prefer eating junk food, or you need to fix your lifestyle and habits.

The fact that you’re reading articles like this mean that you’re already set apart from your competition. Most people don’t take time to think about who they could be. They don’t think about reinventing themselves. Maybe it’s them worried about what people might think, or maybe it’s just a sad acceptance of “this is just how things are.”

If you want to make things more visceral, imagine where you might be 10 years from now if you stay on this course, and if that’s really where you’d like to be or not. And then, consider things that may happen over 10 years that are out of your control. You get diagnosed with cancer. You get in a bad car wreck. A close loved one dies. You take the Mike Tyson punch as Bow Tied Bull calls it. A good friend betrays you. The business that you launched didn’t work out, and now you don’t have a job and you also don’t have a business.

Why do I bring that up? Because the only real commodity that you have is time. You can make more money. If one friend is an asshole, you can meet new friends. The one thing that you cannot get more of is time.

Given that, you shouldn’t worry too much about what people think. They’re probably not thinking about you anyway. They’re too busy with their own problems, and anyone with nothing better to do with their life than be a hater isn’t someone you need to be hanging around with anyway.

This article is for guys who are meeting girls, but they’re not quite meeting the kinds of girls that truly inspire them. They’re not quite meeting that ride-or-die, passionate chemistry, the kind of girl who just gets you.

The inspiration for this article was actually some personal moves of my own over the last 9-12 months. Some of them leveled me up significantly. Others, I took a L. I’m being honest and transparent here. Through this, it’s been a forcing function for me to audit if I’ve been truly living in accordance with my own values.

And if I’m honest, the answer is: kind of, but not fully. And that’s not good enough.

I made a move to a city where a new role leveled up my career, but the social scene here isn’t quite getting it done. That said, am I making the most of whatever scene there is in my city, even if not optimal? And the answer is, no not really. And that’s not good enough. I’ve been taking some shortcuts and making excuses.

Here’s where I tie this back to the start of the article.

Your external reality is a reflection of who you are and the decisions that you make. The blunt way of describing this is, if you meet one or two crazy chicks, then you met one or two crazy chicks. If every girl you meet is crazy, then you’re the problem. That’s an extreme example, but it illustrates the point.

The process for getting what you want out of life is simple enough to explain, but the execution becomes the hard part. The process is:

• Define what you want

• Take actions that get what you want

• Do a continuous audit and progress check

And that’s it. Anything beyond that is just mental masturbation. It sounds easy enough, but the execution is where things become difficult. This article will explain the approach that I take toward this.

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First, you need to define what you want. The context of this article is dating and girls. My type of girl may be different than your type of girl. Be that as it may, you need to define what your type of girl is. Note that I did not say, define the type of girl that society says you should want. I did not say, define the type of girl that feminists say that you should want. I didn’t say define the type of girl that schizo Trad Caths who think visible ankles is pornography and that you need to live in poverty on a dairy farm and churn butter say that you should want. I didn’t say, define the type of girl that Andrew Tate says that you should want.

You may need to date around a bit and see what you actually resonate with. I personally prefer the more outgoing, high energy, extroverted and bubbly type girls. I definitely have a pattern with dancers and girls with a creative side. I like girls who party a bit. The reason for that is simple: I party, a lot. I want us to have things in common. Look, whatever she did in college just having fun, I did way more. At no point ever did I claim that I was a Trad.

Now, maybe you personally want a more traditional girl who is more of a get up early on Sunday for church type girl and isn’t into the nightlife scene. If that’s the case…cool, go for it. It is only on the internet that random people who don’t even know you want to pop off with opinions on who you are dating (if you’re getting that kind of reaction in real life, you need to cut those people out immediately; haters need to be removed from your life). That’s not how I do things.

Define, with specificity, the kind of girl that is your dream girl. I am talking about the kind of girl that when you are grinding on your mission, whether it’s building a business, going through some kind of tough military/law enforcement training or operation, or training for a sports championship—this is the kind of girl that you can come home to, relax with, and makes you feel energized and valued. This is the kind of girl that gets you inspired to go that extra mile on your mission.

Write things down. Get out some paper and make some notes. You can always redo it later, and the list is more than welcome to evolve over time as you get new life experiences and as preferences may evolve over time.

What does she look like, physically? “Hot” is not an answer. What kind of hot? There are many different kinds of hot. Runway model? Division 1 volleyball player? Instagram girl or bottle service girl with a couple tattoos? Again, this isn’t about what society wants or what random people on the internet that you have never met want. I have tattoos. I don’t care if a girl has a couple tasteful tattoos. Maybe you don’t like tattoos. But, that is solely your call to make, not because some internet person said so.

Ultimately, this is entirely your call to make, but I would offer some suggestions as you build out your list:

• She needs to be physically attractive. I’m not going to be politically correct. As far as what is your personal type of physically attractive, whether it’s a more NYC runway model look, or more of a Los Angeles/Miami Instagram look, that’s your call. But nonetheless, physical attraction is biological and to deny it is just silly.

• No issues with substance abuse, addictions, or serious mental health problems. I am pro-therapy and pro-getting help. But, you are not her therapist. Leave that to the professionals.

• This one is more for long-term relationships: healthy family dynamics her side. This is especially important if you didn’t have a stable or healthy family background (I certainly did not) so that at least one of you knows what right looks like if you want to have kids at some point.

• Directionally in line on bigger picture values if something is important to you like politics, religion, or similar.

• Check if her friends are cool. The two biggest, no-BS, unable to be faked tells on a person’s character are how does he/she spend money, and who does he/she spend time with. That applies to both guys and girls. If her friends are cool, then she’s probably cool also. The “ugly fat friend cockblock” is largely a myth if you’re actually talking to hot girls. Hot girls tend to hang out with other hot girls simply because there are less haters, and yes, hot girls get haters too.

• Similar attitudes on sex. I don’t think this one requires further explanation, but I’ll do it anyway. For example, pretty much every girl that I’ve dated, we’ve gone to the strip club together as a couple. I honestly don’t find strip clubs fun otherwise, since I like it when a girl is into me, and if I know she’s just there because I’m throwing money, that just doesn’t really do it for me. Maybe when I was 21 and it was novel, but now, been there done that. Anyways, for the kinds of girls that I attract, this isn’t weird or untoward. When the movie Hustlers came out, my ex was ecstatic to go see it and posted a photo of the movie ticket and the theater entrance LED screen on her IG story. Now, if you want something more traditional, again, I’m not here to lecture you on which route you should take. I think young men have been lectured enough. I will say, whatever your goal is, it should be defined.

I want to emphasize with the above paragraphs: I did not say, be realistic in your definition. That is intentional.

Because now, this is where we start to do the work and move from define what you want to take actions that get what you want.

Your external reality is a manifestation of the actions that you take, which are a manifestation of your inner belief system. Because of this, you need to have a conscious theory of victory. The US right was unsuccessful politically for decades, except for minor pushback or adjustment to the left, but not wholesale cultural change. This was because the US right did not have a theory of victory. They were demoralized after the 1960s and viewed victory as an impossibility, and that once states go “blue”, it is an inevitable one way destination. This changed when new leadership had a theory of victory, and hence formed new political coalitions and used new strategies to win.

All that is to say, you have to have the belief that success is possible, or you are not even going to try. Watch Marty Supreme:

You have now defined the type of girl that you want. From here, things become simple. What does the girl that you want do? Where does she go? Who are her friends? What are her dreams?

In the early 2010s, I still had some friends from back in the day who weren’t really about that life. I’ve since drifted apart from many of them, but that’s for another conversation. Back then, this was at the height of EDM, and I wanted to meet the kinds of girls that went to EDM shows. It was a fun scene! This is when Calvin Harris was big in the culture, Avicii, Krewella, Seven Lions, plenty others. Morgan Page is what got me into EDM originally.

So I was thinking, ok, my friends don’t really go out. Where do I meet girls who go to EDM shows. Hmm. Where can I find girls that go to EDM shows.

Wait a minute.

Hold up. I got an idea here.

What if I meet girls who go to EDM shows…at EDM shows. I go to the EDM shows, just buy a ticket and roll solo if I have to, and then talk to the girls there.

Eureka moment.

Look, if I was “realistic” on getting into that party crowd when I didn’t have a peer group at the time that got down like that, then I never would have done it. If you’re not getting the kinds of girls that you want, you are doing some kind of action that isn’t helpful, or you are doing inaction on things that would be helpful. This is going to require you to put aside some of your existing mental wiring, because to be blunt, what you have done hasn’t worked. If you want party girls, and you’re going out to bookstores to “day game” more chill type girls, then no wonder why things aren’t working. You’re not even in the right playing field. Likewise if you want church girls who are more bedtime by 10 PM types, and your plan of attack is meeting them at Las Vegas night swim pool parties, then no wonder why there is a disconnect. Full disclosure, I love night swim pool parties.

And this applies to anything. I highly recommend ballroom dance like salsa, bachata, and rumba. Go take lessons. Find a good studio with a fun, young, attractive crowd. Friendzone the instructor girls, and they’ll just throw girls at you. I mean that quite literally. They will find hot girls and say, hey go dance with him.

If you want girls that are into fitness, go to social fitness activities like a co-ed sports league, Crossfit, or a run club. If you want girls that go to church, find a church with a young adults group that looks fun and in line with your values. If you want girls who are runway models, go to fashion shows, get plugged into the network, befriend photographers, befriend models, and invite people to fun and glamorous events.

The last step is to do a continuous audit and progress check. This is where accountability partners become useful. I would argue that the real value of the old PUA community wasn’t even the knowledge, but it was that guys would hold each other accountable as far as taking actions to level up.

You can start this process immediately. You have now defined the kind of girl that you want, and you have defined a tentative list of action items to get there. You can begin the audit immediately:

• If you want girls who are into physical fitness, are you taking your own fitness seriously? Are you actually jacked, or do you half-ass your workouts? Look, if you want a girl who is a baddie, getting your bench to 225x10 will do more for your “game” than yet another internet PDF course on text game or whatever.

• When you’re out approaching girls, are you actually approaching girls, or are you drinking beer and just talking broad game theory with other guys that you’re out with? Are you actually starting conversations with the hot girls who are your truly desired type, or are you taking the easy way out and sticking to the girls that are in your comfort zone?

• Are you actually going to the places where the hot girls are, or are you taking the easy way out? If the hot girls go to a club that has a cover, just pay the cover. It’s the cost of doing business. Ideally, you get to a point where the club staff knows you and lets you in for free, but when you’re starting out (especially in a new city if you’ve moved for work/school), you’d be surprised what a small cover does to filter out loser guys. It’s funny since those guys end up spending way more money on a night out to fry their brain with alcohol. Either way, my solution to clubs that can be expensive is to simply just make more money. If anything, use that as motivation to work on your business even more.

• If you’re single again in your 30s and up and want to date younger girls, are you hip to the younger culture? Do you know what’s trendy, or are you stuck in whatever was trendy from your 20s? I’m not saying you have to be a cultural NPC. I am saying you cannot be culturally illiterate.

• Are there any negative habits that you need to cut out of your life that are no longer serving you? Are you spending too much time doomscrolling? I’m all for staying up on current events and being an informed citizen, but have you doomscrolled to the point that you think Epstein is still alive and we need to put raw milk and organ meat into the water supply to scare away the goober demons? If that last sentence made no sense to you at all, congrats, you are still mentally healthy.

All of this sounds simple enough, but the execution requires you to blow up limiting beliefs along the way. A concern that I have is that the new generation has been demoralized, so some of them are not even trying. We are not going to help out the new generation by scolding them into action; they are immune to that after COVID lockdowns. We need to give them a positive vision of something to work towards, and we need to give them actionable steps on how to do so.

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From this app, I've met potential business contacts, mentors, and personal friends. I've wargamed potential career moves and potential business ideas. I've gotten fitness advice that's been spot on. I've gotten invites to exclusive events that there really wouldn't be a way otherwise to get into had it not been for my connections that I've made here. X and Substack are the most intelligent social media platforms, and to be fair, there's also a lot of crap on here also. Fortunately, there are these great features called block and mute.

Here is what has worked for me:

1. Post a lot. Don't worry about every post being a banger. It's actually frustrating sometimes that I make a well-researched post and I get crickets as a response, but then I make some low-effort slop like "woke is bad" and it goes mega-viral. Nonetheless, the people who like your content will appreciate the well-researched posts. Ultimately, that is who you want to connect with anyway. Don't worry about perfection when you're starting out. Just ship a product and iterate.

All that is to say, worry more about quality and less about likes and reposts. Nowadays the likes and reposts might just be the algo spazzing out. The people who you want to connect with are following you for signal, not noise.

2. You CAN network as an anon, and you will get better at writing as an anon. I started this account anon when the Bow Tied Jungle was a thing in the early 2020s. For background, everyone picked a psedonym and a cartoon avatar, and there was a common theme on decentralization. Anyways. It's been an interesting experience for me since I made content before on my IRL brand, so this was starting completely from scratch and without the reputational benefit from my IRL brand. That forced me to get sharper. My ideas had to stand out on their own value, not just ride on my legacy IRL social media presence.

3. Be a reply guy. More specifically, be a smart reply guy. Intelligent comments are how you start a conversation with someone interesting. You need to be replymaxxing. Notice also who replies to your posts. This is how conversations develop.

4. Take it to Instagram when you want to connect. This allows you to vet the other person also. If you see that they're spending time with cool friends and family, you're probably good. The biggest indicators of a person's character are how they spend their money, and who do they spend their time with. Instagram lets you filter on the latter.

5. Block/mute all negativity. If you end up getting a following, sometimes it can be fun to stir up trolls, and who doesn't enjoy annoying woke people? At the same time, once you get not even that many followers, really just high hundreds, you're going to get some weirdos. It's not even worth engaging. Just block or mute. You'll get people deliberately taking you out of context to try to get some clickbait out of you. It's just part of the game.

Additionally. Remember that X, like any social media, is meant to keep you addicted to it. Make sure you're using X and that X isn't using you. Like any social media, it gets way more enjoyable with aggressive muting, blocking, and unfollowing.

The reactor companies have gotten most of the attention in the next-gen nuclear space, but regardless of whichever reactor design becomes the “winning” one, all of them will have to run on some kind of nuclear fuel. This is where Centrus comes in. To go off of the old California gold rush analogy, Centrus is not a bet on the miners. Centrus is a bet on the people selling picks and shovels to the miners.

In my opinion, this is one of the more interesting risk/reward plays.

Centrus Energy Corp., formerly known as USEC Inc., is a leading American company specializing in the supply of nuclear fuel and related services for the nuclear power industry. Headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland, Centrus plays a critical role in the global nuclear fuel cycle by providing enriched uranium, which is essential for generating electricity in nuclear reactors.

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First, the social media climate has changed. I think people have forgotten just how insane the woke era was. You can find all kinds of right-leaning political reels on Instagram now, and I don’t just mean milquetoast “socialism is bad, here let me read an essay by Thomas Sowell” video that only a few politics nerds care about.

In 2020, big tech social media was actively fanning the flames of BLM riots. Instagram had pro-BLM propaganda in the upper right corner of your Explore page and you literally could not scroll past it. It was forced on you whether or not you followed it. To be clear, this wasn’t about you. This was about the normies who then viewed BLM as inevitable and acquiesced.

If you take nothing else away from this article, realize this: Most people don’t go with the truth. They go with whatever they think is socially acceptable. Social media during 2020 mass-programmed people into thinking the riots were socially acceptable and any dissent otherwise was akin to war crimes.

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Just like how time compounds money, time compounds decisions. This is why your 20s is such a key decade. Read the book “The Defining Decade: Why Your 20s Matter “ by Meg Jay. If you use that time to develop good skills, get some kind of money making stream going whether it be a career or an entrepreneurial venture, and get some social skills and good friends, you’ll be in a good spot. Some people hit one of those but not all. Some people hit none of those. Some people neglect their health and fitness.

Some people heard “money doesn’t matter” when it comes to getting girls. This is…both true and false. It’s nuanced. It is true that there are dorky rich guys who have to resort to getting sugar babies or wife-ing up some chick who only wants him for money. It’s also true that there are fun club promoters with a credit score of negative 500 who are getting models.

Looking at extreme outliers, however, is not productive.

This all leads to crash out number one:

The guy who didn’t get his money situation sorted

When you’re a teenager or in your early 20s, nobody really is expected to be rich. Because of this, money truly doesn’t matter when it comes to getting girls. Let’s use some common sense here. High school dating would never happen if girls were screening for money. They’re just screening for a guy who is fun, cute, and high status. Usually that means the athletes, or maybe student body president, high school newspaper editor, etc., maybe some kind of band or musical talent.

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Guys learn this from PUA/red pill, and at face value the information isn’t necessarily wrong, but it’s incomplete. It’s incomplete because in your teens and early 20s, you are being evaluated on potential, not performance. In your 30s, you’ve now been alive enough to have had time to perform.

This is where the crash out comes in.

Guys blame feminism. They blame this or that. “The West is ruined.” “It’s so much easier to just get hookers in [insert whatever third world dumpster fire country].” They blame everything except their own bad decisions.

I’ve seen guys move off to the third world and run through 6s. No, not Latin America 9s and 10s, where they were a cool guy to begin with and just used geo-arbitrage to have some fun. No, I’m talking about full on sex addict running through just busted girls out of Thailand or Cambodia or wherever, and I don’t consider this to be a win at all. This is like banging fat chicks, but somehow seen as “based” because you’re not “supporting Western women” or whatever. I can’t get on board with this at all. I’m not exactly a prude when it comes with sex, but is this really fun? These girls aren’t hot. What is wrong with you.

I’ve seen some guys realize that they’re behind the curve, but instead of getting some kind of proper career set up, they go off into stuff like get rich quick schemes, forex trading because some guy on Instagram said so (why is it always forex with these guys), buying courses from charlatans, etc.

The big problem is that these people often become toxic. If they were truly happy with a more modest level of income and they’ve accepted the natural consequences of that (i.e., you’re not going to fly first class, you’re not going to afford certain luxuries, etc.,) then that’s totally fine. Some people prioritize other things. Some people want to put religion first. Totally cool. I respect that. But that’s not what I’m talking about here. These people often end up becoming haters and becoming disrespectful to people who have made it.

I think one of the big reasons why I completely 180’d my life in my 20s, turned things around and bossed up is that I never hated on people who were more successful than me. I wanted to figure out whatever it was that they were doing and adopt it for myself. There literally is no upside to being a hater. First of all, you alienate all the people of value who could potentially help you out. Secondly, and more importantly, you’re psychologically distancing yourself from success.

How to avoid this: take your career seriously. Have fun, but money comes first. If you missed the boat in your 20s, you’ve got some work to do, but don’t hate on people who made it. You’re just going to distance yourself further from making it.

Speaking of distancing yourself from making it and distancing yourself from people who could help you…

The guy who ended up in a horrible relationship

For all the talk of women hitting “the wall”, i.e. losing attractiveness as a natural result of aging, my hot take is that a lot of men hit the wall hard and fast around age 21-22 when they finished their senior year of college and it’s suddenly not cool anymore to be bragging about how you once got mildly buzzed on Busch Light out of a red Solo cup and made out with a 7/10.

If you’re at least 25, we’ve all seen it. The guy who just has his life sucked out of him by the wrong woman. One of my coworkers (I know, I know…I’m wagecucking for now until other things can ramp up) spends probably 20% of his day complaining about his marital problems. I just put my earbuds in and turn the volume up.

The kind of guy I’m talking about is the guy from all of the red pill/MGTOW horror stories. Those stories were written for a reason, since they’ve happened. The co-worker in question above, his wife tracks his location on his phone and starts crazy texting him if he’s in an unexpected location like a work happy hour at a nearby bar or restaurant. If a guy was doing this to a girl, most people would say this is insane and borderline abusive behavior, and they would be correct.

These are the kinds of guys who have to “check in with the ol’ ball and chain.” These are the types of people who argue over who should take the trash out. Just someone take out the fucking trash when it’s full. This does not need to be a whole spiel.

I want to be clear through all of this that I am pro-relationships. That might surprise you from the nature of my content. Once you’ve met a real ride or die girl, the kind of girl who is supportive, listens, and shares your goals, you can’t go back. This is the kind of girl that is a muse. This is the kind of girl that inspires men to build multi-million dollar businesses.

How to avoid this: Don’t wife up the first girl who gives you the time of day. If you’re not meeting the kinds of girls that would be conducive to a healthy long-term relationship, then work on yourself until you are meeting them. If you need to move to a new city, then move. If you need to get in better shape, then hit the gym and hire a trainer.

I made a post on X that was more just a quick post while bored rather than a serious long essay, one of those posts that you don’t expect much engagement for, and then I came back and was surprised to see negative feedback:

Check the comments if you want to lose some brain cells.

I’m not entirely sure why “I like hot girls” is apparently some kind of controversial opinion, but here we are. Anyways, the pushback all came from guys. No girls complained about it. It makes me wonder if maybe my post struck some kind of nerve on their own life choices, but it is what it is.

Look, I’ve dated an insecure girl once, and once was enough. I’m good on that. Every girl wants to feel appreciated and valued by her man, but there is a clear difference between that and anxiety or insecurity where it’s just a never-ending black hole of lack of assurance. There is nothing you can do there. You’re not her therapist, and if the roles were flipped and you were the one being insecure, she’d run for the exits.

And, when it comes to relationships, it’s not just the guys who crash out. This is an equal opportunity post. Our next crash out is…

The girl who becomes bitter at everything, or brands herself as a “dating expert”

This is an equal opportunity post. This isn’t me just trying to rack up the high score on how many people I can piss off. I’m actually trying to warn you to not become this person.

I started seeing this type in my late 20s. There was one girl in our social/party circuit who it seemed like her main claim to fame is that me and all my friends turned her down. Of course, she then started a podcast talking about dating advice. I’m not entirely sure how she thinks she is qualified to give dating advice considering how she isn’t successful at it herself.

I’m pretty sure girls thinking that they are dating experts is the girl version of how any random guy off of the street thinks he can win a fight, no matter how untrained or out of shape he is. Sure. Right. Of course you can. We’ve got ourselves a real Jason Bourne here. (That’s sarcasm for the humor impaired)

It doesn’t get prettier. I had a long-time platonic female friend from my military days kind of out of nowhere start scolding me on the kinds of girls that I date. This was bizarre since she’s met girls that I’ve dated, got along with them, so I don’t think this was a case of some kind of weird jealousy, since if so, that would have flared up earlier. I do think it is a case of how she is now in her 30s and has been chronically single, and maybe something just snapped when she saw people doing better.

How to avoid this: Look, if you’re not in the kind of relationship that you want, at least don’t be bitter towards people who are. That is just going to put more distance between you and your goals.

If you didn’t make the best decisions in your 20s, we’ve all made some decisions that were dumb. That’s part of life. That’s part of being human. We can’t change that now, but we can move forward. Frame things in terms of what you can do. Don’t be bitter or mean to girls who are younger. The kind of high quality men that you want to meet are not going to put up with negativity, and they probably have platonic female friends of their own, and being disrespectful to them is not going to get you far.

The thing is, advice for girls sucks. On the political left, you will get YAAAS SLAY QUEEN-ed right off of a cliff. On the political right, you get increasingly autistic insanity, so autistic that it probably singlehandedly raised the stock price of Johnson & Johnson with how much Tylenol was ingested to produce it. To summarize, it usually is on the gist of: “Don’t go to college, wear something frumpy, don’t go to any kind of social functions, don’t socialize at all, become as weird and socially awkward as possible, don’t move to a city because cities are bad, so intentionally put geographic distance between yourself and successful high status men”, and so on.

I actually really hope these guys don’t have daughters, because they’re more likely to send their daughters diving headfirst into feminism rather than the opposite with that kind of upbringing.

The good news: crashing out is optional

This article is not meant to be an exhaustive list. It is meant to be cautionary to younger guys and girls.

Even if you did make some bad decisions earlier on, and who hasn’t, nobody’s story is over.

At this stage in the game, despite my 4 years of NCAA eligibility, I’m never going to play in March Madness (I graduated college well over a decade ago and never played basketball at the collegiate level). That’s not a limiting belief. That’s just reality. But, I don’t need to hate on people who are slaying it in athletics.

That’s an easy example. This article isn’t about sports. I don’t need to hate on people who are successful at anything. It’s just going to create cognitive dissonance and put me further away from my goals.

Crashing out is optional, and I recommend that you don’t.

Before I get into the meat of this article, I want to give some background context. Over the last few months, I’ve seen a number of smart people on the right who I respect check out of politics. They say they are disillusioned with how things are going. I respectfully disagree, and I think we may be on the verge of a big cultural renaissance the likes of which transcends politics.

Examples of some writers:

Femlosophy

My Political Fatigue got so BAD that I Quit Political Commentary after 4 Years

I didn’t quit political commentary because I stopped caring. I quit because I got too close to the political process and realized—for the most part—politics is one of the dirtiest fields of industry humanly possible. It became obvious how depraved the professional political class is…

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8 months ago · 35 likes · 15 comments · Aly Dee

Med Gold

The Memes Administration

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9 months ago · 66 likes · 5 comments · Med Gold

I like both of those writers, I respectfully disagree with them here. I was critical of Trump 1.0, but Trump 2.0 has been a lot more effective. The administration has done so many deportations that riots have broken out in Chicago and Portland, and the border is secure. USAID is shut down completely, and we had no idea how much grift and corruption was in there until Rubio exposed it. The DOJ Community Relations Service is shut down. I could go on, but point being, we’ve gotten a lot of what we wanted.

Yet, some are disillusioned. It’s true that nobody has gone to jail for the COVID lockdowns, weaponization of government, trans surgeries on kids, or other abuses of the Woke era. I get the frustration, and I share it also, but this is going to be a problem when blue juries refuse to convict.

So, some on our side have checked out of politics. I see that some of them are now focusing on culture.

My hot take…this might end up being a good thing!

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Politics has always been fake and ghey

Open up a history book. There has always been some kind of corruption throughout history. You could argue that the default state of humanity is tyranny, interspersed with occasional periods of freedom.

If you think US federal politics has grift, just wait until you see city politics, where you don’t have a national media cycle that can at least shine a light on things when someone crosses the line.

I’m not saying this to blackpill. I’m a fighter by nature. I mentally recognize that throughout history, we’ve always had crime, tyrants, and sociopaths, and I realize that I—or for that matter, the entirety of the military and law enforcement apparatus—are not likely to permanently stop it. Nonetheless, I’m a fighter. I want to push back on the evil in the world anyway.

I enjoy messing with evil people. I get satisfaction from ruining their plans. I have always been attracted to dangerous high-adrenaline situations. Most mentally healthy people probably don’t fully relate to this, and that’s okay. Only about 0.5% of the population served in the military, and I’m for an all-volunteer force. We don’t need everyone to be fighters. I also never claimed that I’m mentally healthy either.

Some would rather just be left alone and go about their business, so I get it that now that the worst extremes of the Woke era are behind us, they don’t feel the need to be in the fight as much. Even someone who isn’t a fighter is probably going to put up a fight if necessary in self-defense.

Since the Woke era started around Obama’s second term, a lot of us got forced into politics. It was self-defense. That’s more or less done now. The social media censorship era is over. We’re allowed to say retarded and gay again, and we’re even allowed to say Merry Christmas. The anti-White male rhetoric now has backlash to it. The border invasion has stopped. The campus false rape claims of the 2010s are behind us.

Because of that, there is not as much impetus for people who are not natural fighters to be as political as they once were. So, they are turning to culture.

And I think, that’s probably okay.

Politics is downstream from culture

Andrew Breitbart’s famous quote was that politics is downstream from culture. We had a robust cultural renaissance that started in the 2000s with online men’s self-improvement communities. I could expand on this, but again, I highly suggest you listen to the recent BAP podcast episode 204. I will now tie this back full circle to the start of this article, since I have thus far not seen content aside from the BAP podcast which gave a comprehensive history of that time period, how it stopped with censorship post-2016, and how I can now see it resuming now that we can focus on areas other than politics.

Link:

The cornerstone of that time period goes by various names, since there wasn’t centralized leadership. The manosphere. Red pill. PUA. Seduction community. The term that I use is men’s online self-development communities. I use this broad umbrella term since there were many different facets of these groups, and they often disagreed with each other, but they had a common thread: practical self-improvement. For some, that was as simple as meeting girls. But this prompted more research: fitness, evolutionary psychology, entrepreneurship, building communities.

The renaissance started as an analytical response to how the things that common culture said would work for guys to meet girls simply did not work. Bear in mind, readers now in 2026 are either overtly or by osmosis exposed to ideas that came from the 2000s-2010s renaissance, whether or not they are aware of it, so some things I may speak of here may seem basic and remedial. For example, we now know with empirical research that women are attracted to men of high status, good physical fitness, leadership characteristics, and also more bluntly, women are attracted to men that other women are attracted to, which is called pre-selection.

That is going to seem basic to many of you, but in the 1990s, this knowledge was not common. This is how you’d have guys who were engineers or other respectable professions fail to meet women, even though they did everything that society said they should do. These people were boring. They did not excite women. We know this now. We did not know this then.

Investigating these basic facts of life caused people to start investigating other facts of life. The discovery of knowledge in some areas and speaking the truth plainly about human intimate relationships prompted knowledge exploration in other areas and speaking the truth on all things. As much as I criticize some PUA types, the reality is that the PUA movement of that era got a lot of things right. I criticize from a place of in-group constructive criticism.

This cultural renaissance got stopped in its tracks after the election of Donald Trump in 2016 when social media censorship disrupted our communications channels. Anything that was considered dissident was labeled as “Russian propaganda”, “incel”, “militant White nationalism”, or other increasingly silly names. “Harmful disinformation.” This is how a lot of us got forced into politics as a means of self-defense.

But that’s done now. So, we can get back to culture. And, when we’re able to build culture, this is how we build deep-level influence—and then, it’s how we build the kind of social power that allows us to have juries that do in fact convict the Anthony Fauci’s and trans surgery on kids Dr. Mengele’s of the world.

The metaphor I propose is: we’ve won World War 2, and now we have an opportunity to build a space program.

All of the mental energy that we expended on a Samizdat resistance and fight against Woke can now go to literally anything else.

I think we could truly be entering into an American Golden Age, and I am excited to see this. I said during the height of totalitarianism in 2021 that things may get worse before they get better. We are now in the getting better phase.

BowTied Bull

Nuclear Market Overview and Other Updates

Welcome Avatar! We’re going to do the nuclear part in two posts. Since a lot of people are unlikely aware of the industry at all, we have BowTiedPlayer here to do an initial overview. This is going to save us all a ton of time as we outline what we’ll be investing in to get exposure to the space next year…

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8 months ago · 46 likes · 19 comments · BowTied Bull

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This is in response to an exchange of posts on X over the past week:

AJAC is a good dude. I recommend checking out his fitness material. Anyways, you get people like Matt or others who make ragebait posts, but there are guys who actually do believe this, and this needs to be engaged with. Ignoring this isn’t going to make it go away.

Birth rates are down, and this is a civilizational problem. Singlehood is rising. The previous discourse on this has not worked. We need a different approach.

The feminist chant that these men are “incels” won’t make it go away, nor will the tradcon refrain that the men need to “man up” or face their “duty.” This isn’t going to work. Young men have been hectored for decades by the longhouse system, and they’re not listening anymore—which is good. What it means though is that we need to present a carrot, not just a stick. The only “stick”, if you can even call it that, is that some random person on the internet might call you a mean name. Oh no. Big deal.

If we want to promote healthy families and increase the birth rate, we need to offer a carrot.

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The downsides that men see

In culture today, and for the past several decades, we have examples of successful single guys, or we have examples of dorky father figures like Everyone Loves Raymond. We don’t have examples of successful father figures. If you came from a healthy family, this part may be confusing to you. A lot of people did not come from healthy families. If you don’t have a good example at home, and you don’t have a good example in the culture, then fatherhood is going to look like getting scolded by your wife, being a fat dork, and essentially being emasculated.

You lose your freedom, in exchange for a nagging wife who can take half of your money in a divorce, and in exchange for a pile of dirty diapers.

Again, I am not saying that I endorse these views. I am saying that these are views that guys have, and frankly, those views are not without evidence.

I’d encourage you to read this article by Brittany Hugoboom:

Vanity & Virtue

Why Should Men Get Married?

What’s the benefit for men in a marriage…

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a year ago · 94 likes · 26 comments · Brittany Hugoboom

What about leaving a legacy? What about when yet another brunch party gets old?

Okay, now we’re talking!

If fatherhood is framed from the lens of legacy, mentorship, building an empire that outlasts you—you’d get a much better reception.

To truly shift the narrative, we need to shift the narrative away from Fatherhood = Everyone Loves Raymond loserdom to something better. Think of entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, who balance building global enterprises with raising multiple children. Think of Donald Trump! Even if you don’t like his politics, you have to admit that he did a great job of raising his kids, all while maintaining an active social life in the NYC elite circles, running a successful business, and then even running for (and winning) the Presidency.

By reframing the discussion, we can demonstrate that fatherhood isn’t a zero-sum game of lost freedom but instead a rewarding experience that cannot be found elsewhere.

The stick didn’t work. It’s not going to work. We need to offer young men a carrot.

Game isn’t over, but it changes. Game at 18 is you hook up after half an hour of beer pong. For all the talk of women hitting “the wall”, my keen observation is a lot of men hit the wall and hard at 21-22, immediately after their senior year of college and suddenly it’s way less cool to be bragging about how you once made out with a 7/10 after drinking red Solo cup Busch Light in the basement of Sigma Chi. If you’re in your mid-late 20s and still talking about college parties, this means you haven’t done anything of value since then.

At a big picture level, girls evaluate guys on either potential or performance.

Girls will form relationships, sometimes lifelong relationships, with guys in college based purely on their potential. I’ve heard it described as “girls date like venture capitalists.” If guys were purely being evaluated based on if they had a yacht in Miami and a Ferrari, then high school dating/relationships would not be a thing. Let’s use a little common sense here. A guy who is 18-21 isn’t expected to have it all together. That said, when you’re 30 and up, the expectation goes up. This is when expectations shift from an evaluation of potential into an evaluation of performance.

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You will hear a refrain from 2010s era PUA guys that “money doesn’t matter.” Short answer, this is incorrect. Longer answer, it is partially correct. When you’re 18-21, money doesn’t matter, since a guy that age isn’t expected to have a successful business or career. When you’re 30 and up, that is what is expected of you. You are welcome to disagree with me here, but I have seen multiple crash outs now from guys who hit a wall hard and fast as they got a bit older since they didn’t have their core foundation dialed in, such as their career. They got by with hookups with young girls when they too were young, but eventually that runway ran out.

Without further ado.

Non-negotiables if you’re over 30

1. First off, don’t overly blackpill or overly redpill. Depending on which clickbait slop merchant you’re following, either when you’re over 30 you are simply just doomed and it’s too late, or on the other extreme you’re supposed to have sorority presidents and Victoria Secret models throwing themselves at you left and right. As are most things in life, something as complex as dating cannot be reduced down to just platitudes online. My advice really would be to tune out a lot of online dating discourse. It’s mental masturbation at a certain point. The point is to actually be out talking to girls, not just reading content about talking to girls.

The only opinion that actually matters when it comes to what kind of girls you can/cannot get are the girls themselves. See what the market has to say, and you’re not going to find that out until you actually do your approaches. From that, you can adjust. If you’re out of shape, get into shape. Basics.

2. Your mission in life comes first. There is a line from the Soldier’s Creed from my military days, “I will always place the mission first.” It’s not “I will always place my personal comfort first.” It’s not “I will always place what random people think first.” I will always place the mission first. Go back and re-read Way of the Superior Man by David Deida. Women are drawn to ambition. Look, I’m all for getting hot girls, but you should have more going on in your life beyond that—and, when you do, it becomes easier to get girls in the first place. Yes, I used a long dash. I wrote like that before SlopGPT became a thing. Sue me. Anyways. You should have something you’re passionate about, whether it’s your career, your hobbies, fitness, maybe some kind of civic or social organization that you’re a leader in, or something.

3. Cut out excessive alcohol and any junk food. I drink. But, I know when I’ve had enough. It’s just a biological reality that you’re not going to metabolize alcohol like you did when you were 19 playing beer pong in a college frat basement. Alcohol is going to age you unnecessarily. Junk food needs no explanation. It’s going to age your skin, make you fat, and sap you of energy. You don’t need it. You cannot out exercise a bad diet. I know that many pro athletes say you can in fact out exercise a bad diet. You are not a pro athlete, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading my dating blog.

4. Cut out all negativity, including (and especially) friends from back in the day who are haters. This is frankly a step you should have done in your 20s, but if that hasn’t been done, or if you have had friends along the way who had a crashout and now are negative, there’s nothing you can do. Let them go. I had one friend in particular of 8 years who we spent a lot of time together in the Army. Somewhere along the way, she had a total crashout and got extremely toxic to be around. I’m not happy about it, but I really don’t think there was anything I could do. I’ve also seen guys who were ballers in their 20s suffer once they hit their 30s since they weren’t working on other areas of life like their career. I feel bad for them, and if they asked for advice I could give some input maybe, but it’s not your problem. And, if they’re venting the frustrations of their own bad choices onto you, you don’t need to take that kind of negativity. Let it go. Draw a boundary.

5. Don’t apologize for who you are. You may be thinking that as a single guy in my 30s, in shape, high income job, that I get haters demanding that I settle down. After all, that’s what the various red pill guys will say. They’re going to shame me! First of all, who’s “they?” This has honestly never happened. If you don’t apologize for who you are and don’t even explain yourself, these people don’t even bother. It’s just hyper-online nonsense. If someone does ask questions that don’t need to be asked, you can just brush them off with a quick and curt “none of your business.”

6. Switch up the venues that you go out to. I’m going to give it to you straight. You want to be in the places where you have younger girls who are attracted to older guys. You are likely not going to find that at the post-college bars that you may have used to go out to. You will, however, be a lot more likely to find these girls in upscale nightclubs and lounges. Yes, I’m well aware that they charge a cover and have expensive drinks. Pay it anyway. By this stage in the game, that expense should be no sweat for you anyway.

Lastly, I want to reiterate once again that you should not be overly redpilled nor should you be overly blackpilled on this one.

Like most things in life, dating cannot be reduced to simple platitudes from internet slop merchants. It is certainly not a binary function of you turn 30 and then Sydney Sweeney and Ana de Armas are going to be banging on your door for an emergency threesome, nor is it the case that you’re just doomed and younger girls are now verboten.

Follow these non-negotiables, and you’ll greatly improve your odds if you’re a single guy over 30.