Neil Strauss's "The Game" aimed to teach any man how to hook up with beautiful women. All he needed was a little bit of sociopathy, a lot of misogyny and a fanny pack full of props.
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Neil Strauss's "The Game" aimed to teach any man how to hook up with beautiful women. All he needed was a little bit of sociopathy, a lot of misogyny and a fanny pack full of props.
Support us on Patreon
Where to find us:
Sources:
Thanks to Mindseye for our theme song!
Peter: Michael.
Michael: Peter.
Peter: I know that you must have heard of The Game.
Michael: Yes, this is the book that taught me how to neg.
[If Books Could Kill theme]
Peter: One of the books I'm reading for this podcast is The End of History book about the ascendance of liberal democracy after the fall of the Soviet Union. But first, I thought it was critical to discuss The Game by Neil Strauss, a book about how to get the most pussy.
Michael: About dudes getting their dicks wet in LA in the 1990s.
[laughter]
Peter: The subtitle of The Game is Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists.
Michael: How did I not notice the penetrating thing?
Peter: Yeah, that's search engine optimization, baby.
[laughter]
Peter: The basic gist is that it's the story about how the author joins a group of so-called "pickup artists," guys who study the art and science of picking up women.
Michael: Yes.
Peter: The aesthetic of the book, quite interesting. The OG print edition is leather bound.
Michael: [laughs] I forgot.
Peter: It's got one of those like built in ribbon bookmarks, like a bright red one, like the Bible.
Michael: Oh, my God.
Peter: There are many quotations throughout the book from famous authors and thinkers. Can you guess, Mike, who the first quote comes from?
Michael: Ah, it's going to be someone horrible like Tony Robbins or something.
Peter: No, no, you're going in the wrong direction, my friend. The first quote is from Betty Friedan.
Michael: What?
[laughter]
Peter: Betty Friedan quote is, "Men weren't really the enemy. They were fellow victims suffering from an outmoded masculine mystique that made them feel unnecessarily inadequate, when there were no bears to kill."
Michael: Yes, that's a good quote.
Peter: I'm telling you, there are some great feminist quotes all throughout this story of banging as many chicks as possible in LA.
Michael: [laughs]
Peter: So, have you read this book? Have you read The Game?
Michael: I actually read this. I think shortly after it came out or a couple years after it came out, when I was in a pickup artist curious phase. I've always been slightly fascinated by this, because first of all, I always struggled to get laid. And second of all, this whole thing always seemed very straight dude to me. This was always wrapped up in this weird-- The dating norms of straight people, which I genuinely find fascinating and totally baffling, where for gay men, it's 90% attractiveness.
Peter: Uh-huh.
Michael: There's not a lot of game to be done in my world. Whereas in straight world, it seems there's this dance of confidence and kind of the vibe that you give off. I was always fascinated just because it seems it's harder to date as a straight guy than a gay guy somehow.
Peter: Yeah, I think that's right. Unfortunately, women, they've got all kinds of standards.
Michael: I know that-- [chuckles] The first problem.
Peter: It's a big downer for dudes.
Michael: My memories of the book, it's been a very long time since I've read it is that, he seems to toggle back and forth between an anthropological dissection of this world. Look at the men and how they are broken and how they are dealing with their brokenness. And then one paragraph later, he'll switch to basically advice, how to be one of these pickup artists. It seems the author himself couldn't really decide or was trying to have it both ways.
Peter: Yeah, that's exactly right. It's very clear that he goes into this dorky guy that struggles to get laid and he finds out how to get laid. He finds these techniques that help them get laid and they work. Part of him is smart enough to know that this is weird, and manipulative, and demeans women. On the other hand, he is very impressed with himself and very happy about these developments. He's constantly, it's the struggle of two kneels all throughout the book.
Michael: Did you ever have a pickup artist phase?
Peter: No, I have never had any phase like this. I definitely had a phase where I was dorkier and not doing well with women. I've never enjoyed even when I was better at it going out to bars and talking to random women and trying to hook up with them. I don't have a ton of interest in being like, "Oh, could I sleep with that random stranger?"
Michael: Right.
Peter: But now, I was never intrigued by this. Certainly, when I was in college and had a couple years where I wasn't super successful with the ladies, I think that it was probably loosely intriguing to me, but never enough to be like, "I'll read the book."
Michael: So, this was your first-time diving into this?
Peter: This was. There's a whole bunch of pop culture that descends from this.
Michael: Oh, my God, no.
Peter: I haven’t really absorbed any of it, until I did for this podcast and changed my brain forever. It's too bad I'm now locked down for the rest of my life, because-
Michael: I know.
Peter: -if you have put me in LA in 2004, I [crosstalk] slayed using the tactics I have learned from Neil Strauss.
Michael: [laughs] Now you're tooled up. Now you're equipped. Yeah, to trick some out of work actress into having sex with you and then both of you waking up feeling bad about it the next day. That seems like the experience that he's trying to replicate in this book.
Peter: So, let's set the table here. Neil's a journalist. He, as part of his job, first dives into this online community of pickup artists. And we're in the early 2000s here. They use all sorts of cult like lingo. Surging is going out and picking up women.
Michael: Oh, my God.
Peter: Groups of girls are called sets. So, if there's three girls, that's a three set.
Michael: Oh, my gosh.
Peter: IOIs are indicators of interest. So, it's never like, "She seemed she liked me." It's always, "I was getting some IOIs from this girl."
Michael: Right.
Peter: Number closing is when you get someone's number. Peacocking. Do you know what peacocking is?
Michael: Oh, this is from that fucking TV show, where you're supposed to wear at least one very flashy item of clothing, like bright purple sunglasses in a bar or something. Isn't it so people will comment on it as a conversation starter or something?
Peter: That's right. So, you're wearing intentionally over the top loud things in order to attract attention and pretend that you're interesting or whatever.
Michael: Oh, my God.
Peter: So, Neil becomes fascinated by this stuff and he decides to meet some of these guys in person. He signs up for a pickup artist workshop, put on by the most prominent guy in the community, Mystery.
Michael: Mystery, the now famous Mystery.
Peter: That's right. Made famous by this book. Mystery's real name is Erik Horvat Marković. For some reason, he has a legally change to Erik von Marković, which I guess he just thought sounded cooler.
Michael: He's right.
Peter: He's a prolific writer online about picking up women. Well known within the community. His aesthetic is just fully Criss Angel.
Michael: Right.
Peter: Pale, dark hair, soul patch, nail polish, big earrings. He embraces aggressive form of peacocking. So, he'd be wearing large top hats all the time. He's 6'5" and wears boots with six-inch platforms.
Michael: No way.
Peter: You throw in the top hats and this guy is like towering in the club well over seven feet tall.
Michael: He's like the fucking Chrysler Building everywhere he goes.
Peter: [laughs] He wears vest and large coats, and numerous watches on each arm at a time.
Michael: Also, my memory of this guy from the eventual VH1 show is that he's also quite conventionally attractive.
Peter: It's interesting, Neil describes him as a very mediocre looking dude. I think he's a pretty good-looking guy. He's got tall cheekbones. He's tall, he's in decent shape. He's a good-looking guy. It makes you wonder why he needed everything else.
Michael: Yeah.
Peter: When they first meet Mystery hands Neil manila envelope containing pictures of the hottest girls he's ever dated.
[laughter]
Michael: Wait, really? That's a real detail from the book?
Peter: Yep.
[laughter]
Michael: Imagine having a manila folder.
Peter: To be clear, that wasn't at the workshop. Neil spots Mystery [Michael laughs] in the hotel lobby and Mystery just hands him the envelope.
Michael: Oh, my fucking God.
[laughter]
Peter: So, Neil's reasonably self-reflective about all of this. He described signing up for this workshop as "acknowledging defeat, inferiority, and inadequacy." So, he's starting from this place of like, "Yeah, I'm a big loser who can't get laid and I'm going to sign up for a workshop and pay someone $500. I understand that that is pathetic." So, I guess, I should teach you some strategies, right?
Michael: Yeah. Give me the wisdom and the knowledge, Peter.
Peter: A lot of it is very stupid icebreakers. "My friend was invited to be on Maury, should he go on or is it going to be too embarrassing?"
Michael: Oh, okay.
Peter: Some of them are things that you do to build a little artificial bond between you and the gal. So, one of them is, "You're in the middle of a desert in a box. Describe the box to me."
Michael: [chuckles]
Peter: Well, describe your box, Michael?
Michael: Wait, what? I don't even understand this one.
Peter: Yeah, me neither. [laughs] But the point is that when someone will describe their box, they'll be like, "Okay. It's big." And they're like, "Ooh, big." That means you have a large ego.
Michael: Oh, right. So, it's almost like a palm reading thing, but it's not, you don't grab their palm. Okay.
Peter: Yeah. It's a little fake psychoanalysis thing. Most of this is just ways to make people confident in what are traditionally the most awkward parts of a conversation, right?
Michael: Yeah.
Peter: Another part of it is just a recognition that women have a sex drive and want to hook up, but again, it's less socially acceptable for them. They're these artificial barriers that you need to work through.
Michael: Wait, can I tell a story?
Peter: Yeah.
Michael: I was in a bar with a female friend of mine, and we were hanging out, and I left to go to the bathroom, and I came back and there was this guy talking to us. He had come up to her and said, "Hey, me and my friends are trying to name all of the oceans. We got Pacific, Atlantic, Indian. I feel there's another one. Isn't there another ocean?" She's like, "Oh, Arctic." And then before she knew it, she was in a conversation with this guy.
Peter: Yeah.
Michael: Then the next day, I googled. Something felt fishy to me about it and I googled around and there was literally an article of like, pickup artists strategies and one of them listed was pretend you don't know the names of all the oceans.
Peter: I don't think that's in the book, but it sounds exactly like a ton of their openers.
Michael: Yeah.
Peter: You're just engaging someone off the bat in a really natural sounding conversation.
Michael: Right.
Peter: Another thing they do is little sleight of hand magic tricks.
Michael: Oh, yeah.
Peter: So, Mystery is like a magician as one of his little gigs. And Neil spends a flood a couple of like plane flights, learning little sleight of hand things. It's basically what it sounds like, "Check this, look, I can make this beer bottle levitate."
Michael: Okay.
Peter: There's something called soul gazing, which is when you're a few minutes into a conversation, you just have a girl stare into your eyes and you stare into hers, and you give it a little intro like, "Oh, there's just technique I'm trying. So, let's try it out." The whole point is that there is research showing that if you'd stare into someone's eyes for long enough, you start to feel more comfortable with them.
Michael: That sounds fake, but sure.
Peter: There's also the prop bag. I'm going to send you a couple of screenshots. The prop bag is literally what it sounds like. Many pickup artists carry around a bag full of props that they use in the course of picking up women.
Michael: Wait, like literal physical props, like carrot top?
Peter: You'll see. Not to that level. All right, let me know when you get it. [laughs]
Michael: Okay.
Peter: And feel free to read out your favorites.
Michael: You've sent me three pages of this fucking book.
Peter: The prop bag is very full.
Michael: So, one of them is a pack of gum, Wrigley's Big Red, a pack of condoms.
Peter: It's starting off somewhat normal.
Michael: A piece of dryer lint for the lint opener, walk up to a woman, stop, wordlessly remove lint hidden in the palm of your hand from her clothing, ask, "How long has that been there?" Then hand her the piece of lint.
[laughter]
Peter: Oh.
Michael: That would work on me. I would feel small if somebody did that to me.
Peter: [laughs]
Michael: I'm in, this works. Okay, one digital camera.
Peter: It's 2005 at the end of the day. Yeah.
Michael: Take a photo of yourself and a girl smiling. Then another one striking a serious pose. And finally, one kissing. In the final photo say, "We make a good couple, don't we?" If she agrees, you're in. Oh, that's a high-risk strategy.
Peter: Master of psychology. If you take a picture of you kissing her and [Michael laughs] she's like, "Yeah, that was fun. We make a good couple," then she likes you.
Michael: What else? One set of wooden runes in cloth bag for rune readings. Okay, I'm not going to ask you what that is. [laughs]
Peter: Well, I'm not sure I can explain it, but for some, just like I said, there's a lot of magic going on. There's a lot of astrology for boys.
Michael: Wait, holy shit. Okay, now I'm at the end of the list. One small black light for pointing out lint and dandruff on girls' clothing, a neg.
Peter: Yeah, [Michael laughs] that's only if you forget your lint. You should blast her with a black light. [laughs]
Michael: This is something you would do to someone you fucking hate.
Peter: Right.
Michael: This is like someone in college who you just absolutely loathe and you want to humiliate them as much as possible like, "I'm going to bring a fucking blacklight, because Emma's going to be there."
Peter: I also feel any part of you that might be successfully negged would be outweighed by the part of you, that's like, "Why do you have a blacklight?"
Michael: [laughs]
Peter: Aren't you going to ask that question? And then the guy's like, "Oh."
Michael: [laughs]
Peter: What's your line? Where's the explanation for why you have a bag full of shit, including runes and a black light?
Michael: [laughs] And like a 20-sided die.
Peter: [laughs]
Michael: Yeah.
Peter: Some of these strategies are just gratuitous. There's one bit where a guy explains that when he has a girl back at his place, he'll ask for a massage and then tell her that she's doing it wrong.
Michael: Oh, my God.
Peter: And then tell her that he'll give her a massage to show her the right way and then he transitions that into sex. It's like, "Bro, she's at your place giving you a massage. [Michael laughs] You don't need tactics anymore." This guy is experiencing one of life's great pleasures, getting a massage from someone who's attracted to you while sexual tension builds. And he cannot enjoy it, because he's turned all of human interaction into this weird manipulative game. And that's an ongoing theme throughout this, where like, "They cannot process human interaction, except through the lens of the game." At one point, Mystery has a conversation with a girl he likes and he calls it comfort building-
Michael: Oh, my God.
Peter: -as in trying to make her comfortable with him. Yeah, that's what getting to know someone is.
Michael: That’s just like literally-- [crosstalk]
Peter: [laughs]
Michael: You're having a conversation. Yes.
Peter: Right.
Michael: This has always been my deep melancholy whenever I hear about this stuff, because it's hard to find connections with other people. It's just hard, as a human being and it's the thing that all of us want the most. But you can't just come out and say like, "I'd really like to form a connection with you." Everything has to be done in this between the lines way, but you're gamifying it to the point where you're not even participating in these conversations, it feels like.
Peter: It's just how deep the insecurity runs, right?
Michael: Right.
Peter: They have to imagine everything as part of the game, because if it's not, then they're laid bare.
Michael: Yeah.
Peter: There is another guy. Ross, whose primary game is "technology," which is a word for psychological techniques. It's like hypnosis adjacent. He believes that he is a master of hypnosis.
Michael: Oh, my God.
Peter: He does things like try to get women to associate positive emotions with him. At one point, he's talking to a waitress and he's like, "Picture someone that you're attracted to, and look at me." And then later he tells Neil like, "Yeah, now she's associating attraction with me."
Michael: Oh, my fucking God.
Peter: You made her picture someone attracted like someone else--
[laughter]
Peter: And he like, "Now look at me, now look at me."
Michael: Yeah. [laughs]
Peter: Her stupid girl brain thinks I'm the guy from her fantasies. [laughs]
Michael: "Now when she hears the bell, she'll think of me."
Peter: There's an incredible bit where Neil is saying something that the hypnosis guy does not like. And the guy goes, "Stop." And Neil is like, "This was a hypnosis technique to interrupt your train of thought." I was like, "Yeah, man." [Michael laughs] Master of human psychology using the advanced hypnosis technique of screaming stop when you want to interrupt someone.
[laughter]
Peter: So, obviously, there are many things these guys do that are just scumbag shit. Just terrible things. There are systems for getting around women who have spouses or hanging around the spouses, you can hook up with the women. There are a lot of tactics that involve like ignoring the person you're interested in or being mean to them in some way.
Michael: Wasn't just the thing if there's a hot chick, you should hit on her less hot friend?
Peter: Yes.
Michael: Because she's used to being the center of attention. But all of a sudden, she loves getting the guy hitting on her and it makes her feel weird and then you can scoop her up later or something.
Peter: That is correct. That's a big part of the book. There is one part of the book where there's diagrams that are drawn out like fucking war plans. There's two girls at the bar and I will move in from this direction.
Michael: Oh, my God.
Peter: I'm going to send you a diagram.
Michael: Oh, you're sending me the actual fucking diagram? Jesus Christ.
Peter: No, no, no. Not that one.
Michael: Okay.
Peter: This is a different diagram. The book is full of diagrams. [laughs]
Michael: Wait, what the fuck is this?
Peter: This is from Mystery's workshop and it is a bunch of negs.
Michael: Should you explain what a neg is?
Peter: I guess so. Even though, it's such a part of the culture now that I assume everyone knows. But a neg is when you intentionally say something rude with the idea being that they will be a little bit offended and therefore want to win your affection.
Michael: Right. So, it's a female diagram, like a woman, and then next to each I guess, body part is like a neg. So, a neg associated with each feature. "Is that a wig? Oh, well, it looks nice, anyway. I think your hair would look better up. What do you call that hairstyle? The waffle? I like that skirt. Those are really popular these days. Those shoes look really comfortable." And then another one is, "You kind of have man hands." That was just mean.
Peter: Yeah, some of them are way to mean, where it's just like, "You look like a stupid bitch."
Michael: [laughs]
Peter: I don't understand how that's working. A big theme of negging is that I don't know if this is a 2005 thing, but they're very convinced that telling a girl that another girl at the club is wearing the same thing will just devastate her.
Michael: Oh, yeah.
Peter: I don't know if that's true or not, but they seem to believe very much that it is.
Michael: What's so frustrating about this is, there's a lot of people that really struggle in these kinds of interactions. Talking to a person at a bar who you don't know is just the worst form of human interaction. It sucks that this is what people have to do to date.
Peter: Right.
Michael: So, I get that people would want to systematize this or have conversation openers that are more interesting than what do you do for a living or what's your name or something. I get the need for it. But instead of guiding people to like, "Okay, here's how to have a meaningful conversation" or "Here's how to make somebody comfortable, it's like this shit," where it's like, "Here's how to manipulate somebody, here's how to seem you're giving somebody a compliment, but you're actually denigrating them and establishing dominance in a conversation."
Peter: Right.
Michael: This is where it goes from like, "Oh, they're helping people" into just like, "Okay, you're a huge piece of shit, if you're telling people to do this."
Peter: Right. There's tons of little shitty tactics they do. But more than any given tactic is offensive, there's just this general sense of sociopathy running through everything. They have zero interest in the joy of other people, except as a way to get things. Zero concern for the pain or discomfort of other people, except insofar as it interferes with their ability to get things.
Michael: Right.
Peter: Sometimes, it feels they maybe humanizing women, but then you quickly realize it's incidental. They'll say things like, "Don't pressure women or make them feel unsafe." But it's not like, "Don't make them feel unsafe, because they're human beings." It's like, "Don't make them feel unsafe, because then you might not hook up."
Michael: It feels the original sin of all of this is a lot of people are just not well suited to pick people up in fucking bars.
Peter: Right. It's an insanely difficult environment.
Michael: Yes.
Peter: I don't consider myself someone who has terrible social skills or whatever. The idea of just walking up to a stranger in a bar and trying to become their friend.
Michael: Nightmare.
Peter: Yeah, total nightmare.
Michael: A lot of these guys should be taking a cooking class, or learning [Peter laughs] French, or something.
Peter: Don't give them new angles. Don't give them new angles.
Michael: Think of all the opportunities for negging [Peter laughs] in a cooking class. "Burnt another one, huh?"
Peter: [laughs] "I guess, you just didn't let it prove enough."
Michael: Yeah. [laughs]
Peter: It's also not women alone who are treated poorly here. These guys are all hanging out and a couple of them seem to be friends, but their social dynamics are riddled with jealousy and mistrust. It's likely replicate all the toxic masculinity of a 1980s high school football team in a movie, but with none of like the male bonding.
Michael: Yeah, because some of these guys would be better off just like making male friends. Some of these guys need intimacy.
Peter: The last thing I will say about the strategies is that, it's hard to divorce them from the age and type of the girls that they seem to be pursuing. So, they love the idea of the hot Miami, LA club girl like blonde and big fake boobs. They love fake boobs for some reason.
Michael: Okay.
Peter: This is the early to mid-aughts. So, they're always being like, "Bro, this girl is so hot. She's got the flattest hair I've ever seen in my life." [Michael laughs] But the main thing here is that a lot of these girls are super young. It's a thing where you're like, "Are these great strategies for picking up women or are these great strategies for picking up 21-year-old women in LA in 2004?"
Michael: Right. Also, shouldn't we mention the fact that, because most people are drinking, there's also a level of genuine questions of consent here too?
Peter: It's weird how little he mentions about that.
Michael: Yeah.
Peter: At no point is he like, "Yeah, this girl was a little bit wasted." And yet, they're all at clubs all the time. They're partying, they're drinking. Obviously, that's part of what's happening here.
Michael: I would be a lot more of a charming lothario, if the person I'm trying to pick up with had seven beers.
Peter: [laughs]
Michael: You don't have to have a blacklight with you to get somebody that to go home with you.
Peter: Imagine some poor girl is at the end of her night just raging drunk and you just blast a blacklight in her face. [laughs]
Michael: It's like [onomatopoeia].
[laughter]
Michael: [unintelligible [00:24:15]
Michael: Oh, no. [laughs] Okay. So, Mystery and Neil hit it off at this workshop. Mystery makes him his protege. They grow close. They ultimately end up traveling doing workshops together. At one point early on, Mystery is like, "You can't just be Neil, bro. You need to have a seduction nickname. Why don't we call you Style?" Because Neil, I guess was moderately well dressed. Whatever that meant in 2005-
Michael: Okay.
Peter: All these dudes have stupid nicknames. You've got Mystery and Style, there's Sin, Juggler, Two Timer, Grimble.
Michael: [laughs] That's a hobbit name.
Peter: Yeah, not everyone has a cool nickname. Some guys just have stupid nicknames and you're like, "Is that getting you laid?" It also makes it extremely funny when someone involved doesn't have an insane nickname. You'll have a dozen dudes with these crazy nicknames and they're like, "And then also there was Ross."
[laughter]
Michael: That's how U2 is Bono, the Edge and Larry and Adam.
Michael: [laughs]
Peter: They weren't there that day when they were doing the names. So, are these guys [crosstalk] themselves like when they meet women at clubs, they're saying, "Hi, I'm style."
Michael: Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. But for the most part, they are supposed to. Girls throughout the book know Neil as Style. These guys are trying to have these entirely separate personas and it's something that you present to the chick.
Michael: Oh, my God, you know what this is? You know how they deliberately write the Nigerian prince emails to be really bad, so that they don't waste their time with people who are going to check it and you want to get the real dummies?
Peter: Oh, yeah. Oh, shit, you're right.
Michael: Part of this feels this is fulfilling the same purpose that there's a huge number of people who the minute you introduce yourself as fucking, "Hi, I'm Grimble," at a bar, are just like, "Okay, have a good night."
Peter: Right. If some guy introduces himself as Juggler after taking lint off your top and you don't break [Michaels laughs] into a full sprint in the other direction, maybe you're a little more susceptible to the tactics of The Game.
Michael: That's the thing. Then it's this survivorship bias, where anybody who makes it past the Grimble stage is like, you don't actually have to be that charming at that point, because they're just open to whatever weird experience is going to come next.
Peter: It's true. They are pretty explicit that although some of the real experts are like, "I can get any girl." A big part of actually doing this is just like, you approach a lot of girls and a lot of them are like fuck off. Eventually, you find someone who enjoys rune readings.
Michael: Right. [laughs] A lot of it is just numbers. It has to be.
Peter: Oh, yeah, for sure. So, we should probably talk about Mystery himself, because his personal troubles are a big B story in this book.
Michael: Oh.
Peter: He is a huge piece of shit. He pressured his last girlfriend into getting a boob job and becoming a stripper, then dumped her when she wouldn't have sex with other girls.
Michael: Okay.
Peter: If you guessed that perhaps someone like Mystery is more interested in controlling women than attracting them, congrats. It is you who is in fact, the master of psychology.
Michael: [laughs]
Peter: At one point, they are in Belgrade and there's a little story about Mystery getting a girl at the bar infatuated with him and she starts calling him and stuff like that. I think you're supposed to be impressed that this girl met him for a brief period of time and is now obsessed with him. It is later revealed that she is 17 years old.
Michael: Oh.
Peter: Yeah.
Michael: Yeah.
Peter: Mystery for reference is I believe in his late 20s at this point. Maybe a little older.
Michael: Yeah.
Peter: Yeah, I would say that it's actually not impressive to get a 17-year-old to be a little bit obsessive with you. In fact, every 17-year-old is a little bit obsessive with everyone. They have a slight crush on. That's the whole point of being 17. It's a big part of why it's so fucking gross [laughs] to hit on 17-year-olds.
Michael: Yeah, So many reasons we don’t do that.
Peter: At one point, Neil is asking for advice on hooking up with a girl that he actually likes. And Mystery's advice is to get her alone and take his dick out. Just take your dick out and start jerking off.
Michael: [laughs] Is there a prop for that? I feel that’s probably neg, like a little puppet or something.
Peter: Only the props God gave you for this one, Michael.
[laughter]
Peter: Mystery is also very clearly, emotionally unstable. The book opens up with a flashforward of a mental breakdown he's having. There are scenes where he references his abusive father in ways that make it clear he is not well and could use some therapy. At one point, he snaps, "Don't tell me what to do. My dad used to tell me what to do." He will also say things that are so on the nose that it's hard to believe you're reading it. At one point, he says, "I feel really bad about myself and then a girl sleeps with me and I feel good again."
[laughter]
Peter: That is what I suspected, Mystery.
Michael: You're in the right line of work, Mystery.
Peter: Dudes will literally invent a system for seducing women before going to therapy.
Michael: Yeah. [laughs]
Peter: Let's talk about some of the other teachers, the other pickup artists teachers in the community. Of course, they call themselves gurus.
Michael: Obviously.
Peter: Now, Style expressly says that they all have one thing in common, which is that they are obsessed with the idea that they're the best at this and that the other teachers are not as good.
Michael: Oh, nice.
Peter: Neil describes this as like a competing group of cults, each centered around like one weirdo.
Michael: Yeah.
Peter: I'm going to read you a quote from Ross, the hypnotist guy, when he's trying to bring Neil into his crew. "You are being led into the inner sanctum of power, my young apprentice. And the price for betrayal is dark beyond the measure of your mortal mind. Keep quiet and keep your promises and I will keep opening the door."
Michael: This man is 29. The man has a college degree.
Peter: [laughs]
Michael: Why are you talking like this?
Peter: No, that guy is even older, I think. [laughs] Ross is one of the older guys in the community.
Michael: Yeah.
Peter: It's very fedora era, you know?
Michael: Yeah.
Peter: These dudes who are trying to be like, "I am a master of the dark arts."
Michael: It's like you're sleeping with buzzed 21 year olds.
Peter: [laughs] There's a running theme that a lot of these gurus. Not all of them, but some of them are fraudulent and are only good at picking up anyone in very limited conditions. Again, namely like very young and impressionable women in clubs who have had five drinks.
Michael: Ah, okay.
Peter: There's a point where Style takes Ross, the hypnotist to a fancy Hollywood party, where Ross just embarrass himself repeatedly, including when he crawls around on all fours pretending to be a dog sniffing Carmen Electra's ass.
Michael: Oh, my God. Wow, that's quite the 2004 cameo as well.
Peter: Yeah. So, the bulk of this book is just like tails of him trying to pick up girls or observing other guys trying to pick up girls in various settings. Insanely boring.
Michael: Yeah.
Peter: Super boring. He keeps it interesting in in part, because they're in LA and Neil's profile is rising as the book goes on. Not just within the community, but also with his journalism, because he's writing about this as it goes. So, he starts getting invited to cool parties and shit. At one point, he has a pickup competition with Heidi Fleiss, the Hollywood Madam.
Michael: Okay.
Peter: At one point, Neil nearly gets his target intercepted by Andy Dick. And then Andy Dick expresses some interest in Neil himself.
Michael: Okay.
Peter: It's a night where everyone at a party is being super nice to Neil and telling him that they love him and stuff like that. He's like, "Sorry, what's going on?" And then someone reveals that everyone thinks he's Moby.
[laughter]
Michael: There were only two bald white dudes in LA at that time. So, I'm sure that happened a lot.
Peter: He's doing interviews as part of his job as a journalist and he's interviewing celebrities like Britney Spears.
Michael: What?
Peter: He's using pickup artist techniques to get them to open up.
Michael: Okay.
Peter: It's working. Britney Spears likes me.
Michael: He's like, "Is that lint on your overall?"
Peter: [laughs]
Michael: She's like, "I love you, Neil. I'll tell you everything."
Peter: He meets Courtney Love for a piece. They ended up hitting it off and she comes in crashes with him and his friends for a bit. Again, this is 2004. So, I don't know if you recall, but we're talking about the dead center of a very public struggle with addiction and mental health in Courtney Love's life.
Michael: Yeah.
Peter: But again, for the most part, the book is just countless variations of the same basic dynamic. He'll show up somewhere, there's a blonde hottie with fake boobs, and someone tries to pick her up with varying degrees of success.
Michael: There's also the thing where clearly Neil Strauss is like a charming, intelligent guy.
Peter: He starts off the book saying like, "I'm a dork who can't get laid." Yeah, I think a very likable, intelligent, educated guy with a cool job, people will be interested in someone who's confident and accomplished and all that. It's not a total mystery why Neil is good at this after a bit.
Michael: Right. It's not like the magic tricks that are doing it. [Peter laughs] Or, this the gimmicky things or even like the manipulation. It's probably just a little bit of maybe practice or little tips with how to make other people feel comfortable and build rapport.
Peter: Yeah, I think that's a huge part of it. The rest of it is just replicating confidence until it turns into actual confidence. And that's really all there is to it. It never feels there's a science here.
Michael: Yeah.
Peter: So, as the book moves on, the pickup artist industry is booming. Like tons of different workshops are springing up. It's becoming more popular, techniques are becoming refined. Neil is himself becoming a bit of an icon within the community. He's writing on their little message boards and stuff like that. He's just having lots of sex, and writing about it, and trying to make it interesting. There's one bit where he purports to be writing a few paragraphs while having sex and the writing devolves into gibberish and I was just like, "I know you think this is cool, Neil, but it is hack shit."
Michael: Yeah.
Peter: An absolutely hack.
Michael: Yeah. One of my few memories of this book is that there's like an entire fucking chapter of him having a threesome and it's really long? It didn't feel integral to the plot at all. It was just like you really wanted me to know about the threesome you had.
Peter: There are several scenes where you're like, "I don't feel this is driving the plot forward, Neil. It really [crosstalk] you want to tell me about this girl that you had sex with." [Michael laughs] There's a ton of that and everything. There's a threesome scene, it's not interesting. It doesn't feel like the girls really wanted to have a threesome.
Michael: Yeah. [laughs]
Peter: Congrats, dude. I guess, you talked to girls into having a threesome, because they wanted to feel accepted.
Michael: Awesome. Score.
Peter: Again, circling back to the age of a lot of these women, at one point, he's dating a 19-year-old.
Michael: Okay.
Peter: He's in his mid 30s.
Michael: Nice.
Peter: This is one of the more serious relationships he has in the book and I'm like-- I can't even fathom this. I talk to 19-year-olds the same way I talk to seven year olds. Like, "Are you having fun at school? Great."
Michael: [laughs] This probably isn't true, but isn't there something that if you're a black belt in karate and you get in a bar fight, it's technically assault with a deadly weapon, because you have these like extra skills?
Peter: I'm sure that that's not true. [laughs]
Michael: You're a lawyer, Peter. You should know every law. This was something that kid said in the school yard when I was growing up. But if you're as good at manipulating people, especially women as Neil Strauss is by this point, It really feels double unethical to be dating somebody who's 19.
Peter: Right.
Michael: Once you're this good at it, your ethical requirement not to go after people that are drinking or that a younger or have mental illness stuff or they can't totally consent or whatever. It just seems there needs to be a lot more thought put into this or at least more than he was putting into it at the time.
Peter: Absolutely. This particular story felt like a little-- The girl lives with her parents and she has like a one-year-old baby that the father is out of the picture and you're just like, "Neil? Are you fucking kidding me with this? Are you fucking kidding me with this, Neil?" It feels really gross.
Michael: But her shoes looked really comfortable [Peter laughs] that’s how we got her.
Peter: So, as the book goes on, the guys are becoming more and more consumed with the lifestyle of running game. And again, it just keeps leading to all of their interactions and experiences being viewed through The Game framework. There's a situation where he has a beef with a guy nicknamed Papa. A mutual friend is like, "Hey, Neil, Papa's using tactics on you." Tactic is just like slang for a psychological game.
Michael: Okay.
Peter: Neil's like, "Okay, well, what's he doing?" And the guy's like, "Well, he's telling everyone not to talk to you." Is that what tactics is?
Peter: That's the high school conflict.
Peter: Right. I'm pretty sure I saw some girls at first grade recess running tactics in that case.
Michael: [laughs] He's calling someone else, but you're on the line, but they don't know that you're on the line?
Peter: [laughs]
Michael: Yeah, it's really sophisticated stuff.
Peter: He and Mystery and some of their buddies set up a clubhouse in LA, which they call Project Hollywood. It ends up being like less of a party spot, which is what they envisioned and more of like a hub for aspiring nerdy pickup artists.
Michael: Yeah.
Peter: That all falls apart when a girl moves in, and she and Mystery fall in love, when they fall out of love, and then she had another housemate fall for each other.
Michael: Nice.
Peter: The ensuing drama destroys the household. And that brings us back to Mystery. We should put a wrap on his story, [chuckles] at least for now, because the book is a following his ups and downs and they are intense. His ups are pretty wild and his downs are pretty crazy. I told you he had a mental breakdown that the book opens with. When he is entering that breakdown, he says that he plans to go to Eastern Europe, find two young bisexual women, and get them visas, bring them to Canada to be strippers and magician's assistants. Neil is like, "Okay, well, my quest for self-improvement has led me to white slavery." And that's where are right now.
[laughter]
Michael: As plans go, it's not great.
Peter: [laughs] To be clear, just so everyone feels better. At no point, does Mystery take any steps towards that plan.
Michael: Okay.
Peter: It's less of a serious plan and more of a just a signal that he's falling apart a little bit. He starts giving away his possessions, including his bed to his sister. He's like, "My sister needs a good bed." He's fairly, openly contemplating murder, suicide of his father. He does not do that, because Neil gets his family to intervene and put him in the hospital.
Michael: It is wild that VH1 read this and was like, "Let's give this guy a show." [laughs]
Peter: I was going to say, a producer who read this book and was like, "You know what? Let's take this guy who has an obvious wide array of severe mental health issues that he's burying inside a shallow Pickup Artists persona. Let's give him a TV show glorifying that persona."
Michael: Right.
Peter: That guy is a psychopath unmatched by anyone you read about in the pages of this book itself.
Michael: Yeah, because Mystery on some level's kind of a tragic figure. But then the people who are exploiting him and are like, "Let's share his lessons with the world. This broken man." That's so much worse, because it's cynical.
Peter: Oh, God, the fact that this book, it ostensibly wraps on this like, "Well, you know what? This wasn't very fulfilling, I guess." Neil falls for a girl who likes him for his actual self and is not impressed by this pickup artist shit. He's starting to doubt whether pickup artistry is the answer to his problems. And so, the last 40 pages of his book-- It's a 450-page book.
Michael: Yeah, it's absurd.
Peter: The last 40 pages or so are just him being like, "That was fun, but it wasn't very fulfilling." [unintelligible [00:41:37] all this time. Someone feels a void in their life and they try to fill it with some shallow pursuit or another and then they realize that they misdiagnosed the void and can't find fulfilment in the shallow pursuits.
Michael: Yeah.
Peter: It's straight to the point where it feels hacky and really disingenuous, because his self-awareness, again, it feels a bit performative at times. He knows that he's too smart to be taking this all too seriously and he needs to show some self-awareness. So, he'll talk about how shallow this is, how this is all an outgrowth of insecurity and doesn't address the underlying problems. But, yeah, you just wrote for 250 pages about all the pussy you got and it was very few that you enjoyed yourself writing about it. [chuckles]
Michael: Yeah, he's giving himself an arc.
Peter: Right.
Michael: But ultimately, he's essentially publishing a guide to how to do this.
Peter: Yeah. I think to some degree, it's hard to tell whether the arc was real or whether he was like, "Well, I just wrote about how I turned myself from a dork into a cool pickup artist."
Michael: Right.
Peter: You don't want to end it and the book would like, "Well, that was cool and I'm cool now. See you later." [laughs]
Michael: Right. [laughs]
Peter: You have to have something a little deeper. And of course, the marketing is all about just like, "Here's how you pick up chicks," right?
Michael: Yeah.
Peter: It gets glommed on to by pop culture and they, of course, skip over any life lessons or moral implications. They glorify the pickup artist concept. Mystery gets his TV show. The tactics that they talk about throughout the story become so popular that they're no longer effective, even in the course of the book. There's one point towards the end of the book where they're in LA and they use one of their stupid lines on some girls and it's one of those dumb questions, like name an ocean kind of thing. And the girls are like, "Why have five guys asked me that same question in the past hour?" [laughs]
Michael: Yeah. Nice.
Peter: So, as we get into the 2010s, a lot of this stuff ages pretty poorly. And so, Neil spent a lot of the last decade distancing himself from The Game a little bit and half apologizing.
Michael: Penancing.
Peter: He did an interview with The Atlantic in 2015, where he said, "Obviously, I was a journalist. This community already existed and I went into describe my experience of it. But because no one had even heard of this world and the techniques, let's face it are so objectifying and horrifying that the book became the Bible of what it was trying to chronicle in a more neutral way." He's trying to be like, "I was just reporting," right?
Michael: Yeah.
Peter: It's like, "Bro, you wrote a whole thing where you're like, 'I'm having sex right now.'"
[laughter]
Peter: It's like, "Come on, man." Not only that, but a couple of years later, he follows it up with a book called the Rules of the Game, which is just like a straightforward Pickup Artists manual.
Michael: [laughs] Let's get all this stuff about how all of these men are emotional husks out of here.
Peter: [laughs]
Michael: You get rid of the filler, I just want the tips.
Peter: Right. Look, I get it. There's only so many chances to cash in in your life as a writer and some publisher was like, "Neil, I got a million dollars for you. Here you go, Neil."
Michael: Yeah.
Peter: So, maybe it's not quite an endorsement, but at that point, you have to admit, "I sold my soul for this shit," right?
Michael: Right.
Peter: You can't try to walk the tightrope about was just a journalist or whatever.
Michael: Also, even if it was a journalistic account, I feel the journalistic thing to do would be to actually follow up with some of these women.
Peter: Right.
Michael: It'd be like, "Oh, yeah, you went home with Mystery last night. How do you feel about it afterwards? Do you feel tricked? Do you feel deceived or manipulated? I have friends who fallen for this." And they wake up the next morning and they're like, "That guy didn't need to feed his puppy. He just wanted to get me to his house," or whatever.
Peter: Yeah.
Michael: The manipulation, once you're sober, once it's the light of day, you're like, "That was not a good faith spontaneous hookup," right?
Peter: Right.
Michael: It feels like theater. So, a journalist would actually tell those fucking stories. Really, really basic journalism like, "What is the cost of this?"
Peter: Yeah, but he was trying to tell the unspoken tale of the male.
Michael: [laughs] Of how much sex the men were having.
Peter: So, what's the vibe? We've talked about this as we went, but is your general vibe these guys are disgusting assholes or these guys are just pathetic losers? Or, even there's a third way too. There's a much more sympathetic way. You can say like, "These guys are just trying to better themselves and it came out wrong or it came out bad."
Michael: I think all three are true.
Peter: Yeah.
Michael: It's impossible to ignore the misogyny at the heart of this. You're basically tricking women into going home with you.
Peter: Right.
Michael: You're doing this not for the benefit of the women in anyway. You're basically doing this to seek status among men. I think that there's a critique of the critique of this book that's like, "Oh, you think pickup artists are bad? Oh, I guess you think women shouldn't be having sex."
Peter: Right.
Michael: As a gay guy, I have had periods of my life where I go to bars and I hook up with people. I also get on some level that that's a fairly messy process. A little bit of help to fake confidence or have a comfortable, fun conversation with a stranger, I actually think is fine. On some level, it's okay to help people get through these interactions, but also, that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about bringing a fucking piece of lint with you to a club, and putting it on somebody, and taking it off of them to damage their self-esteem and make them vulnerable to you having sex with them, so you can brag about it later.
Peter: Yeah, I do think that you could potentially veer into being a little bit paternalistic, a little bit puritanical. If you find yourself fretting that like, "Oh, these women are being manipulated into giving up their honor," or something like that, right?
Michael: Right.
Peter: You're right. There's almost a lightened and polite dishonesty that's part of hookup dynamics. You puff yourself up a little bit, you might make yourself a little bit more interesting. If you're not into hiking and someone you're very attracted to says they love to hike, you might be like, "Yeah, me too."
Michael: Yeah, Peter, I live in Seattle. I do this all the time.
Peter: [laughs]
Michael: Yes, absolutely.
Peter: I think I was month six of my relationship with my now wife when she told me that she does not like to work out, actually.
Michael: [laughs]
Peter: But what makes the pickup artist strategies so gross is this complete embrace of inauthenticity and the gamification of social interaction. It just ensures that whatever relationships ensue, whether it's casual sex or something more, there's this wall of inauthenticity between you. You're just playing a game and the other person is the dehumanized object of The Game.
Michael: Right.
Peter: I think in a world where we are all constantly searching for human connection, there's something particularly awful and sad about that.
Michael: The whole idea of it is misogynistic to its core.
Peter: Right.
Michael: On the other hand, I do think that there's a large reservoir of insecure dudes in society who don't really know how to do this stuff, and are desperate for intimacy, and we live in a culture that tells them that it's impossible to form intimacy with other men because like, "That's gay, bro."
Peter: Yeah, it's hard not to have some sympathy for the basic plight.
Michael: Yeah.
Peter: There's a lot of social pressure on men to have sex and to be cool to be someone who women want to be with. Society views sex is something men earn and women give up, a dynamic that is unhealthy for everyone involved and has caused untold strife from negging to wars.
Michael: Yeah.
Peter: If you squint hard enough at this stuff, you can see this group of guys who maybe got a broad deal banding together and trying to figure out how to work their way out of it. It's almost nice. It's just unfortunate that the only angle they could figure out is latching on to a mix of manipulation tactics and misogyny.
Michael: It's a little bit like I get the people who join the proud boys or whatever. On a purely subjective level, it feels like an attack on you that the world is changing and your position in society is less secure than it used to be. On a human level, I get it. But also, at the end of the day, you join the fucking proud boys.
Peter: Right. [laughs]
Michael: You're a huge piece of shit for doing that. I'm not going to retreat to being like, "Oh, but they did the piece of shit thing for good reasons." Okay, but look at the destination where they ended up. A lot of other people have these concerns and don't end up tricking women into having sex.
Peter: Right. There's a difference between being like, "I can see how these tendencies might develop and being like, "So, it's okay that you joined the proud boys." You're a rational living human being, you need to be able to recognize when you're crossing those lines, when you're like, "I'm taking these frustrations and I'm stepping into something awful and dangerous."
Michael: As you place your blacklight into your fanny pack [Peter laughs] at 10:00 PM and head out to the bar, you should have a little moment of reflection. Should we talk about incels?
Peter: Because you mentioned the proud boys and I was going to say, "In a lot of ways as gross as some of this stuff is, it feels really quaint."
Michael: I know it, right? Ah.
Peter: When you look at modern incels.
Michael: Oh, my God.
Peter: I suppose male sexual frustration manifests differently. Every generation, each has its own strategies and philosophy about it, like unique to the times. The only thing they have in common is the steadfast refusal to envision women as living breathing human beings, right?
Michael: Yeah. I do think it's fascinating that incels began as a reaction to the pickup artist community, that it was like PUA hate, Pickup Artists hate was the original incel subreddit.
Peter: Yes.
Michael: The whole premise was that pickup artists are telling you that you can change your lot. If you do this peacocking and negging, and all this kind of stuff, you can score chicks. And then the incel response was like, "No, it's never going to get better."
Peter: Right. The pickup artists are saying like, "Look, we're dorks. But with some strategies, we can move up in the social pecking order. We can become cool dudes who get girls." And the incel generation is nihilistic. They are accepting that their societies losers. Instead of trying to break out of that, they just dwell in their rage about it towards women and towards society. It's a sense of entitlement. It's very literally, they're saying like, "These guys are trying to give us these elaborate systems for hooking up with women. Why the fuck should we need that? Why do we have to do this?" Which by the way, is not the worst, most unreasonable question. It's not an unreasonable question, because men are entitled to sex. It's more that you're gazing out upon this bizarre social order that governs sex and relationships in our society, And being like, "What the fuck is all of this?" And I do think that that's a normal reaction. [Michael laughs] You just have to take it to a healthy place.
Michael: This is how I look out on straight dating norms. I'm like, "What is this?" [Peter laughs] This is like a fucking nature documentary to me.
Peter: So, yeah, both of these groups are holding out their lack of sexual success as a grievance. But the incels believe that it's an injustice. And so, their solution is not to improve themselves to develop some game or whatever, but to lash out violently. So, you have Elliot Rodger, who murders women, because he's an incel man that he didn't get laid. He writes a fucking manifesto about his entitlement to sex. He says that he deserved sex because he was a descendant of British aristocracy. [chuckles] And it's just incoherent, because they're grasping at anything they can to intellectualize this anger they're feeling right. They believe that they're owed sex and attention from women and, yeah, no need for self-improvement. All you do is just stew in your anger about not getting what you believe that you're owed.
Michael: It's really bleak that we're at this point with relations between the sexes and especially, the crisis of I think straight white dudes, where it's like, "Yeah, I'll take the raging misogynist."
Peter: [laughs]
Michael: Because the other option is fucking mass shooters.
Peter: Oh, God, yeah. You look at something like negging and you're like, "Wow, that is just an awful way to look at like human communication." And then you look at the incels and you're like, "Actually, maybe it's okay." I don't know. [laughs]
Michael: Yeah, keep negging, guys. You' fine out there. [laughs]
Peter: Maybe we let them neg. I don’t know. The only truth is that whatever solution men come up with for these problems, it will not be good for women. It's just a matter of where on the spectrum it lands.
Michael: Do you have a sense, Peter, of like, "Why you never got sucked into this world?"
Peter: I don't know. I don't think that I was in the situation that a lot of the guys that are drawn to this in.
Michael: Were you in cooking classes, were you're learning French? Maybe that's the secret.
Peter: No, I had one move, and you see if a girl likes to smoke weed, and then you're like, "Do you want to smoke weed?"
Michael: [laughs] That's actually much more effective than most of the props.
Peter: No, I'm the classic dude where I've got weed and I'm going to make you watch Season Three of The Sopranos. If we don't hook up it's because I got way into The Sopranos.
[laughter]
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]