The Game

Michael.

Peter.

I know that you've...

you must have heard of the game.

Yes, this is the book that taught me how to nigg.

You know, one of the books I'm reading for this podcast is The End of History, a book about the ascendance of liberal democracy after the fall of the 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.

About dudes getting their dicks wet in LA in the 1990s.

The subtitle of the game is Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists.

How did I not notice the penetrating thing?

Yeah, that's search engine optimization, baby.

You know?

So the basic gist is that it's this story about how the author joins a group of so-called pickup artists, guys who study the art and science of picking up women.

Yes.

The aesthetic of the book, quite interesting.

The OG print edition is leather-bound.

I forgot.

And it's got one of those like built-in ribbon bookmarks, like a bright red one, like the Bible.

Oh, my God.

There are many quotations throughout the book from famous authors and thinkers.

Can you guess, Michael, who the first quote comes from?

Ah, it's going to be someone horrible like Tony Robbins or something.

No, no.

You're going in the wrong direction, my friend.

The first quote is from Betty Fredan.

What?

The Betty Fredan 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.

That's actually a, yes, that's a good quote.

I'm telling you, there are some great feminist quotes all throughout this story of banging as many chicks as possible in LA.

So have you read this book?

Have you read the game?

So I actually read this, I think, shortly after it came out or a couple years after it came out when I was in kind of 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 like straight dude to me.

Like 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 like 90% attractiveness.

So there's not a lot of like game to be done in like my world.

Whereas in straight world, it seems like there's this dance of confidence and kind of the vibe that you give off.

And I was always kind of fascinated just because it seems like it's harder to date as a straight guy than a gay guy somehow.

Yeah, I think that's right.

Unfortunately, women, they've got all kinds of standards, you know?

And

the first problem is a big downer for dudes.

Which actually,

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 a kind of anthropological dissection of this world.

Like, look at the men and how they are broken and how they are dealing with their brokenness.

And then like one paragraph later, he'll switch to basically advice, how to be one of these pickup artists.

And it seems like the author himself couldn't really decide or was trying to have it both ways.

Yeah, that's exactly right.

It's very clear that he goes into this a dorky guy that struggles to get laid.

And he finds out how to get laid, right?

He finds these techniques that help him get laid and they work.

And part of him is smart enough to know that this is

weird and manipulative and and demeans women on the other hand he is very impressed with himself and very happy about these developments right and he's constantly it's the struggle of two kneels all throughout the book did you ever have a pickup artist phase no um i have never had any any sort of phase like this um 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, like going out to bars and like talking to random women and trying to hook up with them.

I don't have like a ton of interest in being like, oh, could I sleep with that random stranger?

Right.

But no,

I was never intrigued by this.

You know, I certainly when I was like, you know, in college and had a couple of years where I wasn't super successful with the ladies, I think that it was probably like...

loosely intriguing to me, but never enough to be like, I'll read the book, you know?

So this was your first time diving into this?

This was, yeah.

I hadn't even, you know, there's a whole bunch of pop culture that descends from this.

And I hadn't really absorbed any of it until I until I did for this podcast and changed my brain forever.

It's too, it's too bad.

I'm now, I'm now locked down for the rest of my life.

Cause I, if you had put me in LA in 2004, I could have slayed using the tactics I learned from Nielsen.

Now you're tooled up.

Now you're equipped, yeah, to trick some like 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.

So let's

kind of set the table here.

Neil's a journalist, right?

And 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 like cult-like lingo um sarging is going out and picking up women oh my god groups of girls are called sets so like if there's three girls that's a three set oh my god

i oi's are indicators of interest so it's never like she seemed like she liked me it's always right i was getting some i oi's from this girl right number closing is when you get someone's number peacocking i do you know what peacocking is oh this is from that fucking tv show where it's like you're supposed to wear at least one very flashy item of clothing.

Yeah.

Like bright purple sunglasses in a bar or something.

And isn't it so like people will comment on it as like a conversation starter or something?

Right.

That's right.

So yeah, you're wearing like intentionally over-the-top loud things in order to attract attention and pretend that you're interesting or whatever.

Oh my God.

So Neil becomes fascinated by this stuff and he decides to meet some of these guys in person.

So he signs up for a pickup artist workshop put on by the most prominent guy in the community, Mystery.

Mystery,

the now famous Mystery.

That's right.

Made famous by this book.

Mystery's real name is Eric Horvat Markovich.

For some reason, he has it legally changed to Eric von Markovich, which I guess you just thought sounded cooler.

He's right.

He's a prolific writer online.

about picking up women, well known within the community.

His aesthetic is just fully Chris Angel.

Right.

Pale, dark hair, soul patch, nail polish, big earrings.

He embraces like an aggressive form of peacocking.

So he'd be wearing large top hats all the time.

He's 6'5 and wears boots with 6-inch platforms.

No way.

You throw in the top hats, and this guy is like towering in the club, well over seven feet tall.

He's like the fucking Chrysler building everywhere he goes.

Yeah.

He wears vests and large coats and numerous watches on each arm at a time.

Also, my memory of this guy from the eventual VH1 show is that he's also quite like conventionally attractive.

You know, it's interesting.

Neil describes him as like a very mediocre looking dude.

I think he's a pretty good looking guy.

He's got like, you know, tall cheekbones.

He's tall.

He's in decent shape.

He's a good looking guy.

It makes you wonder.

It makes you wonder why he needed everything else.

Yeah.

When they first meet, Mystery hands Neil a manila envelope containing pictures of the hottest girls he's ever dated.

Wait, really?

That's a real detail from the book?

Yep.

Yep.

Imagine having that.

Imagine having a manila folder.

To be clear, that wasn't like at the workshop.

Neil spots Mystery like in the hotel lobby and Mystery just hands him the envelope.

Oh my fucking

so Neil is like reasonably self-reflective about all of this.

He describes signing up for this workshop as quote, acknowledging defeat, inferiority, and inadequacy.

So like, you know, he's starting from this place of like, yeah, like I'm a big loser who can't get laid.

And I'm going to sign up for a workshop and pay someone $500.

And I understand that that is pathetic.

So

I guess I should teach you some strategies, right?

Yeah.

Teach me, give me the, give me the wisdom and the knowledge.

A lot of it is like very stupid icebreakers.

Like, my friend was invited to be on Maury.

Like, should he go on or is it going to be too embarrassing?

Okay.

Some of them are things that you do to sort of like 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.

Well,

let me describe your box, Michael.

Wait, what?

I don't even understand this one.

Yeah, me neither.

But the point is that when someone will describe their box, they'll be like, okay, it's like big.

And then they're like, ooh, big.

That means you have like a large ego.

Oh, right.

So it's almost like a palm reading thing, but it's not.

Yeah.

You don't grab it.

It's a little fake psychoanalysis thing.

Most of this is just ways to sort of make people confident in what are traditionally the most awkward parts of a conversation.

Right.

Yeah.

Another part of it is just a recognition that women have a sex drive and like want to hook up, but again, it's like less socially acceptable for them.

You know, there are these artificial barriers that you need to sort of work through.

Wait, can I can I tell a story?

Yeah, yeah.

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.

And we got Pacific, Atlantic, Indian.

I feel like there's another one.

Isn't there another ocean?

She's like, oh, Arctic.

And then sort of before she knew it, she was like in a conversation with this guy.

Yeah.

And then the next day, I like Googled, like something felt fishy to me about it.

And I googled around, and there was literally like an article of like pickup artist strategies.

And one of them listed was pretend you don't know the names of all the oceans.

I don't think that's in the book, but it sounds exactly like a ton of their openers.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You're just sort of engaging someone off the bat in a really natural sounding conversation.

Right.

Another thing they do is little sleight of hand magic tricks.

Oh, yeah.

So Mystery is like a magician as like one of his little gigs, and Neil like spends

a couple of like plane flights learning little sleight of hand things.

You know, it's basically what it sounds like.

Like, check this, look, look.

I can make this beer bottle levitate.

Okay.

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 sort of, you know, you give it a little intro, like, oh, there's this like technique technique I'm trying.

So like, let's check, let's try it out.

And the whole point is that, like, there is research showing that if you like, stare into someone's eyes for long enough, you start to feel more comfortable with that.

That sounds fake, but sure.

There's also the prop bag.

I'm going to send you a couple of screenshots.

Okay.

And 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.

Wait, like literal physical props?

Like carrot top?

You'll see.

Not to that level.

All right.

Just let me know when you get it.

Okay.

And feel free to read out your favorites.

You've sent me a page.

You've sent me three pages of this fucking book.

The prop bag is very full.

So one of them is a pack of gum, Wrigley's big red, a pack of condoms.

It's starting off somewhat normal.

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.

That would work on me.

I would feel small if somebody did that to me.

I'm in.

This works.

Okay, one digital camera.

It's 2005 at the end of the day.

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.

That's a high-risk strategy.

Master of psychology, if you take a picture of you kissing her and she's like, yeah, that was fun.

We make a good couple.

Then she likes you.

What else?

One set of wooden runes in cloth bag for rune readings.

Okay, I'm not going to ask you what that is.

Well, I'm not sure I could explain it, but for some reason, just like I said, there's a lot of magic going on.

There's a lot of astrology for boys.

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.

Yeah, that's only if you forget your lint.

You just blast her with a black light.

This is something you would do to someone you fucking hate.

This is like someone, 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 black light because like Emma's going to be there.

And I also feel like 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 black light?

Right.

Aren't you going to ask that question?

And then the guy's like,

what's your line?

Where's the explanation for why you have a bag full of shit, including runes and a black light?

And like a 20-sided die.

Yeah.

Some of these strategies are just gratuitous.

Like 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.

And then tell her that he'll give her a massage to show her the right way.

And then he sort of like transitions that into sex.

And it's like, bro, she's at your place giving you a massage.

You don't need tactics anymore, right?

Like this guy is experiencing one of like life's great pleasures, you know, getting a massage from someone who's attracted to you while sexual tension builds.

And he cannot enjoy it.

because he's like 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.

Oh my God.

As in like trying to make her comfortable with him.

I'm like, yeah, that's what getting to know someone is.

That's just like literally

you're having a conversation.

Yes.

Right.

This has always been my like deep melancholy whenever I hear about this stuff because it's hard to find connections with other people.

It's just hard, like 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, I'd really like to form a connection with you.

Everything has to be done in this kind of between the lines way, but you're gamifying it to the point where you're not even participating in these conversations, it feels like.

It's just how deep the insecurity runs, right?

Like, they have to imagine everything as part of the game, because if it's not, then they're sort of like laid bare.

There is another guy, Ross, whose primary game is, quote, technology, which is a word for like psychological techniques.

Oh, no.

It's like hypnosis adjacent.

He believes that he is a master of hypnosis.

So 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 like, look at me.

And then later he tells Neil, like, yeah, now she's associating attraction with me.

Oh, my.

You made her picture someone attractive, like someone else.

And then you're like, now look at me.

Now look at me.

It's like her stupid girl brain thinks I'm the guy

from her fantasies.

Now when she hears the bell, she'll think of me.

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 uh a master of human psychology using the advanced hypnosis technique of screaming stop when you want to interrupt someone

so obviously there are many things these guys do that are just scumbag shit uh just terrible things um there are systems for getting around women who have spouses right who um or they're getting around the spouses so you can hook up with the women love it there are a lot of tactics that involve like ignoring the person you're interested in or being mean to them in some way.

Wasn't this the thing if there's a hot chick, you should hit on her less hot friend?

Yes.

Yes.

Because like she's used to being the center of attention, but all of a sudden Sheila is getting the guy hitting on her and it makes her feel weird and then you can like scoop her up later or something.

That is correct.

That's a big part of the book.

There is one part of the book where there's like diagrams that are drawn out like fucking war plans.

Like there's two girls at the bar, and like, I will move in from this direction.

Oh, my God.

I'm going to send you a diagram.

Oh, you're sending me the actual fucking diagram?

Jesus Christ.

No, no, no, not that one.

Okay.

This is a different diagram.

The book is full of diagrams.

Wait, what the fuck is this?

This is from Mystery's Workshop, and it is a bunch of negs.

Should you explain what a neg is?

Yeah, 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 sort of want to win your affection.

Right.

So it's a female diagram, like a woman, and then next to each, I guess, body part is like a neg.

So like 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.

Which is, that one's just mean.

Yeah, some of them are like way too mean, where it's just like, you look like a stupid bitch.

And

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 like very convinced that telling a girl that like another girl at the club is wearing the same thing will just like devastate her.

Oh, yeah.

I don't know if that's true or not,

but they they seem to believe very much that it is.

What's so frustrating about this is like there's a lot of people that really struggle in these kind of interactions.

Like talking to a person at a bar who you don't know is the is just the worst form of human interaction.

And it like it sucks that this is what people have to do to date.

Right.

So I get that like people would want to sort of systematize this or have conversation openers that are more interesting than what do you do for a living or like what's your name or something.

I sort of get the need for it.

But instead of guiding people to like, okay, here's how to have like a meaningful conversation or like, 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 like you're giving somebody a compliment, but you're actually denigrating them and establishing dominance in a conversation.

Like 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.

You know, there's tons of like little shitty tactics they do, but more than like any given tactic is offensive, there's just this general sense of sociopathy running through everything.

Like 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.

Right.

Sometimes it feels like they're maybe humanizing women, but then you quickly realize it's like incidental.

Like 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.

It feels like the original sin of all of this is a lot of people are just not well suited to pick people up in fucking bars.

Right.

It's an insanely difficult environment.

Yes.

Like I don't consider myself someone who has terrible social skills or whatever, but I have like the idea of just walking up to a stranger in a bar and trying to like become their friend.

Nightmare.

Yeah, total nightmare.

Like a lot of these guys should be like taking a cooking class or like learning French or something.

Don't give them new angles.

Don't give them new angles.

Think of all the opportunities for negging

in a cooking class.

Burned another one, huh?

I guess he just didn't let it prove enough.

You know, and it's also not women alone who are treated poorly here.

Like 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 like they replicate all the toxic masculinity of like a 1980s high school football team in a movie.

Right.

But with none of like the male bonding.

Yeah, because some of these guys would be better off just like making male friends.

Like some of these guys need intimacy.

The last thing I will say about like the strategies is that it's hard to divorce them from like the age and type of the girls that they seem to be pursuing.

So they love the idea of like the hot Miami LA club girl, like blonde and big fake boobs.

They love fake boobs for some reason.

Okay.

You know, 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.

You know.

But like, the main thing here is that a lot of these girls are super young.

And

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, right, in 2004?

Also, should we mention the fact that because most people are drinking, there's also like a level of genuine questions of consent here, too?

It's weird how little he mentions about that.

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.

I would be a lot more like of a charming Lothario if the person I'm trying to pick up has had seven beers.

You don't have to have like a black light with you to get somebody like that to go home with you.

Imagine, blood, you know, some poor girl is like at the end of her night, just raging drunk, and you just blast a black light in her face.

It's like, wow.

What a lit here.

Oh, no.

Okay.

So.

Mystery and Neil hit it off at this workshop, right?

And Mystery sort of like makes him his protege.

They grow close.

They ultimately end up traveling, doing workshops together.

And 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 like moderately well-dressed, whatever that meant in 2005.

Okay.

All these dudes have stupid nicknames.

You've got Mystery and Style.

There's Sin, Juggler, Two-Timer, Grimble.

That's a Hobbit name.

Yeah, not everyone has like a cool nickname, right?

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.

Like, you'll have a dozen dudes with these crazy nicknames, and they're like, and then also there was Ross.

That's like how U2 is Bono, the Edge, and Larry, and Adam.

They weren't there that day when they were doing the names.

So are these guys introducing themselves?

Like when they meet women at clubs, are they saying, hi, I'm Style?

Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't.

But for the most part, they are supposed to.

They are like

girls throughout the book know Neil as style.

These guys are like

trying

to have these entirely separate personas and it's something that you like present to the chick.

Oh my God.

You know what this is?

You know how they deliberately write the Nigerian prince emails to be like really bad so that they don't waste their time with people who are like gonna check it and you want to get the real dummies right?

Yeah, oh shit, you're right.

Part of this feels like this is fulfilling the same purpose that like 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.

Right.

If you, if you, if some guy introduces himself as juggler after taking lint off your top and you don't break into a full sprint in the other direction, then maybe you're a little more susceptible to the tactics of the game.

That's the thing.

And then it's this like survivorship bias where like 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 like open to sort of whatever weird experience is going to come next.

It's true.

I mean, and they are, you know, they are pretty explicit that although some of like 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.

And eventually you find someone who enjoys rune readings.

Right.

I mean, a lot of it is just numbers.

It has to be.

Oh, yeah, for sure.

For sure.

So we should probably talk about Mystery himself because his

personal troubles are a big sort of B story in this book.

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.

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.

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.

And I think you're supposed to be sort of impressed that like 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.

Oh.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Mystery, for reference, is, I believe, in his late 20s at this point, maybe a little older.

So 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

to hit on 17-year-olds.

Yeah, that's one of the reasons we don't do that.

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.

Is there a prop for that?

I feel like I'm throwing you in the bag of like what, like a little puppet puppet or something?

This is only the props God gave you for this one, Michael.

Mystery is also very clearly emotionally unstable.

The book opens up with a flash forward of a mental breakdown he's having.

There are scenes where he references his abusive father in ways that make it clear he is like 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.

And he'll also say things that are like 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.

Well,

that is sort of what I suspected, Mystery.

You're in the right line of work, Mystery.

Dudes will literally invent a system for seducing women before going to therapy.

Yeah.

Let's talk about some of the other teachers, the other pickup artist teachers in the community.

Of course, they call themselves gurus.

Obviously.

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 like not as good.

Oh, nice.

And Neil describes, like, describes this as like a competing group of cults and

each centered around like one, one weirdo.

Yeah.

I'm going to read you a quote.

from Ross, the hypnotist guy, when he's sort of like 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 measure of your mortal mind.

Keep quiet and keep your promises, and I will keep opening the door.

This man is like 29.

This man has a college degree.

Why are you talking like this?

No, that guy is even older, I think.

Ross is one of the older guys in the community.

It's like,

it's very fedora era, you know?

These dudes who are trying to be like, I am a master of the dark arts.

It's like, you're sleeping with buzzed 21-year-olds.

And, you know, there's a running theme that a lot of these gurus, not all of them, but some of them are fraudulent and are like 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.

There's a point where Style takes Ross, the hypnotist, to a fancy Hollywood party where Ross just embarrasses himself repeatedly, including when he crawls around on all fours pretending to be a dog, sniffing Carmen Elektra's ass.

Oh my God.

Wow.

That's quite the 2004 cameo as well.

So the bulk of this book is just like tales of him trying to pick up girls or observing other guys trying to pick up girls in various settings.

Insanely boring.

I mean, just

super boring.

And he keeps it interesting in part because they're in LA

and his Neil's profile is sort of rising as the book goes on, not just within the community, but also like with his journalism because he's writing about this as it goes.

So he starts getting invited to cool parties and shit.

So at one point he has a pickup competition with Heidi Fleis, the Hollywood madam.

Okay.

At one point, Neil nearly gets his target intercepted by Andy Dick.

And then Andy Dick expresses some interest in Neil himself.

There'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.

And he's like, sorry, what's going on?

And then someone reveals that everyone thinks he's Moby.

There were only two bald white dudes in L.A.

at that time.

So I'm sure that happened a lot.

He's doing interviews as his...

part of his job as a journalist, and he's interviewing celebrities like Britney Spears.

What?

And he's using like pickup artist artist techniques to get them to like open up.

Okay.

And it's sort of working.

Britney Spears likes him.

He's like, is that Lint on your overalls?

She's like, I love you, Neil.

I'll tell you everything.

He meets Courtney Love for a piece.

They end up hitting it off, and she comes and crashes with him and his friends for a bit.

And again, this is like 2004.

So I don't know if you recall, but we're talking about like the...

dead center of a very public struggle with addiction and mental health in Courtney Love's life.

But again, for the most part, the book is just countless variations of the same basic dynamic.

Like, they show up somewhere, there's a blonde hottie with fake boobs, and someone tries to pick her up with varying degrees of success.

There's also the thing where clearly Neil Strauss is like a charming, intelligent guy.

He starts off the book saying, like, I'm a dork who can't get laid, but he's also, yeah,

I think a very likable, intelligent, educated guy with a cool job.

people will be interested in someone who's like confident and accomplished and all that, right?

Like, it's not like a total mystery why, why Neil is good at this after a bit.

Right.

And it's not, it's not like the magic tricks that are doing it or the sort of like the gimmicky things or even like the manipulation.

It's probably just a little bit of maybe practice or like little tips with like how to make other people feel comfortable and build rapport.

Yeah, I think that's a huge part of it.

And the rest of it is just replicating confidence until it turns into actual confidence.

Yeah.

And that's really all there is to it.

It never feels like there's a science here.

Yeah.

So as the book moves on, the pickup artist industry is booming, right?

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 like writing on their little message boards and stuff like that.

And he's just sort of having lots of sex and writing about it and trying to make it interesting.

There's one bit where he like purports to be writing a few paragraphs while having sex.

Okay.

And the writing like devolves into gibberish.

And I was just like, I know you think this is cool, Neil, but it is hack shit.

Yeah, absolutely hack.

Yeah.

Wasn't there also, one of my few memories of this book is that there's like an entire fucking chapter of him having a threesome.

Yeah.

And it's like really long and it 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.

There are several scenes where you're like, I don't feel like this is driving the plot forward, Neil.

It really is what you wanted to tell me about this girl that you had sex with.

There's a ton of that.

And yeah, there's a threesome scene.

It's not interesting.

It doesn't feel like the girls really wanted to have a threesome.

It's like,

congrats, dude.

I guess you talked two girls into having a threesome because they wanted to feel accepted.

Awesome.

So, and, you know, again, circling back to the age of a lot of these women, at one point he's dating a 19-year-old.

Okay.

He's in his mid-30s.

Nice.

And this is like one of the more serious relationships he has in the book.

And I'm like, are you like, I can't even fathom this.

Like, I talk to 19-year-olds the same way I talk to seven-year-olds.

You know, like,

are you having fun at school?

Great.

It's also, it's like, this probably isn't true, but isn't there something that like, 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.

I'm sure that that's not true.

You're a lawyer, Peter.

You should know every law.

This was something that kids said in like the schoolyard 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 like double unethical to be dating somebody who's 19.

Right.

Once you're this good at it, it's like your ethical requirement not to go after people that are drinking or that are younger or that have like mental illness stuff where they can't totally consent or whatever.

It just seems like there needs to be a lot more like thought put into this, or at least more than he was putting into it at the time.

Absolutely.

I mean,

this particular story felt like a little, like the girl lives with her parents and she has like a one-year-old baby.

You know, the father's out of the picture.

And you're just sort of like, is this real?

Like, Neil, are you

fucking kidding me with this?

Are you fucking kidding me with this, Neil?

It's it feels really gross, but her shoes looked really comfortable.

That's how we got her.

So, as this book, as the book goes on, the guys are becoming like more and more consumed with the lifestyle of running game.

And again, like 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, and the the mutual friend is like, hey, Neil, Papa's using tactics on you.

And tactics is just like slang for psychological game.

And Neil's like, okay, well, what's he doing?

And the guy's like, well, he's telling everyone not to talk to you.

Okay.

Well, is that what tactics is?

That's a high school.

That's a high school conflict.

I'm pretty sure I saw some girls at first grade recess running tactics in that case.

He's calling someone else, but you're on the line, but they don't know that you're on the line.

Yeah, it's really sophisticated stuff.

He and Mystery and some of their buddies set up a sort of 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.

That all falls apart when a girl moves in and she and Mystery fall in love, and they fall out of love, and then she and another housemate fall for each other.

The ensuing drama destroys the household.

And that sort of brings us back to Mystery.

We should put a wrap on his story, at least for now, because the book is sort of following his ups and downs, and

they are intense.

Like his ups are pretty wild, and his downs are pretty crazy.

I told you he had a sort of

mental breakdown that the book opens with.

When he is sort of entering that breakdown, he says that he plans to go to Eastern Europe, find two young bisexual women, get them visas, bring them to Canada to be strippers and magician's assistants.

And Neil is like, okay, well, you know, my quest for self-improvement has led me to white slavery.

And that's where we are right now.

As plans go, it's not great.

And to be clear, just so everyone feels better, at no point does Mystery take any steps towards that plan.

It's less of a serious plan and more of just a signal that he's falling apart a little bit.

He starts giving away his possessions, including his like 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.

It is wild that VH1 read this and was like, let's give this guy a show.

You know what?

I was going to say the 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 artist persona.

Let's give him a TV show glorifying that persona.

Right.

I mean, that guy is a psychopath unmatched by anyone you read about in the pages of this book itself.

Yeah, because mystery on some level is like kind of a tragic figure.

Yes.

But then the people who are like exploiting him and are like, let's share his lessons with the world.

This like broken man.

Right.

That's so much worse because it's cynical.

Oh, God.

The fact that this book, it sort of ostensibly wraps on this sort of like, well, you know what?

This wasn't very fulfilling, I guess.

You know, Neil falls for a girl who likes him for like his actual self and is like not impressed by this pickup artist shit.

And he's starting to doubt whether like pickup artistry is the answer to his problems, right?

And so like the last like 40 pages of this book, and it's a 450 page book.

Yeah, it's absurd.

The last 40 pages or so are just him being like, you know, that was fun, but like, it wasn't very fulfilling.

And, you know, tale is old as time, right?

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 fulfillment in the shallow pursuits.

It almost, it's tried to the point where it feels like hacky and really disingenuous because, like, his self-awareness, again, it feels a bit performative at times.

Like, he knows that he's too smart to be taking this all too seriously, and he needs to show some self-awareness.

So, like, he'll talk about how shallow this is, how this is all an outgrowth of insecurity and doesn't address the underlying problems.

But, like, yeah, you just wrote for like 250 pages about all the pussy you got, and it was like very clear that you enjoyed yourself writing about it.

Yeah, you know, he's giving himself an arc, but ultimately, he's essentially publishing a guide to how to do this.

Yeah, and I think, like, 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.

Right.

You don't want to end the book with like, well, that was cool and I'm cool now.

See you later.

Like, that's right.

You have to have something a little deeper.

And of course, like the marketing is all about just like, here's how you pick up chicks, right?

Yeah.

And it gets glommed onto 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 like no longer effective, even in the course of the book.

Like, 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 like one of those dumb questions, like the,

you know, name an ocean kind of thing.

And the girls are like, why have five guys asked me that same question in the past hour yeah

nice so as we get into the 2010s a lot of this stuff ages pretty poorly yeah and so neil spent a lot of the last decade distancing himself from the game a little bit and like sort of half apologizing penancing he did an interview with the atlantic in 2015 where he said obviously i was a journalist this community already existed and i went in to 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?

Yeah.

And it's like, bro, you wrote a whole thing where you're like, I'm having sex right now.

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 artist manual.

Let's get all this stuff about how all of these men are like emotional husks out of here.

Get rid of the filler.

I just want the tips.

Right.

And look, I get it, right?

Like there's only so many chances to cash in in your life as a writer.

And you know, some publisher was like, Neil, I got a million dollars for you.

Here you go, Neil.

So like, maybe it's not quite an endorsement, but like at that point, you have to, you have to admit, I sold my soul for this shit, right?

You can't, you can't try to walk the tightrope of I I was just a journalist or whatever.

Also, even if it was a journalistic account, I feel like the journalistic thing to do would be to actually follow up with some of these women.

Right.

Be like, oh, yeah, you know, you went home with mystery last night.

How do you feel about it afterwards?

Like, do you feel tricked?

Do you feel deceived or manipulated?

Like, I have friends who've fallen for this.

Right.

And they sort of 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.

Like, 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?

It feels like theater.

So like a journalist would actually tell those fucking stories, like really, really basic journalism.

Like what is the cost of this?

Yeah, but he was trying to tell the unspoken tale of the male, you know?

Of how much sex the men were having.

So what's the vibe?

I mean, 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, right?

You can say, like, these guys are just trying to better themselves, and it came out wrong, or it came out bad.

I think all three

are true.

It's impossible to ignore the misogyny at the heart of this.

You're basically tricking women into going home with you.

And you're doing this not for the benefit of the women in any way.

You're basically doing this to seek status among men.

I think that there's like 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.

Right, right, right.

As a gay guy, I have had periods of my life where I go to bars and I hook up with people.

And I also get on some level that like, that's a fairly messy process.

And like a little bit of help to like fake confidence or have a comfortable, fun conversation with a stranger, I actually think is fine.

Like on some level, it's okay to sort of 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 like 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.

Yeah.

I mean, I mean, 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.

Right.

You're right.

There's almost like a light and polite dishonesty that's part of hookup dynamics, right?

You puff yourself up a little bit.

You might make yourself a little bit more interesting, you know?

If someone, 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.

Yeah, Peter, I live in Seattle.

I do this all the time.

Yeah, I think it was month six of my relationship with my now wife when she told me that she does not like to work out, actually.

But you know, what makes the pickup artist strategies so gross is this like complete embrace of inauthenticity and the gamification of social interaction.

You know, 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.

And I think in a world where we are all constantly searching for human connection, there's something like particularly awful and sad about that.

The whole idea of it is misogynistic to its core.

Right.

On the other hand, I do think that like there's a large reservoir of insecure dudes in society who like don't really know how to do this stuff and are desperate for intimacy.

And we live in a culture that tells them that like it's impossible to form intimacy with other men because like that's that's gay, bro.

Yeah, you know, it's hard not to have some sympathy for like the basic plight.

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.

And

society views sex as like something men earn and women give up.

A dynamic that is like unhealthy for everyone involved and has caused untold strife from negging to wars.

And if you squint hard enough at this stuff, you can see this group of guys who maybe got like a raw deal banding together and trying to figure out how to work their way out of it.

And it's almost nice.

And it's just sort of unfortunate that the only angle they could figure out is latching on to like a mix of manipulation tactics and misogyny.

It's a little bit like I sort of get the people who join like the proud boys or whatever.

On a purely subjective level, it feels like an attack on you that like the world is changing and your position 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.

You're a huge piece of shit for doing that.

And

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 like tricking women into having sex.

Right.

There's a difference between being like, you know, I can see how these tendencies might develop and being like, so it's okay that you joined the Proud Boys, right?

No, like you're, you're a

rational, living human being.

Yeah.

You need to be able to recognize when you're crossing those lines, right?

When you're like, I'm taking these frustrations and I'm stepping into something awful and dangerous.

As you place your blacklight into your fanny pack at 10 p.m.

and head out to the bar,

you should have a little moment of reflection.

Should we talk about incels?

I was just, 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.

I know, right?

When you look at like modern incels, I suppose male sexual frustration manifests differently and like every generation, each has its own strategies and philosophy about it, like unique to the times.

And the only thing they have in common is the steadfast refusal to envision women as living, breathing human beings.

Right.

Yeah.

I do think it's fascinating that incels began as a reaction to the pickup artist

community, right?

That it was like P U A hate, pickup artist hate was the original incel subreddit.

Yes.

The whole premise was that pickup artists are telling you that you can change your lot, right?

That 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.

Right.

The pickup artists 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, right?

Yeah.

They are like.

accepting that they're society's losers and instead of trying to break out of that they just dwell in their rage about it towards women and towards society yeah it's a sense of entitlement right it's like very literally they're 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?

Like, why do we have to do this?

Right.

Which, by the way, is like not the worst, most unreasonable question.

It's not an unreasonable question because men are entitled to sex.

It's more that like you're gazing out upon this like kind of 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 kind of a normal reaction, you know?

You just have to take it to a healthy place.

This is how I look out on like straight dating norms.

I'm like, what is this?

This is like a fucking nature documentary to me.

Right.

Yeah.

So, yeah, I mean, both of these groups are holding out their lack of sexual success as a grievance, but the incels believe that it's an injustice, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so their solution is not to improve themselves to like develop some game or whatever, but to lash out violently.

So you have Elliot Roger who murders women because he's an incel mad that he didn't get laid.

And he writes a fucking manifesto about his like entitlement to sex.

He says that he deserved sex because he was a descendant of British aristocracy.

Sure.

And it's like, it's just incoherent because they're grasping at like anything they can to like 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.

It's really bleak that we're at this point with like relations between the sexes, and especially the crisis of, I think, like straight white dudes, where it's like, yeah, I'll take the raging misogynists because the other option is fucking mass shooters.

Oh, God.

Yeah.

It's where, you know, you look at something like nagging 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.

No, keep negging, guys.

You're fine out there.

Maybe we let them nag.

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.

Yeah, it's just a matter of where on the spectrum it lands.

Do you have a sense, Peter, of like why you never got sucked into this world?

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 are in.

Were you in cooking classes?

Were you learning French?

That's the secret.

No,

I had one move, and it's:

you see if a girl likes to smoke weed, and then you're like, Do you want to smoke weed?

That's actually much more effective than most of the props.

No, I'm the classic dude where it's like, I've got weed, and I'm going to make you watch season three of The Sopranos.

And if we don't hook up, it's because I got way into The Sopranos.