I’ve been writing about some heavier stuff in the past couple of posts - meditations on the problem of evil, the tether scam, the controlled nature of the Russia/Ukraine war, the preplanned decline in the quality of life for almost everyone, and the untrustworthiness of Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson.
So I thought I would lighten it up a little bit (well, as much as can be lightened up with my posting style, which is matter-of-fact, dry and serious) with a life update on some of the famous pickup artists (PUAs) from the early 2000s, and a couple more thrown in from more recently.
Why are the PUAs interesting? Because they emerged as one of the first cracks by Millennials against the United States sole-superpower international “rules based” order total-informational-narrative-dominance after the fall of the Soviet Union (get a sense of Fukuyama’s End of History for the feeling that America would always be on top thereafter). Other major routes to “taking the red pill” such as Alex Jones with InfoWars started around the same time, and Mencius Moldbug with his political takes arrived a bit later in 2007. There was also the Patriot movement around this time, but it was mostly an older generation…
The history and motivation
The pickup community emerged sometime during the early 2000s because of cognitive dissonance that young men were experiencing because of their difficulty in finding mates. It had its roots in earlier eras - in 1970, with the publication of How to Pick Up Girls! by Eric Weber and in the 1990s with Ross Jeffries with his “neuro-linguistic programming” - but this is when it became widespread and mainstream. As discussed previously, cognitive dissonance occurs whenever narratives pushed by the establishment do not fulfill needs of low-status groups, and lower-status young men were increasingly being deprived of mates due to unleashed female hypergamy1 which was itself caused by multiple factors (decline in religion and associated decreased stigma of hook-up culture, increased atomization, increased takeover of women in the workplace, government welfare obviating the need for women to secure beta male providers, a deliberate and nasty strategy employed by the central bank owners, etc). These low status men, suffering cognitive dissonance and psychological pain, had to devise alternative approaches because the establishment messaging and incentives were the cause of their pain in the first place.
These young men looked around and tried to reverse-engineer the ease of success of that high-status men (who they eventually called “Chad”) had with women. Was it Chad’s confidence? His looks? His height? His humor? The fact that he could be unavailable and a bit of a dick? It definitely wasn’t his money; Chad was often poor, even destitute, yet basically had to swat away women who swarmed him for attention. Think of some bartender living in a filthy tenement apartment, rats and trash everywhere, regularly hooking up with 9s and 10s, who felt honored to experience his attention, while “nice” low status men with stable jobs and looking to get married were completely ignored. In response, some low-status men got together on internet forums and in small groups in the real world (to go sarging and critique each other) and tried to devise techniques to attract women; which pick-up lines worked, what attitude to use, how dressing differently affected results, which locations were best, even which countries were better than others. They treated it with all the rigor of autistically trying to beat a video game; i.e. they viewed women mostly as inanimate objects where if the right combination of emotional hind-brain buttons were pressed they would “win” the interaction and be rewarded with sex (a point Neil Strauss would later make as a critique).
Later on the community split. The ones that had success moved on to other chapters of their lives, and some of the better PUA tactics and terms were absorbed into mainstream dating culture2, while the low-status males who couldn’t or wouldn’t adapt became mostly incels and shut-off in their own online communities. The most memorable incel was Elliot Roger, the “Supreme Gentleman”, who went crazy after failing in his lotto-ticket get-rich-scheme due to his inability to attract a woman and went on a killing spree.
The PUA leaders
A number of the PUA community’s most prominent leaders included Roosh Valizadeh, Roissy/Heartiste, Neil Strauss, Mystery, and Rollo Tomassi3. Also of note is Tucker Max (via PUA’s cousin “fratire” which celebrated fraternity hookup-culture, but without the loser autism of the PUAs).
There is a maxim that once someone becomes red-pilled in one area of life and sees establishment lies in that area, it makes it easier to then transition to becoming red-pilled in many other areas of life (this is different than the Gel-Mann amnesia affect which refers to becoming red-pilled in one’s compartmentalized work specialty).
The meme is: first comes the blue pill (just believe what the establishment tells you), then the red pill (belief that the establishment teaches the masses lies for their own gain), then the black pill (despair and a sense of hopelessness at the world’s situation), then the white pill (finding solace in God). How has this trope manifested in these prominent PUA figures in the years since, if it has?
Roosh Valizadeh
Roosh was known as a pickup artist who traveled the world to have casual sex with women. He released a series of books: Bang: The Pickup Bible That Helps You Get More Lays (2007), and then with sex-themed travel guides on the countries he had visited such as Bang Iceland, Don't Bang Denmark, Bang Estonia, Don't Bang Latvia, and Bang Lithuania. These books provided him a steady stream of passive income from his followers. He had a well-read blog and a well-read forum, and his concurrent controversial takes on women and politics via the “manosphere” resulted in feminist boycotts of his in-person meetups with the protests in Canada receiving widespread media coverage.
Eventually, a combination of Roosh experiencing hedonic adaptation (much like drug users, a person with an addition, including a sex addiction, needs more extreme experiences in order to receive the same level of dopamine hits to feel pleasure), combined with aging resulting in declining testosterone levels, led to Roosh’s general disillusionment with the pickup artist and casual sex lifestyle.
Roosh experienced a triggering event, though, when his younger sister died of cancer. That shook him to his core and he ultimately became devoutly religious as a result, first in the Armenian Apostolic Church in 2019 and then in the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR) in 2021.
I believe the conversion was fully heart-felt and legitimate given he unpublished all of his PUA books, which were his primary source of income, and closed his PUA website. He then released a book about his journey to God called American Pilgrim.
Roosh continues to maintain his blog which is generally very well written, his Gab account, and his Forum, which is very censored and controlled to specifically promote ROCOR views. He maintains his unusually intense interest in women, but he tries to filter it through his religious perspective. I believe he continues to live at home and is unmarried presently.
Roosh, then, went from the red pill to the black pill and then to the white (God) pill.
Roissy/Heartiste
Roissy in DC, also known as Heartiste, had a very popular blog for many years starting in 2007 which deconstructed female behavior in the context of the pickup artist scene. It remains online currently but experienced a lengthy shutdown by Wordpress in 2019 for unspecified violations of their terms of service, and Heartiste gave up posting on it as a result. He continues to regularly post as King of All Nads on Gab, almost exclusively about politics these days from a far-right perspective.
It seems Heartiste has somewhat taken the black pill, perhaps straddling the line between red and black.
Neil Strauss
Neil Strauss popularized the pickup artist community to the world when he published the 2005 book The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists. Strauss was a prominent author who rolled in high society as a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and also wrote regularly for The New York Times, so his book was prominently displayed and talked about by the public.
Strauss was short, bald, and nothing special physically, and he was unsuccessful with women so he turned to this lifestyle in order to improve it. He eventually got married, had a child, then got divorced, while in 2015 wrote a book walking back much of the PUA lifestyle. He continues to be a very successful writer, and in 2021 wrote a book about the wonders of Ethereum and is working on a book about NFTs.
It appears Strauss stayed in the red pill zone, which was necessary for him to continue a respectable writing career, or semi-reverted to the blue pill.
Mystery
Mystery came to fame in Neil Strauss’s book, where he had at least one major mental breakdown. He later had a short-lived television show called “The Pickup Artist”. His approach was to peacock, i.e. to dress outlandishly with weird hats, shoelifts, makeup, and garish clothing, to do magic tricks, to be constantly in the “dancing monkey” frame to keep attention-scattered nightlife-tier women entertained.
It looks like he continues to host pickup seminars in 2023, so it looks like he remains redpilled.
Tucker Max
Tucker Max came to fame as a result of his quite popular fratire series of books documenting his numerous hook-up escapades, especially I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, which he later turned into a self-produced movie which was not successful. He had a number of controversies, and also had a forum which he shut down at some point. Tucker was a gifted writer and then parlayed his gift for writing into a successful business helping people write and publish books called Scribe Media, and he ghostwrote Tiffany Haddish’s memoir.
Tucker moved to a rural area of Texas, got married, and has four kids, and he documents his attempt to become a rancher on his Twitter account, which is a very interesting read. He encourages his followers to become self-sufficient in food production and champions a rural lifestyle, which is a positive message, although the financial resources to do so are outside the reach of many (although there are steps that anyone can take in this regard, no matter how limited). Tucker’s own lifestyle requires a level of capital that most people who are not already rich cannot afford, where he lives on a self-owned large cattle ranch with a nice house and the ability to raise many kids.
His religious views are not clear, and he seems disillusioned with the current American form of government, but his public-facing persona focuses on his work and his lifestyle.
I wanted to mention two others involved in this scene, even though they are much more recent additions: Looks Maximus and Gonzalo Lira.
Looks Maximus
Looks Maximus came out of nowhere a year or two ago, posting videos on Youtube where he eschewed dating altogether and instead advocated for a lifestyle of steroids and prostitution, and tied his viewpoints into an endless number of stories regarding ancient Greece and Rome, which he was very well versed in. He was a Canadian living in Poland where his family was from, and he spoke Polish fluently. He viewed dating any women to be “simping”, where the woman was the man’s “massa” (i.e. she controlled him and told him what to do because this “gynocentric society” gave them that power), and he looked down greatly on “jestermaxxing”, where one had to act as a jester to women to get sex. He was an advocate for androcentrism.
His Youtube channel was eventually banned as he was rapidly growing his following, and he shifted to Odysee and Bitchute, hosting multi-hour Symposiums where he interacted with his followers. However, Looks was mentally unstable — he live-blogged himself harassing women on the streets of Poland, and he filmed himself sniffing used women’s panties (multiple times; these videos were re-uploaded by “Gimpina”, one of Looks’s stalkers and chief-haters)— and the steroids apparently gave him cancer. He got a girlfriend, had a mental breakdown, disclaimed everything he had said before and then disappeared from the internet (for now), after having deleted almost all of his videos, which were, to be fair, quite entertaining.
After digging a lot of Bitchute and Odysee, I was able to find some of his older videos:
Here’s one asking who would you be cast as in a movie or television show? (an attack on people with weak bodies)
Here’s one where he attacks Nietzsche for being a simp for women.
Here’s a short one on Achilles and Leonidas.
Here’s one where he recommends remaining unmarried and childless.
Here’s a long one attacking the manosphere and Richard “Belle” Cooper.
Here are a bunch of others, the older ones are better than the newer ones.
If you watch these (which are interesting and entertaining), keep in mind he later had a total nervous breakdown and disclaimed all of this.
So he went from redpilled to either blue-pilled or insane-pilled.
Gonzalo Lira
I don’t know too much about Gonzalo other than he went by the moniker “Coach Red Pill”, giving advice to men on dating (despite looking quite slovenly himself), before shifting entirely to focus on the Russia/Ukraine war, where he bizarrely was extremely pro-Russia, pushing a 5D chess narrative, despite living in Ukraine-controlled Kharkov. He was arrested in 2022 by the Ukrainian authorities for his views and re-arrested recently in 2023. Gonzalo, if they let you out and you see this, please clean your toilet (it was shown in the arrest video) — it looks completely disgusting.
He appears to be standard red-pilled.
****
So that’s the gamut of prominent PUAs and what happened to them. There isn’t a particular lesson to be drawn from any of this; these guy’s journeys are just interesting in light of their significant exposure to perspectives that put them at odds with establishment messaging, at least with respect to women, and they should be commended for having unique personalities that aren’t standardized and rubber-stamped like most “I support the Current Thing” NPCs are today via educational and media propaganda. Uniqueness and going against the herd should be respected and appreciated; there isn’t enough of it, and when one comes across someone being unapologetically themselves (and not in an aggressive, brainwashed “lean in” way) it’s a breath of fresh air.
As mentioned elsewhere, hypergamy is as toxic for women as it is for men. Women end up having sex with very high-status men far beyond their ability to lock that man down for marriage and children, because men are fine “hooking up" down/far down from their status level, leading women to become angry and bitter when they are unable to successfully pair bond. The more men that a woman has sex with, the harder it is for her to pair bond and the weaker her pair bond will be. This also applies to men but to a much lesser extent. This results in a phenomenon where women "settle" in their 30s before their eggs expire, but they are generally very unhappy with their sub-par mate. These Red Pill comics demonstrate the phenomenon described here, but please note that they are sexual and very crude in nature. Also see here.
Andrew Tate’s lifestyle grifting for insecure men looking for a father figure, which incorporates dating tips, can be seen as a successor to this stuff.
Rollo I am less familiar with, although he seems quite unimpressive in 2023, encouraging men not to procreate and to focus on pure hedonism; his definition of “high value male” by “avoiding family creation” will likely leave one alone, sad, and giving off creepy-pervert vibes in older age, which is not a proper long-term definition of high value. His Twitter profile photo is of an old man pretending to be a young man while giving off Satanic imagery.
Great read. Takes me back.
I think the key takeaway is that there are limits to what the individual can do. He either recognizes the limits that society places on him or he bands together with other men and leaves society or goes to war with society.
That is something that could also be elaborated on in your article. Many of these men left the West. Roosh, Lira, Forney. Most small-time PUA types live in SE Asia now. There they can go to prostitutes without having a mental breakdown because no one looks down on them for it.
Might need a slight post mortem.
Coach Red Pill was later basically murdered by Ukrainian authorities in jail.