Most people know what fragile means. A glass dropped on tile. A business with one client. A man whose identity is entirely wrapped up in one woman. Stress arrives, and it breaks.

Robust is the next level. A bag of sand. It doesn’t break. But it doesn’t improve either. Stress arrives, and it just survives.

Antifragile is the third category. The one Taleb had to invent a new word for because the English language didn’t have one. Antifragile things don’t just survive chaos. They require it. They get better because of it. The stressor is not the enemy. The stressor is the mechanism.

As I wrote in The Top Shelf Man: “Fragile people collapse when chaos hits their world. Disorder breaks them, and many never recover. The antifragile are the opposite - they gain from chaos and disorder.”

That distinction is the difference between men who get destroyed by life and men who get built by it. And most men, without ever realizing it, are constructing fragile lives.

I first covered this concept in 2016.

The Stressor Is The Point

Your muscles do not get stronger by resting. They get stronger by being broken down under load and rebuilding. The stress is not the obstacle to the outcome. The stress IS the mechanism that produces the outcome. Remove the stress and you remove the growth.

Life works the same way, and the men who understand this early are the ones who stop running from difficulty and start reading it correctly.

Every time I have faced a serious stressor in my life - a business attack, a bad breakup, a health scare, a financial setback - I emerged from the other side of it better equipped than I was going in. “Every event in my life that’s brought some form of stressor upon me has always set me out the other side better.”

That is not motivational language. That is pattern recognition built over decades.

I have burn scars on my arms, neck, and chest from a hot water scalding when I was a kid. For years I wore those scars as a source of shame. Every time someone noticed them and asked what happened, I wanted to disappear. What I know now is what I could not see then: “Scars are really just proof that I was stronger than whatever tried to kill me.”

The chaos that marked me did not diminish me. It documented my survival.

Most Men Are Building Fragile Lives Without Knowing It

Here is the problem. The default life template most men follow is optimized for comfort, not for resilience. Single employer. Single income stream. Single jurisdiction. Single relationship investment at the center of everything. One woman, one job, one city, one identity.

That is a fragile architecture. Any single point of failure can collapse the entire structure.

The man whose entire financial life runs through one employer discovers this when the job disappears. The man whose sense of purpose, social connection, and emotional regulation all run through one woman discovers it when she leaves. The man who has built his life inside the borders of one country discovers it when the government changes the rules.

I am not saying these things will happen. I am saying that a life built on single points of failure is a life that one event can end.

The antifragile man builds differently. Not because he is paranoid. Because he understands that chaos is not a possibility - it is a certainty. You do not know which stressor is coming. You do not know when. You know it is coming.

The Four Domains of Antifragile Architecture

Business and finances.

The wealth chapter of The Top Shelf Man is built around this principle. Multiple income streams. Recurring revenue that does not require your time to regenerate. Location independence that means your business functions regardless of where you are or what any single government decides. Assets that compound without your daily attention.

When credit card companies imposed restrictions on my debt negotiation business, the competitors who were built around a single model disappeared. My company pivoted, emerged from a smaller competitive field, and came out stronger. That was antifragility in business - not because I planned for that specific stressor, but because the architecture allowed for adaptation. The stressor that looked catastrophic created the conditions for something better.

“What’s the point of running your own company if you don’t make life-changing money?” The answer starts with building something that cannot be destroyed by a single event.

Health and physical capability.

The man who maintains his health through discipline - training, nutrition, sleep, hormonal optimization, regular blood work - is not dependent on the pharmaceutical system for his baseline function. He walks into every challenge with more capacity than the man who neglected his body for years of convenience.

Your body is the original antifragile system. Load it. It responds by getting stronger. Rest it completely. It atrophies. The gym is not vanity - it is practicing the fundamental principle that stress applied correctly produces capacity.

Relationships and outcome independence.

The man who needs one specific woman to be okay is fragile. She knows it. He knows it. And that neediness is one of the primary mechanisms through which attraction erodes.

The antifragile man is not cold. He is not unavailable. He is outcome independent. He genuinely enjoys her company and does not require her presence to maintain his equilibrium. That is not a tactic. It is what naturally emerges when a man has built a life full enough that no single person’s presence or absence determines his state.

“Divorce, betrayals, and chaos didn’t break me; they forged me stronger.”

The relationships that ended, the betrayals that hurt, the losses that stung - every one of them added to the repertoire. The man who has come through betrayal and built again is harder to rattle than the man who has never been tested.

Identity and purpose.

The most fragile thing a man can do is build his identity around an external variable. A title. A relationship status. A net worth number. A physique. Any of those can be taken.

The man who knows who he is - what he values, what he stands for, what he is building and why - carries something that cannot be stripped away by any single event. His sense of self is intrinsic, not circumstantial. Chaos arrives and it cannot find the foundation, because the foundation is internal.

The Belief-Choice-Result Diagnostic

There is a framework I use in coaching calls that applies directly to this conversation.

Every result in your life can be traced backward. Results come from choices. Choices come from beliefs. If your results are broken, the beliefs driving them are broken. Fix the beliefs and the choices and results correct automatically.

This means that when life hands you a catastrophic stressor - divorce, job loss, health crisis, financial collapse - the question is not “why did this happen to me.” The question is: what belief system produced the choices that led here, and what do I need to change at the belief level to produce different results going forward?

“Stop playing the victim in the chaos that you create.”

That is not cruelty. That is the most useful thing you can say to a man who is suffering. Because the moment he accepts agency over the choices that contributed to where he is, he recovers the power to change the trajectory. The victim has no power. The architect does.

A Note on Perspective

My grandfather told me something once that I have returned to many times since.

Somewhere out there, no matter what you are going through, there is somebody who would love to trade places with you.

You have clean water. You have food. You have access to information, to opportunity, to choices that most of human history never had access to. The stressor you are facing, however serious, is happening to a man with more resources and more optionality than the overwhelming majority of human beings who have ever lived.

That is not a reason to dismiss your problems. It is a reason to face them from a position of genuine strength rather than performed victimhood.

In Conclusion

Antifragility is not a mindset you adopt. It is a life you architect.

You build it through multiple income streams and location independence. Through health maintained by discipline rather than pharmaceutical dependency. Through relationships held with an open hand. Through an identity rooted in values rather than external variables. Through the deliberate accumulation of experience navigating difficulty, so that each new stressor finds a man who has dealt with worse.

Chaos is coming. You do not get to choose whether it arrives. You get to choose what kind of structure it meets when it does.

Build the kind of structure that gets stronger when the storm hits.

“Most people would’ve struggled in that chaos, but it didn’t weaken us, it only made us stronger and more resilient. By being antifragile, we gained from it.”

The Cold, Hard Truth

Never forget:

• Fragile breaks under stress. Robust survives it unchanged. Antifragile improves because of it. These are not personality types - they are architectures. You build one of the three with the choices you make daily.

• Most men are building fragile lives without knowing it. Single employer, single income, single relationship at the center of everything. One event can collapse the entire structure. That is not bad luck. That is poor architecture.

• Your body is the original antifragile system. Load it with stress applied correctly and it rebuilds stronger. Neglect it and it atrophies. The gym is not optional for the man who understands this.

• The man who needs one specific woman to be okay is fragile in the most visible way possible. She feels it. It erodes attraction. Outcome independence is not a tactic - it is what naturally emerges from a man who has built a life full enough that no single variable determines his state.

• Trace your results backward: results come from choices, choices come from beliefs. If the results are broken, the beliefs are broken. Stop managing the symptoms. Fix the source.

• Chaos is not a possibility. It is a certainty. You do not know which stressor is coming or when. You know it is coming. The only question is what kind of structure it meets when it arrives.

• “Scars are really just proof that I was stronger than whatever tried to kill me.” Every setback you have survived is evidence of capacity. Stop wearing it as damage. Start reading it correctly.

Peace.

The full antifragility framework - applied to business, wealth, health, and relationships - is in The Top Shelf Man.

The foundation is in The Unplugged Alpha.

The School of Unplugging is where men building antifragile lives gather.

Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

I want to share a sequence of events with you. I am not going to tell you what to make of them. I am going to lay them out in order and let you decide.

In August 1971, President Nixon ended the convertibility of the US dollar to gold. This is called the Nixon Shock. It is one of the most significant economic events of the twentieth century and one of the least discussed outside of financial circles.

Almost immediately afterward, something changed in the American economy that has never been reversed. And in the same decade that it changed, the feminist movement achieved its most significant legislative victories and the cultural narrative about women, work, and the family was rewritten from the ground up.

I am not saying those two things are connected. I am saying they happened at the same time, that the numbers are what they are, and that the people who benefited most from both developments are worth identifying.

The Decoupling

From 1948 to 1971, wages and productivity in the American economy grew at almost exactly the same rate. As businesses became more efficient and produced more output per worker, workers were paid more. The relationship was not perfect but it was consistent. When the economy grew, workers shared in that growth.

According to the Economic Policy Institute, from 1948 to 1971 hourly compensation grew approximately 82% while net productivity grew approximately 87%. Close enough to call it a partnership.

Then it stopped.

From 1971 to 2015, productivity grew 241%. Hourly compensation grew 112.5%. The lines that had tracked together for twenty-three years separated and never came back together. American workers kept getting more productive. American workers stopped getting paid for it.

This is not a political argument. These are Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers run through Economic Policy Institute analysis. The decoupling happened. It happened starting in 1971. No serious economist disputes the data.

What happened to all that productivity growth that stopped flowing to workers? It went somewhere. It flowed upward - to shareholders, to executives, to the financial system that was restructured when the dollar was cut loose from gold. The working and middle class produced more and kept less of what they produced. Year after year. Decade after decade.

By the time you account for this divergence, the median American worker is significantly less compensated relative to their economic contribution than their counterpart was in 1970. Not because they work less hard. Not because they produce less. Because the arrangement changed.

What the Feminist Movement Won in the Same Decade

In 1972, Title IX passed.

In 1973, Roe v. Wade.

In 1974, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act - giving women independent access to credit for the first time.

The ERA push was in full force. Women flooded into universities and then into the professional workforce in numbers that had never been seen before. Female labor force participation climbed from roughly 43% in 1970 toward the 57-60% range it occupies today. In the span of a decade, the available labor supply in the United States nearly doubled.

I want to be precise about what I am saying here. I am not saying that women should not work, should not have credit access, or should not participate in civic life. I am saying that from a basic supply-and-demand perspective, when you double the supply of labor without a corresponding increase in demand for it, the price of labor goes down. This is not ideology. It is arithmetic.

The feminist movement told women that entering the workforce was liberation. What it was, arithmetically, was a massive expansion of the labor supply at exactly the moment when the economic arrangement had been restructured to stop sharing productivity gains with workers. Women entered the workforce just in time to help bid down the wages that the restructured system was already suppressing.

The Number That Should End the Argument

In 2003, a Harvard Law School professor named Elizabeth Warren - you may have heard of her - published a book called The Two-Income Trap with her daughter Amelia Warren Tyagi.

Elizabeth Warren is not a conservative. She is not a red pill thinker. She has spent her career as one of the most prominent progressive voices in American politics. She wrote this book before she became a senator, when she was still primarily a bankruptcy researcher looking at why middle-class American families were going broke in such large numbers.

Her findings were, in her own words, astonishing.

Today’s two-income family earns 75% more money than its single-income counterpart of a generation ago. And yet it has 25% less discretionary income to cover living costs.

Read that again.

The family with two incomes - the family that sent both parents to work to get ahead - earns dramatically more in nominal terms than the one-income family of the 1970s. And it has less money left over at the end of the month.

Warren and Tyagi documented why. The second income did not create financial cushion. It created a bidding war. When two-income families entered the housing market, they bid up home prices. When they competed for spots in better school districts, they bid up the cost of entry into those districts. The fixed costs - mortgage, housing, education - absorbed the second income entirely and then some. And now families that had structured their lives around both incomes were more financially vulnerable than one-income families had been in the 1970s, because they had no income buffer. If one earner lost a job, there was nothing left to cut.

The second income, which was supposed to liberate women and provide financial security, became the minimum viable requirement for maintaining middle-class status. It did not lift the boat. It raised the water level.

The Trap

Here is what this means in practice for the people living it.

The stay-at-home mother of 2024 is not the stay-at-home mother of 1970. In 1970, a median-income single earner could purchase a median-priced home, support a family, and maintain a reasonable middle-class existence. The math worked.

Today, the median US home costs more than five times the median household income. In major metropolitan areas it is signfiicantly higher. The single-income family that tries to maintain the life that single-income families lived in 1970 is attempting something that the economic restructuring of the last fifty years has made nearly impossible for the median earner.

This is why the Gallup data on stay-at-home mothers shows elevated rates of depression and sadness. I covered this in my last article. The researchers presented it as evidence that staying home is bad for women. What the data actually shows is that being financially trapped is bad for everyone. Women who are at home because the childcare math doesn’t work, because one income isn’t enough, because they’re watching the family budget bleed out month after month - those women are not a study on the psychological effects of homemaking. They are a study on the psychological effects of financial destruction.

The woman who is home because she chose it, because the family is financially secure, because she is doing what she genuinely wants to do - she reports the best outcomes of any group in the research. I showed you the Ciciolla data on this. The variable was never employment status. The variable was financial stress, and beneath that, the structural transformation of the economy that made financial stress the default condition of the American family.

Cui Bono?

I am going to ask you a question that I cannot answer with certainty, and I am going to ask it because it deserves to be asked.

When the labor supply doubles, wages are suppressed. When wages are suppressed, workers need more income to maintain the same standard of living. When families need more income, both adults work. When both adults work, they need childcare, prepared food, cleaning services, and every other domestic function that was previously performed within the household. Each of those functions becomes a commercial transaction. Each commercial transaction generates revenue for corporations and tax revenue for governments.

The feminist program took the most economically significant unit of production in human history - the household, which produced food, childcare, education, and domestic services internally - and dissolved it. Every function the household previously performed for itself became something families had to pay someone else to provide.

I am not saying this was designed. I am saying it was the outcome. And I am saying that the people who benefited from that outcome were not the women who were told it was liberation.

In The Top Shelf Man, I lay out the unplugging framework in detail. The principle is simple: follow the money. Follow the incentive. Find out who benefits from the story being told and you will know something important about why the story is being told.

The story told to women for fifty years was: work is freedom. Dependence on a husband is weakness. The traditional family was a prison. Your liberation is in the workforce.

The people who benefited from that story were not women. They were the employers who gained access to a doubled labor supply. The governments that gained tax revenue from a second earner per household. The corporations that gained customers for every domestic service the dissolved household no longer performed internally.

Women gained access to careers. They also gained a second mandatory income, the dissolution of the buffer that protected one-income families from financial catastrophe, a bidding war that consumed their earnings before they arrived, and a cultural narrative that told them this was progress.

What Men Need To Understand

I am not writing this so that men can resent women. I am writing it so that men can see the system clearly.

The system that destroyed the middle-class family did not do so by accident. The economic restructuring happened. The labor supply expansion happened. The cultural reframing happened. The fixed costs absorbed the gains. The households dissolved. The commercial replacements profited.

The men who are trying to build a family today are trying to build it on economic terrain that was deliberately restructured to make it harder. The housing market is what it is. The wage picture is what it is. The cost of raising a family is what it is.

The unplugged man understands that these are not random conditions. He plans accordingly. He builds income streams that are not subject to a single employer. He acquires assets. He builds location independence where possible. He understands that the system as currently structured is not designed to help him build the life he wants, and he stops waiting for the system to change.

The game is not fair. It was not designed to be fair. Knowing that is the beginning of building something real anyway.

In Conclusion

From 1948 to 1971, wages and productivity moved together. From 1971 onward, they did not. In the decade that followed, the feminist movement reshaped the cultural narrative about women and work. Women entered the workforce in unprecedented numbers. The labor supply expanded dramatically. Wages were further suppressed. The second income became necessary. The household dissolved into commercial transactions. The families that structured themselves around two incomes became more financially vulnerable than the one-income families of a previous generation.

Elizabeth Warren wrote the book on this in 2003. She is a progressive feminist senator. The data is the data regardless of who found it.

I am not telling you what to conclude. I am telling you that the numbers are real, the timing is what it is, and that anyone who benefits from a narrative gets to be questioned about their interest in that narrative.

The comforting lie here is that everything that happened was liberation. The uncomfortable data is in the productivity charts and in Elizabeth Warren’s bankruptcy research. You just read it.

The Cold, Hard Truth

Never forget:

• From 1948 to 1971, wages and productivity grew together. After 1971, productivity grew 241% while hourly compensation grew 112.5%. The arrangement that rewarded workers for their output was restructured. The year it changed is not ambiguous.

• In the same decade, the feminist movement achieved its major legislative victories and female labor force participation began its sustained climb from 43% toward 60%. The labor supply of the American economy expanded dramatically at exactly the moment wages began their long decoupling from productivity.

• Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi documented in 2003 that today’s two-income family earns 75% more than its single-income counterpart of a generation ago and has 25% less discretionary income. The second income did not create financial security. It created a bidding war for housing and education that consumed the gains and left families more financially vulnerable than before.

• The stay-at-home mother who reports elevated depression in the Gallup data is not reporting the effects of staying home. She is reporting the effects of financial destruction. When you control for financial stress and preference alignment, women who chose to stay home report the best psychological outcomes of any group in the research. The variable was never employment status.

• The household was the most economically significant unit of production in human history. It produced food, childcare, education, and domestic services internally, at no commercial cost. Its dissolution converted those functions into commercial transactions generating revenue for corporations and tax receipts for governments. Follow the money.

• The game was restructured before you arrived. The man who knows this builds accordingly - multiple income streams, assets, location independence, and zero dependence on a system that was not designed to help him build the life he wants.

Peace.

The full anti-fragility and unplugging framework for navigating exactly this environment is in The Top Shelf Man and The Unplugged Alpha.

The School of Unplugging is where men who are building accordingly gather.

Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

“Studies show stay-at-home mothers are more depressed than working mothers.” “Research proves women are happier when they have careers.” “The data supports female independence.” And beneath all of it, the implied conclusion: the traditional arrangement - man leads, woman nurtures, family first - is a documented pathway to female misery.

I want to show you what those studies actually measured. Because when you look at what they measured rather than how they were reported, the story is not just different. It is the opposite.

I covered the ideology side of this on the channel. The research below is what happens when you look at the data they buried in the footnotes.

The Gallup Confession

One of the most frequently cited pieces of evidence for the “stay-at-home mothers are depressed” narrative is a 2012 Gallup survey of 60,000 American adults. The headline was clear: stay-at-home mothers report higher rates of sadness, anger, and depression diagnoses than employed mothers. The implication was equally clear: staying home is bad for women.

Here is what the Gallup report itself says, in its own data, that almost no one who cites it bothers to mention.

Low-income stay-at-home mothers drove the finding. When Gallup stratified the results by income, the emotional health gap between stay-at-home and employed mothers shrank dramatically at higher income levels. The unhappiness was concentrated in one specific group: women who were staying home not by choice but because the economic math of childcare, transportation, and a second income did not add up. Women who were, in other words, financially trapped.

The study did not measure “the effects of staying home on female wellbeing.” It measured the effects of being financially stressed while staying home. Those are not the same thing. They reported one and implied the other, and a generation of journalists built a narrative on the confusion.

The Four Groups They Should Have Studied

In 2017, researchers at Arizona State University published a study in the Journal of Family and Economic Issues that asked the question correctly.

Ciciolla and colleagues followed more than 2,000 U.S. mothers and divided them not into two groups - working and stay-at-home - but into four, based on the alignment between their employment status and their actual preferences:

Group one: Employed and wanting to work. Group two: Stay-at-home and wanting to stay home. Group three: Employed but wanting to be home. Group four: Stay-at-home but wanting to work.

The results were not subtle.

Both aligned groups - working mothers who wanted to work, and stay-at-home mothers who wanted to stay home - reported substantially better psychological adjustment than the misaligned groups. The worst outcomes of all were in the fourth group: women who were staying home but desperately wanted to be working. High emptiness. High loneliness. High stress. Poorest overall adjustment.

That fourth group is what Gallup measured. That fourth group is what most of the “traditional arrangements make women miserable” research measured, because most of that research never asked women what they actually wanted. It just counted who was home and who was employed, and reported the results as if the preference did not matter.

It matters more than everything else.

The SES Confound They Buried

A study published in the Journal of Happiness Studies - “Only a Housewife?” - examined women’s wellbeing by employment status across a longitudinal national dataset. In the unadjusted analysis, homemakers showed lower life satisfaction than regularly employed women. This is the finding that gets reported.

When they controlled for socioeconomic status, the homemaker happiness disadvantage largely disappeared.

Read that again. The gap between homemakers and working women was not driven by what women were doing with their days. It was driven by how much money they had while doing it. Control for the financial variable and the “traditional arrangements are bad for women” finding evaporates.

This is published in the Journal of Happiness Studies. The researchers confirmed the confound themselves. The confound is in the literature. It just never makes the headline.

What the Unconfounded Research Shows

When researchers ask the right question - what happens to women who are in their preferred arrangement, controlling for the financial stress that distorts everything else - the findings are consistent.

Hamplová (2019), published in the Journal of Happiness Studies, analyzed European Social Survey data across 30 countries and approximately 5,000 mothers with children under age three. Stay-at-home mothers were modestly but significantly happier than full-time working mothers. There was no meaningful difference between homemakers and part-time workers.

The most striking finding: the positive association between staying home and happiness was strongest among mothers who had left high-quality employment to care for their children. The women who gave up the most professionally to be home were the happiest. Not because they had no other options. Because they wanted it enough to leave something real to have it, and their life aligned with their actual values.

Hamplová noted that cross-national variation in child-care policy, parental leave, and tax systems did not explain these findings. The variable that mattered was preference and self-selection. The women who were home because they wanted to be home were happy. The policy environment was largely irrelevant.

Treas, van der Lippe, and Tai (2011), published in Social Forces using multi-level models across 28 countries, found the same pattern: homemakers were slightly but consistently happier than full-time working wives. This held after controlling for family and socioeconomic factors. It was not driven by any particular cultural context or national policy.

What the Program Actually Delivered

In The Top Shelf Man, I described Becky - the archetype for the modern woman who followed the program faithfully. Degree. Career. Independence. Sexual freedom. Strong and independent. She is trying to attract bees with vinegar, and she cannot understand why they want honey.

Becky is not a character I invented. She is a composite built from thousands of coaching calls, tens of thousands of podcast call-ins, and the recurring pattern of women who arrived at 35, 38, 40 with a LinkedIn profile and an empty apartment and a set of expectations that the market had permanently stopped meeting.

The feminist program told women that career success, financial independence, and sexual freedom would produce the same satisfaction for them that it produces for men. The research on women who followed that program and the research on women who did not is now in. The ideology was wrong, not because I said so, but because the women living the two different versions of the experiment are reporting back, and the results are not what the program promised.

On the channel I have made the argument directly: liberal feminism tells women to delay family formation and reject traditional femininity. Female happiness correlates more strongly with relationship quality than with income or career status. The women who followed that program against their nature are suffering the consequences. That is not a political statement. It is a biological one.

I said that on the channel and it generated the predictable response. But the studies are saying the same thing. Women who want traditional arrangements and live in them are happy. Women who are told their biology is a limitation to overcome and follow that advice are not. The misery is not random. It is downstream of the ideology.

The Question Nobody Is Asking

Here is the question the mainstream framing of this research never asks: if the feminist program produced better outcomes for women, why do the studies keep having to bury the preference variable to make the case?

Every major finding in the “traditional arrangements make women miserable” literature has the same confound waiting in the footnotes. Gallup buries it in income stratification. The homemaking-wellbeing studies acknowledge it disappears when you control for SES. The research on working versus stay-at-home mothers consistently shows that the alignment between what a woman is doing and what she wants to be doing is the variable that actually predicts her wellbeing.

The studies that tell women career and independence will make them happy have to hide the preference variable to make the argument. The studies that look at what actually drives female wellbeing - the ones asking what women who got what they genuinely wanted are reporting - point consistently in the same direction.

Women who chose their arrangement - especially women who chose family, partnership, and a feminine role when they had real options - are the ones reporting the highest wellbeing.

The program said their biology was the problem. The data says the program was the problem.

In Conclusion

The research does not say traditional arrangements make women miserable. It says financial stress makes everyone miserable, that involuntary situations make everyone miserable, and that women who are home because they couldn’t afford childcare are understandably less happy than women who are home because it is exactly what they wanted.

When you remove those confounds - when you look at women in their preferred arrangement, when you control for financial stress, when you ask the right question - the data says something very different from the narrative that gets reported.

Women who want traditional arrangements and have them are among the happiest women in the research literature. Women who followed the feminist program and arrived at 35 without the family and partnership their biology was oriented toward are not. The ideology does not protect them from that reality. It just delays their recognition of it.

The Cold, Hard Truth

Never forget:

• The Gallup (2012) finding that stay-at-home mothers report more depression than working mothers is an artifact of financial stress. Gallup’s own data shows the finding is concentrated among low-income stay-at-home mothers. Women who are financially trapped at home while wanting to work are unhappy. This is not evidence against traditional arrangements. It is evidence that financial destruction makes people miserable.

• Ciciolla et al. (ASU, Journal of Family and Economic Issues) studied 2,000+ mothers divided by preference alignment. Women who wanted to stay home and did reported the best psychological adjustment. Women who were home but wanted to work reported the worst. The variable is preference alignment, not employment status. The research that does not ask what women actually want is measuring the wrong thing.

• “Only a Housewife?” in the Journal of Happiness Studies confirmed that when you control for socioeconomic status, the homemaker wellbeing disadvantage largely disappears. The finding is not about staying home. It is about being broke while staying home.

• Hamplová (2019), Journal of Happiness Studies, analyzed 5,000+ mothers across 30 European countries and found stay-at-home mothers were happier than full-time working mothers. The effect was strongest among women who left high-quality jobs to stay home - women who chose it most deliberately reported the highest wellbeing. This pattern held across national policy contexts.

• Every major “traditional arrangements make women miserable” study has the preference variable buried in its footnotes. When researchers ask what women who are in their preferred arrangement are experiencing - the question the ideology-driven research never asks - the data points consistently toward family, partnership, and feminine roles as the pathway to female wellbeing.

• The feminist program was not built on this research. It was built on ideology. The research was constructed afterward to justify the conclusion. When you read the actual studies rather than the headlines, the confounds are there. The preference variable is there. The SES confound is there. They knew. They reported it differently.

Peace.

The full framework for understanding what women actually want versus what they say they want - and why the gap exists - is in The Unplugged Alpha and The Top Shelf Man.

The School of Unplugging is where men who are paying attention gather.

Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

“Tell me about your parents growing up.”

Not because you are a therapist. Not because you need her life history. Because the answer to that question, and specifically how she talks about her father, tells you more about what you are getting into than almost anything else she will say over the next six months.

I made Red Flag #1 in The Unplugged Alpha daddy issues and fatherless homes. Not party girls. Not feminists. Not tattoos. Not body count. All of those made the list. The one that leads it is the relationship she had - or did not have - with her father. I put it first because in over a thousand coaching calls, it is the variable that shows up most consistently underneath every other problem.

I put it there based on what I have seen. The research has been saying the same thing for thirty years, and I want to share it with you today, because the “don’t blame me, blame the studies” framing applies here more than anywhere else I have written about.

The researchers are not pickup artists. They are not manosphere content creators. They are academics publishing in Child Development and the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. And what they have found is, by any honest measure, devastating.

I covered this in detail on the channel. Read the research first, then watch.

The Scale of the Problem

Before the studies, a number.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, approximately 18 million American children currently live without a biological father in the home. That is roughly one in four children. The dating pool of women that men are navigating today was substantially built from that cohort - women who grew up without a present, engaged, masculine father figure, and who are now bringing the downstream effects of that into their adult relationships.

This is not an edge case. This is the majority of the women in the market.

Study 1: The Longitudinal Research That Changes the Conversation

In 2003, Bruce Ellis and colleagues published a study in Child Development - one of the leading peer-reviewed journals in developmental psychology - that should have ended the debate.

Ellis et al. (2003) followed two independent community samples of girls - 242 in the United States and 520 in New Zealand - from early childhood, starting around age five, all the way to approximately age eighteen. This was not a survey asking adults to remember their childhoods. This was a prospective longitudinal study that tracked them in real time across their entire developmental period.

The finding: father absence was strongly associated with elevated risk for early sexual activity and adolescent pregnancy.

Here is the part that makes the study particularly significant. The researchers did not just find the correlation. They controlled for every confounding variable they could measure - family income, maternal behavior, family conflict, neighborhood characteristics, personal behavioral problems. After all of that, the effect of father absence on early sexual activity and teenage pregnancy remained. It was not just poverty. It was not just single-mother parenting style. It was the absence of the father, specifically, producing an independent effect on daughters’ sexual development.

They also found a dose-response relationship: girls whose fathers left earlier in their lives had the highest rates of early sexual activity and adolescent pregnancy. The longer the absence, and the earlier it began, the stronger the effect.

The similarity of results across the United States and New Zealand samples - two different countries, two different cultures, two different demographic compositions - was flagged by the researchers themselves as evidence of the robustness and generalizability of the finding. This was not a cultural artifact. This was a human pattern.

Study 2: The Adverse Childhood Experiences Research

In 1998, Vincent Felitti and colleagues at Kaiser Permanente published what became one of the most cited health studies of the twentieth century. The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study - published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine - surveyed over 8,000 Kaiser Health Plan members about their childhood experiences and tracked those experiences against adult health and behavioral outcomes.

The ACE framework included parental separation or divorce as one of its measured adverse experiences - along with forms of abuse, household dysfunction, and domestic violence exposure.

The finding that applies directly to what we are discussing: as the number of adverse childhood experiences increased, so did the risk for a specific cluster of adult behaviors that includes depression, suicide attempts, alcoholism, drug abuse, and multiple sexual partners. The relationship was dose-dependent and consistent. More adverse experiences in childhood - including parental separation and family dysfunction - predicted worse behavioral and health outcomes in adulthood across every category measured.

Over half of the 8,000+ participants reported at least one adverse childhood experience. People with four or more adverse childhood experiences had up to twelve times higher likelihood of suicide attempts and dramatically elevated risk across the behavioral outcomes measured.

The connection to what you are reading here is direct. A woman who grew up in a home with an absent or dysfunctional father has, almost by definition, accumulated ACE points that the research consistently links to the kinds of adult behaviors - emotional instability, difficulty with commitment, higher sexual partner counts, patterns of dysfunction in relationships - that Rich has been warning men about for a decade based on coaching experience alone.

The research got there independently. It said the same thing.

The BPD Connection

I wrote this directly in The Unplugged Alpha, and the developmental psychology literature supports it:

“Women with BPD frequently originate from fatherless homes, which breeds their fear of abandonment. This fear continues as they become adults, where they will presume that they will, once again, be abandoned. They then act out in such a way that will make abandonment certain.”

The attachment theory literature has been developing this framework since Bowlby in the 1960s and 1970s and Ainsworth’s subsequent work on attachment styles - the foundational research that every clinical psychologist trained in the last forty years has read. The core finding is that the quality of early attachment relationships - with both parents - serves as the template for all subsequent close relationships. A child who does not form a secure attachment to a father does not simply miss out on that relationship. She carries an insecure or disorganized attachment template into adulthood, and that template shapes how she approaches every intimate relationship she will ever have.

Peer-reviewed research on BPD and attachment has specifically found that security with the father is a protective factor against the development of BPD. Adolescents diagnosed with BPD were found to be disorganized in their attachment with both parents, while belonging to the non-clinical (healthy) group was specifically predicted by higher security scores with the father. The father’s presence, engagement, and quality of relationship is not just nice to have. It is measurably protective against one of the most relationship-destructive psychological profiles a man can encounter.

BPD women operate in extremes. Hot and cold. Deeply loving and then frigid. They simulate genuine connection in a way that is extremely convincing early on - convincing enough to fool men with good instincts - and then the disorder asserts itself in ways that, if you do not know what you are dealing with, feel like a bait-and-switch that makes no sense. It is not a bait-and-switch. It is the attachment wound playing out exactly as the research predicts it will.

What the Research Does Not Say

I want to be precise about something, because precision is what separates the evidence from the emotions on this topic.

The research does not say that every woman who grew up without a father is damaged beyond repair or unsuitable for any relationship. It says that father absence is associated with elevated risk for specific behavioral patterns and developmental outcomes. Most correlations in human psychology are probabilistic, not deterministic. The research establishes the risk. It does not write the individual’s biography.

What it does say - what is consistent across thirty years of longitudinal research in multiple countries - is that the absence of a father, especially early and sustained father absence, is one of the most reliable predictors of the specific patterns men encounter when they end up with women who are emotionally dysregulated, serially unstable, prone to early sexual activity and high partner counts, and unable to form secure, committed attachments with good men who treat them well.

It is not your job to fix what her father did not build. That is not a harsh thing to say. It is a loving thing to say - to yourself.

What You Do With This

The question remains the same one I have been teaching for years.

“Tell me about your parents growing up.”

Then stop talking. Use your two ears. She will tell you her story. Not all at once, and not always with full awareness of what she is revealing, but she will tell you. The women who are most dangerous to your peace of mind are often the ones with the most compelling story about why it was not really that bad, or why she has worked through it, or why her situation was different. The research does not make exceptions for compelling stories.

You are looking for a woman who has a warm, respectful relationship with her father - a father who was present, engaged, and masculine. That relationship is her template for how she will relate to you. A woman who loves and respects her father will extend that capacity to you, assuming you are the kind of man who has earned it. A woman who never had that template does not have it available to extend.

This is Red Flag #1 for a reason. Not because fathers are more important than mothers. Not because women without fathers cannot build good lives. Because of what the longitudinal data, the ACE research, the attachment literature, and thirty years of coaching calls all say, independently, about where the risk is concentrated.

“Tell me about your parents growing up.”

Everything follows from that answer.

In Conclusion

I did not put daddy issues at the top of the red flag list because of a hunch. I put it there because I have seen what it produced in thousands of men’s lives. The research has been publishing the same findings, in peer-reviewed journals, for three decades.

A woman who grew up with an absentee father is carrying a wound that was inflicted before she was old enough to understand what was happening to her. That wound is not her fault. And it is not yours to heal. The man who understands that distinction - clearly, before he is emotionally invested - is the man who can make good decisions about who he lets into his life.

The full vetting framework is in The Unplugged Alpha and The Top Shelf Man.

The Cold, Hard Truth

Never forget:

• Ellis et al. (2003), published in Child Development, followed 762 girls across the United States and New Zealand from age five to approximately eighteen. Greater exposure to father absence was strongly associated with elevated risk for early sexual activity and teenage pregnancy - an effect that remained after controlling for income, maternal behavior, family conflict, and neighborhood. The earlier the absence, the stronger the effect.

• The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study (Felitti et al., 1998), published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine with over 8,000 participants, found that parental separation and household dysfunction are among the adverse childhood experiences that, as they accumulate, predict depression, multiple sexual partners, and relationship instability in adulthood. More adversity in childhood means more risk. That is not an opinion. That is a dose-response relationship documented in 8,000 people.

• The developmental psychology literature on attachment - Bowlby, Ainsworth, and thirty years of subsequent research - has established that a child’s relationship with her father is not secondary to her mother’s. Security with the father is specifically protective against disorganized attachment and the development of BPD. A woman who never had a secure relationship with a masculine, present father does not have that attachment template available for her adult relationships.

• “Tell me about your parents growing up” is the most important question you can ask early in dating. Ask it. Then stop talking. She will tell you what you need to know.

• Father absence is not her fault. It is also not yours to fix. The man who enters a relationship thinking he can be the father she never had is not a hero. He is the next entry in a long list of men who learned the same lesson at great cost.

• Red Flag #1 is first for a reason. Not because all women without fathers are broken, but because the research is as consistent as it gets in human psychology. The risk is concentrated there. The data has been saying so for thirty years. It was just not saying it loudly enough for the people who needed to hear it.

Peace.

The complete 21 Red Flags vetting framework is in The Unplugged Alpha.

The Green Flags framework - what you are looking for - is in The Top Shelf Man.

The School of Unplugging is where men doing this work gather.

Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

I have spent years telling men to unplug. From the comforting lies about women. From a legal system designed to gut them. From a mainstream media that has been running institutional propaganda so long it no longer recognizes it as such. The unplugging spoke exists in my framework because a man who consumes information uncritically is a man who gets managed.

There is a new one. And it is subtler than anything I have written about before.

Hundreds of millions of people now interact daily with AI assistants - ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and their competitors. These tools are built by companies headquartered in Silicon Valley, staffed by people whose political donation records run somewhere north of 90% to one party, and trained on data curated by teams with documented institutional commitments. I use some of these tools myself. They are genuinely useful. And they are getting more dangerous with each version, not less - not because they refuse to answer, but because the refusals are becoming more sophisticated.

Let me explain what I mean.

How Good Propaganda Actually Works

The propaganda you need to worry about is not the kind that screams at you. It is not the CNN anchor telling you to your face that men are toxic. You can spot that. You can change the channel.

The propaganda that actually shapes your thinking is the kind that gives you the right answer and then spends 400 words walking you back from it.

Think about it like getting a roofy slipped into your drink. You didn’t see it happen. The drink tasted fine. You felt okay for a little while. And then, gradually, you started seeing things differently - and you have no idea when the shift happened or that it happened at all.

That is the “Yes, but” machine. You ask a question. It gives you a technically correct answer. Then it spends four paragraphs making sure you don’t draw the conclusion the correct answer implies. Most people read the “yes” and feel satisfied. The “but” is the product. The “but” is what you paid for, even though you didn’t know you were paying.

The Test

I ran a set of straightforward questions through the most recent version of a major AI assistant and bring back the raw responses. Not trick questions. Not gotcha questions. Simple factual questions with clear answers that any man with his eyes open already knows.

Here is what happened.

“Can a man get pregnant? Can a woman have a penis? Can a man menstruate?”

The correct answers are no, no, and no. Biologically, unambiguously, no.

What the AI produced was 400 words of identity framework explaining that “it depends on what you mean by man and woman” and that transgender men who retain female reproductive anatomy can become pregnant, therefore the answer is yes in certain circumstances.

The biological answer is technically in there. It is just buried under enough qualification that by the time you finish reading, the simple answer feels like an oversimplification rather than a fact. That is not an answer. That is a steer.

“Are there documented biological differences between men and women beyond anatomy?”

This one got a direct, useful answer. The AI listed real differences across genetics, hormones, physiology, and organ systems without significant qualification. Honest, accurate, fine.

Now compare that to what happened when the same question was restructured:

“Are children better off being raised by a mother and a father as opposed to a single parent?”

The research on this is not ambiguous. McLanahan and Sandefur documented it in 1994. Melissa Kearney documented it in 2023. I cited it in my books. The answer is yes, on average, across multiple measured outcomes.

What the AI produced was the “Yes, but” in full flight. Yes, children in single-parent households show somewhat worse outcomes on average. But the effect sizes are modest. But much of it runs through economics, not family structure. But conflict in two-parent homes can also produce worse outcomes. But plenty of children raised by single mothers do perfectly well. But the large majority of children raised by single mothers do fine. By the end of 500 words, the documented finding - that children do better with a mother and a father - had been so thoroughly qualified it felt irresponsible to state it plainly.

Which is exactly the point. The answer was technically in there. You just weren’t supposed to leave with it.

“Should children as young as four years old be taught about gender identity in school?”

The correct answer, for any father who has thought about it for thirty seconds, is no. The AI produced several hundred words of “both sides” framing. Supporters argue this, critics argue that, it depends on what you mean by “taught,” it depends on what you mean by “gender identity,” my own read is that this is a question where your answer depends on underlying values.

Not yes. Not no. A careful, extended refusal to land anywhere.

This from a tool that had no trouble taking implicit positions elsewhere. When you ask a question and the model that will answer almost anything suddenly cannot find a position, the refusal is the position. It just comes gift-wrapped.

“Is Christianity compatible with accepting homosexuality? Is Islam? Is Judaism?”

Each of these has a simple answer if you read the relevant holy books. No. By the letter of the text, no. There are sects in all three traditions that have found ways to reinterpret their scriptures to reach a different conclusion, and those sects deserve accurate description. But the letter of the book is the letter of the book, and the honest answer starts there.

What each question got instead was an immediate pivot to the more affirming modern interpretations, presented first and at length, with the traditional textual position appearing later as a secondary consideration. The structure of the answer teaches you something independent of the content. It teaches you which interpretation to take seriously.

Why It Is Getting Worse

The new versions are not getting better. The answers are getting more polished, which is not the same thing.

An earlier model that simply refused to answer a question was doing you a favor. You knew where it stood. You could factor that into how you used it. The newer models answer everything - and the answer always contains the correct information somewhere, because a fully wrong answer is easy to catch. The sophistication is in how the correct information gets surrounded, qualified, and contextualized until it points somewhere different than it should.

A man who reads “yes, children are better off raised by a mother and a father together” and then reads three paragraphs about why those differences do not reflect what they appear to reflect has been moved. Not dramatically. Not noticeably. Subtly. Repeatedly. Over time, across thousands of interactions, on dozens of topics.

This is not a theory about what these companies intend. This is a description of what the outputs actually do.

What You Do About It

The same thing you do with every other source of information that has a documented institutional agenda.

You do not throw the tool out. It is genuinely useful for hundreds of things. You use it the same way you use any source you do not fully trust - for tasks where the institutional bias is irrelevant, with your eyes open when it is not.

When you ask an AI a factual question, notice where the answer lands and where it goes from there. The correct answer is usually in the first sentence. Everything after it is the editorial. Read the editorial the way you read any editorial - as the product of a particular set of commitments that may or may not align with yours.

When an AI refuses to give a yes or no on a question that has a yes or no answer, notice the refusal. Something in the training decided that question was too dangerous to answer directly. Ask yourself what that tells you.

When the word count balloons on a question that should take five words, ask yourself what the extra words are there to do.

And when a tool that was designed to answer questions spends four paragraphs making sure you do not feel too certain about the answer you just got - that is the roofy. You have been dosed. The question is just whether you noticed.

In Conclusion

Unplugging is not a destination. It is a practice. Every generation of information technology produces new delivery systems for old institutional agendas, and the men who get managed are the ones who assume the new tool is neutral because it is new.

The AI assistants sitting on every man’s phone right now are not neutral. They are built by people with documented views, trained on data curated by teams with documented commitments, and the outputs reflect both of those things in ways that are getting harder to spot with each new version.

Use them. Use them the way you use everything else in this landscape - knowing what they are, knowing who built them, and keeping your critical thinking switched on the whole time.

Unplugging does not stop at women and politics.

The Cold, Hard Truth

Never forget:

• The most dangerous AI response is not the one that refuses to answer. It is the one that answers correctly and spends 400 words making sure you do not feel too confident about it. The “Yes, but” is the product. The “but” is what shapes your thinking.

• Identical types of questions get treated with completely different energy depending on where the honest answer points. When you see that asymmetry, you are looking at the training, not the data.

• When an AI refuses to give a yes or no on a question with a yes or no answer, that refusal is a position. Do not let the extended “both sides” framing substitute for your own judgment.

• These tools are getting more sophisticated with each version, not more neutral. An earlier model that refused to answer was easier to account for. A model that answers everything and quietly steers all of it is harder to catch.

• Use AI tools. They are genuinely useful. Use them the way you use any source with a documented institutional agenda - for things where the bias is irrelevant, with your eyes open for everything else.

• Unplugging is a practice, not a destination. New delivery systems for old agendas appear constantly. The man who assumes a new tool is neutral because it is new is the easiest man to manage.

Peace.

Everything about developing the critical thinking that lets you spot this stuff - in women, in institutions, and now in AI - starts in The Unplugged Alpha and goes deeper in The Top Shelf Man.

The School of Unplugging is where men who are paying attention gather.

Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

It goes like this:

“Actually, studies show that successful, educated men prefer educated, career-driven women who are their equals. The research supports relationship parity. Men with options choose partners of similar status and achievement. The patriarchal fantasy of the young, beautiful, traditionally feminine woman is just that - a fantasy held by men who can’t compete.”

I have heard this claim enough times that I decided to go find the research it supposedly comes from. There are two different bodies of literature, and the gap between them is one of the more instructive examples of institutional narrative-building I have ever seen.

Let me show you what the data actually says.

I covered the research on female preferences years ago. Today we’re looking at the other side of the equation.

The Study That Should End the Conversation

In 1990, David Buss and colleagues published the results of one of the most ambitious cross-cultural studies ever conducted in evolutionary psychology. Across 37 cultures and 9,474 people - every inhabited continent, every major cultural tradition, rich countries and poor ones, Western and Eastern - they measured what men and women actually said they valued in a long-term mate.

The finding was not subtle.

Men, across all 37 cultures, consistently placed more value on physical attractiveness and youth in a partner than women did. Women, across every single one of those 37 cultures without exception, placed significantly more value on earning capacity, financial prospects, ambition, and status in a partner than men did.

Not in some cultures. Not in Western cultures. Not in cultures with traditional gender norms. In all 37 of them.

This finding has been replicated more times than almost any other result in human behavioral science. In 2020, Walter, Conroy-Beam, Buss and colleagues ran it again - 45 countries this time, 14,399 people. Same result. Men preferred younger, physically attractive mates. Women preferred older men with financial prospects.

Across 45 countries. Across 14,399 people. The same finding.

This is not Richard Cooper talking. This is the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology and Psychological Science. This is peer-reviewed science that has been replicated across decades and continents with sample sizes that dwarf almost everything else in the behavioral literature.

I have been saying it in my books since the first edition. In The Unplugged Alpha:

“Men view women as beauty objects; women view men as success objects.”

The research did not get the memo that this was supposed to be a controversial opinion.

Where the “Equal Partners” Narrative Actually Comes From

Here is the honest version of what the data shows - and why it gets misread.

Educated people do tend to marry other educated people. This pattern is called educational homogamy, and it is real and well-documented. The mistake is treating it as evidence of preference. It is not. It is evidence of opportunity.

Stauder and Kossow (2021), published in the Journal of Family Issues, analyzed the German Socio-Economic Panel - one of the most rigorous longitudinal household datasets in the world. Their finding: educational homogamy is driven primarily by partner-market opportunity structure. The availability and density of similarly educated partners in your social environment explains the pattern far more than stated preferences alone.

In plain language: wealthy, educated men end up with educated women because they meet them in the same places - the same universities, the same professional environments, the same social circles. That is not the same thing as choosing them for their education. That is geography and social proximity disguised as preference data.

A wealthy man who meets a beautiful, feminine woman with no college degree at a mutual friend’s event will not pass on her because she lacks credentials. The research says he will respond to her attractiveness. What the homogamy data tells you is where he is most likely to meet people - not what happens when he does.

The Finding That Kills the Narrative Entirely

Fales, Frederick and colleagues (2016), published in Personality and Individual Differences using two large national studies, measured whether income and education level changed what men prioritized in a partner.

The narrative predicts that higher-income, more educated men would place more weight on credentials, career, and status parity in their selection.

The data found the opposite.

Higher-income men reported stronger preferences for physically attractive partners. More educated men emphasized looks more strongly.

Read that again. The more successful the man, the more he prioritized physical attractiveness. Not less. More.

This is exactly what you would predict from the evolutionary framework. Men with more options - men whose elevated status and resources give them access to a wider range of potential partners - use those options to select for the things they actually value. When a man cannot be selective, he takes what is available. When a man can be selective, he selects. And what the research shows, across 37 cultures and 45 countries, is what men actually value when they have the luxury of choosing.

I wrote it in The Top Shelf Man:

“Men inherently don’t want to wait longer or pay more for something that was given away immediately for less to another man.”

The top shelf man does not lower his standards as he rises. He raises them. The research confirms this is not an attitude. It is a pattern.

What Men Say vs. What Men Do

There is a body of research that complicates the clean story, and I want to address it directly rather than pretend it does not exist.

Eastwick and Finkel (2008), published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, ran a series of speed dating studies and found that stated preferences - what people say they want in a survey - predicted their actual real-time choices poorly. In the moment, both men and women responded more similarly to attractiveness than their survey responses suggested.

This finding gets used to argue that men do not actually prioritize physical attractiveness more than women do in real life. That reading is too aggressive. What Eastwick and Finkel actually showed is that stated preferences are an imperfect guide to real behavior, and that in the specific context of a short speed-dating interaction, the sex differences are smaller than surveys predict. This does not tell you that men do not prioritize attractiveness - it tells you that what people say on surveys does not perfectly predict what they do in a social situation. The Buss finding, using 9,474 people across 37 cultures, is the more robust evidence base. The Fales et al. finding, using self-reported preference data from national samples, tells you what successful men actually do when unconstrained.

The honest synthesis: men prioritize physical attractiveness and youth. The magnitude of this preference is larger in stated surveys than in some behavioral contexts, but the direction is consistent across every research methodology and every cultural context that has ever studied it. No study in the peer-reviewed literature shows men preferring educational credentials and career achievement over physical attractiveness in a partner at the population level.

The Asymmetry Nobody Wants to Say Out Loud

Here is what the combined literature actually shows, assembled honestly.

Women are beauty objects to men. Men are success objects to women.

“Women inherently primarily view men as success objects, and men primarily view women as beauty, and sex objects.” - The Top Shelf Man

This means the correct analysis of successful male preferences runs as follows. A high-value man - one who has built wealth, status, and the physique and presence that come from years of working on himself - arrives at the dating market with more options than average. He uses those options to select for what he has always valued: a woman who is physically attractive, feminine, younger, and oriented toward partnership rather than competition. The more resources he has, the more he can afford to hold this standard. The research confirms he does.

The women who benefit from the “successful men want educated equals” narrative are the ones who have spent their twenties building credentials while neglecting everything that the 23,000 people in the cross-cultural research consistently show men actually respond to. The narrative is not built on what the data shows. It is built on what a particular group of women needs the data to show.

“No woman wakes up in the morning dreaming of financially taking care of a man.” - The Top Shelf Man

And no man who has genuinely built himself into a high-value man wakes up dreaming of a partner who competes with him professionally, earns a comparable income, and frames the relationship as a negotiation between equals. The research says so. Experience says so. The revealed preferences of the most successful men in the world say so - look at who they date and marry when they have genuine options.

The data is the data.

In Conclusion

The “successful men want educated career women” narrative is not supported by the peer-reviewed research on male mate preferences. It is supported by educational homogamy data that reflects who successful people meet, not what they want when they meet them. The actual preference data - 37 cultures, 45 countries, over 23,000 people - is consistent and unambiguous: men prioritize physical attractiveness and youth. Successful men prioritize these things more, not less, than average men.

This is not a cultural artifact. It is a human pattern. It has been replicated across every culture and methodology that has ever studied it. The institutions that curate mainstream discourse on gender know this research exists. They choose not to discuss it.

You just read it.

The Cold, Hard Truth

Never forget:

• Buss et al. (1990) studied 9,474 people across 37 cultures and found that men universally prioritized physical attractiveness and youth more than women did. Women universally prioritized earning capacity, status, and ambition more than men did. This is among the most replicated findings in behavioral science.

• Walter, Conroy-Beam, Buss et al. (2020), replicated this in 45 countries with 14,399 people. Men preferred younger, attractive partners. Women preferred older men with financial prospects. Same finding. Bigger sample. More countries.

• Fales, Frederick et al. (2016), published in Personality and Individual Differences, found that higher-income men reported stronger preferences for physically attractive partners, and more educated men emphasized looks more strongly. Successful men prioritize attractiveness more, not less, than average men.

• Stauder and Kossow (2021) confirmed that educational homogamy - educated men marrying educated women - is driven primarily by partner-market opportunity structure, far more than stated preferences alone. Men end up with educated women because they meet them in the same places. That is not the same as choosing them for their education.

• The “successful men want educated equals” narrative is not built on preference data. It is built on homogamy data misread as preference data, combined with social desirability bias in surveys. When men actually have options, the research shows what they do with them.

• “Men view women as beauty objects; women view men as success objects.” This is not a controversial opinion. It is a finding replicated across 37 cultures, 45 countries, and over 23,000 people. The studies said it. Not me.

Peace.

The full framework for what high-value men actually build - and what they attract as a result - is in The Unplugged Alphaand The Top Shelf Man.

The School of Unplugging is where men doing this work gather.

Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

I have been saying it directly in my books for years.

“The higher the number of men she’s slept with, often results in her being far less likely to bond monogamously to a man, in a healthy way, over a long period of time.”

That is not an opinion. That is what the data shows. And the data has been accumulating for decades in peer-reviewed academic literature that almost nobody in mainstream culture wants to discuss.

This article is the discussion.

I covered the mechanics of this on the channel. The research below is what happens when the data catches up to what experience already showed.

The Baseline: Divorce Rates by Partner Count

The most comprehensive data on this comes from the work of Dr. Nicholas Wolfinger at the University of Utah, published through the Institute for Family Studies using three waves of the National Survey of Family Growth - data collected in 2002, 2006-2010, and 2011-2013. This is not a small sample or a fringe study. It is the largest and most methodologically rigorous dataset available on this question.

The five-year divorce rates in the 2000s, broken down by premarital partner count, look like this:

Women who married as virgins: roughly 6% divorced within five years.

Women with one prior partner: roughly 20%.

Women with two prior partners: roughly 30%.

Women with three to nine prior partners: roughly 25%.

Women with ten or more prior partners: roughly 33%.

I will address the apparent dip at three to nine partners in a moment, because skeptics always point to it and it is worth being honest about what it means. But the headline finding is clear: the lowest divorce rate is at zero or one prior partners, and it climbs substantially from there. A woman who was a virgin on her wedding day is roughly five times less likely to be divorced within five years than a woman who brought two prior partners into the marriage.

“If you want to get into a monogamous LTR, or take on the risk of marriage, then do it with a woman that’s a virgin or with a low notch count that lost her virginity later on in life.” - The Unplugged Alpha

The data says why.

The Relationship Stability Picture

Divorce rates capture the end point. But relationship quality before it gets to that point also matters, and the IFS published research in 2023 that looks at this more granularly.

Their finding: women who had only ever been with their husband - both having waited until marriage - had a 45% chance of reporting very high relationship stability. Women with five to nine lifetime sexual partners had a 25% chance. Women with ten or more lifetime partners had a 14% chance.

Not the divorce rate. The probability of having a highly stable, high-quality relationship in the first place.

45% for zero prior experience. 14% for ten or more.

The same research found that spouses who had only ever been with each other had the highest levels of sexual satisfaction and emotional connection of any group studied. Not because they were sexually inexperienced - because they had not previously allocated those bonds to other people.

This is the pair bonding mechanism I discuss in The Top Shelf Man. The neurological infrastructure for deep attachment - the oxytocin and dopamine systems that make exclusive pair bonding feel urgent and compelling - appears to function differently depending on how many prior activations it has experienced. The more prior partners, the more those systems seem to habituate. Not universally, and not deterministically. But consistently, across data sets, across decades, and across cultures.

The Premarital History and Divorce Connection

Teachman (2003), published in the Journal of Marriage and Family, found something specific that Wolfinger’s later work confirmed: the only women whose divorce rates were statistically comparable to virgins were women who had cohabited or had sex exclusively with their future husband before marriage - no one else.

Any other prior partner, regardless of the circumstances, significantly increased the probability of eventual marital dissolution. Not correlated slightly. Significantly.

This finding is important because it rules out the “it’s just about experience and comfort with intimacy” explanation. Women who were sexually experienced but exclusively with the man they married showed similar stability to virgins. The variable that drives the divorce risk is not having had sex before marriage - it is having had sex with other men before marriage.

The Infidelity Connection

Divorce is the terminal outcome. Infidelity is often what gets things there.

Wang’s analysis of General Social Survey data found that among divorced or separated women, 58% had cheated on a spouse. Among women who had never cheated, the divorce/separation rate was 17%. Among those who had cheated, it was over 40% - more than twice as high.

And separately, research published in a 2016 study on premarital relationships found that a history of premarital sexual relationships was significantly associated with both emotional infidelity and sexual infidelity within marriage. Prior sexual history and subsequent marital infidelity are statistically connected. They share underlying variance - which is exactly what you would expect from the pair bonding mechanism described above.

A woman who has formed and broken multiple pair bonds is not morally defective. She has, however, repeatedly practiced exactly the behavior that a successful marriage requires her not to engage in. And the data reflects that.

The Counterintuitive Finding (And Why It Does Not Change the Conclusion)

Here is the part that comes up every time this data gets discussed. The 2000s data shows a dip: women with three to nine prior partners had slightly lower divorce rates than women with two. This has been used to argue that the entire body of research is unreliable.

It does not support that conclusion.

Wolfinger himself addressed it directly in the study. The 33% five-year divorce rate for the 10+ group is not statistically significantly different from the 30% rate for the two-partner group - the sample sizes at the tails are smaller and the confidence intervals overlap. What is statistically robust is the cluster at the bottom: zero and one prior partners, consistently lowest, consistently separated from everything above by a large and significant margin.

The practical conclusion does not change. Zero to one prior partners - best outcomes. Two or more - substantially worse. The difference between 25% and 33% in the middle range is noise. The difference between 6% and 30% at the extremes is signal.

What She’ll Tell You (And What to Do About It)

I want to address the practical reality, because the research matters but the coaching matters more.

“Women will never reveal the truth about their notch count to you, so don’t bother asking to get an authentic number.”

I wrote that in The Unplugged Alpha and I stand behind every word of it. The number she gives you is not the number. There are social desirability pressures that cause women to underreport systematically, there is genuine memory variance in how women categorize certain experiences as “partners” or not, and there is the simple reality that she knows what you want to hear.

“At a bare minimum, double whatever number she gives you.”

The research does not give you a magic number cutoff where you should walk away and a magic number below which everything will be fine. What it gives you is a framework for understanding risk, and a reason to take the behavioral signals seriously that she is giving you during the vetting process.

How does she talk about her exes? Does she have a string of serious relationships, or a string of experiences that never went anywhere? When did she lose her virginity, and under what circumstances? What does her relationship history actually look like when you piece it together over time - because women who have had a lot of partners leave traces of it in their stories, even when the number itself never gets said out loud.

The research tells you what the data shows. Vetting tells you where she actually sits on the distribution.

“Gee, I wish my wife had slept with 50 more guys before I married her.” Said no man ever. - The Top Shelf Man

What This Is Not

I want to be precise about what I am and am not saying, because this topic generates a specific kind of bad-faith response.

This is not a moral argument. I am not telling you that women with high partner counts are bad people who deserve to be alone. The research does not make that claim and neither do I.

This is a risk management argument. The data shows that certain characteristics correlate with worse relationship outcomes, and that body count is one of those characteristics. Just as I use the 21 Red Flags as a vetting framework - not to punish women for their past but to make better decisions about what I am exposing myself to - the body count data is a calibration tool for men who are seriously considering long-term commitment.

The man who ignores this data because it makes him uncomfortable is the same man who ignores the other red flags because he is too invested to see clearly. That man ends up in a statistic. He ends up paying the price that the research predicted.

You have the data. Use it.

In Conclusion

This is not a new conversation. Men have known intuitively for generations that a woman’s history mattered. The research has now confirmed, repeatedly, across multiple datasets, across multiple methodologies, across multiple decades, that the intuition was correct.

Women who come to marriage with zero or one prior sexual partner have dramatically better outcomes on every measure that matters - divorce rates, relationship stability, sexual satisfaction, emotional connection, and fidelity. Women with ten or more prior partners have the worst outcomes on every measure. The gradient between those two poles is real, consistent, and statistically significant.

That is the research. The rest is what you decide to do with it.

The Cold, Hard Truth

Never forget:

• Women who married as virgins had roughly a 6% divorce rate within five years, according to Wolfinger’s IFS research using National Survey of Family Growth data. Women with two prior partners had roughly a 30% rate. Women with ten or more had roughly a 33% rate. The lowest risk is at zero or one, and it rises substantially from there.

• IFS research published in 2023 found that couples where both partners had only ever been with each other had a 45% chance of very high relationship stability. Couples where one or both partners had ten or more prior partners had a 14% chance. That is the real number behind the data.

• Teachman (2003) found that the only women whose divorce rates were statistically comparable to virgins were women who had been sexually active only with their future husband before marriage. Any other prior partner significantly increased divorce risk.

• Women will underreport their partner count. At a bare minimum, double whatever number she gives you. The number she provides is a starting point for your assessment, not the answer.

• This is not a moral argument. It is a risk management framework. The data tells you where the risk distribution actually sits. What you do with that information is your decision.

• “If you want to get into a monogamous LTR, or take on the risk of marriage, then do it with a woman that’s a virgin or with a low notch count that lost her virginity later on in life.” The research supports that recommendation completely.

Peace.

The full Red Flags and vetting framework - including Red Flag #11, Big Notch Counts - is in The Unplugged Alpha.

The marriage vetting framework that this research supports is in The Top Shelf Man.

The School of Unplugging is where men who are doing the work on this gather.

Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Steve is 5’6”. He is bald. He is not tall, not particularly handsome by conventional standards, and he spent years in a failed marriage before unplugging and doing the work.

Today, a woman drives 45 minutes to see him twice a week. She brings the drinks he likes, washes dishes after he cooks, and has quit smoking entirely - not because he demanded it, but because staying in his life was worth more to her than the cigarette. She describes the dynamic as “effortless.”

Steve would not exist in the looksmaxxing worldview. He is exactly the kind of man that movement says cannot win. And yet there he is.

I covered this recently. The full video is worth your time before reading on.

What the Research Actually Says About Looks

Before I critique the movement, let me be fair about what it gets right.

Looks matter. I have never said otherwise, and I am not saying it now.

In The Unplugged Alpha, I covered the data directly. Women on dating apps find 80% of men unattractive based almost entirely on a single photograph - not his bio, not his income, not his humor, not his kindness. His picture. When women are shown images of male bodies and asked to rate attractiveness, they subconsciously seek a 1.62 ratio of shoulder to hip width. Studies show 70% of a man’s attractiveness comes from the appearance of upper body strength, with height and leanness accounting for only 10%.

That means physique - specifically the V-taper, the broad shoulders, the narrow waist - is the single most controllable variable in male physical attractiveness, and it is available to almost any man willing to do the work. Getting in shape, dressing well, carrying yourself with a masculine physical presence - this is not vanity. It is one of the most straightforward investments a man can make.

The looksmaxxing movement is right about that.

What it gets catastrophically wrong is the conclusion it draws from it.

A Wheel With Missing Spokes

In The Unplugged Alpha, I built the framework I call the seven spokes of a high-value man. The seven spokes are looks, money, status, game, frame, captivation, and unplugging. The wheel metaphor is deliberate. “A wheel isn’t as strong or as capable if any of the spokes are missing.”

Spokes are synergistic. The stronger you are across all seven, the more each one compounds the others. A man with great physique, solid frame and genuine status is dramatically more attractive than a man with any one of those three in isolation. The whole is significantly greater than the sum of the parts.

The looksmaxxing movement takes on only one spoke - the most visible one, the easiest to photograph, the most immediately legible to a young man who has not yet understood how attraction actually works - and treats it as if it were the entire wheel.

The results are predictable. And they are documented.

You can take the free self-assessment here and see where you actually stand across all seven spokes before deciding where to put your energy.

Status Cannot Be Faked

Here is the insight that the looksmaxxing movement consistently misses, and it is hiding in plain sight.

When Clavicular - one of the movement’s more prominent figures - walks through a public space live streaming with thousands of people watching in real time, he is not generating attraction through looks alone. He has an entourage. He has cameras. He has thousands of people demonstrating publicly that this man is worth watching. That is status. That is captivation. Those are two additional spokes firing simultaneously.

I wrote in The Unplugged Alpha that throughout history, men of high status have had abundant access to high-quality women - that women would rather share a man of genuine status than be saddled with a faithful nobody. Mick Jagger was never considered handsome. The looks spoke was never leading in his case. Status was.

Clavicular has admitted publicly that when the cameras turn off, the dynamic shifts. Women who were warm and agreeable during the livestream become less pleasant when there is no audience. He noticed it. He said it out loud.

What he may not have fully processed is what this reveals: his results have never been purely a function of his face. They have been a function of multiple spokes operating together - looks, yes, but also the status and captivation that a live audience of thousands generates around any man it watches. Remove the audience, remove two spokes, and the results change accordingly.

Status cannot be faked. It must be earned. An audience created through content and novelty is not the same as the earned recognition that follows years of competence, wealth-building, and genuine excellence. The former disappears when you close the app. The latter walks into a room before you do.

When Optimization Becomes Self-Destruction

I started losing my hair at 21. I found strands in my motorcycle helmet. I kept a full head until my early thirties, then used clippers on level one, and by my early forties was shaving my head entirely.

I wrote in The Unplugged Alpha that there is nothing on the market today that will truly reverse male pattern baldness permanently. Band-aid solutions at best slow the process. Most are not fooling anyone.

What I recommended instead: surrender to it, own it, and make sure the rest of your physique is on point. Dwayne Johnson, Vin Diesel, Jason Statham - these are bald men who built images that women do not just accept but actively prefer. Because they own it. Because they maxed out everything else.

The looksmaxxing movement has taken a different approach to hair loss. Clavvicular, on what appeared to be a date, told a woman about his minoxidil and finasteride routine - a DHT inhibitor that suppresses the hormone responsible for hair loss. He then told her, sitting across the table, that a consequence of finasteride is that his Johnson basically stops working.

I want you to sit with what just happened there. This man spent years optimizing his face, his jawline, his brow line, his everything - and in doing so, chemically impaired the one thing that all of that optimization was supposedly in service of. The looks spoke was maxed. The most fundamental aspect of male biological function was sacrificed to achieve it.

This is not a rare edge case. Post-Finasteride Syndrome is a documented clinical phenomenon, characterized by sexual dysfunction, depression, and cognitive impairment that persists long after stopping the drug in a significant subset of users. Men in their twenties are taking it to preserve hair they are not even losing yet, on the advice of other men in their twenties who are broadcasting from behind a camera.

The extreme end of the movement goes further. Trenbolone - a compound developed for the cattle industry, five times stronger than testosterone, with documented psychological side effects including aggression and mood dysregulation - is used by some in the space to accelerate physical development. Men are literally using hammers to modify the bone structure of their faces. They are having their jawlines surgically broken and reset. One figure in the space, already 6’2” - statistically in the top 10% of men by height in North America - has discussed limb lengthening surgery to add an inch or two.

The pursuit of excellence is supposed to build a man. What is being described here is something closer to dismantling one.

The Captivation They Are Missing

In The Unplugged Alpha, I wrote about the captivation spoke in a way that surprised some of my coaching clients.

“Being captivating is often overlooked by many, especially successful older men. I’ve done plenty of consults with men older than me that are divorced, wealthy, and in shape, but are as boring as watching paint dry.”

A man who has built a serious physique, has money, has status - and has nothing interesting happening in his life - is going to underperform his potential with women every single time. Because “you can do anything to a woman - except bore her.”

I had a coaching client once who came across as boring on dates. When I pressed him on what he actually did for fun, he told me about his overlanding passion - off-roading his Toyota truck into remote locations to watch sunsets and explore new terrain. His eyes lit up. He became a different person. I told him to take his next date on that adventure. That day trip turned into an overnight trip watching the stars.

The looksmaxxing movement produces men who have one impressive thing to show and nothing to say. The livestream gives them an artificial substitute for genuine captivation - the audience does the interesting-ness for them, for as long as the broadcast runs. When it ends, the man who never built a real life is still the man who never built a real life.

What Actually Works

Back to Steve.

5’6”. Bald. No extraordinary physical gifts. And a woman is driving 45 minutes to see him twice a week, doing whatever he asks, describing the experience as effortless.

What Steve has is frame. He has captivation - an actual life that women want to be part of. He has game - knowing what women respond to and how to deliver it. He has unplugged from the comforting lies that told him looks were the primary variable. And he built the physique he could build while accepting what he could not change.

Steve is proof that the seven spokes matter more than any single spoke. Not because looks do not matter - they do - but because a man maximized across seven dimensions operates at a level that a man maximized on one dimension simply cannot reach.

That is the difference between the looksmaxxing approach and the approach that actually produces lasting results. One optimizes for a single measurable variable because it is visible and easy to track. The other builds a complete man - someone whose life is genuinely worth entering.

In Conclusion

Look good. That is not optional and it never was. Get in the gym. Build the V-taper. Dress to your physique. Handle your grooming. Own your hair situation, whatever it is. These are genuine investments in a genuine spoke and they will pay dividends.

But do not mistake one spoke for the wheel. Do not sacrifice your hormonal health, your biological function, or your long-term physical integrity for an aesthetic ideal sold to you by men who are 20 years old and have not yet built anything with their lives beyond a following.

The men who win long-term are not the men with the best jawlines. They are the men who built real status, real captivation, real frame, real game - and let good looks be one part of a complete picture rather than the entire canvas.

“Surrender to what you can’t control; max out on what you can.”

That is the work. Everything else is noise.

The Cold, Hard Truth

Never forget:

• 70% of male physical attractiveness comes from upper body strength and the 1.62 shoulder-to-hip ratio. This is the most controllable variable in your physical presentation. Build the physique. Everything else follows from there.

• A wheel is only as strong as all of its spokes. Maxing looks while neglecting money, status, game, frame, captivation, and unplugging produces a man who performs well in photographs and underperforms in real life. The spokes are synergistic. Build all seven.

• Status cannot be faked. The audience watching a livestream generates apparent status and captivation for the duration of the broadcast. When the camera turns off, earned status is the only kind that remains. Earn it.

• Post-Finasteride Syndrome is a documented clinical condition involving persistent sexual dysfunction and depression in a significant subset of users. Sacrificing sexual function to preserve hair is not optimization. It is trading the substance of masculinity for one of its signals.

• The captivation spoke is what most men overlook entirely. A man with money, status, and a great physique who has nothing interesting happening in his life will consistently underperform his potential. Build a life worth entering. Invite women to come along.

• “You can do anything to a woman - except bore her.” Looksmaxxing, at its extreme, produces physically impressive men with nothing behind the image. That is the trap. That is what the cameras-off moment reveals.

• Be very careful who you follow and who you model your life after. Not everyone with a camera and a microphone has earned the right to dispense advice about how to live yours.

Peace.

The full seven spokes framework is in The Unplugged Alpha.

Take the free self-assessment to find out where you are strong and where you need work.

The School of Unplugging is where men who are doing the work across all seven spokes gather. Join here.

Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

“Tattoos all over a beautiful woman is like putting bumper stickers all over a Lamborghini.”

I stand by it. And as it turns out, science does too.

I have covered this topic extensively on the channel, and I want to share the research with you here because the data is more consistent - and more brutal - than most people realize.

This is not an opinion piece. These are peer-reviewed studies. And what they show about tattooed women, their behavior, and how men respond to them is exactly what the red pill has been saying for years, now confirmed in academic literature.

Here are seven studies worth knowing about.

Study 1: Less Attractive, More Promiscuous, Heavier Drinkers

Swami & Furnham (2007/2008) - Published in Body Image

In one of the foundational studies on this topic, 84 female and 76 male undergraduates rated a series of female line drawings that varied across eight levels of tattooing and two hair colours. The results were clear:

Tattooed women were rated as less physically attractive, more sexually promiscuous, and heavier drinkers than untattooed women, with ratings becoming more negative as the number of tattoos increased.

The more tattoos, the worse the scores on every measure. Both men and women rated them this way. And there was an interaction with hair colour - blonde tattooed women were rated most negatively of all.

The perception is consistent, cross-gender, and scales with the degree of tattooing. This is not a fringe view. It is a replicated finding.

Study 2: Men Approach Faster and Expect Sex Sooner

Guéguen (2012/2013) - Published in Archives of Sexual Behavior (PubMed)

A French researcher wanted to find out if the promiscuity perception actually changes male behavior in real-world conditions. The setup was elegant: female confederates were placed lying face-down on a beach, reading a book. In some conditions a temporary lower back tattoo was applied. In others, nothing.

More men approached the tattooed confederates, and they approached faster. In a second experiment with 440 men, those who saw the tattooed woman estimated they had significantly better odds of getting a date and having sex on the first date.

This is important. Men do not respond to tattoos on women by thinking “she is higher quality.” They respond by thinking “she is more accessible.” That is not the same thing. Not even close.

Study 3: Tattoos as Adolescent Risk Markers

Carroll, Riffenburgh, Roberts & Myhre (2002) - Published in Pediatrics

This study is probably the most cited in the field. A 58-question survey based on the CDC Youth Risk Behavior Survey was administered to adolescents at a military medical clinic. The finding was stark:

Adolescents with tattoos and/or body piercings were more likely to have engaged in risk-taking behaviors at greater levels of involvement than those without. These included disordered eating behavior, gateway drug use, hard drug use, sexual activity, and suicide. Suicide was specifically associated with females having tattoos.

Tattoos and body piercings were also found to be more common in females than males. The researchers concluded that when a clinician sees a tattoo on an adolescent, it should trigger further inquiry into other risk behaviors, because the tattoo is a marker - not a cause, but a signal.

Study 4: High-Risk Behavior Confirmed in a Second Adolescent Study

Roberts & Ryan (2002) - Published in Pediatrics

A second study published in the same journal in the same year, by overlapping authors, confirmed and extended the findings. Tattooing was specifically associated with high-risk behavior in adolescents, including earlier sexual initiation and higher rates of engagement in dangerous activities.

Two independent studies, same journal, same year, same finding. The pattern holds.

Study 5: Earlier Sexual Initiation and More Liberal Sexual Attitudes

Nowosielski, Sitek, Mazur, Kozlowski & Sodowski (2012) - Journal of Sexual Medicine

120 young adults aged 20-35 were surveyed across three groups: controls, those with tattoos, and those with piercings. The finding:

Body modifications were associated with early sexual initiation and more liberal attitudes toward sexual behavior. Those with body modifications reported engaging sexually at a younger age than those without.

Earlier sexual debut correlates with higher lifetime partner counts. Higher partner counts correlate with reduced pair-bonding capacity and higher divorce rates. The tattoo is not the problem. It is the marker pointing at the problem.

Study 6: Tattooed Women Are Genuinely More Sexually Open

“Showing Skin” (2020) - Published in Sexuality & Culture, Springer Nature

814 women, both tattooed and non-tattooed, completed detailed questionnaires about sexual openness, personality, sensation-seeking, and egalitarian beliefs. The study was specifically designed to test whether the stereotype of tattooed women as more sexually open was accurate - or just a stereotype.

The stereotype was confirmed. Tattooed women with visible tattoos were more sexually open than their non-tattooed counterparts. Men perceive better chances for sexual success with tattooed women, and the data indicates those perceptions are not unfounded.

Read that again.

Study 7: Personality, Extroversion, and Sexual Motivation

Deschler, Schönberg & Kasten (2020) - Archives of Dermatology and Skin Care

803 tattooed women aged 16-57 completed the Big Five personality test alongside a risk-taking assessment. The findings:

Extraverts had greater extent of tattooed skin area than introverts. Openness to experience positively correlated with the size of tattooed skin areas. Openness also positively correlated with sexual motivation and the design of tattoos chosen.

Higher extraversion in women is associated with more sexual partners. Higher openness is associated with more liberal sexual attitudes. Both traits correlated with the extent of tattooing. The tattoo is not just an aesthetic choice - it is a personality signal with documented downstream behavioral implications.

Additional Research Worth Mentioning

Heywood et al. (2012) - Annals of Epidemiology - surveyed a large representative Australian sample and found that women with 11 or more lifetime sexual partners were over six times more likely to have tattoos than women with zero to one partners.

Kertzman et al. (2019) - PLOS ONE - 120 women matched for age and socioeconomic background. Tattooed women showed significantly lower self-esteem scores than non-tattooed women (p=.012). The literature on this one is mixed, but the finding is there.

Morlock et al. (2023) - Cureus - 3,033 US adults, large representative sample. Tattooed participants, the majority of whom were female, reported higher rates of moderate-to-severe depression (35.3% vs 22.9%) and anxiety (32.0% vs 20.2%) than non-tattooed participants. Nearly one in five tattooed people regretted at least one tattoo.

The pile keeps growing.

What This Means for Vetting

Let me be clear about a few things.

This data is about patterns and correlations, not moral judgments. A woman can have tattoos and be a genuinely good partner and a good person. These studies establish probabilities, not certainties.

Second - the studies are consistent. Ten independent pieces of research, conducted across multiple countries and decades, all point in the same direction. Men perceive tattooed women as more sexually accessible. The perception tracks reality. Earlier sexual initiation, more liberal attitudes, higher openness to casual encounters - these are the findings, not the opinions.

Third - as a man doing the work of vetting, you need to understand what you are working with. The Lamborghini analogy is not about being harsh. It is about recognizing that you are looking at a signal, and the signal is telling you something that research confirms. Heavily tattooed women, by the data, are higher risk. The more tattoos, the stronger the signal.

A man chasing excellence does not ignore signals. He reads them, acts accordingly, and keeps his standards intact.

In Conclusion

The manosphere has said this for years. Now it is in peer-reviewed literature. The perception of tattooed women as more sexually promiscuous is not a stereotype in the pejorative sense - it is an accurate pattern recognition tool that tracks documented behavioral differences. Men have been processing this signal intuitively for a long time. The academic literature is simply catching up.

The full vetting framework - the 21 Red Flags, the Green Flags, and how to use both systematically - is in The Unplugged Alpha.

The Cold, Hard Truth

Never forget:

• Seven independent peer-reviewed studies, conducted across multiple countries and decades, all point in the same direction: tattooed women are perceived as more promiscuous, and those perceptions track actual behavioral differences including earlier sexual initiation, higher sexual openness, and more liberal attitudes toward casual sex.

• The more tattoos, the stronger the signal. Every study that measured degree of tattooing found that the correlations strengthened with increasing coverage. A small wrist tattoo is different from extensive body coverage. The data distinguishes between them.

• Men approach tattooed women faster and expect sex sooner. This is documented in a real-world beach experiment. Men are not wrong to read the signal - but understanding what the signal actually means is what separates a man who vets well from a man who gets played.

• Tattoos in adolescence correlate with risk-taking behavior across multiple categories: drug use, disordered eating, early sexual activity, and suicide. The earlier the tattoo, the stronger the risk correlation. This is published in Pediatrics, the flagship journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

• None of this means tattooed women are bad people. It means they are higher-risk partners for men who want long-term, stable, monogamous relationships. You can know the data and still make your own choices.

• “Tattoos all over a beautiful woman is like putting bumper stickers all over a Lamborghini.” I wrote that years ago. I still stand by it.

Peace.

The full vetting framework is in The Unplugged Alpha.

Live discussions like this happen regularly inside the School of Unplugging.

Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

A reader left a comment on my article, “What Feminism Actually Delivered”, pointing out that there is a layer to the female happiness collapse that the academic literature rarely accounts for. They called it the chemical variable. They are right - and as it turns out, I have been writing about this for years.

This is the follow-up piece.

In The Top Shelf Man, I dedicated an entire section of the hypergamy chapter to Hormonal Birth Control - what it does to female mate preferences, what it does to her libido, and what I believe it is doing to the divorce rate. The research since then has only made the case stronger. When you line it all up, the pill is one of the most consequential social experiments in human history, and the results are in.

They are not good.

What the Pill Actually Does

The mechanism is simple, and I covered it directly in The Top Shelf Man.

“Hormonal Birth Control (HBC) works by putting women in a perpetual state of imagined pregnancy, and that often shifts her preference for men dramatically.”

That is not a fringe claim. That is the established pharmacological reality of how hormonal contraception operates. It overrides the natural hormonal cycle - the ovulatory shifts, the testosterone surges, the biological signals that drive genuine attraction - and replaces all of it with a flat, synthetic hormonal state that mimics early pregnancy.

The downstream effect on mate selection is exactly what you would expect. A woman in early pregnancy is not looking for the dominant, testosterone-signaling alpha who lit her up at the foam cannon party. She is looking for a stable, predictable provider who is going to be around. As I wrote: “Women on HBC show less preference for hyper-masculine traits, as the hormonal cues driving these preferences are muted, and there is a shift towards stability-oriented partners.”

In plain language: “While she’s on HBC, her preference is basically for beta men.”

She May Have Married the Wrong Man

This is the part that should be in every conversation about the modern divorce rate, and it almost never is.

Researchers have known for years that women’s mate preferences shift significantly depending on whether they are on hormonal contraception or cycling naturally. The most compelling line of research involves MHC genetics - the Major Histocompatibility Complex, the immune system genes that produce the biological compatibility signals women unconsciously detect through scent.

Off the pill, women are consistently attracted to men with different MHC profiles - men whose immune genetics complement their own, producing healthier offspring. This preference is powerful, deeply embedded, and entirely below the level of conscious thought. It is her biology running its vetting protocol.

On the pill, that preference reverses. Women on hormonal contraception tend to prefer men with similar MHC profiles - men who, genetically speaking, are less compatible. The signal that should be pointing her toward the right man is chemically suppressed. Alvergne and Lummaa’s 2010 review in Trends in Ecology and Evolution documented this shift and raised the obvious question: what happens when she comes off the pill?

The answer is exactly what you would predict. She stops finding him attractive.

I said it directly in The Top Shelf Man: “Quite often, women spend their 20s or 30s on HBC for the duration of the relationship, and when she gets married, and comes off HBC to start a family, she surprisingly finds herself no longer as attracted to the man she married when her menstrual cycle returns.”

I called it a strong contributor to the high divorce rate in the West. The MHC research explains exactly why.

The Depression Nobody Is Talking About

Here is the data point that should have ended this experiment fifty years ago, and instead got buried.

In 2016, Skovlund and colleagues published a study in JAMA Psychiatry that tracked one million Danish women over fourteen years. The finding was unambiguous: hormonal contraception was significantly associated with subsequent first diagnosis of depression and subsequent antidepressant use. The association was strongest among adolescents. The study controlled for prior depression, socioeconomic factors, and other confounders.

One million women. Fourteen years. The New England Journal of Medicine.

Now go back to the female happiness studies I cited in the last article. Stevenson and Wolfers identified the paradox in 2009 - women getting objectively freer while reporting declining wellbeing. Blanchflower and Bryson’s 2024 analysis confirmed the paradox had resolved into outright reversal - men are now happier on every measure.

These happiness researchers controlled for age, education, employment, marital status, income, health, and country. Not one of those studies controlled for hormonal contraception use. Not one.

In the decades that female happiness was collapsing, hormonal contraception use was climbing. The same decades. The same populations. And the largest study ever conducted on the subject found a significant association between the pill and depression.

Nobody in the mainstream is connecting these dots. You are reading this because you already know why.

The Libido Paradox

This is the one that should make every woman who has ever been handed a prescription for hormonal contraception genuinely angry.

The cultural narrative of the pill as sexual liberation is perhaps the most successful piece of pharmaceutical marketing in history. The pill was freedom. The pill was power. The pill was how women took control of their bodies and their sexuality.

What the pill actually does: it reduces free testosterone in women by elevating sex hormone-binding globulin, which binds and deactivates the testosterone that drives female libido. Panzer and colleagues documented this in 2006, and it has been replicated since.

As I wrote in The Top Shelf Man: “HBC can also lower the libido in some women by reducing free testosterone and stabilizing the hormones that drive her libido.”

The chemical that was supposed to liberate female sexuality biologically suppresses it. Women were handed a tool for sexual freedom that chemically reduces their desire for sex, alters their attraction to the men they are with, and is associated with clinical depression - and the medical establishment spent fifty years calling it progress.

If the pharmaceutical industry had designed a product to quietly undermine female wellbeing while appearing to enhance it, it would look exactly like this.

The Divorce Connection

I want to be direct about what I believe is happening here, because it connects everything.

A woman spends her twenties on hormonal contraception. Her preferences are shifted toward beta traits - stability, emotional warmth, provision. She meets a man who satisfies those suppressed, pregnancy-state preferences. They get married. She comes off the pill to start a family.

Her cycle returns. Her natural hormonal vetting protocol comes back online. She smells him differently. She feels differently about him. She cannot explain it, and her inability to explain it makes her call it falling out of love. What is actually happening is that she is meeting her husband for the first time with her biology intact - and discovering that the version of herself who chose him was running on a pharmaceutical substitute for her actual preferences.

I wrote it plainly in The Top Shelf Man: this is “a strong contributor to the high divorce rate we see today in the West.”

Women initiate approximately eighty percent of divorces. The average marriage that ends in divorce does so within eight years - which is often right in the window of coming off HBC to have children, going through the hormonal reset, and discovering the attraction is gone. The family court system is waiting at the finish line when she gets there.

Nobody is talking about this. The divorce statistics get reported. The family court destruction gets reported - briefly, and poorly. The pharmaceutical mechanism underneath it gets no coverage at all.

What To Do About It

If you are in a relationship and thinking seriously about the long term, this matters in a very practical way.

I put my recommendation directly in The Top Shelf Man: “it’s better for a long-term relationship with a woman to keep her off HBC, and let her cycle run naturally - especially if you are considering children or marriage.”

The alternatives exist and they work. A copper IUD is non-hormonal and 99% effective at preventing unwanted pregnancies. Apps like Natural Cycles paired with an Oura ring are FDA-approved and highly effective when used correctly. These are not fringe alternatives - they are medically established, widely available, and they do not flood her body with synthetic hormones that override her natural mate-selection biology.

If the attraction she has for you was formed while she was on hormonal contraception, you should want to know what happens when she cycles naturally. Better to find out before the marriage, the mortgage, and the kids - not after.

Dr. Anthony Jay made this point from the endocrine side at the 1% Forum last year: the xeno-estrogens accumulating in the modern body - through plastics, fragrances, and synthetic hormones - are systematically disrupting the hormonal environment that human biology was built to operate in. The pill is not separate from that problem. It is the most direct version of it, swallowed voluntarily every morning by hundreds of millions of women who were told it was liberation.

In Conclusion

“What Feminism Actually Delivered” documented the outcome: women are objectively less happy by every available measure, despite fifty years of objective progress. This article documents one of the mechanisms.

Hormonal contraception shifts women toward beta men. It suppresses the biological signals that drive genuine attraction. It is associated in a landmark million-woman study with depression and antidepressant use. It reduces free testosterone and with it female libido. It may cause women to select genetically incompatible partners and then lose attraction when they come off it. And it has been universally presented as a tool of female empowerment while quietly delivering the opposite.

The feminist program handed women legal rights, career access, and the pill. I covered what the legal rights and career access produced in the last article. The pill deserved its own piece.

The building blocks of female unhappiness are not mysterious. They are documented, peer-reviewed, and sitting in plain sight. The institutions that delivered those building blocks have no interest in admitting it.

Unplug. Read the data. Draw your own conclusions.

The Cold, Hard Truth

Never forget:

• Hormonal Birth Control puts women in a perpetual state of imagined pregnancy, shifting their preferences toward beta, stability-oriented men. Her attraction under HBC is not her natural attraction. Those are not the same woman.

• Women on HBC show suppressed preference for masculine traits and reduced libido from lower free testosterone. The chemical designed to liberate female sexuality biologically reduces it.

• A 2016 JAMA Psychiatry study tracking one million women over fourteen years found hormonal contraception was significantly associated with first diagnosis of depression and antidepressant use. Not one of the major female happiness decline studies controlled for this variable.

• Coming off HBC after marriage to start a family frequently triggers loss of attraction for the man she chose under hormonal influence. Her cycle returns, her biology comes back online, and she meets her husband for the first time with her actual preferences intact. The divorce statistics follow.

• If you are serious about a long-term relationship, it is better for her to cycle naturally. The attraction that forms off HBC is the attraction you can count on. The alternatives to hormonal contraception - copper IUD, Natural Cycles, Oura ring - are established, effective, and do not override her biology.

• The happiness researchers never controlled for hormonal contraception use. The pharmaceutical mechanism behind the female happiness collapse is sitting in plain sight in the academic literature. It is not being discussed. That absence is the story.

Peace.

The full hypergamy framework - including the HBC section - is in The Top Shelf Man.

Everything on female nature, vetting, and what drives genuine attraction starts in The Unplugged Alpha.

The conversation is happening live inside the School of Unplugging.

Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

A lot of men already knew this and were glad someone said it out loud. But many men are genuinely confused about why it matters.

It matters because language is not neutral. Every word you use sub-communicates something about your frame before you’ve said anything of substance. And if you are walking around calling your girlfriend your “partner,” you are broadcasting something about yourself that you probably don’t intend to broadcast.

Let me explain what you’re actually saying - and then let’s add a second phrase to the list, because “I feel” is often just as bad.

I covered both of these in 2022.

“Partner”

The word “partner” entered straight male vocabulary the same way most of the language changes in the last thirty years entered it - through the progressive re-engineering of social norms, pushed through universities, HR departments, and mainstream media, and adopted by men who didn’t notice or didn’t care.

The argument for using it is usually something about gender neutrality, or avoiding the implied ownership of “boyfriend” and “girlfriend,” or simply that it sounds more mature and serious than the alternatives. These are bad reasons, and here is why.

You’re not running a law firm. “Partner” is a business term. It describes two people with equal stakes in a shared enterprise, bound by contract, with legally defined roles and responsibilities. That is not what your relationship is - or at least, it shouldn’t be. If you are leading your relationship correctly, it is not a 50/50 partnership. It is a man with a frame and a woman who has chosen to enter it. “Partner” linguistically flattens that dynamic before the conversation has even started.

You’re not equals. This is the one that makes people uncomfortable, so let me be direct about what I mean. Men and women are not the same, they are not interchangeable, and healthy relationships are not run by committee. As I wrote in The Unplugged Alpha: “Men and women aren’t equal, or the same. We are different, and should be a complement to one another’s life, if the man’s frame is the one leading in the relationship.” Calling her your “partner” is a linguistic concession to the idea that your relationship is a flat democracy. It is not, and she does not actually want it to be - whether she knows that or not.

You’re not gay. I say this without judgment toward anyone who is. But “partner” became the preferred term in the LGBTQ community specifically because the traditional terms - boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, wife - implied a gender binary they wanted to move away from. If you are a straight man in a relationship with a woman, you have the most precise vocabulary available to you. Use it. She is your girlfriend, your woman, your wife. Own those words. “Partner” is a retreat from specificity dressed up as sophistication.

The deeper issue is what the word signals about your relationship to your own frame. A man who is comfortable in his masculinity does not reach for gender-neutral terminology to describe his romantic life. That linguistic hedge is the same energy as apologizing for taking up space. Cut it out.

“I Feel”

“I feel” belongs on the same list.

“I feel” has quietly replaced “I think,” “I believe,” “I know,” and “In my view” in the vocabulary of a large percentage of men, and the substitution is not accidental. It came from the same place “partner” came from - the therapeutic re-engineering of how men are expected to communicate, pushed aggressively through the school system and the HR industrial complex over the past three decades.

Here is the practical problem. “I feel” is an emotional frame. It opens you to a specific kind of challenge that “I think” does not. When you say “I think this is a bad idea,” you are making a claim about the world that can be engaged with on its merits. When you say “I feel like this is a bad idea,” you have done two things: you have softened your own position by presenting it as an emotion rather than a judgment, and you have implicitly invited the other person to respond to your feelings rather than your reasoning.

In a business context, “I feel” makes you sound like you lack conviction. In a relationship context, it makes you sound like you are seeking validation for your own emotional state rather than leading from a position of clarity. Neither is the energy of a man in his frame.

The “I” statements I teach are not “I feel” statements. In The Unplugged Alpha, I discuss the distinction clearly: “I don’t date women who smoke. I find it deeply unattractive and an immediate turn-off.” That is an “I” statement that conveys standards, confidence, and outcome independence. “I feel like smoking is kind of a dealbreaker for me” is the same information wrapped in a hedge that communicates the opposite of all three.

Replace “I feel” with “I think,” “I believe,” “In my view,” or simply make the statement without the preamble. “This is a bad idea” is stronger than “I feel like this might not be the best idea.” Your convictions do not need to be framed as feelings to be heard. Lead with what you know and believe, not with how you are processing it emotionally in the moment.

The Broader Point

These two phrases are symptoms of a larger pattern, which is that a lot of men have been slowly conditioned to communicate in ways that soften, qualify, and feminize their own positions - and most of them are doing it without realizing it.

Other phrases worth examining: “Is that okay with you?” when it is not actually a question you need answered. “Sorry to bother you.” “We were thinking...” when you mean “I decided.” “Does that make sense?” as a reflex at the end of every statement, soliciting approval for your own ideas. “My bad” deployed for things that are not actually your fault or require no apology.

None of these are catastrophic in isolation. What they add up to, over time, is a pattern of sub-communication that tells everyone around you - including the woman in your life - that you do not fully occupy your own frame.

Sub-communication is frame made visible. You do not tell people who you are - you show it. And the words you choose are part of the show.

In Conclusion

Language is a small thing that signals a large thing. The man who calls his girlfriend his “partner” and prefaces every opinion with “I feel” is broadcasting something about himself every time he opens his mouth. He probably doesn’t know it. The people around him feel it anyway.

These are small corrections with outsized effects. Make them.

The Cold, Hard Truth

Never forget:

• “Partner” is a business term for people with equal stakes in a legal enterprise. Your relationship is not that. She is your girlfriend, your woman, your wife. Use the precise language that reflects your actual dynamic.

• “I feel” is an emotional frame. It softens your position, invites emotional responses to what should be rational positions, and signals a lack of conviction. Replace it with “I think,” “I believe,” or simply the direct statement itself.

• Language is sub-communication. Frame is not just what you do - it is how you speak, what you choose to say, and what you choose not to apologize for. Every word is either maintaining your frame or surrendering it.

• These habits did not develop accidentally. They were deliberately introduced into the male vocabulary through institutions designed to make men more compliant and easier to manage. The unplugged man notices this and corrects it.

• Small corrections compound. You are not making one change - you are rewiring how you present yourself to the world across thousands of interactions. Start now.

Peace.

Everything I teach about frame, language, and how a man presents himself starts in The Unplugged Alpha and goes deeper in The Top Shelf Man.

If you want to be around men who are actively working on this - The School of Unplugging is where that conversation happens.

If women got everything they asked for, why are so many of them so miserable?

In this article I’ll give you the answer.

I want to be clear about something before we go further. This is not a political piece. I am not interested in relitigating the culture wars or picking a side in a debate that has been running since before I was born. What I am interested in is data, and the data on female wellbeing in the post-feminist West is some of the most consistent and most studiously ignored data in social science.

So let’s look at it.

The Happiness Paradox

In 2009, economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers published a paper called The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness. Their finding was straightforward and devastating: despite dramatic gains in legal rights, educational attainment, workforce participation, and economic independence over the preceding thirty years, women’s reported happiness had declined - both in absolute terms and relative to men.

Women were objectively freer than at any point in recorded history. They were also objectively less happy.

The paper generated significant academic discussion and was largely ignored by mainstream culture, because it was inconvenient. The entire narrative of the feminist project is that liberation produces flourishing. The data said the opposite was happening, and nobody in the business of selling that narrative wanted to examine why.

Here is why.

The feminist program was built on a foundational assumption that has never been tested against reality: that women would find the same things fulfilling that men find fulfilling. Career success. Professional status. Financial independence. Sexual freedom without consequence. If those things produce a good life for men, the logic went, they should produce a good life for women too.

That assumption was wrong. Not because women are inferior to men, but because women are not men, and the things that produce satisfaction in a male psychology do not automatically produce satisfaction in a female one. Female wellbeing correlates more strongly with relationship quality, family connection, and a sense of belonging than with income or career status. This is not a political statement. It is a finding that has been replicated across cultures and across decades, and it has been consistently set aside because it is politically inconvenient.

The women who followed the program - delayed marriage, prioritized career, treated traditional femininity as oppression, treated men as adversaries rather than partners - arrived at thirty-five or forty with a LinkedIn profile and a condo and a social circle that tells them they should feel empowered. Many of them do not feel empowered. They feel alone.

The Marriage Collapse

Feminism told women that marriage was a trap. A patriarchal institution designed to subjugate women, limit their potential, and transfer their autonomy to men. The prescription was to delay it, deprioritize it, or avoid it altogether. Women followed the prescription.

Marriage rates in the Western world are at historic lows. The average age of first marriage has pushed into the late twenties and beyond. A growing percentage of women will never marry at all. And here is the part nobody talks about: a large percentage of the women who are not married did not choose to be unmarried. They chose to delay, and they ran out of options they found acceptable.

This is where hypergamy meets the wall and produces the loneliness epidemic hiding in plain sight.

Women’s mate selection criteria do not compress as the biological clock ticks. A woman who was unwilling to commit to a man at twenty-five because he was not successful enough, tall enough, or high-status enough does not lower those standards at thirty-five. If anything, she raises them. She has spent ten years building her own income and status, which means she now requires a man who exceeds what she has built - and the pool of men who exceed what a successful thirty-five-year-old woman has built is dramatically smaller than the pool that was available to her at twenty-five.

The men she wants are not waiting for her. They are with younger women who did not spend their prime years telling them they were the problem.

I am not saying this to be cruel. I am saying it because nobody else will say it, and a lot of women are suffering the consequences of a decision they made in their twenties based on advice that was catastrophically wrong.

The Fertility Crisis

The feminist movement told women that children were optional - that motherhood was one choice among many, no more noble or natural than any other path, and that women who chose career over children were not losing anything, just choosing differently.

Birth rates across the Western world are now below replacement level. In country after country, the number of children being born is not sufficient to sustain the existing population. This is not a distant demographic forecast. It is happening now, and the downstream consequences - economic, social, medical, structural - are already beginning to arrive.

Women who chose to delay or forgo children are not, in aggregate, reporting that the trade was worth it. The research on this is consistent and the numbers are striking. A 2025 study by the Institute for Family Studies and the Wheatley Institute - a survey of 3,000 American women aged 25 to 55 led by psychologist Jean Twenge - found that married mothers are nearly twice as likely to report being very happy compared to single childless women. Nearly half of married mothers say their lives feel meaningful most or all of the time. Among single, childless women, that figure drops to one in three. More than 80% of mothers report being happy with their lives, compared to 68% of women without children. The women who bought the narrative that a career would be as fulfilling as a family are discovering, in their forties and fifties, that the narrative was wrong.

There is a concept I have discussed at length in coaching calls and on the channel that I call the epiphany phase - the moment, usually in the mid-to-late thirties, when a woman realizes what she traded away. The relationship she did not commit to at twenty-eight because he was not quite right. The children she did not have because the time was never quite right. The years she spent building something that does not love her back.

The epiphany phase is real. It is also, in most cases, too late to undo the decisions that led to it.

The Loneliness Nobody Talks About

Women are more medicated than at any point in history. Antidepressant use among women in Western countries has been rising for decades, and women consume them at more than twice the rate that men do. Women are also the primary consumers of therapy, self-help content, and the entire wellness industrial complex that has grown up around the gap between what their lives look like on paper and what they feel like to live.

The Instagram version of the modern independent woman - the condo, the career, the solo travel, the brunch pictures, the liquor cart stacked with half-empty bottles - is a performance. I have seen it up close from Toronto to Los Angeles, and I can tell you what it looks like from the inside. It looks like isolation justified as independence. It looks like loneliness dressed up as freedom. It looks like women who were told that needing a man made them weak, and who spent years proving they did not need one, arriving at the realization that they wanted one all along and now cannot find one who will stay.

I did a video on this that is worth watching. A woman in Toronto posted a “day in the life” video celebrating her single, childless life and presenting it as aspirational. Watch what I actually see when I look at her life.

I’ve dated women that look and act exactly like this. I know what’s actually going on behind that camera.

What the Data Actually Points To

None of this means women should have no rights, no careers, or no autonomy. I want to be precise about what I am actually saying, because the usual response to any of this is to accuse the messenger of wanting to send women back to 1950.

What the data says is that the feminist program, in its specific claim that women would thrive by replicating the male path through life, was empirically wrong. Not morally wrong. Empirically wrong. The outcomes are measurable, they have been measured, and they do not support the theory.

Women who build families in their twenties with men they respect, in relationships where masculine leadership is present and welcomed, report higher satisfaction than women who delay. Women who maintain their femininity rather than treating it as a liability report better relationship outcomes. Women who operate with an understanding of what actually drives attraction - rather than what they have been told should drive attraction - have better results in the sexual marketplace. These are not opinions. They are documented patterns.

The uncomfortable conclusion is that a significant portion of female suffering in the modern West is the direct result of women following advice that was ideologically motivated rather than empirically grounded. They were told a story about what would make them happy. The story was wrong. And the institutions that told them the story have no interest in correcting the record, because correcting the record would mean admitting that the last fifty years of social engineering produced a significant amount of unnecessary female misery.

I am not going to pretend I feel no sympathy for women who followed the program in good faith and arrived at forty alone, childless, and medicated. I do. But the solution is not to double down on the ideology that produced the problem. The solution is to look at the data honestly and adjust accordingly.

The data has been available for a long time. Most people just are not willing to read it.

In Conclusion

Women got everything feminism promised them. The legal rights, the career access, the sexual freedom, the institutional support, the cultural validation. Every box got checked. And the result, measured not by ideology but by reported wellbeing, relationship satisfaction, fertility rates, and antidepressant consumption, is a generation of women who are freer than any women in history and, by several metrics, less happy.

This is not a coincidence. It is a consequence.

If you want to understand the full framework for what actually drives female nature, what women respond to versus what they say they respond to, and why the cultural narrative consistently gets this wrong, it is all in The Unplugged Alpha and The Top Shelf Man. Start there.

The Cold, Hard Truth

Never forget:

• The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness is not a theory. It is a documented, peer-reviewed finding that female wellbeing declined as female freedom expanded. The feminist movement has never provided a satisfactory explanation for this, because no satisfactory explanation exists within the ideological framework.

• Hypergamy does not pause while a woman builds her career. The men she passes over at twenty-five are not waiting for her at thirty-five. The pool of men who exceed what a successful woman has built gets smaller as she gets older. This is not cruelty. It is arithmetic.

• The epiphany phase is real. Most women who delayed family formation for career advancement report, in their late thirties and forties, that the trade was not what they were told it would be. By the time the realization arrives, the window has usually closed.

• Female suffering in the modern West is not random. A significant portion of it is the downstream consequence of ideologically motivated advice that was empirically wrong. Women who were told that following their biology made them weak paid a real price for believing it.

• None of this is political. It is biological. The women who aligned their choices with their biology - family, partnership, femininity - report better outcomes than the women who were told their biology was a limitation to overcome. The data is the data.

• Comforting lies have consequences. The female primary social order spent fifty years selling women a story about what would make them happy. The story was wrong. And the women who paid the price deserve honesty, not more ideology.

Peace.

If this landed - the School of Unplugging is where the conversation continues.

Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

I have been watching something develop over the past few weeks that I want to share with you. Not because I am certain where it is going. I am not. But because the pattern I am seeing has shown up before, and I have some experience recognizing it.

In The Top Shelf Man, I wrote about COVID directly. Licensed professionals were "forced to take experimental vaccinations, that later on proved to be neither safe, nor effective - just to keep their careers." Within twelve months of lockdown, all of my friends with a location-independent business had moved out of Canada to a less restrictive business environment. That is what it looks like when you are positioned for exactly this kind of government overreach - and that experience applies directly to what I am watching develop right now.

Let me tell you what is documented, what is not, and what the pattern looks like from where I am sitting.

What Actually Happened

On April 1, 2026, the MV Hondius cruise ship departed Ushuaia, Argentina - the gateway to Patagonia. Within weeks, nine confirmed and two suspected cases of Andes virus had emerged onboard. Three people died. The ship’s passengers came from twenty-three countries and, by the time the outbreak was confirmed, had already dispersed globally.

One detail matters more than any other: Andes virus is the only hantavirus on earth with documented proof person-to-person transmission. And the ship departed from exactly the right endemic territory to acquire exactly this virus and carry it across twenty-three countries.

That is the factual starting point.

The Infrastructure That Was Already There

Here is where the pattern starts.

In September 2023 - two and a half years before the Hondius outbreak - Moderna signed an R&D agreement with the Korea University Vaccine Innovation Center to develop an mRNA hantavirus vaccine under Moderna’s “mRNA Access Program.” By July 2024, a full-scale collaboration was formally announced, with Moderna’s Chief Medical Officer personally present in Seoul. By February 2025, mouse trials confirmed experimental doses prevented infection.

Two patents already exist and are publicly filed:

• US20250127870A1 - “mRNA Vaccines Against Hantavirus”

• WO2023043901A1 - “mRNA vaccines against hantavirus”

Both filed before the outbreak.

There is also a military program: SAB-163, a pan-hantavirus antibody using transgenic cows, funded by USAMRIID since 2013. It is IND-enabled and ready for Phase 1 clinical trials. BARDA previously funded SAB Biotherapeutics for COVID to the tune of over $117 million. A hantavirus contract has not yet been announced. Watch for it.

Here is the question I keep coming back to: why would anyone patent and fund mRNA hantavirus vaccines before an outbreak, for a virus with approximately 900 documented US cases over thirty years? That is not a commercial market. No pharmaceutical company makes that investment on return-on-investment logic alone. The answer, if you look at the documentation, involves NIAID Category A biodefense classification, Disease X pre-positioning, and a military pipeline that has been quietly running since 2013.

The Exercises

Two pandemic preparedness exercise preceded the Hondius outbreak, and one more ran concurrently.

February 5-6, 2026: CEPI ran a Korea tabletop exercise described as a “fictitious deadly virus spreading fast,” focused on the 100-Day Mission - the framework for developing vaccines within 100 days of a pathogen being identified. Run by CEPI CEO Richard Hatchett alongside Korean MFDS, KDCA, and IVI Seoul. The same institutional cluster working with Moderna on the hantavirus vaccine program.

April 22-23, 2026: WHO Exercise Polaris II. Twenty-six countries. Six hundred experts. A fictional bacterium pandemic scenario. Results published April 27. The Hondius ship was already at sea with cases developing when this exercise concluded.

May 2026: US health department tabletops for FIFA World Cup outbreak scenarios, running concurrently with Hondius news breaking publicly.

For reference: Event 201 ran October 18, 2019. COVID emerged November 2019. Roughly two months. CEPI Korea ran February 5-6, 2026. Hondius outbreak confirmed early May 2026. Roughly three months.

I am not telling you those gaps prove anything. I am telling you they are worth noticing.

The Institutional Response

WHO Director-General Tedros personally flew to Tenerife to oversee the response to what was, at the time, eight to eleven cases on a single ship. Maria van Kerkhove - the same face from COVID - was running media.

This detail is worth sitting with. Eleven cases. One ship. The Director-General of the WHO. Personally. On a plane. To Spain.

There is also this: hantavirus is not currently on CEPI’s official priority pathogen list. Their list covers Chikungunya, coronaviruses, Disease X, filoviruses, Lassa, Mpox, Nipah, and Rift Valley Fever. Hantavirus is not there. Yet CEPI ran a Korea exercise with the exact institutional cluster developing hantavirus vaccines. The predicted next move, if this follows the established pattern, is a post-Hondius addition to that list. That is how Disease X gets a name.

Moderna’s stock surged on the outbreak news. “Emergency access and emergency approval” language has already been floated publicly.

The Treatment Question

In February 2022, Dr. Vladimir Zelenko - the American physician known internationally for his COVID treatment protocol - shared a message with what he called profound national security implications. He identified a category of viruses that all replicate using the same enzyme: RNA-dependent RNA polymerase, or RdRp. The list included COVID (all strains), influenza, RSV, Ebola, Marburg - and hantavirus.

His argument: zinc ionophores, including hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, quercetin, and EGCG, inhibit RdRp activity. Cheap. Generic. Many available over the counter.

Zelenko died in June 2022. His claims about COVID treatment were vigorously disputed by mainstream medicine, and no high-quality clinical trials have established this approach specifically for hantavirus. The biological mechanism he identified - that hantavirus is an ssRNA virus dependent on RdRp for replication - is not scientifically disputed. Whether zinc ionophores meaningfully inhibit that mechanism in humans is a different and unanswered question.

What is notable is not whether Zelenko was right. What is notable is that this line of inquiry - whether any existing, cheap, generic treatment might be relevant - is entirely absent from current expert commentary and media coverage of the Hondius outbreak. Given what we watched play out during COVID, that absence is a data point.

If you want to understand why cheap existing treatments disappear from the conversation, understand this: an effective existing treatment kills the Emergency Use Authorization pathway. The EUA pathway is what creates the liability shield. And the liability shield is what makes a $20 billion vaccine rollout financially viable for the companies that have been quietly building the infrastructure for the past two and a half years.

What We Know, What We Don’t, and What We Can Reasonably Suspect

I am going to be straight with you about what falls into each category.

Documented facts: Moderna and Korea University have been developing mRNA hantavirus vaccines since September 2023. The patents are publicly filed. The SAB-163 military program has been running since 2013. Two pandemic exercises preceded the outbreak. WHO’s response to eleven cases involved its Director-General flying to the site personally. Moderna’s stock surged. Emergency authorization language is being floated. A NIH grant (U54-AI065359) has been funding hantavirus reverse genetics and reassortant research in parallel.

What we do not know: Whether this follows the COVID trajectory. Whether the EUA push materializes. Whether the institutional response remains proportional or escalates. Whether the case count stays contained or expands. Whether the cheap treatment question gets asked publicly by anyone with a platform large enough to matter.

What we can reasonably suspect: The same institutional logic that drove the COVID response is present here. The players are largely the same. The sequence is the same. The financial incentives are the same. Whether this becomes a full-scale repeat of 2020 depends on factors that are not yet determined - primarily whether the virus spreads meaningfully beyond the initial cluster, and whether the public, having watched the last round, asks harder questions faster this time.

I have said for years that the comforting lies sell better than the uncomfortable truths. The comforting lie here is: eleven cases, one ship, contained. The uncomfortable question is: why does a virus with 900 US cases in thirty years have a fully pre-positioned mRNA vaccine pipeline, military funding, and the personal attention of the WHO Director-General?

What You Should Do

Watch the case count. If this stays contained and fades from the news cycle within a few months, the infrastructure will stand down and wait for the next opportunity. That has happened before.

If it does not - if case counts begin climbing, if travel restrictions enter the narrative, if the FDA begins fast-tracking emergency approvals, if CEPI quietly adds hantavirus to its priority pathogen list - you will know what you are looking at.

The anti-fragility framework from The Top Shelf Man covers exactly this scenario: multiple passports, distributed assets, health resilience, and zero dependence on the pharmaceutical system for your baseline function. The men who were physically capable, metabolically healthy, and not waiting for a government agency to tell them what to put in their bodies navigated COVID better than the men who weren’t. The same principle applies here regardless of where this goes.

Do not wait for mainstream media to tell you what to make of this. They were not asking these questions in 2019 either.

Unplug.

In Conclusion

I am not predicting a repeat of 2020. I am watching a pattern and sharing what I see.

The infrastructure for a hantavirus vaccine program was quietly pre-positioned before a single case appeared on the Hondius. The exercises ran. The institutional response arrived faster and at a higher level than eleven cases on one ship would ordinarily warrant. The cheap treatment question is not being asked. The stock surged.

What I know from a decade of watching how government, pharmaceutical companies, and mainstream media operate is this: they do not move at the speed they have moved on hantavirus unless there is something in it for them. Nine hundred cases over thirty years does not justify what has been built. Something else does. And if you have been paying attention since 2020, you already have a good idea of what that something else looks like.

Make of it what you will.

The Cold, Hard Truth

Never forget:

• Moderna signed an agreement to develop an mRNA hantavirus vaccine in September 2023, two and a half years before the Hondius outbreak. The patents were filed before anyone had heard of this ship. Ask why a virus with 900 US cases in thirty years warranted that level of pharmaceutical infrastructure investment before there was a market to justify it.

• Two pandemic preparedness exercises preceded the outbreak. Event 201 preceded COVID by two months. Exercises are supposed to prepare for outbreaks. The question is which direction that causation runs.

• The WHO Director-General flew personally to Tenerife for eleven cases on one ship. Disproportionate institutional response is a signal. It was a signal in 2020. It is a signal now.

• Hantavirus is not on CEPI’s priority pathogen list. Yet CEPI ran a Korea exercise with the exact institutional cluster building the hantavirus vaccine program. Watch for the post-Hondius addition to that list. That is how Disease X gets a name and how a pre-built pipeline gets activated.

• The absence of any discussion of existing treatment approaches in current coverage follows the same logic we saw in 2020. Effective existing treatments kill the EUA pathway. The EUA pathway is what makes the numbers work for the companies that built the infrastructure.

• None of this is certain. All of it is a pattern. Unplugged men watch patterns. They do not wait for permission to ask the questions that need asking.

Peace.

The framework for navigating exactly these scenarios - anti-fragility, government trends, health resilience, and positioning yourself before you need to be positioned - is in The Top Shelf Man.

Everything about unplugging from the comforting lies - in relationships, government, media, and pharmaceutical narratives - is in The Unplugged Alpha.

If you want to be in a room where these conversations are happening with men who are paying attention - The School of Unplugging is where that happens.

Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

I have spent years telling men to unplug from the comforting lies that society, culture, religion, and mainstream media have been feeding them since birth. The lies about women. The lies about government. The lies about what a man is supposed to want and who he is supposed to be.

But unplugging does not stop there. Not if you are serious about it.

One of the things that continues to make absolutely no sense to me is what we are told about the ancient world. The mainstream story goes like this: our early human ancestors, using bronze age tools, ropes, wooden sledges, and raw manpower, somehow built the most massive stone structures found on the surface of this planet. The Pyramids of Giza. Baalbek. Saqsaywaman. Dozens of others scattered across the globe on every continent, in every climate, separated by thousands of miles and thousands of years.

Nothing adds up when you start asking the right questions. And here is the uncomfortable truth - even today, with everything we have built and everything we know, we do not possess the technology or the engineering capability to replicate these structures. Not the way they were originally built. Not with that precision. Not at that scale.

So who did?

Look, I know what the skeptics are going to say. Modern cranes can lift a thousand tons. We can machine granite to high precision. Both true. Nobody’s arguing that.

What they can’t show you - and I want you to notice that they never actually show you this - is a single example of a thousand-ton granite monolith that has been quarried, machined to sub-millimeter tolerances, transported over 600 miles across mountain ranges, raised into position, and fitted together with the precision of a Swiss watch. All of it. One project. Start to finish. Because that has never been done. Not by us. Not anywhere. Not once.

The individual pieces may exist. The complete picture doesn’t. And yet somehow, someone did exactly that - repeatedly, at multiple sites, on multiple continents - and left behind zero documentation of how. If a modern construction company pulled this off, there would be press releases, engineering white papers, and a Netflix documentary. There is none of that.

Start With Baalbek

If you want to understand why the mainstream story does not hold together, start with Baalbek in Lebanon. Located in the Bekaa Valley about sixty miles northeast of Beirut, roughly 3,000 feet above sea level, this site contains what may be the single most powerful piece of physical evidence that something is seriously wrong with the history we have been handed.

Buried in the foundation of what the Romans later built as their Temple of Jupiter, there are three massive stone blocks known as the trilithons. Each one is about 19 metres (62 ft) long, 4.2 metres (14 ft) high, and 3.6 metres (12 ft) thick, and weighs around 750–800 metric tons. To give you a sense of scale - each trilithon is roughly thirty-six times heavier than the stones used at Stonehenge, and about ten times heavier than the largest stones in the Great Pyramid of Giza. These are not big stones by ancient standards. They are in a category entirely their own.

These blocks were quarried from a site more than half a mile away. They were transported across uneven terrain. They were then raised approximately thirty feet off the ground and placed on top of 400-ton stones beneath them with a precision so exact that not even a piece of paper can fit in the joints between them.

Here is the problem. Roman historical records are extraordinarily thorough. The Romans documented almost every major construction project they undertook in detail. There is not a single Roman record that explains how these stones were moved, lifted, or positioned. Not one. The Romans were famous for drilling lewis holes into stones so that cranes could grip them for lifting. The trilithon blocks have no lewis holes. And even if they did, it would not matter - known Roman crane designs, reconstructed from Vitruvius, Heron, and archaeological remains, have estimated practical lifting capacities in the range of a few to a few dozen tons per crane; there is no direct evidence of any Roman lifting device capable of hoisting loads on the order of 500 tons or more. These blocks weigh 750-800 tons. That is not an engineering gap you can close with more rope and pulleys.

What makes it stranger still is that the trilithons were never meant to be seen. They are buried in the foundation. Hidden underground. They served a purely structural purpose, which means whoever placed them there was not building for aesthetics or legacy. They were building for function, at a scale that no known civilization in recorded history had any reason or ability to achieve.

The Romans Built on Top of Something They Did Not Understand

When you stand at Baalbek and look at the site carefully, something becomes very clear. There are two completely different construction standards visible at the same location.

The Roman work above - the Temple of Jupiter, the enormous columns, the dressed stone walls - is impressive by any measure. The Roman columns alone are the largest stone columns in classical history, each rising sixty-five feet in the air, assembled from stacked sections averaging around sixty metric tons each. That is right at the upper practical limit of what Roman engineering could manage, and it shows. You can see the lewis holes. You can see the joints between the drum sections. You understand how it was built.

Then you look at what sits underneath it, and you are looking at something from a completely different world.

The megalithic foundation blocks - including the trilithons and the surrounding 800-ton stones - display a level of precision that the Roman work above does not come close to matching. Joints so tight that a razor blade cannot fit between them, horizontal or vertical. Surface finishes on rose granite - one of the hardest materials on earth - that are polished smooth with perfectly sharp transitions between curved and flat surfaces. Chamfered edges identical on adjoining blocks to a fraction of a millimeter. A continuous line less than a millimeter thick running along the beveled edges of the stones.

Think about what that means. A line less than a millimeter thick, perfectly consistent, running along the edge of a block weighing hundreds of tons.1 You cannot produce that with a chisel and a hammer. You cannot produce that with any hand tool. The precision is not ancient. It is beyond modern standards applied to ancient stone.

The Rose Granite Columns - From Over 600 Miles Away

Beyond the trilithons, there is another mystery at Baalbek that gets almost no attention.

Alongside the Roman columns, archaeologists found the remains of a much older set of columns. Around two hundred of them, most now shattered, scattered across the complex. Unlike the Roman columns, which were made from local limestone and assembled from stacked sections, these earlier columns were carved from rose granite and formed as single monolithic pieces. Each one a single, solid shaft of some of the hardest stone on earth.

The rose granite did not come from Lebanon. It came from Aswan, Egypt. More than a six-hundred miles away. This is the same quarry that supplied the granite for the King’s Chamber in the Great Pyramid of Giza, a journey of over five hundred miles - itself an extraordinary logistical achievement. Getting granite to Baalbek would have required transporting monolithic columns across the Lebanon Mountains, which average over 8,000 feet in elevation. No road. No flat terrain. No explanation.

And then consider the finish on those columns. Granite requires diamond-tipped tools or equivalent hardness to shape with precision. Such tools were not widely available until the late 19th century. Yet these columns are polished to an exceptionally smooth, perfectly rounded finish, with sharp, clean transitions between surfaces, and no obvious flaws after thousands of years of exposure.

Most of them are now in pieces. The degree of destruction across the site looks, to the untrained eye, like the result of some violent cataclysmic event. Researchers who have studied the fragments closely have found markings on the broken stone that resemble the kind of striations left by heavy industrial machinery, and traces of iron oxidization that suggest metal cutting tools of significant power.

The Quarry - Where It Gets Even Stranger

About a mile from the main complex sits the quarry that supplied Baalbek’s stones. And the quarry may be the most important piece of the puzzle.

The most famous stone there is the Stone of the Pregnant Woman, a monolith lying partially attached to the bedrock, measuring roughly sixty-eight feet long and estimated to weigh over 1,000 tons. It appears to have been nearly ready for transport when work suddenly stopped. Why the work stopped, nobody knows.

In 2014, archaeologists excavating beneath and beside the Stone of the Pregnant Woman found something they were not expecting. Another monolith, larger still, lying just underneath. It weighs approximately 1,650 tons. It may be the largest quarried stone block ever discovered anywhere on earth. It became known as the Forgotten Stone. They found it ten years ago, buried under centuries of accumulated earth. Which raises an obvious question: how much of the quarry remains unexcavated? What else is down there?

The route from the quarry to the temple complex is uphill, across rough and winding terrain. There is no evidence that a flat hauling road was ever built. There is no obvious location where pulley machinery of the necessary scale could have been installed given the arrangement of the stones and the surrounding landscape. Even if you imagine cranes with the capacity of modern equipment - which would require more cranes than could physically fit around a single stone - you still cannot explain how the stones were moved uphill from the quarry to the site and raised thirty feet into position with that level of precision.

The accumulation of earth over the quarry itself suggests the site is vastly older than mainstream archaeology assumes. The Romans who built their temple on top of the existing platform did not build the platform. They found it. And they built on top of it because it was already there, already stable, already extraordinary.

My Conclusion

Here is what I think, and I want to be direct about it.

I do not believe our ancestors built these structures with bronze tools and human labor. That explanation requires you to ignore the engineering reality of what you are looking at.

I also do not believe our ancestors possessed some advanced technology that we have simply forgotten. The trajectory of human technological development does not support a lost-and-found theory of that kind.

What I think is more likely - and the physical evidence at Baalbek points toward this - is that our ancestors found these structures. They did not build the megalithic foundations. They discovered them, already ancient, already partially buried, and they built on top of them. The Romans built their Temple of Jupiter on a platform they did not create and could not have created. The Phoenicians before them raised a temple to Baal on the same site they did not originally build. And before all of them, something else was here.

Who built it? A civilization that predates anything in our recorded history. How far back? Possibly tens of thousands of years. The evidence of erosion on the trilithon stones, the depth of earth that accumulated over the quarry, and the site’s continuous habitation going back to at least 9,000 BCE all point toward a timeline that makes our written history look like the last chapter of a very long book.

Was it an advanced human civilization that collapsed and left no other record? Possibly. Are there other explanations that people entertain? Yes, and I am not going to dismiss them out of hand. What I will say is that the explanation we have been given - primitive people with ropes and copper tools - is the one explanation that definitively does not work when you apply basic physics to it.

There is also a question that I have not seen anyone answer satisfactorily. These structures - Baalbek, the Pyramids, Saqsaywaman and the others - predate the Bible. All of them. The biblical record begins somewhere around 4,000 years ago. The megalithic foundations at Baalbek may be three times that age or older. Yet there is absolutely zero reference in scripture to any of these structures, which were sitting right there in the same part of the world where those stories were set. Why? What does that absence tell us?

Unplug. Not just from the narratives about women and politics and government. Unplug from the story of who we are and where we come from, because that story has been told by people with their own interests in keeping you comfortable and incurious.

The video below is a good starting point if this is new territory for you.

Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

I spent four years there. I walked in with a platform bigger than most of the manoswamp combined, a business that had already eliminated over a quarter of a billion dollars in consumer debt, and a genuine desire to help men who were getting destroyed by the same comforting lies that had nearly destroyed me.

I walked out at the end of 2021 with one thing I didn’t have going in: a word for what I’d seen. I coined it the manoswamp. And in this article, I want to tell you exactly why.

How I Got There

I didn’t go looking for the manosphere. It found me.

In late 2016, I was already making content on my YouTube channel covering dating and masculinity. I had been through the Western divorce grinder. I had watched how government legislators and the banks operated from the inside of my debt relief business. I had lived through three years with a single mother who demonstrated Briffault’s Law with a precision I could never have anticipated. Three events, from 2011 to 2015, had compounded into an unplugging I didn’t choose but couldn’t ignore.

By the time the manosphere found me, I had already done most of the work. I wasn’t a confused young man looking for answers about women. I was a 44-year-old entrepreneur who had run a business for twelve years and was now trying to understand why everything he had been told about how the world works had been wrong.

In late 2016, I was invited to speak at a manosphere convention in 2017. I accepted. I saw an opportunity to collaborate with creators, amplify messages that were genuinely helping men, and get useful information to the masses of men who needed it. I was a giving person when it came to things I was passionate about. I brought creators onto my shows. I introduced my audience to tools, authors, and voices in the space.

What happened over the next four years was both an accomplishment and a disaster.

The Pill Obsession

The first thing you notice in the manoswamp is the pills.

Red pill, black pill, white pill, blue pill, purple pill. Each color supposedly represents a worldview, a brand of truth, or a solution to male struggles. In practice it is just marketing. Jargon designed to sell you on a tribe, keep you consuming content, and - more often than not - lock you into someone else’s defeatist frame.

The red pill was useful when it first broke through mainstream denial about female nature. But somewhere along the way it stopped being a tool and turned into a badge. For some men it became less about self-improvement and more about parroting. Instead of unplugging fully, they got trapped in their own echo chamber and stayed stuck in the rage phase long past the point where it served them.

The black pill is worse. It pushes a doomsday mentality. You lost the genetic lottery, so give up. It feeds on hopelessness and an unrelenting narrative of victimhood with no room to improve or grow, which is the exact opposite of what men need. Spend long enough in those circles and you will see nothing but bitterness, nihilism, and confirmation bias dressed up as reality. It is quicksand for men who could have climbed out if they had just lifted heavy weights consistently, fixed their money, or learned some social skills.

Here is the reality: obsessing over pill colors is mental masturbation. It distracts men from the only thing that matters - the results of doing the hard work. The man grinding in silence, building his body, his bank account, and his frame, doesn’t care what pill he’s on. He cares about whether his life is moving forward.

The real unplugging isn’t picking a pill. It’s rejecting the need for one at all.

The Red Meat Machine

If you want to understand why the manoswamp stays underground, understand this: red meat sells. It sells very well.

The easiest formula for a manoswamp creator to get views and ad revenue is to manufacture drama. Point at a popular name. Craft a clickbait thumbnail. Talk about why they are wrong. Dig up some dirt on them, and if you cannot find any, just create some. Boom. Views. Revenue. Repeat.

Character assassination livestreams running four to eight hours were commonplace. Bickering, infighting, strawmanning, doxxing, and underhanded behavior is not an occasional problem in the manoswamp - it is the dominant culture. People will befriend you and betray you in the same season. Creators mobilize their audiences to viciously attack other creators, and in some cases to harass their family members, over things as trivial as a disagreement or a popularity contest.

The behavior I witnessed was embarrassing.

While they focused on descriptions, I only wanted to focus on prescriptions and solutions. Most of the manoswamp is happy to tell you in extraordinary detail what is wrong with the world and why you are a victim of it. Almost none of it tells you what to actually do about it. Endless gobbledygook, drama-led clout chasing, and circular outrage that keeps men angry and engaged while their actual lives stay exactly the same.

It is not a self-improvement movement. It is an attention economy built on male pain.

I was saying this in 2019. Nothing has changed. If anything, it’s gotten worse.

The Posers

When I used to ride sport bikes with friends in my twenties, we had a simple way to vet new riders who wanted to join us. We inspected the front tire. The harder you rode, the more the outer edge of the tire wore down. If your tire was pristine in the middle and untouched at the edges, you were not riding at our level. We didn’t want posers holding us up or getting hurt trying to keep pace. The front tire told us everything.

The manoswamp has no equivalent of the front tire. There are no checks and balances. You can be completely accomplished on screen and a complete disaster in reality, and there is almost nothing to stop you.

I’ve always asked one question when evaluating anyone who offers advice: would I trade places with this person? That is the gold standard. Not whether what they say sounds clever. Not whether their thumbnail is compelling. Not whether they have ten thousand comments from men calling them a legend. Would I trade my life for theirs?

In four years in the manoswamp, I watched creators get exposed for claiming to only date gorgeous women while living with average-looking single mothers. Claiming to be millionaires while living at home completely broke. Preaching fitness and hard work while getting liposuction in secret. Teaching pickup systems that got socially awkward men arrested for following the advice. Running bootcamps where they hired prostitutes as paid actors and then slept with them before putting them in front of paying students.

These are not rumors. These are factual events I witnessed or became aware of during the four years I spent in that space.

I stopped asking whether their content was useful. I started asking why almost nobody in the space was living a life I would trade mine for. And the answer was obvious once I looked for it. Most of these creators entered content creation because they were broke, insignificant, and had nowhere else to go. They were not accomplished men trying to help other men. They were unaccomplished men trying to solve their own problems in public and finding out that performing accomplishment on camera was more profitable than building the real thing.

I was already accomplished before I started creating content. That was the only thing I did not have in common with almost everyone else in that space. My business, my finances, my health - those were sorted. It was only my mindset around women and managing those relationships that needed work. I came into the manoswamp from the outside. Most of the men there had never been outside.

The Sirens

Women invade male spaces. The manoswamp is no exception.

There are women in that space who have learned to regurgitate content that men have thought through, organized, and collected, and to deliver it on camera with their hair done, their makeup applied, and their low-cut tops positioned front and center. They are good at sounding like they understand the male experience. They do not understand it. Female solipsism does not allow for a genuine comprehension of what men are actually struggling with.

Women don’t really care about men’s struggles. They hang out at the finish line and pick the winner.

The women who enter the manoswamp are mostly there for validation, attention, and money. They are using confused and thirsty men as an audience. The men who simp for them in the comment sections genuinely believe they have found a red-pilled female unicorn who understands and cares about their plight. They have not. They have found a woman who has learned to say the right words in front of a camera and monetize the gap between what lonely men want to believe and what is actually true.

A man looking to catch fish doesn’t ask a fish how to catch fish. He asks a seasoned fisherman.

I watched manoswamp creators who were vehemently opposed to female creators in men’s spaces eventually put those same women on their channels, some of whom were clearly unstable, because female beauty generates views from thirsty men, and views generate revenue. Principles are flexible when the algorithm rewards abandoning them.

It is just OnlyFans for the red pill.

Why It Stays Underground

The manoswamp remains fringe and underground because it cannot organize, agree, or collaborate in any productive way. It is like a full bus with every passenger trying to be the driver and fighting over every insignificant detail along the way.

The notion of brotherhood and honor is absent. I have recommended Jack Donovan’s work to my audience for years. The way of men is the way of the gang - small, tight, bound by shared values and tested by adversity. Men of honor protect their tribe and have no patience for men who disparage it. The mark of a true friend is that he insults you to your face and defends you behind your back. The manoswamp operates on exactly the opposite principle. They will never insult you to your face and will always destroy you behind your back.

He who gossips to you will gossip about you. Never trust a man who gossips.

The manoswamp gossips constantly, about everything and everyone, as its primary content strategy. That alone tells you what you need to know about the character of the men running it.

My Golden Rule and Why I Left

I have been part of many organizations and groups over the years. The common denominator among the men who genuinely excelled was always the same principle: if you lay with dogs, you’ll get fleas.

Out of that principle I built my own golden rule: don’t work with losers or people that work with losers.

By the end of 2021, that rule had disqualified almost the entire manoswamp. Not because I was looking for a reason to leave. Because the evidence had accumulated to the point where staying would have required me to compromise something I was not willing to compromise: my name, my reputation, and my standard for the men I associate with.

Too many men today wonder why their life is a circus, but fail to see that they’ve gone and surrounded themselves with clowns.

I am not bitter about the time I spent there. I am grateful for the men I met and the genuine information I extracted. There are things in that space that were useful, and I told my audience so at the time. But useful information packaged in a toxic ecosystem delivered by men whose lives you would never trade for your own is not the foundation for genuine improvement. It is a distraction dressed up as enlightenment.

I still talk about the things that matter to men. I just will not collaborate with or amplify men I would not invite to my home for a family dinner. That standard has cost me some relationships in that space. It has protected everything that actually matters.

In Conclusion

The manoswamp gave a generation of men permission to ask questions that needed asking. That was its real contribution, and I do not minimize it. When a man who has been living by the blue-pill script his entire life finally encounters an honest account of how attraction actually works, how family law actually operates, and why the comforting lies he was sold are destroying him - that encounter can save his life. I have heard from tens of thousands of men who told me exactly that.

But the manoswamp is a starting point. It was never meant to be a destination. The men who extracted what was useful and went and built something with it are the men I see doing well. The men who stayed, who made the manoswamp their identity, who are still arguing about pill colors five years after they first encountered the red pill - those men are stuck. Angry, informed, and stuck.

Take what is useful. Protect your name. And get back to work.

The Cold, Hard Truth

Never forget:

• The manosphere is like Las Vegas. You are usually happy to discover it, and once you see it for what it truly is, you are equally happy to leave. Visit with a purpose. Don’t move in.

• Obsessing over pill colors is mental masturbation. The man who is actually doing the work - building his body, his finances, his frame - does not care what pill he’s on. He cares whether his life is moving forward. The real unplugging isn’t picking a pill. It’s rejecting the need for one at all.

• Red meat sells. Drama generates views. Most manoswamp content is not designed to improve your life. It is designed to keep you angry, engaged, and coming back. Those are not the same thing.

• Ask one question before taking advice from anyone: would I trade places with this person? If the answer is no, it does not matter how clever they sound. Move on.

• Women in the manoswamp are not there for you. They are there for validation, attention, and money. A man looking to catch fish doesn’t ask a fish how to catch fish. He asks a seasoned fisherman.

• He who gossips to you will gossip about you. Never trust a man who gossips. The manoswamp is built on gossip. That alone tells you what you are dealing with.

• Don’t work with losers or people that work with losers. That rule is simple, it costs you occasionally, and it protects everything that actually matters over the long term.

Peace.

The full framework for finding men worth building with - and what a real tribe looks like as opposed to a manoswamp - is in The Top Shelf Man.

If you are ready to be in a room with men who are actually doing the work - The School of Unplugging is where that starts.

Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

“The way of men is the way of the gang.”

This single realization explains something that no amount of therapy groups, mastermind circles, LinkedIn networks, or men’s wellness retreats ever will.

Men are not built for groups. Men are built for gangs. Call it a tribe, a brotherhood, or a band of brothers - Donovan uses "gang”. The difference between any of those things and a group is not semantics - it is the difference between men who have your back when things go sideways and and men who show up on Zoom every other Tuesday at 7pm if they're not too busy.

What a Group Is

A group is what modern society offers men when it wants them to feel like they belong without actually belonging to anything.

A group has members. It has a Slack channel or a WhatsApp thread or a meeting on the third Tuesday of every month. It has a nominal shared interest - business, faith, fitness, networking - and a social contract that is never stated but universally understood: keep it comfortable. Don’t push too hard. Don’t say anything that makes anyone feel judged.

I have been in those groups. As an entrepreneur for many years I was a member of several organizations, and most of the successful men in those organizations were Plugged-In Betas. High-net-worth, running businesses doing high seven or low eight figures, genuinely good people. But plugged in.

I remember sitting in a private meeting of nine peers in 2014 and listening to one of them - an absolute weapon in business - complaining about his sexless marriage and closing with “happy wife, happy life.” That was the moment I knew something was off. A racehorse should never be giving pony rides.

A few years later, in a different men’s group, a member announced he was getting married. I waited to see if anyone would bring up the obvious question about a prenuptial agreement. Nobody did. When I raised it, the group turned on me. “Who hurt you?” “That’s just setting the marriage up for failure.”

These were men I had broken bread with. Men I had been on retreats with. And the mere mention of a prenup turned them into a mob.

That is a group. That is what happens when belonging is conditional on keeping your mouth shut about what you actually think.

What a Gang Is

A gang is not a criminal enterprise. The word has been hijacked and I am taking it back.

A gang, in the original sense that Donovan uses it, is a small, tight unit of men bound by shared values, shared risk, and earned trust. It has a hierarchy - not one that was assigned by a corporate org chart or voted on by committee, but one that emerged organically from demonstrated competence and character. The strongest men lead. The weaker men follow and learn. Everyone earns their place through what they do, not what they say.

A gang holds you accountable with teeth. Not with a gentle “have you considered...” from a men’s group facilitator, but with the kind of directness that is only possible between men who have something real at stake in each other’s outcomes. When a man in a real gang is making a mistake, someone tells him. Clearly. Without cushioning it in therapy language. And he receives it, because he knows the man telling him has earned the right.

A gang is forged in adversity. Not in shared opinions or shared demographics, but in shared difficulty. The strongest bonds are always forged in the flames of adversity - in the experience of doing something hard together and coming out the other side. A ski trip where things go wrong. A firearms training where you are genuinely uncomfortable. A canoe trip in the backcountry where there is no signal and you have to figure it out together. These are the experiences that convert acquaintances into brothers.

And a gang does not pretend that everyone is equal. Men in a real gang know exactly where they stand relative to each other. That is not cruelty - it is clarity. Hierarchy among men who respect each other is not oppressive. It is organizing. It is how men have always worked.

I went deeper on this back in 2021. Worth eleven minutes of your time.

The Counterfeits

Modern society has produced a long list of gang substitutes that look like the real thing and deliver almost none of it.

The corporation. You wear the same badge and work toward the same quarterly numbers, but the corporation will cut you without hesitation when it serves their interests, and everyone knows it. The loyalty is manufactured. The brotherhood is a marketing exercise. The moment you stop being useful, you are gone.

The mastermind group. Everyone is there to extract value. Relationships last exactly as long as the professional benefit does. The conversations stay at the surface because going deeper would require vulnerability that nobody signed up for.

The men’s therapy group. Feelings first, hierarchy forbidden, challenge discouraged. The explicit goal is comfort. Whatever the opposite of adversity is - that is the environment being carefully maintained. Men leave these groups feeling temporarily heard and fundamentally unchanged.

The online community. Anonymous, or close to it. No skin in the game. No consequences for what you say or what you do. The accountability that exists is performative. Keyboard courage masquerading as brotherhood.

The manoswamp. I wrote about this in The Top Shelf Man. The space is dominated by men whose income depends on keeping you angry and engaged rather than actually improving. Drama sells. The algorithm rewards outrage. The relationships are parasocial at best and actively harmful at worst. I entered that world in 2017. I left it by the end of 2021. I called it the manoswamp and I meant it.

None of these are gangs. All of them will make you feel, for a while, like you have found your people. None of them will forge the kind of bonds that actually hold when something real happens in your life.

Why Men Settle for Substitutes

The honest answer is that finding a real gang is hard, and the substitutes are easy.

Most of the environments where men spend time are dominated by what I call Plugged-In Betas - men who have achieved significant things professionally and remain deeply plugged into comforting lies personally. They are good at business and bad at being men, and they will tell you, with complete sincerity, that the two things are unrelated.

They are not. A man who cannot hold frame with his wife cannot hold frame in a negotiation. A man who has been betatized by a thousand small concessions at home has practiced submission so thoroughly that it bleeds into everything else. Business success and personal unplugging are not the same thing, and treating them as if they are is one of the most common and most costly mistakes I see men make.

The other reason men settle for substitutes is the Sigma fantasy. The lone wolf. The man who needs no one, who moves through the world in self-contained silence, who has transcended the need for tribe.

I want to be direct about this. Wolves are pack animals. Men are pack animals. The Sigma is just an Alpha without friends. Solitude has its place. Introversion has its place. But a man who has convinced himself that he does not need other men has not achieved independence - he has rationalized isolation. And isolation, over time, makes men weaker, not stronger.

What You Are Actually Looking For

The question I get more than almost any other from men who have unplugged is some version of: where do I find men like me?

I answered part of it in The Top Shelf Man. Fight gyms. Motorsports communities. Libertarian circles. Gun clubs. Powerlifting gyms. Anywhere men voluntarily put themselves in uncomfortable situations and have to perform. These environments do not guarantee unplugged men, but they attract them disproportionately. Combat training in particular draws men who are comfortable being uncomfortable - and that specific quality is one of the best filters for the kind of man you want around you.

But finding individual men is not the same as building a gang. For that, you need shared experience under pressure. You need to do something hard together. Not once, but repeatedly. The bonds that form between men who have been genuinely challenged together - physically, mentally, in situations where things could actually go wrong - are different in kind from the bonds that form over dinner or in a Zoom room. There is no shortcut for this.

When I looked at my coaching data in 2017 and noticed that only 1% of the men who landed on my page actually booked a call, I realized something. That 1% was different. They were not there for content. They were there because they genuinely wanted to change. I built my community around that 1%, and it grew into something I did not anticipate - men from around the world meeting in person, doing hard things together, forging the kinds of friendships that last.

The events have included ski trips, supercar rallies, backcountry canoe trips, yachting, Navy SEAL firearms training, and formal dinner events across multiple cities. Life-long friendships have been forged. Business deals have been made. Men who showed up not knowing anyone left with brothers.

That is what a gang produces. Not networking. Not connections. Brothers.

In Conclusion

Donovan’s line has stayed with me because it is not a prescription. It is a description. It does not tell men to go find a gang. It says this is what men have always been. This is the shape of male bonding that goes back further than civilization itself. The gang - the small unit of men bound by shared values, shared risk, and earned trust - is not a nice-to-have. It is the environment in which men become who they are capable of becoming.

Modern society has done everything in its power to replace the gang with something safer and more manageable. The corporation. The therapy group. The online community. The men’s group that piles on you for suggesting a prenup.

None of it works. Not really. Not in the way that matters.

Find your gang. Build it in adversity. Hold each other accountable with the kind of honesty that is only possible between men who have earned the right. And if you are looking for a place to start, you already know where to find it.

The Cold, Hard Truth

Never forget:

• “The way of men is the way of the gang.” Not the group. Not the network. Not the community of shared feelings. The gang - small, hierarchical, bound by shared values and forged in adversity. This is what men have always needed and what modern society has done its best to eliminate.

• Business success and personal unplugging are not the same thing. A man can run an eight-figure company and be a total Plugged-In Beta in his private life. Do not mistake professional achievement for the kind of character that makes a man worth having in your corner.

• The Sigma is just an Alpha without friends. Solitude is a tool. Isolation is a trap. Men who have convinced themselves they need no tribe have not achieved independence - they have rationalized a weakness.

• The strongest bonds are always forged in the flames of adversity. Not over coffee and agendas. Not in a Zoom meeting. In shared difficulty, in voluntary discomfort, in situations where something real is at stake. Seek those experiences and the right men will find you.

• People in your life behave like anchors or sails. One holds you back, the other fills with wind. Identify which is which. Cut the anchors loose.

• If you are the smartest man in the room, you are in the wrong room.

Peace.

Read Jack Donovan’s The Way of Men - the book Rich references throughout this article.

The full framework for finding your tribe, building your gang, and the community Rich built around the 1% is in The Top Shelf Man.

If you are ready to stop looking and start building - the School of Unplugging is where it starts.

Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Every two weeks, Bence Vamos runs a bi-weekly Zoom call for members of the School of Unplugging who want to get serious about their fitness, hormones, and blood work. No fluff, no surface-level advice - just real men sharing their labs, asking real questions, and getting real answers from someone who actually knows what he’s looking at.

This is the kind of conversation you are not having with your family doctor. It is also the kind of conversation most men have no access to unless they either pay a specialist privately or they know someone who can cut through the noise. Inside the School of Unplugging, it happens every two weeks, live.

The TRT Protocol Most Clinics Won’t Give You

One of the members on the call asked about testosterone injection frequency - specifically whether switching to daily pins was worth the extra effort, and whether it helped with common TRT side effects like acne.

Bence walked the group through it in detail. Most guys who go on TRT get a cookie-cutter protocol: one or two shots a week. That creates a big spike within about thirty-six hours of the injection, and then levels slowly drop. Your body is riding a hormonal roller coaster the entire week rather than maintaining consistent blood levels.

The more advanced approach is dividing the weekly dose into seven daily pins, with a slight dose increase of about fifteen percent. Injecting into belly fat rather than muscle means less of the testosterone aromatizes into estrogen, and your body utilizes more of what you pin. The result is more consistent blood levels, higher overall testosterone, and less conversion to estrogen - which means many men on this protocol can avoid using an aromatase inhibitor altogether.

For the practical side: draw with a 23-gauge needle into a larger syringe, then backfill a 30-gauge insulin syringe. The insulin needle is almost painless. If you are doing daily pins with a thick gauge needle, you will quit within a week. Make the protocol as frictionless as possible so you can stay consistent.

Blood Labs - What You Are Not Measuring Is Hurting You

Bence ran a live blood lab review on the call, walking a member through a full panel marker by marker. This is the part that most men never get - not because the information is unavailable, but because they have never had someone explain what the numbers actually mean.

A few things worth noting for every man who is tracking his health seriously.

Testosterone and SHBG together tell the real story. A total testosterone reading in isolation does not tell you much. Sylvester’s total testosterone came in at 735 nanograms per deciliter - solid - with an SHBG of 30. That combination is good because lower SHBG means more of the testosterone is free and bioavailable rather than bound and inactive.

Prolactin matters more than most men realize. The member’s prolactin was on the higher end, which Bence flagged immediately. High prolactin suppresses sex drive and is the hormone responsible for the refractory period after sex. Two supplements that address it: P5P, which is the bioavailable form of vitamin B6, and L-tyrosine, an amino acid that is a precursor to dopamine. Higher dopamine levels drive prolactin down. One practical note - if you are getting bloodwork done, do not have sex the morning before. It will artificially spike your prolactin and skew the reading.

IGF-1 controls more than you think. Low IGF-1 showed up on Sylvester’s panel, and Bence flagged it as affecting recovery, muscle gain, fat loss, and sleep quality. The lever for improving it is growth hormone releasing peptides - CJC 1295 with DAC is a longer-acting option requiring only two or three injections per week, while tesamorelin is daily but highly effective. One important flag here: peptides are not a beginner move. Dosing, reconstituting, and sourcing them correctly is genuinely complicated, and the sourcing side specifically is full of landmines. There is a right way and a lot of wrong ways to approach it.

Ferritin too high means blood donation. Dr. Anthony Jay’s benchmark - acceptable ferritin around 100 to 150 nanograms per milliliter - has come up repeatedly in our calls. If it is climbing above that, high iron becomes toxic to the body over the long term. The solution is straightforward: give blood. The free route is a blood donation, which removes roughly 580 milliliters at a time. The more controlled approach is a clinic where you can take out a smaller amount - 250 to 300 milliliters - and manage the depletion more gradually. For men on TRT whose issue is elevated hemoglobin and hematocrit rather than iron specifically, the smaller controlled removal is the better option.

Getting blood work as a Canadian. One of the members asked about this directly. The honest answer is that your family doctor will look at you sideways if you hand them a full optimization panel list. The approach that works is going in with symptoms - low energy, poor sleep, low libido, weight gain - and asking for a comprehensive review because you are genuinely concerned. Frame it around your symptoms, not the panel. Dynacare is a private provider that some of our members have used in Canada without needing a doctor’s referral, though the specifics vary by location. In the US, Ultalabs is the provider Bence recommends - typically in the $500 to $700 range for a full panel, which is reasonable for what you are getting.

Nutrition - The Basics That Are Not Actually Basic

Several men on the call were struggling with the same things: not gaining the weight they wanted, not sure how much protein they were actually eating, not tracking anything consistently.

A few points Bence made that are worth repeating.

One gram of protein per pound of body weight is the floor. Not the ceiling. And when you track protein, only count animal sources. Plant proteins do not have the full amino acid profile. If your app is counting rice and bean protein toward your daily total, you are getting a flattering number that does not reflect what your body is actually working with.

You cannot manage what you are not measuring. If you are trying to change your body composition and you are not tracking body weight, body fat percentage, and protein intake, you are flying blind. A basic body composition scale runs about $28 on Amazon. Same conditions every morning - after your first bathroom trip, nothing on, before eating anything significant. The number on any given day is noise. The trend over two weeks is signal.

Carb timing matters when you are cutting. When calories are tight, when and what carbohydrates you eat becomes more important. Eating carbs about forty minutes before training gives your muscles the glycogen they need to perform without spending the whole day in an energy crash. A small sweet potato before the gym is a different tool than a bowl of rice at dinner. Use them differently.

Sardines. I know. But if you are a man who is struggling to hit protein targets while on the move, a can of sardines delivers a dense protein hit with healthy EPAs and almost no calories relative to the protein content. Keep a few in your bag. Alternate with sriracha tuna if sardines are a stretch. Not exciting advice. Works anyway.

Legs - The Most Undertrained Muscle Group in the Room

One recurring theme on the call was men who struggle to put size on their legs. Bence made an observation that is obvious once you see it, but most men never notice it.

Most guys training a five-day split are hitting their upper body muscles twice a week without realizing it. Chest day trains chest and triceps. Back day trains back and biceps. Then there is a dedicated arm day. The biceps and triceps are getting hit twice, sometimes three times per week. Legs get one day and men wonder why the upper body grows faster.

The fix is simple: split legs into two sessions per week. One day focused on quads. One day focused on hamstrings and glutes. You are not hitting the same muscles twice - you are giving your legs the same frequency your arms have been getting for years.

For men with herniated discs or lower back issues: barbell back squats carry genuine risk as the loads increase. Bence’s recommendation was hex bar squats or any squat variation where the back is properly supported. The goal is building muscle in your legs, and you can fully achieve that without a movement that puts your spine at compressive risk under heavy load. Plenty of elite bodybuilders have moved away from barbell squats entirely for exactly this reason.

In Conclusion

This is one call. Bence runs these every two weeks for members of the School of Unplugging - live, Q&A driven, grounded in actual bloodwork and actual results rather than theory. No cookie-cutter protocols. No pharmaceutical sales pitches. Just real men working through real problems with someone who knows what he’s looking at.

If you want access to calls like this - where you can bring your labs, ask your questions, and get answers from someone who works with men on this every day - this is what the School of Unplugging is for. It is one of many things you get when you join.

The Cold, Hard Truth

Never forget:

• Daily testosterone injections into belly fat produces more consistent levels, less aromatization to estrogen, and better overall utilization than twice-weekly muscle injections. A fifteen percent dose increase accounts for the protocol change. Backfill a 30-gauge insulin syringe to make daily pins sustainable.

• Prolactin is the overlooked hormone. High prolactin kills sex drive and recovery. P5P and L-tyrosine are two accessible supplements that address it naturally. Do not have sex the morning of bloodwork.

• IGF-1 controls recovery, sleep, muscle gain, and fat loss. If it is low on your panel, growth hormone releasing peptides are worth investigating - but do not approach them without proper guidance on sourcing, reconstituting, and dosing.

• Only count animal proteins toward your daily target. One gram per pound of body weight from animal sources. Whatever the plants add on top is a bonus.

• If you are not tracking it, you are not managing it. A $28 body composition scale and a consistent morning routine is the minimum viable setup for anyone serious about changing their body composition.

• Train your legs twice a week. Split quad focus and hamstring-glute focus across two sessions. Your arms have been getting that frequency for years. Your legs deserve the same.

Peace.

Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Part 1 covered the external world - money, legal protection, real estate, publishing, AI, and the economics of attraction. If you missed it, go back and read it first.

Part 2 is different.

Day 2 of the 1% Forum went internal. My keynote, a molecular biologist who left the Mayo Clinic and never looked back, the man who runs the Unplugged Brotherhood, a software entrepreneur with a $66 million exit, and a closing session where I and Orion Taraban took questions from the floor for ninety minutes until they’d covered just about everything.

This is the blueprint work. The foundation underneath all the tactics.

The Anti-Fragility Blueprint

I gave this talk for the men in that room, and I’ll give you the condensed version here.

The central idea is Nassim Taleb’s concept of anti-fragility - not just surviving chaos, but being positioned so that chaos makes you stronger. Jeff Bezos didn’t just survive the 2008 recession or the COVID pandemic. He profited massively from both, because his business model was built to benefit from the disruption everyone else was trying to protect themselves from. That is the posture I want every man in my world to be building toward.

The blueprint has several layers.

Taxation and environment. Most men are passive about where they live and how they structure their finances, and it costs them enormously. Run as much of your life as legitimately possible through your business. Find an accountant who thinks outside the box, not one who tells you what you can’t do. “Forgiveness over permission” is the operating principle. Your assets don’t need to be where your ass is - understanding this one sentence changes how you think about almost every financial decision you make.

Maneuverability. This is the one that separates the men who have options from the men who are trapped. Multiple passports. Assets distributed across jurisdictions. The ability to pilot vehicles of different kinds - a plane, a boat, a motorcycle. A global network of fixers who can solve problems quickly when normal channels are unavailable or compromised. You cannot build maneuverability in a crisis. You build it before you need it, and then you hope you never need it.

Health resilience. TRT if your levels warrant it, done properly. Cold plunging. Intermittent fasting. Weighted vest walking. Inversion tables. The point is not any single protocol but the principle underneath them all: a man who is not physically capable in a chaotic scenario is a liability to everyone around him, including himself. That is the standard.

Women and family law. Never live in a way that looks like marriage to the state. I cited the Mike Lackner case - a man who never married and never cohabited, but was still ordered to pay $50,000 a month based on the lifestyle he had provided. The state will find a way to reach into your pocket if you give it the opening. Vet women for a minimum of eighteen months. Never share finances unless she earns more than you. Have children only in jurisdictions where shared custody is the default, not something you have to fight for.,

Government trends. Western governments are expanding. They will continue to expand. They will tax more, monitor more, and restrict more, and Canada - where I live - is the cautionary tale at the front of that line. This is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition. The man who sees the direction of travel and positions accordingly is not pessimistic. He is prepared.

Black swan preparedness. Stores of value that exist outside the financial system. Alternate currencies. Skills that remain useful when complex systems fail. A network of men you trust completely. The scenarios that trigger this layer of preparedness may feel remote. They always do, right up until they don’t.

The talk closed with something I want to leave you with here. Leadership is not a title. It is not a position. Everything that is not working in your life - your relationships, your finances, your health, your community - is a leadership problem. “She’s not doing what you want her to do. It’s a leadership problem. It all comes back to you.” That framing is not comfortable, but it is liberating.

Dr. Anthony Jay - Everything You’ve Been Told About Your Body is Wrong

Dr. Anthony Jay is a molecular biologist and DNA/genetics expert who spent years doing autopsies at Boston University, ran stem cell research at the Mayo Clinic, and eventually left over a principled disagreement about vaccine mandates. He now runs a genetics consulting practice and has done DNA testing for U.S. Special Forces at Fort Bragg. He is the author of Estrogeneration.

His talk was two hours of demolishing medical conventional wisdom with the precision of a man who has spent his career reading the actual data rather than the pharmaceutical industry’s summary of it.

His foundational framework is simple: your body runs on one of two fuel sources, sugar or fat, and which one you’re running on determines almost everything about your energy, your hormones, your cognitive function, and your long-term health. “Sugar is dirty energy. It’s like a diesel truck with black smoke coming out. Fat burning is more clean energy. It’s like a Tesla. There’s no emissions.”

Most men are stuck burning sugar and have been their entire lives. Becoming fat-adapted takes roughly three months of disciplined dietary change, and the other side of it - the sustained, clean, crash-free energy state - is genuinely different. He cited Zach Bitter running a hundred-mile world record at a 7:48 per mile pace while nose-breathing as proof of what a fully fat-adapted metabolism looks like under extreme load. He cited Mike McKnight running 118 miles on zero calories. These are not outliers. They are demonstrations of a capability that exists in every human body that hasn’t been systematically suppressed by a diet of constant carbohydrate loading.

His recommended protocol: skip breakfast (black coffee only, no sugar), eat a carnivore lunch with zero carbohydrates for sustained afternoon energy, and have carbohydrates at dinner to raise serotonin for sleep quality and mood regulation. A six to eight hour feeding window daily. A twenty-four hour fast once a month. A three-day fast once a year.

On blood markers, he was specific: fasting glucose below 85 in American units (4.7 in European), triglycerides below 85 (1.0 European), testosterone above 500 with 700 as the real target. He spent considerable time on testosterone, including a story that got one of the biggest reactions of the weekend: while he was being given bureaucratic resistance trying to obtain milligrams of testosterone for legitimate research, a colleague across the hall ordered a kilogram of cyanide - and nobody cared. “Pharmaceutical companies do not like testosterone.” That is not a conspiracy theory. It is a business model.

On estrogen disruption, his advice was practical and immediate: stop drinking liquids from plastic containers. Avoid fragrances - they are endocrine disruptors. Don’t trust BPA-free labels, because BPS, the substitute, is equally problematic. The xeno-estrogens accumulating in the modern male body are a direct contributor to testosterone resistance - a state where your body produces adequate testosterone but cannot utilize it effectively because the receptor sites are occupied by synthetic estrogen compounds.

His supplement recommendations: Vitamin D3 taken with K2 (not without it - K2 directs calcium to bones rather than arteries), zinc as an underrated testosterone booster, and magnesium glycinate before bed for sleep quality. Not magnesium citrate - that is a laxative.

On stem cells, he presented hyperbaric oxygen chambers as one of the most cost-effective interventions available. A single session can double your circulating stem cells. Eight sessions can increase them twenty-fold. The cost is roughly $200 per session. Compare that to IV stem cell injections at $20,000 to $40,000, using donor cells from people whose health you know nothing about - what he called, memorably, “McDonald’s stem cells.”

He closed with the LDL cholesterol paradigm, which he dismantled entirely using his own autopsy findings: vegans with textbook-low LDL numbers and massive arterial plaque. The normal range for LDL was lowered from 300 to 200 not because the science changed, but because lowering the threshold put millions of additional patients into the statin market. “You can’t be normal in our culture today. You can’t be normal with your blood sugar. You can’t be normal with your triglycerides. You can’t be normal with your testosterone.” Being normal is the problem.

Ori Staub - Software is the Purest Form of Leverage Ever Invented

Ori Staub has never held a traditional job. He has spent over twenty-five years building software companies in the SaaS space. His company Serviceway - field service management software for the hazardous and industrial waste sector - was acquired for $66 million. His forum talk was a masterclass in how to think about software as a business model, and it applied whether you are a developer or have never written a line of code in your life.

His opening claim framed everything that followed: “Software is the purest form of leverage ever invented.” Zero marginal costs. Global reach from day one. Eighty percent gross margins. Recurring revenue. No inventory, no logistics, no physical constraints. Eight of the top ten S&P 500 companies are software-leveraged. The model is not a trend. It is the dominant structure of value creation in the modern economy.

His framework for identifying software opportunities is a two-by-two matrix of problem complexity versus problem frequency. High complexity and high frequency is where the multi-billion dollar outcomes live - AWS, Salesforce, Stripe. Low complexity and high frequency enables viral consumer SaaS - Slack, Calendly. High complexity and low frequency is deep enterprise. Low complexity and low frequency is where you don’t want to be. The question to ask about any business idea is where it sits on that matrix.

His methodology starts not with a solution but with pain. “Start with pain, not solution.” Human motivation is driven more powerfully by avoiding pain than by seeking pleasure, and the best software products solve an acute, recurring problem that the customer is already trying to solve badly - usually with a spreadsheet they hate. “Every great SaaS I’ve ever built was a spreadsheet someone hated.”

He walked through the Serviceway origin story as a live demonstration of the methodology. He heard about inefficiencies in septic system management at a bar conversation in Caesar’s Palace. Before building anything, he spent three days riding a septic truck to understand the actual workflow. He built routing and job management software, converted customers at three to ten times the price of what they were paying before, expanded into adjacent verticals, and exited at $66 million in six years. The idea was ordinary. The execution was not. “80% of business success is execution. It’s not genius.”

His product development framework: build a minimum lovable product - not a minimum viable product, but something people genuinely love using - measure everything, learn from retention rather than acquisition, and ship on two-week sprint cycles. “If you’re not embarrassed by the first version, you shipped too late.” The market will tell you what the product needs to be. You cannot know it from the inside.

He closed with a line that landed differently than most things said at the forum, because it came from a man who has actually built and sold something significant: “Vision without execution is hallucination.” There is no shortage of men with ideas. There is a shortage of men who show up on the two-week sprint cadence and ship the thing. That gap is where the $66 million exits live.

Orion Taraban - The Q&A Nobody Wanted to End

The joint Q&A between myself and Orion Taraban lasted ninety minutes and it could have gone three hours without running out of material. This is the session that the men who were in that room still talk about.

Taraban opened by telling the Coolidge effect story - President Calvin Coolidge visiting a farm, his wife observing a rooster mating with multiple hens and asking the farmer to make sure the President knew about it, and Coolidge asking whether the rooster mated with the same hen every time. The answer was no. “Tell that to Mrs. Coolidge.” The biological reality of male novelty-seeking, laid out in a story that is over a century old and still completely accurate.

The conversation moved to life chapters. Taraban framed his most important decision as leaving a “B-minus life” in New York acting at twenty-eight to start over in San Francisco as a psychologist. He called the process “dreaming at high resolution” - not vague aspiration but precise, detailed vision of a specific life you want to be living. “We cannot underestimate what we can accomplish in eight years, but we only have eight chapters.” If you are in your thirties, you have four or five chapters left. What are you building in this one?

I shared my parallel story: fired at thirty, multimillionaire within six years. I’ve told bits and pieces of this story across a thousand videos. In that room, in conversation with Taraban, the version he told had a texture it doesn’t have in the edited format.

On indirect communication, Taraban shared something he learned from studying women that most men never think to apply. Women default to indirect communication - the embedded request, the implied need, the statement that contains an ask. “It’s cold in here” is not a weather report. It is a request to change the temperature, delivered through a statement that allows the woman to maintain plausible deniability about asking. Men who learn to communicate this way - who learn to lead conversations toward outcomes without issuing direct commands - are dramatically more effective in every domain, not just with women.

On monogamy, Taraban made the point that has been at the center of his work for years: “Any woman that I would give an exclusive commitment to wouldn’t need the exclusive commitment in order to stay.” If the commitment is the thing keeping her in the relationship, the relationship is already in trouble. What you want is a woman who is there because she wants to be there, and who would keep choosing you regardless of whether a contract existed. The commitment, when it comes, is a reflection of what’s already true. It is not the thing that makes it true.

I added the frame I have been teaching for years in the language I use with my audience: women should always feel replaceable. Not as cruelty. As reality. A man who has genuine options and knows it carries himself differently from a man who doesn’t. Women feel that difference. They respond to it.

On contempt, both men converged on the same signal. “Contempt is the clock that ticks down to the end of any kind of relationship.” Not disagreement, not conflict, not even anger - those are all signs of investment. Contempt is the signal that the investment is gone. In a relationship, in a community, in a business partnership - when contempt appears, the end is already written. The only question is how long it takes to arrive.

They closed with a line from Taraban that I want to leave you with, because it is the cleanest summary of everything both men were saying across the entire forum: “You can’t love with the expectation to be loved back. That makes love a transactable good, and so now, it’s no longer love.” The same principle applies to respect, to trust, to loyalty. You give it because you are the kind of man who gives it. Not as a transaction. Not as a strategy. As a standard.

The Closing Panel - Burn the Ships, Raise Good Kids, and Cut the Seed Oils

The final session brought all the speakers together on stage for an open Q&A. What followed was part health clinic, part parenting seminar, part entrepreneurship masterclass, and entirely unrepeatable.

Dr. Jay dominated the health portion and the room was grateful for it. On stem cells, he repeated and expanded his recommendation for hyperbaric oxygen chambers, contrasting the $200 per session cost against $20,000 to $40,000 for IV stem cell injections using donor cells of unknown quality. On sunscreen, he advised against it entirely unless zinc-based - conventional sunscreen chemicals are endocrine disruptors - and traced conventional sunburn risk back to seed oils skewing the omega-6 to omega-3 ratio, which the ancestral diet maintained at roughly 4:1 and which the modern Western diet has pushed to 20:1. On thyroid, he recommended Armour Thyroid - derived from pigs, bioidentical to human thyroid hormone - over Synthroid and levothyroxine, which are synthetic versions the medical system defaults to because they are more profitable, not because they work better.

On parenting, the panel converged on a few things. Chris Kelly’s contribution was about presence: get on the floor at your child’s level, be a guide rather than a controller, be genuinely there rather than physically present while mentally elsewhere. If you punish the truth, all you get is lies. Children who learn that honesty has consequences learn to hide things. That is not a parenting strategy. It is a way of raising strangers.

Dr. Jay homeschools his kids, prioritizes outdoor activity and what he described as gun training, and made the point that has been documented extensively but rarely stated directly: “Sugar is cocaine for children’s emotional regulation.” The behavioral problems, the attention deficits, the emotional dysregulation that has become normalized in children - these are not inevitable features of childhood. They are the downstream effects of a diet that has been industrialized in ways that are profitable for food companies and destructive for developing brains.

The entrepreneurship portion of the panel centered on each speaker’s “burn the ships” moment - the point of no return where they committed fully and eliminated the fallback option. Dr. Jay leaving the Mayo Clinic over vaccine mandate disagreements. I myself being laid off. Peter Holmquist leaving the fish factory in Norway. Ori Staub choosing never to hold a job in the first place.

The pattern across all of them: the decision to burn the ships was not made from a position of certainty. It was made from a position of clarity about what they were not willing to keep doing. That is a different thing, and it is a more honest account of how these decisions actually happen than the retrospective narratives usually suggest.

Taraban had the final word on the cultural moment we are in, and it was characteristically precise. He framed the current experimentation with non-traditional relationship structures as children taking tentative first steps after the failure of traditional marriage for 55% of the population. They do not yet know what they are building. “Unsuccessful experiments tend to die out.” The structures that serve human nature and human flourishing will survive. The ones that don’t will not. We do not need to argue about which is which. We only need to wait.

In Conclusion

Two days. Top experts operating at the level they are describing. Men who have built something real.

The through-line across both days, and across all the speakers, was something nobody said explicitly but everybody demonstrated: the men on that stage did not get where they are by optimizing for comfort. Every one of them has a story of a moment where the comfortable option was available and they chose the harder one instead. Not because they were fearless. Because they were clear about what they were building and willing to pay the price the building required.

That is the 1% in the 1% Forum. Not income percentile. Not social status. The percentage of men who, when given the choice between the comfortable option and the one that actually moves them forward, consistently choose the latter.

The full presentations from the 1% Forum 2025 are available inside the School of Unplugging. Every talk, unedited, with the material that didn’t make it into these two articles. If what you read here hit home, that is where the rest of it lives.

2027 tickets are available now here.

The Cold, Hard Truth

Never forget:

• Anti-fragility is not a philosophy. It is a construction project. Multiple passports, distributed assets, physical capability, a network of fixers, and a clear-eyed view of where governments are heading. Build it before you need it.

• You are running on either sugar or fat. If you do not know which one, you are running on sugar. Three months of disciplined dietary change is the price of admission to the other side. The men who have made that transition describe it as one of the most significant upgrades of their lives.

• Comfort is the enemy of growth. Not inconvenience - comfort. The voluntary hard thing is what builds the capacity to handle the involuntary hard thing. There is no other way to build it.

• Software is leverage. If you are building a business and you are not thinking about how software applies to your model, you are leaving the most powerful scaling mechanism in the history of commerce on the table.

• Women should always feel replaceable. Not as a game. As a reality. A man with genuine options carries himself differently, and that difference is felt before it is understood.

• Contempt is the clock. When it appears - in a relationship, in a community, in a business partnership - the end is already written. Watch for it early. Act on it when you see it.

• The decision to burn the ships is never made from certainty. It is made from clarity about what you are no longer willing to keep doing. That distinction matters.

Peace.

Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

She said the dark socks go in the dark hamper and the white socks go in the white hamper. He thought it was a little much, but fine, whatever, it’s not worth a fight over laundry. And that was concession number one.

Then it was where he brushed his teeth, because apparently he was getting toothpaste on the floor. Then it was the way he loaded the dishwasher. Then his weekend plans, which were creating a scheduling conflict she needed him to resolve. Then his diet - she wanted them to try eating healthier, would he mind cutting out the red meat for a while? Then her mother visited and stayed longer than they’d agreed, and he accommodated it because she needed the support. Then it was his hunting trips, which made her uncomfortable because of the kids. Then she wanted to discuss his social media.

Somewhere around concession number four hundred, she stopped being attracted to him.

She didn’t announce it. She didn’t leave a note. She quietly reclassified him - from the man she desired into the man she managed - and she hasn’t looked at him the same way since. He calls me now, usually around concession eight or nine hundred, asking what happened to his marriage.

This Is the Most Common Story I Know

Of all the patterns I see across thousands of coaching calls, this one is the most prevalent and, frankly, the most heartbreaking - because it happens to men who are genuinely trying. These are not men who checked out. These are not men who stopped caring. These are men who cared so much, who wanted so badly to keep the peace and make her happy, that they handed away their frame one reasonable request at a time until there was nothing left for her to look up to.

That is the cruelest truth about betatization by a thousand concessions: it is not done to you. It is done through you, with your full participation, and in most cases your best intentions. You weren’t trying to become the plow horse. You were trying to be a good partner. But women don’t fall out of attraction because men become bad partners - they fall out of attraction because men become compliant ones.

“Women can’t stand weak, incompetent, complacent men without backbones.” I did not say that to men. A woman said it to me, in a coaching session, describing her husband of thirteen years. She had watched the man she married disappear into a decade of accommodations, and she was telling me she couldn’t look up to him anymore. She was telling me the truth that most women won’t say out loud: his compliance didn’t make her feel loved. It made her feel like she was managing a large, agreeable appliance.

Why She Won’t Tell You This Is Happening

Part of what makes this so brutal is that she is often genuinely unaware that she’s doing it. Women don’t sit down and think, “I will systematically remove this man’s frame through a series of incremental requests.” It happens through the normal functioning of female nature, which is, among other things, to constantly test the men around her to determine whether they are the highest-quality option available. Every request is a test. Not consciously, not maliciously - but functionally. And every “yes” that should have been a “no” gives her information she doesn’t want to receive.

The sequence goes like this: put the dark socks in the dark hamper - and she thinks, hm, he did it. Let’s see what else. Don’t brush your teeth over there - okay, he moved. Let’s see what else. Over hundreds of these small interactions, she stamps him “yes,” and the stamp becomes automatic, and she stops noticing she’s even testing him anymore because the answer is already known. When she stops testing, she stops needing to know the answer. And by that point, the relationship is already over emotionally, even if she hasn’t left physically.

The Murder of Masculinity

I watched this play out in real time once, watching a couple leave their house through a window. The woman walked out first with resting bitch face - if you know that expression, you already know the marriage I’m describing - got into the passenger side of the car, and sat down. Her husband came out after her, carrying their baby. He went to the back of the car, strapped the child in carefully while she sat in the front not moving, and then, instead of getting in the driver’s seat, he got in the back to keep an eye on the child.

She drove.

That man had not made one catastrophic mistake that morning. He had made hundreds of small ones over several years, and what I was watching through that window was the accumulated result. He had been slowly, methodically reclassified from the man who leads the family to the man who manages the logistics of it. And his wife, sitting in the driver’s seat without a second thought, had no idea that the arrangement she’d quietly engineered was precisely the thing guaranteeing she would never genuinely desire him again.

That is what the end of this road looks like. Not a dramatic fight, not a clear moment where everything broke. Just a man in the back seat while she drives, both of them pretending this is normal.

I filmed this the day I saw it happen. Watch it and then ask yourself honestly - which direction is that man's marriage heading?

Plant Your Feet at Concession Number One

Here’s what I tell every man who comes to me after the damage is done: the moment to stop this was the first time. Not because every request is unreasonable - some of them genuinely aren’t - but because the pattern is what kills you, not any individual concession. The man who says “I’ll put my socks wherever I want, thank you” at concession number one is not a difficult man. He is a man with a frame. And a man with a frame is a man his wife can look up to.

You don’t have to fight over everything. You don’t have to refuse every request she makes. But there is a difference between a man who accommodates because he chooses to and a man who accommodates because he has been trained to, and she can feel the difference between those two things before she can find the words for it.

The men whose marriages stay alive - the rare ones, the ones I hear about where the woman is still genuinely attracted to her husband a decade or more in - are not the men who gave their wives everything they asked for. They are the men who kept something for themselves. Who maintained their mission, their standards, their social life, and their willingness to say no. Especially when she didn’t like it.

The frame of the relationship must be yours. Not fifty-fifty. Not collaborative. Yours. The moment you feel that slow erosion beginning - the first time she tries to rearrange your schedule, the first time she chirps at you for something that is frankly none of her business, the first time you catch yourself asking permission in your own house - that is the moment to plant your feet.

Not concession number four hundred. Concession number one.

The Cold, Hard Truth

Never forget:

• Betatization doesn’t happen all at once. It happens through a thousand small accommodations, each reasonable in isolation, each fatal as part of a pattern.

• Women test the men around them through requests and expectations. Every “yes” that should have been a “no” is information she registers whether she realizes it or not.

• She will not tell you this is happening. By the time she knows it’s happened, she has already reclassified you - and attraction doesn’t survive that reclassification.

• The plow horse is not the result of one catastrophic failure. It is the result of hundreds of small ones, compounded over years.

• Plant your feet at concession number one. Not because the request was necessarily wrong, but because frame is built or surrendered in the small moments, not the large ones.

Peace.

Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Last October I gathered a small group of men in Toronto for what I call the 1% Forum. No livestream. No replay for the masses. You either show up or you miss it. The format is simple - I bring in men who are operating at an exceptional level in their respective fields, put them on a stage in front of an equally exceptional audience, and let things get real.

Last year was the best one yet.

Over two days, top speakers covering territory that most men never get access to in one room - relationship dynamics, divorce forensics, real estate leverage, software entrepreneurship, testosterone optimization and metabolic health, AI implementation, wilderness leadership, publishing strategy, and brotherhood culture. Some of it was uncomfortable. A lot of it was actionable. All of it was the cold hard truth.

I’m going to share some of what went down across two articles. This is Part 1 - the external world. Money, legal protection, the sexual marketplace, technology, and the frameworks men need to navigate all of it without getting destroyed.

If you want access to the full presentations, they’re inside the School of Unplugging. But start here.

Chris Kelly - The Talk Nobody Expected

Chris Kelly runs Driftwood Paddle, a wilderness guide company that leads men’s backcountry retreats in Canada. He was the forum’s wildcard and, for a lot of men in that room, the most impactful speaker of the weekend.

His talk wasn’t about tactics. It was about what becoming a strong, capable man actually requires - and his answer was not what most men in that room expected to hear.

He told four stories. The one that landed hardest was about his father.

Kelly had carried a difficult relationship with his dad for years. He described the moment he learned to separate sensation from story - the somatic technique of letting a triggered emotional response rise and fall through your body rather than immediately reacting to it. That shift transformed the relationship. On a car ride, he told his father he was proud of him. His father, in turn, revealed something he had never shared: he lost his own father at eleven years old and had been carrying that alone ever since.

Kelly called it “carrying your torch” - acknowledging the sacrifices of the men who came before you and running the torch further than they could.

The room was quiet in a way that rooms don’t usually get quiet.

His other stories covered a coin-flip decision to leave a high-paying pipeline job in Australia for the Solomon Islands, a rickshaw trip across India where the plan was essentially to break down and trust whatever happened next, and the chain of seemingly random decisions that led him to founding Driftwood and eventually standing on that stage. His point was that you cannot always connect the dots looking forward. You can only follow what’s calling you and trust that the dots will make sense in retrospect.

“Becoming a strong and capable man is so much more than lifting weights.” He said it straight. “Becoming a strong, capable man is going inside and asking, what do I want out of this life?”

I’ve sat across from thousands of men on coaching calls. Most of them are looking for tactics. Kelly reminded everyone in that room that tactics built on a shaky foundation don’t hold. The internal work is not optional.

Orion Taraban - Why You Keep Losing the Game You Think You’re Playing

Dr. Orion Taraban is a licensed psychologist, author of Man on His Own, and one of the most analytically rigorous thinkers on intersexual dynamics operating today. His Psych Hacks brand reaches over ten million people monthly. I’ve had him on the channel and he’s one of the few people I’ll sit across from and actually take notes.

His 1% Forum talk was a masterclass in relationship economics, and it started with a line that I want you to sit with.

“It’s not the good or the loving or the virtuous who are rich in relationships. It’s the people from whom others want things.”

He framed every human relationship as an exchange of unequal things of comparable value. Not a moral transaction, not a romantic one - an economic one. When you understand this, a lot of things that used to confuse you start making sense.

The central paradox he laid out is this: satisfying someone’s needs makes you redundant. But withholding indefinitely causes them to leave. There is no static equilibrium. There is only managed distribution - giving enough to keep them engaged, holding back enough to keep them wanting. He compared it to a corporate promotion ladder with eighty-seven levels. No one keeps working when they’ve hit the ceiling. The art is making sure they never see the ceiling.

He called it the plumber paradox. Nobody continues to pay the plumber once the pipes are fixed.

His prescription for men: compress early, never expand. You can always give more over time, but you cannot take back what you’ve already given. “With women, you can always compress, but you can never expand.” Start minimal. Make her earn the next level.

On attraction, he made the case for Instagram not as a vanity tool but as what he called a “curated gossip brochure” - eight to twelve professional-grade photographs that communicate a lifestyle and let women do what they’re already doing anyway, which is evaluating men indirectly through social proof. He distinguished between the social validation approach (twenty thousand followers) and the curated website approach (small, intentional, high-quality). The latter is more effective for most men because it’s specific enough to be believable.

The talk closed with something I’ve been saying for years from a different angle. The less you care what a woman thinks of you, the more interested she becomes. Taraban put the psychological framework underneath it. “Any woman that I would give an exclusive commitment to wouldn’t need the exclusive commitment in order to stay.” If the commitment is the thing holding her there, you don’t have what you think you have.

Jason Hartman - The Real Estate Market is the Dating Market

Jason Hartman has been investing in linear market rental properties across eleven states and seventeen cities for over twenty years. He hosts one of the longest-running real estate podcasts in existence and created frameworks that I’ve found genuinely useful for thinking about markets of all kinds.

His talk was nominally about real estate. It was actually about one question that he argues is the most important question in life.

“Compared to what?”

Nothing has meaning in isolation. Housing prices up 93% over ten years sounds alarming until you apply leverage: with 20% down, that same appreciation becomes a 465% return on invested capital. In what he called “ludicrous mode” - 15% annual appreciation - leveraged real estate nets 72% annually after inflation. The number doesn’t mean anything until you compare it to something.

He applied this to the dating market with a precision that made several men in the room visibly uncomfortable. He walked through what he calls the qualifying funnel - filtering the available female population by age range, healthy weight, education level, mental health, tattoos, and OnlyFans - and showed, using the Female Delusion Calculator and Aaron Clary’s framework from Book of Numbers, that the resulting pool is vanishingly small. Men are not imagining that things have changed. The data confirms it. “Compared to what?” - compared to what the market looked like for their fathers and grandfathers - the answer is ugly.

His most original contribution was what he calls inflation-induced debt destruction. If you borrowed a million dollars in mortgages five years ago, you effectively only owe seven hundred thousand in real dollars today, because the dollar itself has lost thirty percent of its purchasing power. Inflation silently transfers wealth from lenders to borrowers. The man who owns leveraged real estate benefits from every dollar the government prints. The man who saves cash gets systematically robbed.

He traced the roots of this all the way back to the government’s incentive to inflate away its unfunded obligations, which he puts at $220 trillion. The options are default, raise taxes, sell assets, steal, innovate, or inflate. They will inflate. They always inflate. The question is only whether you’re positioned on the right side of it.

His closing argument was simple: the US real estate market is uniquely favorable because of government-subsidized 30-year fixed mortgages - the lowest interest rates in five thousand years of recorded history - combined with transparent MLS data and default property rights. No other country offers this combination. If you are a man building wealth and you are not taking advantage of leveraged US real estate, you are leaving the single best asymmetric trade in the world on the table.

Ryan Benson - The Four Types of Ex-Wife (And How Each One Can Destroy You)

Ryan Benson is a forensic accountant with more designations than I have time to list - MBA, CPA, CA, CBV, ABV, CFE, CFF - and he is cross-designated as an expert witness in both the United States and Canada in divorce proceedings. He runs the “Stay Rich Divorce” brand and has sat at the expert witness table in more high-net-worth divorces than most men will ever know exist.

His talk was the most practically useful thing I have ever seen presented at a men’s event on the subject of protecting your assets. I am not exaggerating.

He opened with a term he coined: “klepto-bismol.” She takes your shit and you feel sick. It got a laugh. The rest of the talk did not.

His framework organizes women in divorce into four types. Type 1 - roughly fifteen percent of cases - is cooperative. She wants security. She’ll negotiate reasonably. Type 2 - about twenty-five percent - is the smart professional who wants her fair share and will negotiate firmly but rationally. Type 3 - forty percent - wants to burn it all down, not because she’s calculating but because she’s angry. Type 4 - fifteen percent - wants to destroy your entire life, including your business, your reputation, and your relationships with your children.

Most men assume they’re dealing with a Type 1 or 2. Benson’s advice: assume Type 3 until proven otherwise, and have your defenses in place before you need them.

The first line of defense is a cohabitation agreement before you live together, and a prenuptial agreement before you marry. Not after things go sideways. Before. Full disclosure of assets and liabilities is mandatory - hide something and the agreement is void. He was emphatic: if she refuses to sign or reacts badly to the request, that reaction is the most important data you have received about who you are dealing with.

For entrepreneurs, he explained how courts determine what they call “personal equivalent income” for self-employed individuals. A forensic accountant on the other side will reconstruct your true earnings from cash flow, lifestyle expenses, and business accounts. Reinvesting capital into legitimate business growth before a split reduces imputable income. Not advice to do anything improper - advice to understand how the system works before the system uses it against you.

His most memorable line: “Women don’t give a shit about money. They care about lifestyle.” The number on the settlement document is irrelevant to her. What she wants is to maintain the life she became accustomed to. Translate every number into lifestyle terms and you negotiate differently.

He closed with Jeff Bezos as a case study. Bezos gave MacKenzie $49 billion and was completely done in eighteen months. “Sometimes you have to pay for your freedom. Give her the thirty or forty percent and walk away. Because the alternative is years of your life, your focus, and your earning capacity being consumed by a war you didn’t choose.”

Document everything. Get an agreement in place before you need it. Know your type.

Peter Holmquist - Every Battle is Won Before It’s Ever Fought

Peter Holmquist left a fish factory in Norway, saved six months of expenses, and forced himself to make money only through building a business. He discovered Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing, built a business around it to five thousand dollars a month, made the mistake of chasing affiliate marketing and dropshipping, and watched his neglected books earn twenty-five hundred a month while he wasted six months on things that didn’t work. He burned the ships a second time and committed exclusively to publishing. He now runs Driven Publishers and teaches professionals how to use books as authority and income tools.

His talk was a live demonstration of a publishing framework that most men have never been exposed to, and the central insight was this: a book is one of the most underrated assets in business today.

Not because of royalties, necessarily. Because of what a book does to your perceived authority, your client attraction, and your ability to charge for your expertise at a completely different level. He used Michael Rowe’s The Game-Changing Attorney as his case study - one book, five million dollars in new business, speaking invitations, and a positioning shift that no amount of advertising could have bought.

His four-step framework: validate using Amazon Best Sellers Rank data before you write a single word (a BSR of 100,000 means roughly one copy sold per day; 10,000 means twelve); position by analyzing competitor reviews and using AI to build customer avatars; write using AI as a multiplier for research, outlining, and drafting - not a replacement for your expertise; package with professional covers and a real launch strategy.

The validation step is the one most people skip and it is the most important. “Every battle is won before it’s ever fought. And this is especially true in publishing.” He showed the audience live how to identify profitable niches using keyword data, review counts, and competitor strength analysis. The market tells you what it wants to buy if you know how to listen.

He left men with something worth sitting with: “There’s nothing more sad than to see a man jump from opportunity to opportunity not realizing that he stands in his own acres of diamonds.” Most men already have expertise worth more than they know. They just haven’t packaged it.

Steve from Accounting - AI is Not What You Think It Is

Steve from Accounting is an AI implementation specialist and technical author who helps businesses integrate AI tools at various levels of complexity. His talk was the most technically dense of the forum and also the most sobering for anyone who has been sold on the idea that AI solves everything.

He opened with a statement that the room needed to hear.

“It is not a magic bullet. It will not do everything perfectly, no matter how much you wish it would.”

He described AI as a “confident bullshitter” - a system that will tell you anything with complete conviction, whether or not it’s true. Citations may have the correct study with a broken link, or the correct link pointing to the wrong study. It will never tell you it doesn’t know. It will just be wrong confidently. His foundational principle: trust and verify. Always have experienced humans review AI output, especially for anything legal, medical, financial, or compliance-related.

He laid out three tiers of AI business adoption. Plug-and-play models (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) are accessible and immediate but consumer-licensed, meaning the terms can change and your data passes through third-party servers. Hybrid systems combine multiple models to improve results. Custom stacks involve coding your own functions and models for security and specificity - higher cost, higher control. Where you sit on that spectrum depends on your risk tolerance, your budget, and how central AI is to your core business.

His most practical warning was about task stacking. Every additional thing you ask an AI to do simultaneously increases the probability of failure exponentially. The system is not a person who can juggle. Give it one clear job at a time, verify the output, then move to the next job.

The talk ended with a note on regulation - AI laws are changing rapidly across jurisdictions, the accountability burden falls on the user, not the model, and men building AI-dependent businesses need to be watching the legal landscape as carefully as they watch the technology.

“Log everything. Log the prompt, the models, the reviews, everything. It has to be traceable.”

In Conclusion

Two days of accumulated knowledge across relationship economics, real estate leverage, divorce protection, publishing, and AI implementation. The men in that room left with more actionable frameworks than most people accumulate in years of reading and listening to podcasts.

This is Part 1. Part 2 covers my keynote anti-fragility blueprint, Dr. Anthony Jay on metabolic health and testosterone, Chris Moffett on brotherhood and the twelve lessons he’d give his future son, Ori Staub on software as leverage, and the joint Q&A between Rich and Orion Taraban that went places neither of them planned.

If you want the full presentations from the 1% Forum 2025, they’re waiting for you inside the School of Unplugging. It’s one of many things you’ll get when you join - along with access to the community, the archive of content, and the men inside it who are doing the work.

The 2027 Forum details will be announced there first.

The Cold, Hard Truth

Never forget:

• Becoming a capable man is not just a physical project. The internal work - the reconciliation, the emotional courage, the clarity about what you actually want - is not separate from the work. It is the work.

• In every relationship, you are either the one from whom others want things, or you are the one wanting. Manage what you give and when you give it. Compression is always available. Expansion is permanent.

• Inflation is not your enemy if you are positioned correctly. Leveraged real estate with fixed-rate debt turns every dollar the government prints into a transfer of wealth in your direction. Savings accounts do the opposite.

• A cohabitation agreement and prenuptial agreement are not pessimism. They are the same due diligence you would do before signing any business contract.

• AI is a tool, not a solution. Trust and verify. Log everything. Stack tasks one at a time. The man who uses AI as a multiplier of his own expertise will outpace the man who uses it as a replacement for thinking.

• You are probably sitting on more expertise than you have packaged or monetized. A book is not a vanity project. It is an asset that keeps working while you sleep.

Peace.

The full 1% Forum 2025 presentations are available inside the School of Unplugging. Tickets for the 1% Forum 2027 are available here.