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.

Let me tell you something that most guys in my position will never say out loud.

I’ve changed my mind. Not about the fundamentals - hypergamy is real, female nature is what it is, family law is still a disaster zone for men, and the work of becoming a high-value man never ends. None of that moved. But over eleven years, somewhere north of a thousand coaching calls, three books, and a billion video views, there are five areas where the picture got sharper, more complicated, and more honest than what I was putting out in the beginning.

This isn’t a confession. I’m not apologizing for anything I said. What I’m telling you is that I kept doing the work - the same work I tell you to do - and the work changed me. That’s how it’s supposed to go. A man who looks at new evidence and refuses to update his thinking isn’t principled. He’s just stubborn.

Here’s where I evolved, and why.

1. Marriage

In The Unplugged Alpha, the chapter was called “Why Smart Men Avoid Marriage.” That title tells you everything about where I was at when I wrote it.

My divorce nearly killed me. I mean that literally - I was driving on the highway in 2011 contemplating whether to aim for an overpass pillar. My lawyer looked me in the eye and said if you have the penis and go to court, you are going to lose badly. The statistics were brutal. Fifty percent of first marriages fail, women initiate eighty percent of divorces, only thirteen percent of couples report being in love after eight years. The financial mechanics were designed to gut a man. I’d lived every word of it.

So when I sat down to write that chapter, I wrote from that place. And I wasn’t wrong. The risks are real. They haven’t changed.

But then the coaching calls kept coming, and something started showing up that I hadn’t fully accounted for. Men in genuinely happy marriages. Not the obligated compliance marriages, not the sexless roommate arrangements - actual marriages where both people were thriving. I started asking those men what they were doing differently, and a pattern emerged that I couldn’t ignore.

In The Top Shelf Man, I wrote a chapter titled: “How Marriage Can Be the Sweet Spot for the Average Man.”

The data changed the framing. Not the risk analysis - that’s all still in there, every word of it. But the adversarial tone gave way to something more accurate: marriage is conditionally a disaster, and the conditions are knowable, and they can be vetted before you sign anything. That chapter tells you what those conditions are. That’s more useful than telling every man to run.

2. Hypergamy

When I first started talking about hypergamy, the framing was almost entirely defensive. Here’s this force working against you, here’s how it will blindside you, here’s why it destroys marriages and leaves good men wondering what the hell happened.

That framing wasn’t wrong. But it was incomplete, and I’ll tell you where I landed.

Hypergamy is awesome - if you’re the man at the top of the scale.

My editor said it himself: hypergamy helps you stand out even more in a sea of guys who have no idea how any of this works. When you understand what women are actually responding to, you stop wasting energy being angry at the mechanism and start using it. The man who knows what genuine burning desire looks like, who knows what drives it and what kills it, who knows why competition anxiety is an aphrodisiac rather than a problem to eliminate - that man has an edge that ninety percent of the male population doesn’t.

The shift was from “here’s the threat” to “here’s the edge.” Same knowledge. Completely different operating position. I think the earlier framing was where a lot of men needed to start, because you have to see the thing clearly before you can use it. But staying angry at hypergamy is like staying angry at gravity. At some point you either need to swim with the current or you’ll drown fighting it.

3. The Manosphere

I entered that world in 2017. A friend at a men’s retreat handed me The Rational Male over breakfast, and it genuinely saved my life - I mean that. Rollo Tomassi’s work gave me the framework I needed to make sense of everything that had happened to me. I threw myself into that space, amplified voices in it, collaborated with people in it, built my channel partly inside of it.

By the end of 2021 I walked away from it. In The Top Shelf Man I coined the term I’d already been thinking about for several years: the manoswamp.

Here’s what I saw up close that I hadn’t seen from the outside. The space is dominated by men whose income depends on keeping you angry, not on helping you improve. Drama sells. The algorithm rewards outrage and punishes solutions. There are men in that world hiding behind pen names with fabricated success stories, women using it as an OnlyFans with slightly more clothing, and a culture of infighting and backstabbing that would embarrass a high school hallway. And the pill obsession - red pill, black pill, white pill, clear pill, whatever’s next - is mental masturbation. Obsessing over pill colors does not get you to the gym. It does not build your business. It does not help you vet a woman or hold your frame.

I’m grateful for what I learned there. I’m glad I left. The best thing that space can do for a man is give him a starting point. The worst thing it can do is become his identity.

4. The Wealth Goalpost

In the first edition, the target I put out was a million dollars. Get to a million and you’ve achieved real financial freedom. That was the number.

By the second edition I had to be more honest about that. In any major Western city, a million dollars is not financial freedom. It’s a reasonable net worth for a man in his forties if you’re being generous about it. One medical crisis, one bad business year, one divorce - and a million dollar net worth becomes a much smaller number very quickly.

The number I stand behind now is ten million. That’s where genuine options open up. That’s where the money starts working harder than you do. That’s where you stop being one bad event away from starting over.

Some men heard that shift and felt the goalposts move on them. I understand that reaction. But I’d rather give you an honest target that’s harder to reach than a comfortable target that leaves you exposed. The work doesn’t change - the seven spokes, the wealth creation methods, the relentless pursuit of excellence - none of that changes based on the number. You don’t get to complain about the distance. You get to decide whether you’re going to run.

5. What “Doing the Work” Actually Buys You

This one is the hardest to say, because it touches the most important thing I’ve ever told men to do.

For years, my core message has been: do the work. Build yourself. Chase excellence. Become the man women want instead of chasing women who don’t want you. That message is right. I stand behind every word of it.

But I’ve watched something happen with a subset of men who took that message seriously, did everything right, built themselves into legitimately high-value men - and then stopped. They reached a level they were satisfied with, locked in a relationship, and quietly started coasting. They thought the work had bought them something permanent. They thought arrival was possible.

What I understand now, and what I didn’t say clearly enough in the beginning, is that doing the work earns you access. It does not buy you permanence. Briffault’s Law doesn’t care how hard you worked to get here - it only cares about what you’re providing right now, today, and what you’re likely to provide tomorrow. The woman who was drawn to the man building something will leave the man who stopped building. Not because she’s cruel. Because the firmware running her attraction doesn’t have a loyalty setting for past performance.

The work is not a transaction. You don’t do it, collect your prize, and retire. It’s a standard of living. The man who understands this doesn’t find it depressing - he finds it clarifying. There’s no finish line. There’s only the man you’re becoming, and the man you’re becoming is either moving forward or sliding back. Pick one.

In Conclusion

Eleven years. Over a billion views. Three books. Thousands of hours of coaching calls with men at every stage of the journey. This is what that looks like from the inside - not a man who got everything right on the first try, but a man who kept doing the work until the picture got clearer.

I didn’t change my mind because someone pressured me to. I changed it because the data kept coming, and I made a decision a long time ago that I was going to follow the evidence wherever it led, even when that meant looking at my own earlier positions with fresh eyes.

That’s what unplugging actually means. Not just unplugging from society’s lies. Unplugging from your own comfortable ones too.

The Cold, Hard Truth

Never forget:

• Evolution is not weakness. A man who updates his thinking based on evidence is doing exactly what he tells other men to do. The man who refuses to update is just protecting his ego.

• The risk analysis on marriage hasn’t changed. What changed is the roadmap for the men who are going to do it anyway. Know the risks. Vet accordingly. Or don’t do it. Those are still the only options.

• Hypergamy is not your enemy. It is the single most useful piece of information you can have about how attraction actually works. Use it.

• The manoswamp gave many of us a starting point. It is a terrible place to build a life. Take what’s useful, leave the rage, and go do something with it.

• Ten million is the honest number. A million feels good. Ten million is freedom.

• Doing the work is not a transaction. It is a permanent standard of living. There is no arrival. There is only the direction you’re moving.

Peace.

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

I always ask the same follow-up question: “Do you want to hear what you want to hear, or do you want to hear the truth?”

They always say the truth. Then they spend the next twenty minutes arguing with it.

Let me save you the fee and give it to you straight.

I’ve had well over a thousand coaching calls with men, and I’ve covered this on video to the tune of over a million views, because the experience of men who date single mothers follows a pattern so consistent it might as well be a formula. The details change - the number of kids, the custody arrangement, the ex’s particular flavor of chaos - but the architecture of the situation is always the same, and it always ends with a man who gave significantly more than he got.

Here is why.

You Will Come Last. Every. Single. Time.

The most fundamental thing you need to understand about dating a single mother is that her children will always be her first priority. And they should be - that’s not a criticism, it’s biology and instinct, and it’s what you’d want from any mother. But here’s what nobody tells you before you get in: what that means in practice is that you will never be her priority. Not first, not second, not third on a busy week. You are a welcome addition to a life that was already full before you showed up.

I dated a single mother for several years. We traveled together, built something that looked like a relationship, and what I observed, consistently and without exception, was that the moment her child needed something - or wanted something, or acted out, or decided to test the boundaries - the relationship came second. That is the arrangement. It was the arrangement from day one, I just didn’t fully accept what that meant until I was deep enough in to feel the cost of it. The mama bear instinct is real, it is powerful, and it does not negotiate.

You need to know that going in.

Five Structural Problems That Don’t Go Away

I cover these in detail in The Unplugged Alpha, but here they are plainly:

Cuckoldry. You are investing your time, your money, and your emotional energy into raising another man’s genetic legacy. In most jurisdictions, if you cohabitate with a single mother long enough, or if you marry her, you can acquire legal financial obligations to children who aren’t biologically yours. That is the deal the state will enforce upon you, and it doesn’t ask for your explicit consent.

Responsibility Without Authority. You are not their father. Which means the moment you attempt to set a boundary, establish a standard of behavior, or correct something you’d correct in your own child, you will hear some version of “you’re not my dad” - or she will step between you and the situation to protect her child from your entirely reasonable expectations. You carry the weight of the role without the authority.

The Victim Mindset. The vast majority of single mothers I encounter in coaching have a story about why their situation isn’t their fault. The ex was a narcissist, a deadbeat, emotionally unavailable, abusive, absent - pick the narrative that applies. Some of them are completely true. Some of them are the version of events that developed over years of telling the story in a way that minimizes her own contribution to the outcome. Either way, you are inheriting the emotional wreckage of someone else’s choices, and the story about those choices is already fixed before you arrive.

Financial Issues. Single motherhood is expensive. Child support, if she receives it, rarely covers the full cost of running a household. Her income, split between childcare and the basic expenses of a life that was designed for two, often leaves her financially stressed, financially dependent, or both. That stress flows downstream into everything else.

Re-prioritization. The custody schedule, the school runs, the co-parenting calls, the sick days, the events, the activities - all of it was in place before you arrived, and all of it takes precedence. You will plan things that get rescheduled. You will have conversations that get interrupted. You will exist in the gaps of a calendar that wasn’t built with you in mind.

If you want the full picture, this is the video. One million views and the comment section still hasn't stopped.

The Captain Save-a-Hoe Trap

The reason men walk into this situation anyway is that the impulse to protect and provide is hardwired into us, and single mothers are often genuinely sympathetic figures. She’s struggling. The kids are cute. She appreciates you in a way that women without dependents often don’t - at least at the start. And so the instinct kicks in, and a man who should be evaluating the situation clearly ends up auditioning for a role in a family built around a man who isn’t him.

Here’s the thing: you cannot buy genuine desire. You can subsidize a woman’s life, take her kids to school, pay off her debt, fix her car, and be everything she needed when she was struggling - and at the end of it, when your utility is no longer required, you will discover that obligation and attraction are very different things. Every Captain Save-a-Hoe I’ve coached thought he was building equity. He was building dependency. Those aren’t the same investment.

The One Exception - And Why It Barely Counts

There is one scenario where I think dating a single mother can be considered. She has one child, the child is older and relatively self-sufficient, the biological father is genuinely not in the picture, she has her financial house in order, and you have cast-iron frame and a real willingness to walk the second the arrangement stops working. Some men can do that. Most men can’t, because they get emotionally attached before the vetting is done.

Finding a woman who meets all of those criteria while also being someone you genuinely want to build a life with is roughly equivalent to finding a Leprechaun with a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. The exception exists in theory. In practice, the men who go looking for it spend years trying to build something on a foundation that was compromised before they laid the first brick.

My advice to single fathers specifically: focus on women without children. You already have children. You know exactly what that life costs. Don’t add another man’s complications to an equation that’s already complex enough.

The Cold, Hard Truth

Never forget:

• She will always choose her children over you. That’s not a character flaw - it’s biology. But it is the deal you are signing up for, and you need to be clear-eyed about what it means.

• The five structural problems - cuckoldry, responsibility without authority, the victim mindset, financial issues, and re-prioritization - are not edge cases. They are the pattern.

• The Captain Save-a-Hoe instinct will activate. Recognize it before it costs you years of your life and a significant portion of your resources.

• The one exception is so narrow as to be almost academic.

• Your time, money, and energy are finite. Invest them in relationships that aren’t structurally compromised from the start.

Peace.

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

Not struggling. Not getting less than they want.

None.

According to the General Social Survey, 24.9% of men between the ages of 18 and 29 reported zero sexual encounters in the past twelve months - that’s the 2024 data. In 2010, that number was 12%. It has more than doubled in fifteen years. The same survey shows women in that age bracket at 18.5%, and the gap between men and women on this is widening, not closing.

Sit with that for a second. One in four. That’s not the fringe. That’s not the basement-dwellers the internet likes to mock. That’s a significant chunk of young men in what should be the most sexually active years of their lives, getting absolutely nothing.

Here’s what the mainstream conversation won’t tell you about why.

The Math of Hypergamy

Women do not distribute sexual access equally across men. They never have, and hypergamy - the biological drive to select the highest-value male available - ensures that they never will. What dating apps have done is take a dynamic that always existed and put hard numbers on it. When the data shows that women swipe right on fewer than 20% of the men they see, and men make up over 62% of the users on these platforms, you don’t need a PhD in mathematics to figure out what happens to the bottom 80%.

The top men - the ones with the physique, the status, the social proof - get shared. Multiple women, casual arrangements, no commitment required. And the bottom of the marketplace? They don’t get rationed less. They get nothing at all. This is what hypergamy looks like at scale, and the modern dating marketplace has made it more transparent, and more brutal, than any other time in history.

Women are the selective sex. They receive the bulk of the attention and they do the choosing. And what are they choosing based on? Not your emotional availability. Not your communication skills. Not your ability to express vulnerability. They’re swiping on what they can see in the first three seconds - your physical presentation, your status signals, and how you compare to the other thirty men they looked at this afternoon.

“Women don’t swipe right on your mental frame,” I’ve said this on the channel more times than I can count. “They swipe right on the optics of your hotness.”

I covered this in depth on the channel a few years back - the mechanisms haven't changed, the numbers have only gotten worse.

The Wrong Prescription

If you listen to the mainstream conversation about the male loneliness crisis - and it has become a mainstream conversation, which tells you something - the solution being offered is therapy, emotional intelligence, and learning to communicate better. The relationship skills gap, as the experts like to call it.

This is well-intentioned, and completely wrong.

A man who learns to communicate better, to be emotionally available, to open up about his feelings, has not moved a single point on the sexual marketplace value scale. He’s just become slightly more articulate about his situation. Women respond to physical presentation, competence, status, and the social proof that other people find you valuable. The guy who spends six months in therapy is still overweight, still broke, still boring, and still invisible to the dating market - he’s just more comfortable with it.

The solution to one in four young men being shut out is not a feelings workshop. It is the gym, it is income, it is developing actual skills and interests that make you worth spending time with, and it is understanding how the marketplace you’re operating in actually functions.

This Is On Both Sides

I want to be fair here, because the data cuts both ways. Women’s standards have risen in direct proportion to the social validation they receive online, and a lot of those standards are completely disconnected from reality. A woman who insists on a 6-foot man making six figures while she brings nothing particularly exceptional to the table isn’t exercising discernment - she is pricing herself out of the market through delusion, and then blaming the market when the math doesn’t work.

But here’s the thing: none of that is in your control. What is in your control is whether you are in the group of men who get selected or the group who don’t. And the uncomfortable truth that nobody in the mainstream conversation will say out loud is that the vast majority of young men are not doing the work. They are overweight. They have no game. They have nothing interesting going on in their lives, and women can tell that within about ten seconds of meeting them.

The men getting results in this market are doing what most men won’t do. They are consistent at the gym. They are building income. They are developing skills and interests that make them interesting to be around. They understand how female nature and the sexual marketplace actually operate, rather than running on Disney programming and hoping for the best.

The Unplugged Alpha is where I lay out the full framework - the seven spokes, the sexual marketplace, the mistakes most men are making and how to stop making them. The information exists. Most men won’t use it, which is exactly why the men who do have an enormous advantage.

The Cold, Hard Truth

Never forget:

• One in four men under 30 had no sexual encounters last year. The number has more than doubled in fifteen years, and it’s still rising.

• Hypergamy does not distribute access equally. The top men are shared by multiple women, and the bottom gets nothing.

• The mainstream prescription - therapy, emotional intelligence, communication skills - addresses the wrong problem entirely.

• Women swipe on what they can see. Physical presentation, status, and social proof are the only variables that matter at the top of the funnel.

• The solution is not a feelings workshop. The solution is the work - gym, income, skills, self-improvement across every spoke.

Most men will read this, nod, and go right back to whatever they were doing.

Don’t be most men.

Peace.

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

And yet.

Less happiness.

This is not a hot take. This is not something some guy in a car said. This is peer-reviewed research from the National Bureau of Economic Research, tracking three and a half decades of real women reporting how they actually feel about their lives. And it found that across all demographics - married, unmarried, young, old, with children, without - women were reporting lower life satisfaction than they had before the liberation began.

I have watched this play out in my coaching calls, on my podcast, and in the messages I get from women who followed the program to the letter and arrived, exhausted and confused, at a destination that wasn’t what they were sold.

She Had Everything. She Was Miserable.

Let me tell you about a message I received a while back from a woman in her mid-forties. I’m going to share it because it is the most honest and precise description of this dynamic I have ever read.

She had a PhD. She owned her house. She made six figures. She was a published author. She drove a Tesla. She had traveled around the world. By every metric that feminism told her to optimize for, she had won.

She wrote to me in all capitals: “I AM MISERABLE.”

She listed her reality in plain language. She had very few friends, because the ones who got married gravitated toward their husbands and families over time, and girls’ night became Tuesday lunch once every few months. She spent most of her time alone. She ate dinner by herself, every night. She had to earn the money, go to the grocery store, buy the food, drag it home, cook it, eat alone, and clean up. Every task a partnership would have shared, she carried alone. She had worked multiple jobs her entire adult life to afford what married women get through partnership.

And then the line that matters most: “Men don’t give a shit about my career, my home, my degrees. None of that.”

I have said this more times than I can count. There is not a man alive who has ever looked at a woman’s framed credentials on a wall and felt attraction. We don’t care about the Tesla. We don’t care about the six-figure income. We don’t care about the book. Women are beauty objects to men - that is not a moral judgment, it is an observation that holds across every culture and every era of recorded history - and no amount of career achievement changes the variables that actually drive male attraction.

She knew this now. At forty-six.

I read her message on the channel when it came in. The reaction from the audience tells you everything you need to know about how common this story is."

What the Program Actually Delivered

Feminism promised women that they could achieve the same satisfaction men get from career success, independence, and sexual freedom. It told them that the impulse toward family, partnership, and a man who leads was a social construct imposed on them by patriarchy - something to overcome, not honor. It told them to delay family formation, to treat traditional femininity as oppression, and to view male leadership as a threat.

Millions of women followed the program. They delayed marriage in their twenties to build careers. They delayed children until their thirties or forties, at which point biology started answering in ways the ideology couldn’t override. They pursued independence until independence was all they had. The culture applauded them at every step, right up until the moment they were sitting alone and realizing nobody was coming home.

The cruelest irony in all of it - and I’ve said this before - is the bait-and-switch. Women were told not to serve a man. So instead, they spent fifty, sixty, seventy hours a week serving a company, usually a company owned by a man, and called it empowerment. They traded the voluntary partnership of a marriage for the involuntary dependency of an employer. The independence they won was the independence to pay their own bills. Alone. Forever.

That is what the program delivered.

Biology Doesn’t Care About Ideology

I want to be precise here, because this gets misread as political commentary. It is not. I don’t care about culture war points, and this is not about left versus right. It is about what the data says - and the data says that women who followed the feminist program are reporting lower satisfaction than the women who didn’t. That’s Stevenson and Wolfers, not me.

The paradox only exists if you believe the premise. If you accept that female happiness correlates more strongly with relationship quality, family connection, and a sense of belonging than with income or career status - and the evidence strongly suggests this is the case - then there is no paradox at all. There is just a predictable outcome from predictable inputs.

The desire for partnership, for children, for a man worth following - these are not imposed constructs. They are wired in, and the women who spent their twenties and thirties fighting those drives discovered, somewhere around forty, that the drives had won regardless. The drives are patient. They wait.

This Isn’t Your Problem to Fix

I want to be clear about something: this is not a piece designed to gloat over women’s unhappiness. The women living this reality are not my enemies, and their misery is not a victory for anyone. But you need to understand what produced it, because the same cultural machine that manufactured it is still running, still telling young women to follow the same program, and still going to produce the same results for the next generation.

And as a man, you need to understand the marketplace you’re operating in. A generation of women who delayed family formation, accumulated independence, and are now in their late thirties or forties with baby rabies and a suddenly urgent desire to lock down a top-shelf man - that is the dating market you’re navigating. Knowing why it is the way it is helps you navigate it with your eyes open.

The Cold, Hard Truth

Never forget:

• The peer-reviewed data is unambiguous: women’s happiness declined over thirty-five years across every demographic, despite every feminist objective being achieved.

• Female happiness correlates more strongly with relationship quality and family than with income or career achievement. This holds across cultures and eras.

• Biology does not care about ideology. The drives toward partnership, family, and a man worth following are not constructs to overcome. They are features of female nature, and they don’t switch off because a cultural movement decided they should.

• The program promised liberation and delivered loneliness. The women who followed it, and the women who didn’t, are now reporting the results accordingly.

• You cannot override nature with narrative. You can only delay the reckoning.

Peace.

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

And then, somewhere between six months and six years later, she’s cold. She’s distant. She initiates nothing. Sex is scheduled at best, nonexistent at worst. You ask what’s wrong. She says she doesn’t know. Or she says she loves you but isn’t in love with you anymore. Or she says nothing at all, and you just feel the temperature dropping, one degree at a time, until you’re sleeping in the same bed as a stranger.

You did everything she asked. And you lost her anyway.

What most men never figure out - and what I want to lay out for you clearly in this article - is that this isn’t a coincidence. The thing that killed her desire for you was precisely what she asked you to give her. Not despite it. Because of it.

The Three Killers

In The Top Shelf Man, I laid out a framework I call the Three Ity’s - Proximity, Familiarity, and Exclusivity. I called them the killers of most modern long-term relationships, and I meant that literally. These three forces don’t weaken attraction over time. They structurally eliminate it, the same way oxygen feeds a fire and then, when there’s too much of it in a closed room, puts the fire out.

Let’s take them one at a time.

Proximity: She wants to be around you all the time. She wants to share space with you, to know your schedule, to be woven into your daily life. And proximity is good, up to a point - it creates the kind of comfort and connection that makes a relationship feel real. But what proximity also does is kill mystery. When she knows exactly where you are, exactly what you’re doing, exactly what mood you’ll be in when you walk through the door - there’s nothing left to wonder about. And a woman who has nothing left to wonder about you has no reason to reach for you. The tension is gone. The wanting is gone. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and total presence makes the heart grow indifferent.

Familiarity: The old saying is that familiarity breeds contempt, and I’ve seen this play out in thousands of coaching calls over the years. Familiarity means she has now seen your flaws, your habits, your patterns, your weak moments, your failures and insecurities and the face you make when you’re tired or annoyed. She has seen the man behind the version of you that attracted her in the first place. That’s not automatically a death sentence - men who maintain their frame and keep doing the work can manage this - but familiarity means the mystery she projected onto you at the beginning is gone, replaced by reality, and reality rarely lives up to fantasy. The man who captivated her has become the man who leaves his gym bag by the door and always orders the same thing at restaurants.

Exclusivity: This is the most misunderstood of the three, and the most important. She asks for commitment. She asks you to stop talking to other women, to stop being available to anyone else, to be fully and completely hers. You agree, because it feels like the loving thing to do, and because you want only her anyway. But here’s what you’ve just done - you’ve eliminated the competition anxiety that was the engine of her desire.

Competition anxiety is a powerful and misunderstood concept. It is the feeling a woman gets when she senses that other women are interested in you, that you have options, that she is not the only one who sees what she sees in you. That feeling - that slight, healthy worry that you could be taken - is not just tolerable to women. It is an aphrodisiac. It’s what keeps her working to keep you. It’s what makes her initiate, make an effort, stay interested in maintaining what she has. The moment you hand her total exclusivity, and she knows with certainty that you have eyes for no one else, that engine shuts off. She has you locked down. She stops working for you. And desire without effort is desire on its way out.

I broke this down in detail in this video. The research alone will stop you cold.

The Paradox

Here is the part that most men - even men who’ve done the work on themselves - never fully sit with.

She is not asking for things that will make her want you less because she doesn’t know what she wants, or because women are irrational, or because there’s something wrong with her. She is asking for exactly what her conscious mind wants. Security, closeness, commitment - these are genuinely desirable things to her. The problem is that what her conscious mind wants and what her biology responds to are not the same thing, and they are in direct conflict inside every serious relationship.

Her biology responds to tension, unpredictability, scarcity, and competition. Her conscious mind wants comfort, certainty, availability, and total dedication. The more you give her what she consciously wants, the more you deprive her biology of what it needs to maintain desire. The more you give her comfort, the more you eliminate the tension. The more you give her certainty, the more you eliminate the mystery. The more you give her total exclusivity, the more you eliminate the competition anxiety. You are, every time you do exactly what she asks, dismantling the conditions under which she is capable of genuinely wanting you.

This is not her fault. I want to be clear about that. A woman who goes cold in a serious long-term relationship is not a bad person. She is not doing this to you deliberately. She is experiencing the entirely predictable downstream effects of conditions that were built into the relationship by both of you - by her requests, and by your compliance with them. The genuine burning desire she had for you at the beginning was organic. You cannot manufacture it back, and you cannot negotiate your way back into it. Anytime you try to negotiate desire, you get obligated compliance in return, and obligated compliance is not what you’re after. Sex she has because she feels guilty is not the same thing as sex she wants because she can’t help herself. If you’ve been in a serious relationship for any length of time, you know the difference.

What Men Do Wrong

When men feel the temperature dropping, they almost always make the same mistake. They try harder. They give more. They become more present, more attentive, more accommodating, more eager to please. They ask what’s wrong and listen carefully to the answer and try to fix whatever she says. They suggest couples counseling, or a vacation, or a date night, or a long conversation about where things stand.

Every one of those responses digs the hole deeper.

When a man responds to declining desire by becoming more available, more attentive, and more accommodating, he is adding proximity, familiarity, and the signal that she is absolutely his only option. He is pouring gasoline on the fire he’s trying to put out. She sees his anxiety and his effort, and it confirms for her, at a biological level she cannot fully articulate, that she has him completely. That he has nothing going on outside of this. That he is, in every way that matters to the firmware running underneath her conscious mind, not as valuable as he once seemed to be.

I’ve sat across from men on coaching calls who’ve spent two years doing everything right in the conventional sense - being a loyal, attentive, devoted partner - and who are genuinely blindsided by the outcome. They did what they were told. They gave her everything she asked for. They can’t understand why she’s looking at them with barely disguised contempt, that specific and devastating kind of contempt that Gottman identified as the number-one predictor of relationship failure. Contempt is the clock that ticks down to the end of the relationship, and that clock starts ticking the moment she stops seeing you as a man with options and a life of his own, and starts seeing you as a man who needs her to be okay.

What Actually Works

This is where men get the cold hard truth they didn’t come here for.

You cannot fix this by giving her more. You fix this by becoming more again. Not more to her - more in general. A man with an interesting life and a clear mission, who is doing things that don’t involve her, who is working toward something that matters to him, who has other men in his world who respect him and other women who notice him - that man does not struggle with proximity and familiarity in the same way, because he is not available enough for those things to fully set in. He is not overexposed. He cannot be completely possessed.

A woman’s desire for you will track your trajectory as a man. When she can see that you are moving forward, that you are building something, that you are captivating to be around because there is always something new happening with you - her desire either holds or it rebuilds. When you have stalled, when you are fully absorbed into the relationship, when your purpose has become her comfort - it dies. Every. Single. Time.

This does not mean you treat her badly, or that you manufacture drama, or that you play games. It means you take seriously the fact that the most loving thing you can do for a relationship is to remain the man she chose in the first place. A man with his own frame, his own mission, and his own life that he would be living with or without her. A man she chose, not a man who has quietly handed her all of his options and made her the center of his universe and then wonders why she doesn’t look at him the way she used to.

You can do anything to a woman - except bore her.

In Conclusion

The trap built into every serious relationship is that the conditions required to maintain her desire are in direct tension with the conditions she will consciously ask you to create. Understanding this is not cynical. Understanding this is the difference between a man who loses his relationship in slow motion and cannot explain why, and a man who navigates the long haul with his eyes open.

She is not the problem. The structure is. And once you understand the structure, you can work with it instead of against it.

The Cold, Hard Truth

Never forget:

• The Three Ity’s - Proximity, Familiarity, and Exclusivity - are the structural forces that kill desire in long-term relationships. Left unmanaged, they will dismantle what you built, slowly and invisibly.

• Genuine burning desire cannot be negotiated back into a relationship. When it’s gone, more effort and more accommodation will not bring it back. They will bury it faster.

• Competition anxiety is not jealousy and it is not manipulation - it is the biological mechanism that keeps a woman invested in keeping you. The moment she is certain she has you fully and completely, that mechanism switches off.

• Contempt is the clock that ticks down to the end of the relationship. If you are seeing contempt, the question is no longer how to stop the clock - it is how far back the clock has already been running.

• The most loving thing you can do for a relationship is to remain the man she chose. That means a life, a mission, and a forward trajectory that exists independently of her. Not despite the relationship. As the foundation of it.

• You cannot maintain her desire by giving her more of you. You maintain it by being more - more valuable, more captivating, more forward-moving. That work never ends.

Peace.

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

His total testosterone came back at 380 ng/dL. He’s 36 years old.

His doctor told him it was “within normal range.” Sent him home. Didn’t even blink.

Now here’s what that doctor didn’t tell him. That number is well below where a healthy man his age would have been sitting just two decades ago. And the reason it’s now “normal” is because they keep moving the goalposts to match a population that is getting weaker, fatter, and more hormonally compromised with every passing decade.

This isn’t just aging. This is something else entirely. And the data on it is terrifying.

The Study That Should Have Changed Everything

In 2007, a team of researchers led by Thomas Travison published a study in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism that should have set off alarm bells across the entire medical establishment. They tracked 1,532 men from the Massachusetts Male Aging Study across three waves - 1987, 1995, and 2004 - all between the ages of 45 and 79.

What they found was that testosterone levels in American men were declining at roughly 1.2% per year on a population level, independent of age.

Let me make sure you understand what that means. This wasn’t the normal decline that happens as a man gets older. Everyone knows testosterone drops as you age - somewhere between 1-2% per year after 30 in a healthy male, and that’s in a best case scenario. What Travison found was an additionaldecline on top of that. A man born in 1970 had measurably lower testosterone than a man born in 1940 at the same age, with the same BMI, the same health markers, the same everything.

Something in the environment, in the food supply, in the way modern life is structured, is actively suppressing testosterone production in men - and it has been doing so for decades.

And it got worse.

The Follow-Up That Confirmed It

In 2020, a study by Lokeshwar and colleagues analyzed data from 4,045 men in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (or, NHANES) between 1999 and 2016. Average total testosterone dropped from 605.39 ng/dL down to 451.22 ng/dL over that period. That’s a 25% decline in less than two decades.

And before someone says “well those guys were probably just fatter” - the researchers controlled for that. Even among men with a normal BMI, testosterone dropped from 664.79 to 529.24 ng/dL. Normal weight men, eating reasonably, still saw their testosterone crater across the study period.

This goes beyond individual lifestyle choices. This is a civilizational problem.

And if you want to understand why men are more anxious, more depressed, more medicated, and less motivated than at any point in modern history, you might want to start here. Only about 17% of men with mental health issues even seek treatment, compared to 28.5% of women. Most men don’t even know what’s wrong. They just know they don’t feel like themselves anymore, and they can’t figure out why.

I’ll tell you why. Their biology is being undermined, and nobody is talking about it in a way that gives men a plan to fight back.

What Is Actually Causing This

The decline is not coming from one thing. It’s coming from everywhere, all at once, and it’s compounding.

Endocrine disruptors are in everything. BPA in plastics, phthalates in personal care products, pesticides in food, synthetic estrogens in the water supply. These compounds mimic estrogen in the male body and interfere directly with testosterone production. You are being exposed to them every single day - in the food you eat, the water you drink, the containers your food comes in, and the products you put on your skin.

Men are fatter than they have ever been. Excess body fat doesn’t just correlate with lower testosterone - it actively converts testosterone into estrogen through a process called aromatization. The more body fat you carry, the more testosterone your body converts into estrogen. It’s a vicious cycle. Low testosterone makes it harder to lose fat, and more fat produces more estrogen, which further suppresses testosterone. This is why you see so many men carrying visible breast tissue now. That’s not just fat. That’s estrogen dominance.

Chronic stress is destroying cortisol balance. Cortisol and testosterone have an inverse relationship. When cortisol goes up, testosterone goes down. And the modern man is drowning in cortisol - financial stress, relationship stress, work stress, the constant low-grade anxiety of being plugged into screens 16 hours a day. Your body cannot optimize its endocrine system when it thinks it’s under threat every waking moment.

Sedentary lifestyles and processed food are finishing the job. Most men sit at a desk all day, eat garbage that comes out of a package, stare at blue light screens until midnight, and then wonder why they feel like a shell of themselves. If the 2.4 million years of human history were broken down into 24 hours on a clock, we’ve been eating meat for almost 24 hours, wheat for six minutes, and processed foods for four seconds. Your body was not designed for this.

None of this is going to fix itself.

What You Actually Do About It

This is the part most people skip. They’ll give you the doom and gloom - testosterone is dropping, men are suffering, the world is falling apart - and then they move on to the next depressing headline. I’m not going to do that. If you’ve done any amount of reading on this channel or in my books, you know that I don’t bring you problems without solutions. That’s not how this works.

I wrote an entire chapter on this in The Unplugged Alpha because it’s that important. Chapter 3, “Testosterone and Health.” It covers the full protocol - natural optimization, TRT, bloodwork, supplementation, all of it. If you haven’t read it, this is the chapter alone that’s worth the price of the book.

Here’s the short version.

Get your bloodwork done. I don’t care if you’re 25 or 55. Get a full blood panel. Not the basic one your family doctor orders - a comprehensive panel that includes total testosterone, free testosterone, estradiol, SHBG, LH, FSH, thyroid, and a full metabolic panel. You need a baseline. You cannot manage what you do not measure, and you cannot optimize what you cannot see.

Fix the basics first. Cut processed food. Get your body fat to 12-15%. Lift heavy compound movements. Get 6-8 hours of quality sleep in a dark room with no screens. Reduce blue light exposure at night. Minimize EMF exposure. Supplement with Vitamin D3 paired with K2-MK7 - most men living north of the tropics are severely deficient, and D3 is directly correlated with testosterone production. Add zinc, boron, and ashwagandha. Consider Tongkat Ali, which has clinical evidence supporting its role in testosterone optimization. You can find the specific supplements I use and recommend at theunpluggedalpha.com.

If the basics aren’t enough, explore TRT with a competent doctor. Not your family doctor who will tell you 380 is “normal.” A doctor who specializes in male hormone optimization and treats symptoms, not numbers. My own protocol is 90mg of testosterone cypionate per week plus 1000 IU of Human Chorionic Gonadotropin (or, HCG) weekly, under the supervision of a licensed TRT doctor. Most TRT doctors will prescribe between 80 to 200 mg per week and then adjust based on your bloodwork. Everyone responds differently - there is no one size fits all.

I made a video on this that breaks down my full experience with TRT - the good, the bad, and the ugly. It’s one of the most viewed videos on my channel because men are desperate for someone to tell them the truth about this instead of the sanitized, hedge-everything version they get from mainstream health media.

Andrew Huberman said it best when he described the importance of healthy testosterone levels in men: “It makes effort feel good.” That’s the simplest, most accurate summary I’ve ever heard. When your testosterone is optimized, you want to do hard things. You want to train. You want to build. You want to compete. When it’s in the tank, you want to sit on the couch and scroll your phone until you fall asleep. And that’s not a character flaw - that’s a hormonal deficit that can be identified, measured, and fixed.

Why This Matters Beyond Your Health

I want you to think about this in the context of everything else I talk about on this channel and in my books.

Testosterone is the foundation. It underpins your energy, your drive, your confidence, your ability to hold frame, your capacity to lead, your physique, your sexual function, and your overall presence as a man. When it’s compromised, everything built on top of it starts to crack. Your relationships suffer because you don’t have the drive to lead. Your business suffers because you can’t focus or push through hard days. Your body deteriorates because you can’t recover or build muscle the way you used to. Your mental health takes a hit because the chemical that literally makes effort feel good is running on fumes.

And here’s the part that should really make you pay attention. This is generational. The Travison data shows that your sons will likely have lower baseline testosterone than you did at their age, and their sons lower still - unless something changes. Unless men start taking ownership of their biology the same way they take ownership of their finances, their businesses, and their relationships.

Nobody is coming to save you on this. Your doctor won’t flag it. The government won’t warn you. The food industry sure as hell won’t stop putting endocrine disruptors in your cereal. This is on you. It has always been on you. That’s the deal.

The Cold Hard Truth

Never forget: Men’s testosterone levels have been declining since before you were born. The Travison study proved that men today have significantly less testosterone than men of the same age twenty, thirty, forty years ago - and the decline is accelerating. This is not normal aging. This is environmental, dietary, and lifestyle poisoning that compounds across generations.

Getting your bloodwork done is the single most important health decision you will make this year. You cannot fix what you refuse to measure. Start tracking your levels now, establish a baseline, and revisit it every year.

The medical establishment’s definition of “normal” is a trap. Normal is the average of a sick population. You are not aiming for normal. You are aiming for optimal - the levels of a healthy 30 year old man operating at peak capacity.

Natural optimization works and it should be your first move. Cut the processed garbage, reduce stress, lift heavy, sleep properly, supplement D3+K2, zinc, boron, and ashwagandha. You would be surprised at how much your body can recover when you stop poisoning it and start feeding it what it actually needs.

If natural isn’t enough, TRT under the supervision of a competent doctor is a legitimate, life-changing option. Do not let anyone shame you for optimizing your biology. Hate never comes from above - only from people beneath you.

This is a competitive advantage. In a world that is systematically weakening men through environmental estrogens, processed food, chronic stress, and sedentary living - the man who takes ownership of his testosterone is operating at a level most men will never reach. Not because they can’t, but because they won’t do the work.

Do. The. Work.

Peace.

Sources:

Travison, T.G., Araujo, A.B., O’Donnell, A.B., Kupelian, V., & McKinlay, J.B. (2007). A population-level decline in serum testosterone levels in American men. Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, 92(1), 196-202.

Lokeshwar, S.D., Patel, P., Fantus, R.J., Halpern, J., Chang, C., Karber, A., & Ramasamy, R. (2020). Decline in serum testosterone levels among adolescent and young adult men in the USA. European Urology Focus, 7(4), 886-889.

Disclaimer: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases

This is not a dating problem. It is a math problem.

When you have one option, you treat it like it’s irreplaceable. You accommodate things you shouldn’t accommodate. You ignore red flags you’d normally catch immediately. You suppress your own standards because the cost of losing this one option feels too high to pay. And the cruelest part of this whole situation is that she can feel it. Women are extraordinarily sensitive to need. The very desperation that scarcity creates is the thing that kills her attraction before you’ve even had a chance to build any.

Abundance mentality is not an attitude adjustment. It is not something you can talk yourself into on the drive to a first date. It is the natural result of having actual options - multiple women in rotation, at various stages of the vetting process, none of them irreplaceable because you know from lived experience that the marketplace has more. When you have that, everything changes. You stop treating individual women like scarce resources, because they’re not. And when you stop treating them that way, they start treating you differently too.

Scarcity Is a Symptom, Not a Strategy

A man operating from scarcity will tell me he just needs to project more confidence. He wants the attitude that abundance produces, without doing the work that creates abundance. He’s looking for a shortcut between the output and the input, and I’m going to tell you the same thing I tell him: you cannot fake this, and you shouldn’t try.

Real abundance is built. It requires that you are, in fact, someone other people want to spend time with - which means the gym, the income, the social skills, the interests, the style, and the mission. A man who has done genuine work across all of those areas has actual options, and a man with actual options does not manufacture anxiety over a text message. He is too busy living his life.

The man who fakes confidence collapses under pressure. She tests him, he fails the test, because the foundation wasn’t there. The man who has built real options does not collapse under pressure, because walking away from a woman who is wasting his time is not a sacrifice - it is a preference expressed. That difference in the quality of his “no” is something she registers before she can articulate what she’s sensing.

What Abundance Actually Does

When you have real options, it changes the dynamic in ways you cannot manufacture by pretending. She can tell, on some level whether consciously or not, whether she is your priority or your preference. She can tell from how quickly you respond, from how much you accommodate, from whether you seem like a man with other things going on or a man who is waiting around for her to make his week interesting.

“Women don’t want to be with a guy that nobody wants,” I’ve said this a hundred times. “They want to be with a guy that other men want to be and other women want to be with.”

This is the mechanism behind competition anxiety - that low-grade awareness she has that other women find you attractive, that your time and attention are things worth earning. You cannot create competition anxiety by telling her you’re a high-value man. You create it by being the kind of man other women are genuinely interested in, and letting her notice that naturally. Social proof is not something you manufacture. It is something that follows from actually being in demand.

726,000 men have watched this. Most of them nodded along and then kept making the same mistake. Don't be most men.

Abundance Changes How You Vet

The other thing scarcity destroys is your judgment. When you are talking to one woman, every positive signal gets amplified and every red flag gets rationalized. You convince yourself that the issues aren’t that serious, that she’ll change, that the exceptions will become the rule. You make long-term investment decisions based on short-term scarcity, and those decisions cost you years.

When you are genuinely dating multiple women simultaneously - non-exclusively, non-deceptively, in the normal way that the marketplace actually functions - you can evaluate each one clearly. You’re not comparing her to an imaginary perfect woman. You’re comparing her to the actual women in your life, and the comparison is clear and honest. The red flags look like red flags again, because losing one option doesn’t mean losing all of them.

“The big problem most guys have when it comes to dating,” I’ve explained this more times than I can count, “is they go in too far, too quick, too fast with one woman.” And it’s nearly impossible to form an unhealthy attachment to one woman when you’ve got others in rotation. That’s not cynicism - that’s how proper vetting works.

The Foundation

None of this works without the foundation. Abundance without the work is delusion. And deluded men make terrible decisions about women, because they lack the self-awareness to recognize that their scarcity is distorting everything they see.

If you want to understand how the sexual marketplace actually operates, and what building real value looks like in practice, The Unplugged Alpha is the starting point. The abundance mindset is the output. The seven spokes are the input. There is no shortcut between them and no substitute for doing the actual work.

The Cold, Hard Truth

Never forget:

• Abundance mentality is not an attitude. It is the natural result of having actual options. You cannot fake it, and trying to will only accelerate the failure.

• Scarcity makes you irrational, accommodating, and easy to dismiss. She can feel it before you’ve said a word.

• Real abundance requires real work: gym, income, social skills, interests, mission. Every spoke contributes.

• Competition anxiety - her awareness that other women find you valuable - is one of the most powerful drivers of genuine desire. You create it by being worth competing for, not by claiming to be.

• Abundance clarifies your vetting. When no single woman is irreplaceable, you can see red flags for what they are instead of rationalizing them away.

Do the work. Build the options. Then let the math take care of the rest.

Peace.

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

“Easy for you to say, Rich. You’re tall. You’re rich. You’ve got supercars. You’ve already made it.”

I hear it so often I could set my watch to it. And every time I read it, I think of Steve.

Steve edits my books. He’s been in my world since 2020, when he first started working on the original Unplugged Alpha manuscript. He’s also one of the most dramatic proof-of-concept stories I’ve ever seen for the advice in that book - because Steve started with almost every disadvantage the excuse-makers love to hide behind.

Let me paint you the picture of where Steve was in 2014.

He was the textbook plugged-in Beta. His words, not mine. He had spent twelve years following his wife around the UK while she trained to be a doctor, putting her career ahead of his own at every single turn. He had zero concept of what a boundary was. He describes himself in that period as - and I’m quoting him directly - “a fucking man-child.”

He was earning shit money. His self-worth was in the basement, thanks to years of childhood bullying that he’d never dealt with. He was sleepwalking through life.

And then the divorce hit.

The Numbers

Let me give you the Steve stat sheet so the excuse-makers can sit down.

Five foot six. Buzz cut because his hairline is gone. Not a millionaire. British, living in the UK where the family court system doesn’t even recognize 50/50 custody - it’s not a thing there.

His divorce cost him the best part of fifty-five thousand pounds. That’s roughly seventy thousand dollars. It took two years. He needed a barrister to get it sorted. And even with a female judge who had his back, the UK system still left him fighting for scraps of time with his kids.

The chronology he created for his solicitor during the proceedings was - again, his words - “truly embarrassing.” He read it back to himself and cringed. That’s the guy we’re starting with. Five-six, bald, broke, humiliated, and co-parenting with a high-conflict ex who weaponizes the kids when it suits her.

This is not the origin story the excuse-makers want to hear. But it’s the one they need.

Are you balding? No problem, here’s how to deal with it.

The Work

Steve didn’t sit around feeling sorry for himself. Well - he did for a while. That’s normal. Red Pill Rage is a legitimate phase and I’d be lying if I told you there’s a shortcut through it.

But then he went deep into the work. Not dabbling. Not watching a few videos and calling himself “based.” He’s been at it since 2014 - over a decade of applied effort across every area of his life, and he’s still going.

He took his own balls back in 2018 - his words - and started treating his life like something he was building on purpose instead of something that was happening to him.

Here’s what doing the work for years actually looks like.

Physique. When he wrote his testimonial for the second edition, he was forty-four and in the best shape of his life. Strongest he’d ever been. He wears fitted clothes now - tailored by a local lady who used to work for top-tier shirt companies in the UK. The guy who couldn’t be bothered to dress properly is now getting custom fits.

Money. His income is well into six figures between his career and a business that he says is “taking off (accelerated massively by the advent of A.I.)” Compare that to 2014 when he was earning shit money. That’s not a small gap. That’s a different person.

Frame. This is where it gets interesting. Steve learned to let go of the things he couldn’t control. During the divorce, he went from dreading every message from his ex - the anxiety of “what bullshit is she going to come up with now” - to genuinely laughing when he reads her messages. He uses the Yellow Rock communication method with her now. Business-like. Civil. Zero emotional engagement.

He applies the same frame everywhere. In dating, he doesn’t get butthurt when a woman ghosts or isn’t interested. In business, he turned down projects he didn’t want and focused on ones where he could add real value. His stress levels dropped significantly.

Women. And here’s where the excuse-makers really need to pay attention.

Steve - five foot six, bald, not a millionaire - has a woman who drives forty-five minutes each way, twice a week, to come see him at his place. He has never been to her house. She buys new lingerie for him. She does his dishes after he cooks. She makes his bed without being asked.

He told her he would see other women. Not only did she accept it - she told her parents and her friends about the arrangement.

And she’s never been happier.

That’s not money buying compliance. That’s not height creating attraction. That’s genuine burning desire from a woman who trusts his competence and leadership enough to willingly fall into his frame.

His exact words: “It’s such a monumental night-and-day difference from what my marriage looked like, it still blows my mind.”

The Smoking Story

I want to share one small detail from Steve’s life because it captures the difference between the man he was and the man he became.

In the book, I talk about “I” statements versus “You” statements when it comes to setting boundaries. The difference between “I don’t date women who smoke - I find it deeply unattractive and an immediate turn-off” versus “You can’t smoke around me, so you need to stop smoking.”

Same desired outcome. Completely different energy.

The old Steve - the one who spent twelve years following his wife’s career around the UK - would have used the “You” statement, if he said anything at all. More likely, he would have said nothing and quietly resented it.

The new Steve? A couple of months into seeing this woman, they were driving to a weekend away and she asked if she could smoke in his car. Without skipping a beat, he told her he doesn’t want to spend his time with women who smoke - that he finds it deeply unattractive and an immediate dealbreaker. She looked shocked. She asked what he’d do if she kept smoking. He told her he’d wish her all the best and stop seeing her.

She got to decide whether spending time with a man who “ticks all of her boxes - and then some” was worth more to her than smoking. She chose him. And she’s genuinely grateful for it - because she’s healthier now too. That’s what a real “I” statement looks like when there’s frame behind it.

The Part Nobody Talks About

Steve’s arrangement with his kids is worth hearing, because it’s practical in a way that most divorce advice isn’t.

He couldn’t fight for 50/50 custody. The UK system doesn’t offer it. And he’d already spent fifty-five grand on the divorce. He didn’t have another twenty thousand pounds to gamble on a court system that wasn’t built for fathers.

So he got creative.

Instead of fighting for more overnights - which is how child support gets calculated in the UK - he fought for quality time. He takes his kids to school every day. Picks them up most days. Gives them dinner and a bath at his place. Then their mum collects them in the evening - she lives a minute’s drive away.

Does his ex get a few hundred extra quid a month in child support because of the overnight split? Yes. But he sees and hugs his kids every single school day. He has half the holidays and every other weekend. And his evenings are free to build his business, pursue hobbies, or date.

He summed it up simply: “I can always make more money. I can’t make any more quality time with my kids.”

The man who was a “shell of a man” in 2014 is now raising two incredible kids while building a business, maintaining his physique, and experiencing genuine desire from women - all at five foot six with a buzz cut.

What Steve Proves

Steve proves the one thing I’ve been saying for a decade that the excuse-makers refuse to accept.

The playbook works.

Not just for tall guys. Not just for rich guys. Not just for guys who were born with advantages. It works for five-foot-six British guys with receding hairlines who spent twelve years as a doormat and came out the other side of a messy divorce with fifty-five grand less in his pocket and a custody arrangement that a lot of men would have given up over.

Steve didn’t give up. He did the work. Over a decade of it and counting. And the results speak louder than any excuse you could come up with in the comments.

He’s not done, either. His exact words: “I’m only just getting started on this never-ending journey of living my best life for my kids and I.”

The life you want is available to you. Every piece of it. But nobody is going to hand it to you, and nobody is going to feel sorry for you while you sit on the sidelines making excuses about your height or your hairline or your bank account.

Steve was 5’6”, divorced, and broke.

Look at him now.

Your move.

Men from six continents, every tax bracket, of all ages. CEOs, tradesmen, military officers, teachers, a few professional athletes, and a whole lot of regular guys who feel like their life just detonated.

And here’s what nobody tells you about coaching a thousand men: you stop hearing individual stories and start hearing the same five stories on repeat. The details change. The names change. The city changes. But the architecture of the disaster is almost always identical.

So I’m going to walk you through the five archetypes. The five guys who book the call. And at the end, I’ll tell you the one thing they all have in common. Because it’s the same mistake, every single time.

1. The Guy Who Married Too Fast

This is the most common call I get. By a mile.

He met her, she was incredible, she was everything he’d been looking for, and within six to eight months he’s talking about moving in together. By month twelve, there’s a ring. By month eighteen, they’re married.

Now he’s sitting across from me - virtually, anyway - three to five years later, and he can’t figure out what happened.

Here’s what happened: he was dating a representative.

What do I mean by that? For the first 12 to 18 months of any relationship, you are not seeing her. You are seeing the version of herself she has assembled for your evaluation. The representative shows up on time, laughs at your jokes, cooks you dinner, and fucks you like she means it.

The representative is not the woman. The representative is the audition.

And this guy locked it down before the audition was over. He signed a legally binding contract with the government based on a performance that hadn’t even finished Act One.

Dr. Shawn T. Smith, who wrote The Tactical Guide to Women - a book I recommend to every man I coach - points out that it takes a minimum of 18 months before a woman’s true personality comes through. That’s not his opinion. That’s clinical observation from decades of practice.

What happens after month 18? The real person emerges. The shit tests ramp up. The “I don’t feel like it tonight” starts becoming the default. The enthusiastic sex that happened three times a week becomes once a month of starfish obligation.

And the guy who married at month twelve is sitting there thinking, “Where did she go?”

She didn’t go anywhere, brother. She was never there. You married the representative.

The lesson: Two years minimum before you even consider marriage. If it’s not a “Hell yeah!” at the two-year mark, it’s a definite “Fuck no.” Hire slow, fire fast. This applies to women even more than employees.

2. The Captain Save-a-Hoe

God, I get a lot of these.

This is the guy who found a woman who was a walking disaster. Broke, in debt, kids in tow, maybe an ex-husband who’s “a total deadbeat” according to her. And he decided that he was going to be the one to fix it all.

He pays off her debt. He moves her in. He takes on her kids like they’re his own.

I counseled a man who was married for less than two years. In that time, he paid off over $100,000 of her debt. She brought two special needs kids to the table. Know what happened? She wanted out - and was taking him to court for child support. For life.

A hundred grand. Gone. And now the state wants him to keep paying for kids he didn’t father.

He was a utility. An ATM with a pulse.

Look, I’m not unsympathetic. The impulse to protect and provide is hardwired into men. It’s part of what makes us men. But there’s a difference between providing for your family and subsidizing the wreckage of another man’s relationship.

Every single Captain Save-a-Hoe I’ve coached shares the same blind spot: he believed that if he just gave enough, did enough, sacrificed enough, she would see his value and love him for it.

That’s not how genuine desire works. You cannot negotiate desire. You cannot buy your way into her burning attraction. You can only buy obligated compliance. And obligated compliance breeds resentment.

The lesson: Never make yourself less so she and her kids can become more. If she doesn’t add value to your life as she is today, she’s not going to add it after you’ve spent six figures trying to fix her situation. She’ll just find a new man to extract from, and tell him what a loser you were.

3. The Thousand Concessions Guy

This one breaks my heart a little, because this guy actually had it. He started out alpha. He was the man she bragged about to her friends. He was the man she drove across town at midnight to see. He was the guy she enthusiastically tore the clothes off of.

And then, slowly - so slowly he didn’t even notice - he gave it all away.

It starts small. “Honey, could you put the dark socks in the dark hamper and the whites in the white hamper?” Sure, no problem.

Then it’s, “Can you pick up the kids on Tuesdays? I have yoga.” Okay.

Then it’s, “I think we should try going vegan together.” Uh, alright.

Then it’s the pink jobs creeping in. The cooking, the laundry, the school runs, the grocery shopping, the emotional labor of managing her calendar and her kids’ calendar and her mother’s birthday.

And somewhere around concession number 847, she looks at him and feels... nothing. Not anger. Not attraction. Just indifference. He’s become a plow horse. A utility. A piece of furniture in the house that occasionally snores.

This is what I call betatization by a thousand concessions, and it is the silent killer of marriages.

Every single guy who calls me from inside this pattern says the same thing: “I don’t understand. I did everything she asked.”

Yeah. That’s the problem. You did everything she asked. You surrendered the frame one tiny concession at a time until there was nothing left of the man she originally chose.

Women don’t divorce alpha men they admire and look up to. They leave beta men who’ve become a utility to them. And the cruelest part? She’ll describe you to her friends and the next guy as “just a beta” and “boring.” The same man she was sneaking out at 2 AM to go see five years earlier.

The lesson: The frame of the relationship must be yours. Not fifty-fifty. Not collaborative. Yours. And when you feel that slow creep of concessions eroding who you are as a man - the first time she rearranges your schedule, the first time she tells you what to eat, the first time she rolls her eyes when you want to do something for yourself - that’s the moment to plant your feet.

4. The Divorce Blindside

This guy is usually the one crying on the call. And I don’t say that to mock him. I’ve been this guy. I know exactly what it feels like.

He comes home one day and she says some version of the magic words: “I love you, but I’m not in lovewith you anymore.”

Or worse: he finds out she’s already lined up the next guy. Or she’s already talked to a lawyer. Or she’s already told her mother and her friends and her sisters, and he’s the last person to know that his marriage is over.

When I went through my own divorce, my lawyer told me something I’ll never forget. He said, “If you have the penis and you go to court, you are going to lose - and badly.”

I thought he was exaggerating. He wasn’t.

This is the guy who discovers, in the span of about 72 hours, that:

• The family law system was not designed with his interests in mind

• The woman he married is not the same woman who is divorcing him

• His access to his own children is about to be reduced to every other weekend and a Wednesday dinner

• His net worth is about to be cut in half - at a minimum

• And the emotional toll of all of this makes him understand, for the first time, why the male suicide rate spikes after divorce

I’m not going to sugarcoat it. Divorced men are more than twice as likely to commit suicide as married men, and almost ten times more likely to kill themselves than divorced women. That’s not a talking point. That’s a crisis that nobody wants to address because men are the disposable sex.

When I was six months into my separation, driving to the office, I had a very dark thought about taking off my seatbelt and slamming my truck into a concrete pillar. I share that because if you’re in that place, you need to know that a guy who went on to help millions of men was sitting in that same dark hole a few years back.

It gets better. But only if you do the work.

The lesson: Before you get married, go sit in a family court for an afternoon. Watch what happens to the men. Then go buy one hour of a local divorce lawyer’s time and have them walk you through exactly what happens to your assets, your income, and your custody rights if the marriage doesn’t work out. If you still want to jump out of that plane after hearing the odds, at least you’ll have your eyes open.

If you’re in the middle of a Divorce Blindside, I made this video for you.

5. The Late Bloomer

This is actually my favourite call to take, because this guy has the most upside.

He’s usually mid-thirties to mid-forties. He’s spent his entire adult life doing what society told him to do. Be nice, be agreeable, put her on a pedestal, “just be yourself.” And he’s gotten absolutely nowhere with women, or he’s gotten burned repeatedly, and he just found my channel six weeks ago.

His mind is blown. He’s angry, which is normal. Red Pill Rage is a legitimate phase. He’s consuming everything. Rollo, my book, every video on the channel. And he’s calling me because he wants a roadmap.

This is the guy I can help the most, because he hasn’t made the catastrophic mistakes yet. He hasn’t married the representative. He hasn’t signed over half his wealth. He hasn’t been betatized into a plow horse.

He just needs to understand three things:

One: Women should be a complement to your life, not the focus of it. Chase excellence. The women will come.

Two: Your sexual market value is the single most important factor in your results with women. Looks, money, status, and Game. Max them all out. There is no shortcut, and anyone telling you there is wants to sell you something.

Three: You are the prize. Not her. You are the gatekeeper of relationships. She is the gatekeeper of sex. And your gatekeeping power is the stronger bargaining chip of the two. Especially as you age into your forties and fifties and your value compounds while hers declines.

The lesson: The best time to take the Red Pill was twenty years ago. The second best time is right now. You are not too late. But you need to stop wasting time being angry at the game and start learning how to play it.

The One Mistake They All Share

Here it is. Every single one of these guys - the fast marrier, the Captain Save-a-Hoe, the thousand concessions guy, the blindsided husband, and the late bloomer - all share the same root cause.

They made a woman their mental point of origin.

They organized their life, their decisions, their identity, and their self-worth around a woman. Whether that was chasing her approval, subsidizing her life, surrendering to her frame, being blindsided by her departure, or spending decades trying to figure out why women didn’t want them.

In every case, the man had stopped being his own mental point of origin. He had made her the center of his universe. And a woman cannot respect a man who orbits her. She needs to orbit you.

That doesn’t mean being cruel. It doesn’t mean being indifferent. It means being a man of purpose, vision, and mission. A man who is so locked into chasing excellence that a woman’s presence in his life is a welcome addition, not a requirement for his happiness.

I’ve taken over a thousand of these calls. And the men who recover the fastest - who rebuild their lives, get their finances right, get their physique right, start doing well with women again - are the ones who finally, truly understand:

She should be a complement to your life. Never the focus.

Do the work.

Peace.

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

But when I sat down to write the second edition, I knew I’d missed one. And the more coaching calls I did, the more I realized it wasn’t just a missing flag - it was the flag that explained why many of the other twenty cause damage in the first place.

So I added a 21st. And honestly - it might be the most important one on the entire list.

She Can’t Be Led.

Now before the internet loses its mind, let me be very clear about what this means - and what it doesn’t.

This isn’t about obedience. This isn’t about a woman who has opinions, or who pushes back when you’re wrong. A high quality woman WILL push back when you’re wrong. That’s a green flag, not a red flag.

This is about a woman who fundamentally cannot allow a man to lead in any capacity. Ever. On anything.

You suggest a restaurant - she has a problem with it. You plan a trip - she replans the entire thing. You make a decision about finances, about the house, about the kids, about anything - and every single time, it gets challenged. Not because the decision was bad. Because she cannot psychologically accept that a man is steering.

I’ve had well over a thousand coaching calls with men. And this pattern shows up constantly with men who are in miserable relationships but can’t articulate why.

They’ll say things like “everything is a negotiation” or “I feel like I need permission to exist in my own house.” They don’t have the language for it, but what they’re describing is a woman who treats male leadership as an inherent threat - not because of what he’s leading toward, but because he’s leading at all.

Why This Is The Boss Girl Era’s Biggest Export

We are living in a culture that tells women that any form of male leadership in a relationship is oppression. That “submission” is a dirty word. That a strong woman never follows - she only leads or co-leads, which in practice means she leads and he gets a vote that doesn’t count.

The result? A generation of women who have been trained - by media, by their friend groups, by social media - to see a man taking charge as a red flag. The irony is staggering. A man leading well is one of the most attractive things a woman can experience - women crave adventure, variety, and fun - but the cultural programming tells her to fight it every time.

And here’s the part that really matters. Pay attention.

Contempt is the number one predictor of relationship failure. Not fighting. Not disagreeing. Contempt. And a woman who cannot be led will eventually develop contempt for you - not because you’re weak, but because your very existence as a man with opinions and direction threatens her frame.

You will be diminished. Your ideas will be dismissed. Your plans will be overruled. And eventually, you’ll stop making plans at all. You’ll stop leading because every attempt gets punished. And then - here’s the cruel twist - she’ll lose attraction because you stopped leading.

She created the conditions that killed your leadership, and then she resents you for not leading.

Read that again.

How To Test For This

This one is easy to spot if you know what you’re looking for. Early dates are where a woman shows you who she really is - if you’re paying attention.

Plan a date. Not “where do you want to go” - actually plan it. Pick the place, pick the time, have a plan for the evening. A woman with genuine burning desire and the ability to be led will love this. She’ll appreciate that you took initiative, that you have a vision, that you’re a man who acts.

A woman who can’t be led will immediately start modifying. She’ll change the time. She’ll suggest somewhere else. She’ll restructure the plan so it becomes her plan with your name on it. And she’ll frame it as being “helpful” or “collaborative” when what she’s actually doing is establishing that she runs things.

Do not confuse this with a woman who has a legitimate conflict or a genuine preference. There’s a difference between “I’m actually allergic to shellfish, can we go somewhere else?” and “I don’t know, I was thinking maybe we should do something different.”

One is communication. The other is a frame grab.

Here’s how I’d handle here if she grabs the frame.

The Cold, Hard Truth

If you’re with a woman who can’t be led, you have exactly two futures:

One - you stop leading entirely. You become passive, you defer on everything, you ask permission to breathe. She runs the household, she runs the finances, she runs the social calendar. And slowly, over months and years, her attraction dies because she’s living with a man she doesn’t respect. The relationship dies from the inside.

Two - you keep leading and she fights you on everything. Every day is a power struggle. Every decision is a battle. You’re exhausted, she’s resentful, and nobody’s happy. The relationship dies from the outside.

There is no third option where she changes.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again - you cannot negotiate genuine desire and you cannot negotiate someone out of a deeply held frame. If a woman fundamentally believes that being led by a man is degrading, no amount of conversation, couples therapy, or “working on it” will change that core programming.

The 21st red flag. She can’t be led.

Never forget it.

If you’ve got the first edition, the 2nd edition of The Unplugged Alpha has this flag and a lot more. And if you want the 21 green flags - the things you should be looking for - that’s in The Top Shelf Man.

Peace.

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