Sunday, July 10, 2016

PUAs and Entrepreneurship

On the recent post on  Reader Comment: Opinion on BradP reader MacDragard left the following note:
Aaron, what is your take on the recent shift of many of the big names in the PUA community shifting their focus to "entrepreneurship" training? I know it has been going on for a while now in the form of ex-PUA's shifting their focus to self-help and David DeAngelo went back to being Eban Pagan, but now RSD is really starting to go the whole entrepreneur skills route and now we have all these psudeo-entrepreneurs popping up that know everything about marketing but close to nothing about how to read and interpret financial data. It's like MLM without the opportunity to get paid and instead paying thousands of dollars more for training.

I was aware of "Eben Pagan's" move towards promoting pseudo-business courses, and I was occasionally pointed towards one or the other thread on the RSD form for laughs where some deluded moron talked about their great business plans, which tended to be modifications of putting a lemonade stand next to a busy road and dreaming of all the money flowing in because, obviously, everybody is a potential buyer.
I am not at all surprised that PUAs are moving into other areas. By now, the bootcamp well has run dry. Judging from the high numbers of download of my free ebook Debunking the Seduction Community, I don't think it's much of a stretch to say that I played a significant role wrecking that industry. (In case a PUA shill is reading: dude, if your gurus are doing so well, why are they peddling something else nowadays?)

The step towards selling information on entrepreneurship is an easy one to make for a PUA. Recall the old mantra of those losers: "Looks don't matter!" Of course they do. And of course, those incel losers only want to bang 10s, so for them looks matter quite a bit, even though in their twisted view on reality looks should not matter for women. Apparently they don't grasp that hot women have options. Now replace "woman" with customer with disposable income, and we're closer to understanding why "looks don't matter"-PUAs turn into "it's all marketing"-business coaches.

Of course, in the end the problem is that the vast majority of people are lazy, and dumb as fuck. Instead of lifting weights or just doing a few pushups, they rather sit down on their couch with a few cans of Mountain Dew and a bag of Cheetos, and the highlight of their day is when they manage to "teabag" someone in Destiny or Halo or Call of Duty or whatever the current flavor-of-the-month multiplayer shooter is.

If you weren't born with a silver spoon in your mouth then success requires work. Even the dude who won the genetic lottery won't grow muscles from watching YouTube videos. Getting in shape and fixing your wardrobe go a long way with regards to having success with women. But if you're lazy and can't take any criticism, then "looks don't matter!" is a much more appealing message than "fix your life if you want to get laid", just like "You're special. You deserve an A in Gender and the American Workplace" is, for some people, more appealing that getting a real college degree.

When it comes to making money a good first starting point is acquiring useful skills, i.e. marketable skills. Without that, economic success will be elusive. Of course there are occasional outliers like the guy who invented the pet rock and became a multi-millionaire in 1970s money. For those not so lucky, you need access to money, either your own or "OPM", and an actual skill that allows you to create something people will want to buy.

Thus, the kind of guy who falls for "looks don't matter" marketing is likely to also fall for shallow business coaching that conveniently leaves out the "learn a marketable skill" part of economic success. It took years of incel virgins not getting laid with 10s to make the PUA bubble implode, so the only question is how long the shallow business coaching bubble will persist, and what PUAs will move to afterwards.


What do you think? Let me know in the comments below!
(Also, if you’ve got a comment that is off-topic or only tangentially related to this article, then please post in the most recent Open Thread. Thank you.)

5 comments:

  1. Thanks for posting!

    When you consider that many of these PUAs failed in running a business, why would any person with half a brain want to learn entrepreneur/business skills from them? I cringed really hard when I heard about Neil Strauss's entrepreneur skills seminar where he has some of the 'top' business leaders as guest speakers (like Tim Ferriss), considering how much of a disaster Stylelife was. For most of the people attending these seminars, they're just drawn in by the idea of having a lot of money and a luxurious lifestyle. If they really knew what it was like to be a business owner, especially for a very large organization that rakes in the amount of money that allows the owner to have that kind of lifestyle, they'd go back to playing Halo and eating Cheetos without a second thought.

    ReplyDelete
  2. High earners work extremely hard, and wealth earned by legitimate means (not those fuckers who work in financial industry who try to fuck people out of their money) can take a long time to accumulate.

    It's much harder to become rich then to fuck and get fucked.

    ReplyDelete
  3. "Of course there are occasional outliers like the guy who invented the pet rock and became a multi-millionaire in 1970s money."

    This is called chance, it will become clearer if you are well versed in statistics and probability.

    ReplyDelete
  4. It is usually a bit easier to get add on business from an existing customer than find a new one. If the customer is stupid enough to buy into the PUA nonsense it probably is not a huge leap to convince the customer you can also help with things like making money and entrepreneurship. Most PUAs are sort of good at marketing their schtick, and the product is intangible, so migrating into equally nebulous fields is logical.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That's an excellent observation! If the transition from PUA advice to entrepreneurship wasn't due to the former having imploded, one could assume that they are doing a (very) long con.

      Delete

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.