LordFall

Also probably this, I've had that same problem before. I think most men run into this at some point in our lives.

It's good, it's a sign that you have some sex appeal. I would keep levelling up so that the women you're more into also start giving you indicators of interest. You should flirt with them to practice your verbal game, it's win-win for both parties. They'll feel good about receiving the attention of a younger man and you can let them down smoothly. It's like a hot girl some of them are gracious about refusing advances and some of them are really bitchy about it, no need to be unpleasant to people that are into you.

I never heard about the trauma correlation before but it would make sense. Having trouble being present on a single task and being hyperaware of the environment sounds like a trauma response to me.

Have you read books like the Rational Male or read through the red pill forum? If you're only watching Fresh & Fit type of content then of course that's the impression you're gonna have from it. It was mostly about the opposite and stopping blaming other people for your mediocrity in life and sharing ways to elevate men's standing in the sexual and financial marketplace. I don't agree with everything in it but most men should probably read through it at least once and also books like the manipulated man by Esther Vilar.

@yetineti Thanks for the kind words man. I would say I'm quite aware of other people's emotions, I'm a very aware person in general who's always analyzing my surroundings. I tend to compartmentalize my own emotions though, I realized this after I had a dream where my emotional range was so vivid and I woke up shocked and wondering if this is how some very emotional people experience life. Felt quite good but also like it would be hard to be an effective person on a day to day basis with this much reactivity so I'm glad my subconscious is built the way it is. I would say I fall into intellectual empathy more than sharing emotions all the time, usually I get way less stressed than other people when stuff goes wrong and I only feel the anxiety after the situation is dealt with. It's partly why I have the dating vision I do. I have found not many experiences much more satisfying in life than embodying the grounded masculine surrounded by an abundance of femininity. Spending my time consuming knowledge and upskilling myself so I can solve problems with people is very satisfying and each time I do it specifically in an intimate context it feels even 10x sweeter. That's why I think being vulnerable and crying as a man is fine but the real gem is in developing hyper-competence so you can bless others with your divine masculine gifts and they gift you back the joy of unencumbered emotional expression while in your presence. I think a lot of women also get hooked on that part once they meet a man who's genuinely worked on himself and they give you a degree of appreciation and love that other men that are not as advanced in their journey often complain about not receiving.

Weird take, it's just an activity like any other where you go with the goal of meeting new people. Some people do the same thing with co-ed sports league or any other type of hobby. There is the added feedback loop of introspecting on your experience and getting advice from others on how to make your socializing more effective. Having a growth mindset and tracking your progress over time are effective ways to get better at any skillset.

Currently reading Laws of Human Nature by Robert Greene. I really like him as an author and I feel like he gets wiser and deeper with the wisdom he shares with each book. I've read 48 Laws of Power and Mastery by him which were really good but this is by far a better book. Best insight I've gotten so far in the book is that mastering your emotions is gonna be highly relevant to reaching most big goals. Robert writes about many known people in history who both had great emotional control and it helped them or a terrible grasp on their arrogance or need for approval and it sabotaged them. Feel free to share what you're reading right now, what you're getting out of it, and whether it's worth checking out.

Developing genuine social and conversational skills isn't the same thing as putting on an entertaining persona that turns you into a dancing monkey. Have you actually done pickup, or are you looking at it from the outside and concluding that it's solely about putting on an act?

Yeah that's fair, this part is not my forte so I don't think I've solved this. I tend to cope with emotional exhaustion by smoking weed and relaxing on my days off. That and offloading my life's frustration onto forum debates of course. I recently came to the conclusion that even my dating photography business was me looking to stick to my analytical problem-solving skillset to make money from solving other men's dating issues. I run into a slightly different issue since by default I'm dissociated from my emotions to better analyze and figure out solutions so in a group scenario I wouldn't be the one people gravitate towards. With my ex we were much more emotionally attuned so it wouldn't really come up as an issue but the problems we were dealing with at that time were so complicated that I couldn't solve them regardless of what mode I was in.

I think a large portion of day-to-day emotional distress comes from problems that can be solved, but of course there are existential experiences completely beyond our control where the only path forward is to feel, process, and release the emotions. If a woman you know is crying because a loved one died, then the only thing you can do is be there for her and hold space for her sadness. Most of the time, though, it's gonna be solvable things like financial problems, issues with her peer group, feeling overwhelmed with the pressures of life, etc. That's where you can actually make her life better by helping solve the root problem instead of just staying in emotional support mode.

Crying to release pent-up emotions seems helpful, sure. But afterward, you still have to solve the problems; the problem-solving skill set is what's fundamentally important. If you consistently solve your problems, you won't have as much to cry about. A lot of people seem to cry as a subconscious strategy to get others to take pity on them and handle their responsibilities. That's not a reliable long-term life strategy.

Most people are self-absorbed and boring to the bone. God forbid you learn some conversation skills so you can make someone feel good talking to you. Calling that skill sorcery seems a bit silly.

Do you love yourself unconditionally? Start with that and build a beautiful life for yourself as a gift. Other people will enter your life based on conditions but that's not a bad thing. You seem to be looking at it as a mountain of tasks that you need to accomplish to be worthy of love and feeling exhausted by the list. That's not really the most effective way to look at life. Think about it more like a video game and unlike most people that lack a growth mindset, you're able to build all kinds of cool skills to add to the value of your base character. What does your character want to achieve and what kind of adventures will he live? What kind of exciting and helpful companions will he meet on his quest? People that don't go on quests don't really find cool companions, that makes sense. I want to throw creative events globally and help local businesses and creative people reach their financial and career goals through being part of my communities and agency. It'll help me both make the world a better place but also meet thousands more cool women that I might possibly date and business owners that I might start joint ventures with. This is at times a tedious, painful and exhausting quest for me but the upside makes it worth it. If you find a similarly appealing quest, otherwise phrased as life purpose, then the pain of life will become worth it. No matter how you live your life it'll be painful, the main difference is if the pain is building towards something amazing or you're mostly stagnating at the same spot not accomplishing your deepest and wildest dreams. https://www.instagram.com/stories/highlights/18036783041423983/ In this video I talk at the beginning about the fashion show I threw last year. It was one of the coolest experiences of my life and I had about 15 models walk the show under my agency name and the brand of another agency I partnered with. It was very stressful and we had to cancel it once and I ended up $2,200 in debt from it. That's the cost of the game bro! Learned so much and I would've paid even more for the experience. The next ones will be way more successful as my character has gotten way more powerful and experienced since then. What is your characters main goals in life? Flesh that out and build a beautiful and fun quest around it and you'll have no shortage of female companions that want to join you on it. The Red Pill is too negative, take the truths from it and have fun. I would start with the question, if everything worked out and you were building your dream life for the next 3 years, what would it look like on October 13th 2029?

If you find that your conversational style is working for you then there is no need to change it. If you find yourself lacking the ability to convince people of the merit of your ideas due to over-combativeness like I sometimes fell into then I would give reading the books a go! That's a fair critique. For me, I find his writing style refreshing and captivating. I read other books that touch more directly on business and psychology concepts so for me technical knowledge is not what I lack; seeing how these concepts have shaped our civilization is what I find really interesting. He shares a story in Chapter 7 about Lyndon B. Johnson's rise from congressman to senator, and eventually to US President. He gained immense influence by befriending powerful figures using that exact principle: making others feel important rather than flaunting his own importance. It led to him being able to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He ended up being a mixed figure and having a horrible effect on the Vietnam War but learning how he grew up poor and thus had a vested interest in improving the rights of all Americans and used years of persuasion to do so was fascinating. There's also another story on how the Arctic explorer Ernest Shackleton kept his men alive after getting stuck in the ice for over a year in extreme conditions and the psychological principles that made that possible. I personally found it very memorable. A book like this requires taking notes and linking it to concepts you already understand and building a web of knowledge around it. I do it with my commonplace book through Obsidian. If you listen to it as an audiobook at the gym then yeah probably you'll zone out and forget much of what was said and find the book bland. @Natasha Tori Maru That makes sense! It's also helped me in business and serving clients by understanding their motivations and incentives on a deeper level, reflecting on my own blind spots, and finding win-win solutions that work for both parties even when we aim at different goals.

It's a pretty wild case and I think it's worth deconstructing from several angles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Cornell_University_rape_allegations The case has been reopened by a New York District Attorney so you'll be hearing a lot about it in the coming months. Since it's reopened, the District Attorney will present the evidence to a grand jury to determine if there is cause for an indictment. More official details will come out through that process.

Yep, that's it in one word! Yes that's fair, it depends on what we mean by high consciousness. I find that he summarizes deep truths about human nature through entertaining historical examples. I'm sure there are other books that are more rigorous in their psychological understanding but his work is fun to read and gives you quick history lessons, so I find myself learning a lot each time I read even a few pages. I was just reading a passage about becoming more influential with people by resisting the urge to prove you're right in conversations and instead focusing on how other people make good points. This helped me right away because oftentimes I engage in aggressive intellectual debates and perhaps win the argument, but I don't think it convinces people because I make it adversarial more than collaborative. He names a few times where this tendency has backfired on people and it's led me to introspect on my own style of conversation. If you read the books with an open mind and aim to improve your own behaviour, they are tremendously useful, I've found! I wouldn't let the dark psychology angle stop you from giving him a shot, I think the way he exposes all of our shadow tendencies to gain control is what's led me to increase my consciousness of those traits both in others and in myself. It resulted in more productive and healthy conduct many years ago after reading 48 Laws of Power, and now, reading this more recent book, I'm already getting some pretty deep insights and I'm not even halfway through the book!

It releases next month on November 10th 2026, you can preorder it now! I'm also very excited to read it. Which of his books have you read? I think you're missing the point of his books, he synthesizes history into concepts that apply to day to day life. I think on the contrary what he teaches in books like 48 laws of power is very high consciousness; if you don't understand the shadow sides of the human psyche you will be caught off guard by it and not able to act effectively in the world. Shadow work is essential to becoming a well rounded human being that can be effective in society. @enchanted I've never really gotten into Shakespeare apart from having to read Romeo & Juliet in high school but I watched Rome HBO lately and Anthony and Cleopatra's story was pretty cool to witness. How is the play?

Those are good choices! I also really loved Skyrim. Yeah in my experience people either love or hate the game. For me I thought it was mid after a few games and a week later I got hooked for 10 years straight. I used to play a lot of Call of Duty before but the ranked system is not really as developed as LoL, I really like the ELO system and I ended up becoming semi-pro at the game.

Curious if you guys had to just name one game that was the best for you, what it is and why? For me it would be League of Legends. I've never experienced a game that changed my life as much. It was both an insanely multiplayer experience that grew my psychology and pushed my skillset to its limit but it was also a very social experience that allowed me to make new friends in different countries and keep in touch with my friends after I moved away. Their ability to still be relevant culturally and host yearly world championships since 2011 has been impressive. It's an experience more than just a game which is why it seems that it attracts many casual and female gamers. If you guys haven't seen their world championships opening ceremonies enjoy! If I could do something even 10% of that for my own game project I would be over the moon. In a perfect world I would not only reach that and 10x more but we'll see how it goes. What about you guys?

Good point! Humans are very good at avoidance and projecting is one of the key symptoms of it. Most men are scared of accountability and in this case admitting that their ability to attract high quality women into their life is lacking and therefore project that there are no high quality women around. They are also in scarcity and don't know a lot of women so they meet 2 bad apples and give up instead of taking ownership, reflecting on what went wrong and then learning from it to build a life where aligned people are around them in abundance.

After the discussion on AI in the AI bubble thread, @Joshe suggested we start a thread discussing more specifically AI applications in a business context. @something_else had good insight on a business model based around being a context-engineering agency that customizes frontier models for specific enterprise applications which indeed sounds like it would be quite profitable. I don't really have a technical background so my main use case will be to use agentic solutions to build a cutting edge CRM that automates outreach and prospect followup for my existing services. Feel free to discuss either of these applications or brainstorm/share other ways you can think of to use AI to make money! It's great to talk about the philosophical and political implications of the AI revolution but keeping things practical and actionable will give us all way more value and experience in the field.

Seems like you're starting to know me! I did read it already like 10 years ago and I enjoyed it a lot. I enjoyed reading how his life unfolded and how Apple became the giant it is today. The part on him doing consciousness work, taking psychedelics and going to India to explore spirituality was particularly interesting. Apple has deeper roots than most technology companies. I think he's a good business inspiration for people on the forum. A dude that became a billionaire not by being a greedy capitalist but through being obsessed with building great products for humanity. That's cool, I should read more enlightenment and non-duality books. It's a topic of life that still scares me so I think I subconsciously avoid looking into it too much. It's starting to be an area of research that calls to me more and more though, often when I read technical stuff it feels a bit shallow and like I'm bypassing deeper knowledge.

I respect your openness, and honestly, almost every man who's had a lot of dating experience goes through that numb phase just to survive the circus of dating.. The trap is getting stuck in cynicism and ending up jaded. The more experience I get in my dating business, the more I realize a lot of this is due to not setting strong boundaries early on in your relationships and it leads to women baby stepping their way past them and the man resenting the woman and himself for it. I think there's no shame in taking a break from dating to go back to your centre and as a matter of fact I've done it myself a few times. Once that's done one can go back to the dating market from a position of self-awareness and power as opposed to being needy for approval and companionship.

I've changed my exact services a few times. My main skillset is in online lead acquisition and content production so I've had b2b clients where I managed their social media profiles for a retainer and last year I was more like a personal brand consultant. What I found the most interest in and I've done the longest is be a dating photographer so I think I'm gonna triple down on that. So that's dating profile photoshoots, dating consulting, help throwing events, help shooting content to build a nice looking instagram ,etc. I think if I focus on that vertical and really nail it I can scale it to 7-8 figures over the next few years. My personal branding client paid me $5,000/month so if I'm looking to productize the services I gave him into something like a $1,000/month offer that solves the dating life of single male professionals 28-40 and perhaps even women since the women I consulted on their dating lives seemed to benefit from my advice. Yeah I never touch any of meta's optimizations. I don't know what their aim is with it but they always reduce my performance. I always calibrate every setting myself. > And again, you still seem ambiguous about whether you intend to tell customers they're speaking to an AI. That's important point to establish. No I think that part is mostly irrelevant. When they message my brand they talk to the Royals Dating instagram account. It hasn't made much of a difference when I've had a random guy use my templates when booking appointments for me and even other people doing sales calls is standard. What matters is how happy they are with the results they're getting from purchasing our services. My role as the founder and face of the company is to guarantee a standard of quality across every offer that goes out under my brand.

Totally I agree with you. Part of my issue with the business I was running was cognitive overload. I had to have the skillset to take good dating pictures, package them into a worthwhile offer both for myself and the customers, shoot the ads to sell the service, run the ads, answer incoming DMs to book calls, take the sales calls, book my calendar, do the photoshoots, edit the pictures, handle customer support, etc. I tried to bring on business partners a few times and that worked in some ways but introduced some new issues. One guy was mostly reliable but he wanted 50% of the business to dedicate himself to it and I thought he brought nowhere near the value I did. I was willing to just split the profit 50% with him until we worked successfully together for at least 6 months-1 year before signing anything but that didn't work for him. Building a successful global enterprise has been a goal of mine for years and I'm always learning new skills to make that goal possible but it's obviously not quite there yet. Another massive use case for AI for me is a personal assistant that helps me organize all my ideas and plan my workday depending on my priorities and energy levels. I use Gemini for that a bit but it's not as advanced as I would like it. I don't think it's really all that complicated. You assign it a few lead conversations and see how it does. This stuff is based off of closing percentage so for example myself I would spend about $6 for leads while running meta ads. I would convert around 20% to sales calls so each call could cost me $30. I would close around 20% of calls so customer acquisition cost $150. That number went up closer to $200-250 when I brought on another guy and at that time I sold $500 photoshoots so the margins are really important. An AI appointment setter would allow me to analyze all the conversations and try different formats to see how the % change. These are not in depth conversations. Meta Ads lets you set pre-selected prompts for people to send as the first message, so they ask things like: "How much are the photoshoots?" / "How does the photoshoot work?" / "Can you tell me more about this?" then we do have you ever done a photoshoot before? -> There are a few different packages depending on what you need -> When are you available for a phone call? I think in the next 1-2 years the voice agents will good enough to handle the sales calls themselves. I've had some call me and try to sell me and it's definitely not good enough to build a sales team around but very soon it will be. The amount of business models that this unlocks is insane. @Lyubov This should already be able to handle my personal needs for setting up sales calls en masse. I will play around with it over the next 1-2 months update you guys on how it went.