Vegas

A Man in Demand Conference – The Review

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On August 7th I made the announcement about the Man In Demand Seminar I’d be speaking at along with Christian McQueen, Tanner Guzy from Masculine Style and Goldmund, whom I’d done the impromptu interview with while he was passing through Reno towards the end of July.

In that blog post’s comments a bit of criticism was leveled at both Christian McQueen and myself for agreeing to speak at this conference and in that discourse I promised readers the following:

I’ll tell you what Joe, I’ll give a personal, honest and objective review of the whole conference when it’s done. I’ll make sure I’m present for all the talks (which I was going to do anyway), and I’ll watch that all the money goes where it’s suppose to go (primarily paying for the venue – it’s spendy even by my standards).

If anything is shady, if anything is off the books, if any of the men who attend want to opine about it, you’ll know and read about it here.

You see, I have always had an open forum; if you want to say you got ripped off, be the first to post it here. Unlike other forums and Disqus threads, I neither edit, censor nor ban any critical opinions. I’ll pull blatant spamming, but the integrity of TRM is based on an open exchange of ideas.

So it’s not my rep on the line, it’s everyone else living up to their own. I have confidence in each of the speakers to deliver what they will. If they don’t, I and anyone else who chooses will let you know.

I don’t do this for a living Joe. If the manosphere shut down tomorrow I’d be making the same scratch I do now.

So here now is my honest and objective assessment of the entire conference.

Before I get into the breakdown of the entire weekend I want to first address that not one speaker at this event made money from it. I wont speak for the guys, but I know how much I spent on a flight, my three days accommodations, my transportation (not cheap in Vegas) while there, my food expenses, my drinks, etc. All this far exceeded the marginal profit (about $330) we each made from our appearances once the venue, insurance and security was paid for.

Christian provided all of us with the financials every step of the way up to and after the event sold out inside of 19 days after we announced it. Christian promptly paid us after the event sold out, a full 3 weeks beforehand. Each admission was $46. Divide that by 4 and each man there payed a mere $11.50 per speaker.

This was Vegas. The venue was everything (and more) than I expected. We wanted it to be affordable since travel and accommodations don’t come cheap. Beyond the basic admission we had a limited 4-person VIP dinner at Sinatra in Wynn’s Encore Casino Resort with the 4 of us for a bargain $98.

That said, everything was above board with Christian, all the speakers and every man who attended.

I put a bit of money out to make this happen, and for me it wasn’t anything concerning, but I know it was a stretch for some of the speakers as well as some of the attendees. I’ve always viewed money as currency. Not in the formal sense that money’s a currency (duh), but rather how money is like a current – as electricity is a current – and an energy with which I can do things.

This event was something I wanted to do. That’s not me trying to be magnanimous, it’s just how I approach things I think are worthwhile. And this seminar was most definitely worth my investment.

The Trip

Here’s a Vegas tip if you’ve never been; practically no one rents a car if you’re flying in. If you get a good one, stay with the same driver. The company I work with usually has me set up, but on this trip I got two good taxi drivers, Allan and his brother Jairo. Get their cell numbers and stay with that guy while you’re out. They appreciate it, and you get info on where cool shit is happening.

I wont bore you with the flight or my first night in town, but suffice to say the room was comfortable as to be expected and conveniently located where I needed to be. My evening was spent reviewing my talk and writing out points on flash cards. I treated myself to a couple of IPAs at the hotel bar and met a very hot bartender named Candace. She was 26 and we promptly got into conversation about her LTR ex-boyfriend, her son and where she was on the Preventive Medicine timeline. I mention her here because I gave her a copy of both my books and she seemed fascinated by them.

The Talk

Jairo dropped me off at our venue at around 8:45 Saturday morning. I was pleased to see the security guard we’d paid for was right in front on the street and immediately directed me to the conference room where I was greeted by Christian and our stunning events hostess (easily an HB 8.5 brunette). I then meet up with Goldmund and Tanner and settled in for the start.

The room was pretty hot at first (air conditioning problems), but our hostess resolved it before Goldmund had got halfway through his talk. I had a few men kind of tentatively look me up and down when I got into the room as if maybe they were wondering if it was me. This was my first public appearance so it was a bit strange for me as well. I was oddly more nervous when I first got into the venue and began having men ask me if I was Rollo Tomassi than when I started my actual talk 5 hours later.

Goldmund

As promised I took a seat in the back of the room and did my due diligence by taking notes on each speaker. Goldmund was first and in all honesty he built his talk up much more than I’d expected. What I knew was that he’d give a recounting of his trans-American trek he did this summer. What surprised me was how in depth he went about how getting out on the road both frees and educates a man about himself.

Nothing causes a man to learn more about himself and teaches self-reliance than putting yourself out in the open with only your wit and perseverance to sustain you. Goldmund’s talk was more than just an adventure guide and some video about the women he met and banged along the way. He made an effort to grow from it, not to mention meet and interact with many manosphere personalities along the way.

I was very impressed with his insights about his trip, but also that he made it accessible for the men who were present, many of whom (myself included) were 10-20 years his senior.

Tanner Guzy

I’ll confess, I wasn’t aware of Tanner and his Masculine Style blog until Christian had mentioned his name as a possible speaker for this conference. I looked him, and at first I thought, well he’s a ‘style guy’ – I was wrong. Both on his site and during his talk Tanner brings not just style advice for men, but presents it in such a succinctly Red Pill way I was forced to rethink a few of my own TRM principles about bearing, physical presence and appearance.

I daresay I learned the most from Tanner of all these talks. Granted, Tanner is a professional style consultant and works directly in men’s fashion, but he doesn’t simply suggest men wear this or that; Tanner explains why men should dress to be impressive and why men should care about their appearances.

It’s easy to quote the 48 Laws of Power about dressing the part to have others consider your status, but it’s important to grasp the Red Pill dynamics that go along with demonstrating our strengths, our status, our accomplishments and why what we wear indicates this.

I should add that during Tanner’s Q&A session (easily as long as my own went) I felt compelled to make the point that guys who hate on other men for being concerned with what they wear was in fact a form of intrasexual combat. Tanner had an example of some of his forum haters telling him “only fags worry about their clothes” and “real men don’t think about fashion”; essentially ‘just be yourself’, be manly, wear jeans and a t-shirt and it’s all good. I made the comment that this type of SMV disqualification is comparable to fat girls telling slightly less fat girls they look OK being fat on FaceBook to hold them in place and hinder any ideas of attempting to improve their SMV.

Christian

Christian’s talk, rather speech, surprised me most. I don’t think I was alone in expecting the Playboy game talk in some manner would be forthcoming from Christian, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. He was well prepared with a speech, he primarily read, and had obviously given a great amount of consideration to.

He began with suicide and divorce statistics and wove these facts into what I can only describe as a call to arms for men in reclaiming their masculinity. If he’d left it there it would’ve made an emotional impact enough (his voice choking with emotion during some moments), but the import of his speech was also about men defining masculinity for themselves in a feminine-centric culture that aligns itself against them from ever unplugging from it.

I’ve come to expect the happy-go-lucky Game proponent with the Rat Pack swagger to be larger than life from my 2 interviews, but Christian dropped that persona for this speech and it made his point for him. Goldmund described it as inspirational and motivational, and I’m thankful for Christian for being that at this event – it’s what was needed to round out the line up.

I should add that my good friend Sam Botta took it upon himself not only to fly out from L.A., but he also brought his MacBook Pro and some pro audio equipment to record me. He warmed up by doing a test run on Christian’s speech and while I don’t know when it’ll be available I think the recording will speak volumes about Christian’s actual maturity and the seriousness he’s capable of. It will surprise many of his critics.

Rollo Tomassi

Well shit, what can I say about myself that wont sound like I’m glossing myself? As I mentioned I was very nervous when I first got to the event in the morning and had men I’d only just met ask me to sign their books and let me know how grateful they were for my work. After a while I felt like I was more among a group of old friends than guys I needed to impress and that nervousness turned into a comfort kind of like speaking to a family gathering.

I’m sure that sounds all touchy-feely, but I don’t know how else to describe it. In between speakers I had men come to me, ask me questions, show me appreciation, tell me their stories about their lives and so on, so it put much more at ease. As the talks went on I saw that there were men attending who were obviously my senior – I’d guess late 50s maybe early 60s – as well as young men in their 20s, and this also put me into a family frame of mind.

I understand that my presence was a big draw for this conference. I’m humbled by that, especially when I have men in the military, men and their sons, men on the Vegas police force and men who’ve seen decades more of a feminine-centric society than I express their gratitude for my writing and ideas.

Still, going last has it’s disadvantages, not the least of which was that I’d taken notes of all the speakers’ talks ahead of mine. My head gets filled with things I think need to be expanded on, areas I thought should be explained better, and this then leads to my mentally rewriting my own talk and trying to jot down things I now want to cover too. I had to make a conscious effort to repress this, but I’m afraid some of it found its way into my talk.

As you might guess, I talked about what I know best and this is the influences of Hypergamy on women, men, society, etc. I didn’t mention it, but I had titled my talk Hypergamy – Micro to Macro the night before and this was my basic outline. I began by defining terms because I didn’t want to presume every guy in the audience was entirely familiar with my interpretations of what Red Pill, Alpha/Beta and Hypergamy mean in my referencing. This turned out better than I thought because it sparked a lot of ideas and later discussions while I was in-speech.

For a while I entertained the idea of simply making my speech an hour long Q&A session since so many men had hit me up with such great questions between talks and I really wanted to go into more detail. Instead I opted for sticking to building up Hypergamy from its evolutionary psychology and biological roots in ovulatory shift behaviors, through the personal and sociological implication. After this I held a Q&A and this really developed into the group discussion I’d hoped it would. So in the end I got a happy compromise and I hope I got to all the questions every man had.

Overview

As I said, Sam Botta was my hero for recording the audio of this. He told me I went on for 133 minutes and I can tell you it seemed to blow by so much faster. I will make that audio available for a reasonably purchasable download once Sam has it mastered in order to be fair with those who attended.

It was an honor to meet so many diverse men who’d also made an effort to make this event worthwhile. And while none of us made money from this I think every man there profited from the experience. I met a father and son, I had lunch with my commenter Rugby, I met commenter Jeremy, a Vegas police detective, a former Marine pilot who told me he would be insisting his sons read my books before they graduated high school, and so many more who I don’t have the space to mention here. Thank you for oming to this.

There were no “leaks” of where the venue was to be held. There were no publicity stunts or pandering to contrived social agendas. There were no bomb threats or feminist protests, and, as promised, no video or photography of our guests. I’m proud to say that this conference was well designed and well executed in a luxurious location with every effort made to ensure the anonymity of the men attending and all with the intent of helping each of us collectively learn and grow in a Red Pill awareness.

The VIP after-dinner at Sinatra was fantastic and some of the best camaraderie I’ve had with men I’d only met in person a few hours prior. The women at Encore were top shelf and the martinis were too.

I should also mention that at Encore I was ‘coined’ by one of our Air Force guests who was stationed in South Korea and was in Vegas for the event. Up until this time I was unaware of the significance of receiving an Air Force coin, but it was the highlight and honor of my weekend.

coin

Things We Could Do Better

Finally, at the end of the seminar we had a group Q&A and bluntly asked everyone what we could do to make a (possible) annual event better. Among these comments were a meet & greet or a group lunch which I thought would be good, but also I’d like to open up the VIP into a larger collective gathering in the evening.

My thoughts would be a larger venue, and of course a longer time frame for registration. Maybe a 2 day event over a long weekend with 6 or so speakers would be ideal.

So with that I want to thank all those who attended one last time here. A Man in Demand was as it should be, a collective experience and a collective discussion and that requires all of us being present and relating.

Goldumnd has a great write up of the event here, and Christian gives his thoughts here too. Also, Tanner had a funny video of his trip to the event here.

If you attended or you have and ideas or comments about this being an annual gathering you’d like to see please let me know in the comment thread. If I missed you or you were one of the guys I met or mentioned in this review please let me know.

Thanks gentlemen.

Men In Demand

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Well, I think I’ve teased it long enough now. If you’ve been watching my Twitter posts or you’ve payed close attention in my comment threads you already know I’m the confirmed ‘featured guest’ speaker at the first annual Man In Demand seminar on September 12th, 2015 in Las Vegas, Nevada.

I’ll be speaking and doing a Q&A along with Christian McQueen, Tanner Guzy and Goldmund. We’re doing this collectively at our own initial expense and the venue is amazing (literally on the strip across from the Bellagio). “Seminar” doesn’t begin to do this meet up justice, it’s really a well rounded Red Pill TED conference with each of us covering our respective aspects of Game, style, life applications and of course theory and Red Pill awareness.

While I’m flattered by the response thus far (the VIP tickets are already sold out), it’s not just about me – the idea we had was to give readers / attendees a collaborative all-day experience that they can benefit from on many levels. We’ve made every effort to make this meet up as affordable as possible for guys too ($47). Trust me, I know better than most how expensive a trip to Vegas can be.

You will be impressed by this venue. As you might expect, this is legitimately high-end, not a rented Elks Club hall or a La Quinta conference room.

Needless to say this event is my first (and certainly only for this year) in-person appearance. Just to allay some fears, I have no plans for ‘going public’ in the foreseeable future, so with that said, let me assure the men considering attending that we all place our highest priority on your anonymity and personal privacy. I can personally assure you there will be no media (invited or uninvited) allowed, no surprise interviews of attendees, no video recorded (and certainly not any of the attendees), and no undercover Huffington Post bloggers posing as a hostess will be hired – keep in mind this is Vegas, not Montreal (*wink*).

I know everyone always states this, but tickets really are limited and we expect a pretty full house since Vegas is a premier destination. Each one of us is very accessible and very approachable so it’s highly likely we’ll have some (not on the schedule) social gathering or club crawl after the conference too. I’ll be signing books and if you’re lucky I’ll have a bit of one of my whisky brands left for you to have a taste of too.

So, if you’re going or not, let me know what you think about this. If you have questions I’ll answer them in the comment thread over the weekend. Also, I’m doing the outline of my talk right now so if you have some suggestion about what you think I should cover let me know. I should add too that I have at least one scheduled podcast interview between now and the conference.

Hopefully I’ll see you in Vegas.

Boundaries

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The Mate Guarding topic of last week’s post made for some lively debate. It usually does because it’s this behavior, and the root motivators of it, that gets to the heart of dynamics such as an Alpha / Beta mindset, the Scarcity Mentality, Hypergamy, issues of morality and maybe an uncomfortable realization that your LTR has been subject to those motivators.

The purpose and approach men have with regard to mate guarding usually comes down to two positions.

The first being a moral high-ground idea that women do in fact have a moral or rational agency and thus have an obligation to keep their own Hypergamy in check. This may be from a religious perspective, but more often it’s based upon men’s idealistic equalist hopes that a woman can rationally be expected to parse her own investment in what men think should be Relational Equity.

Or in other words, women should know better, and be expected to cooperate with a male imperative by self-regulating their Hypergamous impulses as a matter of personal and social responsibility.

On a limbic level Hypergamy doesn’t care about Relational Equity and openly appealing to a woman’s reason, rationality or sense of responsibility a man believes she should be beholden to is counterproductive in influencing her genuine desires. However, this is usually a self-guided hope that women will recognize and regulate those behaviors at the risk of being socially ostracized in an already feminine-primary social environment.

Again, this can be couched in a religious expectation, but in a secular-equalist sense it amounts to putting the burden of mate guarding on women by presuming their ‘equal rationality’ will result in women mate guarding themselves by policing their own Hypergamy in men’s best interests. Anything less either makes them convictionless or the nebulous “low quality woman” who wont play by the old-order rules and expectations.

The second approach is a proactive mate guarding based on the presumption that mate guarding is a ‘defense’ against mate poaching by other, presumably (but not necessarily) more Alpha men than the one doing the guarding.

Within that context it’s understandable why men would want to protect their personal investment in a woman. What woman wouldn’t be aroused by the prospect of being fought over by two men she perceives as Alpha rivals? It’s a strong affirmation of her desirability and SMV.

Where it turns into a Beta Tell is when a man’s lifestyle revolves around ‘keeping’ her in a possessive sense for fear of losing her because she’s his only viable option for sending his genetic material into the future. That kind of mate guarding is the kind inspired by a scarcity mentality, but it’s also due to long evolved, subconscious sensitivities to her behavioral inconsistencies at or around her time of ovulation.

This is what Dr. Hasselton was getting into in her studies – ovulatory shift in mate preferences created an evolved sensitivity of them in men which in turn produced contingency behaviors (mate guarding) to ensure he wasn’t wasting his parental investment efforts with a child that wasn’t his own.

An evolved mate guarding sensitivity and contingent strategy was basically insurance against men’s cuckoldry risks.

I would argue that a contingent mate guarding strategy evolved not as a direct response to Alpha (or even Beta) competition stresses, but rather due to women’s innate Hypergamy, their sexual pluralism and the potential for parental investment deception when women were left with their Hypergamy unchecked.

If a woman’s predominant perception of you is Alpha, if her mental point of origin is one in which she recognizes her own SMV as being subordinate to your own, she wont be asking your “permission” to go to Vegas with her girlfriends for a weekend because her desire for her Alpha will be stronger than her peers influence on her during her ovulation week.

In theory, no woman who sees you as her perceived Alpha and Hypergamous best interest will want to ‘cheat’ on you – so the idea wont even occur to her. I realize this sounds simplistic until you consider the readiness with which most men will similarly isolate themselves socially, putting off friends and family in preference to spending his time with what he believes is a high-value woman.

Demonstrate, Never Explicate

From The 48 Laws of Power

Law 9

Win through your Actions, Never through Argument

Any momentary triumph you think gained through argument is really a Pyrrhic victory:  The resentment and ill will you stir up is stronger and lasts longer than any momentary change of opinion.  It is much more powerful to get others to agree with you through your actions, without saying a word.  Demonstrate, do not explicate.

There is no greater demonstration of higher value for a man than walking away from a woman. Even a woman’s strongest perception of higher value cannot compete with the self-certainty of value a man has when he disconnects himself from a woman who’s already accepted him for her intimacy.

While Dread (even passive dread) is a strong signal of a man’s higher value, removing your own intimate acceptance from a woman and confirming the value her Hypergamous nature questioned about you is the last word in DHV.

For the first half of their lives, even the most mediocre of women become accustomed to men qualifying for their attention, intimacy and sexual access. Women quickly learn the utility of their first, best, agency with men – the power of sexual control.

So when that agency is proven useless with a man, that control is eliminated and she begins to question her capacity for that control. By removing himself from dependency on that agency he confirms that his SMV is more valuable than her own.

A lot of men report that their unprompted disinterest in sex with a woman, a wife, a girlfriend, often provokes a woman’s imagination with regard to her control and/or inspires a greater sexual determination to please him in order to reestablish this control when they next engage in sex.

There’s precious little that’s more effective at reestablishing Frame for a man than the demonstration of higher value walking away from a woman’s accepted intimacy represents. Some of the best sex you’ll have in your life will come after a reunited breakup.

Now, the reason I’ve detailed this is because the foundations of a man maintaining Frame within a relationship are rooted in limiting or removing this sexual agency and demonstrating higher value as part of that process.

Establishing Boundaries

London Towers on the SoSuave forum started a fairly contentious debate on how a man ought to establish boundaries within a relationship last week:

In my last LTR I never set boundaries, let her hang with her ex, guys, never got jealous, just didn’t give a fuck…because my life was going well and I had no insecurity she wouldn’t do anything because I was the shit. She even wanted her ex to hang with us, just so she could show me off. This actually seemed to work for me as I had some natural alpha state for the first 1 year due to life success and she could feel this, thus other guys were just orbiters. I would even joke to her about who she found attractive in the bar, that’s how self confident I was. This would actually make her want me more.

Then cracks in my game came out, I was going through a rough patch with life and suddenly the game shifted. She would start to compare me to other guys including her ex in a negative way. I suddenly became insecure because I didn’t feel Alpha anymore due to life not going well and suddenly started enforcing boundaries which she would constantly test because she knew I lost my game unlike when I was Alpha and didn’t give a shit. Enforcing boundaries was actually coming from an insecure place and I don’t think your words mean shit if you ain’t got your game tight.

Now, I’m not too sure how I would handle my next LTR. I’m in the process of becoming alpha again, but now truly alpha as in my inner game this time. But would I now still have the not give a sh1t attitude if my girl still hung out with her ex/guys?

Part of me thinks if my game is tight, I give her great sex, pluck at her emotional spectrum, she rides on the magic carpet of my exciting life (which comes from knowing my life mission) she will be hooked on me in a multiple of ways and if she knew I would drop her cold and can easily replace her if she doesn’t provide me with the affection/sex that I need.. she will enforce her own boundaries.

This is the only true boundary I can provide. A girls attention will drop if she starts even emotionally to involve someone else. At that point you just freeze immediately. So the only boundary you can ever enforce is through your attention and her subtle awareness you have options and will walk away with ease at the very beginning of her not providing for your needs. That loss is something she could not deal with.

I’d encourage readers to take the time to read through that discussion and the various approaches to establishing boundaries within a relationship (or even non-exclusive plates you may be spinning). After picking through the differing perspectives I made the connection between establishing boundaries and men’s natural predilection for mate guarding behaviors.

Most of the expressed perspectives tend to side with either of the two mate guarding approaches I mentioned at the beginning of today’s post; one, in which women are rationally expected to police their own Hypergamous impulses, and the other, where an active (and equally reasoned) explicating of boundaries are overtly declared as an ultimatum in an effort to protect a man against the parental investment risks of being cuckolded by a woman he knows can’t be expected not to otherwise succumb to her Hypergamous impulses.

If you notice how London Towers’ story unfolds here he essentially proceeded by demonstrating his higher value, secure in the confidence of it, only to have that DHV eroded due to his life’s circumstance.

This is when the boundary of Alpha indifference he’d organically set (albeit unknowingly), based upon his value, was challenged in his drop of status and esteem. I’ve elaborated in the past about a man’s burden of performance or how women’s concept of ‘love’ is based on a passive opportunism of what a man is (rather than who he is), but you get the picture illustrated for you here.

Next, commenter Soolaimon picks up the opposite end of the extreme:

These boundary guys have it ass backwards.

They are judging women by their words instead of judging them by their actions.

Judge women by their actions and not their words.

Agreeing to a boundary is only her words that these guys think will keep her from cheating.

Women who cut out other men from their lives on their own is a woman who understands what an exclusive relationship is.

Those are her actions you judge her on.

Not useless words she can go back on at any moment.

[…]

Smart classy intelligent women already know what exclusivity means they don’t need to have it defined when they are defining it for you by removing other men on their own.

Women do that for Alphas and not betas who need to set a boundary out of fear.

Women that are really into you will agree to what you want with no problem.

When they lose interest they will still cheat on you making your boundary useless.

If your woman knows what exclusivity means and has the same values as you why are you so terrified to put a ring on her finger and marry her?

There’s a lot to consider when you establish boundaries with a woman. Essentially those boundaries men wish to establish and have respected by a woman really just amount to a codified form of mate guarding.

When you think about it, this is what (at least in an old social order) the marriage contract was meant to insure from a male-beneficial perspective – an assurance of fidelity, but also a contractual insurance against Hypergamy.

Considering the contemporary risks involved, in the current social environment there are any number of reasons men are wary of marrying a woman, but what marriage has become is really a challenge to what a man believes about mate guarding and his confidence in controlling a woman’s Hypergamous nature based upon his degree of desirability to her.

Though I don’t disagree in principle, Soolaimon’s exaggeration is founded on the idea that there’s always going to be a bigger fish; another AMOG to seize your woman’s interest should your combination of Game, material and emotional provisioning, or ambition for such be lacking.

Like most absolutists, he does little to contextualize the preconceptions a woman may have with a particular man they’re already involved with. A woman may fantasize about sex with a more Alpha male during her ovulatory phase, but that doesn’t mean she has the opportunity to realize it – even for “smart classy independent women”.

That said, and after London Towers’ example, it’s impossible not to come to a conclusion that implied, demonstrated boundaries – ones that have actionable consequences of intimate and invested loss (i.e. Dread) – are preferable to explicated, but ultimately appealed-reason declarations of boundaries that are negotiated insurance policies to limit her Hypergamy.

While I do believe boundaries are a necessary part of a relationship, it’s far better for women to discover them for what they are, and the consequences of them, by demonstration rather than overt explanation.

The hand burned by the stove teaches better than any warning.

The only person who’s behavior you can control is your own, but that behavior can have a significant impact on the behaviors of others.