Friday, December 6, 2013

How to start a marriage on the wrong foot

I never paid any attention to the "cocky-funny" spams that used to show up in my inbox a while back. But even so, I don't know how anyone who even understood just that much about women could go so wrong on his wedding day:
Mr. Pagan, who under his Deangelo alter-ego preached the joys of being cocky and funny, never showing any weakness with a woman and constantly keeping her guessing, has gotten married.  And he’s done the whole thing in a self-humiliating style that I just can’t ignore.

So here is a bit from his wedding registry

“Soon after, Eben gathered his tribe in yet another circle, placing 3 women at the front of the room: his ex-girlfriend Rose, myself and his friend Shannon.” Rose was the only other serious romance he’d ever had.

“He kneeled before her and began to recount all the hard-won lessons learned from their relationship. He thanked her for being his teacher, for enduring the drama, and for preparing him so perfectly for me. Then, body to the ground, he bowed to her in reverence.”
Spammers are scammers, I suppose.

25 comments:

Gareth said...

Crikey

Anonymous said...

Sounds like he's lost his mind. I'm not sure why a PUA claiming only one previous "serious" relationship would be surprising, though. You can nail thousands of chicks without ever getting serious about one. But kneeling in front of women and thanking them for their wonderfulness is ridiculous no matter how you look at it.

I never bought anything from him, so I don't know anything about any scams, though it always bothered me that so many Game authors were so heavy into the latest schemes in Internet marketing. I did watch a video of one of his seminars, and it was excellent, from his exploration of the theory of why Game works to the specific techniques discussed. If he was faking it all, I guess it's an example of how you don't have to understand (or believe?) a topic to teach it well.

S. Thermite said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
S. Thermite said...

Yikes! Think it was a buddy who gave me a copy of Deangelo's first ebook 6 or 7 years ago, back when all I'd read was Neil Strauss's book. The funny thing is, I seem to recall buying a copy from his website later on, so as not to feel guilty about pirating it. Hindsight is always 20/20, and reading about tricks was no substitute for the red pill, but it helped wake me up a bit.

Or maybe I'm remembering wrong, and Deangelo just suckered me in through one of those crappy ads on WND...

Unknown said...

"that so many Game authors were so heavy into the latest schemes in Internet marketing."

I called that a few years ago. The more they are into self-promotion, the bigger of a fraud they are.

S. Thermite said...

Hmmm...went back to the archive and I don't remember reading this gem, it was so long ago, but it looks like we were warned:

When she says, "What are you talking about?", you say, "Well, I know that most men fall for this ‘I’m beautiful and aloof and I get my way’ part of your personality... but I know something that none of them know... that there’s really another side of you. A side that none of THEM get to see. I’ll bet you a dollar right now that I know something about you that no one who’s only known you for 5 minutes has EVER known... ... You may act tough, but you’re actually EXTREMELY sensitive on the inside. If someone makes a negative comment to you, you might act like it doesn’t bother you... but you’ll think about it all the way home... I know that secretly you’re as sensitive as a little girl... it’s just that most people never get to meet that part of you..."

This messes up a cold woman soooo hard that you have to be ready for instant personality meltdown and a completely different person to come out of her. At this point, it’s often easy to start talking about the whole pick-up scene and how women play men, etc. to let her know that you’re an insider and not falling for her game. If you drop two or three more profound comments during this time, you’ll have a woman who won’t leave you alone (but keep acting like you want to be left alone so she’ll stay after you!). Nice.


Yeah...brilliant.

Sentient Spud said...

This man's friends have failed him. As soon as he got the idea to credit an ex-girlfriend, one of his buddies should have smacked him across the face and told him to get ahold of himself. Kneeling before Olympus, however... The man has to be on drugs; that's the only explanation. There's no way you can do that and not be high as a kite in a hurricane.

LibertyPortraits said...

Granted his wife appears to be pretty attractive from that picture. However, even my old gamma self would have shaken his head at learning of a man bowing in reverence to his wife.

Anonymous said...

What.

The.

Fu%$.

Anonymous said...

Sounds like he got into some femcentric mysticism at some point, like those creepy guys from the "Dear Woman" video a few years back.

Doorstop, I have a pirated copy of DdA's Double Your Dating and never bothered to make it honest. I think it's one of only two or three essential pieces of game reading. I have heard that his interviews with dating gurus are top-notch as well.

"If he was faking it all, I guess it's an example of how you don't have to understand (or believe?) a topic to teach it well."

I doubt that he was "faking it" so much as he probably saw it as a skill to be coached, rather than a personality mindset the way Vox sees it. One of the longstanding criticisms of both salesmen and managers is that they don't care much about the actual core of what they are dealing with, just on massaging the machine necessary to sell or produce it.

mmaier2112 said...

"Double Your Dates" wasn't expensive IIRC, though it was soon followed by a flurry of emails for "upgrades".

C&F works, it's just being aloof and interesting. But, yeah... everything I've read about the dudes in the last few years has been cringe-inducing and painful. He sounds like he's headed for a bad fate.

Anonymous said...

yeah, that girl is not hot....

Anonymous said...

I doubt that he was "faking it" so much as he probably saw it as a skill to be coached, rather than a personality mindset the way Vox sees it.

Except that, if you're familiar with his materials -- ignoring the marketing hard-sell -- he very much did present it as a personality mindset. In the seminar I mentioned, he spent at least the first half of it on building confidence, avoiding the scarcity mentality, reframing, and all that mindset stuff. It wasn't until at least halfway through that he got into "lines" and specific techniques for approaching women. That's why I considered it -- and still do -- one of the best introductions to game that I've seen; and I've been around since alt.seduction.fast, when everyone was trying to learn NLP.

Now, as someone said, he was mostly compiling ideas others had already come up with, rather than inventing anything new. I think he even credited his famous phrase "cocky and funny" to someone else. But there's value in pulling ideas in from various sources and compiling them into a format that's easily learned. The guy who invents a better mousetrap is often not very good at marketing or selling it, so there's nothing wrong with someone else doing that and getting a piece of the action too.

On the other hand, even back then he was into affirmations and other stuff that smelled of New-Agey "law of attraction" thinking, so maybe he was always prone to that kind of flakiness. His wife referring to their friends as his "tribe" makes me think they're all a bunch of nutballs. (If he were banging all those women, it might make a bit more sense.) Maybe the lesson here is that learning Game isn't like riding a bike; you have to keep working at it. You have to stay on guard against slipping back into bad old habits, especially in today's feminized atmosphere.

Yohami said...

He's how I got into Game. Batcrazy shit.

Anonymous said...

"it always bothered me that so many Game authors were so heavy into the latest schemes in Internet marketing"

I totally disagree with this kind of mindset; there was a big anti-commercial "anti-seduction community" push in the late 00's, and even today it's fashionable to express some kind of disapproval of PUA instructors and boot camps and such under the idea that marketing your wares makes them invalid. Neil Strauss played that up in his book, with competing hordes of pickup instructors running pyramid schemes out of a Hollywood mansion.

These people seemed obsessed with "disproving" game somehow and a big part of their argument had to do with some kind of assertion that if guys were trying to make a living peddling game techniques, then what they were selling was automatically bunk. I recall a particularly boring individual under the nom de guerre "Aaron Sleazy" who was highly concerned with such. (He put out a book called "minimal game" where his advice was to not try to build any attraction just to "be cool," approach a lot and then quickly proposition for sex. That's more like the Law of large Numbers than anything resembling behavioral game.)

After encountering it a few times, I concluded that the "if someone is selling then it has to be a fraud!" chatter was a bunch of anti-corporate Boomer/Millenial hipsterism. People like to make money and anything that's effective is going to get marketed hardcore, put some caveat emptor in your quiver and stop trying to look moralistic. It's not hard to tell the difference between "more lays in 60 days" and "7 words to get any woman into bed!!1!"

In any case, it's neither here nor there for me - neither I nor almost anyone I consider a blog compatriot is charging for their blog works, and the guys wringing their hands have egg on their face anyway because the best game stuff is either absolutely free on blogs (Roissy, Roosh + the RVF, SoSuave, AG, etc) or costs about $10 on ebook with no followup - that would be DYD, Bang/Day Bang, and Athol Kay's books.

Anonymous said...

Badger, I have no problem with marketing in a general sense, or anyone making money by compiling and disseminating useful information. By "latest schemes in Internet marketing," I'm referring to a particular niche that focuses far more on the marketing than the content, and sometimes strays too close to spam territory. I considered getting into that line of business myself, and did a lot of research on it. The usual method was to write an e-book or create some other digital product -- about what, who cares, so do some keyword research and select a topic from that -- or even better, outsource the writing to someone overseas for a few bucks (grammar and spelling are so 20th century). Then throw up a long page of text and pictures and made-up testimonials on a new domain, do a bunch of SEO and linking tricks to bring traffic to the page, collect email addresses for a free version, then hit them with offers by email for your products as often as you can without annoying them enough to unsubscribe. Rinse and repeat.

I'm not saying DYD did that -- as I said, I think it was a solid product, regardless of Pagan's personal issues, and I wouldn't be exaggerating to say it changed my life -- but it seemed like a lot of game products were promoted that way. It was probably just because Game and Internet Marketing were both growing at the same time, with a lot of crossover in the audiences that were interested in them, but it didn't look good. I remember those anti-Game people too, and how tiresome it was to constantly be challenged to defend the sleazier peddlers. (I think they hated the truths in Game more than they hated people making money, but there was probably some of both.)

As you say, there's so much good information available today for free or very cheap that anyone who gets roped into paying a lot for it just didn't look very hard -- or he has money to burn and would rather pay someone to take him by the hand and walk him through it than do his own research, which I guess is fine too.

Anonymous said...

Same here Yohami; his Advanced Dating Dynamics is the first Game product I bought. I still think most of the material is solid, but this bit of news just goes to show you that you can know something back and forth in a theoretical sense yet still lack the stones to integrate into your life. This is assuming that, as others have guessed, this isn't just a marketing ploy for his new marriage seminars. If it is, it seems to be very bad marketing; as good as I think the stuff I have of his is, I wouldn't even consider buying what he's selling now, given his behavior here. If I am at all typical of his past customers in this regard, he will have to build a whole new customer base from the ground up. Unless he plans on marketing his new stuff mainly to women and 'Dear Woman' flat-sacks, this wasn't a smart move at all.

Unknown said...

Deangelo is not fake as most would have it, he just has a way of seeing things that he argues may differ depending on the individual. I now know that if you will use deangelo's advice you first should have a backbone of sorts before you do so, otherwise you will have to go to confidence classes and learn how to be a man first. If deangelo was to sit against me I would have a point against his as he would have against mine, but I fear that most would just listen and run to implement game full-heartedly

Anonymous said...

Alex, I have no idea what you just tried to say.

kh123 said...

"I just threw up in my soul."

Lucky him. My Sapporo just came back up after wading through that sh*t.

kh123 said...

"I know that secretly you’re as sensitive as a little girl... it’s just that most people never get to meet that part of you..."

22 fl. oz., down the drain. Thanks guys.

Duke of Earl said...

That was truly pathetic.

Sure, going down on bended knee to propose is traditional but the rest is just... bad.

Laguna Beach Fogey said...

"David DeAngelo, aka Eben Pagan, Loses His Balls, Admits To Only Two Relationships In His Life!"

Sometimes I suspect a lot of PUAs and Manosphere bloggers, scammers or not, fit the same profile. And not by choice.

Morpheus said...

Late to this thread, but wanted to add my comments as DeAngelo's material was my intro to Game. Whatever has happened with him, I still think a lot of his stuff is great material, and hands down what I would give a guy just starting.

Beginners don't need esoteric abstract discussion, they need simple hit the ground running instructional material. I don't think DeAngelo was the creator or even necessarily a skilled practitioner. I think he was just a clever marketer and good aggregator of quality information from others. Double Your Dating is still a great primer for a guy totally stuck in Blue Pill World of being a nice guy who is polite and deferential. The Interviews with Dating Gurus product was tremendously useful to me in understanding a completely different way of interacting with women.

Yohami said...

The Interviews with Dating Gurus was the bomb.

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