PUAs, Con Artists, and the Dark Triad
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
145.35898
Summary
Con Artists and the Dark Triad: An explanation for why nice guys finish last, and chicks dig jerks. Why do women like guys with the dark triad? How do they do it? And why do they get all the money?
Transcript
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Now this is a very complex and controversial subject.
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It requires a very subtle touch to tease apart the different threads of it.
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So to even get into this in the first place requires some background on what all these terms mean.
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Now if you've never heard of it before, the Dark Triad is something that's often brought up in pickup artist and game circles.
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Basically as an explanation for the conventional wisdom that nice guys finish last and chicks dig jerks.
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But to talk about the term itself, we should consider where it came from.
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It was a psychologist, J.M. MacDonald, who first coined it in a 1963 psychology paper, A Threat to Kill.
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And in it, he was analyzing the behaviors and the paths of spree killers, of serial killers.
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And the Dark Triad was also connected with such things as animal cruelty, fire starting, bedwetting.
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And it specifically referred to three behavioral tropes that could predict future criminality in his eyes.
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And those were Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy.
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Now in modern times, with this completely deregulated sexual market that we have,
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one of the observations that more and more guys have been making is that chicks dig jerks.
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Now, if you went a hundred years ago and told somebody about this theory,
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they'd agree with you, but everybody in society would say that these guys are scum.
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These days, nobody's enforcing any sorts of social norms.
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And to interact with girls at all, you need to understand at least the basis of these traits.
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Which is a very sad indictment of where our society is going.
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You know, many, I think, make the mistaken view that these traits work because women are just feral,
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or they're just venal, and so they automatically go for evil people.
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Because their evil babies will have more babies than the non-evil babies.
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You know, it's a little bit of a reductio ad absurdum of evolutionary psychology, in my opinion.
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But before we get to that part, before we really talk about why it is that girls go for guys that display the Dark Triad,
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Now, con artistry, the important thing that you need to understand about con artistry is what the con stands for.
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He's somebody that gets your confidence and uses that to steal your money.
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You know, there's an old saying that you can't con an honest man.
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And to understand how all of this works, let's talk about your typical, kind of the basic, most basic con of all.
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Now, down below is a link to Michael Shermer of Skeptic Magazine, kind of doing a little video segment about how exactly this works,
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Essentially, you have two con men and the mark.
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He goes up to the mark, which is just anybody walking down the street.
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Once they've established a rapport, the first two people,
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he comes up and puts a wallet down behind the mark and says,
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They pick it up, and there's a whole bunch of money in it.
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The inside man points out, you know, wow, that's $300, or that's $3,000.
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And he takes the money, puts it into an envelope, which he puts in his pocket.
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Then he pulls another envelope out of his pocket, which is full of paper, cut to the same dimensions as the $100 bills in the wallet.
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So it feels like the same thing, and of course it's sealed.
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So the outside man says, you know what, I'll go into that building and try and return it.
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But how do I know you guys aren't going to run off with the money?
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And so the inside man hands the envelope with the fake money to the mark.
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The mark thinks he has $3,000 in an envelope, and that everybody here is being honest, and we're all going to split the money if we can't find who the wallet belongs to.
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And so the inside man volunteers to say, all right, well listen, I've got a couple hundred bucks in my wallet.
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I'll give you a couple hundred bucks, he says to his cohort.
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And then they convince the mark to also give the cohort a couple hundred bucks.
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At which point the cohort, the outside man, disappears.
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After about five minutes of waiting, the inside man says to the mark, well listen, you'll wait here with the money, right?
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Okay, because I'm just going to go check on that guy, he's been a while.
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They got the money out of the mark, they've still got the $3,000 in the wallet they dropped,
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they're out $10 for a leather wallet, and the mark eventually realizes that he got conned.
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Now, there's one critical key to all of this that Shermer doesn't specify,
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because they actually were using a real mark, and they probably didn't want to be insulting to the guy.
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Is, these three people found a wallet with $3,000 in it.
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That could be their first and last month's rent.
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And here the three of them are talking about splitting it amongst themselves,
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because this poor imaginary fellow dropped their wallet.
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If you're going to be a con man, what you do is you get the mark complicit.
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And then, best case scenario, once you scam them,
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you know, if any of you watch Better Call Saul,
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there was a bit with a fake Rolex where they were conning people.
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You know, at that point, that mark thinks that,
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Then he gets away and he finds out he has a useless piece of junk.
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He thinks it's just unfortunate that the watch that he stole is not worth very much.
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You know, in the pigeon drop, the mark might know that he got conned,
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but now he's so embarrassed that he was planning to steal money from this stranger's wallet
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or at the very least, he's going to think about it for a long bit.
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He's now embarrassed because he knows he did something wrong.
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And the best way to avoid being conned is be an honest person.
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Don't rationalize it and say it's okay to steal a watch from that guy because he's a jerk.
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Or it's okay because we found the wallet and, you know, who wouldn't steal the money?
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Which begs the question, what does any of this have to do with sex?
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What does any of this have to do with picking up women?
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What does it have to do with game or pickup artists?
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Deep down, we all know that sex is far too powerful.
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We all know deep down that these are our powerful forces that we're dealing with.
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You know, horror movies are a great example where the, you know, the stereotype goes.
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It's as soon as somebody has sex, that's when the killer gets to them.
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That's because the horror movies, the killer is always some sort of metaphor for societal dangers at the time.
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Take the freshman by the verb pipe, which is all about the regrets over a casual relationship resulting in an abortion.
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You know, that line, uh, 40 days of one night stands.
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Just this profound regret that we're treating sex like candy, like something so casual and flippant.
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Now, you can certainly go the Anita Sarkeesian route and say that this is all just a social construct being forced upon people.
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Or you could look at the fact that this is universal to all cultures, pretty much.
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Big exceptions being primitive Stone Age tribes.
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And yet, on a certain level, everybody, you know, saints and sinners alike, everybody wants to have casual sex.
00:12:07.260
The way you manipulate the mark is you get him to, you get him to do something he knows is wrong.
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Women, no, deep down in their souls, they know that sex is about a little bit more than just an orgasm.
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You know, women aren't as direct and obvious as men.
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But believe me, they are extremely lustful creatures.
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And so, the way you sleep with a woman is you allow her to sin and say that it's okay.
00:13:00.280
You get them involved in the crime and tell them it's not actually a crime.
00:13:04.980
It's not actually a crime to steal from that guy's wallet.
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You know, it's not actually a crime to cheat on your boyfriend with me.
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And as long as you act like a criminal, as long as you manifest these dark triad traits,
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You are helping her fight against her better nature.
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You know, this is, the word seduction literally means to lead astray.
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Now, I think it's really worth thinking about feminism in light of all of this.
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Because feminism is just really this whole ideology built upon self-delusion.
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But it had all these misperceptions of what women were.
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They didn't have all that evil in them like men did.
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And see, feminism continues to believe in all of this.
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You know, they continue to promote that women can do no wrong.
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Women don't abuse their boyfriends or their children.
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Feminism is really all about rationalizing women's behavior.
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And so because we have this feminist indoctrinated culture,
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we have these women that they already have all the rationalizations in place already.
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Because these women have been so programmed to rationalize everything,
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and then they go with the pickup artist or with the bad boy,
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the guy that is just using the woman as a mark,
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the mark in the Connors game does not want to admit that he got played.
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because ultimately if he'd done the right thing,
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When the woman gets played by the pickup artist,
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she doesn't want to admit that it was her fault.
00:16:01.720
and went after a guy that she knew from the very beginning was no good,
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but that she needed to get her tingles satisfied.
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which makes me feel miserable the same way the mark feels miserable,
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well that was date rape or something like that.
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Because I can't admit that I did something wrong.
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the reason the dark triad is so effective nowadays,
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is because women have been progressively trained to rationalize everything.
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Fifty years ago they would make different sorts of excuses.
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I think people were a little bit more sane in general.
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But there's always people that want to rationalize things.
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and who are going to regret it and hate themselves afterwards.
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They'll think it was all the other guys that are to blame.
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You're the one warm memory from their childhood.
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is going to think the con artists were some of his best friends.
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of what it's like to live in a very low-trust society.
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where it was easier to make money as a scam artist
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And we're still suffering these effects nowadays.
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In fact, one of the few growth industries right now