Revenge of the Pickup Artist Nerds: How the “Dating Advice” Industry Makes Millions Off Clueless Men

If you were online in the early 2000s, you probably remember the pickup-artist or “PUA” era. This was a bizarre period of time where grown men treated dating and seduction like a live-action RPG (this was literally called “sarging”)…

… dudes would go to nightclubs, run canned “openers” (or scripts), attempt “kino escalation”, battle “AMOG’s” and then go home to a forum and report on what went wrong.

The days when Neil Strauss, Mystery, and a handful of other blowhard dating/attraction “gurus” were all the rage.

And the funniest part is this: a lot of the ideas weren’t even totally wrong.

They were just packaged in the most cringe, over-engineered way possible. This stuff proliferated the internet heavily for probably around 10-15 years.

Eventually, it imploded because of pure greed.

The promises were becoming increasingly out of control, while the “results” were nothing short of abysmal.

Guys eventually woke up and realized they were part of a marketing machine extracting millions of dollars. People involved in the internet marketing industry at the time saw people like David DeAngelo (from ‘Double Your Dating’ fame) netting an estimated $20 million dollars a year.

Countless others were banking off courses and “bootcamps” costing thousands of dollars.

Mind boggling, isn’t it? It was also an incredible incentive to make as much shit up as possible, and sell endless products to guys who just needed help with dating and attraction.

Somewhere along the way, the MGTOW movement or “Men Going Their Own Way”) was born… then came the rise of the “red pill” movement and manosphere content. People like Andrew Tate were leading the charge with over the top “alpha male” tropes. Podcasts like Fresh and Fit, and Whatever starting becoming more popular, and currently is a pretty popular category on YouTube and social media.

And more recently, parts of that same energy have started mutating into the blackpill and “looksmaxxing” world, where dating advice bleeds into doomer ideology, fatalism, and obsessive self-analysis/comparison about looks.

In these circles, attraction is framed as a rigid pecking order largely determined by appearance and social status, leaving little room for growth or personal agency.

You may be asking yourself, what does PUA or pickup-artists have to do with anything at this stage?

Because they are now selling narratives and exploiting the same insecurities those fake PUA and dating gurus capitalized on years ago.

Except now, their business models thrive on algorithms that reward controversial, clip-ready short-form content, because outrage and debate generates views, and views convert directly into money.

Men do not buy into this stuff because they are stupid.

They buy it because uncertainty around women can make even an otherwise capable guy feel weak, confused, and strangely desperate. Suddenly he is overthinking basic interactions, reading into every glance, replaying conversations in his head, and looking for some hidden rule that will make the whole thing feel less chaotic.

That is where the industry stepped in and made a fortune.

It sold the feeling that attraction could be systemized. That with the right lines, the right timing, and the right “game,” you could finally stop feeling confused and start getting predictable results.

That promise was intoxicating.

It also happened to be perfect for marketers.

Because once a guy accepts the premise that success with women is mostly about secret techniques, he becomes endlessly sellable.

There is always another layer to buy…

… Another advanced course, bootcamp, or guru with a darker, edgier, supposedly more effective take on this age-old problem.

Don’t get me wrong…

A few ideas buried inside the PUA world were pointing at something real.

Neediness can kill attraction. Social proof matters. Emotional strength matters. Experience matters. A man who is calm, playful, and comfortable in his own skin usually does better than a man who is tense and approval-seeking.

But the problem began when the industry took a handful of decent observations, wrapped them in weird jargon, overcomplicated them, and sold them back to insecure men like forbidden knowledge.

It was all packaged and resold into endless “secret systems,” magic scripts, and made-up nonsense with names like the “annihilation method” and “story stacking.”

Looking back, the vocabulary itself tells the whole story.

The industry was full of men trying to make attraction sound technical because technical things feel controllable. Once you can label something, categorize it, and build a system around it, you get to feel like you’re mastering something, instead of admitting you’re nervous, needy, and socially uncalibrated.

This is what so much of the old PUA world really was:

Insecurity dressed up as methodology.

The language gave it a fake sense of precision, the branding gave it a fake sense of depth, the price tags gave it a fake sense of value.

So before going any further, it’s worth walking through the old PUA glossary museum for a minute, because those absurd little terms reveal exactly how the scene thought, exactly what it was trying to sell, and exactly why so much of it aged like milk.

The PUA glossary: a museum of male insecurity

DHV (Demonstration of Higher Value)

DHV stood for “Demonstration of Higher Value.”

The premise was simple: attraction is influenced by perceived value. Instead of directly bragging, a man would tell a story that implied social proof, leadership, adventurousness, or preselection by other women.

For example, a guy might casually mention the time he organized a last-minute road trip with friends, or how he ended up backstage at a concert.

These were called “DHV stories.”

Sometimes they were real stories, just sharpened for impact. Other times they were strategically embellished. The theory was that the story demonstrated value without stating it outright.

In practice, it often sounded rehearsed, and not genuine at all. In fact, with the lack of “social awareness” of most of the guys that got sucked into this stuff, I’d venture to say it came off weird and creepy as well.

Negging

Negging became one of the most infamous tactics of the era.

It referred to giving a backhanded compliment or mild tease designed to lower a woman’s confidence slightly and shift the dynamic. The idea was that highly attractive women were used to constant validation. A subtle, unexpected tease would stand out and create intrigue.

For example:

• “You’re cute. You remind me of my little sister.”
• “I like your nails. They’re almost cool.”

The tactic was meant to signal non-neediness and emotional independence. Over time, it devolved into awkward or outright insulting behavior when misunderstood or misapplied.

When done with genuine playfulness and good timing, teasing can create tension. But imagine some nasally-voiced nerd delivering that line to the hottest girl in the bar. Suddenly it doesn’t sound playful… it just sounds weird and rude (and it definitely doesn’t create attraction).

Peacocking

Peacocking meant wearing something outrageous enough to force attention.

Big jewelry. Loud jackets. Random hats. Eyeliner if you were feeling brave…

… or if you’d been watching Mystery and thought, “Yeah… that seems like a normal adult man.”

The logic came from evolutionary psychology: peacocks spread feathers to stand out. The problem is a peacock’s feathers signal health and genetics. A fedora in a nightclub usually signals a forum account with 30,000 posts.

Not all attention is good attention…

Moving on:

Canned Routines

Canned routines were pre-written openers, stories, games, and conversational threads designed to guide interactions in predictable directions.

These included:

• Opinion openers
• Story-based DHVs
• Jealousy plotlines
• “Attraction switches”

The upside: it gave socially anxious men structure – like training wheels for conversation.

The downside however, was that doing this stuff without the inner belief systems required just came off like robotic, scripted conversations.

Trust me when I say this: If you have no idea what you’re doing, she already knows …

That’s why you need to acquire knowledge and work on your inner belief systems first- not memorize canned lines and fake stories.

I say this a lot, but its about how you make women feel, not what you say.

Bitch Shields

Few phrases aged quite as poorly as “bitch shields.”

In pickup slang, this referred to defensive behaviors women sometimes displayed toward strangers in social environments.

Short responses, dismissive body language, or polite disinterest were interpreted as protective barriers against unwanted attention.

The term framed these behaviors as obstacles to overcome rather than boundaries to respect.

Even within the community, interpretations varied. Some saw it as a signal to back off. Others treated it like a puzzle to solve… clearly, the social calibration was lacking at the time. I do recall seeing “in field” pick up attempts where women were clearly uncomfortable and the “pickup artist” was refusing to leave.

Shit Tests

Shit tests referred to teasing or challenging comments meant to evaluate a man’s confidence.

Examples included lines like:

“So you use that line on every girl?”
“You seem nervous.”
“Are you always this weird?”

According to “PUA theory”, these were little probes to see how emotionally stable you were.

If you reacted defensively, it supposedly showed insecurity. If you stayed relaxed and playful, it signaled confidence.

The idea itself isn’t completely crazy. People do test each other socially all the time. The funny part is entire forum threads analyzing these exact moments (the SoSuave forums were a goldmine for shit like this) …

“Was that a Level 2 shit test?”
“What is the correct response sequence?”

Instead of just taking comments like that as normal sarcasm or playful banter, dudes would literally pre-plan responses to any perceived “shit test” to avoid looking rattled for even half a second.

Frame Control

This was one of the few ideas that actually had some real substance.

“Frame” was basically the emotional reality of the interaction – what things mean in the moment. Whoever holds the stronger frame sets the tone. They decide whether a comment is playful, whether a pause is awkward, whether something is a big deal… or just nothing.

Frame control meant staying calm, not chasing approval, and not getting thrown off by every little remark.

A lot of guys treated frame like a tactic – something you “do” with the right line or the right response.

But “frame” isn’t a trick.

It’s a side effect of your inner belief system.

It’s just funny that the whole scene spent years obsessing over scripts, tactics, and “moves” before landing on the simplest conclusion: Your self-concept is doing most of the heavy lifting, not made up DHV stories and “negging”… LOL.

A few other classics from the glossary…

Sarging – Going out specifically to meet women. Yes, the community invented a military-sounding word for “going to a bar.”

Preselection – The idea that if other women appear to like you, you instantly become more attractive. Some guys even brought female friends out with them purely to manufacture this effect.

Kino – Short for kinesthetic touch. Basically a very serious-sounding term for casually touching someone during conversation.

HB Rating System – Women were rated numerically as “HB8,” “HB9,” etc. (“HB” stood for Hot Babe). Nothing says social sophistication quite like turning the entire female population into a spreadsheet.

AMOG – Alpha Male Other Guy. Supposedly the dominant guy you had to outmaneuver socially before talking to women around him. There were full forum threads about defeating AMOGs at one point in time…

Field Reports – Detailed written breakdowns of pickup attempts posted to forums.

Some of these read like war journals. Others read like a man discovering conversation for the first time.

Reading through all of this again, it’s fascinating how much of the early dating advice internet felt like a strange social experiment.

What made that era so strange was not just the terminology itself, but the mindset underneath it.

Reading through that old glossary now, the bigger pattern becomes obvious. The scene was not just inventing funny terminology. It was trying to turn attraction into something mechanical, because mechanical problems feel easier to solve than emotional ones.

Once dating gets reframed as systems, routines, and “methods,” a guy no longer has to admit he feels awkward, needy, uncertain, or inexperienced.

He can tell himself he is just one more tactic away from finally cracking the code.

…The same stuff is happening today, just with new terms, new influencers, and new delivery systems.

Back then the ecosystem revolved around forums, long blog posts, DVDs, and overpriced weekend “bootcamps” where a nervous guy would hand over two grand to get lectured by dorks that were overcomplicating the simplest stuff.

Today the delivery system is algorithms.

Instead of forums like SoSuave and PUA message boards, attraction and dating content now lives on TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Instagram reels, and endless podcast clips with Miami bimbos.

Instead of 2,000-word forum posts dissecting a failed approach at a nightclub, you get 30-second videos with some self-appointed “alpha” pointing at the screen explaining why you’re not good enough and why modern dating is supposedly broken.

I have a lot to say about many of the popular “podcasts” and “alpha males” that are proliferating the internet currently.

People like Andrew Tate galvanize young men with slivers of truth, and then feed them absolute slop… all to get them to pay for his fake online “university”.

He’ll say and do just about anything for a dollar or clout.

I have more to say about him and a few other characters in the same circles… but for now, I digress.

The point is this:

The real genius of these industries was never that they understood women especially well.

They just understood male pain well enough to package it, which is why these movements keep mutating instead of disappearing.

Instead of building a life they actually respect, one that gives them real confidence, real standards, and a real sense of direction, men get pulled into endless analysis about women, status, looks, and hidden rules.

They get taught to study attraction from the outside while neglecting the inner weakness, approval-seeking, and lack of purpose that make them so susceptible to all this nonsense in the first place.

No amount of memorized stories, canned lines, or rehearsed swagger was ever going to solve that problem.

Because the real issue was never a lack of tactics. It was inner fragility, approval-seeking, and a weak self-concept. A man can learn all the right lines in the world, but if his life does not feel solid underneath him, women will usually feel that long before his “game” has a chance to work.

Ultimately, women see you as you see yourself.

This is probably one of the biggest keys I wish someone told me when I was younger. It might have saved years off the learning curve, instead of endlessly searching for “pickup artist” stuff and “dating secrets”.

If you see yourself as unworthy, behind, or not enough, that usually leaks through in the way you carry yourself.

Even if you think you can hide it well, the cracks will emerge soon enough.

But when a man genuinely likes his life, respects himself, and has a clear sense of who he is, that leaks too – it manifests in more natural confidence, magnetic attraction, the way he speaks and more.

How do you begin doing this?

For starters, it means focusing on material that pushes you toward stronger habits, a better mindset, and a more grounded sense of self – not more gimmicks, scripts, or fatalistic nonsense.

There are a few key methods I highly recommend men undertake in the Dark Aura Blackbook.

The other is by absorbing the information left behind by OG Player Supreme.

For all the nonsense that came out of that era, some of the material he was putting out actually cut through the fog.

A lot of it still holds up surprisingly well, and in some ways it anticipated many of the talking points currently being recycled by the red-pill/manosphere crowd (minus a lot of the grift, whining, and algorithmic brain rot).

Even though some of it may be a little dated, it’s raw and real. Instead of complaining and becoming fatalistic over women’s choices, Supreme gave men a way out of mediocrity.

If you’re curious, you can browse the archive here:

Discover The Secrets Of “High Level Players” To Effortlessly Attract The Most Beautiful Women…

Inside you’ll find hours of old Player Supreme breakdowns, podcasts, and commentary.

Including many of those legendary rants where he dismantles the PUA industry piece by piece.

Some of it is hilarious.

Some of it is brutally honest.

But a lot of it still contains insights that most modern dating advice completely misses.

If nothing else, revisiting the old PUA glossary is a reminder of how bad advice can sound once the spell wears off.

And how far the conversation around dating has (hopefully) come since then.

Stay tuned.

• Joe Masters

P.S. While digging around some old PUA forums recently, I stumbled across something that reminded me how much impact Player Supreme had on people back then. In 2017, a thread appeared on the SoSuave forums when news spread that he had passed away. What followed wasn’t drama or marketing hype… it was dozens of guys posting their memories of how his material helped them.

A few that stuck out:

• “Man… Player’s podcasts back in 06, 07, 08 were pure HEAT. I learned so much game and attitude from PS. He really tried to help young guys trying to come up in the game and in life.”

• “Player Supreme taught me so much… things my own father didn’t. I started listening to him when I was 15. I actually saw him as a second father figure.”

• “His advice was top notch and the real deal. He never taught mainstream PUA nonsense just to make money. It was the harsh truth about game and dating.”

• “He clowned me for 15 minutes on one of his videos… and honestly it was great advice. It helped me break out of a pattern I was stuck in.”

If you want to see the thread yourself, you can still read it here:
https://www.sosuave.net/forum/threads/player-supreme-passed-away-former-member-here.248430

Those posts are one of the reasons I preserved the Supreme Attraction archive. A lot of the podcasts, breakdowns, and insights people mention there would’ve otherwise disappeared as forums and YouTube channels slowly fade away.