Imagine if those x-ray glasses advertisements in the back of 1970s Marvel comics had been real. Imagine it was possible to don a pair of glasses that let you see through all the bullshit and see the world as it really is.

I had zero calibration as a child until well into my adult life. I’d run around doing my own thing, imposing my reality onto the world and then show total obliviousness to the responses of others. I never learned to read the subtle cues in peoples behaviour that betray what they really think. Perhaps I was an unusually blundering idiot but I think men generally are an oblivious bunch. We live in the world of direct obvious overt communication.

Two years into the Game I still marvelled at Jambone’s ability to just know where a girl was at and whether she was up for it. To me it seemed he had a superpower but really he’d just taught himself calibration by fucking 150 girls since he started university. When you go through enough sets from beginning to end you get calibrated. When I asked him to deconstruct and list the signals he was reading he couldn’t really do it. It was too internalised.

So one thing I’m doing with my book is deconstruction. I’m breaking everything down into tiny micro steps. Ultimately Game follows a simple mini-loop:

Provoke feedback -> Use girl’s response to place her -> Make an informed next move

When you read her IOIs you are doing this. When you compliance test her you are doing this. The further you can deconstruct the steps and the more precisely you can sort the signal from the noise, the faster and more reliably you can move the girl forwards. That’s the nuts and bolts of calibration but the end goal is to internalise it and make it intuitive.

As you get calibrated you see the world differently. It permeates your world view and can’t be unseen.

You see a chode on a first date. Immediately you classify him on the socio-sexual hierarchy and you calculate relative SMVs with the girl. You know where the girl is and what she’s looking for. You can future project the next ten years of their lives with actuarial certainty. You see people on the bus and you can see their inner game issues written into their face, their posture and their clothing. You start to see men as women see them, seperating them into “gets laid” and “doesn’t get laid” buckets.

It’s weird. There’s an unbelievable amount of information transmitted if only you know what signal to detect and how to process it. The Red Pill does the same thing. You start to see what the office environment really is. You can almost see dollar signs being transferred from the middle-aged professionals across to the welfare housing a few streets across the office. You can see the cage office chodes build around themselves.

People talk about red pill bitterness, that emotional reaction to realising everyone’s lied to you every year of your life to pick your pockets and frustrate your ambitions. Perhaps we should also talk about red pill disengagement, that Cassandra Complex of seeing things as they really are but being powerless to change them. Watching the lemmings marching to the cliff and wondering why they can’t see they are marching into the abyss.

I love John Carpenter movies. Watching They Live as a teenager really got me thinking “what would it be like to have a pair of glasses like that?” Well, twenty years later after swallowing the red pull, learning game and the fundamentals of economics I get it. The world is so simple and it amazes me the elusive obvious is so well hidden from so many.