Pablo Torre Finds Out - Share & Tell & Neg with Sarah Spain, Charlotte Wilder, and Pablo

Episode Date: March 28, 2024

What do pickup artists get totally wrong about successfully attracting women? Should you get a QR code on your gravestone? And did the three of us make a horrible, horrible mistake by talking about our old blogs in public? Sarah Spain, Charlotte Wilder, and Pablo discuss. ALSO: Mystery's sun necklace; scouting HB9's; crossfit; why your twenties are overrated; Pablog; gender dynamics in media; and the Dan Orlovsky of incels. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to Pablo Torre finds out. I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is. Oh my God. I'm so stupid. Can you help me with this? Right after this ad. You're listening to Draft King's Network. We should say up front that it's Charlotte's birthday.

Because I was going to pretend like we're running this later in the week until let's not acknowledge the present tense, but happy birthday, Charlotte. Thank you so much, Pablo. What better way to spend it? Charlotte sat down and was immediately complaining about the ways in which her body is betraying her. Oh, my God. Last night... Just wait, honey.

My back just, like, goes into spasm. And I was lying on the floor in a heating pad. And then I woke up this morning and it was like, oh, yeah, no. Like, I think it's a little better. And then I went to go for a walk. And it was just like shooting pain. And I was like, you know what? Welcome to 35.

Welcome to 35. I was in Amsterdam over the weekend. Oh my God. I'm back because I love you guys. And speaking of back, I carried with me two, I don't know what they're called. They're going to sound disgusting when I say it, but like two massage balls. Oh, like a lacrosse ball. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Just so I could plant them into my seat and lean against it, quietly massaging myself for seven hours and 15 minutes. Because that's kind of old than I am. And I tell you that there is a product that you're going to be real fire. up to learn exists. And it is the equivalent of, actually, I think it's three lacrosse balls melded together. I believe it's called a snake, but I haven't used it in a little while, but I bought it a couple years ago because I have major back issues. And it's the equivalent of having multiple lacrosse balls for either that lumbar support or you can use it against a wall or you can use it to like foam roll when you don't want to bring a full roller with

you traveling. You just described almost every Instagram ad that I guess, serve now. Would you like more balls to put against your body? Yes. Can we be, actually yes. Can we be sponsored by body balls? Can we be sponsored by a vaguely, well, not even vaguely, just straight up sexual sounding device that you stick into yourself to make yourself feel that much younger. When you put it that way. I don't think you stick it in anywhere, Pablo. It's not a thing you stick into yourself. I believe that's what you just said and that's not what you do with it. Well, you know, like pressing into this skin. Yeah. Oh, my knots.

My knots. I would say against. I would say against yourself. It's a good distinction. What I would recommend to literally anyone is if you have any back pain to immediately try to figure out if you can get to the root cause because I had so many other injuries that when I started to have back stuff, I kind of just thought it would eventually go away.

At the time I was still playing like rec league flag football, softball, beach volleyball, dodgeball, like all the things. And when my back started hurting a lot, I was like, yeah, it's just probably another thing I tweaked. I'll just wait for it to eventually get better. And that was not the right choice. So whatever's going on, try to figure out. Because usually back pain is actually a deferral of pain from some other part of your kinetic

chain that's not properly working. And your spine is basically like a bunch of jelly donuts on top of each other. And there's like jelly in the middle that keeps, that like allows your spine to like go up and down and like jump. And when all the jelly gets squeezed out, then you basically just have your spine smacking against itself. Just a bunch of buns, no jelly. So the longer you go without treating it. And the more jelly that oozes out, the harder it is to fix without things like surgery. So go to the doctor or a leaveny like me until you find one that makes this. So just to recap, you are the person telling me that my vocabulary seems too sexual.

What was sexual about that? Why, whenever the three of us do a show, it becomes like the horniest episode? Back. Literally every word you said. Sorry. It's because Pablo is surrounded by women and it's a thing he's thought about for years but never been bold enough to actually try these odds and dynamics. And it's very hard for him to step away from the inner recessive. I just want to thank both of you because I came in here like being like, yeah, my back hurts.

but I'm fine, feeling really good. Now I'm like, oh, my back is broken. All the jelly's gone. I have no jelly left. I'm not going to say it. So when we were talking about what topics to do on the show today, I sent a text that is the best encapsulation for how I want to start today's show with Sarah Spain and Charlotte Wilder.

Hello, guys. And it's the text that reads, I'm going to do alpha douche. So can we play alpha douche? You do not have to accept her rejection. I'm a professional dating coach and I teach guys how to understand the female mind. Now, if you're one of the people that haven't applied anything in my course or my videos or anything like that, this video is not for you. This is an advanced technique.

This is for the people that have the course, have my videos, are applying it, seeing results. and eventually I'm going to put this in the course. I just don't have the time right now, so I'm releasing it now. You don't have to accept her rejection. Now, here's an example. I was talking to her girl, and she said, oh, you know, I'm not really interested. And I instead of just going, okay, and then just turning it right away, I did this. Why would you not be interested in me?

I'm the best. Absolutely the best. And she's like, oh, how? I'm like, well, you'd have to come over in my house to find out. And you'd also have to be okay with kink, and you'd also have to be okay with my mastery of ropes and the fact I have multiple women. Actually, maybe, maybe not. Maybe you wouldn't be the best for me.

And now I did turn it around at the end, but I could have left that part out and still got her to start bantering back and forth, and she did. She started going back and forth with me, and I started building attraction in that because now I had sidestepped her fucking rejection. Granted, keep in mind, I didn't force it

and say, no, no, no, you're, you know. I just played into her a little fucking game. I knew she was playing with me a little bit, or just kind of disengaging, and I gave her a little bit of fun. You want to know what I did with her later? No. Yeah, absolutely don't want to know.

I should say that I don't know if the song at the end of that video was a song that he, like, edited in, or if that was just the sound of a car that had pulled up next to him playing that song because he is sitting in his car. And it's a very popular TikTok now, and it's basically about how you don't have to accept rejection from women. And before I get into how I feel about this, just how do you guys feel about this? So my first reaction, Pablo, was that everybody knows guys like this. Everybody knows a guy who's like a little squirrely and weird and like all the hair on their, their beard and their head is like all the same.

And it's like sort of reddish blonde. And it's like, and you're like, what's going on? And that guy has two choices. He can either be like the goofy fun friend who gets out of his own way. or he can become the worst person you've ever met. And this guy clearly chose the latter. But I can't even think of anyone I know who's like that, but I know that guy.

Yeah, whether or not you know someone who claims to have a mastery of ropes, I feel like you guys have encountered people in that guy's coaching tree, either a predecessor or a descendant. And that's the kind of type, Sarah, that I wanted to like almost ethnographically study with you guys, because I am unfortunately fascinated by how one becomes that guy, as Charlotte had described it. I mean, I think what Charlotte nailed is what I felt watching it, which is first, like, unimaginable levels of cringe and, like, deep-seated memory of being engaged with or attempted to be engaged with by people like this, and how awful it is, and how if they just got out of their

own way, found a way to be confident in whatever it is about them that makes them unique, even if it's their very dorkiness and quirkiness, if it's their mastery of ropes and kink, you can find your person that's going to love that. What they are always doing instead is trying to figure out how, if they just better understood the female mind and tricked women into liking them, they could get the women they want. Instead of saying, let me look for a woman that wants me and then just be myself confidently and see how attractive that is. Like, it's so easy to like understand but hard to explain to people who aren't naturally confident that all you need to be, all you need to be to get women is confident.

That's it. In whatever, like, look at the guys and you're like, how did he, how did he do that? How did he pull that off? You're like, I guarantee you that guy walks in anywhere just authentically and genuinely themselves. And whatever weird and unusual ways that might be, even. without being the hottest guy, and people are just drawn to that confidence. So this pitch that Sarah is giving all men on how to attract and even just be a person who can

have conversations with women, which is confidence and influence people. Yes. Yes, yes, exactly, that confidence being the key. What's very funny to me about this type of person, which, I should say, has an occupation now pickup artist. This is a pickup artist. There's a whole genre that is now decades old about pickup artistry. And what they sell instead is this complexity that reminds me almost of how an NFL defensive coordinator might talk. And I wanted to show you guys, I don't know if you know, do you guys know who mystery is? No.

Yes. Like when you said pickup artists, it again unlocked this part of my brain that sadly watched multiple episodes of the pickup artists starring mystery, whose goal was not to bring out people's natural and awesome uniqueness in a way that would make them confident, but rather to completely change them in every way until they could trick people into thinking they were something else. So Charlotte said no. Sarah obviously is envisioning mystery right now in her brain,

and so let's show Charlotte mystery. So in the first phase A1, we open. In the second phase, we dhv to get I-O-Is. In the third phase, we get her to DHV so we can give her I-O-I's, and that's attraction. If you go straight into comfort without doing that, you will just go nowhere. There's no pickup involved.

You're forgetting the plot line. So banter is something that some people think that, wow, I was in set for 10 minutes. And I was shooting the shit with her and everything was going well, but it didn't lead anywhere. So I'll say, well, did you qualify her? Was she even attracted? Did you upload DHVs into her head?

Does she know that you have had girls in your life in the past? Has she seen you with girls? Does she know that you're the leader of men, that you're pre-selected? Does she know anything about you? If the answer is no, then you went straight into comfort and you got stuck in there. That is mystery. Or as I like to refer to him now, having just watched that video, the Dan Orlovsky of incels.

Just like doing a telestrator on like, DHV. So DHV, by the way, is demonstrate higher value or a demonstration of higher value. I-O-I is an indicator of interest. A set is a conversation. And it goes on, right, qualify. You want to qualify. These are words that I came to learn in another text message that I said to you guys, that was immediately embarrassing. I explained it.

I read the book by Neil Strauss called The Game. And the game is not the manual that mystery and alpha-dom slash douche are selling, but it is a book about them, essentially. And so the game, it taught me these phrases in a way that made me genuinely interested in whether these guys have figured out literally anything, or whether this language they've developed is entirely something that is a scam. And when you're talking about DHVing and I-O-Iing and Kino-escalating and all of that stuff, what is just important for everybody to know here is that this stuff has become extraordinarily popular.

That is so depressing. I have a theory. I have a theory that the more people use acronyms, the more they rely on acronyms or on vague sentences, that don't actually say anything but signal that they know what they're talking about, and you just haven't learned it yet, the more full of shit they are. Yeah, I agree with you. And I also think that in this case, when you're trying to commodify something that is sort of inexplicable,

which is like chemistry, pheromones, you know, interacting with other humans, you have to give it special names. Like what it actually reminds me of, and I know that I will be in the way. consulting plenty of people out there, and I'm very sorry in advance. But one of my friends got really into CrossFit and then wanted to become a personal trainer and offered my husband and I some free sessions so that he could say he had clients on his website. And some of the exercises we were doing were things that have existed forever and that I did in college Division I track. But they gave them new names so that they could be CrossFit exercises. Like one was like a pulse thruster or something, and it was just a bodyweight squat. You know, it was.

I don't think it was something... I like how all of these exercises get rebranded as American Gladiator like code names. Yeah. Pulse thruster. Right, but I mean, that's the point is, like, we need our own language approved to you and expertise that will allow us to charge you for this thing that already exists. I think you're exactly right. I also think the, you know, the obvious part of this is that the...

Is his necklace? Well, the necklace... He's wearing a sun necklace. Sorry, the one thing I liked about mystery was his necklaces. Necklace was a little cool. So that's called peacocking. Yeah, I'm kidding. Charlotte.

That's called peacocking. That is a move. It reminds me of something I got on vacation, like in Wyoming in fourth grade. By the way, though, I get the system is the systematization of this. The idea that, yes, these are obviously like dorks and nerds who are yearning for some way to get anything resembling confidence. There is a fundamental, I will even say relatability on top of sadness to the idea of like, I don't. don't know what to do, can someone help me? And then someone filling that vacuum with, here is a, here is a literal book of things to do. I get where it starts. But what it, what it does, and this is like

both obvious and also, I think the key to so much of the internet now is that you become convicted in terms of why your approach should work. And it turns the person you're trying to win over into somebody who is definitionally two-dimensional. I wonder if you guys even encountered this in the wild, right? So, like, one of the things that PUAs, as they are called, what they stress is a neg. Sarah, how would you explain a neg for people who aren't familiar with the vocabulary here? So, negging is actually this thing that I've seen in the wild, and occasionally it works on some people, which is kind of wild and unfortunate, because I'd like to say mystery is completely

full of shit, but this kind of like has some vibes that are useful. This is why is... This is interesting. This whole conversation is that there's some stuff in here that is in fact worthwhile. Right. And with nagging, what I think the end result is that it infers some sort of confidence that someone has that might not actually be there because only the most confident among us would be willing to say something mean to a beautiful woman instead of just being

a pushover who is completely adoring. Right? So they would say something like, hey Charlotte. That's interesting T-shirt. I think my mom has it, but you're somehow still like pulling it off, right? So it's like kind of mean, like, oh, I don't really want to be wearing what your mom wears, but I look good. It's this weird sort of like, I'm kind of negating you, neging. I'm finding something negative to say about you, but it's not full on like, hey, you look like. So what's interesting to me about this is I feel like these guys are taking little kernels of normal things and just putting them on steroids and growing them into like the biggest ears of corn. that nobody wants.

Like, teasing someone is a great way to build a connection with them. Like, it's charisma. It's actually called flirting. Where, you know, where you're like, oh, my God. And, like, did my mom give you that shirt? And, like, you know, and so, but these guys are taking it, calling it something new, making it seem like the man is more in control and he's doing it to someone instead of it being a banter back and forth that the woman is also having agency in.

Yes. So that power dynamic of the control is like the under. underlying truth of this, which is that they're typically, when it comes to a pathetic feeling guy and a woman he's interested in, a power imbalance in his head, right? Like, how can I possibly be enough for this person such that they are attracted to be? And so people are using negs, like, and a basic neg is also, like, you got something right here. And they're, like, pointing to their nose. And they make the woman think that there's, like, a booger in her nose. So immediately, she's, like, insecure about that. Right? So that's, Charlotte is a guest at this psychological.

that this guy's being running. Yeah. This guy's been running. And then, look, I just looked up, like, sample negs and it's like,

hey, do you know if there's a zoo in Central Park? I get the feeling you spend a lot of time at the zoo. What? What? That's just a sample that I looked up. Why?

I would love to spend time at the zoo. I guess the feeling you spent a lot of time in the library. Okay, thank you. Yeah. I'm brilliant. This is not working so far. What I do next?

All right. When surrounded by HBs. That's hot babes. You're going to open the set. Kino Escalate. And then someone to wingman. All right. Cortez. Wait, wait. Did you say keto escalate? Keno escalate.

What does that mean? Like kinetic chain, I believe. Like this is, why am I explaining this? Yeah, why do you know all this? You are supposed to touch somebody in such a way that creates a physical rapport. Also just a part of flirting if it's going well. my worst nightmare. Like, I remember going on dates where there would be an attempt to immediately put a hand on top of my hand on the table or otherwise, and I would just move away. And then I would,

I would eventually have to say, just so you know, like, I'm not really comfortable touching people right when I get to know them. Like, I just want to get to know someone more. Because I, like, I want to say that, like, living in L.A., especially in the early 2000s, oh, man. The number of, of guys I met that were running this playbook. And it was very hard to describe because I couldn't just say they're like reading the pickup artist. But it was a feeling I had that they had a checklist of what to do. And if it didn't work, it was the woman's problem for wanting a bad guy or not liking a nice person or not knowing, like not respecting that they're a good catch. But none of it was organic or felt like just a confident guy hanging out.

It was always like the same exact thing. Like, negging shows of like value, like literally talking about their money or saying, I want to take you to go shopping for clothes. Yeah, they're an AMog. They're an alpha male of the group. Right. Talking about their alphanus. They're not an AFC, an average frustrated jump.

Oh my God. You know too many of these. These better be written down in front of you. They are definitely not memorized by me. Honestly, Pablo, do you want to know the female version of this? It literally was like, um, Try not to be too confident. Use baby talk, especially in your 20s.

Men are intimidated by women who are like partners and equals, so they want to date someone that they feel more manly around. So it's like, oh my God, I'm so stupid. Can you help me with this? Like, you have to. I'm not lying. I had to, in my 20s, like, just start acting like a dumbass who needed help with shit on my first dates. Just to give them like a second of thinking.

that they might be in charge ever. And once they were interested, then I could go back to my normal self. But I literally had to... It's a hard pivot, Sarah. Oh, my God. You guys, the amount of integrity I lost in my, like, pride in myself

when I just gave up and I started being like, no, I don't know. I'm like, what? Just started acting like a dump bitch because otherwise I didn't get any dates. And it worked. It worked every fucking time.

I went on a date. my early 20s, I got there. It was like an internet date and I was immediately like I cannot be here. He was not like this guy basically, he was like very quiet. I'm sure he was nice. But you know when you just show up and you see someone and you're and not even like, not even what he looked like the vibe. I was just like I can't sit here. We like order beers. I'm sitting there. Just boring feel like I'm like my skull is, you know, dropping through my body. And I was like I have to, I'll be right back. And I went outside and I called my roommate at the time, my best friend. Hillary, who we talked about on here before.

Just going to bring her up every time the three of us are together. And I was like, I cannot be here. And she was like, oh, I'm sorry. She's like, oh, also our dishwasher broke. And I was like, say no more. Perfect. And I went back inside and I was like, I'm so sorry. I have to go.

And he was like, oh, is everything okay? I was like, you know, my dishwasher broke. And there are just suds everywhere. Oh. And then I left. Good one. And I think about him. I feel a little bad.

Because you radicalized him. And now he's running. Yes, exactly. He's mystery. This is mystery's urgent story. He is this alpha douche guy. Wait. That dude has a sun necklace and is wearing giant goggles.

Oh my God. And he could not be kino escalating more right now. All right, Sarah. What did you bring us today? What topic did you bring us as a pallet cleanser? It's actually interesting. We were talking about the, the sun necklace

that might be the membership requirement for these men's confidence groups. It reminded me of gravestones that used to have a variety of different engravings that's different about things.

This is the most incredible transition I've ever. Back in the day, this is true, back in the day, there were a series of different things you could get engraved on your gravestone that stood for things. One would be like a weeping will

that was less about the person who lived, but more about the people left behind and the grieving that they were doing at the loss. There used to be like a sunset or a sun rising that reflected the time of your life that you died where you lost young or old. There was also different symbols for like Mason and different like groups that you could have belonged to that people used to know when they saw your grave if they saw that symbol, oh, he or she was part of X or Y. Probably he, because I don't think women were allowed to belong to anything meaningful enough that you would get it on your gravestone back in the day. Probably just dudes. But, Anyway, the point is they're completely abstract and meaningless to most people now.

If you go to a gravestone and you were to see something like that, you wouldn't immediately say, oh, they were a part of this group or they were a member of this. It's lost to us now. And what's now on gravestones that could eventually be the same thing hundreds of years from now are engraved QR codes. Now, I thought this was new because I saw this particular image on what was probably a TikTok that turned into an Instagram real, because that's how I see TikTok.

That's how I contemplate, yeah, the passing of time and human death is... Right. As a regurgitated TikTok Instagram real. That turns into an Instagram. And when you play the video, which I'm sure will maybe play here, although it's mostly visual,

so the podcast audience won't get it. It zooms in and shows you what the QR code sends you to, which is a video of an older couple dancing. And dancing, like, with a lot of energy, It looks like maybe some sort of swing-type dance. It's not a slow dance. And it said this was their last great memory together. And it was incredibly moving to be like the person buried there

isn't just a series of numbers of when they started and ended or a name or even a family or beloved daughter. They are someone who had this life and this was the part of their life that they wanted remembered. Can we pause on this part? Just the idea that to me, back in my day, a gravestone was a stone that had stuff written on it that you didn't scan with a technological device. The whole point, the whole point is to convey a sense of like ancient permanence that is not about, um, this feels like someone buying a verified Twitter account so they can post more than 180

characters on their gravestone. It's like, it's, it's sort of like, so my husband and I have had this argument, conversation for the entirety of our relationship. His mom used to be a funeral director and his family talks about death very nonchalantly. And, oh, did you know who died the other day? This guy. And so sad, Christmas Eve. We went and got his body. And I'm in the corner of the car, like, wanting to cry about a stranger.

And, like, Christmas Eve, oh, my God. What was his family? Were they with him? Did it? We're like, well, everyone remember Christmas every year that he died and he was in the house. And then you had to get, like, it's so upsetting to me because I never talk about death. It's something I'm working on as I get older because I'm going to need to be in, in interaction with it. But I said to my husband, he's like, it's a part of life. I said,

no, it's the end of life. And he said, no, it's a part of life. I'm like, no, it's the existence of life not existing anymore. So it's not part of it. It's the end of it. I think I'm coming around to his side because it's a part of life in that the rest of us who are left behind have to deal with it. But what you're saying is that the gravestone should ultimately show you permanence and the end. This is all you get is their name and when they lived. And the QR code would tell you that what you get after their death is still all the memories of who they were in life and that it's worth remembering and telling a full story instead of just wandering by and saying, oh, I wonder that, we've all done this. Oh, 14. That person died. I wonder what happened to that person that they only

made it 14 years. I think that there is a finality to a gravestone. Like, there's near my parents' house, there's this graveyard. And I would, I still do this. I just go for walks. And I read the, I read the names. And you see, it's exactly what you're saying. It's like, what little bits of information, can I gather from this, you know, beloved daughter, and then you see the families and where they are in relation to each other. And I think there's something to me more moving and spiritual about imagining that and about knowing that those, the memories that would be on that QR code are in the heads of the people who love them or love them. And at a certain point, those memories are gone. And that's okay. Yeah. I,

I feel like when I, when I, because Sarah, now I feel like an asshole. Because Sarah brought in a topic where I was like, oh, that's dumb. Sarah's going to think it's dumb. And Sarah's like, this is actually quietly beautiful. And I'm like, but here's, here's why I feel, here's why I feel the way I feel about the ancient permanence I was describing is that there's almost like a democratic aspect to it. It's like the way that people had to be commemorated.

Eons and eons ago is the same way we're trying to do it now. There is a constraint to the form that encourages, I think, which, Charlotte is saying, which is both an interpretation and almost a beauty of what can you say inside this limited space? Because when I admittedly am looking through these QR code headstones, I'm like, these are hinge profiles. It's like, here are my four best, here are my dozen best photos. Here's me with a fish. Yes, here's my representative video of me doing something fun. And it just feels like I want everybody to have that ability to be remembered the way they want to be remembered. And so something I love actually in the realm of the, um, of the dark and sad, but beautiful

is, uh, is the obituary.com obits that other people have written, um, for their loved ones. And it's not like you submit it to a newspaper and it gets edited. It's just like, here's, here's a bunch of paragraphs about somebody who really love someone else. And I love that. and I want that. Yeah. But the notion of like, we're going to replace the gravestone, we're going to replace the epitaph with, a social media profile is to me so anti what I personally want to imagine eternity to be, Sarah. I agree. So, but here's one thing I would say is that we were limited by technology in terms of how people were remembered in the past because we did have, at the beginning, just memories and

stories that we told each other. Then we had a printing press and we had actual letters and books and print. Then we add photographs that we can add to it. Now we're just continuing that. So you're seeing it as a social media profile when in fact what we're doing is just continuing the storytelling by using what we have now, which is video. And it's a complicated thing. Like a friend of mine that used to be a sports reporter kind of decided to move on to something else. And she started a company that collects memories and digital storytelling as people are in their older years that they want to pass down to their kids and grandkids. And, you know, if you didn't ask us all these questions about our life and we pass away and you don't know, here's, it's like when you can hire

someone to write your parents' biography with them, which, by the way, I've also had friends do, and they always tell you it's going to be like this many hours and that it's usually like 10 times as many hours. So it costs way more than you expect it because your dad has a lot to say. But it's the same concept. And so in this, like, I get your point. I don't even want a gravestone. And I don't think that I, again, don't want to insult people, but I think cemeteries are taking up space that can be used for a million other things, including just like animals and nature that we're constantly taking out for our strip malls. And so I just want to be cremated and thrown somewhere. But I also think that there's a real beauty in saying this was who I was. I'm not just these numbers.

And the one in particular with the two old people dancing, like, obviously that's the best case scenario. I mean, what if someone decided that they were going to make their own QR code and they were like, me doing a line of blow backstage at the Viper Room and then having a threesome is how I want you all to remember me. And like, are there guard rails

for that? Like, what if it's just a sex tape? Can you just make a sex tape your QR code for your gravestone? What if it's a video in which I'm explaining to men around the world that rejection is a choice? This sort of reminds me in mind of what I brought

to talk about. Oh, what didn't Charlotte Wilder bring on her birthday? I want to talk about getting older and about what it feels like to get older because my experience with getting older and I wrote something on my substack. If you're listening and you'd be so kind as to subscribe thewilder things dot substack.com scan the QR code now. You know, I think for me, I found this, this blog post I wrote when I was 25. I had the wilder things. Dot blogspot.com that is now lost and gone forever,

thank God, as it should be, because things should be ephemeral. But I had this saved from when I wrote it, and first of all, I did quote F. Scott Fitzgerald, which I think, as any 25-year-old does when they realize he wrote

more than the Great Gatsby. Something about, you know, the idea of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in the mind at the same time. I really like that. But when I was reading this blog post back, I was like, holy I was terrified. I was terrified to turn 25. What did it feel like at the time that made you want to quote, yeah, great literature to express how you were feeling? You know, it felt like I had this sent. I wrote actually there's this sense of impending doom,

maybe because it means the excuse of, quote, I'm just a dumb kid out of college who doesn't know what she's doing is no longer valid. And then I say at the same time that I'm kind of strike through, totally freaking out, I do know that so much of my life is before me and there's still so much possible. And what this blog post was was basically me going back and forth

being like, oh my God, I hope that I'm able to make myself the life that I want. and oh my God, what if I'm not able to? And then being like, no, but I think I'm going to be able to. And racing against some clock. And as I wrote about turning 35, you know, every birthday since 30 for me, I have felt this sense of freedom. Like the age, it has not fazed me. It has not bothered me. I was so scared to turn 30 also.

And I sort of realized I was just like, I think because of how our society feels about, you know, wonderkins and 30 under 30. Of course. And the most embarrassing thing that I can say publicly is that when I left 29, I was really bummed that I was never named to the 30 under 30. And then I felt the sense of freedom. And now I'm like, thank God. Like, thank God I wasn't because I was not the best version of myself. I feel like I keep becoming that.

And for me, especially in this industry, I feel that the older I get, the more established I become, the longer I do this, the less frettable I am. The more I can be in control. I think in my 20s I didn't know that I was in control. I think I thought being liked was more important

than, you know, forging my own path the way that I thought I should because if I wasn't like, I wouldn't get anywhere and it leads to this sort of interesting feedback loop. But I do feel so much steadier than I.

I did and I look back and I'm like, oh my God, your 20s can be tough. I don't want to burst your bubble because it may be different for you. But when I was 35, I felt exactly the same as you, which is I no longer have to try to fit into this expectation of 25. Now, oh my God, now I'm an adult and they do this. 30. Oh, my God. Have I done anything to be like exceptional compared to other young people?

Am I young anymore or now am I just a normal person who has to achieve? then the problem is, like you said, your career now feels like you're in charge of it, you're un-h-wit-withable, you get to decide. I'm 43. I was you, and I was getting better at my job every day. I was getting more knowledgeable. I was meeting more people. I was bringing more stuff to the company I worked for, and I started to feel what every woman in her early 40s starts to be told to feel, which is you're going to get squeezed out. And I was completely convinced. that it didn't happen to everyone. And it doesn't.

There are examples. But if you look across the media landscape, there's this giant divide from about 40 to maybe 65. Like, women get to be old and then we want to kind of hear from them again, maybe, but in that way that we love like Betty White or someone who's stuck around long enough,

Gloria Steinem. But between 40 and 65, we're like, oh, we just don't really want to look at you anymore because you remind us that aging happens and we place so much value in women's aesthetics, even if they're writers and radio people

and people who are ostensibly not connected to their looks, we kind of deeply and maybe subconsciously associate their value with youth, and then we stop listening. And there's this giant gap

of like, we just don't hear that much from women of a certain age. And I hope that doesn't happen to, but, and I'm sure there's plenty of people will say, like, my career stuff has nothing to do with that. But I was talking about,

by the women who came before me, just so you know as soon as you get to a certain age, they're going to want someone who knows as much as you do in a younger body that they can pay less. And if she doesn't know as much and hasn't done as much work, they'll just say, ah, it's still worth doing. And I look at a lot of the people who are around my age and came around the same time as me, and most of us have gotten shoved off to do other things. I mean, I think that's partly, Sarah, that's not bursting my bubble at all. That's partly why I wrote that, what I wrote right now, of where,

where am I? Because, and I was very careful to say, I don't know how I'll feel in 10 years, in 20 years, in 30 years, you know, fingers crossed. Like, I should be so lucky. And I think that part of what I hope for is the ability to keep, it's not that I feel, it's not that I feel unfa-withable. I feel less f***withable. You know, and I think, that's an important distinction. I feel like when the day comes where I am, where people do try to with me again, not in the way like I'm naive, so they're going to take advantage of me, but in the way that I know too much, so I'm now a threat, so I need to be pushed out, I hope that I have the wherewithal to be strategic enough to navigate that as well. I think that to me is where, you know,

I can see it coming and it's more about not reverting to what I did before, which was still trying to please people, but doing what I need to do, even if that means I am no longer at the place that I thought it was going to be, if that makes sense. Right. Do you guys feel that then that there's like, what's the way I want to put it? Do you feel like there's a less romantic? And I say that not in the sense of pick up artistry, but in the sense of like an optimist. optimism, a poetic optimism around what this is, what we're doing in work and in life is.

You get that sense. Because you're describing a harsh reality that is like the antithesis of the F. Scott Fitzgerald quote. I think the industry is negative. My thoughts on aging within the industry. My thoughts on life are exactly like Charlotte. The older I get, the less pressure, the more happiness, the more. confidence in myself, the more surety, the less

I have to give for shit that doesn't matter. It's all the stuff that when I was younger, I thought older women were lying about. I was like, oh, they just don't want to get older, so then they're now telling us, oh, your 30s are great, your 40s are, and then you get there and you're like, oh, man, this is so much better. It's you just, that people pleasing and that worrying about stuff that doesn't matter is not there. So it's hard, because I'm trying to reconcile

now this, like, general happiness and satisfaction in life that feels like I know more about myself in the world than ever before while simultaneously fighting this unfortunate reality of a business that doesn't give a shit. But I don't think, but I think Pablo, like, in general, the optimism, the hopefulness, all the stuff that is in F. Scott and in Charlotte's substack is spot on for me. Do you feel that way when you get older?

I am mostly thinking about how, A, I am blessed with the genetics of Asian skin and God help me because these natural oils do a lot of the work. And I also think about, yeah, look, I don't think, truly, I do not worry about my appearance, which is what an amazing thing, right? I don't worry about that. And I assume that that's not what I'm going to be graded on, which is so vastly unlike what your experience has been and will be. And so is the world that we live in, a world of PUAs and AMogs. But I also think about how vastly unlikable I find my previous selves while also having affection for them.

So I had a blog, too. It was called Pablog. Well, we all had just unbelievable. Yeah. Nailed it. But Pau blog was also on Tumblr for a while. And Tumblr was a place where you could do anything. and what I did was chronicle every single meal I ate.

Oh, no. So I was that guy. I was the person who was saying like a picture of my lunch and I described my lunch. Sort of awesome. That was every fucking meal. Even when it wasn't great or special or? Even when it was the most mundane. That's actually fascinating to me though.

And that, but that person I cannot even begin to relate to anymore because I again can't decide what to put on my Instagram grid. And I'm like, that guy wanted people to know what he was eating for... I was the definition of the thing you made fun of as like a millennial on the internet. Telling me what he had for lunch, yes, in fact, in exhaustive detail for years. And I deleted all of it. I was like, I don't want anybody to know I did this. Not until a introspective opportunity comes along on a podcast that I host my friend

someday will I ever speak of this. It is horrifying. And I feel like that every 10 years where I'm like, I don't want to read what I wrote. I might not want to listen to this in 10 years because I just feel like I am changing in ways that I hope are directionally correct, but leaves my younger self feeling like less of myself. I think what you're also talking about is something that happens for some people much younger and some people much older and some people never, which is the idea that your brain is not yourself. you can step outside and look down in it and decide to question why you're reacting in a way, feeling in a way. And a lot of people never do that.

But it's like the biggest part of maturity for me is that idea of like if I'm about to react to something and it doesn't feel quite right, ask myself, why did I feel the urge? Is it embarrassment? Is it anger? Is it like, and is that a feeling that I want to have? Is the person who I want to be someone who reacts that way? And can I choose to react? react differently. And you can do it all in like a second, right? Like, as opposed to letting your

emotions or your reactions control you, you're in charge. I think I saw something going around and I'm not going to get it just right, but someone said, like, wow, school has really changed because a teacher told us a kid that, imagine that their angry response was a fish and a pond. You're not the fish, you're the pond. You get to decide that all these things swimming around in you have a place, but when they get their moment and when you notice them and when you use them, you aren't that thing that can't stop itself. And I do think that when you get older, that's a huge part of it. And writing down, are you a fish or are you a pond?

Because that is a great opener. This is water. Another quote that most people find when they're 25. I definitely put that on my blog for sure. I also put Steve Jobs commencement speech that was quoted on there. Oh, Sarah. I had a lot of that. Oh, just a third.

throw pillow onto which humanity's humanities greatest cliches can be stitched. Live life, love, I'm sure at some point. I do think in this house we drink wine. I don't have any of those. I cook with mine. Sometimes they even put it in the food.

Yeah, there you go. I think also there's a level of strategy with like how does this emotion serve me? And if it doesn't serve me, maybe I can just... Adaptive embarrassment. Adaptive embarrassment. Is something that I think, Charlotte, you have you seem like you have mastered it at age 35.

What is that? It's kind of like ropes. No. Wait, is this a pickup artist thing? Yeah. It's hard to tell anymore. Yeah, he's negging you. He's like, you're so often embarrassed

that you've figured out how to use it. You're constantly embarrassing yourself. Oh, I hate this. I got got. I was like, wait, what? Really cool. Were you suddenly really attracted to Pablo and interested in his mastery of ropes?

Ropes. No. But wait, ropes. What did we find out today, guys? Here on Pablo Torre finds out, a show where we find out things. I found out that you are surprisingly poetic about the continuation of a tradition like a cemetery in a gravestone. I would not have imagined you as someone who would find such beauty in the idea that regardless of the tools that we have, doing the same thing that they did hundreds and hundreds of years ago to commemorative.

a life is meaningful. And it was a compelling argument and it moved me. I didn't expect it from you. I also never in a billion, million trillion years, gajillion even, would have thought that you would be host and talk about as food guy. I just mainly because if anything, I thought your cringe-worthy previous habits would be so highfalutin that even you would be like, settle down, partner. And instead, they were the opposite. They were incredibly dull. and requiring no intellect, which is not something I ever thought you would want to put out into the world

as a representation of yourself. This turned into the insult lane real quick. Oh, you got neg. You got negged. No, that was not meant to be an insult. And then I just felt my pride and my former self, which I already said I disliked,

now having to like, because a woman made fun of it, which feels like it brings us back around to how we started this episode with pickup artist and how you get radicalized. What I found out today really, though, the through line, I like to try to find a through line through the things we talk about, which seem disparate and unlike and actually are quite

cosmically aligned, is that we've talked about three topics in which everybody is trying their best to be remembered the way that they want to be remembered. That is the beating heart of every sad sack dude who wants to attend a pickup artist's boot camp. That is at the core of the couple who wants to be remembered dancing unto eternity through a QR code. on their gravestone, and that is 25 and now 35-year-old Charlotte, trying to figure out what adaptive embarrassment is. And I'm not being embarrassed by being called adaptively embarrassing. And I do think that in the end, like, far be it for me to tell you what your yum is.

I'm not here to yuck your yum, even if it's ropes, provided there's a legal context that, you know, makes this not actually criminal. And consent. Yeah, consent for the rope. Exactly. Consensual mastery of ropes. Totally fine, with Pablo Tore finds out. But I do think that we are going to be remembered as far less than we want. That's a very negative ending, Pablo.

And I would like to posit that instead of being remembered for less than we imagine, instead we far underestimate the incredible impact that we have on every single person that we meet. And therefore, our memory is much more about the collective feeling that we gave other people and what we did for them. So thinking less about legacy as an act and more about a continuation of acts of every single moment of your life, which is back to your lunch and just be in the moment and appreciate that tuna sandwich. I also think less about how will we be remembered when we're dead, but how do people think of us right now? Yes. I think you guys are both freaks, to be honest.

This has been Pablo Torre finds out a Metal Arc Media production. and I'll talk to you next time.