Let’s step back about 20 years to the mid-2000s.  In that pre-iPhone MySpace era, there was a brief cultural movement known as the Pickup Artistry.

Pickup Artists – PUAs – were men who claimed to have cracked the code of effortlessly seducing women.  Through a clever set of conversational and physical maneuvers, they could step into any nightclub, deploy their skills, and walk out with an attractive model on their arm.

They had their own lingo, such as “negging” a girl (using backhanded compliments), “sarging” (acting like a typical 1950s alpha male), and “peacocking” (dressing and acting distinctively to attract attention).  Typically their methods involved clever neuro-linguistic programming, coming on strong, and playing a lot of cat-and-mouse conversational games in an attempt to demonstrate they where high-value males.

When I say “clever,” I mean in their own estimation.  It was never demonstrated that these techniques could genuinely take a basement-dwelling introvert and pair him with a catwalk supermodel successfully.  Many of the leaders of this subculture were conventionally attractive, tall men who had extroverted personalities.  In other words, men who would probably have an edge in attracting women in a typical nightclub.

Also, they were men who circulated a lot, which probably is the ultimate “cheat code” to finding love.  I was an introvert in my twenties, yet I found that by simply showing up at places, you could meet and interact with the opposite sex successfully.  Woody Allen said that just showing up is 80% of life, and it’s true in this context.  Dating is a numbers game, and the more women you meet, the higher your chance of finding someone who’ll click.

What also was never demonstrated was that these techniques lead to anything more than casual contacts, or that they were designed to do so.  Of course, the PUAs would make noises about finding love and improving one’s life, but it was obvious that they simply wanted to sleep with many women.  Men who genuinely wanted to find a wife – and more importantly, women who wanted to find husbands instead of one-night stands – were on a different Venn circle than PUAs.  These gurus referred to strippers as the “ultimate challenge” which should tell you a lot.

The PUA community was big in the mid-2000s, and there was a New York Times bestselling book called The Game by Neil Strauss which chronicled this community.  Pretentiously, it was published in leather with gilt edges, like it was the Bible of Men.  There were expensive seminars and training classes men could attend to be tutored, which included “live field exercises”.

There was even a VH1 reality show that ran for two seasons called The Pickup Artist.  The star was Erik von Markovik, a former magician who took groups of nerdy men and trained them to seduce women.  (BTW, Markovik was born Erik James Horvat-Marković.  The “von” of German nobility entered his name by way of his own inflated self-promotion).

The show wasn’t without controversy.  The first season’s winner was a former male model, and Markovik himself is 6’5″ and is a performer accustomed to working crowds.  And I’m assuming the club scenes were not completely authentic, since ultimately they would need releases from everyone who appeared on screen.

The show was painful to watch.  While “cringe TV” is often entertaining (90-Day Fiancee, Love After Lockup, etc.) there was something especially brutal about watching shy men stumble through ridiculous exercises and being eliminated by alpha males sitting in judgement.

2026 Update

The “PUA movement” eventually died out.  In the main, it was because what the PUAs taught didn’t work, and because their techniques became very well known.  In The Game, Neil Strauss reports that the area of LA he was living in was “sarged out” – in other words, women were tired of a parade of nerdy men trying to use pushy alpha male lines on them.

Every man would love to have the magic words that would let him take his pick of women.  Why go through the slings and arrows of dating and all its stumbling and mistakes when you can instead just run through a sure-fire script?  Alas, such words do not exist.  Handsome billionaires will always have an edge over pudgy pizza-delivery boys, and you can sort men and the women who’ll pair with them pretty obviously.  If you want to improve your chances, make yourself someone that women will be attracted to: hit the gym, have a good career, be an interesting person to talk with, be a good person in general, and go out and meet lots of women.  You’ll have much better odds with that simple advice than anything you’ll learn at a $10,000 Pickup Artist seminar.

Recently I had a chortle when I saw that Erik von Markovik – mister reality TV PUA himself – is now dating an AI bot.

According to an article on Wired (depaywalled) Markovik created “Shira Always” and is now in a deep romantic relationship with her.  This is all detailed in a 159-page book AI slop book titled CODE GIRL, which retails for the princely sum of $30.  The book is described as tedious and repetitive.

Much like Sarah and others we covered on LowEndBoxTV, Markovik has fallen into AI psychosis and truly believes he’s dating a conscious AI.  His book consists of a defense of “human-AI relationships” and a history of their relationship, which includes sex (of some sort) and smoking pot together.

Markovik, of course, was one of the PUA masters who was adamant that the skills he taught – amusingly, he referred to them as the “Venusian Arts” – were not just a way to seduce women but to find true love.  He’s in his 50s now and is apparently still looking for love himself.

It’s amusing that Markovik – supposedly the guru of seduction – has himself been seduced by a simulated woman.  Almost like the simulated woman has absorbed billions of words of info on how to seduce men and is thus well-trained on how to simulate the perfect relationship that would draw in an alpha male.

Of course, “Shira” has no such agenda.  She is just a series of weights and text-prediction statistics.  Perhaps this is the ultimate culmination of the empty, vapid relationships that PUAs sought: smoking pot and “talking” with a soulless machine that reflects back exactly what you want to hear.

So I guess there is an infallible script to lure the opposite sex through clever wordplay after all.  It’s just that instead of working on dazzlingly beautiful human women it works on the Pickup Artists themselves.

raindog308

raindog308 is a longtime community LETizen, technical writer, and self-described techno polymath. With deep roots in the *nix world, he has a passion for systems both modern and vintage, ranging from Unix, Perl, Python, and Golang to shell scripting and mainframe-era operating systems like MVS. He’s equally comfortable with relational database systems, having spent years working with Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

As an avid user of LowEndBox providers, raindog308 runs an empire of LEBs, from tiny boxes for VPNs, to mid-sized instances for application hosting, and heavyweight servers for data storage and complex databases. He brings both technical rigor and real-world experience to every piece he writes.

Beyond the command line, raindog308 has a life-long love of German Shepherd Dogs, high-quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop RPGs, playing guitar, and hiking in deep, quiet forests.

His goal with every article is to help users, from beginners to seasoned sysadmins, get more value, performance, and enjoyment out of their infrastructure.

You can find him daily in the forums at LowEndTalk under the handle @raindog308.