Richard Cooper, entrepreneur and author of The Unplugged Alpha, dismantles modern dating myths, arguing that feminism’s shift to "supremacy" has warped gender dynamics—skewed family law, IVF-driven careerism, and hypergamy force men into high-risk relationships. He ties women’s evolving preferences (dominance cues during ovulation, provisioning otherwise) to evolutionary psychology, warning that entitlement and laziness kill attraction, while legal biases make marriage a losing gamble. Rejecting MGTOW or conservative backlash, Cooper insists men must chase excellence—physique, wealth, resilience—to outcompete peers, but blames women for enabling toxic "boss girl" culture unless they demand cultural reform. The core takeaway: societal collapse in relationships stems from broken social contracts, not inherent flaws, and only personal agency can fix it. [Automatically generated summary]
So a while back, I was talking about MGTOW and I got this men going their own way, which is kind of an anti-female movement.
And I didn't really, I wasn't as interested in that as I was in some of the philosophy.
It's more called more like the red pill.
And so I've invited a guest, Richard Cooper.
He's an entrepreneur.
He's a creator of the YouTube channel Entrepreneurs in Cars, but he is also a men's high-performance coach and the best-selling author of the book, The Unplugged Alpha, The No BS Guide to Winning with Women and Life.
Richard, it's great to see you.
I really appreciate your coming on.
And I'm approaching your, I've been listening to your video, watching your videos and reading part of your book.
And I'm really interested in it, but I have to tell you, it's a little, it's kind of foreign to me.
It's foreign from the way I look at life.
And so I want to really hear what you have to say.
On your Twitter feed, you say, I unplug men from comforting lies with cold, hard, uncomfortable truths about life and women.
So that's a big statement, but let's break it down a little bit.
What are the comforting lies that men are told or tell themselves?
Well, there's a lot of them, and they're told them throughout most of their life.
And almost all of these are what get them the terrible results that they arrive at in life, where they get frustrated with, for the most part, with women and the results they get with women, with relationships, with their financial situation, with their self-care.
There's a lot of things that contribute to what's happening with men today, which isn't too great.
I mean, it's not great for men.
It's not great for women.
It's not great for relationships.
Is this something, is what's happening something new or is this a tale as old as time?
Are you saying something that is in our time or has it always been this way?
I think it's been more recent.
I think it's since we've seen feminism evolve from something that went from equality and turned into a supremacy movement where we've seen men become this weak and women start to act like terrible men.
You know, this conversation on this show began when I asked a female commentator whether marriage was still worthwhile for men.
I've been in a great marriage for over 40 years, but I look at young men and I think, well, you know, my wife made me a home.
She took care of my children.
She helped me become a success.
She was a complete value added to my life.
And I'm not sure that women offer that.
Is marriage today, is what you're working on with men a way of getting them well married or keeping them from getting married at all?
I'm not opposed to the idea of men and women living in a way that would be called marriage.
The problem is, is that there's a lot of risk that's involved.
It's mostly high risk and low reward for men, and it's low risk and high reward for women.
I'm in a long-term relationship, very happy with my girlfriend.
She's a compliment to my life.
She's not the focus.
She's, you know, she's a great piece.
So I'm with you on that.
But the problem is, is that things have changed quite a bit.
You know, the fabric of society, the social constructs, the social contracts that we have between men and women are quite difficult.
I mean, I have a chapter in my book, the book that you mentioned at the opening on why smart men don't marry.
And in the West, it's a pretty risky endeavor.
And most guys march into it like they're marching into a slaughterhouse with their eyes closed, not knowing where the landmines are and where all the sharp objects are that can hurt them along the way.
So give me a brief rundown of things that men should be looking for when they walk into dating.
Yeah, well, I mean, there's really a lot of them.
And I talk about this a lot on my channel in different videos.
And I have a series, like a longer running sort of podcast series on my channel called Before the Train Wreck that I initially started with a clinical psychologist because we really wanted to help guys avoid making a train wreck out of their life.
I mean, I can give you a number of examples.
We could start with something like a woman's notch count.
So, promiscuity is rampant today.
It's not that uncommon to see women with a notch count of 50, 100 by the time they hit 30.
And there's no consequences for that anymore.
In fact, it's often celebrated and embraced.
But on the flip side of things, there's a lot of guys that are looking for the opportunity to wife up a fine woman that would compliment him for his life or sickness and health and richer and poorer and all that good stuff.
And it doesn't work out that way.
And one of the problems with a woman's promiscuity is she makes a bad long-term partner for men because they have a hard time basically connecting with a guy in a healthy, monogamous way over a long-term basis.
There's been lots of studies done on this.
So one of the things that I talked about in my book and on my channel often is if you're going to get involved with a woman on a long-term basis and invite her into your life and have children with her, make sure she hasn't lived a promiscuous lifestyle.
So that's just one of many, really.
You know, your book is called The Unplugged Alpha.
And I hear people use this all the time.
And it always bothers me a little bit, the idea of the alpha male, because it's a gorilla term, you know, some term we learn from gorillas.
And we're kind of, we're kind of not, we're somewhat different, most of us, from gorillas.
What is an alpha male?
How would you define it?
I wouldn't define it as embodying specific characteristics because I think it's better if you defer to women when it comes to defining what an alpha male is, because they're the sexual selectors.
Women are typically the gatekeepers to sex and men are the gatekeepers to relationships.
So women have a strange mating strategy where depending on the time of the month, depending on how old they are, you know, the epochs in their life, they make different choice, different mate choices at different times in their life.
So for example, a woman in her 20s today, it's quite common for these to be known as the party years.
And, you know, she'll nonchalantly go from guy to guy, generally seeking the higher value, alpha-type men that have the high testosterone cues, chiseled jaws, broad shoulders, narrow waist, deep voice, like that kind of stuff.
And at some point during that period of time, they'll hit something called the epiphany phase, where they start to realize that they got to cash out their chips because they're getting close to 30.
They see their girlfriend starting to get married, having children, and their internal biological clocks start ticking really loud.
It starts ticking for them in their early 20s, I believe, anyway, but it starts becoming going from a whisper to like a shout, and they realize that they've got to get wifed up.
So they then pivot their strategy looking for a guy that might be good enough for them, that would have suitable genetic potential and provisioning.
The problem with that, though, is if they spent their earlier years being promiscuous, making some really bad choices, getting some bad results, they can't just cast that aside because typically higher value men, like men that are on the top shelf, they're more concerned with a woman's past.
And a woman that's looking for a higher value guy is more concerned with his future.
Can he preside?
Can he protect?
Does he have good genetic potential?
Is he going to be a good father sort of thing?
So, you know, it's an interesting dynamic and it continues to evolve over time.
And like I said earlier, even the course during the month.
So, I mean, if you want to talk about the monthly cycle, we know that women have an ovulatory shift.
And during the time when they're ovulating, it's more often when they're looking for the higher testosterone cues, the alpha type of male.
When they're on their period and they're menstruating, they're typically mostly looking for comfort, you know, provisioning, protection.
That's why, you know, your wife, your girlfriend will get all wrapped up in a blanket and want to snuggle up and watch Netflix.
And usually when she's ovulating, that's when she gets stressed up.
Women's Biological Imperative00:11:14
You know, all the makeup's on, there's more skin exposed.
That's often when the girls' night outs happen.
That's when the vast majority of infidelity happens with women as well because they're seeking the higher testosterone cute alpha men.
So when you're counseling men, I mean, they can't go out and get a chiseled jaw and they can't go out and get broader shoulders.
What are you counseling them to do exactly?
Well, it really depends on what their objective is.
I mean, if they're looking to get better results with women, yeah, you can get broader shoulders.
Yeah, you can certainly structure your body in such a way where you lift heavy stuff and put it down in a constructive fashion so that you broaden your shoulders and you narrow your waist.
We know through studies that women prefer men with what's called the golden ratio.
So the 1.62 ratio, meaning the shoulder width is 1.62 width of the waist, you know, the torso.
So there are things that you can do physically about the optics of appearance.
You can't change your height.
You know, you can't change genetic discrepancies, you know, but you can shave your head, you know, if you're losing your hair.
So there's certain things you can do to max out on your looks.
There's certain things you can do to max out on your ability to earn money.
That's one of the other problems that we see today with a lot of guys is they're quite lazy and they have this entitlement mentality where things should just come to me.
You know, they were bubble wrapped growing up.
Maybe they were a helicopter parent.
Everybody got a participation trophy when they showed up for a track and field meet.
So they don't have a lot of the tools that they need to deal with society with things like basic things like rejection.
You know, for example, a lot of guys have a difficult time getting rejected by girls, which is why you've seen a large movement with men towards this whole MGTOW sort of community as well, right?
So the MGTOW people are kind of people who've been rejected and they're taking, to coin a phrase, they're taking their balls and going home, basically.
But you're not saying that.
You're saying just up your game.
Yeah.
Well, when I say up your game, it's you want to max out on your looks.
You want to look max out on your status, meaning if you're insignificant, become significant, right?
Do something of significance with your life.
Find, you know, find your purpose.
You know, you've got some talent somewhere that you can apply to yourself and the world that will become a gift to you and the world itself as you put a dent in the universe.
Not all men will be able to find that, but the problem is that most men don't really try.
A lot of guys today would rather sit in a corner of the internet and sulk with a bunch of other guys complaining about why women suck and how, why can't I get a good girl?
Because I'm a really great guy.
Well, that's a function of a lot of things.
But more importantly, you're in the driver's seat and there's things that you can do to get better results out of your life.
But they don't want to hear that message because it's stress and overalls and it looks like work usually.
Yeah, no, that all makes perfect sense.
You're telling people to be their best selves and that's going to help them all the way down the line.
One of the things that I've noticed that I work with a lot of younger guys and I've noticed that guys all notice the same things about women.
Women have certain traits as women that are generally true of them.
They're exceptions, of course.
But I've noticed that older guys like me regard those traits with a great deal of affection.
When an older man says women, he's usually saying it with a great deal of love and respect and affection.
The women drive us crazy, but we love them.
Whereas when these younger guys, I'm talking about not that young, I'm talking about guys who are like 40 and down.
They say it with a great deal of anger, the same words with a great deal of anger and fear.
And they talk about the traits that women have that have driven men insane since Adam, right?
Since the Garden of Eden, they talk about those same traits with a bitterness and an anger that kind of startles me.
Why is that?
What makes that difference?
Well, these are the cold hard truths that I unplug men from, right?
So, you know, this is what I was talking about in my book earlier.
So a good example of that would be a concept known as hypergamy, which is essentially women are predisposed to select the best value men that they can get.
So a lot of the times guys on the internet, they'll find like a website or a YouTube channel or something like that, and they'll learn about this concept.
And then the closing soundbite will be, there's no point in getting involved with women or wifing them up or spending any time with them on a long-term basis because if Brad Pitt couldn't do it, then what makes you think that you can do it?
Or if Johnny Depp couldn't do it, what makes you think that you can't do it or can do it, sorry.
So they commiserate together with a bunch of other guys and they sulk over it.
And that's not the solution to your reproductive problems.
The solution is, okay, now that I understand that women are hypergamous and it's in their biological imperative to always select the best male that they can get, how about you be that guy so that every morning that she gets up, she looks at you and says, this is the best that I can do.
I can't do better than this, which means you can't relax in a marriage.
You can't get fat.
You can't get lazy.
You can't sit around all night watching sports with Cheeto dust on your shirt or your beard and really doing nothing with your life.
You've got to continue to chase excellence.
That's why I always tell guys, chase excellence, not women.
And everything else will start to fall in line after that, provided that you understand the game of relationships and all that sort of stuff.
So the other thing that always strikes me, whenever I hear people your age and younger discussing these things, there's a kind of an animalism to it that you discuss, women want to marry a high earner, someone who can take care of them, someone who has strength, someone, things we always knew, but you seem to delete women's personalities.
In other words, you seem to feel that women are more at the mercy of their female nature than men are at the mercy of their male nature.
My wife married a starving poet who she never thought was going to make a dime and was startled when we did a lot better, even though I told her we would.
She was, you know, it surprised her.
So that was her personality.
She liked being around that kind of guy.
You don't seem to take into account the differences between one woman and another.
Yeah, well, the common denominators are the ones that I like to focus on the most.
Like all women are hypergamous, right?
So that's how women operate and have always operated throughout history.
There's lots of evo-psych studies.
There's a lot of science papers and research papers that have all concluded the exact same thing.
So yeah, there's emotional concepts which you could throw into the blender and blend up with all of that.
But I'm not concerned so much with feelings.
I'm more concerned with the facts and what women actually respond to.
Because the narrative between what we've been told women respond to and what they actually respond to are quite often two different things.
You know, that last thing you just said seems to me to be one of the big problems that we have.
I mean, I think that when I was young and you talked to your father or your older brother, they told you a lot of things about women that so you weren't surprised when you saw them.
Whereas now I think the entire culture is based on lying about women, lying about what they are, what they do, what they want.
Even women themselves.
I mean, when I give talks at college, colleges, I frequently say, all the young women I see are miserable.
Please stand up and tell me if I'm wrong.
And no one ever has, not one ever has.
And I feel like people are just being relentlessly lied to.
You know, you say some of the things you said did not actually resonate with me.
And I'll just run a couple of them by.
One, you said, we live in a female first social order.
Well, let me first ask you what you mean by that so I'm sure I'm about what I'm talking about.
Well, the current narrative is that we live in a patriarchy and that the patriarchy oppresses women and blah, blah, blah.
I'm sure you've heard that, right?
Right.
Well, the fact of the matter is we really don't.
We live in a matriarchy.
I mean, if you look at things like family law, everything in family law is written there to preserve and protect women.
And unfortunately, there's a lot of components of family law which encourage women to behave quite badly towards the father, which subsequently does affect the children.
So despite what the narrative is about how family law is there to protect the interests of the children, it's really written more so to protect the interest, control, and financials, availability to financial resources for women.
So that would be one great example of that component.
Because I mean, it seems to me that women get that a lot of the things that women like to naturally like to do, like build families and take care of families and take care of children are kind of denigrated in our society, that they are looked, that women are looked down upon unless they behave like men, unless they take on male values.
Yeah, and I fully agree with that.
I mean, like, you know, women are encouraged to put off their childbearing years, chase a career, climb the corporate ladder.
I mean, one of the funny things that drives me nuts around here is when I turn on the radio, we have this radio ad running locally here in Toronto where it's from a IVF fertility clinic.
And I don't know if the marketers drop this into the ad as kind of like a ha-ha sort of thing, but it's like, hey, you know, you've chased your career.
You know, you're 40 years old.
You haven't had kids yet.
Why not use IVF for $20,000?
You two can, you know, have the value of family.
It speaks nothing of a father.
It speaks nothing of raising children in a two-parent household.
And then at the end of it, it's got the sound of a baby's voice going like this, right?
And it's like, well, you know, if we didn't tell women to act like men, you know, meaning be, you know, promiscuous, chase money, chase excellence, and behave more feminine.
Like the whole thing that I have an issue with when it comes to feminism is it's really a toxic version of feminism that's a supremacy movement that tries to convince women to behave like bad versions of men.
And men don't want to be, I mean, okay, let me correct myself.
A lot of men would be okay to be with a woman like that, but top shelf men don't have time to be with, you know, like a hashtag boss girl.
No, no guy that's worth his salt wants to go to work all day, chase excellence, bring home the bacon, hoping she's going to cook it up, only to be lectured about 15 different things from his boss girl wife.
He wants an agreeable, beautiful woman in his frame that's there to raise his kids and turn his, you know, home, sorry, turn his house into a home sort of thing.
They don't want to deal with disagreeableness and arguments and all that sort of stuff.
It's just a bizarre thing that's that's popped up only recently that didn't exist, even as far back when I was a child, right?
You know, I'm wondering, I can't help wondering as I listen to you.
I mean, you're kind of arguing for traditional values.
You're arguing for, without mentioning that, you're arguing for a world that was kind of like the world in which I grew up.
Is that fair to say?
I think it's reasonable to say, but where I typically would detour from the typical traditional conservative route is I think that if anything's going to change and return to a environment like that, that's better for children to grow up in and for society in general, is we're going to need women to really lead the charge in that.
75 Cents Gap00:00:56
They're the ones that need to take off the pink hats and march on Capitol Hill because guys aren't getting married to them because family law is too hostile and they want those laws to change to become more balanced.
So there's lower risk for them.
But I haven't seen that happen.
I mean, I haven't seen any of that change.
In fact, all I keep hearing is the patriarchy's bad.
Women still make 75 cents on a dollar.
We're oppressed.
We're victims, blah, blah, blah.
Wow.
Right.
So I'm waiting to see some signs of that happening.
But until it does, I'm just, I'm just sitting here on the sidelines.
I talk to as many guys as I can to try to enlighten them and unplug them from the comforting lies so they can at least take control of their own lives.
Cause I know that you can't control the universe.
You can only control yourself.
True enough.
Richard Cooper is the author of The Unplugged Alpha, The No BS Guide to Winning with Women and Life.