In this article I interview Rollo Tomassi author of The Rational Male trilogy, blogger at The Rational Male and expert on the Red Pill.

This article is part three of a five part series from the upcoming Life Lessons Podcast.

In this article we talk:

Let’s begin:

Frame

Michael Frank: What advice do you have for the average guy in regards to frame control?

Rollo Tomassi: I think you first have to understand what a frame is. A frame is this unspoken acceptance of one person’s authority, and the other person is going to follow along with that.

When you have a boss, when you’re at work, you’re in your boss’s frame. You’re doing what he says and you’re producing whatever it is he wants you to produce. You’re a utility to that guy, and you have to be useful to that guy because you are in his frame.

When you were a kid, you were in your parents’ frame, because you were dependent on them, and you mostly had to do what they said.

When we get into interpersonal relationships, men need to create that frame and give themselves permission to be that dominant person, but most guys don’t want to do that. Why? Because they’ve been taught for most of their lives that they’re supposed to defer to the feminine. They’re supposed to defer to mommy. They’re supposed to defer to wifey. They’re supposed to defer to whatever woman is in charge of them.

And women are always going to be in charge of you if you don’t make yourself your mental point of origin. If you make women your mental point of origin, you’ll never have frame to begin with.

So the first and most important aspect of frame, is you have to make yourself your Mental Point of Origin. You have to put yourself first, you have to make decisions for yourself, and then you have to decide who you want to have as part of your frame.

Mental point of origin

I think this is one of the most important aspects of the red pill, and that is that most men do not make themselves their own mental point of origin. They make women their mental point of origin.

You need to make yourself your own mental point of origin. That’s I think the first step in unplugging yourself.

I think most boys are born kind of Alpha, and then they are systematically told that that’s bad, and they need to think about others, especially others feelings. Think about that. We have to think about other people’s feelings first.

What does that do? It prioritizes emotion above logic and reason and that’s what we teach boys. It doesn’t matter what the context is, or what is going on, or what the information is, it’s all about feelings. You need to think about others feelings before you do something, because you might hurt someone’s feelings.

The feminine imperative and the village teaches boys today that they should never be their first thought, they shouldn’t be their own mental point of origin, and women should always be first in their thinking, and as part of that education, boys and then men tend to put women as their first order of thinking.

When a decision is to be made, boys are supposed to think about others, or they’re supposed to think about mommy, or teacher, or sister, or girlfriend, or wifey etc. they’re supposed to put other people’s needs before their own.

In religion we say you have to be a good servant and have a servant’s heart. Well the problem with that is it doesn’t serve that guy’s interests, and what it does is it ends up hobbling that guy later on in life.

And I’m not saying that you need to be this selfish prick.

I’m saying you need to put yourself first.

Mental point of origin is training yourself to think about:

How does this information affect me?

How does this decision affect me?

And then: How does it affect somebody else?

And this is hard for guys to do. It was really hard for me to do.

And this is a principle called enlightened self-interest.

“Enlightened Self-Interest. I cannot help anyone until I can help myself” – Rollo Tomassi

I cannot help others, or I cannot help us others as well, until I can help myself first. So when the oxygen mask falls out of the ceiling compartment when you’re flying in an airplane, what do they tell you to do? They tell you to put the mask on yourself first, and then you put it on the kid, because if you don’t you’ll die first, and then you don’t help anybody.

So frame is a byproduct of having yourself as your own mental point of origin, and I think that the more confident a guy is, the stronger the frame that guy has, because he knows that he is valuable and he can replace people.

I have a chapter in The Rational Male called The Threat and I start out that chapter saying that there’s nothing more threatening, but also simultaneously arousing, as a man who understands his own self-worth, and his own worth in the sexual marketplace. The guy who knows his value, who makes himself the prize, who turns himself into the prince, who makes women qualify to him, that is solid frame.

Most guys when they develop frame, they don’t have anything else to lose. They’re like fuck it, I’m zeroed out, I’m just gonna be me, I’m just going to have this irrational self-confidence and it’s my way or the highway. And they usually come to that because they’ve been in a traumatic situation. They’ve gone through some sort of crisis and they have nothing to lose. Those are the guys that have the most solid frame because they can be courageous and not have to worry about it.

But to most guys frame is this alien thought because they were raised as Betas with that blue pill conditioning. They were never taught to have frame, or even to call themselves a man. They don’t even understand what masculinity is. “I don’t understand masculinity, I don’t get into all that macho bullshit, I’m just not like that”.

Well you’re not like that, because you’ve never given yourself permission to even think about that, and how you relate to that, and how you fit into that. You’ve never had that modeled for you.

When it comes to frame it’s important that you create your own world. You have to have a world that women want to enter into. And then once a woman does enter into your world, you have to accept that she wants to be there, she wants you to lead, she wants to be in your frame, and you’re going to have that frame tested.

Why women will test your frame

And the reason women will test your frame is because hypergamy is based on doubt, it asks the question:

“Is this guy the best that I can do?”

“Is this the best guy I could have sex with?”

“Is this the best guy I could pair myself with?”

So when you set that frame up for her and let her know:

“Here’s who I am”

“Here’s what I do”

“Take it or leave it”

She’s going to test it and ask herself:

“Are you really like this?”

“Is this really the way you are?”

“Or is this all an act?”

And she has to do that. Because again, hypergamy is based on doubt, and it’s also part of her reproductive investment.

To the same degree that paternity is an obsession and men want to know that the kid is theirs, women are obsessed with knowing that a guy is the real deal, that he is who he says he is. Because there was nothing more dangerous in our evolutionary past then for a woman to be tricked by a guy into thinking that he is one way, and he’s really not, and then he takes off, or he wasn’t the good investment that she thought he was. That is almost an existential fear for women. That’s why women’s shit test, that’s why women test your frame.

You need to be willing to walk away

So your frame needs to be solid, and it needs to be something that you’ve already established, and whether she is a part of that or not, you’re okay.

So if she’s like:

“I love you”

“I respect you”

“I admire you”

And then she tests your frame, you have to know that she is replaceable, and you have to be able to walk away from that, because anything you cannot say no to makes you it’s slave.

If you can’t say no to your wife – you’re her slave.

If you can’t say no to alcohol or drugs – you’re it’s slave.

If you can’t say no to your boss because you’re afraid you’re going to get fired – at that point – you’re his slave.

Your frame needs to be genuine

You also need to build and develop The second part is building and developing a real honest to goodness genuine frame, and not some house of cards.

That is where I think pickup artistry kind of falls short because it’s all about the presentation. And that’s why I say that there’s a difference between game and red pill. Red pill is the theory, and game is the practice, and each one is incomplete without the other.

If all I’m about is game, but I’m lacking red pill theory, I’m going to get myself into a lot of trouble, and I might even be suicidal.

If all I’m about is red pill theory, and I don’t do game, then it’s just all talk, mental masturbation is what it is. Unless you go out in the field and you try to put this stuff into practice, what are you doing? How does it benefit you in a real sense?

So the interplay between red pill awareness and red pill theory, and then going out into the field and practicing game is a key element in creating frame for yourself.

Because if you don’t go out there and you don’t get rejected, you won’t get experience, and you won’t learn anything, and I would say that rejection is better than regret, because you learn something from that. It’s better to have tried something and failed at it, than never to have tried it at all.

People like to say it’s the ZFG, it’s the Zero Fucks Given. You have to be able to say Zero Fucks Given. Well, it helps to have that attitude if you really have zero fucks to give, and you really have that belief in yourself.

Confidence is derived from options

People want to talk about confidence. Confidence is derived from options. Your belief in yourself will be based on the options you actually have.

If you’re asking your boss for a raise, you’re more likely to be bold and ask for what you want, if you’ve already got another job lined up when you ask for that raise.

It’s the same thing with pretty much any other aspect of life. You want to have those options available to you before you go and experiment. But most guys are afraid to experiment all together, they don’t even give themselves permission to experiment.

Married guys do this all the time, “I love all this red pill stuff, but I can’t really apply it to my wife because she’ll cut me off. I won’t be able to get laid. She might divorce me if I do that”. And so they’re too dependent on their wives frame for their own existence because they can’t say no.

Most guys are monkey branching, they’re serial monogamous, they don’t want to let go of that girlfriend until they have another girlfriend. And women do this too. They’re afraid to be alone. They’re afraid to feel the rejection side of things. I think that rejection is something that guys need to get used to, but the confidence they have has to be derived from those options.

So give yourself permission to experiment and then develop options through game, and I’m not saying go out there and be a pickup artist or something. I think guys within a marriage can still apply game principles and the red pill to their married life.

Pussy on the pedestal

Michael Frank: I think of frame as your reality, it’s how you mentally define a situation. And a useful frame that’s often spoken about in the pickup artist and red pill communities is “I am the prize”. But most guys don’t have that frame. Most guys psychologically have the pussy on a pedestal.

How do guys psychologically make that switch and take the pussy off the pedestal?

Rollo Tomassi: Again, mental point of origin. The reason most guys have pussy on the pedestal is because they’ve been conditioned that way, to put womankind, not one particular woman, although it eventually becomes one particular woman, on a pedestal.

They need to knock womankind off of that, and put themselves as their mental point of origin. They’ve got to become the most important person in their lives. They’ve got to get rid of this idea that I’ve got to be a servant, and I’ve got to make other people happy, otherwise I’m not going to be happy.

So if the question is: “How do I develop this prize mentality?”

It’s going out there and doing it and taking rejection on the chin. It’s going out there and developing yourself into the best version of yourself that you can be. So if that means going to the gym, go to the gym. If that means learning game, learn game. If that means reading my books, read my books. Make yourself your life’s art project.

Ask yourself:

“How am I going to sculpt myself?”

“How am I going to build myself?”

“How am I going to create a new me?”

Guys tend to want to look at the outside world and ask themselves what the possibilities could be. Well, you need to apply that to yourself. What are the possibilities that you could be?

How Rollo made himself his mental point of origin

People always say to me: “Rollo you call yourself a lesser alpha, and you’ve had it easy, you had all the answers”.

No. The reason I’m where I’m at right now is because I’ve fucked up so much, because I got a lot wrong.

When I was a teenager, I was very Beta, I was very blue pill, and then later on when I got into what I call my rock star twenties, I had gone through a really bad breakup, I got zeroed out, and I didn’t have anything to lose. I’m like, you know what, I’m going to be who I’m going to be and I’m going to put myself first.

And that’s when I started playing in bands and I started learning how to game, I developed a look for myself, I started lifting, I played in the Hollywood rock scene in the late eighties and early nineties, and I learned how to get laid and I learned how to get what I wanted finally.

And the key to that was making myself self-important. I had to be the one that I thought about first. And of course what happened later is I got into a relationship with a woman who was verifiably clinically borderline personality disorder and it crushed me. It dragged me from being the fun loving, devil may care, Alpha guy, to being a guy who believed that the woman I was with had problems, and I was the source of those problems, and if I could just change myself, then it would change her, and we’d have this ideal relationship, and that was never, ever going to happen. And so I was just destitute and didn’t know what to do with myself.

And then I got out of that situation and lo and behold, what did I do? I started making myself my mental point of origin again. And shit started happening. I started becoming successful. I got into doing what I do for a living. I got into a graphic design, then art direction, then brand management, and I got all the stuff because I was sick of being the supportive good boyfriend, “It’s all about your needs”, “I’ll wait for you while you go get your degree in college” etc.

I lived through all that kind of stuff, and every time I started making someone else my mental point of origin, that’s when things went to hell. And when I started making myself my mental point of origin, that’s when things started to go well again and people wanted to be around me, and I started developing a frame that people wanted to enter into. That’s when I made myself the prize.

People say: “Fake it til you make it”, and there’s some wisdom in that, but make sure that you actually do make it, make sure that you’re actually doing something, you have to actually legitimately do something with yourself.

Be the best you can be

I always say:

“Women want to be with Men who other women want to fuck, and other men want to be.”

And if you can be that guy, if you can even present that appearance, that is going to get you further than just being like: “I don’t care about anything”, or not caring enough.

I think that one of the things that hobbles guys the most is not caring.

Like:

“I’m just going to be who I want to be”

“I don’t want to girl who doesn’t want me for who I am”

“Just be yourself”

How many times have you heard that?

“Just be yourself”

Well the problem is that guys who are sucking down a six pack at night, and eating a half a pie of pizza, and watching anime, have this attitude of: “Well, that’s just who I am, and I really want to get with this fitness model, but she just won’t accept me for who I am”.

It’s all on her. It’s all her fault right?

No. You need to become the best person that you can be. I’m not saying you have to live your life to appease, and MGTOW’s will always say this, “You’re just creating this frame because you want to get laid”.

That is the opposite of what you should be doing. You need to develop real mastery. And as a byproduct of that real mastery, as a byproduct of you creating the best version of yourself that you can be, women are going to fall into that. Success is going to fall into that. People are going to want to hang out with you.

You need to be the prize

You need to be the prize, the guy that has women qualify to him, and it’s very important that you start doing that because it’s a law of power. You need to treat yourself like a king if you want to be treated like a king, you need to present that appearance, you need to treat yourself in the way that you want to be treated.

And when you actually have your shit together, and you actually have that mastery, that’s when qualifying women to you is going to be more genuine, and when you make yourself the prize you flip the script on women, because women are used to having adoration, they’re used to having that attention.

One of my sayings is: “Attention is the coin of the realm in girl world”

Women get self-esteem and ego strokes from generating attention, and they’re used to measuring their ego and their self-esteem based on attention.

So when you come out and say:

“You know what? It’s not about you. I’m not qualifying to you. You’re going to qualify to me.”

That flips the script because they’re so used to having guys qualify themselves.

You want to be the guy that says:

“You know what? Here’s my world, here’s my frame, this is who I am, here’s some pre-selection, here’s some social proof, I’m the prince, and if you want to be treated like a princess, then you have to treat me like a prince. I’m the one that’s in control of this. I’m the one who’s guiding this ship. I have a plan for my life. I have ambitions. I’ve got all these dominant personality traits. If you want some of that, I’ll be over here, and you can take it or leave it, because if you don’t take it, there’s 10 other girls that will”.

This concludes part three of my interview with Rollo Tomassi. Part four tomorrow will focus on the Dark Triad personality traits of Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and Psychopathy.