Mindful Masculinity

oaklandgary12@gmail.com- Article Written by Gary Oakland

Top Shelf Alpha is Richard Cooper’s second book—a YouTuber, blogger, businessman, and red pill advocate who rose to prominence after blogging and documenting his divorce around 2017. He spoke at the 21 Convention, partnering with other prominent speakers in the space and achieving around 1.6 million views for one 21 Convention speech and 650k for another. Despite his successes in public speaking, his ideas are sadly not unique to anyone with vague dating experience. This book showcases his limitations as a self-help guru and illustrates why simply putting out quotes like “chase excellence, not women” does little but confuse his audience.

“Chase excellence, not women” is one of Richard Cooper’s most famous quotes. Again, people in the manosphere ride his coattails on this, but where is the substance behind it? During Richard’s most successful periods of entrepreneurship, when he was making his “millions,” he dated single mothers and had a pretty tumultuous time relationship-wise. It showed that business success was not correlated to relationship success. Your average PUAs like Tom Torero could run down the streets of London homeless and still not be struggling in relationships with single mothers like Cooper is. This sort of quote does little to help young people in dating; experience matters. You want to make time for cold approaching and meeting as many women as possible to garner reference experiences for what you like and don’t like. Cooper never points this out in either book; he just states his usual spiel: focus on yourself and don’t date single mothers. Hardly innovative and not something that can actually help you increase your options. Richard himself was in a relationship with a single mother for three years during his “peak SMV,” so I see him as proof that his own concepts are heavily flawed.

There was a claim that he had more views than the other 21 convention speakers combined—this was utter bollox. At the time he spoke at the 21 convention, he had 100k subs, while The Natural Lifestyles had around 500k. Cooper was significantly behind in views for actual dating content compared to them. He was also down by about 800k to a million views compared to other dating coaches at the time of the event like James Marshall, James Mclean, and Sasha Daygame, who all produced more practical dating advice and are men who have achieved far more in the dating game than Cooper has. Yet Cooper refuses to acknowledge this—too busy with his own ego, denying basic reasoning.

That’s the reality of the men’s dating sphere: a 50-year-old bald guy who achieves little dating success injects himself with TRT and shouts self-help slogans at men who lack direction in their dating lives; yet, he can achieve more views than those who have had more dating success, like Nick Krauser, Tom Torero, James McLean, or Sasha Daygame, all with far less money and no TRT or peptides. Richard fails to understand the irony of what he is doing; he no doubt uses this book to pitch his private coaching alpha male groups, where he can rake in more monthly subscriptions from directionless men. Is Richard taking advantage of the situation here? He seems to have monetized his poor relationships and divorces to upsell subscription-based services to men—a classic fake guru tactic. He never interviews someone with any real relationship success, like Nick Krauser, which is fitting because doing so would destroy the narratives he tries to build. He argues that men’s value increases until they are 35-40, but I’d disagree—there are many scenarios in which a man’s value can drastically decrease in their 30s and 40s, of which I will provide reasoning here:

-less time to date and pickup experience – as you approach your 30s and 40s there’s obviously less time to impact the world in dating sex and relationships .

• lowered testostorone level makes it harder for motivation in pickup – men’s testosterone declines rapidly post 30
• More probability of injuries and weight gain in 30s and 40s – men traditionally gain weight as they get older, muscle recovery also takes a lot longer.
• Possibility of hair loss- as someone who’s experienced balding in his early 30s some men’s looks can really deteriorate rapidly even in their late 20s to early 30s if they don’t look after themselves/ hair loss / weight gain
• Business failures or divorces can rinse men of their cash and status in their 30s 40s – this is an extreme example but i’ve seen it happen to me and to other men – so be careful . A large percentage of men also commit suicide post divorce – men’s recovery time from relationship breakups is often longer and tougher than women’s.
• Calcification  of social circles – if you’re not socially active in your early 20s you will probably miss out on a lot of dating opportunities with your current circle – it could be harder in your mid 20s and mid 30s to date your friends and university social circles – starting earlier and focus on gaining social momentum and experience younger is absolutely crucial if you want social circle success at university and friendship circles . If you simply spend that time “improving yourself” you may miss out on all the young women that are into you at university who have less baggage than those in their mid 20s and 30s .
• Sperm deterioration – older you get the more men’s sperm decline and the higher the statistical probability of birth defects increase. Both for men and women the sperm and eggs decline in quality – again Richard seems to have a problem admitting this because he’s too stuck in the same perspectives.

He showcases the importance of ai in optimising business but forgets how it’s just made his content into ai slop – his twitter is just generic ai slop calling out women for high body counts, red pillisims and calling out bad behaved women again no advice on how to approach more women for better quality because he himself never really did so. Its just red pill feel good crap that gets boring and repetitive- the chapter in the book entitled “becky” showcases the “struggles” women face when they get pumped and dumped still even women who get used in their 30s are still statistically far easier to bounce back then men are . Even my worst looking female friends had options in the dating market in their mid 30s the fact is most men are desperate enough to date anything nowadays again Richard is ignorant of this and is perhaps too one sided in this regard.

Richard makes 100ks views highlighting the bad parts of women psyche but of course there are always bad women and men in the world – he’s found a formula :

Make a clickbait tweet calling some random woman  a whore  for a high body count

Make a video about some random woman doing something bad – with an ai slop picture on the YouTube thumbnail

Upsell a dating course and group telling men to focus on themselves with no advice on how to actually approach women and increase options

Rinse and repeat

This formula in fairness has  worked for him to increase his sub count from some 100k in 2017 to 750k today impressive by someone with so little actual dating success.

Then there are his “suggestions” for having a harem. He points to Andrew Tate, who has essentially worked as a webcam and OnlyFans pimp, as an example. Tate is currently in jail under dubious circumstances, to say the least. The fact that he refers to him for advice may be a clue as to how little he knows about Tate’s legal cases and about dating, sex, and relationships in general. Another person he promotes for relationship advice is Tony Huge, who actively pays prostitutes to live with him and takes steroids. He seems devoid of promoting anyone with decent dating advice and seems to instead post people dealing with rape lawsuits /prosti

Then there is his jab at John Anthony Lifestyle. This fight between the two of them happened about five years ago, yet it clearly remains on Cooper’s mind for him to include it in his book. Richard gives the old “I don’t care about how many women I’ve had sex with; I just want success,” which seems like a cop-out considering he has made tens of thousands of dollars selling very generic dating advice to men. He attacks John Anthony for engaging with trans individuals and prostitutes, which is fair game, but in John’s defence , Richard also seems to lack self-awareness regarding his own lack of experience never setting an example for men on how to approach women and proactively increase their options.

Then there’s more generic self help stuff in the book , “a lot of men will kill for your life so appreciate it ” line which we’ve heard all before , a lot of Rollo Tommasi’ work has simply been repeated by Richard in these two books fo his plus his YouTube channels . He never actually has interviewed anyone with half decent dating successes just only fans’ pimps and steroid body builders akin to Mike Thurston . It all makes Richard pretty irrelevant to the average man – especially as he’s using testosterone and peptides to function in the world right now.

Ok how about the pros of this book? Some good relationship advice on conflicts his green flags for women include the woman having a strong relationship with the father which I most definitely agree with. He has some value here for those trying to find a woman to marry and find a long term relationship with .

He even has a chapter at the end of how to use ai models to help you in divorce court which seems weird – why not approach good women so you don’t have to end up going to divorce court? And using ai tools to communicate your divorce it seems odd .

All in all, this is another self-help guru’s cash grab – we’ve seen many of these in the past with the likes of Jack Donovan, Jordan B. Peterson, and Elliot Hulse. Did any of these guys bring actual advice to the dating frontier that would improve men’s dating prospects? I just don’t think so. This “new school of alpha male coaches” seems painfully insufficient compared to the old school. The high inequalities in dating caused by apps, men’s testosterone decline, increasing autism rates among men, and neurodegenerative disorders have given way to the rise of actors like Cooper, who really don’t add much to the dynamic but can linger long enough to mug off their inexperienced audience. The proof of his lack of due diligence is in his shilling of figures like Andrew Tate, Tony Huge, Jack Donovan, and Mike Thurston – characters whom I believe add little to the manosphere that any non-steroid-using average Joe can relate to.

Whilst shilling TRT Cooper never seems to offer any real advice for how to naturally increase testosterone – things like basic sunlight, avoiding BPAs , eating red meat, avoiding blue light etc. aren’t really focused on – instead he discusses TRT which can be very risky for a lot of men and peptides which have their risks too. He seems to be a man of extremes instead of offering small realistic solutions to problems he doesn’t seem to discuss the basic problems affecting men here. There is little on the other issues affecting men- pornography, video game addiction, diminished testosterone from the environment etc. Which is odd for a masculinity book.

When all is said and done Richard has found his niche audience of males who seemingly struggle with basic dating concepts and approaching others, and who want to be fed feel-good alpha male sayings; however, he really lacks substance. I’d say 70 percent of this book consists of adaptations of “The Rational Male,” with another 20 percent featuring generic alpha male sayings, and the remaining 10 percent offering long-term relationship advice. There is very little actual evolution from him as a person, and there is very little difference from the 2017 21 Convention speeches that made him famous. Which is odd considering he’s actually improved as a person but seems very much the same in his opinions that seem owned by Rollo Tommasi his one dimensional character is probably a contributing factor to him struggling in his dating life it seems. What’s undeniable is that, at a time when the men’s self-development movement has suffered a rather substantial decline, a few have profited from that, and Richard is most definitely one of them – he will continue this alpha male self help guru formula because it makes him money and garners views – if it an’t broke why fix it? And until men think for themselves they will continue to stan for gurus like Richard because they don’t know any better or go out there to gain personal experiences for themselves.

3/10