Steve Hsu: recommendation

Transcript context

…With the students or only the secretaries? Secretaries! Well mostly secretaries. They were almost all female at that time. He had thought about this a lot and thought of it as a numbers game. The PUA guys (pick-up artists) will say, “Follow the algorithm, and whatever happens, it's not a reflection on your self-esteem. It's just what happened. And you go on to the next one.” That was the advice he was giving me, and he said other things that were pretty standard: Be funny, be confident—just basic stuff. Steve Hu: But the main thing I remember was the operationalization of it as an algorithm. You shouldn’t internalize whatever happens if you get rejected, because that hurts. When we had to go across the bar to talk to that girl (maybe it doesn’t happen in your generation), it was terrifying. We had to go across the bar and talk to some lady! It’s loud, and you’ve got a few minutes to make your case. Nothing is scarier than walking up to the girl and her friends. Feynman was telling me to train myself out of that. You're never going to see them again; the face space of humanity is so big that you'll probably never re-encounter them again. It doesn't matter. So, do your best. Yeah, that's interesting because.. I wonder whether he was doing this in the 40’–– like when he was at that age, was he doing this? I don't know what the cultural conventions were at the time. Were there bars in the 40s where you could just go ahead and hit on girls or?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.