Sleazy, how come gurus make money if they're so shit?

PUA shills haven't pestered me much recently, apart form some dude who tried to pollute my forum. However, quite recently there was a blog comment that had an angle I wasn't familiar with. Let me just cite the shill comment as a whole:

Yeah. Just out of curiosity, Aaron. A lot of people seem to say that speed seduction doesn't work. How would you explain that Ross (but also V Kelvin, RSD, and other "guru$") is still making money and have supporters?

(This comment appeared under Romance is for Losers.)

Please take a moment or two to let the previous quote sink in.

There are at least two good counter arguments. Let me start by questioning the premise, namely that PUAs make money and have fans. As I've shown in recent articles, interest in the big names of the PUA scene has dwindled dramatically. It's also a fact that there haven't been any big releases like 20-DVD sets in years. Also, many PUAs have moved on. David DeAngelo tried rebranding himself as Eben Pagan, Neil Strauss is back to writing about celebrities, and many of the B-team either quit or moved into self-help. Some seemingly well-established names like DJ Fuji are barely hanging on. His forum has something like 500 posts...


So, how much money do the PUAs make? Surely David DeAngelo didn't decide to focus on business coaching if peddling PUA advice was such a gold mine. The gold rush is over, and what's left are some people who are fighting over scraps.

Further, just because you make money doesn't mean that your product has any validity. Let's consider a steaming pile of bullshit like astrology. Do you know how big that market is? It's at least hundreds of millions of dollars per year, if my recent Google searches are to be believed. This means it's easily and order of magnitude larger than the PUA industry. I even came across an article that claimed that Italians spend several billions a year on astrology, being an unusually superstitions people:

Amid rising unemployment and general gloom over the state of the economy, Italians are spending billions of euros a year on astrology and fortune telling, according to a report by the European Consumers Association. 

Tarot card readers and pavement fortune tellers are doing a roaring trade, with about 30,000 Italians paying between 20 and 600 euros a day looking for advice to help them out of their financial woes.

Yet, astrology is complete nonsense.

Of course, having supporters doesn't mean that you are right either. This ties in with the previous point. For an obvious example, look at sects like the Catholic church, or Scientology. They do have followers, their followers donate absurd amounts of money, yet what they teach does not hold up to any scrutiny. They are in it for the money. The founder of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard, famously said:

I'd like to start a religion. That's where the money is!

Likewise, the Catholic Church found itself quickly drawn towards money and power. The historic Jesus of Nazareth was a revolutionary, an anti-authoritarian, and an enemy of "money lenders". Heck, he even supported the use of force against enemies. Mere decades after his death, though, Christianity developed into quite possibly the worst kind of intellectual poison the world has ever seen, turning into a tool for subjugation the masses, and hindering scientific progress on a large scale. It's due to the influence of the Catholic church that the Middle Ages were a dark age, which cost us hundreds of years of progress. Imagine that we've had stem cell therapy and plasma TVs back in the year 1,000!


People are gullible, and those who sell hope in whichever form do so, to a large degree, to profit from it. Those who sell hope --- be it PUA gurus, religious leaders, astrologist or whoever else --- may delude themselves and believe their nonsenses. However, many are hardened business men, which I illustrated by the example of L. Ron Hubbard. Heck, he openly said what his real goal was, and people could easily have figured out that he was merely a science-fiction author. Nonetheless, many were stupid enough to fall for him and his organization. Victims include celebrities like Tom Cruise and John Travolta. "But, wait, how can Scientology be a scam if the mega alpha Tom Cruise is a member. I mean he's rich and famous, so he's got to know better. Right? Right??"

What's your opinion? Let me know in the comments below!