---
title: Episode 64 Rational Optimism
episode_number: 64
era: early
source_file: Episode 64 Rational Optimism.mp3
audio_size_mb: 59.7
duration_sec: 1956.6
duration_min: 32.6
language: en
provider: deepgram
model: nova-3
diarized: true
confidence: 0.994
transcribed_at: 2026-05-28T07:00:15Z---

# Episode 64 Rational Optimism

**Speaker 0:** Tom Torero podcast 64, rational optimism Optimism from somewhere very near Moldova. I'm heading to Moldova, Kishino, however you say it. I'm heading there for a week or so with a mate to do some filming, to have a laugh, have a lark, and obviously do some day game, do some street hustling. It's the last former Soviet Union country I haven't been to. So I want to go there and report back to you in vlog form, in podcast form, and obviously put it in the new book called calling. I couldn't miss out a country. So I'll have a good overview of how it relates to Ukraine and Russia next door to Romania how it's comparing to Bulgaria we shall see but I have high hopes cause I've heard good things. Two things before we kick off the rational optimism discussion. Saturday, August 6 in Vancouver, Canada. One spot left for my Infield Street hustle training twelve to 5PM if you want it. The last Canadian spot, tom@tomterrero.com. On the same day in the evening, Saturday, August 6, I'm giving a talk to the local lay. I love that PUA word. Lay. Proper underground fight club. Slightly creepy word, but, it's called the Vancouver brotherhood. I think that's what they're called, which sounds very da Vinci Code esque. And if you wanna come to the talk that I'm giving, you email them, not me. They've got the list for the venue. It's vc.brotherhood@gmail.com. I'll put that below on iTunes and YouTube. You put the subject as Tom Torero. Just give them your name. Let them know you come in how many places you want. It's 10 Canadian dollars. That's about £5 to cover the cost. Nobody's making any money. There you go. That's the Canada news. More Moldova news coming your way. Topic of today, like I said, rational optimism. I've mentioned it a few times, yet I've done podcasts already on, depression and anxiety, on being a boss, on not sinking into procrastination. This is hopefully more practical. It's more of an overview. It applies to daygame, but it obviously applies to all aspects of your life, health, wealth, women, and beyond. And guys have said, yeah, it sounds like a good philosophy, rational optimism or being pragmatic with your optimism, not sinking into despair and depression. But how does it work in practice? What are the things I do day to day? How does it fit in with daygame? Guys want to know more. They wanna know the nuts and bolts. So this is the podcast dedicated to being a rational optimist. Rational Optimism is also the title of a very good book by Matt Ridley. You might know him from Red Queen Evolutionary Biology Stuff, But that book is on a slightly different topic. He does cover some of the stuff but he's talking about the rise of trading. So I'm using the term rational optimism in a slightly broader sense. In that, I'm neither a pessimist nor a blind optimist. I think that pessimism causes paralysis. Can't really argue against that. People with depression, people with stress, people that are angry, they're stuck in their situation, they're the victim but equally sure irrational Disney optimism is a delusion and it leads to all sorts of problems, it's naive. So this is about being pragmatic, this is about boundaries, this is about sticking to values, knowing your values. We're not talking about hippie dippie happiness like I've said many times, peace and love and all will be well remember this comes back to biology nature red in tooth and claw so how can we square the circle without getting all idealistic how can we improve day to day our mental state and this is something that I focus on I focused on massively in the past because of taking antidepressant medication, going through clinical stress, having anxiety, stuff that I've talked about before. So it's not something that you just cure one quick fix, all is well, you become a rational optimist. It's a muscle that you've got to work, it's an area that you've got to focus on. And like I said in the last podcast or two, where you put your focus massively determines what happens. We need to be very careful where we're putting our focus. And day in, day out, hour to hour, I'm thinking about this stuff even when I'm daygaming, even when I'm dating. And it obviously helps. The tagline for this podcast is obviously being a rational optimist to boost your vibe. If you just want to think about this podcast in terms of daygame, you need all of this stuff to have a shining, glowing, warm vibe. Alright, girls are very sensitive to this stuff. What you feel, she feels. She's mirroring you. I've said many times the girl is your mirror and yeah, you might have that fixed grin, that pretend optimism about you but she can spot it, people can smell it. Micro signals that you're giving off. So by improving your levels of oxytocin, serotonin, etc which we'll come on to, your daygame will magically improve. And again, it's not about holding hands, playing the guitar, putting a flower in your hair and being happy forever and ever and ever. A big part of being a rational optimist is tough love. Many times I talk about tough love in terms of a good parent or a good teacher or the male female polarity where you need boundaries. Freedom can only exist in the context of boundaries. A rational optimist is not just sitting there in a deck chair smiling. It's an active thing. It's a muscle you work. It's often bold, it's strong, it's about boundaries and that is what creates the rational side of things. You're saying, look, things are not perfect forever and ever and ever but I'm going to take action to improve upon the things I can. And that leads to you being in the moment, you saying fuck it, you realizing life is short. All the things my videos are about grabbing life by the horns, licking the lid of life, having this joy de vivre, lust for life, right? Just sticking it to the man saying fuck it and living it and ultimately having fun because I remember all my classroom days teaching, it was a lot of fun. Kids naturally do all the things that we're going to talk about today and as we get older we close ourselves in and being an optimist, being a rational optimist is a lot harder. So having fun, remember, pick up, dating, girls, sex, it all should be fun and we make it far too heavy, far too academic, far too stressful, far too negative. Right? So we need to focus on those kid behaviors and have a laugh of it. A bit like you might remember the Jackass craze on MTV or the British equivalent, the Welsh equivalent, which was Dirty Sanchez. Just grown men having a laugh. And you forget as an adult, you're allowed to. It's like, oh, yeah. I can have a laugh. I can jump off something. Can climb a tree. I can do something stupid. I can go up to a complete stranger and make her smile or tease her. You forget that you're allowed to do this stuff because people around you are pushing the agenda of doom and gloom. The world is terrible. This is what I talked about in the last podcast or so. And if you keep putting your focus there, you'll forget that the world is beautiful, that you're alive, that life is short, that you're allowed to enjoy this stuff, that daygame is fun, etcetera, etcetera. And it's the sign if you want to bring it back to dating and biology and mating, it's the sign of a healthy human. Right? Somebody who's all negative, stressed, angry, depressed, that's very unhealthy all those signals. But a healthy human has an ease about them, a charm, a warmth, a glow. They don't take life too seriously and girls pick up on that. It's a sign for sexual market value. So again, if you want to focus on daygame, think about that. Even more specifically because you know I don't like the woo woo stuff, I'm fascinated about what causes these warm positive feelings. How can you increase these warm positive, quote unquote, happy feelings? And you've heard me talk before about endorphins, adrenaline, dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, all these glowing chemicals that make us feel alive. And a really good book I read recently, goes into the biology and the biochemistry of these chemicals in a very clear manner is a book called Habits of a Happy Brain by Loretta Bruning, I think you say. I'll write that in the description. It's a very good book if you want to understand how to boost levels of those chemicals inside your body. I'll come back to that book when we do a podcast on habit forming because she breaks down the how and why of habit forming on a biochemical level which is crystal clear easy to understand for a layman. But anyway, you can dig as deep as you want. But let's bring it back to daygame to kick off. You have to see daygame as something you enjoy. I recently tweeted this based on a comment when a guy came up to me and said, I've just hated doing daygame for the last two years. It's been such a bloody chore. I just want it to end. I just want that girlfriend. And it really shocked me because I'd never heard anybody say that, they saw day game in such a negative light. For me, from the very beginning, day game was liberating. Day game as I've said, elsewhere is a bungee jump for me into the now. I don't believe in mindfulness. I don't do meditation. Daygame is my walking meditation if you want to call it that. Daygame is my mindful activity. Daygame is my flow state. I've spoken about the book by Chokshi and Myhael. Flow. There's two of them. The second one being a bit more practical. They're great reads for this stuff as well. Why is daygame so fascinating, so fantastic, so positive? Well, you're walking around. You're outside. You're in the sun. There's fresh air. And most importantly, you're being social, you're chatting to human beings. And a lot of those interactions, you're smiling and laughing and joking and you get this warm feminine energy and that improves your masculine energy. Yeah. You might get a phone number, you might not. That's not the point on one level. Of course, you know, you're in it to get laid. That's fine. You shouldn't be ashamed. But there's this whole wider thing, which is why day game, as I say, is the Trojan horse. It's life transforming on so many levels. You think it's just about the sex in the beginning but you realise you're feeling better, you're losing weight. People notice this glow about you after a day of daygame. So daygamers, the majority of day gamers I meet are rational optimists because they believe that they have control, they don't play the victim anymore, they focus on a good vibe, they see results, they see their life improving in many many different ways and essentially they're taking back control. So that's the rational part of rational optimism. You're not just blindly saying it's going to be amazing. This is like what's that called the secret where you think of something and it appears Like I just want a hot girl and a Lamborghini. Bang. There you go next day. You meet your 10 and she happens to be sitting in a Lamborghini. No. This is stuff you have to work for. Tom Torero is action based. I tweeted recently about people getting it wrong the wrong way around. They think the motivation leads to amazing action filled results when it's the action and the results from the action that leads to motivation. So very easy to get that the wrong way around. Typical self help junkies, they're just focusing on motivation, but it really doesn't lead to much action. So try and switch it around. You go out, you do daygame, you get a positive reference experience and surprise surprise, you feel motivated to go out the next day and do it again. Speed of implementation. All successful people talk about this. You have the idea maybe you have a germ of motivation a little seed is planted you listening to a podcast you're watching a video bang the next day you go out and you get in that positive loop a good little tracker is to think often use this for YouTube and content. Think am I creating more content or consuming more content? So do you spend longer consuming media and movies and music or are you creating something? Are you writing? Are you doing something with your hands? Are you putting something out there that is you? So for daygame if you're spending more time listening to podcasts, YouTube videos, reading stuff than being in the field, you obviously need to readdress that balance. That goes without saying. Yeah. The amazing thing about optimism, not blind positivity but rational optimism is that people are starving for it. I've said in previous podcasts that our brain naturally focuses on the negative. If it bleeds, it leads clickbait and all that stuff. People spend a lot of their time leading lives of quiet misery as the quote goes, walking around with very dark thoughts, feeling trapped, feeling like the victim and you come along maybe as a daygamer or just being positive to somebody in a shop or an airport or getting in touch with a friend or phoning your mom. Bang. It's like this ray of light. Now if you're religious, you'd see in other terms. But I simply see it as that people are so surprised. People are drawn to it. People recognise when somebody has this warmth about them and they'll travel across continents to be with that person or to stay in touch with that person. People will describe you as charismatic or extremely confident. People are drawn to you and they don't know why. It's because they're starving for optimism. For somebody to say, look, you can take back control. Things can get better. You might be in a dark place now but you can tunnel your way out. Here's a spade. And people vote with their feet and you see the content that people are drawn towards. If you're talking about internet marketing or perhaps having a YouTube channel like this or a podcast like this. Just look at the kind of stuff people are consuming. People want to feel better. People are consuming positive content. Sure, we're drawn to the car crash. We're drawn to the fight, we're drawn to the argument but largely if you're looking at vloggers or podcasts or books that people read, we're starving for someone to say it's okay. We stand in darkness surrounded by light. That's one of my favorite quotations. We stand in darkness surrounded by light. And you just have to be reminded that there is this light. And you have to remind yourself constantly and consistently because as I said, the brain likes to focus on the negative. That's a very healthy Darwinian thing that Loretta Bruning talks about in Habits of a Happy Brain. So it takes effort to be a rational optimist, to not play the victim. I've grouped the practical strategies into 10 things. Now, if you've listened to all my content over the years, I'm plugging from the matrix when I've talked about depression and anxiety and stress and being a boss and not being a victim, you'll recognize some of these things but it's always good to have a reminder. I have to remind myself of these things as I said daily because it's so easy to slip into doom and gloom. Alright. We'll go through the 10 and we'll be as practical as possible. So think about the ones you're already doing. Think about the ones that you can incorporate immediately. Some take longer than others. And watch how it impacts on your your well-being, your mental health which will obviously impact on your physical health and vice versa. Watch how it impacts on your daygame and your relationships. Hopefully watch how it impacts in so many areas. Okay, the first thing we can do to be a rational optimist is as I've said, my little secret, gratitude. Now this is very popular with life coaches and the hippie dippie crowd but gratitude just simply means recognizing the good things in your life, recognizing what you've got, recognizing that you're alive, that life is short, it's not going to last forever. Some people say, okay, if you catch yourself having that negative thought and there's nothing wrong with that, they're natural, they just pop up. Balance it immediately with two positive things. So it's the two to one gratitude principle. So let's say you're walking around and you just go, oh bloody hell, know, I'm feeling a bit rough after a heavy night last night, know, I'm not feeling particularly with it today. You catch yourself having that thought which is fine. That thought exists to readdress the balance to get your body feeling a bit more positive but you stop and you say, well listen, it's a sunny day, it's very beautiful and look over there, look at that dog running around chasing a ball. What a happy image, what a beautiful image. And then focus on that and then back to your day to day activities. Or you can do it a bit more in chunks like I do. I do gratitude usually when I'm walking around maybe before daygame or between sets. I just say wow, you know, it's a sunny day today. I'm so lucky that I can do this. Wow, that was a nice cup of coffee. I'm so lucky to be in this place. Wow, it's great that I've got this relationship with this person or this person's in my life or I'm lucky to be living in this moment in history, etcetera etcetera etcetera. On whatever level you want to do your gratitude, you do it. But it's essentially just focusing on all the good stuff in your life. Yeah. Number two, posture. And if you saw me daygaming in 2010 and if you see me daygaming now, you'll see a man with completely different posture. Still not great, still rounded shoulders. I still hunch a lot because I'm tall. But since stopping teaching when I had to hunch down and talk to kids, bend bending down all day and from watching infields of myself doing daygame and, doing talks, I've improved my posture. So plenty of posture exercises on the internet. Just Google good posture exercises. Stretch. So before a day game session or every morning if I can, which is pretty much all the time, you just stretch even if you're in an air aeroplane bathroom. Do some stretches. Open your body up. Combine it with breathing if you want. You'll automatically trigger some of the chemicals that I mentioned just like with exercise. Moving, going for a walk as I already said, daygame automatically triggers optimistic feelings, those chemicals just by doing a bit of exercise. And don't underestimate day game exercise. It's usually about 10 kilometers I do a day. If I'm teaching someone for a block, will be 20 kilometers. I'll sometimes be walking for four hours doing infield day game a day. So very good. Number three, you've guessed it with the health is your diet. And I still haven't got this down perfectly obviously, but I'm aware of it and I do focus on it, which is clean eating, watching your calories, watching what type of things you're putting into your body, watching your sugar levels, watching your caffeine and noticing, just being aware of how it impacts on your positivity. Is it making you cranky? Is it making you irritable? Is it making you stressed? What types of food are an annoyance to your brain? And what calms you down? Yeah, different things for different people, but just being aware of it is very important for this toolkit. Number four, sunshine. Just any rays, not being in a dark gloomy office. That's going to trigger depression, anxiety, and stress. You go outside, you do a bit of daygame. You're walking around, hopefully in a sunny place at the moment, unless you're in the Southern Hemisphere. And again, you feel optimistic. Life feels a little bit better. Number five, which is essentially what daygame is connecting with people. And I've said here connecting with positive people because you have to remember if somebody's a vibe vampire, if somebody's leaching your positivity, you got to cut them out. If it's a family member that's a big decision. I've said before you don't do that lightly. I'm not encouraging you to at all cut any family members out. That should be resolved. But if it's a wing or somebody like a hanger on you've tried to be friends with but it's just constant negativity, they're dragging you down, they're they've got the victim mindset there, they're moaning and whining, they gotta go. Don't feel guilty about cutting them out. The old cliche of, you know, you're the sum of the five closest people around you. That's common sense. Yeah. If you spend time with positive people, if you spend time doing day game and chatting to pretty girls and laughing and joking, surprise, surprise. You're gonna feel nice and positive. Yep. Number six. Do something to help somebody else. This is old wisdom, universal wisdom from whatever religion or belief system you have. It's win win. It's altruism. You're passing something on. Teaching is great for this. Do doing something kind. Like I said, calling your mom, calling your grandma, calling your aunt, calling your sister, calling an old friend, whatever. No excuses now with Skype. Yeah? Just doing a little thing. You don't have to be massively altruistic or religious. Just doing a little thing and daygame often does this. A girl can be having a really shitty day and you go out, you make her smile, you make her laugh. Sure, she's engaged or she's not available but she says, wow, thanks for coming up. Know, I feel a lot better now. And she smiles, you smile, you both walk off, life is good, the world is better. Number seven, something I do a lot, watch a lot of comedy. I watch a lot of stand up online. In London, I used to go to the comedy store all the time. Laugh. Laughter like smiling but genuine smiling. Deep laughter releases so many of those good things that we talked about. Going to a comedy store with mates or if you're stuck at home, get your laptop out, find comedy you like and watch it regularly. It reminds you that life is short, life is good, you shouldn't take it too seriously. You can rise above it. Number eight, and we forget to do this even though it's so easy to access it now. Music. Music that you love. Music that makes you happy. Even if it triggers a bit of a melancholic emotion, that's still better than feeling angry and stressed because it lets it out. Right? But find some music, dance like nobody's watching as they say, close the curtains, do a bit of old school raving. A lot of pickup guys do that before they go out. I know daygamers that jiggle with music before they go out. There are daygamers that walk around with good music in their ears. So it's all around us but we forget because we've got the problem now of too much choice. Whereas in the past the old cassette tapes, old CDs, you cherished music and mix tapes but now you can basically listen to any song. So choose ones you like, make a playlist and use that to boost some positivity. Number nine, I mention in pretty much every podcast which is to travel, quick fix. I know if you've got a job, not that easy but just daygaming in a different part of your city, going to a different shopping center at a different time of the day or shaking up your day game if you've become a bit rigid and bored of it. Yeah. You're sounding like a robot. You're sounding like a parrot. Remember, London day game model is only training wheels that you abandon. Hopefully after the first year or two, you freestyle, you have a laugh, you mix it up, you leave your phone at home, you do a burn the boats thing, you try something different in a different place. Immediately you'll feel lighter and better. And number 10, the big one which is the cause I would say of a lot of guys despair especially at the moment. If you're fixated on reading negative blogs, you're watching news 20 fourseven, you're feasting on internet gossip, triviality, you're blowing up things in a ridiculous proportion compared to what they actually are in the grand scheme of things. And you're enjoying, you're getting addicted to these negative feelings which is trapping you more and more. You're locking yourself in your own prison as I've said. If you cut out TV, which you don't need anymore with the internet, God bless the internet, if you really just cut out news, as I say on unplugging from the matrix on that video, say if the world's going to end you're going to know about it, right? Avoiding the gossip as much as you can, know. What somebody says about another person says more about them than it does about the other person, you know that old saying. And triviality, know, thinking that one thing that happened across the other side of the world, to a handful of people that that therefore colors the whole world, it colors your whole life and it traps you when you're a victim and there's nothing you can do about it. The message of this podcast, as many of my podcasts and videos, is to say that take back control. Stop being the victim. Stop moaning. Take action immediately. Speed of implementation. Do something. And you'll see your mental state change very, very quickly. I'm guessing this is how I became a rational optimist. Maybe on another podcast, I'll even talk to my mom. We'll get my mom on the podcast because she's a rational optimist. I guess I learned most of my stuff from her. My dad to some extent but it was definitely my mum who was a massive action taker who never was about doom and gloom. She was always saying right, it's okay to have that negative thought because that's healthy, that's flagging up different things but immediately propose a solution. So you have the negative thought like, oh you know, I've put on some weight. So what's the obvious cause of action? I'm going to lose some weight. Right. Bang. Either move more or eat less or start eating clean. So it's coming up with a solution. A company that I really like who you could say are ambassadors for rational optimism. Guys I came across on YouTube, a pair of brothers, Bert and John Jacobs and they give talks all over the world about rational optimism. They wouldn't call it rational optimism. They were just two guys with a van who used to sell t shirts. They still do sell t shirts but they used to sell t shirts at the back of a van. They weren't selling that well and suddenly they sold the t shirt that simply said life is good. Now that sounds corny, that sounds cheesy. Who's gonna buy a t shirt that says life is good? What do you know? These t shirts just flew and the company grew into a multi million dollar t shirt company based on positivity. Now some of you would go oh that's a bit cheesy. British people or northern Europeans are automatically cynical of anything positive so that's why I say be rationally optimistic and Bert and John Jacobs explain why life is good. They're not just saying everything's sweet and easy like me they're saying recognize what you can control and all the good things in your life. He's got a book, I think it's Bert out of the brothers, Bert Jacobs and I skim read it on a plane yesterday and he goes through different categories of people who have this belief system who live this kind of life categories of things they have in common. He says the first one is openness. So being like a child, opening yourself up to experiences. Number two, courage. You can tick those off if you're a daygamer. Simplicity which is another Tom Torero thing. Minimalism, not for religious or ethical reasons, just for the lightness, the good feelings it gives you. Number four, humor. We've said that as well. Their game is you'll be good with that. Improvisational. Gratitude is his next one. Very common. The next one is fun. Pickup guys should be having a lot of that. Compassion. Now this is hard if you're a really good pickup artist because you get drawn into the dark arts. You have to be a little bit dark triad. And, life can just be about nailing girls. You become a bit too badass. You become a bit too much of the bad boy and you lose the compassion because you don't want to be the super nice guy, the chody guy of of days gone by. So being the nice bad boy, being the badass Buddha, you have to get some of that compassion back. Maybe not becoming soft again with girls but in different areas of your life. Creativity, daygamers nice and improvisational coming up with as I said non London daygame model copy and paste material I find pickup to be a massively creative thing so having a creative pursuit authenticity opening yourself up being honest and direct and love and when he says love as his last quality, no, he's not talking about romantic ideal of love, the Disney romance. He's actually a single guy, I think it's Bert we're talking about him who wrote the book. He's a single guy. He's a happy bachelor. He's talking about love like I talk about love. Love for many people on many different levels. Love of your friends, love of your dog, love of life, love of your parents, love of girls but just not in a monogamous let's get married way. So I recommend reading that book, Life is Good by, Bert Jacobs, I think it is. What else did I say? Habits of a Happy Brain. I'll link that below. And if you want to know about how this links to trading and earning money and the world becoming a better place throughout history, then read Matt Ridley's book on the same topic, pragmatic sorry, rational optimism which is about being pragmatically optimistic about the state of the world. But I want you to focus on your life. Before trying to fix somebody else or even trying to fix the world, trying to rage against somebody else and trying to solve their problems in faraway lands, focus on yourself. Save yourself first and then you can save other people around you. And that's it. That hopefully is the toolkit for becoming a rational optimist. I shall leave it there because I've got to edit this, go to bed and continue the travels. I'll speak to you next week with a wing called Turkish. We'll be in Moldova, so I'll speak to you then.