Something worth acknowledging upfront: this isn't a cold exposure article. It found its way into the Cold Shower Sessions feed, but the content is about cultural communication, identity, and authenticity in dating. And honestly? That's worth sitting with for a moment.
The core claim is elegant. "Game" — the way Black men communicate romantic interest — is not manipulation. It's a cultural tradition. Storytelling, rhythm, improvisation. The griot lineage adapted to the modern dating landscape. When critics dismiss it as performative or disingenuous, they're missing the entire cultural infrastructure that produced it. The speaker's point is sharp: the "colonized version" of game — canned lines, scripted openers — is precisely what game is not.
Here's where it connects to the broader knowledge base. The Huberman dopamine research describes how genuine engagement — being fully present, dropping scripted behavior, leaning into real curiosity — produces sustained motivation and connection. Dopamine isn't just about anticipation of reward. It's about authentic pursuit. The manipulation tactics marketed in modern dating courses operate on scarcity and anxiety — the same cortisol-driven stress loops we work to disrupt in the cold plunge.
The "watered-down bastardized commercialized version" the speaker describes is the exact dynamic that plays out in wellness too. Cold plunging and sauna therapy bathing have been practiced in Scandinavian, Japanese, and Indigenous cultures for centuries. When that gets extracted, packaged, and sold without any acknowledgment of the lineage, the same dilution happens. The form survives. The meaning doesn't.
The cultural appropriation discussion is genuinely contested. Not everyone agrees on where authenticity ends and borrowing begins. But the speaker makes a strong structural argument: when expressions of Black cultural identity get stripped of context and commodified, something essential is lost — not just culturally, but functionally. The communication stops working the way it was designed to work because the substrate it emerged from has been removed.
If you're genuinely curious about communication — romantic or otherwise — understand the cultural context before you critique or adopt it. Not to borrow techniques, but to understand why certain expressions of presence and intention land, and why others don't. The form is always downstream of the tradition.
Dr. Jonathan Leary's vision for cold plunge clubs as "the future of wellness communities" rests on a specific premise: connection and purpose cannot come through electronic media. The more isolated a person becomes, the faster they decline.
Real game — the version the speaker is defending — is fundamentally anti-isolation. It's a tradition of showing up in person, reading the room, improvising, connecting. Every element he describes runs counter to the curated, algorithmically-optimized performance that modern dating apps reward. Cold exposure builds presence. Presence enables real connection. Real connection is what the griot tradition, at its core, was always about. The container changes. The biology doesn't.