nerdspeak

I’m familiar. You need to be like a psychopath narcissist to do many of the things they teach. The steel man version of his claim is, you need to act like a psychopathic narcissist to cut through the noise of the nightclub and monopolize the woman’s attention on the initial approach and convey your personality. That’s sort of true for drunk women in nightclubs. But if you act self-obsessed and aggressive like this in normal contexts where the woman is sober, it’s unnecessary and will attract the wrong kind of woman. If I’m being less charitable, I’ll point out that you have to be like a narcissist psychopath to deploy the tactics they teach. And he’s massively exaggerating the situation with this red pill stuff to help his audience rationalize using these extreme tactics. Probably he doesn’t go into such extreme detail anymore like he did in the 2010s. But those tactics included: 1. Tricking drunk girls in nightclubs to leave with you to go to an “after party” that’s really just your house. While you’re fully sober. Julien invented this but Owen taught it. And it’s borderline kidnapping. 2. Pushing reluctant girls to sleep with you once isolated with compliance chains. Jeffy and Julien used to advise putting the condom on “just for rubbing” and then “slip it in.” If this didn’t work, they advised crying and begging for sex. 3. Putting a girl in a rotation and deflect all talk about whether you want a relationship until the girl’s become attached to you, so that she’s only sleeping with you and you’re sleeping with other women. You can do some of this stuff if you have a high enough EQ. A lot of it is illegal but you probably won’t go to jail. But yes, you need to have a personality disorder OR be sucked into his weird cult with multiple levels of reinforcement (through him and his videos, your wings) to justify it. Again, let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and say he wouldn’t advise the extreme tactics anymore. But even if you just do the rotation stuff and the lying and deflection to maintain it (what he calls “pimping”), you will make a lot of girls hate you after they break up with you. Despite what Owen says, normal women without borderline or histrionic personality disorder don’t enjoy being on the receiving end of narcissistic abuse. Unless you hide it, which most RSD guys did not because Owen taught them to believe their behavior was “awesome,” your normal friends will reject you as a social liability. Worse, your ego will massively inflate and get addicted to this behavior, and you’ll create a lot of rationalizations about why it’s actually okay that will further alienate you from society and from truth. Owen’s advice to “be very spiritual” to stop it from corrupting you is bs lol. Doing some meditation and reading the Tao Te Ching is not going to stop this behavior from fucking you up. And the more you identify with it, and the more friends you get from this community, the harder it will be to leave. Some people who got chronically rejected or abused maybe need to become players for a bit to work through their trust issues. I was one of them. And people in blue need to become more selfish to break into orange. But even so, you don’t need to be predatory about it, even if you’re short and average looking. Owen’s red pill conspiracy theories are just marketing. The real reason mass market dating in general audience nightclubs and dating apps is harder now is because society is fragmented by niche social media marketing. And women feel less pressure to have boyfriends. But that’s easy to adjust to. And also people have worse social skills now. However, there’s also less shame about casual sex compared to even ten years ago. You don’t need to become a narcissistic micro-celeb like Owen to date around, you need to: 1. Pick a subculture that you like and optimize your dress and energy around it, ideally building some local status but even if not, it will allow you to niche down 2. Get good at picking up on subcommunications of interest and availability from women. All of Owen’s theories are really not necessary provided you have basic communication skills. Whether a woman will be interested is determined by (1) how attracted she is to you; (2) how available she is. If you want to date women more physically attractive than you, then live in a place with a lot of single women in your subculture and get good at picking up on signals of high availability. If she’s very available, she’ll settle for medium physical attraction provided you fit into her lifestyle. If you’ve ever done sales or marketing before this will make immediate sense. If a buyer has a lot of urgency, they’ll settle for an only adequate product, or overpriced product, and then become attached to it over time as it becomes integrated in their workflow. It’s the same thing here, the woman will settle for adequate physical attractiveness if she’s super horny and available and then become attached as she falls in love. But she won’t view you as a real option unless you fit into her subculture. Btw I’m not trying to counter sell against Owen or teach pickup or anything like that. Teaching pickup is the last thing I’d ever want to do lol.

Going through the OP's original notes in more detail and I have to say something about this. There is a kernel of truth in this quote, but Owen is massively exaggerating to make a point. And it's reckless of him. He means you have to accept your needs, and that your needs have to come first, no matter what. You also need to have a clear direction in life that you prioritize over other people's agendas. But young men (including me when I was in my 20s) misunderstand this as meaning you need to be self-obsessed and grandiose. And that's terrible advice. You will attract other takers who will take advantage of you and then drop you once they've exploited you. More normal people will get sick of your BS and drop you. You will end up increasingly isolated, without social resources, and if you're not actually a psychopath (they have different brain chemistry that allows them to deal with living like this), it will be extremely stressful and depressing. Moreover, it will cause you to believe your own BS and think whatever your impulses tell you to do is great because it comes from you. This is a big reason why RSD got into so much trouble in the 2010s. They believed they could do no wrong and that they could get away with anything. Owen should know better than to say things like this having gone through that and basically having to junk the company. But instead he blames society for victimizing him and keeps preaching the same self-centered nonsense.

@Cocolove The high-level advice is ok if you’re trying to sell coaching to consumers. For sharper b2b buyers (and b2b sales is where most salespeople actually make money), the tactics he describes would seem quite hokey. But I guess that’s okay. His main goal seems to be coaching people how to coach people how to become coaches lmao.

I watched the first ten minutes of Owen’s recent “Society has gone feral” video. It’s pretty extreme. It’s still structured in a problem-agitate-solve framework (the solution is to buy his bootcamp) but the “problems” he claims are real and then agitates are basically straight from online incel/men’s rights ideology. It’s not the same Owen from 2011, it is way more extreme. Society is more polarized now, so could say he’s adapting to his market lol but I think it’s pretty irresponsible to validate red pill ideology like that, even if it helps him sell more. That said, even in 2011, this was always a big problem with him. At least half of what he said even then was designed to make guys feel insecure and paranoid to put them in a buying state. You might say, what can you really expect from an influencer—it’s a funnel to sell high-ticket coaching, he’ll say anything to make the funnel work better. But there was a time when I took him seriously so it’s disappointing. Edit: One thing I’ll give him is that sometimes he’ll explain how he’s manipulating his audience. Which is a common tell—manipulators like to gloat about it—but if you’re interested in being an info marketer, you can learn the basics from him if you focus on tactics not content.

Do you have a theory about why he’s still so obsessed with pickup after all this time? With me, at a certain point it was enough. Did it take fifteen years and culminate in me running around post-Soviet countries dating up to ten women at once? Yes. Am I proud of it? No. Did I finally burn off the obsession at a certain point? Yes. That said, I did psychedelic-assisted therapy, and started to see how my behavior was hurting the women I was seeing. Maybe without the psychedelics I would still be caught up in it. But he’s self-aware enough that he should be able to get beyond this absurd addiction. All of the discussion about whether there’s an ethical way to do pickup or whatever is sort of besides the point. The pickup mindset where you’re trying to maximize volume of experiences just gets boring and stressful beyond a certain point, and you just want to find one (or two or three) people with similar values that you collaborate with instead of chasing the rush of sex with new people all the time.

Tl;dr: In the US it's relatively hard to establish mutual attraction, but extremely easy to pick up a woman who is attracted to you. In the Global South it's easy to establish attraction, but you get a lot of false positives (superficial attraction) and you'll often need to go on multiple dates before establishing a sexual relationship. In the USA the odds of establishing mutual attraction are lower than in Brazil or Russia because of (1) the obesity epidemic in the USA; (2) if you're coming from the US or Western Europe, you're automatically higher value in those places; (3) US women only date within their subcultures for the most part and the society is very fragmented due to intense niche marketing creating siloed echo-chambers. These echo chambers also exist in the Global South, but not to the same extent. And you can overcome it with the "Foreigner Effect," which basically makes you a C-list celebrity just by virtue of being from the US. Even in Kyiv, a very cosmopolitan city with many foreigners, women (and men too) would come up to me and my friends, speaking English on the street, and ask us where we're from and request our Instagram accounts. (This was pre-war, now they've become a lot more closed off and nationalistic). But, if you have mutual attraction, it's much easier to pick up in the US or Western Europe because there isn't much shame about sex. Probably in Brazil it's pretty straightforward, but in Ukraine (and Russia even more so), to have sex or even get a woman in isolation can take 4-5 dates. And you'll spend a lot of time on dates with women who are not seriously interested in you but curious about spending time with a foreigner. And they'll often guilt-trip the hell out of you if you don't want to get serious quickly Of course, there are hipster subcultures in Eastern Europe where norms are closer to the USA or Western Europe.

USA is no better than anywhere else in the West. And tends to valorize an exaggerated alpha approach that seems try-hard in most other cultures.

It’s cool to get used to poverty in sense of limiting your material wants and being willing to tolerate financial uncertainty. if you do both these things, you’re a lot harder to control.

The Thai Forest tradition goes as far to say that you shouldn’t do insight practice (vipassana) until you have at least a bit of pleasant concentration (shamatha). The shamatha protects you from the terror and makes it a good deal easier to deal with. Doing insight practice without basic concentration skills can really screw up your life.

Yeah when I was 19 I wanted to end the world over all kinds of dumb stuff. The thought of using guns never occurred to me because they weren’t around me growing up.

The shooter was not a leftist. Leftism means organized left-wing political groups, this guy appears to have been a lone weirdo with over-exposure to firearms from a young age.

I agree propaganda of the deed doesn’t work. But this murder was not directed by any kind of “left” organization. So, yelling at the “left” is sort of pointless. if there was some kind of underground party directing this murder, then we could talk about this as political violence and discuss how it’s an ineffective strategy, even if you’re a revolutionary. but there wasn’t…it was just a random dude.

Lenin opposed assassinations and terrorism because it does not get you any closer to power and provokes repression by the state.

NYC sucks in many ways but it has 20 million people in the metro area, you can find all kinds of people. The “hypergamy” you describe (I hesitate to agree that’s what it is) is specific to club culture, there are lots of women who want all kinds of relationships.

You didn’t ask me, but “mastering” pickup is not worth the opportunity cost. There are transferable skills but a lot of them are extremely specific and it’s very time-intensive to get to mastery level. You would have to make it almost a full-time job for several years to reach “mastery” unless you have very high natural talent. It’s like trying to “master” skiing or billiards. Not worth it for most people, doesn’t mean you can’t go skiing sometimes or play pool. Another way of putting it that’s more analogous, is whether, in sales, it’s worth it to master cold-calling. Probably not—there are many other way more efficient marketing funnels. Doesn’t mean you can’t cold-call sometimes but you don’t need to master it like the Wolf of Wall Street guy. Night game, in particular, is one of the most exhausting and self-destructive things you can do to yourself. Even if you don’t drink.

If you’re good looking you can just use dating apps and be normal on the dates and do fine. No need to do cold approach really. But you need to move to at least a medium-sized city. it’s like any other kind of funnel, you need volume at the top or it’s not going to work.

Hitler was not meticulous, clever, or skilled at hiding bias. Which is why the German elite thought he was a clown they could control Social forces have their own momentum and produce demagogues that reflect them. I don’t think these demagogues are puppet master manipulators at all.

Great way of putting it.

Figuring out how to live somewhat off-the-grid and avoid intensive exploitation is a form of "success within capitalism." It depends on how you define "success."

The best way to get over hustle culture is to make friends with people who aren’t caught up with it and are doing what they find exciting, regardless of the material payoff. They know how to deal with material insecurity without it driving them insane.

In the age of mass politics, in the 20s and 30s, and again in the 50s and 60s, people fought in the street over wages and political gerrymandering. People are capable of getting fired up over economics and corruption, there is something else about the current context which is suppressing this process.

I live in Belgium, which is similar to Sweden culturally and even somewhat weather-wise. If I could do it again I’d have moved to south of France or Vienna. Better balance of decent welfare state and good weather.

Reno also seems super cool. If I moved back to the USA, I would seriously consider it.

@Magnanimous London is not good for pickup, there’s a reason all the “Euro jaunt” borderline incel people come from there. Pick a cheap walkable city where you can live close to the clubs and aren’t competing with billionaires for girls.

"stage green" in the US was weaponized by Democratic Party operatives trying to preserve hegemony of neoliberal financialization, it's not real green, it's orange capitalizing on green and turning it into a propaganda narrative