nerdspeak

Islamophobia in the 21st century is structurally very similar to antisemitism in the mid twentieth century. Who are these Muslim immigrants who “feel disgust and contempt” for European society? I really think it’s improper and dangerous to generalize like this. (1) Radicalized Muslims are a tiny minority of the immigrants; (2) many of them are refugees created by the War on Terror. If Europe didn’t want them pursuing their asylum rights under international law, it shouldn’t have allowed the US to turn the Middle East into a war zone to pursue control of the global oil market…

Fair enough. But in the US, permanent university staff who speak English and have permanent residency would not be categorized as “migrants.” Here, arguably our children will still be seen as migrants. It’s bizarre.

The issue in Western Europe is that the societies are (1) xenophobic AND (2) locked in permanent wage deflation because of EU mismanagement. Politicians can’t deal with (2) so they direct all anger at (1). This hostile environment reinforces big barriers for migrants to find jobs or housing and for their kids to even make local friends and learn the language properly. They and their children get locked in permanent marginal positions or parallel societies. The crime rates are (predictably) higher as that tracks social exclusion. I’m a scientist from the USA with a permanent research job in a Benelux country. I still get frequent micro-aggressions like, “When are you going back to the US?”. I’m a permanent resident and people treat me like a tourist. For people from Arab countries or even Eastern Europe it’s way worse. That includes professionals who aren’t in “blue” or “red” lol, these categories can be really stupid in how they are applied. My colleague is a scientist with a PhD from Oxford. He is from Lebanon and couldn’t find a landlord willing to rent to him in the city center despite a permanent job and work visa; he had to live in the immigrant neighborhood and commute 30 minutes. He does not have lower “development” than the local population. Aside from his credentials, he comes from a long line of scientists and writers in the Levant and spent his youth reading in five languages and attending prestigious Francophone boarding schools. Neither of us have made any real local friends despite speaking the language and only socialize with other international university staff. Even the local faculty, while professionally polite and courteous, are socially very distant.

Leo was talking about the USA, where crime by citizens is much higher and integration into the labor force by immigrants (even illegal immigrants) is very easy. Europe is very different. Integration in one generation, even two, is almost impossible, and base crime rates are extremely low by US standards. Having lived in both I could go on and on. People really underestimate how different the US and Europe are.

I got to a certain age and approaching a girl without IOIs started to feel thirsty. I also got good at forcing IOIs. There are people who stick with the spam approach but they’re naturally high-energy so it’s fun for them.

Common negative effects: feeling paranoid when you’re not talking to someone; value scanning for people to approach even when not doing pickup; devaluing individual interactions (to an extent this is good but it can get pushed too far); exhaustion mixed with guilt about not “pushing through” it (as Owen becomes less influential this is maybe less common); obnoxious trolling during approaches that is subtly dehumanizing to the people you’re trying to talk to. Most people I know who stuck with it evolved out of spamming to doing 2-3 warm approaches per night. But spamming is maybe a necessary phase before you learn how to spot approach invitations (specific to you) or signs that a woman is looking to meet someone (more generally). Basically I started pre-qualifying my approaches. But that was after almost 10 years.

As a teenager it’s just way easier

I think they work if you start very young, when the brain is very neurally plastic, and live in a monastery continually. When I was 20 I spent 6 months in a monastery doing zazen on average six hours per day and had some wild stuff happen toward the end. Fourth jhana after 20 minutes of sitting, consistently. Sometimes 10. Then I went back to normal life and backslid massively. 20 is still relatively old to start compared to Asia.

160 approaches is nothing. Think like a marketer. With an untested product you wouldn’t expect to make any sales on the first 160 ad engagements. Back in the day we’d do 160 approaches in a weekend. Not saying it’s good, it makes you crazy. But if you’re trying to learn pickup (admittedly a dubious pursuit), you need to crank volume at the top of the funnel for a while.

It’s an ideal age. The people who start at 20 become pickup-obsessed freaks. I was one of them for a time. Really harmed my life. At your age you will be able to keep it in perspective and not let it control your life.

I remember thinking this way in my twenties. Over time I just realized the futility of overthinking and worrying about all this stuff, which is mostly, if you boil down to it, about status and thus pretty pointless, and anyway beyond your control. You could have played it “smart” and got into finance in 2007, just before the GFC, and been forced to work 100 hour weeks for a year and then been unceremoniously fired. You could have been “smart” and studied CS like they told you to, and graduated in 2024 with no job options. The status and other surface-level stuff is mostly right place, right time. There are so many uncontrollable variables in life that what works for me is just doing work that’s fun for me and making sure I’m cash flow positive each month with at least a year of expenses saved. Anything good that happens beyond that is just by the grace of god.

I’m 35 and have had multiple 4-5 year relationships and am in one now that’s going on three years. Marriage doesn’t change much and you have many more years to decide about kids. No use backing yourself into a corner making decisions you might regret later, unless you actually *want* kids now. That said, I’ve lived in New York and Northern Europe my whole life, so women are generally cool with not getting married. If I were in the South, probably I would have gotten married in my late twenties and maybe I’d still be together with that woman as we would have made more compromises for each other. Would that have been better than my current situation? Maybe, idk. Doesn’t really matter, I’m fine with my current life. Even if we’d gotten married and then divorced, that’s really no big deal unless you have a *lot* of money that will turn it into a big fight. As I’ve gotten older I realize the futility of planning too far into the future and just do what feels good for next 6-9 months.

Dating was “easier” because women were under pressure to pair up quickly. But that generation was very frustrated, lots of empty shell marriages people stayed in too long out of social pressure. At the same time, social changes meant increased pressure on nuclear family to meet every social need, as extended kinship ties became less important. The boomers had it rough. Even though material conditions were in some ways better, they were not culturally equipped to deal with their situation. Probably the late 90s early 00s were the best in living memory to be just like middle class. My GenX friends describe it as an amazing time to be a young adult.

Yeah I was clarifying the date range of my firsthand observation. It was already happening in 2011, Owen just didn’t care about it and treated those clients like shit. Once the top of funnel dried up after Juliengate, it makes sense Owen would shift focus to those rich clients. But like I said, a lot of the higher end of the market moved away from RSD to 1:1 stuff with less aggro marketing. One coach in NYC got $250k to coach a billionaire’s kid for three months. They barely went infield and mostly just texted.

This was 2011-2013. Owen didn’t care about selling them much, and was more focused on building his audience, but it was a significant percentage of revenue at least in NY and SF. However, even in 2013 they were losing some of these clients to higher-end sole proprietor coaches who would do lengthy 1:1 mentoring programs that were frankly much more value-add. Like, “pay me $20k-$100k upfront and I’ll be your wing once a week for a year.” Which is obviously much better than 5-10 bootcamps per year, especially if it’s 1:1. In mega cities that business model works.

Dude he says more misogynistic shit now than back in the day, just coated in Neo-reactionary right wing pseudo-Christian language. Like that every woman should have has their goal to be impregnated by Jocko Willinck, but they lack the consciousness to recognize it so they chase Harry Styles.

I’m not sure. When I was hanging around, they had rich clients who would buy 4-5 bootcamps / year just for a laugh, like it was going to CrossFit. One client bought every New York bootcamp for like a year straight. Rich fanboys would like follow Jeffy around the country buying every Jeffy bootcamp. They knew it was low value-add but was more fun than going to the Hampton or buying bottle service. Maybe that still happens and they avoid the front-end stuff. But probably even bootcamp clients have declined in quality. I went to a free thing in 2019 and was horrified.

I wonder if it’s even a good business move. This tone screens for anxious 20-year-olds that are easily manipulated. I get that. But he also has his old audience of 30-somethings, and many of us have money now. Maybe we’ve outgrown him, but if he talked like a human being we’d occasionally engage and buy stuff, for a laugh and for nostalgia’s sake, and he wouldn’t have to chase new leads constantly.

It’s so annoying. It didn’t use to be like this. Skinny Owen was much more laid back. He’s probably tested it, though, and determined this way works better.

Free Tours worked because he could fill the room for free based on his YouTube reach. Let’s do a simple model without repeat customers, where all customers come from the free tour. Let’s say he had 100 free tour attendees per event x 2 = 200 month on average, and filled two hot seats with 30 people each -> 60 per month and two bootcamps of 3 students each per month -> 6 students. That’s $30k gross which isn’t bad, and seminar rooms back then were cheap, maybe $1000 per weekend x 2 = $2k per month. Subtract another $2k per month for travel costs, and you’re at $26k. That’s $312k profit just on Owen each year, which isn’t bad. And maybe some other instructors put up similar numbers, and he was banking $70k net from 2-3 of them after splitting it with Papa (if that’s actually what happened). But plenty of salespeople make half a million dollars without flying around the country like a madman. It would have been a lot easier to sell digital services or even long-term dating mentorship just for rich guys in LA. He might have made more doing that actually (and it’s what he seems to be doing now), with way less risk since he wouldn’t be burning through $4k/month in travel and seminar room costs, and without the disruption from the constant flights. It’s an inefficient way to sell services, which is why he had to develop all these content generation and sales tricks to make up for it with high conversion rates.

@Cocolove The peak of my involvement was early-mid 2010s. There’s not much to steelman. Owen rarely makes cohesive arguments. If you want, give me a talk by him, and I’ll turn it into a formal scientific argument, and it will be obvious how facile it is. Like 1st year BA student C-level stuff. What he is, is an entertainer. When he’s in high gear, you get the same vibes you might get at a good blues concert. There’s so much emotion that you don’t care that they only play 3 chords and one scale, or that his content is thin and repetitive. But what’s the business purpose of these entertainment skills (transmission of emotional energy) he developed? Several, but I’ll call attention to three. First, it allows him to spend less time writing new content and rehash the same generic self-help ideas repeatedly to feed the YouTube top-of-funnel. Second, it allows him to get away with interspersing his talks with pretty crass DHV stories and references to paid programs, which you overlook because he’s so entertaining. Third, like with women, they pump your buying temperature and get you to suspend your critical thinking faculties and give into the parasocial attachment, which makes his sales more effective. He seeds the sale with stories about his programs (like you’d seed the pull with a girl on a club) and then pushes for the sale on a high note after the free talk (like you’d pull after she laughs at a joke). If he made logical arguments, you’d be more likely to critically assess them and that would be bad for his sales conversion rates. He had to develop these entertainment skills because the RSD business model was insane. Early YouTube’s generous algorithm gave him thousands of free viewers, but he monetized by bringing them to hotel seminar rooms he had to travel to and pay for. Break down the biz model, it’s a miracle he ever made money this way. So he had to get extremely good at feeding the beast with massive volumes of thin but entertaining content. What I did learn from Owen, I learned by watching what he does and how the whole Owen show works. Among other things, even smart people just want to feel good. If you want to make money you’ll do much better clowning around then persuading people logically, even if they’re scientists or engineers. Just give them enough seemingly logical material that they can rationalize continues investment. He even said in a staff email that later got leaked, RSD is in the entertainment business. But being that he’s an entertainer, not a scientist or clinician or even a professional, you really shouldn’t trust anything he says or expect him to conform to norms of good faith or honesty or anything like that. It’s like trusting a musician to pay back a loan because they play a good blues guitar solo.

I’d encourage anyone who thinks Owen is actually so genuine and we’re being too harsh to upload a YouTube transcript into Perplexity or similar, ask it to review it plus the academic literature on influencer marketing, and pick out all the sales tactics he’s using, even in his supposedly informational content. It’s mind-blowing. His “authenticity” is a carefully-refined avatar designed to create reciprocity pressure, disarm skepticism, and suck as much money and attention out of you as possible. There’s very little there there beyond basic communications concepts, which I’ll grant he does explain in a very engaging way.

Con artists tend to get conned and lose large amounts at once. Greedy, dishonest people are the easiest to steal from. I don’t know about Tai, but Owen made almost no money from RSD beyond his expense account. His partner conned him out of everything. All the money he’s made that’s his, he’s made since 2019.

@Miguel1 Is it healthy orange? A lot of what he does to clients, and tells clients to do, is very manipulative and has lots of red in it. I won’t say it’s always bad. Whether dealing with Owen is a net positive depend on where you’re coming from. If you would have become an incel otherwise, it’s a net benefit. You could argue, anyone who gets sucked into a guru trip with Owen, would have got sucked into some other guru trip. For whatever reason they’re resistant to or can’t afford therapy, and Owen is better than most manosphere figures. In my case, I probably would have been fine dating normally without the guru trip with Owen. I got sucked in during a weird moment in my life when I was isolated studying abroad. But otherwise before getting sucked in I had lots of friends, including female friends, and would hook with one every once in a while. Without Owen, I would have had fewer sex partners but healthier relationships and wouldn’t have spent so much time and energy on night game, which has huge opportunity costs. I also would have alienated less of my college social circle. Moreover, for people who really buy into the guru thing and adopt the whole belief system he promotes, any benefits in meeting-women skills are mostly counteracted by the paranoid worldview he pushes in order to keep guys in the product cycle. That worldview is very destructive to relationships. Some of the brass-tacks info he provides is valuable, like thinking of dating as a funnel. Some if that even it’s pretty questionable, like spam approaching regardless of IOIs. But even if you say it’s all good, you can get the same information from more neutral sources that don’t deliberately cultivate fear and dependence in their audience.

@Zen LaCroix I know Owen said it’s necessary to act this way. And look, if you’re getting value from the relationship with him at the moment, I am not looking to interfere. However, I wonder, why he is making such extreme claims? I hung around him for a long time. After a while I observed that he has the same manipulative gambits for clients and interns that he uses on women. The same lines he used to draw me in, I saw him use to draw in other prospective interns or wealthier kids that could turn into repeat clients. While he’s a smart guy and has momentary empathy, everything Owen says is calculated to encourage guru dependency and keep the money or free intern labor flowing. Insofar as he says true things, it’s only insofar as it benefits him. He’d just as soon lie if it made him more money or got him more sex. So, if he says things have gotten so catastrophically bad that you need to be a psychopath just to date, do I think that’s necessarily because it’s “true,” just because he’s the guru and he says it? Well, idk, it conflicts with my experience. And it conflicts with a lot of things he used to say not long ago, how this is the best time ever to sleep with many beautiful women, because “there are more sluts now than there have ever been in history” (a direct quote) and that you just need to find horny bored girls and be there best option in that moment, and pickup is the easiest thing ever. Ok, that being the case, why would he start saying that things are so bad you need to be a psychopath narcissist just to have sex? For marketing reasons. He’s tested it, and it helps him sell and upsell more in the current environment.