nerdspeak

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.

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.