nerdspeak

It really depends on the age you start too, I think. There’s a reason they used to start monks off as children. I started Theravada stuff in my late teens and made insane progress. Could sit for 3-4 hours without a problem, lots of inadvertent “power realm” experiences. i had to take a few years off from serious practice due to financial challenges and work, and getting back into it in my late twenties was ROUGH. It takes me 2-3 days of retreat practice to get to level of samadhi I used to achieve in 10 minutes when I was young. I may have also corrupted myself working in tech in NYC and doing pickup, and picked up some bad karma. But I think it’s mostly less neuroplasticity.

I left in 2020, no regrets

I don’t doubt Owen has done $100mm in sales over 20 years, but (1) he was first to platform on organic YouTube, so it’s more a function of that; (2) how much of that was profit, and of the profit how much did he keep. My understanding is not much, although if he pivoted to 1:1 high-end coaching and subscriptions since then, I’m sure he has made a lot since RSD. I knew one of the RSD coaches and two of the main independent NYC coaches in the 2010s, and they were no richer than successful psychotherapists or NY law firm associates. Mid six figures. And there were several coaches with really good game that I knew who were struggling just to break even in NYC.

This is just wrong, there are lots of components to value besides looks. If you are rich, extroverted, and socially savvy but average looking you will have an easier time dating the hottest girls than an introverted good-looking guy. Context matters a lot too. If you are an average-looking guy in Moldova (or Montreal or New York) you will have an easier time dating a hot girl than a good-looking guy in San Francisco. You are right though that the most common reasons guys get frustrated is they try to get girls that are unattainable for them. No amount of marketing or sales tactics can fix a product that is plain overpriced.

Omg this thread. People like to hate on dating teachers but there’s a sense in which they deserve some kind of humanitarian award. It is probably worse than being a social worker and doesn’t pay much better either.

You’re right that I phrased my “peak technocracy” comment in a way that left it open to misinterpretation. That said, I think there is a connection between these events. The War on Terror (which Obama extended despite promising to end) and the mishandling of the financial crisis severely harmed public trust in government. In both cases, experts funneled money upward while claiming it was necessary and that the average person couldn’t understand why. I am sympathetic to Charles Taylor’s diagnosis of democratic degeneration, and would extend it to suggest that COVID skepticism is symptomatic of a broader decline in the perceived legitimacy of liberal democratic states and their officials. Inequality, and the (valid but of course incomplete) perception that Western states prop up that inequality, is leading a significant number of people to lose trust in public officials — even those in non-political roles like public health. Populist authoritarians then mobilize that distrust, although of course once in power, they just make the situation worse.

@Apparition of Jack Yeah of course, I am not a moron despite what Leo apparently thinks. The point of my comment was that in an environment of completely degraded public trust in both government and in expertise, you would expect a populist backlash to a drastic policy measure like lockdowns. Many influencers tacked to the right to profit from that backlash, since they’re mostly entrepreneurs rather than intellectuals or scientists.

@Leo Gura I should be grateful for George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld “saving my life” in the War on Terror? You missed the point of what I said, which was about the optics and the political opportunity it created. There has been a huge crisis of legitimacy since the War on Terror and especially the 2007-2008 crisis. No one trusts anything the government says. Because…they constantly lie. Whether the lockdowns were on-balance beneficial is a completely separate issue from public trust in government being in total crisis.

COVID was peak technocracy. The bureaucrats went from telling you war and austerity was necessary, to telling you to stay inside for two years lol. I won’t get into whether it was a good idea or not, that’s a separate issue. The point is, you would expect a backlash—which you see now, as every government in power in 2021 has effectively been thrown out — and influencers were positioning themselves for it.

10-15 years ago, many of his followers did. RSD generally attracted angry young men whose parents had failed them, so they were looking for a replacement belief system. I agree it’s irresponsible for Owen to feed that impulse, but that’s audience capture. Regarding whether “pickup” is ethical, doing cold walk-ups is a lead gen channel like any other—a moderately obnoxious one like broadcast fax or cold-calling. Is cold-calling unethical? The tactic itself is not the part that got RSD in trouble, it’s the other sleazy beliefs that RSD promoted.

Engaging with Owen content is too risky, he’s a sociopathic Zen devil type. I would just avoid.

School isn’t same as work. It’s expected and tolerated at school much more. But you can also date people you work with if they don’t report to you, the paranoia about it is exaggerated if you know how to read people. I guess if you’re super uncalibrated it’s a problem.

You joke, but Donetsk was supposedly insane before 2014, and Minsk before 2020, I can say with firsthand experience, was insanely easy. That said, you get to a certain age and ask yourself, how much in common do I have with a 20-year-old university student from Minsk? @LostSoul Bigger transient cities. The small cities in the parts of Eastern Europe that are still safely accessible are actually much harder to meet people than Western Europe, with the exception of Warsaw, Gdansk, and the more Russophone parts of Riga and Tallinn.

There has been a lot of asset inflation since 2008. Not taking anything away from your dad (I don't know enough to comment), but anyone who got into the market after the financial crisis did well. For example, let's look at the S&P 500 first. There was a huge crash after the fall of Bear Stearns, and at the end of 2008 the S&P 500 was below $1000. December 31, 2008 S&P 500 Close: 903.2515 February 25, 2025 S&P 500 Close: 5,955.254 That's a growth factor of 6.593, not including reinvested dividends. Let's say you reinvested all dividends to make the math easier and say that made the growth factor 7x. That means, if you put in $100,000 at the end of 2008, you'd have $700,000 now. As a second example, let's look at the Nasdaq 100, since it contains the tech stocks that have seen huge growth. Nasdaq 100 Close (12/31/08): 1,211.653 Nasdaq 100 Close (2/26/25): 21,298.25 21,298.25 / 1,211.653 = 17.57, which is an insane growth factor. If you invested $100,000 in the Nasdaq 100 at the end of 2008, you'd have $1,757,000 today. That's an annualized return of 19.5%. That's just with a dumb buy-and-hold index strategy that a lot of people do by accident through automated 401k contributions. Of course, most people in a position to do this in 2008 had lost a huge amount of money in the crash from the GFC. But the point is, there have been huge structural factors pushing stock prices up since 2008 (read; massive money-printing) so no one who did well in the past 15 years should think it's necessarily because they're a genius. Unless they did much better than the market overall, in which case maybe they can think they're a good investor. That said, I rather doubt anyone did better than 19.5% unlevered return on an annualized basis, otherwise they should be running a hedge fund.

There are always narcissists, the issue imo is more about how people respond to complexity. Complexity of our societies has annoying costs and makes it difficult to change course fast, which has a tendency to cause decline. People find it tempting to believe some Caesarist figure can come in and clean it up with simple solutions. Although Caesarism tends to actually accelerate the decline.

Maybe but it's not very helpful to go here outside of your in-group.

The federal agencies he's dismantling and gutting were set up by Congress. He cannot shut them down with exec orders--he has to go through Congress. If he went through Congress to do it, I wouldn't say much about it other than that I disagree. Doing it with Exec Orders is the problem. He hasn't directly defied the courts yet, but Musk's talk about impeaching judges Is not a good sign. So -- that's 1 branch he's directly defied, and a 2nd branch a key quasi-appointee (the legal status of Musk and DOGE is a separate side issue) has threatened to attack. I don't need a 4th branch for my argument -- that's 2 of the 3 branches. There's no need to misconstrue what I say.

Because Trump won an election, is it the will of the people to attack the separation of powers? There's a lot they could have and still could do. They could block Trump appointments more aggressively, and the governors and AGs could have planned a more coordinated response earlier instead of just reacting now. Since this unitary executive nonsense threatens the power of Congress across both parties, they could have passed legislation before Trump took office to preemptively limit executive powers, e.g., preventing impoundment abuse, and introduced reporting requirements on funding freezes and agency reorgs.

Given the degree of illegality and the fact that they told us what they were going to do in advance, a stronger and more coordinated national response would be expected. Too many Republicans would defect if he tried to federalize elections. Not only because that would actually be a coup in the true sense, but also because it would work directly against their interests. Under normal circumstances, Republicans gain a lot from running elections through the states, it helps them with their gerrymandering games.

What? The Democrats govern almost all major cities, most large states, and the entire NGO complex. On balance, you could argue they’re still the most powerful political force in the US, even with Trump in power. Yet the response so far is for Hakeem Jefferies to fly to Silicon Valley and beg them to come back. Ok that’s not entirely fair, state AGs have filed some lawsuits, but that’s defense not offense.

Vance is a very sneaky guy who is good at making many far-right "public intellectuals" think they've got influence over him because then they're more likely to do his PR for him in their weird internet echo chambers. I don't think Vance takes this guy very seriously. Yarvin is a monarchist who wants to go back to an era before the English Revolution. That's a far-right reactionary position, but that has nothing to do with MAGA.

I am not panicking yet. Of course, the Democrats want us to panic, to cover up how gutless their response has been so far. The executive branch has been overactive since the 1960s, as the legislative branch has been unwilling to take the political heat required to actually do anything. The president has filled in the vacuum. Although it's illegal for the president to shut down or gut agencies established by Congress, presidents always do illegal things. I am not panicking yet, although I agree it's very bad. We should worry about what happens if federal courts issue a decision Trump doesn't like and Trump decides to do it anyway, in broad daylight. This would be pretty unprecedented. Even presidents that subscribed to the unitary exec theory, like Nixon and Bush II, generally followed court orders, even if they dragged their feet. If Trump goes against the courts, then the question is, what do those elements of the executive branch that take an oath to the constitution, rather than the president, do? By "those elements," I mean the military. However, even a military junta would likely quickly revert to civilian control in a place like the U.S. I wouldn't worry too much about future elections not happening or whatever. Elections are run by the states, not the federal government. Trump lacks the popularity to overhaul the government the way he is attempting to do, so he will fail and most things will go back to how they were, except slightly worse.

Lack of economic opportunity is a real problem. But you should probably say, men can’t get sex with the women they feel entitled to. They need to lower their standards. E.g., if a man has a minimum wage job, only high school education, and lives with five roommates, then he shouldn’t expect to date women with professional jobs who can afford to live alone — even if she comes from the same social class originally. A guy like that, experiencing downward social mobility, needs to date someone in a similar situation, which may mean dating “down” either in looks or in social background. When I lived in London I found it mildly hard to date women who were as pretty as what I was used to, because I was competing with the most successful men in the world for a set of women who generally don’t value their appearance. I valued companionship so I settled for a temporary relationship with someone not that attractive. Instead of being bitter I just accepted the conditions and lowered my standards. When I lived in Kyiv, it was extremely easy to date. Not just pretty girls from the village, but very pretty professors, doctors, lawyers and IT executives, who had multiple graduate degrees and had travelled abroad a lot and spoke perfect English. Mind you before the war. On Khreshatyk, the main high street, I would often see gorgeous women walking away from average-looking men, crying after being broken up with. I’ve never seen anything like it. I guess that sounds awesome from a male perspective but it actually creates a lot of other problems. Namely, women are typically scared to communicate their needs for fear of being abruptly dumped, and this is coupled with (often) extreme paranoia and drama related to fear of being cheated on.

Depends what you mean by left. For Mao, all power comes from violence or the threat of violence. For Lenin, the role of the state is to enforce class exploitation. The actual left is pretty cynical. I agree that liberals have a deluded idealistic view of reality.

I agree, there’s an element of the red/orange Owen Cooke bitter former drug dealer / incel worldview in a some of what Leo says about political stuff and dating. Not saying it’s wrong, but the framing is a bit negative and odd sometimes.