She's spitting a lot of truth...

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I think you'll find historic empires were run by ruthless leaders who nurtured generations of sycophants who were a mix of psychopaths, sociopaths and narcissists. Not surprisingly in the neo-capitalist world we find ourselves in, the number one books followed by managers are all about curtailing empathy and emphasising selfishness in the interests of power and control. Rich Dad poor dad, The Art of War etc....

Our modern society re-directs our biological urges using psychological manipulation like operant conditioning to create a a very stratified conformist social structure that pretends to be altruistic and socially progressive. We are like the proverbial donkeys following the carrot on the stick.

Getting back to the podcaster. Her examples of men who are a mix of alpha and good traits are perhaps more wishful thinking on her part, I believe she is projecting her own aspirations for social engineering by constructing a narrative (nuch of which is not far from the truth) but based on her own shortcomings.

Well, I won't 'find' it, it's common knowledge. My big concern with this is getting to the whole thing that Nate Hagens gets into with the Great Simplification, ie. that we've had this wild ride for the past century that we seem to think is our inherent cleverness or all the ways in which we're wiser than our ancestors when really it's just our discovery of what we can do with oil / hydrocarbons, his take among others that we've had something like 500 billion virtual workers by being able to use all of this stored solar power in the way of hydrocarbons, and that the party is going to be slowing down in the next few decades - to such a degree - that we might be forced to cut down to 1/3rd of our usage just because the amount that we can get out of the ground cost-effectively won't allow for more. Where this gets really bad - the while Girardian bit where if 2% growth stops we'll all be killing each other and, add narcissism, 'no one has any right to live and have more than I do'.


There's a both-and. On one hand we do need things made and hard, even undesirable, labor done to make this all go round. The part that I was never taught as a kid, and what makes it horrible as an adult, is that 80% of the difficulty in participating in work isn't the work itself - it's the people. It's the perpetual knowledge-hording and backstabbing. Trying to synergize as a functional team, even with hard work, is a much different experience than having grueling work and Hunger Games on top of that.


Can you unpack what's 'wishful thinking'? While everyone has flaws I know plenty of guys who are quite big, athletic, and try to do the right thing (maybe not full Jocko Willink but they've got a bit of that in them). She's not inventing men who don't exist. She also never specified whether her grand fathers were big either, just that they were able to have integrity.

Also to clarify - since we're doing 'TL:DW lets talk about it', she never used the word 'alpha', I'm using it - and I'm using it because I have to shorthand / Cliffs note the content of a 3 1/2 hour discussion - so in that sense I'm using my definition of alpha which just means healthier, stronger men who can show both in outward physical traits and in their neurological power reserves, quickness, athleticism, etc.. Pretty much guys who are less likely to be messed with and who got there, or at least got a really good foundation for that, through doing well in the gene lottery.

Yes this is why Kiyosaki's "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" and Sun Szu's "Art of War" are in every managers book collection. It's not just what you know, it's who you know" and how making alliances help you to overcome the competition.

It takes hard work to build up skills but its even harder to network and watch your back. Being able to engage NTs is essential to get promoted.

I don't necessarily dispute her claims, but she is drawing upon her own personal experiences which is shaping her views, Some element of confirmation bias there.

I also suspect when she was younger she would have been the type of woman who would reject men and was waiting for Mr Perfect, So whether single men should be listening to her advice is questionable. But yes she is interesting and insightful.

Possibly, and even if that's the case I'm probably a bit like that as well (maybe not hyper-choosy but I never went with anything that felt wrong and there were a lot of situations I turned down - that just coupled with not having much luck with anyone I was attracted to, and stranger - having mutual bad luck with people I was attracted to for reasons beyond our control).

There's something really awful I've been feeling about being on the spectrum lately - ie. that if you're from a k-selected family and on the spectrum or if your parents raised you with k-selected values, to be on the spectrum means you're genetically inferior in the worlds eyes and thus the only right you have is to be r-selected or fast-life history strategy which means, in your vast inferiority, the only right you have is to throw yourself at absolutely anyone - again because you're fundamentally inferior and you have to treat yourself like genetic pond scum because it's where we'd slot your ultimate value as a human being (ie. that you're 'different' in any way and we didn't smash your face in with a brick for being born - you owe us all of your freedom and we get to tell you who are, you have no right whatsoever to set your identity because you're still breathing at our inconvenience) and you have no right to do anything but treat yourself the way the world would value you, which is nothing. My tolerance for the NT superiority complex is really flagging and has been especially since the middle of the last decade - watching all Lord of the Flies break out in the political world, seeing that truth of any kind is for freaks, losers, and weirdos (like the GameB lot) and you hang people from a flagpole by their boxers if they say anything you haven't heard before, they're like ultraviolent children that never grow up, high school is forever, and their core value above all others is violence and Machiavellianism, which we know for certain at this point with AI, synthetic biology, environmental constraints, etc. means either human extinction or hard reset if we don't either completely redo incentive structures or have China style dictatorship and Sesame social credit systems. I'm starting to think of them as the genetic and social suicide pact.

She's telling anyone whose listening that it's okay to be k-selected even in a world where everything is going toward r-selection and not be a suicide machine over getting your genes into the next generation even when it takes penning checks for kids you never get to see or finding a guy who'll beat you but has high status and good looks or turning yourself inside out and torturing yourself for the approval of a high-status imbecile with no values above their own immediate self-interest and who either won't raise the kids or who'd raise them to be as useless as they are. She's poking almost everything about the modern dating world in the eyes in very satisfying ways.

What I said above is a bit of a mouthful but a couple less colorful distillations:

1) I think it's okay for people to admit when the dating world is twisted metal and opt out accordingly.

2) Ideally while people who really want to be in relationships should keep an eye out and keep themselves in the best physical and psychological shape they can, and stay somewhat close to opportunity, if their choice is between self-destructing to meet really narrow/procrustean standards which would make them much less than they are or staying intact and not having kids - stay intact, within a few generations your genes wash out and have very little impact on your progeny.

On issues of 'bigger' existence:

3) The whole 'All we're here to do is make copies of ourselves' - if one believes we all cease to exist at death then there's no punishment for not having kids and there's no extension of conscious existence by having children (and Woody Allen's right if that's the case - living on in other people's memories won't matter). The only system I'm aware of which say there's an afterlife for parents and no afterlife for bachelors / bachelorettes is Shaivism and TBH it's just a Hindu version of Catholic fertility policy, don't sweat it - check the NDE literature and see if it makes a clean cartesian break for deep NDE's around people who have children vs don't, my guess would be that there's no such break regardless of what our biological instincts might suggest. OTOH if you worry about an afterlife and consider that you have an identity that follows, doing significant damage to that identity in order to conform to make some particular milestone that you were out of bounds with society on, the price for that might not end at death and might last quite a long time.

The issue some people might fear is getting mugged and taken advantage of in their elder years if they have no family. Fair. That could happen having been married or having an estranged spouse and children just as easily but there's also living in communities and places where there's some degree of safety in numbers.

I think this is a western cultural phenomena. Case in point is Japan. Japan is a non-western culture that has complete uniform social adherence to the corporate individualism of the United States. when they lost WWII, the shame drove their society to adopt American values of the victors. This included (among other things) individualism where women forgo traditional marriage arrangements and enter the dating market as free agents. The result is scary and extreme.

Japan's young people (particularly young men but even women) are experiencing loneliness and disconnection from society. The high expectations that men achieve in Japan's highly competitive corporate environment means they are unworthy for dating if they don't live up to societal expectations. The results is many hundreds of thousands of young people don't even bother leaving their bedrooms leaving their parents to ponder what happened?

While some elements of this are unique to Japan, I think this is a taste of what the rest of the western world will experience in the future.

Btw, among chimps, the alpha is not necessarily the strongest physically; he can be weaker than some others but have strong alliances/friends among the male folk.

Kinda rings a bell, no?

Don't know if you're familiar with Peter Zeihan, he's a geopolitical strategist whose been framing a lot of his thinking about the future in terms of demographic collapse. This is the sort of thing where countries start losing power based on loss of head count. He said the US was doing better than most western countries in terms of generational replacement rates although he worried that Gen Z's fertility might fall off a cliff and it's hard to tell where this will go for millennials. Best we can hope for, if we do lose our baby boom echoes, is that Elon Musk's Tesla bots can make up the difference for the birth rate plummet.

I also have a distinct feeling that we're in a time and place where things are different in this sense - through history the Y chromosome has been exfoliated regularly but this is less true with the XX (not for joyous reasons of course - lack of women's rights). In this case this situation's really going to select for men and women who can get along even despite what almost feels like an organized cultural effort to sabotage fertility, there'll be a bumper crop of both dog men and cat women (some decent but just eccentric, others pretty insufferable) and it might well be that what shakes out in a few generations is a much more cohesive society. That's probably at least in part wishful thinking but I would say misogyny and misandry, to the degree that some people are more inclined toward them, are ultimately misanthropic and if nature can more readily select both out right now that may be to our benefit.

That's reminiscent of dominance vs. competence, and the possibility that sometimes leadership will be selected on how well they organize the troupe.

I'm not familiar with Zeihan, but I am familiar with John Calhoun's mouse utopia experiments from the 1960s. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-ne ... 180954423/

Calhoun observed mice and rats reach a certain population density then they consistently developed strange and sinister behaviour. What appeared to happen is that aggressive mice would stake out the best spots in the enclosures creating large numbers of isolated and lonely mice. The mice started behaving in a manner that was counterintuitive to their own survival.

While humans are more complex than mice (and one can argue we have more control over our environment) the model of unfair distribution might also impact or alter our psychology, Loneliness and isolation in the mouse utopia is mirrored in the despair many people feel in 2022. Despair is defined as a complete loss of hope and lack of optimism,.