Hustle Economy

Sizzle & Steak: Hustling the Hustlers

Hustlers and the Hustled

Today’s Hustle Economy is measured in market shares of ‘influence‘. How many Followers do you have? How many subs (subscribers)? Comments? Likes? Views? What’s your engagement like? In an age when anyone can have a free digital soapbox to prosthelytize from our egos become our brand. So, when you attack an idea you also attack the brand; and when you attack the brand you also attack the ego whose identity is the brand.

Our livelihoods, our wellbeing, are vitally connected to with a Brand of Me which in turn is intimately connected to the self. The separation between man and brand becomes more difficult when his revenue stream(s) is dependent upon man and brand being synonymous. That brand’s value is also quantified and qualified by the platforms (soapbox) it’s based on. Lose followers, lose viewers, lose money and lose self. As a result you get pathological hustlers grifting on other pathological hustlers by selling them access to exposure, influence and and insurance for their very precarious-but-lucrative brand of me. In turn, this “insurance” is a buffer against losing an equally precarious sense of self.

From 2000 to about 2015 organizing live events and conventions was a fairly lucrative proposition in the burgeoning Hustle Economy. Being a speaker at a TED talk held a certain gravitas for the Brand of Me who was invited to relate his very important, self-affirming ideas to a rapt audience. Today, not so much. The TEDx series saw to it that anyone could pay-to-play and thus debased any legitimacy the original TEDs started with. I remember the pay-to-play grift that destroyed the late 80s’ metal scene in Hollywood. Show promoters would buy out a classic venue like Gazzari’s or the Troubadour for a night and then talk “up-and-coming bands” into playing the gigs. All they had to do was sell enough tickets to cover their portion of whatever the promoter had paid to reserve the venue. Whether the bands decided to sell their tickets at a profit or a loss was irrelevant to the promoters – they just had to cover the rent on the club for that night. Most promoters were making their money on marking up that rent, and a percentage of the alcohol sales they’d arrange with club owners. It didn’t matter if the bands were great or they sucked, just that they covered the rent with ticket sales – usually to friends and family to come watch them play on the same stage that Van Halen and Ratt got their start on. The promoters weren’t selling actual talent, they were selling the fantasy of playing on historic stages in L.A. to guys who believed they were good enough to play them. By 1989 pay-to-play was killing what was once a vibrant music scene that naturally culled the talentless bands from the great ones.

Hustle Economy conventions today are following the same pay-to-play graft. It makes little difference what the niché is – masterminds, hotseats, summits, etc. – conventions have become Brand Showcases replete with (gumroad) book signings and the hot girl “Booth Candy” to prove proof-of-concept (i.e. Receipts). Convention promoters care less about the messages of the personalities who speak at their events and more about the gravitas it brings to their event (which is also part of their own Brand of Me). And the loudest most extroverted (pathological) brands of that year always draw attention.

What you get then is a competition of escalation. Punch the biggest guy in the face as soon as you arrive in the prison yard or you’ll end up as his bitch. If you want to make a name for yourself as a niché marketer (especially as a noob in the Manosphere) you have to punch up. Call the biggest name in that sphere a charlatan or a hack and some of his followers might defect to your cult out of spite. Grifters sell other grifters programs and templates to ensure their brand’s value, which increasingly is tied to their own sense of personal worth. Mastermind sessions and “hot seat” workshops become psychotherapy for the Hustle Economy “Guru“.

Insurance of personal brand value will be big business in this decade. It will be sold using the same perception marketing that Instagram influencers use. It will be based on the same insecurities the Hustler sells his products with. Image is all – the Hustler becomes the hustled – but image is fleeting. Even mediocre minds can figure out how to jump on a current trend. Copy & paste a viral tag, aligning with something trending; all that is easy to do, but most niché marketeers lack the talent and insight to understand (much less foresee) a zeitgeist. Good hustlers borrow, great hustlers steal, but the true “ideas guys” are exceptionally rare in the Hustle Economy. Innovators and New Thinkers are the carrion that draws the Brand of Me vultures out in the open.

Ideas Guys

Hustle Economy carpet baggers live a very insecure and unpredictable existence. They are not innovators – they are fast followers. Not only is their sense of self fused to their brand, but their brand’s success is their metric of self-esteem. Their (often tenuous) mental health is measured in Followers, subscribers, views, comments, likes, engagement, analytics and clicks-per-minute (CPM). It’s never quality of ideas that define value; it’s only numbers. Money in the payment processor or number of email addresses on your list. It’s never ultimate causes / effects, it’s only proximate causality. It’s the number of trees over the health of the forest. But the numbers don’t lie, so the new teachers give the Lost Boys cigarettes, candy bars and cheap booze – or their emotionally proximate equivalents (hope). It’s what they really want, it’s what makes you money and it’s what your ego-brand’s long term security needs. Besides, if you don’t give the temporary salve for their miserable lives another Influencer has already copy & pasted your tags to lap you on the Hustle Economy racetrack.

Insecurity in self, brand, livelihood, sustainable ‘lifestyle creep’, even family relations are what define the Hustle Economy today. Most personal brands rarely last more than two years – at least in their initial incarnation. As such, there is a constant need for belief pivots and “brand makeovers” for influencers. Reinventing one’s “self” becomes a vital part of existence for the career grifter. And there’s a lot of money waiting the clever guy who figures out how to cater to this pivoting need. Those unable to adapt, or those who miss the cues of the rapidly changing zeitgeist, will become extinct. Only true innovators – the Ideas Guys – have any kind of real staying power, and that’s if they can roll with the social changes; if they can put off the ennui of seeing their ideas cannibalized and bastardized by the next wave of hustlers who will plagiarize their work with impunity.

Continued in part III next week,…

Sizzle & Steak: Evangelism in the Hustle Economy

What exactly are we teaching the Lost Boys today?

I came across the term Lost Boys in 2016. It’s attributed to the fan base that Dr. Jordan Peterson was generating around that time, but I had heard similar references to “drop out” young men as early as 2014. The fem-stream media was concerned that these 18-29 year old men were deliberately thwarting women’s mating/life strategies by not preparing themselves for adulthood. Women were concerned that fewer young men were going to be suitably ignorant-yet-dutiful husband material by the time they were 30. Meanwhile, TradCon media (predictably) made this crisis of masculinity all about men “shirking their responsibilities” from a want to “perpetuate their adolescence”. As expected, men assuming more masculine responsibility was the cure to solving this social malaise. Both sides of the ideological spectrum have never had a real interest in discerning the root causes for the now two generations of Lost Boys. To do so would challenge both ideology’s base presumptions about innate sex differences, feminism, gynocentrism and female empowerment stretching back to the sexual revolution. Hannah Rosen called it the End of Men in The Atlantic back in 2012. The Kidults and Peter Pan Men were an easily shamed novelty. Breitbart called them the Drop Out Generation and we’re similarly dismissed as “lazy kids not preparing themselves for being fathers and husbands.” Even I threw my hat in the ring when I penned Are You Experienced.

In 2021 we are now two generations into the Lost Boys. Just like the latter half of the Millennials, now Gen Z young men are becoming the next wave of guys trying to find purpose in a life that has no need of them – or they’re endlessly derided for not living up to an old order standard. As Rian Stone has said, they are sheep in search of a shepherd – students with no teacher – young men who are effectively rudderless in life. This is where the Red Pill, Manosphere, male space or whatever we’re calling it now is stepping in to become the teachers these young men have lacked. But what are we actually teaching the Lost Boys? From what I see today, most “coaches” haven’t done much more than profit by them. Today, they are more lost now than when Dr. Peterson identified them. What will be the long-term human, societal, cost of two generations of young men guided, taught and/or hustled into, or out of, embracing conventional masculinity?

The Blind Lead the Blinder

“Who’s the more foolish, the Blue Pill chump or the chumps who follow him?”

If you’ve read my latest book The Rational Male, Religion you’ll already be familiar with the concept of The Brand of Me. Today, everyone is their own brand. From the frustrated soccer mom, to the 12-year-old girl interacting with “friends” she’s never met, to OnlyFans girls, to niche marketing Gurus, everyone you know is actively engaged in some form of personal brand management. Even your grandmother on FaceBook is her own PR agent. Likewise, masculinity/positivity gurus are their own personal brands. I’m emphasizing ‘are’ here because we live our own brand identity as our personal identity in our day to day lives now.

It’s becoming exceedingly difficult to separate the ‘man‘ from his brand today. In the Hustle Economy, managing brand identity, is managing livelihood, is managing personal identity. Everyone is their brand. In the early 2000’s it was the likes of Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian who were the pioneers of being famous for being famous. Neither had (has) any real exceptional talent that made them celebrities; they simple were famous. There are other examples, but most of that “fame” was generated via careful personal brand management in a time when social media was nothing like it is today. Then, it took a lot more work and money to curate fame for being famous. Now, in the new order, it’s never been easier to create an easily believable perceptions of fame – even if it’s just a low degree of it.

It’s all sizzle and no steak. E-Celebrity is now reality show entertainment that virtually anyone, any demographic, can create for themselves. In my 2014 essay Hysteria I detailed the social experiment of a guy who created his own instant celebrity:

Basically, the guy had a few friends follow him around the mall, one guy filming him and the other two guys (I can’t tell if any of his hired guns were women) acting as his “groupies” or entourage. He goes around identifying himself as “Thomas Elliot” when people, mostly women, ask him his name. Eventually, he begins to pile up admiring and gawking female attention, which only snowballs into more female attention. Apparently, not one of these starstruck chicks thought to question if Thomas Elliot was a real celebrity. That’s the power of preselection and fame; so powerful, it can disengage a woman’s neural logic circuitry.

Remember, the linked videos were produced in 2012. This experiment required a film team, at least 2-3 collaborators to give the guy some legitimacy. You don’t need this today. In fact you don’t even need great post-production or computer skills now. All that’s required to create a similar video is a smart phone and Instagram. Social proof, preselection, status, clout, prestige, indignation and fame have never been easier to manufacture for average people than in the first 20 years of the 21st century.

Never have more people (and mostly women) been so rewarded for so little real work, talent, virtuoso, education or creativity. And rewarded with money, adulation, admiration, “respectability“, love, attention and importance. Today, anyone can become influential – an influencer. Potentially, anyone can get paid better and enjoy more status than the career they may have went to years of college to get. As a result, the value of a formal real education is debased.

But, who cares about college or education anyway, right? Even STEM fields and the hard sciences have been infiltrated by Wokezis. Academia is rife with socialists and Marxism at every level now. Post-modernism has owned the humanities and the arts since at least the 1960s if not the late 1800s. True education has become a grift too. Most universities are just very expensive diploma mills that supply you with the paperwork necessary to allow you to be considered for an entry-level job – usually determined by an underpaid Karen in the HR department; likely with less “education” than what you paid for just to get an audience with her. Now, is it any wonder that education and “preparing oneself for life and responsibilities” is effectively worthless to the Lost Boys generation?

‘Cause I’m a twenty-first century digital boy
I don’t know how to live but I got a lot of toys
My daddy’s a lazy middle-class intellectual
My mommy’s on Valium, so ineffectual
Ain’t life a mystery, yeah?

Bad Religion, 21st Century Digital Boy, 1990

Damn, that song was prophetic. If an education’s purpose is to allow the graduate access to the job (in the working world) he believes will profit him best, and he’d have better results in the Hustle Economy, why bother with the investment of time and student debt? If a young woman can make a fortune from the minimum investment needed to be an OnlyFans influencer (sex worker) why bother to study nursing? If a guy can make more money and be more attractive as a “life coach” for far less investment than a degree in a suspicious major like psychology what’s the incentive to be educated?

The motive is profit and the process is profit. In the New Order we’ve become hyper-efficient at commodifying both motive and process. This has led to a mistrust, if not disdain, of education, science (as a method), wisdom and genuine creative inspiration.

“If it doesn’t lead to my first million dollars what’s the point of doing it?”
“Fuck it, I’ll just be a stripper OnlyFans girl or entrepreneur.”

As a result the Hustle Economy tends to attract pathological personalities. As most of my readers know, crazy tends to draw more crazy into its orbit. Pathological doesn’t always mean criminally insane. Guys like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk had/have pathological reality distortion fields about them. And while they are what we’d excuse as eccentric, maybe asocial, they weren’t destructive malcontents. Unfortunately, they’re the rarer exceptions. Get rich quick, get fit quick, get clout quick, get love, adoration, props, respectability, attention, concern, empathy/sympathy, and commiseration instantly, with the least amount of money and personal investment is an irresistible pull to pathological personalities. In any other era, these guys would have to be supremely creative and driven to get up and over the loser status barrier to become more than they started as. And only then after a constant learning from defeat and setbacks. For today’s TL;DR generation, if it can’t be delivered instantaneously why else would you bother doing something?

“Only the insane have the strength to prosper. Only those who prosper truly judge what is sane.”

Part II, next week,…

She’s Not Yours

My colleague and friend, Rian Stone, took it upon himself to breakdown the brilliant simplicity of a common Manosphere idiom:

She was never yours, it was just your turn.

This phrase has been around since the earliest days of the Pickup Artists’ (PUA) online communities. And like many of the old wisdoms of that time the reasoning for it gets distorted by the various factions of what’s become the Manosphere today. In 2020 the more extreme end of MGTOW communities – Black Pill, Doomers, and VolCels – are what most mainstream audiences conflate with Red Pill. What they, along with Success Porn niche marketers, have done is pick and pull the parts of Red Pill praxeology that resonates with their personal beliefs and circumstances and demonize what doesn’t. Both factions have an interest in misconstruing what the Red Pill has taken 20 years to develop. It doesn’t really serve the ends of either perspective to spend too much time thinking about a contentious Red Pill principle when misrepresenting it is more valuable in confirming their belief sets – especially when doing so generates views, subs and ad revenue.

To the Doomer mindset She’s not yours… is confirmation of women’s duplicitous, fickle or evil nature. That’s not to say the nihilistic perspective doesn’t approach women’s nature from an objective Red Pill understanding, it just means they focus on surrendering to it and giving up on women. This confirmation bias also gets mixed up in the Doomer understanding of Hypergamy. Hypergamy resonates with them because it confirms the idea that all women will dump a guy at the first sign of his losing an Alpha Frame veneer; an act which he must constantly maintain in a world of endless options and online attention for women. Slip up once too often and at the first opportunity she’s gone. It’s the fallacy of Hypergamy as a straight jacket, and She’s not yours… justifies the defeatism. You will never find a lasting contentment with a woman because she holds first right of refusal in any intimate relationship (i.e. Briffault’s Law). Ergo, sooner or later your turn will be over and all the effort, time and emotion you invested in her will be for nothing (i.e. Sunk Cost, Relational Equity). In fact, it may be worse than nothing when you consider the opportunity cost of having bothered with trying to make her yours in the first place. While the juice might taste really good in the short term, it’s never really worth the squeeze in the long term. This conclusion is what really upsets the Success gurus because it’s a hard logic to refute – at least from their own Man Up! perspective.

That’s the Doom Pill interpretation. It’s based on reflexive, immutable binary extremes – the default reaction of this generation – because it confirms a hopelessness that defines them. Ironically, it was the very PUAs of the 2000s they despise so much who originally coined the phrase. Back then it served as a reminder to guys to never get too attached to one particular woman while dating several women concurrently. It was almost a mantra to ward off ONEitis because they were spinning plates and “catching feelings” for one girl tended to end up destroying them. It was a maxim that worked best as a preventive medicine since most practitioners of Game saw it as a means to achieve the monogamy their Blue Pill social conditioning convinced them was possible. Average men build lives around serial monogamy; it’s always been the surest way to solve the average man’s reproductive problem. So when you open them up to an abundance of sexual/intimate potential via Game they tend to use it to get their Dream Girl and ignore what the Red Pill says about women’s nature.

In today’s ‘sphere, She was never yours, it was just your turn is a salve for guys who’ve already invested in a woman and she dumped or divorced them. The presumption is that despite all their best Blue Pill qualifications or their Game savvy, Hypergamy gets the best of all women and she’ll move on to the bigger and better deal. This perspective presupposes a stable monogamy, not spinning plates, is the goal-state for every guy. Notice the maxim here is cast in the past tense. She was never yours,…At some stage a man believes she is his (or should be) and she no longer is now. Thus, She was never yours becomes a post-facto rationalization to the guy who’s probably feeling gutted by his breakup. The real issue is the guy’s want for a permanent solution to his desire for intimacy. We see this all the time among simps who spend small fortunes (monthly) to achieve some kind of virtual intimacy with his favorite OnlyFans cam-girl. In this case, She was never yours is reconfirmed for simps over and over as they move from one cam-girl obsession to the next.

For the Success Porn guru, all this is grist for the mill. On one hand, men struggling with confidence (see social skills), achieving intimacy/sex and finding purpose are their bread and butter. On the other hand, what they’re usually selling is the Blue Pill ideal of a sustainable contentment for otherwise discontent men. That contentment includes the hope that a permanent, loving and monogamous relationship with one woman is not only possible, but is also a sign of his authentic manhood. When Dr. Phil sells this hope we write him off as a naive Pollyanna and old order thinker. However, this same Blue Pill hope is repackaged and sold online as a return to masculine virtue by today’s Life Coaches in the Hustle Economy. The permanence of your contentment amounts to your ability to qualify for it and sustain it with their (usually repackaged) concept of masculine virtue. Any discontent on the part of the client is reflective of his own lack of determination or hard work to achieve it. 80’s Televangelists and 90’s Multi-level Marketing hustlers used similar graft. It’s really a monetized version of the philosophy of personal responsibility — which has always been a darling of traditional conservatism and now a staple of personal development. Any failure of the concept is always attributable to the man’s deficient effort and investment, which can then be attached to his character. This isn’t to say that all personal development guys are unscrupulous hustlers, just that the true responsibility of education rests with the student.

She’s not yours, it was just your turn, and other unignorable truths that the Red Pill makes men aware of, defeats the self-reinforcing circular logic of the personal responsibility hustle. It forces the hustler to admit that something outside men’s control might have an effect on a their lives. Rather than accept this and work within the framework, the response is more of the same; deny the phenomenon exists, or presume that even acknowledging it is indicative of a defeatist mentality – thus, a shirking of personal responsibility which completes the circular logic.

This is the origin of the “Truthful Anger” fallacy. Around 2015 the instructors working for Real Social Dynamics (RSD) started getting a lot of questions about the material in The Rational Male from students attending RSD seminars. At some point they had to address these questions, but to do so would mean acknowledging the validity of the concepts in my book – concepts that challenged the positivity grift they were rapidly converting over to during this time. The solution was to acknowledge the truth in my work, but tacitly disqualify it by presuming it came from a place of anger. They then cautioned against internalizing it at the risk of becoming angry or bitter against women — both presumptions commonly used by mainstream gynocentric norms. It was misconstrued as “truthful anger”; poignantly true, but best not to dwell on it if a guy wants to be happy. In other words, would you rather be happy or would you rather be right? Happiness is always easier to sell than truth.

Now that we understand the opposing sides of the impermanence of women debate, we also have to consider the Lie of Individuation that usually gets thrown into the mix to dismiss the She’s not yours maxim. The Individuation Fallacy is most easily understood as:

“People are all individually special cases; each a unique product of their environments and experiences, and are far too individually complex to understand via generalizations according to sex, etc.”

The individual supersedes any commonalities attributable to biology or evolution, and usually focuses solely on social constructionism and personal circumstance as a basis for motivating behavior, developing personality and influencing others accordingly. The supremacy of the individual is the natural extension of an underlying belief in The Blank Slate. When you start from a belief that we’re all functional equals everyone is an angel or a devil according to the choices they made. But depending on the person’s circumstances they can be forgiven or damned for the consequences of those choices according to how we interpret their character as individuals. This is how we get rationales like, not all women are like that and “People are too complex to categorize” to dismiss the unignorable commonalities we see in men and women in the information age. No one likes to think they aren’t in some way unique as much as they don’t like to think determinism has influenced (in some way) what they think makes them unique. And since I’m sure you’ve made this connection already, yes, the Individuation Fallacy dovetails nicely into a doctrine of personal responsibility.

When we read some example of a woman opting out of a relationship (or sex) with one guy to take up with another, the reflexive response is to individualize her behavior according to her individualized circumstances. She’s damaged, she’s got Daddy Issues, she’s insecure because you weren’t Man Enough, etc. — any and every consideration that points away from categorizing her actions as commonalities in women’s innate nature are the reflexive thought process. She’s not yours, it was just your turn defines her actions in a concrete visceral understanding of women’s nature that conflicts with the Blank Slate‘s individualism. In this case the maxim is a description, not a prescription.

Men have an evolved need to know paternity. Unhindered by social strictures or women’s Hypergamous filtering men would opt for unlimited access to unlimited sexuality as our innate and preferred mating strategy. I’ve written a lot about this so I wont belabor it here, but a majority of men, over the course of history, will never be able to actualize this strategy. Ergo, socially enforced monogamy became the best mating strategy compromise for men as modified by the selection pressures of women’s mating strategies. The risk in this compromise is the assurance of paternity. If a man is going to compromise mating opportunities with many women to parentally invest in one woman, the deal must come with one condition: the child must be his genetic stock or the compromise invalidates his existence (evolutionarily speaking). To ensure this men evolved a mental firmware that predisposes us to jealousy, mate guarding and desire to possess a woman. This is why we develop a A Sense of Ownership with our girlfriends, wives and children. The dynamics of Kin Selection and Kin Altruism all find their root in men’s imperative to ascertain their paternity and protect their genetic legacy.

The need to control women’s sexuality is nothing less than men’s evolutionary compulsion to ensure that their compromise in parental investment is not for nothing. In a social order where masculine responsibility to wife and children was balanced with a commensurate masculine authority to enforce those responsibilities, men could nominally control the reproductive process. Part of that process included possessing a woman. This was both an evolutionary imperative and a social imperative.

Every man loves a slut, he just wants her to be his slut.

In today’s gynocentric social order the thought of owning a woman is an affront to the female-primary sensibilities that stem from individuation. Feminism and gynocentrism have conditioned generations of women to believe they are autonomous ‘things‘ with no need for anything outside themselves – least of all men – to find true contentment. They are Strong Independent® women who believe their fulfillment comes from self-ownership. Eschewing a man’s surname in marriage, or even marriage at all, is a sign of independence and stiff middle finger to the idea of passive femininity or notions of ever submitting to a man’s authority. The evolved complementarity between men and women is replaced with the social contrivance of an idealized egalitarianism. Husband and wife is replaced with “Equal Partners“.

For women, the problem with this equalist fantasy is biology and evolved impulse are excused, if not encouraged, in a social order that prioritizes women’s mating strategies. Literally anything goes when the worst consequences of women’s Hypergamy can (enthusiastically) always be attributed to men’s inability to accept them as individuals.

The problem for men is that we still have an innate want to possess a woman to ensure our paternity and invest in our genetic legacies. As mentioned, this desire for permanency with one woman was both an evolutionary imperative and a social imperative in a patriarchal social order. In a gynocentric social order the evolutionary imperative to possess a woman still remains, but the social imperative says…

She was, is, will, never be yours, it was just your turn.

And that is why this maxim rubs so many men the wrong way.