TheRedArchive

~ archived since 2018 ~

Consilience: The Business of Me

Rian Ston
January 5, 2021

The purpose of this essay is the same as every other piece of content I put out. It’s men helping men and swapping notes. Praxeology through the concept of convergent evidence as it applies to the Red Pill. I will be expanding on James’ points in the same note-sharing manner we do everything else.

To read the original piece, go here.

I.

The appeal of a steady job is the trade off between potential and stable revenue. Sacrifice potential riches for the steady, consistent budget. During the 2020 worldwide global crisis, a growing group of men are seeing the not so stable corporate job as a risk. This isn’t a pandemic issue. Pandemics are public health crisis. Our economic issues are self inflicted. More men are trying their hand at entrepreneurship, leveraging the information and attention economies to start the business model called the “Brand of Me.” What a perfect blend of millennial narcissism and capitalism.

Like everything involving talent the Brand of Me is a slave to the Pareto Principle. Most people earn nothing. A few at the top will have everything. There are only so many outraged talking heads one can have on feminism, racism, libtards and MAGA nuts. The biggest personalities, most attractive platitude spouter's and longest running Me’s clean up after the crisis. Everyone else begs at the trough for access to Me’s audience. I didn’t see the value in trading up one risky career for another, so over the past two years I have worked to make something simple: provide scalable value to a group of people who are receptive to the content I provide while only using as much Me as I had to.

I’ve learned a lot in a short time. I was taken aback by some lessons from James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits. He talks about lessons learned from ten years of experience. There was a fair bit of consilience between our respective approaches. If you have an on-line business you quickly learn no one knows what they are doing and everyone is taking educated guesses while hoping for the best. So when multiple people from different approaches arrive at similar conclusions it’s not an accident. That consilience. I am proposing a new mental model for anyone looking to leave one unstable career for another on account of our self inflicted economic pandemic. Instead of the Brand of Me, I suggest the Business of Me. The difference is subtle, but I argue it’s vital.

I was lucky in my timing. I decided to leave the corporate world and join a loose connection of misogynist™ Me’s almost a year before COVID-19. My governments dollar-short and day-late response to the pandemic decimated the primary value of a corporate job: job security. I watched my wifes company restructure 80% of its full time employees and squeeze a ton of extra productivity and a pay cut out of the remainder. I’m sure for those people it was damned reassuring to know that their income was stable, until it wasn’t. Bills, vacations and expenses can be planned for, until they can’t. It mirrored my experience within the Red Pill. Whether a girlfriend, a wife, a career or a battle, everything is perfect until it meets resistance, things are great and we don’t need any help, until we do.

On the off-chance there is someone new to my work, when I discuss the Red Pill I’m talking about it’s pre-Me definition: the praxeology of sexual dynamics and strategy for the modern man. Whatever you’ve heard about government conspiracies, multicolored pill pop-philosophies and similar dick riding brandings is irrelevant. Men found that they can put their collective heads together and solve problems around women, relationship, sex, career, and more recently self actualization. It’s low on rigor it’s high on replication, much like entrepreneurship.

Worse than hard science, but more scientific than Science™.

II.

Mike Cernovich, The Hodge Twins, Roosh V, and hundreds of Me’s, having various levels of fame and one primary skillset: being as entertaining as possible with vaporware. Or, “How do I make the most money with least effort” hustling circles. Hustling used to describe drug dealers scraping together a few dollars while avoiding the police. Now it’s some virtue for the Me’s. The most resonant metaphor is for slowly killing clients who pay for the privilege, which is accidentally accurate in my opinion.

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, give a man fear, indignation and a villain and he will feed your multiple income streams for a lifetime. At least until you get banned from MailChimp, Facebook and Youtube on the same day. Hey, leverage that into ‘they don’t want you to hear my truth, follow me here to continue drip feeding my income!’ The business model is as brilliant as much as predatory. This may sound like anger, disdain or sour grapes, I should clarify that it’s closer to a cynical acceptance of human nature. I’m an adult and don’t believe in fairy tales, only ass models on Instagram, or Me’s.

Like any thirst mining ass-model, no one is forced to like their stuff. They cater to the demographic with more money than sense, more dream than actualization, and more emotions than utility. It’s all the same grift no matter how high you go. Goldman Sachs convinced Americans to keep their underwater mortgages in 2009 and no one says international finance is a grift. If you don’t think that’s a fair analogy to equate these plucky Me’s to an unregulated evil empire of mustache twirlers? read:

  • Launch by Jeff Walker; and

  • Trust me I’m Lying by Ryan Holiday

Pay attention to the identical strategies billion dollar media companies use to your local ‘content creator’ then get back to me. Last year I pointed out how this one Me who runs a ‘convention’ in south Florida was reading through Ryan’s work and implementing the strategies chapter by chapter, predicting his next moves. It matched perfectly. None of the hustle is an accident, or clever innovation. It’s disenfranchised men chasing after the gold rush. Most people didn’t make money on the gold rush either.

James Clear: author of Atomic Habits, which I admittedly have never read, put out a series of tweets on entrepreneurship. He is a self declared ten year entrepreneur who condensed his rules into some pithy platitudes. What caught my attention was that it paralleled mine.

This is called consilience, or converging evidence. Where I talked previously about low rigor and high replication consilience is how every good strategy within the Red Pill gains or loses stature. Read, watch or listen to a strategy and ask: “did this work for me?” (note: past tense, not a navel gazing future tense, this is important) The only evidence that matters is replicated evidence. Consilience is where more men in more walks of life can answer with ‘Yes.’ Values cannot be replicated, neither can hopes and dreams.

‘Should be’ doesn’t exist, only ‘Is.’

III

The tail can’t wag the dog. This is why so much of what you see on Twitter, Reddit, or Discord echo-chambers may call themselves Red Pilled but they aren’t. Instead of consilience you get clustered collections of platitudes designed to appeal to the aspirational values of the demographic. Just about all those values are impotent, unattainable, and no one else thinks of them as values, and that’s also by design. Without that, you don’t have an enemy to rally against. E.g.

  • They hate women. What monsters! Buy my course on Me!

  • They hate conservatives, what monsters! Buy my course on Me!

Again, audiences are split up into a demographics clusters. As the Me’s becomes familiar with the demographics in group and out group values, they shit out ‘worldly wisdom’ as a placating set of reassurances wrapped in wisdom wrapping paper topped with a Red Pilled bow. This isn’t men swapping notes, this is Instagram panderers knowing that if they show their ass, you’ll buy their merch. They call themselves Red Pilled and If you don’t get whats going on here, re-read the second sentence in this paragraph. You’re gullible and Me’s know that. You are here reading this so maybe there’s hope. The structure of the platitudes are:

  • You are special, it’s the world that is the problem

  • You have an enemy, it’s either feminism, government, liberals, PUAs, grifters, globalhomo’s (I’ve yet to get a clear definition of this boogeyman)

  • I am your aspirational model. My authenticity is perfect. Everyone else is lying to you.

  • I will give you impossible demands.

  • I will berate you when you don’t meet them and offer you information products to do better next time

This is not unlike how Catholics devised the idea of confession, absolution, and indulgences. If Me’s are secular-catholics, where are the Cardinals?

The top of this authentic demographic fuck pile are the gatekeepers. If you say the right things and repeat the right mantras they give you access to their audience. This isn’t speculation. YouTube tells you in the creator studio that the best way to grow is with collaborations. Twitch, Amazon, BlogSpot and WordPress even makes space for you to add guest authors to your free blog site! There is nothing Red Pilled about demagogues leveraging sycophants. I don’t know how to collaborate with experience, only to share it. I also know that a small beef with Me’s running the ‘War Room’ will get a half dozen third world sycophants to harass me for months, so I can confirm this is how things work. ‘War Room’ heh. I guess the ‘League of Extraordinary Gentlemen’ was taken.

As a reader, I don’t know about your aspirations, but I didn’t leave the military or the corporate world just so I could have another master with softer power and an uncertain standing with them. When I fuck up in the Navy, my Petty Officer chews my ass out. In my corporate career if I fuck up that promotion disappears, I get fired, my contract doesn’t get renewed. For better or for worse I knew where I stood. It would be hell on earth to wonder if the latest tweet or video irritated some thot-leader/ass model and you lose access to their authentic and loyal audience. Refusing to play that game is why my growth is much slower than it could be. I’m OK with that, but I’ll talk about slow money later.

Remember this isn’t sour grapes. It’s a reflection of the landscape. This is the result of a series of rational and logical choices one has to make to gain success. Yes i’m shitting on it, but life is shit and you’ll get messy. Make sure you can clean that shit off in a cold shower. Even if you wanted to take the high road and avoid it, the constant barrage of demands from aspiring Me’s for you to ‘debate me in good faith!’ or ‘show the other side!’ will simply weaponize your virtue (read:weak stomach) to step on your neck to inch further ahead in their reach. Their demands for free speech are always weapons of the powerless to attack the powerful, full stop. The Me’s goal isn’t to learn, to teach, or entertain. Me’s goal is to maximize reach while minimizing effort. You may not believe me, you are more than welcome to learn this lesson the hard way. Most Me’s burn out once they get their first viral Tweet and decent payday. Then they buy into their own hype and so my focus on longevity and sustainability can weather the occasional idiot running their mouth.

IV.

The Business of Me differs from the Brand of me in it’s subtle detachments. There is a detachment from the work which is vital for long term sustainability and mental health. The last thing I would want is to pull a Roosh and ‘find’ Jesus at the bottom of a bag of mushrooms with a potential demographic eager to fund his revelations. I would have a hard time swallowing the fact that a decade of work pick up artistry, a decade of lifestyle management, a core decade of my life is wasted and I have to pretend I popped out of one of those matrix batteries covered in the slime of my previous work. A business can pivot when things are no longer working because it’s not identity, it’s work. People have to pretend ‘I’m not like that anymore, I have been through all the bad boys and want to settle down with a nice customer like you!’

A lawyer can train in medicine and become a doctor without being thought of as a farce. Roosh can’t come back from the Ukraine and be thought of as a prophet. Cernovich can’t come back from fucking lady-boys in Thailand and become a political pundit. Well, to be accurate, they can (and do!) What they can’t do is handle the identity pivot without a little help from Columbian Santa showing something up their chimney every Christmas. You can do that if you like. I wrote earlier about sustainability in the business of me and cocaine doesn’t fit the model.

Business of Me implies there is a product. Me’s have onlyfans pages, but built for men. You pay money to see the ‘private nudes.’ A business can’t survive prostitution. This means you require a product of value outside of your own ego. This means books, this means videos, this means podcasts, this means events, this means merchandise which someone would have bought even if your logo wasn’t plastered across it. Everything exists outside of yourself, so it’s not about you(Me.) If you died tomorrow would anyone want your stuff? Do you honestly see anyone buying Gorilla Mindset without seeing Cernovich ‘own the libtards!’?

It’s a Business of me because you aren’t your product. If I write something that offers no value, I get rid of it. If Me’s write something that offers no value, they lashes out at you for not liking it or hide you from their audience. Don’t believe me? Remember when Jack Murphy was proud of driving his girlfriend to hook ups? He is, to this day harassed by people who throw that up every time he talks about How Obama supporters like Trump or some such. I thought it was weird and incongruent.I even mentioned to him that it could makes perfect sense from a business perspective. He used to be married, had kids, got divorced. That was everything a man is ‘supposed’ to do in life. Now that he got that out of the way, he wanted to spin plates with one of them at home to bake bread. Every man who is in the dating market knows that the girls they sleep with are sleeping with someone else. There is literally nothing there you have to hide from or defend or explain away. It’s modern life, sans kayfabe.

My guess is that he was ego invested in the new grift. Disenfranchised, capital-L liberal politics don’t much mix with sexual degenerate demographics. Then again, when you write about driving your girlfriend to get railed that doesn’t exactly come off in a shower. Instead, pretend it didn’t exist and keep blocking people until it hopefully goes away while posting stories about how the Liberals don’t let you spend time with your kids to appeal to the sympathetic demographic sensibilities.

When authentic identity pivots happen, bringing up authenticity sucks. A Business of me isn’t ego invested like this. Past decisions don’t need to get buried. Past decisions follow a trajectory to where the business is now while the business moves forward, better. Remember when IBM supplied that 1945 Austrian painter with computers to help round people up for his ‘work camps?’ That pivoted into ‘no one gets fired for hiring IBM’ pretty quickly. Everyone knows what they did and it’s OK, everyone makes mistakes, plus it WAS very efficient.

V.

I want to expand on James points with my experience making similar choices, and expand upon them

How I run my business. 2020 was my 10th year as an entrepreneur. Here are some "rules" I try to follow after a decade of stumbling around building my company. Not rules for all businesses. Just how I choose to run mine:

Create something useful. If it doesn't deliver value to the reader, don't do it.

I don’t pander to the audience, I make videos, write content, authored books and audio-book versions. In every word I wrote, I wondered how this helps the reader in their own life. Not their feelings, their life. You see if in small examples. For example, in my Youtube series: Relationship Breakdown, I made the choice to add a section that is in every video called ‘Why this matters to you.’ This part is where the listener has to map any lessons to his actual life. It separates these from being Dear Abby articles for Men. Me’s point at people and laugh or point at bad people as a reassurance that they (read:you) are good people.

That’s not value, that’s pandering.

My Red Pilled Coffee videos involve a warning not to eat paint: so you don’t over-misinterpret to the point of sabotaging your success. What objective measure does your work add utility to the reader? If you can’t find one, then you’re not there yet, keep working.

That’s not pandering, that’s value.

Create something timeless. The more evergreen your work, the longer time-line you have to find success.

There has been not a small amount of pressure for me to generate content towards the outrage of the day. Now you will have to do some of it. But if that’s all you do, prepare to be in the same situation as Ukranian Pick up Jesus, or MAGA Me’s who don’t have a 2021 roadmap. Do you honestly think anyone will be watching Tim Pool videos about the Trump election hearings when they pop up on their feeds next year? Do you think anyone is reading ‘From Democrat to Deplorable’ once the next election cycle is underway? I joke when I complain about my cooking videos have the worst performance out of all my videos. But when I grow, each one of them is as watchable today as they were last year. This goes for the relationship breakdowns, the sidebar series and the rest of them. Fuccfiles, my own book too! Part memoir, part homage to Neil Strauss: The game and part 12 Rules for Life. A sailors life picking up women, a man succeeding through hardship and persistence is as timeless a subject of worth as any. After a few reads people notice the subtext of how I got myself a girlfriend and stopped being an idiot. Ten years from now, god willing, it will be as resonant now as it was in 2008 when I was doing it.

Optimize for time before money. The most important question is, "How do I want to spend my days?" Make as few choices as possible that violate your answer.

Now this isn’t a slam against Jon from Modern Life Dating, but this is a difference in work philosophy. When I was 23 I was more than happy to burn the candle at both ends. Showing up for a sail with 3 hours of sleep and not even sober enough to be hung over was fun, for a while. I could joke with the boys about how I was still a damned good sailor when I looked like I was hit in the face with a shovel. I could joke with my boss and he’d say ‘So was she worth it?’ to which the answer was always yes, but actually no. The story was worth it. I don’t want to pull the old man card here as I haven’t earned it yet. I will pull the nothing-to-prove card. I have enough stories that I don’t need to beat myself up to have any more. Jon, with that crazy work ethic isn’t there. He busts his ass, 16 hour days for months at a time. He runs a humble online course the same way the military runs a deployment. After they finish he’s burned out and has to go unwind. He had to shave his head because he couldn’t carve out enough time to get proper haircuts without cutting into the bottom line. In a way, he and I are running the opposite paths, optimizing for time or money. Now I still have enough money from smart investing, a lucrative corporate career and a modest military payout/pension that I don’t need more money. If I did I would have never left my corporate gig. Information Security analysts make good enough bank, but I didn’t want or need shiny widgets or bigger numbers in my account: I wanted time. Had I gone the other route I can only imagine how much of my extra revenue would go into buying me my physical health back, only to waste it away again on another money and time trade off. There is no right answer here, but I haven’t needed an alarm clock in 2 years, nor have I needed a drink or a pill or the runners high of a shopping experience to function the next day. You can see us both working in tandem, pick your path and own the tradeoffs.

Once you start making money, do not sacrifice your lifestyle simply to make more money. Again, first ask, "How do I want to spend my days?" Then, within that subset, "How can I make the most money possible?"

I moved this point to be together with the one before it because they are related. I see guys make their first dollar on-line then instantly upgrade their social media flexing. Psychologically I have to believe that the customer looks at this instant lifestyle inflation and thinks to themselves ‘did I gain anything here or did I simply fund this guys Miller Lite truck nut masculinity lifestyle?’ I hope you never see me bragging about how much money I make for my clients while I can’t get together a single testimony, even though my Instagram is full of cash. If you’re wondering, yes, I am referring to someone specifically. I do like the guy so you’ll have to do your own sleuthing. This is an guesswork granted, time will tell if this wisdom holds.

It’s not an uneducated opinion. In my previous life as an art history major, I recall the medieval Italian period had many ultra wealthy aristocrats (e.g. the Medicis) had extravagant palaces for being successful merchants. They used to have ostentatious facades and went through cycles of making money, showing money, and peasant uprisings burning the palaces down. Soon, giant palaces were built with modest facades. All the decadence was behind their walls, and you can see those buildings today when you travel to Italy. No one has a problem with you doing better than them, but I don’t see long term success happening when you rub their noses in it. I started my Business of me with the same lifestyle I would be living before. Some people see it as a flex, others see me as one of the poors, but it’s consistent and I can’t forsee someone giving me grief about their funding my lavish lifestyle at their expense. Again, time will tell, but it kinda already has.

Build assets that compound. Eliminate problems, responsibilities, and obligations that compound. Your business should feel easier to sustain each year.

The smartest piece of business advice I’ve ever gotten was from Richard Cooper: Don’t work with retards, and don’t work with people who work with retards. I sometimes wonder if I left revenue on the table, but I also haven’t had some retard jeopardize my business with his stupidity either. I can imagine what life would be like had I decided to stop working with the guys from Rule Zero and continued to work with the old Me’s. Funny, I don’t have to wonder, as the guy who came to the Red Pill the same week I did has done just that. He went from understanding the converging evidence that is the Red Pill to becoming some power-dad, still making no money and tons of hassle off that relationship. Someone will have to correct me, I don’t know if his planned book was ever released or if he has had success in other realms. I only know he decided to work for someone who doesn’t pay, and brings nothing but outrage and drama to everyone around him.

Attention

All attention is good attention isn’t real. Some attention gets you cancelled, and some, like Kurt Eichenwald just gets you known. With his faux seizures and admission that he shows tentacle-porn to his children, you may think he’s an idiot, but you did learn his name. Some attention gets you cancelled, and some like Dr. Eugene Gu who is notorious for being catfished by a fat chick and pretended to sleep because he was too timid to kick her out of his house. Those dramas made their names known. The drama I’m talking about is the crab bucket drama that just makes everyone look like clowns and without any of the clout thats supposed to come with it. If you make national news and it leverages into a large brand thats good. If you are arguing on the daily with anime avitars with 300 followers, you aren’t. All I have to do know is get better at what I do and continue to work, because all that attention won’t matter for shit if theres nothing for people once they learn your name. The loud roar of outrage has turned into a small whisper. And unless you plan to write my wikipedia article, I ain’t about to engage it like that. I like his point about the reciprocal:

Be easy to work with. Nobody wants to add friction to their life. Make sure each relationship you build is a win for the other side. Win-win is the only kind of relationship that is sustainable.

So don’t be the guy you would refuse to work with. I want people who think like me, so I should be what I consider to be the ideal collaborator.

Optimize for reach over revenue. Choose to reach more people rather than squeeze out another dollar. You'll help more folks and the person with the largest audience usually ends up with more money anyway.

I wish I had a pithy anecdote on this, but this was actually my earlier failing which turned into success. You’re supposed to build something called the ‘lifetime spending per customer’ metric, according to the grifters bible. I don’t track that, I wouldn’t want to, my focus is on the stuff I deliver, not the customer. It hasn’t steered me wrong so I don’t plan on changing that. I’ll leave it to the reader to decide if I’m smart or stupid.

Besides, who doesn’t love watching Internet pixel numbers go up? Not so much that I would change what I do for more of them but enough that I don’t need to get the high of squeezing another shekel out of a potential customer because of some fancy psychological tricks. Learn my name, see what I offer, grab what interests you. Keep it simple. Simple keeps you honest. Authenticity is what people do to bullshit you into thinking they are honest.

Complexity and statistics are the best ways to lie to everyone, including ones self. If all those modest numbers on all the platforms were to double I would do far better than doubling that dollar metric. 99.9% of the 8 billion people on earth have no idea who I am, plenty of room for growth!

Be patient. Think longer-term than anyone else in your industry. Be impatient. Don't let a day pass without doing something that contributes to your long-term vision.

I hope I am not betraying any trust here, but Rollo and I have talked about this a lot. Slow money versus fast money. In his work with the liquor industry he has had the chance to meet men of wealth, and then to meet the wealthy men™. The one observation he had was that the ones who had the most were patient, and did things methodically, deliberately. Plenty of flash in the pans would come and go. This jived with my experiences. My stepfather was new money. He built his empire from one auction priced excavator and his own bare hands. The business paid for his visits from Columbian Santa and his elves (I can’t think of a clever metaphor for half the chicks in town he slept with) and then when NAFTA gutted the logging industry he lost it all. It wasn’t the ending from Scarface, but it wasn’t the ending from Brewster's Millions either. Besides, I am going against what I learned in an old article where I wrote how I never wanted to become a man like my step father and how it damaged my dating life for too long. I’ll keep the part where he could sleep with half the town, and lose the deviated septum part.

Continually ask, "What is the highest leverage thing we can do right now?" Then, spend at least two minutes today working on that thing.

I don’t have much to add here, other than to laugh at the new years resolution people. So busy telling everyone not to drink on new years eve, go to sleep at nine and start building your empire at 4AM or you’ll get left behind. Always do 20 push-ups and have a cold shower. So much busy work with 0 payoff. It’s the illusion where we ‘feel’ like we are working without accomplishing anything.

Fuck that.

The navy had instilled two great lessons: When in doubt, rack out and If you don’t have anything to do, don’t do it here. During Primary Leadership Qualification, the course that everyone must take before promotion to the MS/MCpl I got a great example. The idea is to simulate high stress and workloads and low sleep environments to get everyone to focus on mission essential duties and test our resolve. It ended up with every platoon leader (we all get a day or two during the course to lead) afraid to make a call and to pass the leadership course by being risk averse. Ironic. Instead of managing their people they would having everyone sit in limbo making busywork so as to look productive.

My day came up and we were to give a series of lectures on how to give a lecture or briefing to a command team. Start the day at 4:30AM and go till 7:00PM. Our workload didn’t require all that time unless we wanted it to. I got people who weren’t presenting to finish the tasks scheduled after the lectures. It turns out we weren’t required to have everyone sit in on every lecture and waste time. They didn’t need the info and we weren’t graded on attendance. We were expected to work until 10:00PM but we had time and resources and everyone was just stressing over their lectures so better to give them something else to do. At 2PM everything was done except the last few hours of lectures. I told everyone who had finished theirs to go home. I got a lot of conflict avoidance resistance. People argued it wasn’t fair, that they would get into trouble, that we were ‘suppsed’ to stay till ten, and what about the reservists who had to stay in barracks because they lived elsewhere? How is it fair that some of us have it good while others have it bad? I brought my section leaders into a room and laid it out:

“I’m the last one to go home, I’m not complaining. Everyone will eventually have a half day in the military so just be happy someone is today. I was specifically given this authority and I’m using it, end of discussion.”

The next day, this 6 foot amazon named Kiraly dragged me into the side room to chew me out about letting everyone go home. I had all their requirements met to standard. I was given the authority to let them go. After 15 minutes of being yelled at I went back in the hall to the entire group stunned. I had a laugh:

“Look, I had to eat shit for 15 minutes while 50 people got 6 hours to hang out with their families, it was a good trade”

I was told later on that Piche, one of the other Petty Officers laughed at the whole thing. We sailed together later and he was a great boss who trusted me. Everyone in my PLQ platoon looked to me for leadership, even if it was only for a few days. I never forgot that lesson. Every time I see some platitude twitter asshole talking about some manufactured hardship to ‘build their great empire’ I think about them as some platoon leader filling everyone’s day with busy work so they didn’t have to risk appearing lazy while still getting the job done. They would have scored a higher mark on the PLQ course, so I suppose it was all worth it. Both appear to be altruistic while personally gaining from everyone elses misery. How noble.

Spend as much time as possible doing the actual work (the thing that delivers value) and as little time as possible doing the "pre-work" that fills the calendars of most people. Example: Have as few meetings as possible.

Same thing, rephrased

Reduce the scale, not your standards. Aspire to do exceptional work and apply that standard to everything. Book. Article. Tweet. Doesn't matter the size. In the long run, your brand is the quality of work you do. Sacrifice quality⁠—anywhere⁠—and you sacrifice the brand.

This one stands on it’s own. While heavily drinking on new years, I put out a tweet where, I said: The dumbest shit I post on here contains some of the smartest points you will see made on this godforsaken platform. And I stand by it. I don’t need giant pedantically wordsmithed multi thousand word essays, overly verbose tweets about stoic spartans or listicle youtube videos.

Ten ways to build your own Empire! Number 5 will surprise you!

The irreverence and subtext is the point. Those who get the context understand the shit-posting. Those who don’t just see another ass model. Exceptional does not mean to look need to look like you are trying to look smart. Exceptional simply means consistent and relevant, look upon this standard and weep. In my case game/sexual strategy is a game. Games are meant to be played, and I suggest you play, but seriously. Girlfriend, wife, plate makes no difference, it’s all a game.

A stupid post about high brow culture may sound exceptional until you realize that you’re sniffing your own farts and not delivering value to anyone. Irreverence is attractive, a social signal that you have enough abundance that you aren’t bothered by the problem on today's news cycle. It’s all a game. I have concerns about the world, same as the next guy. If I can’t put out some irreverence then why would you listen to be about the only thing I am here to promote? You may think this is silly, then I ask you to look at all the Red Pill accounts who have spent the last 4 years wearing MAGA hats and bitching about liberals. The only value they have provided for you is distraction, actually less. The infamous ‘dream opener’ on Tinder is where one such man suggests you tell a girl ‘I’m going to cum on your face and make you my girlfriend’ And we had a few guys try it and got their accounts banned. That’s not Red Pill, thats the Instagram ass-model doing more harm than good. Open your eyes and look around and you’ll find 75% or more of Me’s are no different.

Own your distribution. (In my case, my website and email list.)

No man is an island. While I get the point here, get as close as you can to full ownership of your work, realize that there is always a gatekeeper somewhere. A middle aged soccer mom complained to Mailchimp about Stephan Molynoux and they pulled his email list immediately. Sargon of Akkad started talking about nationalism and politics, until Mastercard pressured Patreon to pull his funding. ‘Own your own’ makes a good sound bite, but I would say more accurately to diversify your distribution. Stirling Cooper had a great example of this. I had him on my podcast last week and he discussed how a milquetoast tweet of his got him blacklisted from LA porn, of which he had a fairly stable career. He’s made a ton of money off the outrage with his information products, books etc. He also has Europe which doesn’t care about LA. He didn’t own distribution in a lot of his income, but he was able to lose one and not bat an eyelash. Steph owned his own distribution, which one came out better?

Think it over.

Continually reach out to people who do the kind of work you aspire to do. Build friendships with exceptional people.

Friendship isn’t the right word. Woman use it like this. Build acquaintances. Don’t over invest, they are people whose interest align with yours. Maybe in the future you become friends, for right now, follow the laws of power: Always appeal to their self interest, never their charity. Friends do favors, acquaintances engage in win-win behavior.

Reinvent yourself. Time erodes every advantage. Evolve or die.

I want to put a big fucking asterisk on this one. Roosh going from eastern European playboy to Christian Unibomber was not a good reinvention. Slutty Suzy and her triple digit notch count turning into the TRADWIFE with a sun-hat and summer dress is not a good pivot either. I mean for her it may be, but for whoever wifes her up and finds out she ‘doesn’t do anal, oral, or cowgirl anymore’ it’s a life destined to platitudes and misery. Reinvention needs to come with a narrative structure. If you don’t know what I’m talking about Venkatesh Rao has a great book called TEMPO where he goes over the concept of narrative based decision making.

The difference between narrative based decision making and narcissistic fantasies are whether the actions drive the narrative or the narratives drive the action

Frame your life as a series of narratives with axis on intensity, and a positivity/negativity. Make decisions based on the narratives that come out of it. It makes more sense when you do it because people can follow you along on your reinvention. A reinvention isn’t the same thing as calling a mulligan. A reinvention is a series of actions that deliver a better result over time. Change is part of that process.

From a mental health standpoint, a common issue with unhealthy levels of narcissism is the fantasy. You create an identity (e.g. you make it up) and then require fuel to cement the identity in place. I’ll give you a few examples: Strong independent woman who don’t need no man, the “I’m a good dad” guy who has a good job and women should love him, or the white knight who defends women against misogynists. Now people can hate them or love them, just so long as they acknowledge the fantasy.

  • If you think the independent woman is a desperate spinster then you’re just a hater.

  • If you think the good dad is a milquetoast virgin then you’re simple a degenerate who wants to decay the west.

The issues come when someone doesn’t acknowledge the fantasy, this causes an injury, and thats where the problems happen.

Using the example of the white knights, that’s why ‘I hope she sees this bro’ is such a powerful tool. His fantasy involves being the nice guy. He defends women against men who treat her poorly and she rewards him with adoration (or at least the girl who sees his signaling). He wants his fantasy so your responses to his accusations feed the fuel. But flat out suggesting he’s only doing it to try and sleep with a girl doesn’t acknowledge his virtue, and attacks that identity. On-line people will just ignore you, but in real life you can see a dude truly melt down at the accusation.

On the other hand, switching from a pick up artist in the 2000s into Red Pill in the 2010s makes sense. I got the women, now what? You find out that the same stuff that picks up women also helps negotiate salary at your new job, helps you when raising your daughter not to be a princess, or helps you get through mental health scenarios. For me it further reinvented into the failure of modern psychiatry and psychology to address the needs to men, the failure of the creative class to cater to male sensibilities, and the failure of modern institutions to fulfill their social benefits for men. That sort of reinvention makes sense, you can follow it with the ‘what’s in it for me’ mental model I talked about earlier. Reinvention is not pulling a mulligan, it’s refining and expanding in ways that make sense.

The next few don’t really apply to me. I’m a one man show and while I have hired editors for the book, and want to hire editors for the videos, I’m not there yet. Mostly it doesn’t make sense but I don’t want to post a spreadsheet here so I’ll leave these to speak on their own merits.

  • Run lean. Hire slowly and keep your team as small as possible. Find a way to do it without hiring another person. Use freelancers and build partnerships before creating another full-time role.

  • Stay small even if you can afford to be big. The more people you have on the team, the harder it is to get everyone rowing in the same direction. The cost of consensus is more expensive than the cost of payroll.

  • Share the profit with employees. Get the incentives aligned. Everyone should get a slice of the upside. When the business wins, we all win.

  • Negotiate expenses yearly. Analyze all of your expenses and eliminate anything you no longer need. With your biggest expenses, look up the latest pricing of their competitors and ask them to beat the lowest price. If there is no relevant competitor, ask for 20% off.

Try this stuff out and let me know.

VI.

For increasing amounts of men, the idea of the stable office or manufacturing job is becoming less and less stable while simultaneously having stagnant wages make them less attractive. If this stuff applies to you, I wrote this to show the concept of convergent evidence, or how we all say men swapping notes when discussing the Red Pill. I bring up the roadmap that most Me’s are using to create a business around vaporware using nothing but personality to drive revenue. I argue not only is it lazy, unsustainable, and comes with costs. I argue It also is more of the same. The king is dead long live the king type stuff. Your corporate job had people for whom you had to tolerate out of fear of being fired, and with Me’s is the same thing, except you never know where you stand. Instead of being the male version of an Instagram ass model, create evergreen works, be patient, be diligent, and never sacrifice time for money. Hustles are for poor drug dealers with nothing better to do. Your goal is a comfortable life with no busybody fat to weigh you down, along with the sustainability that comes with it. The last thing you want is to break under your own hype and turn into a cocaine addicted idiot dancing for quarters. So with a little bit of mental health, a little bit of work ethic, and a lot of streamlined time management I’m sure you too can carve out your own comfortable niche in this world; or like how the old Pick up Artists put it:

Leave her better than you found her.

Epilogue

“Wait a minute, I remember making it clear to people who have followed me that I do the exact same thing, isn’t this hypocritical? Why won’t you ever work with people who work with that Florida convention? Don’t you expect the people you work with to be Red Pilled as well? Aren’t you just making your own demagogue recruitment agency and this is all sour grapes for those who have done it longer and better than you?”

If you really want to have your mind blown, go read this again and point out all the parts where I did all the platitude-statement techniques I spent the last 8,000 words critiquing.

TheRedArchive is an archive of Red Pill content, including various subreddits and blogs. This post has been archived from the blog Rian Stone.

Rian Stone archive

Download the post

Want to save the post for offline use on your device? Choose one of the download options below:

Post Information
Title Consilience: The Business of Me
Author Rian Ston
Date January 5, 2021 4:49 PM UTC (3 years ago)
Blog Rian Stone
Archive Link https://theredarchive.com/blog/Rian-Stone/consilience-the-business-of-me.34470
https://theredarchive.com/blog/34470
Original Link https://www.rianstone.com/blog/consilience
You can kill a man, but you can't kill an idea.

© TheRedArchive 2024. All rights reserved.
created by /u/dream-hunter