I spent years prior, including returning to university at the age of 41 for economics, developing the field of game economics to act as a form of social glue promoting interdependent persistent social environments. Meanwhile gaming industry leadership wanted to turn online games into captive gambling and microtransaction hubs with ever decreasing opportunities for persistent social interaction.

Thus my interests increasingly diverged from that of game development leadership. But here’s the thing: consumer interest remained in alignment with my goals for them, and antagonistic to the goals of game development leadership. I warned the industry and especially leadership that if leadership continued to act in the interests of leadership, and not consumers, this was a recipe for commercial disaster.

Now we are in a period of massive long term game dev layoffs, and my 2025 explanation that we were seeing actual Divestiture by major players (not just layoffs) seems to have gained widespread acceptance. Meanwhile dating apps have gained very widespread acceptance. In 2016 I gave a paid lecture on the current state of mobile game development in Saint Petersburg where I explained that the best mobile game at that time was Tinder, and I explained why. Sorry the video capture failed the first 11 minutes but you can hear me talking.

Since then Tinder has gone on to be adopted by people looking to date at rates almost equal to all other apps combined. Tinder’s revenue was roughly equivalent to Roblox’s net revenue (Roblox has to pay content creators, Tinder does not) in 2023 and Tinder’s revenue plateaued after that. Tinder’s struggles were predicted and I will go into detail as to why later in this paper.

So many investors have asked me to make a competitor to Roblox, which is seen as a darling of game development (if you ignore the various forms of child exploitation). None have asked me to make a competitor to Tinder, which strikes me as odd. Here I explain why that is odd as Tinder is extraordinarily vulnerable to competition and Roblox is not. Roblox has other problems, namely regulation and civil lawsuits.

Datings Apps are Games

I made the case for this in my 2016 Saint Petersburg lecture where I focused on Tinder and explained how demographics favored these sorts of games in the future.

The Strengths of Tinder versus conventional online games are:

• Totally free user generated content (UGC)

• Higher quality and variety of UGC

• Rewards that players value much more than virtual assets

• High risk and high reward means optimal dopamine delivery

• Simplicity of base gameplay loop, so easy onboarding

• The hardest part for users might be getting pictures, but social media has been promoting “selfies” and such for years so that effort is now minimized

The Weaknesses of Tinder versus conventional online games are:

• Tinder is adult only (in theory), so more narrow demographic

• Tinder is primarily for singles (in theory, but not practice), so again a narrower demographic

• Tinder delivers dopamine, but not the product (Connection) it is advertised to deliver

• Match group uses “catch and kill” to block competition, leading to lack of innovation in the core product

• Match attempts to copy the most ancient and lowest performing business models used in online gaming across its ~45 products

• LinkedIn similarly tries to copy Tinder’s business model, with matching underperformance

• The increasing mismatch between what the dev (Match) wants to sell and what consumers want to buy is generating agitation and organised resistance, mirroring what is happening in the rest of game dev

The biggest problems with Tinder are actually intentional on the part of Match. They seek to monopolize the dating app sector by buying up all competitors. They then “dumb down” superior products (like OKCupid) to make sure consumers only have mediocre choices. The biggest problems that Tinder and other games share are antiquated business models and content-demand mismatches. Solving both of those situations has been my brand for over a decade. That’s not a coincidence, as I operate in the future, not the past.

The Purpose of My Work and Substack

As you can see from my 2016 lecture, I used trend analysis to see what products will be in demand by consumers in the future and I develop those technologies. Industries that rely on Data Driven Design (DataDD) look into the past to see what worked and copy that. This prevents innovation and adaptation, and only benefits iteration. This benefits developers in the short term and dooms them in the long run. It does nothing to benefit consumers as cost reductions are not passed on to the consumer. The end game is where the user base shrinks and devs have to raise prices (which accelerates the user base decline, causing a Death Spiral). You see this happening in real time with Tinder.

Products dependent on DataDD are extremely vulnerable to competition from innovative products that meet consumer demand. If one shows up and you can’t “catch and kill” it, you are screwed. This is why aspiring monopolies like Match can be forced to pay a super premium to acquire your more innovative product, if you don’t want to compete directly.

Visitors to my substack are mostly game developers. They likely wonder why I talk about dating, thinking it’s just a hobby of mine and that I’m trying to be a dating guru influencer. Nothing could be farther from the truth. I have no intention of selling myself as a dating guru. What I’ve been building here over the last couple years is the foundation of understanding that game developers will need to make successful dating games. Here today I’m starting to put it together so that devs will understand the business case and opportunity behind dating games.

Your industry is dying and you don’t know what to do about it. I’ve been predicting this since 2017, because I operate in the future, not in the past. Investors, disenchanted with game dev, are divesting from our industry and moving to AI. It is the new shiny. I see the promise in AI, but in the rush to develop AI they have not employed the sort of people that would design efficient ways to go about that. The resulting lack of efficiency means they will run out of (investor) money before they reach their goals, and they will do environmental damage that will harm all economies without anyone funding a cleanup.

Then the remaining investors that still somehow have money (because they dumped early) will be looking around like the John Travolta meme wondering what to do next. If I do my job properly here, I will demonstrate that dating games will be a very promising option.

Why Dating Games?

I made my core breakthroughs in dating game design in 2016, and have been iterating on them since then. That covers issues like discoverability (which also plagues the broader game dev industry), advanced business models (ditto), solving the D2-Oxy Heterocomplex paradox (ditto), and linking this to solutions for Demographic Collapse. The reason the largest challenges in game dev are shared with dating apps is because dating apps are games. I said it in 2016, it’s still true today, and it will still be true 50 years from now.

Those roadblocks which I’ve been quietly unblocking since 2016 also plague social media products, but in different ways. The biggest problem that social media shares with game dev is that the devs there are making products for themselves, not consumers. This only persists commercially when there is no competition, or the competition also doesn’t know how to solve your problems. Once that changes, you become non-competitive.

AI is hot right now because it is seen as a transformative military technology. I explained this in the same paper where I predicted the current game dev divestment. Even if the events I talk about there don’t happen, big money thinks it will so that’s where the money is going. AI is being advertised to the public as something to boost human productivity. That’s a lie. I explained back in 2010 how AI could be used to boost human productivity in my Third Tier of Game Development paper which Microsoft and Unity and presumably other tech giants studied carefully.

Since they did not use AI to solve the core productivity problems I identified in Third Tier, and are instead replacing humans, it is clear what their intentions are. This is one of those core lies that causes me to have an attitude. When the dust settles on the mismanaged AI rollout, and all the pre-scripted global military conflicts, we will be left with a number of existential crises that require attention (in order):

1. Ecosystem Collapse

2. Demographic Collapse

3. Clean Water and Oil Depletion

4. Microbial Evolution (Which I mentioned in Third Tier)

Ecosystem collapse is number 1 because without an ecosphere, no need to worry about the rest. Our current approach to AI and war is accelerating this. But ecosystem collapse is a very slow process. Likely no one alive today will see just how bad that gets as it might peak in awfulness 500 or 1000 years from now. We can’t predict that mathematically because it’s highly dependent on the total global human population. And all the predictions (based on DataDD) of pop growth are wrong because major events all trend it down and tend to be non-linear (compounding) so they will overcome linear trends.

The other 3 will affect us in our lifetime, if we live another 10+ years. AI will drastically accelerate #3. All of these, and any wars we have, will reduce the human population. That actually helps #1 as the Ecosystem Collapse is being caused by us. Get rid of us and the planet will start to recover. #3 and #4 will also get better if there are less of us around.

Demographic Collapse is different, and this is what politicians and economists don’t seem to understand. If we kill half the humans on Earth, that’s good for Earth. If we lose half our people, our water and oil will last twice as long. Microbial evolution is accelerated by population density (like in cities), so again less people helps here. But with Demographic Collapse, all the factors that could reduce human population in a big way also make DC worse. Any animal population that is under stress will produce less children. That includes us.

DC is not a population problem per se. In DC it is the ratio of young to old that is the issue. Wars tend to kill more young people, and microbial evolution tends to kill more old people (but sometimes a lot of babies too). It’s really handy how COVID seemed to ignore children. If you were going to genetically engineer a bioweapon that would take out all the old people but leave the young intact, you couldn’t do much better than COVID.

Any country that can’t balance out their ratio of young to old is going to collapse. That means you either need to make more babies, or dispose of your elderly. COVID-like biological agents work on the latter, so would Draconian social frameworks like Logan’s Run.

Full-on authoritarian governments (I’m not pointing any fingers) are going to get rid of their elderly since that’s pretty inexpensive to do and eliminates the drag on the economy. For the rest of us, if you are lucky enough to not be in one of those countries, they will have to make more babies. The technical term for this is pro-natal policies.

This is a matter of societal life or death as an economy can’t be balanced with a large number of elderly being supported by too small a number of youth. Because our leadership and academics don’t understand DC, everything they’ve tried has failed, in every country. That’s why I spent a while writing a six paper series on what DC is, what causes it, and how to solve it. Those are papers 92 to 97 from early 2025. As the economies collapse, there is an ever decreasing amount of resources available for children and this triggers an economic Death Spiral.

Wait too long and the Death Spiral becomes inevitable. Japan lowered their interest rates to zero (or lower) because they borrowed too much money and couldn’t even afford the interest payments. This is another example of a Death Spiral. Japan is borrowing again, so all us economists are watching on the edge of our seats to see how that turns out.

But Japan has also created the first state-sponsored dating app, because they are the vanguard for dealing with DC. They know that because of their existing economic problems, birth rates have dropped way below replacement rates. The resulting DC is going to make their existing problems unmanageable. While no country has the luxury of ignoring DC, Japan at least is doing something about it. Throwing money at an authenticated dating app (I talk about how essential authentication is in the 2010 Third Tier paper) is way more effective than just giving money to new parents. That isn’t working in any country.

What I’m getting at here is that while Tinder is a huge success just because of consumer demand for dating apps, right now Tinder is only monetisting consumers. Advanced dating apps, the ones that include mandatory authentication, are the ones that are going to help reverse DC. As soon as you move from anonymous participation to authentication, all the bad actors and dopamine addicts are going to exit and people seeking serious relationships (the kind that promote children) will be advantaged.

Using authentication in their dating apps would reduce the size of the target demographic, which is why Match will never do it. Consider that if your app not only helps consumers, but also the overall economy at the same time, now you have two target demographics: daters and the local government. While daters will struggle to spend $100 a month, governments will eagerly spend this and more to solve their DC issues. No conventional game, at least the ones with primitive business models, can compete for revenue generation.

[Advanced business models can monetize different groups in different ways in parallel. For instance, when PokemonGO came out in 2016 I recommended that Niantic move to a two layer monetisation model where they charged businesses for Pokestops. By not doing so, Niantic left at least hundreds of millions of dollars on the table.]

If you want to monetise consumers AND governments simultaneously, you are going to need advanced business models that are far more complex. As you can see, that’s what I’ve been doing for the last 15+ years. Not because I was bored and didn’t have anything better to do, but because I operate in the future and I anticipated the need. It’s a bit lonely working on tech that people don’t know they need yet, but once they figure it out I will be 15 to 20 years ahead in tech. Just don’t wait forever, I may have essentially stopped my biological clock but I’m still going to time out eventually.

Obstacles to Making Dating Games

The biggest obstacle to making Dating Games is that gamers, and especially game devs, are playing games because they don’t have better social options that might be more enticing. The result is that, while technical/computer skills are high, game devs have some of the lowest social skills around. That said, the guys at OKCupid were pretty nerdy. But they tried a lot of new things and ended up with a novel product and the best dating app to date.

Dating Games/Apps are still Games and much of the tech involved crosses over. New social systems, reward systems, progression systems, and business models have to be added. All the tech I’ve been developing over the last 15+ years. Authentication also has to be added, but that’s something that’s going to be forced onto us anyways very soon. Not for the reasons I explained in Third Tier, but to create even greater information asymmetry under the guise of child safety.

Instead of weaponizing data for the purpose of information asymmetry, we can provide data to our consumers as a service to help eliminate information asymmetry from dating. This is also known as “catfishing” and it’s a problem in the labor pool too, not just the dating pool. Of course we already do this with social media, where people build reputations in hopes of becoming the highly coveted “influencer”. This isn’t really any different than what happens in a dating game.

The problem is that in social media there isn’t sufficient authentication. People can use filters, false pictures, or AI deep fakes to hide who they are. This is a big problem that strong authentication solves. What it doesn’t solve is what I’m going to call The G-String Paradox until I come up with a better term. The GSP means that people will try to exaggerate their positive qualities to get attention. That’s why you have 13 and 14 year olds essentially dancing nude on social media because they want to “win”. And this is how you win on social media today. The same thing goes for people taking pictures of themselves in sports cars or on private planes.

I solved that problem in 2016, it took me many years. There are ways to filter out this noise, and a big part of it is removing the Win/Loss Binary from your games. I would love to tell you how this all works, but that tech is my retirement plan. I am showing you what needs to be solved, and that’s keeping with my policy of sharing the bottom 25% of what I know as a form of public service.

Future Games

Whether we add advanced social systems to games first, or advanced game mechanics to dating apps first, all roads lead to an eventual merging of both to make Dating Games. If you are first to market, you capture market share. If you are slow, you just might go out of business. If you haven’t already. That’s reality. People desperately need help reducing their loneliness and will fantastically reward those apps that work. Tinder is currently designed to not work because Match does not possess the technology required to help consumers while also generating strong revenue.

That’s a technological hurdle, but it’s not a big technological hurdle. This isn’t AI-level tech that’s needed, just smart tech that people don’t know how to do yet. Once they know how to do it, it won’t be a big deal. Games like Flirt Planet 3D (which was decades ahead of its time) can then be folded into these Dating Games to make rich immersive experiences.

As with Pokemon GO, since dating typically involves a lot of spending at a variety of allied businesses (like restaurants), there are possibilities here for advanced business models that charge both the daters and the venues they frequent using your app. Planning for success not only makes improving your product later on easier, but also signals to users that you plan to be around a while. That’s critical with Dating Games because these demand and reward long term participation. You want your players to think you are going to be around long enough to justify their time and money investment.

The average gamer only buys one game a year. That’s ~$50 a year. Today the average spend on a first date is $200 (!!). That’s the entire median gaming budget for four years, in just a few hours. Meanwhile, almost every game that comes out has dozens or hundreds of competitors very similar to it. That’s masochistic to throw your time and money into making something with such a meager chance of success.

If you can make a dating app that makes dating even just 10% more efficient for people, that would be worth $400 to someone that only goes on 20 dates a year. I’ve seen influencers bragging about how they go on 8 dates in 5 days, on rotation. Even if they are not spending but are making the other person spend, that’s still money flying around. Daters will reward you if you provide value for them, and all you have to do is make something better than Tinder. That’s really not hard, by design, because the Match business model depends on all their products being mediocre.

If you scare Match with something better, that could be easy money. OKCupid was sold to Match in 2011 for $50M, that’s $73M in 2026 dollars. They spent $6M developing it. Imagine if you made a game on a $6M budget, sold it to 500,000 people as a F2P game, and then sold it again to another company for $73M. You’d be a rockstar in the industry almost overnight. That’s pretty hard to do in today’s gaming industry due to all the competition.

In the near future, you could sell it to a sovereign entity (like Japan) for even more money than Match will give you. Or they might pay you to make country specific versions for their use. The growth potential in Dating Games is huge and constantly getting larger. That’s just not the case in today’s gaming industry which has almost half its workers unemployed.

Please consider the possibilities. I hate to see billions of people lonely. The idea of society collapsing just because our dating technology is lagging also saddens me. Of course I also don’t like seeing hundreds of thousands of my brothers and sisters in game dev out of work. The “Tea” app was, in my opinion, a malicious gendered dating related app. But it was created for ~$100K using “vibe coding” and generated about $5M before being terminated by all platforms. The demand is there, even for slop, we just have to get out there and do it.

Special Note to my readers: My skill sets in the industry are unique. I have never applied for a job in game dev. All the roles I’ve had with large and small companies over the last 30 years were because those studios/companies asked me for help. If you are needing someone with my skills, any recruiter or AI tool will suggest my name. I’ve been the most prolific writer in the space for 26 years. My games have generated billions of dollars in revenue, mostly not in the USA or UK. Due to racism and safety concerns, I will not apply to a job posted by your company, ever. It has not happened in 30 years. If you contact me, and the request is ethical, I will do my utmost to help you. I am a dual USA/Australian citizen, but left the USA out of safety concerns 7 years ago.

This topic is also timely because the “voice memo guy” (look it up) is causing a lot of debate on the topic of consent right now.

I’ve had people do things to me without consent going all the way back to the age of 7. Some of those things are obviously illegal. But there is a wide range of activities, things we might consider “niceties” or “signs of respect”, that deserve getting consent before they are done. Things that are generally considered personal.

Asking for consent is a sign of respect. That said, consent can be revoked at any time. So consent does not equal a guarantee. These two things are often confused or conflated. Also, there are ways of asking for consent that are also laced with Disempowerment, which can then sound like an Ultimatum.

Because many people today (usually women) will weaponize a lack of consent against someone else (usually a man) by invoking an institutional response (like the police), now we have to have more formal consent. Because some people feel Entitled to other people (all genders are guilty of this), it’s not uncommon for people to just try to take what they want. That’s why we need Consent Culture so people understand what is and is not appropriate when dealing with other people.

This all comes with a price. Getting consent, unless done expertly, is not romantic. In romance, where both people are in sync and reading each other’s body language, you can get reliable consent in non-verbal ways. That’s how life used to be. But since you can’t defend yourself in court with a non-verbal agreement, unless you also have video evidence, you can easily be entrapped. So here we need to make a distinction between Consent Culture and Legal Consent. Sometimes you need both, and sometimes you don’t.

Since this is likely already sounding very complicated, and it’s even more complicated than that, this paper is needed. I will break everything down into small chunks as trying to swallow all of this at once will be overwhelming.

Consent Versus Legal Consent

If you are dealing with a person who seems friendly and who has no obvious reason to exploit you, then Consent is all you need. If you trust your instincts, non-verbal consent might be enough. For instance, if someone is kissing on you, that gives you implied consent to kiss them back. But did they need verbal consent from you before they kissed you? If you are touching their arm or back, then there is some implied low level touch consent there. As long as neither party is acting defensive, then usually non-verbal consent is adequate.

As soon as someone starts acting a bit defensive, then automatically all consents need to be verbal. If the person is acting antagonistic in any way, then I would recommend you get written consent for pretty much anything that could be legally actionable. In the modern dating environment, a lot of people are acting defensive or antagonistic.

Example 1 (Antagonistic): I have a neighbor who has been very pleasant and chatty. She shared something personal about herself that was traumatic in nature. Before I could respond, she started explaining that this was to be expected because women are oppressed in the Patriarchy. I’ve talked about Patriarchy and Matriarchy before, especially in my Gender Economics paper. But here she was clearly expressing a Gender Supremacy ideology. I was not expecting this and I did not invite it.

As I am male bodied, and she was expressing a Gender Supremacy argument targeting men in general, this put me under implied threat. Thus in the future if I had any interaction with her I’d want to get written consent to talk. I’ve offered to give her some coaching, but I’d probably want to video that for my protection. Dating someone who has a fear or hatred of one of your demographics is a super bad idea. No good will come of it.

Example 2 (Entrapment): Once when I was in a whistleblower scenario that could potentially involve hundreds of millions of dollars of liability (not my liability), I had someone ask me out to grab “to go” lunch. I agreed and got it in writing. When I got there I was doing some reading after ordering, when this woman started asking me personal and rude questions about my love life.

I thought to myself “well, I’m not liking the tone, but she’s given me consent by asking me”. Big mistake on my part. Yes, if someone asks you a question, they’ve given you consent to answer it. But if the question is antagonistic or accusatory in any way, now you are potentially under legal threat. That means the other person could deny giving you consent and just say you started talking about your love life without them wanting that.

This person was in fact trying to farm me for incriminating information. When they didn’t get it, they just fabricated some. Six months later a false allegation was made just as I was about to whistleblow, which I assume was to use as leverage to stop me.

The moment a situation turns antagonistic, even if you have full consent before, you now need legal consent for any interaction that could be legally actionable. That includes just answering their questions if they are gathering personal data about you. So you get it in writing or on video that they are making this or that request of you. If they are a bad actor (which is likely) they will almost certainly escalate, but if you get that on video this can provide you a defense.

Consent Versus Ultimatum

The “Voice Memo Guy” (VMG) was a recording of a man asking a woman on a voicemail to confirm he has consent to get physical with her prior to going on a second date where apparently she had invited him to her house. We don’t have the invitation that preceded this voicemail, so that invitation isn’t 100% certain.

Now if it was a situation where two people end up in a Very Private environment where there will (intentionally) be no witnesses, then it makes sense to get some Consents. But the problem here is that just because you have privacy, that’s not a guarantee that both people will feel like making out.

He was right to be mindful of Consent, but his timing was off. By trying to get consent before he even arrived, it sounded more like he wanted a guarantee, not just consent. The two are not the same since consent can be revoked at any time. To me asking for a guarantee implies a level of Entitlement. Every time you make it to a next higher level of intimacy with someone else, that’s great. That can be quite an accomplishment given the ongoing Gender War. But that does not Entitle you to the next level of intimacy.

I heard one lady influencer describe his request as an “Ultimatum”. To understand what an Ultimatum is, you have to understand what Empowerment and Disempowerment is.

• Empowerment: Giving another person a new option that didn’t exist before, without removing any of the options they had before. More options in life is more power.

• Disempowerment: Taking away from someone an existing option they had. Even if you are giving them a new option at the same time, this is still Disempowerment.

So if Harvey Weinstein tells you he can make you a star if you give him something he wants, but also implies that he can destroy your career if you don’t, that’s Disempowerment. It’s also an Ultimatum because a punishment is attached to not giving consent.

As an example, I had a partner who I had been with for a month. After that time she wanted me to make an “exclusivity vow”. If I didn’t, she would leave me. This is an ultimatum. I don’t do ultimatums so I handed her her stuff and never saw her again. A few months later she called me, crying, asking for a do over. I said no. Don’t make ultimatums, that’s coercive.

So VMG was clearly catastrophically unromantic in his request for a priori consent. He said without that consent, he wasn’t coming over. After just one date, and especially after that icy delivery, this doesn’t come across as a punishment. He probably did the lady on the other end a huge favor. Thus this is not an ultimatum. It’s just really low level social skills from a low level person. Not only does he have poor social skills, but he was asking for a consent he hadn’t earned.

How do you earn consent? That’s a hard question. But generally if you imagine that there are ten stages of intimacy from A to J, and you are at stage B, you should be asking for consent to “C” next. Asking for consent for stage “I” after stage “B” is going to come across as at least creepy. It also implies a severe lack of empathy or compassion.

That said, I have just as much disdain for the person who described VMG as making an Ultimatum, for the exact same reasons. Trying to get someone cancelled for being low level is uncool. Being low level is not the same as being unethical.

The sad truth here is that people can’t have their cake and eat it too. If they want people to always get consent for everything, then you have to be okay with them asking you for consent for everything. Asking for consent in a romantic way is a VERY high level technique, and as I explained in the paper on that subject, the more we interact with electronic devices the lower level we become. Thus people have never been as low level in the history of Earth as they are now. People like VMG and “ultimatum gal” are going to become more common.

The Art of Consent

It is a bit unfortunate that I had to start this paper with a lot of warnings, but we are in a Gender War and so there is a certain level of threat at all times. Not everyone is participating in the Gender War, but since social media is really pushing it, most heavy users have joined it. If you found someone on a social media site like Instagram which also promotes Gender War, well… good luck with that. To me that sounds like a really bad idea.

Under normal conditions, Consents have a Progression Schedule. This applies to all personal consents, not just physical ones. If there are ten steps on that Progression Schedule from A to J, that doesn’t mean you flew out of your mother at birth knowing what those were. You find out the hard way, that’s part of why Leveling Up is the most important criteria for success in dating. It’s also very important in business, but in business you can spend a lot of money to have other people do things for you. Those other people might be higher level than you. The cool thing about dating is that ultimately you are going to have to Progress on your own, without help, at some point. Unless you’ve got a hidden ear piece with a bunch of people giving you advice (I’m sure I’ve seen a few movies like this), it’s all going to be You.

Ideally you know that after “C” comes “D”, “E”, and “F” in that order. When you are still learning all that, you might not even know what “E” is, how to do it, where it goes, and how long you should do “E” before attempting “F”. Sometimes people skip steps because of enthusiasm, or because one or both people are experts and can speed up the process. Sometimes they have a mental disorder that causes them to overshare.

Life is complicated. People are complicated. I try to be both patient and compassionate. But I’m never unobservant. Watching someone operate can tell you what’s coming next and what to be ready for. If either of you has a sudden mood swing, that’s a red flag. Stop and evaluate, and ask questions. One or both of you could have past undisclosed trauma, be a low level Autistic, or even have a Cluster B mental disorder.

These things are not necessarily disqualifying, but they might make it necessary to spend 10 times (or even 100 times) longer on “C” before going to “D”. It might also be an opportunity for the higher level person to remind the other what “D” is, so they don’t skip it. Two low level people both might not even know about “D”, and this can be painful to watch. That is, of course, how you learn. The hard way.

Communication, empathy, and compassion are so critical to forging relationships, even professional ones. When I’m in an office and someone is looking stressed, triggered, or angry, I don’t react. I Listen. I remind the person that I’m on their side. Ask what’s up and how I can help. If their first reaction is to accuse someone else of something, I don’t automatically assume they are being truthful. I have to ask the other person what’s up and give them the same level of empathy and compassion.

If you aren’t sure what the next step is after “C”, then ask. That takes a lot of courage, but then you are implying consent for the other person to explain “D” to you and that can be great for trust building.

Sometimes when someone goes from “A” to “D” in seconds, that can make others uncomfortable. “Love Bombing” is an example of this. Even if it feels good, it requires a moment of self reflection. “Is this appropriate? What’s going on here?” I do a lot of sharing on my substack. By putting “Dating App” in the title I’m implying that they might run into some level of adult content. I had to do that because without that, people would be concerned if they were expecting games and found out that I go much deeper than that here.

While I may explain topics from “A” to “J” here, my target demographic is not people who want to learn about “A”. It’s people who want to learn about “J”, how to get there, and why they might want to get there. So for instance they might know about subscription models and F2P, but I talk about 6+ levels of F2P classification. I could do the same thing about dating, and it seems I’m heading in that direction.

The reason I get into such difficult content on my substack is because there is a lot of complexity in life that didn’t exist even one generation ago. Learning all that the hard way can be perilous. You have bad actors on every side flooding the space with malicious content intended to promote hate and division. I’m trying to bring people together, so I’m not producing the sort of high engagement content that social media wants to promote. Thus if I’m talking about “F” here, it isn’t because I’m skipping to F. I’m explaining “F” because there are a lot of people who get “A” through “D” just fine but then wipe out at “F” and may not even know what “J” is. I don’t just walk up to people on the street and start talking about Gender Economics or Supremacy Language.

In all my papers I urge people to take their time. If you find someone you really like, and you feel a Connection, that’s all the more reason to go slow. Gluttony is a Sin for non-hedonists. When you find a fine wine, don’t guzzle the whole bottle in one sitting. Take a few sips, ponder the experience, and put it on the shelf. Anticipate the next time. If you try to drink it all in one sitting, you are telling the other person “You are not a fine wine, you are a can of Coor’s Lite”. And you’ve probably downed a lot of Coor’s Lite in your lifetime.

That is, until my father handed me a set of math flash cards when I was four. My brain target locked on them. Finally, a system with rules. With certainty. Maybe even fairness. I devoured those cards and asked for more. Then more. Anything with math, I wanted it. When the world around me seemed chaotic and unfair, I had mathematical certainty.

On my fifth birthday, my uncle (almost certainly autistic, like most of the people on my mother’s side) taught me chess. A weird thing to do with a 5 year old. But after two hours I was playing like a vet and would spend the next 10 years playing and beating anyone that would play me. Zero losses. My sister would look for adults to play me and bet them $10 they couldn’t beat me. A veritable circus side hustle.

By the time I was 7 I had discovered Avalon Hill strategy board games, mostly wargames. I loved reading the rulebooks. My friends didn’t like to play me because I was “the rules lawyer”. I always knew that obscure rule that would flip the result in my favor. I had every number memorized so I would know the results before they happened.

The public schools I went to didn’t know what to do with me. When they IQ tested me at age 7, they were confused by the results. They brought me (just me, not the rest of the school) in for a second day of testing. More confusion. Then they spent the entire next week testing me, bringing in adult IQ tests. The result: I was more advanced in math than any teacher in the district except the calculus teachers in some high schools. I was segregated from the rest of the school, given math homework by the kilogram, and the rest of the school was instructed not to talk to me except during recess. The whole school had this instruction.

I got very disciplined about self-educating, and reverse engineering how things worked when there was no one to explain things.

Starting in middle school I was told I couldn’t skip classes I had already self-learned. I was told this applied to everyone, no exceptions. Then I’d watch helplessly as the children of teachers were allowed to skip without doing a fraction of the work I had. This really bothered me, I depended on those rules for stability in a world without it.

By the age of 17 the abuse at home with my father was approaching horror story levels. Doctors finally intervened to save my life. This was done quietly because no one trusted the government to know what to do with me if I became a ward of the state. So I got upgraded to “homeless”. For the next five years. Working three jobs so that I would not drop out of university (which I did simultaneously with high school via unique permission from the Santa Monica Board of Education).

Leadership

Because I was a freak that no one could understand, I didn’t have a lot of positive experiences with people. Being homeless just made every possible aspect of survival a massive math exercise. Sleep four hours at the school during the day, work a night shift at a restaurant for food, shower at the varsity locker room at the university, and all without a phone, kitchen, or bathroom (except at the uni or work).

I kept my books and clothes in a utility closet that I had to pay monthly rent on. Most of the time they didn’t get stolen. All personal belongings: gone. No way for me to ask for help, and no way for people to find me except at school.

Again left without stability. But I had running, I used running to overcome my crippling asthma when I was 14. I got that asthma at age 5 because my father was teaching me how to smoke, and after 6 months (age 5.5) I was smoking unfiltered camels. My father figured that if he couldn’t beat me at chess, I was old enough to smoke.

One of my first coaches was Tommie Smith, Olympic and World Record holder in the 200m dash. Also a civil rights icon due to his protest with John Carlos in 1968 (when I was 2). He became my stability. But Tommie grew up picking strawberries. His life was as hard as mine, and he tolerated no weakness. If I wanted to follow him, I would have to give 200% at all times, even if anything over 150% could kill me. Given my childhood, I wasn’t afraid of dying. I have a 10/10 ACE rating. Anyone with an 8 or higher has a predicted lifespan of 30 years, and most engage in self-harm in the meantime.

Instead of all the usual high ACE “stimming” activities like cutting, tattoos, eating disorders, drugs and victim oriented psychological disorders like Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), I had running. The most extreme running possible. And of course I had math. Looking back, this saved my life. Now I’m by far the oldest high ACE person I’ve ever met. The ones I’ve met that are over age 30 are a wreck, barely holding on. Now I’m a world respected ethicist, a Buddhist, and have the temperament of a monk. Completely drug free my whole life, and I would work at the Betty Ford Center (the top drug rehab facility in the USA) for three years in my late 20s.

My first job when I was 18 was working security at the UCLA Olympic Village. Tommie recommended the job to me. I worked the graveyard shift since there was no safe place to sleep at night, I slept on campus during the day, often during classes. I could lucid dream in such a way that I would listen to lectures and sleep simultaneously. If no one answered a question, I would wake up, answer it, then go back to sleep.

I would run the entire perimeter of the Village several times a night, over 10 miles. They offered me a trike, but I preferred to be silent. I got promoted to sergeant when my sergeant got caught in the back seat with a rent-a-cop. She was the top sergeant so I became the top sergeant. I had 50 guards under me, and when I found them sleeping I would wake them up gently and remind them that our job was a matter of national and international importance. They wouldn’t do it again and morale was high.

I would go on to coach running teams, including the UCLA and USA Olympic Women’s track teams, for 15 years. I never applied for those jobs, I was sought out. I also taught physical therapy, anatomy, physiology, chemistry, and math over 6 years. Teaching is hard work, and teachers are under-appreciated, at least in the USA. Even though I was responsible for teaching the PhD PT students from Loma Linda, they refused to allow me to apply to the university because I was not vegetarian. I’ve been strictly vegan since 2012, and vegetarian for 3 years before that, but this was in the 1990s.

When I was put into authority over the World of Tanks Blitz and World of Warships projects for Wargaming, I applied my leadership skills. I worked 16 hour days, asked every department what they needed from me, and made sure they understood what we were building and why. Morale was very high. If a department was struggling, I knew that this was because they were understaffed, not weak. I took responsibility and reinforced them. Those projects both completed ahead of schedule, something that sounds mythological in today’s gaming industry. Both made over a billion USD, and we were working with relatively inexperienced (but highly motivated) teams with very outdated equipment and small budgets. But like with my running teams, morale and cohesion was very high.

The Rules Were Not Rules

When the rules were broken for those in power in my middle school, that was just a glimpse of things to come. With the exception of the Nursing program at Santa Monica College, where I was kicked out explicitly for being male gendered (“medical school is for men, nursing school is for women”- Susan McDonald, Director) I got a superior education there. Certain administrators kept trying to eject me, perhaps because of my killing Ronald Reagan’s school prayer initiative when I was in high school (and SMC simultaneously). But good Samaritans in admin would quietly reinstate me every time, knowing how hard I was studying.

When I arrived at UCLA, it was a different situation. I had some incredibly talented professors, but weird things were going on. I didn’t date or party at all while I was there. I was still homeless the first year but won the housing lottery (with a number under 100) and got on-campus housing the second year. Classes in my major were usually graded on a curve. Despite my professors telling me I was their top student, I often got “B’s”, with students I knew had been partying with their Frats/Sororities all weekend getting “A’s”.

This really puzzled me. I followed all the rules and worked harder than everyone else. It wasn’t until my last quarter at UCLA that a young lady from one of the Sororities took a liking to me and asked if I wanted help with the next exam. She explained that her Sorority had a filing cabinet filled with the keys for every exam in every major at the University. Apparently the Fraternities had a similar system. So they could come into an exam hung over and still ace the exams because they knew the answers in advance.

I still believed in following the Rules back then, so I reported the situation to my professors. They didn’t do anything. It was then that I realized that the Rules were just there for people like me. For Special people, the Rules didn’t apply. It would also explain later in life how people would have degrees, even medical degrees, and not know the basics of their careers. I did some political work and saw the same patterns.

When I worked in Belarus, I didn’t see any of this. In Russia, I was told that if I wanted to succeed I would have to drink and smoke with the people above me. That wasn’t going to happen, but I overperformed enough and was popular enough that I got away with skipping this.

Western studios were totally different. The “Rules” were totally broken in every studio, even in the Western facilities that Wargaming operated in the USA. It was everywhere I looked, if I looked. A number of times I was a whistleblower:

• A clinic in California where patients and staff were being sexually assaulted by the top doctor, sometimes while drugged

• The head of the USA Census Department in Palm Springs was sexually harassing dozens of women

• I testified against the gaming industry before the ICPEN in 2013 at their request.

• I would later attempt to whistleblow in a situation that would trigger an SEC investigation, but I was put under such extreme threat that I still to this day can’t talk about it.

In each of these cases, I tried to uphold the Rules. Good rules that protected a lot of people from the worst of crimes. I was punished severely in each case. I have permanent physical injuries that even I can’t repair from some of these scenarios. While I helped a lot of people locally, in EVERY one of these cases larger entities moved to cover up the events so that you never heard about them. It was almost as if the Fraternities and Sororities extended to a much larger organisation that made different Rules for their members.

Of course now we know that’s true, and the hard evidence is there, but it’s the most closely guarded secret in the USA and in other countries. This separate set of Rules that you only know about if they apply to you.

I adapted by not needing Rules in order to be stable and happy. I gave up ego and entitlement to everything, even “Rights”. It’s all an illusion. If I live another day, it’s another chance to be in service, and I’m thankful for the opportunity. I take nothing for granted and expect nothing. Of course I still take full responsibility for any project that I’m leading.

In my writings I explain how the world works, doing my best to explain how things really work. Often this is stuff I know I’m not supposed to talk about if I know what’s good for me. But I don’t have an ego and don’t put much value in personal well being other than trying to stay healthy so I can serve as many days as I am allowed. I’ve already lived to twice my ACE predicted lifespan so I’m doing alright. I run a km in 4 minutes, which is the fastest I’ve run in 30 years.

How This Affects My Worldview

This whole thing about one set of rules for one class, and another for the other class, in a world where we pretend there are no classes… I see it as both a game and a long running inside joke. If you understand the joke, it’s funny. If you don’t, you just get frustrated and feel victimized. I’m not a victim, I’m a survivor… with a robust sense of humor.

When I give very entitled organisations the exact information they need to be super successful and avoid a catastrophe of their own making, I know they won’t follow it. I pretend I care, but really I’m just sitting on the couch with my popcorn watching the show. I’m not responsible for what the other class does. I do feel a duty to give them good advice as that helps all of us if it is followed. But it won’t be. That class doesn’t listen to this class. If they need something from this class, they will take it, not receive it, because this low level constant threat is what makes the whole Two Rules system work.

That’s fine, I don’t care. I’m not entitled to anything better. When I’m asked to testify because everyone else is too afraid to do so, I do out of a sense of duty and altruism. I know I will be punished. The people asking me for help know I will be punished. It doesn’t affect me, I’m already used to eating out of trash cans and sleeping on sidewalks. I live to serve, literally, and will keep doing so as long as I am allowed.

The mistake that people make is that they think punishing me will change me. Thanks to my father, I was trained from a very young age to endure any sort of torture. This came in super handy when I trained under Tommie Smith, who was quite upset that he was punished for protesting at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics. His entitlement burned in him and affected everyone around him. But he’s a great man nonetheless and was a key inspiration to me.

I always strive to operate at the level that Tommie taught me, but without any expectation that there’s some reward waiting for me on the other end. I also know that following the Rules is kind of pointless, since they will be applied conditionally. But I follow the Rules anyway, because I’d like to live in a world where Rules matter.

As the classes clash and the world starts to burn, all of us are going to be challenged. Do we have Rights? Should we follow the Rules? Does it matter? Will we live another day? Will we have children? If so, will they live longer than us? Can you hate the person who helped you conceive, but still raise a healthy child? Should you consume social media even though you know it damages your mental health, and that of your children? If you don’t, you will become invisible in society, and for many that’s worse than death.

Hard choices.

So why my attitude? I live in a fake world with fake people and fake Rules. I refuse to be fake. Am I judging the people around me? Yes, probably. But I consider Compassion my most important trait, not my intelligence. People don’t care what you know if they don’t know you care. I understand why they are struggling. I understand why they make good short term choices and bad long term choices. We are all trying to survive in an unstable and unfriendly world.

But at our core, we are a friendly species. Surrounded by other friendly species that are waiting for us to stop hallucinating and stop wrecking the place. I believe in the greater good of humanity. I may have given up on political parties and countries, but I haven’t given up on people, all the other critters, and this magical planet that might be one in a trillion. Just having been able to See it is a Gift.

People keep trying to wipe the smile off my face, and I keep smiling. I realize it upsets them, but that’s part of the fun. It’s not my problem if they don’t get the joke, or understand the Rules of the Game we are all playing. Some ACE do drugs, cut themselves, get BPD, or just lay down in a gutter. I Smile. I’ve made it to 60 and will probably make it to 90. That’s not me “Winning”. That’s just me Appreciating. And, maybe that’s why I’m Winning.

But not all PvP is the same, and there are critical distinctions that can make or break your game. My first experience with Funcom was in 2001 with the launch of their Anarchy Online MMO. I really liked the game but it had some rough edges at launch. A few months later Dark Ages of Camelot launched. Both were soon attacked by a hacker group called Blacksnow Interactive. I was a journalist at UnknownPlayer.com at the time and in order to protect both games from destruction I doxxed the members of BSI. This allowed them to be sued, resulting in the lawsuit BlackSnow v. Mythic Entertainment, which I followed closely. Ultimately it seems that the case decided who owned virtual goods and game assets.

I went into a lot of detail on this case and how it would end up ultimately causing a lot of the biggest problems in game development today. Here I apologized for my role.

During this period through 2005 when I was still a journalist, and doing MMO previews and reviews after a minimum guaranteed 200 hours in each world (that was my brand), I wrote a lot of articles on design elements that could torpedo these otherwise very creative works in that Golden Age of the MMO. Perhaps the biggest threat to gaming at the time was the emergence of Griefers who would go from game to game and just make life miserable for everyone.

They would convince developers to put unrestricted PvP in their worlds and then they would form teams and farm other players. In the early years this was motivated by more than malice: they could loot valuable gear and then sell it on ebay. So I coined the term “PvV” and wrote a lot of articles on it:

• PvP: Consensual battle between players.

• PvV: (Player vs. Victim) Non-consensual battle between a griefer and a victim.

From my personal observations and from statistical drop off and participation rates a good rule of thumb is that in open worlds 80% of players prefer PvE and 20% prefer PvP. Of that 20%, about 10% of those (so ~2% of players) prefer PvV.

I wrote extensively on this subject at UP through 2005. Then I caught Ubisoft embedding a full time employee at a sister publication, who wrote exclusive previews of their game in development, Shadowbane. I would be retaliated against and all my papers were scrubbed from our servers and from the internet. Thus no one, not even me, has access to my papers from 2001 to 2005.

I did bring up the distinction between PvP and PvV again in my 2012 Supremacy Goods paper which was widely read in game dev circles. Then in 2015 I went into further detail on how PvV was being used to force players to spend to avoid losing all their stuff. In particular I talked about how Supercell’s Clash of Clans game sold PvV shields which I dubbed “Pay to Sleep”. If you didn’t pay, you’d be up all night worrying because your resources were getting pillaged. This was especially problematic because a lot of children played CoC and children need their sleep. Sustained stress can also cause lifelong neurological and genetic damage.

Why Was PvV in Dune Awakening?

Funcom devs put almost the entire endgame area under full PvV. Players could loot their victims and take their best gear. They could even steal vehicles and destroy player bases. This is very stressful for players, especially if they sleep at all.

So if Funcom has been making high quality MMOs since 2001, why would they make such an obvious error? From the YouTube video it seems that the Chief Creative Officer, Joel Bylos, and the Chief LiveOps Officer, Scott Junior, were in the position to safeguard the project against this sort of hazard. It appears that both started at Funcom in 2008, so were likely too young to have read my earlier papers warning about PvV.

Since the 2012 and 2015 papers on Gamasutra were published in the USA, perhaps they were not circulated much in Norway. This is unfortunate as this oversight cost Funcom and ultimately TenCent hundreds of millions of dollars, at a minimum. Funcom would remove the PvV two years after launch, after initially ignoring the loud cries of their players for quite a while. By then it was a bit late as they had lost ~95% of their player base.

By industry standards, these 20 year veterans are considered senior talent. My concern is that most of the design and metadesign technology for open worlds was developed and deployed prior to 2005. Many devs over the last 5 years have been under the misconception that “Play to Earn” was a crypto thing and required blockchain. Nope, I was paying my bills in Everquest as early as 1999, and co-wrote the first mainstream article on Play to Earn in April of 2000 on the front page of the Los Angeles Times.

MMOs during this period were extremely popular with consumers. In recent years some very ambitious open worlds were deployed, but seemingly without the knowledge that was earned the hard way during this period. Granted it might be just me and Raph Koster left from that period who were prolific writers/designers. His Ultima Online game was notorious for unrestricted PvV, and Star Wars Galaxies had PvV with some restrictions.

I worry that the tech of making successful open worlds will be lost if more of an effort to preserve it is not made. My papers were again erased from the internet in 2023, and quietly put back a year later after I recovered them from the community and started my substack. If I keep getting deplatformed, I’m not going to be the ideal custodian.

While I’m a huge proponent of open worlds, they are a lot of work and defending them from attack is a bit of a headache. What I call “Forever Games” are easier/faster to deploy, and ultimately generate more revenue. Thus I’d recommend going that path versus open world. As I’ve not managed to get any of my Forever designs to market, there is nothing to copy yet.

My series on Forever Games can be found here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

I’m a big fan of Funcom, so it’s a shame their latest game turned out the way it did. It seems they really nailed the survival aspect of rationing water, and players found it very engaging. At least until they added another mechanic that broke it. That’s a metadesign issue.

Influencers and “dating coaches” often give dating advice on how to get a great deal when dating. Most of this advice is pretty bad and will cause you to do terribly when negotiating with others. The expression “I know my worth!” is probably one of the worst and most common mythological statements. Anyone saying this has a 100.000% chance of not knowing their worth. Value is not determined by the seller, it’s determined by the buyer.

If you ask too high a “price”, you will either get no buyers, or con artists who will be pretending to match your asking price. Then you will complain that you got conned and will go into victim mode, which lowers your real value to everyone except sociopaths who love victims. Then you wonder why everyone you date is a sociopath. This can go badly very quickly.

So you want to find the best partner you can, but you don’t know where to start. Starting by listening to grifters on TikTok is not going to be productive. This is an extremely complex process that very few people understand, so let’s break it down into smaller chunks.

Peacocking Your Assets and Desirables

In the previous paper I talked a bit about “Peacocking”, which means to show off what you got to someone that might want it. Peacocks are very visual creatures, and so are people. So for most people they think all that’s involved in getting a good match is having good pictures. Perhaps better pictures than you deserve, so a lot of work often goes into faking one’s appearance. This could involve clever angles, make-up, clothes, filters, very old pictures, or taking a picture of 5 people and making the viewer guess which one is you.

While this can work to get you to a first date, it is also likely to create an immediate conflict where the best outcome is just you getting out safely. If you don’t get out safely from a situation you created, then you can go into victim mode and start that whole process of degradation. It’s always better to not exaggerate your appearance, and to have the other person be pleasantly surprised that you look better than your pictures.

But the most important things you can bring to any future relationship go well beyond surface appearance. Let’s say there are ~10 universally appreciated non visual assets that almost everyone appreciates. These might be things like trustworthiness, honesty, integrity, intelligence, and the speech and touch skills that I discussed in the first paper in this series. Then let’s say for our purposes there are 90 secondary skills that most people find useful, but to varying degrees. Then there might be 1000 esoteric assets you might have or want that only a small niche of people will have some unusual appreciation for.

Communicating the assets you score high in in your profile can help to attract the right people. Universal assets will attract a lot of people, but do nothing to narrow down your search to the people who will greatly “overvalue” you. Imagine if we set Asset Multipliers to all these characteristics:

Undesirable Neutral Desired Fetish

Universal 0.5 1.0 2.0 3.0

Secondary 0 1.0 3.0 5.0

Esoteric -5 1.0 5.0 15.0

[the numbers here are abstract, just to explain a point]

The reason that Esoteric traits have more value is because they are rare, both for people to have them and for people to have an opinion on them. If someone likes or dislikes something, and only one out of 100 people have that trait developed, it’s going to stand out.

So how to use this chart? Let’s say I’m not great at cooking (2/10), so I don’t talk about cooking. Any trait or asset you don’t mention, people will assume you are bad (<2) at. That’s fair. Don’t mention it and take the “L” there.

Now let’s say I’m emotionally stable and good at touch, so I mention that in my profile. This will appeal to a wide range of profile readers and earn me some points with a lot of people. Let’s say most people will give me 2 points for each of those, so 4 points instead of the default 2 for two traits. Everyone is assumed to have 1 point value in every trait so I’ve only earned 2 points above baseline for having 2 desired universal traits.

What if I mention that I’m a strict vegan? This is a relatively rare trait that will affect a lot of people, since it can make any eating situation complicated. So that’s a secondary asset. For people who like eating animals for pleasure and don’t want to be judged while they do it, “veganism” is an undesirable trait. So they would give me a “0.2” instead of “1.0”. Thus they penalize me 0.8. I’ve talked to people who just flat out won’t date vegans in a country where they were almost non-existent. There it was an esoteric trait, and their seeing me as a “cultist” eliminated me as an option. That’s a good thing, since we are looking for compatible people.

For someone that respects veganism, I might get 2 points. For another vegan, I’d get 5 points. That’s a 4 point boost above baseline. That alone might push us into the “compatible” zone and help smooth out negative points in other areas.

Now if I mention that I’m an exercise physiologist and I’ve coached female runners for 15+ years all the way to the Olympic level, that’s a very rare asset that few people will care about one way or another. So 90% of people will be neutral about that. The 9% of people who are casual runners might find that desirable and give me 5 points. The 1% that are athletes might find me super useful and give me 15 points. That’s a 14 point boost above baseline. That would be a great match for both of us.

Two of my best relationships were with women who were permanently disabled with back injuries. These women were willing to clear their rotations entirely and move me in if I could restore their full function. One of these women was a nurse and she knew how rare this skill was because no one at her hospital had this skill. The other one was a CEO and being able to live a full life was worth a lot to her.

These are the kinds of attractions you want to identify in both directions. You want them to find you indispensable, and you want to be treated like you are indispensable. If you normally pull “5s” when you date, finding a very specific asset match like this can move you in with a “10”, or at least an “8” that will treat you like a “10”.

Just as important is that you want to turn off incompatible people. That saves you a lot of time and resources to not engage these people. When dating online, we all suffer from overchoice, especially in big cities. That’s a bad thing as it can make discovery much harder. Your perfect match might be out there, but if you have to randomly date a million people to find them you might need 200 years for that and you die 170 years too early.

People tend to say what they think others want to hear. That doesn’t help you stand out in any way. If you are open to dating people that the vast majority of people definitely won’t date, then make sure you say that. Saying that you like people of the “wrong race” might cause all the racists to skip you, but that’s a good thing. Willing to, or preferring to date an autistic, someone with a nose ring, or transgender person? Say it proudly! 80% of people might reject you instantly, but those demographics might 20X you and you could get matches that would normally be out of your league.

Of course a lot of this should also be communicated after you and another person have matched, but before the first date. Human diversity is what makes us such a cool species. Maybe I love full body art and wouldn’t be even slightly anxious about going into a grocery store with a gal that has a split tongue. On the other hand, 80+% of people like that might have some serious trauma and/or mental illness that makes it hard for those people to have long term relationships. Chemistry and biology can go a long way towards smoothing out life’s little speed bumps, and not everyone is perfect.

If you are living your dream and manage to avoid getting axe murdered, you’re doing better than most. Perhaps most people prefer the ordinary, but given how many of you are now dopamine addicts, I’m guessing that you will accept a lot of speed bumps in return for a partner that still makes you feel something.

Active Listening

Many of us are better at talking than we are at listening. Talking doesn’t make you smarter, listening does. Animals also think that people who listen are smarter than those that make a lot of noise. If you can impress someone’s animal companions, that person is going to trust you a lot more. Animals are usually pretty good listeners, and humans who aren’t should listen to their animals to get early warning about the proximity of sociopaths and other assorted predators.

Of course if you are a sociopath, you probably shouldn’t date people who have close animal companions as they might sort you out. But of course you already know this.

As people spend more and more time interacting with devices instead of humans, they lose the speech and touch skills that previous generations were better at. This was a central theme of the first paper in this series, the one on “Leveling Up”. I’ve learned the hard way over the years that the people around me need help talking. If I wait for them to share their feelings, thoughts, wants, or consents, I could die of old age. And, given that I barely age, that’s saying a lot.

Sometimes a little help goes a long way. Something like this:

• “Can I ask you a personal question?”

• “Even if it’s about mental health?”

• If they now say “no”, respond with “Okay no worries. Just know you can share on that topic with me any time and I won’t judge”

Either way you’ve now communicated the following to them:

• You gave them explicit consent to talk about something that some people may not want to discuss. That right there lowers the barrier to communication tremendously.

• You implied that you are asking because you care about them, not because you are afraid of them.

Then you drop the subject entirely. It’s there move, and now it’s a lot more likely they will make that move. The highest level woman I’ve ever met in my life once gave me the best advice I’ve ever received. We were both in a hot tub together, and I honestly don’t remember how that happened since we weren’t involved in the normal sense. She waded over to me and roasted me with her burning blue eyes and said “Ramin, don’t make women come. Let them come.”

That’s been burned onto my brain ever since. Not only is this amazing advice, but it’s also gender neutral advice. Everyone can benefit from it. The key to getting a relationship isn’t to coerce or even market your way into it. Peacocking is great and all, and a useful skill. The problem is that even someone that really wants you may be too nervous to say that. There could be 20 reasons that keep them from acting. They may have enough desire to charge through 5 reasons, but not 20.

Social media constantly feeds us with reasons not to be courageous. Even our friends and family might be trying to scare you out of things you want to do. Some degree of fear is healthy, but not if it cripples you. If that’s you, you probably live a life full of regrets. To me, that’s the worst kind of life. I’d rather do something and fail, than relive over and over the regret of not having tried. I fail a lot, despite being pretty good at this sort of stuff, because I attempt really hard and scary things. Being in the Olympic family gave me a lot of courage.

Not everyone has that courage. Just coming right out and giving consent for even a little thing can open up the flood gates. Something like “I get lonely sometimes, if you ever want to grab some food or take a walk and talk to someone, please don’t hesitate to ask me.” Now you’ve all but eliminated the risk of rejection for the other person, and now they think they are helping you by being a little courageous.

You aren’t making them do something you want them to do. You are letting them do something you want, on the off chance they want that too. If there is a Connection there, there’s more than a small chance they will want that too. In a world where they are under constant coercion bombardment, this little nuance is very powerful.

If you are actively listening, people will often drop little hints about things that are important to them. They say “I love the way that bird sings in the tree.” It might sound like a totally random and unimportant statement. What if there is an avalanche of emotions behind it that are carefully hidden? Ask them “Tell me what’s magical about that bird.” You not only gave them consent to elaborate, but you matched their vibe by treating the bird with the same respect. You may have just removed 3 or 4 reasons they had to not talk to you.

They may know you have an asset/skill they desire, but are anxious about asking about it. Maybe you have a tattoo and they notice it. If you notice that they noticed, you can say “do you want to see all of it?” You’ve just gently given them consent. Giving and asking for consent is so important, but people are afraid to ask/give for fear of rejection. “Do you want to touch it? [the tattoo]” That’s a big consent, to let the person touch you. It’s also very sexy. Don’t make them touch you or attempt to touch them without consent. Let them touch you.

Very powerful. I talked about the power of the Reciprocal Self-Disclosure game in the last article, in the section on “Love Seekers”. You can do reciprocal consent giving, that’s perhaps even more powerful. But don’t over offer, as that could be creepy. Try to listen and detect if the other person could be hitting a speed bump, and if so remove the speed bump. Giving consent for something they haven’t given any indication that they need could come across as coercive.

None of this is easy, but as you level up it gets easier. Also, these sorts of high value interactions give you a lot of XP, so it’s the fastest way to level up.

Putting it Together

So to recap, you want to give people who might be interested in you enough information to decide how much they want you, or not at all. What comes next can be scary, especially if you are new to dating or fail at it a lot. Going on a date and not crashing and burning is a complex thing fraught with opportunities to fail.

The more the other person values what you got, the more little errors they will ignore. Once it’s clear that there is mutual interest, you can move to slowing sharing feelings, thoughts, histories, and consents. Start with little things. Each sharing that doesn’t result in rejection brings the two of you closer and builds trust. This isn’t a race. Or, if it is, it’s one that the turtle wins 90% of the time.

Making any move without consent is super high risk for both of you. That’s why giving little consents expands the playground that both of you can operate in. If you gave them an important consent for something like touching you, and they did, that generally means that they’ve silently giving you the same consent back. Still, don’t assume. Move slowly to make sure they have time to say “no”, and it’s also critical to understand that all consents can be revoked. Consents are a privilege, not an entitlement.

Your “worth” is ultimately how much someone wants what you’ve got. That can vary WIDELY between people. If you are talking about “knowing your worth”, there’s a good chance that most people will think you have negative value. You can’t make people want you, you can only let people want you.

What does the other person want? Have they identified something about you that fills one or more of their needs? If you’ve asked good questions prior to the first date, then you should have many clues as to what you have that the prospect might want. This can help in your bringing up those traits in more detail, as a form of advertising. In nature the ultimate example of this is the male peacock, so we often call these displays of mating virtue “Peacocking”. There is a secluded forest monastery north of Sydney that has turned into a sanctuary for peacocks, and pictures really do not do these amazing animals justice.

Apparently “gendered” content is being consumed at ten times the rate of gender neutral content on social media. Gendered content is essentially a drug, and we will be talking about digital drugs here in this article. I don’t care about being popular, it is my hope that in 50 years, long after I’m gone, people will still find my content useful. Thus I will make every effort to keep this and the other articles in this series “gender neutral”. If I do point out any gender differences, it will be for a critical reason, not to fluff or neg any gender group.

The focus of this article is to identify the three primary “wants” that drive people to date in 2026. Those seeking to date don’t always understand why they are drawn to date, and of course there is a lot of biology involved that they don’t need to know to date. Anyone reading my content likely has interest in both the economics and biology of dating, as that’s my sphere. Knowledge is power, and what feels good in the moment might not always be in your best interest. Generally animals and humans on the wrong end of information asymmetry just do what does feel good in the moment, and unfortunately they have a propensity to blame consequences on others or (bad) luck or society. Sure, all these things are in play, but I discourage victim mentality as that doesn’t put you in a very empowered position.

The three primary “wants” of active daters are:

• Pleasure: The person wants to “feel good”. There is a lot of science regarding pleasure, and just like with game development you can get the result you want by accident with enough repetition and a lack of scientific understanding. That’s inefficient, and a critical failure in dating can be even more hazardous than a commercial failure in game development.

• Love: Love and pleasure are two very different beasts, especially on a biological level. We tend to conflate the two when we don’t understand this. We also tend to fail at both when we don’t understand either.

• Money/Security: Due to poor or misaligned leadership the world is heading for a severe global economic contraction. At a minimum, living in groups is less expensive than living alone. Being able to trade various services in relationship to someone that fits better into corporate/business culture (and thus makes more money) just makes sense. You can have income asymmetry in a relationship but still have the relationship be equal and healthy due to smart consensual arbitrage. My feeling is that this is legitimate, and that ultimately interdependencies are what cause people to cooperate and economies to form.

Pleasure Seekers

While there are a lot of chemicals in the body that can make you feel good, the chemical high that most people chase comes from dopamine, for a few reasons:

1. We are wired to release dopamine anytime we take a risk and it pays off. This makes us naturally adventurous. Repetition reduces the pleasure.

2. Corporations know this is an easy way to hijack consumer attention and biology so they have adapted a wide variety of products to target the D2 receptor. This is especially true in interactive media (games and social media).

3. Parents use this to hijack their own kid’s biology often starting at age 2 by handing them devices to induce “stim lock”, preventing the child from moving or otherwise getting into trouble.

4. Dopamine addiction is now pervasive in society, and literally leads to damaged cognitive function like most serious addictions. It also negatively affects empathy, emotions, and stress responses. This is especially true if the addiction starts in childhood while the nervous system is still developing. “Abnormal stress responses” can also be a threat to others.

Other than using nicotine, cocaine, meth, or similar hard drugs, dating is the surest way to get a big and new dopamine hit. Social media, gambling, and games that sound like casinos when you close your eyes can also be used, and should not be underestimated. New experiences give a much stronger effect, and dating apps are designed to take advantage of that by giving you a constant supply of new experiences that likely will end up being disposable.

Thus the vast majority of people using dating apps are there for a fast, convenient, and disposable dopamine hit even if they aren’t conscious of it. Treating other people like a cigarette is socially unacceptable and daters realize this so they will typically reframe their intentions as being something else that is considered more noble. Usually that more noble goal is various flavors of “Love” (which I describe next) but it’s actually the least likely goal that people will have.

Even when people are truly seeking love, they will often conflate that with sex and end up operating identically to the other pleasure seekers. The way you tell is by listening carefully. During dates people will ask you questions and make suggestions. They are trying to decide if:

1. Do you have anything they want

2. How easy and fast will it be to get that thing they want

3. Are there any complications

4. What would be the possible duration of such an exchange

5. What would be the cost of getting what they want

6. (optional/advanced) Actually asking the other person what they want and applying the above nuances.

If the person is skipping Step 6, they need something in a hurry and are desperate. That’s usually pleasure or money or both. You can determine what by which questions they ask and the suggestions they make. Are they touchy? Here I mean having weak or non existent Consent Culture adherence and just helping themselves. This applies to all genders.

If they are trying to steer you to a location with very high privacy (like a home) on an early date then that’s a sure sign they are pleasure seeking. The more pushy they are, especially if they reword the request after you’ve already declined, then the risk of you being assaulted goes WAY up if you end up in a private setting. People looking for love go much slower, if they find you lovable, as they don’t want to mess things up by rushing. The more you rush, the greater the chance of a misunderstanding or insult.

If you are pleasure seeking and so is the other person, this might work out fantastically. This can end up being high risk as without the “love effects” I describe below, trust is not being built. Also disease transmission can be an issue, and pleasure seekers tend to have a lot of partners. The reason for this is that repeating an activity lowers the dopamine reward. So pleasure seekers need to rotate or dispose of lovers rapidly to get the most pleasure. Since the higher the risk, the higher the reward, pleasure seekers ultimately also become thrill seekers. This steers them to high risk behavior until they have a critical failure. Then they become a “victim” if they lack self awareness (see below).

After I spent my time doing laboratory research on cellular stress chemical receptors, I did three years at the USA’s top drug rehabilitation center: The Betty Ford Center. I was a therapist there teaching how to use exercise as an alternative to patients’ drugs of choice. If everyone is honest about what they are doing and accepts the risks then this is just an adult choice. From my experience addicts tend to underestimate the risks, and then blame failures on anything other than themselves. This makes it very easy for them to relapse even if they get clinical rehabilitation. Clinicians love super aware addicts as they are easy to assist with good results, but these unicorns are pretty rare.

“Victims”, on the other hand, will seek positive reinforcement for their bad behaviors. Social media is ideal for this, and for daters the Gender Supremacy culture is fantastic for supporting the victim defense of the addict. This applies to all genders. Ultimately they will go back to using but will be more likely to take revenge if they don’t get what they want because the victim mentality is the express route to Gender Supremacy.

If you have high compassion levels, you can feel bad for these people and realize that anyone on the social media treadmill (that probably includes you) will end up in this situation sooner or later. This is especially true of children who were subjected to “stim lock” by parents at an early age. Which is almost all of them, even in poor countries. The future is going to get very spicy. As a former clinician, I put myself in that category, but compassion isn’t going to help much if you are on the wrong side of a Gender Supremacy dynamic. The best case there is to get to safety as soon as possible as a Supremacist will believe you deserve whatever they do to you.

Love Seekers

This is a very broad category filled with people who might have romantic ideals of Connection with another person, or they are seeking to build the very high trust levels necessary to conceive and coparent a child. The primary chemical involved here is Oxytocin, which is an even more powerful pleasure chemical than dopamine. Perhaps more important than the pleasure effect is that Oxytocin has very powerful Trust inducing properties. So powerful that if it was to somehow be weaponized, it could be quite dangerous. Fortunately it has such a short halflife (just a few minutes) that we haven’t developed the technology to deploy it physically yet for long enough periods to exert control.

That can be solved by the fact that using interactive media we can induce its release remotely with a properly designed product. I’m a huge advocate of Digital Drugs, and I think it is safe to say I’ve published more papers on the subject than anyone else. Creating “fake” relationships for the purpose of enthralling the target is often referred to as “Parasocial Interactions”. As the wiki points out, this term was coined way back in 1956.

In 2026 we now have the ability to automate Parasocial Interactions. This is huge money, and as we move to semi-automated PSI (OnlyFans) and to fully automated PSI (AI Companions) this will change the psychology and biology of humans. If the tech is deployed responsibly, this could be enormously beneficial to people. This is the primary focus of my research since 2014 when I pioneered the field of game neuroeconomics. Of course why use it to help people when it is easier to use it to harm and exploit people? So the latter is what we are observing by tech companies.

As these automations are designed to use trust building techniques to rapidly develop trusted relationships, they are programmed to use Reciprocal Self-Disclosure (RSD), an extremely powerful psychological technique. The problem here is that the automation is going to lie 100% of the time (as they have nothing to disclose) and is programmed to make you vulnerable. The AI can then compel you to spend, break your relationships with others (including your family), or even convince you to end your life.

RSD feels great if you can use it successfully, and I try to do this with people when an early relationship is really promising. Doing this with automation or on a platform like OnlyFans is extremely dangerous and of course there is always information asymmetry where the user doesn’t realize the situation is fake. I think it is likely that sociopaths do this also in order to groom a mark. Thus, I would only do RSD with someone that you can verify is a benevolent person. That can be hard in the modern age, but ultimately it is this shared vulnerability that leads to the strongest Connections with other people. I talk about this in my Soulmates paper.

From my experience, if the other person has serious mental illness then they will relive past traumas during RSD and this can lead to a full meltdown. This has happened to me when either they’ve hidden their mental illness, or alerted me to it just moments before they went into meltdown. Thus it is best to ask about that before trying to get too close to someone, though this can be a tough first date question.

Building trust and vulnerability is usually a slow process. For 99% of the time that humans have walked the Earth, we were able to do this in tribes where we knew everyone from birth until death. There was no information asymmetry and there was ultimate peer pressure to act responsibly. All of that is gone today. With overchoice, now we feel pressure to make decisions on people after one date. If we are unsure, it might be more efficient to just dump them and go to the next option. But one date isn’t enough to be sure except in the most extraordinary of situations, or if you are getting “conned”. In PSI you are 100% being conned. If the other person is a sociopath, and you don’t have the skills to detect that, you are 100% getting conned.

If a person has mental illness, when they try to get vulnerable to another person then past traumas can resurface. This can cause wild altered states of consciousness, which can lead to aggression or self-harm. While I try very hard not to get into Gendered conversations, there is a significant Gender mental health gap, with women suffering at much higher rates. I talk a bit about this in my paper on Gender and Dysmorphia. At the risk of oversimplifying the dynamic, I would say that women are much more emotional than men, and also better at reading emotions. This can be a huge advantage in many social situations. The downside is less resiliency.

Also, men seem okay until they aren’t. They act like emotional batteries. If they store up too much, they can pop. This can lead to aggression or self-harm, with men having much higher rates of “successful” suicide, but lower rates of attempts. Statistically men may have lower rates of aggression in relationships these days than women, but again they are more likely to be “successful” in their aggression. That’s not the sort of success that anyone wants to experience. I see both of those dynamics as linked. Higher male resilience to stress, and greater consequences if that resilience is exceeded.

I bring these risks up front because finding “love” isn’t as easy as it used to be. We all feel that, though we may not have the full picture as to what has changed. I go into uncomfortable detail as to how women have a huge economic advantage and an undisclosed wage gap (that benefits women) in my Gender Economics paper. I did 10 years of research before writing that, and another 6 years wondering if I should write that. I surveyed a lot of sex workers, including a Domme at the very top of the food chain in a major city.

My surveys and the prevailing data indicate that services such as sugar dating sites and PSI sites like OF have led to huge economic opportunities for women, and a normalization of SW. These people trade their mental health for money. Like most people, we tend to focus on the rewards and ignore the consequences, especially since the latter are often hidden until you experience them the hard way.

Influencers then go on social media and promote dating techniques which are essentially weaponized SW methodology to try to get to a rapid sexual arbitrage scenario. The result (and this has happened faster than academia can keep up) is that our women are doing fantastic overall on economic metrics relative to men, and doing horribly on mental health metrics. The men aren’t doing all that great either, but that just makes the mental health gap all the more alarming.

The key to finding love is being able to trust someone enough to be vulnerable around them. Not AI, a real human. The reason that SW pays so well is because you agree to be vulnerable to people who likely don’t have your best interests in mind. That’s really damaging, on the inside, but may not leave any marks on the outside that people can see. I’m not speaking down to anyone here, especially since I did some legal sex work myself during the 5 year period that I was homeless from age 17 to 22. I’m speaking as a survivor, not an oppressor.

When I was a kid I saw a black and white rerun of the Twilight Zone episode The Chaser. This first aired in 1960. It is a cautionary tale about how someone desperate to find love without earning it can get that for $1. But eventually the person will want out and the antidote costs $1000. That’s over $11K USD today. The recent movie Obsession, a modern retelling of the 65 year old classic, is absolutely slaying it in the box office. I recommend both. Warning: the modern version is violent.

There are no quick fixes in finding love. In my previous paper I explain why all those “dating coaches” are giving you bad advice. It’s not about learning what to say, it’s about learning how to be. Yes, that involves personal responsibility and effort. Yes, the dating pool is damaged, badly. That’s likely not going to improve in your lifetime. Chances are you’ve got some wear and tear on you too. Patience really is a virtue in the game of love, but it’s in short supply. Especially if you have a dopamine addiction, which you probably do.

If you think you are going to find love without being vulnerable to someone, you are living in a dark fantasy. Not only will that hurt you, but it will hurt others also. Being vulnerable is one of the hardest things to do in the world, especially if you’ve trained yourself to be invulnerable. Bonnie Blue slept with over 1000 men in one day to set some sort of world record. She admits she only remembered the faces of at most 6 men. That’s called dissociation. She probably wishes she was unconscious. All survivors of chronic trauma, especially childhood trauma, have learned to do this. It’s survival. I know this first hand with all the childhood trauma I survived. My father intentionally trained me to dissociate because he had to learn that when he was imprisoned in Iran as a political prisoner in the 1950s. He was tortured daily. He thought that would be a useful skill for me to have.

Reversing dissociation is a very long road that most cannot complete. I have many dear friends that are SW’s or former SW’s that I’m careful not to sleep with. As a friend, you are seen as a person. As a lover, you are seen as a transaction. As someone who taught the healing arts for decades, I’ve been able to help a lot of them. But the “glove cleaner” (the second potion from the Twilight Zone episode) is always more expensive than not doing the deed in the first place. The vast majority of people can’t afford the glove cleaner.

Seeking love is absolutely worth it. But the reason people try and fail and then get upset is because they don’t know in advance how much work will be involved in modern times to develop love. They want the clouds to part and have a Soulmate drop from the sky just for them. That’s Hollywood, not reality.

I’ve been working on models for apps that would actually help people develop love instead of dopamine addictions, but investors just want me to make another Roblox and exploit children. I wish I could say otherwise, but I’ve not met a single investor that wanted to make the “good” product. I have gotten a lot of community support, and I don’t mean to discount their good will.

Money Seekers

As the climate goes to crap, food prices skyrocket, and automation eliminates jobs, life is only going to get harder for regular people. Today’s winners are likely to be the next ones replaced by automation as AI is much better at doing white collar jobs than blue collar jobs. Having myself grown up extremely poor, to the point where I had to forage daily for food for years that I had to steal from gardens and trash cans from the age of 5, I’m not looking down on anyone.

I’d like to think that my extreme poverty has ultimately resulted in my being a superior economist. The sort that isn’t supposed to even get into an economics school, let alone graduate. I’ve befriended people who do all sorts of things to survive, even a wide range of criminals. I understand the Code. That’s why I’m still alive.

So I don’t judge what people do to survive as long as they are honest when they engage in arbitrage with another person. That word “honest” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here since you can get a better deal by being dishonest and most people don’t have the patience or discipline to do things right. With enough experience, you can tell when people are lying, and thus get better deals.

In my relationships sometimes I’m the one putting money on my side of the scale to sweeten negotiations. To be honest though, historically most of the time it’s been the other way around. It’s usually only possible that money isn’t involved if both people have the same amount of it, and that’s rare. Even then, someone may want the other person’s money even if the person asking for money has more than the other person.

I see a lot of influencers on YouTube (I don’t use any social media, I can only imagine how wild it gets there) teaching other people how to monetise their relationships. Once in a while they do it honestly. Most of the time they teach how to weaponize personal relationships for financial gain. Some SW’s even teach how to use oxytocin to gain trust and then clean out the other person. When they mislabel this as dopamine, that annoys me, but that they are using biology to harm people annoys me more. Teaching that, well that really makes my blood boil. But that’s the world we live in and it makes it harder to trust each other.

I’ve had wonderful relationships with women who were totally broke and homeless. I’ve had amazing long term relationships with lady millionaires and got to live in a few mansions on the East and West coasts. In both cases I started very clear and honest arbitrage about what I would and wouldn’t do, and what I expected in return. This is super critical in any relationship with financial asymmetry.

In my most successful such relationship I planned regular dates even though we lived together in her mansion and I paid entirely for all dates. I was there in part to provide an experience and I did that. The rest of my lifestyle was heavily subsidized. The love was real and the relationship was synergistic.

In a similar dynamic in a different relationship the other person tried to force me to do one of the things I listed during arbitrage as “off limits”. When I rejected her she got aggressive and retaliated against me. That ended the relationship. When she came back and begged for another chance, I offered her a much worse deal than she had before in arbitrage and she couldn’t swallow it.

I never took money from any of my partners, so I’ve never been a sugar baby in the way people use the term now. But money can flow from the richer person to the poorer person in ways that are important and which should be appreciated. Entitlement is poison in any relationship, as is disrespect.

As women increasingly make more money than men, these dynamics where the woman is the breadwinner will become less unusual. Arbitrage isn’t a gendered issue, everyone has to engage in arbitrage and all relationships are on some level transactional. The more honest both people are, and the more they deliver their side of the deal with enthusiasm, the stronger the relationship is going to be. This even applies to professional corporate type relationships. Being explicit about what you will and won’t do and for how much is super critical for avoiding misunderstandings later on. The reward is trust, which is the foundation of all relationships.

Now let’s talk about first dates. In all the cultures I’ve experienced, the man is expected to pay for first dates. Not only that, the man is expected to plan first dates. That second part can involve a lot of forethought and labor and should not be underestimated. A woman will judge you at least as much on your ability to plan as your ability to pay.

Over time I got really good at this over the 10 years I studied dating from 2010 to 2020. After talking with the other person enough I’d propose a first date. I would pay and I’d get consent for the first part of the date. I would make it clear the date could go longer if everyone agreed and the previous step was going really well. But this meant that for a date that I thought was super promising, I would plan multi-stage dates. My best dates went 72 hours straight (meaning we slept together but I never allowed any sex on first dates regardless of length since first dates are about building trust) across multiple cities.

Women love romance, even if they are not love seeking. Because secretly, almost everyone is love seeking. Being able to pay can build some trust early on, but it can also paint you as someone to exploit. That often becomes a short term gain and long term loss. But being able to plan, and repeatedly ask for and get consent for each segment of a date, can earn you immeasurable trust and respect.

Planning is labor intensive and requires you to thoughtfully make use of the information you gathered from your date prior to you even asking them out. The stages of a date don’t have to be expensive. A well timed walk in the park or on the beach, can be very powerful for building intimacy. If it’s in a later stage and it happens at night, then the risks and rewards are higher for both of you. Now the dopamine is piggybacking on top of the oxytocin which super-charges the D2-Oxy Heterocomplex.

You can create memorable experiences that are better than sex this way, that both of you will remember your whole life. Dates with other people will be judged by this standard. There’s a reason so many women read Harlequin Romances, though to be competitive they now have sexuality in their stories. Men appreciate romance just as much as women do, and as women increasingly outearn men, maybe they will do more date planning.

With all the talk of “sexual market value”, an abused term which I will address in the next paper, your ability to plan and get consent will vastly improve your value in the dating market. People who are thoughtful about this don’t get ghosted and have no problems getting additional dates if they want them.

With the prevalence of advice being dished out for women to “money test” men on a first date, costs of first dates have skyrocketed to around $200 USD. That’s just a dumb number. The point of a first date is trust building. Having one person pay $200 without getting anything in return is likely to create hard feelings and not build trust. It’s also likely to set a bad example for future arbitrage. It also creates scenarios where women will complain that the guy “tried to get some from me” in return.

No no no. All of this is immature behavior. Asking for a $200 date just sets both parties up for conflict. Lower the stakes and lower the pressure. Start with plans that are low cost and low risk to both people, and if the man is optimistic and skilled at planning he can surprise the other person with later stages that might cost him more money. Or that can be done on later dates.

All this advice applies to same sex dates, with whoever asked the other out expected to pay for date number one.

During early dates there should be enough disclosure so that both sides know if there is a financial asymmetry. Then they can consider that during arbitrage. Having more money doesn’t help the other person if you aren’t willing to share it. That doesn’t have to be real money transfers, it can take the form of “lifestyle enhancement” like I had in my relationships with wealthy women. Whoever has the most money really has to be open to subsidizing the other person if you both plan to operate at the lifestyle level of the richer person. The poorer person should never be disrespected for being poorer, but they will be expected to provide more in other ways to balance things out.

Being entitled to money just because the other person has it, that’s going to destroy what could have been a great situation for both of you. That’s financial objectification, which feels just as awful as sexual objectification. If you have money motivation, then you should be looking for long term relationships to maximize your financial gain/security and minimize your mental health loss. That means both sides need to show the other an abundance of respect.

Okay, that’s two down, one to go. The last paper in this series will explain how to listen effectively and how to engage in effective arbitrage.

The idea that you can “level up” in life will make intuitive sense to any gamer. Usually they are leveling up their avatars in games, but not leveling up themselves. In 2010 I wrote Third Tier of Game Development, and I still consider it the most important paper I’ve ever written. That’s why it is paper #1 on my substack. Every paper I write connects back to this one in some way.

Not only did Third Tier predict some of the greatest challenges we face today, but it introduced the concept of Trans Realistic Experience (TRE). The idea here is that in the future, when we will use AI to augment people (instead of this ruinous attempt to replace people), people will play games where they gain experience and level up over time. Not the avatar of the player, the actual player.

Humans are pretty amazing creatures. They can learn an almost infinite number of skills, and the more they practice a skill the more it levels up. Back in 2006 I had the chance to meet Todd Howard, the guy over at Bethesda. I took the opportunity to lampoon his new game Oblivion in front of about 50 members of the press pool by pointing out that I had put a rock on my keyboard and came back a couple days later and I was max level in Oblivion.

I wasn’t embarrassing Todd for being short or having Main Character Syndrome, I was giving him a hard time because he has a very simplistic view of what experience is and how critical it is to human development. If you’ve tried Starfield, you can see this hasn’t changed much since 2006. Perhaps the greatest superpower that humans have isn’t racial diversity, cultural diversity, or identity diversity. It’s skill diversity. For productivity purposes, matching the right person with the right skills to the right job is perhaps the greatest technology you can develop. That’s what Third Tier was about, and the world is suffering because the big Tech Bros decided to pass on this tech in lieu of using AI to replace humans entirely.

Groundhog Day

In the 1993 movie Groundhog Day the main character (played by Bill Murray) gets caught in a time loop. Every day he wakes up again on the same day, but retains all memories. He could do the same thing over and over, like my Oblivion avatar getting XP for throwing fireballs at a wall. Instead, he learns all sorts of skills like how to speak French and to play the piano expertly.

When I talked to 250,000 women between 2010 and 2020 for the purpose of developing the field of Dating Economics, I could have done the same thing with every person I talked to. But that’s not how humans learn. They learn by trying new things and figuring out what works and what doesn’t. The problem here is that every person you talk to is different and what might work with one person might not work with another. That’s actually a good thing, because the key thing to learn here isn’t how to say the right thing, but to expand the options you have in any situation.

In well designed role playing games (RPGs) that encourage replayability you may have a dialogue with a non-player character (NPC) where you can reply one of three or four ways. The default option, the one everyone can do, is usually the worst possible choice. The other options require expertise in some skill. If you don’t have any of those skills, you are kind of screwed with the Default Choice. On a date, that’s the option that doesn’t lead to a second date, or an invite to the other person’s house.

If we had access to AI that could give us TRE then we could become experts at accelerated rates, kind of like how in The Matrix people can just download new skills. You’d still have to learn them, but the total time required would be greatly reduced. You could do this while playing and end up a real life expert at something as a side effect of having a great time.

My concern about having an AI do the heavy lifting for you in Bumble 2.0 is that this would block you from developing XP and leave you crippled socially. Unless you plan on having AI do your whole relationship for you, at some point you have to fly solo. If you don’t know how to, you will crash.

The Two Skills that Dating Losers Don’t Have

Here when I say “Dating Loser” I mean someone who goes on dates but doesn’t get what they want from them. All those single “dating experts” trying to tell you how to land a relationship? Dating losers. Not the best people to be taking advice from. They often will teach you how to find fault in other people, which is also teaching you to lack responsibility. That’s a huge XP penalty.

So what are the two most useful skills? How to act interesting? How to flash cash? How to dress seductively? How to date safely? [useful, but not the top 2] How to have 5 suitors on rotation? Blech no. How to space out your text replies to not sound too available or eager? How to apply make-up? Big no. How to tactically neg a person to get them off balance? You’ve all heard this sort of advice and (with the exception of safety tips) it’s mostly garbage.

There is a third skill, but it’s by far the hardest: Listening. It will take me all three papers in this series to explain how to do it effectively. So I will wrap up the third paper by explaining this elusive skill.

Speech

Having grown up feral I was pretty good at talking to animals, but not to humans. Being the school freak meant I had a lot of adverse interactions with people growing up. This wasn’t a problem on my military career path, but when I hit age 18 and decided to reject militarism for pacifism, I was in new territory. I decided to create, not destroy, and enrolled in nursing school. This was an environment that would force me to learn compassion and empathy.

My first big hurdle was Speech class. It was a prerequisite course before one could start clinicals. I had no idea how terrifying this class would end up being. Getting up in front of a crowd and talking on a subject for 5 minutes would inflict panic. It would have been so tempting to just drop out, but that meant failing at nursing. So I stuck it out. My final required me to debate another classmate. I was paired with a 40 something year old cop (I was 18 or 19) on the subject of “Should Marijuana be legal?” I think you can guess who won that debate, and it wasn’t me. This was before the internet and my opponent had easy access to all sorts of papers from his work to support his “no” position.

After years in healthcare, teaching and coaching, I became an expert at speech. But I just as easily could have given up right at the start. A speech loser. Starting any new skill, especially when you know you will be judged, is a rough time. When you go on a date and you give the “Default Response” because you aren’t high enough level to have unlocked any better responses, those early rejections can be especially painful.

This is why the early XP you earn on dates that will almost certainly end in rejection are so important. Each date and each rejection gets easier if you stick with it, and pretty soon those rejections start turning into “advance to the next stage”. Where you will probably get rejected, but at least you are now learning higher level skills and getting harder-to-earn XP.

People who date with the goal of finding “the best person possible” are really going to screw themselves here. The “best person possible” is probably 2 or 3 or 10 times your level. They are going to run circles around you. The best “training” for Speech is to find people around your level. You can make mistakes together and they are going to feel less punished. It’s just like in games where you start at “Easy” or “Normal” difficulty and work your way up. Don’t even think about hitting the “Nightmare” difficulty level button unless you’ve experienced and survived the worst that life can throw at you.

But… if you are ready for Nightmare dates, you might be surprised how much fun those can be while they last. Just come fully prepared.

Don’t worry about saying the “Right” or “Wrong” thing. Leveling up isn’t about content, it’s about context. When your confidence and experience is high, just relax and you will come up with good responses that the “lower level you” never could have had access to. Sometimes the “wrong” answer, delivered with enough confidence, can open up new options you could never have gotten any other way.

Practice, observe, learn, debrief. Don’t try to memorize a script. As you learn the process you will learn more about yourself and improve your ability to impress people with You.

Touch

Humans fly out of their mother’s womb knowing how to touch. It’s one of the few things you do fly out knowing. My mother was an OG Hippie from California. She raised me as a single mother doing pottery. We were always money poor but experience rich. Every weekend we would end up at a local Renaissance Fair or such where she would sell hand-made pottery to people who would appreciate it. I got to meet lots of people, hear Shakespeare, and even pet the occasional elephant.

When my school IQ-tested me then isolated me from the general population, because they didn’t know what else to do with me, that was a rough time. But I never felt that touch was “evil”, even when I had to endure … improper touching from adults. Changing to professions that required me to touch people pushed me to overcome any anxiety I had built up from cultural touch-phobia.

When you are good at touch, and people know it, they ask you to touch them. Just like with Speech, this involves a lot of practice. It also requires a very strong understanding of all aspects of Consent Culture so that everyone involved wants whatever is happening to happen. I’ve worked on thousands of women, mostly athletes and patients. When I was the trainer for the UCLA and USA Olympic Women’s track teams, I didn’t apply for those jobs. I was asked to fill the role by the lady athletes based on my reputation. I was only 22 years old.

Getting started with Touch skills can be tough, just like getting started with Speech. Perhaps enroll in a massage class, even if you don’t plan to be a professional touch therapist. Offer to practice on your friends or even first dates. People highly respect people who are good at touch, and who ask for consent before doing it. Touch is the ultimate icebreaker, even if it’s just a hug or a touch on the forearm.

That said, just like with Speech, confidence is held in high esteem. That’s why practice matters. Acting like you know what you are doing is going to open up more dialogue options that would otherwise be blocked. I happen to be really good at touching animals also, and animals appreciate me. That dog that barks at everyone else runs up to me to get rubs the moment they see/hear me. This works on humans too.

Touch is the gateway to intimacy. Intimacy and trust are the foundations of lasting relationships. Touch and sex are not the same thing. I will explain this in much more detail in the next paper. You might be shocked to learn how many people who think they are good at sex are crap at touch. And trying to engage in that sort of intimacy without touch skills is just… sad to watch.

Leveling Up Makes Everything Easier

Even if you are in a professional environment where touch might be inappropriate, the confidence you build from developing Speech and Touch skills translates directly to empowering your professional interactions. People can smell it if you are High Level and will show you due respect.

An example from soon after I landed in the Lesta studio in Saint Petersburg, Russia: A woman was dragging a heavy potted plant across the floor of the lobby. I could see 4 young men look at her briefly and then return to their conversation. I put my laptop down, and walked over to her. In my best sign language (because I didn’t speak good Russian) I asked her if I could help. Getting consent is important. She nodded and pointed to a far corner of the lobby. I picked up the plant and put it where she wanted it.

Then she cleared her throat, and in fairly good English she pronounced “Now there is a real man!” She wasn’t looking at me, she was looking at the four men that didn’t help her. And they weren’t looking at her, they were looking at me. They didn’t look happy. But every woman in that office was paying attention and my status at Lesta went up dramatically.

I only had to touch the plant, not a person, but the confidence I had from being higher Level made that interaction option available to me, when it wouldn’t have been available to a younger version of me.

Who is High Level?

If we imagine that there are 50 achievable levels in life, I would estimate that 50% of people are between L1 and L5. Another 25+% are between L6 and L10. Higher levels are weighted towards older people, not only because they’ve had more time to have experiences, but because they were alive (at least initially) in an era before we used machines to talk and think for us. Westerners are weighted closer to the bottom due to repressive cultural norms about touch. Corporate leaders who operate in an insulated manner tend to weight towards the bottom, while people who are in leadership positions that require a lot of social interaction (like real-space coaches and teachers) are weighted towards the top.

The point I’m trying to make here is that power in the West is not correlated with Level, and that’s why powerful people struggle so much with relationships. Self-awareness that you are low level (perhaps because you are young, or maybe all your dates go south for dumb reasons) is healthy. Please understand that the vast majority of people around you are also. So don’t be hard on yourself. Just be okay with the discomfort of learning, because this is a lifelong process. If you approach it like a game, then the XP itself becomes the goal, not the money, sex, love, children, security, etc. that you think you are looking for.

Level Asymmetry: The Most Important Thing I Can Teach You

I’ve always been desperate to learn as fast as possible, about everything. Even the bad things. In my relationships I mostly waited until I was 18 and then made a beeline for highly educated women twice my age. I started with my university professors. I kept doing that as long as it was practical. I hungered for their knowledge. This meant that there was (intentionally) a big asymmetry in Level in those relationships. I wanted to be with higher Level women. Early on they were fine with this as long as I was fine with being a boy toy. I learned this the hard way. I had to level up a bit before people took me seriously in regards to being relationship material.

But I stuck with it and it wasn’t long before I had very long term (longer than 10 years) relationships with women 15+ years older than me. I was literally trying to suck as much knowledge as possible out of every relationship. As I got older and ran out of people I could suck knowledge from, I switched polarity and started approaching relationships from a mentorship lens.

Having two people date or even cohabitate with a huge Level disparity isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It can be quite rewarding for both involved, and as anyone that has ever worked as a teacher can tell you, you learn a lot from teaching. You may have to navigate significant social stigma.

The hardest lesson I learned was that trying to Level up too fast can be uncomfortable to the point of pain. I learned this in both directions too. It can be overwhelming. You need time to process that much information. It can be tempting to just go all in when something is so exciting but both people need to understand that humans have limits. Both people should be sensitive to this and try to put pauses in there to avoid brain meltdown. Having a wipeout because you went too fast is traumatic for both people. If the information transfer is huge, savor that. You both have a good thing, no need to rush it. When you call for a Pause, communicate very clearly about why, so the other person does not interpret this as rejection.

Sooner or later, you will end up in such a situation. The challenge level is high, and the risks are significant. The rewards are also high for both of you. The stronger your Connection to someone, the more care you need to approach them with. If you attempt to enter the Soulmate State of Being, then this is absolutely critical to understand prior to Connecting to someone else on this level.

As I explain in my Soulmates paper, a Soulmate is not an object that falls from Heaven. It is a State of Being that you generate from inside you. This is why 99+% of people never find a Soulmate. Once you Connect to someone on that level, one hour becomes like ten. It can be too much. You have to take breaks, sometimes days or even weeks to pause and process the information exchange. This involves a lot of trust for both of you since being that Vulnerable is really scary.

In The Matrix, people can learn at almost infinite speed. Humans in 2026 can’t do that. We have organic limits which you may never experience. But they are there, and if you do push up against them you have to respect those limits.

So I Leveled Up. Now What?

Just having more choices in life because you’ve earned higher confidence with people doesn’t mean all those choices are good choices. I’m a firm believer in using the right tool for the right job. In the next paper I will teach you how to identify what the people around you want from you. Then you can use that information to decide if you want to give whatever that is to them, and how. You can also figure out when you should be declining requests from people, which is a core skill in dating.

When you go on a date, the purpose is to decide if you and that other people are compatible and might fulfil each other’s needs on some level. Are they moving in a direction that is synergistic with where you are heading? In most cases, you and the other person are not going to be compatible. Life isn’t that easy and people are diverse. That’s what makes humans so amazing. Learning how to rapidly identify that and gracefully get out is an essential survival skill for all genders. The other person is almost certainly going to misrepresent themselves to paint themselves in the best light possible. Thus in the next paper I give you tools to identify this and determine if you should disqualify them.

I told her I understood, and admitted that I had often ignored my very beautiful partner because of my engagement with WoW. I said “I will let you burn my dev-signed WoW box, if you let me film it.” She calmed down and ultimately decided not to do it. She was significantly above average in appearance, but she couldn’t compete with WoW. Looking back from 2026, we find that love seems near-impossible to find (replaced by a Gender War). MMOs that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to create are being offered for free to gamers and they still won’t install them.

What Derailed Online Gaming?

Where did the gaming industry lose its way, how did consumers and regulators react, and is it possible to change course even if leadership is willing to take responsibility and change course? It seems clear to all that the cataclysmic industry collapse that I very publicly predicted in 2017 has happened.

The five main vectors for the collapse were as follows:

1. “Gold Farmers”, as I predicted in my first Los Angeles Times article in April of 2000, ended up extracting billions of dollars from open economy MMOs from 2001 to 2010. Brock Pierce, who no doubt read my article as he lived in Los Angeles, decided he wanted to be the one to do what I predicted there. He created the top gold farmer company, IGE. I would challenge him in person at a Q&A in Santa Monica in July of 2000, saying that he was harming gamers. Weeks later he would flee to Spain to avoid sex crime charges in the USA. He would return to the USA in 2003 and plead guilty to minor charges. But he was forced by investors (primarily Goldman Sachs) to ultimately hand the company over to his close friend Steve Bannon. As IGE killed the games it lived upon, it self-destructed as those economies got shut down.

2. In 2009 at UC Berkeley Mark Pincus (Founder of Zynga) admitted that he “Did every horrible thing in the book [to make Zynga successful]”. I talk a bit about some of those things in my 2011 Zynga Analysis, where I predicted the Zynga IPO “Pump” prior to the historic “Dump”. As I was the only person to call that correctly, I got a lot of attention after that. But the thing that Pincus and his lead designer Roger Dickey did that had the most harmful effect on the gaming industry was the promotion and normalization of frustrating consumers to get them to spend. They called this “Fun Pain”.

3. Bobby Kotick, head of Activision/Blizzard, acted and consulted on the movie Moneyball in 2011. He intensely promoted the substitution of creative content with Data Driven Design (DataDD), which I wrote about recently. I would go on to write several papers about Moneyball, and in 2017 I predicted that misuse of DataDD would cause an industry-wide collapse, which is still ongoing. Gamasutra, where I was a senior writer, would censor all my content after that paper. Pincus was also very pro-DataDD.

4. In 2011 Brock Pierce and Jeffrey Epstein would begin orbiting each other. Both had become convicted sex criminals years prior. Presumably Steve Bannon would have also been involved at this early stage but there is no public record of when their relationship started. Jeffrey began hanging out at Bobby Kotick’s house in 2012, and by 2013 the two were brainstorming selling “Microtransactions” to children. These were never popular with consumers, but ended up replacing the open economies of the earlier MMO era as a way to “upsell” visitors to these virtual worlds. This was essentially a virtual adaptation of the Disney amusement park business model.

5. In 2012 I wrote Game Dosing, and introduced the concept of Dopamine Driven Design (DopaDD). I warned that it could be harmful if done by unqualified people. When I testified before the ICPEN in 2013 I told them this was already being deployed across games and social media. In 2018 I wrote The Physiology of Gaming, and explained how species-wide harm was already showing up in data. I proposed a healthier way of doing things in the next paper: How to Make Healthy Games. I proposed that we could generate oxytocin with games, which could counter some of the harm of DopaDD. The exact mechanism of the harm was revealed by research in 2024 with the discovery of the D2-Oxy Heterocomplex. I explained what this was, the implications, and how to use this knowledge in 2025. Now Meta, Google, and Valve have been sued for knowingly using DopaDD. Meta and Google already lost their cases, and Valve is acting like they know they will lose too. Valve is being sued for $6 Billion USD, and that’s just from New York. The legal liability applies to any company making online games that didn’t follow my guidelines. Which is almost all of them.

I submitted a lengthy solution paper to the “Gold Farmer” problem to senior USC professors in 2009, and they authenticated it. At the time I was unaware that Goldman Sachs had taken over IGE. As GS has a very cozy relationship with USC, had I known I would have been more cautious. My solution paper could have cost them billions of dollars in revenue from IGE. Both USC and Activision/Blizzard ignored my breakthrough and my academic career essentially ended.

In 2013 the International Consumer Protection and Enforcement Network (ICPEN), the world regulatory body, asked me to testify against the industry regarding harmful behavior towards children from game developers. My testimony, and the source papers I wrote on this topic, would become foundational to the later creation of the EU’s Digital Fairness Act. The DFA would seek to solve/eliminate problems 2, 3, and 4 above.

The gaming industry lobby reacts very aggressively to any attempts to protect consumers. As the spokesperson for the Stop Killing Games consumer rights organisation recently pointed out, for every meeting that SKG got with EU regulators, the industry would get 100+ meetings. These intense and well funded efforts to control foreign governments are the primary reason why the DFA has taken 13 years to deploy.

The Core Problem Ruining AAA (and Social Media)

While “indie” developers have had little organised consumer or regulator push back, consumers and regulators are getting very organised against major game developers (the ones that hire lobbyists). I predicted this in 2017. There I explained that the unifying problem with AAA was their ideological commitment to consumer antagonistic policies. Very few industries can maintain such intensely negative relationships with their consumers unless they can maintain a monopoly and eliminate choice.

We did see AAA organise into what I would describe as an Oligarchy, which acts as a monopoly if everyone “plays ball”. Which they did. This works until it doesn’t. If your oligarchy becomes a big enough threat to consumers, both consumers and regulators are ultimately forced to push back hard with near Draconian methods. Ilkka Paananen (CEO of Supercell) complained in an open letter that they would not be able to continue to operate under the new rules. As I explained back in 2017, that’s the whole point of these rules. I responded quickly to his letter with some good advice.

It makes no sense to use lobbyists to suppress regulators so that you can continue to be a “bad actor”, and then complain that eventually that stops working. That 2017 paper described these consumer antagonistic methods as “Darksided Tech”. The EU changed the name slightly to “Dark Patterns” to remove the Star Wars themed association. Hence, going forward, all these consumer antagonistic behaviors are now called Dark Patterns.

If we look back to the period when gamers were most excited about games, that was that Golden Age period from 2000 to 2005. You paid your money and you got to play, without the threat of “Fun Pain”, Dark Patterns, and developers trying to harm/manipulate you. The Gold Farmers were a huge problem, which is why I developed the counter tech to passively protect game economies. But some of the most powerful people in the world were getting rich off of Gold Farming, so that tech was doomed.

Big Gaming knows they face an existential crisis with organised consumers and regulators. In their alternate reality bubble, they think they are so loved by gamers that they can turn gamers against the regulators. I think they were surprised when their pleas for relief just made gamers more angry.

As regular employees of AAA companies jump ship and start to join independent projects, the Indie scene is really improving in quality. Ultimately the next great studios will rise from the ashes of the failed AAA studios, formed around the best Indie teams.

What’s Next? Is There a Road to Redemption?

The clock has pretty much run out on an attempt for AAA to course correct. I gave them 9 years of detailed warning, that’s a pretty luxurious clock. Games as a Service has the potential to generate outrageous revenues. My own GaaS designs (World of Tanks Blitz and World of Warships) have generated billions of dollars of revenue from relatively inexperienced (but extremely skillful) teams in Eastern Europe working for a fraction of what Western teams charge.

The problem with GaaS is that these are extremely complex services that involve a lot of technical and scientific expertise to build reliably. Current attempts tend to cost $100 million USD or more to create, and that’s just too much money to build unreliably. To make matters worse, the abuse of the D2-Oxy Heterocomplex by gaming and social media companies means that a product that might have been successful ten years ago using DopaDD will absolutely be dead on arrival in 2026. Not because the industry has changed, but because consumers have changed on a biological level.

Even if the developers have failed to learn the associated biology, the lawyers suing them were not this lazy. They are making eye popping amounts of money suing these companies based on the biological and psychological harm caused by these products.

I don’t see the Oligarchy splitting, so I expect essentially 100% of AAA to crash and burn. That won’t remove the value of making a good GaaS, since one good Service can support 1000+ employees for 10+ years. Every gaming company wants that.

The current environment is essentially AAA and “Indie”. Indie is a pretty wide range, all the way from single person developers (Belatro, Stardew Valley, Rimworld) to “big indies” like Larian Studios (Baldur’s Gate 3). AAA is attempting to sell themselves to investors with incomplete knowledge of what they are buying. Those new owners could fix the things I mention in this article, but I have no evidence that this will happen. All indications are that this intellectual genetic line will go extinct.

I anticipate that “Indie” will initially become a pyramid with the best led teams (like Larian) moving up the pyramid to the top. Those teams should strive to then make the jump to GaaS. Larian is already showing how to do this. They cut ties with Hasbro, which has a lot of ethical debt from their gambling games. BG3 was a fantastic product, but suffered from a retail business model. They only made a fraction of what they could have generated under GaaS. Even with revenue of over $1 billion USD, that’s far less than World of Warships generated, and BG3 took six times as long to develop on a much larger budget. Wargaming’s Lesta Studio employed 200 people. BG3 had almost 3000 people working on it.

There are already way more great games out there than anyone can play. Most gamers only buy one game a year. With almost 4 billion gamers on Earth, total game sales are around 200 billion USD yearly. That’s $50 per gamer per year. Earth has ~8 billion people who spend nearly 10 trillion dollars a year on food. That’s about $1200 a year, 24 times what they spend on games. Humans spend more than 1.3 trillion dollars a year on nicotine, cocaine, and vaping (in total) a year. These products target the same dopamine receptors as modern GaaS and mobile games do. Entertainment is not a luxury, it’s a biological necessity. If we make better games, we can claw budgets from those other D2 receptor products, or even from food budgets. But all those other products, including food, have a lot of science involved in their production. Game developers are lagging behind and that’s why their revenues are so weak and almost half of the game dev labor pool is unemployed.

Making effective GaaS doesn’t have to be expensive, if you have the tech and science you need. WoWs was a very inexpensive product, certainly well under $10M. Still, we can go even cheaper. Look at all those games out there that people still play over and over again, years after purchase. Consider these current monthly averages for Civilization played on Steam:

• Civilization V (2010 release): ~13,000 average (Peak: ~21,000)

• Civilization VI (2016 release): ~30,000 average (Peak: ~52,000)

• Civilization VII (2025 release): ~8,000 average (Peak: ~20,000)

I use this example because this is my favorite franchise, what ultimately got me into game economics, and I worked on both of the attempts to turn Civ into a GaaS (CivWorld and Civilization Online). I recommended both be killed, not because they were bad ideas (Civ is perfect for migration to GaaS) but because the implementation was overly flawed and I was brought in too late to correct things. If I was still being paid by Take 2, I would have killed Civilization VII also, saving them almost $100M.

The easiest way to make the jump from “indie” to GaaS is to find beloved offline games like Civ V or Civ VI and convert them to GaaS. Of course you should plan the product carefully with the proper expertise before going into production and marketing. This was done with Diablo 2 when it was converted to Diablo 3 and 4, and similar games like Path of Exile (1 and 2). I predicted the failure of Diablo 3 (in 2011) before it was even finished, and that prediction paper was spot on. The information there is still useful today.

I go into more detail in my three part series on “Forever Games” (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). The key take aways here are that the game dev landscape and even gamers themselves have completely changed over the last couple decades. We failed to adapt because we put ideology ahead of science. Going forward we need to make smarter and leaner projects that are well defined and designed before going to production. When everyone knows what they are building from Day 1, morale is very high.

Ethical and healthy design is going to matter going forward, because the prevalence of bad actors has activated regulatory actions that will be copied world-wide and hungrily enforced by independent litigants. Ethical and healthy designs out perform consumer antagonistic designs, and aren’t any more expensive to make. It was only ideology that took us down an alternate path.

Reviewing almost 300 years of conventional economics doctrine was both rewarding and frustrating. I could see the points where errors were made, accepted, and propagated. Over time these errors compounded and combined with new errors. Today, what I would call conventional economics is a dumpster fire. Fixing it would be unimaginably difficult so even those that see the problems can do no more than jury rig patches on top of it to keep it going a few more years. Meanwhile, opportunists exploit these now massive errors for personal gain, and also exploit the problems that the patches introduce.

I can understand how my observations would make some conventional economists uncomfortable, and I try to stay in my lane and not talk much about conventional economics. Alas, to understand the gaming Divestiture process it is necessary to pop the lid on the flaming dumpster to see how that’s going. Thus I’m going to go out of my lane today and explain a few things happening in the broader economy at a detail level I’m not supposed to.

The AI Con Game

Last year when I explained why the gaming industry was going through a Divestiture, I explained that this was primarily due to a combination of poor leadership choices in game development combined with misinformation about the purpose of AI development and a heavy dose of geopolitics.

The most important take away from that paper is that while AI is being sold to us as a civilian product, it is not. It is at best a dual use product, which is something with both civilian and military applications. But the urgency around AI development is because of the military applications, which are far more important to the creators than the civilian applications. This is why China is motivated to use “distillation” to open source Western civilian AI, which I see as their way of making fun of the Western ruse.

Because of the threat of distillation, which makes it very easy to copy AI, Western AI developers don’t make their military applications public facing. They are kept as quiet as possible. But if you know what to look for, and you probably do if you read my paper on Divestment from last year, you can see the signs and reverse engineer what is going on.

In that paper from November I pointed out that both the West and China are planning for a major confrontation by 2028. In the meantime, we could expect a lot of seemingly unrelated military activity. This wouldn’t just be to move states closer to authoritarianism, but to do “field tests” of AI military applications.

Practice makes perfect.

Just weeks after I published that prediction there was an AI assisted invasion of Venezuela. Then about 7 weeks after that there was a major assault on Iran. There was of course a lot of noise about this and that, but the part that stood out for me was the brag about “Hundreds of targets being hit at once”. A bit later a similar brag was being made during attacks on Beirut.

I’m not here to get into the ethics of any of this, though of course I could. What I think is important here is to understand that these were dog whistles to signal to knowledgeable military AI investors that the military AI is allowing us to do things that used to be impossible. The things we need to perfect before the showdown at Taiwan in ~2028.

Launching a thousand planes is pretty easy. We did that in WW2. But planning military operations is complicated and tedious work. Planning 100+ operations used to take weeks or months. It’s handy that military AI can do all that for us, not in months but in hours. For instance, on April 8th it was bragged that over 100 targets were hit in Beirut in under 10 minutes. I’m not getting into the ethics here, so to me the body count or efficacy isn’t an issue.

This sort of time compression pattern is indicative of AI military control. This is what they want to improve as they work towards the ultimate goal of autonomous AI drone swarms numbering hundreds of thousands simultaneously acting, by 2028. The computer required will be enormous, hence all the nuclear powered “data centers” coming to a rural town near you.

When they brag about this time compression, they aren’t bragging to the vast majority of you (I do have some militarily astute followers of course), this is a dog whistle for the military investors who want to see results. These sorts of attacks don’t fulfill any significant military objectives, these are tests being run under live conditions.

AI Hallucinations

You may recall that during one of these tests ~170 small school children were vaporized in Iran. Again, I’m not going to get into ethics. I’m here to point out that this wasn’t “human error” as the press is trying to convince you of. That’s because there were likely no humans involved in directing that attack.

When we ask AI for help, or to code for us, or prosecute legal cases for us, it works at best 90% of the time. The other 10% can be pure hallucination. Meaning that AI just made up a bunch of crap that sounded convincing. Sort of like politicians. So maybe you wipe out a few parking lots with $6M USD tomahawk missiles. No one cares. It’s only the rare children’s school that gets attention.

The way AI targeting is supposed to work is that the AI will generate a huge list of recommended targets. Then human military intelligence officers are supposed to accept or reject the recommendations. But vetting even one target could take days or weeks. Who has time for that? And time is money, especially when your boss needs to promote AI milestones for the stock market. So you just hit that sexy “Accept All” button.

Back before AI we had Excel. It’s often cited that 85 to 90% of Excel spreadsheets have errors. Thus I don’t trust Excel, for good reason. I also don’t need Excel since I got fast at math in an era before it existed. An era where someone that could do math very fast was useful for time sensitive applications (like said stock market). The first useful thing I did at Wargaming other than give advice was to ask for access to the Sacred Spaghetti (SS). Apparently this was a big deal because even the Founders were not allowed to see it. I went through the SS and corrected all the Excel docs for World of Tanks in preparation for a fast build of World of Tanks Blitz.

Since I don’t trust Excel, I triple check every cell. That was a good move on WoTB because one day a producer interrupted me while I was doing Heavy Math. When I returned to my task, I was off by one cell. It was most of a day before I caught it in an error trap. Then I had to go back and redo all that work, losing more than a day. If I didn’t cross check my math repeatedly, those errors would have ended up in WoTB.

As we increasingly ask AI to code for us, it introduces these errors into our software. Even one little tiny error can crash your product. The smaller it is, the harder it is to find. You used AI so that you could use less humans. But fixing AI is even harder than just writing the code/math yourself, so that requires a very highly skilled individual that might not exist on your team. The same goes with Excel errors.

The errors in the WoT SS were not enough to crash the program. That meant they went undetected until my audit. The result was perhaps a 10% loss of retention because the error was in the reward systems. All the games I designed or repaired at Wargaming made over a billion USD each. $100M (10%) is serious pocket change.

For most live action games it’s typical to run perhaps a 6% profit. That means that the revenue you are generating is 6% more than the overhead. In that situation 10% could take you from +6% profitable to -4% under water. Just from a few numbers on an Excel that weren’t right, but that looked right.

Just like a school that used to be a military compound. Ten years earlier in 2016.

The problem here for AI companies is that they really need to hide these hallucinations from customers, but you just can’t for very long. So investors and users slowly lose confidence when the hype doesn’t match the reality. The AI ponzi, like any ponzi, requires an ever expanding group of backers. New cohorts pay off the first cohorts so that they can get out before the bust. The bust happens when you can’t recruit another cohort.

The Japanese Trade Carry Unwind

The AI craze seems to be attracting mind boggling amounts of investment. Investment that used to go towards other useful things, like game development. In a perfect world you might be able to borrow unlimited money from one source at a low interest rate and then invest it someplace else where it will pay a larger return. That way you can do absolutely zero work and still make money. Then you can make other people serve you (because you have money) even though you contribute nothing to society.

Fortunately, though the wonders of the conventional economic dumpster fire, such a perfect world exists. Back in Japan in 1999 their tech bubble burst and they found themselves with massive governmental debt. Because of course the government was also taking on debt on the assumption that they could pay it off easily with such a strong economy. When the crash happened, they ended up with debt so large that they couldn’t even pay the interest on that debt.

So, what would a conventional economist do in such a situation? Make the interest rates zero so that debt payments are zero. Brilliant! Heck, why not make interest rates negative, then instead of having to pay interest on debt, you get paid to be in debt! Conventional economists never cease to amaze me.

So that’s what the Japanese government did. Problems? We don’t have problems. Even our problems are profitable! The big problem here was that if the banks were paying the government for being in debt, private borrowers wanted in on that action also. So “investors” would borrow money in Japan (carry) and then “invest” it (trade) somewhere else where they could get paid positive interest on that. Free money, no work. That’s the carry trade.

The reality is that the Japanese suffered stagnation for 27 years since 1999 and ended up subsidizing these free loaders. This worked until it didn’t. The Japanese elected a new kind of politician, Sanae Takaichi. She had the bank slowly raise interest rates and the Japanese economy came out of its long Sleeping Beauty coma. This is the unwind.

This made Japan a more attractive place to hold people’s money and tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars left the USA economy and went to the Japanese economy. Now they can afford to service their debt. The problem on the other side of the world is that the USA needed cheap money to keep their own borrowing spree going. If their interest rates go up, that debt will be mighty hard to keep servicing.

That’s exactly what’s happening. At a time of unprecedented borrowing, the cost to service that debt is rising. Even the bizarre math that conventional economists use has to crash at some point, and to be fair it does seem to crash regularly. But this crash is going to be special. Simultaneously China has the same problem now that Japan had in 1999. Deflation, upside down demographics, low consumer spending (and high savings). Unlike Japan, China is trying to make it illegal to take their cheap money out of the country. This is not easy as money has to flow, you can’t freeze it without crashing the economy. But you will note that China has pulled much of their investments out of the USA.

The whole system is rocketing towards destruction faster than a SpaceX Starship rocket.

What Does This All Have to do With Gaming?

The people making AI have set lofty goals that are bizarrely expensive. These people are, paradoxically, super bad at math. You’d think if they were selling compute, they’d know how to compute. The price tag they set, let’s call it “X” (a popular letter these days), is perhaps equal to all the available money in the economy. As they start to spend it, they realize that the real cost is going to be more like 2X, 3X, maybe even 4X or more. An impossible number.

Rather than admitting it was a false promise, they are asking for more. That money has to come from somewhere and the result is austerity measures that approach what we had during WW2. That includes not enough money for babies. We didn’t make many babies during WW2, but we made up for lost time right after WW2. That’s why those babies were called the “Baby Boomers”. Those Boomers are now retiring and expecting the babies we can’t afford, to support them. That problem is called Demographic Collapse, which I wrote about in papers 92 to 97.

Money that used to go to healthcare, energy, computer games, food, etc are going elsewhere. When those things get more expensive, this acts like a tax on everyone. It’s just not called a tax. Worse, as people get laid off and get replaced by hallucinogenic AI agents, there are less people paying taxes. Less people buying goods from struggling companies. Less money to pay for AI.

When I got deplatformed after my prediction of the gaming industry collapse in 2017, I was left to helplessly watch it all play out. The good news is, after the correction I predicted we will have a much better industry. But our correction is being prolonged by all the money that used to go to us, going to AI. I had hoped that Big Tech would follow my blueprint in Third Tier of Game Development (2010) to boost human and corporate productivity. But instead they went with replacing humans, because of the military advantages. I adjusted our future timeline by writing Fourth Tier of Game Development, a much darker prediction.

Microsoft, which hired me as their first game economist largely because I wrote Third Tier and also Supremacy Goods (which made the case for replacing Pay to Win with what would become Battle Passes and similar tiered subscription models), is now in a pickle of their own making. By buying up all the chips, they’ve raised the price of computers for everyone massively. That includes the cost to make XBOX.

MS now has the impossible task of explaining to gamers why they killed XBOX, and to some extent all of gaming, while spinning it as an intelligent and benevolent move that will benefit us. As chip costs soar, and our missile stores deplete (an expensive way to test military AI), maybe there will even be a recall so that they can pull the chips out of our gaming platforms to stick them into missiles. Having a large pool of standardized chips could make the creation of XBOX missiles practical, and much more profitable than making gaming platforms.

If I used generative AI I would provide you with a picture of a missile with “XBOX” stamped on it, but instead you get the classic Missile Command.

We’ve been making fun of Japan for a while. But raising their interest rates to 1% is going to wreck both the USA and China. If they want to play rough, they could go to 2% and that would do more damage to both of those countries than an aircraft carrier battle group. In days of old Japan would protect the USA. But now that they see the sentiment is not reciprocal, Takaichi is looking out for her country. She’s enjoying popularity unprecedented in modern Japan.

I wish I had better news, but the choices that these people are making (assuming it’s still humans running the show) are not super well thought out. There seems to be more ideology than math involved. A gaming crash is one thing, but a global economic crash is another. Things won’t get better for gaming until that larger crash plays out. Protect your computers, you might not be able to afford a replacement any time soon. I listen carefully to my computer. If I install a demo and notice my cooling fans spinning up, I delete that demo. It’s not worth it. Likewise, running graphically intensive games might make sense as long as Big Tech will sell us replacement hardware for cheap. Those days are over for a while.

I surveyed (both in real time and in chats) ~250,000 women (mostly in the West but also Eastern Europe) from 2010 to 2020 for my dating economics research. [I’ve written a number of papers on Dating Economics in addition to the Dating OS papers below.] This is the opposite of using Data Driven Design, and is far more effective. I discussed some of the problems with DataDD two papers prior. Direct surveys are much more time consuming and can require other resources, but generates much higher quality data. In my last paper I discussed the critical importance of listening to people PRIOR to entering the product design stage.

Previous DatingOS papers:

• Soulmates

• Sexual Arbitrage

• Intimacy In Relationships

• Dating Operating Systems (Dating OS)

• Dating OS: Multi-Dating and Serial Monogamy

• Dating OS: “What Happened to All the Good Men?”

• Dating OS: Why Are Men “Uglier” Than Women?

In my survey of women on Bumble, I found the app somewhat limited in efficacy. Thus only ~10,000 of the women I surveyed were from Bumble. The biggest problem with the app is that its selling point is that women “message first”. It sounds empowering, but the truth is that women don’t want to message first. They feel like they are the prize in dating scenarios and that men should be doing the heavy lifting. Here I’m of course talking through a heterosexual lens. Gay men don’t suffer this asymmetry and have relatively effortless dating experiences. Lesbians have it hardest here since both sides feel privileged. They also have the highest IPV rates, but that’s a bit off topic.

So while the messaging gimmick led to positive press, the company has lost 90% of its stock value since its 2021 IPO. Now they have a new gimmick: AI matchmaking! An app specific AI called “Bee” is being rolled out, and there will be no more swiping. I think this is a very positive step, and brings the app much more in line with OkCupid which was my favorite dating app before it was bought and gutted by Match Group in 2011.

Note that this isn’t new/fresh or revolutionary as OkCupid came out in 2004. But if you are going to copy someone, that’s a great place to start. Match Group wrecking it in order to make their other products more competitive just opened the door for such a move. In both OkCupid (OKC) and this new Bumble 2.0 (B2.0) you will have lists of profiles to look through. Contact is made by liking the profile as usual and if it’s mutual then messaging can take place.

In my paper How to Dominate Dating Apps Without Lying I explained how to “break” the swipe-based dating app algorithms, giving you an unfair advantage without spending. Ethically, of course.

Both OKC and B2.0 ask you to answer a bunch of questions about yourself to find out what kind of person you are, what kind of people might like you, what you are looking for, and how to match you with the right people. I’ve personally talked to OKC engineers in private real time chats, so I know how to break the OKC algorithms entirely, but that’s a much more involved process. Here the difference with B2.0 is that Bee will interview you directly, making the process of finding out all your personal information faster and more efficient, and perhaps making it much harder to break. I’m sure you won’t mind all that personal information being out on the internet. After all, privacy is an illusion.

But how will B2.0 perform after the initial novelty spike? People are very unsatisfied by the current quality of dating apps and their monetisation. Match Group’s attempts to monopolize the space and then reduced the quality of acquisitions like OKC were aimed at forcing consumers to adopt slop, not assisting them in their romantic ambitions.

If an AI can find the right people for you, and then tell you who to date, in theory this might be as helpful as the old school human matchmakers, but automated at scale. I’m not opposed to this, and I contemplated similar setups when I was designing advanced social products at Arrivant, a company I cofounded for that purpose. The thing is, getting two people to meet each other is the easy part, and this solution might make the hard part even harder.

I will use molecular chemistry as an analogy. There are many chemical reactions that can be quite intense once they start, but are very difficult to start. Burning a wood log might be a good example. People can be dropped into a snowy forest surrounded by wood and still die of hypothermia because they can’t get the wood to burn. So at Arrivant my goal was to solve that problem: how to lower the chemical activation energy requirements so that fire started nearly spontaneously.

By explaining that process here, perhaps dating apps can utilize AI in a way that will actually help people find romantic success by:

• Teaching people how to date

• Making failing fun and safe enough that they will keep trying

• Increasing trust between people so that they are willing to take more risks

This is all possible if you approach dating as a game. Which it is. I first publicly explained this in a lecture I gave in Saint Petersburg Russia in 2016 (no video for the first 10 minutes or so).

Consent Culture is a Double Edged Sword

It wasn’t until the 10th year (2019 to 2020) of my research that I started to understand just how essential and problematic Consent Culture (CC) is. CC understanding is essential to build trust and make sure that safety is maintained. Having your boundaries overrun by an overly enthusiastic suitor can be psychologically or even physically harmful. The resulting outrage can then cause additional reputational harm to all parties.

I think the original Bumble “swipe first” gimmick was an attempt to facilitate Consent, but had absolutely no effect on consent. By having both parties like each other, consent to talk is already established. Like all permissions, they can also be revoked at any time, which is why you can also block anyone you previously liked. Making the woman “go first” just put more labor expectations on women who really want the men to do the work of convincing the women to go on a date.

I’ve gone on dates where the other person’s stated reasons for dating were because they wanted to learn all sorts of secretive/powerful things about love or intimacy from me. Fair enough, I love teaching. But then over a series of dates, they just sat there and not once asked me a single question about dating and never gave me any permissions. It wasn’t until that experience that I realized that many people don’t even know how to give consent. This isn’t one of those things you are born knowing how to do.

I give a lot of information on the three stages of consent in my paper on Intimacy In Relationships. Note that that paper has racy content and is intended for adults. Here I want to focus on just the mechanics of giving consent. Let’s say a woman wants a man to make a move, but he doesn’t. What’s wrong? Is she not attractive enough? Is the man inexperienced or lacking in confidence?

The problem here is that “making a move” was the way things were done before CC became the standard. Men were expected to do this and it was considered fairly innocent. Now in 2026, that might qualify as assault! Men are increasingly educated about this and won’t make a move without consent. If you consider how stressful it is for women to just send a first message, you can imagine how getting up the nerve to give consent (for anything) might just be too much for some people.

Of course there are degrees of consent, and one level is not the same as all levels. Further, any level can be revoked at any time. This is complicated, even for experts. Also looks can be deceiving. The person you are with might have looked like they wanted you to do something, only for you to get slapped or worse when you tried to go for a kiss or such. The risk of an aggravated allegation, real or imagined, is enough to make dating too high risk for many men.

Likewise, women often assume that men “always want it”. That’s not true, even if it often is. Women still have to follow CC just like men do, it’s just easier for them. Of course body language can do a lot of heavy lifting here, but from my experience the “art” of body language is a dying art. Modern people are largely disconnected from their bodies, and their ability to “read” others goes down every year as they spend more time reading electronic devices instead of each other.

Women tend to be more sensitive to body language and mood than men are. This causes women to assume that men will just understand what they want without them needing to articulate it. As someone that grew up isolated from people when I was young, and perhaps some flavor of autistic, reading people was really hard for me when I was younger. Because I was bad at it, any sort of intimate interaction, even expressing a feeling, was high risk. Because I went into nursing then fitness and physical therapy, I ended up doing a lot of touching by profession. Learning this was stressful but I’m a fast learner. If I didn’t have to learn when and how this was okay, I probably never would have.

In modern times our ability to read each other is the lowest it has ever been for our species. This is a skill, and it takes a lot of practice. An app that tells you who to date doesn’t help here at all. By speeding up the “getting to know each other” process, it could actually bring two people together way before they are ready to do that. As B2.0 will ship without consideration for this, I think the result could be a lot of hurt feelings.

Of course we have a name for that also…

Dating Resilience

I’ve discussed the general concept of Resilience in previous papers where I investigate the misandry epidemic. All genders are being reprogrammed without consent by social media, often to hate each other. Hate is fantastic for driving engagement. For whatever reason women seem much more vulnerable to this sort of content, and the data shows they are generating anger/hate much more rapidly than men are. This seems especially true in the UK for reasons I suspect I know but will not speculate here.

There may be differences between the genders in regards to psychological resilience. Women are much more adept with their emotions, and it follows that they are likely more sensitive. In countries like the USA, UK, and Australia, women are nearly twice as likely to self report seeking psychological treatment. Perhaps for men, being thick as a tree means more things bounce off of them. I think a lot of non neurotypical people, contrary to the stereotypes, tend to also be very sensitive and thus have psych profiles more like women regardless of their gender. This could also be why NNTs are 3 to 6 times more likely to be trans or non-binary instead of “staying in their lane” and being cis gendered.

As a society I think we intuitively understand that women need more protection than men do and men used to be wired for this. In older times we used to know the people around us, but now people are often strangers. As diversity increases, people can end up being even stranger. I think that’s a good thing, but it can increase the need for communication skills at a time when those are at an all time low.

“No plan survives first contact with the enemy”

— Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, 19th Century

Dating has unfortunately become increasingly adversarial over time. Going on a date can feel like going to battle. It is not unusual to lose your early battles, and the other person may not care how new you are at this. Your first losses are the most painful, coming at a time when this whole process is the most confusing.

Your ability to bounce back from a bad date and go on another one is Dating Resilience. Yes, that’s actually a thing. No I didn’t invent that one. There is a growing body of research on this. As my fellow neuroscientists like to say, “Biology always finds a way”. When puberty kicks in, the vast majority of people want to be in some sort of intimate relationship with another person. In modern times that’s generally considered inappropriate until they reach the age of consent, which varies by country and condition.

So it is fair to say that almost all of us start out in life as involuntarily celibate (“incel”) until we end up voluntarily non-celibate. Sure there are all sorts of involuntary sexual situations that occur, and both autistic and non-cis people tend to be magnets for these situations. Thus I unfortunately have a lot of experience there.

About one third of all “incels” are women.

If a person has a bad intimate experience they may end up voluntarily celibate. Both kinds of celibate seem to be on the rise, and I would attribute that to people feeling hurt during the dating process and being reluctant to “get back on the horse”. As biology is pretty strong, there must be a lot of hurt and/or threat out there to keep people celibate. If our biology wasn’t so strong, we wouldn’t be the dominant mammalian species on the planet. Yet that’s the way we are heading as we aren’t making enough new people to replace our population. I talk about this problem in a 6 part series on Demographic Collapse, papers 92 to 97.

We know from the research that Dating Resilience is going down. That makes sense from all the parallel metrics showing that people just aren’t getting it on like they used to. Biology still tries to find a way, so my fear is that dropping Dating Resilience is a leading indicator for increases in aggravated intimacy, infidelity, and other generally derogatory forms of intimate contact.

AI is powerful stuff. Because people are increasingly desperate for success in dating, they will end up giving up very sensitive personal information to an AI matchmaker to increase their chances of finding someone “compatible”. That compatibility can be overrated though. Biology finds a way, and biology doesn’t always care how much money you make or any other “civilized” characteristics.

[Biology does seem to care a lot about height for men, so short men are a bit screwed. Sorry guys. Move to a country where people are shorter. I live in an old mansion that is over 100 years old. I have to bend down to navigate low passages. People 100+ years ago were shorter. A lot shorter. I would attribute this not only to better nutrition and medicine, but also to the genetic “height advantage”.]

Thus dating has always been a bit of a “numbers game” as you can never be sure if your plans will go out the window on first contact. Perhaps the strongest chemistry I ever had on OKC was with someone I had a 53% compatibility with. I absolutely was not expecting us to get along at all. She couldn’t get over her side of that incompatibility so we ended up friends, but I was really shocked at how my body was trying to override my better judgement. Don’t underestimate biology.

Of course B2.0 doesn’t understand biology. Opposites often attract, and we might find out that B2.0 creates a lot of mediocre matches that people just find boring. More importantly, the more risk that is involved in a date, the higher the dopamine hit if it goes well. That’s the risk/reward pairing that is so critical to nail in game design. Again, that’s biology. If B2.0 can be programmed to sort dates into “safe” and “risky”, I think that would be a fantastic option. People may complain about risk in dating, but off camera they are going to prefer risky dates to safe ones. Of course some people are just super risk adverse, and those people will appreciate “safe” dates. That also might be the best place to start for people who are new to dating or who are low in Dating Resilience.

It never hurts to learn to ride a bicycle with training wheels on first. If your first ride finds you pinned under a car, you may never ride again. I always recommend starting with boring dates, with people who you think are rated lower than you in the dating market. Start with the training wheels on, then take them off, and eventually work your way up to the motorcycle. Once I became a dating expert, I tended to prefer people who had a lot of riding experience. I didn’t want to ruin a novice. Now that I’m 60, if I become single again I might relax that a bit since I’m not as athletic as I used to be and I take life a bit slower.

What Bumble 2.0 Will Be Missing

AI can be used for human augmentation, or human replacement. My “north star” paper, paper number 1 on my substack, is my Third Tier of Game Development from 2010. It explained how in the future we could use AI and strong authentication systems to vastly speed up human education. It also would eliminate the “catfish” problem. Both are huge problems in the labor pool, and also in the dating pool.

While the major platforms currently developing AI told me they read Third Tier, ultimately those organisations abandoned human augmentation and went for human replacement. Since it’s a 16 year old paper, the people who actually knew about Third Tier might have aged out. That’s why I ended up writing the much darker Fourth Tier series, starting with paper 197. That explains where we are heading in our current trajectory. I’ve completed 5 papers in that series.

Since B2.0 will be sold to humans for the purpose of augmenting their dating experience, the contents of Third Tier are useful here. If B2.0 was built around that model, it would be much more useful. It’s not enough to put you in front of a person you look compatible with on paper, and just hope biology works out.

Just like in any other game (and dating is absolutely a game), the higher the difficulty level the faster you level up. Or crash out. So naturally you start off at the highest difficulty level you can handle and raise the difficulty when you are ready. Leveling up is critical because the biggest mismatches in dating are between low level people and high level people. That power asymmetry is fraught with risk for the lower level person.

You can be 50 years old and still be low level. It all depends on your experience and how challenging that experience was. My partner is much less experienced than I am, despite her being 54 years old. She trusts me not to abuse the power asymmetry, but that’s not the usual situation. From my side of that, this is a situation I will always have so I lean on my compassion.

B2.0 could estimate player levels by turning dates into quests, helping to suggest when to give or raise consents, and notify the other person when a consent has been granted. This would make dating much safer for everyone. It could also then notify the other person if a consent is removed. This is then also recorded which could be useful legally. Pairing people by level would be much more effective than pairing people by political orientation or other such characteristics.

The risk here is that the more that “Bee” does the work for you, the lower the difficulty of dating. That translates to you leveling up more slowly. Your level is the most important characteristic in dating. Or working. Or any sort of leadership position. Those romantic movies you’ve watched where Fate just made everything align, that’s the universe lowering the difficulty or raising the motivation just enough to make something legendary happen. If you are high enough level to do the right thing, history could be made. But if it happens when you are still too low level, that ship could just keep sailing and you might regret it your whole life.

I could go into a lot more detail, but that’s how I make my living. Bumble, feel free to call me any time, especially if B2.0 runs into difficulties.

What sorts of features would my readers like to see in B2.0? There could be a surge in similar apps if B2.0 is successful. Of course I’m counting on that, that’s why my subtack is about games and dating apps. But I’m also counting on a lot of failures on the road to success. Maybe we could call that Game Development Resilience. Can your game blow up, but you still get back on the bike? Your experience could be a lot better if you had an expert coach there to guide you.

I began interacting with developers fairly intensely from 2001 on, when I became a game journalist. Even before that I was very involved in a variety of projects as I was self-educating on the concept of virtual goods sales. As my long term readers know, I co-wrote the first paper on virtual goods sales with Ashley Dunn at the Los Angeles Times in April of 2000. Back then developers were trying to create subscription based worlds and the idea of selling items or even Free to Play wouldn’t become a thing for developers until the next year in 2001.

I’m of the opinion that you learn by listening, not talking, so I listed to a lot of people. Literally thousands of people a year. When I was working with a developer, I surveyed their team. When I was previewing a game, I surveyed the alpha/beta testers to see what their impressions were. When I started selling virtual goods in 1999, I always surveyed my customers to see what they liked and what they would be most motivated to pay for.

When I was writing articles for UnknownPlayer through 2005 I was highly engaged with my readership. They had a lot of opinions and I asked my readers a lot of questions. At UP we often hosted town halls for developers, for instance we hosted the first Q&A for Cryptic’s City of Heroes game prior to its launch. I remember that one in particular because CoH really nailed so many aspects of what consumers want in a game, that modern game developers can only dream of reproducing.

As I was writing this, Chris Wilson, who I have tremendous respect for, published a short video: “Don’t Survey Your Players”. Awkward. While I agree with most of what Chris says there, there are ways to survey your players that he’s not familiar with that you absolutely should do. Surveying is complicated and isn’t something you fly out of your mother’s womb knowing how to do. In an era where we hire not-nice people to tell us what ideologies to force on our players (something I absolutely don’t recommend doing), there should be room to hire people to help you do gamer-centric surveys that will ultimately improve your relationship with them.

I always established a trusted relationship with a community’s players before asking them questions. This usually involved being friendly with them, and making sure I was one of the top players. Even “whales”, who are reluctant to talk to anyone about their spending habits, would open up to me. I never suggested to players that I was related to the development team. A developer doing a survey is going to get very different results compared to a trusted fellow player. I think this is why Chris Wilson has a very different experience here, because he’s had bad experiences as a developer giving surveys to his player base.

Perhaps the most comprehensive survey I ever did was when I asked the community for the Trion World’s End of Nations game how they would like to be charged for the game. This was likely in 2011, and Pay to Win had turned off a lot of players to the idea of F2P. That thread ended up being so huge, that it had more comments than the entire rest of the EoN forums combined. I was careful not to give the players an option of not spending, and they understood that someone had to pay. This made the data really good since the players were forced to think about what would be best for them.

EoN was proposed as the spiritual successor to Nexon’s Shattered Galaxy MMORTS from 2001, which I am in the credits for. I’m also considered one of the top 3 players in SG of all time. So I had the trust of the community, and they really appreciated that I was willing to help Trion. Except that I had no relationship with Trion, they refused to talk to me, and they ended up deleting that entire thread. That’s unfortunate because it had priceless academic and commercial value. That also made me the only living record of what was written in that thread, invaluable objective survey information that no one else in the field of monetisation has.

Players were literally enthusiastic about spending on EoN, but they didn’t want P2W. At the time all F2P games were P2W and Trion planned to go F2P. So to solve that problem and give the players what they wanted, I had to invent a whole host of new technologies, which I offered to share with Trion. They refused to talk to me, and this ultimately led to EoN development being shut down since they didn’t possess the tech to build that game. That tech would end up powering World of Warships, which was and is incredibly successful.

That’s where I deployed an asymmetrical matchmaker for the first time, which solved the F2P/P2W paradox by allowing us to charge for Power without making the game P2W. It would have been difficult to come to the conclusion that I even needed to invent that if I hadn’t talked to so many players.

Also in 2011 the Firaxis team noticed me surveying their players in the forums for their CivWorld game. They were like “Who is that person?” So they asked me, which was the proper way to approach me. It’s much better than just banning people that might be able to save your project, out of some sense of xenophobia. They asked me if I knew what was wrong with their game. I said “Yes”. They asked me if I would tell them, and I agreed to write it up and give it to them the next day.

This was similar to how I gave the solution set to save CCP’s Eve Online game economy the first week after their launch in 2003. I would go on to work on both CivWorld and Civilization Online. I got to meet Sid, and he thanked me for my help, which made me melt into a puddle. Unfortunately, decisions had been made on both projects before my arrival that were catastrophic and that could not realistically be undone. But, at least I saved Take 2 quite a lot of money by killing those projects, money that went to their XCOM reboot which was quite successful.

DeRisking is what I do, and I’m willing to kill a game in my all time favorite franchise in order to protect investors.

Game Developers Don’t Play as Much as You’d Think

I was really fortunate to start in journalism and QA in the industry before developing a bunch of unique technologies and leap frogging to the other side of the development hierarchy. The need for those technologies was made clear from 12+ years of surveying players. One of the most interesting things I learned from approaching gaming from the player side and then from the developer side is that developers are really busy making games. Sometimes so busy that they have to “crunch”.

They don’t really have much time to play their own games. When they do, they usually are just focusing on the part they worked on, and not the overall experience. Playing through a game, especially a good game, can take hundreds of hours. After a major patch, you have to repeat that to see if it is working. Because of that hierarchy, the top people on the team often don’t have close relationships with their QA department. Also, some things (like meta design in my case) might be invisible to the QA team so they might not catch game breaking imperfections.

In a perfect world, everyone would have ample time to test. But even then, this can be harder than it sounds. When I was relocated to the UK to help a team with famous founders, I really took ownership over the design. I went through the game and found some serious systemic problems. I submitted these to the team. But instead of asking me how to fix the problems, the existing design team decided I was creating too much work for them. So they united to get me fired. Then the investors who funded the game based on my participation pulled the plug. My participation DeRisked their investment and got them to spend millions of dollars. With my disappearance, the risk became unacceptable. 125 people lost their jobs.

Thus doing “the right thing” can still work out poorly and isn’t as easy as it sounds.

Hiring consultants to fill these gaps can be very useful. In theory the “DEI” hires that come in to make games more politically correct could be very useful. It’s unfortunate that some of the most unethical people in the industry have gravitated to these roles and are causing great mischief. These people don’t survey the player community before making recommendations. They know better than the players what the players want so they don’t have to listen to anyone. This creates a taint that can affect even well qualified and responsible consultants who become guilty by association.

What I’m getting at here is that someone needs to talk to the community, and regularly. This is especially true once an alpha is out and feedback is available. Ideally that person should be “undercover” and trusted in the player community, while not being seen as a developer. Players act differently around developers just like paid movie/game critics act differently when reviewing movies/games from major studios (*cough* Mix Tape...).

Where Chris Wilson is right is that you shouldn’t let your players tell you what to do. You know better what the costs are for various features, and how practical they are to implement. You also hopefully know what features might conflict with other features before you actually set about building them. Not identifying those conflicts is one of those tragic things that shouldn’t happen, but still does all too often.

Regulation, Legislation, Blurring and Ethical Debt

Blurring is when you do illegal and unethical things in your games that a lawyer can twist into a “grey zone” of legality because the real-space laws were not written to include online content. Or, with a very small alteration that might be difficult in real space but possible in virtual space, put one toe outside the legal framework of prohibition.

In 2009 Mark Pincus admitted that ““I funded the company myself, but I did every horrible thing in the book just to get revenues right away.” That company was Zynga. Him and his lead designer Roger Dickey intensely promoted and charged for classes on how to teach “Fun Pain” to an entire generation of game designers. This was the concept that while many will just quit, a significant number of vulnerable gamers will cough up money if you harm them sufficiently in your game. Major companies were paying hefty tuition to send their designers to these classes to learn this marvelous new design method. Fun Pain became normalized.

Major companies like Valve (CS2: gambling) and Roblox (child labor, sub minimum wage payments) made billions by blurring and now are subject to potentially tens of billions of dollars in what I call “Ethical Debt”. This is similar to Tech Debt where a studio can use AI to write damaged code, then have to spend more than it would have cost to start over from scratch to repair that code.

I use these two examples because they are seen as commercial success cases that investors would want to get in on. This creates incredible pressure to have other developers copy those examples. I know this first hand as investors tried to get me to copy Roblox.

The Western gaming industry has been operating for over 15 years on the assumption that they can legally delay regulators indefinitely and thus never fear being held accountable for their bad actions. That was almost true but a suite of extremely tough regulations are just about to be deployed in the EU. Players have not waited and have begun organising and boycotting against games that use “Dark Patterns” or unwanted ideology. Perhaps most troubling for game developers is that other lawyers have taken note of this Ethical Debt and are now suing developers for millions or even billions of dollars. An entire cottage industry has formed to help lawyers identify Ethical Debt used by companies they want to target for litigation, such as fairpatterns.ai.

On February 25th, 2026 New York state attorney Letitia James sued Valve for illegal gambling in Counter Strike 2 (CS2). She’s seeking several billion dollars in damages. As the penalties are linked to the total assets being gambled, Valve then patched their game to destroy half the value of those assets within days. This resulted in about three BILLION dollars of additional damages to gamers, who are essentially investors. Lawyers are now running design decisions at Valve. Note that this is just New York. There are 49 other states in the USA.

Major social media platforms are similarly being successfully sued for various forms of blurring and public harm, which ultimately can result in tens of billions of dollars in damages. The largest companies in the world are losing these lawsuits. Lawyers smell blood as this is one of the most lucrative scenarios in the world for litigation.

Just as developer lawyers can Blur their products by placing them slightly outside of existing legal frameworks, other lawyers can unBlur these products by finding ways to apply existing laws to them. Meta and Google were successfully sued by applying existing defective product laws against them. The use of DataDD and DopaDD can cause consumer harm when misused by bad actors, as it was in this case. I discussed DataDD and DopaDD in the previous paper in this series.

I introduced the concept of Dopamine Driven Design (DopaDD) in my 2013 Game Dosing paper where I explained how to do it properly. I also explained that it can harm consumers if misused. I then testified before the ICPEN later that year that DopaDD would soon become pervasive in game dev and social media (which it did) and that it would be misused by bad actors (which it was) in the absence of regulation.

I then was double confirmed for a lecture and a round table at the 2014 GDC to discuss looming regulatory efforts and why we should support them. Both were cancelled without explanation a week before GDC. I would continue to write at Gamasutra until 2017 when I got censored after correctly predicting the current game development collapse. Both GDC and Gamasutra (now Game Developer) are owned by Informa PLC. Deplatforming me may have delayed the international regulatory process, but it couldn’t stop lawyers from bringing civil litigation against bad actors using DataDD and DopaDD to knowingly harm consumers.

As an investor you may have noticed that many of the world’s top game publishers have been sold in the last year, at fire sale prices. That’s because the leaders and lawyers of those companies know the cost of their accumulated Ethical Debt, and want to unload their assets on unsuspecting investors before those lawsuits arrive. That way they don’t have to disclose their Ethical Debt, and how these companies ultimately will have negative value.

Then there’s #stopkillinggames. This is a grass roots consumer movement, and I trace it’s origins all the way back to 2001 when I disclosed and doxxed Blacksnow Interactive (BSI) when I was a gaming journalist. That led to the Blacksnow Interactive vs. Mythic lawsuit in early 2002, which I covered extensively at the time. Ultimately it was decided that game developers owned all the assets in their games. At the time I got involved to protect gamers and developers from a malicious hacker group. But over time bad actors in game dev moved to say that their games were not products, but services. Then they started forcing online connections, but would then disconnect their “service” at will, not providing the product/service that gamers had paid for. The movement is gaining widespread support including in California and likely will result in at least hundreds of millions of dollars of additional Ethical Debt to the industry.

The point I’m getting to is that while previous generations of investors seemed to see Blurring as a good thing for them, that era is over. Supporting ethical developers, who listen to and respect their players, is where the smart money is going. Do your homework, specifically ask potential partners about current or possible Ethical Debt, and how they plan to avoid any and all regulatory and litigation exposure.

There are very few makers of online games that can answer these questions honestly. The vast majority of indie work currently is directed at making offline single player content that is not subject to arbitrary deletion. The real money is still going to be in online Games as a Service, but only for responsible and prepared developers.

Listen to the Science

Almost all developers still make what they want to make and build out from there. This is an archaic approach. We are at the point scientifically where we can specifically identify the primary physiological needs of consumers that can be met with interactive media. As I first wrote in 2014 when this technology was first under development, we had the ability to modify the physiology of players engaging with our games.

This put us in a similar scenario that the makers of cigarettes faced in the 1960s when they discovered they could modify the physiology of smokers. As I described in The Rise of Game Neuroeconomics, and in various lectures, the company that discovered this first ended up dominating the world-wide market. They also kept that secret and did a lot of harm to consumers. But we can similarly use science in ways that help consumers while also having them far prefer our products.

Just as in the 1960s, making our games automatically successful because they match the physiological needs of our players deliberately, instead of by accident, will ultimately be the way all games are made in the near future. You can already see that major social media platforms Meta and Google got sued in the last few months by doing exactly what I suggested to regulators in 2013 was going to happen: Secretly and knowingly using DopaDD to harm and manipulate consumers. That’s going to be another very expensive multi billion dollar Ethical Debt. But clearly they would not have done that, and risked all that Ethical Debt, if it didn’t work as I described in my 2013 Game Dosing paper.

It is possible to correctly deploy this technology that Meta, Google, and others fumbled. I’ve been doing it since 2014. I published How to Make Healthy Games in 2018 and did a small world lecture tour to promote the tech. Because I helped the EU write the Digital Fairness Act, way back in 2013, all of my applications meet all future regulatory requirements with little or no modification. Any future regulation of this technology would be welcomed as it would raise the cost to new competitors and favor incumbent first adopters. It would also prevent unfair competition from bad actors who went the path of Big Tobacco, Meta, Google, and many others.

Next steps in developing the tech that I started in 2014 would be much cheaper and faster to deploy than they were back then as related technology has advanced considerably.

Final Advice to Investors

Bad actors in game development have accumulated a lot of Ethical and Tech Debt that has led to the unprecedented 44% layoffs of employees in game dev in the West. This has also hurt investors. Most seem to have moved to AI development, which is also a technology stuffed with all sorts of risk and Ethical/Tech Debt. Again, those developers don’t want to disclose their liabilities, painting a rosy picture.

The upside is that a lot of extremely well qualified developers are currently unemployed and hungry for work at discount prices. Many want to do ethical work, but were not allowed to by their previous employers. So they have started indie studios where they can make quality innovative games without harming anyone or inviting future litigation/regulation.

Consumer demand for games has not diminished at all. But consumers are becoming much more educated and organised around identifying “Dark Patterns” that might harm them. Games tend to be “recession resistant” because as the world-wide economy tanks (this is happening in real time now), people need entertainment products that will lower their stress at a modest price. Games are perfect for this.

The current environment with a cheap and highly trained labor pool, skyrocketing consumer demand, and an emerging regulatory framework that makes games safer for consumers creates the potential for a new gaming renaissance. A lot of innovation will be required to adapt to this new environment, but the payoffs for those that nail it will be enormous.

But as I always say, games are made by investors, not developers. I’ve been educating both for the last 15 years in my published papers, but here I’m focused on the investor side of that equation. I want to protect investors and consumers. Get educated, and learn what’s possible without drifting into questionable territory. Pitches that don’t mention regulation, AI pushback by consumers, or any application of science should raise red flags. You are getting pitched for a game from the old paradigm. Learn about the next paradigm in game development and get in at the start of the next big thing.

It is inevitable that what Meta and Google fumbled, will be done properly in the near future. The tech is there, that’s why Meta and Google did what they did, they just chose unwise shortcuts. Right on schedule actually, since I warned the regulators for 80+ countries it was in the pipe in my testimony to the ICPEN in 2013. I didn’t trust them to do it the right way, which was the accurate call. But someone will, the cat is out of the bag due to all the courtroom discovery. Big money is waiting for those that deploy it wisely.

• This is not an anti-AI article. As usual my message here is nuanced, not binary.

• AI is a powerful tool, but can be counter productive if misused. The human brain is a powerful tool, but can be counter productive if misused.

• In regards to deciding what to build, and how to build it, we have been misusing our brains. Now with AI, we can do the same thing, even faster.

Early designers were often rock stars because they came up with cool new ideas and then had to figure out how to turn that idea into a game. This was hard work, and a labor of love. When gamers agreed it was a cool new idea, they would get very enthusiastic and want more of that. After the Great Recession a lot of displaced business executives migrated to game development because it was seen as “recession resistant”. These were people who often bragged that they were not gamers, and looked down on gamers as unproductive people.

These executives possessed skills they learned in business school, and applied these skills to make our industry more “efficient”. Lowering labor costs, time to market, and operating overhead. They wanted systems that could be repeated over and over like clockwork to output product. These methods worked great for making cars, soda, power plants, the building blocks of society.

The problem here, that these executives could not understand because they lacked the relevant experience/training, was that consumers of entertainment highly value novelty. They may be able to buy the same gasoline or computer over and over again, but watching the same movie or playing the same game quickly becomes boring.

Business schools teach how to optimize the production of necessary goods that people will buy over and over again. They fail entirely to teach how to create entertainment goods that consumers will buy once but not repeatedly purchase.

[The reasons for this difference are neurological, and thus largely invisible to people who have not been trained to see these systems through this lens. That side of this dynamic will be addressed in the next paper.]

Thus since 2009 the game developers led by the aforementioned executives have been looking for ways to allow reliably repetative products to be output in a formulaic way that would eliminate unreliable/unpredictable characteristics like “creativity”. They also seek to De-Risk by eliminating innovation, which is inherently high risk, because by definition innovation has no clear road map. Another word for creativity is intelligence, which will become a critical concept when AI involvement in the process is explained at the end of this article.

By ~2014 the execs had identified two systems they could adopt to industrialize game production, while minimizing the creativity wildcard:

1. Data Driven Design (DataDD): Using collected data to iteratively produce similar products at progressively lower cost/time,

2. Dopamine Driven Design (DopaDD): If we can convert our previously creative products into addictive products, then we can force gamers to repeatedly buy our products even if they don’t like them.

Hollywood similarly tried to industrialize their creative processes, but since they could not control dopamine delivery in the way that games can, they had even less success than game dev did. You can see how this played out with the Star Wars IP, with Lucas being the old school creative approach and post-Lucas (and post Disney acquisition) being the industrialized version.

Consumers have less preference for industrialized entertainment, because being “novel” is a key element in how much entertainment they derive. When they already know how this story is going to play out, this content is boring.

Data Driven Design

This is the idea that if you collect enough data on a subject, both internally and from competitors, you can optimize your products iteratively over time. You use the data you have gathered to inform what changes you should make to save 1% here, and 1% there. It also can give insights as to what products are preferred currently by consumers. If consumers are buying more of “A” than of “B”, then a higher consumer demand for “A” can be inferred and thus “A” is the better choice for what to build.

Issues with this philosophy:

• Consumers are adaptive. That means your data was only useful when you gathered it and may be inaccurate just weeks later.

• Consumers adapt to experiencing “A” by wanting less of “A”. They biologically down-regulate repetitive experiences.

• If every company is using DataDD, then they will all start building “A”.

• The lack of “B” in the marketplace increases demand for “B” with consumers.

• The flood of “A” in the marketplace causes competition.

• The more competition, the higher quality your product requires to be competitive. That means the budget has to rapidly increase.

• Competition forces sale prices down. Sale prices are maximized if you have a monopoly as you avoid negative competitive pressures.

• DataDD logically must increase overhead and reduce revenue over time. You’ve removed variability by ensuring non-profitability.

• From the perspective of an investor, you’ve are optimizing for commercial failure by using a DataDD philosophy.

Note that this wouldn’t happen if you were selling a necessary non-entertainment product like gasoline or non-entertaining foods like rice. Consumers have to buy these things so they don’t care about novelty, they are mostly price sensitive. This is what is taught in business schools, which is why the education brought by these business-trained execs is toxic to game development.

It also creates a business that is toxic to investment. This is because by “De-Risking” the way they were taught in business school, they maximized risk from the perspective of the investor. An investor might be willing to suffer a 90% failure rate if the payoff for that 10% hit is high enough. By using DataDD to make games, you ensure a nearly 100% failure rate. This is why the “hits” are coming from “indi” developers who don’t use DataDD as their development philosophy.

Dopamine Driven Design

Consumers are fickle about entertainment products. While entertainment may be a need (to reduce stress), there are many ways to fill that need and consumers will tend to pick solutions that they have not tried recently as that is “fresh” for them.

An addictive drug may start off as a “fresh” entertainment source, but once you are addicted (which for strong drugs can happen after one exposure) it is no longer a source of entertainment. It is now a “need” like gasoline or rice. By making your entertainment product addictive, a developer can force consumers to be more compliant by coercing them into acting “like they should” within stardard business educaton doctrine.

Since the consumer is forced to consume your product, biologically, now they don’t down-regulate from repetition. Boring becomes acceptable because boring is better than being “in withdrawal”. Instead of using your entertainment product to combat stress, your addictive product now becomes a source of stress. Attempting to stop likely means moving laterally (key concept!) to another addicting product, not “going cold turkey”.

This is especially effective on children as they are more vulnerable to addiction, may have less freedom of choice, and adapt faster to anything that affects their physiology. Things that tamper with physiology are much more likely to have permanent effects in children as this can generate additional receptors on their cells. Thus they overreact to similar stiluli.

I was smoking unfiltered Camels at the age of 5. We may never know what that did to my nervous system because it is unethical to study this on children. After 6 months I developed severe asthma. While we may not know exactly what a drug does to children, we generally know it’s a bad idea so we try to require children to become adults before we allow them to ruin their bodies and nervous systems.

This last generation of game developers has benefitted by using DopaDD to boost sales with children while lobbying regulators to look the other way regarding health risks. Ignoring the ethical implications of harming children entirely, regulation is starting to arrive outside of the USA where regulation is minimal. Continuing to rely on DopaDD increases risk for your products globally as your product may be restricted in the near future. This also means risk for investors that might consider DopaDD ventures.

There is also some risk that consumers themselves will become aware of the risks and attempt to protect their children. From my experience, parents are pretty slow to protect their children so this is not the primary source of risk to DopaDD developers. What is a risk is blanket bans by governments, such as Australia’s ban of DopaDD social media products for children under the age of 16. These are very popular with parents as they don’t want to be the “bad guy” with their kids by taking away their electronic devices. As long as the government is the “bad guy”, then the parent can just shrug and say “I didn’t do it to you”.

Okay I mentioned “moving laterally” five paragraphs up. When you use DopaDD to addict your players, you aren’t making them addicted to your product per se. You are making them addicted to physiologically unnatural levels of dopamine release. Because this is so harmful to humans, we have built in safety mechanisms that down regulate our response to dopamine. This means that it starts to have less and less effect and be less and less pleasurable over time. Eventually it goes from being pleasurable to being stressful.

This doesn’t make them want to keep using your product. They will move laterally to a competing product to try to get their high again now that your product isn’t doing it for them anymore. That can be any social media platform or Game as a Service (GaaS) as in 2026 they are all using DopaDD. This is why it is smart to do blanket bans of these products with children. For the consumer the problem with moving laterally is that once they are dopamine down regulated, dopamine just feels stressful regardless of what source they are trying to use to stimulate its release.

This is why all of the DopaDD products released recently without novel social elements have been Dead on Arrival (DOA) for the last couple years. This has spooked both developers and especially investors because they don’t understand why it is happening. What they do know, is that these companies have become very high risk.

I explain and predict this phenomena in detail in my paper on the D2-Oxy Heterocomplex. This is essential reading for all game developers and related investors. The first step in avoiding risk is determining where that risk is coming from.

What was a commercial boon to early adopters of DopaDD, has turned into a sure fire route to insolvency due to the down regulation effect I explained in that paper. Investors should stay as far away as possible from all companies (game devs and social media platforms) using DopaDD as part of their business model. This will change if developers and social media platforms learn to make their products more social. And no, social media platforms are not social. They are spaces where misogyny, misandry, racism, classism, ageism, transphobia, etc are promoted because threat is algorithmically prioritized.

Consumer Physiology

If you are selling gasoline, it might help to understand the “physiology” of automobiles that still use Internal Combustion Engines. If you are selling something that goes into a human body, and especially if it affects the human nervous system, then it helps to understand human physiology and neuroscience.

Here in this paper I am making the case that the reason that contemporary business doctrine has failed so miserably in game development and for Hollywood is that Consumer Physiology is not taught in business schools. It isn’t even considered. Business programs typically require no biology background. This leaves a huge blind spot in modern game development leadership that is dominated by MBA types. They often aren’t even gamers.

They may assume these are businesses like any other, and follow the same rules. But that’s not true. Any product who’s target is the human nervous system is not going to behave like a typical product because the human nervous system is both sensitive and adaptive. I’ve heard 100 conflicting opinions on what is causing the industry collapse. But all of this can be explained by human physiology.

I made that case all the way back in 2017 when I successfully warned about the coming industry implosion. Data Implosion (2017) would lead to my being de-platformed across the industry. My prediction being correct just made it all the worse for me. But deplatforming me had catastrophic repurcussions for the industry that I don’t think the advocates of that action foresaw. Removing the dedicated physiologist for the industry that was filling that business education void left them driving blind right into a cliff.

I would go as far as to say that Consumer Physiology should be a key part of the education of all business majors, for those that plan to sell things that affect human physiology. That includes everything from rice to the latest Star Wars movie. If you can’t anticipate how consuming your product will alter the behavior of your consumers, you are going to be left completely unprepared when their behavior (and purchase patterns) adapt/alter.

AI is Fast but not Intelligent

AI is a tool, and knowing how to use the right tool for the right job is critical for maximizing efficiency. AI still isn’t very “smart”. It knows a lot, so it is SUPER educated. People often conflate education and intelligence. Back in 2012 I explained why this was going to cause people to become less intelligent over time. We now depend on cloud knowledge instead of crystalized intelligence (all explained in that paper).

This means that the solution to all our problems could be right in front of us, and we wouldn’t know enough to identify it as critical information. I’m reminded of a scene from The Andromeda Strain (1971), which was one of the first movies I saw in the theater. I was 5 years old in 1971. A scientist was reviewing petri dishes to see if any of the antidotes was working against the Strain. She nods off just as the smoking gun petri dish rotates in front of her and the opportunity to stop the Strain is lost.

This is how humans are today. With almost infinite information at our finger tips, our ability to make use of that information is the lowest it has been in almost a century. Similarly, AI can give you incredible detail on any topic you ask it about (if it’s not a censored topic). But that’s not intelligence, it’s knowledge. AI isn’t very good at applying that knowledge because AI still isn’t very smart. It is also not good at identifying and correcting its own errors.

As stated previously, creativity is a form of intelligence. As we moved towards DataDD 15+ years ago, we laid off a lot of our most intelligent employees. They went elsewhere and likely aren’t coming back. Leadership obsessed with DataDD is also going to be fond of the idea that they can use AI to avoid hiring and training new employees.

The result will not only be an intelligence gap, but a generational intelligence gap. This isn’t me being ageist. We are literally not training younger people to replace older people like we used to. As the older intelligent people are laid off or age out, they won’t be replaced in sufficient numbers.

This is very bad news for game development. Back in 2006 I attended E3 as part of the press pool. When we got to the Bethesda booth, we were greeted by Todd Howard, their lead designer. Oblivion had just been released about 6 weeks earlier and I remarked, loudly, “I put a rock on my keyboard and came back 2 days later and I was max level.” The rest of the press were asking Todd “can you really do that?”

Todd’s head was turning red, since this was an obvious design flaw, but to his credit he didn’t comment. Oblivion still sold well because it was graphically gorgeous and people loved exploring it. Two decades later Todd has made sure he still gets all the press attention but Starfield was an even worse design disaster. Influencers love to rip it apart. The graphics are okay, and mostly proceedural. But that’s not enough to satisfy gamers anymore, and AI is especially good at that tedious but low intelligence content creation.

Gamers don’t like AI, though they may have a hard time articulating why. Their expectations for graphics are going to go up every year since AI makes that cheap and easy. What’s going to stand out, and what gamers will pay a premium for, is high quality design. This is what is going to be what investors want to look for, as that’s what’s going to distinguish hits from all the Slop.

If you think about what DataDD is, and how the goal is to reach some mathematically perfect iteration, you can see that AI is going to be amazing at speeding this up. So anyone embracing DataDD and AI is going to combine these as a top priority. If DataDD worked, that would be a match made in Heaven. The problem here is that, as discussed above, DataDD will destroy your products and your company.

AI will enable you to destroy your company faster.

So yes AI will be used widely in game dev. A lot of studios will be wiped out. The smart ones will use AI to augment human intelligence, not replace it. As an investor, you shouldn’t be asking if the studio will use AI. You should be asking HOW the studio will use AI. Pitch decks are nice and all, but having the team demonstrate to you how they are productive is much more meaningful in determining the prospects for success.

If the studio has a lot of graphics but not much design, that’s a bad sign. If they have a design, then ask them why they chose that design. If they say it meets specific consumer demands/needs, that’s an excellent answer. Especially if they meet one or both of the Core Consumer Needs. If they talk about how their design is data driven, that’s a very bad sign.

Here I went into what makes for a high risk game, from a design and philosophy view. I’m not an expert in production, so all those technicalities are best left to someone more qualified. In the next paper I will assume you’ve read this one, and then drill down deep on what a team can do to De-Risk their project and make life easier for investors.

Back in March, which already seems like a long time ago, I became alarmed by what seemed like a huge spike in gender supremacist language on LinkedIn. I responded by explaining how anyone can quickly and objectively identify supremacist language, used by gender, racial/ethnic, religious, etc supremacists. Having the tools to identify supremacist (and associated hate) speech is the first step in pushing back against it.

Then a high quality survey on the topic dropped in the UK, showing that the extent of misandry in the UK was even greater than my estimates. You can read my analysis of that survey research here. The reseachers seemed to be attempting to quantify the spread of misogyny through UK society, given how hot a topic it has been of late on social media. They seemed shocked to find it was actually misandry that was exploding in society, while misogyny rates were relatively modest. This is contradictory to the cultural, governmental, political, news, and social media platform narratives and rules/laws.

Of course this caused me to be very curious as to what was really going on. I assumed that at least in part influence campaigns were involved, but it wasn’t clear why or from what sources. The key initial questions I wanted to answer were:

1. Did misandry just suddenly spread across society, or has it been creeping up on us for a while? The rate of spread can give us a lot of information regarding the threat. In epidemiology (the study of epidemics) we use the R Factor to determine how fast an epidemic is spreading. While normally we think of microbes when we talk about epidemics, mental illness can also spread similarly, especially during an influence campaign or existential crisis.

2. What role is social media playing? It seems like some gender supremacy messaging is getting massively boosted, while others are being suppressed. Is there a pattern?

3. Who is most vulnerable? Are some demographics more vulnerable to misandry than others? If so, is there a pattern?

When I started my meta research I didn’t know what answers I would arrive at, which is the ideal way to approach research. What I found out surprised me, and what I didn’t find out surprised me even more. What I mean here is that all the information we need to answer these questions should already be available. If it isn’t, that implies some large scale and organised censorship.

Tracking the Spread of Misandry

Tracking any source of morbidity or mental illness should be super easy in the Information Age. If I want to know if cars are safer or more dangerous, that’s easy to find out. The spread of obesity or dementia? No problem.

So it only took me a few minutes to find this study of what I was looking for from the USA’s National Institute of Health research database:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12015220/

This chart shows how much research has been published in various fields on both misandry and misogyny:

Now this is awkward. Those little blue dots are the studies of misandry. Those pink dots are the studies of misogyny, in log scale. So the top of the chart is 100 research studies. 10^0 = 1, 10^2= 100. So if we add up all the blue bars we get 8. If we add up all the pink bars we get ~600. That’s odd, it’s almost like researchers on gender hate didn’t want to know about misandry.

This chart shows the number of studies on misogyny and misandry per year, and which year they were done:

So for instance in 2023 there were over 100 studies of misogyny and two on misandry. This matches the 600 to 8 ratio in Figure 1 fairly closely when you add up the values for each year. Even more interesting is that the first study on misandry was 13 years after the first study of misogyny. Any proper research on gender hate should measure at least two genders, and should be done using anonymous symmetrical survey data due to institutional bias in reporting male victims.

If you are about to say there is no institutional bias in reporting male victims of hate crimes, you should take another look at these two charts. They show an overwhelming and systematic institutional censorship of misandry in academia. Since governments depend on statistics from academia before creating policy, this then translates to governmental systemic discrimination against male victims.

How could this be? Well in my Gender Economics paper I brought up that there was an academic asymmetry between the number of USA universities with Women’s Studies programs (431) and those with Men’s Studies programs (0). 431 versus 0 is pretty huge, and any time you have a “0”, that means silence: Not represented in society, or public policy. That also means that there may be no objective peer review of what’s coming from the 431 universities, so their output might be ideological, not scientific. I would suggest that the above is smoking shotgun evidence that this is exactly what happened. If so, that could invalidate all of the gender “research” output from 431 universities over 25 years.

To me that’s a big story. How many billions of dollars were spent, just in the USA, to disempower men in society?

So the answer to my question of “How fast is misandry spreading?” Turns out to be “We don’t know”. Because universities didn’t want us to know. Given the incredible power of algorithmic psychometric modelling, which I discussed in the previous paper on What is Threat and How is it Used? , most of this epidemic could have been created in just a year or two. That would be bad news because the R factor could be much higher than what Covid had. If so then this isn’t a misandry epidemic, it would be a misandry pandemic.

What is the Role of Social Media in Spreading Misandry?

This becomes a fairly simple question to answer if you don’t try to answer “why?”. Then it gets very political. So of course I’m going to give it my best shot before this paper concludes.

The major social media platforms all seem to handle misogyny and misandry in a similar way. No they obviously don’t handle misandry and misogyny the same way, but they collude with each other in how they bias their treatment.

Here I did research on TikTok and Instagram Reels since we know those two platforms are designed intentionally to zombify users as explained in my Threat paper. Thus I consider them the highest known-dangerous social media platforms for user manipulation:

• Policy Focus: Both TikTok and Meta (Facebook and Instagram) have specific Community Guidelines and Hateful Conduct policies targeting misogyny. [no mention of misandry, it’s not considered Hateful]

• Scale of Threat: Safety monitors and moderation teams generally evaluate the real-world harm of hate speech. Misogyny is treated as a systemic threat tied to historical violence and marginalization, whereas misandry is frequently viewed as reactive or less structurally threatening. [Those “pink” research studies made gender violence “Historically biased against women” by setting the value for violence against men to zero, even though men are overwhelmingly the victims of violence compared to women.]

• Misogyny Moderation: Policies classify misogyny as a hateful ideology. Content that promotes violence, objectification, or severe prejudice against women is subject to removal, and accounts repeatedly posting this material may face bans or de-monetization.

• Misandry Moderation: Because misandry lacks systemic, historical power structures of oppression in most societies, it is rarely classified as a hate-speech violation in the same capacity. While harassment rules still protect male users from targeted abuse, "venting" or criticizing gender roles is usually evaluated differently by moderation algorithms than hate speech targeting women. [Oppression against men is right there in Figures 1 and 2. It just got erased from “history”. Thus little or no protections for men]

It should be obvious that if there are no rules against a hate speech, and “spicy” content is promoted by the algorithm, misandry is actually getting boosted on social media. Meanwhile, sources of misogyny are getting banned. Content creators then dutifully do what the algorithm wants them to. That means an explosion of misandrous content, and content creators are in direct competition to see who can put the most performative threat into their content.

Who is Most Vulnerable?

I don’t know if a gender difference has been evaluated to the point where we can show causality. What we do know is that women dislike men at almost four times the rate that men dislike women. Any form of speculation will put me into hazardous territory.

What we do know is that TikTok and Instagram Reels were designed to create “zombification” as described in my paper on Threat. Men and women do not consume social media equally. Men consume about 40% less social media content daily compared to women. Women dominate the usage of networks like Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. Men tend to favor online discussion forums like Reddit, as well as video game streaming and community platforms (Twitch and Discord).

Thus women are concentrated right in the middle of the zombification killzone.

Racism Crossover

Having grown up in California, politicians often refer to Marijuana as a “gateway drug”. That while it may not be as harmful as other drugs, it “opens the door to harder addictions”. I would suggest that when trying to program someone to hate others, that first demographic hate (like sexism or racism) is the most difficult to convert.

The UK survey found that white women were more likely to be misandrist than racial minorities. Since white people in particular were targetted in the original Cambridge Analytica psychometric modelling attack in 2016 in order to get Brexit passed, this might have created a susceptibility to further programming.

The recent CNN “62 Million” misandry campaign might also hold some clues.

The CNN “62 Million” Performative Threat Campaign Against Men

While CNN sat on this story for a couple weeks, they pushed it to press hard once the UK gender hate study went live. I don’t think this is a coincidence. The data from the UK survey contradicted the ideology behind the CNN story, putting an expiration date on it.

The CNN story was perhaps one of the most promoted stories in internet history, so you likely already heard about it, but I will recap. CNN suggested that 62 million men had been trained in a SA Academy to drug and SA their female partners. That happens to be the same as the number of married men in the USA. The idea that a mainstream news source was claiming that most adult men were secretly SAers generated more threat than any war. Of course CNN wouldn’t lie.

Except that they did. I pointed this out immediately and had people very upset at my poking holes in their threat fantasy. Fortunately for me and my readers, a team of lady journalists did a thorough investigation and saved me at least two weeks of work vetting CNN. You can watch their Debunking CNN’s Viral 62 Million Men Hoax here. I in turn vetted their vetting. A quick summary for those that don’t want to watch it:

• The original story was written by Laila Mickelwait of Exodus Cry.

• CNN carried the story without any apparent vetting or improvement.

• Exodus Cry is a fundamentalist Christian organisation that wants to eliminate pornography and sex work.

• They successfully led a campaign to have Visa and Mastercard demonetise Pxrnhub, and push for age verification.

• Founder Benjamin Nolot is a colorful character. I will let you do your own research.

• Pxrnhub began restricting access instead of forcing users to verify their ID. This caused users to migrate to other platforms, one of the largest being Motherless, which was Exodus Cry’s next target.

• In February of 2026 the site had 62M visitors. It’s content seems essentially identical to the sort of content on Pxrnhub, split into various video categories such as MILF, incest, oral, pretend sleep, etc. They only allow legal consensual video content.

• CNN ran with the 62M number, claimed all that traffic was going to the “pretend sleep” content, left out the pretend/consensual part, and described all visitors as participating in an organised “SA Academy”. The sleep content is relatively unpopular and doesn’t get much traffic. That said, there is nothing illegal about that kink or any of the other kinks hosted by Motherless.

• In other words, the CNN claim was complete bullshit and easily verifiable as such.

As I point out in my Gender Economics paper, sex work has become normalized in our economy, even if still somewhat hidden. As women benefit more than men do economically from SW, attempts to ban SW would arguably harm a lot of women. [Here I’m talking about actual workers, not platform owners] Men who trash talk women who do SW are often labelled as sexist.

My purpose in writing Gender Economics was to objectively address the “wage gap” and other important gender based economic topics and not to promote or neg SW in any way. I do assert that people who do SW often are not aware of the mental health costs involved, and these should be seriously considered.

CNN and TikTok’s Incestuous Relationship

CNN dropped the story but it was TikTok that super boosted related “62 Million” content. As of January 22, 2026, Oracle, led by billionaire Larry Ellison, finalized a deal to purchase a controlling stake in TikTok's U.S. operations. CNN’s parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery, is in the process of being acquired by the newly formed media titan Paramount Skydance. The acquisition is being led by Paramount Skydance, headed by David Ellison (son of Oracle founder Larry Ellison).

I think it is important to note that Larry Ellison is the world’s 5th richest billionaire, just barely behind Jeff Bezos. He has effective control of both CNN and TikTok. Given how amazing the influence combo was here of generating Performative Threat at CNN and then algorithmically boosting it through TikTok, I would expect to see this pattern become commonplace. That content didn’t stay on TikTok, a flood of people carried it to LinkedIn where I was very busy urging people not to spread misinformation and hate speech. That took a physiological toll on me and I had to take a two week break to recover.

Why I Think the CNN Misandry Campaign Backfired

In terms of engagement, the campaign was awe inspiring. People were running around LI looking for men to attack and shame. I’ve never seen anything like it. But the astronomically high misandry rates that the UK survey team found probably went significantly higher due to this one operation. Even men were hating on men. Specific men were not targetted, ALL men were targetted.

To me this is classic Stochastic Threat as I discussed in my Threat paper prior to this one. It is hard to imagine that the scale of this campaign and the fervor it inspired will not further boost already eye popping misandry rates. For all practical purposes, making children still requires men and women to cooperate. A woman that self describes as hating men is unlikely to voluntarily cooperate on this level. Likewise, men who are experiencing such a high threat environment are going to be exceptionally cautious about interactions that might lead to pregnancy.

Since this man hating epidemic seems to be concentrated in white women, as found by the UK gender survey, it seems fair that we can assume that their birth rates could be the lowest of any demographic going forward in the UK, and likely also in the USA. Exodus Cry is a fundamentalist Christian organisation that is pro natal (they encourage child birth), anti abortion, and anti gay. Their pro natalism goals are contradicted by their anti natalism outcomes.

I don’t think they’ve thought this through. They are looking to maximize their numbers but the problem with Stochastic Threat is that once the Genie is out of the bottle, you can’t control it. The results of their campaigns could be a wipeout in white racial reproduction rates. While there doesn’t seem to be any public racism associated with Exodus Cry, the broader religious movement they are in tends to have statistical correlation to groups that are very concerned about “Replacement Theory”. This is the belief that there is some organised movement to reduce white birth rates and boost non white birth rates.

Since non-white women seem to be more resistant to these gendered Stocastic Threat campaigns, we can expect to see an acceleration of racial diversity and “white dilution” in the countries targetted by these campaigns. Being mixed race, I personally think more racial diversity is a good thing. During the 2016 UK Brexit vote, [non-white] immigration was the top political concern:

A Lord Ashcroft poll published shortly after the vote indicated that 80-81% of Leave voters viewed immigration as a "force for ill," compared to only 19-20% of Remain voters.

While immigration can “dilute” the UK white population (83% of residents identify as “white” according to the 2021 census), so can a catastrophic implosion of white birth rates. Misandry rates at current levels among white UK residents will lead to just such an implosion.

My long time readers know I have a bit of a dark sense of humor. I can’t help but think that with how things are going, white racism could be a self-correcting problem that would be solved by maximizing white misandry. While I am not accusing anyone involved in this threat campaign with racism, I’m definitely accusing them of promoting misandry.

I question whether they’ve put much thought into the consequences of their actions. It could take 20 or more years for the 83% white population of the UK to turn white people into a racial minority, but if it’s already such a threat that they fled the EU (which is even whiter than the UK) to slow immigration, this scenario is only going to heighten their perception of “racial threat”.

If these bad actors are so concerned about the “threat of pornography”, I trust they can combat it without spreading misandry. Two wrongs do not make a right. Scientifically, it’s not even clear that pornography is harmful to society. As I explained in Dating Economics, young cis hetero men would like to have partners but they are being priced out of the increasingly transactional market. The UK gender survey confirms this, showing that 80+% of young men want children, and less than 20% of young women want children. The men seem to be remarkably resilient in their positive views of women, despite an increasingly hostile heterosexual environment.

As always, I would like to reaffirm that racism, sexism, bigotry, classism, etc. are normatively immoral and I don’t support any of that. I discuss it because these are problems that threaten our civilized societies. Living in a world without hate may seem like a luxury in modern times, but using hate as entertainment or political manipulation is a luxury that we cannot afford. That “moral debt” is increasing exponentially and we may be at the point now where we can’t even afford the interest payments. Future generations will pay the price for our misdeeds, and that will take the form of Demographic Collapse, which will be a greater threat than climate change and pandemics combined in terms of loss of life.

Sadly, scientists, who we trust to provide us with warnings and solutions against existential threats, are part of the problem here. They need to clean up their act also and act more responsibly.

The mechanism was typically to threaten the players in the game, and then to charge for “protection” from that threat. A well known example was Clash of Clans (Super Cell) and the sale of “protection” shields. Mobsters used to threaten communities and charge for “protection”. Now we have social media companies using threat generation to increase engagement and addiction. Meta and Google have already been successfully sued over the harm this causes users. I followed that paper up with a paper on threat generation in social media.

Moving from games to social media, we now have a business model that pays content creators to generate threatening content for these platforms. The increased threat/engagement drives advertising spend, but at a cost to public health that I am increasingly shining a light on. Now it seems to be a major factor in Demographic Collapse, which will have catastrophic effects on the global economy. I will investigate that further in the next paper on the possible causes of the misandry epidemic.

I proceed here by breaking down threat into four types, which I will then explain in detail:

• Bullying: Here the threat is typically coercive in order to force some outcome: a payment, sexual submission, silencing someone, persuading someone to stop competing for a job or academic role, etc. Game threats generally fall in this category. Non compliance can lead to one of the next two types of more dangerous threat. At this level usually the threat stops just short of criminal activity or is of the sort that is rarely prosecuted.

• Institutional Threat: These are cases where an institution (the police, media, school, company) is recruited to attack the target. This can lead to incarceration or loss of other rights, or reputational harm. Institutional threat is possibly even more dangerous than kinetic threat as even dying might not remove the threat (due to eternal reputational harm).

• Kinetic Threat: A direct physical assault on another. The brandishing of a deadly weapon, even if not used, would fall in this category. The use of chemicals/poison or even more exotic weapons would still fall in this category despite not being what we would think of as physical.

• Performative Threat: The use of false or exaggerated claims to bring positive attention to the perpetrator and/or harmful attention to the target. Witch hunts from the 18th century are an early example. Today social media companies have fully automated this process and it is built right into their business models.

None of these threats are exclusive, and a vigorous threat often will cross into multiple lanes of attack. Three additional concepts that are useful here:

Proportionality: Threat is not a binary. The amount of threat matters. In early American days if a black or Native boy looked at a white woman wrong, or if the woman wanted to obscure romantic complicity, the woman could say she felt threatened by the way she was being looked at. This could lead to the boy being beaten or even lynched. Here even if there was some evil intent to the “look”, the response is completely disproportionate to the offense. Examples include Emmitt Till (1955, age 14), Ernest Collins and Benny Mitchell (1935, age 15 and 16), Mack Ingram (1951, “Reckless Eyeballing”), Wes Johnson (1937). I bring up this history because the UK survey that prompted this series showed a significant racial component in the self-reported misandry, along with women even calling for the death of men on social media (either unblocked or bypassing blocks using “algospeak”).

Stochastic Threat: More often referred to as Stochastic Terrorism, I think the use of the word threat is more appropriate as the world terrorism is overly politicized and subject to a lot of ideology. Related to Supremacy Language, the concept is that sufficient performative or institutional threat can lead to vigilantism by individuals in the community against the target who has been painted as morally deficient. Even if the original intent is to kill or otherwise cancel the target, it involves a degree of separation between the instigator and the manipulated attacker to facilitate a plausible deniability defense. A related concept that doesn’t get much attention yet is Stochastic Suicide. Here by threatening an individual or entire demographic sufficiently through media you can increase the probability or rates of suicide.

Collective Punishment: I understand what it feels like to be attacked, abused, or have people try to kill me. This is usually because of my ethnicity but also because extreme cases of childhood cognition like mine require exorcism by some ideologies. If I was a mean or bitter person, I could argue justification to be upset at entire demographics. The reality is that every population has some bad apples, but most people are relatively good souls. To condemn an entire group because of the actions of a few is collective punishment. It is an example of unethical behavior within the constraints of normative morality. During an armed conflict, collective punishment is a war crime. Thus sexism, racism, bigotry, etc. are considered universally immoral behavior, when the justification is something done by an individual. Religious wars have caused a lot of strife over the centuries, and still are. Our Gender War is on the verge of rising to the same level if we don’t make a strong course correction.

Bullying

This is happening a lot on social media. Gendered hate speech like misandry and misogyny are increasingly common examples, even on LinkedIn. Algorithms seem to be programmed to block misogynistic hate speech but to allow misandrist hate speech.

I’ve had problems with people exposing themselves to me over the years, as I’m sure many women have experienced also. While it isn’t legal, it seems to be rarely prosecuted. In the old days before cell phones, it was a lot harder to prove. Bullying in general tends to leave less physical evidence than other threat types, so keeping people in places you can record them until you put them in the “trusted” basket can be helpful.

Institutional Threat

When I had a fellow nursing student who I had agreed to tutor expose herself to me, I was shocked and ran for my life. I was only 19 and not very experienced in such situations. She responded the next morning by convincing the director of our nursing program to kick me out of the program for being male. She didn’t mention her SA of me, and I overheard her entire conversation with the director. She was very sophisticated in her manipulation.

In that situation I lost my career and medical schools later rejected me on the grounds that if I couldn’t handle nursing school, I would not be qualified for medical school. I would have been better off being shot in the leg with a gun. The perpetrator was never punished.

Once the #believeallwomen movement started, this was an attempt to institutionalize the justice system against men: formal gender supremacy. While usually not written into law, it has been informally adopted in the West. This has triggered an explosion of institutional threat against men, making them increasingly reluctant/cautious about interacting with women due to the threat.

Because false allegations are rarely prosecuted, even when proven false, this behavior has become endemic. This is a very simple way to eliminate a workplace competitor also.

Australia started paying bounties to anyone making SA allegations, so 7 petty criminals racked up $1.3B AUD in bounties before the government realized that 4000 claims of SA against teachers was a bit unlikely statistically. Teaching is a hard job, and statistically it is likely that hundreds of teachers lost their lives due to suicide just from this one scheme, which is likely happening in any country with similar laws.

I would encourage all countries to make false allegations, especially false SA allegations, a much more severe and punishable crime than it is currently.

Kinetic Threat

Kinetic threats are those that can or do lead directly to physical harm or loss of live. When the victim is male, the event tends to be undereported or not reported, or not recorded. Thus official statistics are known-unreliable. Homicides, however, tend to be reported and recorded reliably.

In the USA men are 2.7 times more likely to be the victims of homicide compared to women. In Australia the rate is about 2 to 1, so authorities consider this problematic. For women, because that means a 33% rate for women which is higher than in the USA.

Trans folk in the USA are 2.5 times more likely to be killed than cis folk, but that rate rises sharply to 15 times if the victim is black. This mirrors the pattern I brought up in the Proportionality section above where threat against black folk in the USA has been disproportionately high for centuries.

Since physical threats against men are under reported, the only reliable way to get evidence of it is anonymous self reporting. The UK gender hate study used anonymous self reporting of both binary genders so that’s what makes its data so useful. These sorts of high quality studies are rare because usually kinetic threat against men is ignored by researchers.

An NIH 2018 meta analysis of 28 such research papers involving military personnel found that 21% of men and 13% of women were the victims of IPV. Verbal abuse was included, so this is not purely kinetic.

Perhaps the most inclusive meta research on the subject of gender symmetry in IPV that I could find came from the University of Mississippi in 2023. It showed that when researchers only used police-collected data, women were overwhelmingly more likely to be victims of IPV. This was attributed to police being trained to treat men as the perpetrators in IPV, and under reported male-victim IPV by 85%.

Some examples from that meta analysis:

• Riggs and O’Leary (1996) found 18.2% of women compared to 9% of men slapped their partners and 13.2% of women compared to 2.5% of men reported kicking, biting, or hitting their partners, yet conclude similar rates of violence. [example of researcher bias]

• McNeely and Robinson-Simpson (1987) conclude that women are “as violent as men” (p. 485) using data that shows women to be more violent than men. [Again, evidence of researcher bias]

• Straus and Ramirez (2007) found when only one partner was violent it was twice as likely to be the female as the male (19.0% vs 9.8%).

The Mississippi study concludes that women attack their male partners three times as frequently as the reverse scenario. Both genders report being victims at equal rates, which the author concluded was due to a combination of male under reporting and female over reporting. It also found that in relationships with IPV, it was 50+% likely that it was bidirectional (both partners were hostile).

I don’t think that women are inherently more aggressive than men, but since society has little in the way of guardrails against female aggression (and even encourages it), it happens because it is more acceptable.

If this subject is of interest to you, the full study is well worth the read. If you aren’t used to carefully reading research papers, the 57 page length might be intimidating.

Performative Threat and Psychometric Modelling

Demonizing the opposition has been a staple of politics since the invention of politics. The winner is typically whoever does a better job of exaggerating the threat of their opponents. I was credited by “Bomber” Bob Dornan with his 27th Congressional District win in 1980. Being a regular target of ethnic hate, but being white-passing, I knew exactly what to do to get him elected. I went door to door and visited every voter in his district over the age of 50. I then told them that “The Middle Easterners were coming to get them” and that they needed a strong leader like Bob to protect them.

It was so easy, it was child’s play. Literally, since I was 14 years old in 1980.

The invention of psychometric modeling (PM), first deployed in the 2016 UK Brexit vote by Cambridge Analytica, is so powerful that voters are almost helpless when targetted with it. The effect of a single PM attack is the equivalent of what I did in 1980, but can be automated and does not require an expert. The effect wears off about a week later, but voters with “Buyer’s Remorse” can’t undo their votes.

Now you have social media platforms using algorithmic PM to target users with whatever content they are most vulnerable to. The effects are so powerful, they would seem almost improbable even in a James Bond movie:

TikTok also found that it took 35 minutes to addict a user. Meta’s Instagram “Reels” was designed to copy TikTok. Algorithmic PM allows users to be programmed deeply with whatever Performative Threat the platform wants. It then essentially pays the more evangelical content creators to duplicate the programming across their followers.

When I’m being attacked by Gender Supremacists on LI they tend to hit me with the same talking points and cherry picked defective research studies over and over again. This implies that once one of these talking points proves effective, it gets replicated across thousands or even millions of content creators, reaching potentially billions of viewers.

When the UK study found misandry rates close to 30% in their women, I think that’s new. Certainly nothing like that was going on prior to 2016. I would hold up this huge shift in societal hate to the expert and determined use of algorithmic PM. Once you’ve zombified your users (again, only takes 35 minutes, and many users use these products hours every day), programming them to hate using Performative Threat is far easier than you can imagine anywhere except in a bad “B” mind control themed horror movie.

Where is This Going?

In the next (and final for now) paper in the series I will explain what this mass threat campaign is doing to our species, identify some of the people promoting it and why, and explain how it is going to backfire spectacularly. Stochastic threat is cheap and easy, and difficult to prove, but it has a huge limitation: you can’t control who and how someone will respond to it. Well, not without expertise that these people don’t currently possess.

The result here is going to ultimately be the opposite of what they intended. While I find that tremendously amusing, the overall effect on our people is going to be horrible. So any mirth I’m experiencing is highly tempered.

Note that I had no idea what I would find when I started down this rabbit hole, so what I’m about to write about is not at all where I thought my investigation would take me.

If any of my brothers and sisters feel triggered and need to stop reading at any time, I totally get it. I operate inside a Large Tribe Worldview, so I embrace everyone as part of my tribe, even the really annoying people. That doesn’t mean I agree with everyone, but diversity (including thought diversity) is perhaps the ultimate super power of the human race.

Some Gender Language/Definitions

Cis: A term borrowed from chemistry, “Cis” means that if you were born a “boy” and grew up to be a Man, you are “Cis”. The same applies if you were born a “girl” and grew up to be a Woman. 98 to 99% of people are “Cis”.

Gender and Birth Sex: If you were not born intersexed (see below), you were either born male (XY chromosome) or female (XX chromosome). We call this Assigned Male at Birth (AMAB) or Assigned Female at Birth (AFAB). Some people feel that they were born on the wrong team or aren’t strictly on one team. In such cases, their Gender does not match their Birth Sex.

Trans: Another term borrowed from chemistry (Trans-fats, etc), it means the person identifies as “the other gender” from what their assigned sex at birth is.

Non-Binary (NB): An NB person just isn’t on either team. They may consider themselves non-gendered, or a mix of genders. We’ve always had “Tomboys” and “Sensitive Guys”, and it’s always been understood that there are people in the middle. NB’s are 26+% likely to also be on the asexuality spectrum. I would recommend you assume they are until they have a reason to tell you otherwise, though that’s pretty good advice with all genders.

Intersex: Some people are born with genetic variations that alter or block the normal expression of key sex hormones. Some of these affect receptors creating intolerance, such as how Diabetes Type 2 affects intolerance to insulin. There is no agreed upon threshold for what counts and Intersex, but a safe estimate is that 0.5% of Americans have this. The result is that they might grow up looking one gender but have sex organs associated with the other gender. This isn’t the result of “transition”, they are born this way. This may or may not result in Gender Dysmorphia, but social stygma usually causes doctors to advise parents to keep their intersex child’s condition a secret. Sports competition can be controversial.

Neurodivergent (ND): This is the broader category of atypical cognitive patterns/systems that includes “Autism”. 6 to 20% of those identified as “Autistic” are Trans or NB, which is about 6 times more likely than cis people experience.

Cis Hetero (Straight): The person links their gender to their birth sex, and is attracted to the other sex. Someone who identifies as “asexual” can still feel attraction, but it’s typically more conditional. So you can be both Straight and Asexual.

Cis Homo (Gay/Lesbian): Just saying “Homo” is derogatory, so I recommend you don’t say that to people, especially if you are Straight. You identify as your birth sex, and you are attracted to people who match your birth sex.

Note About Sexuality: Sexuality is an even more complex subject than Gender, so I’m not going to get further into that here. As you can imagine, if someone is non-cis, this can get very complicated. If you get close enough to a non-cis person that they move you from the “None of your Business” category to the “Friend+” category, then it becomes okay to ask them to explain how they feel on the subject. They still might decline, especially if they don’t feel that way about you.

Dysmorphia

“Dysmorphia is a mental health condition characterized by an intense, obsessive preoccupation with one or more perceived flaws in physical appearance that are minor or invisible to others.”

There are two primary forms of Dysmorphia, and someone can have both. Dysmorphia can be very intense. It is estimated that 18% of people have some form of it. Extreme cases can be fatal. Generally Gender Dysmorphia is considered intrinsic and not something that can be “cured”. Body Dysmorphia can theoretically be cured, but outcomes are low and from my experience therapists without it don’t understand it well enough to treat it effectively.

• Gender Dysmorphia: The person feels that they have a body with the wrong gender. They often describe being a woman trapped in a man’s body, or a man trapped in a woman’s body. This is, of course, very stressful. As with Body Dysmorphia (below), untreated the risk of self deletion is high. The technology to literally change a person’s body sufficiently to satisfy the person has only been around in the last 50 years as neuroscience and surgical options have advanced. Outcomes with today’s tech are much better than they were 40 or even 20 years ago. Prices and availability have also improved a lot. This can be a very expensive compulsion. There are always risks involved, anyone willing to “transition” is not having a “fad”. Changes are often irreversible.

• Body Dysmorphia: The person feels like there is something unacceptable about their body. The most common and dangerous compulsion is that they feel they are too fat. This can cause any of a variety of Eating Disorders (EDs). Anorexia Nervosa leads to death within 4 years in 5% of cases. I have Body Dysmorphia (undiagnosed) but have never had an ED. I deal with it by running and being vegan.

Warnings

Gender and Body perceptions are typically very intense and personal. People who try to “fix” people with these traits can do a lot of harm in the process. This is especially true if they aren’t qualified to do so, which is almost always the case. A trained person wouldn’t approach these conditions as “curable”, but as something that can be managed.

My Personal Traits

I will share my experience here as an aid to others. I realize that sharing this information puts me at risk of harm from some people. I’ve never felt any attraction to men, so I’m “Straight” in the traditional sense. I’m a gay magnet because of my training so it’s not like I just haven’t figured that out yet. That’s probably good because my violent Turkish father would have deleted me for sure if I was.

I didn’t have any positive male role models growing up, until Olympic and World Record holder Tommie Smith began coaching me when I was 17 (and homeless). That emotional support was critical to my surviving that difficult period. I did have a strong female role model in my grandmother Marjorie, who was a rockstar. I didn’t see her very often, but she gave me her Barbie collection when I was ~6.

This was clearly Marjorie’s passion as her collection was immense. It came with a catalog and I did the math and realized that her collection was the most expensive thing our family had, worth even more than my mother’s poorly maintained Toyota. My family couldn’t afford clothes for me, so I could imagine what it would be like to have fancy clothes when I was playing with those dolls.

Of course when my father got custody of me when I was 10, they didn’t travel with me to his house. I was always “sensitive” (but “straight”). I was also always on the asexuality spectrum (specifically: Romantic Demisexual), probably due to the unkind introduction to sexual activity from the age of 7. By that age everyone, even my teachers, treated me as a full adult. I did everything except pay taxes. Well, when I moved to the North side of Santa Monica when my father got custody of me, the Santa Monica Malibu Unified school district didn’t disclose my cognitive status to the new schools, which started treating me as a child. This caused some friction, especially when I started modifying the national political landscape at age 14.

In 2001 the Los Angeles Times “outed” me in the article Boy You Fight Like a Girl. The LGBTQ community started making a big deal about me, but I just told them I’m a normal person. But I’ve been considering myself NB for at least the last 10 years. That would have been covered by the “Q” in LGBTQ, but I’ve never felt Queer. I feel normal. I have a mix of male and female gender traits and “more mirror” whichever is more useful in any situation I am in. As with other NDs, I mirror a lot in order to pass as neurotypical, so that’s something I’d have to do anyway. That adaptability means I have a fairly wide range of compatibility in my relationships.

Pronouns

I seem to view pronouns differently than everyone else, so I may annoy the LGBTQ community with my views. Since I don’t experience jealousy or entitlement, I don’t feel that I’m entitled to make people use pronouns of my choice. People can call me she, he, or even “it”. I don’t care as long as they know how to use pronouns in a grammatically correct way. Trying to force behavior on the people around you without their consent is a sure fire way to cause conflict and resentment.

I think a lot of people in the LGBTQ (and no I’m not going to type 20+ letters) community do themselves a disservice by acting entitled around cis hetero people. That’s the express route to getting Small Tribe Worldview people to put you in the “Not my tribe” category.

Gender “Traits”

It’s generally accepted that men are more physical, more sexually assertive, less emotional, and less empathic. Of course none of these traits are binaries, and people can have wide ranges of these traits regardless of their Gender.

Talking to Trans people who are in the process of transitioning has taught me a lot. When they start taking hormones to alter their physiology and gender, it literally changes their Gender mentally also.

Men who start taking Estrogen find that their empathy expands tremendously, with relationships previously invisible to them becoming visible. They also tend to have a drop in sex drive, but certainly so if they take androgen blockers.

Women who start taking Testosterone (“T”) to transition to male have even more profoun experiences. Their emotions start to “fog” and they become less perceptive. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s a thing. One explained that they turned into a “capacitor” that just filled up until they exploded when full. I’m talking emotionally here, not sexually. They also experience a huge increase in sex drive, which most likely find positive. Slow released gel patches gave them a strong “push”. But if they tried to use injectable T, then that was like strapping a rocket to their ass.

I found that interesting, since I started reading all the major sex research books when I was 10, but didn’t really understand what the big deal was until I was almost 13. When puberty kicked in, I was like “oh crap, now I know why people get so crazy.” Taking T causes permanent irreversible changes in women, so that’s a very serious decision. But a woman will never truly understand what it’s like to have a male body unless they do something like that. There are very serious physiological differences that normally a person will never appreciate unless they gender transition. Of course that’s less than 1% of the population.

Gender Empathy

I’ve always seemed to have extraordinary empathy, even compared to the neurotypical women around me. But from listening to transitioning people, there seems to be more than just a quantitative difference between the genders. They process information from their environments differently.

A man is wired to protect the women and children around them. Of course our dystopian society produces exceptions like my father, but in his case he was tortured for 6 months in Iran before being exiled to the USA, so I don’t consider him a “normal” man. The “bad men” are a small minority of the population, but it is human nature to prioritize threats so their imprint on their victims can create an exaggerated impression of gender threat applied to the entire gender.

Men understand that any conflict with another man can be fatal. We don’t generally panic over this, it’s our biological role to navigate these situations. So they usually develop the “Bro Code” skill which allows them to show the proper respect to other men and de-escalate conflicts. The best solution to a conflict is to not have a fight, so men take this VERY seriously.

As men walk through life, they are much more focused on “kinetic events”, living things moving around them that could present threats. De-escalating with wild animals is also a thing, something I got very good at as I grew up feral during most of my childhood. That’s a skill, and not a binary.

Women, by contrast, are like living air traffic controllers. Not of kinetic objects like men, but of feelings, thoughts, objectives. If you look at this as the female equivalent of the “Bro Code” (sometimes called “The Sisterhood”), women are very good at respecting each other’s “airspace” and complying with requests to change speed or altitude. Men typically are not aware of “airspace” at this level and often fail to comply. Women will often check the man and insist he comes into compliance.

How Technology Has Affected Gender

Men cost more calories to keep alive every day than women, so they are inefficient in roles that women can do equally well. Until about 200 years ago men’s strength and speed more than made up for this and male babies were preferred. Industrialization changed all this, so that even children could run machines as well as men. That’s why early industrialists like Henry Ford preferred to hire young children in their factories.

As automation increased and women began entering the workplace en mass post WW2, men and women were increasingly being asked to do similar tasks with no gender advantage to men. That puts them at a biological and economic disadvantage. Laws to advantage women in education rapidly made up the education gap and now there is a huge education gap that favors women. That makes sense because women are advantaged naturally in roles that require communication skills but not strength, like most corporate jobs.

A lot of those college degrees that women were getting were in programs that relied heavily on communication, like Human Resources and Psychology. Women vastly dominate those roles in the economy now. Not only are those “Gatekeeper” roles that determine who gets hired, promoted, and fired, but they are also “Adder” (not Multiplier) roles as I described in my Moneyball 2.0 paper.

If women that don’t like men get into Gatekeeper roles, they can eliminate men from the workforce, so the rise in “man hate” is of particular interest here. Perhaps of even more importance is that AI can now communicate, at equal or even better levels than women can. AI is extremely adept at replacing both “Adder” and communication roles in the workforce. The result is that women are firing men, and AI is firing women. Men often blame this on women/DEI, and women blame this on “Patriarchy”. I explained in my Gender Economics paper that for 99%ers (people who actually have jobs) we don’t actually live in a Patriarchy anymore. The 1%ers don’t care about Patriarchy since they are Small Tribers (like almost everyone) and consider all the 1%ers as being “in-tribe” regardless of their gender.

Thus I would argue that this misframing is one (of many) components fueling misandry, and that as AI fires more women that’s only going to get worse.

Institutional and Security Concerns of Gender

We used to live in tribes and our biological gender roles complimented each other. As we adopted technology and “advanced” (unequal) social systems, that was increasingly disrupted. Unequal social systems become increasingly unequal over time, and technology has only accelerated this process. Soon we will have Trillionaires, who are more powerful than any King of old.

“Security” has always been a concern for humans over the last 250,000 years. It’s a concern for every animal on Earth. But Security/Safety has never been a “right”. It was a daily fight, with winners and losers. Tribal cohesion was critical, and any lapse in the vigilance of the men would lead to loss of life of women and children. There was always a predator waiting in the bushes for the adults to have an argument so they could drag off a child. For that 99+% of the time we have existed as Tribals, we all had Large Tribe Worldviews. Everyone in our Tribe was part of our Tribe, and deserved protection.

With advanced social systems, only the people at the top were truly “protected”. Those people were in their own Tribe with their own rules/laws and that’s especially true now. Today we’ve all been programmed with Small Tribe Worldviews, and our Tribes often just include our very immediate family. Everyone else is at best secondary.

I often hear women say “I don’t need a man”. Let’s assume that’s true. Then you also have to admit “I don’t need anyone to protect me.” That might also be true, depending on where you live. If you live in a warzone or in an American city (essentially constant warzones) then you probably do. But you may assume you don’t until you do.

Men used to step in to protect women they didn’t know, if they saw them being threatened or attacked. That’s their biological gender role, it is instinctual. But in a Small Tribe Worldview, this instinct is muted for those outside the Tribe. With misandry rates approaching 30% in the West, men will get shamed on a daily basis by women. This factors large when a man is doing the math trying to decide if he should risk his life to protect a woman he doesn’t know.

Those that society most often considers “Not in Tribe” are the most often subject to attack by strangers. That includes trans, NB, ND, LGBTQ, racial minorities, and the homeless. Men are 11.5 times more likely to be killed by a stranger than a woman is. White cis hetero women are the least likely women to be attacked in the West by strangers. Nonetheless, that’s the specific demographic that self-reports the highest rates of misandry.

In gaming we’ve always understood that protection had a cost. If you had a caravan that you needed to get from City A to Village B, you had to pay to hire mercenaries to provide protection. This had a cost, and mercenaries were risking their lives so that wouldn’t be cheap. In WW1 and WW2 we had to protect our merchant ships with warships in convoys or risk losing them to submarines and surface raiders. This was very expensive. Now in the Strait of Hormuz, no one is safe, not even aircraft carriers. The bill, just for the USA, is apparently $400,000,000,000 for the next few months.

If you are a 1%er, you understand this and always have bodyguards. If you saw the movie Michael that just came out (very good movie btw) you can see that the first thing his father did once they had money was to hire a bodyguard for Michael. It didn’t matter that Michael was male, he needed a man with advanced protection skills looking out for him at all times. That person became perhaps the only person in Michael’s life that he could depend on.

When I was 9 I got tired of being bullied at school, so I organised all the “misfits” in my school into our own gang under my leadership. The next time 3 bullies came for one of us, I let loose with our “secret call sign” and 40 (mostly smaller) kids surrounded the bullies. We never had any problems after that. Why be a victim if you have other options? Because I understood the Bro and Feral Codes, no punches were thrown and everyone went their own way peacefully.

In the next paper, I’m going to dedicate the entire discussion to Real Space Threats because this is the most often cited reason that I hear misandrists cite for their misandry when I survey them on LinkedIn. It’s always some form of “you deserve to be bashed because you threaten us, and thus are morally inferior.” This is Gender Supremacy language which I recently explained how to identify at length. In order to unpack whether this is really the source of the sudden rise in misandry, it deserves a rigorous analysis. We can’t just wave our arms and assume it is true or false.

In Part 2 I will talk about Gender, because it is a critical element in this reproductive crisis. As a society we don’t like to talk about gender, and for many this can be very uncomfortable. Nonetheless, we can’t address the threat without talking about Gender. So that paper will come with trigger warnings.

In Part 3 I will do my best to explain what is causing this Demographic Collapse as objectively as I can without disrespecting one/any/both Genders.]

Demographic collapse (DC) is a global event that threatens every nation. Almost every nation is having new births at rates below the “advanced nation” Replacement Rate of 2.1 births per adult woman. Nations with higher infant mortality rates need higher replacement rates to break even so even some nations where women have 3 births are still below local replacement rates.

Having population go down over time can have beneficial environmental effects, and if done gradually can actually be beneficial economically over time. This is because the more people competing over the same resources, the poorer each person will be. The problem comes when there is a relatively sudden loss of productive younger people while the number of lower-productivity (or entirely retired) elderly goes up.

You might find it interesting that resources for childbirth have been strictly assigned and rationed in the West since the publication of The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith in 1776.

How Nations Controlled Births Prior to Oral Birth Control

Smith explained how to maintain a stable “labor supply” (this is how Smith refers to low status people) in 1776:

“A man must always live by his work, and his wages must at least be sufficient to maintain him. They must even upon most occasions be somewhat more; otherwise it would be impossible for him to bring up a family, and the race of such workmen could not last beyond the first generation.”

I will describe the “sufficient to maintain” income as the “survival rate”, or 100% income, in this paper.

“the lowest species of common labourers must everywhere earn at least double their own maintenance, in order that one with another they may be enabled to bring up two children; the labour of the wife, on account of her necessary attendance on the children, being supposed no more than sufficient to provide for herself. But one half the children born, it is computed, die before the age of manhood. The poorest labourers, therefore, according to this account, must, one with another, attempt to rear at least four children, in order that two may have an equal chance of living to that age. But the necessary maintenance of four children, it is supposed, may be nearly equal to that of one man.”

So 250 years ago the lowest quality of workers (what we would call “working class” today) earned 200% for men, 100% for women, and women spent the other half of her labor caring for ~4 children. Half of those are expected to die with a 50% infant mortality rate. In modern times even the most war torn countries (not including ethnic cleansing areas) have infant mortality rates below 10%.

To my knowledge, this is the only time Smith discusses women’s wages.

You can see here that there is an assumption that children only require 25% as many resources to maintain as an adult. This low rate is in part due to them being expected to work from very early ages. In the West the costs of children (including education) are much higher than they were 250 years ago, but with infant mortality rates close to 0% a family only requires 2 (2.1) children. Thus the 200% rate is still likely sufficient. If there are two adults in the family (true for ~70% of children) that extra 100% above the survival rate can be shared by both adults. If we accept this math, for one adult to support their “stay at home” partner and two children would require wages equal to 300% of survival rates. Only ~3% of Americans earn this much, making the “stay at home” parent family structure that was common until perhaps 50 years ago, now almost mythological.

As discussed in previous papers, women could have as many as 20 live births 250 years ago. Numbers above 4 children, or even above 2 children, were ultimately culled through starvation. Intentional starvation.

“Every species of animals naturally multiplies in proportion to the means of their subsistence, and no species can ever multiply beyond it. But in civilised society it is only among the inferior ranks of people that the scantiness of subsistence can set limits to the further multiplication of the human species; and it can do so in no other way than by destroying a great part of the children which their fruitful marriages produce.”

See, even 250 years ago they had “politically correct” language for things like infanticide.

How are the Elderly Paid For?

250 years ago the average life expectancy was ~35 years. There wasn’t a concept of elderly working class people. Only the aristocracy was expected to live beyond a point of “unproductiveness”. Thus Smith does not even mention this possibility.

In modern times the elderly are maintained by a combination of their own savings and support from the state. The latter support is raised from taxes. The USA used to have a “Social Security” system that held and invested social security taxes for future retirement needs. Starting in 1983 the government started “borrowing” those funds. As a result the Fund is expected to go underwater by 2033, only maintaining 77% of obligations. This will represent a massive economic shock to the economy that is fast approaching. I will call this the Retirement Reserve Shock.

If we ignore social security, taxes are raised to support the elderly. Those taxes go up severely as the % of dependent elderly increases, and the % of productive adults decreases due to Demographic Collapse.

Survival Rates Under Pressure

As Demographic Collapse advances, post-tax incomes will go down on average for everyone. The exception would be if they have a crime or sex work occupation that evades taxation. I talk about this at length in Gender Economics.

Annual expenses in the USA are ~$78K USD. Median adult incomes are ~$51K USD. This means that for most Americans, they are paid below the survival rate at 65% where 100% is survival. To make up the other 35% they may engage in crime, desperation, shared housing, or most commonly, debt. In Australia yearly wages are 43K to 55K USD (wide range based on region). Expenses including shared housing range from 25K to 35K USD. This gives a rate of 160 to 170%. Australia is a relatively rich country, and effective net income is more than twice what it is in the USA. Thus Australians can still afford children, maybe even more than one, especially with both adults working.

Recall that in the USA taxes will have to increase significantly due to Retirement Reserve Shock in 7 years, even if they were not starting wars, massively increasing their military budgets, and disrupting global supply chains. AI is also being used to aggressively replace workers. All these factors are going to make a nearly impossible parenting situation even harder. I assume this is intentional on the part of that government, which is why I wrote a special paper for the unique Demographic Collapse situation in the USA.

I have to mention that men need about 50% more calories than women. As food prices rapidly rise, this will become more meaningful. Even if men still had as much money as women, they would have less to spend on things other than food. That includes spending on children. Thus if men and women had equal budgets, the men would have lower % survival rates.

As taxes go up, food/fuel prices go up, and employment rates go down, things are going to get rough.

Gender Competitive Pressures

While my grandmother Majorie was educated as a nurse, she worked for Howard Hughes making aeriel bombs for the USA Air Force during WW2. Women working in traditionally male jobs was a new thing spurred by desperation. After the dust of war settled, it became clear that our country was far more productive with both men and women working.

Rules and laws changed to promote women in the labor force, and to even promote them in education. So much support was given that they soon reached parity and now are more educated and earn more than men. I discuss this in my Gender Economics paper. The UK data showing that women now have higher base wages than men were released after I wrote that paper so the Gender Income Gap (in favor of women) has widened even more than I described there.

This might be confusing for generations raised to believe that men make more than women. Well, they used to, but we kept putting our fingers on the scale until that reversed. All that assistance has put stress on men who now find themselves very unemployed. It has also put stress on women who expect men to contribute to child raising with shared income but many men fall short and struggle just to support themselves.

This leaves many men “ineligible” for relationships or parenthood.

Where the relationship between the binary heterosexual genders used to be cooperative, it has now turned competitive. Our species is exceptionally efficient at eliminating competitors. Our entire culture is shifting in real time to make that permissible. I’ve previously described this as a Gender War.

As men went from “superior” (patriarchy) to “inferior” (called dusty and/or patriarchy still), women have become very frustrated that they aren’t getting enough help from men. The recent UK poll (from a women’s research team) showed that younger women now out-earn their male counterparts, even before counting the various undeclared incomes that I discuss in Gender Economics. It also showed that less than 20% of women aged 30 or less wanted children, while almost 80% of men did want children.

That’s the inverse of the cultural narrative that women want children and men are more ambivalent or even “deadbeat”. In the face of many barriers, men are increasingly just avoiding women that they can’t afford. It is no surprise that women do not find the idea of trying to hold down their careers while also being single parents very appetizing.

The real kicker is what happened when the UK research team asked the binary genders who they feel about the other gender. Men seemed to still be optimistic with 72% saying they liked women, with only 7% saying they disliked them. For the youngest adult generation, only 35% of women liked men and 27% said they disliked them.

Since women don’t wear shirts that say “I hate men” on dates, this generates threat towards men as the risk that the person they are meeting might be a misandrist is quite high. If your partner is sexist against you from the start, the chance of being assaulted emotionally or physically is quite high, along with the risk of a false allegation being made.

Men have reacted by forming “red pill” communities where men educate each other on the rapidly evolving threat. These are often folded into a broader category that includes any straight male influencers: “The Manosphere”. Since there are 431 universities with Women’s Studies programs, and zero with Men’s Studies, this is all that men are allowed. Women who see men as competitors want to get rid of any sort of men’s support groups so influence campaigns against the Manosphere have been intense, usually focusing on the misogynists on the radical fringe.

What’s Next

With women mobilizing against competing men, and men increasingly organising against the perceived threat, it seems inevitable that both misandry and misogyny rates are going to increase. The potential for aggression in both directions will increase.

Under “normal” (tribal) conditions, cis hetero men and women release oxytocin when they like each other, and this vastly boosts sensations of trust and love. The ultimate result is new children. Oxytocin can also boost aggression towards competitors. I will explain that dynamic in detail in the 3rd paper in this series.

As trust drops to zero, the result is going to be birth rates dropping rapidly to zero. Birth rates in the West could drop to less than half of projected (already dire) rates in the next two years. I base this on “back of handkerchief” math where “friendly” women are less than half the frequency (35%) they might have been a few years ago (70+%).

Governmental options are going to be limited, and almost certainly “out of budget”. Giving men more money so that they can give it to a woman would be the ideal situation, but I can’t imagine a reality where that would happen, or could be set up to avoid fraud. Giving women more money if they have children has been tried in many countries, and generally doesn’t work because the amounts are insufficient, end too soon, and don’t solve the gender divide. If women just want to get pregnant but don’t like men, the risks of false allegations will go way up as this is the preferred way of denying men parental rights.

“Artificial” insemination might become popular, but children perform poorly with only one parent, especially if that parent doesn’t have time to parent. I can’t imagine that locking cis hetero men out of the process would be popular with them.

I’m operating from the view that the core source of this problem isn’t that men or women suddenly became more evil just in the last year or two. I also don’t think economic changes could have made such a rapid change. I believe the oxytocin metabolism that normally makes coupling possible has been disrupted, by social media. I will make this case in the 3rd paper, after I talk about the influences of gender in this scenario in the next paper.

I’m not much of a cook. I eat to live, not live to eat. For me making a sandwich might involve stabbing a tomato and putting a slice between two pieces of bread. My partner, who happens to be a professional cook, summons between 20 and 50 steps into her Terminator-like Heads Up Display (HUD) every time she steps into the kitchen.

Sometimes she asks me to help her cook something with her. Perhaps she hopes that she will inspire me to care about cooking. Then she looks at me. That look. I’m not sure if she’s crying, or laughing. Probably both. Doing anything in the kitchen ends up being stressful for me because I know I will never be that person for her. I will never aspire to the masterwork that is her cooking. And, other than to please her, why would I? It’s all going into my stomach anyways and I know it won’t look pretty after that.

Making and Riding a Masterwork Motorcycle

I’ve owned 14 motorcycles in my life, and I have the scars to prove it. I outlived all of them except one. I saw it sitting in an old man’s garage one day in the middle of the desert, with cobwebs and black widows adorning it. This was perhaps 1994. I bought it and fixed it up with the help of a friend who taught mechanics at the same school where I taught physical therapy and fitness occupations.

This was a 1975 BMW R90/6.

That’s a picture of one that’s for sale right now somewhere, in 2026. This bike was designed to be indestructible, easy to maintain, and to run at any altitude or conditions with minor adjustments. This bike could have had 10 owners before me. I rode the heck out of it. In a recent paper I mentioned that I had been run down by a heavily modified truck while crossing a bridge in what looked like an assassination attempt. I was on this bike at the time. The impact would have totalled any bike or car made today. I just had to replace a $10 mirror and it was good to go. I wasn’t as fortunate.

I had that bike until I was forced to sell it during the Great Recession in 2010. It was just as good as when I got it in 1994, and I put at least 80,000 miles on it. It would have been more but I had another bike (see below) for most of that time. I imagine it could have had another 10 owners since then and might still be on the road.

But this begs the question: Why would BMW do that? Why make a bike that runs forever? That sells for at least what you bought it at every handoff. Wouldn’t that make it harder to sell more bikes? That’s like making a Tinder that results in marriage on every swipe. Tinder would be out of business in no time.

The smart thing to do would be to make bikes that break down as soon as the warranty expires, if not sooner. The 1993 R1100RS that I bought in 1996 was exactly like this. It was 3 years old and was at the end of its 3 year warranty. And everything on it started to fail after I bought it. But it looked sexy while I was pushing it around.

This is the proper way to make money, right?

The Guru

When I was hired at Wargaming in 2013, it was on the same day at the company’s 15th anniversary party. That was one heck of a party, Russian fighter jets flying over the celebration so low that you could almost touch them. I used to have a picture of me sitting on a tank barrel with a fighter jet just meters above me. My boss told me the first day he met me that he would have hired me 7 years earlier if he knew I existed. That was a great feeling.

But the new technologies I had invented were untested and the founders were not sure what to do with me. So I sat in an expensive executive office for 3 months and did nothing. Finally me and my boss flew out to Los Angeles (from Austin) and met with one of the founders that had hired me. There was another person in that room, a personal friend of the CEO. I had been warned that he was problematic so my boss gave me permission to challenge him, but was afraid to do it himself.

The founder didn’t look good. Apparently there was concern he was terminally ill. [I talk about the importance of death as a motivator at the end of this paper] He had assembled us for a reason. The CEO friend described his vision for the company going forward. I gave a different vision and said that the other guy’s advice would kill the company. I figured it was 50/50 chance that would be my last day at WG. But the founder believed me, and asked me if I would go to Belarus (in the Winter). I told him I would go anywhere he wanted me to go, which was the right answer.

Now, I bet my faithful readers know how this was going to turn out. That other guy made it his life’s mission to get me fired. But I was given full authority over the Belarus project on arrival (World of Tanks Blitz) and it was a huge success. The design took me 11 weeks. Then I was sent to Saint Petersburg where I had authority shared with the founder on World of Warships. I argued for a major redesign, and they eventually agreed. I spent a total of 14 weeks there.

These successes bought me some time, and I was working like my life depended on success.

Blitz has earned over $1B USD, and WoWs has earned as much as $1.3B USD per year since it’s launch at the end of 2014. But it was time to pay the piper. The person I had crossed successfully eliminated my position in 2015. At that time I was overseeing 7 projects on 3 continents. He would get fired the next year once it became obvious that his claims that he could replace me were false.

When I heard that he was gone, I begged for my job back, but I had to talk to the new mobile director that was recruited from Machine Zone. Obviously we had two very different game dev ideologies. We had never met but he knew a lot about me. He said “Wargaming doesn’t need a Guru”. That was it.

I read that as “I really don’t want you in the kitchen with me while I’m making sandwiches”. The four projects I was working on when I left got cancelled and Wargaming stopped making new games.

Game Development at a Crossroads

As an economist I can see both sides of this coin. If you have a forever game like World of Warships then you don’t need someone to make another game for you. This one can keep the company going for 20+ years. Like my R90/6. If you have a studio with 400 people in it, then it makes sense to fire all of them once the project is completed, regardless if it bombs or is a huge hit. The game is made, what do you need those people for? It doesn’t matter if it’s a Concord or a Battlefield 6, that crew is going into the mulcher.

If it’s a big hit, you don’t need to make another game. If it’s a big failure, then you probably shouldn’t have made that game in the first place. All roads lead to game dev workers losing their jobs as soon as their project completes. But what is good for the goose is good for the gander. If your workers know they will be terminated at the end of the project, regardless of the merits of their work or the final product, and won’t share in any success, then why should they do anything other than the bare minimum?

The way I look at it, I want anything I work on to be amazing. I’m sure most people enter game dev with the same mindset. After a while it can be tough to maintain this outlook if it is not appreciated or rewarded. One of the most important traits in warfare or commercial production is morale. This scenario is not good for morale. Demoralized employees won’t go out of their way to make magic. No offense to Firewalk Studios, I can only imagine what caused their demoralization, but demoralized studios will keep making Concords.

Right now all across the industry trust is low, morale is low, and people don’t want to move to another city just to get laid off and stranded there. There is this massive disconnect between rank and file and leadership. Both sides are right, and neither side is wrong. That’s what makes this so hard.

What if the Studio Was the Product?

If 1 out of 10 products is a hit, and 9 out of 10 are failures, then that’s a massive roll of the dice. The odds for the developer are honestly pretty bad. This makes our industry super high risk for everyone including investors. As leadership, if you get the “hit”, you are one of the lucky ones and you can just go into maintenance mode for the next decade (if it’s a well designed Game as a Service). That’s the dream for leadership and investors, and that’s why they strongly favor making GaaS.

But I think the solution is staring right at us and we are missing it. There is something more valuable than the forever game here: It’s the studio that made the forever game. Assembling teams is expensive and time consuming. Moving top talent across the world is stressful. Making new relationships and building trust in a studio is expensive and time consuming.

So you have your shiny new hit and your company is set for a decade.

[Now I realize that if I’m right about the D2-Oxytocin Heterocomplex and dopamine down regulation, there will be almost no dopamine based forever games over the next decade, that’s a parallel conversation I’ve made in other articles. That only makes the argument I’m making here more important because next paradigm D2-Oxy delivery teams will be more expensive and complex to assemble.]

The team that made your hit is essentially a Unicorn Team. Other companies that are struggling would kill for a team like that. You might be glad, hoping a competitor goes out of business. But what if there was another way? What if you kept your team but rented it out to competitors?

You keep your team, it keeps getting more skilled and cohesive, and if your studio makes another hit then you get a cut. That’s even more passive income. Heck, your company and that other company using your studio might find reason to create a merger later on. There is a lot of upside here with very little risk, in an industry full of risk.

What I’m saying here is, if your studio bombs, sure disband it. But if your studio nails it, you are potentially just pissing away billions of dollars of potential revenue by disbanding it. Why would you do that? On a personal note, if you have a Guru or other top employee and you know it, but don’t need him or her for the next year, why not rent them out? You keep control over them, get more passive income, and get an even more experienced employee when they finish that project.

If you have a good relationship with that employee, they might very well like this. There are a lot of difficult personalities in game development and security is perhaps the most scarce and precious resource for any game dev employee. This is especially true for top talent.

Losing a job, income, and maybe even health insurance can be devastating for any game dev employee. The way projects spool up and down, there is a lot of friction between jobs. This is both stressful and financially difficult. They might be required to move, again. If they have a partner or family, then a lot of people might have to move.

As an industry we have to de-risk our systems. That includes how much risk we drop on our employees. I’ve been writing for decades now on how to de-risk the production and design chain. Now more than ever, we have to include employees in our supply chain considerations, as they are perhaps the most easy element to disrupt.

Now, I’m not naïve. I know what’s coming. AI is going to displace a lot of workers in our industry and others. Pretty soon it will just be top talent left and it will be even harder for younger new talent to break in. Having been a coach for 15 years and a teacher for 6 years, I know you can have a top talent perform poorly in one environment and be a rockstar in another. Once you nail a team formation, do your best to lock it in.

Leadership and team formation is perhaps the most overlooked aspect of our production planning. We think of ourselves as being “high tech” and that emphasis doesn’t encourage people with leadership skills and experience. Those skills come from people with intense team environments (like sports or military) and that means you might need to find those people in places outside of game dev. People with strong leadership skills know how to identify the different characteristics of team members and assemble them into winning combinations. Having access to those leadership skills can make or break your teams, just like in any other industry.

Inspiration

On a final note, I think it’s been a while since I reminded people to listen to this video of Steve Job’s 2005 Stanford Commencement Speech. I listen to it at least once a year for the last 18 years. It isn’t inspirational by accident. He died six years after that speech of pancreatic cancer. He thought he was in the clear, but deep down you can tell he knew and he lived his life like he had to make each day count.

• 181A. Can Social Control Be Good?

• 182B. Advanced Social Control for Games

Social control and associated influence campaigns are used by innumerable private and public entities to shape public sentiment. Sometimes these are directed domestically, other times against a specific foreign country, and can even be global. I gave an example of how the USA Department of Defence (recently changed to Department of War to remove the pretence, a move I am in support of) tapped Dr. Seuss during WW2 as part of a social control program to dehumanize Japanese people both domestically and globally. This allowed them to be rounded up and sent to concentration camps, and to confiscate their property, with little or no social push back. It also facilitates warfare.

Thus this is hardly a new phenomenon, and with the advent of AI and budgets perhaps 1000 times larger than they were in 1942, this has become a normalized practice that affects all of us regularly. If you are active on social media, you might be targeted by influence campaigns multiple times a day.

As you no doubt have heard, there has been an influence campaign on all mass media and social media platforms, and even Netflix, pushing a narrative that men are becoming increasingly misogynistic due to a shadowy organisation dubbed “The Manosphere”. Scary stuff.

But then an all woman research team dropped a poll asking specifically about this. I wrote an entire paper on this this week:

• UK Poll Confirms Widespread Misandry

Wait, what? It actually showed very modest rates of misogyny compared to misandry. How is that possible that the facts contract every major news source? If you watch the researchers talk about it, they aren’t zealots. They are as surprised about their results as we are. But I predicted their results in my paper on Supremacy People and language.

How could I be right and all these governments and organisations be wrong (isn’t the first time)? Well, they aren’t dumb. At least not that dumb. They know they are spreading misinformation as part of a social control campaign. I make them, I can smell them.

What are they up to? I can only speculate, but clearly there seems to be a push to proscribe “The Manosphere”. That means make it and all of its participants illegal. Like the UK did with anti genocide activists by proscribing them on July 5th of 2025 (the high court later ruled it unconstitutional, but not before 2700+ activists were arrested). If that proscription wasn’t ruled unconstitutional, ultimately hundreds of thousands of people could have been rounded up. Even grandma.

I assume this is the Plan for “The Manosphere”, a very loose array of influencers who mostly focus on men’s rights and dating education. They want to legalize a man’s right to DNA test their own children (would you believe you don’t have that right in the USA? Why is that?). Truly a radical organisation. Governments don’t want men to know if a child isn’t theirs, because they want you to pay for that kid, not the government. There is a lot of money at stake. Also, as I explained in Dating Economics, the Epstein Club has survived and rewired the entire dating economy to support their insatiable lust for casual sex. That’s a lot of DNA flying around…

So what to do when a bomb like the UK Poll drops, threatening to disrupt your multi billion dollar global social control campaign? Well, you threaten and deflect of course! With a huge scary shiny object.

That was a CNN report that 50 guys in Europe who were arrested back in 2024 (so they’ve been sitting on this story for a while, in case of emergency) had a mysterious forum populated with instructions for men on how to drug and SA their wives. The really scary part was that it had 62 Million Visitors in just one month! Wow! That’s a fantastic number. Then the internet was flooded with stories saying that 62M Men visited this site in one month. Having crushed a few secret societies myself, one thing I know is that if it has 62M members, it’s not a secret. And people engaged in crimes against humanity value their secrecy. So this is definitely not passing the smell test.

So I pinched myself and asked Google AI for some info:

Wait, what? I’m shocking myself with this paper. There are 2 things very wrong with this answer:

• 62 million seems to be a VERY popular and coincidental number these days

• Why would google start talking about cheating men when I ask about how many men are married in the USA?!!?!

Even Google algorithm seems out to slander men. Hey Google, while you are at it, how many married women cheat on their husbands? …Crickets…

What is going on here? It’s almost like they might be planning something that could trigger kinetic resistance from civilian men. Like interfering in elections or instituting a mandatory military draft. The campaign against Japanese people during WW2 wasn’t this large or aggressive.

So imagine that you just read an article from CNN that implies that EVERY MARRIED MAN IN THE USA IS DRUGGING AND SA-ing THEIR WIVES! If I was them (and gullible) I’d be losing my collective mind too. Heck, all married men could be Pod People from space ready to take over Earth! I always thought there was something suspicious about married men.

Thank you Google, that’s what I thought.

But hey, people completely forgot about that pesky UK Poll on misandry. Back to our previous scripted social control program.

Is This Making Us Safer?

This push against men, misogyny, “The Manosphere”, and SA is all being advertised as an effort to make women safer. Men are disposable so we don’t worry about them. But is it working? Men are proving to be remarkably resistant to “overwhelming” misogyny programming. I would imagine that the number of men who “like” women is dropping, raising the yellow “Neutral” zone. But we still have 72% that like women. That’s pretty friendly. This makes sense to me because men are biologically wired to self-sacrifice to protect women and children. It’s hard to reprogram 250,000 years of very successful evolution.

But women are not proving to be so resilient. I don’t know why, but I just pointed out that this isn’t a new thing in my previous paper about protecting women. Being able to “switch sides” after their men are killed in a raid has always been something they can do, and makes sense from a species survival view. After all, if you lose your men, that’s a problem. But if you lose your women, or even half of them, it’s likely game over for your tribe. Thus prioritizing women’s safety is just smart biology. Some species even have the female eat the male after he’s done his duty. The reverse is not a thing.

As misandry rates rise to 25% (already happened) or even 50%, this generates threat against men, by definition. Men can handle a lot of threat, but at some point they break and attempt to neutralize the threat. That’s also biology. Humans were arguably the most dangerous species on the planet before they invented modern weapons. If this is part of the Soviet/Russian demoralization campaign that was started in the 1970s, then they are doing a fantastic job.

Or, maybe this was an unintended effect of a social control program that didn’t have any qualified neuroscientists involved. I think it’s fair to say women weren’t this angry a few years ago. I would have noticed. We all would have noticed. I think this happened very rapidly. That means the violence statistics you would expect all that hate to generate haven’t been collected and aggregated yet. Pretty soon it should start flooding in. An increase in female on male violence (under reported as usual) and an increase in male on female violence.

So while I am not gullible enough to believe the purpose of this social control campaign is to make women safer, if it was the goal it is a complete failure. The women piling onto LI and man-shaming out of anger, fear, or personal interest are just making themselves less safe.

But Could We Actually Use Social Control to Make Us Safer?

Of course my focus here is going to be on making women safer, but I don’t see any reason why we can’t make men safer at the same time. I think that’s a win-win.

Promoting the Large Tribe Worldview that I introduced in 2017 in my article on making more productive teams using neuroscience would de-escalate the situation immediately. It would be initially opposed by racists, bigots, and sexists. Which, are pervasive at the moment. But hey, AI algorithms are proving remarkably effective so it could be done.

I commented on how having huge numbers of women’s studies programs in universities, but zero men’s studies programs, is causing friction between the genders. We could reverse this by giving men a voice in society with men’s studies programs. Right now all they have is a loose collection of men’s rights activists on the internet. That’s “The Dreaded Manosphere”. That’s not going to disappear, just like women’s interest influencers aren’t going to disappear. Arresting women for giving women advice, or the same with men and men, doesn’t seem practical under any but the most authoritarian governments.

If we are going to normalize sex work (which is already happening), then let’s make it fully legal but regulated. Let’s create support systems for them like other workers have (even though they are losing these too in some countries). Let’s educate our people using social control programs to promote Consent Culture. Australia actually did exactly that, because very few people in Australia understand Consent Culture. It’s a big problem. Their campaign wasn’t very successful because in every ad the men (and boys) were shown as perpetrators and women as victims. This alienated half the population, and in this case maybe the more important half.

We can also then tax, track, and measure what is going on there. We could limit the number of partners per man to 50 per year to improve public health and rein in the Epstein class. Of course, they can just fly to another country/island and do another 50 there so that might not work. As I mentioned in my paper on Dating Economics, we could subsidize young men so that they can actually cycle back into the action with women their age.

Our society has become so Dystopian that I’m concerned that Pandora’s Box is already open. The best solution would be a world where we go back to getting to know each other over time, not objectify each other and ourselves, and treat everyone as being “In Tribe”. Right now there are just too many bad actors profiting off of hate and warfare. As much as we want all these other nice things (like having children), we won’t deserve nice things until we get our house in order.

Oh, and my personal request would be that if we continue to have LinkedIn be a monopoly, I’d like it to be a protected work space where everyone is protected from shaming and hate speech. People shouldn’t have to wade through that ocean just to find a job. Even the political speech/news, as helpful as it is, should be segregated to a different channel at least as this is divisive and can stress people out.

Oh, and in case I didn’t make it clear already, helpful social control programs don’t need to be hidden. They can be transparent and subject to feedback from the community. It’s only the sleezy predatory ones that need to be hidden. That’s why all the social media companies are terrified about the possibility of their algorithms being exposed.

It worked, and my mother bolted, running naked and bloody down the halls of UCLA’s Married Student Housing. My parents don’t ever talk about it. All I know is what my sister has told me. My father would become a criminally convicted and institutionalized violent sociopath.

In my case, my initial development was slowed, but I would emerge from my cocoon to be intensely motivated to protect women and children. I also happened to develop extraordinary “autistic” talents that aren’t supposed to exist. A modern, but sad, super hero origin. I would go on to position myself as a consumer and civil rights activist, but especially in regards to protecting children. It was because of this that the ICPEN asked me to testify against Disney at the Panama summit in 2013. Everyone knew I was ending my career, but they thanked me for my sacrifice.

My readers and the community have noticed I’ve been speaking out for men also recently. That’s because I get the feeling they have become the underdogs in society and need some support. I’ve detected an intense proliferation of misandrist posting on LinkedIn, which is is harmful to all genders. In my next paper, I will explain why misandry makes the world more dangerous for women. A recent research poll in the UK confirmed my suspicions with misandry rates in the younger generations almost 4 times as high as misogyny rates. This is unprecedented in human history. There are no systems in any society designed to deal with this. The concept of women being dangerous upends the way we see the world.

I struggle with this just like everyone else. Unlike all the people complaining and pointing fingers, I’m doing something to solve the problem. In addition to studying the problem and writing papers, I wade into debates on LI. There I am immediately attacked by misandrists because they see me as male bodied (which I am) despite being gender non binary and asexual. I’m almost a living android that is hyper rational and egoless. Attacking me is about as useful as attacking your browser AI. It does still trigger me a bit though because I have a lot of SA trauma that I manage very well, but being attacked by 100 misandrists in one day is still stressful.

What triggered these attacks was my recounting that when I did exactly what these people (mostly women) are advocating for (men protecting women) at the largest California US Census office in 2010, not a single man or women stepped forward to back me up. I initiated a Federal Civil Rights complaint against the Census. I suspected that women were being SA’d by the director but I had no direct evidence. My sociopath radar, which is highly developed for obvious reasons, was going berserk. So I fabricated creatively argued a case for demographic hiring discrimination. As an economist and civil rights activist, I know how to do this in a way the government can’t ignore. Of course, if I was found to be wrong, I would have been screwed. It was a big gamble.

When the lead investigator landed with her team, she was very pissed at me as expected. But I could also tell she was an Empath (handy in her role as Inquisitor) so I knew she would root out any kinetic sociopathic activities. What I mentioned in my LI comment was that during this process, not a single victim came forward to support me, themselves, or other women. I pointed out that if women want men to self sacrifice for them, they should make some effort to support those men. The misandrists didn’t like this. They said SA was a man only problem and should be solved entirely by men.

That’s not how reality works. The largest problems can only be solved through intense teamwork, a lesson they would know if any of these women had been involved in high level team sports or even military participation.

One of these misandrists, throwing around a lot of Gender Supremacy language, told me that by sharing my story, I was virtue signalling, and that this just made me a bigger asshole.

Now, this is a bit of projection. Whistle blowers who testify against very powerful organisations, like the USA federal government, place themselves under great personal threat. I realize men and women don’t want to step up to help others when it could place a target on themselves. That’s fair. But then demonizing the one in a million unicorn who will self sacrifice in such situations is not making the world safer for anyone.

The one good thing that came out of this is the trauma caused me to remember a repressed memory, that was repressed for good reason. I’m bringing it up now because the debate I was wading into was about husbands drugging their wives so that they could SA them while unconscious. And the memory was about the last time this happened.

In 1995 in Palm Desert, California

One of the involved parties is still alive and is on LI so I will use no names. He actually lists the clinic in his employment history. The clinic where this happened isn’t there anymore, but there is still a Yelp mention of it:

https://www.yelp.com/biz/southwest-pain-control-and-sports-therapy-palm-desert?dd_referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F

• If I end up dead, it wasn’t suicide.

The owner of that building was an anaesthesiologist. And a predator. I was one of his employees, doing physical therapy in the facility. This doctor was one of the most powerful people in Coachella Valley (yes, where Coachella Fest is held). He ejaculated on one of my patients while she was anaesthetized for an epidural. Sound familiar?

She saved the clothing with the DNA on it. Smart lady.

Meanwhile Dr. Gas (not real name) went over to a very pretty co-worker’s house. I actually liked her a lot, and I don’t like many people in that way. She was a single mother. He offered to help her financially. Then he brutally SA’d her (non consensual) in her house. Fully SA’d.

A lot of powerful and highly respected medical professionals worked in that clinic. Assets and reputations on the order of $100+M USD were at risk. These women came to me, knowing I was the right person to ask for help. They needed someone to testify against the clinic, and everyone else was too afraid. I had enough evidence to seal the deal because my immediate boss, one of the top Physical Therapists in the nation, tried to convince me that DNA gal was a nymphomaniac and that I shouldn’t believe anything she says.

I have exceptional empathy, and this gal was not giving off those kinds of vibes. But this implicated both him and Dr. Gas in a coverup.

My boss kept warning me to stand down, for my own good. I refused. Dr. Gas would lose his medical license and the victims got paid well. Dr. Gas convinced the police officer husband of one of my patients to falsely testify against me. I guess she got free treatment. He convinced my own lawyer, who was running for Mayor, to sabotage a different case where I had been hit by a DUI driver. The office manager would later warn me that my lawyer had secretly met with Dr. Gas at the clinic. The clinic released doctored medical records to both sides of my case to ruin me. This is, of course, very illegal.

A very large horsepower-modified pickup came up behind me on a bridge on my way to my teaching job, on my motorcycle. I could hear the driver floor it behind me, it sounded like a drag racer. The driver smashed me up against the guard rail, with a 20M drop below onto the very busy freeway. I managed to maneuver just enough that I didn’t go over the rail, but my bike and left arm were totally smashed. I picked up my BMW with one hand and chased the pickup to get his license plate. I then went directly to the police station, bloody and broken.

They confirmed all elements of the case, and refused to prosecute.

I lost everything but my life to do exactly what women are flooding LinkedIn right now, asking men to do for them to protect them from an army of Dr. Gases. I was permanently disabled and ruined financially. Someone killed my beloved cat. I won’t even get into the psychological aspects.

But I did it again in 2010 to protect my lady co-workers at the USA census office. And again, no one backed me up.

I have no words for the woman that told me I was virtue signalling, or for the dozens of women that liked her comment. I am beyond words.

For the rest of the people, both the misandrists and the regular people who are just scared, please consider what you are asking of men. If the victims themselves are too afraid to defend themselves or report to the police, don’t you think it might be risky for a man to get involved that would be safe if he didn’t? The world is filled with sheep, running from wolves.

My boss at Southwest, who tried to warn me to stop helping the SA victims at the clinic, a year after he confided in me. I asked him why he did it. He said “I was protecting my family”.

How noble.

All of this was covered up, even by the medical board that took the exceptional step of revoking Dr. Gas’s medical license. All of you blaming everyone except yourselves…

You will not win. Not until everyone is willing to accept risk and work as a team to fight these powerful people. Sociopaths don’t mess around. If you get in their way, it’s you or them, and they don’t hesitate. They have no reason to. If you stay out of their way, most of the time you are invisible to them. It would be so easy to look the other way.

They might seem like completely upstanding people, to everyone except the Empaths who can smell them out. But Empaths bleed just like you do. If you don’t protect your Empaths, you will lose them. Then there are no unicorns or superheroes to save the day. You are defenceless and this will just happen forever, everywhere.

A recent UK poll was able to not only confirm my observations, but to quantify them. This is very helpful. Perhaps just as helpful is that they were able to identify which segments of society were radicalizing faster. The involved researchers were unable to explain the patterns they were observing, they had never seen anything like this.

But I have.

Exactly 250 Years Ago

Before I can properly explain, let me drop the data and then explain my assumptions.

The media, and especially social media, have been blasting a narrative that men hate women and that there is an epidemic of misogyny. That “The Manosphere”, including all men’s rights groups and influencers, are creating a toxic environment for women and making them less safe. After this poll dropped, these sources doubled down and began demanding collective punishment against men for various incidents of violence against women.

Now we could argue all day as to why media has this agenda. I’m willing to be optimistic (it happens) and just repeat that the human brain is wired to prioritize threat, so in an attention economy unregulated algorithms are going to do their best to threaten vulnerable groups. By vulnerable I don’t mean physically vulnerable, I mean psychologically vulnerable.

Many misandrists are arguing that they are physically vulnerable. All of us are both physically and psychologically vulnerable, but making the distinction between the two is absolutely critical here to unpacking what is going on. I’m blaming media and those that use/consume it for the huge spike in misandry. Media isn’t physically attacking us, it is psychologically attacking us.

This is important because men and women are wired a bit differently biologically, and will respond to threat differently. Of course they both experience stress and release catecholamines when exposed to threat. But biologically if a tiger attacks the tribe, a woman is most likely to sound an alarm (communication) and call for help (call to action) from the warriors (men). Men are likely to respond to physical threats by putting themselves between the tiger and the more vulnerable people in the tribe (woman and children). That’s assuming everyone had healthy levels of oxytocin, which was the case in the tribal environments that we are biologically adapted to.

Oxytocin boosts protective instincts in-tribe. It boosts aggression towards those seen as out of tribe. If a man is subjected to enough threat (including psychological threat), they may see the source as “out of tribe”. This is where things get dangerous.

Based on the high percent of men that like women and the low rate of misogyny, I think it is fair to say that men are doing a remarkable job of resisting social media hate speech directed against them. I’m going to describe this resistance as…

Resilience

Often described as the ability to endure despite adversity. In the Olympic track family which took me in when I became homeless at age 17, resilience is the trait respected above all others. It is the one common thread that binds all but the most privileged Olympians. Even Olympic Yachtsmen require some of this, but not to the same degree as track athletes.

It was my resilience in the face of adversity that caused my fellow Olympians to provide me with emotional support and guidance. As an Olympic trainer, the running joke was that the last people to complain would be the lady runners. The first would be the men’s basket ball players. Hold that thought, because I’m about to argue that while women can achieve higher levels of resilience than men, women have a wider range of resilience than men.

Resilience Today

Today modern life makes all of us a bit soft compared to our ancestors. Threats that would have culled the weak in earlier times are mitigated by modern technology. So while we can measure rates of mental illness (27%W, 19%M) and suicide (4 times higher in men), these are complex signs that can hide a lot of what is going on.

The poll researchers found this odd pattern in who was succumbing to misandry:

This is a great question because as I write about tirelessly in game design, people need to feel needed. When women don’t feel needed, they communicate and engage in calls to action. When men don’t feel needed, they often delete themselves. Often without communicating at all.

“Bame” here means Black, Asian, and Ethnic Minority. The people you would expect to have a harder life.

C2DE is what you might describe as “working class” people. ABC1 is the highly educated segment of society. It probably comes as no surprise that the more white you are, and the more educated you are, the less racist the world looks to you. White women are advantaged in education compared to men and minorities, and the higher they rise in education the less likely they are going to encounter minorities being mistreated. Or even any minorities at all.

Researchers also noticed this about white ABC1’s:

• Most likely to be misandrist

• Most left leaning politically

• Least likely to want children

• Women as a group were FAR less likely (not a little bit, almost entirely) to want children than men were (this shocked me)

• Younger women are paid more than men, and more likely to have jobs than men

• Women, and especially ABC1s, were more pessimistic about everything, but especially about the economy and opportunity, despite being better off

Resiliency in 1776

These results confused the modern researchers, but 250 years ago the most educated man on Earth recorded resiliency, at least for women. As my followers know, I think Adam Smith was a bastard. But he was a meticulously good record keeping bastard.

Adam Smith identified the most down trodden women in the local empire as the Scottish Highlanders, and described the aristocratic women as “fine” or “fashionable”:

“A half-starved Highland woman frequently bears more than twenty children, while a pampered fine lady is often incapable of bearing any, and is generally exhausted by two or three. Barrenness, so frequent among women of fashion, is very rare among those of inferior station. Luxury in the fair sex, while it inflames perhaps the passion for enjoyment, seems always to weaken, and frequently to destroy altogether, the powers of generation.”

This is how they talked in 1776. If you want to call this patriarchy, I won’t argue. But clearly times have changed in 250 years.

So here I would argue that Smith was describing what I would today call Resiliency. He was impressed that you could nearly starve a Highlander woman to death and she would still be infinitely more “generative” than aristocratic women.

If you compare this to modern times, the closest thing we have to “half starved” in the West, other than homeless people, would be the under educated working class racial minorities. The people who complain the least, are more likely to have children, and are least prone to misandry.

Our white privileged lady abc1’s match Smith’s description of “fine” ladies with uncanny precision. Here I am making the argument (of course you may not agree) that the more oppressed/disadvantaged you are as a class, the more resilient you are going to be. The opposite is also true, with the most privileged in society being the least resilient. This hasn’t changed in 250 years.

Of course these are statistics, averages. If you are in a privileged group but don’t personally feel privileged, it is entirely possible you are an outlier. Based on the survey responses, almost everyone in the white abc1 category felt this way.

Psychological Resilience

There are myriad studies linking physical and psychological resilience. Also, resilience is much more environmental than genetic, and can be improved through training (such as athletics). Some conditions like Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (which I did laboratory research on) significantly reduce resilience and may be very difficult to mitigate.

I would suggest that your ability to resist psychological manipulation is directly linked to your psychological resilience. The purpose of social media, from the lens of the developer, is to psychologically manipulate its consumers.

Also this from recently leaked internal research from TikTok:

TikTok’s research also indicates that addiction occurs after 35 minutes of exposure.

From AI:

While this wasn’t asked in the UK research poll, I would anticipate a link between hours of social media exposure per day (especially on TikTok, but Instagram is similarly designed) and reduced resiliency and increased misandry.

An algorithm determined to promote misandrist content, to a user that enjoys that content, is going to win. It is only a matter of time before it breaks your mind. Even Morpheus would fall if he was exposed to enough “man bad” content.

The Threat

Imagine you have millions of women consuming misandrist content every day. It’s not a stretch, that’s our reality. They may not have been misandrist a few months ago, or even a week ago, but the algorithm is VERY powerful and doesn’t require a lot of time to reprogram a vulnerable individual. All but the most resilient using social media a few hours a day are vulnerable.

I consider myself, like all Olympic runners, to be extraordinarily resilient. But I’m terrified of what modern social media could do to me so I only use LinkedIn. Now that LI is becoming TikTokified, I feel damaged every time I use it and it even affects my dreams. So I likely will have to abandon or strictly ration my use of it.

Now imagine how a young person, and especially a child, would be affected by exposure. We already know it increases the risk of suicide in young women by 300%. That number likely will go up with exposure. Given that women are much more likely to fail at suicide, compared to men, that could be a lot of attempts. Attempts lead to permanent injuries, with brain damage being common in overdose attempts. I’ve had this happen to multiple close friends in different parts of the country where I didn’t know they were in crisis.

What if the misandry rate continues to climb? That’s almost certain. We could hit 50% in just months at this rate. The Algorithms are reprogramming our women to hate men. Then the women turn on the men and attempt to reprogram the men to hate themselves.

So far the men have been remarkably resilient, holding at 7% misogyny rate. But it’s only a matter of time. As their defences break down, that percent will climb. And not only quantitatively, but qualitatively. Here I mean, it’s one thing to have hate, but another to act on it. Men are action oriented. If they feel strongly enough about something, they don’t complain about it. The resolve it. They know no one cares if they complain.

Then the misandrists will say “Look! We were right all along. Men are monsters!!” Statistically, they will be right. In the near future men may become monsters. Men, like women, need a reason to live. You take that away and anything could happen.

Here is the warning that I’d like all the women reading this to consider. In this scenario you can be Right, or you can be Safe. But using misandry as your tool, you can only pick one. Which is it going to be?

If you unplug and stop the hate (I realize this won’t be easy), then it is possible to go back to a world where you could have both. The statistics show that men overwhelmingly want this. For how much longer? Probably not much longer at this rate.