Modern Dating: Shockingly Perverse Incentives

[00:00:00]Imagine, it is the year 2050, not far off at all. You are a government central planner. Your population, shrinking.

[00:00:10]Your workforce, shrinking. Your military-age population, shrinking. Your entitlement system, insolvent, deep in the red.

[00:00:20]And when you look for a cause, you discover it started decades earlier, not with the war, not with the financial crisis, not with the pandemic. It started with dating or lack thereof.

[00:00:33]With millions of young men opting out.

[00:00:36]Millions of young women delaying marriage. Birth rates falling below replacement levels, and incentives that quietly rewired the relationship market from the ground up. And the scary part?

[00:00:48]We're living through that experiment right now. And so where does it end?

[00:00:53]Let's examine. The dating market is breaking in real time. Something strange is happening all across the Western world. Marriage, collapsing. Birth rates, plummeting. Young men are having less sex than any generation in modern history. Not women, they're having more than ever. And the stats are alarming.

[00:01:14]Only something like 5% of men are matching with women on online dating apps, despite being nearly 90% of the user base. In short, women are having more choice than ever, but are only dating the same 5% of men.

[00:01:30]So, like all incentive structures, resources have consolidated at the top.

[00:01:36]And the 5% of men women seem to want are not marrying, and the other 95% of men are opting out. So where does that leave women?

[00:01:47]Let's just say cat sales have never been higher. Young women are delaying marriage longer than ever, and an entire digital economy now exists where millions of men pay women for attention, companionship, and intimacy without receiving any actual relationship in return.

[00:02:04]>> [snorts] >> It's called the simp economy. Simp is an acronym. And do you know what it stands for?

[00:02:10]Suckers infatuated with mediocre, let's just call it punani.

[00:02:16]It's apt.

[00:02:17]Most people talk about these developments separately. They are not separate. They are all connected. And once you see the incentives underneath the system, you start to realize that this isn't really a story about dating.

[00:02:30]It's a story about civilization itself and the incentive structures that play out. Because every society throughout history has had an answer to one fundamental question. How do men and women pair off, form families, and create the next generation? Everything else sits downstream from that.

[00:02:52]Economics, politics, religion, culture, military power, population growth, the future itself. And right now, the answer that held Western society together for generations is beginning to unravel. Historically, the dating market was local. You met people in your town, your church, your school, your neighborhood, your social circle. Most people married someone roughly within their socioeconomic range. You attract what you are. Not because they necessarily wanted to, but because those who were Those were the available options. And technology imposed limits. Distance imposed limits.

[00:03:35]Community imposed limits. For thousands of years, those constraints acted like guardrails. And then the internet arrived, then social media, then dating apps. Then suddenly, the local dating market became a global dating market. A woman no longer compares the men in her town, she compares against every man visible on her phone. A man no longer competes with local rivals, he competes against every attractive, successful, charismatic man visible on her screen. Technology removed scarcity, but it also removed equilibrium. An economist call this market concentration. A small number of participants capture a disproportionate share of the outcomes. And the same thing happens in business, the same thing happens in investing, and increasingly it's happened in dating.

[00:04:30]Many researchers have observed that dating app outcomes are highly unequal.

[00:04:35]A relatively small percentage of users receive a large percentage of attention, and the result, a growing number of young men simply opt out. Some call it MGTOW, others call it disengagement, and others simply stop trying. Whatever label you prefer, the trend is difficult to ignore. Large numbers of men are reporting less dating, less intimacy, fewer relationships, and declining interest in pursuing them. At the same time, survey data has repeatedly shown significant declines in sexual activity among younger men compared to previous generations. And think about that for a moment. Human beings possess one of the strongest biological drives imaginable, yet millions are increasingly choosing withdrawal over participation, ending their genetic line. And that doesn't happen unless incentives change, and incentives have changed dramatically.

[00:05:34]Today, attention itself has become monetized. Historically, attention was monetized through marriage. Families formed, resources were pooled, and children were raised. The economic unit was the household. But today, attention can be sold directly. The creator economy has changed everything.

[00:05:54]Platforms discovered that attention is valuable. Influencers discovered that attention is valuable. Subscribers discovered that attention is purchasable.

[00:06:06]The result is a marketplace where intimacy can be simulated, marketed, and monetized at global scale. And for the first time in history, a woman can generate substantial income from male attention without entering a traditional relationship. And for the first time in history, a man can spend years consuming the appearance of intimacy without experiencing the reality of it. Again, this is not a moral judgment. It's simply an observation about incentives.

[00:06:36]People respond to incentives. Always have, always will. And the question is what happens next? Because the fewer people marry, fewer people have children. And when fewer people have children, demographics begin to shift.

[00:06:52]Nearly every major Western nation now faces fertility rates below replacement levels.

[00:06:58]Many are dramatically below replacement.

[00:07:00]Look at Japan. Without immigration, mathematically, populations will shrink, and they have. Workforces will contract, and they have. Tax bases decline, and they have. Pension systems and welfare states come under pressure, and they have. Economic growth becomes harder, and it has. Governments become increasingly dependent on fewer working-age citizens supporting larger elderly populations. Need example? Check out Maine. See how well America's oldest per capita population is doing there.

[00:07:34]What is happening to their tax base?

[00:07:36]Now, use that base case to expand it across the entire country. And that is where we're headed.

[00:07:44]No hate on Maine. We We love fly fishing there. It's a beautiful state, but it will collapse under its own entitlements and very soon. Demographics are not opinions. They're mathematics. And mathematics eventually wins every argument. But history suggests something even more interesting. When social systems become unstable, people don't simply accept instability forever. They search for alternatives. They search for certainty. They search for order.

[00:08:11]Consider Iran before 1979. Many people today remember the Islamic Republic.

[00:08:17]Fewer remember what came before it.

[00:08:20]Pre-revolution Iran experienced rapid modernization, urbanization, Westernization, and cultural transformation. Traditional social structures weakened. Old institutions lost influence. Many people benefited.

[00:08:33]Others felt disoriented, disconnected, alienated. A growing segment of society believed something fundamental had been lost. And the revolution that followed wasn't simply political. It was in many ways a reaction against perceived social fragmentation. A return to certainty. A return to structure. A return similar patterns. Periods of rapid social change often generate counter movements.

[00:08:58]When institutions weaken, new institutions emerge. When norms disappear, replacement norms eventually arrive. The exact form varies, but the pattern does not.

[00:09:11]Which raises a fascinating question.

[00:09:14]If current trends continue, what kind of response emerges in the West?

[00:09:19]Do societies become even more individualistic? Do governments create new incentives for family formation? Do religious movements experience a resurgence? Do cultural norms shift back towards traditional structures? Do entirely new models emerge?

[00:09:33]Nobody knows. But the trajectory itself is becoming harder to ignore because beneath every headline about dating apps, beneath every debate about age gap relationships, beneath every argument about hypergamy, beneath every discussion about OnlyFans, marriage, birth rates, or male disengagement lies the same underlying issue.

[00:09:56]Incentives, the invisible force that shapes every market, including the market for relationships.

[00:10:04]People assume societies are held together by values. In reality, values survive when incentives reinforce them.

[00:10:11]When incentives change, behavior changes. When behavior changes, culture changes. And when culture changes long enough, civilizations change. And that is where we are headed now, not at the end of the story, at the beginning. We are watching one of the largest relationship experiments in human history unfold in real time. Nobody truly knows where it leads, but one thing is certain, the future of Western civilization will not be determined by what people say they want. It will be determined by the incentives they actually respond to. And right now, those incentives are reshaping everything.

[00:10:50]And now you know the rest of the story regarding the simp economy, why dating is broken, and where it all leads.

[00:11:00]Build that stack.

[00:11:01]I banker you.

[00:11:03]Good day.