The Diary of a CEODr. Orion Taraban: Why Apps Funnel Women To 10% Of Men
Taraban frames modern romance as a harsh value marketplace today: dating apps funnel women to the top 10% of men, while porn drains male energy.
CHAPTERS
- 2:27 – 6:56
The Modern Relationship And Sex Crisis
Taraban outlines a global decline in all forms of relationships: historic lows in marriage, fewer people dating or even hooking up, and birth rates below replacement in many countries. He argues this is paradoxical given technological ease of connection and warns of both macro‑level risks (population collapse, economic strain) and micro‑level confusion for individuals seeking partners.
- •Marriage and relationship rates are at historic lows in the U.S. and many countries.
- •Casual sex has declined compared to the post‑pill era of the 1970s.
- •In cultures where sex precedes commitment, less casual sex means fewer pathways to long‑term relationships.
- •Population decline can create severe economic burdens, with too few workers supporting many elderly citizens.
- 6:56 – 18:03
Dating Apps, Male Invisibility And The Masculinity Crisis
The conversation shifts to how dating apps and changing gender norms have reshaped the sexual marketplace. Online meeting has exploded, but overall relationship formation has dropped. Taraban diagnoses a masculinity crisis, where men are unsure what it means to be a man, increasingly invisible, and drawn to performative masculine figures like Andrew Tate as navigational aids.
- •Online meeting jumped from ~20% to over 50% of couples in a decade, coinciding with fewer relationships overall.
- •Dating apps are tools that require strategy and massive action, especially for men; casual, low‑effort use leads to frustration.
- •Young men often lack money, skills, and status, making them unattractive to women and not yet useful to older men—hence ‘wallpaper.’
- •Masculinity ‘crisis’ creates openings for influencers offering simple scripts for being a man, often emphasizing visible, dimorphic traits (muscles, hyper‑femininity, etc.).
- •Men’s suicide and depression rates are linked to feelings of worthlessness and not being needed; what they truly need are real opportunities to be needed, not just reassuring words.
- 18:03 – 22:08
Women’s Challenges And Orion’s Path Into Relationship Work
Taraban explains that most women who consult him are trying to figure out how to get a man to commit or marry them, something earlier generations were socialized for from childhood. He then sketches his professional background in clinical psychology and men’s mental health, noting that men’s core issues cluster around money and women, while women disproportionately use therapy and self‑help resources.
- •Most female clients ask, “How do I get a man to marry me?” reflecting a training gap compared to past generations.
- •Taraban’s clinical experience spans addiction, health psychology, severe mental illness, and personality disorders before focusing on men’s mental health.
- •Men come to therapy about work/money or women/love; women come for a wider array of issues but over‑index in consuming therapy and self‑help.
- •Roughly 85% of mental health practitioners are women, which can deter some men from seeking therapy.
- •Men often prefer action‑oriented solutions; they may see weekly emotional processing without action as a poor use of time.
- 22:08 – 30:27
Business Principles Applied To Dating: Funnels, Value And Selection
Taraban maps sales and economics onto dating: attraction is like marketing, dates are leads, relationships are closed deals. He argues that the same behaviors that work in business—understanding your product, targeting, volume, and negotiation—also work in romance. He emphasizes selection (choosing the right partner) as far more important than in‑relationship ‘work.’
- •Men want sex and relationships; women want sex and resources/security—similar to salespeople wanting money from buyers.
- •If a strategy works in business (clear value proposition, persistence, good targeting), it often works in the sexual marketplace.
- •The dating ‘funnel’: meeting people → dates/short‑term → defined relationships → marriage/kids.
- •Many long‑term relationship principles mirror startup building: complementary skillsets, not duplicate CEOs.
- •Taraban believes roughly 90% of successful relationships are about selection—accurate self‑knowledge and good discernment—rather than endless compromise and communication work.
- 30:27 – 44:35
Becoming Attractive: Surface Marketing, Seduction And Communication
This section dives into practical attraction strategy. Taraban distinguishes external ‘surface marketing’ (clothes, grooming, photos) from deeper seduction (directing attention, behavioral testing, emotional resonance). He critiques asking women how to be attractive because they omit the key prerequisite: they want kindness and safety from men they are already attracted to.
- •Top‑of‑funnel problems (no matches, no dates) are primarily marketing issues: presentation, photos, first impression.
- •Small investments in style and grooming can dramatically shift perceived attractiveness; many men leave this on the table.
- •Attractiveness is not evenly distributed; if you’re not genetically advantaged, you must compensate with skill—‘game’ and seduction.
- •Pickup artists functioned as field behavioral scientists: testing what actually works vs. what people say should work.
- •Women’s advice (“be nice, be kind”) is incomplete; those traits are desired from already attractive men, not as pathways to attraction.
- •The female mind is the primary erogenous zone; learning to talk in a way that creates emotional resonance (vibe) is crucial.
- 44:35 – 51:31
Keeping Partners, The Crisis Of Disappointment And Top‑10% Dynamics
Moving down the funnel, Taraban explains that keeping a partner requires different skills than attracting one. Relationships inevitably pass through a ‘crisis of disappointment’ when fantasies collapse and real personalities emerge. He then outlines how women empowered to choose freely tend to chase the top 10% of men, creating instability and dissatisfaction for both genders.
- •Attraction is mostly based on fantasy; early oversharing often ruins the imagined version a partner is attracted to.
- •Many men ‘blow’ first dates by talking too much to prove value, instead of allowing the woman’s fantasy to breathe.
- •Every relationship must pass through a crisis where illusions die and reality appears; only then does true relating begin.
- •Often, traits we’re initially most attracted to become the traits we most resent later.
- •In deregulated sexual markets, women concentrate on the top 10% of men; these men have little incentive to commit monogamously, making long‑term pairing hard for many women.
- •Polygamy and harem dynamics are common in nature and historically in human cultures; modern apps recreate this in digital form.
- 51:31 – 1:10:24
Relationships As Exchanges Of Value, Monogamy And Community Loss
Taraban formalizes his economic model: people only move toward others when they perceive something they want. He broadens ‘value’ beyond money to include sex, security, excitement, emotional support, and childrearing, emphasizing that men and women (and life stages) weight these differently. He also notes how the loss of extended kin and community has made us expect one partner to be an entire village, stressing monogamy and love marriages.
- •Value is anything that can be bought or earned, not just money: sex, safety, excitement, support, parenting, status.
- •People don’t approach those they want nothing from; time, energy and attention are scarce resources.
- •Men and women value types of value differently and their priorities shift across life stages (e.g., casual fun vs. maternal fit).
- •Historically, communities and extended families met many needs; now we expect our partner to be lover, best friend, therapist, co‑parent, and social network.
- •The ‘love marriage’ may be a paradox: demanding both high emotional safety and high sexual passion from one person indefinitely.
- •Absence and separate lives (travel, offices) historically helped maintain desire; constant proximity and tracking apps erode novelty.
- 1:10:24 – 1:22:25
Approach Anxiety, The Game Of ‘Please, No’ And Practical Pickup
Here Taraban provides a mini‑masterclass in approaching and influencing. Drawing on an NYU acting exercise called the Game of ‘Please, No,’ he shows how nonverbal cues, emotion, and incremental requests can turn a default ‘no’ into a ‘yes’ in any human interaction. He critiques men’s typical mistakes when approaching women—overthinking, weirdness, overcompensation—and offers concrete, low‑threat tactics.
- •The default answer in life is ‘no’ because wanting is cheap and giving is costly; relationships form when we overcome that asymmetry.
- •In the Game of ‘Please, No,’ one player can only say ‘please,’ the other only ‘no/yes,’ forcing reliance on tone, body language, and emotional manipulation.
- •Effective strategies in the game (intimidation, seduction, playfulness, victimhood, straightforwardness) mirror strategies in sales, dating, and negotiation.
- •Men’s biggest approach errors: hesitating until they feel weird, overplanning lines, or overcompensating with alcohol and aggressive behavior.
- •Good approaches avoid surprise, respect space, signal intent slowly (like approaching a skittish animal), and can even be disarmingly honest (e.g., “I’m working on my approach anxiety—how am I doing?”).
- •Small compliance requests (“let’s step over here,” “could you grab that?”) can build a ‘yes chain’ that increases attraction via behavioral investment.
- 1:22:25 – 1:29:57
Women’s Initiation, Eye Contact, And Love As A Non‑Transactable Gift
The focus turns to how women should initiate and what love actually is. Taraban argues women historically initiated indirectly (the ‘dropped handkerchief’), and that sustained eye contact is a powerful signal. He then distinguishes between transactional value and non‑transactable goods like love, loyalty and friendship, which cannot be bought or earned and must be freely given.
- •Directly ‘rolling up’ like men isn’t usually the best approach for women; subtle cues work better and preserve plausible deniability.
- •Classic female strategies include dropped objects, proximity, and repeated eye contact that invites men to open.
- •Sustained eye contact between male strangers is experienced as aggression; the same intensity used flirtatiously by women can be highly seductive.
- •Taraban defines non‑transactable goods (love, friendship, loyalty) as gifts that cannot be bought or earned; if they can be traded, they cease to be those things.
- •You can be in relationships without love and love people you’re not in relationships with; therefore, love and relationship are independent variables.
- •People rarely end up with those who love them the most; love in a relationship is often a ‘happy accident,’ not something we can force.
- 1:29:57 – 1:55:17
Porn, OnlyFans And The Future Of AI Lovers
Taraban addresses pornography and its broader ecosystem (OnlyFans, social media, future AI/VR). He sees porn as a massive behavioral trap that satisfies sexual impulses cheaply, undermines sublimation, and reduces men’s motivation to pursue real partners or meaningful goals. For women, the attention and money of platforms like OnlyFans and Instagram become their own addictive substitutes.
- •Men with porn addiction often present with shame, loneliness, no relationship history, and stalled careers; many won’t turn on their cameras in sessions.
- •Shame rarely cures addiction; it just drives it underground. Effective change requires understanding the function porn serves (relief, reward, escape) and replacing those functions.
- •Sublimation: historically, suppressed sexual energy powered ambition, risk‑taking, and creativity; cheap porn short‑circuits that energy.
- •If men exist in a perpetually sexually satisfied state, they have less drive to take risks, apply for jobs, or improve themselves.
- •OnlyFans lets women exchange sexual access for resources at scale—often easier to get $1 from a million men than $1 million from one.
- •AI, VR, and robotics will soon provide highly convincing virtual partners; many men may opt for programmable, non‑disappointing lovers over complex, imperfect humans.
- 1:55:17 – 2:08:15
How To Be A Man In 2024: Spine, Balls And Smart Selfishness
Taraban condenses his view of mature masculinity into two core traits: a spine (principles and willingness to stand up) and a pair of balls (capacity to endure the backlash that follows). He advocates for ‘selfishness’ properly understood—knowing what you want, not over‑compromising, and selecting partners who fit you instead of trying to mold them. He also shares his pared‑down partner criteria and the importance of accepting rather than fixing partners.
- •Being a man is less about performance and more about having a spine (stand for something) and a pair (handle the consequences).
- •Any time you stand for something, you cast a shadow and attract envy and attacks; you must anticipate and withstand this.
- •Taraban endorses being ‘selfish’ in relationships: clarify your needs up front and find someone who naturally fits them rather than compromising into mutual resentment.
- •He reduced his selection criteria to: lots of sex, sufficient attraction (so he doesn’t envy others’ partners), soft femininity, and not being so disagreeable that she creates more problems than those benefits solve.
- •He consciously outsourced many intellectual and emotional needs to friends, colleagues, and hobbies rather than demanding them from a romantic partner.
- •You can only love what you genuinely accept; chronically wanting to change a partner is a subtle form of disrespect and should be a selection red flag.
- 2:08:15 – 2:22:28
Relationships As Veiled Transactions And The Limits Of Therapy ‘Bullshit’
In the final substantive segment, Taraban returns to the economic model. Just as companies disguise the centrality of salary with talk of ‘culture’ and ‘mission,’ relationships disguise core exchanges of value with narratives about communication, love languages, and typologies. He argues you must understand what you actually want and what you truly offer, and accept that if you want a lot, you must give a lot.
- •Professional relationships are ultimately about money, but we soften this with talk of mission and culture to preserve dignity.
- •Similarly, romantic relationships are about getting needs met, but being too explicit feels like prostitution, so we cover the exchange in ‘bullshit’: love languages, MBTI, communication workshops, etc.
- •Those tools aren’t useless, but they don’t compensate if core needs (sex, security, excitement, emotional support) aren’t being met.
- •If you meet your partner’s real needs, you can ‘dispense with’ much of the therapeutic and symbolic window dressing.
- •If you struggle in dating you’re usually either too picky or your value proposition doesn’t justify what you’re asking for.
- •Bluntly: most people want many things in a partner but do not have equivalent value to offer in return; the remedy is either raising your value or narrowing your demands.
