Wednesday Open Thread: Hoeflation Edition

Open to all subscribers, focusing on the intersection of women and money

haven’t seen a *lot* of bisexual porn, but i’m pretty sure it starts like this

The most recent Substack post by Delicious Tacos, which is actually a re-pop from February of 2022, confidently declares, “I get better pussy than Jeff Bezos.” Never met the man, and certainly haven’t seen any of his girlfriends, but I find this easy to believe, the same way I don’t need to put in three sparring rounds with a random ACF reader just to believe that he could beat up Dan Neil.

(The autowriter, not the former Broncos lineman. You want to make that claim, I’ll need some proof.)

How in God’s name do you have assets totaling one hundred and sixty-six billion-with-a-capital-B dollars and you end up with a 52-year-old woman who looks like she shot for the daytime-stripper look but missed and hit the daytime-house-mom look instead?

(If you don’t know what a house mom is, that speaks volumes about you, in a good way.)

Just as pertinently, how do you increase your net worth from “whatever mommy and daddy gave me” to “richest man in human history”, only to downgrade?

they both look like they are seeing a non-pedigreed dog for the first time

Your humble author rather likes the cut of young Mackenzie Scott’s jib. She and Bezos both claimed to be five foot seven; they were both lying. Apparently she made Jeff’s life hell, however, to the point that he texted Lauren Sanchez the following:

I love you, alive girl. I will show you with my body, and my lips and my eyes, very soon.

If I wrote a science fiction novel where a newly self-aware robot decided to use that as a sexting line, the critics would say I stretched the bounds of credulity. What was Bezos-1 trying to say here? Was Mackenzie Scott also a robot? Was she dead? Did they replace her, the way they replaced Paul McCartney for Abbey Road after McCartney’s death?

(For the record, that was a brilliant replacement, because Wings was great and you’ll never convince me otherwise. New Paul > Old Paul.)

I find the use of “alive girl” to describe Sanchez to be a little ironic, since substantial parts of her face and body are either plastic or paralyzed. I’m the same age she is and I’m holding up better, which is not a phrase I thought I’d ever use about anyone besides the fellow from Fargo who got put in the woodchipper and possibly Jerry Garcia.

The Internet has had a lot of fun in the past week with the Bezos/Sanchez photoshoot in Vogue, but true to form I’ve been trying to figure out what message it was actually meant to convey. We've all become so accustomed to cringe-worthy amateur ten-pathetic-picture lower-middle-class Instagram engagement announcements that it’s immediately tempting to dismiss the Vogue piece the same way, even though it was commissioned, executed, and approved by a man whose power far exceeds that of, say, Joe Biden or Donald Trump. There’s nothing random about it.

There’s also nothing unique about it. Your humble author once spent a few years in the professional acquaintance of another diminutive, balding high-net-worth person who also decided to spend his life with a heavily-retouched, high-mileage harridan. The woman in question was universally despised outside her earshot and widely regarded as perhaps the worst gold-digger since Wallis Simpson. What made it so confusing was that nobody could figure out why the Little Bald Person in question would pay so much to have sex with her.

As this fellow and his odd-looking spouse aged, they began to cultivate a social-media presence that seemed designed to give the impression they were heavy kinksters at least and swingers at most. Many bizarre clothing and companion choices were made. They did a photoshoot with someone who is a known pornography purveyor. (Maybe not that well known, but ACF subscribers know, anyway.) The woman repeatedly posted about how sexy and hot her husband was; the first few times she did it, everybody at the company thought she was trying to humiliate the fellow, because while he had some admirable qualities, physical presence wasn’t one of them.

The Bezos-couple social media sends a similar message.

laurenwsanchez

A post shared by @laurenwsanchez

It’s a bad joke. Despite juice and personal trainers without end, I seriously doubt Bezos can deadlift more than my 14-year-old son. He is of an age and size where “hot” simply isn’t on the table. I admire his ability to stay fit, but that’s not necessarily what men in their late fifties need to cultivate. Look at Flavio Briatore, who constantly hooks up with the finest women imaginable, all of them in their twenties; the dude hasn’t lifted anything but a cheese wheel or a Formula 1 constructor’s trophy since 1995. He looks like an escaped zoo walrus.

probably sent her back into the water to find his dropped aarp membership card

All of that being said, I am here to understand these people, not to merely toss quips in their direction. Let’s ask a few questions:

• What’s the point of being rich and getting divorced, if you’re going to marry someone who isn’t hot, isn’t admirable, and isn’t worth knowing?

• Is there really any correlation between how much money you make and the women you can get?

• If the answer to the above question is “not much”, what’s the point of being rich?

• And what are the drawbacks?

• And what should you do if your primary goal in life is to find the “best” woman out there, regardless of how you define “best”?

After fifty-two years on this earth, meeting all sorts of rich and poor people, I’ve come to the conclusion that most successful men are either utter sociopaths or deeply insecure, troubled individuals. Which makes sense, because being wealthy is an edge case and you need to be an edge-case person to get there. It’s also true that we live in a world where it’s almost impossible to be content with your wealth, because the Internet will always show you someone who is richer. If you’re one of the richest people out there, the Internet will show you someone who is almost as rich, but much cooler and more popular. The treadmill never ends. You wind up being like Larry Ellison and Bill Gates, doing increasingly petty and incomprehensible stuff to each other in between checking the stock tickers to see who is winning a made-up game.

So I think that wealthy sociopaths, like Briatore, have no trouble seducing the hottest young women because at some level they truly believe that they are entitled to do so. But here’s the thing: you don’t need to be wealthy to get that. If you have the right mindset, you can do that when you’re broke. I know otherwise unremarkable men who have outstanding “luck” with beautiful women, sometimes when they’re two months behind on their car payments.

What’s the opposite of a flat-broke sociopath? A wealthy fellow with low self-esteem. Those men are rabbits, rich or not, and they are the legitimate prey of Lauren Sanchez and the other one, I probably won’t remember her name any time soon, who exploit their insecurities to become their “alive girls”. Convinced that most women would only want them for their money, these simps are desperate to be convinced that a particular person really thinks they are hot/sexy/whatever… and it helps if the girl in question isn’t hot, because it helps the simp feel closer to his manipulatress.

Lauren Sanchez isn’t going to get within a hundred feet of Flavio Briatore, who has a stainless-steel sense of self-worth and also is unwilling to settle for anything less than the very best — but Bezos? Much easier.

This lack of confidence strikes inheritors and other do-nothings just as often as it does self-made men. It always has — which is one of the reasons we used to have an aristocracy, because that’s how you explained to a young Duke that he deserved a Duchess-quality woman. This strategy worked wonders at keeping young do-nothing simps from being fleeced before they could get wise to the game. Now you have feckless people who inherit fifty million bucks or whatever and they feel insecure about it, largely because they sit around and consume socialist propaganda, at which point the wolves gather and you end up with Tinder trash.

Does being rich help you “get” a better woman? I think all it can do is put you in a position to meet more people. Your humble author didn’t see a lot of fine-looking women when he was cleaning fast-food dumpsters for a living — but if I’d been skiing in Vail instead, I would have had a much better group of prospects. (Or I could have just gone to a half-decent megachurch and played guitar in the evenings, which would have introduced me to the same grade of woman only without the cocaine habits.)

Still. Many Gen-Xers, self included, grew up on stories of how you needed to be rich in order to get laid.

Tony Montana: In this country, you gotta make the money first. Then when you get the money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, then you get the women.

That was probably more true in 1980, when women didn’t make up the majority of college graduates and incoming management-level people. It’s not in any way true now. The funny thing about “Gold-diggers” is that many of them had a fundamentally moral purpose in mind: they intended to marry for money then provide a healthy family in return. It’s not that terrible of a thing, when you think about it. Whom would you admire more: a gorgeous young woman who plainly intends to marry rich and have a wonderful family life, or any of the four infernal demons from “Sex and the City”?

I almost never met a single attractive woman driving my Porsches or someone’s loaner supercar. I met them on my motorcycles, on my bicycles, in the coach class of airplanes, at low-budget parties primarily attended by foodservice workers. Now that I’m permanently out of the business of meeting women — sorry, all you love-struck female readers, there’s no circumstance where I would be dating again, this is a national tragedy — I can look back on this and laugh.

Not to say that there aren’t reasons to make money. The admirable ones center around family and charity. The normal ones are related to club racing, expensive hobbies, world travel, whatever. But you don’t need to get rich just to meet your dream girl. Quite the contrary. The wealthier you get, the more suspicious of her you’ll be when she arrives. Look at who Bezos had at $200k a year, when he had no reason not to trust his fellow Wall Street interns, and who he has now.

With all that said, how do you meet the girl of your dreams? After talking to hundreds of men about this, I’ve come to believe that the Honda troubleshooting process applies. It goes something like this:

• Go see: You have to get to the Gemba—typically the shop floor—to see if the process design supports its intended purpose.

• Ask why: A good leader seeks first to understand instead of being understood.

• Show respect: A Gemba walk isn't about pointing fingers and assigning blame.

Figure out what kind of woman you want, then go where they are found. If you want to hook up, go work at a bar or as a ski instructor. If you want to meet the mother of your children, go to church or somewhere else serious people gather. That’s the Go See part.

When you meet someone, listen to what they tell you about themselves. Don’t ignore them and just plaster your desires on top of whatever you hear. That’s the Ask Why part.

Finally, when you have someone you really like, treat them like they are valuable to you. That doesn’t mean buying a bunch of stuff or trying to earn their affection in some side-quest way like beating up their ex-boyfriend. It means using what you’ve learned about them to make them happy. If she says that she expects you to make decisions, then make them. If she says that she wants to be treated like you’re dating long after you’re married, then do that. Show respect.

Just as importantly, pay attention to the things she doesn’t say. Watch how she responds to weakness, aggression, indecision, irresponsibility. If your life goal is to do 120-mph wheelies on a Kawasaki, make sure you have someone who will hold the camera, not run away screaming. If you want to raise your children in a church, don’t marry someone who has contempt for religion. If you can’t handle your wife earning more money than you do, stay away from women whose career is likely to eclipse yours. And if you have no intention of settling down with them, try not to burn too much of their time. Arguably, they have less of it than you do.

Note that there’s nothing in the above about “settling” for someone, or just taking what’s in front of you, or doing what’s easy. I’ve known a hundred men who are willing to push beyond the limits of human endurance to win a race or create something extraordinary — but they are shacked up with whatever they could get without expending too much effort in the process. Don’t be one of those people, unless you really are a monomaniacal type who doesn’t care about having a romantic partner. (Until all the recent stupidity, I’d thought of Bezos this way, to be honest.)

I’ll close with an anecdote. I recently spent some time at the office of an ACF reader. Our meeting was cut short by a face at the window — this ethereal little girl in a butterfly Halloween costume, and her mother. Who was better-looking than the future Mrs. Bezos. Seemed like a decent person. This fellow had a wonderful family. Because he took the idea of it seriously. He can say the same thing that Delicious Tacos said at the top of this column — but he can also say that he has someone to build a life with, which is not a boast you’ll find on Mr. Tacos’ Substack. So. Tell your sons to do the same. Then they won’t need $166 billion. That’s nice too. Because in the long run, not needing or wanting something beyond what you have is the only real freedom we can find, or keep.