Michael Sartain (MOA Mentoring)

Michael Sartain is a retired captain in the United States Air Force, host of The Michael Sartain Podcast, and founder of MOA Mentoring.

He also was born in Dallas, Texas.

For years, Cowboys football has united the city of Dallas, bringing people from all demographics together every Sunday to cheer on America’s Team, but what few realize is that the city itself may be the most segregated metropolis in all of America.  

“It’s not a uniquely racist city though,” says Sartain, who grew up in East Dallas.

“There are cities in America that are more racist than Dallas, but Dallas has remained segregated because of the lack of civil rights protests in the 1960s.” 

For context, South Dallas is predominantly black, and Pleasant Grove primarily consists of Hispanics.

For his part, Sartain had friends in every corner of the city.

“I went to an all-white Baptist church, but at school a lot of my friends were black and lived in Section 8 housing,” he says.

“To give you an idea of the dichotomy of where I lived, at church I would converse with diehard Republicans who believed that police brutality didn’t exist, and then I would walk home after school with my friends who would get harassed by the police for no reason.”

As a teenager, Sartain wasn’t very popular among his peers, but he excelled in the classroom, and he was also the captain of the football team.

“That sounds cool, but let me emphasize that we had a 75% dropout rate at my high school, so being the captain of the team wasn’t as awesome as you might think,” Sartain interjects.

Despite attending school in an environment where some of his peers were in jail before the age of eighteen, Sartain always had ambitions that extended beyond Dallas, a city with a population of nearly 1.3 million people.

As a debate champion in high school, Sartain fielded letters from Ivy League universities like Harvard and Columbia, however, due to financial constraints, he never applied. 

Instead, he enrolled at UT-Austin, joining their prestigious business program.

For the next four years, Sartain did not learn much practical knowledge that could be applied to business, but eventually he graduated with an information technology degree.

After that, the dotcom bubble burst and good jobs were scarce, so the resourceful Sartain tried something unconventional, landing a job at a gentlemen’s club as a DJ.

“Back then, making $45,000 per year in cash was really good money,” Sartain says of that gig, but when the Twin Towers were struck on September 11, 2001, Sartain left the entertainment industry and joined the military.

He served in the Air Force as a KC 135 instructor navigator, a role that included roughly 500 combat hours. Also, during the military summer surge of 2009, he was the mission planner for all tankers over Iraq and Afghanistan. 

A medical issue eventually forced Sartain to retire from flying, at which point he moved into military intelligence.

Sartain worked in intelligence until 2011, when he then left the military and settled in Las Vegas, of all places.

His initial attraction to the city was simple:

Sartain recognized that Las Vegas wasn’t the most impressive city in the world, but he loved how he could make the city into whatever he wanted, and then go back to a normal life with little effort.

“Everything is easier here,” Sartain says of Las Vegas, where he still resides.

“It’s easier to get a dinner reservation at a five-star restaurant. It’s easier to get around because there is little traffic. If you want to see Tiësto in concert, and you have the right connections, you can just walk right into the venue; and not just into general admission, but right behind the DJ booth. You can’t do that as easily in LA or Miami.”

A bookworm who consumes more books in a month than most will ever read in their lifetime, several years ago he started The Michael Sartain Podcast, where he interviews guests in an array of industries.

On his show, Sartain also explores the nuances of human psychology and the dynamics between men and women, two niches he was inspired to learn more about after reading the work of Dr. David Buss (author of The Evolution of Desire and Why Women Have Sex) and Satoshi Kanazawa (Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters).

“Those three books got me down this path,” asserts Sartain, who regularly references key points from these works on his podcast.

“There is an evolutionary explanation for why we are the way we are, and why we make the decisions that we make.”

Moreover, Sartain sees these theories play out in practice every day, particularly as it relates to the way men and women interact in the modern era.

“The academics don’t understand how things are working in practice right now,” Sartain says.

“Dr. Buss had never done any experiments on how social media affected modern dating. Inversely, the people who were trying to pick up women every night didn’t understand the science behind why things are the way they are, so what I do is bridge the gap between those two sides.”

More specifically, using his vast knowledge of human evolution and psychology, Sartain has surveyed and dissected the modern dating paradigm, and his conclusions are quite interesting.

For starters, in 2023, most men are considered to be unattractive to the majority of women.

“If you don’t believe me, look at the statistics on dating apps or on social media apps that are often used for dating, like Instagram,” Sartain says.

Historically, men have had the ability to appeal to women beyond just their physical appearance by demonstrating their ability to procure resources, exhibit charisma, or achieve status, but now, that is tougher for men to do because of the prevalence of apps like Bumble, Tinder, and Hinge, among others.

“Social media and dating apps changed everything because it put women in situations where they weren’t able to see men outside of their physical appearance,” Sartain explains.

“For example, being very famous or good-looking is advantageous when you are on a dating app or social media because women can clearly see that, but if you are funny or charismatic, it can be difficult to market that online, and that’s why a lot of men, who normally would be desirable, are struggling to attract women who aren’t seeing them offline.”

Consequently, this creates a bottleneck where a small minority of men who are deemed physically desirable by the majority of women are receiving all the attention.

This not only eliminates a large percentage of men from finding partners, but the model also harms women who are then unable to find a long-term partner because the few men they’re interested in already have a bevy of options, and to this point, are not settling down.

At the same time, there is a counterargument to all this, which is that not everyone meets their significant other online, which is certainly true, but in a hyper-digital era, every day these virtual interactions become more common, in turn indirectly leading to the romantic stratification of men and women.

“I was talking to a woman recently who said that she wouldn’t consider dating a guy who made less than $14 million a year,” Sartain deadpans.

“That delusion comes from social media and dating apps that make women falsely believe that they can get any guy they want to settle down long-term.”

Yet, even though many men are struggling to attract women online, Sartain posits that men are not inherently victims, and that there are things they can do to increase their likelihood of having success in the modern dating landscape, such as getting in better shape and learning to communicate more articulately and confidently.

Unfortunately, too many men are not putting in the work, and they’re losing.

Even worse, so are women, many of whom are crossing the age of 35 single and childless, even though they likely would prefer to be in a stable long-term relationship.

For those women, Sartain mentions that he encounters many women in that age bracket who claim to want to find a nice man to settle down with, but then their actions indicate something entirely different.

“Women will say that they like nice men, and that’s true, but it’s only true if she finds a guy to be attractive in some way,” notes Sartain, and according to his observations, women of all ages, specifically in Las Vegas, will not accept anything less than their ideal man when it comes to marriage, even if it is to their detriment.

Luckily for those women, Sartain has found that there is always a surplus of men who women can rely on to give them attention, regardless of their age or quality of character.

“Yes, I witness women who are delusional in what they want from a partner, but what doesn’t get talked about enough is that there are an infinite amount of men who will do anything to attract and retain even a below-average woman,” he says, adding that he routinely sees comments on his social media and YouTube channel of men disagreeing with him in order to gain favor with women.

But that type of grandstanding will not win men the adoration of women.

In fact, the only way out of their romantic conundrum is to become the best version of themselves.

In years past, many men would have done just that, but Sartain believes there are too many outlets in modern society for defeated men to wallow in.

“If men get hurt enough, they change, but why so many men don’t is because of pornography and sedatives like drugs and alcohol,” Sartain states.

“And because of those sedatives most men will never suffer enough. One of the most dangerous things about our society is you can be very unhappy and also not suffer to the point that you want to end it all. Therefore, people end up living middling lives where they’re not happy, but they’re not sad enough to change.”

Sartain goes on to say that if he was a young man who was having issues progressing, he would find mentors and listen to audiobooks at double speed.

“If I was 25 right now, I would figure out if my current job pays me more than being an Uber Eats driver,” he says.

“If it didn’t, then I would go be an Uber Eats driver and listen to relevant audiobooks all day so that I can gain expertise in several areas that would allow me to build a scalable business.”

In the coming years, Sartain will be working to scale Men of Action, his mentorship program, from 800 clients to 5,000.

“I believe there are a lot more people I can reach that are beyond my social circles,” the Dallas product says.

He also wants to get bigger names on his podcast so he can expand his reach on YouTube, and simultaneously continue to establish a platform he will be remembered by.

“I want to leave my grandkids 300 podcast episodes so that when I’m dead they can look back and see what this time period was like,” he says.

“My grandfather wrote two books, but I don’t have any videos of him talking, so that’s why something like a podcast is such a great idea, because you can leave behind a legacy.” QS

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