Pickup Podcast Blog

Women almost universally say that they crave “Intimacy”. And the world is literally filled
with propaganda as to what this means for a woman.

In my opinion, when it comes to sex and intimacy, most men have this completely ass
backwards. I deduce this from two areas:

1. Watching the way society says intimacy should be sought, observing AFCs acting it out,
and observing both AFCs and their female partners grow increasingly frustrated. To me
this is an easily observable frame and I see it all the time with couples who are out having
a supposedly “intimate” dinner together.

2. Feedback I get from the women I’ve been intimate with. You’ll note that a lot of this feedback,
by definition, is not the “sitting around the fire” type of chit chat. It is very verbal in the form of
the SEX TALK I get and it is very EXPLICIT.

Attraction + Comfort + Logistics = Sex. When you hear a woman talk about “Intimacy”, consider
that she means a real, deep connection with the man at every phase here.

Attraction. You are an attractive man and you know it. The same way a beautiful woman knows it;
not the way a tryhard thinks he knows it. This means you are not phased by her looks; you can really
adore her looks but you can “see past” her looks. She’s feminine. She’s vulnerable. Most men she
interacts with haven’t even the capability of seeing past her looks.

You might need to use C&F or a neg or two to demonstrate this sometimes. But as for negs, view those as training wheels; they are mere demonstrations that you are not phased by her looks. The next level for you is to bypass “looks” as an issue that need any compensatory tactic at all. From experience, I can say that this happens automatically when the company of beautiful women becomes routine for you. As in, only with experience and time.

Comfort. Comfort is all about having her trust you. Trust that you can:
- Fuck her and fuck her well
- Not embarrass her socially in the process
- Not be looking to her for comfort.

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More Testosterone Equals MORE Women?!?

(This is the start of a really cool research project that we are doing on testosterone… how it effects your social standing… and how other people can actually LOWER your testosterone just by walking in a room… which is coming soon)

To begin with, current research shows that testosterone levels are inversely correlated to body fat levels in men.

In layman’s terms, the more testosterone you produce the less body fat you will typically have.
With this being said, one of your prime objectives should be naturally boosting your testosterone levels whenever you can.

You can do this a number of different ways… and each can be (and will be) covered in a separate article.

First: Make sure to workout with weights. A heavy weight training session has been shown to stimulate increases in testosterone. In fact, the more often you workout with heavy weights, the more often you stimulate testosterone production in your body.
Shoot for 30-45 minutes of heavy weight training at least 3 days per week to begin seeing a “boost”.
This effect builds over time so stick with it.

Second: Compete. Competition itself causes a rise in testosterone to meet the coming challenge. The only caveat is that you need to compete in something that you MAY or MAY NOT win.
Challenges with no perceived effort do nothing for test levels.

Third: Win. You better be good at what you’re competing in, as research also shows the winner has a lasting elevation in testosterone whereas the loser ends up with a decline in testosterone.
(As a side note, pulling for the “winning” team often has the same effects… as noted by the sheer number of fights that break out in sports bars and sporting events)

Fourth: Talk to women, lots of women. Social interaction research shows that men who engage with women socially have an increase in testosterone… and the more women the better.

THINK ABOUT THIS VERY CAREFULLY.

Doing those 1000 approaches will do you MORE GOOD than just practice. They increase your MOJO.

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The three easiest women to talk to are usually the women you find unattractive, women who are married to friends of yours, or women who are paid to be friendly to you like waitresses, clothing store clerks, bartenders, etc. Why are these women easy to talk to? Because you don’t want ugly women, you know that service people are being paid to be nice to you, and married women are unavailable. There’s nothing to gain by talking to them.

There’s nothing AT STAKE.

So what’s the big deal? This information gets you nowhere, right?

Wrong.

Because the concept of what’s AT STAKE is a key to your success with the gorgeous, healthy, fit, smart, sexy, wild, funny, sweet women you WANT.

How does this help you with the women you WANT?

In the spirit of the green trend that’s sweeping the nation right now, what you need to do is REMEMBER the mindset of there being nothing AT STAKE when you interact with gorgeous, healthy, fit, smart, sexy, wild, funny, sweet women you want and RECYCLE the mindset.

You don’t have to change your approach. Change your REASON for approaching. Your game will improve NATURALLY. Women are drawn to a man who doesn’t covet his opportunities with women.

Instead of approaching women out of a desire to get something for yourself (love/affection/approval/etc.), approach because you find women interesting. Be curious about how they see the world, how they feel in the moment, how they perceive other people, and how they interact with their surroundings.

Most importantly, don’t ever consider what’s at STAKE (you ego/your happiness/your urges/etc.) and just approach, engage, and cut ‘em loose. Consider it a grand experiment to find out more about women.

If you find that women who turn you on make you nervous and blow your mindset, try this. It is an easy, practical way to recycle and re-install the ‘nothing is at stake’ mindset. I call it “high concept.” High concept is a simple concept usually used to explain a film. I use it to explain the concept of having a whole conversation about a simple idea.
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Hey guys -

I’ve got a huge topic to discuss with you today.

I can safely say it’s something you’ve wondered about,
(if you’re like most of the guys I meet) and that you’re still
probably a little confused by it.

At the end of this message is a tried & true technique that will
ALWAYS give you the answer to the question:

Is she ready to be kissed?

You never want to make your move too soon, of course - but
you also never want to wait forever, closing the door on the
sexual tension that is flowing.

I got an interesting question from a guy named Darren a few
weeks back, which gives me the ideal path into this topic:

And hat’s off to him, because he honestly admits his shortcoming.

Most guys won’t admit it, but they fumble this moment like a rookie
running back.

Want to be Walter Payton?

Listen up:

Dear Stephen,

Recently, I was out on a date with a great girl I met at a
party. A number of times in the evening, she would look at
me and hold the stare a bit longer than usual. I kept
thinking, “she wants me to kiss her”. was so nervous
though, that I never went for it! What is the best way to
set-up a kiss with a girl? I mean, I know how to kiss her,
I just wonder if there is a cool way to make the move.
Help!

Thanks,

Darren
CT

Darren, Darren, Darren…I feel your pain, man. First of
all, don’t worry - this is by far the TOP question I get
from guys. “How do I smoothly go from talking to kissing?”

Surprisingly, even the most skilled guys I’ve come across
are constantly looking to handle this tricky situation a bit
better.

So, here we go - the step-by-step guide to being super smooth
when it’s time to smooch:

In my estimation, this is where most guys blow it. They
know the girl is ready to be kissed, yet they freeze up and
pass a bunch of good opportunities to make a move,waiting
for that perfect one.

Even worse, they’ll wait hoping the woman will make the first move.

(Don’t do that Darren…please)

If you’re the kind of guy who hesitates, I got news for
you… There are no perfect windows of opportunity, just
many good ones,and 99% of the time she will not be the
first to initiate any form of intimacy. If she does,
consider yourself lucky.

How do we handle this highly charged moment?

Very simply (as always with me).

Here are some steps, because I have a hunch you like
structure (like me):

1) The first thing to make sure of is that you’re both
having a good time, getting along well and physical
contact has been established. It could be anything from
holding hands, to a playful push on the shoulder. At
this point it is important that she has touched you in
some way indicating interest on her part.

2) When you feel you have reached this point, start
slowing down the energy of the interaction. Start
subtly moving a bit closer to her, slowing down your
speech, and take longer pauses between sentences. The
thought here is SUBTLE.

3) Now here’s the secret, the one move that will assure
you to be remembered by her as the smoothest guy ever…
During each of those pauses in your conversation,stare
at her lips. You can even start talking again, though
slowly, still staring at her lips. Start slowly moving
in closer. The words you’re saying at this point become
irrelevant; the sexual tension in the air will be too
thick.

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My Answer: Not A Chance

Will seduction (or pickup) ever be mainstream? That question is sort of hanging over the community and I thought it would be a good subject for my first post.

I think the answer to that is a resounding no.

Why? The biggest reason is because pickup is so damned hard to master. It’s hard for regular guys, guys that have no social skills, or guys that are just plain unwilling to go out of their comfort zones. That’s most of the guys out there. If you’ve been studying and practicing pickup for awhile, you know it takes thousands of approaches and hundreds of nights of going out to build the experience to really solidify your game. Thousands of approaches means hundreds of nerve wracking sets, hundreds of rejections, hundreds of potential embarrassments. It takes iron discipline, brass balls, and an unwavering frame to soldier through that and most of the population won’t stick it out. Even guys who spend the cash to do a bootcamp might have terrific success for one weekend, but they’ll fall by the wayside after they get home. Pickup is a challenging gig and most people won’t stick it out.

Will pickup gain more exposure in the mainstream media? Yes, and this is already happening, with the publication of articles in magazines like FHM and Maxim, television shows, and books. More and more people will learn that pickup exists, and the number of customers might increase (which is great for business), but I wouldn’t expect to see roving bands of pickup artists at every mall and bar any time soon.

Ross Jefferies recently had a great comment about the popularization of pickup…he said it wouldn’t happen because pickup is still shrouded in a “laughter curtain.” In other words, the mainstream still sees it as a major oddity and something that regular people disdain. Have you ever asked a non-community person what they thought of Mystery, J-Dog, and Matador after watching an episode of The Pickup Artist? I have, and it was always a negative reaction.
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I’m sitting in the middle of the stairs right below the cathedral in Cologne, Germany. It is one of these
days at the end of spring when the sun burns really hot, dark, grey clouds hang miles above your
head and the strong wind tells you that it will rain in a few hours. I flip back the pages of my
notebook as the wind turns them over again. I write down a sentence “talk about stuff that get her
into a flow”. Wind flips over my page.

I am happy. It was a very good weekend, met new people, thought new ideas, sun shines and… wait a
second. She… is cute. Pitch‐black long silk hair, a ponytail that you want to pull, her mouth wrinkles
in a relaxed smile and she fights against the wind that flips over the pages of her book. I watch the
scene for a second. Would I like to talk to her? Yes. Would I like to love her? What I see so far, yes. So
I go.

I get up, take slowly the few steps towards her and sit down next to her and say the first thing that
comes to my mind. “Hey, you’re cute. What do you read?” She blushes a bit, but as I opened the
escape road to respond to what she reads, she only gives me a clue that she is enjoying that
compliment. In this moment I realize that she is attractive and that we should come together – in a
physical way. In this moment I feel the flow in which our emotions can spread. We can both play the
game of seduction, we can allow ourselves to play without having to win. Seduction is not a
competition where one moves his army across the others battlefield and burns every village on the
way so that there is no place left than sex. Seduction… Seduction as I think of it, is a game for adults.
A game where no one fights, but entrances the other, where worlds collide as both share their world
with the other one, no one gets hurt and no one can fail. At one point in time the game will be over
and the memory will stay behind. This point can be reached after 5 minutes, 5 days, a kiss, sex, a year
or 50 years. It will come when one of the players figures that the game is over. But until then it
happens what happens. Seduction is a game that flows, it is not to be seen as mechanical – it also
does not end after sex. Seduction is a lifestyle, an emotion and an idealistic goal.
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Jordan Harbinger and Johnny D from The Art of Charm make a cameo on Conde Nast’s ‘The Daily Special’

Should Pickup Go Mainstream?

When my best guy friend Lance confessed that he was getting into “pickup,” I must admit my first reaction was disgust. He sent me some field reports, and it just seemed so…clinical, and…awful. We’ve been friends for years and I knew he was a great guy, but those reports gave me the willies.

Once I put my gut reaction aside and listened, he made the (perfectly legitimate) claim that guys weren’t trained in the social arts the way women are in our society. If you accept that premise, then it makes sense that if these things don’t come naturally to you (as they don’t to most people), then you have to learn from somewhere.

The thing that still bothers me is how objective, even clinical, these field reports often are. Objectification of women is bothersome enough in and of itself, especially for someone like me who wrote her dissertation on women’s activism. However, objectification aside, how can anyone credibly make the claim that providing people with a vocabulary that enables someone to divorce themselves and their emotions from interactions fosters a more social frame of mind? That still doesn’t make much sense to me, though I get the impression that once you’re “better” at pickup, your game is instinctual enough that you can focus a little more on the person you’re talking to.

So should pickup go mainstream? Certainly there are millions of guys (and girls, for that matter) who could benefit from using a structured system of attraction to a) give them confidence in social situations, b) provide them with a vocabulary to analyze their successes and failures, and c) outline attainable goals and a trajectory for self-improvement.

Need for something doesn’t always guarantee success, however, and certainly pickup has quite a reputation to overcome if going mainstream is the goal. I think the key to deciding whether or not pickup should go mainstream is looking at the possible effects of going mainstream. I see one really important positive effect, along with two biggies that make pick going mainstream a really bad idea.

On the positive side, taking pickup mainstream would force our society to devote resources to something we value, i.e., communication. Obviously to succeed in life you have to be a good communicator. This means that your communication style has to be not only effective, but also appealing. I’ve taught at the university level for six years and I’m here to say that we’ve barely got the former down, let alone the latter.

If pickup went mainstream, people would realize how desperately we need these skills, there would be a public outcry to rectify the situation, and resources (time and money) would be devoted to helping the many people who need it. This is good for everyone—prominent PUAs sell more books and people stop wanting to shoot themselves in the face at bars because guys are so boring/crass/stupid/awkward/creepy. Everyone wins, right?

On the flip side, the quality of the average PUA would almost certainly decline. I find myself comparing pickup to the educational system. For example, I’m getting a PhD in rhetoric, so the average student in my program is amazingly intelligent and hard-working. However, if you take an average of everyone who graduated from high school, that average looks quite different just because there are so many more people in the sample.

I’m totally down with the idea of multiple intelligences and believe me, there are plenty of things I suck at. Royally. However, the point is if every schmoe who buys a lady a drink at a bar is out there calling himself a PUA, then it only makes it harder for the true artists out there to be taken seriously.

Additionally, the perception that PUAs are “elite” would probably disappear. Education in general has that effect. Back in the days when America was made up of small farmers, just being literate was an achievement. Now Bachelor’s degrees are the new high school diplomas—necessary for even the most entry-level of jobs and, while the majority of people don’t have college degrees, it’s nothing to write home about, either.

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Paul Janka of Dr. Phil and Today Show infamy drops by to outline his controversial direct daygame.

If you haven’t heard yet, Paul Janka, the underground New York super-natural, is hosting a red-hot seminar on August 30th and 31st. The word on the street is that it’s going to be one of this year’s hottest events. Paul has taken the community by storm with his book, and now he’s moving to the classroom to teach some of the most effective day game techniques ever seen. If you’d like to take your game to a whole new level, click here to learn more about this once- in-a-lifetime event. Find out more HERE

Check out The Art of Charm

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Paul Janka’s Attraction Formula eBook!