I got shaken down by police recently. Let me tell the story and draw the inner game / daygame lesson from it.

Those euro jaunters among us are well aware that as you go further East you tend to find hotter and more feminine girls. This initially appears to be pussy paradise but spend enough time in these countries and enough time chasing the girls and you realise there are powerful forces that undermine your faith and bring the Pussy Paradise fantasy back to the real world, frustrations and all. One such problem is the extreme K-selection of the Former Soviet Union. It’s very easy to get interest and attention from the hot girls but most of them switch off when they realise you’re only offering casual sex. The best-looking and best-groomed girls are often lifestyle whores, treating their beauty as a full-time job and expecting a salary paid by the sugar daddy in return. It’s not 100% this way and you can occasionally unearth a genuine hottie who is up for free casual sex, but it’s nowhere near as common as you’d think after the end of your first three-day number farm when you appear to be sitting on a goldmine of hot leads.

Not worth the effort

Another problem is bureaucracy. The FSU is teeming with it. I recently came a cropper of the apartment registration system. It goes like this: For a UK passport holder to get a visa to Russia or Belarus you must get a letter of invitation (which costs a fee paid to a specialist agency) and also have valid travel insurance. After a few days in the country you must register your address with the police (and pay another fee). This is especially a ball ache if you use Airbnb because many hosts will not do the registration for you.

Fortunately, Russian police are not so strict. I registered at one place, allowed the registration to lapse over a week, then re-registered at a hotel on my last night. There were no problems at immigration’s exit control on my way out. I recently found out the Belarussian police are different.

I go to register and they tell my landlady they only accept travel insurance documents in Russian (unlike the embassy which is fine with English). This is a new rule and they find a rulebook in the bottom of a filing cabinet to prove it. So I must buy duplicate insurance from a small office in the next street. I get it for seven days and register thus. Days five, six and seven are public holidays. On day eight the police telephone my landlady saying we are both to be fined for the expiring registration and she knocks me out of bed so we can rush to the police station to see what’s up.

I buy new insurance for the remainder of my stay and pay another registration fee. That should be the end of it but the cops are determined to shake me down. The say I owe a 230 rouble penalty (about £115) and my landlady owes double that. A supervisor comes out and gives her a stern telling off while his two subordinates look a bit guilty at being involved in such a blatant shakedown.

Naturally I argue the toss, via Google Translate. The embassy accepted UK insurance and nowhere on the government websites in English does it say Russian documents needed. I show them the website that says after registration lapses I have five more business days to reregister. I also explain it was not possible to reregister before today because the police station was closed for holidays.

“Doesn’t matter. You should have stayed in a hotel on final day to reset registration clock” they say, in Russian.

At that point I’m happy to face them down and just be deported but the landlady is panicking about getting in bad with cops and whatever fate may befall her apartment business. I back down, because I’m not a bad sort really [1] I pay the penalty and chalk it to the game.

Artist impression

I’m sure you all have your violins out playing a symphony of sympathy for me. So, why is it relevant to daygame?

It’s because I was barely suppressing a furious rage at being shaken down for what was, ultimately, an inconsequential fee. I was typing into Google Translate “this is a robbery, they are acting in bad faith, finding a pretext for a shakedown” and my landlady wisely refused to show that to the cop sitting across the desk. I didn’t lose my head, but it was close. Why?

Anonymous Conservative has the answer with his rich explanation of the amygdala. This part of the brain is at the centre of everything when it comes to state control – which is the cornerstone of Game. The amygdala is the threat detection centre and it lights up (in the modern vernacular, is “triggered”) when it perceives threat. Wolves have a highly trained (and literally larger, when measured in autopsy) amygdala that is highly effective at perceiving long term threats and will thus trigger the wolf to proactively seek out and destroy the threat before it grows more dangerous. Rabbits have an atrophied and undeveloped amygdala that is oblivious to threats until they are right in front of the rabbit’s nose. They seek also to remove the threat but usually at the last moment and by running away from it.

This is why in the migrant crisis wolves want to sink the boats and rabbits hold up Refugees Welcome signs. The wolves can very easily see the looming threat of importing third world savages into Europe and want to nip it in the bud at the minimum loss of life. Rabbits are blind to it, completely conflict averse, and just figure it’s better to prostrate themselves at the feet of the savages and hope they are killed last.

Daygame will provide you with both wolf and rabbit stimuli, and the balance depends how you do the daygame. Grinding it out on the streets, hanging out bantering with high value players, and actively honing a skill set are all K-stimuli, meaning challenging behaviours that introduce you to adversity and thus develop your amygdala. Every time you mumble “first one is the worst one” before diving into your first set of the day, you might as well be saying to yourself “adversity incoming, time to train the amygdala with some pain”.

Unfortunately, rootlessly travelling around foreign countries, living off passive income, breaking friendships when they become inconvenient, and having an abundance of casual sex are all r-stimuli, meaning they are the removal of adversity and lead to amygdala deterioration. For salient examples, look at sportsmen who go off the rails when they reach the big time (e.g. James Toney, Adriano etc). Adversity strengthens them on the way up and then comfort weakens them once at the top.

Pre and Post Adversity  Toney

Anonymous Conservative has a whole typology of ways the amygdala can be triggered and thus overheat and take control away from our rational brains (like me in the police station). The most powerful is what he calls Violation Of Expectation. It’s the equivalent of having the rug pulled from under you, and the subject of the famous book Who Moved My Cheese? It’s pretty simple:

1. You overcome adversity and achieve abundance.
2. The abundance becomes comfortable and your new normal.
3. You amygdala switches off as there is no threat to face.
4. An event suddenly rips away the comfort and confronts you with adversity.
5. Your amygdala lights up very strongly and very quickly, accompanied by disorientation because the adversity was unexpected.
6. You’re triggered. Trigglypuffing ensues. [2]

Me, yesterday

I dare say that stage 6 is very unpleasant and can seem important all out of proportion, such as wanting to dig my heels in and get deported rather than pay a trivial fine. It is such situations that inspire sage quotes about wise men keeping their heads while everyone around is losing theirs.

So what’s the inner game takeway?

Don’t try to remove adversity from your life, no matter how tempting. And when comfort is suddenly ripped away from you, recognise the cause (and repeat to yourself “this is just a Violation of Expectation scenario”) and that your emotional reaction is likely way out of proportion to the size of the problem. [3]

You’ll probably also notice that the coolest men in the world are unruffled. Trainee players are always advised to be more chill and less reactive. This is because reactive behaviour is a sign of an atrophied amygdala and poor threat detection, and thus poor reproductive fitness [4]

[1] Despite Bodi’s two-volume attempt to convince you otherwise.
[2] AnonCon has convincingly argued this is the crux of the North Korean crisis and the increasingly insane behaviour of Kim Il Piggy.
[3] TL:DR is “don’t be a bitch”

[4] But isn’t it also interesting that it’s a sign of rabbitry,  and thus a sign to rabbit girls that you may be suited to them. Perhaps this is why grotty sluts actually like drama and seek it out – they are seeking out men with defective amygdalae because it’s a proxy sign of the rabbit breeding strategy.

If you are disappointed that this post explored some new ideas that are relevant to daygame rather than rehashing tired  bullshit in a bullet point list, you probably won’t like my books.

This blog first achieved notoriety because I was writing about my inner most thoughts on my Player’s Journey in graphic and extensive detail. I’d frequently post up photos, infield videos, and date audios. I’d post more about failure than success because that was the reality. Evidently that style struck a chord with many and my readership grew. A friend recently told me “the reason you’re popular is your honesty”. I didn’t write like a huckster (PUA old guard) nor as a shameless attempt to create a fake cool guy personality to help me draw narcissistic supply from an audience of gullible fools to stop me topping myself (PUA new guard).

Round about 2015 I decided throwing this stuff up piecemeal for the blog was no longer satisfying for me. My blog posts are always one-and-done efforts where I get an idea, immediately write it, then post with only a cursory spelling and grammar check. Posts tended to max out around a thousands words and are dropped in either when something interesting happened or when I was in the mood to write. That got boring. I decided my adventures and ruminations deserved a longer form treatment.

Enter the memoir series (currently on sale are volumes One, Two and Four)

I wanted to create a narrative arc that made sense, stitching together my experiences and theoretical development so as to create something deeper and more meaningful. It would help me develop my writing skills and make sense of my time in the Game. It would reward readers with a far more polished story as I typically do multiple rewrites and hire professional editors for the books. Those of you who’ve read them seem to agree that the lessons sink in deeper in book form, and it gives space to tell a better story than what can be thrown up as a blogpost.

There’s a place for thrown up “just got laid” posts. They are still fun to read and can cheer you on to your own adventures. See Xant’s recent lay report here for an example.

Something unexpected happened over the course of writing the memoir series. I’ve long believed that humans make sense of the world and their place within it through narrative. There is the Hero’s Journey plot structure that all epic-feeling stories adopt from Star Wars through to Kung Fu Panda. We are also steeped in written and oral folklore, which is mostly conveyed through stories be they short form Aesop’s Fables or long form parables. We absorb legends, morality plays, novels, and campfire ghost stories.

Humans love stories and learn through them.

Jimmy recently told me that writing volume one of his Game memoir (1) made him realise that he always prized a gang of cool mates more than clacking the women. Something about organising your thoughts sufficiently to write them down (2) will also change the very meaning of how you think about the subject of that writing. We are telling and retelling stories in our own minds, inserting our experiences into a self-narrative. As you go through your life you’ll have an assumed narrative of who you are, where you’re going, and how far you’ve come. Here’s what is funny about writing: when you start organising it for publication, you reshape the narrative.

The act of writing about something significantly changes how you think about it. Daygame Mastery was a good example of that for me – I set out to put the London Daygame Model (3) on paper. Six months of rumination and writing meant that by the time I hit “publish” I’d completely transformed my own knowledge of the model. As I wrote, I’d realise there were gaps in my understanding and I had to ruminate further until I dug up the answer from my experience. In some ways the model changed in the course of writing it, for example ideas such as “respect the hustle” and r/K (4) were late additions when I was trying to organise the techniques around an implicit underlying philosophy.

The unexpected outcome of writing my memoir has been I’ve closed the book on my Player’s Journey both literally and figuratively. Each of the stages came into clearer focus, as did my motivations and failings. Volume One was the zero-to-hero stage that covered the first five stages of the Hero’s Journey, taking me from normal life into this strange world of pick up and the trials and tribulations that ensued. Volume Two represented being cognitively captured by the PUA world, outrageous levels of grandiosity, and the complete rebuilding of my personality. Volume Four was when I reached a maturity level, secure in my skills and lifestyle but starting to feel like the job was done and perhaps it’s time to move on. (5)

Writing the memoir, which ends in December 2014, made me feel like the journey was over. All the game I’ve done in the two years since has been about something else. It wasn’t a journey. There was no clear progress towards a deliberate goal. My life wasn’t changing.

It took writing the memoir to make sense of this, to order the experiences and uncover the themes. Up until the end of 2014 I felt like I was going somewhere, my eyes on a prize. I finished the year on a major upswing, a crowning achievement that felt like standing on top of the mountain. In 2015 I found myself using daygame to spike my own emotional state, distracting myself from the fact I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with myself now that the job was done. In 2016 it was more of the same but I had Donald Trump’s campaign to give me a goal for the year, a sense of progress.

So in 2017 my overwhelming feeling has been….. meh! Running around Europe trying to clack lots of hotties was great fun but I’ve done it seven years straight. Each year brings good memories and memorable stories. I could easily write a 600 page memoir about each of 2015 and 2016 – there were enough stories and points of interest (6) But now it just seems rather pointless.

Let’s say I bang another 25 girls this year (7). What will be different in my life? I’ll be a year older and move the notch count forwards but….. is that a wise use of my time? Banging your first 25 girls is a huge deal. Banging your 25th daygame girl is a huge deal. Banging your first euro jaunt eight is a huge deal. But after seven years of that, do any of the numbers matter anymore?

Not to me.

I dare say this will get me opening again

I don’t have a clear message as to how I intend to work my way through 2017. It’s been three months straight of diabolical weather and I’ve had a period of daygame revulsion that sometimes creeps up on me. That combination tends to sour my mood towards the player’s lifestyle. However, when the sun is shining and girls are ambling around in tight shorts, throwing off IOIs….. you can bet I’ll be on it. But when it’s cold, wet and miserable am I going to be out grinding to try to progress my annual notch count? Definitely not.

I’ve changed how I daygame to reflect this. I’ll be writing more about that.

1) Don’t hold your breath on it ever being finished
(2) If you can’t write your thoughts into paragraphs that readers can understand, then you don’t really understand it either. Anyone who starts blogging finds this out very quickly.
(3) Version 2. Don’t kid yourself that there’s a new version 3. Old wine new bottles. When my next textbook drops you’ll see the actual Version 3.
(4) Yes, both of those were introduced to LDM by me.
(5) Volume Three will fill the gap but I plan on doing the textbook first.
(6) Don’t worry, I don’t plan to actually write them. Four volumes is already testing a reader’s patience.
(7) Or pretend I do, in order to sell PUA products to gullible fools

If you can’t wait for the new London Daygame Model 3.0 then why not make do with the best infield instructional video of version 2.0, which is all anyone is doing anyway.