Daygame is a Sisyphean task. Depending on how you do it, it’s either hunting or fishing. Most of the time it’s the former – we go out onto the streets and search for women. When we find one we like we pounce on them. Fishing is also possible; sit in a good spot outside a cafe and chill with your friend waiting for the right girl to amble past – then you pounce.

This is both the joy and the sorrow of daygame – it’s all on you. When you’re in the mood for the work, it’s exhilarating. You have the ability to roll up into a new city and make things happen. If you get the right combination of effort, skill and luck you’ll bang a pretty girl that week. Long-time daygamers will also know the downside to that calculus – when you aren’t in the mood, it’s a grind. You know that if you stop putting forth the focused effort, your results dry up.

I was watching a video analysis of Dark Souls last night [1] Towards the end of the video the speaker addressed the game’s theme, something widely contested in that geek’s corner of teh interwebs. For him, Dark Souls is about a bleak choice – you either strive or you die. The world or Lordran is fierce, unforgiving and no matter how hard you try you never make real progress. You put forth your best efforts, step-after-step, facing never-ending hardship and then any time you stumble you’re thrown back to the beginning. It’s a never-ending struggle just to stay in the same place. Any time you lose an engagement, you’ve had a little of your humanity whittled away from you never to return. The game is like walking up a down escalator.

And yet you persist. It’s compelling. Why is that?

Is it because that while the world is harsh, it’s fair? Every time you replay an area you learn a little more about its traps and opportunities. Every time you face an adversary you pick up on the tells and patterns in his attacks. You learn his weaknesses. There are few moments as satisfying as taking down a boss at the tenth attempt, crowning a learning cycle that began with you getting smashed into a pulp on the first attempt.

Is it because the alternative is simply death? There’s no easy mode in Dark Souls. It sets you a herculean task and you either press ahead or you give up.

Is it because that perilous journey feeds a never-ending supply of small engagements with enemies and forces you to become intensely aware of every metre of land in the level? Dark Souls forces you into a hyper-awareness of your surroundings and you come out of every play-through with a collection of mini-dramas from the battles – the wins and the losses.

When you play Dark Souls you experience video games very differently to blasting through on-rails levels like Call Of Duty. You sink into the world of Lordran and are immersed. Time ticks by while you are focused on the task. You are in a flow state. But sometimes it’s all too much. You creep down the spiral staircase of an abandoned castle tower to the spot where you died ten minutes ago. You see the bloodstain marking the spot – if you reach that you recover all those souls that took you an hour to collect. You step into the room and….. smash, crash, bang the Black Knight has just killed you. You’d forgotten there was one there.

RAGE QUIT

An absolute fucking cunt, yesterday

Those souls are gone forever. An hour of work evaporates before your eyes while the Black Knight stands above, hacking at your lifeless corpse. FUCK THIS! Your controller goes flying across the room. You simply cannot bear to play it any more.

Obviously if daygame was that shit I wouldn’t have done it for seven years. That’s just the downside. Conversely, the upside creates feelings which are – without exaggeration – the most addictive and joyful I’ve ever experienced. Two days later Dark Souls is back on your mind. You’ve been strategising while in the bath – if I throw an alluring skull into the far corner he’ll investigate then I can creep in and backstab him. Yes! I’ll try that! Four hours on the Dark Souls roller-coaster and the controller goes flying across the room again [2]. But you learned something in the interim. You opened up a new zone and unlocked a new shortcut. You had a compelling four-hour struggle and you remember some of the battles in exquisite detail.

For the past six weeks I’ve been deep in Daygame Revulsion, the rage quit equivalent in our world. 2016 has been a fantastic year with tremendous upsides and many memorable encounters (win or lose). I’ve unlocked new areas in Lordran [3] and encountered new enemies [4] and also helpful NPCs. But now it’s cold, I’m worn out, and I’ve already banged enough girls for the year.

Just as I can’t go long without picking up that controller for another run at Dark Souls, I know with certainty I’ll be back out on the streets putting forth real effort again. But not for a while. I’m done with 2016 [5]. I’ll do a little half-assed opening on auto-pilot, akin to the zombies in Dawn Of The Dead stumbling around a shopping mall listening to the echoes of a former life.

[1] – Go on, tell me that surprises you.
[2] – I exaggerate. I’ve only launched the controller once ever. Usually I’ll just shout expletive-laden rants at the screen.
[3] – Specifically, Odessa and Moscow
[4] – There’s one big muscular brown mini-boss with an Indian accent. His main attacks are smoke and mirrors. It’s pretty easy to just aggro him and watch him kill himself.

[5] – Personally,I blame Donald Trump. It’s impossible to focus on getting laid when the entire future of Western Civilisation is to be decided within a week.

If you thought this was a bit negative, you’ll be glad I was banned from Twitter. In the meantime, buy my book.

There are several socially-inculcated attitudes that are holding you back from developing a powerful Harambe Mindset [1]. They are supported by a web of entangling beliefs and propositions built up over decades. Rather then untangle their sources, let’s just cut straight to the chase – what is their effect on you, the wannabe seducer of YHT girls?

1. You should consider the opinions of others.
2. You should accept your station in life.
3. You should follow the reigning moral code.

When reading them out like that it’s easy to say “hell, no! I will do my thing. I’m a free man” but the whole reason mind control is powerful is because the most powerful determinants are subtle. The world is constantly attacking your frame. This is why: Everything in the world is a struggle for resources.

The best way to win the struggle is to make other people do all the hard work for you.

Mindset, yesterday

Literally every living organism is fighting for those resources and every one of them has developed tricks to get there. That’s why they still exist – the failing strategies were removed from the DNA pool. Nothing is benign and nothing is innocent – even dolphins gang-rape seals. Flowers reach for sunlight and induce bees to do the legwork [2] of spreading their pollen. Fleas attach to the hide of farm animals to suck their blood. Predators hunt prey. Nature is red in tooth and claw. Here is a general rule I use to look at the world:

Any time there is value, attackers descend upon it.

Let’s just think of this in ever-escalating scale:

• Put nutrients in a petri dish and bacteria will develop.
• Shit onto the floor and flies will swarm.
• Put food on the table and the cat will wait for its moment to leap.
• Put gold in the bank and robbers will blow the safe.
• Post a glowing fact sheet on a Pussy Paradise and the PUA army shows up in town.
• Build a peaceful civilisation and third world savages will invade.

This is the way of the world – any place there is value, there will be a swarm of attackers. You – as an able-bodied male of working and fighting age – have value too. Girls see you as a source of money, attention, security and (hopefully) DNA. Employers see you as a source of labour. The government sees you as a source of taxation [3]. You have value and people are coming for it. Most of us, as K-selects, are quite wise to overt physical and logistical forms of attack on our value. That’s why the r-selected attackers will blindside you by underhand methods. The main method is a moral entreaty followed by gas-lighting [4]

There’s nothing an r-select likes more than watching someone else stockpile value, then swooping in and bullshitting them out of it.

Moral entreaties are any kind of statement that follows the structure of “you should behave more like [x] because of nebulous ethical reason [y]”. Examples would be:

• “You should pay the check for dinner because you’re a gentleman” [5]
• “You should limit your carbon footprint because it’s better for the environment”
• “You should support unlimited mass migration to white countries because diversity”
• “You should get married and buy a house, because that’s what real men do”
• “You should date a woman your own age because that’s normal”

It’s pretty clear that each statement is an attempt to get you to surrender your value (or claim to value) so that someone else can take it for themselves. In order: the woman wants your money, the environmentalist wants you shamed into low consumption, the 3rd world savages want your country, the parents want a legacy, and the scold wants you to ignore the hotties and date her haggard old ass [6]. It’s an effective trick because it engages and subverts our hard-coded inclination to support social trust and to live according to a system of moral values. The problem is it is subverting it.

Moral codes are really only one of two things. Either:

1. A way to bullshit you out of your value (as above), or
2. You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours [7]

A back I’d scratch, without needing an entreaty

R-selects are highly devious people and they will shamelessly hijack your own human goodness in order to shackle you with it while they loot your safe and rape your wife. Defending yourself against it is simple: any time your hear the word “should”, ask yourself what part of my value they are trying to steal? If obeying their moral entreaty would result in a transfer of value (present or anticipated) from you / your allies to them / their allies, then you know they are attempting to defraud you. So treat them like the dirty thieves they are.

Any successful moral entreaty / robbery is swiftly followed by a gas-lighting in order to persuade the victim that no robbery occurred.

Gas-lighting: “manipulate (someone) by psychological means into doubting their own sanity.”

Gas-lighting is best explained via the old-time idiom: “don’t piss on my back and then tell me it’s raining” or “these aren’t the droids you’re looking for”. The fraudster will expressly tell you that what you are seeing is not really what you’re seeing, and if they can engage external supports for their view you may begin to doubt your own lying eyes. This is especially effective if the moral entreaty is part of the reigning orthodoxy, supported by the media and academia, and if it takes place over an extended period of time.

For daygame purposes, we’ll just stick to gas-lighting from the feminist orthodoxy rather than talk about political and racial gas-lighting.

The way to resist gas-lighting is two-fold: (i) having recognised the statements are coming from someone engaged in robbing you, you are forewarned and forearmed against believing anything they tell you, (ii) just trust your own eyes and gut instinct. Never believe a logical or emotive argument if it sets your gut instinct churning. Even if you can’t explicate why, trust your instinct. The world really isn’t very complicated. Our entire minds and instincts have been honed over millions of years to see it clearly enough to reach our survival and replications goals [8]. So if someone is presenting you with convoluted logic, the jist of which is “your gut instinct is wrong, do it my way” then it’s a safe bet they are gas-lighting you.

So let’s get back to the original three stumbling blocks in your inner game that prevent you being more assertive. Other people’s opinions don’t matter at all. Most of the opinions they offer are either irrelevant to you or else an attempt to rob you of value. Most people you think may have an opinion of you (e.g. those men sitting at the cafe watching you open the hottie) will more likely have a favourable opinon (“I wish I had the balls to open her”) or just not much care (“what’s the latest footie score?”). So long as you accept your station in life, I get to clack the hotties while you follow that reigning moral code of being a gentleman, treating girls with “respect” [9].

The Harambe Mindset requires you to put your own interests front and centre. Without helping yourself first you can’t help your people. It requires you to see the world with your own eyes and trust the information they receive. It also requires you to recognise that most of the people telling you that you should do this or shouldn’t do that are really just freeloading r-selects attempting to bullshit you out of your value.

[1] heh!
[2] wingwork, really
[3] and if you’re straight and white, someone to troll and to pin the blame for the world’s problems onto.
[4] If you doubt it’s effectiveness, consider how this strategy has brought the greatest civilisations to their knees in just sixty years.
[5] in this case, the nebulous ethical reason is tacit, not stated

[6] I hear dating haggard old cows is more normal in Belgium
[7] Literally in the case of “do unto others as you’d have them do unto you” and in the famous Tit-for-tat cooperational experiments. Much of human morality is about agreeing to exchange favours and to agree to mutual non-aggression.
[8] So no, I don’t agree with Scott Adams’ “nothing is real” theory. There’s a world of difference between the statements the world is not real, or the world is inexplicable, and we are unable to explicate the world.
[9] “respect” is just a chode’s way of reframing his own fear and exporting it onto you.

If you thought this post was eerily similar to another great blogger in a self-aware manner, you should see my book. It’s completely unrelated.

It’s high time to start telling you dear readers about the next big thing to drop in the daygame world – the long awaited next volume in my epic memoir series [1]. Gentleman, I introduce you to Adventure Sex – How To Pick Up The Girls Of The Former Soviet Union

Most of you have read Balls Deep by now so you’re all familiar with the zero-to-hero narrative arc [2]. That story begins when I’m a pathetic office chode struggling to get over a divorce. I dip my toes into the slimey waters of PUA and after much failure I start to get good at it. The volume ends when I finally bone a Russian catwalk model. That gets the story as far as March 2011. I let this next volume gestate for almost two years before completing it. The last thing I wanted was for it to be more of the same: just another game memoir with a new cast of girls [3].

How could I make this new volume something special?

I realised I need to try a different type of story telling. I thought back to my old university days when I dipped my (younger) toes into anthropology. Those meddling white men and women discovered that savage tribes all shared something in common – the importance of myths and oral history. Humans are hard-wired to absorb facts and life lessons when couched in story form. This is why history is so much easier to learn than mathematics. Rather than write another textbook [4] I thought it might be cool to weave all my theoretical knowledge into the memoir. Balls Deep had made a half-arsed attempt at that but I’m a better writer now and I’d put that idea front and centre.

I’ve written a book that functions like an advanced textbook but in narrative form. Prepare to be incepted.

Planting the seeds, yesterday

Volume 4 covers the calendar year of 2014, my best in the Game. I spent most of the year in the FSU and Warsaw Pact countries, getting all but one of my lays from FSU girls. It’s the time I developed the principles that would inform Daygame Overkill and I’ve woven those in throughout. Adventure Sex will present you with a window into my real-time decision making in set (both successes and failures). It will take you along for the ride so you feel the same emotions and work with the same information I had. This will show you how international seduction is lived.

“You’ve created something really good here. This is a quantum leap for you, personally, in the quality of your writing. This is the first time I’ve seen you really put craft into your writing, and it shows.” – my editor

I’ll have more to say soon, including a paper copy to wave around for YouTube from the comfort of my lounge.

[1] I very much like talking about myself.
[2] And if not from Balls Deep, you’ll have seen the same story arc in every other game memoir written ever.
[3] Or invented stories that never really happened, like most game memoirs I suspect.
[4] Or rewrite Daygame Mastery, as seems to be the fashion nowadays.

If you thought this makes you want to read volume one, Balls Deep, you might be interested in my book. It’s called Balls Deep.

I’ve been reading the Anonymous Conservative blog a lot lately. After mine, it’s probably the best blog on the internet* Now I’m quite aware that many of my readers do not share my genocidal tendencies so I’ll endeavour to keep this discussion of a political concept as apolitical as possible. It’s highly relevant to how you daygame. Let’s first parse the rabbit/wolf concept:

• r stands for reproductive focus – the rabbit strategy of pumping out lots of cheap offspring and fucking whatever moves. It’s a response to overwhelming predation.

• K stands for competitive focus – the wolf strategy of mating for life and raising pups together, teaching them to hunt and integrate socially with the pack. It’s a response to selective pressure for individual excellence.

There are three primary mechanisms by which the ratio of r/K expression shifts in a society:

1. Environmental cues alter psychology and biology during childhood development
2. Changes in the population’s underlying genetic ratio
3. Changes in social promotion

Together, these produce the cycle of history, in which hardship creates a superior K selected group, which conquers, prospers, becomes r-selected, and collapses.

r/K theory also fully explains the American political bipolar spectrum of left-liberal vs. right-conservative. However, the story is a little more complex, because America is a decadent empire in decline, so both sides are mostly r.

Put in simple terms, rabbits are fast-breeding, highly treacherous, quantity strategists whereas wolves are slow-breeding, highly trustworthy, quality strategists. Rabbits are r, wolves are K. This is, in a nutshell, why you rarely see rabbity men with quality women. All those PUA videos on YouTube are stuffed full of mediocre or just plain grotty women, while the men all have that shifty, feminised, untrustworthy look. If you want to test this, just check out a few videos that have titles such as “Ugly Guy Pulls Hot Model From Street” or “Playboy Model – Fast Pull From Club”** Turn the volume down and just absorb the body language of the PUA – especially if it’s a piece de camera and he’s looking directly at the lens. Watch for the shifty eyes, the evasive body language, and the odd incongruence between his mouth and his eyes.

Now turn the volume up and listen to the grammatical construction of sentence, the precision of the language (mainly the lack of it, such as weasel words), the hints of things not really spoken. Look for the frame underlying the advice – it’s almost always one of manipulation or getting something you don’t really deserve due to knowing secret tricks. Phrases such as “so I met this girl and…. [tells long convoluted unconvincing story]… and then, at the end…. happy times!”

What the fuck does “happy times” mean? Did you fuck her? Did she give unbeatable LMR? Did you have a drink, good chat, but she demurred because she has a boyfriend? What actually happened? That’s an example from Tyler’s Blueprint Decoded, by the way. As good as the video is – and I do highly recommend it – it’s Exhibit A in a rabbit rabbiting. Naturally, there’s no evidence of Tyler banging quality. Lots of smoke and mirrors though, for the easily tricked.

When you watch PUAs talk you’ll always get an icky feeling in your gut. You want it to be true because they are telling you that you too can fuck hot girls. Yeah yeah looks don’t matter, it’s all about state, mate. Yeah yeah just grind out the sets and you’ll get there. Yeah yeah just learn these little tricks and gambits in my bullet point list of hacks. You want to believe it and because you’re probably not very calibrated right now it’s easy for experienced hustlers to blow smoke up your ass. The icky feeling comes from observing incongruence – your logical brain and ego are tricked by the bullshit but your hindbrain is sharp enough to send the danger signals. It’s the same way you feel before an ostensibly friendly Brazilian helping you find your way to your Rio hostel suddenly pulls a knife and mugs you ***

This is the quantity / quality equivocation in action. They’ll show you actual success with mediocre girls (and bear in mind these are cherry-picked examples, not the normal reality) and then crosscut that evidence with smoke n mirrors clips of actual hot girls. So when you see a montage of a guy “beasting” a nightclub or pulling at girl’s sleeves on the street outside you’ll probably see (i) short clips with hot girls that are fun but no real compliance cross-cut with (ii) clips of actual compliance with grot girls. Vince Kelvin is particularly clumsy at this trick. RSD are very smooth with it.

So you’ll be shown a heavily-edited smoke n mirrors video showing not much actual success while they tell you it’s “ten game”. And then you’re subjected to a long sales letter doing the usual Influence routine of elevating your pain, offering a solution, anchoring to high price, then pressuring you into acting now on temporary low price.

So how is this about rabbits and wolves?

As Anonymous Conservative so perceptively observes, rabbits are all about image and status. In a world of abundant resources you don’t need to worry about starvation. Therefore attention turns to status-based one-upmanship in order to display mate fitness over other rabbits. This leads to politicians worrying about the “optics” of a policy rather than the real-world effect, Instagram tarts chasing likes of staged “my real life, honest” photos, chodes wearing pocket squares in Vegas nightclubs, and PUAs blowing smoke up your ass****. In contrast, when resources become scarce again in the coming Apocalypse suddenly no-one gives a shit about image and status. All that matters is can you go get the resources and defend them in a hostile world. Wolves care about getting shit done. They don’t worry what rabbits think of them because when the Apocalypse comes they just kill all the rabbits.

The interplay between rabbits and wolves is fascinating, by the way. I do recommend you check out Anonymous Conservative’s blog. Although wolves are far far superior animals they have a number of vulnerabilities that allow rabbits to steal from them for a long time before the inevitable pogroms.

So how is this about daygame?

The main reason that rabbitry works in pick-up is that you accept the quality ceiling and then ramp up the quantity. All girls will fall somewhere on the r/K spectrum and signal as such through fashion, grooming and body language. These girls both have a default r/K position but also a variation between a bandwidth during their monthly cycle, and also longer term depending on their age and current options. When I devote a chapter in Daygame Mastery to calibrating a girl’s sexual availability, that’s kind of what I’m getting at.

The push towards r-selected daygame that I initiated with Daygame Mastery is about identifying girls amenable to being pushed into an r strategy while also giving off signals to them that you are r. The problem with this is rabbits have low quality DNA. Rabbit girls are slutty and unattractive. Rabbit men are shifty and of low moral character. Wolves instinctively hate rabbits, and the hottest women have the K strategy. Basically, I’m telling you full r-selection gets you mostly grotty girls.

Don’t fear, it’s not that bad. Remember some girls will be towards the r-most side of their periodic variation when you encounter them and then you amp it up with your birdsong. This is the true craft of daygame and how it becomes possible to square the circle. You end up with a really odd situation where you – as a high value K-selected man – are meeting a high quality K-selected woman and yet you are both interacting as if you are rabbits. It’s a tough feat to pull off, which is why daygame has such a horrific attrition rate and you can do these amazing street stops with stunning women who flash massive IOIs but then flake. Most of the time the birdsong wears off before these wolf girls open their legs.

Intermediate daygamers will start falling into a trap as they climb up the Advanced ladder. By simulating (or actually having) lots of r-traits your results will improve and there’ll be SDLs, street kisses and all that other fun stuff. Over time you’ll start to get an ominous feeling – “this doesn’t seem to happen with the hotties I really want”. Looking back over all your best sets you’ll notice a pattern: the girls are kind of towards the bottom end of acceptable quality. You’ll tell yourself “well, it was a good story!” but still feel an ache as the genuine greyhoud walks past in heels, elegant skirt, and golden tresses. You’ll notice you never see these top-tier girls with the rabbit men. Their boyfriends always have something K about them. Not chodes, just cool wolves. You notice that when you look in the girl’s eyes on the street and hit her with a dumbass PUA line they smile but give back a look like it didn’t really hit.

It takes mental discipline to resist going full rabbit. It’s like walking past McDonalds when you’re hungry because you should wait until dinner time for a steak. It’s tempting to pile up the grot lays so you can text your mates another +1 with funny story. *****

“+1, Macedonian waitress, in between the bins behind Pret A Manger on Piccadilly”******

Game has a central contradiction that being rabbity gets you more lays but being wolfy gets you higher quality girls. I’ve spent most of 2015 trying to square the circle, finding ways to retain all my wolfish quality while playing the r-dance with K girls ******* For now it’s been a partial success. If I ever nail it down, I’ll write another book so that you all get a chance to read it and the daygame community has some new material to package as their own without giving me credit. So, I don’t have an answer to the rabbit-wolf problem but I think it’s good to at least come to grasps with the shape of the problem.

* In contrast, a quick Alexis search ranks Jimmy Jambone’s blog at quite literally the bottom of the entire PUA blogosphere

** Or any RSD video

*** Which, really, isn’t so far from the truth when discussing PUAs selling you bullshit.

**** Also why their websites and book covers are plastered with hot models in bikinis giving come-hither looks but their real Instagrams are full of awkward hoverhand photos with chubby 6s in nightclubs. The marketing is about as realistic as the online gambling sites showing a poker table surrounded by James Bond lookalikes.
***** Don’t for a moment think I’m “above” banging so-so women if it’s a good story
****** Not an actual story of mine, alas.
******* Such as the 21yr old Estonian catwalk model I fucked in Prague in what can only be described as an r/K fractionation masterclass. She still doesn’t understand why she fucked me.

If you think this post had lots of material you can shamelessly pilfer for your fledging PUA business, you should see my book.

Waking up in a European city after a night of thunderstorms to find deserted streets……. that’s the stuff Euro Jaunt nightmares are made of. As I wandered around a park in the drizzle today, a tiny trickle of locals hurrying past underneath umbrellas I thought to myself: Well, that’s daygame fucked for today.

I also thought: Maybe I should rattle off a couple of podcasts.

So with the usual amount of care and pre-planning that you all experienced last year, I have done the first two podcasts of this year’s Womanizer’s Bible. It’s a shameless attempt to keep my fantastic new video product in the public eye but those of you who enjoyed last year’s podcast will find a similar amount of value this time around. If you have particular questions you want me to address then put them in the comments below and I might – just might – remember it next time it rains and I have to knock out more content.

If you thought that was a long-winded piece of shit you should see my product. It’s hard to imagine a better way to spend $49.

If you noticed this video isn’t presented in written form, you should see my book.

A young girl took a stroll at night in the city. Grox saw the girl was very pretty.

“Hello, little girl. My name is Grox. Your pretty face has left me feeling shocked! Come with me to my house, it’s full of treats! I tell you now, it’s the best in these streets!”
“It’s awfully sweet of you, Mr. Grox, but I think I will eat treats from CJ’s box”
“CJ? Please do tell, pretty lady. Who is this CJ? He sounds shady”
“He’s Charismatic Jerkboy, don’t you know? He has the most perfect looking nose, and a perfect square jaw!”
“I don’t know him, so I’m sure he don’t matter.”
“Oh but be warned, he don’t like anyone giving me patter!”
“A person the same as me? I’d better flee!”
and Grox ran away and hid behind a tree.

“Young and naïve Grox, fell for my ploy. Doesn’t he know there is no such thing as a Charismatic Jerkboy …”

On went the little girl through the dark city. A man with a puffy blue coat saw the girl and she was pretty.

“Hey, there, lil Mama, my name is Crowl. I see you eyeing my coat, it’s 100% wildfowl! I was up all night, on the prowl. With looks like yours mama, you could make a man howl!”
“It’s frightfully nice of you, Mr Crowl, but I won’t treat my CJ so foul.”
“Come lil mama, and I’ll make you a star. Tell me, lil mama, can CJ take you as far?”
“He’s Charismatic Jerkboy, don’t you know? He has the most perfect looking nose, and a perfect square jaw!”
“Where are you two meeting? Are you his lil squeeze?”
“Next street over. He’s a guy does whatever he please.”

“That type of man? So long lil mama!”
And Crowl slinked off without any drama.

“Old and slick Crowl, fell for my ploy. Doesn’t he know there is no such thing as a Charismatic Jerkboy …”

On went the little girl through the big dark city. A male model appeared from the shadows of the alley.

Although he was very cute and his muscles smoothing, all the little girl’s senses told her she needed to keep moving.
“Hello, little girl, my name is Jake. I will show you my great big snake. Come with me to the shadows of my alley, so that I could have a taste of your hidden valley.”
“It’s wonderfully nice of you, Mr Jake. But I’m meeting CJ and I baked him a cake.”
“Look at this six pack, check out my hair. Tell me young miss, does CJ have my flair?”
“He’s Charismatic Jerkboy, don’t you know? He has the most perfect looking nose, and a perfect square jaw!”

“Who is CJ? What’s so special about this man?”

“He’s the darkest of triads, a man with a plan.”

“That’s too much for me, goodbye little girl!”

And Jake ran off. After giving a twirl.

“A pretty young boy, is silly Jake. But doesn’t he know CJ is fake!”

On went the girl, walking on a little more. She spied a man with a perfect square jaw!

He was brash and rough, a smirk on his face. He walked with swagger like he owned the place.
CJ yelled out “I found myself a hottie , but she looks weak and rather snotty!” He tweaked her nose and asked “Are you single?” She bristled and scowled but felt a tingle.
“Weak?” she blustered. “Everyone fears me. Just walk behind and then you’ll see.”
“Alright! I’m in. I’m not missing this chance. Lead the way Miss Monkeypants.”

As they walked, CJ heard a sound from the alley. From out of the shadows, Jake made a sally.
“Hey, look it’s Jake!”, the girl exclaimed. She waved her hands “Hello, Jake! We meet again!”
Jake took one look at CJ and lost his glow. “I’m sorry little girl, but I have to go!”
And with that, he took off running. The little girl felt awfully cunning.
“You see that Jerkboy,  I ain’t no prey!”
“Amazing!” he thought. “This girl can play.”

They walked a little bit more, and saw a pimp with his ho. The little girl waved, “That’s a man I know!”
“Hey Mr. Crowl!” she shouted aloud. “I’m back again, what are you doing now?”
Crowl looked up at CJ and lost his bottle. “There must be a mistake. I’m really Aristotle”

He picked up his cane, jumped in his car. Then drove someplace very far.

“You see that Jerkboy. Did you hear me roar?”
“Extraordinary!” he thought. “Let’s see some more”

As they headed further on down to the end of the street, they saw a man dancing to his own strange beat.
“That’s Grox!” she called,  making him jump in shock. “Why are you still here on this block?”
“Hello, little girl with the pretty face. I think it’s time for Grox to make haste!”
He quickly picked up his things and ran as if his legs were made of springs.

“You see that Jerkboy. I’m no push-over”
“Fantastic!” he thought. “A four-leaf clover”

“Well, CJ? Can’t you see? Everyone is afraid of me! I’m a strong girl who can do whatever a man can , maybe it’s time you got up and ran!”
CJ leant back with an inscrutable face. He felt it was time to put this whelp in her place.

“That’s all very clever, I’ll admit I’m impressed. But you’d look a whole lot sweeter in a pretty summer dress”

The little girl blushed, the wind out of her sails. She didn’t know how to handle one of these alpha males.
All was quiet in the big dark city. “I’m admit it Jerkboy, you really are witty.”

He took her hand and she followed undaunted. She’d succeeded in getting who she really wanted.

Way back in 1984, the era of River Raid* on the Atari 2600 and the newly triumphant Margaret Thatcher, an interesting pop psychology book was released: Robert B. Cialdini’s Influence. It has since become a classic. Cialdini summarises his research in the behaviour of compliance professionals – those individuals whose job it is to persuade you to do things for them, such as salesmen, advertisers and TV executives – and of seemingly unexplained social events such as the spike in air crashes in the weeks after a high-profile suicide in the area.

1984, yesterday

Cialdini came up with the “click whrrrr” mental model as a handy way to parse the human tendency to follow fixed-pattern interactions that overrule logic and evidence (something Scott Adams included into his “moist robot” hypothesis). He then devotes six lengthy chapters to explaining six such patterns and their triggers, being:

1. Reciprocation
2. Commitment and Consistency
3. Social Proof
4. Liking
5. Authority
6. Scarcity

What makes the book most interesting to me is that he shows each works by hijacking an otherwise highly-adaptive evolutionary program. The human tendency to follow these click/whrrr programs is actually very smart most of the time. The problem arises when a predator has eaten from the tree of forbidden knowledge and knows how to game them. Cialdini states:

“This feature [of click/whrrr program] is simultaneously its major strength and its major weakness…. It provides a convenient shortcut for determining how to behave but, at the same time, makes one who uses the shortcut vulnerable to the attack of profiteers who lie in wait along its path”

So how can we take advantage of these weapons of influence ourselves?

You thought this piece would apply the six weapons to influencing girls, didn’t you? Admit it! You’re a black-hearted rogue looking for any edge to get laid. But no. I’m occupying moral high ground so elevated that you can barely see me as I sit on a cloud in the stratosphere playing my harp. We are using Cialdini for the Light side of the Force. We are going to apply his weapons of influence to ourselves, to increase our likelihood of sticking to the path and completing our Player’s Journey. Settle in, grasshopper.

Me ruminating on daygame, yesterday

Reciprocation

This is the principle that if somebody does you a favour, you feel compelled to return the favour in order to balance the books, and to avoid being seen as a welcher. How can we turn this around so we give ourselves a favour and compel ourselves to return it to ourselves? Yes, that sounds tough just trying to write it.

One way is to reduce an outrageous demand to a more reasonable demand. This makes it a concession, and thus a favour.

Cialdini introduces the rejection-then-retreat tactic, which goes thus: A man entering into a deal has his desired outcome. So he initially makes far higher demands in order to anchor his counterparty to this outrageous number/term. He knows full well he’ll get rejected but it’s a ploy so he can then walk back from it and make a “concession” – which happens to end in the terms he is really aiming for from the beginning. It’s like Donald Trump** building the wall and expecting Mexico to pay for it – he can walk back a little and perhaps pay for it with US money but he still gets the wall.

Done skillfully, this triggers the click/whrrr program of “he made a concession to me, so I ought to make a concession to him”. How can we do this on ourselves? The two participants in your internal negotiation are your forebrain and hindbrain. The pre-daygame conversation usually goes like this:

Forebrain: Come on, daygame time. Let’s go out and hit on ten hotties. We need out 10+10+20 this week.
Hindbrain: No.
Forebrain: Come ooooooooooon! Please! We need this. Ten hotties.
Hindbrain: No. Let’s play Call Of Duty

And another daygame session is cancelled. You spend the rest of the afternoon earning killstreaks and feeling ashamed of yourself. Let’s rewrite that script for a happier ending.

Forebrain: Come on, daygame time. Let’s go out and hit on twenty hotties. This is going to be a big day. Only the hottest girls. Maybe we’ll do some three sets and girls in lingerie departments.
Hindbrain: Fuck no.
Forebrain: Look, we both want success here. I’m trying to reach a deal. What do you want?
Hindbrain: Call of Duty
Forebrain: Look, I’ll tell you what. I’m probably not supposed to do this and I definitely can’t write it in a field report, but how about this: this one time, as a favour to you, we’ll just hit on ten girls. They don’t even need to be hotties. Nice easy sets – solo dreamy girls with rucksacks. Rattle off ten of them – bam bam bam – and we’ll spend all evening on Call of Duty
Hindbrain: Promise?
Forebrain: Promise!
Hindbrain: Okay.

Commitment and Consistency

Cialdini found that people are more likely to follow through on a large commitment if they have already actioned a small one. Once the ball is rolling and they’ve become “the guy who does that thing” they continue to do so even after the initial logical reason for starting has been removed. People rationalise after the fact, so once they become committed to a path they’ll find all kinds of new reasons why that’s the right path to continue on down.***

Needless to say, this is very powerful in motivating your Player’s Journey. Once you get moving it tends to become self-reinforcing as the power of Commitment and Consistency works in your favour. Once you’ve normalised a regular daygaming plan – such as 30 approaches a week, an hour or two debriefing your sessions, and of course hitting the gym – it’ll stick. This is why self-help gurus often set ten / thirty / ninety day challenges. If you can will yourself through the “get the ball rolling” period you’ll form a habit and then consistency is on your side.

But what if we could reduce the amount of willpower necessary to form the habit? Wouldn’t that be good?

This is where the small commitment comes in. Have you ever felt too lazy to hit the gym and too daunted by the thought of all that exertion you’ll have to put in once you get there? That’s enough to make a man huddle back under his duvet and watch Tellytubbies. Usually the problem is caused by two things:

• The scope of the task is too large. You’ve defined “a gym workout” as being two hours of grunting and pain.
• The failure conditions are too harsh. You’ve defined “failure” as not completing the entire workout to the very best of your ability.

Isn’t it smarter to employ natural supports that obviate the need for willpower? Here are mine for the gym, when I’m wobbling: (i) put on my outdoor clothes and pack the gym bag anyway, because I know once I’ve started that fixed-pattern, the rest of it will click/whrrr into place (ii) tell myself “I’ll at least step into the gym and do a little stretching. If I still don’t feel like it I’ll go home” (iii) I have optimized my gym workout to hit everything I want it to in just four exercises a session, taking about forty minutes. I haven’t yet failed to do a complete workout under these conditions. The very same workout that I would’ve otherwise missed if I had to set my iron resolve without them.

Daygame is the same. The first thing to do is just put on your daygame clobber as if you were in high vibe and ready to get stuck in. Click/whrrr. Then tell yourself “I’ll at least step onto the streets and have a look around. Put myself in the mix”. Click/whrrr. Lastly, you’ll accept that just one opener counts as success for the session. Click/whrrr.

Cialdini found that public statements of intent were the most powerful for producing commitment and consistency. This is why blogging about daygame, or doing it with some friends, will help further. They’ll hold you accountable and you’ll feel extra incentive not to let them down as well as yourself. Blogging is particularly good because you can tell yourself “I’ll just pop out and do some sets, so I’ve got something to write about.”

Social Proof

The rule of social proof is that when faced with uncertainty over how to act in a novel situation, we instinctively look to other people in our immediate environment and take our behavioural cues from them. The more someone is like us, the more we are influenced.

This is why it’s good to read daygame blogs, watch other people’s infields, and to dip your toe into the daygame community of the area you’re working. The act of cold-approaching is a highly novel situation for the newbie daygamer so he will be naturally looking to others for behavioural cues. Even if you’re paralysed by approach anxiety it’s worth walking the streets a little and watching more intrepid guys opening. Sure, you’ll feel a pang of self-loathing for not approaching yourself but eventually that’ll build up and synergise with the sense of normalisation you feel from seeing men just like you cold approaching girls and doing fine.

Social proof is also the reason why students can often overcome approach anxiety on bootcamps as it just requires a push from the instructor to get the first nerve-racked student to open and suddenly all the rest want in on the act. It’s why pairing up with a wing slightly better than you is more helpful than winging with an advanced guy – the former is more like you, but good enough to get some decent approaches in and thus cajol you into doing so via social proof. (the latter is still very useful, just less so from a social proof point of view).

The other three Weapons of Influence will have to wait because I haven’t finished the book

If you think this blog post used someone else’s influence ideas brazenly, you should see my book.

* The junior school me actually took a photo of his high score and sent off to win this badge. I was very proud when my mum sewed it onto my jacket, unaware of the small commitment I’d been lulled into. I would consistently buy almost all Activision 2600 games such as Pitfall, Chopper Command, Megamania, and Enduro

** Peace be with Him.

*** I suppose my blog, business and lifestyle are one long rationalisation of an initially terrible decision to cut down on my video game consumption. Thanks for playing along and keeping my delusion bubble intact.