Krauser PUA

Kiev Diaries

November 19, 2015
krauserpua

“I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key” Winston Churchill, 1st October 1939

There was something in the air during my October trip to Kiev. A couple of months earlier I’d taken my first trip out and been reasonably impressed over the ten days – nice city centre architecture, lively atmosphere, pretty girls, decent reactions on the street. However I’d come away scratching another location off my quest for Pussy Paradise. In some respects it was like sitting in the front row of a Victoria Secrets catwalk show – just because hot lithe girls are parading a few feet away in tight clothes does not mean you’re any closer to fucking them than if you were in an igloo in Greenland watching it over a flickering TV signal. I fucked a very hot 17yr old but she was an extreme outlier. Eddie fucked a pretty girl and she was also an extreme outlier. My other (anonymous) buddy fucked a MILF and she was also an extreme outlier. Tom had been a few months earlier and done the same thing.

Sigh, yet another game of “find the outlier”.

An outlier, yesterday

Things were different in October. For a start it was cold and rainy, so the streets never had that lets-just-hang-out-because-it’s-fun-to-be-here vibe for the hot girls and the men who chase them. Most of the time the girls were hurrying to be somewhere and trying to keep their street time to a minimum. Gone were the summer days of girls just sitting around on kerbs eating ice cream, gazing absently into space. It also meant that being on the streets took a little out of us because it was so cold.

You’d think that would translate into a shitty daygame trip, but no. It was weird.

For some reason I’d accidentally sprayed on Pussy Catnip and my experience was like the fantasy of the Lynx deodorant advert. For the first five days I was constantly IOI’d. Any given day I’d get at least thirty of them, some of which were head-turning tongue-hanging-out mong looks from younger-hotter-tighter girls. Pretty much every set hooked strong and my phone rapidly filled up. I thought to myself, “Jesus fucking Christ, I’m going to smash this town!”

My new street game, infield photo

Alas, it was not to be. I was instead about to get a lesson in the iron self-discipline of Ukranian girls in sticking to their boyfriend script. If Warsaw/Krakow metrics applied, I think I’d have gotten laid every single night of my trip. Instead I banged two new girls. Both hot, both young but also both a pain in the arse to close*. So I was getting half of Pussy Paradise:

Warsaw: Few IOIs, few hotties, but all of them are dirty whores ready to go fast.
Ukraine: Many IOIs, many hotties, but all of them patient value-extractors taking it slow.

It was like getting served a cup of tea without the milk and sugar. What’s the point of that? [or for Americans, it was like getting peanut butter without the jelly]. Many thoughts went through my mind during the first week of the trip. Once the initial disbelief at my reactions died down, I thought:

This is what it’s like to be Steve Jabba, where literally half the girls in a town get wet just looking at you. I can pick and choose my opens according to who I like best and gives the strongest IOI. No need for a cold approach.
It wasn’t like this in August
Why can’t it always be like this? It’s so easy and so much fun.
What is different that’s causing such a change in pre-open IOIs and the solid hooks?

My brain was working overtime to figure out if there was a way to bottle the magic. By the second week when the flaking epidemic hit, I was wondering if there was in fact any magic to bottle, or if it was fools gold. I still don’t know the answer but I do know the reactions were so extreme and so consistent that there was something different going on. Now I must stress that my end-result laycount was no different to a normal trip. Two girls in three weeks. That’s at the low end of what I consider a decent trip. In Serbia and Belarus trips I’ve trebled that before without resorting to barrel-scraping. Here are my unstructured, unpolished thoughts on what might’ve been going on.

I’d gotten back into the gym and gained about eight pounds of muscle in 2015 while keeping body fat constant (a bit fat, but not fatter). While in August I had to wear t-shirts and shorts due to the heat, in October I could layer up with a leather jacket so I gained all the advantage of the muscle mass without any of the disadvantages of looking a bit thick around the middle. So, a girl’s initial once-over to clock my body shape was more favourable now.
My fashion was back to my Overkill style – leather bike jacket, open shirt, t-shirt, accessories, jeans, leather boots, hat. It really stood out against the local men. I literally didn’t see anyone who dressed anything like me. So, my shiniess worked better in cold weather.
My vibe was absolutely glowing. From the very first day I was in a great mood and the constant stream of good reactions and IOIs just snowballed it. I felt extremely attractive. It felt like walking into a nightclub knowing you’re the best-looking guy there. My cold approach game has been honed through five years of being sexually invisible until I open my mouth. It was nice to play the game on easy mode like a good-looking guy and my vibe responded to create a virtuous spiral.
My face and body language were extremely open and pure. I never felt like I was wearing a mask or trying to project a certain emotion. I just walked around feeling great and let that radiate outwards. It felt like I’d been carefully cleaning and polishing the lense on my movie projector for years and now it was time to spool the reels and see an image projected with perfect fidelity. Non-players don’t appreciate that this isn’t “being yourself” or “dropping game”. It’s the opposite. Rejecting game / behaviour modelling / identity change means you just lazily whip out your dirty cracked lense and expect the audience to be happy with the shitty image on screen.
I always followed the principles of my game, but I frequently abandoned the prescriptive model. I’d open girls by shouting at them from ten metres away: “Hey you! Miserable looking girl with the black coat. Stop!” (that was a catwalk model idate – but went nowhere). I’d open by pointing and not saying a word. I even opened three sets. Nothing mattered because I was in full flow and riffing off all the lessons I’d internalised.

But of course despite the unbelievable strength of my initial reactions, things dropped off sharply when it came to getting laid and I was right back to the usual results. Why is that? The major drop off came in two stages. Almost every girl replied to my feeler text but very few came out on dates. Frustratingly, many would keep up a fun flirty exchange, send me (not dirty) photos and then literally just not reply when I sent the date invitation. A few girls messaged me things like “I’m on Khreshatyk street now, let’s meet!” and then when I replied “Ok, outside McDonalds in 15 minutes?” they literally didn’t reply for several days. The other major drop-off came on the date when I went for a kiss. Incredibly, I only kissed four girls, and three of them ended up naked on my bed. The rest rebuffed the kiss.

My daygame face, October

This is what I think. Again, I’m not sure. The whole experience was like Bizarro World where nothing meant the same as it would mean in any other city I’ve been to.

I was plugging directly into a girls hindbrain on the street and frying her circuits. This meant I was getting massive attraction from No Girls just from the power of my presence. They’d love it, lap it up, and then return to No Girl status when they cooled down back home. As I write in Daygame Mastery, good street game will make timewasters out of No Girls that would simply blow out a guy with shit game. That’s why you should always be highly suspicious of men with high number-to-date ratios. They are doing pure Yes Girl filtering, punching below their weight.
My extreme shininess was inducing No Girls to let themselves come out for coffee Day 2 / idates as a diversion to their otherwise routine lives. Many of them had study, homework and part-time jobs so they really don’t do much else any given week. The girls would enjoy the date, thank me for coffee, and go back to their lives unfucked. They knew if they tried to extend it to a second date they’d have to start putting out because I’d subcommunicated my unwillingness to be strung along. So they cashed in their small winnings rather than risk getting fucked while trying to increase their stack of attention chips.
That same shininess and horniness is why the text exchanges dropped off. They loved the process until the moment they were forced to get off the fence. Being conflict avoidant, girls would rather ghost you than give an overt “no thanks” reply.
A bunch of girls were attracted to me and available but they wanted a boyfriend. I quickly formed the impression that Kiev girls are either gold-digging bitches (a tiny proportion overall, but vastly more than in any other city) or straight-laced village good girls. The date became a subtle frame-control battle where they held out for me to audition as boyfriend and when I refused, they disengaged because they’d rather have nothing than have casual sex with a stranger. It was all at a I-know-that-you-know level. I set out my stall and she decided the product warranty wasn’t comprehensive enough. I was unwilling to invest additional time in D3s, D4s etc because once the freshness of the first hour with a new girl wears off, dating bores me now. I’d rather just play a video game.

Kiev has a reputation for being a tough city to get laid in (for free). I can go along with that. Most reports are that you get a ton of harsh blow outs while filtering for the rare outlier Yes Girl. I can believe that too. It never happened to me but I saw it happen to most others. I think I reached a higher level of failure – almost non stop good reactions and getting my eventual “No” further down the line.

A typical reaction to my street stop

So, based on my two trips I’m rating Kiev about the same level as Belgrade in that it’s painful and demoralising for beginners (stick to Prague or Berlin guys), a ton of work for rare but decent reward for intermediates, and an addictive mirage for advanced guys who get to sit front row for the Victoria Secrets show close enough to smell their panties but not able to sample the goods as much as you think you’re going to.

I’ll solve the puzzle. For now I’ve opened the enigma and unwrapped the mystery, but the riddle remains.

* I define “pain in the arse to close” as “didn’t display willingness to jump into bed with me two hours after we met”. These days, if I get any kind of resistance to my escalation I switch off and lose interest. I can’t help it. I think it’s my subconscious trying to tell me to stop being a player. I’ll write about it sometime because I think this is probably the biggest negative impact on my 2015 results – I rarely give a shit about the girl in front of me and she smells it. While I still really enjoy the street (probably due to the constant novelty of each girl), everything else gets boring if it doesn’t go exactly my way on exactly my timetable. It’s probably some kind of notch-fatigue. Like Jimmy said to me recently, “Nick, you’ve fucked enough girls.”

Why are women a pain in the arse?

November 18, 2015
krauserpua

I’ve created a new post category of Mindwank. This one belongs there.

Dealing with women is often a pain in the arse. As men, our hormones compel us to seek out and try to fuck hot women. We develop our brains, create wealth, build bridges, develop art. We pacify nature and then build civilisation on top of it. Women, on the other hand, mostly just stand around, occasionally moving their womb from one place to another. In the interim, they bitch and moan.

A mobile womb, yesterday

Believe it or not, this is a perfect state of affairs. Without it, we wouldn’t have civilisation. We wouldn’t have feather duvets to sleep in, hot water showers to wake us up, or rich aroma coffee to properly wake us up. We owe our entire quality of life to women being stubborn lazy bitches and men being overly addicted to the slightest whiff of pussy.

Women are the problem and men are the solution.

Or, more correctly for seduction, women set the puzzle and the rewards go to the men who figure out the puzzle. If you can figure it out then – by default – you are worthy of the rewards. And if you can’t, then your DNA is worthless to the future of humanity. In this sense it’s factually correct to say that a man can be judged by whether hot women want to fuck him. It becomes more complicated when you consider how the puzzle is solved. To get this straight you have to understand the difference between totalitarianism and freedon, between dead and living, between Call Of Duty (single player) and Metal Gear Solid Phantom Pain. Yes, I warned you this is mindwank.

Think of how a CoD campaign works. You begin with a flashy opening scene of some bad guy fucking stuff up and giving you a goal (kill bad guy). You step into the shoes of a voiced cookie-cut character and then play a game of “follow the NPC”. Your HUD comes up and you are taken through a quick tutorial of “press L to sprint”, “press X to climb” etc and then the next six hours are one long corridor with periodic duck shoots. In gaming parlance we say it’s “on rails” because the game has decided what experience you will have and micro-managed it down to a series of set piece skirmishes. It’s like watching a movie and occasionally pressing X.

It’s fun but hugely contrived and limiting. Your character can’t vault over the low walls that form the boundaries of the playable area. You have to clear the area before the NPC will kick open the door to the next skirmish – a door that your character couldn’t open despite holding an RPG and several cakes of C4.

MGS:PP is an entirely different type of modern military shooter campaign. It relies upon “emergent gameplay”. That means it sets up the rules of its world, introduces you to a set of mechanics (e.g. how to sneak, how to aim), gives some objectives and then….. just leaves you to it. Go anywhere, do anything. Some enemy bases are too tough until you’ve researched better tech but you could still try to infiltrate them. Not a wise move, but you’re allowed to try. The real beauty of MGS:PP is that is never tries to get you back on track. You can sneak in or try all guns blazing – the enemy AI reacts accordingly by its own rules. Or you can sneak, say “fuck this” and start blazing. Usually pandemonium breaks out but it all follows the rules. The game doesn’t even force you to complete the objective – you might be tasked to steal a blueprint but you can just blow up their helicopters instead. You won’t get the set mission reward but you’ll still progress something.

Emergence, yesterday

In this sense CoD is a totalitarian, dead game. MGS:PP is a freedom-loving alive game. Both have their place depending upon your mood. Interestingly, CoD multiplayer is closer to MGS:PP in its role as a rule-bound sandbox that doesn’t try to dictate your actions.

This same tension between totalitarianism and freedom can be seen in political ideology. A philosophy teacher once said to me, “Nick, either you want people to be controlled or you don’t. That’s all it really comes down to.” I agree. One set of ideologies are designed to lock people down and control their daily lives – such as Planned Economies of the Marxist variant, or the thought- and speech-policing of our modern day SJWs. Other ideologies set up some mechanics and rules, then let you play in the sandbox.

The jocular saying is that, in England, “everything which is not forbidden is allowed”, while, in Germany, the opposite applies, so “everything which is not allowed is forbidden”. This may be extended to France — “everything is allowed even if it is forbidden” — and Russia where “everything is forbidden, even that which is expressly allowed”. While in North Korea it is said that “everything that is not forbidden is compulsory”

It’s the first and last which represent the extreme difference between freedom (England) and totalitarianism (North Korea). At least before Labour won their first election in my country. Once you look for it you see it everywhere. For example in martial arts you have the alive ones which set rules of illegal techniques and ways to win, then let you figure out your own answers – boxing, wrestling, BJJ, judo, sambo. Then you have the dead ones which tell you exactly what moves you must do and have judges score you on how well you do it – basically figure skating not fighting.

Now let’s pull this back to women and game.

Evolution is a freedom-based system. Nature sets rules on what is forbidden (death without reproduction) and then it’s a free-for-all for who can game the reward system to consume energy and stay alive long enough to pass on the blueprints. Pre-Darwin, philosophers couldn’t get their head around it. They thought each species had a prescriptive role like a citizen in North Korea allocated to either an office or the salt mines. Consequently their philosophical systems tended to be very large rulebooks as they tried to outline what script each role followed.

There is no spoon.

Likely location of spoon

Underlying freedom vs totalitarianism is a meta-level world view. Is the world a chaotic, ever-changing river or is it a fixed immutable rock? Capitalists believe the former and thus wealth is something that is created anew every day and the economy is a shifting array of preferences and alliances where you can strike it rich and then blow it all. They want to learn how to swim in the river and take advantage of changing currents. Communists believe the world is static and there’s a big pot of wealth out there in the world, that people and circumstances have no feedback loops, and once you establish a position you’ve got it forever. They want to climb up the rock and then sit on their preferred ledge forever.

As the wildly divergent fates of capitalist and communist nations shows, the communists are dead wrong. The UFC proved the dead martial arts were dead wrong. They are fighting nature every step of the way, demanding that the tide doesn’t come in. So it is with women and game.

Here’s an economy I planned earlier

Nature has decreed that women will be the puzzle and as men we must solve it. Nature does not hand us a script micro-managing how that must be done. The end justifies the means. If you have a system which gets you the hot pussy, then by default that’s good. It doesn’t matter how noble, clever or just your system is if women keep you locked out of pussy paradise. You failed. You’re wrong.

Throughout the ages, all kinds of strategies have worked. Be good-looking. Be rich. Be a victorious army. Be sneaky. Be a rapist. Be charming. As far as Nature is concerned, tying a woman up and raping her until pregnant solves the puzzle just as effectively as charming her knickers off and making her fall in love.

The point is not to give up game and start raping, but to accept that solving the puzzle is the priority. Losing beautifully is still losing. Winning ugly is still winning. To win you need the “freedom” meta-level world view.

Think of pick-up with a nature-based metaphor such as hunting or fishing and you’ll unlock your creativity and puzzle-solving skills.

Think of it like linear-programming and you’ll fossilize, wither and die.

It’s not easy because there’s something comforting about the linear-programming route. You can focus blindly on the process and your inputs, ignoring the shitty outputs. It feels like you have more of the game under your control than is really the case. In the real world, you’ll never control more than 20% of the process. The vast majority of factors determining if you lay a girl this week are completely outside your control.

“But Nick, Daygame Mastery is extremely micro-managed. Isn’t that a totalitarian system?” a troll cries.

Daygame Mastery is a deconstruction of my game. It says right there in the Introduction: I have written about what I do and what I think about when picking up girls. It’s my system. Other guys do daygame a different way. Mastery outlines the physics and the engineering behind what’s going on and then lays out hundreds of practical examples of how I operationalise the principles into specific actions. Your specific actions will differ, eventually.

Mastery’s examples will guide you through the Imitate and Assimilate phases, where you switch from your previous shitty system to my good system. At some point it clicks and you move into the Innovate phase where you fully grasp the emergent creative nature of solving the Woman Puzzle and figure out your way to play in the sandbox. In that sense Daygame Mastery is like those Prima strategy guides that give you the level maps, bestiaries and tables ranking the stats of all the weapons. When you’re good at the game you just refer back to it, you’re not a slave to it.

Women are a pain in the arse because they are supposed to be. They are the Dark Souls of humanity. And like the game, it often feels like they are stealing your humanity and rendering you hollow. Your job is to overcome the challenge.

Daygame Convalescence

November 12, 2015
krauserpua

Imagine you’ve just endured a few years working in the smog conditions of early-20th century London (and these pea-soupers continued well after the war too). Every morning upon waking you toss your alarm clock across the room, rise up to sit on the edge of your bed and begin coughing up phlegm. You shuffle across the linoleum floor into the shower and let the hot water take some of the edge off your early start. A glass of orange juice and a freshly-brewed coffee temporarily clear your persistent headache and you dress for work.

Closing the heavy wooden front door you step onto the street and breath in the damp air. Is it mist or smog that softens the distant buildings? It’s time to trudge to the Underground station and jostle through the crowd onto a rickety carriage, swapping bacteria with the other passengers.

A pea-souper

By lunchtime you scurry out because today you’ve got an appointment with the GP and the boss has let you take an afternoon’s leave. Sitting in the waiting room you see crying babies softly bounced on their mother’s knees, and an old couple patiently staring at the various information leaflets pinned onto the noticeboard by reception. The nurse calls you in and after fifteen minute’s tapping your chest, talking your blood pressure and shining a light into your ears and mouth the doctor gives his advice.

“You’ve got a developing case of Chodular Fever. It’s not far gone but I imagine you’ve already had trouble sleeping, frequent bouts of irritability, and unexplained periods of low mental function” he says.

Yes, you recognise the symptoms. You thought this was just a normal part of ageing in the modern world. The doctor pulls his notepad across and begins scribbling.

“I’m going to recommend you take a Euro Jaunt”

Stage Four Chodular Fever

Two weeks ago I was in Kiev with a pair of travel buddies (one of whom is on my latest podcast here). It was a blustery day so we had our jackets zipped and woolly hats on. As we walked through a park in front of Shevchenko university a thought occurred to me.

This is so pleasant. So much so that I could imagine a doctor recommending it as a convalescence holiday. We stopped at one of the many specialist coffee carts and ordered cappuccinos and while I made small talk with the young barista as he told me he’d recently been to New York, I let my eyes wander to the long rows of tall trees covered in yellow autumn leaves. My friend was at another coffee cart a few metres away chatting to a young university student he’d just stopped.

We took our coffees and walked back through the park to a small square full of retired old men in flat caps playing chess on specially-installed tables, their dozens of quiet conversations melding together into a low buzz. It’s nice to see the elderly getting out of their apartments and socialising around a shared passion. It was almost 3pm so I was able to pick a girl out of the rush streaming from the nearby Metro station to the university, hurrying to lectures. I don’t remember if I got her number.

I checked my pedometer and I’d already logged 8km walking and it would reach 15km by the end of the evening by which time the three of us were sitting in a quaint restaurant that looked like a 1960s Parisian cafe, working our way through bowls of the local borsch soup. We raised a toast to the Good Life.

It reminded me of the advice doctors would give back in the late-19th century onwards to city dwellers who were getting run down by city life. Britain had a whole network of spa towns, often in the mountains or by the seaside, where you could book in for a fortnight and let the worries of life fall from your shoulders. Fresh sea air, sunshine, walking, resting, sleeping, and of course sitting sipping coffee with friends as you watch the world go by. Perhaps meet a few like-minded souls.

A relaxing place to stay, yesterday

As my mind turned I thought back to the hit Nintendo DS game in Japan, Brain Training. The (psuedo)-scientific rationale trumpeted in the marketing was that solving the puzzles in the game would keep your brain ticking over and maintain cognitive function longer into old age. So the games activities were all chopped down into short exercises that could be rattled off on the train to work or short coffee breaks. The popular London equivalent was to take a sudoko or logic problems workbook with you on your commute.

Daygame is convalescence and brain-training combined.

What does my typical Euro Jaunt involve? The first thing is to get out of dodge and roll up into a new foreign town full of it’s own local quirks and charms. Almost always it’s got fresher air than London and a slower pace. There’s none of the crush that the average working Londoner endures every weekday. Once I’ve set my bags down and settled into a daily pattern it goes like this:

Wake up whenever I damn well please, after my body has decided it’s fully rested. I suffer none of the persistent sleep deprivation that is the base state for a city worker.
Open my front door and I’m immediately in the mix without any kind of commute. I walk where I want under my own steam without contending with ticket machines, virus-bearing commuters, or delayed trains.
Roll up at my favourite cafe a few hundred metres away and work my way through a (very) late breakfast of orange juice, coffee and pasta. At some point my friends arrive and our morning routines converge.
Once we feel like it, take a walk. Chat, enjoy the atmosphere of the streets, and pick off girls as and when we feel like it.

Freedom has become almost tangible, like every breath of air and every step forwards. It’s all so pleasant. By the end of the day we’ve been in the open air for hours, walked many kilometres, and done an extended cardio routine without even noticing. Often my feet will ache a little and it’s not until I check my pedometer that I realise I’ve done another urban hike. This is the kind of patient low-intensity exercise that men will drive into the countryside once a month to get. My legs feel supple and strong. My posture is good because the whole time I’ve been aware of it. It’s the opposite of being chained to a cubicle in an artificially-lit office with the nearest window ten metres away.

That’s the convalescence but how about the brain training?

Imagine doing twenty engaging and fascinating crossword puzzles over a few hours. That’s how your brain is working when doing twenty sets with girls you are trying to fuck. You’re trying to calibrate her reactions, engage your creative juices, and logically work through a model. And then in the time between sets you can comfortably flip into a meditative state of mindfullness. Twenty times over a few hours.

After a fun but disciplined session of daygame you can feel drained. By 8pm when you raise the glass of your first beer to toast your friends you’ve earned it. Your brain wants rest. I sometimes return from a Euro Jaunt feeling like a boxer the day before a big fight. My body and mind are dialled in and respond with lightning speed. Gone is any trace of slothfulness, inertia or lack of focus.

Me, 8pm

It’s a common joke that carrying your shopping home is “training”. Walking up the stairs because the escalator is broken is “training”. We laugh because it’s true. We all know that the lifestyle of convenience is a fools errand. A man must engage his body and his mind on a daily basis to remain alert and alive.

Daygame is not about lying on the sofa right-swiping Tinder. It’s not about pouring toxins down your throat in a noisy smoky bar full of braying asses. It’s not about outlasting the other chodes at 5am in a nightclub.

Once you’ve overcome the anxiety of it, daygame is an intrinsically healthy activity. Just as small children don’t realise that running around playing tag is training their lungs, muscles, coordination and alertness it’s easy for us daygamers to forget that no matter what the day returns us in phone numbers or dates, it always gives us convalescence and brain training.

Is Steve Jabba Britains Biggest Sexist? (per BBC Three he is)

November 3, 2015
krauserpua

Readers will remember it was BBC Three who cancelled a proposed daygame TV show with me the evening before filming was due to commence. They wanted me to coach their teenage star in how to pick up women on the streets of London. I write books teaching men how they can pull girls way out of their class and I was ready to prove it for the television cameras. Everything was ready to go then they had politically correct hissy fit and pulled the plug.

I’ve already proved it before – my video instructional Daygame Overkill shows men how I regularly pick up and fuck hot young women even though I’m an average-looking 40 year old man. That online program is available here and includes ten videos of me picking up and seducing young women right before your eyes. Then I explain how you can do it too. No money, no bullshit. You don’t even need good looks.

So it’s with much amusement I see BBC Three has a new feminist program called Britains Biggest Sexist that aired tonight. My long-time friend and co-writer Steve Jabba is featured picking up and banging a hot Spanish bird. Go check out the link, it’s Steve at his best!

Click to buy Steve’s book

Naturally, Steve and I wrote a book on just how to do this. Steve’s mindsets make him a universally attractive man and we decided to write a book on how you to can develop the mindsets that will give you a good shot at hot young birds.

If you’ve decided you’ve wasted enough time fucking about on Tinder or getting drunk in bars and now you’d rather just learn how to pick up girls on the street, have a look at the sidebar to this page (or scroll down to the bottom if you’re reading on a smartphone). I can get you started from just £10. And if you want to leap in with both feet try my new Black Book video seminar that explains exactly how to pick up women, step by step

P.S. Richard from Street Attraction is in the BBC Three Britain’s Biggest Sexist show too.

Daygame Overkill – The Album

October 13, 2015
krauserpua

Those of you who bought the Black Book will have noticed a little freebie tacked on, representing half of the vanity project I busied myself with when bored in Newcastle a couple of months ago. I figured if Dr Dre and Jay Z can pump out music without having a shred of musical talent, perhaps I can too. So I produced some tongue-in-cheek daygame songs in a variety of genres.

Don’t get excited – they are all shit.

Still, it’s fun and it’s free. The second half of my album is now a freebie with Daygame Overkill. All existing members can click on the extra tab that now appears when you log in. Enjoy!

Value-added, yesterday

Steve Jabba’s Purple Pill

October 12, 2015
krauserpua

I was asked in the comments of my previous post whether I could address my areas of disagreement with Steve Jabba, specifically:

“Nick, could you please write an article on Steve Jabba’s purple pill beliefs and mindsets and where some things he says aren’t true which if you have seen his YouTube videos know DO exist. I don’t think it’s fair you point out flaws in other people but not Steve Jabba just because he’s your mate.”

Rather than bury it in the comments, it’s probably worth giving my thoughts a more prominent platform. Ok, my main area of disagreement with Steve is simple: My neck is proportionately bigger than his, where as a percentage of height, weight or ratios. But seriously, let’s first recap my working definition of the Purple Pill given earlier: “a marketing ruse to use the credibility of red pill truths but water them down with blue pill illusions so that the listener isn’t required to stare into the abyss.”

My neck, in Steve’s nightmares

The key component of the Purple Pill is not too much reality. We’ll have a little reality so it feels edgy but not too much to make us feel like we’re on the wrong track. Kind of like a girl wanting her boyfriend to have a motorbike but no STDs or criminal record. While I often tell Steve he’s only loosely connected to reality, there are two caveats to that:

He’s written about solipsism before here. The jist is that selectively amplifying or filtering out certain parts of reality can strengthen your frame and improve your success. It’s important to do systematically in the right direction in order to shape your reality, rather than from a position of fear (and thus avoidance).
He’s written about reality before here. Much of successful pick-up is about confronting reality head on and then figuring out how to adapt. Cold approach forces the world to give you accurate feedback on your value and your abilities. There’s no hiding place on the street.

Putting these two together is what some noobs / intermediates struggle to get their head around because they appear to be contradictory. Are you telling me to avoid reality and remain delusional, or to face reality head-on warts and all? Um…… both. You must go out and trigger real feedback and you must process the lessons the world gives you – so, go cold approach. However you must then use that feedback as fuel to power the reconstruction of your identity and as the armour plating on your frame. So having absorbed the reality at the first pass, you can twist reality a little on the second pass.

Think of it like quarantine in a sea port of old. All your new experiences on the street arrive at your boundary control and are placed in quarantine for examination. You get a good look at them but they are not yet allowed into the general population. After some careful consideration the experiences that will enrich your frame are welcomed in and given the red carpet walk. The undesireables are shot in the head and dumped into the sea.

Basically, how we should be handling the migrant crisis.

That outlines what I think some might think of as the reality-denying element of Steve’s “purple pill” writing. It gets quite a long treatment in his book Primal Seduction so there’s a lot more nuance and practical advice on how to do the filtering process.

Secondly, Steve is often accused of the purple pill by way of his pedestalising women and being something of a vagina-worshipper under the cloak of “loving women” (the first of the Eleven Cornerstone Characteristics that forms the centrepiece of Primal Seduction). Ok, let’s address that. This one is easy to get for men who’ve already fucked a ton of women but really tough for those who haven’t. You have to feel it deep in your bones through reference experiences.

Let me tell you the story of losing my virginity. I was sixteen years old and met a girl at a Sepultura concert in Newcastle one night. She was the friend of a girl who was dating my best friend and those two had met a couple of weeks earlier at a Metallica concert. The girls lived about 150 miles away and were here for the weekend, just for the gig. The concert finished and my girl agreed to come home with me (parent’s house) so we were waiting in the centre of Newcastle at 2am for my dad to collect us in the car. One thing led to another and I ended up fucking her in a back alley behind Fenwick’s department store.

My first SNL and first public sex

It was horrendous sex, because I had no idea what I was doing. I remember my biggest surprise was how hot, wet and tight she was. My previous “experience” with naked women had been entirely from looking at soft-porn magazines (this was 1991). I knew how they looked but it had never once occured to me how they feel. It never crossed my mind that the vagina isn’t really a hole but is actually a pulsating group of muscles and thus when you stick your dick in it doesn’t feel empty.

Why do I tell you something so vulgar? Because life is full of many situations where being on the outside does not prepare you for what’s on the inside. Another example is when I went to live in Okinawa for a year when I was 24. I’d only ever seen tropical countries on TV and in magazines where they look beautiful. It never occured to me how it feels to be there. The first thing I noticed is they are very itchy places because of the mosquitos and beetles. It’s also very tiring being out in the sun without a bottle of water. Those things surprised me.

Itchy, yesterday

So it goes with hot girls.

Most men are intimidated by hot girls. We see them as unattainable treasure troves of hotness value and our hormones compell us to pine after them. Even when you get inside some pretty girls, you’re an outsider for the hotter girls. Being on the outside prevents you feeling the reality of being an insider. The best way to feel an insider is to actually fuck and date a hot young girl. Preferably over an extended period of time. Then you get a window into the girl’s life, and how she feels. The first thing that surprised me was she has her own problems.

I’d always thought of women as a problem for me to solve. It was a shift in reality to realise women also have men problems they must solve. It’s like sitting in your WWI trench shitting yourself at how organised the German lines looked, and then suddenly being allowed to sit in those trenches and realise they are shitting themselves at how strong the English lines look. Once you’re inside you get past the fronting and see the real chaos and held-together-with-spit-and-glue nature of people’s lives. Those of you who worked in shops will know the staff experience differs somewhat from the customer experience.

Steve has fucked a lot of hot women so he’s an insider. He’s seen how fragile they can be the next morning as they try to correct their makeup before taking the walk of shame to work. He knows they are often scared (or excitable) little girls in a hot woman’s body, trying to understand and marshall their value while under assault from hundreds of predators trying to relieve them of that value. Often those girls look at men and their insecurities surface, wondering “how can he be so confident? why can’t I be as creative and impressive as him?” Even now it surprises me when I’m on a date with a hottie and she does something that lets slip that she feels like she’s the lucky one to be there.

I think this empathy – which is commonly deeply felt by players with 100+ notch counts of hot young women – is mistaken as pedestalisation by the men who are on the outside. No, we don’t think women are better than men, or special snowflakes. No, we don’t think they lack agency or should receive a “pussy pass” for bad behaviour. No, we don’t think the family court system or job market is fair on men.

We just have a very initimate experience of seeing how these girls live and how they too have problems. You can’t help but get a bit of empathy for them. That empathy is much harder if you’re still at the stage of getting “bitch face” in your nightclub opens. There’s a long chapter in Primal Seduction about empathy and emotional sensitivity.

Socrates: A Personal Map Of The Sexual Marketplace

October 10, 2015
krauserpua

Here are my thoughts on a recent video making the rounds. I do suggest you watch it as the guy has put a lot of effort into building his theory and then figuring out how to present it clearly. He’s offering value and it is worth trying. However, I think he makes some serious miscues – mainly because of who he is and who he’s talking to. Like Jack Nicholson’s famous line to Tom Cruise: “You can’t handle the truth!” It’s a poster boy for the Purple Pill (a marketing ruse to use the credibility of red pill truths but water them down with blue pill illusions so that the listener isn’t required to stare into the abyss)

So I’m going to skip over the stuff he gets right (which everyone reading this blog already knows and is already amply discussed in my own Personal Map Of The Sexual Marketplace talk with Tom Torero) and fisk the bits I think he gets wrong.

The 21 Convention has always been the Chump Convention. A room full of credible chumps lectured to by a stageful of posturing pseudo-intellectuals and PUA fakers. So, it’s with a shivering unease that I considered giving ninety minutes of my life to watching one of their speakers following a recommendation in the comments. I first skimmed through, clicking along the ninety-minute bar to see if it looked interesting. I’ve been burned way too many times into wasting my time on rubbish PUA nonsense (the brown Wayne brothers, I’m looking at you).

On walks a fat bald guy with bad fashion against a David DeAngelo type background. “Hi, my name is Socrates.”

I initially suspect he’s identifying more with the philosopher than the footballer, and that it’s hardly a modest start either way, but his bio says it’s actually his birth name. Okay, can’t hold that against him. Nonetheless he comes across rather pompous, like a Blue Pill Rollo – this will turn out to be closer to the truth than I first imagine. I’m not really against a bit of pomp in a public speaker (I do like irrationally confident people) but I do find myself asking “What’s his credibility?” I don’t actually know the answer to that. He just doesn’t feel credible. An armchair philosopher.

Nick, don’t jump to conclusions, I tell myself. Give him a chance. His ideas might be good enough to render such initial impressions meaningless. His first slide is a picture of some beta chump kissing some reasonably pretty girl, like the poster photo for a Hollywood rom-com. Right from one minute in he’s setting the prize as a monogamous relationship. Okay, that’s setting the bar low. “This isn’t something easily acheived…. You have to find a partner willing to commit to this.” O…..kay.

As I find over the remaining minutes, the purpose of his talk is to re-affirm to the audience what Rollo calls men’s burden of performance. A man must work hard to earn his right to intimacy. Every day. Sustained every day as a process requiring agency.

We then begin on the meat of the talk, outlining the sexual marketplace and the language continues to confuse. I’m not against a bit of intellectual mind-wank but you’ve got to go somewhere with it. This starts off heavy with the mind-wank and needlessly verbose. He’s just telling us the obvious, dressed up in latin-derived unusual words. It’s just S&R value from Mystery Method made opaque. I can save you the first hour with one sentence: Figure out if you need to boost either your alpha or beta traits, and then do so.

Socrates defines alpha as the traits we players generally consider as “sexiness”, which I agree with. However he wants to sell “provider” / sucker traits too because he’s in the Chump Convention and that’s what his audience wants to hear. So most of the next hour is spent finding ways to redefine the attractive men having sex with hotties as somehow limited or damaged, so his audience can feel superior with their chump traits.

For example he brings out the male-dom/fem-sub dynamic and the importance of conflict in nature as we all struggle to survive and replicate. Great, I agree. But then he poo-poos it as not being a nice place to be. Well, the world is struggle. He knows the chodes in the audience don’t want conflict and dominance, they want to be told there’s still a place for unicorns and rainbows. So he introduces the concept of virtue. This is a go-to throughout the talk to baby-talk the chumps.

“Nature’s a bitch. Nature’s a deadly violent place” he says and I agree. But I don’t agree that “the people who live on this domain are equally brutish and violent.” No. Human tribes co-operate into win-win behaviours in order to lift themselves out of it and create stability. That’s also pretty well established in both the biology literature and the game theory literature. Pretty much everyone has these latter traits, except for the small number of people with outright behavioural disorders. He contrasts nature along the x axis with civilisation up his y axis. That’s where virtue resides.

It’s still very wordy. Simple anglo-derived words are not used when there’s an unweildy latin-derived one that could replace it. I appreciate his wish to stablise language and be precise but it’s sounding little different to the 1950s functionalist sociology – an empty structure of interconnected words devoid of real meaning. The power of the logic comes from it’s tautological nature of carving up a chessboard that only dimly resembles the battlefield it’s meant to represent.

He’s pushing strongly that the “vertical domain” of civilisation is where you have to live, because it’s virtuous. And here we are getting to the main limiting factor of the model – he’s feeding the chodes’ desire to use virtue as a cloak to disguise their low SMV and inability to compete.

Beta traits are NOT virtue. To say they are is a sleight of hand. Beta is SMV failure. Beta is sacrificing yourself for the team because you have to. Hot young women only care about alpha traits. Beta traits exist in another dimension entirely and only become useful in preparing the beta male as the parachute for a woman hitting the Wall. Presenting this vertical domain as a component of SMV is pushing water uphill, literally in his graph. More muddying of waters follows.

“Men and women equally display alpha traits.” I know he is precisely defining his version of alpha for the purposes of the talk, but that’s just misleading. There is no alpha in the female side. Just replication value, which is mostly youth and hotness. It’s wrong to say Beta traits are what makes the world safe to raise families. Alphas are leaders who organise and bring the group together to pacify the land and defend it from outside invaders. Think Donald Trump and immigration. Alpha is inherently important to the whole tribe’s ability to make the world safe to raise families, which is why the whole tribe doesn’t just tolerate alphas but it follows them. Betas don’t have a monopoly on it.

His high beta / low alpha guys have a strength per his formulation: teamwork, stablity, handling relationships etc. I think that’s baby-talking his audience of chodes who reside here. Really, they aren’t there due to strengths, these are just compensations for overall weakness. Team Beta pulls together. Really the beta traits he’s describing as strengths are co-dependence and people-pleasing – weaknesses in the SMP (even if they can be strengths in nation building at times).

His advice is to build everything up so you move yourself towards the top-right quadrant. It’s kinda true that if you’re high in Y (beta) then shifting along right-wards with more X (alpha) is the path to success. What’s not true is that people high in X need to add Y. If you’re already strong it’s bad advice to introduce weakness. I get to this in a minute.

17 minutes in he starts mapping familiar territories to their places on the graph, correctly identifying the friendzone. The problem is that this graph requires the friendzone to occupy one location. The reality is the friendzone is relative to the quality of the girl you’re chasing, your competition, her preferences, and her position in the life cycle. It’s more dynamic than a simple category. In his defence, that’s bloody hard to represent on a graph so I’ll give him a pass. While it’s true that you can always stay out of the friendzone, it’s also true that often you do so by never talking to the girl again rather than by fucking her.

19 minutes in he defines high SMV as “emptiness and charm” and puts it as fuck buddies. This is more sleight of hand, trying to bring virtue in to an SMV calculation. This is the centrepoint of selling his presentation to the weaselling chodes. Women really don’t care about virtue. I’m reminded of Dalrock’s post here:

“this paradigm is almost certainly crucial to his friend’s view of himself as a man with a high Sexual Market Value (SMV) and especially Marriage Market Value (MMV). The twisted thinking goes like this:

– Women are attracted to good and noble men.
– I am better and more noble than other men.
– Therefore I am more attractive than other men.

There is of course one small problem with this line of reasoning, which is that the women around Hank’s friend aren’t acting in a way that would suggest that they find him attractive. At the same time, the women around Hank’s friend are demonstrating attraction for unworthy men. This must mean that less worthy men than Hank’s friend are tricking women, essentially impersonating him. These fakers are getting in the way of women realizing how attractive he really is.”

I think this is where I really disagree. Socrates wants to make the real high-SMV men into sociopaths and psychopaths in order to clear them out the way of the mid-SMV men he wants to elevate into their position. “These are dangerous individuals. I’m not kidding.” he warns.

Ok, I think, he’s never fucked a hot girl. Men who fuck hot women don’t feel the need to disparage the other men who do. They “get it”. They know all women like sex and all will sometimes have casual sex.

The individualist Alphas are not pulling their weight for Team Beta and so he’s calling them genetically damaged: “They can’t help themselves.” I think there’s a tell here about not understanding Game. He’s talking like men only get laid off the back of physical characteristics and dominance – Game is all dark triad and looks. After briefly saying the alphas are charming he later acts like they are socially awkward (putting the “awkardness zone” as the X-axis equivalent of the Y-axis “creepy zone”)….. okay. He later says these people need to learn pro-social behaviours to move themselves further into success.

No, they just need to change objectives – they aren’t lacking the skills.

So he’s subtly letting his chump audience position themselves above these high-SMV alphas. How very gamma. As if getting casual sex with hot girls is evil. With those pesky alphas neutered Socrates can move on to describe his happy place, the dating zone. That’s the happy place because ultimately he’s selling try-hard monogamy to gamma chodes. “This is the natural position of mankind” he stastes and therefore he has to define everyone outside the happy place as damaged. He just doesn’t get r/K as permanent and fluctuating strategies.

Up towards the top-right of the graph – high enough to be badass but not so high as to be unattainable – is the “marriage potential” zone. I wondered if the marriage potential area is so small, how come most people in the history of the West managed to get there? And why is he selling marriage as the goal to a room of men when surely it’s women who are desperate for the ring? It’s because in Socrates’ world the man has a burden of performance and he’s raising the next cohort of suckers.

“If you commit outside this range, you are betraying virtue.”

I press on. I think fundamentally his problem is he’s got a purity fantasy: “I’m here to shame”. He doesn’t get that casual sex is fun and consensual, that it can occur between emotionally balanced people who do it because they like it, rather than from personal dysfunction. That’s not allowed because then the virtue sleight of hand loses it’s power. If you want to tell people to be virtuous, great. Do so. But don’t tell them being virtuous raised your SMV. It doesn’t.

The talk is not all bad, mind. He’s right about where creepy and awkward are located. He’s half-right about creepy is an obstacle right at the beginning of your journey – yes, but only once you start hitting on girls or trying to be taken seriously. You can actually do the groundwork of gym / fashion and general social skills withouth encountering creepy. That only comes once you want to take some value back.

It’s a conceit 29 minutes in that the people having lots of casual sex want to enter the dating zone but are frozen out by lack of beta traits. No, only the women might be frozen out. Men who are having sex can enter the relationship zone any time they damn well please. But he can’t say that because that’s admitting the central truth the chodes don’t want to hear: the guys having sex have higher SMV in every way. All the stuff chodes have (money, listening skills etc) isn’t relevant. The chodes don’t have a single advantage. In the SMP they are simply lower value in every way.

“The work they [casual sex guys] have to do is the same as the other side [the chodes]”. Really? C’mon let that sink in and ask if it sounds convincing or if it’s just part of selling system to chumps.

You can’t derive ought from is, but he’s using ought to hamstring his model of is. He’s smart to say nature locates narcissism in teenage because it’s effective to breed and that’s when you need it. So what’s the obvious lesson? He wants you to fight it. Not harness it, but fight it. I disagree.

This talk is clearly to Team Beta on advising them how to be better betas.

33 minutes in he’s wrong. Hot girls with limited beta traits can get relationships, they just have to revise expectations towards thirstier guys or seek out chumps. And really, “don’t be a cunt” isn’t such a high bar for their beta traits. There are also different niches of relationship, from intimate soul mates to kept woman that a hot-but-annoying girl can use.

Socrates needs to paint alphas with low-beta as damaged. Really he’s talking about behaviour disorders rather than a lack of skill. He uses War Machine as an example – a total knacker (not a “world class MMA fighter”) who is “banging porn stars left and right” – so a bottom feeder. That’s not a guy with high-alpha. War Machine is just a roid monkey with issues. Ironically, he’s right that War Machine had no ground game – but it’s true literally, not in his sense. It’s an enduring manosphere myth that jail is full of alphas. No, it’s full of imbeciles.

By forty minutes I had to turn off. My impression is it’s a half-decent exposition of manosphere truisms twisted to make the Chump Convention crowd feel good with a purple pill. Did I miss something in the rest of the talk? Really, maybe the second half resolves all my issues. I’d like to know, but can’t be bothered to watch it.

Womanizer’s Bible # 12 – The Bookish Introvert Virgin Girl

October 8, 2015
krauserpua

Here’s another podcast, this time where Eddie and I discuss a type of girl frequently encountered in daygame.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47v9rRpe5To&h=480&w=640

Meltdowns are a feature not a bug

October 6, 2015
krauserpua

Nervous breakdowns are pretty unpleasant things to be in, but like most things in life they carry lots of benefits. I remember once when Colin was giving a talk to all the freaks of the London Seduction Society he said “This is a hard road and it’ll take at least two years to get good. The only people I know who got good quicker went through unbelievable mental pain.”

He’s right. There’s a fairly predictable path of pain in game because ultimately we are talking about a complete overhaul of your behaviours, beliefs and identity.

Cautious hope -> Optimism -> Hubris -> Vague Unease -> Crash -> Recovery

As ever I’m talking mostly about my own experience but I’ve seen this pattern among all the top guys on their way up. And seeing as few of them ever settle at a given plateau (we’re all strivers) then really this is a recurring cycle. When you take your first step in game you are unwittingly commiting yourself to a complete overhaul. You will eventually become the cool charismatic guy. Unfortunately there’s a major obstacle standing in your way:

Your ego.

Your ego is a fixing agent, as I’ve written about before. It’s the force that prevents you being tossed around like a leaf in a gale. It’s what gets your hackles up when someone’s trying to clown you and take what’s yours. Your ego is the force that says “I’m just fine like I am, thank you very much, and I’m not changing.”

A bug(s). Me, May 2015

Therein lies the rub for the aspiring player who wants to transform himself from Me v1.0 into Me v2.0. The ego will resist him every step of the way. Much of the “taking action” side of the player’s journey is about harnessing your forebrain’s reserves of mental discipline in order to achieve your forebrain’s goal of getting better with women. All of the negative emotions you feel (principally the approach anxiety and the avoidance weasels) are your hindbrain’s attempt to harness your reserves of emotion in order to thwart your forebrain and to instead achieve the hindbrain’s goal of staying exactly where you are.

So every aspiring player is being double-teamed by his ego and hindbrain. That’s where all the cognitive dissonance and badfeelz comes from. It’s tough. It’s also why most successful players have developed masterful emotional control and forebrain discipline.

Normal men might scoff when you say daygame is difficult. “Dude, all you’re doing is talking to women. It’s not like being in a WWI trench.” They don’t get that the conflict is fully internal and your brain is essentially in a state of perpetual Syria-like civil war. It’s about way more than knobbing some sloppy tarts – you are fighting for your destiny of what kind of person you wish to be. This is why every aspiring player has – and needs – periodic meltdowns. They occur when both sides of your brain have exhausted themselves fighting the daily war of attrition. There’s the last final battle and then like a cataclysmic shock both sides collapse. Both sides wave the white flag and you crash.

It’s awful when it happens. Sometimes it’s the death of hope. Other times it triggers hours of existential angst as you go through a long dark night of the soul. You have to remind yourself that your current emotion is not “you”, it’s just a phase. Your life is still exactly the same as it was two days ago, two weeks ago, two months ago.

Remind yourself this is a necessary creative destruction because your meltdown results in a rare opportunity: Your ego has died. It’ll respawn soon but for a precious few days the hindbrain is compliant. All those beliefs and reference experiences that you’ve tried to embed into your hindbrain so that you can feel (not merely intellectually recognise) the player mindset – the hindbrain absorbs them.

A meltdown, yesterday

Every time I’ve had a meltdown, I’ve emerged stronger and closer to the man I wish to be. The calibre of my game always stepped up a level and I felt like my inner game house had been upgraded from hay to wood, then wood to brick and so on. Ultimately, your subconscious is looking out for your best interests. It lets you feel the optimism and hubris so you can go out and accumulate reference experiences, then it lets your hindbrain fight a weasel-based counterattack so you feel unease, and then it throws you both off a cliff and triggers the meltdown.

If you’re a normal guy who wants a normal life, nervous breakdowns are to be avoided. However, if you’re a normal guy who wants to become a player, you have to embrace them when they come. They are not a sign of failure – though they’ll definitely feel that way when they happen. Just remember you are not your emotions and this is the necessary bankruptcy in order to free up the capital to be redeployed into a more efficient enterprise. Your ability to embrace, ride out and then recover from meltdowns is a strong meta-level predictor of how good you’ll get at game.

Cold approach is inefficient

October 5, 2015
krauserpua

Brad is sitting on a plush leather sofa in his flashy bachelor pad in the hippest part of town. His eyelids droop as he pours himself a slug of 20-year Scottish whiskey that cost £100 for the bottle. It’s worth it. Damn fine whiskey. He swills the brown liquid around the glass, revelling in the crackle and pop coming from the ice cubes.

Ah, this is the life!

He’s tired because he just finished another tough ten hour day at the law firm. He’s put in a solid four years at Saul White & Pinkman Associates. That’s on top of the three years at his training firm. Brad just hit 32 so he’s in the prime of his life. He’ll still make it to the gym tomorrow morning. He’ll still measure out all his supplements and weigh his food. A shot of whiskey won’t put a dent in his rock hard body. He’s been training five years now and looks great. Not quite a six pack but he’s pretty buff. Brad prides himself on his mental discipline and ability to carry through on a personal commitment to his lifeplan.

As he’s reading through the internet, he’s nodding his head. Satisfied. He’s reading City Alpha Lifestyle blog and there’s an article: 5 Reasons You Ain’t Alpha. He chuckles as he realises the first four reasons don’t apply to him. He’s buff. He’s got money. He’s dominant in his social circle. He’s wearing good clothes.

Unfortunately it’s that last reason that does apply and it bothers him: He hasn’t fucked many hot women.

Well, how could he? He’s been working sixty hour weeks most of the last ten years. When the weekend finally rolls round he’s just going to cool bars with his buddies. The career chicks who go there aren’t much to look at (or talk to). Most of his spare time is in the gym, or reading motivational material. There’s not really any time or opportunity to meet girls. The only hot girls he sees are walking down the street or sitting having coffee – and how’s he supposed to talk to them? I mean, what do you say?

It’s not so bad though. He hasn’t been truly single for more than a few months in all these years. He always seems to find his way into a relationship – at a party, at dance class, at a business trip – and the girls are quite pretty. He’s even had a few adventurous one-night stands. Indeed he’s fucked maybe twenty girls, more than double most of his friends. It’s just a shame they nearly all insist on fancy restaurants, making him wait, and then those interminable weekends in the parks, beaches and Ikea.

“No worries”, Brad thinks smugly. “I’m entering the prime of my life – Rollo told me so – so at some undefined point in the future the hotties will flock to me.”

****************************************************

Adam is also sitting on a sofa tonight but it’s worn and squeaky. His small loft conversion is in a grungier part of town but that’s where the best nightlife is, so it’s exactly where he wants to be. His eyelids droop as he pours himself a slug of Jack Daniels that cost £25 for the bottle. It’s nice. He sets the glass down and lights a joint, rolling the smoke around his mouth before inhaling it to his lungs.

Ah, this is the life!

He’s tired because he just woke up. He works nights mostly and sometimes early mornings, depending on the shifts at the bar-tending job and the warehouse job he juggles to meet rent. He’s 32 and has lived in the area most of the last ten years. So he knows everyone and has a bit of a rep as one of the cooler local guys. It’s a late shift tomorrow so he’ll be working on his music all afternoon. He started learning guitar as a teenager and after fifteen years cycling in and out of various punk, indie and now rock bands he’s pretty good at it. His tattoos are still pretty cool and it doesn’t matter much that his body is turning to skinny-fat at a young age.

He’s also reading through the internet, nodding his head in satisfaction. He’s reading Dangerous Horizons blog and there’s an article he likes: 5 Reasons You’re Not Cool. He chuckles as he realises the first four reasons don’t apply to him. He’s badass. He’s got a big social circle. He doesn’t answer to anyone (except his bosses, but those jobs aren’t so important to him). He is the life of the party. Unfortunately it’s that last reason that does apply and it bothers him. He stares at it again and again, trying to figure out why:

You don’t get to date and fuck the girls you like.

Hmmmmmm. What’s wrong with that statement? Adam does a mental check. “I’ve fucked 160 girls” he counts, but then he adds “but most of them were pretty grotty.” Then his eyes light up. “That said, Talisa was hot. And Sophie. And Angela” and there’s a faint murmur in his heart as he recalls some nights of fantastic sex. The lights fade when he thinks “but they just chose me and I took what I was given. I wish that would happen more.”

“And Talisa was a fucked-up BPD loon” he remembers, and shudders.

He’s done well though, he reminds himself. Much much better than most people. Okay, so he’s completely sacrificed any chance of making money and living comfortably in his middle age. Okay, so he’s never going to be truly famous and be an alpha like Leonardo DiCaprio or Keith Richards – guys who truly do date and fuck whoever they like. And his tattooed bartender schtick will be decreasingly cool as he ages and all those nights maintaining the hip social circle will start to wear on him. But he’s had lots of fun and there’s still lots more fun to be had.

****************************************************

Brad and Adam are pretty happy with their lives. Years ago they plotted an “in” to women and then dedicated themselves tirelessly to it. Adding it all up, one way or another it’s been nigh on seventy hours a week each, for fifteen years. But that’s fine, because the “lifestyle” is paying off.

Simultaneously, ten miles apart, they both set down their whiskey glasses and stumble across the same article on a little-known site called krauserpua.com. They have the same instinctive reaction deep in their gut best described as “have I missed a trick?”. That gnawing fear recedes as they realise their own lives are still pretty damn good. Nonetheless they can’t help shake the feeling that if only they knew how to cold approach they’d quickly resolve that one nagging issue from the list of five.

Fortunately that entire emotional cycle takes about ten seconds and never really penetrates their consciousness. Simultaneously, ten miles apart, comes a booming clang and the heavy doors of two grandiose egos slam down the shutters together. And then a new reaction springs forth.

“Fuck me, have you seen this clown???? Hardly any money, normal body, no “lifestyle” at all. And he’s running up and down the street chasing girls like some creepy PUA. What a fucking idiot! Hahaha can’t he see what low value behaviour that is: dedicating ten hours a week, for five years, to enjoying nice conversations, dates and sex with beautiful women.

Ooooooooooo-kay, so he reckons in 2015 the average age of girl is 21 (19 years younger than him) and the average meet-to-lay is two hours. And yes, they are mostly good girls and all pretty. And yes, he gets to travel all around the world and sleep as much as he likes. And yes, he’s always choosing the girls he likes.

But, but but…… it’s so inefficient!

What a loser! Dedicating all that time and effort trying to get laid.”

Brad and Adam decide they will type in a comment to tell him precisely how much of a loser he is. And then they’ll retire to bed and ponder how awesome their lifestyle is.