Futuristic Words

The world of dating has changed dramatically since Love Systems started. With greater proliferation of cell phones and facebook and an overall trending away from voice-to-ear phone conversations on the part of younger, more desirable women, the rules guys mistakenly picked up from Swingers don’t apply anymore, to say the least. What’s in the Love Systems Ultimate Guide to Phone and Text Game? Here are some samples:

• Get a woman’s phone number almost EVERY TIME using the "magic words" thatmake flaking nearly impossible even if she’s drinking. (pg. 14-15)
• Avoid the one fatal error that 60% of guys make after getting her phone number that kills their chances right then and there. (pg. 12-13)
• Know whether to use phone or text (pg. 29-31) and how long to wait to get in touch (pg. 31-5) for every situation.
• Use "callback humor" to make sure your first phone call has her dying to see you again… but only if you set it up properly when you first met her. (pg. 21-24)
• Text her while you’re still talking to her so that your conversation continues ‘naturally’ even after you leave — and leads to a same night encounter or a date. Choose from among dozens of scripted messages to send. (pg. 15-18)

Every so often a product comes out that changes the game, something anyone in his right mind would deem a must-buy. When there was no other game in town, Ross Jeffries’s Speed Seduction got people on the right track. David DeAngelo cut a wide swathe into people’s consciousness and became a phenomenon when he self-published Double Your Dating. A few years later, with the community’s momentum online established, Neill Strauss wrote The Game showed the world what was happening on the same Internet they were using to send e-mails to their grandmothers and surf lonely porn in their lonely rooms by their lonely selves. With Strauss paying the Love Systems rent in many ways, Savoy threw down the ultimate gauntlet and wrote the manual, the first train to Gun Hill: Magic Bullets.

That is how significant The Ultimate Guide to Phone and Text Game is. This book is ground-breaking, and if you’re reading this, and you aren’t already buying this jaw-droppingly good book by Braddock and Mr. M, you’re not serious about improving your game. If you want to get better with girls in the modern world, you need—NEED—to purchase a copy. Yesterday.

But don’t take my word for it. Hear it from customers who have read the book. Amazing work, Braddock and Mr. M. I salute the both of you.

This joke is an old saw, but be patient with me.

Two guys are hiking in the forest when a bear appears out of nowhere. The bear chases the hikers, who hurry up a tree. The bear doesn’t miss a beat and starts climbing the tree after them. One of the men goes into his knapsack and starts putting on his running shoes as fast as he can. His companion says to him, “What are you doing?”

“When the bear gets here, we need to jump out of the tree and make a break for it,” said the first man says.

“Are you nuts?” the second guy asks. “You can’t outrun a bear!”

“I don’t have to outrun the bear,” the first man says. “I just have to outrun you!”

We’ll save the discussion of loyalty for another time. Clearly our sneaker-clad fellow was no altruist. Regardless, I want you to remember him when you consider your own development using Love Systems. A lot of guys have some strange and misguided notions about how seduction skills will apply to their own lives. They read The Game or hear some instructor talking about his most legendary experience meeting a girl, and that is the standard to which they hold themselves. While I’m a proponent of goal-setting, this sort of perception is folly. You don’t have to be a super-pimp to walk out of a bar with a beautiful woman. You don’t even have to be a pimp. 

Most of the guys out there are pretty lame. They use the same boring conversation bits as everyone else, they don’t deal with logistics properly, and they aren’t comfortable with physical contact, which translates roughly to being insecure about their sexuality. They don’t know how to tell stories, they’re afraid to tease the girls, and they act like they’re afraid to walk away (usually because they are). This is the world of cold approaches. Of course, most men don’t have the balls to approach girls in the wild, and their problems are different. Their pacing is slow, they take girls on boring dates, they plod along and hope the girl will take a shine to them, or they finally gather the strength to approach after a keg of liquid courage.

That is your competition.

Stop focusing on being perfect. Don’t try to be a PUA or an mPUA. Essentially, if you’re striving for an acronym, you are distancing yourself from your own goal. Take baby steps. Approach x girls per night. Tease each girl y times. Use a routine you like z times. Better yet, sexually escalate z times. Try to isolate a target in every set. These are small goals, they are measurable, and they are not dependent on feedback from the girl. If you work on the small things, if you deal with the basics, you can gradually improve. If you can be gradually more attractive and are the guy actually approaching girls, and you’re having a great time and escalating, you will eventually look around and find that you have game. It’s not easy, but it’s pretty simple.

All the Love Systems instructors are funny people. Name a luminary in the SUISC, and he’s undoubtedly a funny guy. There are smooth pimps out there who can massage social situations and get the girl without making her laugh, but they are few and far between. In our comprehensive boot camps Love Systems instructors spend a lot of time teaching guys how to work their way seamlessly through potentially strange social situations, and a large part of education is learning the role teasing and humor play in the push/pull relationship so essential to attracting women forging the bonds of rapport. Big Business is unique among our instructor staff because in addition to being a ninja when it comes to dating science, he is a credited performer and improv teacher. For years I have been recommending students use whatever resources they can muster near their home to attend an improv class and learn the ability to think on their feet. The hope was that they could mesh the knowledge they accrued in my boot camp with the knowledge from the improv class and the latter would complement the former. The connections would not always be apparent without an instructor present, though, and some students could be lost adrift trying to figure out which lessons from traditional improv could be immediately applied when talking to the women they desire and which could be discarded as purely for the stage. The optimal solution has always been a seduction class dedicated to humor and improvisation skills. 

With that in mind, I’m incredibly excited Big Business is taking his considerable experience and knowledge in stand-up comedy and theater improv and cramming it into the upcoming Love Systems one-day seminar, Humor and Improv for Seduction. To celebrate the occasion, Big Business agreed to sit down with me to do an interview. I’ll post another portion of the interview every day this week as a Christmas present from me to you. Unless you’re Jewish, in which case Happy Belated Hanukah!

November 30 is here. Despite Thanksgiving and a preternatural gift for procrastination, I managed to squeak out 50,000 words in November. The book looks like it will be another 25,000, so I’m nowhere near done, and I don’t think the thing is going to be readable until the third draft, but I couldn’t care less right now. It sure feels good to have nailed this word count. Goddamn.

The novel is coming along swimmingly. I can’t believe it took me this long. One of the first things I figured out is that getting to 1000 words a day is cake. Now, it might take a while to make those 1000 words something special, and they have to describe a story that is worth telling, but if you write 1000 words every day for a little more than three months you have a 100,000 word novel. If you do it for a year you have something epic. If you’re interested in keeping up, here’s my NaNoWriMo profile.

More cool stuff:

“Hero of War” by Rise Against

“Handlebars” by Flobots

I hope you won’t think me presumptuous if I assume you like music. If you don’t, uh, I hope you have a good grounding routine for it. If you like music, and you aren’t using Pandora, you really ought to. I tend to listen to the same thing over and over again, and I’m glad there’s something like Pandora to ease me out of my comfort zone with music that resembles stuff I am already listening to. Sure, there’s a little too much John Mayer on the Jason Mraz channel, and I have no idea  what anyone would listen to Hammerfall, even if they do like Dragonforce, but the flipside is that I find artists like Flobots and Colbie Caillat and Rise Against, none of whom I would know of were it nor for Pandora. That my new Droid gives me the power to listen to Pandora all the time is simply amazing. I know many of you might already have smartphones and are using your LS app on your iPhone, but having the Internet on my person at all times is a little bananas. It’s like I have 24 hour access to the greatest radio station of all time. I should really tell some jokes about that kind of stuff.

I also use last.fm, which offers music recommendations like Pandora, but I think it does so very, very poorly. Last.fm is great for keeping track of my music over a long time period. I love that I can go back through my profile and check for years and years and years and see what I was listening to when I was writing this project or working for that company or dating that girl. Very cool. Its music recommendations? Not so much. On that note, I recommend Last Pandora, which lets you keep track of the music you listen to through Pandora. I wish something like that existed for my Android, but it’s perfect for listening while I’m hammering on my keyboard writing my novel. Good times.

DaHunter’s article on Sexual Hoops changed my life when I read it earlier this year. Do this. DaHunter, you need to write more!

Bonsai is quickly establishing himself as the go-to guy for stripper game. I have dated a handful of strippers pretty seriously, one of whom was comically hot and brought other girls over… yet I still don’t consider myself a master of stripper game. Just reading Bonsai’s blog makes me want to figure out how to get comped at Hustler Club and Scores and return to dating women with too much disposable income and serious daddy issues. Good times.

As well, he wrote a great article about how you won’t get every girl. The article is so good I just deleted two paragraphs parroting him. It’s a fucking incredible analysis of what we all know is true. Sorry, prospective students: we can give you sick game, but you are still going to get rejected.

Big Business has some big things coming down the line. Hopefully I’ll be able to get him to share some good shit on my blog, but in the mean time he finally seems to have remembered he has a blog of his own. Check it out here.

As usual, Braddock’s Blog is a textbook for badassery. A little bit ago he posted an article for Dubbsy on Same Night Lays that anyone considering using Love Systems should read. Takeaways, logistical escalation (moving girls), and keeping a light tone at the front end of the conversation are all essential for anyone who is interested in bedding girls the same night he meets them. But I’ll let Dubbsy tell it.

Recently, Braddock also hosted an article from Helicase about how to get good fast. This article could have been written by any of the other instructors. Everything he says is a truism. If you’re working on your game, and you’re not doing what Helicase has pointed out in his article, it doesn’t mean you won’t get good, but it means your learning curve will be a lot steeper, and your progress a lot slower.

Oh, and we were in the Economist.

Teaching students is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle where the finished result is going to be a Monet’s Saint Georges Majeur au Crepuscule. Love Systems gives our instructors the chance to meet thrilling characters and to try to teach those guys the ability to present their best selves to women. Because our students are generally of such a high caliber, this usually means granting them permission to be themselves, albeit perhaps a bolder and more sexually confident form of themselves than they have previously been able to summon in the presence of women who might otherwise intimidate them.

When a person meets another person, there are a series of minute judgments that happen at both the conscious and the unconscious level. All these judgments transpire in the space of a nanosecond and amount to what Love Systems instructors have taken to calling a person’s “thinslice”, a reference to Malcolm Gladwell’s terrific book, Blink. When a man is poorly dressed and surrounded with other poorly dressed men, and they all sit with slumped shoulders and persistent frowns, that men and his companions create a thinslice that in many social situations would be deemed unfriendly at best or loser-like at worst. When a beautiful woman sits around with her arms crossed and a scowl on her face, her thinslice is that she’s mean or unapproachable. Those guys could be the most successful, interesting men in the room, and the girl could be a gentle flower or deeply insecure girl, but all anyone has to go on at first is the impression another person gives off, and it’s off this impression, this thinslice, that we base a nearly infinite number of our day-to-day decisions: do I feel well? Does my car need a tune-up? Is my boss angry? Is it going to rain? Is this painting a real or a fake? It is off of this that we establish the belief structures that give rise to the frames that we carry with us into every interaction with the world around us.

One of the jobs of Love Systems instructors is to take our expertise and whatever thinslice we pick up from a student and reconfigure his presentation of himself such that his thinslice is more immediately attractive to women. We also equip our students with tools to recover from unfavorable thinslices, true, but everyone can agree they’d prefer to make a strong first impression and follow through on that than fight an uphill battle from the start of a conversation.

Moving forward from either a positive or negative thinslice begs the question: what do I talk about after that? The obvious answer is anything that displays high value. We’ve published the LSRMv1 and LSRMv2 for a novella’s worth of material. You have those links, and you found this blog. If you’re running out of stuff to say, you’re not trying hard enough.

But that’s not really the issue, is it? Mystery used to proudly exclaim that he had “something like 300 pieces of material which [he could] throw in for anything that could pop up in a set. Something for every contingency.” While that might sound great if you’re scared of your own shadow and terrified of talking to the girls after whom you lust, hollowness is the inevitable consequence of using routines as the backbone of your attempts at seduction. Please don’t miss the forest for the trees and mistake me for here maligning routines. I use routines now, and when I first started learning I was a routine junkie, and it got me laid. Anyone who says you can’t get sex with routines doesn’t know how to deliver routines. But used properly, they are just backstops, nuts and bolts to hold down the girders of the interaction, and those girders are two humans finding a connection amidst innumerable possibilities for that connection to be stifled, scuttled, or denied.

Thus the real question of what to talk about is more complicated and more interesting. What truths matter so much that to hide them is to deny someone else a chance to know the real you? What sentences must be said if the chemistry that forms between two people is to have real meaning? Obviously there is no answer to this, but we ask it every time we interact with someone else, be they a boss, a parent, or a stranger we want to turn into a lover. 

synecdoche

A figure of speech in which a part is used for the whole (as hand for sailor), the whole for a part (as the law forpolice officer), the specific for the general (as cutthroat for assassin), the general for the specific (as thief forpickpocket), or the material for the thing made from it (as steel for sword).

[Middle English synodoches, from Medieval Latin synodoche, alteration of Latin synecdoch, from Greeksunekdokh, from sunekdekhesthai, to take on a share of : sun-, syn- + ekdekhesthai, to understand (ek-, out of; see eghs in Indo-European roots + dekhesthai, to take; see dek- in Indo-European roots).]

All art is synecdoche. Great art is the kind of synecdoche that pierces the heart or mind and sings to you in that certain voice beneath hearing, “Yes, that’s exactly what that’s like,” its ability to show, as David Foster Wallace said of fiction, “what it’s like to be a fucking human being.”  The genius of Degas, Monet, Manet, Renoir, and Cassat was their refusal to abide by the tropes of the time typified by Bouguereau, Cot, and Gerome and instead render the world through their own peculiar lens, a vantage more experimental but also perhaps more honest than the idealizations of an Ingres or Delacroix. Expressionism took this to yet another level, when Munch and Van Gogh did not stop at trying to represent what they saw on a 2D canvas but to infuse that canvas with their emotional states.

For the sake of completeness I’ll admit I’m ranting a bit. But only a bit. There is a strange point where artists or creative types use artistic media for experimentation but not necessarily for expression. While I am impressed at Sorabji’s mind, I have yet to find even a fabulously skilled pianist who says that, yes, the Opus Clavicembalisticum is the most moving and powerful piece of music ever written. This is despite the fact the O.C. is commonly regarded as the most technically difficult piece to play on a piano. We need the technicians to explore the boundaries of preconceptions of how we as humans can connect with each other, but if there isn’t an emotional effect, I would submit that art falls short. Feel free to disagree. You and Bertoldt Brecht can high-five each other while I vomit at a performance of the Good Woman of Szechuan. The maddening challenge of any creative endeavor is staring at the infinite collage of colors, words, sounds, and movements and holding them against the even more infinite potentialities of human experience to make an audience member see something the way you do, or to see something the way you want them to see that thing. This doesn’t change just because art belongs to the audience once it leaves the artist’s hands. Art well-rendered might take new meaning for its recipient, but the stuff that withstands the passage of years tends to resonate in the sight of if strictly within the boundaries of its creator’s expectations.

All this happens in the space between when you open your mouth and your vocal cords flex and your diaphragmatic muscles contract and your next words will convey some kind of synecdoche to Her, with every sentence: “This is who I am,” even as you are more than those words or that gesture, vastly more than any sentence or paragraph or biography can ever accurately portray. The paralyzing difficulty of speaking to a woman with an outcome in mind is the burden of the infinite resting on your epiglottis and choking you behind a wall of potential.  It makes sense that it can seem like a challenge of monumental proportions to raid one’s psyche for What to Say Next that will make her panties dissolve like dew in the sunlight of your wit and charisma when you approach an potentially romantic interaction with a tepid sense of self.

The irony is that it’s never that complicated. Talk about those things that cause the most extreme emotional vacillation in you. Talk about the things that interest you. Yes, yes, temper your conversation with the attraction switches, but if you are centered in your preferences and unapologetic in the face of adverse reactions, people—men and women—will be won over. This helps you live in the moment anyway. The weak but perfect advice to be yourself applies here. Be yourself. Be somebody. Whether or not you like chocolate or vanilla is not important, but making a choice between chocolate and vanilla is very important.

Dating science, Love Systems, seduction, or crudely, “game”, boils down to confidence, handling logistics, and a willingness to escalate (okay, and maybe a little or a lot of teasing/active disinterest*). Everything else is legerdemain, even if it’s a highly functional waving of hands that will indeed render results. The common theme among our instructors is mostly a reckless willingness to make mistakes and put our own balls on the line. There’s an argument that likes to float around that we are somehow being disingenuous. I think the reason Love Systems instructors get the results they do is the opposite: terrifying honesty. We come from a place of abundance and are thus genuinely non-needy, genuinely certain that our ministrations will yield the intended results. We’re sexually voracious, and we express it with our words, our body language, our eyes, and the tones of our respective voices. Different elements of our personalities manifest in other situations—in instructor calls or during games of Halo 3—but when we address women we desire, we are good at choosing the best synecdoche of self that reflects the truth of our the sexual reality that drew us to the woman in the first place.

By the way, if you’re reading this from your parents’ basement and you just Alt-Tabbed away from World of Warcraft to check out this article, don’t get mad at me because Miss December didn’t suck your dick when you walked up to her  wearing your Civil War t-shirt featuring Iron Man and Captain America. All of the above assumes a certain level of hygiene and health, maybe even a job. There is a point where the attraction switches from Magic Bullets are not merely filters for conversation but handy guides for life-improvement. There are certain personality traits and ways to dress and jobs and ways to speak that will get you more beautiful women, but if you adopt too many trappings of someone you are not, you may get laid, but you will find yourself sharing fluids with women whose disappearance from the Earth would mean little to you, and those are not the sort of people you should be spending your most intimate moments with. You are going to die. If you are not living up to one of the attraction switches because of fear, I challenge you to stare unflinchingly into your fear and take the next step toward being your best self. On the other hand, if you read dating advice from someone that seems like it would be grossly out of character for you, err toward being true to you and not trying to emulate someone whose results you envy. You’ll be happier in the long run, a masterpiece of self rendered more accurately by your very imperfections.

*—If you come from a powerful world view and a place of abundance, both of these come naturally for the most part but, yes, tactically, they are wonder workers.

Even if you don’t like sports or care much about tennis (I don’t), this excerpt from Andre Agassi’s autobiography is one Hell of a read, and it’s especially good writing given the usual drivel that passes for sports autobiography. Hell, it’s just good writing. Check it out.

Last week I posted an entry about a girl who texted me out of the blue, a girl who wanted some Future but whom Future did not know.

I found out.

It was Soul.

Well played, sir. I will get you back, but that was very well played.

Congratulations to all the students who completed the workshop in San Francisco this weekend. I have high hopes for all of you. Vercetti and Big Business, I really appreciate the help. You gentlemen make it easy to forget that running workshops is a job because the whole experience is so easy with such ridiculously competent fellow instructors. Starlight, thanks for your hospitality at the tail ends of the weekend. You’re a prince.

I have scheduled a pair of boot camps for December.

New York: 4-6 December
Los Angeles: 11-13 December

If you’re interested, contact Love Systems either through the company website or by calling (310)836-0150.

If you do sign up for either of those boot camps, you will be treated to the sight of a man newly victorious.

“Newly victorious, Future?” you ask.

Yes.

“But why?”

I’m glad you asked. Because this November, I will be participating in National Novel Writing Month, or “NaNoWriMo” as the cool kids have been known to call it. For those of you who haven’t heard of NaNoWriMo, it’s pretty simple: one month, 50,000 words. I’ve toyed with the idea of spending an entire November huddled around a pot of coffee for eight hours a day while ranting about gerunds and fireballs since I first heard about NaNoWriMo in 2007, but this time I’m going to put my money where my dreams and delusions of grandeur are.

I’ve set up a contest with some of my friends to make the entire event a little more interesting. Everyone contributes $300 before NaNoWriMo begins. Everyone participates in NaNoWriMo. Those who get to 50,000 words get their $300 back. If you get to 49,999 words or less, you are assed out $300 bucks this Christmas shopping seasons. Money left behind is split by the participants who can now finally call themselves novelists when they look in the mirror each morning.

If you live in the New York area and would like to join me in this little adventure/competition, leave a comment (because I’m vain and like comments on my blog entries) and contact me at future@lovesystems.com (because you need to know where and when to drop off your $300 as well as to participate in whatever weird support group this thing will probably end up being). To prevent your message from being lost in the shuffle of my daily e-mail deluge, please include the word NANOWRIMO in your subject if you’re going to make 2009 the year you finally wrote your novel, and you’re willing to put a new iPhone/new PS3 on it. We’re putting the money together this week, so time is of the essence.

* YOUR FOOD IS POISONED! RUN FOR THE HILLS! If you eat meat made from cows, you should watch this video. It’s not a PETA video. I love me some steak. It’s about the extremely limited testing for pathogens in your food. Oh, and you probably won’t sleep tonight.

* Katie Couric interviews Glenn Beck – Glenn Beck is an idiot. This much is plain from his talk show and his radio show. Watching him squirm before Katie Couric’s terrible and kind grin was a special kind of schaudenfreude for me.

* Lara Logan could kick my ass! – I have been in love with Lara Logan since I saw her on the Daily Show on 17 June 2008. Periodically she shows up on the air and reminds Americans that we have men and women on the ground in war zones. Here she is on The Daily Show:

She was on The Colbert Report on Tuesday where she again made me want to marry her:

Besides that where she did her thing where she made me want to marry her and brought my attention to her amazing new segment on CBS News, Afghanistan: The Road Ahead. I’m linking to the site, since there’s no specific video you should watch. Besides, if you had the same reaction to Lara Logan’s interviews that I did—excepting the boner—I don’t need to encourage you to find out what the situation on the ground is like in Afghanistan.

I’d recommend you add an RSS feed to whatever reader you use so you can keep up-to-date with her work, which is what I do with Michael Ware’s reporting, but that will only lead to despair and spam in your RSS reader. Every other video search for her is cheesecake footage because she’s so frigging hot.

* There’s a special camaraderie between people who list “etymology” among their turn-ons. Marina Orlova’s Hot for Words is pretty much what would result if someone asked me what the ideal PG-13 Internet entertainment would look like. I can barely believe her show even exists. She’s a hot European who explains word origins in every episode. In my dreams Orlova and Lara Logan jello wrestle for my affections before calling it a wash and drawing up a plan for a menage a trois.

* I don’t own a television, but that doesn’t mean much in the world of Hulu and Netflix. Besides Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, I am watching Californication and East Bound and Down. The former is pretty much required watching if you are reading my blog for anything other than entertainment purposes, and the latter is probably the smartest satire of contemporary America I have ever seen. Oh, and I watch Glee every week and download all the songs. Because I’m gay.