PUA Summit 2010 in Hollywood (Inner and Outer Game)

Here I am, fresh from the 2010 PUA Summit. And wow, is there a lot to think about.

First of all, I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who is not hardcore into this shit. There’s some heavy theory, and it’s basically nonstop. It’s like raiding in WoW. Don’t do it until you max out on your level.

I also feel as though I should set the stage for people that aren’t really that much into The Community.

It seems as though there is a fundamental clash of philosophies in The Community. There are the ones that believe in indirect game and then there is direct game.

Indirect game – “Hey guys I need a quick opinion on something. <Ask open ended question about relationships>. Wow, you would think that.” <Keep playfully teasing your target>

Direct game – “Wow you look cute. What’s your name?”

I tend to steer towards indirect because I feel kinda weird doing direct, though I usually find myself doing direct game between 5-10 shots (in which case I pass out). I think my pledge bros still have a lot of footage of my “direct gaming”. I just know it’s hidden in someone’s harddrive, just waiting to come out if I ever happen to run for Congress or something.

I also learned of what I refer to as “Super Direct Game”. They go for a technique called “Insta-Fuck” to close the deal in 10 minutes. The Guru allegedly can point out which girls are there to fuck. You approach them with “you are so beautiful”. Not sure what I think about this.

I found that the recurring motif that the PUA Gurus emphasized was something I heard when I was 5 while reading Alice in Wonderland.

————-

One day Alice came to a fork in the road and saw a Cheshire cat in a tree. “Which road do I take?” she asked. “Where do you want to go?” was his response. “I don’t know,” Alice answered. “Then,” said the cat, “it doesn’t matter.”

————

For sure. You gotta have your goals in mind before you start this quest. It also applies to life in general. Where will you be in one year? 3 years? 5 years? Have every detail planned out so you know if you’re moving and going in the right direction. If you don’t plan to go anywhere, you’ll end up nowhere.

They also said that you need to take one step at a time. It’s like my broker says: “It takes little steps every day, not giant leaps every year.” Everything in life is a test. Are you gonna go to the gym today, or drink a diet coke and call that “exercise”?*
* I know, Diet Coke increases metabolism due to the caffeine so technically you’d lose weight, but you get the point.

Now, one of the people I really wanted to see was Hypnotica, and he is just as great live as he was in Style’s workshop. He is a master at inner game, which of course is preferable to outer game (more on that later).

He brought up a good point. You need to surround yourself with 5-10 girls a day. Even if platonic, it helps. I have so many friends that just want a girlfriend, but don’t hang out with girls at all. They never really learn how to deal with them. It’s a completely unrealistic expectation, but I can’t exactly bring it up to them, or their virgin defensiveness* kicks in. I got kicked out of someone’s house before for telling him what was wrong with his Game (on a side note, a lot of his classmates refer to him as an “Asian Michael Cera”.)
*You know, when someone’s 20 something, still horny, and defensive when someone brings it up.

Your goal should be to improve yourself. If your goal is to get chicks, you’re missing the point. Validation can’t come from outside.

I was also surprised to see Tyler Durden, which I think is much less of a creeper than Style made him out to be in The Game. I do, however, understand that the antagonism was necessary for the narrative of the book.

Anyway, Tyler gave us exercises to work in groups to keep talking, no matter what. It is critical to building value when you don’t know the other person. I realized very quickly that I was actually very good at this, and the other people in my group sucked. A lot. But then I guess I’m a salesperson so this makes sense.

Adam Lyons won #1 PUA in the world again. I wanted to drop by and say hi for 20 seconds or something, but found myself too scared to approach the #1 guy in the world when he was surrounded by other gurus. Goddamn it.

——————————

Inner and Outer Game

——————————-

Outer Game – Knowing what to do and say. Like knowing the posture to have, tonality to have, and what to say. Choosing to talk about relationships and mysterious things, asking open ended questions, avoiding depressing and creepy topics, palm reading, and psych routines are outer game. There’s a lot of canned material, but it’s a great stepping stone for people starting off. Unless you’re with a really hot girl, she probably hasn’t really heard the majority of routines before (and if she has, she won’t point it out and call you out on it unless she’s a total bitch).

Inner Game – Having the inner confidence to attract people. You know, deep inside, that you’re a badass. You are totally separated from the outcome, because it doesn’t matter to you whether this girl talks to you or not. You can just go talk to another hot girl instead. Your value comes from within yourself, and you don’t need hot girls to talk to you to remind you that you are number one.
Side note: A lot of people that think they have inner game…don’t. It takes a fair amount of EQ and social awareness to notice this though. For those of you that know my sphere of friends, Jakiro is an example of someone who thinks he has inner game.

Now, obviously, inner game > outer game. Who would want canned material showing a superficial (and artificial) confidence if you can have the real confidence? It’s like getting a Band-Aid versus surgery to fix a problem.

Because for most people, inner game can’t come to you without learning outer game first.

If you play WoW and have a level 80 Paladin (or whatever the fuck is max level these days, I stopped when max was 60), chances are you’re not too popular with the ladies. How do you feel inner confidence when you have nothing to back it up?

So you learn outer game. You learn some routines to get them interested (I personally like palm reading and psychology tests). Then they begin to pay attention to you. They begin to hang onto your every word, because you become valuable and authoritative to them. Your confidence goes up. You can talk to a woman for about 2 hours based on Outer Game (maybe more, maybe less. I can do about 2 hours).

Then you have women paying attention to you. Then you slowly, slowly but surely, learn inner game. When you start to get surrounded by females, you learn to stop caring so much.

It’s like playing blackjack. You learn the basic chart before you learn to count cards.

An interesting thing is, you can still tell who has inner game and who has outer game. Even if you read every book on pick-up and every forum post and you’re making a completely new routine, you can still tell he’s not inwardly confident if you’re good.

Tucker Max taught us to look at the eyes. The whole body can lie, but the eyes do not. I think it was a line in Scarface too. Unless you’re CIA status, chances are your eyes give away your true intent. I don’t know how many times I looked like I knew what I was doing, but had quivering eyes underneath it all.

I think I’m pretty decent at outer game, but the next step is …. FUCKING DIFFICULT. And the final step is always the most difficult. And it’s the place where the most people give up. And that is a fucking shame.

Make sure I don’t give up.

Let me know if you have anything to contribute to this conversation. I’m sure I’m wrong about some stuff, and I’m sure I’ve left some stuff out.

—————————-

“If I could write you a song,
and make you fall in love,
I would already have you up under my arm.
I used to pull all my tricks,
I hope that you like this.
but you probably won’t,
you think you’re cooler than me”

-Mike Posner, “Cooler Than Me”

———————————————————–

This chorus pretty much summarizes the whole thing.

Dehumanization of White Collar America

As some of you know, I just came back from a sales seminar in Las Vegas. They teach people how to sell and be a “good” salesperson at the cost of $1000 a month. This consists of one call per week to check your progress. This is a prerequisite to being successful in white collar America.

And it will take your humanity away.

Basically, instead of just talking to your clients, a good salesperson is supposed to memorize a script, which means everything you say (and everything your customer says) is completely decided beforehand. It’s the blueprints to human interaction, with the conclusion decided before it happened. A salesman will also cut friendly human interaction to a minimum, because anyone who does not directly benefit your business and make your wallet increase is not really your friend. Having to talk to other people is torture anyway (see: Huis Clos, Jean Paul Sartre). Also, don’t watch the news, because it is unproductive. This means that the friendly face of commerce (see: The Office) is disappearing due to the continuous isolation of man from the world in which he lives in.

Man is different from everything else because he has choice. He has the free will to do either moral deeds or immoral deeds (see: existentialism). I’d hope we have this right, since we’re allegedly condemned to hell for knowing the difference (see: Book of Genesis). The system contradicts this by emphasizing blind faith in the system. The philosophy goes something like “I know what I’m doing. Trust me. I know this is counterintuitive, but deal with it and you will succeed”. This is, of course, contrary to everything that human beings pride themselves on. Without the power to think and choose, how are we human? I guess the blind faith part makes us kind of religious, but this then turns into a cult worshipping the deity known as money (quote the guy, “make money and buy your own damn church.”) So I don’t know if that is any better.

Everything is in the name of efficiency. The goal is to maximize your efficiency with a tight schedule. In other words, set the hours of operation that you as a machine will run. It’s a numbers game. It’s more dehumanizing than the assembly line. There’s no time to just sit at your desk and ADD, and I’m pretty sure I’m not the only guy who does this.

But what I find the biggest problem is the concept of “if you didn’t get it, you lost it and threw it away”. What the hell is that supposed to mean? The philosophy basically states that if you missed out on a possibility of making $5000, you lost $5000 and therefore wasted $5000. According to that logic, every moment you’re not having (vaginal) intercourse, you’re killing babies and you’re a murderer, right? This is retarded.

Interestingly, I’ve seen several correlations between the dehumanization of man in the business world and other aspects of life. There are several ways people study and break down human interaction to make it almost mechanized in the response for response conversations (like the sales scripts that incorporate neuro-linguistic programming). Some of you might know of Paul Ekman, a specialist in microexpressions. This means that he can tell what emotion you’re feeling and if you’re lying to him based on expressions on your face that are too small for normal people to notice. A always causes B, and there are no exceptions, because the ways faces move in different situations are involuntary. Everything is so calculated that the “Truth Wizards” know exactly what is going on all the time, which makes normal human interaction really difficult. They are then forced to isolate themselves from society due to knowing too much. This is a recurring theme in the show “Lie to Me”, starring Mr. Orange/the only guy with enough balls to rob Samuel L. Jackson in a diner.

Another example is Owen Cook, better known for his web name “Tyler Durden” (real original, dude). He is a leading pick-up artist that had dreams of some experiment called “Project Mayhem” (once again, real original). He gets his power differently from the other pick-up artists. Mystery seems to use evolutionary nature to get his way (peacocking, SR value, etc.). Style uses his vast knowledge of everything that has ever been written, which I guess is a legitimate advantage for anyone who writes for the New York Times. Tyler breaks down every fiber of everyone around him and puts them together in different ways as if they were mechanical parts, assigning weird names to every piece of the puzzle. Every action is quantified and analyzed in the lab, which happens to be the room in which he plans his schemes. He predicts every action you are going to take through analysis of everything you did before (see: The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists). The irony of both, of course, is that when you try to be more human by understanding humans, you become less and less human. Whoever is most human tends to be the least human (see: I am Legend, the book).

To maximize efficiency, to maximize knowledge, and to maximize output, you would need to dehumanize yourself. It is to give up the very aspects that make you a person. You make the same movements over and over until you get it right. And then you set a new goal and do the same movements over and over until you get it perfect. You do it day in and day out. You are moving to someone’s rhythm. You are dancing an endless waltz.

With this in mind, here comes the million dollar question. Are we human, or are we dancer?