Hello Dolly

I went looking for source material for this post, hoping that some conscientious college student had transcribed portions of the Game to his website. Specifically, I wanted to reread some of the sections when Style writes about the army of clones that he and Mystery were assembling. This was the first site I found. It shouldn't surprise me that Nerve would not only review Mystery's show, but would actually have a writer who knew about the community.

When Style started to get into the community he "had to meet the faces behind the screen names, watch them in the field, find out who they were and what made them tick." But Style wasn't like Papa, or Tyler Durden, or really anyone else we meet in the book. Style is smarter, and Style proves time and again that he wants to learn as much as he can from anyone. Style never picks a guru and this is what sets him apart.

In the Nerve review, Gwynne writes

The downside: pick-up artists are jerks. After the guys' failed attempts, Mystery and his wingmen enter the same club and clean up. Their canned lines and practiced tricks seem unbelievably hokey and insulting, but girls are, almost literally, falling over them. The contestants watch the hidden camera footage as if they're seeing God for the first time.

In one of my earliest field reports to two of my wings, I recounted how I'd gone out the night before with an incredibly strong natural. This friend Lance was brought up in a very traditional Catholic community - with all the attendant drinking and social authority.

I think it's safe to say that we had very different upbringings than the one I've described here, and probably we're very happy about that. I can't imagine how nerds like us would have been treated in these communities. Personally, I wouldn't trade growing up in the Bay Area for any other childhood I can think of. I grow greener by the day, and realize more and more how much of that is due to California. But, while I wouldn't have traded my upbringing, I would have liked it if I'd been a natural earlier in life (I had some instincts, but when you see a true natural, it kind of changes your perspective).

My point of writing this was the following sentiment I came to this morning.

A lot of naturals are, for lack of a better term, assholes. Looking at the basics of attraction, it makes sense why girls go for the bad boy. Looking at Lance yesterday, I saw, for the first time, a spawning ground for the natural. I can see exactly how people were shaped.

This helped me discover a new facet of the game that I really like. We can have all the success of even the best natural, but we still get our childhood of legos, Star Wars, Ren Fest, Nintendo, setting the curve, Knowledge bowl and so on. Maybe this point is more than obvious, but I'm sure (and I think I've probably heard you both say it at one point) that we've all lamented our AFCness, even when we didn't know what to call it. There was that girl we were crazy about sophmore, junior, senior year, but we couldn't get out of the friend zone, or couldn't get the courage to go talk to her. We didn't have enough natural to know what to do.

But not having that natural has changed outside of our romantic lives. We've had more time and energy to pursue hobbies, artistic pursuits, whatever. Maybe I'm rambling, but after seeing how a natural is built, I guess I'm saying I'm glad that wasn't me, even if I had to miss out on a few girls along the way.

Mystery is aping these assholes, and other than the fact that he could beat any natural for any girl any day of the week, he's just like them. The all belong to the same fraternity and they pursue women with the single-mindedness that one would expect from a frat boy.

I think one of the reasons that even the most liberal and agnostic of us are uncomfortable with human cloning is it forces us to ask if simply being human gives us a soul, or if there is some greater test we have to pass. Mystery and most naturals force this question, too, if one watches closely enough. If they can act so cavalier about women, treat them like targets and trophies, toy with their emotions, what is the nature of their soul?

Style made his own game - borrowing theories from everywhere and used his personality as the basis for his PUA. Style was never in danger of becoming a Mystery clone. This is the same MO Sue and I have adopted. I don't think either of us has ever used a canned opener, and neither of us even really understand NLP. We agree with Style; NLP is genuinely creepy, and so is Ross Jeffries.

If you ran into Sue and I at the bar, or out at a party, you'd know we were running game. But if you were to try to break down our routines or identify our tech, you'd be lost. Other than a few touches of flair to stand out, and a few dual purpose items, we are all improvisation.

Success at seduction is itself seductive. Particularly for those who have had little luck with women, quick results probably outweigh any esoteric concerns. Besides, how could anyone argue that meeting more women means that you're losing something? This is how Mystery built his army - give the desperate a taste of their wildest fantasy and they will follow you over a cliff for another bite.

When Style found bars full of women who already knew all his best material, he shouldn't have been shocked. He'd been teaching his methods, online and in person, for months. He never told these men to investigate their own strengths, to draw from many people and to synthesize all of this into their personality - though this was exactly what he did.

One of my earliest failures came about because I didn't understand that everyone has a different game, if they're still interested in keeping some part of themselves. What works for Sue can be disastrous for me. I'll brief this little sordid affair later.

While Project Hollywood was crumbling around him, Style wrote

Seduction is a dark art. Its secrets come with a price and we were all paying it, whether in sanity, school, work, time, money, health, morality, or loss of self. We may have been supermen in the club, but on the inside, we were rotting.

I believe that Style survived, in part, because he hadn't discarded his soul like a dead battery the way so many others in the community had. They were buying Mystery brand alkalines, NLP Energizers, and David DeAngelo Duracells, and Style decided to recharge himself.

The ironic thing is ...

It all began with an ex. She was intensely interested in The Game - it fed into her love of human interaction, her adventurelust. I was bored, she was discussing it with Lex at the bar. All the abstruse terminology and acronyms began to annoy me. I told them if I heard them mention IOI one more time I was going to get up and go home.

She was reading the book; she'd borrowed it from Sue. The main reason I read it after she did - actually when she stalled for three weeks about 100 pages deep - was that I wanted to be included in their new little club. I was dating someone new and didn't feel like I needed any help, but the only reason I was dating was loneliness. Besides, Rapunzel told me she thought I should - I thought if I succeeded that it might shock her, show her that I was a valuable commodity.

I went through three stages when I read the book. I suspect that most men do.

First was revulsion. I can remember reading passages to my female roommate, detailing the psychological justifications that Mystery used for why negs work. I remember thinking that the only reason I wanted to finish the book was to spot these PUAs and stop them dead in their tracks, rescue these gullible women from exploitation.

Second was awe. When Style number closed the Playmate of the Year, when Mystery pawned his way through three sets in a dead bar to get to the one attractive girl, and then won the stare-down with her armed (ex)boyfriend, I was enthralled. It was Bond with all the extraneous espionage removed. All I wanted was to watch these men run game.

Third was hope. Style was an incurable geek, Mystery had always been an emotional trainwreck, and the cast of supporting characters was even more dysfunctional. But these men had found a set of rules that could be learned, practiced and perfected. It was a memoir, but it was also a playbook.

Initially I wasn't sure it was something I wanted to do. I saw what the game did to Style, and the dead-enders it enabled, like Tyler. But in the end, the allure of walking up to the best looking girl in the bar and walking out with her a few hours later won out. The realization that every time I'd attracted a girl I had inadvertently been running some game won out. My curiosity, my perfectionism, and my libido won out.



You shouldn't expect every detail, nor should you expect real names or even real bars. I've learned from experience that anonymity is a valuable friend.

At the moment, I have a backlog of content which will find the way here, interspersed with current adventures. Maybe you'll learn something. Maybe you'll be able to stay awake at work while you're reading this. Maybe with some help, you'll have your own bulletproof nights.