You get to (need to) decide what conversation you want to have. 

Write those down. They’re two of the most important truths you learn when you start working on your cold approach abilities, and they’re at the core of the Transition stage of the Love Systems Emotional Progression Model. (link goes to our Triad Model page)

When we first started teaching dating science formally, we omitted the Transition step in our formal model, but eventually Savoy realized that anyone who was actually staying in an interaction with girls and eventually taking them home was guiding the conversation away from whatever opening line/routine he used with some kind of transitional material. As I’ve noted here several times the ultimate bugaboo in learning how to seduce strangers is the question of What to Say Next*. Transitioning is the first step on that bridge to the rest of the conversation, and thus warrants its own phase in the EMP.

As I’ve taught over the last few month and pushed the concept of transitioning, I’ve started to realize it’s not a stage at all. If you clicked the above link, you’ll notice that we say, “Transition (if necessary)”. I would submit that while the FIRST transitioin, i.e. the words said off your opening line, if you have an opening (again, that’s labeled as “if necessary”), and the, is optional, the ability to transition is a hallmark skill of cold approach. And it never ends. One of the attraction switches we teach at Comprehensive Boot Camps is the concept of Leadership. Women want a guy who will take charge of a situation. That trait manifests in conversation by a willingness and capability to steer your exchange where you want it to go. Sometimes, especially in the initial stages, this kind of transitioning is mostly about keeping the conversation alive. Other times, such as when she talks about her boyfriend or dead friend or starts into the Uber-Boring Routine**, the ability to transition is the ability to corral her feelings away from negativity or boredom. Call it the gift of gab, call it improvisation—we have a class for that, by the way—but learning how to change from topic to topic on the fly is a critical skill in dating science. It’s one of the skills that really separates the men from the boys.

*—Does Daddy love initialisms? Yes he does. And so W2SN was born.

**—Initialisms give me a boner. Uber-Boring Routine = UBR = Where are you from? What do you do? Where did you/do you go to school? What did you/are you study/studying?

When I teach my Love Systems workshops, the first thing I teach after the Triad Model as a whole is the key importance of understanding frames and frame control. Prior to that I urge my students to break their wrists taking notes because the fullness of the instruction might not be clear until they’ve practiced for a few years, the way frame control was not really clear to me until I’d already been retooling guys’ lives for a couple years. For years I watched other teachers rattle on about the concept and had only a nodding appreciation for the profundity of this concept.

In order to understand frame control, you first have to understand the concept of frames. Briefly, a frame is the underlying emotional meaning, usually assumed, implied, or understood, of a human interaction. I’ve heard different definitions, but this one hews closest to my own understanding and the way it was hammered into my teaching alongside Sinn for so long. In any given social transaction there is an assumption you carry with you, and that assumption charges everything about that interaction. This is one of the most powerful aspects of human behavior anyone can learn. I’ll do my best to explain it.

Let’s use an easy analogy from my own experience. As a semi-professional stand-up comedian, I often pass out flyers for shows in which I’m performing in Times Square. Yep, I’m one of those people screaming, “Do you like stand-up comedy?” to tourists who do their best to ignore me. With my seduction training I’m abnormally good at that job and I’d say 1 out of 200 people will stand and talk to me and 1 out of 10 of those will come see the stand-up comedy show I’m promoting at Broadway Comedy Club. When people see me on the street they make a lot of assumptions, and you would too.

-That guy’s annoying.

-That guy is probably down on his luck.

-That guy’s life sucks.

-That guy hates his life.

You can fill in the rest for yourself while I go into a corner and cry.

Now, let’s switch the scenario. I teach workshops where grown, intelligent, successful men have paid a good chunk of money to hear me share my hard-won expertise on the subject of skin and whispers. They make certain assumptions based on my reputation, based on the sales pitch our office handed them, based on what they read in The Game or what the results they saw after one of their friends took a boot camp from us. The underlying expectations for how our interaction is going to proceed are fundamentally different. Quite simply, no one is turning to me for life-changing wisdom when I’m shouting on a New York street corner.

On the other hand, when people do stop to hear my pitch on the street corner, they get gamed, just like a set. I am present, funny, interesting, persistent, and I assume the sale. I win them over and have abnormally high turnover because my frame, my understanding of the interaction, is not the same as theirs. The people who stop are open and uncertain in their frames, whereas I am rock solid in mine. There is one of the great lessons of frame control: most people have weak frames; weak frames are pliable and tend to receive stronger frames.

Hot girls and frustrated wannabe lotharios come into a social interaction with certain frames. Men who haven’t yet figured out how to interact with women approach with terrible underlying assumptions about women and about hot girls.

-Girls don’t want sex, they think.

-Girls will be annoyed if the guys approach, they think.

-It’s weird to talk to strangers, they think.

-That girl only likes older/younger/more artistic/rich guys, they think.

The girls have their own frames, and they’re interesting to examine, but they’re irrelevant.

Truth bomb: this is because most women have weak frames.

Don’t get mad at me, ladies. You don’t trust your emotions either. Schopenhauer, in reflecting on women’s emotionality and feminine sensibility famously characterized women as permanent children. While this is probably an unfair criticism in the light of the advances women have made since each wave of feminism, it doesn’t change the uncomfortable truth behind Schopenhauer’s assertions. Women are fundamentally more emotional creatures, and the more heightened their emotional state, the more susceptible they are to absorbing the strongest frame they encounter. By the way, men can be like this, too. The more emotionally engaged you are, the more vulnerable you are to accepting a frame placed on you by someone whose assumptions about the interaction are stronger than yours.

There’s the next profundity: whoever has the strongest frame tends to impose that frame on people without strong frames.

This is one of the most powerful concepts understood by NLP practitioners and seducers and sales people and manipulative people and pretty much anyone who is exceptionally persuasive. People tend to wait for a strong frame to manifest and relinquish whatever suppositions to which they were clinging prior to encountering the person who seems like they have a surer hold on reality, at which point they are canvases waiting to be painted, glasses waiting to be filled. This is an oversimplification, of course, since the brain retains pretty much everything all the time, albeit in forms and locations that can seem at best inchoate. When your frame overrides someone else’s, you can insinuate characteristics on them you want them to have. At Love Systems we call this “force framing”, and it’s probably one of the keys to Breakthrough Comfort. I look for the best in people as a rule. I listen to them and hear how they think and I try to see how they would live if they optimized their lives. When I see it, I call it out and point to why I think they fulfill those great qualities I see. Because my frame is so strong they tend to listen to the compliments as if they come from a source of value.

One of the key mistakes guys make when interacting with women is carrying strong BAD frames into their conversations. Girls don’t like me. She will think I’m boring, stupid, ugly, too poor, etc. It might not be okay to interrupt what she’s doing. This is one of the most common problems I see on boot camps, which is why it’s one of the first things I try to address. Men consistently ask permission to talk to girls. They don’t explicitly ask necessarily, but the tentativeness of their body language, the weakness in their voices, and the lack of enthusiasm in their bearings betray their sense of inadequacy. Women are homo sapiens’ emotional radars, and they hear the signals broadcast by the men loudly and clearly. Men will approach women with these rock solid beliefs in their head and the girls, their frames pliable as ever, agree with the guys: yes, you suck. Go away.

This is one of the cornerstones of how to practically implement the behavior implied when people offer the romantic advice, “Be confident.” It’s actually terrific advice, but if you, the horny lonely person, don’t understand how subtly you can guide your own frame, your own underlying assumptions about the interaction away from confidence, the advice is empty and meaningless.

And with great power comes great responsibility, right, Uncle Ben?

See, guys hear about frame control and learn how to adopt a strong frame, and they become, say it with me now: douche bags. Adopting a strong frame and adhering to it regardless of shit tests or opposition does not necessarily mean other people are going to eventually bow to whatever frame you place on him/her. If you’re a dick, please reread that.

It shouldn’t surprise you that some people who have never taken a Love Systems boot camp have strong frames. I know, I could scarcely believe it myself. Sometimes you’ll have a powerful, deeply rooted understanding and belief about the underlying nature of the interaction and the other person will, too. What happens with students of seduction is that when faced with a strong frame they go overboard reasserting their own frame. The odd part is that it often has the opposite effect because if you try to hard to assert a strong frame you just seem insecure, like the other person’s strength is a threat to your own. Women are especially sensitive to this, and when a faux-strong frame is sat next to a genuinely strong frame, it boosts the value of the stronger person in ways that girls find as visceral as a pinprick on their fingertips. If you try too hard with a girl you might just end up getting another dude laid (qv. anyone trying to overpower Love Systems instructor dahunter’s frame). This is one of the great failings of men, by the way, the competitive instinct driven by insecurity. It is all too common for a man to feel the presence of another man’s power threatens his own, and he reacts accordingly. This is the key to getting good with girls without being a total shit. This is where pick-up artists start to veer away from being cool guys and into being obnoxious weirdoes. Sure, sometimes they’re weirdoes who get girls, but if the price you pay for sex is turning into a shitheel, I’m not going to call that a win.

This insecurity in the face of power is one of the most insidious and dangerous forces in all of human thought and contributes especially toward misogyny and women-hating and regarding women as second class citizens. Males’ fragile egos wilt in the face of female power, so patriarchies have been established to keep women in check. Near the end of his life Schopenhauer himself sat for a female sculptor and later remarked, “”I have not yet spoken my last word about women. I believe that if a woman succeeds in withdrawing from the mass, or rather raising herself above the mass, she grows ceaselessly and more than a man.” I personally LOVE it when I meet a beautiful girl with a strong frame. As Savoy noted in Magic Bullets society makes it very nearly impossible for beautiful women to be sane and balanced because they are behaviorally conditioned to see the best in themselves by means of validation through something superficial and impermanent. If a girl has a rock solid frame, it says wonderful things about her personality, about her upbringing, about her brain, and about the life she’s led.

Your mission in self-development is to figure out who you are and inject yourself daily with a dose of not-giving-a-fuck. Be vigorous in your opinions and interests and impervious to the hate and insecurity others will try to foist upon you. Be next immune to the hate and insecurity that will slither from your heart when you see others whom you perceive as being stronger than you. Having a strong frame WILL affect others, but the strongest frame has nothing to do with other people.

1. Mental Floss

2. Investopedia

3. 1,001 Rules for My Unborn Son

4. Goodreads

5. Craiglook

6. Kayak

7. Ark

8. PCIDATABASE and QBIK

9. Openwith

10. PDFGeni

11. Gethuman

12. The Interactive Fiction Archive

13. Kongregate

14. IO9

15. Tor

16. Yanko Design

17. Let’s Play Archive

18. Soyouwanna

19. Ikeahacker

20. Howcast

21. Make: Online

22. Good-Tutorials

23. Vuvox

24. Fffound

25. Interfacelift

26. Customize

27. Prezi

28. Drop.io

29. Newseum

30. Weather Underground

31. Google Building Maker

32. Strange Maps

33. The Big Picture

34. Newsmap

35. Drinkhacker

36. Fatburgr

37. Cooking for Engineers

38. Thesixtyone

39. Grooveshark

40. Musicovery

41. Demoscene.tv

42. Crackle

43. Vimeo

44. TV Tropes

45. Know Your Meme

46. The Inquirer

47. Ars Technica

48. Pandora

49. Reddit

50. Shacknews

51. Fatwallet

• 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.

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.

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!

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.